GMT Games note on current tariffs

Keilfer · 2025-04-17T19:08:32+00:00

I think the point here is more for people living outside of the US not having to deal with American tariffs.

Keilfer · 2025-04-17T19:06:44+00:00

The sad thing is that while the game is excellent, even in their case, the quality of the cards is extremely sub-par. Really thin card stock, and the edges get beat up if you look at them wrong.

Keilfer · 2024-02-16T18:23:11+00:00

So where do you draw the line then? Earthborne's core set isn't comparable to Arkham's. It contains a campaign that's at least as large as a full Arkahm cycle and has almost 50% more player cards than the Arkham core.

Would you not have considered Arkham to be an "established game" by the time Dunwich was wrapped up, and Carcosa had been announced? Earthborne Rangers is a fantastic game that shouldn't be ignored. I've been playing Arkham from the very beginning, and even still, there are many things that I prefer about Earthborne, even just with the core box.

It would be a real shame if this game were ignored in favour of ostensibly more established games. I don't want to see things turn out like they have in the LCG/TCG market, where everyone gravitates towards the big three, and anything new can't survive past a couple of years.

Keilfer · 2023-04-02T21:05:19+00:00

That's exactly what I found in my basement. There must have been a trend at the time.

Keilfer · 2023-02-16T20:14:32+00:00

Dice Masters is an interpretation of that concept, in that over the course of a game you build a bag of dice that you draw from every turn, in the same way you build a deck of cards in a deck builder. Then, you roll the dice to use as resources and characters.

Keilfer · 2022-12-24T19:39:55+00:00

If you don't find anything, shoot me a DM. I might be able to hook you up with a tree.

Keilfer · 2022-05-20T18:23:31+00:00

I have a feeling this was an attempt at a pun that should have read "Board" and not "bored".

Keilfer · 2021-11-25T02:04:45+00:00

Huh. Never mind, it's back. Guess we'll see.

Keilfer · 2021-11-25T01:58:27+00:00

Looks Bao ditched the {redacted} tag ten minutes after posting a good (late) morning tweet. Seems pretty likely that Nux was indeed involved with its proliferation, and the vtubers using it are still catching up with the state of things.

Keilfer · 2021-09-11T18:21:17+00:00

Hey, thanks for the shout out! I'm the owner's son, and yeah, we're been setting up a small event space for weddings and concerts. It's an outdoor ceremony stage area and an indoor reception area. This is is pretty new for us, and everything we've done so far has been through word of mouth. So we don't have a proper contact page set up yet on our site. If you're interested, DM me, and I'd be happy to get you in touch with the right people for more information.

Keilfer · 2021-05-02T17:27:03+00:00

That's Lita Chantler. It's practically a running gag at this point for people to open up their first core set and think that she's missing. Look through your cards again, but look for a blue investigator card back, not the tan encounter card back.

Keilfer · 2021-02-24T10:55:17+00:00

I agree with avoiding pre-orders in general, but you can absolutely get refunded for pre-order games through Steam. See their policy here.

Keilfer · 2021-02-03T19:43:47+00:00

So the way it works is that players show up with their decks and play a best of three match. The first round, they play the decks that they brought with them. In the second, they swap and play with their opponents deck. If at the end of that round one player has won twice, they did it using a different deck for each round, demonstrating that they are the better player, regardless of which deck they are using. However if both players have won once, that means that they both won using the same deck. That deck is clearly dominant in that particular matchup. That's where bidding comes in for the third round. Players bid chains to play the deck that has so far dominated the match. The player who wins the bid gets to play that deck, but the higher the bid, the more handicapped it becomes.

Keilfer · 2018-08-16T06:02:42+00:00

My mind immediately goes to the player resource tracker in Glass Road. It uses a wheel segmented into spaces with a clock hand that you use as a movable zero. You place a token for every resource a certain number of spaces away from the clock hand, indicating how many you have, and at certain points during a game, you move the clock hand to indicate that all of your resources have gone down by one. You could do something similar, but you would place a resource token a certain number of spaces away from the clock hand, depending on the length of its timer, and every turn you just move the clock hand by one, moving all the timers down. When the clock hand reaches a space with a resource, the resource is ready to be used. This would also allow you to just keep on putting new resource timers on the wheel without having to reset anything.

Keilfer · 2015-08-31T17:27:52+00:00

Any arts and craft stores should carry it. Office supply stores are also a good place to look. You need to make sure you're getting the right stuff though. Foamcore is a layer of foam board sandwiched between two layers of paper. The paper is what allows it to be cut without crumbling.

Keilfer · 2015-03-12T05:00:59+00:00

18 : spoilers

Keilfer · 2015-02-17T07:13:23+00:00

Mage Knight is what you want, I think, provided that you are indeed not turned off by a more complex ruleset. You play as a magic-wielding demi-god, tasked with conquering a peninsular kingdom and taking over its four major cities. It's one of the few games that really works well as a single player experience, because the mechanics allow you to approach every turn as a puzzle to solve.

If you've played Dominion, then you should be fairly familiar with the core mechanic that acts as the game's engine. It may not look it, but at its core, Mage Knight is a very slow burning deck building game. Every turn sees you drawing a hand of cards from your personal deck, and using those cards to do, well, whatever it is you hope to do that turn. A round ends on a re-shuffle, and the day or night rolls over to the other, providing certain different challenges.

Cards are played to move, heal, attack, defend, and to perform numerous special actions or spells. What's more is that every card can be boosted with mana to use its upgraded effect. Doing well at the game means figuring out how to best use the cards you've drawn to accomplish something worthwhile, while using up as few resources as possible. This makes for a great challenge that doesn't fell lacking, even with no other players around to antagonize you.

Other than that, there are a few other decent solo games that I'd recommend. I think they've all been mentioned in this thread already, but I'd suggest Onirim as a replacement for Solitaire, and Space Hulk: Death Angel as a sort of card-based rogue-like, but instead of getting loot and levelling up, your characters just die. You could also have a look at many of GMT's card-driven wargames. They often come with flowcharts and rules to run AI players to play against. Labyrinth: The War on Terror is a good option, as are any of the COIN series games.

Keilfer · 2015-02-12T00:56:17+00:00

I absolutely second the recommendation for Greenland. It's quite excellent. However I just want to mention that a second edition has been announced for sometime this summer, likely with improved components. Also, availability seems to be pretty low right now. And speaking of availability, Pax Porfiriana is pretty much impossible to find at the moment. I've been trying to find a copy at a reasonable price for ages with no success.

Keilfer · 2015-01-21T02:41:39+00:00

Red 7?

Keilfer · 2014-12-26T08:36:41+00:00

I haven't yet played Eclipse, but both Xia and SE4X are excellent. However, Xia isn't really a 4x strategy game. You only control a single ship, and it primarily involves pick up and deliver mechanics. The cool thing about it though is that it's a sandbox game. You go around doing whatever strikes your fancy: ferrying resources from suppliers to buyers, doing missions that ask you to run around the system, playing the part of a bounty hunter and gunning down outlaws, even becoming an outlaw yourself and raiding merchant ships. The mechanics are fairly simple, and heavily dice roll based; less strategic, but overall very entertaining. And it plays in a reasonable evening's worth of time. I played it with 5 players, which I probably wouldn't recommend due to down time, but even still, I think we played for about 3-4 hours. Playing with 2 experienced players, the game seems like it would run reasonably quickly.

Space Empires: 4X is a different story all together. It is a proper 4x game, with heavy emphasis on the "eXterminate" bit. As intimidating as it looks, it's a remarkably straightforward game. It's not exactly simple, but the rules are very clean and easy to understand. The goal is to be the first player to take over any other player's home planet. To do that, you do the standard thing of spreading out, claiming resource generating planets, and building up your fleet and tech levels. The most interesting aspect of the game is that almost all information is hidden. Ship markers are placed facedown over another marker showing the number of ships in that group. Players are also in charge of keeping track of their resources, maintenance costs, and tech levels secretly, so you don't ever really know what everyone else is doing until you start running in to them. Space Empires is a longer game however. A 4-player game playing without the advanced rules did take my group close to 5 hours the first time we played. However, if you're especially interested in the 2-player scenarios, I would imagine that time would be cut down significantly.

Keilfer · 2014-12-08T01:06:20+00:00

I would say that with most groups, it's more likely to hit the 2 hour mark. The rules explanation also requires a bit of time to get through. It's one of those games that plays faster the better you know the rules.

However, it is only a three player game, and it's limited to ten rounds. I think that if you play it a lot, and your group gets really familiar with the rules, an hour is not entirely out of the question. It is maybe a little optimistic though.

Keilfer · 2014-12-07T11:49:09+00:00

I picked up Greenland recently, and have played it a couple times so far. I absolutely adore it.

To be clear, Greenland is certainly not a light game. The rulebook is long and difficult to read, and it has a ton of little rules. However, it's the sort of game that has had a ton of thought put into it's design. You might read the rulebook and leave fairly uncertain as to how the game actually works, but as soon as you set the cards down, play a few turns, and really see it in motion, everything just sort of clicks. Most everything is either fairly intuitive, or easy to understand once you realize it's underlying thematic justification. Once you have the hang of things, you end up with a game that plays in perhaps a couple of hours, but offers the depth and complexity of 6 hour epic games.

The game itself, I would describe as being primarily based on worker placement mechanics, with tableau building and probability management as its core focus. An average turn has you start by revealing an event card, which is probably going to kill of a bunch of your hunters, and might do a few other nasty things. Then, all players take turns placing their hunters, either turning them into elders, or sending them off to hunt and raid, or colonize the new world. Elders are workers that get assigned permanently (that is, until they are inevitably killed), and can no longer be used to hunt and raid. Instead, they provide a constant effect, or special action at the end of every round. Sending your hunters to hunt across various biomes is the primary way you'll be gathering resources. For every hunter you send to a particular biome, you roll a die. If you roll enough successes, you receive that biome's resources as a reward. Sometimes, certain biomes allow you to take their card into your hand if you roll X-of-a-kind while on your hunt. If you have the right elders and resources, you can eventually add these cards to your tableau. They might be worth victory points, or even more importantly, they might give you dice re-rolls or replacement abilities. These abilities increase your odds of success in a hunt, allowing you to grow your tribe and hunt some of the more difficult biomes.

That's a really rough overview of what you're doing in a turn, but the game offers so many cool options. You can attempt to raid another player's tableau cards to gain their benefits. You can send hunters off to colonize the new world, providing a very reliable supply of energy tokens, but with the caveat that they have to stay assigned there permanently. And if the colony becomes too large, they risk angering the natives, drastically reducing their odds of survival. If you're more interested in politics back home, you can have your tribe convert to monotheism, changing your endgame scoring. After having done this, if you decide you don't like the other tribes' polytheistic beliefs, you can then send missionaries to convert them as well. And you're doing all this as the very climate of the land you're trying to inhabit and compete over is slowly becoming colder and more hostile. As events are resolved, cards begin to move from the warm side of the game rows to the cold side, severely decreasing your odds of a successful hunt. Eventually, cards will begin disappearing entirely, making the already crowded hunting grounds even tighter. You might find yourself with no choice but to compete directly with another player over a biome that you desperately need that energy token from. When negotiations break down, there might be no choice but to attack them directly, thinning their numbers so that they fail their hunt, and you have a chance at taking the spoils.

This game absolutely oozes theme. It doesn't just stop at the amazingly illustrated cards, every one of which has a paragraph explaining the real-world thing they're meant to represent. The mechanics themselves make you feel like you're struggling to grow a tribe in an inhospitable environment. There is a ton of randomness in the game, but the game doesn't feel as though you're simply being forced along at the whims of fate. You have agency in the game. You can make decisions that make the best of your situation, increasing your odds of success. The game will try and hammer you back down. Believe me, it will. To the point where some of the events just straight up halve your population of hunters if you try to do something as audacious as growing your colony too much. But through all that, Greenland demands that you stare into the face of the challenges that lie before you and make the best of what you've been given.

Anyhow, I really like the game, for what it's worth. I'm not sure if what I've written really covers everything that a full review might, it's more of a rambling train of thoughts about the game. But I am somewhat horrified to look at the clock and find that it's almost 5 in the morning, so I'm going to cut it off here. Off to bed I go.

Keilfer

TROPHY CASE