#172: Metarules/Parateach

Boardgames So Very Wrong About Games
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2021-06-08T10:00:16Z

If Walker doesn’t want Mark to speak to excess, he really shouldn’t be teeing him up by asking about Macross. Or Robotech either, because the difference thereto is a whole discussion unto itself. Of course, Walker is an accomplished troll, willing to return to any subject once raised. Mark has repeatedly been exhorted to not feed trolls, but really, that’s just blaming the victim. At this point it’s mostly just mutual trolling, like an ouroboros of nonsense.
I think SVWAG might have a new tagline.

01:39 AYRUIS: Rurik: Dawn of Kiev (Stan Kordonskiy, PieceKeeper Games, 2019)

Games Played Last Week:
03:46 -51st State: Master Set–Moloch (Joanna Kijanka, Portal Games, 2021)
08:13 -Gaia Project (Jens Drögemüller & Helge Ostertag, Feuerland Spiele, 2017)
10:38 -Beyond the Sun (Dennis K. Chan, Rio Grande Games, 2020)
12:17 -Great Western Trail (Alexander Pfister, eggertspiele, 2016)
13:20 -No Thanks! (Thorsten Gimmler, AMIGO, 2004)
17:27 -Aquatica: Cold Waters (Ivan Tuzovsky, Arcane Wonders, 2020)
20:42 -The Initiative (Corey Konieczka, Unexpected Games, 2021)
22:46 -Good Puppers (Chris Cieslik, Asmadi Games, 2021)
24:41 -Lost Ruins of Arnak (Elwen & Mín, CGE, 2020)
25:57 -Unmatched: Cobble & Fog (Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Chris Leder, & Kevin Rodgers, Restoration Games, 2020)
30:51 -Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile (Cole Wehrle, Leder Games, 2021)

News (and why it doesn’t matter):
33:40 New Nemesis stuff
33:47 Robotech: Reconstruction
34:45 Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe
35:04 Matt Calkins’ Charioteer
35:54 David Turczi and Nigel Buckle’s Imperium: Classics and Legends
37:02 Mantic’s Rainbow Six
37:29 SVWAG heads West, brief interruption in July

38:29 Topic: Metarules/Parateach: All the non-rules stuff you tell people when teaching or selling a game.

1:07:10 SVWAG Presents: Masterpiece Theatre

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Great Western Trail is coming to BGA. Awesome

According to this, it’s pre-Alpha at the moment. I don’t have alpha privilege but will be on the lookout for the beta

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Mad lads! They are committing on reviewing the whole series!

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Which whole series? I think it may have been a little late when I listened to this and I may have been a bit tired.

I find the whole meta thing quite interesting.
I often struggle to “pitch” games to my friends… like just now I am trying to sell them on Arnak. If I say anything about “worker placement” or “deck building” … they’re not going to want to play (I blame Agricola for the first and M:tG for ruining the word “deck”–or maybe coining it in the first place?) So instead I went all-in on the Indiana Jones archaeology vibe :wink:

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It depends on the people. The more experienced the gamer, the more I’m likely to talk about mechanics. (E.g. if I were to pitch Terminator Dark Fate to anyone likely to be reading this I’d say “there’s a lot of standard deckbuilder about it, but it does this interesting thing”.)

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The Fast and the Furious series with Sir Vincent Diesel Esq. OBE.

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These two have a larger game collection than I do… I actually led with “SdJ nominated” …
One half of the couple plays Pax Pamir with me while the other half, was scared away by Beyond the Sun recently after my explanation threatened to last longer than a few minutes but would have no trouble wiping me off the board in Terra Mystica or Terraforming Mars. There are hardcore gamers among my friends who would never ever think of themselves as such.

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I totally agree with Mike Mark where I also stopped recommending games. But I still go for “I know you like spatial games, so I think you might like this one”. I dont do 1 to 1 comparison with games.

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Recommending games, unless they are basic, seems like a fools errand to me. There’s so much that can go wrong in light of the investment required that it’s mostly going to fail. Furthermore I think we’ve got to a point where people think mechanisms are a reasonable language to describe a game but I think it’s so far off the mark it’s ridiculous. Mechanisms so rarely convey the actual feeling and strategy of of game.

Take something like merchants cove which hangs its hat on mechanisms but by the sounds of it forgets to do anything interesting other than diluting good games into Diet Coke games. Maybe there’s an instance where the mechanism can convey the shorthand for a feeling (eg drafting is not about choosing cards but more about making the best of an increasingly dreadful lot, worker placement may be implicitly about replicating the feeling of praying something you need doesn’t get sold out) but it creates quite a insular language to talk about games imo.

I’d recommend my City because not because it’s a tetris type game - for one the challenge of tetris is completely different - in tetris you get to forget about too many long term or permanent consequences - even though they are superficially very similar.

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