The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

civil war games still depressing, renaissance or medieval stuff not so much. otoh i'm okay w slaughtering 1000s of goblins in my d&d campaign and my favorite boardgame is eldritch horror so i'm not sure what my objection is.

i think it's fair to find occult horror or fantasy genre violence to be more palatable than simulations of actual wars where real humans killed other real humans - i was just curious if your objection was to like bleeding edge contemporary conflicts (essentially all counter-insurgency style games i guess) or to any kind of historical violence. what are your thoughts on twilight struggle which is about the cold war but more-or-less abstracts all the violence such that you're adding and removing influence points, not manipulating actual troops/regiments/armies.

I can see the impulse to find it depressing, but there's the reality that people have actually lived through/are living through/trying to negotiate life in these brutal conflicts and understanding the complexities of the conflicts is educational. Playing to "win" misses the point. The game designers understand this and clearly aren't out to glorify bloodshed or violence.

yeah something that interests me about those games is the balance they strike in giving the players the option to pursue both violent and nonviolent strategies.

mordy have you ever played a board game about israel and how did that feel?

something about that screenshot reminds me of a video game i was obsessed with about 20 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict:_Middle_East_Political_Simulator

apologies if that question is too blunt

only once or twice but i love board games about israel. there's a whole genre of them that i like to browse sometimes. there are like 5-7 games about the yom kippur war (that are discussed here: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/10/07/the-guns-of-october/). my friend has this game and he says it's tremendous - i'd really like to try it: http://www.preteristarchive.com/Books/1976_avalon-hill_siege-of-jerusalem.html - tho that's about ancient israel, not the modern state.

idk i guess i feel like what la lechera says is true for me too - i see a lot of these games as ways of trying to understand conflicts in strategic terms and produce insights that i wouldn't necessarily get from texts alone. i don't totally dismiss the competitive aspects but i obviously you can't rate a game by whether you won it or not. instead i'm interested in how the mechanics abstract the content in interesting ways, what kind of emergent strategies are set out etc.

the guy who made "liberty or death" the COIN game was being interviewed on a podcast recently (bruce geryk's) and he said that he doesn't think games like these can get conflicts wrong because they're not accurate simulations but more like artwork - they're the way that a particular person sees a particular set of events. one reason i'm very interested in the COIN games in particular are because they do simulate aspects of these conflicts that are not simply military figures on hex tiles. the 4-player aspect of revolving alliances opens up new ways of thinking too - "liberty and death" take a conflict (the revolutionary war) that is generally confined in games to 2 players and brings the indigenous people and the french in as well. there's a new COIN game in the works based on Gandhi and supposedly his faction is going to be entirely pacifistic (which is a new thing to the series) so that should be very interesting as well.

wow!! would play gandhi

i definitely understand squeamishness btw even tho it wouldn't really occur to me. i'd even be interested in playing that holocaust game they made not long ago (even if i think the holocaust resists being abstracted like that and it does the history a disservice in the attempt) but i'd still be interested in trying it! idk i don't really get offended by things at least not when it comes to abstract art/ideas/literature.

it's this one:
http://www.gmtgames.com/p-630-gandhi-the-decolonization-of-british-india-19171947.aspx

on two completely different notes

excited to see one of my favorite games from childhood (early 80s) is still in production

http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/

definitely considering picking up a copy

i got the lovecraft pandemic game for christmas and i'm finally going to play it this weekend w00t

i've been playing dead of winter lately and it's fun. the first game we played there was no betrayer but i was the only winner bc the other 3 players didn't fulfill their personal objectives before the colony completed the primary objective. that was kinda lol. i'm really hoping i get to be the betrayer sometime soon it seems like a lot of fun.

yeah i played that awhile back when i was visiting a friend, i am pretty over the zombie genre but i really loved dead of winter

as an eldritch fan i really liked the crossroads cards

https://s4.scoopwhoop.com/anj/sgfsf/281429724.jpg

Basically I'm with Mordy and Lech. Games on historical conflicts (really, any game attempting to abstract a real-world topic from history to science) in game terms are also a kind of dense data compression. You unpack the insights of the designer through understanding the rules, components and how they interact through play.

RL rocket scientist Phil Eklund is a cult figure among some board gamers for designing games from turn-of-century US-Mexico border business/conflict (Pax Porfiriana) to solar system colonization (High Frontier) to Meso/Cenozoic evolution (Bios: Megafauna) to Paleolithic cultural evolution (Neanderthal). His games used to have reference lists longer than the rules, and be about as dry in play, but he's gotten considerably better about streamlining things after retiring a few years back. I'm trying to unpack his Bios: Genesis (assembly of life from competing chemistries) now.

If you would like to read about Volko Ruhnke, designer of many of these COIN games, this is a good starting point

The fifth man in the room, a CIA national security analyst named Volko Ruhnke, called us here. The palpable discomfort among us brings him joy. It means he has done his job.
<3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-the-world-of-role-playing-war-games-volko-ruhnke-has-become-a-hero/2014/01/10/a56ac8d6-48be-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html?utm_term=.81ad894e5411

Puts our misgivings about casualties of war in perspective:

We’re hours into our war and no longer strangers. Jeff Gringer, known to us as the Taliban, stands and thrusts a hooked finger in my direction while declaring he’s going to “pop those Coalition troops in Helmand.” The Taliban is using a car bomb to ambush my men. I rock back in my chair, resigned to my fate.

Robert Leonhard, pulling the strings for the Warlords, is in real life a national security analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. He has been sitting in mostly quiet concentration but finally speaks up: “I hate to hear you say that, Jeff. My oldest is in Helmand province.” He pauses, moving his glasses from his nose to the top of his graying high-and-tight. “I think. He can’t tell me exactly where he is.”

I think this ends up unappealing in both directions, for me. Like, a) palpable discomfort isn't a state in which I'd ideally be spending my limited leisure time, but also b) the people who were actually having to make the decisions you're playing a simulation of were no doubt feeling something way beyond palpable discomfort, and to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

this coffee shop i go to has copies of the korean board game 'INTIFADA: FREE PALESTINE' and always i don't know what to make of it

https://tumblbug.com/intifada

https://tumblbug-psi.imgix.net/eb663c81ddd2d3fd2824f755e800244404371d1a/0f5006aa45d951881877d36570448640bd59acc2/7976c04a194f1b20e6501cc6d571cc1c2ccf8978/ad4f2a9ed6d8524ea683a6173245f4fa914ce2b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&w=620&auto=format%2Ccompress&lossless=true&ch=save-data&s=54b4dd301c9117201e14be8d2c54432b

i would be interested in playing the above but my schedule is weird enough without trying to arrange transpacific electronic gaming

sorry, by 'the above' i mean the VASSAL stuff. i would also play intifada, though my korean is in no way, shape, form up to it

i mean it's just kind of baffling that it exists

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ci3-WaGUgAA0dKx.jpg

to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

fwiw i don't think playing these games gives you any insight into what it's like to be a soldier on the battlefield. i think it gives some insight into the strategic considerations that led to that soldier being there. these aren't about simulating the chaos and fear of battle.

played Dead of Winter again last night. again no Betrayer and this time everyone fulfilled their win conditions. somehow it's less satisfying to win when everyone else wins too.

in the middle of a COIN game (Falling Sky). playing as the Arverni. it's... okay. the mechanics still take some getting used to and it's not always clear what moves would best move me towards my win condition. especially since my win condition depends on removing legions from the board, which means i'm somewhat reliant on Rome spreading thin so i can pick them off - i'm kinda waiting around and marshaling my forces. it's also not my ideal theme - tho hopefully after this i'll understand the system well enough that i can jump into, eg, andean abyss, without much trouble.

also terra mystica port to ios news

Ordered Tokaido from amazon this weekend. Hoping it gets my family excited about gaming again.

i have tokaido and haven't taken it out of the box once yet. i keep intending to but never seem to get around to it.

My son and I tried the two player variant a while back and it was pretty fun. A pretty chill and somewhat counterintuitive gaming experience. I'm sure it will be improved with more players.

played terra mystica again last weekend and i'm still so bad at it - i always get caught up in some macro strategy and do a poor tactical job of getting points from the round objective. i'm also bad at planning out what i'm going to do on the map so i rarely get the 'most connected' bonuses which are a lot of points.

Above and Below is cool - a worker placement with fun and unusual Fighting Fantasy-esque side quests.

one thing i've found with eurogames is that i tend to most enjoy the ones that have a fixed game length rather than a point-based ending condition, especially when there's a very visible progression built into the game e.g. Keyflower or Tzol'kin. my group was playing a lot of Scythe recently since its the hot new thing these days and that game just always seems to end very abruptly and it feels bad/wrong

otm

Played scythe once, it felt overstuffed and opaque

Haven't played Scythe, but really didn't like the guy's previous game (Euphoria).

Yeah, agreed - always a drag when you think you have more time to carry out some plan and then kind of suddenly someone draws the last Grain Card or whatever and oops, if that stack is empty and there are fewer than five locomotives left on the board then that means the game is over after this turn! Much prefer games on a 'clock' - they may also feel a turn too short but you at least know it's coming, and are scrambling to get your ducks in a row and deal with what feels like a more tightly planned scarcity of available moves/actions.

AFAICT, Scythe sold purely on the artwork.

i don't think it's a bad game, it just doesn't stand out over other area control euros other than the production value. people lose their minds over miniatures for some reason

Played some good ones recently -- Scythe, Networks, Burgle Bros, Flashpoint Fire Rescue, Churchill. Churchill was the most notable of the bunch.

Played Inis the other week which I loved.

I'd really like to try Churchill

have heard good things about Inis, i'm always wary of "dudes on a map" games though since i haven't liked most of them that i've played

Twilight Struggle is on Steam but y'all probably know that already? I've played it a little and I totally suck at it, but man you'd have to be SERIOUS to play it on an actual board..

It's not that bad really.

I was dragging into participating in a game of Grand Europa (maps, for scale) decades ago. I think we made it to 1941 in a year of Sundays. To this day, people set up rooms to play World in Flames. I've little to fear from games that actually end in an evening.

i tried twilight struggle once or twice on vassal and the guys on there were so quick and knew the game so well. irl it's easier to find ppl with comparable skills to mine (i.e. non-existent) tho games are long enough that it rarely gets played. i tried the steam release but didn't love the UI in general i find it easier to see the entire map at once instead of having to scroll around to take all the information in.

i played the US side a bunch vs a friend and never made it past the halfway point without dying

i'm always wary of "dudes on a map" games

Oh I tend to like them.

keyflower update: keyflower is still the best eurogame

Colt Express a hell of a lot of fun!

Just bought Jaipur and Duel. Jaipur is a 2-player token/card game with a charming but rather orientalist visual design. It's basically 7-card whist with extra gubbins, but it's a nice, fun quick game.

Duel is the 2-player version of 7 Wonders. It's supposed to be great but it has one of those long manuals you can never be fucked to read, so we haven't played it yet.

Jaipur is great, pretty much a classic at this point

Duel is good - worth learning. Me and my girlfriend overdid it a bit though and haven't played for a while - there's not huge amount of variety to the gamplay.

yep colt express, cottage garden and camel up are the best i've played recently
feel colt express suffers from some characters being overly more powerful than others
the apps p good tho