Gen Con is over and we’re recording live from the hotel room the morning after! We’re talking about the games we saw, the (few) games we were able to play, and all the stuff that was hot for purchase at the show.
We kick things off with a big announcement – you can check out our new website here, or enter our contest for a chance to win $50 directly here.
Our acquisition disorders included the new release for 2017 from Quined, Agra, and the newest civilization game from Fantasy Flight Games, Civilization: New Dawn.
We also chat about some of the games we played this week, including the new Munchkin CCG, and Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game.
Finally, we dig into the 18 hottest games we saw for sale at the con this year, including some of the quickest sellouts, surprise releases, and more.
Make sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and on www.www.boardgamersanonymous.com. You can also find us on BoardGameGeek, and if you want to support the show, you can donate a dollar on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
3 Comments
I’m sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with Scott Pilgrim! I’m the designer, and it definitely sounds like you didn’t have the experience I’m looking for in the game; the concept that you had five turns with no opportunities for meaningful actions is shocking to me. Two things that may not have come up in the demo: There’s two draw piles for adding cards to the plotline. At the start of each turn, you may eliminate one of the cards from either pile – as one way to cycle through cards that aren’t useful to you. In addition, when you buy an action card you can choose to remove it from the game instead of adding it to your deck; so late game, buying cheap cards and discarding them is a way to cycle forward to the Challenges or Power-Ups you need to win. And unless you’d already defeated the Evil Ex, there’s no negative consequences to attacking the Ex and failing – so if you truly have nothing useful to do, you could take a stab at it and hope for the best.
Looking to trying to capture the flavor of the property, to me it is about the idea that victory ultimately comes through building a better life – Power-Ups being about relationships, a place to live, professional success, etc. But sometimes the best way to do that is through surreal video game violence. So Stephen can just get a job through hard work – purchasing the Power-Up with the Work resource. Scott just doesn’t do well with hard work. But if he can flip the Power-Up, it becomes a Challenge… and if he can beat the crap out of that Challenge, he can get the job that way. The secondary aspect is the use of Drama, with the idea that Drama is both inconvenient for you but also causes trouble for the people around you, by increasing the difficulty of their Challenges. Stephen handles this by eliminating Drama and becoming more efficient; Scott lives with the Drama, using matching cards to ride with it; and Wallace thrives when he has a friend who has Drama.
Obviously, none of this changes the bad experience you had with the game. But I am sorry to hear that it happened; it definitely isn’t my intention that you could have two turns in which you felt nothing meaningful happened, let alone five.
Hi Keith,
Thanks for your response and insights on the game. The situation described occurred in an initial play through, and it does sound like some rules may have been missing from the explanation of the game at the demo night where we learned it – which would have impacted our subsequent plays as well. In the particular situation I mentioned, I had taken out the Evil Ex to get within 2 VPs of winning. The following turns there were no challenges or powerups available and I purchased cards, but wasn’t able to do much until another player caught up and hit the VP count.
That said, I wasn’t discarding those cheap cards to cycle through the draw piles – I assumed they had to go into my deck so I was usually going for the best card available. This is how we played through subsequent play throughs, and while that situation didn’t recur, it had an impact on end game flow. I’ll be sure to give it another go with these things in mind to see if it has an impact.
~Anthony
That definitely makes sense. Yeah, the buy-and-discard rule is there primarily for the endgame, where there may be a lot of cards on the table that don’t actually improve your deck or that have combat moves that don’t help you (Knives really wants a deck full of left arrows, so a card with a right arrow is a bad option even if she could use it during acquisition). So buy-and-remove is a way to keep things moving, along with that initial elimination at the start of a turn. And any time a card effect says “eliminate a card”, if it doesn’t specify that it’s from your deck, you can eliminate a card from the plotline.
Again, I recognize none of this changes the fact that you didn’t have a great experience with the game, but I hope it will improve it next time.