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Understood. I admit, that was why I picked up a login on Kbin as it would handle aggregating multiple communities into a single "subreddit" but it's still a task for you to manage.

That and Pennsylvania were the two reprints I was after. I had Pampas at one time and I'm curious to see how they do it without using crayons.

I saw someone ask on Mastodon if we are witnessing the next evolution of humanity; those who can be skeptical of the information they are presented with vs just agreeing with it because it tells them what they want to hear. The example was that a disproportionate number of conservatives died from just not believing information about covid from people who were smarter (at this specific subject) than they were.

Concur. it's a better game than GtR (which is enjoyable in its own right, but it's the "world's greatest prototype" and Innovation is a production game...)

I can understand that stance. I think what SdJ represents doesn't really equate to "this is the best game" so much as "this is a game that you should pick up and play over Christmas" because of the criteria that is involved in selection. That's why it has such sway in sales; because you have a bunch of families who are looking for a TtR level game and they run out and buy it for the rest of the year accordingly. Their advanced category is effectively "ok, you've already played a couple of boardgames, now here is the next level" which is still a far cry from Terra Mystica. How decipherable the rulebook is, stages at which planning for turns is done, all of that is criteria but on a culturally oriented level for just German families, not an abstract one for connoisseurs (ala BGG).

Something a friend of mine in Germany told me; you see more people playing boardgames, but a reduction in percentage of "heavy gamers" (which is an amorphous metric anyway once we cross cultures). SdJ meets their needs because that's what the populace by and large needs an award for (compared to heavy gamers who do their own research). That's why I also look at the Jogo; it's going to look at what Americans would consider "heavy" games.

I wish they had an actual “advanced” category, with heavier games. Their advanced cateogory is honestly a joke.

I guess my question is, why would they need to expand? The reason SdJ is so big is because you can hand off the nominations and winner to a generic family in Europe and they go "ok, this is what to play at the holiday season" which is why one of the criteria is "it's widely available in Germany." Heavy games aren't going to have that fit that purpose, and the Jogo de Ano already sort of covers that niche if you're just looking for casual recommendations.

THANK YOU.

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 was hoping this was going to be "you take the PRR and run it over the B&O" and "you try and get your train company to Chicago" or "you never build, only auction or develop" but yeah, it's mostly about what you own and what you're buying.

This is closer to my process. I give the rulebook a first pass, push some pieces around, and then I look for something like a 10min video that goes over turn actions in detail or exceptions to check my understanding of what I did when I was playing multi-handed. A trick I find that works well is to "build the world":

1. Look at components, what does each piece represent, what are spaces on a map, what is the nuance between similar spaces/pieces. Are there things listed on the board that are tracks or warnings or things like that.
2. What's a turn look like; how are actions selected, what actions are options, etc.
3. What special things do I need to be aware of
4. How does scoring function.

3 gets short shift before watching the video, but I do it this way because what they talk about in scoring makes little sense if I don't know what the components are, etc.

The short answer is I've found you have to look at pathways to victory, and how those are accomplished. Is it raw card combos, is it an interaction of actions and cards, etc. "How would one string together points to make a victory, and how many different pathways are there to do that?" As part of doing this, you may find that you have an attribute (e.g. magic, or melee) that features more prominently in the first pass of pathways and you adjust those accordingly. Nothing is going to save you from playtesting though, there will have to be some brute force effort thrown at it to verify assumptions.

The biggest issues with card combo games is solving the deck size problem that exists (see Ark Nova, Pax Porfiriana, etc for games that exhibit the "big deck problem"). The smaller the deck, the more it becomes "how does the limited pool of cards get combined and associated with a player" in a brittle fashion vs at larger deck sizes, you get "will the cards I need show up in the game at all." There are mechanical ways of reducing blind spots associated with large and small decks, but understanding the problem is a helpful starting point.

The Root implementation is good. My personal favorite though is still Twilight Struggle.

My spouse adores the Ticket to Ride and (for a long time but not anymore after an update) Pandemic apps. I like the Twilight Struggle one as well and played a lot of that during covid when I couldn't see friends to play.

In the realm of worker placement/action drafting games, I think Rosenberg is king, and of his WP games, O&L is the only one ** I've kept for multiple years now. The decision space for what to do on any given turn (especially late game) is absolutely massive is part of that reason. Also, kudos to @lolzy_mcroflmao for not wanting to overlap across friend groups. We do the same thing in our household.

If 2p is a requirement, then I would suggest The Colonists by Tim Pulz and once you play it once, start in era 3. It's a longer game in general though, but I find it's a much better 2p experience for the same proverbial question.

** (I have Rosenberg's newest Canal game, but it just arrived and I haven't played it yet. Also, I don't really consider Glass Road a WP game which is why it didn't make the list).