JNLister

Played Dice Forge, which, following on from card-builders being a spinoff of deck builders, is a dice builder.

It's 10 rounds of one turn each. You always roll your two dice regardless of whose go it is, which will give you some combination of victory points, gold and moons/suns. When it's your go, you get to spend moons/suns or gold. The former lets you choose a card (that you can afford), which give you victory points and a new special ability. The twist is that spending gold means you can buy a new die face that replaces one of your existing faces and gives you something better (more points/gold/suns/moons, a multiplier of whatever's on the other dice, or the ability to copy somebody else's die). 
 

It's definitely fun, though you probably wouldn't want to play it too many times in quick succession. It's definitely a tactile experience as playing it online would probably expose the gameplay being quite barebones.

Brandon Thurstan has a good explainer:

Played the original Brass (Lancashire, not Birmingham). Mixed feelings. I get technically why it's a good game and I can see it being great if you have played it a lot and know it well. However, it's very fiddly, not thematically intuitive, and you spend a lot of time trying to do stuff and then being reminded of a rule that means you can't. (For example, you can build a cotton factory but once it's sold it's first load of cotton, it effectively closes. Meanwhile there are four places that will buy cotton, but they will all randomly stop at the same time and presumably nobody in Britain wants cotton any more. Until trains get invented and then they do want cotton again.) Because the theme isn't really used, it's also quite difficult to figure out the best way to earn lots of points.

The real problem (which I also had with Birmingham) is that if nobody knows the game very well, it can be slow and frustrating trying to figure out the rules and exceptions. However, if some people know the game well and others don't, the result is pretty much a foregone conclusion. 

3 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Interesting read in places. Didn't know Vince was actually from North Carolina originally. Must've worked to ditch the southern accent.

The only really worthwhile/new bit of the recent biography of Vince is about his childhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly 90% of his "I was a real badass, always getting into trouble" stories appear to be BS, but the real revelation is that he did backyarding!

You may or may not have seen this:

Well, I just watched the Tim Robinson episode of Netflix show The Characters and he definitely has:

On 7/25/2023 at 9:40 PM, SuperBacon said:

Summerslam 96

Hilarious that WWE seemingly put what looks like four 20" TVs around the ring for people to watch. 

 

Apparently the closed circuit of the first WrestleMania was in Reunion Arena in Dallas (rather than a movie theatre) and rather than install a big screen, they did exactly this, but of course it was for a full show.

Posted not so much for the song, but because around the 33 second mark you'll mysteriously get the urge to watch WrestleMania 17.

As long as Ospreay can find someone with a steady hand, he should be fine.

Apologies if it's already been posted here, but there's a good account here:

Unless Tony Khan's literally made shit up (which seems unlikely given he appears to have been very careful to pick a suitable measurement that has an accurate figure), it sounds like he's simply used the term "paid attendance" and assumed everyone understand it means "number of tickets sold" (the standard use of the term in the sport business) rather than "number of people who attended with a ticket that was paid for" (the standard use of the term by people who read words.)

That probably seems perfectly reasonable to him, but it would have been smart to say exactly what he meant by the term given it was obviously going to be analysed to death. It also means there's no way to actually say which show had the biggest attendance or sold the most tickets without making assumptions about how much to believe the respective promoters.

 

21 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I fucking loved Escape From Antlantis as a kid. I think it was mostly the minis that I was enamoured with, and the fact that I only got to play it at my cousin's house. Has anything changed about the rules, do you know? 

Not sure when the various changes came in as it appears to have been through many editions/revamps. From what I can tell, some of the differences from the original include:

You can have up to 6 players. (Some tiles have different effects depending on play count.)

There's no spinner for monsters. Instead you roll one dice to see what you move (boat/whale/shark/dolphin/sea monster/your choice) and one for how far they move.

One of the movement dice options is dive/drift which means you can move the piece to any empty space.

If you remove a tile with people on it, they go in the water rather than leaping to another space.

Dolphins don't carry people (letting them move further in water). Instead they accompany a specific person and protect them from shark attacks.

The game doesn't end at a fixed point but rather when one of the central tiles is removed/flipped to reveal a volcano. So you only know the end could be at some point in the next six turns.

The people pieces have a number from 1-6 underneath. (You can look at the start but then they remain hidden.) Your score is the total numbers from any players that make it to safety. So you could, for example, make it look like you are concentrating on saving a high-value piece but actually be bluffing and OK if other players target them.

The full Gary Steele story: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2bYw7HFUOzFcODDXMwhPIVp7tFx3jOa/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102997796146870262104&rtpof=true&sd=true

Two more new-to-me classics:

Kingdom Builder is a very accessible tile-layer (well, wooden house layer). The basic gameplay is very simple: on your turn you draw a card with a terrain type and then place three houses on spaces of that type, the only rule being that if you can play a house adjacent to one you've previously placed, you must. A few spaces on the board will give you a special ability that you can use on every subsequent turn, but there's a limit on how many player can claim them. That's pretty much it.

What makes it work is that the board layout, the available special abilities, and the scoring criteria are all variable/randomised for every game. (For example, one game scoring was pieces by water/pieces on the same row of the board/connecting locations while the other was separated groups of pieces/pieces surrounding particular locations/getting pieces on all four quarters of the board.) The particular combo you get completely transforms the best strategy/luck mitigation/way to block other players. It would make a great intro to "hobby gaming" for a newby, particularly if you play the suggested first game setup, then immediately play again with a random setup.

Escape from Atlantis is a modern revamp of an 80s mainstream family game. Simple premise of trying to escape a sinking island and reach safety, either swimming or using boats and avoiding sharks/sea monsters/whales etc. Very simple gameplay, but a lot of fun if you are OK with a lot of luck and playful aggression to other players.

1 hour ago, Browser Brady said:

What was the biggest non WWF or WCW crowd drawn in UK wrestling in the 90’s ?

No idea of the answer, but it's probably not a big one-off, "destination" show like it would be these days. My guess would be one of three things:

1) A Big Daddy or British Bulldog tour date by the Crabtrees that did unexpectedly well/was in a big venue.

2) A very early 90s All Star show in one of their bigger venues when they were still living off the TV exposure and had the likes of Rocco.

3) A very late 90s All Star or tribute show that made the most of the Attitude era boom (though that really took off in 2000 with WWE on Channel 4.)

The TV tapings in Aberdeen for Scottish ITV in 1990 reportedly did 2,000 so that could be it. Other than that, it's probably one of the above three types of show happening to do well in a big venue, rather than it being a promoter going all out to maximise one particular event.

Not a remarkable name as such, but I did just very much enjoy the disconnect of hearing a guy in the street shouting at a toddler in a broad Bristolian accent: "Oi, Alfred, get out of the road, you div!"

When you just make it too easy for your opponents:

Played The Red Cathedral in which you are competing to build parts of a cathedral. It's one of those Euro's that's remarkably simple in principle and quite brain-crunching in practice. You can only do one of three things on your turn (claim a piece of cathedral to build, get some stuff to build cathedrals, build a piece of cathedrals), but there's a bunch of mechanisms that mean your constantly weighing up when to do stuff right away and when to leave it a bit in the hope of getting more points but with the risk that somebody else does something beforehand that stops you. 

I wouldn't play it with somebody who suffers from analysis paralysis (cough-80-minute-game-took-three-hours), but it looks to have a lot of replayability and there doesn't appear to be an obvious path to victory that will always work.

2 hours ago, gmoney said:

I noticed that the Cole/MJF and FTR/Bucks segments had the exact same "ooh, are they going to hit them with a move, ah no actually" tease spot. Shout out the Dynamite agents. 

 

The Dynamite agents were busy warming up to work ROH matches after the taping once they realised CM Punk wasn't sending them home.

28 minutes ago, King Coconut said:

If you're visiting other sites with an X outside of incognito mode, you're asking for whatever you get.

What can I say. some personalised recommendation algorithms work.

If you use Chrome and you visit Twitter a lot, typing T in the address bar will autofill "twitter.com".

If the rebranding has subliminally worked and you type X in the address bar when wanting to get Twitter, it will autofill to whatever site you visit most often that starts with an X.

Autofill does not care whether anyone else can see the screen.

Made up for missing out there by going to The Hundred in Cardiff and seeing Tammy Beaumont break every record going with 118. Just ridiculous stuff where she was clearly picking out exactly where she'd put the ball across the boundary before the bowler even started their run-up. She twatted a couple, but most of the shots you couldn't even hear the bat connect because she was just gently placing them through gaps nobody realised were gaps.

Absolute genius strategy by Gloucestershire:

Step 1) Be shit for the best part of two years while your big rivals win the T20 cup and contend for the County Championship.

Step 2) Have only two squad members signed for the Hundred while your big rivals lose 9 of their First XI.

Step 3) Play your rivals in the One Day Cup:

2nd biggest team score and 3rd highest individual score in a one-day county game. 7th biggest team and 11th biggest individual in list A (ie professional level and international) one-days.

And yeah, of course I didn't bother going.

Played The Taverns of Tiefenthal. The theme is running an inn, but it's pretty much a combo of a deckbuilder and a dice drafting/placement game. Plays very smoothly and simply and doesn't outstay its welcome. There's also a bit of theme in the gameplay as you spend all your energies improving the pub and then old biddies hog a table all night and hardly spend anything.

The only downside is that on your first play, by the time you've got the hang of what's going on and a good strategy, you don't have long left. I'm not quite feeling it's BGG ranking of 230 (which means among the best games ever given how many are ranked), but I can see how it could be improved by the various mix-and-match modules that come with both the base game and as expansions.

Is it wrong that when the news broke of the FBI subpoena and search, I immediately assumed they were just checking to see if Trump had given him some classified documents as a souvenir?