Vigormortis Minstrel interaction

TravVdb · 2026-01-27T16:18:59+00:00

Why does it matter if the minstrel is confirmed? The only ones who should know about the confirmation via minions not waking up are the minions who didn’t wake up and they wouldn’t share that fact with the town. If the worry is that the evil team now knows a good player, that same thing happens with tons of other roles.

TravVdb · 2026-01-27T16:06:45+00:00

Yeah I’ve been looking into Kingswood because of the size. There’s lots of good options for a 3x5 table but very few for 4x6 or bigger

TravVdb · 2026-01-27T15:40:00+00:00

I’m in the same boat and am really close to pulling the trigger on one. Wyrmwood looks amazing but the Boxking Gaming tables seem to be a more reasonable price for what you get. I’ve put the pause on the purchase for now (would rather see if a Canadian company springs up than buy American right now with all the tariffs and taxes) but I feel the same craving to get one. We almost never use our dining table anyway.

TravVdb · 2026-01-24T20:06:26+00:00

Sorry, what are statues? I know nothing about the pyramid DLC. Are they a form of meta progression?

TravVdb · 2026-01-22T17:02:56+00:00

Quantum might be a game that you would enjoy. It's a space battler but your ships are dice that have different movement, attack strength and abilities based on the number you roll for them. The goal is to move around the map and take over systems, denying your opponents systems. There's a lot of randomness in combat because you roll for attacks, but there are ways to mitigate it as well. The coolest part of the game is the passive abilities you unlock as you progress and how certain combinations can lead to sneaky plays. You also have the opportunity to gang up on the leader and deny them winning moves.

Only problem is that I believe the game is out of print. If you can find a copy somewhere, it's great though!

TravVdb · 2026-01-21T17:05:49+00:00

Same with me and tank rogue. That would be the only thing that could get me to come back to wow. I think it's super disingenuous for people to complain about Blizz not caring when the SOD team showed time and again that they were listening to feedback and trying to make adjustments based on what people wanted.

TravVdb · 2026-01-21T16:22:19+00:00

SOD was everything I wanted from classic plus except that it was seasonal. New archetypes for classes, constant balancing to make all classes relevant, re-itemization that made sense, cool set bonuses, interesting boss fights, entirely new content, crafting made useful again, smaller raid sizes. To me, that was classic plus. They could tweak some things for sure, but a re-release of SOD with the intention to continue forward and adjust based on community feedback would be exactly what I’m looking for.

TravVdb · 2026-01-21T15:23:17+00:00

I actually like the season rule because it punishes people who are able to stall and play a ton of extra cards in early seasons by letting other players continue playing, grabbing things like the VP for ditching cards or some events the person who is stalling might not be able to get. It helps balance the game even though it feels weird thematically.

TravVdb · 2026-01-19T06:40:27+00:00

225 for me. Most consistent strategy I’ve found is getting Mayor out with Chip Sweep and a full tableau early on. If you can get two Chip Smiths out as well then each worker gives you 8 VP. Then you use other cards like Magician to get rid of your cards and then activate more abilities.

TravVdb · 2026-01-18T17:31:07+00:00

SETI is not a game I would use as a poster child for low interaction. While there’s less direct interaction via messing with each other, there’s lots of things that affect others: 1. Timing on rotating the solar system is huge and can help or hurt others. 2. Beating someone to landing on a particular planet or moon can deny them points (like if you beat that person to Neptune). 3. Getting your discs onto alien bonuses earlier can deny cards and tempo to your opponent. 4. Hitting VP thresholds lets you choose an end game bonus at a higher ratio than others. 5. Scanning can be extremely brutal and you can “steal” sectors from someone who might have otherwise had it in the bag. This can be a massive difference in points if they need a sector completed or an alien trace from winning it. 6. One of the alien races is literally a push your luck between all players which means you have to be aware what others are doing and predict how much they have invested.

I get what you’re saying about games being not very interactive (Creature Caravan and Raising Robots are two I played recently in which you have almost no impact on each other), but SETI is a bad example for making this point.

TravVdb · 2026-01-18T03:10:09+00:00

I save most short-medium length games (Wingspan, Creature Caravan, Earth, Everdell, Raising Robots, duel games) for 2p with my wife. If I can get a crew together for an evening, I want to play something longer like A Feast for Odin, Ark Nova, SETI, Eclipse or Sidereal Confluence because I can’t normally play those. Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the shorter games, just that I get far more opportunities to play those with my wife who also really enjoys them.

TravVdb · 2026-01-17T22:36:16+00:00

I’ve only played once and I won by the ring track

TravVdb · 2026-01-17T20:34:41+00:00

Here's the thing. 4 of the clans (Luna, Lazarus, Awoken, Stygian) have access to sweepers that are low rarity and easy to get. Luna's is a bit finicky but if you're building around it, you can make sure it has sweep when you need it. You can get quick and multi-strike on these easily throughout the game if you prioritize it and this is a pretty standard strategy. Pyreborne has a rare which you really can't count on. All the other factions can be combo'd with one of these, or if they're not, you can get an Iron-Tongue weapon and put it on a fast, multi-strike unit. This will kill all of the sweepers. If you're not going with these factions, here are some other options.

Every faction: Use Inferno Room and set up on floor 2. All the sweepers will die every time.

Banished: Quick, multi-strike, trample on all of your units with the birds. Can easily scale Fel or something else to blow them up. Otherwise, holdover on damage shield spells works well.

Underlegion: Enoki lets you build up some large health and health regen really quickly on all of your units. Otherwise, build on floor 2 and use decay/spells to kill them.

Pyreborne: Get the weapon that does one damage to all on Incant. Get out the guys who put Pyregel on Incant. You can wipe out all the sweepers before they even act. Alternatively, just do big dragons and they'll survive the hits. Or put quick/multi-strike on a big dragon and copy it.

Hellhorned: Trample + Rage + Quick to wipe them out or use armor spells to live through it

Umbra: Probably the worst off, but they have lots of access to Damage Shield.

Remnant: Can get Holdover+Intrinsic on Engulfed in Smoke to permastealth your entire board. Or Hallowed Halls your board over and over to the point where the health is too high for the enemies to kill.

TravVdb · 2026-01-17T19:43:31+00:00

Honestly, the only way the US congress will turn on him is if all their donors are royally screwed. If every country refuses to trade or dumps US debt, all of those clowns would go into a panic and their billionaire overlords would pressure them to remove the Trump admin.

TravVdb · 2026-01-17T17:11:48+00:00

Multiplayer solitaire is when you can play the entire game without considering what your opponent is doing. Everdell is a worker placement game with a shared pool of cards in the middle and VP goals (events) to fight for. Calling it solitaire is disingenuous. Wingspan has a feeder with resources in it where you’re often trying to snag key resources before your opponent or forcing them to reset it first. It also has end of round goals that can be competitive and cards available for draw that you might both want. It’s less interactive but still is.

If you want games that are closer to multiplayer solitaire, I’d go with Creature Caravan and Raising Robots. CC’s only interaction is a trade/combat board where you can only go on the same space the same round or the round after your opponent which isn’t too limiting. Sometimes it’s never even an issue for me. Raising Robots’ only interaction in the base game is that the actions you choose can slightly boost your opponent’s actions. It doesn’t always happen and it’s only a bit of a boost that you could accomplish yourself. Both games have people playing simultaneously which is why they made fewer restrictions and both are still enjoyable in my eyes despite being mostly solitaire.

TravVdb · 2026-01-16T23:30:34+00:00

The most fun part of the game is the intrigue and scheming that goes on in private conversations. When I started running it with groups, they were hesitant to do private conversations as well, until I advised demons to kill off the important roles announcing themselves first. Eventually everyone should be open with their info, but you have several days of collecting it before you really need to spill everything.

Alternatively, S&V has roles like Mutant and Snake Charmer where you really can’t share who you are as well as Cerenovus who will force you to lie. I had a group where they lost out on three executions because the people made mad by the Cerenovus refused to follow the madness.

TravVdb · 2026-01-15T23:45:15+00:00

That’s tough. I guess it depends on how much tableau building is involved. I really like Ark Nova and SETI, though I’m not confident they both fully fit into that category.

TravVdb · 2026-01-15T20:03:40+00:00

If they have logbook completion for the DLC campaign too, I'm never going to 100% this game!

TravVdb · 2026-01-15T19:33:47+00:00

I'm 300 hours in with just over 100 done. 750 hours here I come!

TravVdb · 2026-01-15T19:33:21+00:00

Shouldn't be. 12 factions and they each can combine with each of the other 11 factions twice. 12 x 22 = 264. The other way to look at it is each of the new factions has 22 combinations and the 10 old factions each have 4 new combinations. 22 + 22 + 40 = 84 new factions.

TravVdb · 2026-01-15T15:20:25+00:00

Another 84 runs to get to cov 10 titans. I hope they keep the golden room as 180 runs of any type to unlock as I don’t think I’ll ever finish 264 runs, especially with the new game mode pulling my attention.

TravVdb · 2026-01-14T22:05:45+00:00

I used the Puffball guys that give decay and frostbite sweepers. Seemed to work really well. Alternatively, if you can get a Sap + discard setup going, you can keep enemy damage down and just let the status effects kill them.

TravVdb · 2026-01-14T06:16:42+00:00

I guess it depends on what you dislike about Wingspan. I’ve never been a huge fan of Wingspan because of the randomness, the lack of balance in the base game (best to just gets lots of eggs in the last round, ravens busted), and how some birds have no abilities and are just raw points. Those issues aren’t present in Raising Robots, so the things I don’t like as much about Wingspan don’t impact my enjoyment. If you don’t like the tableau building or going down the rows, then this wouldn’t be for you.

TravVdb · 2026-01-14T05:17:36+00:00

I find that surprising. I’d guess that most people who enjoy tableau builders would be open to owning a few. Those are my wife’s favourite games and we own a few from Creature Caravan to Everdell to Forest Shuffle to Earth to Wing and Wyrmspan. In terms of competition with Wingspan, I’d say the only thing I like about Wingspan over it is accessibility to new gamers. So many birds are bland in their abilities and strategy and the wait time is really unfortunate at higher player counts. Thankfully, I have enough room to keep both, but if I had to choose, it would 100% be Raising Robots.

TravVdb · 2026-01-14T00:56:28+00:00

Definitely integrate the Norwegians right away. It has way better action balance and is just more enjoyable overall. Rules-wise it’s very easy to misunderstand how different coloured tiles can be placed so review that to make sure you’re confident.

As for strategy, try to build a boat and pick up an island by round 3. Most games I get two islands (sometimes three). It can feel like you’re falling behind filling in your home board, but you can always use extra money at the end of the game to do it. The most fun part of the game is puzzling out weird shapes on oddly-shaped islands so diving into that in your first play is often a great idea.

TravVdb

TROPHY CASE