When in doubt, throw it out! You can always return to it later.

I don’t usually do but when ever I do it it ends up making the experience so much better so maybe I should do it more.

I’ve been playing in a playtest campaign! Hope you like it 💁🏻‍♀️

BTW, the new English name is “Dragonbane” (and the old English name was “Dragonfire”).

The question a few weeks ago was fave designer and then I went with Sackson. But Sackson does have his fair share of duds, and now that this time it’s more of a question of highest floor, I have to go with Richard Garfield, probably better known as Pheldagriff. Each of his games bring something new and interesting to the table.

@Kempeth

Finally got an old fave back to the table—UNO! I haven’t gotten anyone to play that with me since the nineties. So fun ♥

Weirdly enough, once we started playing the “keeping score” variant, a lot of the tactics went away and play became more automatic. Less “probability calculation for a 2% edge” and more “high value cards bad, play them fast”. But then as I realized we were all doing that, some tactics re-entered the fray since I could then strategically play a lower card early etc.

Also we discovered the “when you have two of the +4 cards, select a color you don’t even have for the first time so you can play the second one soon after” tactic which is pretty punishing and unfun towards whomever’s next to you.

Ah, yeah, I can see how that’s not readily apparent right away.

There is tension & decision-space among the players. After all, if no-one takes any treasures, you could go all the way to the bottom and grab what you wanted. But as soon as people start looting, they start gasping and using up the tragically-common air supply. Some might deliberately try to drown each other by tactically picking up and dropping stuff. So it’s a reverse chicken race, it’s a game theory tense wonderful nightmare. All wrapped up in a super-classical roll-and-move shell that’s easy to play and teach.

(I was gonna recommend Deep Sea Adventures in this thread! But I see several people are already recommending it, and that’s awesome!)

no more Brave

So there’s a silver lining. But the WEI project is still overall a complete disaster that needs to rot on the vine. It’ll wreck not just browser diversity but overall hackability, adblocks, mashups, and above all: accessibility.

Go, a.k.a. Baduk. I’ve played it thousands of times and there’s no expansions and cards yet every single game is shockingly different in a “what the heck just happened” way. I love it. Emergent life on a board.

If Dorfromantik is a game—and I’m 💯 not saying it’s not a game, it looks fun and cozy actually—then doing a jigsaw puzzle with a friend is also a game 🤷🏻‍♀️

But that’s not too shabby since jigsaw puzzles are fun and an endless box of one seems like a fun time. I got Mists over Carcassonne a while back for the same reason, although that game is stressful and agonozing while Dorfromantik is chill.

One thing I’l give Dorfromantik a lot of credit for is how they laid out the houses on the so that “all directions are up” so it looks nice and ambiguous and not too jarring. An Escheresque feat. We’ve been playing Zamek lately and it really suffers from having the tiles drawn and shaded such that one direction is clearly up.

I’ve been playing Zamek (a.k.a. “The Castle”) with @smorkin. The plan is to get to at least 1000 plays of that game. It’s a 1x1000 challenge. Fun fun fun ♥

Lightweight, most played, and favorite: go.
Medium weight: this isn’t “of all time” but lately I’ve been into Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation.
Heavy at the moment: We’ve been playing Magic. To an unhealthy degree. I made mythic on the video game version for the first time yesterday and in the evening met up with @Halo to play some battle box–style Magic with AFR cards.

“No Thanks!” is super easy and fun.

But I’ve also found with a lot of oldies that they actually like playing the same old games. They often have more depth and complexity than you might think at first glance, and it’s difficult to learn a new game of similar complexity later in life and might be dull to swap out for a simpler game. Like, if some whippersnappers were to go “granny, put those delvers and cantrips away and come play some fun Cards Against Humanity with us” I’d probably immolate myself on the spot 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yeah, kinda! I’ve been eying it for a while.

I probably won’t get to play it—I’ve got people in my gaming group who really dislike the COIN series, and I’ve been trying to learn Root with the app and even that has been slow going.

But it’s so great that they’re doing a fictional setting, especially one where the lore is so thought-through and comes across with so much detail and life.

That meme sub could get so mean sometimes 💔

I was in a situation in the early 00s when money was even tighter than it is now. And I had a good friend that collected games and would get a lot of games. And I would buy fewer games and more rarely, since I was so broke at the time. And I’d bring them and we’d play them and he’d like them and he’d immediately buy the same games. And I’d think “if he was gonna buy a copy anyway, why did I buy one? I could’ve saved that money.”

💸

To answer your question: have as few games as possible and have a situation or group in mind for every game. “Here’s one I can play with my boyfriend, here’s one for work lunch, here’s one that I think mom likes” and maybe that can be it. If you have friends with games they are probably aching to get those games to the table and if they’re happy to play them with you, that’s great.

I play all kinds of games but abstracts are my favorite, too. Go, chess, focus and loa are some faves right now. Zendo is great for 3p (has some hidden info so isn’t a classic Conway combinatorial).

That could have been:

• Xia, legends of a drift system
• Star Wars, outer rim
• Firefly
• Merchant of Venus

Those are probably the most well-known games along that line 💁🏻‍♀️