La tercera partida de la campaña de Oath que estamos jugando. Como somos todos viejos es difícil coordinar un momento en que podamos todos, pero bueno.
Como canciller logré mantener el control, gané por defecto. No era Oathkeeper, pero nadie más cumplía su objetivo.
I’m sort of peeved that boardgames has gone from a “hey, I get to sit in meat space not staring at a monitor and doing something fun with friends” into a consumerist dog and pony show.
I feel like part of the problem is that the people participating in and boosting the consumerist aspect are the ones with the shiniest toys to show. Like, sure, 1830 is an awesome game (even if I still can’t get a regular group to play it), but you won’t get more upvotes for showing off your 100th game of 1830 than your first game of <insert the newest game>.
An look, I like having new games. I enjoy the feel of new puzzles to try. But in the end, it’s as you say, the best part of the games is getting together with friends and doing soemthing fun for a few hours. Having a collection as a backdrop in my video calls is not the point of buying games.
What I don’t like about your categories is that you’re focusing on the buying and owning games part.
My process used to be:
Now that I have kids I don’t always have the luxury of reading the rules the same day we play the game, so what I usually do is I read the rules a few days in advance, which means I won’t remember as much when the time comes to play, so then I end up complementing that with a rules explanation video.
Te diría que depende mucho de qué le gusta a las dos personas que van a jugar.
Si les gustan los juegos de cartas, Lost Cities.
Si les gustan los worker placement, Caylus.
Si les gusta jugar violentamente a juegos que parecen pacíficos, Carcassonne.
Twilight Struggle es muy dependiente de la temática — si les interesa el tema guerra fría, es excelente, si no, posiblemente les aburra.
Hay muchos juegos específicamente hechos para dos jugadores. Twilight Struggle, por ejemplo. Muchos wargames sobre todo, pero también hay juegos más sencillos tipo Lost Cities.
Y después hay juegos que aceptan más jugadores pero son mejores de a dos. Está Santorini, que es básicamente un juego para dos que le agregaron un modo para más jugadores. Pero también juegos como Azul, Carcassonne, o Caylus, si bien funcionan muy bien de a varios jugadores, son excelentes de a dos.
If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.
But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.
TtR first journey is great because it’s easy to transition to the “full” game after they outgrow it. Catan junior is similar in this. That’s also my main complaint about Stone Age kids, it’s not really the same game.
The problem with this is chatgpt is shit at facts. You ask it a question and it might just give you bullshit, and you tell it to provide a citation and it will happily invent one. There’s no easy way to verify whatever it says to you, other than going to the source, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.
Aside from the online options you’ve been given (which are good), are you a 100% certain that nobody’s playing it in your country?
I assumed the same thing when I first started learning about the game over twenty years ago, and I found out that there was an email list for a group of players in a neighboring country, so I subscribed there and lurked. A few months later somebody else from my country joined and, instead of lurking, she did the smart thing and asked. And sure enough, somebody replied. Turns out there was a group that met weekly in a pub five blocks from my house.
So basically, I wouldn’t totally discount the possibility that there’s other people closer to you than you think.
It’s my favorite series of his. I read the first couple of Laundryverse books, and while they’re fun, I’m not a fan of the lovecraftian horror thing. But Merchant Princes hooked me right from the start. Tons of politicking, and by the end it gets messy, like really messy. It’s basically The Godfather meets Game of Thrones meets Sliders. And then the followup series (Empire Games) is a Cold War spy thriller with portals. You can just start with Empire games, it’s written to be a separate series, but it does have massive spoilers for the original series.
The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry
A note on this: the series is written under the Jack Campbell pseudonym. Took me a while to find. The first book is Dauntless
I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he’s basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the “ok I know this is not real but what if it were” variety.
The Laundry Files series is “what if Lovecraft was right and there’s magic math that can summon the old gods”, but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can’t get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can’t let that magic math run wildly.
The Merchant Princes series is “what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension”. So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There’s also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).
A mí me gusta mucho. Las historias que se arman tienen sentido.