I have a Carcassonne shirt. Strictly speaking it has nothing to do with the game, but it was given to me for that reason : )
This caused me to spend several minutes searching online for the inevitable Beatles/Boardgame cross-over t-shirt design, and to get progressively more perplexed that not only was I not immediately finding such an image (as I’d expected), but that I wasn’t finding anything at all along these lines. I refuse to believe that no one has done this, though.
My only game -ish T-Shirt says “I don’t get old, I level up” with an EXP bar underneath nearly full…
But I would wear a Ticket to ride t-shirt if I found one. One of our game group fellas has a Merchants and Marauders one, really worn off.
The description for Amabel Holland’s Nicaea sold me. It’s pretty accurate
It’s the year 325 and it’s a pretty chill time to be a Christian.
Not only has it been a hot minute since they were forced to renounce their faith on pain of death, but the emperor Constantine has really leaned into it, hoping it will unite the often fractured Roman Empire. So, the big guy isn’t super-thrilled when bishops immediately get into nit-picky, esoteric arguments that John Quintus Romanus doesn’t give two flips about. He demands that the bishops gather together in the city of Nicaea to come to an accord. He doesn’t really care what these nerds decide, so long as they decide something.
This gathering is given irreverent treatment by Amabel Holland in this game for four, five, or six players. Like Constantine, it treats the theological positions argued at the first ecumenical council as fungible. Whether a position ends up accepted orthodoxy or damnable heresy has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with politics - with personal ambition, petty rivalries, and social dynamics. This is a sort of shared incentives game, in which each player commits to one of two sides in various theological disputes; guess which one the majority will go with and you’ll score points. Score the most points, and you’ll win the game.
Unless the player with the fewest points has accumulated the most political influence. That player is powerful enough to splinter the church, provoking a schism and stealing the win. To prevent this, you’ll need to make sure that someone that powerful isn’t left out in the cold during the final settlement.
At once a slick tableau-building game and a study in emergent alliances, Nicaea gives a rude but affectionate raspberry to what was perhaps the most pivotal event in the history of the early church.
i’d be all over this if I could get 3 or more players round the way.
That looks hilarious 
My immediate family are quite religious (I, on the other hand, am a backslidden heretic) but given the number of jokes my parents have told me about church politics, I think they might like the theme too…
If you buy it me and my wife will come and play it
Spacebiff reviewed it a while ago: Nicaea, Now I Don’t | SPACE-BIFF!
It does sound interesting.
I just realized that I missed the first birthday of my Great Zimbabwe pre-order.
I emailed the shop I ordered it from yesterday for an update, and apparently my copy is still in Splotter’s warehouse. Given the size of Splotter, I’m choosing to believe that means it’s in one of the designers’ garage
Damn, this looks cool.
And from the description on its BGG page, it seems like a pretty weird/inventive game.
I was worried it was a campaign/legacy game, which I generally have no interest in, but it seems like it’s more akin to Magic Maze, where there are various setups that add in more rules and you can replay whatever setup you prefer.
It’s on BGA I believe. Many people who aren’t me like it quite a lot. 
I can’t see it on there 
Ah, sorry, thought you were talking about Trek 12 from the name.
Ah, silly Twitter display name making things confusing.
I don’t think it’s legacy but a game that adds mods sequentially.
There was a thread on BGG recently asking about what the “Shift” system in Mind MGMT actually represented. This was made tricky by the fact that the explicit details are firmly within spoiler territory, but it also exposed something: we need a good term for modular expansions that don’t fall into “legacy” or “campaign” groups. It’s amazing how a paradigm can really pigeonhole one’s imagination.
I’m a little surprised it’s hard to describe. I haven’t played the game but i thought it just related to buffs/enhancements given to a loser of a game.
The crux of the challenge seems directly related to the OP not being able to wrap his head around the idea of a sequentially revealed set of game-changing elements at set times which change the game. It feels like they’re stuck in a rigid definition. There are plenty of non-legacy, non-campaign games which nonetheless offer a sort of evolving gameplay loop by this point, but in the case I’ve mentioned, they received several bespoke “definitions” and can’t seem to get over that Legacy hump.
Couldn’t resist a peek at one of the “bad places” and saw that HeroQuest is available for preorder for Januar '22… really cheap, too: 115€
Luckily, that particular game is not my Achilles Heel.
I quickly closed the tab again. I am probably telling my partner about it 
And remind him that Frosthaven is going to ship one day…
I have fond memories of Hero Quest, but not to the degree that I’d pay that much money for it. It’s still just a roll and move dungeon crawler. There’s much better available today. And it was a lazy reissue, it sounds like. They didn’t even fix the quests by incorporating the errata, from what I’ve read on BGG.