What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

There were so many good games that FFG released in that golden era, but the best of them were the collaborations with GW, with BBTM and Chaos in the Old World being at the top of the list.

Last week I didn't realize that we were going to have four, so we defaulted to an all-time classic (Cosmic Encounter.) This time, I knew we were going to have four, so I intentionally brought a modern classic: Magical Athlete. For those who didn't pay attention to the Cult of the Old announcement thread, Virabhadra clued me into the fact that a wholesaler that he uses for rare/out-of-print stuff had a couple copies of Athlete and I'd been looking for one for a while that didn't cost insane Ebay prices. So, I got in touch with them and bought one for $65. When it arrived, it still had the shrinkwrap on it, but I figured they might have done that when they picked it up. But, no, this copy was literally NiS because it hadn't been opened since the day Z-Man printed it. I had to punch out all the tokens and unseal the cards, which is kind of astounding. So, I finally got it to the table with a group of hardcore gamers; none of whom had heard of it.

In the first game, everyone had kind of a motley collection, since no one was really sure how the systems worked except me. But I kept missing out on the really good picks and ended up with an equally motley selection of the Witch, Philosopher, Troll, Thief, and Medusa. Pretty much all "Don't do that" types, except the Thief, whose power is only good in close games, of which this one was not at all. The guy who took the Assassin did use it on the wisest target, which was the Merchant, but there were two players who rushed out ahead of everyone, with one winning 13-10-4-1; that 1 being me. I'm usually the target of really competitive games that I'm teaching to others, which is fine, but I also had miserable luck with the dice and, again, a pretty poor lineup.

The second game was quite different. I ended up with an excellent group of the Assassin, Priest, Ranger, Siren, and the Merchant. The reason I had the latter was because I had the first in my list, which I used to eliminate the Pirate from the game, since I didn't want to deal with the kidnapping. I did decently in the first couple races, but then started to crush things with Ranger, Priest, and Merchant. In the last race with the latter, I swapped places with the Martial Artist no less than three times, eventually winning that one, which gave me the overall win, 11-9-6-2. These are gamer types, so I could tell they were a little less enthused about something that seems so simple (Roll a die and move?) but they soon got into the swing of things and there was more laughter at the die rolls and power effects than many other games we've played in the past. Magical Athlete has lost none of its charm and I think will easily be a return play.

I've played a lot of Ark Nova on BGA, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Now instead of losing 124-79, I'm losing 124-109. I'm now convinced that it's more luck-based than Terraforming Mars, in that you can get a shitty draw that doesn't match what the starting Conservation goals are. That could be just me saying this because I suck at it, though.

RobertB wrote: I've played a lot of Ark Nova on BGA, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Now instead of losing 124-79, I'm losing 124-109. I'm now convinced that it's more luck-based than Terraforming Mars, in that you can get a shitty draw that doesn't match what the starting Conservation goals are. That could be just me saying this because I suck at it, though.

Nope. You are spot on. For as strategic and tactical as I think Ark Nova can be, you're ability to be successful is entirely luck dependant. If you say this on that other website, or on the subreddit, you'll be told you're not "drawing enough cards" & "you should be going through the deck at least twice". Because BGA has afforded me the opportunity, I've tried this several times and have concluded that those people, in fact, have no idea what they are talking about.

No matter how many cards you draw through, you're going to get smashed by an opponent that has a lucky draw with early cards and base conservation projects. They dictate the pace of the game, and you'll soon fall way behind if you're not actively keeping up.

I love a lot about Ark Nova. Lots of great decisions to make, love the art & theme. The mechanism all fit together really well. It falls apart for me when, as I mentioned, your ability to succeed is so luck dependant.

I must be incredibly lucky given how often I win. Time to head to Vegas lads!

I am being facetious of course.

In order to be less of a dick, some real advice I can give is that I think the point where you guys are getting frustrated is that you are forming a strategy and then hoping that enormous deck of cards is just going to give up what you need. I reckon you will more consistently do better when you treat your strategy as pliable and dynamic, responsive to what you can find rather than trying to force things to a plan.

A much bigger decision is what action cards to upgrade and when, to give you the right tools to respond, with the direct purchase from market being an important factor. By extension the choice between associate or card flip on the conservation track is important as an extra pawn early on can provide some much bigger benefits than a card flip you might not actually need.

But my usual statement stands - play the games you like and if this one is frustrating for you then there are plenty more to play ☺️

My strategy is usually to try to get animals that match conservation projects. I'll take a 2.

My last game I out appealed my opponents by 30. Lost the game (by about 20) because I couldn't get any conservation online. Never had the opportunity to match anything from the draw or row. The two conservations I did have were lucky draws, they matched the animals that I was building because I had no other direction.

But in the flip side, I've won a game by 40 because every draw was absolutely useful. Got all the top spots on all the base projects, and two additional ones I drew.

I feel like this is one of the rare cases where introducing statistical terminology adds clarity to a discussion.

When people are saying Ark Nova is luck based I actually think they mean it’s high variance. Lucky is when a player receives positive outcomes from high variance situations consistently. While luck and skill are in tension, skill and variance aren’t necessarily if players have agency to control or play around that variance. An example of a high skill, high variance game is Twilight Struggle. To mezike’s point, high skill players will beat lower skill players by managing that variance better (through better decision making, increased knowledge of the deck, maintaining optionality over heavily anchoring on a specific strategy, etc.). I haven’t played enough to know how much agency a player has over that variance in Ark Nova but I’ll trust mezike when he says it’s manageable. The challenge with Ark Nova is that it presents itself as a traditional strategic euro but it definitely isn’t one.

For what it’s worth, I tend to dislike games in that high variance style including both Ark Nova and Twilight Struggle.

Cappster, although I will opportunistically take a tilt at the base projects they are rarely my main focus. Precisely because, as you mention and Sornars elaborated on more eloquently than I did, you are at the mercy of the draw. Having an idea of what is achievable, and when to pounce to prevent an opponent securing a spot that would make it less likely to complete, is my usual interaction. If I have the opportunity to do them all and at a high level then that may well shape my play, it’s just not a default goal.

My more usual approach is to look for early extra associates so that I can make better use of my Association card in the action cycle rather than having to work around it, and once you upgrade that card it can be valuable to start buying conservation points two or three times per round if no one else is making an effort to compete while they are cheap. But it depends on so many other factors, sometimes building out to activate bonuses is the best path to get started, or focusing on reputation. The goal cards and early sponsors often have a guiding impact on early efforts. Tbh my strategy in the early game is more about leaning in a few vague directions rather than a specific goal.

There are a multitude of places where points can come from, particularly from sponsor cards which have additional value if they provide post-endgame points (and I would say my biggest learning has been that winning scores tend to come from the points you bank rather than the points you score during play). Pushing up reputation via association can yield some big dividends. Holding onto a project card and upgrading actions to buy animals or sponsors out of the display, maybe in combination with using upgraded cards action to drill the deck, and so on. It’s incredibly broad which is what I’m alluding to with working around the random card draws and being pliable with your strategy.

(Ark Nova)

I'll tell you what, in spite of playing the game three or four times I still can't decipher the stuff y'all are talking about regarding conservation projects and associations and all because all of it is so arbitrarily implemented with rando game mechanics that it doesn't hold together for me. Granted, I'm old and not too bright. But I mean really.

And I think that's where I found the game lacking. I'm fine with losing; I'm fine with variance and luck and whatever else you want to use to describe the way the game plays out. I'm just stuck with the impression that at the end of the game I have an anaconda, a duck, a wildebeest and a beehive in my zoo and there are chickens sponsoring me. Not sure why anyone would make the trip, but it's about conservation, at least I think that's what they were intending it to be. But good news -- they all have symbols on them that are what really matters once you figure out how they work together.

This is the most complicated set collection game ever created.

mezike wrote: Tbh my strategy in the early game is more about leaning in a few vague directions rather than a specific goal.

In CCG terms I'm a control player and that style carries across to all sorts of games. I feel a lot of people undervalue maintaining optionality and prefer committing to and maximising a specific strategy.

I also think playing this way while effective can also lead to bad vibes as maintaining optionality often means engaging in denial to the other players. I learned a lot about myself when playing Food Chain Magnate because to me a win is a win (within the rules of the game!) and in that game pursuing a blowout win with a 20% chance of success makes less sense to me than grinding out a $1 win with a 70% of success. I don't go out seeking to create negative play experiences but in games I really like I tend to go in hard and controlling the choices available to both you and your opponents is often a really good route to victory.

To bring this back around to Ark Nova, I can see how maintaining flexibility is what good play looks like and would even address the frequently brought up lack of player interaction in the game. If everyone is heads down building their primate/bird/petting zoos then the game is the dreaded multiplayer solitaire because you're barely competing for anything except for slots in the base conservation projects but if you are all playing to maintain options while denying them to your opponents then the game is a lot more interactive.

Now that I've written this defence of Ark Nova, I will reiterate that I think it's not very fun and I hate the giant deck of cards.

sornars wrote: To bring this back around to Ark Nova, I can see how maintaining flexibility is what good play looks like and would even address the frequently brought up lack of player interaction in the game. If everyone is heads down building their primate/bird/petting zoos then the game is the dreaded multiplayer solitaire because you're barely competing for anything except for slots in the base conservation projects but if you are all playing to maintain options while denying them to your opponents then the game is a lot more interactive.

That's a really great point. I'm also largely a control player in CCGs (Black and Blue were my consistent favorites in MTG) but my version of control usually wasn't just waiting you out (albeit an admitted Turbo Stasis player from back in the day; draw, pay the Stasis, Island, go) but extremely active. I played Black discard to defray the threats from your hand before you even played them. I played small counters (Force Spike!) on early cards to actively disrupt your strategy before it got started and I was faced with a threat that was much more difficult to deal with. I remember Force Spiking someone's Llanowar Elf on their first turn and they stopped and blinked at me for a few seconds before passing the turn. But it utterly slowed down their development and I eventually locked them down and killed them with a Morphling.

So, yeah, I'm like that about a lot of games. If I can see you building something, I'm going to actively interfere in it because that's often going to lead to victory in a much surer way than me just sitting on my side of the table and building my perfect machine. It's why I tend to like engine builders like 51st State far more than those like Wingspan. In the former, you're actively encouraged to disrupt (Raze) your opponents because if you let them sit there and do their own thing and they've had a couple better drafts than you, you're likely going to lose.

Caveat all of this with the fact that I haven't played Ark Nova and could just be missing the point entirely.

sornars wrote: Now that I've written this defence of Ark Nova, I will reiterate that I think it's not very fun and I hate the giant deck of cards.

And I think this is the main part of the issue for me. The deck is too big, and it's difficult to "maintain an open strategy", be flexible, etc, when you're presented with cards that end up not resulting in any points for you.

All the things mezike & sornars mentioned for good play; grabbing sponsors that give conservation points, upgrading the associate action to make the early donations, etc., are all well and good if your given the opportunity to do so. For instance, depending on how long I think it will take to get my first and second upgrade, Building and Associate are almost always my first pick. (Building if I think I can get to my second one quickly after the first). With upgraded building, I can grab map bonuses faster, and not completely waste level 5 build actions. Once Associate is upgraded, well, you can take that action at any level and be efficient.

I have mentioned it before, and I think it still holds - the game would be a lot smoother/predictable if the deck were smaller. And by predictable, I do not mean less lucky/less variable, maybe I mean consistent. You'd have a better idea of what you're building towards, and, as a consequence, what your opponents are building towards. It would create a tighter experience all around.

I will conclude by saying that I've played 5 times in person, and 13 times on BGA. There are games where everything goes my way and everything works out nice and easy. There are games where I can't get a conservation point to save my life. Most of the games are somewhere in the middle. We played BattleStar: Galactica on Monday night, and we came to a very similar conclusion - some games, the crisis cards come up in an order that they basically nullify themselves and you have a nice, leisurely jaunt to New Caprica. Other times, your dead in the water before the second round of loyalty cards are even drawn. Sometimes it's kind of in the middle. Both of these games need something to make their experience more consistent. And I think the easiest way to do that within it's current state is to edit the size of their decks.

In games that don't take 3+ hours to play, this isn't as big an issue. You just know you're on one end of the bell curve and you play again.

The giant ARK NOVA deck wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t constrained to such a limited hand size.

Game night at the office. We played DOGS OF WAR which was great and then I convinced to try my copy of CREATURE COMFORTS which was not. Felt far too much like bean counting, and I had the distinct sense that no matter what I did on my turn, I would probably get around the same amount of points. So there was no sense of achievement, no sense of making clever play or anything, just procedural stuff and very adorable illustrations. One could probably play the game better, make a strategy, maximize turns, and make sure to get a lot of points, but that would require excessive analysis in a game that's already far too long and feels even longer.