There has been a lot going on in board gaming this week. While this weekend has mostly been filled with happy faces of friends at PaxU, before the weekend the big thing people in the industry wanted to talk about was Kickstarter getting into blockchain technology. Honestly, we don’t really understand what Kickstarter’s intentions are with the move, as they seem pretty vague about what this transition to blockchain would solve, which isn’t helped that the white paper promised in the initial blog post hasn’t been published yet. We do hope creators who have been putting all their time and effort into a game or project won’t be a victim of the public’s backlash against Kickstarter’s plans in a time when it’s already incredibly hard to get a game made and into the hands of gamers.
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Speaking of games in our hands, this week we held a lot of them! We played Biblios and My City for the first time in months and really enjoyed both but the one new thing we played was Jekyll vs. Hyde. This is a two-player trick-taking game that has a great twist. One player plays Dr. Jekyll which will not try to win as many tricks as possible but keep the number of tricks won between Jekyll and Hyde as close as possible. This means winning tricks is no longer the point because keeping the scores close is the only thing that will slow down the transformation from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde on the other hand will try to win or lose all the tricks so the difference is scores the be as big as possible. It really changes the dynamic of trick-taking which resulted in really easy wins for the Mr. Hyde player the first few times we played it. We really liked it and we’re curious to see how long it will take for our brain to adapt to this different way of playing.
Another thing we played again was Sleeping Gods and while we love the game, we hate setting it up. The setup is so long and involves so many steps it’s really taking away from our enjoyment of the game, so we’ll be looking for an insert or other means or organisation for the game so we don’t feel mentally drained every time we’re ready to play. If you have any tips, let us know!
This week we also received several other games which we can’t wait to play. Osprey was kind enough to send us Undaunted: Reinforments, which we did a comic about and Brian Boru which is the new game by Peer Sylvester, which we think has designed some pretty fantastic games. We also got the aforementioned Jekyll vs Hyde and 50 Clues: The Pendulum of the Dead from Geronimo Games. The Pendulum of the Dead is a pretty dark escape room type game, so we’re very curious if that is our cup of tea and if (we think) they’ve handled the subject matter well. Lastly, our Kickstart pledge for the Tiny Libary came in, it’s a deck of cards that are all micro roleplaying games. We already spotted some fun ones like The Lion’s court.
Chris
Me, having no idea what a blockchain is: ?
James
I’ve backed one game on Gamefound and two on Kickstarter. One of the Kickstarter ones did it’s fulfillment through Gamefound, which is how I found the other one. Given the choice, I’d pick the service that doesn’t use crypto, but I wouldn’t withdraw support when it’s not the game creator’s fault. Same reason I use KoFi over Patreon when it’s available (and when Stripe is enabled).
Josh
Backed Eleven on Gamefound. Have a couple of other games being fulfilled through there, and the interface seems decent enough. Embracing crypto seems a bit iffy for something like Kickstarter, where projects have to deal with refund issues, and crypto currencies sure seem to float in value. Throw in the issue of the power generation required to support blockchain & crypto currency and this seems less good all the time.
Eric
Heinze, my group plays Sleeping Gods and we’ve gotten the set-up/put-away down to a science. It only takes about 5 minutes. I did it for cheap too with containers similar to this: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HBS5Q4Z/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1 They come in different sizes.
The game comes with three boxes, plus the card library case, and a small tuck box to put completed quests. In the smaller of the three boxes, I bought those cases in a size that fits and put bits and pieces in them separated by types. I also store all the equipment cards, ability cards, and level cards in this box that are in use by the group. In the medium box, I have several more of those containers in a larger size to fit the box. More bits such as the coins, damage tokens, resources, etc. The larger box has all the player boards, monster cards, and any other items I didn’t fit in the other boxes.
When we finish a session, each player takes a picture of their player area (board, cards, damage and conditions, etc.) One person also takes a pictures of the map with ship location and any other items on the map, the Captain’s board, ship board, and all the quest and equipment cards, including which ones have tokens on them. Then we put everything away in the little containers with the rest of those bits, and all the supplies the group has gathered, along with the ship and crew meeple, captain token, etc, go into one container so it’s easy to keep track of.
When we play, I open the boxes, set all the containers on the table open, hand out player boards, place the map and ship board, then each player uses the pictures they took to “restore” the save-state of their characters.
Hope that helps, and that you can quickly set up and play Sleeping Gods!
Heinze Havinga
I really like this! I will be on the lookout if I can get the same containers!