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homullus posted:this is almost "belongs in the OP" level of important information -- I had no idea Same
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Jun 7, 2022 18:00
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FulsomFrank posted:Unsure about the US but while shipping in Canada is fairly prompt and on schedule as far as I'm used to, but I know personally that they are all MEGA-SUPER-DUPER SLAMMED constantly and always lately. Additionally, negotiations with the union for one of Canada's top-3 delivery companies are degrading, which is only going to make things worse. I like 22MX at 3 more than the other 22s, though I still think just original 22 is the best one overall. 22CA just has too many extraneous things for me, and I typically like big games like C2C or 25.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:03
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Leperflesh posted:FedEx is actually two companies, because they use a contractor for "FedEx Ground" and that contractor suuuucks. "Regular" FedEx, which you'll get (at a high cost) for any air delivery, is pretty good in that it has union employees, decent tracking, and actually processes insurance quickly. But FedEx Ground will lose (or steal) packages and if you try to fix things, FedEx customer support can't do much because everything is at arm's length. Wow. That is so interesting. Thanks for sharing that tidbit.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:07
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Oh they're actually even more than 2 companies apparently. This Quora explanation is a good summary: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-FedEx-run-its-Express-and-Ground-services-as-if-they-are-separate-companies quote:FedEx Ground was originally RPS (Roadway Package System) a direct competitor to UPS. From its inception in 1973, Federal Express invented and controlled the express delivery market. By the early 80's they had competitors like Emory Air Freight and Purolator. However, in the late 80's, UPS began to compete directly by offering a next day delivery option. With UPS taking some of the overnight market share, Federal Express needed a "ground" component to compete. Federal Express bought out RPS. Shortly thereafter, Federal Express created a parent corporation and rebranded as "FedEx Corporation". and quote:Why does FedEx run its Express and Ground services as if they are separate companies? So FedEx Ground is a subsidiary, and most of the trucks and delivery drivers etc. work for contractors of that subsidiary. Layers within layers.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:41
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homullus posted:this is almost "belongs in the OP" level of important information -- I had no idea I don't order enough stuff online to be aware of this sort of thing. It's probably a matter of overall internet literacy way beyond the scope of board games, unless it can be very easily boiled down to a rule of thumb. edit: vvv No, I did not take this as a criticism, just meant it as a clarification. I'm a Luddite who doesn't order much stuff online. Magnetic North fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 7, 2022 |
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Jun 7, 2022 18:46
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Magnetic North posted:I don't order enough stuff online to be aware of this sort of thing. It's probably a matter of overall internet literacy way beyond the scope of board games, unless it can be very easily boiled down to a rule of thumb. I don't think you think this, but to be certain: I didn't mean it as a criticism of the OP. I order online all the time and didn't know.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:52
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Yeah this is just general "shipping things is a hellish nightmare" generic posting, not sure if it's relevant to the boardgame thread. I only found out about what's up with FedEx Ground when my wife and I got Pixel phones and a FedEx Ground driver "lost" them by delivering them to a nonexistant address several blocks away, and was then impossible to contact, and Google and FedEx Ground both insisted the other was responsible, while FedEx customer support insisted they could do nothing since it was FedEx Ground and not them who lost the package. Eventually Google were the good guys and sent us replacement phones. FedEx never copped to recording a delivery to a nonexistent address and the best they ever came up with was "can you go to that address and ask for your package?" Nowadays I go for USPS, or UPS Ground if USPS isn't an option.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:53
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Leperflesh posted:
This sounds like a mechanism for a pick up and deliver Splotter game.
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Jun 7, 2022 18:53
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Package Pirates, the hot new card game about being a contracted delivery driver who must balance:
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Jun 7, 2022 19:30
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I got Spirits of the Forest yesterday and its expansion Moonlight and I've just gotta say the dustjacket on this thing is so tight that it's a right pain in the rear end to remove and put back on. I'm gonna need to figure out what to do with it because the dust jacket has some nice art as well as some game info on it so I don't want to just cut it off but I really do wish it has been something slightly looser or something that would fold around the box instead of slide over. The box opens by a magnetic flap so maybe I'll think about altering the cover so it opens up and is held in by that magnetic tab, the same way a dust jacket on a book is held in when it's closed.
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Jun 7, 2022 20:34
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Honestly, the only mshipping service I have not had trouble with are Poste Canada and Amazon. UPS, Fedex, Purolator all suck.
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Jun 7, 2022 20:55
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah this is just general "shipping things is a hellish nightmare" generic posting, not sure if it's relevant to the boardgame thread. I only found out about what's up with FedEx Ground when my wife and I got Pixel phones and a FedEx Ground driver "lost" them by delivering them to a nonexistant address several blocks away, and was then impossible to contact, and Google and FedEx Ground both insisted the other was responsible, while FedEx customer support insisted they could do nothing since it was FedEx Ground and not them who lost the package. Eventually Google were the good guys and sent us replacement phones. FedEx never copped to recording a delivery to a nonexistent address and the best they ever came up with was "can you go to that address and ask for your package?" USPS varies a lot address to address. Despite being in a pretty big suburb my home is on what’s called an auxiliary route, which means it doesn’t have a regular postal carrier and gets staffed essentially with part time workers of various levels of competence. I’ve had several very important documents and packages lost, misdelivered or returned to sender with a “this address does not exist” note, depending on which particular brain donor is working that week.
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Jun 7, 2022 20:56
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Auxiliary routes you say? 
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Jun 7, 2022 21:07
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Bottom Liner posted:Auxiliary routes you say? Yeah I was going to ask you if you'd seen my package since you're in Florida. Good to hear that 1822MX is good with three, because that's the most likely player number. Was considering getting a game going this weekend but given the unreliability of Fedex I've put it off until next weekend.
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Jun 7, 2022 21:19
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medchem posted:This sounds like a mechanism for a pick up and deliver Splotter game. Worker Placement game where a percentage of your workers are unionised.
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Jun 7, 2022 22:50
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As long as nobody ever uses pittney-bowes shipping
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Jun 8, 2022 00:59
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Pitney-Bowes is a bluffing game where your opponent tells you they're ready to print on the envelope and you determine if they're lying. If you're wrong, they dump a cup of water on your important mail. 50% of the time, the game box is locked shut and you have to wait 6-36 hours for the DRM to let you open it again.
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Jun 8, 2022 19:39
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So I finally decided to give the Faiyum solo game a try. I must have gotten God's own card flop or something because I ended it with 330 points, which I attribute mostly to getting a fairly early Grower + Small Town (saw regular Town in the endgame cards, knew I had to snap it up) and a midgame Tax Collector + Papyrus combo that saw me burning 4 cards out of the market to do back-to-back $28 pulls out of my discard pile. I pretty much always felt the tension of card play order, though. Okay, I need to set up the map like this and get these resources in order to play this card, but if I actually play those cards first how am I going to get them back so I can keep setting up the map and getting resources?
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Jun 8, 2022 20:50
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Glazius posted:So I finally decided to give the Faiyum solo game a try. I must have gotten God's own card flop or something because I ended it with 330 points, which I attribute mostly to getting a fairly early Grower + Small Town (saw regular Town in the endgame cards, knew I had to snap it up) and a midgame Tax Collector + Papyrus combo that saw me burning 4 cards out of the market to do back-to-back $28 pulls out of my discard pile. How do you find Faiyum as a whole? I've wanted it for a while after reading the Space-Biff review. Do you think it'd play alright at 2P?
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Jun 8, 2022 20:57
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FulsomFrank posted:How do you find Faiyum as a whole? I've wanted it for a while after reading the Space-Biff review. Do you think it'd play alright at 2P? The thing it's going to depend the most on is how the players feel about their own bad luck / someone else's good luck. This game tips the odds quite a bit, but it's absolutely got the generic market row problem in that there will be times when you're going to see a new card come into the market based on your buying or admin that would be so perfect for you, and an opponent buys it before you get the chance. Very few cards provide genuinely unique map functions - there are lots of ways to, for example, get more grapes - and it's extremely unlikely you'll find yourself completely screwed out of any one thing, but a bad shuffle and a bad flip can leave you disadvantaged for quite a while. Or, in short, it's a game where reacting to chance is important, but that also means chance is important. Skip it if that's a problem for you. Otherwise it's a pretty great gathering and conversion game which is extremely leaning into its sort of "game from grandma's attic" aesthetic, which kind of weirdly helps to sell the general "city of antiquity" theme? I maybe consider it to do a little better at 2P and 4P than 3P and 5P? The one thing that's bumping up against the granularity limits is how many cards fall out of the market every admin, which is 2 for 2P and 3P and 1 for 4P and 5P. And unlike in the solo game you don't get a choice, so at 3P and 5P you could potentially see a market wipe if a bunch of people's admin phases line up. Glazius fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jun 8, 2022 |
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Jun 8, 2022 21:32
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Finally received my copy of Carnival Zombie 2nd edition and played a couple of quick solo games yesterday. It is such a weird but fun game that comes together far more cohesively than I thought it would from reading the rules. The game plays out in two phases - starting with the day phase where you are moving as a group to flee the city of Venice before it sinks into the sea. This phase is very simple and probably only takes up 10% of the playtime, as you are mostly making decisions about which location to move to to try and defend yourself for the night and/or heal up and search for equipment. Then there's the night phase which is really the main game, and plays out like a tower-defence thing where you have your six characters defending the centre of the map from waves of zombies who move towards the centre down eight different lanes. Zombies are represented by standard wooden cubes, and have various simple abilities (move twice as fast, have twice as many hp, or hit for twice as much) but are otherwise identical. Your characters' actions are entirely deterministic -each characters gets to assign a certain number of hits, each of which do a certain amount of damage to zombies in that character's facing, and then the zombies move and attack again in an entirely deterministic way. Apart from which zombies spawn where and a few terrain pieces that are picked at random, all of this feels very Euro - you're just moving cubes around trying to prevent them reaching the centre. Except for the fact that when you kill zombies rather than them just being removed from the game or going back to the spawn bag, you have to drop them onto a cardboard tile a little smaller than a standard playing card. If they stay on the card, all well and good but if any fall off they reappear on the map and your character takes a point of damage. As the night phase goes on, this card gets more and more crowded with dead zombie cubes making it more and more precarious each time you kill another one. It also makes for some very fun high-risk high-reward plays. The rules state that any zombies killed in the same action have to be dropped on the card at the same time, so if you use an explosive weapon to kill 5 zombies at once it's awesome but at the same time, now you have to try and drop 5 cubes onto the stack without any of them falling off which later in the game might be close to impossible. It's such a strange mechanic to have in a game that's otherwise pretty deterministic, but it adds an impressive degree of tension and humour particularly as the night wears on and the stack of dead zombies gets taller and wobblier. There's a ton of different scenarios and variants in the game what with it being kickstarter and all, most of which I haven't tried yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to playing more.
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Jun 9, 2022 01:49
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Kerro posted:Finally received my copy of Carnival Zombie 2nd edition and played a couple of quick solo games yesterday. It is such a weird but fun game that comes together far more cohesively than I thought it would from reading the rules. US fulfillment supposedly begins next week and I am excited
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Jun 9, 2022 02:30
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Apart from the fact that the rule book is horrible, the game is amazingly well produced given the shambles that was the ks campaign. I dunno how good/balanced all the ks extra bloat will be but the core game at least seems really solid.
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Jun 9, 2022 02:52
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In board game news: the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund has invested in Embracer Group, owner of Asmodee, owner of many board game studios. In case you're not aware, a SWF is a state-owned investment fund, so this fund is owned by the state of Saudia Arabia, not merely domiciled within their borders or operated by Saudis. This is noteworthy because Saudia Arabia has been associated with human rights abuses and extra judicial killings such as that of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Asmodee was already sort of a boogieman in the board game world, similar to the way EA was perceived in 2010 as hoovering up all the video game studios and ruining them, so this adds some fuel to that fire. Whether you change your purchasing choices based on that is your choice to make. One unfortunate practical issue as to whether individuals can act on this is that I tried to unravel what studios were and were not part of the Asmodee umbrella to add to the OP, and I found it very difficult to be adequately thorough since they own so many studios. This issue proposes something a lot stickier and more difficult than "This small company is run by a fascist/rapist" etc. I don't really want to get too deep in the weeds, but I wanted people to know in case they hadn't heard.
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Jun 9, 2022 11:08
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It’s very difficult to boycott companies with significant interests from the Saudi fund, as they simply have such a wide spread of investments. They have large stakes in Uber, Boeing, Facebook, EA/Take 2/Activision Blizzard/Nintendo, and Disney, so that’s most of transport, social media, video games, and Marvel/Star Wars/Frozen all out if you want to avoid products made under their investment umbrella. It’s up to the individual of course but this is one of these things where I think the problem is so big and structural it’s difficult to consume ethically. I think Asmodee just being Asmodee is almost enough rationale to avoid them even without the Saudis but as you say, they have stakes in most of the rest of the board game industry. And I mean let’s not kid ourselves, while there isn’t moral equivalency between the Saudis and the United States there are also an awful lot of bombs and weapons being used in the ME against civilians proudly stamped with made in the USA and the investors in the big arms sale companies there are similarly diversified across the global economy. I doubt many (or any) major global company with tradable shares is that squeaky clean. Which isn’t to say this isn’t all super important and of massive concern. But it’s political change not consumer action id recommend supporting. (Non-American here often troubled by all this a lot too)
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Jun 9, 2022 11:54
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My own board game hubris might finally get the better of me. I've just kept adding to my collection to the point that I don't know where I'm going to store the next stuff I get, and I just arranged to purchase almost the entire collection for Eldritch Horror.  Maybe it would feel less like a problem if I actually got to play more than maybe once a month. Anyone have some tips for storage solutions other than just adding more shelves?
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Jun 9, 2022 13:46
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All of Eldritch can be packed into just three of its big boxes.
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Jun 9, 2022 14:06
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Deckboxes for card games save some space. One deckbox fits about 70-100+ sleeved cards (or double that if you don't sleeve them). Of course then you have to get rid of the original boxes...
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Jun 9, 2022 14:17
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Freakie posted:My own board game hubris might finally get the better of me. I've just kept adding to my collection to the point that I don't know where I'm going to store the next stuff I get, and I just arranged to purchase almost the entire collection for Eldritch Horror. It's not an addiction, you can stop at any time... I think BottomLiner is ruthless and throws boxes away and uses universal storage solutions that hold multiple games? If it's not him it's some other heretic in this thread that surely deserves his place at Satan's feet. I know I'm hitting limits of my own Kallax and extra sections but there's definitely some fat that can be trimmed. Considering donating the weaker entries and selling the bigger ones or using them for prizes.
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Jun 9, 2022 14:21
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SelenicMartian posted:All of Eldritch can be packed into just three of its big boxes. I have the entire of Eldritch Horror stored in one of the large boxes and a tool organiser that is slightly wider than an EGG Lacerda box but about the same depth and length.
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Jun 9, 2022 14:24
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Freakie posted:My own board game hubris might finally get the better of me. I've just kept adding to my collection to the point that I don't know where I'm going to store the next stuff I get, and I just arranged to purchase almost the entire collection for Eldritch Horror. fwiw there is an app on google play that you can use to take the place of many of the card decks in the game - called 'Eldritch Companion', which you setup based on expansions, sideboards, and the old one in play. There's still gonna be a lot of cards since you still need all the player related ones like weapons, spells, etc, but you will no longer need to unpack any of the 'encounter' type cards which alone saves you a lot of setup/teardown Unrelated but we did our first play of gaia project and it was an enjoyable experience, i feel like it's a great improvement over TM but also could still see myself playing TM, TBH Sloober fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jun 9, 2022 |
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Jun 9, 2022 14:49
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SelenicMartian posted:All of Eldritch can be packed into just three of its big boxes. You can get away with two if you pack them extra tight and don’t use thick sleeves!
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Jun 9, 2022 21:41
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If you memorize all the components of a game, you can throw them away and then just represent everything with a single set of numbered chits. Here is a game of Argent in progress: 
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Jun 10, 2022 01:50
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Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:If you memorize all the components of a game, you can throw them away and then just represent everything with a single set of numbered chits. I would simply use a 5050 side die to represent all possible gamestates to reduce components further. Each game could have a differently coloured die, perhaps.
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Jun 10, 2022 02:41
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BinaryDoubts posted:I would simply use a 5050 side die to represent all possible gamestates to reduce components further. Each game could have a differently coloured die, perhaps. Analysing the quantum superpositioning of your own brain neurons allows you to simulate trillions of board games simultaneously; it certainly saves a lot of time that would have otherwise been wasted playing them by hand.
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Jun 10, 2022 03:10
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Thinking about the guy who told me gloomhaven sounds cool but that he wanted to know how feasible it'd be to try and approximate it with a pencil and a bunch of index cards
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Jun 10, 2022 03:32
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BinaryDoubts posted:I would simply use a 5050 side die to represent all possible gamestates to reduce components further. Each game could have a differently coloured die, perhaps. Just use a few extra dice to show what game you're playing.
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Jun 10, 2022 06:54
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BinaryDoubts posted:I would simply use a 5050 side die to represent all possible gamestates to reduce components further. Each game could have a differently coloured die, perhaps. Reminds me of how robots play chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtgZKwK6C3U
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Jun 10, 2022 06:57
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FirstAidKite posted:Thinking about the guy who told me gloomhaven sounds cool but that he wanted to know how feasible it'd be to try and approximate it with a pencil and a bunch of index cards https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/340909/gloomholdin
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Jun 10, 2022 17:55
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Well poo poo
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Jun 10, 2022 18:12
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