At this rate, we’ll be back to everything being hex-and-counter, not that I’m complaining…

To be fair, the OG Hitler was also pretty open about his goals.

You can put me down in the meaningless distinction camp. Back in the day, it was a useful designation to separate “American” board games like Sorry, Monopoly, Scrabble, and etc from “European” board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and etc. As a whole, though, the hobby has moved on. Today, it’s more useful to define games in terms of specific mechanics and level of interactivity, with similar games being grouped in genres. A few examples would be trick takers, deck builders, worker placement, auction games, and cube rails, though there are many more.

“Yeah, we can get Age of Steam done in 2 hours.”

The little sub that could!

Yeah, you’re allowed to curse on the internet. Be free! It is bullshit when this happens.

“In further news, strange link between board games and train motifs also explained.”

Hard to find much info on this. Looks like some kind of dice game?

BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/438266/va-mourir-sur-mars

Unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrMlC231JQI

To be honest, if you had access to the equipment that would be a lot more practical way to make this. Get a piece of square bar stock of your chosen metal, cut it into cubes, and then engrave and polish. That said, most people don’t have that kind of stuff just lying around. Maybe if you’ve got access to a makerspace or a shop thru work or some really, really good friends.

Got Bohnanza and Resistance placed this week. We discussed whether or not Bohnanza should be considered a board game, card game, or go into a third, new category called a “bean game.” It was a four player game and decently close. I think Bohnanza holds up at 4, but I wouldn’t want to play it at any less. My hot Uwe Rosenberg take has always been that Bohnanza is his best game, but that’s probably not true. After all, there’s Mamma Mia and at least a few others that contend for the title.

Resistance is my cult of the old pick for social deduction. It’s less convoluted than Secret Hitler, doesn’t need a GM like BOTC or Werewolf, and has more depth than One-Night Ultimate Werewolf. It’s a tightly designed game that expects a lot from the players and needs repeat plays to appreciate. It’s short enough that it doesn’t feel excessive to run it 2-3 times back to back. In my opinion, the best way to play is with the plot cards expansion. It does need a little more than just the base rules to be interesting, and I like the democatic element of powers being handed out to people during the game instead of being chosen beforehand.

I’m big on the cult of the old. I’d rather play one game ten times than ten games one time, and I think that if a game can’t hold up to at least five plays it isn’t worth owning. Of course, if other people want to spend their money on that kind of stuff, it’s fine, but I like to keep my collection small and replayable. In my opinion, the best board games get better with repeated plays because that’s when you can really get into the strategy.

Side note, but I also really hate the idea of legacy games where you just have to throw the thing out once you’re done.

PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I’m not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn’t fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he’s retired today.

It’s too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer’s blog he said he didn’t think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.

Yeah, modded Minecraft is still a big deal. You can join us over at !moddedminecraft@sopuli.xyz if you want. The mod Create is a big deal right now, and rightfully so. It may well be the greatest of all time, as far as Minecraft mods go.

!strategygames@sopuli.xyz

Edit: didn’t mean to make this a comment reply instead of post reply, but it still counts

Yeah, it’s hard to get people to care about stuff sometimes. Sometimes you just have to let it die.

Mostly just Minecraft out of the box. I feel that resource packs and certain performance mods like optifine could be accurately referred to as “vanilla with optifine” or “vanilla with such-and-such pack.” Once you get into datapacks or Forge or Fabric or hacked clients, it’s not vanilla.

Serverside, it’s a little more dodgy. How many server plugins can you have before it’s not vanilla?

That said, I don’t think there’s much reason to play Java Edition over Bedrock other than mods or wanting to play on older, pre-bedrock versions. Then again, I almost solely play modded anymore so I don’t have a lot of vanilla Bedrock under my belt to compare the two.

Intrinsically, definitely. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Victoria 2, and etc.

Pretty sure Forge is dead in the water. The majority of devs left for NeoForge, and it’s likely the majority of moddevs will follow.

Warsim deserves love. It’s a real passion project: a text-based kingdom management sim with lots of things to do and nooks and crannies to explore.