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GeekNights 20100817 - Expansion Packs
Tonight on GeekNights, we examine expansion packs, but not before a lengthy discussion of games we're playing currently, including the fantastic tabletop RPG A Thousand and One Nights from Meguey Baker. Also, we are finally able to discuss the PAX Late Show, for which we are the hosts!
- Rym's Thing - Games in Prison
- Scott's Thing - Yakuza 3 Reviewed by Yakuza
Comments
I can help
In retrospect, I'd tell any kid to save their time and read some Elric and LotR instead. The books are anvilicious and the ending sucks. The only interesting part in hindsight was Iorek, but you can just play Warhammer for shit like that.
A lot of author tracts suck, and HDM is no exception. HDM sucks for the same reason Atlas Shrugged is a fucking bore: large sections of the books are author mouthpieces or metaphors just holding forth on stuff the author hates.
I got the Settles of Catan 5-6 player expansion but have never opened it. I also just got Power Grid for my birthday, and the person I got it from also bought the China/Korea expansion map, but I haven't had a chance to even play the base game yet.
I purchased the first expansion to Last Night on Earth, which is a new stuff bonanza. New characters, new missions, new maps, but most importantly, new cards, because the base game is completely imbalanced. This is what left the sour taste in my mouth. The zombies can never win, and the expanion provides a new deck of zombie cards to rememdy this. I was very much on the fence as to whether I should reward their failure to produce a balanced game by giving Flying Frog (the company who makes this game), more of my money. I really wanted to, because my group saw a ton of potential in the game, but I was hesitant solely on the moral basis. Ultimately I decided to spend the cash to fix my game because I felt they had shown a dedication to supporting their product through the release of several free missions online.
On The Brink is another mixed bag expansion. It gives you several variant rules (with a few added bits to support said new rules) for playing Pandemic. It also gives you a few things such as properly sized people tokens, and nice containers for your disease counters. Things which I felt should have been in the original game. Also, I found that all of the new special event cards are not worth playing with. Shuffling in an extra stack of special event cards dilutes the deck, and spaces out the time between epidemic pulls, therefore weakening the game. Thanks, I now have cards which I am going to leave out every time I play. I have not tried every variant play-style yet, so some might be a lot of fun, but still I consider this an "eh" purchase.
The other expansions I've purchased, I love. Days of Wonder has put out two expansions to Small World that are pure impulse buy and awesome. $10 gets you 2-3 new races, plus a few new special powers. It just gives the game a shot in the arm to add continued interest in the new potential race/power combinations, and extends the life of the game for a few rounds if you've gotten bored of it.
The in order bit is really important too, everything that happens depends upon what happened before and if you just jump into it in the middle of season 3 nothing will really make sense.
A SciFi story like this is usually told over the course of several novels and it does not get much more epic than this folks. So find the pilot and all the dvd's for the regular seasons and watch it all*.
Be kind to the time battered CG and to Bruce Boxleitner's need to monologue(Thankfully this is only for seasons 2-4). The story is deep, intricate and a hundred times better than that SciFi version of The Blair Witch Project.
*You can ignore Season 5 IMO, because FOX canceled the show toward the end of Season 4 JMS (the sole writer of 99% of the scripts) had to condense everything important that should have unfolded over season 5 into the the last 5 eps of season 4 because he wasn't sure he was going to get a chance to film a season 5. TNT picked them up for season 5 and well ... lets just say that Legend of the Rangers should be forgotten like the Matrix sequels.
I've pretty much learned that the one geekery I am not into are the live action sci-fi TV shows. All the ones that everybody else likes such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Firefly, Babylon 5, etc. I find intolerably corny and ham-fisted. I get the same feeling watching them as I get when reading a Stan Lee comic book. Some are better than others, but they're not my thing.
Despite this, I still don't pass judgement on something I haven't tried. Yes, I have tried all of those listed, some of them extensively.
Rag on him for some things, but I deny noone their right to dislike Babylon 5. It's a show that hits you in the face with a ham fist every few episodes.
That said B5 is terribly slow to develop, over monologued, and more than a few things are pretty clunky.
Then again, if Scott has found that he doesn't like stuff like StarTrek, Firefly or Battlestar Galactica there's not much to be done is there?
(Blair Witch reference was to the camera direction in the new Battlestar Galactica, completely unbearable.)
Expanded Notes:
Geeknights 201000817 - Expansion Packs
Expanded Show Notes - Show Run Time: 01:02:32
Time | Notes
---------+----------------------------------------------------------
00:00:00 | Intro
00:00:24 | Opening Chit-Chat & News
| - Scott got the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner
| - Discussion of the Adventure Burner & BW mechanics
| - Rym busts Scott's chops over no shows last week
| - Scott calls Rym out on his shit-talking
| - Rym has been working on Pax Late Show
| - Rym actually likes Babylon 5 so far
| - Scott still hates on Babylon 5 and other space shows
| - The Shore this year was GAMING TIME
| - Battlestar Galactica game was ok but has issues
| - Cosmic Encounters is a "vote who wins" game
| - Race for the Galaxy is solvable without the expansions
| - A Thousand and One Nights - indie RPG from Night Sky Games
| - Problems with gaming/role-playing:
| - - People not paying attention to what's going on in the game
| - - Not remembering other players in-character names
| - - Not being able to stay in-character
| - A Thousand and One Nights forces people to pay attention
| - Discussion of A Thousand and One Nights game mechanics
| - Scott went to a boardgame night
| - Castlevania: Harmony of Dispair
| - DOOM & Doomsday Engine
| - Forbidden Island is a "beat the game" game
| - Discussion of people playing at a lower level
| - Tigris & Euphrates expansion
| - T&E expansion discussion
| - Space Alert - a real-time boardgame, a "beat-the-game" game
00:31:03 | Things of the Day
| - Scott doesn't remember what happened last week
| Scott - Yakuza 3 reviewed by actual Yakuza
| - Billiards versus Pool
| Rym - Games in Prison
| - Checking in and out games in prison
00:35:25 | Meta Moment
| - Announcement of secret PAX Prime Event!
| - PAX Late Show - Friday, Sep 3, 2010, 10 PM, Serpent Theater
| - Guests will include: Alex Albrecht, Rooster Teeth, Jon St John, and a musical act!
| - Also running: Egregiously Unrealized Potential
| - Also running: Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design
| - Book Club: Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury
| - Aside on e-Books and subway travel
| - Scott has never heard of The Golden Compass and Philip Pullman's other books
00:40:51 | Main Topic
| - Tangent - meeting people at RIT, one guy was referred to as Expansion Pack, he didn't read
| - Expansions of (board)games!
| - Rym gushes over Tigris & Euphrates and its expansion
| - Discussion of what constitutes an expansion
| - The bottom of the expansion barrel - Carcassonne: The Catapult
| - Discussion of what games sell and what games don't
| - Expansions are sometimes "more of the same"
| - Other times it's a money-grab
| - Expansions in Magic: The Gathering
| - Rym won't let the character names thing go
| - Dominion expansions
| - On selling an unfinished game
| - Expansions are inevitable for popular games
| - Too much expansion results in a completely different game that depends on the original games
| - Unnecessary physical bits in modern boardgames
| - El Grande expansions
| - Sometimes an expansion is just a rules modification, but you're paying for the extra bits
| - When is it a mod and when is it an expansion?
| - Agricola discussion - is it solved?
| - Board game expansions are promotional things as well
| - Promotional Pokemon - Pokemon board game?
| - Pokemon miniatures game
| - Mind-blowing expansions?
| - The best expansions are the ones that give you more goodness.
| - Changing it too much ends up being a mod
| - Mod versus Expansion versus Sequel
| - Most of the mind-blowing things are completely new games
| - Expansions are good if they:
| - - Are more of the same goodness
| - - A fix for a problem in addition to other goodness
| - - Include tweaks for balancing
| - If an expansion sucks, call it out and don't go near it
| - One final point where an expansion is good...
01:01:01 | Outro
01:01:59 | Outtake - Midi-vuvuzelas?
Also, if anyone would like to make another thread, I would like to argue that most of that stuff isn't actually sci-fi. It's just crappy soap operas that happen to take place in outer space. Star Wars isn't even sci-fi, it's action adventure, which is why I like it. Twlight Zone is sci-fi. Babylon 5, probably not.
Also, if you're going to be corny sci-fi, at least go all out. For some reason I can totally watch shows like the original Lost in Space.
Remember this is the same person who does not like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Firefly". Everyone misses the mark in taste in one thing or another...
I'm going to have to do penance for derailing this thread I think ...
This is nothing new to these forums. ^_~
I'm actually finding Season 2 to be a lot less ham-fisted than Season 1. They're introducing interesting plot twists, and the morality is becoming a bit less black and white. Lots of divided loyalty intrigue. They've given us some mustard to go along with that ham.