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JNLister

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Everything posted by JNLister

  1. I'm sure I've posted this here before, but this is an interview I did with Sean Herbert just after he'd sold the channel and it was rebranded:
  2. Why are Reform UK and GB News suddenly so interested in the opinions of a foreigner?
  3. This could be General Politics, but it's a Tory cunt so (shrug.emoji):
  4. Savage book is a weird one in that the stuff about his WWF run is the least interesting (and gets a few big picture things wrong). There's some good stuff on his family and pre-WWF career, plus some interesting bits where they talk to people you wouldn't normally hear from like his robe designer. https://prowrestlingbooks.com/macho-man-the-untamed-unbelievable-life-of-randy-savage-by-john-finkel/
  5. There used to be a response that got posted to this question every single time until it got so overhyped that people realised it was probably wishful thinking and getting excited over over something fresh. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
  6. Played The Wolves which is somewhat thematic but basically a strategic area control game where you each have a pack of wolves. Your actions are fairly simple: move your wolves around, build dens, upgrade dens to lairs, and "persuade" other wolves to join your pack. All fairly simple but with a brain-burning core mechanic. The spaces on the board are each a specific terrain type. You each have a set of five two-sided terrain tiles, plus a unique one per player that's a particular terrain on both sides. To do an action, you need to have one, two or three terrain tiles (depending on the action) matching the space where you want to do the action. You then flip over those tiles, leaving you with a different set of tiles for your next action. It means you have to think quite hard to plan ahead and keep your options open, particularly as you do two actions on your turn. It's an enjoyable if not groundbreaking game, though the rulebook is not great and some of the placement rules are ambiguous and fiddly (though make sense with better wording). We're playing a follow-up game on Board Game Arena to make sure we properly get to grips with what moves are and aren't legal.
  7. 1977: Mick McManus says "getting on a bit, in me late 40s now, going to selflessly put a couple of guys over on TV and make some new stars. Just a couple, mind, or it won't mean as much." 2013: Upon his death it's revealed that he kayfabed his birth date and in 1977 he was in fact 57 years old.
  8. What are the odds George Galloway gets sworn in at the Commons on Monday afternoon and goes into the Celeb Big Brother house Monday night?
  9. Epic thread on hot wrestling crowds:
  10. Played Marine Worlds, the first expansion for Ark Nova. Short version is that it adds a decent bit of variety and asymmetry so there's more of a challenge in figuring out the situation in each game and the best order to do things. It's definitely one for experienced Ark Nova players only but I'd say after your first game with the expansion it wouldn't add any extra playing time. Long version, the new stuff is: * You replace two of your five action cards with new versions (there's about half a dozen variants for each card) that offer slightly better powers in both standard and upgraded variants. For example, my association card in basic form gave me an X-token every time I used it for a lower action than the slot it was in (eg used it for the 3-power 'get a zoo association' when it was in the 4 slot.) When upgraded, I could make donations at a ÂŁ1 discount for every X-token I had. There's a draft to get these cards, so picking ones that work together well with each other, your map special rules (if you're using variable maps) and your bonus cards is a big part of the challenge. * There's a new category of animals, namely sea creatures. They're a bit fiddly as you need to put them in a new special enclosure, an aquarium. The benefits are that you can have multiple animals in an aquarium so they are more efficient for space on your board, and some of them have a reef feature. This means that every time you put a reef animal in your zoo, you get to repeat the placement bonus of all your other reef animals. It's a nice touch, but you really need to go all in on an aquarium-base strategy to make it worthwhile. * Some cards have a wave symbol which means when they come out into the display, one of the existing cards gets removed and everything moves along. It's basically a thematic way to make sure you get through more of the deck in each game and to introduce a little more jeopardy in waiting to take a card in the display. * There's now an extra type of university that you can take instead of one of the normal three (two research icons/one research and two reputation/one reputation and increased hand limit). The new one means you can select one of six tokens which are one research and one animal icon (one of each type, first come first served.) When you take these you also get to hunt through the deck and take the first card of that animal type. How useful this is depends on if and when you are chasing a conservation project or end game bonus that's about collecting a particular animal icon -- I wound up just taking the normal three universities. * There's also some upgraded player pieces - mortar boards for the reputation tracker, tickets for the appeal tracker, something not very obvious for the conservation tracker, and animal pieces in place of the cubes you use to mark conservation project achievements (and thus unveil a bonus on your player board.)
  11. Kid at the show I went to last night asked his dad if it was real and his dad blatantly lied. No, he didn't say "Yes, it's all real." He said "No, it's all fake and I write the scripts."
  12. Had a weekend away with my games group so plenty of first-time plays: That’s So Clover (sister to the maths game That’s So Clover) is a bit of a mix of Just One and Codenames. It’s cooperative and you are randomly assigned four square cards on a two-by two grid. Each square has a word on each edge, meaning each side of your grid has two words. You have to write a one word clue on the board on each side of the grid to connect the two words. Once you’re done, you take off all the cards and add in a fifth card (that you didn’t use). The other players have to recreate the board, meaning they figure out the four cards you had, where they were placed, and which way round each card was. At this point you quickly discover your clues are considerably less obvious and unambiguous than you thought! Deathwish is a very silly card collection game where you are trying to contract diseases, which you do by collecting a disease card with a colour and a varying number of skulls. You also need to collect a “how I contracted it” card and the relevant number of symptoms cards, all of the matching colour. However, you have hand limits for both the contraction and symptoms cards, so you run the risk that somebody else gets the disease you were targeting before you have enough cards. It’s pretty thin, undemanding gameplay, but works because of the very juvenile card contents (poonomic plague, LOLera, Radioactive Poop, etc). Endless Winter: Paleoamaricans is themed a bit like a post-Ice Age variant of Stone Age but is a full-on mix of different game mechanics. You build a Dominion-style deck of cards and your turn is choosing one of five sets of actions, each of which has “do this as many times as you like/can afford” then “do this once” and then “do this if you were the first person to choose this action during this round.” All the actions work and get you towards scoring points very differently, eg some are set collection, some are area control, some are building your deck, some are “get points if you’ve taken particular actions.” I’d play it again as it’s quite neat once you get the hang of the mechanics, but it’s definitely one where your first few turns on the first play leave you with no idea what to do. Don’t Get Got isn’t a board game as such but instead each player gets a series of secret challenges to perform over time such as a weekend gathering. You have six challenges, first to three wins, but if you attempt one and somebody correctly accuses you of trying to complete the challenged, you fail it and can’t complete it. It’s a wide range of stuff from “get somebody to look inside a toilet cistern” to “offer to show somebody a picture of you and a celebrity on your phone but it’s actually a picture of this card” to “make somebody discover one of their own items inside a jelly.” If nothing else, it’s very revealing to see who gets competitive and takes it seriously. Stationfall was basically a disaster. It’s set on a spaceship that’s about to blow up and has a wide range of characters that each have their own goals, some of which involve escaping the ship, while others involve uncovering military secrets, blackmailing people, carrying out a secret research project, while some characters want to protect the ship or cause chaos or damage stuff. The main mechanic is confusing because you are secretly playing as one of the characters and trying to achieve their goals. (You get a reward/power/benefit for revealing your identity but then leave yourself open to everyone else trying to stop you getting the goals.) However, you can control any character on your turn by placing from your limited supply of influence cubes. The idea is that it’s about navigating the chaos as different players do different stuff to the characters and you have to try to figure out what other people will do with them and if that will get you towards your goal. Problem one is that there’s just way too much info you need to know, so I suspect it’s the best part of an hour’s teach in good circumstances. Problem two is that we had a player who would not stop interrupting and asking questions (usually stuff already covered or that the teacher planned to cover later on in a logical order) so it wound up two full hours teaching, by which time no game could overcome the resentment we’d built up. Problem three was that you only have around 12-15 turns, some of which are literally “move a character one space”, so there’s very little feeling of control or any intentional action being achievable. It’s the classic game type where if you play it 10 times with the same group it’s probably great, but that’s never going to happen in a world of thousands of games. Finally Magnate is a twist on the familiar city building game with the usual residential/industry/shops/office options and the various effects such as people wanting to live next to shops but not factories, shops wanting to be near houses and offices, etc. The twist is that you are a property developer and all you care about is making land more valuable by adding buildings and tenants and selling it at a profit. There’s a lovely market mechanism by which the actions people take each round (such as buying, selling, attracting tenants, advertising, etc) affect the speed at which the price of land goes up (as it becomes more scarce), the likelihood of a market crash, which is measured on a tracker, and the increasing scale of the inevitable crash. As in real life, the increasing risk of a crash means its sensible to sell your land, but than in turn makes the crash even more likely. When the crash happens prices drop and everyone has to sell at the new prices, then whoever has the most money wins. It’s a lovely mix of calculated risks and timing the market and even has a tutorial mode that might make it a good gateway game as “a bit like Monopoly but not shit.”
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