u/Funkymonkzz

As far as I know the shorter game length proposal is just to make it 60 minutes but stop the clock when the ball goes out of play. Which is actually longer than the ball is in play on average currently (roughly 55 minutes, depends on the league). And it gets rid of the benefit of time wasting.

Where in the UK are you? That does seem to be very good value!

I'm going to go against the grain here I think. But my recent experience is that we bought a 75" Bravia 7 for a distance of almost exactly 10'. My partner and I were torn between 65" and 75". We read all the relevant reddit threads and comments and looked at size recommendations to try to decide, and the majority said go bigger (in some cases 85" was recommended by people on reddit).

Well, 75" was too big for us. Everything felt too close, particularly gaming. We couldn't see all the screen well enough at once; I felt I was having to make an effort to check HUD elements. Even for movies it felt uncomfortable. We gave it a good try for several weeks to try and get used to it but never did, and we ended up returning the TV. 65" for us.

I think perhaps my tables have been a bit more cooperative with the early Act goals. It's never felt like anyone is guaranteed to fail their objective until near the end of an Act. Interesting to hear different viewpoints though!

I see what you mean, although I've actually much more regularly had players finish their objective a chapter early than know they've failed it very early. I would think that even if you know you've likely failed an objective early it's generally still worth trying to focus on an objective, to minimise the points lost upon failing it.

If you preemptively knew what fate you would be moving to in the next game I think the effect on player incentives would be quite negative, add to downtime, and the focus would inevitably be more long term than the present Act. Why would a player do certain things if they know for sure they won't benefit from them long term? In the current system they may not know that. Deliberately failing would also be a big problem as you say. Maybe there's a smart way of fixing that.

Personally I find the fact that Arcs can be paused one of its greatest strengths, as it means it can be played over 3 weeks of a regular game night! The times I've played in one sitting have been pretty epic though.

What do you mean by it souring Act 1 and 2 if you can't finish your mission?

Even if you fail to complete your objective for an Act you keep some of the abilities from the previous Fate, and the B and C Fates are still strong so isn't all that much of a disadvantage to having to pivot to a new Fate (admittedly the C Fates are very unlikely to win on points so are more restrictive in victory conditions).

Great info, thanks. You've clearly put a lot of care and love into your garden!

Amazing. I'd love to see a picture in the daylight if possible! Definitely would like to take inspiration from this for my garden.

How many plants/trees do you have, and if you don't mind saying roughly how much did you spend?

I use the Legends cards. Draw a random card, and grid order is left to right across the card, ties broken from top to bottom

The crisis on Song of Freedom is: 'The player with the most Power must replace a Loyal city with a Free city'. I assume from your question you're asking what happens in the event of multiple players being tied for having the most Power.

Ties are broken in turn order, as stated on page 22 of the base game rule book. And in the Blighted Reach rulebook on page 13 it says 'At the end of a round where any Event cards were played, do the following just after checking whether initiative changes' (it goes on to describe that the player with initiative may call the Summit and then rolls the event and number dice which is when the crisis could happen). So the answer is, initiative changes before the event happens, which firstly changes which player chooses whether to call the Summit, and for your question could change the tie break order and therefore which player must replace a Loyal city with a Free city'.

There's a whole list of different types of games where you can target others. Most wargames/dudes on a map games allow, or are fundamentally based on, the ability to target or attack other players. The classic example being Risk, but modern alternatives such as Root, Kemet, Arcs, Twilight Imperium, War of the Ring, and Dune to name but a few. Fighting games obviously involve targeting and attacking other players. Also many other games, which may otherwise be potentially much less confrontational, have an element people call 'Take that', where you can target a specific player or players with a negative power or effect - games such as Terraforming Mars and Lords of Waterdeep have this as examples.

Open the link in browser, edit the link and delete the ? and everything to the right of it (in this case you need to delete ?_t=8qWYJOJGSgY&_r=1). Then load the edited link. Works on any tiktok link, let's you play it in browser without forcing you to download the tiktok app

There is a comeback mechanic in Arcs though - the escalating points make the final rounds much more significant. So with a well played round the player in last place can easily catch up

This is definitely not a design flaw and I don't think you can tell anything like that after one play anyway. Hansa is a high interaction game where players need to watch what the other players are doing and adjust what they do accordingly. Having more actions is good, and it's probably key to unlock a 3rd action, but any more than that is certainly not essential or a guaranteed route to winning.

If one player is going for lots of actions, then the other players should stop that being done efficiently and get in the way, since it's both beneficial for them to do so (through getting more tradesmen out) and hinders the player going for more actions. If it continues and one player is getting a lot of actions, then the other players need to focus on ending the game earlier, which is easy to do and score efficient. Then the player who has spent all their time getting more actions and not getting points will inevitably lose. It takes a long time to get more actions.

That might not be immediately obvious on the first play but it's definitely not a design flaw, and it doesn't need house rules to 'fix'. You're just playing a different game at that point.

I picked up Mantis Falls for £28. It's very good value for that price - multiple cloth bags for all the components, screen printed wooden pieces, multiple cloth bags for everything, a lovely cloth game mat, 3 included mini expansion modules, lots of cards, and it even includes 2 packs of Sleeve Kings sleeves for the cards. I've only played it once so far so I'm not sure how much I like the game yet, but the production quality is fantastic.

I picked up Spectral at the UKGE this weekend. Production quality is lovely, it's in a nice small box, and the rules are clean and straightforward. Very positive first impressions, but I've not had chance to play it yet. I'm taking to it to a game night tomorrow so I'll report back how it went down afterwards.

This is wonderful, great work. I'm tempted to try something similar with the Heat system

I think there's a little different content, but not much.

Putting the content of of the 2 boxes side by side, it looks like the vast majority of component content is the same, with a few different cards, tokens, and the board is a little different. In reality I think both games could easily have been included in one box at a significantly lower price point than buying both boxes separately as standalone games and duplicating the majority of the components. Splitting them is presumably a financially driven publishing decision to get people to buy 2 separate games rather than 1 slightly larger game.

The game is indeed on Kickstarter now. But you don't need to get it from there if you're willing to go with the Retail version (this doesn't have the plastic magnetic ship models, just cardboard pieces, but they're perfectly fine and functional and a lot cheaper). If so, you can get it from the IV Games website directly; they don't tend to sell games via other retailers.

https://shop.iv.studio/collections/fractured-sky

If you want the fancy plastic model version though you'll have to back the Kickstarter and get either the Deluxe or Super Deluxe versions.

Personally I've had great experiences with Moonrakers with 3 different groups. The deck building is fun and satisfying, and the negotiation is solid. It's very positive, if that matters to you - there isn't really working against each other, you either help each other or try and solo missions without help.

It's definitely not too light- Dune Imperium is my favourite game for reference! I think weight matters less on negotiation games anyway since there's more player interaction than just playing the puzzle of the game.

However I wouldn't recommend the Titan box if you've not played it before. The base game is good on its own, and Titan is a whole lot of money to spend on something you've not played. You wouldn't really want to play with all the expansions at once, so it probably makes sense to get the base game first and see which way you want to take it as the expansions all do different things. Overload is the only expansion I've got, and I really like it as it adds to the deckbuilding.

You're welcome!

It's a good question. Obviously the themes are similar, you're building up fleets and taking over planets. There is significant faction asymmetry in both games. If you like one there's a good chance you'll like the other. But they do feel pretty different to play to me, which I think is partly a function of player count differences and partly mechanics.

In the short game of Arcs (single session, roughly 2-3 hours) there isn't the equivalent of a political assembly phase, so you definitely don't have the same scope of above the table political discussion. There's no more negotiation than in something like Root. You do have those politics in the Arcs campaign game, and there's the neutral Empire who you can either stay aligned with and potentially utilise or break away from, which has big political implications. You can also trade with other players in the campaign game like in TI. Admittedly though since the campaign is 3 games you're looking at probably 5-8 hours to complete it at a guess, so that's kind of TI territory of game length anyway.

Arcs feels to me like there is more of a focus on the mechanics and interacting with the game systems; I think there's more scope for clever mechanical gameplay than TI. Whether that's through manipulating the 'trick taking' for actions, the 'Ambitions' by which you score, using resources for bonus actions etc. It also feels a bit more entangled from a player perspective; you're almost always within reach of an attack if an opponent is suitably determined, you can't really just sit back and build up forces.

So I think my answer is to an extent it feels like TI; the themes are very similar and particularly the campaign game does feel TI-like at times. The short game, while very good, misses out some of the political and trading elements that make TI the game it is. At least in my opinion.

That's awesome! I'm hoping he'll be at UKGE this year

Arcs by Leder Games. I've enjoyed pretty much everything Cole Wehrle has designed, and Arcs may well become my favourite. I've loved my plays of it on TTS and I'm really excited by the idea of shorter campaigns that might actually be completable since each campaign is only 3 games long.

We went in late March last year and it was ok. Got pretty slushy towards the end of the days but manageable. You should be fine in early March, seems to be a good snow year so far too.