Lurker > SeabassDebeste

-_Saint_Boot_- posted...

It\s far too easy to pretend to be something online these days.

honestly if people pretend to be racist/sexist online, i'm pretty comfortable labeling them as being racist/sexist

Wordle 441 5/6







oxide
sugar
gunky
guppy
gully

figured i had 3 tries starting with #3, but it took me all three

though i suppose long at it now it could also have been gummy

Leonhart4 posted...

You'll always have bad "allies" regardless of whether you like or dislike something

true, though with dislike it seems more specifically problematic in many cases!

that's rough - i kind of want the show to be able to be bad on its own without having campaigns against it and especially racist brigading

15. Dracula's Feast

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159575/draculas-feast

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Hidden roles, social deduction
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 15-30 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 30+ plays over 10+ sessions with 4-8 players, incl with extra roles

Dracula's Feast is a hidden roles game, having each player secretly assigned a classic monster - the titular Dracula, Alucard, Van Helsing, the Boogie Monster, a Werewolf, and more. The goal of the game is, on your turn, to make a successful Accusation - by revealing your own role and then attempting to simultaneously guess each other player's role. Until you're ready to make that accusation, you can either Whisper between players - secretly inquiring if a specific player is a specific role - or Dance, a mutual proposition where you and an opponent look at one another's cards.

If you've been following my lists for a while, you might recognize Dracula's Feast as a mainstay - it's been a longtime favorite of mine, and the only game I've ever backed on Kickstarter, because a friend of a friend of a friend designed it.

I love hidden-roles social deduction games - I came up through B8 mafia! - and Dracula's Feast is, in my eyes, one of the absolute best of the genre. The variable player powers are awesome, and I love how the tenor of a game can change so much depending on what roles are in - games with the Boogie Monster or Werewolf should feature much more dancing; games with heavy reliance on roles like the Trickster and Alucard will feature extra "are you Dracula?" queries. It's not a perfect game - I think Dr. Jekyll is a little too fiddly, Beelzebub isn't particularly fun, the Werewolf feels OP, and Van Helsing is too strong in a game with over six players. I actually quite like the extra roles, but they add a fair bit of complexity, and more annoyingly, they require a second reference sheet, which feels like a sin to me.

But the core mechanics of the game are extremely well thought out. With a tight player count, you very often find yourself juuust about ready to make an accusation before someone else has it figured out. Whispering and dancing are both super-fun; people pass cards face-down with sketchily drawn yes and no to represent the whisper, and it's never not fun to say "Would you join me for this dance?" And of course, the table can ooh and ahh depending on whether the invitee rejects the asker. The game moves ultra-fast, with no turn realistically taking longer than thirty seconds. And of course, an accusation process is fantastic - because all of the role cards have additional accusation cards, there's the fantastic satisfaction in dealing those out to players, collecting their answers, and flipping over all yeses (or even more hilariously, all nos).

As I said, if I would change this game, it would be largely in terms of rebalancing roles a little bit. I don't mind a little bit of OP, but I'd like a slightly more ideal scaling. I actually also have the second edition and a Kickstarter-exclusive expansion Cthulu and Friends, but I have yet to get those to the table. I've massively gotten my money's worth out of this game - the Kickstarter was something like $25 for some truly delightful art and an extremely clever mid-player count game - but I'd still love to get more plays on this game. Someday I'll regularly have 5-6 players again. Someday!

watched the first episode and i mostly cringed through it

that said the visuals are great so i am optimistic about its potential. i like the actor they have for elrond and i enjoy the harfoots.

sleepy princess sounds awesome

definitely a yaoi romance. watched heaven officials blessing so yeah i recognize both the art style and the author

(edit) actually there was a chinese phrase for it but i forget what that was

Wordle 440 4/6






spray
radon
frail
charm

wait what???

these last few shows seem pretty interesting - kind of serene and pleasant without having anything too extra. also not necessarily compelling, but hey

good stuff! i don't have high expectations, but i do think a lot of people will watch it and it'll be a fun show to discuss together. wish HBO hadn't put HOTD right at the same time of year though.

ah yeah, now i see the TLOU review zone topic. along with ltm going ham bashing it for whatever reason.

16. Medium

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242529/medium

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Word game, guessing, separate rounds
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: <1 min per turn
First played: 2020
Experience: 10+ sessions with 3-10+ players

Medium is a party-style game composed of individual mini-turns. During a mini-turn, a player and the player to their left or whatever are partners. Each reveals a word card from their hand at the same time. Then, they must try to think of a related word and, after a countdown, announce it simultaneously. If they succeed, they score points. If they fail, they must use the incorrectly matching words to try to arrive at yet another word, though of course the original words are banned. There is one final attempt in a third round as well if the players again fail to match.

The above describes basically every single detail of Medium's gameplay. The dirty little secret about Medium is that it's not much of a game at all - rather, it's an activity, more akin to a drinking game than a hobby game. If not for the nice production of the box and the art on the back of the cards, it certainly would come off that way.

But yeah, it lacks game-i-ness. The rules are incredibly loose; because of its entirely open-ended nature, like Just One, you basically just play until you feel like it. The game is hardly calibrated any other way to ensure consistent experiences. And there's absolutely nothing stopping players from just saying "dog" every time, even if it doesn't relate to the words on the table, or (less game-breakingly) just defaulting to "thing!" or "person!" when it gets too difficult. The downtime scales poorly when you exceed four players. There's little enforcement of the rules, and the way the scoring works (you're awarded highest points for getting the guess right on the first try) is somewhat contrary to the most fun part of the game, which is when you somehow match on the third try (when you guys have gone from "corn" and "bread" to "dog" and "white" to "dalmatian" and "fur" to somehow matching on "Cruella" or something). Also, picking the same two cards leads to the same answers, so your replayability can be limited by the deck and people's choices.

The upside of Medium is pretty clear though - it's a fun sort of spectacle that matches the vibes of non-gamers. There is one final game above Medium that similarly lacks game-i-ness. But since the pandemic has started, a lot of my IRL gaming has gone down without actual hobby gamers. So we take out activities like Medium, and we just sit around watching players shout at each other as we drink and eat cheese and crackers, and we add clarifying rules or challenges or let other people jump in if they want, and we don't keep score. And you know what? It's a great time!

so i only played europe and africa once each, back before i really liked TTR. at the time, i did like the fact that the game was less punishing with the stations (tunnels? whatever let you use a blocking route), and it's probably a slightly more balanced map.

now, i think i really like that i know USA's cities pretty well (which shortens the amount of time trying to figure out where a route goes) and the fact it has basically no other rules makes it even easier to parse. that said, i'm sure i could also probably handle the mental load of a few more rules pretty happily!

17. Ticket to Ride

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Route-building, card drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 40-60 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 8-15 plays with 2-5 players (including one each of Europe and Africa)

On a shared map - the original being the USA - players draw cards to build rail routes between cities. Each route needs to be filled using a certain number of same-colored train cards. Players gain points for laying track - the longer the track the better payout per train car - and for fulfilling their personal (secret) route tickets. Your turn is either drafting train cards (via a facedown deck or a faceup offer), taking a new route ticket, or laying a single track.

So many of the games on my list are rough on the first go and have managed to work their way up into hall of fame territory. Ticket to Ride is a stone-cold classic, dating back to 2001 and probably the second-most famous hobby game today after Settlers of Catan. It was one of my first hobby games, and I found its runtime long and the gameplay somewhat inoffensive, but not particularly pleasant. It took too long to do anything, and the game didn't need to be as long as it was, and blocking sucked, and I hated waiting for my turn. My games of Europe and Africa in the next year and a half didn't change my opinion much.

I've played a lot more eurogames since then, including several games more of TTR. My opinion has changed big time in that timespan, and I think it 100% has to do with playing the game way faster. There is technically a large decision space in TTR, but an experienced eye/attentive gamer can effectively reduce that decision space to like two or three decent options and wing it. When 80% of the turns take under fifteen seconds, the downtime shrinks to near-nothing, and suddenly the game is incredibly engaging. Instead of feeling passive-aggression, I can joke about what's happening in a relaxing way and laugh if I get blocked or someone else gets blocked. Similarly with Splendor, I feel like simple passive-aggressive euros get a ton better when played quickly and without too much concern about the outcome.

And as a result, I've actually requested TTR recently. The game is legitimately beautiful in a "classic eurogame" way - instead of having beautiful art on individual tableaux - in its own way pretty - you've instead got brightly contrasting trains criss-crossing a very sizable map. And if you draw your turns quickly, you spend less time "heads down" thinking about your hand and more "heads up" sweating out the board. And man, the game really sings much more.

The original TTR has one undeniable weakness, which is that its cards are micro-sized. Fortunately, future editions largely use standard-sized cards and avoid giving hand cramps. TTR is one of the three "classic gateway" games alongside Catan and Carcassonne, and these days, it's the one I'd most rather play.

Accel_R8 posted...

Glad this is still up and about! Excited to see top 10.

thanks - gonna try to crank out some leading up to and through the long weekend!

Maniac64 posted...

Have you tried Forbidden Sky?

It's the "sequel" to Forbidden Island & Desert.

I don't know how it works but I'm curious about it as a fan of Island.

i haven't! friend of mine had it but we haven't had a game night in too long. damn you pandemic. have definitely heard it is inferior to island/desert, but would still like to try it firsthand

lordjers posted...

If only her played it that way that would imply at most the thirstiness is one-way or that she's the needy one, and we've also seen that she has not much of a problem in becoming the queen thus distancing from Rhaenyra. If it had been the Rhaenyra actress playing it that way then it'd make more sense

yeah, with you there. the editing and directing is also obviously contributing to people's impression

odysseus
dad

surprised faraday made it here, honestly...

Wordle 439 2/6




let's go guide / fungi

AriaOfBolo posted...

A Wizard of Earthsea: It's...not grabbing me yet, actually, and I'm a ways in. I feel like I haven't been given a reason or opportunity to really start caring about this character or this world we've spent half the book setting up. Feels a bit like the first book of Discworld (we just go a bunch of places and meet a bunch of people and do a bunch of stuff without really giving any of it space) without the humor. I liked Lathe of Heaven and everybody likes LeGuin though, so I'll stick it out.

i never got into AWOE. also want a huge fan of left hand of darkness, but i did like it more - and its exploration of gender identity might be more up your alley

err what exactly is TLOU part 1?

oh hey, there's one i definitely have heard of! and probably one i'd like. is the manga complete?

ford

hearing on podcasts that alicent's actress is queer and was playing the relationship as if they were more than friends. so yeah the vibes your picking up on were put out there. but they still have to be inferred; they are not yet (and at this point will likely never be) explicit

though for a change i didn't particularly get that vibe, and recently i have been very stunned when showrunners are trying to create romantic subtext

also fuck i forgot to play yesterday and lost my streak ugh

Wordle 438 3/6





had for possible choices for the last word, was lucky i had my eyes on the prize

enjoying this segment of rulership a lot more. it moves and i'm not bogged down by tons of dialogue

survivng gratien while being poisoned feels like plot armor though

man that was a long interlude about ceren. reminds me of how "wtf?" the fujmara backstory was

even its title is unique!

Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysium Quadrant

18. Sidereal Confluence

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/202426/sidereal-confluence

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Real-time, trading, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 7
Game length: 120-180 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 6 players

In Sidereal Confluence, each player controls an asymmetric alien race. Over the course of a fixed number of rounds, players can openly, in real time, trade resources and ships, used to play cards into their tableau and activate powers. Once everyone is finally done transacting, there is a production phase, during which tableaux's cards can generally convert resources into points or more resources.

I'll be honest - the details of Sidereal Confluence, like those of Circadians: First Light, are vague in my memory. This is by far the highest-ranking single-play game on the list. It's also a huge fucking mess of mechanics and fiddliness. When we set it up, even after assembling components, the rules explainer spent perhaps five minutes explaining to each player at the table what their faction did. And we grasped incredibly little of each other's. Ships...? Research...? Ehhh.

But the thing is, my experience with Sidereal Confluence was exactly what was promised: a singular experience, like a fever dream. Time seemed almost abstract since I was never waiting for it to be my turn. I would be occasionally frustrated that I wasn't getting the trades I wanted, but I was never bored. It was just this constant flow.

Well, except for the actual income/upkeep phases. The game turns into a confusing grind during those phases as everyone plays heads-down, does stuff with ships, fiddles around a bit. It's unfortunate, but getting the inputs to drive these engines in your tableau is what motivates the absolute trip of the trading phase, so it's a price worth paying for this great game. Sidereal Confluence is undoubtedly an "event game"; sadly I think there's no reason for me ever to purchase it because of that. But if the opportunity arises again, I'd love to get it on again.

incomplete stories are sad - that does like a cool concept, but a story like that sounds like it really needs a story

AriaOfBolo posted...

I don't think I've seen it mentioned outside of this topic, but to be fair I am not the target demo

i get the impression this show is more low-discussion, high-viewer at the moment

i don't think beyond hardcore fans it's inspiring a ton of passion. fans who were put off by the end of S8 are watching with more caution than hype. i would consider myself a pretty big GOT fan and there have been moments i've liked in HOTD so far, but i've definitely been pretty reticent to get too swept up in it. (i haven't read F&B but the fact that the ending is known is also a limiting factor in the hype; i definitely got more excited when GOT shot past the source material, even though the show got infinitely worse)

19. Isle of Skye

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/176494/isle-skye-chieftain-king

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, auction, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-60 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 6-10 plays with 4-5 players

In Isle of Skye, each player builds their own isle of square tiles containing features like livestock, mountains, fields, roads, boats, and lakes. The game runs a set number of rounds. In a round, each player simultaneously draw three tiles that become that player's "marketplace"; they get to set prices on them. Then, each player in turn can buy up to one tile from an opponent, paying that opponent in cash. If no one buys your tile, you buy it from the bank. Then, tiles are laid, points are scored according to a changing rubric based on the contents of your island, and income is distributed.

For a legitimate medium-weight euro, one of the great strengths of Isle of Skye is its quick playtime. The fixed number of rounds ensures a relatively consistent playtime. And the simultaneous play of almost the entire game (other than purchasing), keeps the downtime quite low.

But the game isn't exactly lean and mean, either. It's a confluence of mechanics with somewhat visually involved tiles and a scoring track that's relatively straightforward but requires some head-space maneuvering. Each round of scoring is based off a different subset of four criteria - for example, boats might score in rounds 1, 3, and 5 this game, while animals score in rounds 2, 4, and 6. Or boats might not score at all during a given game, or they might only score once. In that sense, it's a little point salad-y, but because the randomized scoring conditions are laid out all at the beginning of the game, you can determine what you're interested in at the beginning. You can have a lot of fun just trying to construct a nice little island.

But of course, the layer that covers the tile-selection and -laying is actually the auction. I'm a huge fan of marketplaces where players interact in this economic way. There's such a fine balance between ensuring that you have a trickle of cash by having others buy your tiles, and trying to keep your own tiles to score them. Get both your tiles bought in a round, and you may end up with only one or zero tiles to place for the round - but you go into next round flush with cash. Buy everything and keep your own islands, and you get three tiles for tons of points - but your next round is handicapped, and you actually can't even set high prices for the tiles you draw! Really interesting tug of war in terms of incentives.

In the end, Isle of Skye isn't a dramatic game. It's highly consistent. The player interaction will lead to some fist-shaking and face-palms as people get their most desirable tiles sniped from them or realize they're buying something for their own island at way too high a cost. But other than that, the most exciting thing that will happen is that you manage to enclose your little scroll and get to do a little dance to yourself.

And honestly, I think that's really nice. Not every game has to have soaring emotional highs - Isle of Skye instead manages to have a multi-level puzzle, none of which is murderously difficult, but which together can put your brain through several paces. The ebb and flow of the economy ensures that each player experiences dips and scads of cash throughout. And its compact playtime for its relative intricacy is great.

i liked the episode. rhaenyra is definitely likable. hope they branch out the story a bit though - keeping the scope this tight limits the shows potential imo

otto's sneering insults to daemon were so incredibly enjoyable. he really channeled ser courtnay penrose absolutely rising stannis in his sole scene

20. Blokus

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2453/blokus

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, abstract
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 15-25 minutes
First played: 2017
Experience: 5-10 plays with 4 players

Blokus is a puzzle game where you compete to lay the most Tetris-esque tiles down from your hand onto a shared map. Each player starts with the same set of tiles onto a square grid, with the restrictions that your first tile starts on your own corner of the map, that each subsequent tile must touch an existing tile of yours, and that your pieces must only touch one another at their corners, not on edges. Eventually the space on the map runs out; at that point, the player whose remaining tiles have the least stuff on them wins.

Unlike many of the previous games on this list (but not unlike a few games above it!), Blokus isn't a "designer game" - it was published by Mattel, which is more "mass-market." It also lacks a lot of the parts that make designer games feel "designer-y" - lots of rules, a solo element, any sort of sense of progression. It feels more like a puzzle, or Chess, and while there are a ton of tactics, I'm not sure there's a ton of depth (admittedly not necessarily a modern game trait).

That said - I've never had a bad game of Blokus. Every time, it's a fun little spatial puzzle. Every time, it's tactical, with something of a race to the center before, and you need to figure out how to get "through" your opponents' pieces.

And that's where the puzzle/knife fight really begins. That's actually one of the greatest dynamics of Blokus - while your pieces need to touch your own pieces on the pieces' corners only, you're allowed full adjacency to your opponents' pieces. And since your opponents' pieces also only touch each other's corners, that means that if you can get your pieces' corner to fit into one of your opponent's corners, your subsequent piece can actually go over their two pieces and break into the other side. But you can also effectively block your opponents' pieces - while laying adjacent to your opponent's piece just provides a cozy neighbor, placing a piece so that it's in an opponent's corner square - well that's war.

I don't have a ton else to say about Blokus - I think a lot of it just comes down to beauty in simplicity. It looks great on the table, it feels great to snap a nice plastic piece into the hard grid, and its straightforwardness makes it incredibly quick to play. It's clearly more filler than main event for me, but it fills that role pretty perfectly at the right player count. Now that player count is very restrictive, but if people show up while others are playing Blokus, they can easily spectate for ten minutes to watch the resolution of this clever design.

21. Acquire

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5/acquire

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tile-laying, hand management, economic
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 45-90 minutes
First played: 2016
Experience: 5-8 plays with 4-6 players

In Acquire, each player is a real estate investor, founding, expanding, and investing in different hotel companies in a mostly undeveloped city. On each turn, you must lay a square tile from the six in your hand. The tile gives you the coordinates in the city where it goes. Lay a tile next to a single other tile and you found a hotel, gaining stock in it. You can then buy additional stock in any hotel. Lay a tile so that you join two hotels, and an acquisition happens; the smaller hotel is acquired by the larger, and the largest two shareholders receive additional buyout money. The bigger a hotel is, the more valuable its stock at the end of the game.

Acquire is perhaps the oldest game on this list - it dates all the way back to the 1960s. But it carries many unmistakably "modern" design sensibilities - strong focus on player agency, mitigating luck, and indirect player interaction. The primary focus of interaction in Acquire, beyond the actual acquisitions, lies in which hotels you choose to expand (helping those shareholders) and which companies you choose to buy into (creating competition for ownership of those companies). These forms of economic interaction can be deeply satisfying and appear in many beloved modern games as well.

The process of a hotel getting acquired is also a fun procedure that creates some pomp and circumstance and gets many players involved. Obviously, being one of the top two shareholders gets you a cash payout, so that's always a win. But after that, players can choose to sell their stock (the only source of *getting* liquid money from the game!) or trade the acquired stock at two-for-one for the acquiring stock. Anyone who bought in at this point gets to have some fun.

One of the key points of tension that makes Acquire so delightfully tough - just like Food Chain Magnate, people will usually have a chance to react to your move before you can chain stuff together. Here, I'm referring to the tile-laying/stock-buying order. You can't buy stock and then immediately lay a tile, making that stock more valuable. Instead, your turn goes lay tile, then buy stock. So if your plan is to expand the Continental chain and gain value on your stock, you'll need to buy stock into Continental a turn before you actually expand it - and in so doing, give everyone else a shot at Continental as well. How do you stop yourself from tipping your hand? Hard decisions!

If there is an area in which Acquire shows its age, it's probably in its production. The grid and the artwork are very bland, and it uses paper money for transactions. That said, the stocks themselves are printed onto nice thick stock that feels good to manipulate.

Performing well at Acquire eludes me still. After half a dozen or more plays, I've yet to win a game, and I think I've yet to come in even second place. There certainly is some element of strategy - the companies you want to invest in and grow, of course. While you can pick among six tiles in hand to play, admittedly there is a fair bit of luck; holding the right tiles means that you can angle yourself perfectly for a merger or to found a hotel when it's your turn, while others do not have anywhere near that degree of control. And while you clearly want to be majority/minority holder in as many companies as you can, my last game - in which I think I might have led payouts - I still performed highly mediocre. What exactly is the secret sauce preventing me from doing better? Is it that you really want to be holding the most valuable hotel, even if it means not being able to wheel and deal throughout the game?

The one sad part about Acquire is that you can get blown out. It shouldn't happen that often, but making a big mistake with liquidity early (i.e. buying a bunch of stock that doesn't get acquired) can mean you have very little else to do in the game, especially if you don't have the tiles to ensure those companies get acquired. This was exacerbated in a six-player game, which is probably one over the sweet spot of five. Often there will be one player feeling left behind. But I think the game overall isn't particularly rough-edged and is pretty beginner-friendly. - definitely worth trying, in my eyes.

Wordle 435 4/6






i see i am not the only one to get tripped up on their penultimate guess (gauge before gauze)

a spinoff anime has gotten over 70 episodes? whoa

Leonhart4 posted...

Layton vs. Ace Attorney OST is pretty good

absolutely! what brought this on?

enjoying these writeups but man i haven't heard of many of these

the vampire in london one looks like it has nice art on MAL?

monster reborn
mirror force
jinzo
imperial order
delinquent duo
call of the haunted

22. Splendor

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/148228/splendor

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Card-drafting, resource management, tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-35 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 20-40 plays with 2-4 players

In Splendor, you draft resource gems of five colors and use them to purchase three tiers of cards from a public offer. Your turn is either collecting resources, reserving a card from the public offer so only you can buy it, or spending gems to purchase a card from the offer. A bought card adds one gem's permanent purchasing power. The game ends when someone hits fifteen victory points - printed on the purchased cards, or gotten via achievements of buying those cards.

My first play of Splendor was not fun. It was early on in playing eurogames, and it felt tight, tense, slow, and passive-aggressive. While my opponents took their time making their decisions, I'd stare at my card and just hope no one reserved it, or I'd stare at the gems and hope no one took the ones I needed.

I revisited Splendor a few years after that and found it greatly different. These days, that sort of tension is a lot more pleasurable to me. I more easily accept what is and isn't in my locus of control. I play faster, and I don't get too invested in outcomes. And of course, the people I played with that time during the revisiting played al ot faster too. For a time, Splendor became, like Hanabi, a staple game to bring to game nights where there would be less experienced players - it's pure and simple and lets people experience strategic fundamental eurogame play and get some satisfaction out of it.

And I think some of that satisfaction comes from the very lizard-brain dopamine hit of becoming more powerful. While the optimal way to play Splendor isn't to engine-build, very few games distill the experience of "engine-building" down the way Splendor does. Even a game like Catan has more tiers of involvement; you have a dice-based random method of resource generation there and have to deal with area control and hidden cards. In Splendor, you want gem, you go out and get gem. And then once your card is in place, future cards are easier to buy. Incredibly straightforward.

I would be remiss not to omit Splendor's physical form in its appeal. While its visual art is almost comically bland, it crucially involves extremely satisfying weighted chips to represent the gems. I believe that Asmodee's current printed version uses lighter, cheaper plastic, but the experience of clacking and stacking the original, beefy discs adds a wonderful tactile layer.

I mentioned that building a massive engine wasn't the actual the strategic way to play Splendor. Because the game has a VP limit of fifteen, there is a race element. It turns out that in most high-level play, at two- or four-players especially, doing a high-point card rush tends to be better than trying to spend all of the early- and mid-game building up low-value cards to build an engine. (I say early- and mid-game, because in such a strategy, you'll have under three points for the vast majority of turns before rapidly collecting several points in later turns).

Splendor is a game I've actually played enough at to get "okay," and it holds up to more competitive play reasonably well. While anyone who sees a high-VP-rush strategy work once can grasp its basics, developing just the right amount of engine-building based on the tactical card offer and the noble achievements in the game is the layer that really separates the best from the mediocre (like me).

LordoftheMorons posted...

Managed to beat Safer Sephiroth (the hardest boss the global release is going to get before end of service) in FFRK! Guess I should really get around to doing the same in FFVII...!

how far did you get into ff7?

AriaOfBolo posted...

I thought Hanabi was a fun concept but I don't have a burning desire to play more

this is pretty fair - hanabi doesn't actually set off any fireworks in my heart. but i have at least one friend whose mind was born by it, and i've gotten a ton of use out of the tiny box with my more casual gaming friends on trips.

my partner unfortunately isn't big on hanabi (or many of my old favorites!) so it will probably continue to see its reps decline. but i also got the game for $5 at target, so i'm very happy with the run it's gotten

AriaOfBolo posted...

I thought Hanabi was a fun concept but I don't have a burning desire to play more

this is pretty fair - hanabi doesn't actually set off any fireworks in my heart. but i have at least one friend whose mind was born by it, and i've gotten a ton of use out of the tiny box with my more casual gaming friends on trips.

my partner unfortunately isn't big on hanabi (or many of my old favorites!) so it will probably continue to see its reps decline. but i also got the game for $5 at target, so i'm very happy with the run it's gottenPeace___Frog posted...

I played hanabi for the first time just last week. Group was more math-orientezmd and we had some drinks, so it wasn't super tryhard.
Definitely a great time that I'm excited to play again.

glad to hear about positive experiences!

24. Hanabi

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Clue-giving, deduction, hand management
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 20-35 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 20-40 plays with 2-5 players

In Hanabi, players cooperate to try to build fireworks - a.k.a. lay out sequences of five numbers in five different colors. Each player has a set number of cards in their hand and can play them freely - except that they cannot see their own cards, but only the cards of everyone else. Instead of playing a card, you can give one of a limited pool of hints.

The tension of the limited pool of hints is what drives Hanabi, which evidently is quite popular among science- and math-oriented folk. There should be an ideal algorithm for understanding one another, through which you can achieve great goals. But in the absence of it, the game can be chaotic... and still fun.

Granted, Hanabi does require that you have some stomach for mistakes. There can definite be a sort of passive-aggressive, "god how could you forget!" energy about the game - so a forgiving crowd is a must. Erring in front of a perfectionist can result in a very unfun experience. Ultimately, the game works well if players recognize that it's about trust and play into that - but don't take it personally if their faith in their friends' memories and powers of inference isn't always rewarded.

There are a few design choices that make Hanabi uniquely clever. There is a distinctly limited number of hint tokens, which makes you have to be really judicious with hints and aggressive about playing/discarding. The "every yellow card/5 in your hand" clue-giving restriction adds some delightful ambiguity which needs to be deciphered every game. And the distribution of cards - three of the 1s, two each of the 2s, 3s, and 4s, and only one of the 5s - really means your discards are likelier to be safe but more painful if you do hit that 5. I also love that 5s give you the clue back when you hit them correctly; that really gives a dopamine hit for completing a color!

Again, in some groups, Hanabi definitely won't work - it can be pretty unforgiving if you're a perfectionist (or playing with one). But if you find people who are on your wavelength or seriousness level, it's a great source of mild brainburn, occasional laughs, and hard-earned satisfaction.

well fuck

listening to the CV3 soundtrack and it is def rad

andylt posted...

Just a heads up for this @SeabassDebeste , Village is adding a third person mode later this year.

seems relevant if they ever port it to switch :P

Wordle 431 5/6