Podcast 125 - fiddle factor and engagement

BGA chat varies a lot with the game - may be nothing but a “gg” at the end, may get quite talkative, but in my experience at least it’s almost always complimentary - “nice move”, “ouch I didn’t see that coming”, “that’s why I prefer to play with this multiplier mode turned off”, etc.

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Really? You’ve not seen Rahdo go to town on Journeys in Middle Earth, Mansions of Madness, Eldritch Horror, Imperial Settlers? He ain’t fond of games with roll to resolve, take that, pick up and deliver… more a straight Euro guy. Which is why his endorsement of Etherfields was worth noticing.

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This was exactly my complaint with Tainted Grail; you’d have to spend 10-30 minutes figuring out a way to do something with your cards, and then? The actual result comes down to a coin toss. Literally flipping a blasted coin. Not even a real coin, but those shonky plastic dials that feel like crap to throw, and have one side obviously heavier than the other :thinking: Sometimes there wouldn’t be a coin toss, but the randomness of card draws meant you could still be absolutely wasting your time.

Would have been much happier if they’d just had you with chucking some dice and calling it good, cause at least things happen then.

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Ah, well, that’s a slightly different peeve (don’t worry, I have plenty). The canonical game for this for me was London Dread: it’s a coop, in which you do a series of small tasks in order to build up a store of dice for the big endgame battle. At some point you say “OK, we now have enough dice, let’s end it”. But it’s always going to come down to a roll of the dice in the end.

Oddly I don’t mind this anything like as much in Black Orchestra.

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Sorry, I meant to answer this earlier - I stopped watching Rahdo fairly quickly and I haven’t seen those reviews. The ones I did see were all very enthusiastic.

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Yeah, I watched a bit of Rahdo at some point, so see what the gameplay of some games would be like. Even for games he decided he would not be keeping, he always made whatever he was showing off sound like a great game. Just tons of enthusiasm for every game I saw him go through (and plenty of rules errors, but at least he tries to tag all of those).

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I enjoy Black Orchestra too even though it is precisely this … I think the desperation of the last roll of the dice fits with the desperation of the theme.

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The triple enthusiasm of Ava, Radho and Tom Vasel about Le Havre is making me strongly considering it as my first purchase of 2021.

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Zee’s target reviews don’t work for me either - I very much respect his opinion of a game, but I need to dig to find the general comment he spends only 20 seconds giving instead of the rest of it.

I really like Ava. I listened to recent podcasts and was impressed with their in-depth knowledge of games, and a lot of their comments are exactly what I wanted to know.

And I still find Rahdo useful, especially by paying attention to anything he says that’s mildly negative and interpreting it to how bad it would be for a normal reviewer :slight_smile: I’m a total care-bear too, so it’s nice that he highlights big take-that in games.

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I’m not sure I’m a fan of this new conversation format with complex games. Maybe they’ll ease into it better but I couldn’t tell you what hallertau was except it’s mechanisms. I get the sense that Tom also struggled because he insisted on a summary but even then neither Quinn’s nor Ava could say what made the game fun in a podcast friendly format.

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I think it’d take a literary genius to review an Uwe game without it sounding like a collection of mechanics! They all may have settings, but describing the themes never conveys the game very well.

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I thought they did a decent job of conveying the interest of Feast for Odin - this kind of slow tetris game where you choose to do the puzzle you fancy to fill out your area and you choose how you work to get your pieces.

That’s parseable I think without spending ages on mechanics.

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If in doubt, there’s always “whoops, misery farming, but fun”.

(which only really works if you sing it to the tune of “eye-tiddly-eye-tie, brown bread”, which naturally I would encourage at all times)

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With regards to fiddle, I agree with the distinction between fiddle through the gameplay, which I tend to be OK with, and then there is book-keeping, or tedious set-ups.

Much as I love Raiders of the North Sea, I love how the Steam app does the math and setting up for you. I do not find getting the raiding targets filled up with tokens very amusing. But then a game like Village, where you have a similar mechanic repeated several times, because it is in-game and you are all watching to see where will you plan to move next, I don’t mind it at all.

Also there is book-keeping like the final VP counts that, with the expectation of where everybody will end, I have no problem with. But some games suffer from the video-game complexity syndrome. Games like Gloomhaven, where set up after set up of new scenarios (specially if you have failed them adn you are having another go) it can be very off-putting, there is the fiddle of the city stage, where city event cards and road cards kind of pull in some decision making and narrative to spice things up, otherwise that would be a very dull phase of the game.

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I once stood in my FLGS and told one of the guys who works there what I had grasped from a video play through of Hallertau and his comment was “Huh? I think now I want to play the game.”

In any case I found myself agreeing a lot of what was said about the other games on the podcast. Caveat: I only watched people play Glassroad once, and my few app games of Le Havre (there is an app!) were years ago. My one disagreement: I never thought of Bohnanza as particularly ugly. Just look at other “local favorites” like “6 nimmt” and “Rage”

If I had to rank my four big Uwe games by how much I want to play them right now, I’d go Hallertau, Nusfjord, Odin, Arler Erde. There’s a certain “newness” to Hallertau obviously so maybe it won’t stay that way. The card decks in Hallertau are very good but so are the Nusfjord decks. If I rank them by how much I want to go through convincing people to play and teaching them I would go: Hallertau, Bohnanza. (btw Bohnanza has a decent 2 player game called Bohnanza Duel).

I once opened the TTS mod of Nusfjord and before I had said 5 sentences 2 people said: “Nope. Not tonight.” And we ended up playing Wingspan.

The fiddle factor of Hallertau is decidedly less than any of the other games and the central action board is much clearer than both Odin and Arler Erde and even Nusfjord.

My take away from the podcast was that I need to revisit Le Havre (I also heard Tom Vasel go on about how much he loves this game, he also said that Hallertau was developed from Le Havre) and that I missed out on something by not sitting down at SPIEL to play Glassroad. But there’s that new edition coming… so maybe I need yet another Uwe. And it’s probably a shame that I only ever played any of the small polyominoes games as app.

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