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taser rates posted:mark herman is awful at rulebooks Yeup. Jejoma posted:Where does Fire in the Lake sit on a scale of Falling Sky to Pendragon, in terms of rules complexity / weight? Second most complex.
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Dec 5, 2018 23:00
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blackmongoose posted:Someone hasn't heard of United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins It's a little harder to spin that one as being a dispute over Hammurabi's Code though.
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Dec 5, 2018 23:30
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blackmongoose posted:Someone hasn't heard of United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins I like United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton
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Dec 5, 2018 23:34
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Tokyo Metro is very mathy, just like an 18xx although that is where the similarities end. I wouldn't play it with more than three at least not for awhile. It's an interesting game, just wish someone who knows how to actually write rules and make game boards would publish it. The cloth poo poo is poo poo, had to buy a plexiglass sheet to make the game playable.
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Dec 6, 2018 00:06
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rchandra posted:United States versus Approximately 450 Ancient Cuneiform Tablets sounds like it came from the Simpsons. https://www.museumofthebible.org/
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Dec 6, 2018 00:25
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TheNakedJimbo posted:"United States versus Approximately 450 Ancient Cuneiform Tablets" is objectively the best name ever for a court case. yet both posts leave out that the full name is "United States versus Approximately 450 Ancient Cuneiform Tablets AND Approximately 3000 Ancient Clay Bullae"
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Dec 6, 2018 00:32
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Terminally Bored posted:Are there any legit good roll&move games? A little late to the party, but Stefan Feld's Merlin is a roll and move in the sense that you roll dice and move pawns the number of spaces on the dice. Really, though, it's a dice allocation game with a rondel.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:03
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Stefan Feld's Merlin is good?
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Dec 6, 2018 01:06
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discount cathouse posted:I like United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton Forfeiture cases have the best names: United States of America v. 17 Pallets of DOT 1.3G Fireworks Weighing Approximately 15,384 Pounds USA v. Colt M203 40 MM Grenade Launcher et al Or for a topical cross-post with GBS: United States of America vs. 89.9270303 Bitcoins, more or less, seized from a Trezor Virtual Currency Wallet. Saltpowered fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Dec 6, 2018 |
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Dec 6, 2018 01:08
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Mayveena posted:Tokyo Metro is very mathy, just like an 18xx although that is where the similarities end. I wouldn't play it with more than three at least not for awhile. It's an interesting game, just wish someone who knows how to actually write rules and make game boards would publish it. The cloth poo poo is poo poo, had to buy a plexiglass sheet to make the game playable.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:26
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al-azad posted:
I just got this in today, and they didn't even pretend to have a native English speaker proofread the rules.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:35
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al-azad posted:Speaking of weird licensing, I can't believe anyone still wants to work with Harmony Gold over Robotech knowing their reputation for being flaky and litigious. There were two or three Robotech games at the con by at least two separate publishers. Yeah, the Tokyo Series games shipped a couple weeks back, got mine. Jordan is a great game designer, but you're absolutely right that his rulebooks need work. Its a small blessing, but he's super responsive to rules questions on Twitter and BGG at least. al-azad posted:Much like a Splotter game Tokyo Metro makes many unfortunate design choices and will never change because the designer likes it. I would never introduce this to a colorblind person, this game where cyan and teal are adjacent colors. That's not entirely Jordan's fault...he kept to the actual colors of the Tokyo train lines. Everything is double coded though; the train lines all have letters and numbers, and the actions all have symbols.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:42
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Lawlicaust posted:Forfeiture cases have the best names: And I like the bitcoin one. Amount accurate to 10-7... more or less.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:52
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I make the comparison to Splotter because Indonesia may be the ugliest and most unwieldy game that's still really good but they'll never update the graphic style because they like the look. I understand wanting an authentic game but sometimes you gotta make concessions for playability.
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Dec 6, 2018 01:55
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Pierzak posted:Why is an inanimate object a side in a court case? How does that work?
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Dec 6, 2018 01:59
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al-azad posted:I make the comparison to Splotter because Indonesia may be the ugliest and most unwieldy game that's still really good but they'll never update the graphic style because they like the look. I understand wanting an authentic game but sometimes you gotta make concessions for playability. The colorblind comment didn’t make sense, though.
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Dec 6, 2018 02:32
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Lawlicaust posted:Forfeiture cases have the best names: This one's my favorite: United States v. One 6.5 Mm. Mannlicher-Carcano Military R., 250 F. Supp. 410 (N.D. Tex. 1966) https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/250/410/2341251/
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Dec 6, 2018 02:40
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quote:civil forfeiture involves a dispute between law enforcement and property such as a pile of cash or a house or a boat, such that the thing is suspected of being involved in a crime. 
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Dec 6, 2018 02:56
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Kiranamos posted:The colorblind comment didn’t make sense, though. Have you seen Tokyo Metro? The colors do not contrast at all and they all converge in the center in multiple points. Reading the map with 20/20 vision is a nightmare, I can't imagine someone with a vision impairment trying to do so.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:25
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al-azad posted:Have you seen Tokyo Metro? The colors do not contrast at all and they all converge in the center in multiple points. Reading the map with 20/20 vision is a nightmare, I can't imagine someone with a vision impairment trying to do so. I want to again point out that the train lines are also coded with letters for each line and sequential numbers per station. The map would work in greyscale.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:27
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After playing Mini Rails a few more times, I'm really appreciating the game. Mini Rails is the friendliest hyper-political board game I know. The game is a stock holding game stripped down to the bare minimum. Since there are almost zero mechanics involved in running a rail company, the value of each stock is mostly determined by player politics. But Mini Rails forces all players to gain six stocks, and the simple ruleset intersects to encourage players against holding too many multiples of the same stock. This ensures everyone will have overlapping ownership, and the various alliances that come with that. In most political games, shy people who are bad at political manipulation can end up all alone in the late game. But Mini Rails is set up so players practically have to have an ally at some point in the game, even if everything collapses into kingmaking on the last turn. Plus, it's short enough to run a teaching game in half an hour.
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Dec 6, 2018 03:59
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I'm pretty sure the board game map is easier to read than the actual real-life Tokyo metro map.
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Dec 6, 2018 04:30
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jivjov posted:I want to again point out that the train lines are also coded with letters for each line and sequential numbers per station. The map would work in greyscale. It helps but the font is still small and then you run into the issue of cloth maps where the fabric isn't pure white. Being grayscale would actually be a benefit for better contrast especially in areas like Otemachi where two blues, a purple, and a dark green converge. I'm a strong believer that anything that gets in the way of information should be smoothed over. People may scoff at 18xx for its Excel spreadsheet look but I could walk in on a game in the middle and follow the game from across the room.
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Dec 6, 2018 05:13
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Jabor posted:I'm pretty sure the board game map is easier to read than the actual real-life Tokyo metro map. someone print this on a rug and put it on Kickstarter, pretty sure you'll make a quick million (
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Dec 6, 2018 05:16
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Oh yeah, I saw Pax Pamir at PAX and it is a handsome production for a prototype. Very clean map, contrasting colors, and large bold symbols on the cards. The "rug" map was simple and readable but still stylized. A far cry from Phil loving Eklund's style. 1st edition Pax Pamir is fine by comparison but 2e is the refinement it needed.
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Dec 6, 2018 05:57
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The rulebook for lords of Hellas is the worst one I've seen. But not because it's hard to follow (that's Feudum, but that's the fault of the rules rather than the book) but because of how all over the place it is. Certain rules only appear in reminders, some only in examples, a rule for normal play only appears in the single player rules, and terminology used on certain sections is explained only in passing in what looks like a fluff section, etc etc. Every time I read it, or someone asks a rules question on the Facebook group, I just think, how loving hard can it actually be to write a rulebook, because apparently it's almost impossible?
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Dec 6, 2018 09:40
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!Klams posted:how loving hard can it actually be to write a rulebook? It's incredibly hard.
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Dec 6, 2018 11:57
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al-azad posted:Is something going on with Catalyst? They had a huge booth but the only thing available was Dragonfire and some other Hasbro licensed games. I don't remember seeing any Shadowrun products and they had a couple boxes of their Battletech skirmish game. This reminds me of Gencon 2017 when they had a box of The Duke in their coming soon display. I asked some booth trolls for more info and nobody knew anything. Then I was introduced to the owner of the company, surely he would know more. He had no clue, he just asked me my opinion of the art, which I said just looked like the artist stole Shadows of Mordor... What I'm saying is Catalyst may be a drug front, because they aren't really enthusiastic about games.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:21
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taser rates posted:mark herman is awful at rulebooks 
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Dec 6, 2018 12:27
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Casnorf posted:It's incredibly hard. Brains aren't meant to read the same thing over and over and then try to figure out the difference between what the brain knows and what's written. I must have proofread the Advanced Civ rules literally 20 times and I still missed some stuff.
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Dec 6, 2018 15:04
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Bottom Liner posted:someone print this on a rug and put it on Kickstarter, pretty sure you'll make a quick million Discord meta is porg > rug > trains > porg. al-azad posted:It helps but the font is still small and then you run into the issue of cloth maps where the fabric isn't pure white. Being grayscale would actually be a benefit for better contrast especially in areas like Otemachi where two blues, a purple, and a dark green converge. Nah 
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Dec 6, 2018 15:10
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Chill la Chill posted:
Good god. And yes, Indonesia's board is pretty tough from a functional perspective both in the stylised font they used and the decisions with the sizes of the territories with regard to what is going to end up on them. And then there's the business with the actual components... I would imagine cloth maps being super thematic for certain games but wouldn't the fold lines get annoying and the way pieces kinda slip off them if it isn't perfectly flat?
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Dec 6, 2018 15:31
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There's fabric MTG playmats, they can have pretty cool designs and seem to hold in shape pretty well. Couldn't tell you what they're made of, though, and I know they're kinda pricy.
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Dec 6, 2018 15:33
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A board game done as a play mat would be very very cool but probably very very expensive to make.
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Dec 6, 2018 15:50
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I hate to keep ragging on Tokyo Metro but I'll post this as kind of a warning that maybe the game wasn't finalized yet. I posted a rules question on BGG and not only received conflicting answers, some people were playing flat out wrong for a year and didn't even realize. The last rules posted was the "beta" dated 12/26/2017 and a how-to-play video posted by the designer on 12/20/2017 where he says the rules are subject to change but, as far as I'm aware, doesn't conflict with the current "beta" rules. I hope things are smoothed over as the rewards are shipped and Jordan Draper has another Kickstarter ending soon so I'm guessing he's busy between that and fulfillment.
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Dec 6, 2018 16:44
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Casnorf posted:It's incredibly hard. Mayveena posted:Brains aren't meant to read the same thing over and over and then try to figure out the difference between what the brain knows and what's written. I must have proofread the Advanced Civ rules literally 20 times and I still missed some stuff. Ok, fair play, I stand corrected. Apologies.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:33
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!Klams posted:Ok, fair play, I stand corrected. Apologies. Hah, I was just using a Moneyball reference to make the short version of the point. Writing a rulebook is teaching to a noninteractable audience. It's a lecture at best and you're bound to make wrong assumptions all along the process about who knows what when. Ever get lost in a classroom because the teacher didn't think to check if you knew all the background context behind the point he's making? Making up rules is easy. Communicating those rules so that anyone but you can understand them is monumentally difficult, even if you are a tech writer by trade (I'm not). We've got a whole judicial system centered around interpreting rules some dudes wrote a while back and those guys spend their careers trying to parse it. What chance do game rulebook writers have? I'm probably harping on this a bit, haha, and I don't really mean to. I just like to expand on what was initially a bit of a throwaway joke.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:50
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There’s also the challenge of presenting the rules in a manner appropriate for teaching (casual tone, using extra words make the point clearly), and having a easily referenced, concise rulebook for questions during play. You can have two rulebooks to do this, but now you have generated a pile of work cross-referencing and making sure there is no contradictions during the revision process.
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Dec 6, 2018 18:02
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The greatest of rulebook sins is not having an index.
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Dec 6, 2018 18:04
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No the worst is an index where there are a dozen or more pages listed for something like "Modifiers" or "Income" because SOMEONE thinks an index is a list of every single page where the word appears -- regardless of how briefly and heedless of context. Want to know how Modifiers apply or remember how to calculate income? Have fun going on a wild goose chase, it's faster to just flip through it all yourself.
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Dec 6, 2018 18:16
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