In all seriousness, it’s difficult to explain the chilling horror of the words “Bus replacement service” in the UK. Urgh, it feels dangerous just typing it.
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It’s the most loathesome term. You’ve already made the decision to not bus. Yet you are making me bus.
It’s like “escargot replacement service” I already chose chips why do I have to eat snails.
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Missed opportunity to use the phrase “snail replacement service” to refer to the the British rail network 
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From a different perspective, I don’t think that creating a big decision space with simple rules is intrinsically an achievement. It’s not that hard to do. The hard part is doing that while keeping players engaged. The issue I have with Hansa Teutonica (and similar games) is that creating such an enormous potential decision space makes it a bit of a chore to play for me. That might seem quite harsh, but I do mean it literally. When you have a huge number of options on each turn (with the number of outcomes rising exponentially as you play), playing well means doing an awful lot of prediction and calculation. To some people that’s a satisfying puzzle, but to me the balance has been tipped from puzzle to work. Yes, I could put an awful lot of effort in, but my reward for all that effort will be having more points than my opponent. No big shared experience, no interesting story emerging from the gameplay, just points. So while it may not be a criticism for some, it certainly was in line with the negative experience I had of HT.
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I wonder whether part of the success of Terraforming Mars is the way the card draw each turn forces a restricted set of choices and generates different stories in a Euro context.
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I’m sure it is. I mean, I like hand management, random draw, and the restricted choices that cards provide. I just think TfM is too limiting. I prefer the hand management in TS, for example, or Mage Knight, Innovation, etc.
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That’s why I kind of enjoy low-level Go, but once I’m up against competent opposition, it sometimes does feel like work. I recognize this is mostly a self-inflicted problem, but I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to find the optimal move (even knowing I’m not remotely capable of doing so!)
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I strongly agree. I guess there is a charm on introducing busywork without adding decisions. Creating duplications without increasing depth. Youre doing something alright. Pulling levers, pushing buttons, without the mental workload.
The ameoba card was a good example to this. Its action is to add an ameoba on the card. You score points with those. So theres no decisions on whether you should add an ameoba or not, as theres no restrictions on taking actions or how many. Theres no decision on whether you should build the card or not (cards are always worth their price). So, adding ameobas is a thing you HAVE to do every round. Then, extrapolate that on a lot of things in TfM, suddenly, you have a game that appeals to thematic gamers with its evocative theme and Euro gamers who likes to do their Cube Accounting.
Decisions? I only work here, mate. Ask Mr. Musk upstairs.
EDIT: Just a disclaimer: my point is that depth of decision making isnt the only metric of fun. As someone who plays with trains, I have zero credibility on telling people that theyre doing the hobby the wrong way.
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I would kindly disagree and say you should try designing one. It’s not that simple.
In hindsight, it seems to be inevitable that Euro game design, that originally all about accessible rules (to contrast themselves against consims and thematic games), are on an arms race to make Euro games more and more complex. Because it’s easier to design that way. It’s easier to add depth by increasing complexity.
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Technically, the value of amoeba changes depending on how early you can build it. There is a decision on whether to build it or not based on that, and also on synergy. I agree with your general point, I just think over-stating it in this way isn’t accurate.
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We used to do it as an exercise for maths. It’s remarkably easy to create a big decision space. An empty board and a handful of weighted interactions and your options are immediately enormous. Were those games fun or engaging? Hell no, but they had a big decision space. The point is that it’s not intrinsically an achievement to do so. The achievement is making it engaging - that’s REALLY difficult, and HT seems to achieve that with a lot of players.
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Ah. I see your point now.
But I don’t like your assumption that “engaging” is something that can be achieved in general. If you set a goal to make a game engaging to you, then great. How do you design a game that is engaging full stop?
Name any game and I can find someone who will say “Yes” and another to say “No” on this question.
I mean, I don’t make that assumption. I would never expect a game to be engaging to everyone. As I said, HT seems to engage a lot of players based on the opinions I see/hear, but it’s not engaging personally to me.
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Is the other thing with Hansa is that to recommend it you really need to know there are two other people who will “get it” and it’s appeal is fairly niche?
It feels like a game thats worth a punt given it’s the same price as Kickstarter postage.
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BGG has it ranked at 137 overall, so I think it’s pretty safe to say the appeal is more than just niche. I’ve introduced it to numerous strangers at my local convention, and had no shortage of positive reactions to it, and I can’t recall anyone actually saying they hadn’t liked the game (which isn’t to say that there weren’t any keeping silent about that, but I feel they would be a minority if they were).
For sure; I wasn’t trying to suggest that a big decision space was the only goal : )
Yep, the only reason I could see them not recommending (considering how much Matt & Quinns like it) is that you need a minimum of 3 players. Maybe they don’t want to do that during Covid because a lot of people can’t play it?
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I wouldn’t ever use BGG rankings as an indication of a game not being niche. They’re based on a tiny subset of a small subset of people who play board games (people who not only care enough to use BGG, but also care enough to rank their games).
Dobble is Asmodee’s bestselling game* and it ranks at 1,112 overall.
*May not be true. I’m going off Quinns saying it once on a podcast or something.
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Can’t confirm that, but when I was talking with the pre-purchase Leisure Games Esdevium demo people, they said that the vast majority of what they did was Dobble demos in random shops in the middle of nowhere.
(edit for horrible memory)
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Maybe not, but the BGG search can tell you some interesting things. For instance, there are 12 games that have more than 10,000 ratings, but an average score under 6. I bet most of us have played at least six of them and still play some of them. These are popular and distinctly non-niche. There are 4 games with over 80,000 ratings, all of which are in the top 400. These are popular and good, but not very niche. There’s one game (not a special edition) that is over 10 years old and has an average rating over 8.5 with at least 100 ratings. Now that’s properly niche. 1817 | Board Game | BoardGameGeek
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