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Mycelia Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)

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When the Game Gets Out of Your Way

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30 Aug 2009 21:00 #197116 by Sagrilarus

"Running will only postpone your traitorous death."  Paul's voice was low, damn near cold-blooded.  All around him the others were arguing and yelling at each other in a fevered pitch as their plans for overthrow fell apart, but Paul was under control and all about business.  Though his comment was not directed at me, I made a mental note to never ever cross this guy in real life.

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07 Feb 2015 21:51 #197117 by Sagrilarus

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08 Feb 2015 09:08 #197129 by Shellhead
This is what I enjoy most about Spartacus. The ability to spend or gamble money throughout the game instead of just at designated intervals really opens up play. All kinds of side-deals and bribery become possible, and the potential for player interaction is great. I realize that some people hate an open game, because they feel that too much interaction makes all heavy-interaction games too similar, giving an advantage to the most persuasive players. But I would rather play with sociable players than quiet ones.

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08 Feb 2015 23:00 - 10 Feb 2015 05:23 #197166 by Cranberries
I am very excited to have Sag writing monthly.

This sentence gave me a warm glow: " The eggheads debate games and argue that anticipating someone's card play or blocking someone's next move constitutes interaction. But that's weak tea."

I belong to a religion that has a bi-annual conference. The speakers are often kind, older men, who often say something like, "I'm so grateful for my wife. In three hundred years of marriage, we have never argued."

When they say this, I think of my own normal, tense, fractious marriage and what to hit that nice old man in the face.

That's how I feel when I'm reading someone here in FAT-land who says something like,

"This Ameritrash classic is a piece of poorly developed crap, but when I got together with my magical group of hilarious and emotionally-intuitive friends, we drank and sang like pirates all night long and played this game so immersively that we all had to get shock therapy afterwards in order to be brought back sobbing to reality"
Last edit: 10 Feb 2015 05:23 by Cranberries. Reason: Changed "sailors" to "pirates"
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09 Feb 2015 07:54 #197176 by SuperflyPete
That may be the best article relating to gaming that I've ever read.

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09 Feb 2015 09:24 #197184 by Sagrilarus
To clarify, I wanted to see if old articles would show up in the Trash Talk forums when they had a comment added to them. This is an article from 2009. It did indeed.

Once in a blue moon I'll tap on one of my old articles and find comments that I haven't read yet, some of them a year old. It appears that those will show up in Trash Talk now, a good thing.

Excuse me while I go tap on Tom Hancock's review of Warriors of God.

S.

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09 Feb 2015 13:32 #197209 by stoic
Rasputin is one creepy looking dude. His eyes are piercing even in crappy black and white photos.

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03 Mar 2020 16:19 #307653 by mads b.
This is still a great article. Reading it again got me thinking about why we don't see a lot of these kinds of games. One of the reasons is already touched upon by Sag; this is a high risk high reward kind of experience. And to be honest I think a lot of us don't want to slog through endless hours of gaming to just maybe get that once in a lifetime experience. So while I agree that we as players and game designers should take risks, as a designer I would always aim to have the highest possible bottom. A game doesn't have to shine every time it''s played, but it needs to be fun, interesting or at the least a good experience almost every single time. For me a good example is Battlestar Galactica. When it all comes together it's a fabulous game. When it doesn't it's pretty good and sometimes too long and not very dramatic. But it's worth it because of those highs and because it always has some moments of drama or tension.

The other reason is maybe more a reason for why I don't play these very open games that much, and that's because I want to play the game with my fellow players and not just play the players. If the game doesn't set a framework we can interact with or (role)play within, then it will sort of feel like I just spend a couple of hours dicussing whether I or one of my friends should win, and I hate that. But that is a real risk with an open game: that people play the meta rather than the game. So how does one walk the line between empowering the players enough for those odd ball situations to happen, but not so much as to render most of the game somewhat insignificant?
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04 Mar 2020 15:25 #307679 by hotseatgames
I've owned Junta for years, and have never even played it once. In fact I think it's the only game in my collection I have never played. Perhaps I'll get to it some day.

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04 Mar 2020 16:24 #307681 by Shellhead
Same here. My Junta has been gathering dust for about a decade without even one play. One big obstacle was that one of my most reliable players had played it once and disliked it, so he always vetoed Junta. But I know and play with more gamers these days, so I should be able to pull a group together to try Junta some time.

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04 Mar 2020 16:32 #307682 by RobertB
Played Junta once, maybe 20 years ago. ISTR it being pretty fun, right up to when a coup broke out, at which point the game jammed on the brakes.

I know (faulty memory of a coup or not) it was definitely a game that needed the right players to make it fun. I guess that's why I play a lot of stuff like Terraforming Mars or Wingspan now - I can have a pretty good (not great) time with 90% of the people I might end up playing.
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04 Mar 2020 17:52 #307684 by Shellhead
What kind of game gets directly in the way of players? Is it just low-interaction eurogames that are effectively multi-player solitaire? Or can it also include games that allow runaway leaders because there aren't enough options to go directly after a leader? What about a game like Root that tightly restricts and defines a player's role in the game? Or games where the geography of the board restricts your interaction to primarily dealing with up to two adjacent players?

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04 Mar 2020 20:10 - 05 Mar 2020 11:07 #307686 by Sagrilarus

Shellhead wrote: What kind of game gets directly in the way of players?


For me it's any game that only provides a rigid set of choices to select from. Worker placement is generally awful for this with a very few exceptions, but there's others. In the years that have passed since I wrote this the center of the hobby has moved to more open-framed games, which has been good news for me.

In general, if there's a consensus at the table on what my best move is, I'll stop thinking and let the other players find it for me. The game's restrictions on my choices are an impediment to my happiness.

S.
Last edit: 05 Mar 2020 11:07 by Sagrilarus.

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