We have a regular Game Night here and the last game played was “Fandooble”.
Four dice with dragons (red and green), treasure chests, thieves, wizards and knights.
Simple rules. You get to take a gold pieces from the dragon’s hoard for every chest you roll. You get to steal a gold piece from another player if you roll the thief (the eponymous Fandooble).
If you get a dragon you have to drop that die from your next roll. If you get a knight (for the green dragons) or a wizard (for the red dragons) you can take the die back. If you get 3 dragons you lose your winnings and if it is 3 red dragons, you lose you entire stash.
Fast and fun. Silly, yes, but a bunch of us enjoyed it last week. But, then again, we all love “Cards Against Humanity”.
How many players in The Bricker household? Ages? Desired complexity?
Suburbia (1-4) is a great “SimCity the board game” - tiles give you money and/or reputation, and generally make sense (you are punished for putting an airport near houses)
Stone Age (1-4, there is a 5 player expansion) is a good intro worker placement game.
Blokus - relatively simple game that can involve some pretty complex strategy. One of those games where the smartest person playing will almost always win.
Quiddler - cards with letters and point values on them. Make words. Fun to be had by all.
To me, this sounds like you’re just losing. If one player has three provinces before you have 1, they are kicking your ass. It’s not a problem with the game at that point, IMHO.
This does not refute the possibility that the person who is getting three provinces before anyone else has 1 is not just playing much better than everyone else. Honestly, I’ve never seen this happen in my games of Dominion, because as soon as someone buys a Province, the rest of the table goes “Crap, time to start buying Provinces” and no one gets to three before other people have at least one. I’d also argue that by the time someone has three provinces, they’re no longer an “early leader”.
Actually, I don’t think this will do what you think it will; Provinces will still be the most efficient way to score because of the way Dominion works. Someone with four estates in their deck is worse off than someone with one province because they have four green cards clogging their deck instead of one, AND it took them FOUR buys to get those points. The person with the province is still going to win unless the score gets counted that turn.
Er, duh? The game is ABOUT getting buying power. This is like saying “Rules variants of monopoly make getting properties easier or harder, but doesn’t change the goal.” Of course it doesn’t. But a thief heavy game means that it’s very, VERY hard for people to get the buying power to play an “empty the provinces pile” game.
This is mostly because the early phases of Seven Wonders are basically fooling you. The points you get during the early stages of the game are nearly trivial compared to the points you will get later as a result the SETUP that you do in this part of the game. The difference is that in Dominion, you just don’t GET points for the setup portion of the game. Who is leading in the “early phases” of both games is basically completely irrelevant to the final outcome, but you have a skewed idea of what the “early” phases of Dominion are vs Seven Wonders. (Seriously, if someone has three provinces, that game is LONG PAST the ‘early’ phases.)
I also am against 7 Wonders. Its unnecessarily complex and your strategy is essentially to do what your wonder is good at, although you certainly can deviate. You see what choices your neighbors are making as well, so you’re able to adjust accordingly.
The first complaint is subjective - my 7-year old doesn’t have any problem with the game’s complexity. It takes a little while to learn but subsequent games go very quickly.
As for your other two points - those aren’t bugs; they are features. Those are two of the reasons we like the game. You would rather play a game that didn’t allow you to adjust your strategy based on what the other players are doing?
Betrayal isn’t one of my favorite games, but it’s still pretty fun. I enjoy the exploration phase on its own merits - it’s fun building the house, and equipping and powering up your characters scratches my RPG itch a bit. (More so if the group gets into roleplaying their characters in general.) I like the strong narrative element inherent in the varied scenarios, and the way the reveal can kick the legs out from under your group’s strategy is a feature to me, not a bug. It can occasionally leave one side or the other in an unwinnable position, but I’ve found that to be the exception, not the rule.
I understand most of this and it makes sense, but I take issue with the statement “and the way the reveal can kick the legs out from under your group’s strategy”; no, it can’t, because it’s essentially impossible to HAVE a strategy at that point because you don’t have any goals. You’re just wandering aimlessly through the house and being subjected to random events.
Of course there’s strategy in the early part of the game. You need to make the best use of the time you have before the scenario pops to equip the entire party to handle the scenario, without burning too many resources on passing the early game challenges, but also without taking so much damage that you can’t stand up to the traitor, and maintaining party balance so you don’t end up with one character who’s strapped to the gills with weapons and magic items, on the off-chance that he’s the one who becomes the traitor. (Or, on the off-chance that you become the traitor, you don’t want one player who can take you down solo).
I’d rather not play 7 Wonders. Board game nerds might like it, but typically, a board game nerd would find the saving grace of any board game if they looked hard enough. I *greatly *preferred Dominon over 7 Wonders.
If you don’t like the game, you don’t like the game - I’m not going to try to change your mind on that. But I have to counter the impression you seem to have that 7 Wonders is a broken game that only hard-core afficianados can appreciate. The game has been enormously successful. Among board game nerds, its hailed as one of the best games of the last few years, and has won boatloads of awards. It’s also been commercially successful enough to spawn two expansions, with a third on its way, which usually means it’s had significant cross-over appeal with the non-nerd market. Speaking purely anecdotally, as someone who knows lots of nerds in mixed-marriages, 7 Wonders is the game they break out when they want something their spouse will play, too.
Your three claims are: