u/Effective-Muffin-224

I feel like I'm doing something very wrong. Every time I play solo, both rivals get their swordmaster so quickly that I simply can't keep up anymore. And by quickly I mean round 2 at the latest.

I just took one of the rivals that needs 9 resources for their swordmaster. Same thing as always happened - gets a few resources round 1 and then lands on the Deep Desert round 2. He already had 10 resources at this point. If this was one of the harder rivals, he would've had his swordmaster twice by now. And when this happens, the game starts feeling unwinnable right away and I just want to start over.

I just don't get it, because the one time my rival actually didn't get his swordmaster until turn 5, it made the game pretty easy. And other times he gets it immediately and it becomes impossible. There's such a gigantic gap in difficulty here that's completely dependent on luck. Especially the desert fields give the rival way too many resources in one turn, while other fields barely do anything. It feels really unbalanced and makes me think I'm doing something wrong. Deep Desert is an instant swordmaster for most of the rivals. That just feels so wrong.

Is it supposed to be like this? I honestly don't even see much difference between the rival needing 5 vs 9 resources. They'll get to the 9 so quickly that it doesn't really matter what the number says.

I bought the digital version a few weeks ago and just finished the final challenge for Uprising . And it's wild how completely different my experiences with the individual expansions were.

• The base game is fine. It's lean, streamlined and everything it needs to be. It's also as deep as a puddle and after a few plays I already felt like I've seen all it has to offer. Every game after felt the exact same. It actually made me question how this even got into the BGG top 5.
• Rise of Ix improves the base game so much. The boring fields are gone, there's more variety, and it still feels very lean, while also allowing for very different strategies. With this expansion I actually started to get the high placement. Even if it's more like top 50 for me.
• Immortality frankly ruined Dune Imperium for me. It felt like a completely different game at times, and not in a good way. The player interaction went way down, the new currency and tracks just felt like pointless bloat that distracted from the core game, and I honestly never want to play with this expansion again. I don't know how it plays with Rise of Ix at the same time, but base game + Immortality wasn't fun, at all, and almost made me quit halfway through the challenges.

And then comes Uprising. Like holy crap, how is this so much better? It fixes every single gripe I've had with the base game. It has so much more depth and the cards are so much more interestiing, leading to different feeling games every time. Player interaction is up by a lot thanks to spies and battle icons. I can now actually predict what they are planning and incorporate that into my strategy. Amazing game, like 10/10. This is what a top 5 game should look like.

Shortly after I bought the physical version and just got Bloodlines along with it. Now I know I already gave Uprising a 10/10, but this expansion flat out improves it in so many ways that I would honestly call it a perfect game at this point. I can't imagine changing or adding anything else without making it worse. It feels so tightly designed, and just so right. It's incredible.

So that's my story of how I got into Dune Imperium and how I don't understand why the base game is at 6 and Uprising at 5 on BGG. Uprising is just so much better on every single level.

TL;DR: Base game is fine, Ix makes it great, Immortality ruins it, Uprising is superior in every way and Bloodlines makes it a perfect game.

Two years ago my main group decided to buy Spirit Island with all of its expansions. And I kind of regret it. We have not been playing anything else since then. The game is so incredibly good that it feels like there's no reason to pull out anything else anymore.

There's nothing in any of our collections that we would choose over Spirit Island. We only meet every 2 weeks, and then we just play for 10 hours straight. Every time we try to play something else, there's this feeling of the time being better spent just playing Spirit Island. The game has ruined board games for us. I could honestly get rid of my entire collection and wouldn't miss any of it.

I don't know what it is about the game. It simply never goes stale for us. Even the best of games become boring when you've played them enough, but this feeling never sets in for Spirit Island. We just keep playing round after round, and at the end of the day we still don't feel like we've played enough. I often get back home from a long session and immediately boot up the digital version and keep playing for hours.

We've tried to force ourselves to play something else more than once. But we quickly realized that none of us cared about the variety and seeing something new. Every single other game is basically dead to us. And there's this weird feeling that it shouldn't be like this. But the truth is that I've never had as much fun with board games in my life. I might actually be playing only this one until the end of time. At least until Spirit Island 2 comes out.

Has this happened to anyone else? Doesn't have to be Spirit Island of course. But has there ever been a game that became your 'only game'? Did that ever change again?

I'm playing Legacy of the Duelist right now and just had a game with that mill deck involving Iron Chain Coil and Paralyzing Chain. Both of these have effects that absolutely don't work like I expected them to.

1. Iron Chain Coil says that a monster gains "300 ATK and DEF as long as this card is face-up on the field". To me, "this card" very obviously means the Iron Chain Coil itself. But apparently it doesn't. I targeted my Iron Chain Repairman, my opponent destroyed the Iron Chain Coil and the Iron Chain Repairman still had 1900 ATK. Why?

2. Paralyzing Chain sometimes just doesn't trigger. For example, when Gravekeeper's Servant makes the opponent send one card from the deck to the GY. Paralyzing Chain says "When a card(s) is sent from your opponent's Deck to the Graveyard by a card effect". That's exactly what is happening here, yet it doesn't trigger. I don't understand. I even find multiple wiki entries that specifically mention this combo, but apparently all of them are wrong?

This deck is clearly built around milling your opponent and slowly burning them with it. Yet it seems like the interactions don't even work as intended. And I'm not sure why.

I feel like this is such a specific and petty thing to be annoyed about, but I've noticed that I'm increasingly avoiding all games that have a 'race' mechanism.

My main examples would be Ticket to Ride and Ark Nova. In Ticket to Ride the game ends when someone has less than 3 trains, and in Ark Nova it ends once someone reaches enough points.

Every single time this happens, the other players are screwed over. They can't finish what they wanted to do and there's a good chance someone gets pissed off. It feels like everyone is having fun, and then this one guy goes 'no' and just ends the game. It always feels like it ends prematurely and it always takes away the other players' big payoff moment.

I actually started to avoid these games and gravitate towards games with a fixed amount of rounds. And I feel like the people I play with enjoy these way more. You can plan out every move and there's never a risk of your strategy fizzling out because someone decides that they want to stop playing the game while everyone else isn't done yet. And at the end you just feel more fulfilled, since you didn't just get blue-balled.

Was wondering if anyone else made the same experience or if this is specific to my groups.

I've played a ton when I was child, and just got done with the Early Days Collection. And now I was interested in seeing how the game, the meta and the mechanics evolved from those early days until now. Apart from emulating the DS games, is there a way to get this experience on PC?

I've tried Master Duel, but there's almost no 'old' content. Everything has all of the new cards mixed in in some way. The free simulators like Omega don't seem to have anything like a solo mode. I could look up old metas and import decks, but that's not really the experience I'm looking for.

I think what I want is an entire campaign that goes through the different anime seasons or eras and has prebuilt decks that were used at the time. Does something like that exist?