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:

1. Read the rules before everyone arrives
2. Play the game and have fun
3. Read the rules again
4. Email everyone with everything we played wrong

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.

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.

State Tectonics, third book of the Centenal Cycle by Malka Older. It’s not bad so far, but it feels like too artificial. Like the setting doesn’t make much sense, the author just wanted to play with it. Yes, same applies to the first two books. I liked the first one much more to be honest.

A lot of times. It doesn’t really help to find a problem, but rather when the problem was introduced. It’s a really great tool.

Because nobody has windows user as a core part of their identity.

But why?

My kids are not going to be happy about this…

Through the Ages is probably the best example of a boardgame that works better in digital form. Asynchronous in particular.

This looks incredibly shady.

The problem with a single spirit is that the different spirits have different strengths and with just one you’ll be missing something. Like, for example, there’s the storm thing that is super powerful and destroys buildings, but it doesn’t do much against single explorers, and if you don’t have a way to contain those somehow even with your superior building destroying powers you won’t be able to keep up.

That is, it’s actually harder with one than with two.

Seconded Flashpoint. I’ve had success with that game with people from 8 to like 80.

Saturday was our twice a month large meetup. Went with the kids for the first couple of hours, and we played:

• Dodo. The kids love this. It’s really simple, just be fast and remember position of the tokens, and that’s it. But it’s a lot of fun watching that ball roll slowly towards disaster.
• Team3. Interesting communication game, we discovered that if the 8 year old gives spoken instructions to the 5 year old tempers can get a little hot. All other combinations worked well, it was just that one that didn’t.
• Stella. My 8 year old loves it, but the 5 year old still isn’t fully ready. She has issues with mapping the cards to her pad. Still, by the fourth round things went much smoother.

Then the kids went home with mom and I got to play a couple of heavier titles:

• Pax Pamir 2nd Edition. First time playing. I expected this to be good, but it was still much more fun than I expected. The rules seem a little dry, like you’re just moving stuff around, and all the theme will be all condensed in the card text. But then you play it and everything feels very thematic. I’m pretty sure we played it extremely wrong (in the strategy sense, I think rules were fine), but still had a blast. And I think it would probably work better with at least one more player (we played a three player game)
• Beyond the Sun with expansion. I love this game. First time playing with the expansion (the other two players were also first timers, one was also a first time BTS player). I really liked the leaders cards. Also, it was a weird game, in that there was no achievement token in either Empire or Trascendence. One player had the leader that gives you a private achievement, and he completed that, plus the other two achievements that were drawn (4 strength in three locations, fully empty a single disc track), that meant three and triggered game end. He was the second player, and I was the third player, so I maneuvered to be able to colonize a fourth system, while at the same time denying player 2 the ability to do so in two of the systems he had a majority in. Player 1 had nothing to earn him more points than maneuvering over the map, so he did that, and he couldn’t prevent me from colonizing (I had two possible targets and he didn’t have enough ships/jumps), so he prevented player 2 from doing so, since that was a 9 point difference (5 from the planet, 4 from the achievement). Player 2 had his turn busted, so he instead prevented me from colonizing. My last turn was also maneuvering on the map, so nobody got their fourth system, and the achievement stayed empty. And for techs, there wasn’t even a single level three tech researched. The leaders do push you to play more on the map board, plus only a single guild came up, and I chose the terraforming one because others were better prepared to take advantage of the research action. And only a single level 2 tech that could research level three was drawn, but again, it was discarded. So that was it, no level three techs, so of course no level four either. Scores were quite lower than we’ve seen other times, too: 36/32/31. Anyway, definitely the highlight of the night, and as usual after playing BTS I’m left wanting to play more.

The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They’ve enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of “engagement”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

And that’s just assuming they’ll be good citizens and won’t do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it’s harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.

I don’t think this is too bad, but the question here is why they set it up this way. Are there any restrictions like no SSH? Also, this would make it hard to clone from an off site location (for remote work).

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).