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Scratch Monkey posted:How complicated is it? I like to buy anew board game very summer to play on vacation with my kids ages 12-16. Is it a pain to learn and play? Root is pretty darn complicated. Of course, every board gamer has different levels of what they think is complicated, so it will depend on your personal experience and preferences. On most scales, this one is certainly up there, and that is due in large part to one big selling point of the game: its asymmetry. Each faction plays very differently, sharing only a small core set of rules. Of course, that means you as the Rules Person will need to know how to play all the factions to teach others. Here's a quick and dirty rules video that goes over the basics. (Don't worry about the silly sketch at the beginning, the rest is played much more straight.) Root is a very common topic over in the Board Games thread, so you might get some advice over there. Also, I hear the OP is a true visionary  and modest too.
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May 28, 2022 15:08
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Xiahou Dun posted:Is that the rules themselves are super complex, or is it just that asymmetric design means there are X times as many rules where X is the number of factions? It's a little bit of both, but primarily the latter. The rules are moderately complex. There is a difference between a pawn and a warrior, there is a difference between a building and a token. Also, many cards will have two suits shown on them, and those suits might not match, one being the actual suit of the card when using it for something other than its own effect, the other is the requirement to craft the card for its own effect. Also, there is card crafting but there is also a subset of card crafting which is item crafting which you also need to keep distinct for certain other rules. Also, there is a rule called Rule which is fairly intuitive but has a vital exception. They aren't too bad once you get your feet under you, and these rules apply to all or at least most factions equally. The real complexity comes in the individual factions. One is a resource production industrialist faction with straightforward actions, one has expandable actions but the actions are mandatory and failure is punished, one is a sort of a card collection faction of underground resistance, and one is a personal role playing game. Each individual faction is not too bad, but it's keeping them all in mind to know what can be done that is the tough part.
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May 28, 2022 20:08
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Xiahou Dun posted:That sounds not too bad ; I taught the same people Gloomhaven so I’m not too worried. There’s disparity in how into the rules some people are where some like just jumping head first and some want to fiddle with mechanics, so I wind up doing weirdness to make sure everyone is happy and things don’t get horrifically unbalanced. This looks like it might be a good fit. Ah, well, yes. If you'd said, "We've played Gloomhaven" I woulda just said, "yer fine" BGG considers Root to be slightly less complex than Gloomhaven.
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May 28, 2022 23:22
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When the first of the root political talk came about, I thought about responding questioning the idea of if the LotH could be adequately described as Fascist, mostly because that's such a 20th century idea, despite deep roots. I even considered using the Khanates as a better metaphor, but I know incredibly little about them and did not want to parrot outdated Orientalist ideas out of ignorance. I'm just not a political science guy. When I read Marx last, it was to focus on his philosophy like his species being which is much less relevant to this discussion. I'm glad someone who knows more than I do responded. 
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May 29, 2022 09:59
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radmonger posted:Any political leader who delivered that for his people would be lauded as a hero to be emulated, not forgotten as a loser. The Eyrie Dynasties won the popular vote. 
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Jun 10, 2022 10:49
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For those wondering about Vagabond nerfs, the competitive Root scene devised what they call Despot Infamy. Basically, when removing pieces from a faction that they are infamous with, instead of getting an additional point per piece, they get one per battle in which a piece was removed. This is similar to how the Despot Eyrie leader works, hence the name. This guy explains it in this YouTube short. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoQ5HYdiiLA
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Jun 16, 2022 00:11
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NikkolasKing posted:Because when you have sole control over an unstoppable robot army, that rather undermines "No Gods, No Masters." I think the quote was something like, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create him... or, failing that, an army of robot cowboys, gently caress yeah! *pew pew pew*"
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Jun 16, 2022 09:33
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Quoting myself from the Board Games thread, I wonder if this thread would be interested in this sort of topic.Magnetic North posted:I think about this sometimes. This kind of question is inherent in certain politically theme board games. For instance:
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Jul 1, 2022 22:21
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Rappaport posted:Richard Nixon did run for office, and he even won it, twice. Trying to engage with his mind-set might be interesting, but it doesn't look like that game tries to emulate it very hard, maybe I'm judging it too harshly though. Yeah, the one good example that commonly gets brought up at lot in this context is Freedom: The Underground Railroad, which I also haven't played. As you might imagine from the name, it is a game about the efforts of abolitionist to attempting fight the institution of slavery to get slaves from the pre-Civil War US to Canada, which is probably about as serious as most board games ever get. The primary difference here is it is full cooperative. All players are fighting against tyranny; no one has to be the tyrant. That has to be a big part about making this subject matter considerably more palatable. While thinking about ACW games, there is a game that serves as a counter example to my concern that playing a side is an endorsement. It's a less well known example by Amabel Holland called This Guilty Land, which I also haven't played. This game is also about the political struggle over slavery in the Unites States, but it is not a cooperative game against 'the system' like Freedom. However, there can be little mistaking the game's message: one player plays Justice, the other plays Oppression, while a third non-player force called Compromise attempts to maintain the status quo. The game is quite explicitly not endorsing slavery. Of course, having an anti-slavery message might be considered a safe and obvious opinion over a century after the war was won. However, the publisher has a deeper explicit message in this game. They are quoted describing it thusly: Hollandspiele posted:When the game ends, the American Civil War begins: the game's argument is that the Civil War was both inevitable and necessary, and through its mechanisms, the game seeks to illustrate why that is the case while still providing a deep and engaging play experience. This also makes sense considering the source of the title, taken from abolitionist John Brown's final speech before his execution. John Brown posted:I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done. So, I would normally say that with adequate gravity and consideration given, it's unlikely one could accidentally construed to be endorsing something terrible, but then again: Ghost Leviathan posted:fascists are dumb as poo poo There is likely only so far we can go to prevent intentional willful misinterpretation.
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Jul 2, 2022 09:44
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Slantedfloors posted:There's a Czech film from the 70s called Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scaled Myself With Tea which is about a cabal of elderly Nazis using a time machine to go back and help Hitler, but they keep accidentally killing him or psychologically destroying him with knowledge from the future. It's pretty good. Man, I wish I watched that old foreign time travel movie in film class instead of La Jetée (which is good, but this sounds hilarious).
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Jul 3, 2022 09:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:I bought that root game on steam because of this thread. It's super fun! Is there a dedicated thread anywhere or just the general board game thread in traditional games. I wish to have somewhere to complain, which is apparently a phase everyone who plays it goes through There's no Root thread (though that is one of the only non-legacy board games that might be evergreen enough to justify its own thread), and I don't believe there is a Board Game Apps thread, unless it's in Games and I missed it. We're actually talking about Root RIGHT NOW gogogo
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Sep 27, 2022 00:40
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Xiahou Dun posted:Which is an interesting case study in how effective the Lost Cause was in catching on. I barely knew who Grant was besides "a Union general in the American Civil War" before I actually got into history and it's been slow learning because I don't specifically like that period. Basically, only nerds knew much about him until relatively recently. (Cool nerds, no shade.) The concerted effort to rewrite the Civil War history was talked about in the most recent "Checkmate Lincolnites" which is a series of ACW historical video essays in a debate style. As a series, it takes a few episodes to find its groove, but one conceit is that the primary southern defender's comments are often taken directly from his YouTube comments, which is both funny and demonstrates that it's probably not a strawman. Previously, I had (wrongly) always imagined it was more organic and (wrongly) figured it was too late for a central authority like a king to control it but too early for modern media to sculpt the narrative.
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Dec 7, 2022 10:39
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Shrecknet posted:Shadowrun made a dragon president then blew him up in his limo. I always read this as a metaphor for Kennedy, but I wonder if there were different intentions behind it. I came in partway through 3e so lots of the established metaplot big character stuff was in the past for me.
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Dec 14, 2022 12:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Was absolutely meant to be that kind of big assassination inspiring a million conspiracy theories but a big part is more that President Dragon is almost certainly not actually dead and very likely planned the whole thing. His will is a pretty famous bit of plot and lols. The will always bothered me, and I only now realize why. There's stuff like, "To the owner of a Datsun Sunspire that was crushed under a large piece of plascrete on Ballemer Street in Seattle on March 11th, 2041, I leave my 1929 Rolls Royce. Sorry, I had an itch that day" and it's like: you could have made that amends when you were loving alive, rear end in a top hat.
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Dec 14, 2022 14:00
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Josef bugman posted:Shadowrun also has the dubious honour of having their newest system be so bad that everyone just stopped playing it. Wait, really? After surviving 4e and 5e, it managed to get even worse? (IMHO, 4th Anniversary was okay.)
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Dec 15, 2022 12:34
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Gort posted:Errata is done by unpaid volunteers. It feels like every part of every publication has been farmed out to a different contractor. Feels like the complete lack of hacking support in 4e (which was wild since they changed up so much to make decking into the new hacking), but even more egregious.
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Dec 15, 2022 13:13
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PeterWeller posted:Cyberpunk's setting is shallow and flashy, in keeping with Pondsmith's particular style-over-substance take on the genre So, weird tangent but: I hated basically every inch of Snowcrash and I would call that book style-over-substance. In your seemingly informed opinion: is something like Neuromancer still worth reading if I reacted so negatively so something everyone seems to like?
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Dec 15, 2022 23:11
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Yeah, even though I wasn't on-board for some of the silliness, that book has loving problems. Like, the idea of Barbies and Clints is quite an interesting one, and has borne out in real life in some ways with "defaults' becoming a classroom insult, allegedly. But then the mutant guy is super tall in the metaverse and that means he would have to be that big in meatspace? Why? By what mechanism would that possibly operate? Wouldn't it have been more interesting and narratively compelling if maybe Hiro made note that it was a Clint that visited he and Dav5id with the Snowcrash and maybe only afterwards realized it was weird that anyone would go to a place moderately trendy without a custom avatar, not immediately realizing the anonymized danger? That book is not one where stuff just works or happens for narrative convenience; stuff just works or happens for literally any reason. I never played it but I remember hearing about the Deadpool PlayStation game where it changes gaming genres as a send up to certain gaming tropes. It was criticized because, for those tropes that are considered annoying or bad, presenting those gaming tropes as 'Isn't it silly that Deadpool is doing this?" meant that those negative tropes were faithfully recreated in this game, which was not appreciated by players. That's Snow Crash.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:41
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Needing to hack your cybereyes because even though you'd gladly pay the 15¥ a day for LensCraftersPlus you just can't because the servers are permanently offline is pretty loving metal. This all reminds me that I should buy Hard Wired Island, but I'm never ever ever going to play it or basically any RPG again, so I don't know why I'd bother.
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Dec 19, 2022 13:02
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Shrecknet posted:It's one of the reasons I love FIASCO! and other GM-less games that don't have combat rules at all and are more explicit about being shared-narrative storytelling over adversarial objective-overcoming. I'd love to try FIASCO some day. I feel that farces are something that sings to each of our own inherent nature as fuckups.
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Dec 21, 2022 15:59
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There definitely needs to be a name for the fallacy of 'more complex=better'. The Board Gamer's Fallacy.
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Dec 21, 2022 17:00
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Raenir Salazar posted:Anyone play Hegemony? It's very interesting as it's a game where your four different interest groups with mostly opposed goals trying to bend the countries resources to your benefit (capitalists, middle class, working class, and the state). I have not played Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory (or any of the games I will mention below, so if anyone has, please correct me) but I heard some chatter about it this year when it got to backers. I think it contains a booklet that explains some of the political ideas that underpin the game, but it's not part of the rules on BGG per se. Based on that, I have heard some people criticize the game's idea that the Middle Class and the Working Class are shown as different, and while I think it's true this could be viewed as normalizing class disunity, I think there's something that's being missed here. By containing actual named concepts and policies, such as whether the game accepts that the Middle Class is 'real' or not is at least a treatise being made by the game, and this puts it in marked contrast to some other 'political' board games. One example, Mr. President: The American Presidency, 2001-2020, also from this year, contains policies with flat generic yet thematic names. It contains "Healthcare Reform" but not "Universal Healthcare" or "Privatized Healthcare" or any concept that contains any actual tangible political reality. It's trying to have a political flavor without any actual political statements. There's a somewhat similar thing in 1960: The Making of the President where there are 3 main issues: Civil Rights, Defense and The Economy. You don't win on these issues by any particular stances; rather, you are simply showing strength on the issues. It's a bit more appropriate here though since neither player is a policymaker yet, so the game is about public opinion. Mr President doesn't have the same excuse. Now, I don't think that failing to engage with the ideas is necessarily a bad thing, especially if a game requires someone to be 'the bad guy' like Watergate. Through its gameplay it isn't making much of a statement on whether Nixon was a bad guy or not, except insofar that actions are thematically about cover-ups etc. I guess what I mean is there are 3 forms of "politics" in board games.
The third category is going to be smaller because plenty of people will just want to remain coy about their ideas to try and avoid offending others, not put themselves on a pedastal, or just to sell as many copies as possible. But I am interested in the ideas that a game can have a political idea. I mean, we've all heard about The Landlord's Game by now.
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Oct 6, 2023 17:09
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JMBosch posted:When Hegemony was first announced, it piqued my interest. But the first thing I saw when looking into its approach to the subject matter was someone essentially asking on BGG "Where's communism?" and one of the designers answered with basically, "It's too effective so we left it out to be fair to the capitalists and bourgeoisie players. Reform is revolution." So I kind of wrote off its politics. This comment makes me think it might be cool to have a game where the modules controlled by the classes can change between players. So, the ownership class starts with the Factories board among other things, but the state could nationalize them and take control of them, or the working class could seize them, etc. Moving around like a company charter in an 18XX game.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:54
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That sounds rad. Hedgemony sounds like the type of political game I would be interested in, though 1960 has my imagination at the moment since it's an abstracted version of something I've always been interested in (the Electoral College).
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Oct 9, 2023 10:03
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