tberton

Yeah, it can be an extremely stressful game. I played in a tournament last week and there was one game that had both of us sweating. I was Andromeda, he was NBN: The World is Yours and neither of our decks were playing the way they were supposed to. He got down to four cards in R&D and had I run there three times instead of hitting his remotes and HQ, I would have one. It was an incredible game.

In my mind, Norman Sky is the hard boiled detective tasked with taking down the notorious, date-based assassin, Max Ides.

Jake, you should totally watch the Massive Chalice streams. I'm not even a backer and I've been watching them. They're fascinating.

I liked what Machinarium was going for, but gave up on it when I got stuck about an hour into it. When you're hint system is too obtuse for me to understand what I'm supposed to do, that's a problem.

Your first couple of games could very well be under an hour each. I would definitely be surprised if it were to take more than an hour and a half to play a game before at least a couple of the packets are opened. The game is quite accessible, especially if you've already played Risk before. It also has a kind of tutorialization built in to the design, so new game elements get layered on in an easily digestible way. One thing I would be wary of is rules mistakes: for obvious reasons, certain misunderstandings can be tough to take back, so I would try to have a crystal clear understanding of the rules before proceeding. That in mind, it's an awesome game and a worthwhile purchase. I'm jealous that you're going to be experiencing it for the first time!

I assumed that Sean was talking about something from his time at Disney. In my mind, it was a crazy Tron game.

Truly, then, it is Nick who is fucked.

Man, I'm disappointed that the Game of Thrones game is based on the show and not the books.

I actually don't use OAI in my Weyland deck. I just have a boatload of money and rez things the old fashioned way or I hit them with Priority Requisition.

It's so bad, but so good. We should start some sort of group to co-ordinate games. Did you guys mention Off the Grid in your discussion of Second Thoughts? My Weyland deck is running it and it's working really well. It takes a lot of money, some big Ice and a sense of when not to go for it, but I'm liking it a lot. Corporate Troubleshooter works really well with it as a complement too. On a side note, I've managed to hit people with Troubleshot Archers in the past couple games (in one case, twice within a couple turns!) and it is so, so satisfying.

Yeah, I'm going to respectfully disagree here. First Nations people certainly were (and are) not perfect. They are (and were) human beings, with all the faults and virtues of humanity, just like people from anywhere else. They did some things that seem pretty bad from our point of view. And in many ways, many of them were complicit in some of the processes of colonization going on from the 16th century up until the present day. However, that in no way justifies the genocides perpetrated on them, nor the continued subjugation they face today. I am not super familiar with the US case, other than the big examples, but I am rather familiar with the Canadian situation and I can tell you, one hundred percent, that the Canadian government committed genocide on an entire group of people. Even getting past the French and British colonial period, going into the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of First Nations children were stolen from their parents and placed in residential schools, were they were systematically divorced from their culture. They were prevented from wearing their own clothes, beaten for speaking their own languages and sexually abused on a regular basis. The number of children who committed suicide because of this is staggering, not to mention those that died simply because of the situation. Those that survived were sent back to reserves where they were once again prevented from practicing their own culture and their own form of government, not to mention scarred from their experiences in childhood, making it difficult to make their own way as adults. That is genocide. It's reprehensible. It makes me sick to think that my country did it. Were there good intentions? Certainly, from many of the people involved. People thought that they were helping these poor backwards people. Did it turn out terribly for everybody? Certainly not. There are many First Nations people who speak well of their time in the residential schools. But there are many more who died or were permanently scarred. It doesn't matter that there were good intentions. We all know what paves the road to hell. And hell it certainly was. That's colonialism. It's a mindset and a practice that says "my people are better than yours, so we can take what we want and make you do what we want." It's disgusting. It's no way to live.

I am now addicted to OCTGN. It's terrible.

I actually had my first OCTGN game tonight. It was fairly painless! I made a couple mistakes, but ended up winning in a very tense game with my Andromeda against Jinteki, in which 3 Archers got rezzed and broken (twice behind an unbroken Chum with Femme Fatale! 16 Credits!), I got to the end of my deck and pulled the winning agenda off R&D on a hail mary run. But we should play sometime!

Hey Nels, do you want to pop my OCTGN cherry?

I haven't listened to the episode yet, but the description text is amazing.

Thanks for that article! That's exactly how I felt about the game.

Yeah, I'm not saying "make the guards wake up in Dishonored and it would be better!" Of course these games are designed with the idea that knockouts and death are essentially the same thing. I'm just saying that I think there is an interesting design space to be explored there and I wish that more developers would try it out.

But they're having fun!

One problem I've always had with games set in history (both board and video) is that they have a tough time specifying who you are and what you're doing. I think I've mentioned this in another thread, but it applies most to strategy games. Something like Total War, which puts you at the head of a tribe, nation-state or empire, feels weird. I'm playing a "England," but in real, historical terms, "England" doesn't exist. No nation does. They're groups of people and institutions that interact in a variety of complex ways. Boiling that down to a simplistic, disembodied nation feels like it removes half of the interesting stuff from history. That's what makes Crusader Kings II so great. It puts people and institutions front and centre, grounding you in the setting. Like Gormongous said, it really makes you feel like a person in that time may have felt. Interestingly, one of the most historical games I've ever played was Gone Home. Not in that it takes place in a historical setting (although I think the research that the Fullbright team did to recreate 1995 was admirable) but in that it recreates the feeling I get when I'm actually doing historical research. I think that most people don't realize this, but historical research is an extremely weird process of finding disconnected pieces of information, some of which are hard facts and some which require a lot of assumptions and guesswork, then putting them together into something coherent. So much of history takes place inside the historians head. While the facts are more clearly laid out for Katie, I still got that same sense when I was exploring the house on Arbor Hill: I was taking all these bits of information and trying to make something out of them. I would love to play a game that really made that its focus.

Flower and Journey.

That's some awesome stuff, Teg. Lego is cool, but I don't really play with it anymore. I have a friend who's super into it though.

One of the nice things about A Song of Ice and Fire is that the world and history are so large. I'd love to see Telltale take on a story that takes place far in the past. Maybe follow the She-Wolves of Winterfell, who fought over who would rule the North?

I guess it just depends on the focus of your game. I haven't played Thief, but Dishonored is a game about approaching a difficult situation and finding an interesting way through it. I suppose in that case, as you say, it makes sense to front load the non-lethal trade-off. I guess I just wish that there were more games that focused on the aftermath of situation. Something like a game where you're faced with Dishonored-like scenarios, but the emphasis is placed on how you remove yourself from a situation, rather than how you infiltrate. In that case, I think having enemy's wake up would make total sense.

I was just reading the DOTA Today description. What the fuck is this Lords Management bullshit?

Maybe I just suck, but I find Normal to be plenty hard. I have yet to complete a campaign. I do play on Ironman, though.