Heart of Crown x Dominion – A fan variant

Posted on December 16, 2019November 28, 2022 by drunkcrunkfranken

I first played Heart of Crown during Anime Expo 2017, and I was pretty enamored with it. I usually don’t like sitting around the tabletop area during AX since there are usually better things to do (lot of friends fly in from around the world and it’s a rare opportunity to meet anime creators), but that year I actually spent the majority of my time there. I even entered (and won) a tournament that was held for the game. During the weeks following the convention, the game was in heavy rotation. I played the hell out of it with a friend who also picked it up during the con. We got a few dozen games in before we got tired of seeing the same cards over and over, since none of the expansions were released at that point, so we had the idea to play the game using cards from Dominion, which has way more expansion content. Here’s how we did it (but updated to work with the most recent Heart of Crown and Dominion sets):

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Recommended games for fledgling gamers

Posted on December 7, 2019 by drunkcrunkfranken

Thought I’d make a list of beginner friendly games. Simple rules and on the cheaper end of the spectrum (generally $10-$25). I think the problem with too many of these lists is that they tend to recommend “gateway” games or games that people are supposed to use as a jumping-off point and get bored of once they start getting into “real” games so they sort of end up recommending a lot of bad games, without any sense of real curation (if they aren’t outright shills or Amazon affiliate link farms). They’re part of a board gaming culture where people regularly have monstrous collections of hundreds (if not thousands) of games, that on average end up getting played like once or twice, if at all. I think that mindset kinda sucks, so all the games that I’m recommending here are ones that I have personally played several times that I think you can get your money’s worth out of.

Don’t just take my word for it though. Look up reviews and discussions/comments on any given game (BoardGameGeek is a good source) and read the rules and see for yourself if it’s something that you’d enjoy (I understand this might be hard to gauge for newbies but it is a good habit to form if you decide to continue playing board games). Depending on where you live, you may be able to find a board game group, cafe, or even a public library that stocks board games, so you can try before you buy. If you can’t find a place, there’s always Tabletop Simulator, which is basically a universal board game piracy engine. Also, consider buying games from a local game store or specialized online retailer (like Miniature Market or Coolstuffinc) instead of just buying from Amazon or Target.

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Intro + My Top 5 Board Games

Posted on December 6, 2019December 12, 2019 by drunkcrunkfranken

Intro

Since I mostly plan on blogging about board games, I figured a good way to introduce myself would be with a list of some of my favorite games and a bit on how I got into boardgaming. I got my start playing tabletop games around high school when I got into Yugioh. We had a small group of like 3 people that met up at lunch and after school, until we started growing and ended up with around 2 to 3 dozen people on any given day. After a while I and a couple others became more interested in the competitive aspect of the game and ventured outside of our little group. A lot of the cards we needed to be competitive were prohibitively expensive (we were high school kids) and became obsolete almost as soon as we were able to acquire them. In an effort to be able to afford them, I got pretty invested in the whole stock trading aspect of the game, and even started selling cards to the other kids who played at lunch (at fairly outrageous markup to be honest, but they didn’t know any better). Ultimately, I didn’t get very far.

Fast forward a couple years, at Anime Expo 2011, I walked into the tabletop area. It was a relatively small, poorly lit, and poorly trafficked room, with about a couple dozen bodies, in stark contrast to the rest of the convention, which was teeming with energy and people, tens of thousands of them wandering around with long lines everywhere. Wanted to get some games of Yugioh in but couldn’t really find anyone to play with but a couple boardgamers saw that I was just standing around idly and invited me over. I was hesitant to join them and my first thought was “what the fuck is this nerd shit and why is there so much shit all over the table” but they insisted it would be fun so I gave it a shot. The game was Tanto Cuore, a maid-themed deck-building game, and that was my first taste of a designer board game. I had a lot of fun. I loved its fast pace and combo-tastic card play. And you could have a complete game with all the cards for just $50 and you only need one copy of the game to play with up to 4 people? (I realize now that $50 was highway robbery for this game, especially in 2011, since you can get it via online retailers for like $30 but I didn’t know any better) I was pretty enamored with it. I immediately bought my own copy and spent the rest of the con playing it in that poorly lit dungeon.

Around the same time, I was becoming increasingly aware of Yugioh’s issues as a game. At one point games would be decided before the person going second had a chance to even play their first turn (Inzektor format, for those familiar). Balance issues aside, the game had a bunch of unchecked rules problems, like how the damage step had 7 substeps, while being itself a substep of combat, as a consequence of various poorly planned card effects, and this resulted in a strain of players who would try to rules-lawyer their way to victory by having effect interactions ruled in their favor. In general, I wasn’t a huge fan of the culture. Cheating and theft/mugging were rampant, I’ve run into actual rapists and people who beat the crap out of other people to take their cards, and seen children interact with the financial side of the game in ways that are frankly disgusting. All good reasons to quit.

I didn’t immediately jump into board gaming after that. I played around with other CCGs but never found myself all that invested in them, and got in some Tanto Cuore with people that I managed to temporarily pry away from their CCG of choice. Meanwhile, I picked up a couple board games here and there, like Gravwell and Coup, and before I knew it, I’d amassed a fairly sizable library and found a consistent group that wanted to play them at my university. Eventually, I dropped all my CCGs and jumped into board games full force, becoming more involved in my uni’s tabletop game club, getting into game design, which I even ran a workshop for, for the uni’s game development club. My tastes have shifted quite a bit over the years. Had a phase where I was mostly interested in light games, then went on a deckbuilder binge, then got into mid-weight euros. This is where my tastes have landed on:

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