spacerumsfeld

There is a game listed as being discussed called "1866." Is this about the Austro-Prussian War? I looked it up but can't find it. (Haven't listened yet.)

Sure! Mitch passed along this list: 100 Days - Sandy Woodward Amphibious Assault Falklands Michael Clapp 3 Command Brigade in the Falklands No Picnic - Julian Thompson Falklands War - Martin Middlebrook Argentine Fight for the Falklands - Martin Middlebrook Battle for the Falklands - Max Hastings Thanks, Mitch!

I just love that picture! @ilitarist It's a novel and not a work of history, but I think Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels would be a good book to read.

No, he and I recorded a special talk for 3MA just a few days ago - it should be up sometime in the next coupla weeks.

Upcoming - not posted yet.

+1

I'd be up for the Brutal Legend show.

Hey, can we talk more about conception of aliens in sci-fi? Because that's fascinating. The score argument thing has been done to death. Let's just all agree that the sooner Tom is taken to the International Criminal Court at The Hague to pay for his crimes, the better. The example of the planet in Solaris is a great one: in most SF 4x games this would be treated like a one-time event, and you'd send a science ship, and you'd spend some time and eventually get +15% research and you'd either colonize the planet or not and that would be that. Are there any games where the planet itself could be a major game point that lasted longer than the time it took to read the event log? I haven't played a lot of Stellaris, but this is what I feel it really missed: the ability to actually make events an organic part of the gameplay, rather than something you just read and discarded. There would have to be some way to interact with the planet over the course of the game, and for small changes to be meaningful. In Stellaris, your scientists would all go insane. But Stellaris doesn't make you care about your leaders, and there is no way to make them do things other than just be attached to ships. Of course, there are a whole bunch of problems - most players would want to just nuke the planet or something. I'd love to hear about some game that goes more in the Solaris direction.

Do you think it is equally dishonest to tell people that he is pronouncing them three of the worst games ever made? Because he is not.

From IGN's own score description page: 7.0-7.9 - GOOD Playing a Good game is time well spent. Could it be better? Absolutely. Maybe it lacks ambition, is too repetitive, has a few technical bumps in the road, or is too repetitive, but we came away from it happy nonetheless. We think you will, too. 6.0-6.9 - OKAY These recommendations come with a boatload of “ifs.” There’s a good game in here somewhere, but in order to find it you’ll have to know where to look, and perhaps turn a blind eye to some significant drawbacks. 5.0-5.9 - MEDIOCRE This is the kind of bland, unremarkable game we’ve mostly forgotten about a day after we finish playing. A mediocre game isn’t something you should spend your time or money on if you consider either to be precious, but they’ll pass the time if you have nothing better to do. Reading Rowan's review, it seems like he did indeed find the game "Okay." Which is somewhere in the 6-range. Sounds appropriate to me.

One problem with this approach is that unless the Stellaris reviewer is the same person who reviewed the other games, fitting his or her score into the site's ratings for those other games will be impossible, simply because he or she might rate the games differently relative to one another. For what it's worth, in all the years of reviewing games for websites and magazines, I never once checked to see what rating someone else had given a game for the purposes of deciding my own score. The only considerations were my opinion and the rating scale I was given. Not the ratings scale I perceived to be in use. If a website said that 5.0 was an "average" game (and at one time, most of the major sites did) then an average game got a 5.0 from me. It was then the editor's job to take the review and make sure that the text matched the score assigned, and that the score matched the website's scale. I once had a game score significantly lowered because the editor felt that the text did not support the score as laid out by the magazine's scoring system. And editorial control is important: if the editor feels that the score does not match the site's/magazine's scale, then a discussion should (and often does) take place between the editor and writer. I have had scores tweaked up or down (with my approval) and have also rewritten reviews to match what I felt was an appropriate score (with editorial approval). Another problem is that the sites themselves aren't quite sure what their ratings systems mean. In the early-ish days of Gamespot, I went back and forth many times with editors about whether a marginally above-average game on their scale was 5.5, 6.0, or 6.5. 7.0 was supposed to be "good." But even then, the 1-10 scale seemed to be unsuited to the purpose. I noticed in one comment on Rowan's review that the writer considered 6.3 absurdly low because it was just 0.3 away from 6.0, which was a score that should be reserved only for horrible broken, unplayable games. Which immediately made me wonder what 1.0 to 5.9 was for. Scores can be very useful screening tools when you are looking for a few games to choose between in a genre, for example, and don't want to read 10 or 20 different game reviews. The problem is that with all the pre-release streaming and gameplay information, scores have become more about validating people's opinions than actual purchasing guides. At least it seems that way to me based on how many people complain about scores while announcing that they haven't purchased the game yet but fully planned to do so and would be back shortly to really show up the reviewer. I have never met Rowan Kaiser, but I would personally never justify criticism of his work based on my dislike of his person. And it seems rather poor form to even bring it up. Although I am pretty old-fashioned.

Battle of the Bulge is absolutely not a puzzle.

I think it is less about a "grievance culture" and more about the demographic that populates game message boards. Rob's comment about "game culture" is on point, I think. I was reading these same types of comments as letters to the editor in Computer Gaming World 20 years ago.

That's the one unfortunate thing about Steam. I'd love to be able to choose which patch version of a game I use. Ah, for the days of patches-scrolls.de!

I certainly doubt that you're in any way stupid, but I think this simply speaks to the difference between people who grew up with digital games in a certain space, and those who grew up with boardgames. For me, learning a boardgame is just learning all the ways to lose, until you eventually don't. I find it much more satisfying to figure out why something isn't working than to have someone tell me. And against the AI, I can lose over and over and not worry about it. Although I've played the game enough in the boardgame iteration that I'm not coming at it from a newbie perspective. You should definitely check out Twilightstrategy.com, which was mentioned upthread. That has all the hints and tips you could ever want.

Although I have to ask why you expect a game to teach you strategy in addition to the rules. Good on ya, as they say, for reading the rulebook. That's the best way to learn the game, in my opinion, since then you can tell if the game isn't applying the rules correctly. But back to the question of how friendly the game is to new players, I think the playing field is tilted here for people used to digital games, who have no problem with the intricacies of Europa Universalis but aren't necessarily open to playing a game like Twilight Struggle over and over until they figure the strategies out themselves. Or has the expectation of strategy guides/hints become the norm for all games? But no better way to learn than to have those permutations happen to you, no? Or no? +1. I think this is a result of people not reading the rules and just learning from someone who taught them, or reading the rules wrong once and never being corrected. When our group learns a new game, usually multiple people read the rules and correct each other when we do things wrong. It helps to enjoy reading rules! I think this demonstrates how narrow the digital strategy spectrum is. I mean, this isn't a new problem - boardgame ports have been available for a long time. What would you call digital Puerto Rico? There is an aversion to too much abstraction in digital games that I think prevents abstract mechanics from entering the vocabulary. It's back to the old question: why abstract something on the computer when you don't have to?

Warning: Episode has nothing to do with party games.

Glad to hear that people liked this episode. It was important to me to do it.

Troy says a lot of things.

+1

Hello Ludwig von Mises! Thanks for the great feedback. I'm only going to disagree strenuously on one point: Programmed Instruction is only meant to teach you the game, not to codify a set of rules for those scenarios. Once you learn the rules, Guards Counterattack is meant to be played with all the rules, not just the initial rules presented via PI. Furthermore, Programmed Instruction doesn't just turn off this rule or that rule at random - the scenarios require a certain subset of the rules that build upon each other, which is a long way from the disconnection of pretty much any rule system you want. If computer wargames did this kind of rules teaching, I'd be very receptive to it - but computer wargames can't even be bothered to have proper tutorials (and I include Decisive Battles in this as watching a separate video is not a tutorial). As for the other two points, I'd have to go back and listen to the podcast again but you may be correct that you understand the game better than I do at this point. I think we're probably on the same page regarding our overall impression of the game, which seems to be that we both like it. Now if we can just get them to fix the UI. -Bruce

Few things in boardgaming bother me more than people professing in-depth insight into a game after two playings.

Also, if anyone is interested in seeing how the game plays, this is a great video:

For those who are interested, I got an email today saying that the 3rd printing of Sekigahara had "made the cut" in P500, so it will be headed to press! $47 is a bargain for this thing. https://www.gmtgames.com/p-501-sekigahara-3rd-printing.aspx

I really enjoyed this episode. I think this phenomenon of enjoying things you're "good at" even extends to things like boardgames: I feel that my experience of U.S. Civil War (new game by Mark Simonitch) was improved by the fact that I won my first game, because it felt like a game that I could "understand" rather than something that defeated me the first time and that I might never master. As far as The Witness goes, I felt like the underlying issue was the panel's unstated unease with the idea of games as "worthwhile" pursuits. It felt like even when you were trying to downplay the idea of "learning skills" from games, you were assuming the existence of some sort of "ideal" game pursuit, such as one that taught you organic chemistry. (And while Danielle brought it up in the context of medicine, as a physician, I'm not sure what benefit I would get from a game that taught organic chemistry ) I recall Erik Wolpaw's comment that Tom mentioned recently on one of his podcasts, that when the apocalypse comes, the thing that shooting people in video games will have taught us is how to shoot people in video games. I'm just waiting for the day that people are comfortable saying, "I enjoyed playing this game, and that's all the justification I need."