Simplish rules but super cool strategy can be tough criteria to find in one game. Most strategy games are going to run $50-60 at retail. You can easily find discounts of 20+%, but does that still exceed the bounds of "cheapish?"
You mention liking Carcassonne, so have you played through Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan yet? These are the "textbook" games for introduction to strategy, because they are easily teachable yet do a good job of presenting skill-based competition.
I'm going to throw out Survive: Escape From Atlantis, Zooloretto, and Sunrise City as other suggestions. These are all legit full-size board games. You might have better luck finding affordable light strategy games if you look more into card games.
Oh yeah Ive played a lot of Ticket to Ride and Catan. I think like the 30ish range is what I am looking for at most. So far I've put Carcassonne, Bohnanza (thanks for reminding me about this people!), and Forbidden Island in my amazon cart. Zooloretto looks bomb as hell and exactly something Id love at least asthetically. Also just remembered I loved Marrakech so I think I'll pick that up too.
I do not think it is a Scott game. You would probably find it uber-fiddly, as it is basically a dungeon crawling board game, except that you are crawling the overworld.
It is a LONG ASS GAME. The intro session for 4 players took us over 3 hours, and from what the game's owner told me, any time you might gain from having everyone already know how to play will be eaten up by additional complexity in the meatier scenarios. It's appointment gaming, not something you can pop out at game night.
What I liked about it, and has people rating it highly, is that some of your actions are controlled by a deckbuilding game. It does a great job of working the deckbuilding in as some of, but not the entire game, and that makes it very refreshing for those who already want to play this sort of game. You need to already want to play this sort of game though.
Has anyone played Saboteur 1 or 2? It looks like its tile placement + hidden roles/goals, and does 2-12 players. Sounds super cool but is it Good Game?
Read this. It's heavy on the overview, light on the details, but 100% accurate. It's what you should read to get a feel for whether you actually want to do this or not. From there, you can read the full blog posts on that website, or go to a hundred different other resources around the web for the nitty gritty on what each step entails.
I'm suddenly stricken with the desire to prototype, playtest, and kickstart a boardgame.
I'm falling down in the area of "once I'm at the proper point, how do I get game boards and cards printed?" Anybody have experience in this area?
I don't have experience. Most people seem to deal with China for printing, and it's a pain.
However, I did meet someone at ConnectiCon who had some board games that were printed on demand! Here is where they got it done.
The Game Crafter people are good people. I've talked with them before and they have an impressive list of satisfied customers. They are primarily used for people building prototypes. HOWEVER, I would caution you to not jump into making sexy prototypes before you actually make sure your game is FUN using crap components.
Regarding Chinese manufacturing, things have gotten a LOT better since Panda Game Manufacturing set up shop there. Some of the best-produced games have been coming from them. I strongly suggest listening to a recent episode of the Ludology podcast where they had an hour long interview with Panda about the entire manufacturing process.
Very doubtful, but the slightest chance does exist. I have off of work on Friday, Aug 3rd, and I know a bunch of people traveling great distances to be there who always push me to go, but I just don't see myself driving two hours each way just so socialize for the day and play a few games.
I finally won my first game of Castles of Burgundy (on the 3rd tiebreaker). It's a big deal because that game takes a lot longer than most of the other games that we play.
Another game that has become a favorite for us is Nefarious. It's a fun, quick game by the guy who designed Dominion, so it has an interesting mechanic where you draw two cards that fundamentally change the rules of the game. Each one forces you to play very differently, and the right combinations have taught some of our casual gamers to learn to think very critically.
Those are both great games! Castles of Burgundy is hitting the table a lot with my groups. It's our go-to euro at the moment.
I also tried Nefarious at DexCon two weeks ago and really liked it as a 30-min or less warm up game. It's a simultaneous action selection game where you can do these four things: get cards, get money, spend money to play cards, or lastly, spend money to set up speculative bets on other player's future action selections.
It's got a mad scientist theme which is fun. All of the cards you play to the table are whacky inventions. They give you victory points and can also trigger some extra effects. Get enough points and the game is done. As UncleUlty also mentioned, there is a HUGE deck of additional rules cards. You get two per games, so it really tacks on a lot of replay value and keeps you thinking.
BTW, one more post in this thread today and I'll shut up. Village won the Kennerspiel des Jahres earlier this month. It's being imported from Germany by an up-and-coming publisher, Tasty Minstrel Games, but they only got 2,000 English copies on their first print run. The games have cleared customs and are on a truck headed for the TMG warehouse. When they arrive, they'll immediately go on sale at playtmg.com and I don't expect they'll last very long.
BTW, one more post in this thread today and I'll shut up. Village won the Kennerspiel des Jahres earlier this month. It's being imported from Germany by an up-and-coming publisher, Tasty Minstrel Games, but they only got 2,000 English copies on their first print run. The games have cleared customs and are on a truck headed for the TMG warehouse. When they arrive, they'll immediately go on sale at playtmg.com and I don't expect they'll last very long.
That one's been out for like a year but I haven't had the chance to play. Was getting mixed signals from the people I trust. Some love some hate, but SdJ win tilts things quite a bit. I def have to try it for myself. Anyone here have thoughts?
That one's been out for like a year but I haven't had the chance to play. Was getting mixed signals from the people I trust. Some love some hate, but SdJ win tilts things quite a bit. I def have to try it for myself. Anyone here have thoughts?
I recognize the box. I've seen it everywhere. I just never actually paid attention to it.
We play Kingdom Builder on occasion. It's not one of my favorites, but a few people in our group really like it. The idea is that you are placing settlements on a hex grid, on the type of terrain that matches the card you drew. But you must play on a tile adjacent to one of your existing settlements if possible. And there are bonus tiles that you can acquire that will let you place extra settlements on your turn in various ways.
And because it's a Donald X game, there is a deck of victory conditions that you will randomly choose 3 from each game. It might be "1 victory point for each settlement next to a water hex", or "12 victory points if you have the most settlements in any quadrant of the board", or "1 victory point for every 2 settlements in your largest contiguous settlement area."
So you can see how the loadout of victory point cards can drastically change the strategy of each game.
Hmm based on that description I think I would prefer Castles of Burgundy. Scratches that "building stuff on a hex grid with some input randomness" itch but it's got a few other elements like the goods trading. Kingdom Builder still sounds like a fun game though.
In one of the cooler moments of my writing side-career, I took off from the dayjob today to interview Rich Sommer (Mad Men actor and huge board gaming nerd). He turned out to be a really nice guy and we had a great talk about all sorts of gaming related topics.
Afterwards he took out Wurfel Bohnanza and we played a full game. It's a Bohnanza dice game that has nothing to do with Bohnanza other than using the beans on the die faces. You roll and bank dice in Yahtzee-style combinations, except that there is no limit to the number of re-rolls as long as you bank at least 1 die each turn. This can drag out your turn, but opponents stay involved b/c they can score on your turn if you happen to roll exactly what they need with your non-banked dice.
The die combinations you are seeking get harder and harder, so at some point, you can decide to bank your points and receive a new card with different combinations on it. You just have to work through some of the easy combos before you can start earning points again.
On a side note, the New York Public Library is awesome. I'd rather not try to record an interview in a restaurant, and getting visitor badges and a building sponsor to use the MTV offices as a part-time employee is a hassle and a half. NYPL hooked me up with a private conference room on short notice and it worked out great.
I bought Saboteur cause it sounded kinda cool and it was 10 bucks, then I got the expansion (Saboteur 2) cause it was also ten bucks and apparently expanded the max players to 12. The rules changes in 2 are just terrible as far as I can tell from reading them over. Convolutes everything, good god.
That might actually work a lot better than the regular game. Regular Villa Paletti often ends up just coming down to who went first because you can somehow always manage to get your highest point pieces out. Once we figured the game out, the die almost never passes to another player. With a big set, it might be much more difficult, and you will be forced to sacrifice your higher point pieces earlier on since a bigger plate needs more support.
Comments
Mage Knight, the board game is ranked BGG #13.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/96848/mage-knight-board-game
Is it actually worth playing?
It is a LONG ASS GAME. The intro session for 4 players took us over 3 hours, and from what the game's owner told me, any time you might gain from having everyone already know how to play will be eaten up by additional complexity in the meatier scenarios. It's appointment gaming, not something you can pop out at game night.
What I liked about it, and has people rating it highly, is that some of your actions are controlled by a deckbuilding game. It does a great job of working the deckbuilding in as some of, but not the entire game, and that makes it very refreshing for those who already want to play this sort of game. You need to already want to play this sort of game though.
I also saw this game at the store, Sky Traders. Seems interesting enough to try out.
I'm falling down in the area of "once I'm at the proper point, how do I get game boards and cards printed?" Anybody have experience in this area?
However, I did meet someone at ConnectiCon who had some board games that were printed on demand! Here is where they got it done.
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/
Regarding Chinese manufacturing, things have gotten a LOT better since Panda Game Manufacturing set up shop there. Some of the best-produced games have been coming from them. I strongly suggest listening to a recent episode of the Ludology podcast where they had an hour long interview with Panda about the entire manufacturing process.
Another game that has become a favorite for us is Nefarious. It's a fun, quick game by the guy who designed Dominion, so it has an interesting mechanic where you draw two cards that fundamentally change the rules of the game. Each one forces you to play very differently, and the right combinations have taught some of our casual gamers to learn to think very critically.
I also tried Nefarious at DexCon two weeks ago and really liked it as a 30-min or less warm up game. It's a simultaneous action selection game where you can do these four things: get cards, get money, spend money to play cards, or lastly, spend money to set up speculative bets on other player's future action selections.
It's got a mad scientist theme which is fun. All of the cards you play to the table are whacky inventions. They give you victory points and can also trigger some extra effects. Get enough points and the game is done. As UncleUlty also mentioned, there is a HUGE deck of additional rules cards. You get two per games, so it really tacks on a lot of replay value and keeps you thinking.
And because it's a Donald X game, there is a deck of victory conditions that you will randomly choose 3 from each game. It might be "1 victory point for each settlement next to a water hex", or "12 victory points if you have the most settlements in any quadrant of the board", or "1 victory point for every 2 settlements in your largest contiguous settlement area."
So you can see how the loadout of victory point cards can drastically change the strategy of each game.
Afterwards he took out Wurfel Bohnanza and we played a full game. It's a Bohnanza dice game that has nothing to do with Bohnanza other than using the beans on the die faces. You roll and bank dice in Yahtzee-style combinations, except that there is no limit to the number of re-rolls as long as you bank at least 1 die each turn. This can drag out your turn, but opponents stay involved b/c they can score on your turn if you happen to roll exactly what they need with your non-banked dice.
The die combinations you are seeking get harder and harder, so at some point, you can decide to bank your points and receive a new card with different combinations on it. You just have to work through some of the easy combos before you can start earning points again.
On a side note, the New York Public Library is awesome. I'd rather not try to record an interview in a restaurant, and getting visitor badges and a building sponsor to use the MTV offices as a part-time employee is a hassle and a half. NYPL hooked me up with a private conference room on short notice and it worked out great.