I was just having that conversation the other day. When Dominion came out within 2 years there were several games that were obviously directly influenced by it. I'm not sure what was officially the first "worker placement" game, but many games use the basic mechanics that were first made prominent in Caylus. However, you don't really see much that so directly borrows from Catan or Cosmic, which does seem odd given the popularity of those games within the hobby market.
Not to say there aren't games that borrow a bit - randomly selected asymmetric starting powers are a part of many games, and the idea of collecting resources and turning them in for functional improvements certainly appear in many places, but other than Catan spinoffs I can only think of one game (Boomtown) that uses catan's version of dice-based resource generation, and I can't really think of anything that is terribly similar to Cosmic (though I do suspect that if Cosmic was released today it would have a hard time gaining traction due to it's inconsistency of pace and experience from game to game - that may be a reason why potential imitators have not gotten off the ground). As for games with similarly tight VP systems to settlers, Twilight Struggle comes to mind (though the 'tug-of-war' aspect is different), and sorta Cyclades, though you are playing to 2. On Friday, August 3, 2012 11:03:18 PM UTC-7, ErikPeter wrote: > > .l. Damn iPad. > ... Is that the game end condition is very tight. How many games have a VP > system where individual VP are so important? War of the Ring, I guess, > trick taking games not really because individual tricks don't feel super > important. > > Alien frontiers has tight VP and endgame. I just wish the beginning was > more tense in two- (and somewhat in three-) player games. That is the > drawback of area control abilities. > > Another classic you don't see ripped off as much as you'd expect is cosmic > encounter. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BGG Down" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bgg_down/-/M7klEaZxr6kJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bgg_down?hl=en.
