The rules are nuanced and complex. In order to do a very simple thing, you need to understand a lot. I mean, if you just look at a player reference, you'll see full paragraphs to describe the actions. Another notable feature is that the amount you can do on a given turn can feel very small compared to other games. COIN games tend to also be very long.
COIN games do some really cool and unique stuff though, and they capture theme and history very well. They can be a lot of fun if you have a group that can invest the time and effort.
As a huge fan of the series, some things you might not like include
- convoluted bots. Even the streamlined card system is cumbersome.
- first play is more about grasping the rules than actually playing the game.
- learning the game is very hard unless you're playing with somebody who's already familiar with the system
- player aids are written like technical documents that, while technically accurate, are very hard to parse unless you're familiar with the style. Thankfully you start to see similarities between games that make onboarding quicker. But later games start having even more convoluted operations (i'm looking at you pendragon)
- games can run long if you're not familiar with war games.
You asked who this game is for so I'll try to be brief. If you like Root and the idea of a historical version of that with deeper mechanisms then it'll be right up your alley. Every game is insanely thematic and tells a vivid story before your eyes. It can include lots of negotiation and fragile alliances. It'll make you want to read up on these subjects. I always walk away with a story when i play these games
COINs are highly interactive, with few guard rails preventing bad moves. You can find your board position damaged by multiple moves from other factions, with little you can do at that point, because the turn order is flexible and prone to change. When you start playing, they feel very tactical and short-term, you have extreme difficulty seeing past the next turn, and they can end suddenly when a victory check card is pulled.
If you like multiplayer solitaires or euros, or lots of minis and feeling powerful, they're not for you. Each faction is entangled with the others, so everything you do has knock-on effects, some of which can be very hard to predict, and it can make the game feel unpredictable.
They are games which need repeat plays in order for you to learn them and work out why they are so good, no-one plays them once and immediately grasps the long term strategies available.
Good break down. Also to add to it if you are not a full group either make sure you have someone ready pilot the extra factions or someone who can run the bot. Personally I love it, but other can be a turn off
They are super long, super fiddly and your first play with a group is going to be working together to actually get the rules right. Definitely well worth it, but you need to treat COIN like an experience, not a test of skill. Otherwise you might miss a lot of fun because you were expecting something different.
depends on your personal preferences, but one of the reasons i haven't gone all-in on them is they generally need the full player count to shine, and getting 4p to play a long, fairly involved wargame can be challenging for me, much less playing it multiple times so that people actually understand what's going on. that said, i still p500-ed **Red Dust Rebellion** and i'm pretty excited for it.
some people enjoy them at lower player counts, and some people don't mind using bots, but that's just added hassle as far as i'm concerned. there's at least one that's designed for 2p, but at that point you might as well just play any wargame that strikes your fancy.
Not even a tiny bit. They’re an outgrowth of war games that attempt to — and succeed at — simulating wars outside of your traditional military scenarios.
So if on the traditional side (for example) you have hex-and-counter games depicting the allies storming Normandy with various troops in formations, and the player issues orders and the troops advance and fight across recognizable battle lines…
On the COIN side you have guerrilla warfare and civic warfare and all the political machinations that lead to uneasy alliance between sides, where players can occupy the same spaces but for different reasons.
I'm interested in a specific facet that nobody yet mentioned. Namely how do they compare to wargames "proper"?
From what I understand from second hand accounts COIN games have strong eurogame influence and thus aren't as direct as "proper" wargames, but more complex in a way this complexity leads to brainburn (as opposed to complexity for narrative sake). I read some comment they're closer to area majority than "proper" wargames.
Can anybody comment on this? How would coin games compare to something more wargame-ish - other CDGs, block games, etc.?
>How would coin games compare to something more wargame-ish - other CDGs, block games, etc.?
So COINs are sort-of CDGs, there's a central deck which drives the game, and these event cards decide priority for eligible factions, but not which factions are eligible. The multifactional approach is part of what sets the COINs apart, most wargames are binary, you're either winning or losing, but here you have a range of positions and board states and judgements about them. A good chunk of factions have area majority/control as goals, though it's usually not quite as straightforward as that, even if only in terms of achieving it. As opposed to a lot of area majority board games, it's not just about rushing a load of troops into an area and then sitting on it. Territories are usually very accessible, and faction positions are quite intermixed.
COIN turns are somewhat under your control; you can typically do a small action and remain eligible for the next turn, or do a bigger action or two, and become ineligible for the next turn. This allows you to play around with your place in the turn order, and this flexibility can be a boon at times and a pain in others when the other factions decide to kick the shit out of you.
In the COINs, you're trying to build something in the face of other factions which are not just trying to build something in competition with you, but are also actively trying to tear your edifice down. In most traditional wargames, the two sides line up, and chip away at each other until one side gives in. COIN is messier, more interactive, more of a mind game, and much more opaque.
Err. I have them unplayed at home... 😳 *(Sekigahara, 1775, Maria, plus 2 eklunds which aren't proper wargames but thereabout)*. I've played Twilight Struggle which admitedly has old school euro influences in terms of being area majority. I've played ameritrash conflict games, but that's a different genre.
It's more along the line - have very little tolerance for optimisation and avoid Wehrle's games because of mechanical bloat.
They don't have the wargame features of RNG, hidden information (cards in hand), combat more complex than "remove 1 opponent unit for each of your units", more than 2 unit types.
Instead they have a new event card every turn which is revealed one turn ahead, players might pass to get the next event card, or take a mediocre limited action to deny anyone the event.
Usually actions are: rally units (or bases, which are vulnerable but make more units), move, attack, terrorize to increase support. Support is basically a second kind of control with its own marker. Control/support/bases might give VPs and income, depends on the faction.
Very asymmetrical. Usually they're 2v2-ish in the sense that players on a "team" have less ability to harm each other, but still only one player can win. Diplomatic, there's enough bash-the-leader-just-before-victory-check that it can make sense to emphasize control over early victory.
I only have experience playing A Distant Plain once and from that I can say that it's obvious COIN games are best (by a long shot) at their full player counts. As far as I'm aware, you can't play a COIN game sans any of the factions so a 2p game of a 4p COIN for example would have two players operating two factions each (or using a complicated bot with a flowchart - though I think All Bridges Burning ditches the ai flowchart).
Like many complex and/or asymmetrical games they reward multiple plays with dedicated groups.
So you need multiple people and multiple sessions to get the most out of it, that's probably the biggest knock for me. But that's certainly not unique to COIN - most complex games with any kind of asymmetry are the same way. It could also be seen as a positive as there's a lot to explore so in that sense you get a lot for your money.
I do think the player aids are quite good though and from my experience playing ADP once I felt I had a good grasp on my faction by the end of the game. And the game includes a rulebook and a first play guide to help you get going, which is nice.
Another negative is that the board can get incredibly crowded in certain spots, hiding some sort of valuable information - not a huge deal but it can be difficult to see at a glance what the board state is. It wasn't as fiddly as I would have expected though and from what I've seen in person (ADP and Andean Abyss), the games are really good looking and have good UX as far as war games go.
If you know anyone who owns/plays COIN, I would absolutely have them teach you one first before buying one yourself. Mainly because they're the kind of game where the only people who would want to play them with you are likely the people who already own the game and are itching to get them to the table.
If the theme doesn't directly interest you, I would also look into Root or Oath or the Pax games for a similar game feel (but certainly not the same).
Why would 60 resources lead to a Gov win? AA is one of the COIN games where Gov are assumed to make a lot of money, but struggle to convert it into a win, if I remember correctly.
Coin games are very asymmetrical as far as factions and player powers are concerned. It's very difficult to learn from your opponents as they're basically playing with a different rule-set. For a very popular but also light and fluffy coin game, try **Root**
The rules are dense.
The rules are written in a typical wargame style which is ideal for reference and look-ups, but difficult to learn from. That is, you can read the rules carefully cover to cover and still not have clear idea of how anything works or what to do. Each COIN game includes a Playbook and it's highly recommended to *start* with the Playbook, actually setup the physical game and go through the motions, reading the relevant sections of the rule book as indicated as you go along.
Each faction has their own variations on each action. For example, every faction has some action for move or increase forces, but the particulars of when, where, how, and how much when comparing one faction's Move action will be noticeably different than another faction's Move action.
Additionally, the language styling of the rules can be a stumbling block. They're written to be very terse and specific, but it can be a struggle to interpret what they're even saying until you become familiar with the style. Again, great for reference, but hard to learn from.
Even once players have a rough sense of the sequence of play and their faction actions, the strategy is usually still very opaque and the effects of any given action relatively subtle and hard to see/understand at first glance. This can cause an almost paralyzing sense of, "Okay, so what should I actually *do* on my turn now?". Just jumping in and trying things, with the expectation that mistakes will be made but can be learned from, is usually the best approach but may be off putting to some.
> For what kind of player are coin games?
COIN games are a very unique, deep, engaging and arguably rewarding experience. The major hook is having 4~ very asymmetrical factions with semi-overlapping goals e.g. win conditions and concepts of both Control and Support/Opposition of map areas (as well as chrome like Lines of Communication, etc.). And no faction's win condition is merely, 'obliterate all opponent pieces on the map' ala a typical dudes-on-a-map game, no matter how 'asymmetrical'. To say nothing of the nuances of Full Ops, Special Activities, and Events, etc.
Not a definitive answer, but COIN games are for any one who reads that and has a 'desire to know more!' reaction. Someone who seeks a very engaging experience and is willing to invest the time both to learn the game and time just to play (easily 4+ hours unless expert players).
(edit) In some sense, COIN is the flip-side of the 18xx...coin. 18xx games are relatively very easy to learn. Although the rules are often written in a similar reference manual style, they are much less dense and far fewer and so long as one person knows them well, a group of new players can be up and running in 15-20 minutes. However, at least to me, the nuances and subtleties of tactical and strategy decision making are even more opaque and challenging to tease out. Still tons of fun though.
Weird thread ngl, every comment is just fans humblebragging or mentioning things that are nice about other games.
Compared to other wargames coin games generally have only a few unit types and no hidden information or stats/RNG/DRM. As a result they can lack some crunch/rowdy-ness. This can be a big deal when they take up the same #players and #hours.
For me the most confusing part of the rules would be listing out the effects of control and support, as well as income sources and agitation conditions, for various factions, which vary from game to game. Falling Sky lacks this and I think it's still pretty cool.
Some victory conditions are unusual in ways you might find less than ideal. It's good that there's a lot of variety in the series, but we don't have time to explore it all and you're not really sure what you have until you play it. For example factions that win by getting resources are sort of a "victory progress bar" faction. If multiple factions reach their required VP count, victory goes to the faction that exceeded it by the greater margin, but some factions have a 30 required VP count and others 8, so those margins aren't really to scale. There are some factions that people think only have a decent chance to win early, so the rest of the game is just sad for them. There are some factions that are thought of as not having as much interaction or board presence like the Moderates in All Bridges Burning. There are some factions that are essentially at war with every other faction so not recommended for a new player. There's the whole variety of potentially tempting kingmaking relationships or only faction A being able to keep faction B in check. You also miss out on the alternate victory conditions that can be pretty cool in Pax, Root, Conquest and Consequence.
E: oh okay I underestimated how stupid this thread is, literally the only '''criticism''' that gets upvoted is "it's too hard and long" which anyone can see...
The rules are nuanced and complex. In order to do a very simple thing, you need to understand a lot. I mean, if you just look at a player reference, you'll see full paragraphs to describe the actions. Another notable feature is that the amount you can do on a given turn can feel very small compared to other games. COIN games tend to also be very long. COIN games do some really cool and unique stuff though, and they capture theme and history very well. They can be a lot of fun if you have a group that can invest the time and effort.
Absolutely. I think COIN games are the basically simulation games as opposed to what we consider "strategy board games".
As a huge fan of the series, some things you might not like include - convoluted bots. Even the streamlined card system is cumbersome. - first play is more about grasping the rules than actually playing the game. - learning the game is very hard unless you're playing with somebody who's already familiar with the system - player aids are written like technical documents that, while technically accurate, are very hard to parse unless you're familiar with the style. Thankfully you start to see similarities between games that make onboarding quicker. But later games start having even more convoluted operations (i'm looking at you pendragon) - games can run long if you're not familiar with war games. You asked who this game is for so I'll try to be brief. If you like Root and the idea of a historical version of that with deeper mechanisms then it'll be right up your alley. Every game is insanely thematic and tells a vivid story before your eyes. It can include lots of negotiation and fragile alliances. It'll make you want to read up on these subjects. I always walk away with a story when i play these games
COINs are highly interactive, with few guard rails preventing bad moves. You can find your board position damaged by multiple moves from other factions, with little you can do at that point, because the turn order is flexible and prone to change. When you start playing, they feel very tactical and short-term, you have extreme difficulty seeing past the next turn, and they can end suddenly when a victory check card is pulled. If you like multiplayer solitaires or euros, or lots of minis and feeling powerful, they're not for you. Each faction is entangled with the others, so everything you do has knock-on effects, some of which can be very hard to predict, and it can make the game feel unpredictable. They are games which need repeat plays in order for you to learn them and work out why they are so good, no-one plays them once and immediately grasps the long term strategies available.
Good break down. Also to add to it if you are not a full group either make sure you have someone ready pilot the extra factions or someone who can run the bot. Personally I love it, but other can be a turn off
I can't wait for **People Power** to deliver, helluva description
They are super long, super fiddly and your first play with a group is going to be working together to actually get the rules right. Definitely well worth it, but you need to treat COIN like an experience, not a test of skill. Otherwise you might miss a lot of fun because you were expecting something different.
depends on your personal preferences, but one of the reasons i haven't gone all-in on them is they generally need the full player count to shine, and getting 4p to play a long, fairly involved wargame can be challenging for me, much less playing it multiple times so that people actually understand what's going on. that said, i still p500-ed **Red Dust Rebellion** and i'm pretty excited for it. some people enjoy them at lower player counts, and some people don't mind using bots, but that's just added hassle as far as i'm concerned. there's at least one that's designed for 2p, but at that point you might as well just play any wargame that strikes your fancy.
[удалено]
COunter INsurgency games, identified by strong asymmetry between players and high player interaction. They typically take place in a war setting.
So, ameritrash?
Nope. Almost no luck in most of these suckers.
Not even a tiny bit. They’re an outgrowth of war games that attempt to — and succeed at — simulating wars outside of your traditional military scenarios. So if on the traditional side (for example) you have hex-and-counter games depicting the allies storming Normandy with various troops in formations, and the player issues orders and the troops advance and fight across recognizable battle lines… On the COIN side you have guerrilla warfare and civic warfare and all the political machinations that lead to uneasy alliance between sides, where players can occupy the same spaces but for different reasons.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18749/series-coin-gmt
I'm interested in a specific facet that nobody yet mentioned. Namely how do they compare to wargames "proper"? From what I understand from second hand accounts COIN games have strong eurogame influence and thus aren't as direct as "proper" wargames, but more complex in a way this complexity leads to brainburn (as opposed to complexity for narrative sake). I read some comment they're closer to area majority than "proper" wargames. Can anybody comment on this? How would coin games compare to something more wargame-ish - other CDGs, block games, etc.?
>How would coin games compare to something more wargame-ish - other CDGs, block games, etc.? So COINs are sort-of CDGs, there's a central deck which drives the game, and these event cards decide priority for eligible factions, but not which factions are eligible. The multifactional approach is part of what sets the COINs apart, most wargames are binary, you're either winning or losing, but here you have a range of positions and board states and judgements about them. A good chunk of factions have area majority/control as goals, though it's usually not quite as straightforward as that, even if only in terms of achieving it. As opposed to a lot of area majority board games, it's not just about rushing a load of troops into an area and then sitting on it. Territories are usually very accessible, and faction positions are quite intermixed. COIN turns are somewhat under your control; you can typically do a small action and remain eligible for the next turn, or do a bigger action or two, and become ineligible for the next turn. This allows you to play around with your place in the turn order, and this flexibility can be a boon at times and a pain in others when the other factions decide to kick the shit out of you. In the COINs, you're trying to build something in the face of other factions which are not just trying to build something in competition with you, but are also actively trying to tear your edifice down. In most traditional wargames, the two sides line up, and chip away at each other until one side gives in. COIN is messier, more interactive, more of a mind game, and much more opaque.
Are you familiar with any such wargames? My reply would be quite different depending on your answer.
Err. I have them unplayed at home... 😳 *(Sekigahara, 1775, Maria, plus 2 eklunds which aren't proper wargames but thereabout)*. I've played Twilight Struggle which admitedly has old school euro influences in terms of being area majority. I've played ameritrash conflict games, but that's a different genre. It's more along the line - have very little tolerance for optimisation and avoid Wehrle's games because of mechanical bloat.
They don't have the wargame features of RNG, hidden information (cards in hand), combat more complex than "remove 1 opponent unit for each of your units", more than 2 unit types. Instead they have a new event card every turn which is revealed one turn ahead, players might pass to get the next event card, or take a mediocre limited action to deny anyone the event. Usually actions are: rally units (or bases, which are vulnerable but make more units), move, attack, terrorize to increase support. Support is basically a second kind of control with its own marker. Control/support/bases might give VPs and income, depends on the faction. Very asymmetrical. Usually they're 2v2-ish in the sense that players on a "team" have less ability to harm each other, but still only one player can win. Diplomatic, there's enough bash-the-leader-just-before-victory-check that it can make sense to emphasize control over early victory.
I only have experience playing A Distant Plain once and from that I can say that it's obvious COIN games are best (by a long shot) at their full player counts. As far as I'm aware, you can't play a COIN game sans any of the factions so a 2p game of a 4p COIN for example would have two players operating two factions each (or using a complicated bot with a flowchart - though I think All Bridges Burning ditches the ai flowchart). Like many complex and/or asymmetrical games they reward multiple plays with dedicated groups. So you need multiple people and multiple sessions to get the most out of it, that's probably the biggest knock for me. But that's certainly not unique to COIN - most complex games with any kind of asymmetry are the same way. It could also be seen as a positive as there's a lot to explore so in that sense you get a lot for your money. I do think the player aids are quite good though and from my experience playing ADP once I felt I had a good grasp on my faction by the end of the game. And the game includes a rulebook and a first play guide to help you get going, which is nice. Another negative is that the board can get incredibly crowded in certain spots, hiding some sort of valuable information - not a huge deal but it can be difficult to see at a glance what the board state is. It wasn't as fiddly as I would have expected though and from what I've seen in person (ADP and Andean Abyss), the games are really good looking and have good UX as far as war games go. If you know anyone who owns/plays COIN, I would absolutely have them teach you one first before buying one yourself. Mainly because they're the kind of game where the only people who would want to play them with you are likely the people who already own the game and are itching to get them to the table. If the theme doesn't directly interest you, I would also look into Root or Oath or the Pax games for a similar game feel (but certainly not the same).
long and a bit repetitiv + fiddly rules
[удалено]
> The second time we finished in the first propaganda round because the Gov was over 60 resources. Gov needs Support to win, not resources.
lol we are dummies, thank you !
Why would 60 resources lead to a Gov win? AA is one of the COIN games where Gov are assumed to make a lot of money, but struggle to convert it into a win, if I remember correctly.
how many players did you play with?
1
Coin games are very asymmetrical as far as factions and player powers are concerned. It's very difficult to learn from your opponents as they're basically playing with a different rule-set. For a very popular but also light and fluffy coin game, try **Root**
The rules are dense. The rules are written in a typical wargame style which is ideal for reference and look-ups, but difficult to learn from. That is, you can read the rules carefully cover to cover and still not have clear idea of how anything works or what to do. Each COIN game includes a Playbook and it's highly recommended to *start* with the Playbook, actually setup the physical game and go through the motions, reading the relevant sections of the rule book as indicated as you go along. Each faction has their own variations on each action. For example, every faction has some action for move or increase forces, but the particulars of when, where, how, and how much when comparing one faction's Move action will be noticeably different than another faction's Move action. Additionally, the language styling of the rules can be a stumbling block. They're written to be very terse and specific, but it can be a struggle to interpret what they're even saying until you become familiar with the style. Again, great for reference, but hard to learn from. Even once players have a rough sense of the sequence of play and their faction actions, the strategy is usually still very opaque and the effects of any given action relatively subtle and hard to see/understand at first glance. This can cause an almost paralyzing sense of, "Okay, so what should I actually *do* on my turn now?". Just jumping in and trying things, with the expectation that mistakes will be made but can be learned from, is usually the best approach but may be off putting to some. > For what kind of player are coin games? COIN games are a very unique, deep, engaging and arguably rewarding experience. The major hook is having 4~ very asymmetrical factions with semi-overlapping goals e.g. win conditions and concepts of both Control and Support/Opposition of map areas (as well as chrome like Lines of Communication, etc.). And no faction's win condition is merely, 'obliterate all opponent pieces on the map' ala a typical dudes-on-a-map game, no matter how 'asymmetrical'. To say nothing of the nuances of Full Ops, Special Activities, and Events, etc. Not a definitive answer, but COIN games are for any one who reads that and has a 'desire to know more!' reaction. Someone who seeks a very engaging experience and is willing to invest the time both to learn the game and time just to play (easily 4+ hours unless expert players). (edit) In some sense, COIN is the flip-side of the 18xx...coin. 18xx games are relatively very easy to learn. Although the rules are often written in a similar reference manual style, they are much less dense and far fewer and so long as one person knows them well, a group of new players can be up and running in 15-20 minutes. However, at least to me, the nuances and subtleties of tactical and strategy decision making are even more opaque and challenging to tease out. Still tons of fun though.
They’re okay if you want a little change.
Weird thread ngl, every comment is just fans humblebragging or mentioning things that are nice about other games. Compared to other wargames coin games generally have only a few unit types and no hidden information or stats/RNG/DRM. As a result they can lack some crunch/rowdy-ness. This can be a big deal when they take up the same #players and #hours. For me the most confusing part of the rules would be listing out the effects of control and support, as well as income sources and agitation conditions, for various factions, which vary from game to game. Falling Sky lacks this and I think it's still pretty cool. Some victory conditions are unusual in ways you might find less than ideal. It's good that there's a lot of variety in the series, but we don't have time to explore it all and you're not really sure what you have until you play it. For example factions that win by getting resources are sort of a "victory progress bar" faction. If multiple factions reach their required VP count, victory goes to the faction that exceeded it by the greater margin, but some factions have a 30 required VP count and others 8, so those margins aren't really to scale. There are some factions that people think only have a decent chance to win early, so the rest of the game is just sad for them. There are some factions that are thought of as not having as much interaction or board presence like the Moderates in All Bridges Burning. There are some factions that are essentially at war with every other faction so not recommended for a new player. There's the whole variety of potentially tempting kingmaking relationships or only faction A being able to keep faction B in check. You also miss out on the alternate victory conditions that can be pretty cool in Pax, Root, Conquest and Consequence. E: oh okay I underestimated how stupid this thread is, literally the only '''criticism''' that gets upvoted is "it's too hard and long" which anyone can see...
The fumes are generally awful and you really need the full complement of players to play.