The little sub that could!
Yeah, you're allowed to curse on the internet. Be free! It is bullshit when this happens.
"In further news, strange link between board games and train motifs also explained."
Hard to find much info on this. Looks like some kind of dice game?
BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/438266/va-mourir-sur-mars
To be honest, if you had access to the equipment that would be a lot more practical way to make this. Get a piece of square bar stock of your chosen metal, cut it into cubes, and then engrave and polish. That said, most people don't have that kind of stuff just lying around. Maybe if you've got access to a makerspace or a shop thru work or some really, really good friends.
Got Bohnanza and Resistance placed this week. We discussed whether or not Bohnanza should be considered a board game, card game, or go into a third, new category called a "bean game." It was a four player game and decently close. I think Bohnanza holds up at 4, but I wouldn't want to play it at any less. My hot Uwe Rosenberg take has always been that Bohnanza is his best game, but that's probably not true. After all, there's Mamma Mia and at least a few others that contend for the title.
Resistance is my cult of the old pick for social deduction. It's less convoluted than Secret Hitler, doesn't need a GM like BOTC or Werewolf, and has more depth than One-Night Ultimate Werewolf. It's a tightly designed game that expects a lot from the players and needs repeat plays to appreciate. It's short enough that it doesn't feel excessive to run it 2-3 times back to back. In my opinion, the best way to play is with the plot cards expansion. It does need a little more than just the base rules to be interesting, and I like the democatic element of powers being handed out to people during the game instead of being chosen beforehand.
I'm big on the cult of the old. I'd rather play one game ten times than ten games one time, and I think that if a game can't hold up to at least five plays it isn't worth owning. Of course, if other people want to spend their money on that kind of stuff, it's fine, but I like to keep my collection small and replayable. In my opinion, the best board games get better with repeated plays because that's when you can really get into the strategy.
Side note, but I also really hate the idea of legacy games where you just have to throw the thing out once you're done.
PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I'm not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn't fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he's retired today.
It's too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer's blog he said he didn't think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.
It was quite the battle.
And it just gets worse. I tried to wait them out, but even when they left a few stayed behind, lurking in the treetops:
I knocked over one tree with a ballista, and those creatures left voluntarily. I took about thirty casualties clearing out the second tree.
A year later, the horde returns, and right now I'm ignoring them because there's lots of work inside the fortress that needs done, and I've got a decent tree farm up and going. I'm thinking it's time for Operation FTW, but I'll have to wait until they leave to set up it for the inevitable third return.
Yeah, mechanism is a lot more objective way to classify board games. We can argue all day about, say, what exactly a wargame is, but what games have hex grids, area control, and resource managements is a lot easier to agree on.
I haven't played the expansions, but I thought the base decent. It was more interesting than your average Euro, but it didn't blow me away either. I'd say buy it if your into the theme.
Tip: If you have visitors wandering around your base, you can go under the knowledge task to see what all books they've read in their lifetime and what kind of books they are. That way, you can search for somewhat unusual types like novels, chronicles, cultural histories, biographies, autobiographies, dictionaries, dialogues, and etc.
I really wish this functionality was on the written objects screen. Right now you just have to go off of the title. This work, unfortunately, wasn't written in my fortress and we don't have a copy of it, either. That said, I do have a pair of autobiographies and some cultural histories.
What I would like to do is figure out a way to reliably make dwarves produce biographies. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how. The only requirement that I know of for a dwarf to produce a biography is knowledge of the biography topic, which can be obtained either from them reading a book on the subject (easy) to discovering it themselves (very, very hard and random). After that, I don't know if they have to be assigned to a library or not to actually produce the biography.
That sounds simple, but the thing is that dwarves are practically-minded. They seem to prefer to write manuals and guides about topics they know than novels, biographies, and etc. What if you had a dwarf that knew only of biographies and of no other topics, though? They might write one guide on the subject of writing biographies, but will they stop writing guides after that and start writing biographies?
The problem is, once you have a big library, dwarves tend to swarm it and learn about all the topics. It's hard to pick and dwarf that's "unpolluted," so to speak, and I suspect that if they've avoided the library that much, they'll be poor biographers anyway.
One idea I've had is the Dwarven Monastery. We take kids that just turned 18, which haven't had a chance to read books yet, and slap them in a private, sealed off room with writing materials, food, and drink. Toss in a bookshelf and make a tiny library only they can access. Assign them as a scholar, and throw down a book on biographies as inspiration. Then, see what happens.
Note that what kind of books your dwarves write has literally no gameplay impact. This is just for Armok and maybe internet points. Damn it, I want my dwarves to have quality literature!
Got a play of Pax Porfiriana in yesterday. Excellent game, very close play. It came down to money after a military coup was narrowly averted. I probably could have won on money had I abandoned the coup attempt and sold off my assassin cards instead, but dang it, I don't want to be the richest player, I want to be the military dictator of Mexico!
It's reminiscent of Pax Pamir, which is in the same system. I'd have to get another Pamir play in to compare, but I think I prefer Porfiriana.
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"Yeah, we can get Age of Steam done in 2 hours."