F:ATties Five Favorites - Ameritrash

DukeofChutney wrote: RE Ares Project; I am one of the few people that really digs it. I like double blind systems (which this is) I like the video gamey strategy feel to it, and i like the in built tempo to the game. You build up armies behind screens and then throw dice at each other. After a few games you start to learn the speed at which the different factions build up, and the different routes you can take with each deck. I also quite like the base building aspect. In some respects it feels similar to Sirlins newer rts inspired magic clone. It is also sort of unique, no other card game plays like it. It is definitely worth a spin but i think it will always be a niche game. Its a 2 player, or 2 team game, the 3 and 4 way bashes can be fun but don't really work.

I've always wanted to play his game but the number requirement prevents me from doing it. I think it would have been fantastic with my old group, actually.

I had some lovely and well-written responses about each of my favorite games... then my computer crashed. Instead, you just get a list of my top five favorite Ameritrash games...

1. Betrayal at House on the Hill v.1/v.2/Legacy

2. Wings of War/Glory/X-Wing v.1

3. DungeonQuest

4. Star Wars Imperial Assault

5. ah crap, are you going to make me choose? I mean Kingdom Death: Monster or Thunder Road? Camp Grizzly or Red November? Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit or Survive: Escape from Atlantis? Screw you, I'm picking them all.

You start preaching the word about Wings of War and you're going to end up being Sag's new best friend.

Star Trek Ascendancy
Viktory II
Axis & Allies
Fortress America
Titan

Honorable mentions

Ogre
Shogun
Conquest if the Empire
Buck Rogers Battle for the 25th Century
War and Peace
Crucible
Old Milton Bradley's Broadside, Dogfight, and Screaming Eagles

My own mixes

Hero Fix - various house-ruled versions of HeroClix including my son's with Lego minifigs
Blood Feud New York with Sons of Anarchy

and not yet published

Shores of Tripoli - a light wargame we're playtesting with Viktory II pieces, others are using Broadside pieces

Forgot this thread was pinned. Here is my list, revised as of 2/14/11 1/02/12 1/03/13 9/21/21:

1. Camp Grizzly - All the good AmeriTrash games tell stories, and Camp Grizzly consistently tells entertaining stories. It's a semi-cooperative game, so there is occasionally a vast betrayal. The five small expansions add significant replay value, but the base game is a very solid, well-rounded experience, perfectly capturing the summer camp slasher movie style with a simple board, some dice, and some decks of cards. The play time is typically 60 to 90 minutes and it is easy to teach, so Camp Grizzly hits the table often and everybody enjoys it.

2. Marvel Champions - I grew up reading comics, especially Marvel superhero comics, and I have long been searching for a good superhero game that really captures the feel of the genre. Marvel Champions finally delivers the goods, in a co-op/solo game about scheming super-villains and the heroes that thwart them. The game is not extremely complicated, but there is enough meat on the bones of the rules that the designers have been able to successfully and thematically express a wide range of characters. The game offers the chance to customize player decks, but doesn't require it, and I am the rare CCG veteran who never enjoyed deck design.

3. Arkham Horror - With all the expansions in the mix, Arkham Horror offers a thematic sandbox with near-infinite variety. The mythos cards function like punch cards for a cardboard computer that generates the illusion of a great interactive story. I would play this constantly if I didn't own any other games. Setup is lengthy and it hogs the whole table, but the experience is memorable.

4. The Gothic Game - By every reasonable standard, The Gothic Game should be a bad game. It uses mechanics that have fallen completely out of favor, like player elimination and roll-and-move and keeping track of things with pencil and paper. Many of the important things that happen in the game are random. Players often have few choices. And yet, every single person who has played this game with me has loved it. The bizarre board delivers great atmosphere and the weird events from the room decks complete the experience. And everybody seems to get a sick thrill from playing a game that encourages them to directly attack and kill the other players, or at least their playing pieces.

5. Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress - I have also been looking for a great dungeon crawl board game for decades, and Blackstone Fortress is the best that I have found, despite the science-fiction setting. The map tiles are vivid and evocative. The characters offer distinctive play styles. The combat is very tactical, and there is a nice though small mixture of enemies, ranging from vicious HTH fighters to ones capable of psychic attack from a distant corner of the board. The overall game is a bit easy, but a few injuries can abruptly ramp up the difficulty, and all the boss fights are tough.

What left my list this time and why:

Space Hulk: Death Angel is a great little game, but the difficulty level makes the game a bit too tense to fit my current definition of fun. It's a great design and nearly always a great play, but I just don't have quite as much enthusiasm for it and so it hasn't hit the table recently.

The Hills Rise Wild - Still a great budget tactical game, but the headcount is too particular for frequent play. Two players is fine and four players is great, but three players tends to leave one player getting squeezed hard by the other two. Or two engage in total war while the third player tiptoes away with the win.

Fury of Dracula - This is still a great game, but I feel that the greatness is slightly diluted by the various editions. Each version has different advantages or disadvantages, and each feels like it falls slightly short of an ideal version of the game.

Cosmic Encounter - This one also fell off my list due to a headcount issue. It's perfectly playable with 3 to 8 players, but I feel that 5 or 6 players is a much better experience. More dynamic combinations possible in play, and better multi-player dynamics. With 7 or 8 players, it is entirely possible for the game to end before everyone has had at least one turn.

Huh, this is a thread. Ameritrash? Hmm...these should fit, right? Eh, I'm not too worried, I just want to write. Alright then, time to start.

5. Galaxy Trucker: This game reminds me of Mario Kart in that everyone is clawing to the front but misfortune and wacky antics will screw everyone eventually. I love the blurb in the instructions where it mentions that as long as you profit, you win. It helps take the edge off, though I know a couple instances where a wrecked early run soured someone's opinion on the game. Eh, it adds to the drama. It's a frenzy to shift through and find the one tile you need, or get tunnel vision on certain components, or panic and leave a key gap where you KNOW a meteor will happy split your ship in half. The actual race feels communal in all of us hoping everyone can make it through, obviously with you profiting more, but all suffering is shared from pirates or meteors. I have the original print and I wish those expansions didn't cost an arm and leg.

4. Millennium Blades: So I grew up with Yugioh, both the card game and the anime. When I saw SpaceBiff's review, I knew I had to get this. It took years for a fresh reprint, but it was so worth it. This year was the year I got back into Yugioh's physical card game, which made me appreciate things like deck building and the overall community around CCGs like this. The fact that Millennium Blades riffs on card games (those stacks of paper currency are sadly too accurate!) along with other fun references makes each new card in these gargantuan decks a treat. Again, the real-time scramble is wonderful with you not only trying to form a deck, but adapt to your opponents' strategies and the upcoming round's meta bonuses. Plus, the collection and promo cards enable even useless cards for your strategy to still deserve a moment's consideration...except time's running out and your deck isn't any better than last round while everyone else has been salivating over their new pulls ARRGH!!

3. Treasure Island: Come on, you get to make your own treasure map!! This is one of those games where you need that physicality board games offer to really bring out the true joy in this design. Long John Silver really struggles to win, but I don't think him having a fair chance is the point. He's there to provide drama and weight to everyone else's plans or puttering about. This smarmy bastard is getting out soon, and his fake pirate accent is annoying, he must not win! I love seeing how people react to clues. Some get obsessed on certain details, others are not easily swayed off their searches that are getting ever so closer to the treasure, and others are so desperate for that smarmy bastard to fall that they'll give whatever info it takes to others to make sure Silver doesn't get his...silver....anyways. There is nothing else like this and what is on offer makes me feel like a kid doodling in the margins of his school notebook.

2. Argent: The Consortium: I see you. You're standing there saying, "Worker placement is one of the mainstays of stale Euro design! What the hell is this doing in the thread?!" I move my red mage over, spend a mana, and blast your ass into the infirmary. It's worker placement, but it is FAR from dry and wonderfully thematic. The hidden nature of the voters, the one thing that matters come the end, means you either need to spend your limited actions to get marks and check them, or see what your rivals are doing, which they KNOW you can see. There's plenty of chances for optimization and forethought, but also time to say "Screw it, I'm blasting!" And the spells, sweet child of Gandalf and Mr. Hogwarts! (never read Harry Potter) This is one of the few games where the reveal of new cards make me and everyone else at the table drop their jaws at all the batshit that's on offer. It's magical...heh, this board game writing shit is easy...heh

1. Inis: The king, come from on high for his crown, crafted solely for him. All hail. All bow. My first hobbyist game and nothing still comes close. This is a game where you can plan, scheme, betray, and feel like a brilliant madman as the whole table finally sees the plan you made for several rounds now come to fruition. Those cards, THOSE CARDS!! Brilliant. Each is useful but some are designed for certain situations over others. Even those that make an immediate impact no matter what, Druid, Exploration, Bard, have to fear the merciless shadow of the Geis looming over everything. Even cards that have no use for you to be played can be used to keep your clans alive in combat. Nothing is useless, all have purpose. All just from 17 cards. My god. Hark friends, the High King is here and his reign is kind and just forevermore! All hail. All bow.

Interestingly, people usually gush the most about either Inis (for the reasons you've highlighted) or Kemet (for its speed and ruthless aura) but my favorite of the Matagot "mythic trilogy" is Cyclades. Even though I love the other two, there's something that appeals to me more about the power dynamics in the Greek game. There are different levers to be pulled at different stages of the game and what emerges from the monster deck can create or destroy those levers. Plus the variations are greater with the various expansions (Titans, etc.; I almost never play without Monuments.) Wade and I wrote a piece about the trio years ago:

therewillbe.games/articles-beyond-review...-s-legendary-trinity

I actually own Cyclades, but it is one of my, what do you guys call it? "Shelf toads?" I have Titans and Monuments with it (Charlie's article on the latter is specifically what made me get that.) and I cannot wait to play it. I know enough about it that I feel confident in enjoying it once I can get it tabled.

Actually, Kemet is the one that interests me the least. I mean, it looks good for sure, but it seems to blend in with the rest of the genre more compared to the rest of the trilogy. I'd love to play it at some point, but I am not in a hurry to get my own copy. I have several other DoaM games I want to get played for the first time: Vast, Oath, TI4, Clockwork Wars, Clash of Cultures, Cyclades as I said before, and I will probably buy Last Light here soon.

Yeah, Kemet is the fastest. We've gotten through four-player games in less than an hour. It's really a different flavor of DoaM game because of that speed and the "deckbuilding" aspect to it, so might not be what you're looking for in the genre. I like it because it's that different, but it is definitely third in the Matagot trio for me.

Which version of Vast? I enjoyed (and retained) Mysterious Manor more than Caverns. I didn't dislike the latter. It just didn't hit with my groups and Manor is kind of Caverns 2.0 and went over better with people the couple times we've gotten it on the table. Not sure I'd define Vast as a DoaM, but I'm not going to nitpick, either. (In a recent Reddit thread, I was calling out people for labeling Cosmic Encounter as a DoaM...)

If you like Inis, I think you'll really enjoy Oath. I mean, you should like Oath because it's Cole Wehrle, but even beyond that.

Inis seems to be a standout favorite, with its unique gameplay and strategy dynamics. It's interesting how each person gravitates towards a different title within the Matagot "mythic trilogy"

I think a lot of gamers gravitate to Inis because it's doesn't strictly involve "combat" in the sense that most DoaMs do (e.g. I move to your space, crush your dudes, and take what was yours.) In Inis, there's a lot of space sharing and it's not the all-or-nothing situation that exists with most area control games like... Kemet and Cyclades. That less combative angle I think attracts people who wouldn't be OK with games like TI, in the same way that Root attracts people based on the meeples and the theme ("Cute woodland animals!") when it is, in fact, a total wargame, beginning to end. Both of them are good for convincing otherwise reluctant people that DoaMs can actually be quite fun.

Mysterious Manor. Dan's review of it made it too good to pass up. Honestly, him and SUSD have formed most of my collection based on their opinions. It's just a matter of getting people who are accustomed to heavy games together to play it. I have friends that enjoy Root so it's only a matter of time.

I have Oath! Again...need to play it, but so much of it gives me Inis vibes with the wild twist of its evolving world. "Historiography" represented in a board game is too fascinating for me to pass up. No idea when I'll get to play it, but I am happy to have it with me for when the day comes. I'm like many of you guys in that I find Cole Wehrle's stuff to be so interesting. Pax Pamir 2 and John Company 2 are on my wishlist,

For Inis, it's a mix of things that first drew me in. The art because duh. Your actions being limited to cards helps break down the possibility space of your turn into something digestible, which makes it easier to plan ahead. The epic tale cards gives some great spice and fun turns of fortune, while the advantage cards help people care about and go after the territories on the board. The rules are also pretty small for a game with this much going on (seriously, it's one of the few games of that weight I can teach off the cuff). Finally, those 3 victory conditions help people carve their own path to victory. That being said, have any of you guys ever won from ruling over 6 other clans? My friends and I tend to focus on 6 sanctuaries and 6 territories to much better success. That could just be our subjective meta though.

Huh. It seems I've only commented on another's list in this thread, never contributing my own five cents. Here we go:

1) Heroquest
2) Risk Legacy
3) Wiz-War
4) Talisman
5) Fury of Dracula

And this was difficult because I hold Heroscape and Spartacus is high regard.

I didn't want to post on a friday, but being drunk/forced by the universe I have to quickly point out that Cyclades/Kemet/Inis are not a trilogy. They are part of a line with two other games called Giants and Hyperborea which are widely ignored.
I sincerely think both may be great but have played neither so there.

Eh. Both of those games have nothing to do with ancient mythologies/traditions and Hyperborea wasn't even published by Matagot. I'm still fine calling it a mythic trilogy, which is a counterpart to Eric Lang's mythic trilogy. There's symmetry there.