@pathief Your Dorfromantik comments made me laugh; I've had discussions about what happens when you decouple ways of determining "victory" from players and their actions (coop or competitive) and you essentially have the same opinion I do.
"All games are activities, but not all activities are games..."
Dorf is not a bad thing, but it's not my jam is all. I know people who absolutely adore it and I'm happy it exists for them.
@lolzy_mcroflmao Yeah, we've seen the "blow out one really good round, and then don't paradox" in 4p. 3p less so but it's still a decent approach. This may just be a quirk of the design is all (and that's fine. I have lots of games where there are annoyances and I still love them). I appreciate the replies, thanks.
@lolzy_mcroflmao Yeah, generally. I've also seen the term used where "the influence of a player to your left/right is outsized compared to the effect of players which are separated by at least one other player" (so in Pax Porfiriana or The King is Dead, you are responsible for stopping your left-handed opponent from winning).
In Cat the Box, our observation is the further you are from the trick leader that started that round, the more likely you are to get stuck in a bad situation. So we really want to either lead the trick, or be second. In a 3p game, we found it was just a quirk, but in 4p, the pressure on the 4th player to disrupt the tendency of "complete my run and get out" that you find in many (but not all) trick takers caused the game to be less stable and more often then not, the 4th player in that round fared worse.
I'm willing to accept it as a group dynamic issue in terms of conservative/aggressive play styles, but since you said you'd played at 5 (and none of my group) I thought I'd ask if you had seen a similar effect.
@lolzy_mcroflmao I've played the original Cat in the Box a decent amount and we noticed that there is a seat binding that becomes more prevalent in impact at 4 players than at 3. Not having access to the re-issue, I've never tried it at 5. Do you think it becomes more so at 5 than at 4?
@dpunked I playtested Oath, but I've never played the final ruleset (we did all of our contributions at the beginning before covid started). It is complex though, and requires people to really sign on for that experience so I agree with that inclusion.
I've played a snot load of Terra Mystica and I've heard that Gaia Project is effectively "Space TM w/ a variable setup." I've also played a lot of FCM, the expansion really helps the game, if for nothing else than the new milestones. I would have nominated Indonesia over FCM, but that's purely personal.
Even if you exclude wargames though (so ASL, Here I Stand, etc which all have monster level rulebooks), the one omission I'm surprised about is that John Company 2nd didn't make it. That's like 45 pages but its doable. It's not like it's out of print or just unavailable either. Might not be able to walk into a generic hobby game store and pick it up, but that's a bending of the criteria IMHO (even if the article is intended to be a list of complex stuff that would be something you graduate to, which excludes High Frontier for example). Overall not a bad list.
PS: High Frontier should be a computer game for the rules enforcement standpoint and I'll die on that hill. Also, while the rules are only 1 sheet of paper, Southern Pacific from Winsome should be a computer game for the automated accounting alone...
@ada Bingo. I deal in systems professionally and how they are designed and that sort of stuff. It definitely gives me a leg up in the process.
One big thing is that of the modes of learning (visual/tactile/auditory), I prefer to feel pieces and stuff while I'm learning (and sometimes I'll even go through and do solo rounds multi-handed just to see how things fit together), but I can pick up manuals and just read them now to at least get started. I can't just sit and listen to someone explain the game though, something about just the listening piece does me in.
My spouse laughs at me, everyone knows when I'm learning a new *big* game because I have all of the pieces setup on the board, a tablet with a PDF I can search through, the rulebook in hardcopy, and a notepad where I have both "ooo, this is probably critical to remember" type things, and a second sheet of paper with what will (after a bunch of drafts) become the lesson plan when I teach others (assuming they don't read in advance).
A) 6 Nimmt. scales relatively well with a sweet spot at 4 and 6 players. Takes about 20-40min to play a complete game.
B) One Night Ultimate Werewolf. The first two sets and maybe the bonus roles have lasted us hundreds of iterations. I think it's superior at 5, but other groups like it from 5-8p. Total round/game length is about 10min (almost regardless of player count).
C) For Sale. Skip the expansion, the base game is one of our better higher count options. Total game length is maybe 20min since the second half of the game is simultaneous action selection.
ONUW in particular should go over really well with a LARP group. I do recommend doing index card type role cheatsheets and laminating them. I used to have one that fit in the box but I've lost the photoshop file I made it in... If you get more than about 12 people, then Two Rooms & A Boom works as well and has a ~20min running time. It needs a lot of players though.
@donio I have done lesson plans like that for teaching a game (I used to have them saved in google drive so I could pull them up on my phone). I haven't done it for setup though outside of one instance; for Ginkgopolis, I had a sticky note with with player count and resources in the game for each but I think I have a note in the print out of the english rules now for it.
Most of the time, I can open the box, and look at the components and that's enough to jog my memory for setup.
@Allenthar Aegean Sea; how many players? My copy showed up yesterday and I'm thinking about when I can spring it on some of my group.
@Profilename1 I agree with your right up; your first game might have been the better of the two. I haven't played the final version of JC2, but in the first one, the most interesting games were cash poor and always teetering on the edge of collapse.
Indonesia: Booo people who are merge happy and still lose.
Have you ever played Bus at 3?
What did you think about expropriation in Fresh Fish? (I think it's possibly the most polarizing aspect of it))
@Profilename1 If you're headed to #PaxUnplugged this winter, I'm happy to bring Southern Pacific and try and put together a 3 or 4p game. I know some other train gamers who are going so that should be doable.
Send me a DM if so.
@fathermackenzie since our group has an uneven distribution of game ownership, we bring things to the table and the first person to nominate a diverse set of N games (where N is the quantity of players) as a cohort of games starts the process. Then everyone gets to remove one game (the original selecting person doesn't because they defined the cohort) until you have just one title remaining.
That's effectively the "least bad" choice at the time, because people remove the title they least want to play and the remaining game is not the bottom choice. It also means you have to sort of read the audience for what they might go for (e.g. don't pick 5 train games for a mixed group where a disproportionate number don't like train games). Given enough time, everyone will get to define the cohort once.