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panko posted:vp auction is a lazy fix, a good game designer would go the extra mile to issue a decree of adjustment, just like jamey stonemaier Oh drat, was just thinking about getting Tapestry back on the table. Didn't know the balance among regulars was that bad!
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Sep 26, 2023 02:46
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It's more than a little amusing that "The Chosen" really, well... weren't. ;-)
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Sep 26, 2023 03:11
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NRB got a new table for the channel, and it's actually a really great idea for filming people playing games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyCMNxOzkYM
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Sep 26, 2023 18:20
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Dumping Adam is also going smoothly.
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Sep 26, 2023 18:29
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Magnetic North posted:As for the game itself, one guy picked Vagabond, one picked Eyrie and me (Cats) and the other (2nd Vagabond) were random. I had the best of my 3 games with the Cats, and could have won but the Eyrie tried to take a clearing of mine but just made it free for the Vagabond who was between us in player order. I focused on Workshops because I don't know the real strategies, which lead me to being able to craft Tax Collector late and Royal Decree which became 6 points. I was positively swimming in Bird cards, so I used Hawks for Hire or Overwork basically every turn. That did mean I had only 2 recruiters and Sawmills for a while since I jumped to 3 workshops early to create Scouting Party. My opening hand was 3 bird cards so I didn't want to craft those, so I placed my starting crafting piece essentially randomly, so that was slightly suboptimal. Our game of Root ended when the guy that had the Cats had taken control of two opposite corners of the map, then played a card where if you control both opposite corners on your next turn you win. And he won... But we had already played for 2 hours at that point with setup and rule explanation, and nobody had more than 12 points and you needed 30. I was kind of relieved, because I was not ready to play that game for another 2 hours. I also played as Eyrie. I went into Turmoil twice and ended the game with zero points. I felt like I just sort of got screwed twice where I had to play a card in the decree that was impossible to accomplish on that turn. And when you only have one card in hand that you have to play, it was all luck. I feel like Eyrie should always end the turn drawing two cards. But I don't know... maybe I would have gotten to that point if the game didn't end so suddenly?
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Sep 26, 2023 18:42
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Astro7x posted:Our game of Root ended when the guy that had the Cats had taken control of two opposite corners of the map, then played a card where if you control both opposite corners on your next turn you win. And he won... But we had already played for 2 hours at that point with setup and rule explanation, and nobody had more than 12 points and you needed 30. I was kind of relieved, because I was not ready to play that game for another 2 hours. How did it take so long to get that many points? Were people just not fighting or anything? You get a point any time you remove a token or building, were people simply not attacking the cats or what?
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Sep 26, 2023 19:24
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I’ve had Isofarian Guard on my list for a bit now and I can’t remember if that rec came from here or if it’s Kickstarter poo poo that looked fun on Instagram but maybe isn’t when you actually get it to the table Anyway it looks like there’s a second print coming around and it seems right up my partner and I’s alley as far as a beefy 2P co-op adventure thing, confirm or deny?
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Sep 26, 2023 19:45
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Morpheus posted:How did it take so long to get that many points? Were people just not fighting or anything? You get a point any time you remove a token or building, were people simply not attacking the cats or what? 2 hours could only be like 3 rounds with new players and a teach. ~12 points sounds about right for most factions at that point. Most factions have exponential scoring growth so 15 isn't really halfway but more like 3/4th.
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Sep 26, 2023 19:51
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The Food Chain Magnate deluxification campaign is on Gamefound now: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/lucky-duck-games/food-chain-magnate-special-edition?ref=homepage-upcoming_2
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Sep 26, 2023 20:03
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Infinitum posted:NRB got a new table for the channel, and it's actually a really great idea for filming people playing games. It is a really swish table. Thinking quickly, I don't know of any board game media creators with a fully-dedicated filming space that could justify a custom table like that, outside of Watch it Played but they now use a normal table of some description. Seeing only the first few minutes: I've never heard of Articulate, but I didn't realize Poetry for Neanderthals had the bopper from Ugg-Tect which I played once 7 years ago. I had fun whacking but not much fun trying to actually build poo poo because those components were slippery as gently caress.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:27
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That style of table has been pretty popular for the RPG streaming scene for a while, with at least one major table maker having one as a standard option. I'm surprised more board game folks haven't used it but I suspect is has to do with RPGs being more about the people than what's on the table. https://carolinagametables.com/product/streamer-game-table-base/ Speaking of, Carolina Game Tables make the best quality stuff I've seen in person and don't look gaudy and overdesigned like a lot of stuff out there.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:49
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I'll write up my last game of Root. I've groused about it a little in the discord so I'll try to be in more detail here. Public meetup, nothing doing, so I asked to be the fifth in someone's game. He really likes it, has all the expansions, has third party 3d printed tokens, brings a tablecloth to the meetup to protect his game. He and his group play it, say, once a month or so. I've played it three times before so asked for a base faction (the Eerie) and a rules refresher. He told me how conflict resolution works and left it at that. Soon everyone had arrived and the table talk started, about how we should all be careful because the game owner was playing a new faction and so he likes to cheat, or at least misunderstand the rules to his benefit. I don't like tabletalk because I don't have a personality or sense of humour, but I didn't appreciate how bad an omen this was. The other factions were the Vagabond, the Lizard Cult, the Badger Knights, and the Moles. I've played against the lizzies once, back before they got a buff, but I never really got a grip on what the moles or badgers cared about. True to the chat, rules were misunderstood throughout. Even at setup the Badgers lay claim to the middle of the forest and heaped their relics around them - neither of which were strictly legal and had to be retroactively unpicked after another player seized the rulebook and pointed it out. Everyone was having great fun acting out how pained they were by their opponent's cruel actions, and how their turns are actually really difficult choices and they'll never win now. Except for me who would fire off my actions and be done in about three minutes. After two hours a spectator arrived who played a lot on tabletop simulator, and he pointed out some places where we weren't being exactly by the book. The lizards should only make martyrs when they lose troops in defence, for instance, or the Badgers can't have a stack of more than three troops in one place before they start eating each other. Eventually, I decided to join the fun and started killing downtime by reading the rules to see what was supposed to be happening, which is where I found we had been calculating who rules clearings incorrectly. We'd been counting only soldiers, rather than soldiers and buildings. This is an essential rule, it's present in every game of Root, and is on page three of the rulebook. Really makes you think of the many different ways people can enjoy a board game.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:59
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Mr. Squishy posted:I'll write up my last game of Root. I've groused about it a little in the discord so I'll try to be in more detail here. Public meetup, nothing doing, so I asked to be the fifth in someone's game. He really likes it, has all the expansions, has third party 3d printed tokens, brings a tablecloth to the meetup to protect his game. He and his group play it, say, once a month or so. I've played it three times before so asked for a base faction (the Eerie) and a rules refresher. He told me how conflict resolution works and left it at that. Soon everyone had arrived and the table talk started, about how we should all be careful because the game owner was playing a new faction and so he likes to cheat, or at least misunderstand the rules to his benefit. I don't like tabletalk because I don't have a personality or sense of humour, but I didn't appreciate how bad an omen this was. The other factions were the Vagabond, the Lizard Cult, the Badger Knights, and the Moles. I've played against the lizzies once, back before they got a buff, but I never really got a grip on what the moles or badgers cared about. True to the chat, rules were misunderstood throughout. Even at setup the Badgers lay claim to the middle of the forest and heaped their relics around them - neither of which were strictly legal and had to be retroactively unpicked after another player seized the rulebook and pointed it out. Everyone was having great fun acting out how pained they were by their opponent's cruel actions, and how their turns are actually really difficult choices and they'll never win now. Except for me who would fire off my actions and be done in about three minutes. After two hours a spectator arrived who played a lot on tabletop simulator, and he pointed out some places where we weren't being exactly by the book. The lizards should only make martyrs when they lose troops in defence, for instance, or the Badgers can't have a stack of more than three troops in one place before they start eating each other. Eventually, I decided to join the fun and started killing downtime by reading the rules to see what was supposed to be happening, which is where I found we had been calculating who rules clearings incorrectly. We'd been counting only soldiers, rather than soldiers and buildings. This is an essential rule, it's present in every game of Root, and is on page three of the rulebook. Really makes you think of the many different ways people can enjoy a board game. That's a really unfortunate experience. The only people worse than boardgame cheaters are RPG cheats. (I'm not extending the benefit of the doubt to the game owner if people note that game rules constantly bend in his favor.) But it must also be frustrating to find out in the middle of a game that not just one but several key rules are being broken by the group as a whole, whether intentionally or by accident. It's been said before of RPGing, "No gaming is better than bad gaming," and maybe it's worth considering this for that group. (edit: I realize that Root is not an RPG; I'm just citing an RPG maxim here and saying it's applicable to boardgaming) Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 21:17
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My bad Root experience was teaching 3 players at a local con and 2 hours later having one of them decide to throw the game to their boyfriend and feed them points because they were bored and wanted to go eat. That was when I decided I was done teaching that game to strangers or playing it with strangers that haven't played it before at all.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:19
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I think we’ve arrived at the root of the problem.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:41
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Mr. Squishy posted:He and his group play it, say, once a month or so. How can they play that often and get all the rules wrong?  Like there's misinterpreting a rule wrong to your advantage, and then there's just being straight up wrong
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Sep 26, 2023 21:54
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Intentionally misinterpreting rules is worse than getting rules wrong and it’s not close. That’s just cheating.
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Sep 26, 2023 22:15
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I know several people who love certain games but know only like 70% of the rules. I am compelled to read the rulebook of every game I play so this lead to some weird interactions when we play their favorite game and I have to correct rule gaffs. e: To be clear I mean it's their game and they introduce it to me. SettingSun fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 22:33
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SettingSun posted:I know several people who love certain games but know only like 70% of the rules. I am compelled to read the rulebook of every game I play so this lead to some weird interactions when we play their favorite game and I have to correct rule gaffs. My favorite pastime is correcting people so this sounds ideal to me.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:02
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Bottom Liner posted:My bad Root experience was teaching 3 players at a local con and 2 hours later having one of them decide to throw the game to their boyfriend and feed them points because they were bored and wanted to go eat. That was when I decided I was done teaching that game to strangers or playing it with strangers that haven't played it before at all. love to play long game with cheaters
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Sep 26, 2023 23:06
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It blows my mind that that there are grown rear end adults cheating at board games. If I found out someone was cheating I just would have left.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:18
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I like to read the rules after playing a game a couple times, it's a lot easier to spot things you did wrong when you have a full picture of the game in your mind.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:24
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It is literally inconceivable to me to intentionally cheat at a board game. It doesn't matter and even whatever tiny way it does actually matter, such as demonstrating one's own strategic prowess or good fortune, is rendered completely pointless by cheating. This isn't professional sports where steroids or corked lumber or Tom Brady's perfectly inflated balls mean money or fame or something logical. I don't get it. As far as playing with cheaters, if they were young or not much of a gamer, I might cut them some slack exactly once.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:28
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There's a guy in the public group I attend who will butt in during rules explanations to add stuff to what I'm saying, which normally would annoy the hell out of me, but he's the only one who watches tutorials online hours before sitting down to play and his help is invaluable during the game so I don't mind. We managed to get through a full 4p game of Brass with only one fuckup (someone forgot to draw cards once) between the two of us so he's earned my eternal patience
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Sep 26, 2023 23:35
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We had a lot of "oh, I did that wrong so everyone else can do it wrong once too" when I was teaching Tiny Epic Galaxies but I don't think my group would tolerate that with anything heavier. TEG owns.
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Sep 26, 2023 23:38
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Mr. Squishy posted:He and his group play it, say, once a month or so. WOW, yeah that's insane  Also gotta give points to this: panko posted:I think we’ve arrived at the root of the problem.
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Sep 27, 2023 01:37
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I played Hansa Teutonica like 20 times before I realised we'd been playing trade routes wrong the entire time and had been putting the removed cubes back into the player's supply instead of into the "bank". Which lead to a hilarious occasion when I finally realised in the middle of a game and thought that I'd been accidentally cheating for the first few turns (I didn't play any games for a couple of months and was rusty) but no it turned out we'd just all been playing it wrong since the first game. I'm glad that the game has enough emergent gameplay to keep it interesting as this was a pretty major gently caress up!
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Sep 27, 2023 07:34
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There are really only two kinds of house rules:
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Sep 27, 2023 07:44
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Any time we flub a rule and we're like halfway in we have a discussion on if we continue playing the wrong way or correct it. A lot of the time we end up finishing the game with the wrong rule, cause it'd impact other things, and then note it for next time. I get really annoyed about forgetting or loving up smaller house keeping style rules, generally cause I'm the one that makes sure to read the manuals back to front as the host.
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Sep 27, 2023 07:51
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RabidWeasel posted:I played Hansa Teutonica like 20 times before I realised we'd been playing trade routes wrong the entire time and had been putting the removed cubes back into the player's supply instead of into the "bank".  did anyone ever go hard on upgrading income in your 20+ games of playing incorrectly? it’s already not great, but getting an instant refund on completed routes would make it nearly useless
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Sep 27, 2023 07:53
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T-Square posted:I’ve had Isofarian Guard on my list for a bit now and I can’t remember if that rec came from here or if it’s Kickstarter poo poo that looked fun on Instagram but maybe isn’t when you actually get it to the table Nobody responded to this in the shock and horror. I haven't played Isofarian Guard, but I've seen videos and it's a very polished product with solid mechanisms and ways to ensure replayability. It also comes in a box that makes Kallaxes quake with fear and it's a monstrous table hog, so there my interest ended.
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Sep 27, 2023 08:07
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My mother cheats in our family Carcassone games. We play such that if everyone ahead of you in the turn order has picked up a tile, you can grab one early to start thinking about your move. Sometimes, she will causally look at a piece, decide she doesn’t like it, put it back and then try another. I’m just wondering which of this threads strategies for dealing with cheaters I should go with? Do I fire her into the sun or organise a massive game and then call her out in front of everyone or just stop speaking to her? Even when she cheats she rarely wins but this behaviour clearly demands measures beyond karma.
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Sep 27, 2023 09:21
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panko posted:
Yeah, we'd kind of been wondering why you would ever use the income upgrade because it never came up, it makes more sense now.
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Sep 27, 2023 09:40
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million dollar mack posted:My mother cheats in our family Carcassone games. We play such that if everyone ahead of you in the turn order has picked up a tile, you can grab one early to start thinking about your move. In this case, there may be another option. IIRC, Carcassonne has a somewhat common house rule that just has you draw at the end of your turn instead of the start. You keep it secret until it becomes your turn but it can let you plan ahead. Apparently it's called Precognition according to this random tiny wiki I found, but could not find tons of additional info. The other thing you could do is include this with the Strategic Variant where players have a 'hand' of 3 tiles.
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Sep 27, 2023 09:42
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Magnetic North posted:In this case, there may be another option. IIRC, Carcassonne has a somewhat common house rule that just has you draw at the end of your turn instead of the start. You keep it secret until it becomes your turn but it can let you plan ahead. Apparently it's called Precognition according to this random tiny wiki I found, but could not find tons of additional info. The other thing you could do is include this with the Strategic Variant where players have a 'hand' of 3 tiles. Ah that’s what we do (Precognition), hence giving her the chance to sneakily try for a different tile whilst we’re all distracted.
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Sep 27, 2023 11:13
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Bottom Liner posted:My bad Root experience was teaching 3 players at a local con and 2 hours later having one of them decide to throw the game to their boyfriend and feed them points because they were bored and wanted to go eat. That was when I decided I was done teaching that game to strangers or playing it with strangers that haven't played it before at all. How the gently caress are people taking so long. My group is slow, and we taught the gsme to someone who had literally never played a designer board game before and played 2 3P games in about 3 hours (I think it was more like 2.5)
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Sep 27, 2023 12:38
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People hum and haw their turns forever, and often don't plan their turns in downtime. Which is funny in Root, since the decision space isn't that vast.
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Sep 27, 2023 14:14
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million dollar mack posted:Ah that’s what we do (Precognition), hence giving her the chance to sneakily try for a different tile whilst we’re all distracted. Just keep the tile pile far enough from her so she has to be obvious about switching.
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Sep 27, 2023 14:23
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Root is fragile as poo poo and you definitely feel it when one player isn't picking up the slack. It's one of the reasons I don't like it a lot and as someone who is part of the problem I'm confident in explaining that: A) not that good at it and B) if someone ain't that good at it and other people are it turns into this nightmare of more competent people eating your lunch and everyone else has to adjust accordingly or die. Pax Pamir has the same issue where if someone is just constantly buying poo poo from the market and leaving money around one person is going to be getting an advantage from it from the virtue of sitting next to them. I think Root bugs me more because PP should be faster and Root I find inevitably turns into a 2+hr game every drat time. Curious if COIN has the same problems where if one faction isn't playing well it throws everything off. As I write this I wonder if this is an issue with most games outside of the bog-standard zero interaction MWE though that if one player is weaker than the rest either everyone else can feed off them or one lucky soul by virtue of seating placement or random happenstance can take advantage. It happens in Civ, it happens in TI, it can sort of happen in 18xx but usually they just go bust/lose.
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Sep 27, 2023 16:21
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FulsomFrank posted:Root is fragile as poo poo and you definitely feel it when one player isn't picking up the slack. It's one of the reasons I don't like it a lot and as someone who is part of the problem I'm confident in explaining that: Honestly i think the reason for the dominance of MWEs is because they work okay on first teach type games and that's all people play of them whereas more ambitious games are always going to be a bit more fragile and sensitive to the play of different people at the table.
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Sep 27, 2023 16:30
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