Hello Codexers
Since getting tied to a permanent girlfriend I've had to do more socializing and of course, that means I've had to find ways to make spending time with other people enjoyable, which as we all know is quite the challenge with normies. Deep board games have been my answer as far as my girlfriend's brother and some of their friends go, so I've been playing more of those.
Below are the best three we played this year - two of them I'd wager just about every RPG fan would enjoy:
1. Isofarian Guard
Game setup image (with bonus cat)
This game is just insane. What you see in the image above is pretty much just the barest setup - there's books for days and many more components besides. It's a 1-2 player game that I play with my girlfriend's brother, though out of all games I've played I think this is the one I could really see myself enjoying solo as well.
It's a massive, story-driven RPG with an incredibly ingenious combat system (never really tried anything like it). You build your characters getting new abilities, spells, gear, the works. There's 6 campaigns which are gonna last your for dozens of hours each. In each one, you take control of two guards (or one guard each) and you go on side-quests and main quests and do puzzles and explore. Shit like that. The story is pretty basic bitch fantasy stuff but we paid for the narrative app with professional voice actors (trust me, it's preferable to reading out each narrative progression beat yourselves) and it's very well done with sounds effects and music. The app also works pretty well.
The main thing with this game though, is that it can really be as long as you want it to be - as in: you can grind if you want to, and that can kind of ruin the game for you. The game is full side stuff and crafting and if you want to tune everything you can spend forever on that. It has lots of mechanics in place that incentivize you to progress and some of them are very intelligently made (for example, you get more crafting materials from sending out followers to harvest for you, and these harvesting missions progress by progressing the main quest, so if you've sent out a harvesting mission you will be disincentivized to grind for those materials), but in the end, this aspect will probably feel like the game's weakest for some players. It's not a Gloomhaven mission-based design where you do stuff once, it's more of an open-ended exploration game where you decide where to go or what to do, and that entails random encounters, which might not be to everyone's liking. We found it manageable after crafting some gear that let us manipulate exploration results, however.
The combat system is at least an 8/10, some of the most innovative turn-based design I can remember seeing. The character building is quite good. The exploration is decent. The narrative is excellently produced if somewhat lackluster in substance. If you need that "big game" to play with a steady buddy or yourself over a long period of time, this game will last you for a year, if not more.
It's expensive though, and it weights more than 20 kilos. *Without* additional add-ons.
A small addendum is that it is one of very few board games that has a world that feels big. Travelling between nodes on the world map actually takes some time because of events and random encounters, so you can't just swoop from node to node doing everything.
2. Arkham Horror Card Game
This game is just... chef's kiss, man. Game setup image stolen from YouTube (the actual, current version is 4.0.3):
We play it on Tabletop Simulator as you can see, since there's an... illicit mod out there that's very polished and automates a lot of the setup, and the game can be very expensive if you get the cardboard version. The sort of eldritch knowledge required to get your hands on the latest version is in the hands of but a few, but throw me a message and I'll get it to ya.
This game is basically everything that the Arkham Horror/Eldritch Horror board games aren't. It's extremely evocative - the decks really conjure up their characters, while stuff like weaknesses, the encounter deck and the scenario locations just scream Lovecraft. The odds are stacked against you and the game is designed so that fail states aren't binary, which is how you know they really got Lovecraft; you're kind of supposed to fail and then get a bad ending, and this game allows for that in a way few board games do. This means they can churn up the difficulty and make the world actually grim, which evokes the setting much better than restarting to attempt a flawless victory that doesn't feel very lovecraftian.
Besides that, it just plays very well. Turns can be quite fast even though it's a very complex game. You can agonize for minutes during key turns - and for hours building your deck - but of your three actions each turn, some are like to be spent just drawing a resource or a card. Your abilities are also appropriately down to earth a lot of the time; you'll be using first aid kits, a rain coat and a flashlight as your cards more often than anything supernatural.
The actual genius comes from how campaigns, scenarios and locations are designed. It's a really simple system that allows the designers to print a ton of different mysteries (most of which you'll know from the literature) and design around the same skeleton of game (the "game's goal" is to progress an 'Agenda' against you, your goal is progress 'Acts' against it) so that, having played it once, you know the gist of it, yet build infinite complexity on top of this by varying the framing of each game using different encounter decks and Agenda/Act modifiers. This is besides you just changing decks and investigators yourself. The gist of it is that each campaign has a number of scenarios. Each scenario is "one game" of Arkham Horror. Each scenario consists of you investigating a location, which then branches out to more locations. So this can be everything from a single house (you might start in the attic but slowly get access to the hallway, cellar, and kitchen) or an entire city or country (with locations being the docks, the hotel etc.). So you can give each scenario its own feel, modifiers and gimmicks without having to reinvent the wheel, and the design space is huge.
Great game, highly recommend it.
3. Pandemic Legacy
Game setup image:
(Didn't have a pic of our own setup). So, I don't like Pandemic. At least I thought I didn't. I played it a lot when it was all the rage since my pals enjoyed it, but even though I thought it was decent I didn't really get why people loved it *that* much. It was too simple and games became the definition of the quarterbacking problem (that's where the most experienced player makes the decisions for everyone else). Arkham Horror avoids this by hiding most of your investigator's info from your allies and the game is also just complex enough that quarterbacking is hard, but Pandemic has all info available all the time and it's also very simple.
However, despite Pandemic: Legacy having this problem to some extend as well, I absolutely loved it. I've tried other legacy games and thought they were OK, but this has a combination of the base game (Pandemic) being actually well-designed while adding just enough spice on each subsequent game through the legacy mechanics to keep things interesting. It also has a lot more secrets *in addition to* a lot less text between games than most legacy games, so it really does strike the perfect balance.
Every game of Pandemic: Legacy adds new rules and while the quarterback-problem is still there, characters get more complex and they're switched out more often so even when you do quarterback you might find yourself assuming things that just aren't true due to some switch-up.
I think this is probably the legacy game I've enjoyed the most, which is ironic since I gather it's one of the first.
Bonus: King's Dilemma
Game setup image (once again didn't have any lying around myself):
This game is like my dream game on paper. It's Game of Thrones: The Boardgame but instead of another cheap Risk-knockoff that is everyone's dream strategy game in concept but plays like trash, this game is a legacy, story-driven game focusing on the political machinations and power thematic of ASoIaF, which was always the more interesting part. You play a noble - or rather, you play different nobles *from the same house of nobility* over a long period of time - centuries.
The reason it's not on my top three anyways is simple: this game does everything exactly right in terms of narrative, in terms of being evocative, in terms of the basic mechanics. Decisions you make cascade through the ages and the power dynamics of the game's core voting design are quite brilliant. It just doesn't pay enough attention to the finer details of its game design which ends up making it way less enticing than it could be.
Basically every turn of the game you draw a dilemma and depending on a lot of variables each player has some number of votes, money for bribes etc. You debate the dilemma, roleplaying-style, and use arguments for your case, but at the end of the day, voting, money, favor-promising etc. determines the outcome of the vote. The actual mechanics are voting are fucking brilliant and there's a lot of detail I can't go into here that makes it really kick. Then after some amount of votes, the king dies and you move a few decades ahead and start playing a new character from the same house, dealing with the consequences of your selfish, scheming ancestors.
The reason the game isn't a masterpiece despite being one of the best games at telling an empire-spanning story of political scheming through game mechanics is that the mechanics that govern your incentive to vote one way or another are very jumbled and abstract. Every start of a new king's reign you have a myriad of incentives:
1. Your house's overall incentive, which doesn't change.
2. The new noble character you're playing, who changes from reign to reign.
3. The short-term goal of each vote.
4. The narrative goal of the story each vote is tied to.
5. Your pledges, allegiances and the power and money available to you.
While this sounds interesting on paper making for new games every time, it also means that your first 7 games of King's Dilemma, when you still haven't realized the underlying mechanics of it, are very interesting. After that, you start realizing that the actual arguments everyone are making when discussing the (very, very well-written dilemmas) actually don't matter in the slightest bit, because everyone will be voting from some abstract interest based on mechanics they don't really understand rather than being tied to the throughline of their noblehouse with arguments being able to sway them. In other words, your incentives to vote are hidden from everyone, so it's really difficult for others to attempt to manipulate those incentives.
In addition, to attempt to make you roleplay and forget your incentives, the goals for long term victory for each player are really, really vague. This is good, because it means you don't get bogged down by numbers. However sadly it has the effect that all the sliders that move up and down for your kingdom as it feels the consequences of your voting - economics, culture, food, etc. - don't matter one bit. They're essentially just tallies to make out what player wins a round of King's Dilemma - they represent nothing actually tangential, and tanking your country's food and economy for the entire reign of a king will mean *almost nothing* for your kingdom longterm. How your kingdom develops can shift wildly - but it's decided by how you vote on dilemmas, not by how well your kingdom does economically or in terms of science.
I think I'd still really recommend it for a group that can get into the roleplaying and put aside the mechanics for a bit - opening up new dilemma's and building out each of the narratives, watching it branch with the catastrophic results of your scheming, is really, really fun.
Just don't expect the foundational mechanics of anything besides the power dynamics of voting to work especially well.
Since getting tied to a permanent girlfriend I've had to do more socializing and of course, that means I've had to find ways to make spending time with other people enjoyable, which as we all know is quite the challenge with normies. Deep board games have been my answer as far as my girlfriend's brother and some of their friends go, so I've been playing more of those.
Below are the best three we played this year - two of them I'd wager just about every RPG fan would enjoy:
1. Isofarian Guard
Game setup image (with bonus cat)
This game is just insane. What you see in the image above is pretty much just the barest setup - there's books for days and many more components besides. It's a 1-2 player game that I play with my girlfriend's brother, though out of all games I've played I think this is the one I could really see myself enjoying solo as well.
It's a massive, story-driven RPG with an incredibly ingenious combat system (never really tried anything like it). You build your characters getting new abilities, spells, gear, the works. There's 6 campaigns which are gonna last your for dozens of hours each. In each one, you take control of two guards (or one guard each) and you go on side-quests and main quests and do puzzles and explore. Shit like that. The story is pretty basic bitch fantasy stuff but we paid for the narrative app with professional voice actors (trust me, it's preferable to reading out each narrative progression beat yourselves) and it's very well done with sounds effects and music. The app also works pretty well.
The main thing with this game though, is that it can really be as long as you want it to be - as in: you can grind if you want to, and that can kind of ruin the game for you. The game is full side stuff and crafting and if you want to tune everything you can spend forever on that. It has lots of mechanics in place that incentivize you to progress and some of them are very intelligently made (for example, you get more crafting materials from sending out followers to harvest for you, and these harvesting missions progress by progressing the main quest, so if you've sent out a harvesting mission you will be disincentivized to grind for those materials), but in the end, this aspect will probably feel like the game's weakest for some players. It's not a Gloomhaven mission-based design where you do stuff once, it's more of an open-ended exploration game where you decide where to go or what to do, and that entails random encounters, which might not be to everyone's liking. We found it manageable after crafting some gear that let us manipulate exploration results, however.
The combat system is at least an 8/10, some of the most innovative turn-based design I can remember seeing. The character building is quite good. The exploration is decent. The narrative is excellently produced if somewhat lackluster in substance. If you need that "big game" to play with a steady buddy or yourself over a long period of time, this game will last you for a year, if not more.
It's expensive though, and it weights more than 20 kilos. *Without* additional add-ons.
A small addendum is that it is one of very few board games that has a world that feels big. Travelling between nodes on the world map actually takes some time because of events and random encounters, so you can't just swoop from node to node doing everything.
2. Arkham Horror Card Game
This game is just... chef's kiss, man. Game setup image stolen from YouTube (the actual, current version is 4.0.3):
We play it on Tabletop Simulator as you can see, since there's an... illicit mod out there that's very polished and automates a lot of the setup, and the game can be very expensive if you get the cardboard version. The sort of eldritch knowledge required to get your hands on the latest version is in the hands of but a few, but throw me a message and I'll get it to ya.
This game is basically everything that the Arkham Horror/Eldritch Horror board games aren't. It's extremely evocative - the decks really conjure up their characters, while stuff like weaknesses, the encounter deck and the scenario locations just scream Lovecraft. The odds are stacked against you and the game is designed so that fail states aren't binary, which is how you know they really got Lovecraft; you're kind of supposed to fail and then get a bad ending, and this game allows for that in a way few board games do. This means they can churn up the difficulty and make the world actually grim, which evokes the setting much better than restarting to attempt a flawless victory that doesn't feel very lovecraftian.
Besides that, it just plays very well. Turns can be quite fast even though it's a very complex game. You can agonize for minutes during key turns - and for hours building your deck - but of your three actions each turn, some are like to be spent just drawing a resource or a card. Your abilities are also appropriately down to earth a lot of the time; you'll be using first aid kits, a rain coat and a flashlight as your cards more often than anything supernatural.
The actual genius comes from how campaigns, scenarios and locations are designed. It's a really simple system that allows the designers to print a ton of different mysteries (most of which you'll know from the literature) and design around the same skeleton of game (the "game's goal" is to progress an 'Agenda' against you, your goal is progress 'Acts' against it) so that, having played it once, you know the gist of it, yet build infinite complexity on top of this by varying the framing of each game using different encounter decks and Agenda/Act modifiers. This is besides you just changing decks and investigators yourself. The gist of it is that each campaign has a number of scenarios. Each scenario is "one game" of Arkham Horror. Each scenario consists of you investigating a location, which then branches out to more locations. So this can be everything from a single house (you might start in the attic but slowly get access to the hallway, cellar, and kitchen) or an entire city or country (with locations being the docks, the hotel etc.). So you can give each scenario its own feel, modifiers and gimmicks without having to reinvent the wheel, and the design space is huge.
Great game, highly recommend it.
3. Pandemic Legacy
Game setup image:
(Didn't have a pic of our own setup). So, I don't like Pandemic. At least I thought I didn't. I played it a lot when it was all the rage since my pals enjoyed it, but even though I thought it was decent I didn't really get why people loved it *that* much. It was too simple and games became the definition of the quarterbacking problem (that's where the most experienced player makes the decisions for everyone else). Arkham Horror avoids this by hiding most of your investigator's info from your allies and the game is also just complex enough that quarterbacking is hard, but Pandemic has all info available all the time and it's also very simple.
However, despite Pandemic: Legacy having this problem to some extend as well, I absolutely loved it. I've tried other legacy games and thought they were OK, but this has a combination of the base game (Pandemic) being actually well-designed while adding just enough spice on each subsequent game through the legacy mechanics to keep things interesting. It also has a lot more secrets *in addition to* a lot less text between games than most legacy games, so it really does strike the perfect balance.
Every game of Pandemic: Legacy adds new rules and while the quarterback-problem is still there, characters get more complex and they're switched out more often so even when you do quarterback you might find yourself assuming things that just aren't true due to some switch-up.
I think this is probably the legacy game I've enjoyed the most, which is ironic since I gather it's one of the first.
Bonus: King's Dilemma
Game setup image (once again didn't have any lying around myself):
This game is like my dream game on paper. It's Game of Thrones: The Boardgame but instead of another cheap Risk-knockoff that is everyone's dream strategy game in concept but plays like trash, this game is a legacy, story-driven game focusing on the political machinations and power thematic of ASoIaF, which was always the more interesting part. You play a noble - or rather, you play different nobles *from the same house of nobility* over a long period of time - centuries.
The reason it's not on my top three anyways is simple: this game does everything exactly right in terms of narrative, in terms of being evocative, in terms of the basic mechanics. Decisions you make cascade through the ages and the power dynamics of the game's core voting design are quite brilliant. It just doesn't pay enough attention to the finer details of its game design which ends up making it way less enticing than it could be.
Basically every turn of the game you draw a dilemma and depending on a lot of variables each player has some number of votes, money for bribes etc. You debate the dilemma, roleplaying-style, and use arguments for your case, but at the end of the day, voting, money, favor-promising etc. determines the outcome of the vote. The actual mechanics are voting are fucking brilliant and there's a lot of detail I can't go into here that makes it really kick. Then after some amount of votes, the king dies and you move a few decades ahead and start playing a new character from the same house, dealing with the consequences of your selfish, scheming ancestors.
The reason the game isn't a masterpiece despite being one of the best games at telling an empire-spanning story of political scheming through game mechanics is that the mechanics that govern your incentive to vote one way or another are very jumbled and abstract. Every start of a new king's reign you have a myriad of incentives:
1. Your house's overall incentive, which doesn't change.
2. The new noble character you're playing, who changes from reign to reign.
3. The short-term goal of each vote.
4. The narrative goal of the story each vote is tied to.
5. Your pledges, allegiances and the power and money available to you.
While this sounds interesting on paper making for new games every time, it also means that your first 7 games of King's Dilemma, when you still haven't realized the underlying mechanics of it, are very interesting. After that, you start realizing that the actual arguments everyone are making when discussing the (very, very well-written dilemmas) actually don't matter in the slightest bit, because everyone will be voting from some abstract interest based on mechanics they don't really understand rather than being tied to the throughline of their noblehouse with arguments being able to sway them. In other words, your incentives to vote are hidden from everyone, so it's really difficult for others to attempt to manipulate those incentives.
In addition, to attempt to make you roleplay and forget your incentives, the goals for long term victory for each player are really, really vague. This is good, because it means you don't get bogged down by numbers. However sadly it has the effect that all the sliders that move up and down for your kingdom as it feels the consequences of your voting - economics, culture, food, etc. - don't matter one bit. They're essentially just tallies to make out what player wins a round of King's Dilemma - they represent nothing actually tangential, and tanking your country's food and economy for the entire reign of a king will mean *almost nothing* for your kingdom longterm. How your kingdom develops can shift wildly - but it's decided by how you vote on dilemmas, not by how well your kingdom does economically or in terms of science.
I think I'd still really recommend it for a group that can get into the roleplaying and put aside the mechanics for a bit - opening up new dilemma's and building out each of the narratives, watching it branch with the catastrophic results of your scheming, is really, really fun.
Just don't expect the foundational mechanics of anything besides the power dynamics of voting to work especially well.
Last edited:
). I did borrow a copy of Spirit Island and play that sp for quite a few runs (I also tried it proper coop, but I kinda preferred it solo). Playing it solo also meant I could just keep it unpacked on a table for a month, which helped a lot with reducing setup time. It is a coop game, where you play as evil nature spirits trying to exploit the native tribals (and just wield fearsome supernatural powers) to kill the good guy european explorers trying to bring the light of civilization. Didn't feel like it really had quarterbacking problems, instead just really long discussions every turn to try and figure out what everyone has and how to optimally deal with the current crises. The game does suffer a bit from being fully deterministic, so you want to plan out literally every action and its consequences before you take your first decision (which does slow it down a lot).
