Boardgames, anyone?

Twilight Imperium with the Kings expansion, each game turn will take roughly seven hours and everyone will hate each other by the end.

So this just showed up



And Kingdom Death: Monster is on the way.

Big big boxes.

I have a copy of Mythic Battles Pantheon on the way, that comes in 3 separate massive boxes. I am going to be murdered when they arrive.

Nice.

The whole survival / settlement building campaign system looks very cool.

There was a guy selling his collection of the base game plus a whole bunch of expansions “cheap” on FB last week. Was only after £1800 plus postage.

KD:M arrived. As anticipated it is absolutely gigantic.

That is an iPad. I tried to get the cat in the picture for scale but she was having none of it.

Played an 8 player game of Game of Thrones on the weekend with the Mother of Dragons expansion.

I really like the base game but wasn't a fan of this one; I ended up picking Targaryens randomly and had a target on my back from the Baratheons, Starks, Martells and Arryns all game - wasn't much fun. Game also lasted far too long (about 8 hours).

Think I'll stick with Twilight Imperium for the 'long games'.

wear his balls as a chin

Sounds like Monster Hunter.

For campaign dudes on a map fans, I really cannot strongly NOT recommend Trudvang Legends enough. It's balls.

Pros:

* Visually very nice, artwork and lore is good, writing is actually pretty decent, minis are standard CMON quality
* Some interesting innovations - the board itself has sleeve pockets where you can evolve the world and make it a legacy game without destroying or writing on anything, or extending setup time
* The draw mechanic for combat is fun at first (you draw four cards from your deck, all of which have two or more symbols on them. You then draw tokens from a bag, and use these to activate the cards. If you draw a skull icon or draw a token you can't place, it fills up a "miss" track that has negative consequences, so kind of a nice push your luck element to it)

Cons:

*Production quality overall leaves a lot to be desired. The sleeves are fiddly and I creased one just trying to get a card in it first time. The advent calendar-esque board for revealing the story points doesn't fit the sheets that need to go in it, and the doors bend and break easily. It feels over engineered when this could have been a card deck or other entries in the story book. The story book itself is the type of giant A4 paperback that won't stay open without creasing the pages.
*The box is a hot mess. You get a million tiny tokens and zero space to put them anywhere. You get a ton of cards you need to keep separate but nowhere to keep them apart. 
* While the mechanic for actually doing stuff in combat is good, combat itself is boring and repetitive. Every enemy feels exactly the same, and there's absolutely no reason to vary tactics, especially as it's reliant on two luck elements (card draw AND chit pull) so tactics aren't really possible anyway. There's no strategic layer, so it's "enemy hits, you hit the enemy, repeat"
* The rulebook is absolutely fucking garbage. It has weird notes all throughout that aren't indexed or referenced anywhere else (example - there's a rule that only impacts player counts of 3-4 players, but that rule isn't in the setup, it's in some footnote about tokens towards the end of the rulebook). It has significant timing issues where it's just not clear in what order things should happen or who they should affect.
* The biggest one here - you cannot lose the game. Literally. I'm fine with fail forward games that add nuance and complexity to the story or give you alternate paths or challenges (like Arkham Horror LCG, etc), but here, if you're killed by an enemy you immediately revive with 6 health. Then you have to take a "wyrd" card, which has negative effects if it's still in your deck at the end of the current scenario. That negative effect is that next scenario you'll be slightly easier to kill (enemies might get an extra hit etc). That's it. Maybe there are story consequences later on, but so far there's been absolutely zero and I think I'm over halfway through. Every single combat you will win eventually through attrition, even against the toughest of tough bosses, and the only downside is that the attrition becomes longer the more you die. There are no quests or story routes that are shut off from dying.

That said, it gives it somewhat of a palate cleanser feel playing it inbetween sessions of KD:M where your entire party can be permanently killed just by tripping over a rock, so I guess there's that. But that aside, absolute bollocks of the highest order. Can't be bothered to finish it, and it's going straight into the for sale pile.

What annoys me the most is it was co-designed by Eric Lang, so at the very least I thought I’d get some good dudes on a map action out of it, but there’s nothing there. And what’s worse is this is apparently the redesigned version after the first take on it tested extremely badly.

Not really a fan of Lang's work - I've only played Blood Rage, Rising Sun and Ankh but they're all so incredibly drawn out (and quite similar to each other). Rising Sun is probably the pick of the lot.

I’ve just started diving into this with a mate. It’s very cool.

I don’t really find any of Lang’s games particularly drawn out tbh. The mythology trilogy or whatever it’s called are some tightly designed area control games. Rising Sun is probably the loosest and longest.

Chaos in the Old World also means he’ll always have a place in my heart.

Michael Shinall is also a pretty good designer CMON have on their books.

Big oof right here - gamefound.com/projects/boardcubator/kcdboardgame/updates/19

Tl;dr, they needed 150x what they actually asked for up front and the whole studio is also shutting down.