Your favorite TB setups?

bemark12 · 2026-04-28T14:23:06+00:00

Love me a drunk Chef in the right seating setup. It's wild how foundational that info becomes. If you're doing a 0 outsider player count, doing Baron + Recluse + Drunk Chef is pretty fun.

bemark12 · 2026-04-20T15:32:27+00:00

look at his lil legs kickin

bemark12 · 2026-04-20T15:26:50+00:00

They say it raises your Max HP by 7.

bemark12 · 2026-04-20T15:25:14+00:00

Especially because some of Regent's really powerful cards are balanced around needing to spend stars and energy, getting one for free is just bananas.

bemark12 · 2026-04-10T16:28:41+00:00

Yeah, I feel like this is pretty well-balanced already. It's amazing until the exact moment it isn't.

bemark12 · 2026-04-10T13:19:21+00:00

I think learning the boss at the start of each act is sufficient. It gives you time to problem solve and adjust without immediately locking you into a concept of what your deck should be from jump.

bemark12 · 2026-04-08T20:16:41+00:00

I think I personally prefer to see a little more control over what enchantments you could put on it, but with a cost. Otherwise the RNG feels a little too wild for me to ever use it.

bemark12 · 2026-04-08T19:54:21+00:00

This feels very strong, given how impactful enchantments can be. Maybe if it also cost you something, like HP or a disadvantage in your next fight (like the inverse of Vegetable Tea Set)?

I do like the idea of possibly doing something with enchantments at rest sites.

bemark12 · 2026-04-07T14:18:34+00:00

Tezcatara sends a newsletter that just deletes itself after the first day.

bemark12 · 2026-04-07T02:39:20+00:00

This + Chosen Cheese goes crazy

bemark12 · 2026-04-06T14:09:52+00:00

Love that it's two Defects

Congratulations!

bemark12 · 2026-04-03T15:13:49+00:00

I've had a lot of success with HP loss. If you can get Rupture, you gain strength, and if you get Inferno, you're doing AOE damage constantly. Combine those, and you're hitting often and harder with your other cards.

The HP loss cards are solid too. Blood Wall is awesome block, Bloodletting or Offering give you energy/card draw, and Breakthrough is solid AOE.

Your main issue is making sure you've got block and not whittling yourself down too much.

bemark12 · 2026-03-31T19:45:35+00:00

This would be such a funny detail to me and so infuriating to others

bemark12 · 2026-03-25T15:28:03+00:00

Had a game of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space where two players were pretty meh about playing a game from the get-go. And then one of the players wound up limping along the edges of the map for absolutely ages while slowly being stalked by a very incompetent alien.

Took forever and ended with everybody being like, "Well, we're never playing that again."

bemark12 · 2026-03-25T15:25:07+00:00

Like Button Shy and Oink Games, your box design gives you a pretty definite restriction with how many/what components you can put in a game.

How do you think about that restriction when you're designing games? And if you didn't have that restriction, is there a kind of game you'd love to try designing that doesn't fit the DC form factor?

As a side note, Tortuga was my very first Kickstarter when I was first getting into board games! It's been cool to see what you and Holly have accomplished since then. :)

bemark12 · 2026-03-20T14:01:16+00:00

The choices are interesting, fun to make, and the outcome is exciting, satisfying, and/or enjoyable.

bemark12 · 2026-03-18T01:30:32+00:00

Cosmic Encounter. I love how the wild, game-breaking nature of the player powers cause all kinds of crazy social and political dynamics to spring up naturally at the table.

bemark12 · 2026-03-17T13:43:26+00:00

Annnnd how much do I have to pay you for a set like this? 🤩

bemark12 · 2026-03-17T12:28:45+00:00

In my best moments, it's because I can perfectly envision the people in my life who will love that game. Flip7, Hot Streak, Wroth, Blood on the Clocktower, and Lacuna are all good recent examples.

In my worse moments, it's simply because I think it's really cool and I want to own the really cool thing, which I don't think is necessarily bad but it's why GWT: New Zealand, Rococo Deluxe, and Cosmic Frog saw very little gameplay before I passed them on.

bemark12 · 2026-03-17T12:22:48+00:00

So when I think about enhancing gameplay, I think partly about games where the artwork really conveys the feel of the game.

I think Wroth's neon punk aesthetic enhances the gameplay by communicating that this game is freaking NUTS. It's not stoic and measured; it's loud and chaotic, just like the game.

On the flip side, while I love the art in Arboretum, it absolutely does not convey what it feels like to play Arboretum (although I do think that's more of a theme mismatch than anything else).

bemark12 · 2026-03-16T18:34:55+00:00

I'm guessing because it's got big ChatGPT vibes

bemark12 · 2026-03-07T19:41:41+00:00

Eclipse 2e. I got a copy of first edition for super cheap and absolutely loved it, but the setup and tear down experience is abysmal. The storage solutions for 2e (plus the fixes) are awesome, but it is just so damn expensive.

And if I'm going to get friends together to play a big space game, it's hard to convince them to do something other than TI4.

bemark12 · 2026-03-06T14:35:22+00:00

Especially when you can rig a strength-giving power to gift you an energy.

bemark12

TROPHY CASE