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A Reflection


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Originally Posted By: Dantius
Originally Posted By: Nikki
It's all about the train stations


Yes. And the utilities, useless as they may seem, have massive revenues. You know the card that says "advance to the nearest utility and pay owner ten times what he is owed"? Well, if he rolled a 12, times 10 for owning both, times 10 for the card, means you earned 1200 dollars on a property that cost you 300, the largest single profit margin in the game.


Actually, the card says:

Quote:
ADVANCE TOKEN TO NEAREST UTILITY

IF UNOWNED you may buy it from the Bank.

IF OWNED, throw dice and pay owner a total ten times the amount thrown.

That isn't multiplied by the normal amount payed when landing on it, so you would never have to pay more than 120 dollars.
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Hahaha, that reminds me of my brother, changing rules in the middle of play. I beat him for the first time a while back, and he hasn't played with me since. He says he didn't lose, he just didn't want to play since all the other people were out. I think my massive advantage and the fact he almost went bankrupt every turn dictates my victory!

 

Originally Posted By: Excalibur
Illinois Ave. is actually the most landed on space in the game. Someone took the time to find this out by running a computer simulation.

 

Also, it's often better not to buy hotels in the first place. When you build a hotel, you throw four houses back into the bank that your opponent can use against you.

 

Yes, I remember the Illinois part. And we always, or at least usually, play with unlimited building. At least I did back with the oldschool computer game. We had our own set of family rules. $500 to start in free parking, and a bunch of things go into it. Transactions from jail. Passing on property (rather than just buy or auction).

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How often will players get that card after rolling a seven or higher, earning you back the money you put in? It's only a 7/12 chance that they'll roll enough to pay you 700, and the card won't come up that often. It looks like a mediocre investment to me.

 

—Alorael, who from this concludes that Monopoly is not, in fact, a better game than he remembers.

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Our set of made up rules includes more starting money and intrest. Every time you pass go you can put any amount of money in a prented safe then when you pass go you will receive 10% intrest. Of course you have to be careful not go go brankrupt by putting every dollar in the intrest box.

 

I like the boat the best. Although the hat is good as it is the only peice that can't fall over.

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Scrabble. I judge them thus based on their ability, and tendency, to foster strife and end in tears. Scrabble takes the cake because no matter how you deal with timing, somebody ends up getting frustrated.

 

Life is admittedly pretty bad. Candyland is just War with pictures, but at least that was educational for me -- I was a very excited four-year-old when I discovered I could stack the deck with the lollipop (or whatever that last candy symbol was).

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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
...
So who here plays real boardgames?


Man, that list includes crokinole! Crokinole is great!

It's totally the game you would have invented when you were a little kid, if you weren't as incompetent as little kids are. You flick wooden checkers around a wooden board with your fingers, trying to make your checkers hit the other guy's checkers off the board and then stop as close to the center of the board as possible. And there's a ring of pegs as obstacles.

With practice it is totally possible to slam a checker in between the pegs, blast two enemy pieces into the wall, and settle smoothly into the 20-point pit in the very middle. And the Snap! as those checkers hit the edge of the board ... sounds like victory.

Life: Yes, there's a lame board game that has nothing to do with John Conway's 2D cellular automaton. Conway's life can be done with checkers, too, but it's tedious.
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Originally Posted By: Arancaytrus
Quote:
The Game of Life


That's a board game now?

Code:
 X XXX  X
We'll give you some slack because you're from Germany, where they actually make decent board games. In the States and neighbouring countries, board games are rather different.

The Game of Life is a half-century old game where you live out the American Dream. The point of the game is to retire with the most money. Each turn you spin a wheel and move between one and ten spaces. Then you pass control to the player on your left. Sounds boring and devoid of choice, right? Wrong! In fact, it's a very intricate game - you will be making one choice! At the beginning, you have to decide whether to go to college, or immediately enter the workforce. This makes sense, because this is the only significant choice people make in their lifetimes. In fact, you don't even get a choice when (or if) you get married. At some point after college, your car token (everyone uses automobiles in The Game of Life) will pass by a miniature church. At this point, you must stop and get married. You will do so by placing a peg representing someone of a different sex into the car with you. After this, you will continue 'playing' the game, landing on squares that tell you to do everyday things like buying a sailboat.

Yeah.

Even strategy-devoid games like Candyland or Tic-Tac-Toe have their (small) purposes. Candyland teaches kids how to count, and since it's random, it will teach them how to win or lose graciously (if you're Slarty, it'll also teach you how to cheat). Tic-Tac-Toe teaches kids how to plan ahead, and how to solve games. But The Game of Life combines the Ameritrash tradition of upholding randomness over strategy with a horrible message. And it's bloody long. Apparently the newer versions are better, but I'm not going to find out.

--

Slarty: Word games like Scrabble and Boogle are among the few 'traditional' games I enjoy playing. I agree, it goes poorly when you're playing with people of varying ages and skill levels. On the other hand, every game goes horribly when you play with varying ages and skill levels.
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I like Scrabble a lot, and I like Upwords too (except when you end up using only one tile in a turn). I also want to play them in French sometime, though the letter tiles would be worth a different number of points (i.e. French has a whole lot more "q"s than English does, so a "q" is worth less points in the French version of Scrabble)

 

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
Candyland teaches kids how to count, and since it's random, it will teach them how to win or lose graciously (if you're Slarty, it'll also teach you how to cheat).

I don't know, I think pretty much every little kid will learn to cheat at Candyland. At least my siblings and I all did.

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I have never played and had no idea what this Candyland was until I wikipediad it. All I can say is that if it's a "cultural icon in the United States", I've vastly over-estimated you all.

 

Edit: In semi-related news, I just discovered that the hungry hungry hippos have names. I had no idea.

 

 

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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
Slarty: Word games like Scrabble and Boogle are among the few 'traditional' games I enjoy playing. I agree, it goes poorly when you're playing with people of varying ages and skill levels. On the other hand, every game goes horribly when you play with varying ages and skill levels.

I love Boggle, although I know very few people who I can play without the differing skill levels being an issue. That isn't the problem I have with Scrabble, though. The problem is that when it's your turn you want to take a while to find words and when it's somebody else's turn you want them to play quickly. So a smooth game of Scrabble requires not just comparable levels of verbal ability, but comparable and adequate levels of patience (for the untimed version) or pragmatism (for the timed version).
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Originally Posted By: To Activate is Hazy and Unread
Scrabble. I judge them thus based on their ability, and tendency, to foster strife and end in tears. Scrabble takes the cake because no matter how you deal with timing, somebody ends up getting frustrated.


Counterpoint: Diplomacy.
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I play risk on the computer, with Sillysoft's Lux Deluxe. Computer simulation makes the dice rolls of a hundred armies attacking a hundred armies go much faster. Not to mention the multitude of maps. And there is more to it than chance, although chance does play a big role. I always restart the game when my dozen armies are all crushed by the single defending one.

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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
Word games like Scrabble and Boogle are among the few 'traditional' games I enjoy playing.
Scrabble can be a lot of fun if you have a large vocabulary. I don't play it much, though; no matter who I play against, we end up getting stuck using 3-letter words.

Boggle is a lot more interesting when there's no timer, as you have more time to find longer and more obscure words.

Originally Posted By: w-dueck
I used to be really good at monopoly, but then the housing bubble burst.
I guess you shouldn't have been playing with real houses. tongue
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Originally Posted By: To Activate is Hazy and Unread
So a smooth game of Scrabble requires not just comparable levels of verbal ability, but comparable and adequate levels of patience (for the untimed version) or pragmatism (for the timed version).


Or good conversation, so that you can basically sideline the active player and continue discussing a topic much more interesting than if "pogue" is a valid Scrabble word.
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Originally Posted By: Thuryl
Counterpoint: Diplomacy.

Yes, good point. I _also_ hate Diplomacy (you should have seen my reaction when *i first told me he was thinking about a DL Hunt / Diplomacy hybrid). And if Diplomacy enjoyed the same general currency that Scrabble and Monopoly do, no doubt it would rank as worse. Its relatively isolated appearance buffers it from those titles, I think.
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Risk also suffers from long turns that give most players little or no influence on the game. I've found Small World to be a wonderful substitute that downplays randomness, increases diplomacy, and can lead to epic battles of commando elves vs. alchemist skeletons.

 

—Alorael, who went through the list of the top 100 games and found that he has only played about half of the ones he recognized, and that he does not, in fact, even recognize the vast majority of them.

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I've played 22 of those, and heard of another nine. (Although listing multiple versions of the same game confused me a bit and I don't think I was totally consistent about what I did with those). There are probably 5-6 I like a lot, and another 10-15 I'd happily play.

 

I don't mind word games, except when playing them against people who have memorised lists of obscure scrabble-legal words, so they can make some move that gets "ka" and "arb" or whatever, without even knowing what they mean.

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Anyone ever played Titan? That was an obscure classic, stupid in many ways but somehow addictive, largely because the look of the board and the unit counters not only fit the style of the game perfectly, they actually helped determine the style of the game. The colors were dark and glossy, the outlines simple and grim. They put you in the mood to really enjoy a game that, with less complementary artwork, would have been good but not so compelling.

 

Titan was a game where you formed stacked armies of different mythical creatures, recruiting fresh ones by entering particular types of terrain with armies that already contained particular numbers of particular creatures. There were several different 'tech trees' of creature, so in the course of the game a player who successfully pursued the 'jungle' tree would go from Gargoyles through Cyclopes and Behemoths to monstrous Serpents, while a player who could bring two Trolls into the mountains could begin working up toward the Colossus. So the army-building aspect of the game gave a lot of options and interesting goals.

 

But it also had a lot of randomness, because the game board was this sort of web of multicolored tri-hexes, you rolled one d6 to get the distance all your armies would move that turn, and they all had to move full or nothing. And the rules for moving between hexes were so strict that, depending on where it started, a unit never had more than three choices of where to land, and often had only one. It tended to take a lot of patience, wasting turns sitting still, to get into the mountains; there was a strong tendency for any army to end up slogging through the jungles around the board perimeter. There was no conquering of territory; your armies just moved around the board, recruiting units, splitting when they got too big, and chasing or fleeing each other.

 

When two armies met, they would move to a separate tactical map, and slug it out by rolling enormous handfuls of dice. A single Serpent used 18 attack dice, while a Centaur only got three; and the number of dice was also the unit's hit point score. But units could have three different skill levels, and a Serpent would need a 6 to get a hit on a Centaur, while a Centaur would score with 4 or better. Obviously this still leaves the Centaur getting crushed by the Serpent — it's a bottom tier creature against a top — but it might survive a round, and it would probably wound the Serpent a bit before it died.

 

Titan strategy, moving on the main board and building up armies, was kind of like baseball strategy, a long-term game of percentages; but Titan tactics were great. With all those dice, the luck element in combat was actually suppressed a fair amount just by the law of averages, but a lucky roll at the right time could still change the game.

 

Titan's actual game elements worked together well enough to make it a good boardgame; movement on the main board was a kind of awkward dance, but it was tolerable, and it moved fairly quickly because a player never had many options at a time. Also the other players had a keen interest in watching the moving player, because keeping track of what he recruited where was their only way to know what was in his armies, before fighting them. And the tactical battles were short and lively, and fun to watch as well as fight. But it was still the game's style that lifted it to an addictive classic. Too bad a many-player game could last many hours.

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Titan sounds fun, though complicated. The mention of tons of dice reminds me of my Magic: the Gathering games.

Having looked through some google images of it, it actually seems quite fascinating. To investigate.

 

Scrabble is an immensely fun game. I don't know what you have against it wink Whether you whip out your 8 letter 9x score words, or come up with a two letter monosyllabic pair of vowels, and then point it out in the Official Scrabble Dictionary (a pile of weird words), you're in for a fun time. Anyone want to share highs scores? ( I once got 200~ points for one word).

 

Another fun board game is... chess.

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I know some people use percentiles to keep track of their life total and d6s for counters.

 

What my group uses is poker chips for life totals and counters (white for +1/+1, black for -1/-1), and regular playing cards as tokens. This can get confusing at times, though.

 

"Okay, so for me, spades and clubs are Saprolings while hearts and diamonds are Goblins. But for you, spades and clubs are Wolves while hearts and diamonds are Elementals, correct?"

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Originally Posted By: JadeWolf
Whether you whip out your 8 letter 9x score words, or come up with a two letter monosyllabic pair of vowels, and then point it out in the Official Scrabble Dictionary (a pile of weird words), you're in for a fun time. Anyone want to share highs scores?

I think the most I've ever scored in one game is ~400 points. I've got 80 points in one turn before, and I find it pretty amazing that you could actually get 200.

Yeah, scrabble dictionaries have some pretty weird words. I think mine has a lot of Native American words in it.
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Originally Posted By: Pansupticon Ply
Originally Posted By: JadeWolf
The mention of tons of dice reminds me of my Magic: the Gathering games.

Magic doesn't use dice.

Magic very, very occasionally uses dice. Rolling buckets of them reminds me more of some roleplaying games, though.

—Alorael, who wonders which game has the highest number of dice rolled out of any roll with an actual hard or soft cap. He's definitely seen thirty dice hurled at a table with great glee.
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I just tried Uckers, a bizarre variant of Ludo/Parcheesi that is actually quite entertaining. It uses two dice instead of one, and any time you roll a six you get to roll again, without any limit on the total number of rolls. And you're allowed to stack your own pieces into 'blobs' that are barriers to your opponent. Since even a player who is far behind can suddenly roll a lot of sixes in a row and storm back, the game can change abruptly.

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Monopoly and Risk are two of my favorite games, but I rarely get to play them; everyone I know, while sharing my love for the games, says that they take too long. My brother devised a plan for a shortened version, that, while being mind-numbingly simple, actually works quite well. The only change to the rules is that you're not allowed to mortgage properties. That way, when you land on a hotel on Boardwalk, you're pretty much finished.

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Originally Posted By: Sun and Shadow and Rain
Originally Posted By: Pansupticon Ply
Originally Posted By: JadeWolf
The mention of tons of dice reminds me of my Magic: the Gathering games.

Magic doesn't use dice.

Magic very, very occasionally uses dice.

As far as I am aware, Magic has never used dice -- with the sole exception of some Unglued cards, which are not part of the regular game at all (and have never been legal in any tournament format).

There are versions of Scrabble that have alternate board layouts, but it would be silly to say "Scrabble uses multiple board layouts."
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But it would be perfectly reasonable to say "Scrabble very, very occasionally uses multiple board layouts," now, wouldn't it?

 

—Alorael, who finds that still a bit misleading. Scrabble very, very occasionally uses different board layouts. He's not sure anyone has played with multiple concurrent but different boards.

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I use dice for Saproling and Elf tokens. Seeing as my previous deck was a Doubling Season / Supply//Demand basic combo, I ended up with tonnes of dice. In one game, I had one dice representing 10 saprolings. With 15 dice.

 

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
I know some people use percentiles to keep track of their life total and d6s for counters.

 

What my group uses is poker chips for life totals and counters (white for +1/+1, black for -1/-1), and regular playing cards as tokens. This can get confusing at times, though.

 

"Okay, so for me, spades and clubs are Saprolings while hearts and diamonds are Goblins. But for you, spades and clubs are Wolves while hearts and diamonds are Elementals, correct?"

 

We just write down on a bit of paper the current life totals of our cards ^^, and when the supply handy objects becomes deficient, use the same for tokens.

A lot of people I know use 20-side dice to keep track of their life totals. I personally find this silly, when a card like Stream of Life can get you tons of life. Seeing them twiddle their dice with numbers illegible from use for ages at the end of each turn is annoying.

 

@Excalibur I forget exactly what word it was, but it started with 'qu', had eight letters (one was already on the board), was connected to two other quite long words (it added letters to the end of them, but they were still valid words). It was more luck than skill, really.

 

EDIT: I believe it was "quixotic"

 

 

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