My wife started working with me yesterday, hence the lunchtime gaming.
Have played Azul, Race for the Galaxy and Innovation on BGA the last two days. Today we brought Turing Machine to work as well and did the puzzle of the day together.
Also, have been utterly schooled by @Acacia at Thurn & Taxis. First game seemed easier when I didn’t really know what I was doing. Second game, I went in with a plan, found it much harder and did much worse. The BGA tutorial (aided by an excellent and patient teacher) makes it very playable.
Oh, lord do I know the pain. I was very excited to have a game day to celebrate my graduation and had several games laid out to introduce to my group (Keyflower, Hansa Teutonica, Troyes). In the span of 8 HOURS there was a 1-lap round of Rallyman and a game of Isle of Skye that happened. EIGHT HOURS!!!
This has gotten worse and worse over the past year or so when playing with my group. It’s one of the reasons I’ve shifted so much to BGA and solo-oriented games for heavier stuff. At least I can get a couple games in with my partner and stepdaughter when we’re playing lighter games in the space of an evening. I’ve been desperate to play Hansa since I picked it up and really want to play Keyflower physically.
There are some meetups for gaming in my area, but my taste in games is very different unfortunately.
Still loving Thurn & Taxis - I’m only one step further down (up?) the learning curve but that’s enough to drive score discrepancies. All to say, come on in, the water’s fine!
Couple of games to round the year out: Barenpark: Still great, only at four players
The Crew: I’m still cursed with inconsistent tables. Every time I’ve tried this half the party has loved it and wanted more and the other half has said “I’m done.” I think it’s the trick taking - those who know the general layout really engage with the puzzle. Those who don’t, who aren’t thinking in terms of suit length, voids, and counting cards, feel lost and like there’s a lot of pressure on them to not screw up.
Same with Fox in the Forest - I think it’s a genius game for anyone who’s sworn off trick-taking due to too much play and finding the formula rote and deterministic. Anyone who hasn’t already scraped the barrel dry is liable to miss all the hooks in the puzzle, though, and find it bland.
Silver: This was a hit. The first teach, as usual, is rocky and the rest of the table got a little mixed up about the difference between exchanging cards and discarding cards, as a card goes into the discard pile either way (but different things happen). Were able to sort it out. I’m still on Amulet to let the others get used to the formula - Amulet mostly focuses on managing your own cards. We’ll get to Bullet (messing with each other’s cards) and Coin (organizing a tableau to both win and screw with everyone else at the same time) down the road. This should get some more play!
Formosa Tea: Still a smooth, svelte euro that has yet to disappoint.
Poverty tokens are horrible by endgame, you don’t want to run your town at all (expanding to 4 stacks was a mistaaaaake), and the solo bot is obviously not how the game is meant to be played, but overall it was very enjoyable. Love the artwork and the London Boroughs. Would absolutely not have done so well if I hadn’t bought Westminster early on for additional card draw.
We played the team game, my youngest and I took down my wife and our friend. I thought we wanted the Scots to cruise to victory but looked up at the end and realised my wife had been hoarding their favour! Managed to scrabble Essex to a draw which meant we won on the sets tie break.
I really like this after 2 plays. I’m really into team games currently which helps, but I think it’s better than War of Whispers and much quicker and simpler than Pax Pamir (PP is a better game, but can be a lot, especially on a Wednesday night).
I can put up with a bit of AP every now and then, we all can suffer it, specially on a new game. My last Monday game of Euphoria had a bit of that, where out of the six of us only two had played previously. I had a couple turns where I simply forgot what I was going to do (!) as I had decided a couple of players ahead. That is understandable. We still finished the game in less than three hours including a teach, many turns went really swiftly, so I can live with that
The AP that I hate is when somebody that knows the game inside out takes a good few minutes every turn considering all options, and still wins the game by a landslide. I was discussing this with a friend, and I think the person I have in mind logs their games and scores, and who they played with, which sort of explains the aim to get higher and higher scores. That might be fun for them, but when it is clear that they are many points ahead and they will win the beige heavy euro game, taking a few minutes extra per turn can make the experience a drag for everybody else on that table.
I log my plays and who I play with, but I typically make my moves pretty quickly. Only once in a while am I a bit at a loss for what to do and it takes me a minute to decide what to do. I don’t care about maximizing my scores, I just want to play games. The more a game drags out, the less likely we are to play another!
So yeah, I’m usually the one trying to keep the game moving.
We got caught up in chopping some vegetables and by the time we looked up, it was just too late to learn something as intricate as Bitoku with any real confidence. After reading the rules, it really doesn’t seem so bad, maybe on the level of Great Western Trail, it’s just intimidating and that board is hard to parse with all the colours. Tomorrow or Saturday, though, we’ll absolutely play.
So instead, we played a game of Disney Villainous, with me as Maleficent and Maryse as Jafar. I came close to winning, with three curses set up (and I’d gotten all four out earlier, but I was thwarted), but in the end, I couldn’t stop her getting the lamp in the palace and the Genie was already under hypnosis.
I will rephrase that, then, they log a lot and try to maximize their scores, not number of plays. They definitely are oblivious to anybody else not having much fun…
I get that. I was just trying to convey the idea that not all those who log their plays are people who are trying to break all time scoring records every game.
I log my plays. I never log scores, or who I played with. Mainly because I tend to log way after it happened, normally when I return home from a Games Night or even the day after, and that’s normally as much as I can remember. Which sort of works for me, it doesn’t have to be exact science, but a good indication of what I play and how often.
I feel the pain regarding the long turns, and I also understand how people do that because I used to be quite bad that way myself (albeit not 2.5 hour Azul bad! There are levels…). The games were great for me because my mind was continually engaged in an interesting task, and the rest of the group was too polite to ask me to hurry up and do something; and it’s awfully easy to just assume that if you’re having a grand time then everyone else must be as well.
To my shame, it wasn’t until I had a regular group with someone who took slower turns than me that I understood how much it must have sucked for everyone else in the games when I’d been playing slower than everyone else.
I now recognise the trait as a part of my general mind-set – I always try to do things well the first time, which means that I’ll think things through and consider pros and cons as best I can, before making a decision. I don’t much like to do things on instinct. It’s not that my first attempt at something has to be perfect, but in general I try to follow the best approach I can come up with at the time with the information and experience I have, and it means I’m often slow at doing things generally (but hopefully with better long-term outcomes).
It’s something which is pretty ingrained in how I think, so it’s hard to switch it off for board games; but I do try quite hard not to be that guy nowadays, which mostly means that I’m just aware of the issue now, and if I notice myself taking an unreasonable amount of time I’ll now give up trying to figure it out and just make a move; or make sure I have some nice quick turns to counter-balance a longer one.
I’ll add that I do enjoy winning a game, but I’ve never been remotely bothered by losing (indeed I tend to assume it’s the most likely outcome). Everyone having a good time is far more important to me than winning, which makes it pretty easy to “just make a move” if I realise I should do that. Players with a “win at all costs” mentality would be more of a problem, and I couldn’t guess at how often that’s the case, but it’s certainly not the only reason for people playing slowly.
For those like myself, I think it’s mostly a matter of awareness and consideration. I wish the awareness had come faster, and it probably would have been a really good thing if early on someone had told me bluntly that everyone else at the table was having less fun on my account – but board gamers do tend to be an exceedingly nice bunch of people…
Thanks for posting that. I play with a guy who takes a long time to plan his decisions and you’ve just articulated his mindset. I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t notice that my wife and I disengage from games rather than sharing his experience.
I am more of the „try and try again“ mindset. This also extends beyond games. So rather my normal approach to learning/improving extends to how I play games. In order to think things through I need to see them happening/experience them as I am cooking/programming/playing/…. I am not sure if my general impatience stems from this approach or necessitates it. There are certainly areas in life where an iterative approach is impossible or inadvisable but for learning new stuff and playing games it works out just fine (for me).
It is the polar opposite of how my partner goes about things. And so my not-patience and his careful planning crash at the game table sometimes…
I have only recently (maybe a year ago) realized all of this and that it is the reason some things are really difficult for me to learn and how it drives me nuts when my partner suggests an approach to something new that I am just not able to utilize very well and how I drive him nuts when teaching games by jumping right into the game Things are a little easier now that I have learned this thing about myself.
I wonder how much of the long turns thing may come from being bad at reading the mood of the table. The people I know who do it certainly wouldn’t want to annoy everyone else…
For about 2/3 of that game I’d thought I was coasting to a win; but things had turned south and I had been scrambling to pick up the pieces ever since. I was still hoping to turn it around, but the game was very much hanging in the balance; and with both of the barbarian armies on the board now threatening Rome, I had needed to divert all of my efforts into preventing either one of them from getting there.
My heavily-supported blue emperor was about to crush the army at location IV:6 in a pincer between blue and purple (really green, but I don’t have a small green meeple) after I’d cut the barbarian’s supply line at IV:3; and I’d laid a similar trap (albeit with a much less-certain outcome) for the other barbarian army approaching Rome from the north. However by this point there was only a single black revolt token in the supply, and the chances of rolling the coordinates for an existing revolt were very high… and indeed I rolled location II:4 on the dice, which is already in revolt, meaning a new uprising which spreads to the neighbouring locations (clobbering the yellow and red garrisons) – leaving me two revolt tokens short of the three I needed to place, and therefore ending the game (with control of the empire irreversibly lost).
I’ve now played a couple of the “historical scenarios” as well, and as they make use of some of the optional systems, they’re a nice way to give those a try. Scenario 1 uses the Pirates (which was rather underwhelming as they ended up playing no part in that game), and scenario 2 uses the Goths (who can only enter the map in region III or IV, but will do so even if you had already secured that border – automatically defeating the garrison securing it (or the emperor occupying it) – and fighting at +1 thereafter. Yikes!)
