What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Oh, Lost Cities is not great in the sense you're talking about Andy. It isn't the goal of an evening in the way that a deep war game or even a heavy euro would be. Playing a game of Hannibal Rome vs. Carthage can be the point of a whole evening.

Lost Cities is like a traditional card game as you suggest. It's a facilitator. A social lubricant that allows time to be spent with other people.

It may not have theme, but it's pretty to look at. It may be over in a heartbeat but we can play until we tire of it and not feel as if we abandoned the game. Trivial in the sense that a particular game of it will not live in my memory, perhaps, but spending direct face to face time with Peggy where we aren't just watching TV is not without value.

So, what I'm getting at here is that I agree, it's not the best game nor my favorite game, but as I said I find it pleasant.

Repo has the right of it. Maybe enjoy things for what they are instead of shitting on stuff you don't like. I used to look down on people for liking certain kinds of games. But hey, if you like playing Munchkin and you have a group that likes to play it with you, knock yourself the fuck out.

Like what you like, leave everything else along. Not worth losing sleep over.

ThirstyMan wrote: So, meet a truly dogmatic ameritrasher who doesn't fit your cute categorisations.

Allow me to cutely recategorize you: the type of grizzled wargamer who, back around 2000, would sneer at us when we'd set up Ra at the table next to their ASL session. Or roll their eyes at us at the WBC circa 2001, visibly apoplectic that all these cute little German games were knocking Rumpus at Sátoraljaújhely: Romanian Perturbations Against the Hapsburgs 1703-1705 out of the Century Group. Right?

Michael Barnes wrote: Don't like Lost Cities, that's cool. Don't like Eurogames, that's cool. But the old fashioned "all Eurogames/all Knizia games/all games with wooden cubes suck" dogma is fucking bullshit that should have disappeared years ago. Especially when it's being blabbered by people that haven't even played enough games outside of the post-FFG AT genre to make such general statements.

As always, Barnes is the Truth.

It has nothing to do with a generation gap but everything to do with the online "community" hobby. It is easy to parrot the popular talking points because you'll likely not get challenged. It's much harder to come up with your own opinions and be forced to defend.

How many people came out of the woodwork with that AT GeekList? How many times did people say "You know, I do like these types of games" once someone else took the lead.

And you know what? You don't see this dogmatic crap outside of the online community, when people are talking and socializing face to face.

black inferno wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: Don't like Lost Cities, that's cool. Don't like Eurogames, that's cool. But the old fashioned "all Eurogames/all Knizia games/all games with wooden cubes suck" dogma is fucking bullshit that should have disappeared years ago. Especially when it's being blabbered by people that haven't even played enough games outside of the post-FFG AT genre to make such general statements.

As always, Barnes is the Truth.

Capital fucking T? You blew it right there, Billy.

black inferno wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: So, meet a truly dogmatic ameritrasher who doesn't fit your cute categorisations.

Allow me to cutely recategorize you: the type of grizzled wargamer who, back around 2000, would sneer at us when we'd set up Ra at the table next to their ASL session. Or roll their eyes at us at the WBC circa 2001, visibly apoplectic that all these cute little German games were knocking Rumpus at Sátoraljaújhely: Romanian Perturbations Against the Hapsburgs 1703-1705 out of the Century Group. Right?

Fuck you, you twat. You don't know me and, until you do, you can fuck right off.

Grizzled is a fairly pathetic personal insult, I have never rolled my eyes at anyone for playing any game but I guess you have.

Is it Friday?

You try to be cute, Friday comes early.

ThirstyMan I think you need to jam your hype & ave a proper cuppa m8

VonTush wrote: It has nothing to do with a generation gap but everything to do with the online "community" hobby. It is easy to parrot the popular talking points because you'll likely not get challenged. It's much harder to come up with your own opinions and be forced to defend.

How many people came out of the woodwork with that AT GeekList? How many times did people say "You know, I do like these types of games" once someone else took the lead.

And you know what? You don't see this dogmatic crap outside of the online community, when people are talking and socializing face to face.

Yeah, but the online community hobby IS the generation gap...gamers who were around before, and gamers who were around after. You've got people that remember how it was back when all that existed, really, was face-to-face talk about board games and maybe some minor discussion on rec.games.board or looking at an issue of Counter, Space Gamer or something.

The online thing is why Eurogames- and BGG- were such a problem in 2003, 2004, 2005. Because the small handful of people that DID have their own opinions completely dominated the discussion and guided it toward a certain worldview of what the "right" games and the "right" way to play them were. Some of the newer folks won't remember, but I certainly remember literally watching the way people talk about games change after those tastemakers like Thornquist, Schloesser and so on would write a review. I remember when I got my first "paid" writing gig at Boulder Games, Jim told me to go read these reviews by a guy whose name I can't even remember...but I did, and what he was writing was garbage. Because it was EXACTLY the same style as Thornquist and Schloesser. I hated that, so I did my own thing. And I got TONS of letters from people who loved that I was doing something DIFFERENT from what that other guy was doing.

So the AT thing really was just kind of re-establishing a sense of balance...but that's the key, what was needed was balance, not "all these Eurogames are shit because they told tell these incredible stories that you remember for the rest of your life".

Where the generation gap happens is when you've got people who were coming in around that time, being introduced to the hobby either through these tastemakers or slightly later on through FFG games and the online community. They get mixed up in the dogma, the silly political stuff that like you say doesn't actually exist IRL.

I think there are many different styles of gamers. Puzzle games, optimisation games, card games that are basically rummy in a different package, non interactive games and their like are not and never were a big thing for me. This means Euros are not on the cards for me or classic abstract games.

I have to say that I never really met anyone (at least in UK) who was playing German family games in the early 2000's but that's probably just the group I used to hang with. It may have been a bigger discussion in the USA than in the UK primarily because GW were taking over the entire space in the UK. The talk in the UK (from my experience) was all GW and D&D with other RPGs but again, this was probably just the group I went around with.

An upshot of this is I really don't care about BGG. I use it to clarify a rule or two but I am not in the least interested in 'the hotness' or logging the number of plays I have on a particular game (I still don't get why anyone would want to do this) or 'rating' a game. I've found the marketplace to be awful compared with doing business here. Why would anyone want to get microbadges? It must be an age thing because the place has zero attraction for me.

I met someone a couple of years ago, here, where I live, that was in the military and was always trying to get me to play Lost Cities, Agricola etc etc. I had to, in order to keep him as a valid opponent but when it was my turn to choose we hit Twilight Struggle (he's a convert), Descent (never played but really enjoyed). It is just that everyone told him that games with dice and randomness are universally crap on BGG. He just hadn't played any. Unfortunately, I did not get converted to any of his dice less games, most of which I found super dry. He did try with Race for the Galaxy but I might as well have been playing solitaire. He was maybe 10-15 years younger than me so I'm guessing he started gaming in the mid to late 90s when online access was just starting up.

In the UK, family gaming (at least when I was growing up) was non existent bar Monopoly and Escape from Colditz at Christmas. It certainly was not a growing hobby. I'm not sure if much has changed in the UK. To me, it is still dominated by GW but others may have a different opinion.

Michael Barnes wrote: Yeah, but the online community hobby IS the generation gap...gamers who were around before, and gamers who were around after. You've got people that remember how it was back when all that existed, really, was face-to-face talk about board games and maybe some minor discussion on rec.games.board or looking at an issue of Counter, Space Gamer or something.

Yeah. I mean, I remember when pretty much the sum total of online board game discourse (rec.games.board notwithstanding) was user reviews at Funagain. As much as I'm grateful that a robust and diverse online community has developed around the hobby, back then there was an element of wilderness and mystery to learning about these strange games from overseas. And even as a loooooong-time lurker, I noted a very obvious temperature shift at BGG during the period Barnes cites. Anyway thank the lawd for this place.

It used to be that Funagain was literally the ONLY place you could get import games other than Settlers and the small handful of titles that Avalon Hill/Mayfair picked up. Then Boulder started having them...and even then, you were looking at paying import prices for German-language copies, and then you had to get a .txt file translation...or paste translations onto the cards.

Kids today have it easy.

The good ol' days.