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CommonShore posted:Imo balance isn't a factor in games in that genre. If you pick up a game like Talisman or Firefly or whatever hoping for balance, you're picking up the wrong box. It's like saying "I like 18xx but I don't like the math and I wish there was more randomness involved." Plenty of card games have elements of skill in them. Firefly does not. Which is fine, like I said, if you want the experience generator... experience... but it's not if you want a game. I'd go so far as to say that Firefly doesn't really qualify as a game at all, any more than say snakes and ladders does. It's just as arbitrary and random and time-wasting. I honestly don't think I'd ever play it again, because as noted, I'd prefer to spend the time watching the show, if I wanted a Firefly experience, or playing literally anything else.
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Nov 12, 2019 00:27
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Mr. Squishy posted:I've been thinking it would be very funny to train one of those Go or Chess AIs on the dumb bullshit we play instead. Someone did once: http://keldon.net/rftg/ Race for the Galaxy is pretty much custom designed to train neural nets for and have them wind up much, much better than human players, and... well, someone did. There are a LOT of games this is a lot less true for, especially games where only a subset of components are used in each game, since you can't then just chuck the AI the whole component and ruleset and let it play itself forever anywhere near as easily. But even then, I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't make AI players better than human players in most games. But conversely, it's aso difficult to make them abel to track the board state etc in a hardcopy game, and making hardocpy AI good is a whoooole nother level of difficult.
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Nov 23, 2019 00:21
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Control Volume posted:Thinking of other games, does anyone have a challenging but not unfairly difficult coop game for 3 people? I was considering buying Robinson Crusoe ha ha ha ha ha Hanabi!
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Nov 26, 2019 20:22
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SettingSun posted:This probably varies by player but my group found Aeon's End really goddamn hard to win. We enjoyed it, but losing more than winning really started to exhaust us of it. This has been my experience every time I've played it. The balance point is such that even playing perfectly, we would still have lost about 75% of the time.
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Jan 2, 2020 15:48
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Yeah, they've been gradually selling off chunks of it for a long while. It's a great shame.
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Jan 17, 2020 17:25
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Crackbone posted:I wasn't trying to say that FFG would close, just that it no longer resembles the FFG pre-Asmodee. I don't think it will close per se, but I'd be pretty surprised if it doesn't wind up a brand-only subsidiary of some megacorp before the decade's out.
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Jan 17, 2020 23:36
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Rutibex posted:
Monopoly, ripping off a game by an independent creator for profit? Surely not(!)
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Jan 29, 2020 17:04
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CaptainRightful posted:My dirty boardgaming secret: I bought it on Steam when it was on sale for like $5 because I didn't want to rely entirely on this thread's opinion about it. The AI is terrible (I won my second game against all Hard bots) and the UI sucks (slow animations and no undo!), but I still play it every now and then if I want a chill hour or less of messing around with engine building. You can finish in an hour and a half to two hours if everyone actually plays well and doesn't durdle, but playing physically will always add time. E: oof this is on phones for 6.99 I wish I was working right now so I could justify that cost.
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Feb 6, 2020 17:47
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TheRealMcFoy posted:I got Terraforming Mars as a christmas present and enjoyed it, but did look at some of the expansions. Which ones are necessary, which ones are nice, and which ones should I skip? Whatever the one is with the Corps, and whatever the one is with the starting bonuses (Preludes might be both I think?) Venus is also good, I think the others we've tried have gotten a little too complex and given a little too much engine durdling options. Definitely do the drafting variant though.
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Feb 6, 2020 19:30
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Chapel is amazing, it's the single most important card in dominion for a whole host of reasons, and people thinking it's bad or badly priced is always amusing.
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Feb 7, 2020 13:43
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:My only beef with it because I feel like it makes 2/5 hands to good? Maybe the solution is to let people pick if they want 3/4 or 2/5 Only if there's a really good 5, and even then, it's going to be a little variable depending on exactly what that 5 actually is. It's been a while, admittedly, but there are openings where I'd take chapel/silver over chapel and a strong 5-cost terminal, simply because it reduces the chance that you draw Chapel and your 5 together and have the worse choice of what to play. But honestly, in a casual situation I'd generally set opening hands to be the same for everyone anyway.
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Feb 7, 2020 13:52
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Aramoro posted:Chapel and chapel like cards are absolutely critical, why would anyone say they were bad? The people who think it's a bad card (i.e. not something you want to buy) are generally people who are new to deckbuilders and don't understand the value of trashing. Which is why it's a doubly good card, because it's SUCH a good lesson in how trashing is amazing.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:39
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Funzo posted:Making me worry for X-Wing. They've already stopped re-releasing 2.0 versions of previous ships. I'm sure they have some new stuff already in the pipeline, but after that, who knows? They have at least two waves of ships on the way, and another film to fulfil, but i wouldn't be surprised to see the pipeline slowly dry up after that. Especially given that the CIS faction in particular is essentially out of content from anything other than the Clone Wars cartoon, and movie content is what shifts ships to the non-die-hard fans, and the Republic factions has like... 2 ships left - the ETA-2 and the LAAT, which is in the next wave, done as duly boringly as expected. I was sad to get out of x-wing a few months ago, but honestly it's feeling more and more like the right decision.
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Feb 19, 2020 09:53
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Aramoro posted:Played the 2nd Edition Eclipse last night and the QoL improvements are really great. Cards for everyone with what the technologies do, the trays for things to sit in so you can pass someone the research board etc. Some rules changes and re-balancing as well which is good. Game is only 8 rounds, you get 2 money for passing first, you can move through your allies empty territories without it being an attack, you don't have to place an influence disc to claim a discovery tile. You can actually really be eliminated now though unlikely. Have they done anythign to de-dice the combat? (Also, it was always possible to be actually eliminated, if you get superbly unlucky and over-extended playing the pirates who have no money on their home planet. I did it once.)
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Mar 9, 2020 17:34
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Aramoro posted:Not really, the dice have hits on them now though so there's that. It's still roll a lot of dice until someone dies. I mean if you get knocked off the board entirely (which as noted, happened to me, no ships or planets left) you were functionally eliminated given you had no way to gain points or make ships to take planets, so it's kind of irrelevant to say that some actions are possible at that point. The combat was the worst element of Eclipse for me, so it's probably no bad thing to know it's not significantly improved. God the combat just dragged, more games need to understand that dice are not the only way to resolve fight.
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Mar 10, 2020 00:34
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FWIW Boardgamearena is currently overloaded and trying to increase their server count. I've literally never seen this happen before, they apparently have a cap of 9.5k.
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Mar 17, 2020 21:49
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Chill la Chill posted:Is BAJ still good or is it slowing down too? Seems fine. And honestly BGA seems to have caught up again very quickly, I just finished Not Coming Last in a good game of Russian Railroads, a feat which I keep repeating. I think I have yet to actually win one  I do like the game but boy does it feel bad when the UI tricks you into spending a rouble you didn't intend to rather than passing...
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Mar 17, 2020 23:43
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armorer posted:Frosthaven kickstarter went live. And crossed into I think 3 million within a couple of hours. I think this is probably the fastest funded boardgame kickstarter to date?
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Mar 31, 2020 23:36
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Fellis posted:I was just saying the other day how impressed I was that Asmodee had not smacked TTS modules with DMCAs like a sack of bricks, because they suck. Most other companies would probably not care about that sort of piracy since playing with physical components is really superior and only people who can't afford or don't have game groups (and probably not playing games) are resorting to TTS. Of course, the current global pandemic is a different situation entirely, but also drat what a time to decide to gently caress over your customers. Of course the BGG thread is full of people defending the move... like yeah it's their IP, but drat. It's particularly dumb as poo poo during the pandemic, when most companies are realising that whatever they would normally do about their digital arms, their physical arms are loving DEAD right now, because nobody can go into the shops to buy them and nobody can meet the friends they play them with, so being lenient with the online offers is not just sensible but advisable, from a PR perspective and a monetary perspective. See, Magic making Brawl free on Arena and not loving about with keeping the current-set drafting up, moving Friday Night Magic to online, etc. Taking the opportunity, when people cannot buy and often cannot use your physical products, to shut down the unofficial digital products, when you don't even HAVE official digital products for most of them, is staggeringly dense and shortsighted. The amount of bootlicking going on in the BGG thread sure is amusing though.
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Apr 27, 2020 23:17
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I literally said 'oh my loving god' out loud. This is just so On so many levels. SO many levels.
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May 9, 2020 09:08
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PerniciousKnid posted:Is gloomhaven on TTS better than the stand alone Steam digital version? Gloomhaven standalone has some different content (a couple of its own monsters, and a substantially different campaign IIRC) but is very incomplete at present (last I checked they hadn't even coded all of the base classes let alone any of the extended ones). TTS is just a copy of the boardgame.
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May 11, 2020 19:22
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Aramoro posted:Yeah you're going to have a tough time convincing folk in Seville that Columbus wasn't pretty great. And you're gonna have a tough time persuading people in London that Churchill was a racist twunt. Unpopular things are often nonetheless correct, and difficult things are often nonetheless the right things to do.
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Jun 18, 2020 09:43
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Big things you can do to improve representation: 1: HIRE THE PEOPLE YOU'RE TRYING TO REPRESENT. This one should come above all others, because the others will, in the end, flow from it. If you wanna represent queer people? loving hire some. Already have some? Hire some more. Wanna represent people of colour, hire some people of colour, and not just as diversioty consultants. Wanna represent disabled people? First make sure they can actually get into your buildings. Then hire some. 2: De-emphasise normativity in your artwork. Depicting a couple? Make it a non-heterosexual couple. Depicting a cis, heterosexual, physically able, white man? Change at least one of those things to be not that. Have some art featuring trans people, featuring non-binary people, featuring people of colour, featuring disabled people, ideally featuring people who fit more than one of those categories at once. 3: De-emphasise normativity in your mechanics. This isn't that huge these days, given that things like The Game Of Life are not really a thing any more, but don't force heterosexual relationships, don't force binary genders, etc etc. 4: Consider how you're writing your rulebook, and how it references the gender(s) of the players used in the instructional text and examples. (As regarding representation of trans people specifically, representing them as the gender they are, is obviously important, but equally, it's important to represent the fact that people can be trans, and that's OK - representation particularly of non-cis gender identity is important for people who might not otherwise KNOW about it. So if you represent the trans woman exactly the way you would a cis woman without making it clear that she's trans, you're kind of doing a disservice to the people you're trying to reach with your representation - trans people, out or otherwise. If they don't know this character is trans, how do they know they are being represented?) If you're making a game that is based on a historical setting, do some deeper research on the actual balance of things like races and genders in that setting, and don't assume that everyone was cis and heterosexual and white, because they almost certainly weren't. Don't use the stereotypes, take an opportunity to educate people about hy the stereotypes are dumb. This ESPECIALLY applies to anyone making games about Vikings because holy poo poo. And ancient Greece. And... you know I'm not sure there's a historical culture where there hasn't been some major misrepresentation of contemporary cultural attitudes to gender, sexuality, race or some combination of them. Also consider in particular how you're representing the police, and colonisation/war-making, if you're representing them at all.
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Aug 7, 2020 18:55
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armorer posted:This all seems great and I agree. As I said above, I don't really know how to accomplish the visual depiction of gender identity or sexuality that you describe in point 2, outside of cases where you're specifically drawing couples. (I am not an illustrator though, and if there's a way to capture those elements based solely on graphics that works, then great.) If there is prose that accompanies the artwork, whether as character details, general setting fluff, or whatever, then yes absolutely all of these things should be possible. Hire some queer models, hire some queer artists to make art of your queer models. I'd concur that visually depicting queer people is non-trivial without risking being obvious and/or stereotypical, but... if you want to represent people, you run that risk. You reduce it by hiring the people you're trying to represent, who will be best placed to know which stereotypes are harmful, and which signifiers are helpful. The other obvious thing you can potentially do, in modern settings at least, is show the flags. Character in a trans flag t-shirt? Could be trans, could be cis, but either way, you're showing that you support the cause (ideally, make the art by drawing a trans model wearing a trans flag shirt, etc). Visual representation is obviously easier when the people being depicted have obvious visual difference from the normative depictions - but equally, unless you're a part of the group concerned, you might not be aware of the visual difference from the normative that apply. Depicting people who are gender non-conforming is a way to depict queer people in a visually obvious way, in particular - but again, treading the line between being representative and being stereotypuical is a challenge - which is why you need to ask the people you're trying to represent how best to do it. I could go into more specific examples, but I'd probably wind up stepping a little too far out of my lane, since whilst I'm not straight and not binary, I'm not, say, a butch lesbian or a trans woman, so I couldn't say exactly how best to show those people as well as they could, and more than as a white person, I could say how best to depict non-white people in a representative way. Which is why it all comes back tot hat first point: hire the people you want to represent. Everything else flows from that.
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Aug 8, 2020 13:26
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Infinitum posted:Communism is a disease ...wow I was looking forward to PL3, but this sounds poo poo.
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Aug 16, 2020 13:52
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Infinitum posted:Theme or mechanic? Theme. I'm very much not loving here for that theme.
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Aug 16, 2020 16:05
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Pvt. Parts posted:I guess you should never hop in your car and drive to the movies ever again either? (After all, you can crash and die.) After all, you could crash and die, but not know for two weeks that you crashed and died, and every person you interacted with for those two weeks would also have a high chance of crashing and dying if you did. Get your analogy right, friend.
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Aug 29, 2020 16:45
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Infinitum posted:If you take an analogy, and then replace a part of the analogy with an analogy, and then slowly over time all parts of the original analogy have been replaced with more analogies, is it still the same analogy? If you play the boardgames on Tabletop Simulator instead of going and playing them in person because there is a loving plague, are they still the same boardgames?
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Aug 29, 2020 17:21
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Jedit posted:It's not the games, it's meeting people. My group are friends that I haven't seen in six months. Then meet the people separately, without playing board games with them. I miss people too. I've not seen anyone who doesn't live in this house or shop at the same place I do for 6 months either. I miss gaming, and LARPing, and RPGs, and hell I'm honestly starting to miss the companionship in the office. I miss a huge range of communities I was just starting to get to know, too. I want to see my local game cafe's new premises, it looks very shiny. But you know what? I'm. Not. Just. Thinking. About. Me. I'm thinking about every person like my wife, who are going to be trapped inside for the foreseeable future, until there's a vaccine or the thing finally runs its course - IF it runs its course - because if they catch it, they die. And we would, at some point, like to interact with people in person for recreation again, but we can't, and nor can millions of other immune compromised people. I'm thinking about every kid of every person I interact with, and the grandparents of those kids who take care of them when their parents have to work. Board gaming, in particular, is a very bad activity, because you can't do it outside (wind is a problem...), you usually sit facing one another, and you usually sit within a metre of one another. You usually spend several hours within aerosolised droplet distance, touching all the same objects, probably eating and drinking at the same time, from vessels that are all within aerosolised droplet distance, probably without washing your hands very often. About half the times I've had colds or flu since I've started playing board games and RPGs, I can link directly to playing board games and RPGs, they are an amazing transmission vector, moreso than things like cinemas, or theatres, and definitely moreso than having a nice picnic or barbecue outside, in the park, in the sun. So if you wanna meet people, go chill together in the park, 2 metres apart, wearing masks. Don't sit around a small table, breathing on each other and touching things each other have touched. E: and yeah, take advantage of TTS automation to play all those nightmarshly complex games with annoying faffy logistics which work better online than in person. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 29, 2020 17:58
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Gloomhaven storage solutions are a game unto themselves tbh. I think we went through like four or five generations before finally settling on something a week or two before we started playing online anyway...
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Nov 16, 2020 17:48
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How does new eclipse handle simultaneous play and research having an order? Like, the big issue we had with the simultaneous variant from 1e was when someone's turn needs to START with research (i.e. because they can't do the move they're doign without researching a new engine) and they don't have the turn marker that lets you research, the whole game just grinds to a halt...
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Nov 29, 2020 22:20
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