The PayPal slush fund continues its eternal cycle:
Latest expansion for Mage Knight: the Board Game, which came out a year ago.
Latest expansion for Race for the Galaxy’s second branch.
Latest Vlaada game, which I saw played like crazy at the last three cons I hit. Nice to see him putting crowd pleasers out.
No Thank You, Evil!, for Iris and I to play in a year (thanks for reminding me it exists, John Till!)
Cube Quest, because quick dexterity fillers are always welcome here.
I didn’t even know a new RftG expansion had been released!
Marshall Miller Looks like lots of it is related to the boardgame element they added in Alien Artifact, which tbh I’m pretty iffy on. The new cards are nice though.
Codenames is good fun
Honestly, I’ve only really liked that first expansion. The others have all felt like needless complication. …but I continue to buy them…
Marshall Miller The first one from… the first branch of expansions? The Gathering Storm? It’s probably the tightest of the bunch, although wow there are some buh-roken combos that got introduced.
The second branch is smarter about that but there’s all this other boardgamey cruft they’ve added. We played the AA exploration map once, once and it was more than enough. I want a 10 minute card game, not a two hour long boardgame slog with cards.
How does one acquire a PayPal slush fund?
I’ve had that MK expansion on my wishlist since it first came out. No luck so far… let me know how you like it.
Joe Beason Secret Projects
Joe Beason by selling old games that have, hopefully, accrued value.
jeff fearnow man I wish. It’s been very hard to get focused on them. Bad few months for my brain.
Paul Beakley Yeah, it’s been kind of non-stop UnHappyPaul for a spell. :/
How’s your back? Cube Quest requires a lot of time retrieving warriors from under furniture. There is the bonus factor where you may discover small change under the sofa to augment your slush fund.
Neil Robinson yeah I’m a little concerned about that. We’ll see!
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Marshall Miller I was wrong! That RFTG expansion doesn’t continue the Alien Artifacts arc, it’s a third flipping arc! With both a simple “just add these cards in” element as well as a “aaaaaand maybe also play this whole other game” element to it. I’m middling stoked, but if the whole-other-game component ends up being as creaky as Alien Artifacts we may just stick to the additional cards. (Which btw are not compatible with AA at all. I wonder if anyone’s ever worked out a superhack of all five expansion cards into one big not-broken deck?)
Paul, have you played Roll for the Galaxy?
Adam Blinkinsop oh lord have I. Yes. It’s my wife’s favorite. I liiiiike it but I don’t loooove it.
Oh, curious! I think I like it more than Race, but that may just be because I find it easier to teach.
Race expansions give me some severe FOMO.
Adam Blinkinsop I’ll say that I don’t feel like Roll is master-able the way Race is. I’ve got about 3k plays of Race on BGA and, whatever my rating, I feel like I’ve fully mastered it. There’s enough randomness in Roll, and the tile draw is so unpredictable, that I don’t know that I can get much better than I am now. Does that make sense?
Definitely easier to teach. And fiddling with the dice is delightful. The cups, the little GM screens, the whole form factor is really nice. I kind of hate the giant RftG deck but I play 99% online so I kind of don’t care about that any more.
Ah, skill ceiling. Perhaps. And online play would definitely make Race more palatable. I’ll have to give it another shot.
BGA, man! Look me up! I’m uh… pbeakley
Christian Griffen oh oh I forgot to mention: I didn’t know Tezla was predominantly a book of scenarios. I mean, yeah, there’s another Knight and all their attendant stuff. But I’m really much more interested in the 10-or-so scenarios that it came with. Really interesting. It’s also ostensibly standalone, although I can’t imagine anyone who bought this hadn’t also picked up Lost Legion and uh…the other one.
Unfortunately the color matching is fucked. You can’t really stack the new critters any more, you need to pull ’em from a bowl or a bag or something. I sleeve my cards so it’s nbd there, but they’re also fucked.
Yay for scenarios, boo for the color screw up. I wonder if that’s just printer error or what, but that’s definitely a hurdle in bringing it to the table.
Christian Griffen it’s why it took me a year to buy it. Confession: it was the filler bit I needed to hit the free shipping threshold at coolstuffinc.com.