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silvergoose posted:Very much for the best, yes. Is erasure better than romanticized versions? I know there's not a good answer and that's not aimed at you. It's just a running theme in Pfister's works (like the quote I posted above brazenly and bizarrely defends).
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Mar 15, 2023 20:11
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did they clarify that the new bandits aren't still native americans?
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Mar 15, 2023 20:31
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Boonlake's description is absurd.quote:With a group of pioneers, you have left civilization behind to settle along the shores of Boonlake, a long-forgotten region inhabited by humans long ago. This unexplored area beckons you! Dude just loves Terra Nullius
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Mar 15, 2023 21:05
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Azran posted:Boonlake's description is absurd. Maybe I'm missing something as an ESL reader, what's so absurd about this one?
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Mar 15, 2023 21:21
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Anyone play Bloodborne & Dark Souls mini games? I'm thinking of getting one or the other for solo play, and to paint the minis, anyone have any opinions on which to get if I had to pick one? I don't have a preference on either IP, but whichever one has more lasting power and more fun is the one I'd go with.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:30
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe I'm missing something as an ESL reader, what's so absurd about this one? A pretext used to colonise places like Australia, America and Canada is 'Terra Nullis' where the first nations people who owned the land were not in fact inhabitants / nations and thus have no claim to land and therefore colonialism is fine QED. Some obvious problems there but then when people say this land is uninhabited, and thus colonisation is fine, looks problematic in the context of attempts to say Australia and Canada were uninhabited therefore colonisation is fine.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:50
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I don't know about the miniatures games but the blood-borne card game is very nice and I recommend it for a group of three to five.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:54
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Bottom Liner posted:Is erasure better than romanticized versions? I know there's not a good answer and that's not aimed at you. It's just a running theme in Pfister's works (like the quote I posted above brazenly and bizarrely defends). Very likely yes, bad representation can be extremely harmful in a lot of ways.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:00
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silvergoose posted:Very likely yes, bad representation can be extremely harmful in a lot of ways. the great western trail across the virgin unspoilt american lands. just a cowboy and his cows and the stars.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:03
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe I'm missing something as an ESL reader, what's so absurd about this one? "A region inhabited by humans long ago" is largely a fictional concept in human history, but it's a fiction that has been used by colonial apologists to justify the colonization and displacement of lands then-inhabited by humans we didn't like very much. (Technically there have occasionally been marginal lands that have been abandoned, e.g. parts of the Sahara/Gobi Deserts that used to be arable thousands of years ago, or tiny islands that could barely support human habitation to begin with, but those aren't the types of places most exploration & settlement games are about.)
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Mar 15, 2023 22:12
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:A pretext used to colonise places like Australia, America and Canada is 'Terra Nullis' where the first nations people who owned the land were not in fact inhabitants / nations and thus have no claim to land and therefore colonialism is fine QED. the holy poopacy posted:"A region inhabited by humans long ago" is largely a fictional concept in human history, but it's a fiction that has been used by colonial apologists to justify the colonization and displacement of lands then-inhabited by humans we didn't like very much. (Technically there have occasionally been marginal lands that have been abandoned, e.g. parts of the Sahara/Gobi Deserts that used to be arable thousands of years ago, or tiny islands that could barely support human habitation to begin with, but those aren't the types of places most exploration & settlement games are about.) Eh, in this case I feel like that's inventing non-existing problems unless there's something else in there that really screams "the author has some weird-rear end opinions." I get that it has a bad history but in this case it really just seems like "there's no one here that you have to fight, steal from or work for in order to do your thing, and there are some archeological sites to poke around for stuff more interesting than raw materials."
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Mar 15, 2023 22:17
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That Italian Guy posted:Aside from the atmosphere (and maybe the story too? I've only tried the demo) the two games are completely different. I have a (sadly abandoned) LP of the BG version of Tainted Grail if you want to have a look at how it plays irl: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3944128 (the OP and first few posts have a somewhat complete teach for the game if nothing else). i have this and by the second session i quit the whole resource management thing altogether and don't think i played a fourth
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Mar 15, 2023 22:20
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silvergoose posted:Very likely yes, bad representation can be extremely harmful in a lot of ways. In this specific example though, erasure was a systemic practice of the US in a way that makes that game change look just as bad if not worse. The cattle trade was instrumental in a lot of it too. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 22:22
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Bottom Liner posted:In this specific example though, erasure was a systemic practice of the US in a way that makes that game change look just as bad if not worse. The cattle trade was instrumental in a lot of it too. i think you are wrong 99% of the time but here i finally agree with you on something. there were frontier conflicts and it seems stupid to erase that in a history themed game. it's fine to depict those conflicts as long as you don't treat the native populations as faceless bloodthirsty savages. completely erasing that and pretending like bandits were the more present threat in the game revision seems insane
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Mar 15, 2023 22:31
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Considering we have actual unrepentant colonialist game designers out there, I think that Pfister having a change of heart towards these portrayals in GWT (as well as Maracaibo and Mombasa) is still a net positive, though not unreservedly so for the reasons we've talked about.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:51
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Anyone play Bloodborne & Dark Souls mini games? No idea about the Bloodborne one, but the Dark Souls game is terrible. It feels like whoever designed the game believed that Dark Souls is about grinding easy encounters for extremely important character levels and made a game that very heavily incentivizes that as a playstyle. Boring, monotonous, and an unimpressive boss battler when you house-rule the previous part away..
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Mar 15, 2023 23:29
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Anyone play Bloodborne & Dark Souls mini games? I really, really like the Bloodborne board game but I think it's really important to understand what it is. It's very much a near-perfect-information tactical puzzle/optimisation game, with a fun theme and pretty minis, not in any way a typical dungeon crawler or dice-chucker. It's got far more in common with something like Mage Knight, Gloomhaven or even Spirit Island than it does something like Zombicide, Cthulhu Death May Die etc. down to the fact that enemies don't even have their own independent behaviour, they strictly move in response to player's actions and positioning so you have near complete control of the game. I played it an absolute ton when I first got it, including playing through all the base game scenarios and most of the expansion ones. Since then though I haven't played it a great deal, and I think this is because one of the weaknesses of the game which is that it does start to get quite repetitive after probably 20-30 hours of play. There are a ton of different hunters and monsters all with their own mechanics, but the fundamental 'puzzle' of the game remains largely the same and unfortunately the scenario design is not very varied so there is little to break up this issue. I'll still keep the game and bring it out occasionally cos it still is a ton of fun when you're in the mood for a serious puzzly experience with a nice power-progression curve that you can play through in about three hours but it's not something that will hit the table again and again in close succession the way say Spirit Island might. In short, amazing mechanics, average replayability and somewhat poor scenario design.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:26
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Mr. Squishy posted:I played Stephenson's Rocket for the first time in years. I've only played it once before, with me teaching but it was so traumatic I put it back on the shelf forever. I'm a bad teacher, it wasn't the crowd for it, but yeesh it was painful. People like it but I've yet to see past the clunk. There are three ways of in-game scoring, two out which are pretty much identical, and the last is totally different and pretty inconsequential. The fact that the minimal one is rail freight, with the real money coming from passengers is thematically jarring. The actual anatomy of a turn is a chore. Again there are two simple actions, place some wood down on the board, no problems there, but laying track is annoying. Move a loco, add a share, determine if a veto auction is happening, do the veto auction, spend some shares, let someone else move the loco but it's still your turn, lay down track, maybe gain a passenger, maybe do a bit of scoring... and then you get to do it again. We were four experienced gamers but that was so ungainly! Maybe if we played it enough to memorize all that and we can actually play the game, it'll be fun. But I do most of my gaming at meetups so there will always be a new player trying to keep straight town and merger scoring. On top of everything, the Grail rulebook is.... I want to say lousy but maybe it's just bad, and the iconography is utterly opaque. I dunno if it translates well, but i made some helper cards and dropped them in my old edition Stephenson's Rocket. It's so much easier just to have that Build Track process in front of everyone at all times, even if the other 2 actions are super simple. I heard the points are different in the new one? I dunno? What mad man didn't like a giant wad of plus-sized bills for score anyway? Gonna play Dinosaur Rails for the second time tonight. First time around was super fun... I like how all the little parts interplay with each other. I'd never played anything close to a cube-rail type game before unless you count a game of Railways of the World i half-slept through 10-ish years ago. I got p. hosed by a land bridge tile late game last time gonna have to watch for that this time.w
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Mar 16, 2023 00:39
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe I'm missing something as an ESL reader, what's so absurd about this one? Aside from what others said, I find very funny that the description says the region used to be inhabited and then immediately describes it as 'unexplored'. The 'do board games glorify colonialism' discussion is a long-running one (there's a reason why Catan isn't called Settlers anymore) and this is one of the less egregious examples, but still
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Mar 16, 2023 02:37
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PurpleXVI posted:Eh, in this case I feel like that's inventing non-existing problems unless there's something else in there that really screams "the author has some weird-rear end opinions." I get that it has a bad history but in this case it really just seems like "there's no one here that you have to fight, steal from or work for in order to do your thing, and there are some archeological sites to poke around for stuff more interesting than raw materials." I mean we do have the 'this is a fictionalised representation of colonial rule where bad things don't happen' and 'native Americans are obstacles to be' removed'' lol.
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Mar 16, 2023 03:08
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If you want to have a game about settling an unexplored idyllic wilderness, there's no real reason to not just go with an explicitly fantasy setting. A magic portal opens up to a land with mysterious ruins but no pesky natives, whatever, go nuts. You've already committed yourself to an unrealistic scenario that only seems plausible due to colonialist narratives, so verisimilitude is out the window anyhow.
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Mar 16, 2023 05:32
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the holy poopacy posted:If you want to have a game about settling an unexplored idyllic wilderness, there's no real reason to not just go with an explicitly fantasy setting. A magic portal opens up to a land with mysterious ruins but no pesky natives, whatever, go nuts. You've already committed yourself to an unrealistic scenario that only seems plausible due to colonialist narratives, so verisimilitude is out the window anyhow. and thus birthed the beginning of board game isekai hell
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Mar 16, 2023 05:38
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Magnetic North posted:Considering we have actual unrepentant colonialist game designers out there, I think that Pfister having a change of heart towards these portrayals in GWT (as well as Maracaibo and Mombasa) is still a net positive, though not unreservedly so for the reasons we've talked about. Nobody would think about making a boardgame about IE: the slave trade, but for some reason "the hunt for Mayan gold" or "the taming of the New World" are still romanticised with a sense of mystery and adventure. The Mayan gold is in an abandoned temple full of traps, the native Americans are an unknown adversary for the rugged frontiersmen, etc.
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Mar 16, 2023 08:55
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That Italian Guy posted:Yeah, malice aside, the problem is intrinsic with the setting when you look at it with modern sensibilities. Hell, even something as lightly-themed as Lost Cities has shades of it. I've heard that some of these lost civilization myths were assuming that Africans could never have built these things, so it must have been Atlantis or Hyperborea or Aliens or whatever nonsense. Board games are going to be some small part of the media landscape as we interrogate that history. In all probability, even people who are against all the various -isms may still disagree on what is appropriate: sensitive thoughtful inclusion of the more sensitive matters, a softened theming with supportive heartfelt context contained in the manual, or a simple abandonment of these tropes and themes altogether. Of course, I say this all as a know-nothing who knows nothing. I'm more interested in what members of the affected communities and other minority thinkers in the board game world would say.
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Mar 16, 2023 09:21
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Harold Fjord posted:I don't know about the miniatures games but the blood-borne card game is very nice and I recommend it for a group of three to five. I'm always happy to play Bloodborne the card game. Each player is a hunter, trying to get blood and trophies from the monster that walks into view. This is done by playing cards from a Concordia-style hand, with one card being hunker down in the Dream to bank your blood and retrieve your played cards. (this is called Action Retrieval according to BGG, I just looked it up. For their part, Monsters attack all hunters at once, trying to reduce their HP to 0 and make them lose all their unbanked blood. The monsters roll the green, orange, or red 6-sided attack dice (depending on how mean they are), with some sides telling you to add a number to the total then roll again, so it's fun to guess the likely damage output given that it can range from 0 to infinity. (I already knew the term for this, it's exploding dice). Mixing it up a little is a card draft to add weird cards to your hand, some pre-empting the turn order, some attacking the other hunters as well as the monster, and so on. There are enough new cards to add variety, but the deck is pretty slender so it wont take too many games before you know what everything does (this is a good thing). One last modifier is the final boss is selected out of 12, and alters the games rules somehow for the entire game. I would say this deck has some bone-headed alterations. The one that comes to mind is player elimination which but there's one or two other unfun choices. That's an easy fix though, you just don't play with those cards. It's a good game! Short, comprehensible, almost all of the design looks like it was made by people who know what makes games fun. Apparently the same cannot be said of the miniatures games, but I have not played them so I cannot comment.
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Mar 16, 2023 10:17
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PRADA SLUT posted:and thus birthed the beginning of board game isekai hell Kanban EV-kun?
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Mar 16, 2023 11:07
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I mean we do have the 'this is a fictionalised representation of colonial rule where bad things don't happen' and 'native Americans are obstacles to be' removed'' lol. Oh, is that in something else the creator has made? Because I didn't see that in what I could find of the "Boonlake" thing.
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Mar 16, 2023 11:21
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That Italian Guy posted:Yeah, malice aside, the problem is intrinsic with the setting when you look at it with modern sensibilities. Well, Brian Mayer made Freedom: the underground railroad, where you're trying to rescue slaves from slave catchers while gaining support for abolition. And then there's Amabel Holland's This Guilty Land, which is a direct criticism of centrism as a force for maintaining an evil status quo. It's more that some topics aren't touched unless designers are deliberately and respectfully broaching the topic, whereas "it's a period of history...ignore all the bad stuff please" is super common. silvergoose fucked around with this message at 11:49 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 11:47
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silvergoose posted:Well, Brian Mayer made Freedom: the underground railroad, where you're trying to rescue slaves from slave catchers while gaining support for abolition. And then there's Amabel Holland's This Guilty Land, which is a direct criticism of centrism as a force for maintaining an evil status quo. In the case of Mombasa we were told twice by the demonstrator that it wasn't about slavery and the rulebook mentions it as well. Serious "my T-shirt" energy, except the rulebook saying "it's not about slavery" does not, in fact, answer those questions.
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Mar 16, 2023 12:00
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, is that in something else the creator has made? Because I didn't see that in what I could find of the "Boonlake" thing. Two different things yes.
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Mar 16, 2023 12:37
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Jedit posted:In the case of Mombasa we were told twice by the demonstrator that it wasn't about slavery and the rulebook mentions it as well. Serious "my T-shirt" energy, except the rulebook saying "it's not about slavery" does not, in fact, answer those questions. Yeah Mombasa might just be the game I enjoy the gameplay most compared to the theme. It's kind of astonishing how awful the setting is the more you look at it. Crypto palace in the sky retheme did not compel me to give that a try.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:16
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silvergoose posted:Yeah Mombasa might just be the game I enjoy the gameplay most compared to the theme. It's kind of astonishing how awful the setting is the more you look at it. Crypto palace in the sky retheme did not compel me to give that a try. Yeah it's great! Bitcoin space mining was more of a sidegrade than upgrade. Jedit posted:Kanban EV-kun? Bus-kun
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Mar 16, 2023 15:15
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Chill la Chill posted:Bus-kun expansions imply the existence of boardgussy
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Mar 16, 2023 16:42
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the great games night double feature of bus-kun followed by that time I got reincarnated as king philip the fair, which I adore even though I’m not normally into caylusekai
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Mar 16, 2023 17:46
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Mighty VP one-thousand Don’t crit again, DM-San! Super dimensional Legacy Sticker Pi XR I don’t want more begging cards so I’ll take sheep every turn Season 2 Mediterranean grain in another world
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Mar 16, 2023 20:38
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MizuZero posted:the great games night double feature of bus-kun followed by that time I got reincarnated as king philip the fair, which I adore even though I’m not normally into caylusekai I'm having trouble parsing how much of this is the title
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Mar 16, 2023 20:46
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I am bad at reviews, but wanted to report some of the games we've played this month as a bit of an outlet. Merchants and Marauders we played this this week because we bought both it and Xia because we hate money but love piracy and wanted to see which one gets to stay. Turns out both! Definitely felt more like you could get away with being a pirate in this one as a playstyle. I don't know why but Xia seems far more punishing to lose your ship. This one was hilariously good fun, and didnt outstay it's welcome. Total time was about 2h with 3 players (one focusing piracy, the other two focusing trade) including a teach so that was good. Weather Machine my second playthrough of this game. First was a learning game at 2p, and this was a 3p with all players who knew the game. Being my third ever Lacerda (CO2, then Kanban) this one was definitely a step up in complexity. I think this is partly due to the more fantastic theme than Kanban or CO2 which are definitely more grounded in "realistic" themes. Lots of fun though, look forward to playing this more and trying to wrap my head around the chaining and foreplanning required. Dorfromantik is a pleasant little co-op hex-layer. The idea is to make some exact-sized chains of terrain features where you can't count larger spaces to fulfil goals so you avoid mega cities or super rivers if you're trying to complete goals. We played 3 games of this back to back at 2players because it was so endearing and short playing. It has a sort of campaign that introduces more and more things as you go with a neat little pathway decision as you go. I think we'll enjoy this as a break from brutal carcassonne games until we finish one campaign, but can't see us wanting to run through it more than once after that. Fields of Arle I think this is my favourite or second favourite Uwe so far (behind Feast for Odin). It's just so immensely satisfying with the right amount of interaction on the worker placement that it never feels too punishing but has a little bit of back and forth that avoids it feeling like multiplayer solitaire. Glass Road has a fun gimmick but... I dunno if I really liked the cardplay of it. We played it at 2players, which seems to be what most people recommend it at. I want to try it at higher just to be sure but can't imagine it sticking around long term. It's a Wonderful World was really good! Touted as a 7 Wonders killer I don't really see the comparison except that it does drafting. The game itself I felt far more engaged and more like I was playing with a table of people instead of just my neighbours. Really keen to try this one some more. Bohnanza is just the best. That's all The Thing: The Board Game so, bit of a story. We had The Thing : Infection at Outpost 31, and we've played Who Goes there, and so it only felt natural to try this when it came up cheap as chips locally for a copy that was all painted and whatnot. It's REALLY good! Outpost 31 felt like a slightly more admin-y game of Werewolf, and Who Goes There was very forgettable. In fact, I've forgotten most of how it worked. This one though was so so so good. We had an early reveal of a thing, but not before they'd had long enough to have possibly infected 3 of the 5 other players so there was the perfect amount of mistrust and finger pointing. What sticks this one out is how there's still a game to be played after the reveal, and even more ways for someone to be infected after the fact too. Doesn't hurt either that the gameplay is interesting enough to carry the betrayal game on it's back, without falling into the trap that we found with Unfathomable, or Dead of Winter where it's so goddamn hard to win that the betrayer sometimes doesn't even need to do anything to cause a loss. We're all already keen to table this again next time we have a big group so we chalk this up to a win.
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Mar 17, 2023 01:57
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Our store got in two copies of Hoplomachus: Victorum which two of my coworkers have been talking up a lot. I'm interested but we've got it at 250 bucks and even with my 35% employee discount that's a little too much to ask for a solo board game. It's apparently 150 if you get it directly from the company which is an option, but they won't be producing it forever and I have a feeling that these are going to be on the shelf for a long time. Maybe, many years down the road, I'll get my hands on it.
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Mar 17, 2023 03:36
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I bought Tabletop Simulator and have no idea what I’m doing. Excited to figure it out and eventually play some Eldritch Horror with my friend who lives on the other side of the world.
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Mar 17, 2023 03:44
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Twelve by Pies posted:Our store got in two copies of Hoplomachus: Victorum which two of my coworkers have been talking up a lot. I'm interested but we've got it at 250 bucks and even with my 35% employee discount that's a little too much to ask for a solo board game. It's apparently 150 if you get it directly from the company which is an option, but they won't be producing it forever and I have a feeling that these are going to be on the shelf for a long time. Maybe, many years down the road, I'll get my hands on it. CTG lets you add on anything in their catalog whenever they do a KS.
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Mar 17, 2023 04:33
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