JNLister

Had another game of Ark Nova last night and it confirmed my theory that real play time is one hour per player, plus one hour if anyone hasn't played before. It's amazing how well it flows because the turns are so short and so you're pretty much always taking your turn or figuring out the next one. It really helps that it has the perfect balance where once you're up and running you can start planning out a few moves ahead but not more than a normal person can hold in their head at one time.

I played Argent: The Consortium, which is probably the heaviest game I've ever won. It's an aggressive worker placement (you can push people out of slots through wounding or magic, though some workers are exempt to one or the other.) The theme is that you're teachers at a magic school trying to get elected as the new dean and 10 randomly selected board members will vote, each using their own criteria.

In gameplay terms you have 10 win conditions (only 2 of which you know up front) and whoever is leading on the most wins the overall game. You can secretly find out what the other conditions are, but each one you look at is at the expense of performing other actions. One player tried the strategy of finding out all of them, but just wound up with massive analysis paralysis. I think I one by only revealing and targeting a couple, but prioritizing the "influence points" tracker that's used for all tiebreaks.

Main criticisms are that it's a bit of a long game and there's some design issues with the colours that make it hard to keep track of what's going on (each player has a colour, but each type of worker also has a color, and there's some overlap, plus some colours are hard to distinguish.)

6 minutes ago, chokeout said:

I know Orig Williams did because he got a cease and desist after WWE bought them out but was still using them on the camp shows in Prestatyn (they were also about twice the size of the ring he was using) 

The first WCW tour in 1991 used Orig's ring and they just flew over the WCW apron, so it's possible they just let him keep it after the tour.

Schadenfreude at its finest. Because Boris Johnson has got the government to pay for his lawyers for the COVID inquiry, technically their client is the Cabinet Office rather than him. As a result his lawyers had to send them all the case material, which includes his diaries.

The Cabinet Office had a look through and found an entry during lockdown that reads [paraphrased slightly] "had a massive dinner party with all my mates at Chequers." The officials reading this realised that might be a lockdown violation and have now reported it to the police who have opened an investigation.

On 5/20/2023 at 8:15 PM, Onyx2 said:

Just One is terrific @JNLister. I should be on commission, the amount of copies I've convinced people to buy after a session. Such a simple game, but works every time. To travel it, just take the cards and tell people to use their phones.

On the party game vibe I'll chuck in Concept. A bit like Just One in that you're trying wordlessly to get people to guess your word, but using abstract icons representing 'money', 'religion', 'the colour red' and dozens of other concepts (hey that's the name of the show!). It's hard to describe in words but we played for over two hours straight. 

My favourite example from the instructions. The question mark piece is for the main "concept" (ie, the thing you're trying to guess) and the explanation marks are related concepts. The cubes add more context for the piece of the same colour.

On 5/5/2023 at 9:29 AM, JNLister said:

My council (South Gloucestershire) went from Conservative to No Overall Control after they lost 10 of their seats, which is a big surprise given most analysis was that it was 50-50 whether they'd lose the 3 seats needed to lose control.

And my ward went from three Conservative to two Conservative and one Labour. Not exactly a revolution, but I think it's the first time I've ever been somewhere where Tories have lost something.

Labour and the Lib Dems finally agreed a coalition here. We actually voted the Tories out of power. Probably means council tax going up and the public loos shutting, but it's still a good feeling.

Played Just One for the first time last night. It's a very fun cooperative game (though actually scoring/winning is pretty much arbitrary and tacked on, it's more of a fun activity). One player has to guess a word based on clues from every other player. The catch is the clues can only be one word, and if two or more people put the same clue then that clue is removed. It's very tactical trying to figure out the right clue that's obvious enough to be useful but not obvious enough that someone else puts it. However, you might want to put it because you assume everyone else thinks it's obvious. For example, we had the answer Australia and two people both put Perth because they figured somebody else would put a more obvious city.

I think I've forgotten to mention Scout which is now a common evening-ending filler in our group. It's a simple card game (with a theme that you can completely ignore) where you're trying to put down your cards and collect points by beating the previous players hand (or pick up a card if you can't), either with a set of matching numbers or a run of consecutive numbers. The catch is that you can only put down a group of cards that are next to each other in your hand and you can't rearrange your hand (though if you pick up a card, you can put it in anywhere). It gets surprisingly tactical between getting down cards as often as possible and tactically taking cards so that you can build up groups. It's a little fiddly to get your head round which hands beat which, but once you've got it it becomes a lovely balance of luck and skill.

Played Coinbra, which is ranked #200 on BoardGameGeek (ie among the very best) and I don't know why. When we were setting up, I joked it looked like somebody told an AI tool to create a Euro-game, but it turned out to play that way too. Whatever theme its meant to have is impossible to detect while playing, so it's just a bunch of mechanisms. You roll dice and pick one to decide the order in which you pick a card (and the price) which lets you push a cube up a track and at no point do you really understand why.

For example, there are two main resources (money and troops) but they work in exactly the same way and there's no thematic reason why you need money to acquire some cards and troops to acquire others. It just leaves it as a massive maths/probability puzzle where at some points you have to look at 12 dice and 12 cards, each of which has a bunch of unintuitive icons and figure out which combo is going to work out best in the long run, so turns take ages and there's no logical story behind any strategy.

I didn't actually hate the experience of playing but I wouldn't be keen to do it again and I'd keep it well away from anyone who was new to modern board gaming because they'd never come back.

Played Genotype last night. It's the rather odd premise that you're an assistant to Gregor Mendel, the man who fucked about with pea plants to figure out how genetics worked. It's a combination of worker placement and dice rolling. The dice determine what genetic traits you can create and you're trying to get specific combinations of traits to get a particular plant. One of the actions is fixing the genes so that there's a better chance (or even a certainty) of getting the particular traits you need. 

While it looks very complex and takes a while to learn, it flows very nicely once you're into it. There's not much downtime and a nice level of interaction where you can fuck people over but not in an aggressive manner. It's definitely one I'd be happy to play again.

My council (South Gloucestershire) went from Conservative to No Overall Control after they lost 10 of their seats, which is a big surprise given most analysis was that it was 50-50 whether they'd lose the 3 seats needed to lose control.

And my ward went from three Conservative to two Conservative and one Labour. Not exactly a revolution, but I think it's the first time I've ever been somewhere where Tories have lost something.

1 hour ago, El Mistique said:

Is All Out still going ahead or will this replace it? I’ve had a quick look around and it looks like it’s still planned in for the week later which is ambitious. 

Seems 99% certain it's still going ahead but AEW aren't going to confirm that until the Wembley tickets are on sale.

One of the main reasons for WWF running Wembley was the spring tour in 92 where they weren't just selling out at a time house show business was collapsing in the US, but they sold so much merch they had to send the company jet back to Connecticut to pick up another load.

I had a passing thought. It turns out a few other people agreed...

 

Just saw somebody make a "obviously joking but just imagine if" suggestion that it winds up with Blood and Guts with Blackpool Combat and Punk vs the Golden Elite of Omega/Bucks/Page/Ibushi.

I'd be happy with:

• Omega-Ospreay 2/3 falls.
• Sabre-Danielsen 30 minute Ultimate Submission.
• 120 man battle royale.

1 hour ago, Supremo said:

I take it back. He can’t change. He won’t change.

Plus, what type of weirdo has never seen a Rocky film? 

 

22 hours ago, Gay as FOOK said:

The Bloodline Complete Story is on the free version of the network if anyone's looking for a decent playlist to get in the mood for WrestleMania. 

Edit: Seems to have gone from the listings

It's still there on the free version. There's a weird thing by which there's stuff that is listed on the free version (which is what appears when you aren't logged in) that isn't visible when you're logged in. However, they're pretty much all stuff that's on the YouTube.

I'm in a bit of a "watch Hacker T Dog video/algorithm suggests Hacker T Dog video/watch Hacker T Dog video" cycle and this is one for fans of the genre who also enjoy this thread:
 

Obviously not claiming complete credit but:
 

Just discovered there's a performer with the stage name Keylani Lei. That's either a weird coincidence or a spoonerism from Leilani Kai.

Very much not 22/23 season, but a nice piece from the 80s sports blog on the debate surrounding the introduction of regular live TV games: http://that1980ssportsblog.blogspot.com/2023/03/198384-tottenham-v-nottingham-forest.html

3 hours ago, Onyx2 said:

Indeed. The excellent Quins published a great guide exactly how to explain games https://youtu.be/P5fjDaFuft8

I did an article back in the day: https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2016/10/05/board-games-week-teach-games/

The struggle is real:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUrRsx-F_bs

Not posting this to say it's real or that it's fake, but rather that I couldn't even begin to guess if it's real, which is worrying in itself.

https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1632401548641812480?t=BpNOoFnE486XQ5lOUiPXVQ&s=19

Played Dune Imperium which is completely different to the original Dune board game (which is all about hidden powers/win conditions, area control and forming/breaking alliances). Imperium is apparently less explicitly thematic, but is mechnically very sound and at a level I enjoyed (took two hours, took a lot of rule teaching but was straightforward and intuitive once we were playing).

It's key selling point is that it's a combination of a deckbuilder (eg Dominion) and a worker placement (eg Stone Age, Viticulture). Both that and the balance of the various action spaces means you don't get the problem of some worker placement games where there's a clear winning strategy and it becomes very predictable what people will do (eg first player always goes for agriculture in Stone Age). Instead the randomness of what five cards you get in your hand each turn means it's very tactical and you have to find a way to make the most of each round and pick your battles well (each round ends in a massive fight where you lose all the troops you put in, win or lose). While you may get a duff hand, over the course of the game the luck element evens out.

It's probably not for hardcore Euro-game enthusiasts as there's little scope for developing a long-term strategy, but it's great if you like the principle of Euro games but not the whole "you have to build up an engine/strategy, you wind up doing the same thing every turn, and you can tell very early who's going to win" elements.