What I don’t like about your categories is that you’re focusing on the buying and owning games part.
My process used to be:
Now that I have kids I don’t always have the luxury of reading the rules the same day we play the game, so what I usually do is I read the rules a few days in advance, which means I won’t remember as much when the time comes to play, so then I end up complementing that with a rules explanation video.
If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.
But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.
TtR first journey is great because it’s easy to transition to the “full” game after they outgrow it. Catan junior is similar in this. That’s also my main complaint about Stone Age kids, it’s not really the same game.
The problem with this is chatgpt is shit at facts. You ask it a question and it might just give you bullshit, and you tell it to provide a citation and it will happily invent one. There’s no easy way to verify whatever it says to you, other than going to the source, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.
A lot of times. It doesn’t really help to find a problem, but rather when the problem was introduced. It’s a really great tool.
Because nobody has windows user as a core part of their identity.
Through the Ages is probably the best example of a boardgame that works better in digital form. Asynchronous in particular.
This looks incredibly shady.
The problem with a single spirit is that the different spirits have different strengths and with just one you’ll be missing something. Like, for example, there’s the storm thing that is super powerful and destroys buildings, but it doesn’t do much against single explorers, and if you don’t have a way to contain those somehow even with your superior building destroying powers you won’t be able to keep up.
That is, it’s actually harder with one than with two.
Seconded Flashpoint. I’ve had success with that game with people from 8 to like 80.
Saturday was our twice a month large meetup. Went with the kids for the first couple of hours, and we played:
Then the kids went home with mom and I got to play a couple of heavier titles:
I don’t think this is too bad, but the question here is why they set it up this way. Are there any restrictions like no SSH? Also, this would make it hard to clone from an off site location (for remote work).
So ultimately I sold it (to another person in that same group ;-) )
That sounds like an ideal outcome, since you still get to play it.
It’s my favorite series of his. I read the first couple of Laundryverse books, and while they’re fun, I’m not a fan of the lovecraftian horror thing. But Merchant Princes hooked me right from the start. Tons of politicking, and by the end it gets messy, like really messy. It’s basically The Godfather meets Game of Thrones meets Sliders. And then the followup series (Empire Games) is a Cold War spy thriller with portals. You can just start with Empire games, it’s written to be a separate series, but it does have massive spoilers for the original series.
If I want to play it with a different group, one the people who have it are not part of, then I consider buying it.
I’ve also bought some games that I just had to have because they were just that awesome. And then never played, because other people already have a copy, and sometimes they have more content or whatever. Terraforming Mars, for example, I ended up only playing it a handful of times solo, and then the app came out, and I haven’t opened my copy since. I try to avoid doing this now, because it really doesn’t work out that well.
Although I am considering buying Brass: Birmingham so I can decide when I want it to be available in a meetup. Also Spirit Island, but that’s because I think I can get my kids to play with me.
The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry
A note on this: the series is written under the Jack Campbell pseudonym. Took me a while to find. The first book is Dauntless
I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he’s basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the “ok I know this is not real but what if it were” variety.
The Laundry Files series is “what if Lovecraft was right and there’s magic math that can summon the old gods”, but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can’t get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can’t let that magic math run wildly.
The Merchant Princes series is “what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension”. So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There’s also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).
Always a good opportunity to learn something new.
I feel like part of the problem is that the people participating in and boosting the consumerist aspect are the ones with the shiniest toys to show. Like, sure, 1830 is an awesome game (even if I still can’t get a regular group to play it), but you won’t get more upvotes for showing off your 100th game of 1830 than your first game of <insert the newest game>.
An look, I like having new games. I enjoy the feel of new puzzles to try. But in the end, it’s as you say, the best part of the games is getting together with friends and doing soemthing fun for a few hours. Having a collection as a backdrop in my video calls is not the point of buying games.