![]() ![]() A bit of worker-placement/action-programming, which then leads to area-control and a pretty cool unit-customization-system, there's multiple ways to victory but they are quite intuitive and straightforward and it also looks really, really good. Okay, The Lord of the Ice Garden is very strategic, with zero luck, a high level of intense interaction, actions that have repercussions that often only come back rounds later to bite you in the ass and it's also quite unforgiving, plus the symbology is a bit problematic and there's a few too many little rules that overcomplicate things, but the central gameplay-loop is relatively straightforward. Then again, I really don't consider The Lord of the Ice Garden all that complex and also basically everything with a weight above 3.5 is an utter waste of time and people who like these games are pretentious wankers. Here's my secret weapon! Because whenever folks accuse me of not liking deep and complex games, I can go "You're wrong, because The Lord of the Ice Garden is in my personal Top Ten and it has a weight of 4.08 at time of writing! Check mate!". Well, maybe now that the substantially worse second edition is becoming scarcer and scarcer, Wallace will return for a third edition that is closer to the first one? I mean, I doubt it, but a man can dream, right? It's a shame that this glorious first edition isn't widely available anymore, more people should be able to play it. But if it works, there's hardly anything better than it. It can also occasionally bomb like you wouldn't believe (and I mean the bad kind of bomb, not the one you shove up Azathoth's ass.), most often thanks to folks who don't get it or aren't on the same page as everybody else. It's a super-strange game that is on the one hand very restrictive (lots of rules and lots of little exceptions), on the other hand lets you loose with very little direction, so it does have a very sandbox-y feeling to it. Or feed their own agents to Yog-Sothoth for laughs. The bad guys want to stop the good guys from doing so. And you only do that if you're on the side of the good guys. who just happen to be ghastly monstrosities from beyond time and space. An incredibly weird, wonky, fragile and quite opaque quasi-team-game about murdering European, American and African royalty. Although not that easy to get to the table.Īlso not that easy to get to the table, although definitely usually worth it: Martin Wallace's best game (and arguably the only one that's unconditionally recommendable) A Study in Emerald. I'm also still not a hundred percent sure about the balance, the good side seems to have it easier than the shadow player (although not to an alarming degree), but to me personally, that doesn't matter all that much, because this is one of those games you can really immerse yourself in, that tends to create dramatic and lasting tales each and every time you play it. ![]() The central dice-mechanism is cool, but the combat-system is a bit convoluted to say the least. Also one that looks fantastic on the table, has a great dramatic arc and is a thematic delight, even though I'll go on record once again saying that I absolutely don't care for Tolkien's bullshit, but yeah, while I'm not a huge fan of the theme of the game, it does come across as quite strong and involving, so that's always good. Because yeah, even though The Battle of Five Armies is substantially shorter and smaller than its big brother War of the Ring, it's still a pretty darn big, complex, epic game. I actually came very close to playing this one just last night, but then we postponed that in favor of some other, smaller games. Nevertheless, please "oooh" and "aaah" and clap accordingly, that'd be great. there probably won't be too many surprises, because aside from some jockeying for positions, not much has changed since last year. So let's see what I chose this year, shall we? I mean. Today's games are gonna be "a slightly smaller spinoff of a gigantic war-game based on a popular (and not very good) fantasy saga, a wonky team-based-but-not-really deckbuilder by a highly overrated designer, a zero-luck-area-control-game based on a Polish science-fantasy-book-series, a worker-placement-game set in a popular RPG universe and finally a tableau-builder that I have played entirely too much (or maybe not enough) quite recently" and Jan already identified all of them correctly (although he didn't seem to be too sure about the title of one of them). You should never show how the blogging-sausage is made, right? Anyway, today, we've finally reached the holy, sacrosanct Top Ten and we'll count down the five worse of the ten best board games of all time. Maybe I shouldn't talk about that this freely. On a Saturday this time, because I've got more time tomorrow, so I can do something that needs deliberation then, while today's post is one that I can probably just crank out on the side. ![]()
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