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Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


Occasionally traditional games come up over in the dragging games down/good things about games threads and there was interest in them getting their own thread.

Some ground rules

No edition wars. If someone posts about how 4th ed D&D was trash just let them vent. There is no need to counter with how bad 3.5/Pathfinder are. Each edition of D&D is the worst.

If someone says good things about a game you hate or bad things about a game you like just let it go.

That said:

Exploding Kittens is not a fun game. The gameplay is very simple and it’s s just so bland and unfunny.

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GoGoGadgetChris
Mar 18, 2010

i powder a
granite monument
in a soundless flash

showering the grass
with molten drops of
its gold inlay

sending smoking
chips of stone
skipping into the fog
I think Settlers of Catan is actually pretty fun. The Cities & Knights expansion adds some fun depth, and there's another accessory where you substitute a deck of cards in place of the dice, so you are literally guaranteed to see 1x "One", 4x "Six", 5x "Sevens" etc per rotation of the deck.

It's also a nice bridge between the games everybody knows and hates (Risk, Monopoly) and the games that are probably fun but literally require a 2 hour youtube training video (7 Wonders)


My favorite thing about Ticket to Ride is putting it away and never speaking of it again

PubicMice
Feb 14, 2012

looking for information on posts
DropMix is the greatest work of humankind.

Ok, maybe not, but it's still rad as hell and the new puzzle mode is really fun. The game as a whole has a surprising amount of depth in the gameplay; it may sound like a shallow gimmick party game, but it's really not.

e since a lot of people still probably haven't heard of DropMix: It's a game by Harmonix published by Hasbro that uses cards with nfc chips in them and a special board and app to mix music, with a variety of game modes as well as a freeform mixing mode. The three game modes are Clash, a vs game where you try to be first to a certain score; Party, a cooperative mode in which you play cards according to random requests from the game before a timer runs out; and Puzzle, a single player zen puzzle type mode they added recently where you try and clear blocks off the screen, with the more a single card clears, the more points.

There are rules for deckbuilding, which allows for interesting strategy in the vs mode, since there are quite a few cards that can interact with the board state to possibly give you lots of bonus points.

PubicMice has a new favorite as of 00:52 on Aug 28, 2018

C-Euro
Mar 20, 2010

:science:
Soiled Meat
The smell of a freshly-opened Magic: the Gathering booster pack, at least until they changed the printing process this year. When people talk about the area of your brain for smell being adjacent to the area for memory, they were probably talking about that.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


My favourite thing about Cargo Noir is the limited turns. Putting a limit on the length of a game is a brilliant idea that could improve so many other games. Like, even games I like can be ruined by being too loving long. I'd play Trivial Pursuit or Talisman if I knew I wasn't going to still be playing four hours later.

My least favourite thing about Cargo Noir is how the player characters are weird, racist stereotypes.


GoGoGadgetChris posted:

My favorite thing about Ticket to Ride is putting it away and never speaking of it again
What's wrong with Ticket to Ride? (Not trying to start an argument, just curious)

artoke
Apr 8, 2011

I both love and hate every game of Libertalia. No matter the hand I have there is never a single card I want to play and the entire game is just an exercise in frustration. It becomes a challenge to pick the least bad lines of play, which is super interesting once you get over the feeling that every play is awful.

Plus the pirate names are fun.

mercenarynuker
Sep 10, 2008

My buddies and I are getting into Gloomhaven and I kind of like it so far. I don't know how I feel about the forced retirement of characters, but we'll see when I get there I guess! It does not have the best rulebook, as we've constantly had to go back and clarify (we've played somewhere between 6 and 10 adventures at this point, and I'm still learning new basic rules every time it feels). Also, some of the monsters seem annoyingly meaty in the same way 4e mobs did.

We're also playing 5e Shadowrun, and good loving christ it has an abysmal core book. I'd say it's edited like rear end, but that implies they splurged on an editor. The setting is rad as hell, the character creation is interesting, it just takes hours to create a character because you have to flip to like three different parts of the book to figure out basic things.

Lastly, one of my buddies and I are going to start up Legacy of Dragonholt, a narrative-based rpg boardgame, I think? Really, it sounds more like a CYOA (and not even one like Fighting Fantasy, necessarily). I am simultaneously intrigued and kind of put off by it

Edit: gently caress Agricola, that game gets me so stressed out that it's become a running joke in my group of friends

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

In terms of P&P, my group recently tried Godbound, and we really liked how committed it was to making the player characters feel like being a big deal in the world. The general concept of the game is that the PCs are demigods imbued with the very powers of creation, and the rules reflect that quite well. For example, the system doesn't even bother with regular old skills. You're demigods: If there's a mundane problem (like, say, a locked door) in your way, it's pretty much a given you'll be able to manage it quite effortlessly. Like the rulebook itself states quite plainly (paraphrasing): "If the goddess of daggers want to stab somebody, stab is going to happen". Instead of skills or classes, the main decision in character generation is picking three Words that represent general domains, like "Health", "Sky", or "Sea", and then some premade gifts from that.

And those tend to be remarkably powerful, e.g. just taking the Word "Death" means your character can take command of any undead they come across no questions asked, whereas one with the word "Deception" has a gift that allows them to perfectly assume the shape of anybody they have ever met. And these are things that are available from the word go at character generation. In addition to that you can work Miracles, which is basically doing anything you can think of that falls within your domain. In combat, stuff like throwing singular bolts of lightning at individual dudes isn't even kept track of. Instead you get fray dice, which basically boil down to "roll to see how many mortals you happen to smite completely incidentally to your main action". :allears:

The rules are on the whole fairly lightweight and free-form, but I can really appreciate how it's done to just get out of your way and let you be a loving demigod. You're not limited by potentially narrow skills where you have to go through contortions to make them applicable to the problem at hand. Instead you have a broad and powerful toolbox that can almost offer not just one but several ways to not only achieve your goals, but also do some cool poo poo along the way. It's very conducive to the "Yes, and..." style of GMing, since it's hugely unlikely that the party would ever find themselves in a situation where they failed a roll and plain don't have any options.

Jimmy Noskill
Nov 5, 2010

mercenarynuker posted:

Lastly, one of my buddies and I are going to start up Legacy of Dragonholt, a narrative-based rpg boardgame, I think? Really, it sounds more like a CYOA (and not even one like Fighting Fantasy, necessarily). I am simultaneously intrigued and kind of put off by it

My wife and I played a little bit of Legacy of Dragonholt not too long ago. To me, it felt like baby's first tabletop RPG. It could be fun if you've never played an RPG before and were trying to ease yourself in, but if you're playing Shadowrun I doubt that you'll find anything terribly compelling about it. It really is a glorified CYOA.

Jimmy Noskill has a new favorite as of 16:09 on Aug 28, 2018

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


I want to play Shadowrun and I've had the 5th Ed rules since they launched but trying to read it is frustrating as it's just words and terms and without the context of playing the game it all means nothing. A guy I know who takes games far beyond hobby swears character creation is smooth and can be done in ten minutes but I think he's full of it because the times I tried to make a character I just get frustrated and confused and quit.

Anyone try the Shadowrun deck building game? It sounds fun and looks neat but unless we've missed part of the rules I'm pretty sure it's unnecessarily difficult just to be difficult.

Fifty Farts
Dec 23, 2013

- Meticulously Researched
- Peer-reviewed

mercenarynuker posted:

We're also playing 5e Shadowrun, and good loving christ it has an abysmal core book. I'd say it's edited like rear end, but that implies they splurged on an editor. The setting is rad as hell, the character creation is interesting, it just takes hours to create a character because you have to flip to like three different parts of the book to figure out basic things.

So it's a normal Shadowrun book? I swear, they do that "spread out info on one subject into four different chapters" poo poo in every single edition.

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

Shadowrun has a gonzo awesome setting but has never, ever had a good edition of the rules. It's like a curse of the franchise.

SiKboy
Oct 28, 2007

Oh no!😱

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

I think Settlers of Catan is actually pretty fun.


My favorite thing about Ticket to Ride is putting it away and never speaking of it again

You are literally the anti-me. I think if we touched we would both be annihilated. Settlers bored the hell out me after I'd played it maybe 3 times, while I'm literally always up for Ticket.


Len posted:


Anyone try the Shadowrun deck building game? It sounds fun and looks neat but unless we've missed part of the rules I'm pretty sure it's unnecessarily difficult just to be difficult.

I havent personally. I've heard its good, but (and I may be remembering the wrong game here) it has an experience mechanic where you apply stickers to cards when they level up, but the XP gain is such a trickle it becomes a real grind. If thats the game then I've heard ignoring that and just leveling everything up to max makes the game way better.


food court bailiff posted:

Shadowrun has a gonzo awesome setting but has never, ever had a good edition of the rules. It's like a curse of the franchise.

Yeah, I played 2E (and maybe 3E for a bit? I'm really not sure.). Theres just too much in the setting. In theory you want a balanced party but if you get one you (as a GM) would be staring down the barrel of party which included a decker (who did decker things and wanted to use their cool decking abilities, all of which took place at a different rate to normal actions and essentially required the GM and Decker to have a 1-to-1 mini session in the middle of a play session, a mage who can use the astral plane (who wanted to do cool asttral abilities, all of which took place at a... You know what, see last bracket). In combat (which, lets be honest, it always comes back to eventually) combat cyberware that boosted reflexes made you immediately better than anyone or anything else in the game. A dedicated cyber monster could easily take something like 4-6 actions for the mages 1, and with decent weapons that makes the mage (and decker, and rigger, and anyone who had taken cyberware that wasnt wired reflexes and the spinal superconductor things) pretty much obsolete in combat. There were so many splatbooks and most of them had new cyberware.

I had some really good times with shadowrun, but my players had an unspoken agreement not to break the game too badly and to let each other have turns to do cool stuff in fights (and that the Decker role was relegated to NPCs so the "Yeah, I've hacked the door, we're in" stuff can happen off camera. And occasionally be appropriately delayed for dramatic effect). They would theorycraft ridiculously overpowered characters with hilariously unbalanced combinations of gear/cyberware/traits, bring those character sheets along to show to everyone... then play their usual (reletively balanced) characters instead. Except for a one shot we did where everyone made their most broken loophole abusing motherfucker of a character for a suicide mission.

Spermando
Jun 13, 2009
My favourite thing about Love Letter is how fast the gameplay is. You don't get people taking forever to make their move like in Catan.

In that vein, I like how Decrypto barely has any downtime, unlike some versions of Codenames.

I like how in The Shipwreck Arcana people can join and leave at any point.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Mage the Awakening 2nd edition is a roleplaying game that has one tiny little thing in it that bugs me, and that is how it seems to assume mages get mana. Prepare for nitpickery of the highest order.

Mage is about being a wizard in the modern world. Mana is your magic points. You don't need mana for the spells you're really good at, but you do need it for spells that aren't in your wheelhouse as well as for a bunch of extra little effects. You generally only need to spend one at a time. Newbies can carry a max of, like, 10 at at time while big boys can have 20 or so (the chart goes up to like 75, but that's for the supermages that are epic-level and it scales weirdly at the high end).
It's entirely reasonable that over the course of an 'adventuring day' in the mage sense, you might spend between 1 and 5 points of mana.

Mana doesn't replenish 'naturally', you have to get it from somewhere.

One way to get mana back is from meditating at a 'Hallow'. A Hallow is a place where mana leaks into the world. A level-1 hallow generates one mana per day. The highest level, a level-5 hallow, generates 5 mana a day. Hallows can bank up to three times their level in mana.
Hallows are described as being special places in the world that feel just kinda special. The top of a mountain, or a shrine, etc., it's up to the GM what kind of places are often hallows.

Anyway, the book says that "the most common way for a Mage to get mana is from a Hallow" which is clearly buuuuull shiiiiit.

Firstly, you can do the math yourself. A big boy mage who runs themselves dry is going to wait four days to replenish themselves from even a top-level hallow. I assume level-5 hallows are rare enough that no way is there enough for all the big boys to keep themselves topped off even on a weekly basis).

Secondly, if you need mana fast, you can 'scour' yourself. Just straight up turn your health or physical stats into three mana, in a three-for-one deal. Just spend a day sick in bed with the "mana-drained-my-muscles" flu and you've generated more mana than a level-3 hallow.

Thirdly, any non-babby mage has a 'Legacy' which is basically their version of a DnD prestige class. One benefit of being in a Legacy is that you can do an 'oblation', like a ritual, to gain mana Hallow-style except you don't need to be at a hallow. Oh but "a mage away from a hallow is limited per day by their magic level for the legacy" that's still gonna be like 3 minimum for any non-babby mage.
What counts as an oblation? It's different for every Legacy, but a really common one is to solve puzzles. Like a crossword puzzle. This shows up for multiple different legacies.
So just be doing the newspaper sudoku on the way to work and bam, three mana.

Finally, every mage has what are called 'praxes'. A praxis is basically a spell that the mage has such a giant hard-on for that it doesn't cost them mana to cast even if it normally would (unless they're adding extra stuff to it), and that it's much easier for them to 'crit' with the spell.
What's one possible effect of critting with a spell, that the player can choose?
Gaining a point of mana.
There's no limit to this, casting a basic spell that you want to feel reasonably sure you can crit on only takes like ten seconds.

So even a newbie starter mage can generate as much mana as they need by magi-masturbating about how awesome it is to cast a basic mind-reading spell on people walking past them.

tl;dr the book lies, there's no way mages use a Hallow unless there's something else to pick up there on the way. it's like going all the way to shop at the organic grocery when all you usually need is a bag of chips from the corner shop.

thanks for reading all these dumb words about imaginary wizards

SneezeOfTheDecade
Feb 6, 2011

gettin' covid all
over your posts
So the correct response to "do you want to play Mage the Awakening 2e?" is to say "...you mean 'the Ascension', right?"? :v:

FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

I like vanilla Race for the Galaxy a bit, but it seems like there's one dominant strategy: start collecting 4-8 vp every two turns, and empty the point pile before anything else can get off the ground. You can do it fast with a couple of the starting planets - all you need is a way to generate 2-4 VP, and the double victory point Consume card.

GoGoGadgetChris
Mar 18, 2010

i powder a
granite monument
in a soundless flash

showering the grass
with molten drops of
its gold inlay

sending smoking
chips of stone
skipping into the fog
I just get so stressed by Ticket to Ride. It always feels like there's a 10 to 1 ratio of things outside my control vs within it so I just don't feel good while playing it! Goddamn monster friends stealing my routes!

killer crane
Dec 30, 2006

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

FactsAreUseless posted:

I like vanilla Race for the Galaxy a bit, but it seems like there's one dominant strategy: start collecting 4-8 vp every two turns, and empty the point pile before anything else can get off the ground. You can do it fast with a couple of the starting planets - all you need is a way to generate 2-4 VP, and the double victory point Consume card.

My biggest gripe with this sort of game is that you play so independently of the other player(s) the strategy is solvable regardless of anyone's play style.

FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

My biggest gripe with this sort of game is that you play so independently of the other player(s) the strategy is solvable regardless of anyone's play style.
Yeah, maybe that's why I got so bored of it.

Doctor Spaceman
Jul 6, 2010

"Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."
Race and 7 Wonders are fine games but San Juan and Sushi Go are far easier to get to the table because you don't have to explain the iconography.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



Besesoth posted:

So the correct response to "do you want to play Mage the Awakening 2e?" is to say "...you mean 'the Ascension', right?"? :v:

No, I really like Awakening, and the main selling point it has compared to most other adjacent games is that its freeform magic system is actually reasonably consistent. Like, "what do I need to roll to use magic to turn the clothes of me and all my friends into armor that's even better than ballistic armor or medieval armor" is a question that actually has a distinct answer and multiple people reading the rules will actually get the same answer out of it. Likewise with "I use magic to find out how many people in this room are useful witnesses to this guy's murder".
(Finding out who killed somebody, unless they take extra precautions, is super easy for most mages, especially if they have access to the body, the crime scene, or both. A starting character can do it. Figuring out who knew about it and did nothing is a more interesting question)

Awakening 2e's core also makes the 'fun' and "what do mages do" actually engaging and makes the setting more fun and approachable. It's stuff that was all mostly there in 1e, just behind a layer of boring crap or hidden in supplements. Game good.

I just nitpick about that one line about how "most mages get their mana".

killer crane
Dec 30, 2006

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

It's also a nice bridge between the games everybody knows and hates (Risk, Monopoly) and the games that are probably fun but literally require a 2 hour youtube training video (7 Wonders)

Risk and Monopoly are both fun if you would watch a 2 hour youtube on the rules, because people don't play by them correctly and games last hours and hours. Also none of these games need a 2 hour youtube.

Really the best thing to come out of this boardgame renaissance are coop games.

The worst thing is miniatures. gently caress, I don't need to have a 3d printed, anatomically correct Mrs Peacock! It's an obvious sign the game mechanics are poo poo, and don't present the theme at all; it's just a clone of another game with widgets and stickers, like a Something Awfulopoly.

Pandemic really is the best boardgame.

GoGoGadgetChris
Mar 18, 2010

i powder a
granite monument
in a soundless flash

showering the grass
with molten drops of
its gold inlay

sending smoking
chips of stone
skipping into the fog
Oh man, speaking of, I actually read the rule book for Uno and we've been playing that poo poo WAY wrong! You can only play Wild when it's your only legal play, and other players can wager that you're lying with penalties for the wrong party!

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Ottermotive Insanity posted:

My biggest gripe with this sort of game is that you play so independently of the other player(s) the strategy is solvable regardless of anyone's play style.
I always get bored with games where it turns out you don't have to pay attention to what anyone else is doing.

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Risk and Monopoly are both fun if you would watch a 2 hour youtube on the rules, because people don't play by them correctly and games last hours and hours. Also none of these games need a 2 hour youtube.
I've never played Risk, but Monopoly is bad even by the correct rules. The variant where you keep playing until everyone wishes they were dead is, of course, much worse, but the "correct" way is still really bad.

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

Oh man, speaking of, I actually read the rule book for Uno and we've been playing that poo poo WAY wrong! You can only play Wild when it's your only legal play, and other players can wager that you're lying with penalties for the wrong party!
You can play a Wild any time, it's only Wild Draw Four that's restricted. And it's not when it's your only legal play, it's when you have no matching colour. If the last player played a red five and you've got a blue five and a WDF in your hand you can play either of them.

GoGoGadgetChris
Mar 18, 2010

i powder a
granite monument
in a soundless flash

showering the grass
with molten drops of
its gold inlay

sending smoking
chips of stone
skipping into the fog

Tiggum posted:



You can play a Wild any time, it's only Wild Draw Four that's restricted. And it's not when it's your only legal play, it's when you have no matching colour. If the last player played a red five and you've got a blue five and a WDF in your hand you can play either of them.

*Pushes Turing Test button under desk*

Sponge Baathist
Jan 30, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
In Arkham Horror, probably an expansion pack, you could play as the cop who had a motorcycle and a gun. The gun helped in fights and the motorcycle meant you could go anywhere on the board without using movement points. It's been a long time since I've played but the cop was the most fun character to play.


In dice forge you can build dice and if you're really good at rolling them you can get what you want out of each roll.

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


I make it a point where if I'm playing Monopoly I play rules as written or not at all. I don't know where "free parking generates money!" came from but it's a poo poo rule.

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

The Robber in Catan is the worst thing ever. A completely random chance that a player gets to completely shut down one of your tiles, and just starve you out and slow the game massively.

Worse, you have to discard half your cards if you're above seven. Which means sometimes (late game, lots of players) you can go from a virtually empty hand, build up a huge pile on other people's turns, then get completely shafted by an unlucky role.

It's a pretty drat passive game at the best of time. Your starting position completely determines your chance of winning, and a lot of the time your moves are clear and youre just waiting on the resources. And then a loving 7 comes along and can randomly stop you even doing anything.

But that's not all! On rolling a seven you get to steal a card, which is yet another randomly occuring gently caress you. And over a few months of playing my friends graduated from goofing around trying to make you pick one card over another, to outright telling people which card in their hand is which so you can make a steel that's mutually beneficial. Arggggh.

gently caress Catan.

Spermando
Jun 13, 2009
There are many things I dislike about Citadels, but the worst has to be the assassin. If you are the king in one turn, and then on the next turns you always choose the assassin and kill the king, you can screw everyone over.

mercenarynuker
Sep 10, 2008

I forgot about Kingdom Death: Monster. It is, firstly, an INSANELY expensive game, even by boardgame renaissance standards. Also, the miniature's are all "assemble yourself" and have varying levels of sprue and wispy figure models (seen more than a few broken models). Not only that, it is a BRUTALLY unforgiving game, where it's not until you're entire settlement been killed like 12 times that you start with bonuses to make it marginally more fair.

But each settlement has like 8ish people (give or take), and you can level them all up, and they all need to die and just gently caress, man. I don't want to run the first fight a million loving times just to get to a "ok, life is marginally less, but still overwhelmingly so, poo poo" state of being. And then depending on the whims of fate, nigh-unkillable supermobs could show up, abduct/kill significant portions of your leveled up and thus useful characters in an event on a card, so your choice is to fight and die, or choose to not fight and MAYBE characters you care about won't die. Doubt it, but maybe

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

mercenarynuker posted:

I forgot about Kingdom Death: Monster. It is, firstly, an INSANELY expensive game, even by boardgame renaissance standards. Also, the miniature's are all "assemble yourself" and have varying levels of sprue and wispy figure models (seen more than a few broken models). Not only that, it is a BRUTALLY unforgiving game, where it's not until you're entire settlement been killed like 12 times that you start with bonuses to make it marginally more fair.

But each settlement has like 8ish people (give or take), and you can level them all up, and they all need to die and just gently caress, man. I don't want to run the first fight a million loving times just to get to a "ok, life is marginally less, but still overwhelmingly so, poo poo" state of being. And then depending on the whims of fate, nigh-unkillable supermobs could show up, abduct/kill significant portions of your leveled up and thus useful characters in an event on a card, so your choice is to fight and die, or choose to not fight and MAYBE characters you care about won't die. Doubt it, but maybe

Another thing about KD:M is the presentation. Like, in principle it sounds like an actually rather interesting cooperative survival game. But then you google it, and the first thing you see is tits. Lots of tits, in the cringiest, most awkward tie-in softcore porn imaginable. Like, how do you even go about suggesting that to a casual gaming group? "Don't worry about all the marketing material being made of tits, trust me, it's actually a really good game!". I can't imagine anybody not being very :crossarms: when pitched something like that.

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


Yeah on paper that game sounds really fun. But the price tag is up in the hundreds I believe? Isn't it like $400 for everything because gently caress you there's no need for an entry level version of the game.

And then you look it up and it took the "grim mature" route of titties on everything. Everything is a titty monster.

If someone would take it, make it affordable, and drop the titties I would be okay with giving it a try. But as it is pass.

mercenarynuker
Sep 10, 2008

Perestroika posted:

Another thing about KD:M is the presentation. Like, in principle it sounds like an actually rather interesting cooperative survival game. But then you google it, and the first thing you see is tits. Lots of tits, in the cringiest, most awkward tie-in softcore porn imaginable. Like, how do you even go about suggesting that to a casual gaming group? "Don't worry about all the marketing material being made of tits, trust me, it's actually a really good game!". I can't imagine anybody not being very :crossarms: when pitched something like that.

Holy loving poo poo, what the gently caress. I didn't recall any of that from what we played, just looked it up and what is going on with all the super curvy ladies and cheesecake figures :psypop:

edit: THIS IS AN ACTUAL EXPANSION, WHAT THE gently caress
:nws:A literal penis-headed titboob monster impregnating ladies, what the gently caress:nws:

mercenarynuker has a new favorite as of 04:37 on Aug 30, 2018

FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

To briefly interrupt discussion of how terrible Kingdom Death is (very), I want to talk about how good Patchwork is. It's real good. It's so good. It's a very simple game with only a few rules and elements and all of them are good. The art is good. The game is fun and endlessly replayable. It has an amazing concept. It's so good.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


The thing that annoys me about a lot of games is how badly the instructions are written. There are a lot of games that are actually pretty simple to play once you know what you're doing but which seem byzantine at first because the rules are written in a weird order and use a lot of pointless jargon.

Kei Technical
Sep 20, 2011
Game writing is technical writing, which is surprisingly hard.

killer crane
Dec 30, 2006

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

CMS posted:

Game writing is technical writing, which is surprisingly hard.

Kickstarter games all need to include a reward tier where they pay a functional writer to rewrite the instructions.

For real though, I get that small game publishers or self published designers aren't going to invest the money, but for the larger publishers, paying a functional writer to rewrite 15 pages of instructions (including pictures) is probably going to cost less than they're paying the artists they hire.

So many instructions seem to include guides to strategy mingled with rules, so strategy gets muddled with rules, and the game ends up becoming stale quicker. Either these games are only fun played in a narrow play style, and delineation breaks the game, or the designer had played it so many times they've optimized the strategy, and taken that fun away from the player.

Perestroika
Apr 8, 2010

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Kickstarter games all need to include a reward tier where they pay a functional writer to rewrite the instructions.

For real though, I get that small game publishers or self published designers aren't going to invest the money, but for the larger publishers, paying a functional writer to rewrite 15 pages of instructions (including pictures) is probably going to cost less than they're paying the artists they hire.

So many instructions seem to include guides to strategy mingled with rules, so strategy gets muddled with rules, and the game ends up becoming stale quicker. Either these games are only fun played in a narrow play style, and delineation breaks the game, or the designer had played it so many times they've optimized the strategy, and taken that fun away from the player.

Yeah, I followed the development of an indie RPG for a while (eventually bailed because the core group was on 4chan's /tg/, and... yeah), where at one point they hired an actual professional editor to go through the whole thing to restructure/rewrite everything to do with the rules. The difference in readability before/after was staggering.

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PubicMice
Feb 14, 2012

looking for information on posts
I know you're all going to be very horrible to me for saying this, but have you guys considered that maybe Kingdom Death is not the literal worst?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3VzOayLcYs

PubicMice has a new favorite as of 11:39 on Aug 30, 2018

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