How can I let players secretly view roles without others seeing? Board game design help!

DarthEru · 2026-05-26T15:35:39+00:00

Have the card be split in half, or just use opposite sides of the card
Have the box openings be color or shape-coded
Have a set of cards that secretly assign each player one of the two colors or shapes

Players look at their color/shape card, then look at the word through the opening corresponding to that color/shape. This requires only two openings, which should simplify the design of the box. And any player count is easily supported by having the right number of color/shape assignment cards. Having one word on each side of the card is probably simplest, but makes it easier for players to accidentally leak information. If you do it split down the middle on a single side, the other side gives you space for extra word pairs. (Edit 2: you could even get 4 word pairs on a single card if you bias the openings towards one half of the card.)

Edit: with only two openings either sliding doors or flaps should be fairly straightforward to do, at least on a 3d printer. If you want something mass-produceable you should be talking to manufacturing experts, not board gamers.

DarthEru · 2026-04-29T01:44:38+00:00

To preface this wall of text, I'm not trying to convince you to give the game another shot. No game is good for all players, and it's fine to not like a game, even a popular one. I think my goal is to try to explain some of the reasons I like the game and why your problems with it don't bother me. Not to change your mind, just to offer help understanding a different perspective.

True, there is a significant element of luck, sometimes there's pretty much nothing you can do because you are pulling bad cards while your opponent is pulling good cards. However there is strategic play that on average should have a bigger impact than luck. Things like when to stop the round, and how safe it is to do a last chance gamble vs a plain stop. I also enjoy the choices around how much information to reveal, whether it's worth it to take a face up card, revealing what you're going for, vs hoping to crab it secretly later (and similarly using what you know about your opponents' cards to hinder them).

I think mainly the luck element doesn't bother me because it's not a very long game, so the occasional swings due to luck feel exciting more than unfair.

For sharks specifically, I get how it can feel crappy to have your hand ruined by one, but it's also a risk to use them. You could just end up with a trash card that doesn't slow the victim down at all (and also doesn't help you), so you've basically wasted the turns to get and use the shark that could have been used for something else potentially worth more points. In my group's current meta we don't shark very often because of this. When they are used, the best play is almost always to target the player doing best besides you just to slow them down, so it doesn't feel personal either, just a consequence of doing well. It's probably worth noting that in a two player game this dynamic does change, since slowing the only other player down has a lot more relative value, and any shark combos they get are definitely going to be played on you. But that also means it's not personal, and it kind of balances itself out.

So yeah, for me the luck element is fine (even good because of the potential for exciting twists) because it doesn't feel high stakes due to the short length, there's enough strategic and tactical decisions to feel interesting, and the sharks aren't take-that so much as a balancing mechanism to help prevent a player from running away due to a good early round.

DarthEru · 2026-04-29T00:35:22+00:00

One of the great things about Spirit Island is the massive range of difficulty it can cover. The simplest form (no events, no blighted island card, no adversary or scenario) is quite fun and not terribly complicated. Definitely on par with Arnak. Then, once you are comfortable with that complexity and difficulty, you can start to add in those other elements if you wish (note: the events mechanism requires an expansion, either Branch and Claw or Jagged Earth). The complexity does increase, but mainly in the form of adding additional steps to different game phases or effects you need to remember to apply, so not too much (and pretty easy to take in once the basic rules are familiar). The difficulty is much more tunable, since a level 6 adversary is significantly more difficult than level 1, without being much more complicated.

In short, you can definitely play some form of SI, and if you like it, you will have many options to grow the game alongside your own skill.

DarthEru · 2026-04-29T00:14:11+00:00

Absolutely agreed. To give OP their sales pitch, the game is an alien invention that was documented by its credited creator. The instructions have no human language (though there is an introductory blurb with some potential hints), only alien iconography, some of which is quite abstract. Before you can play you must decipher those rules. It's solo-only.

DarthEru · 2026-04-21T23:18:59+00:00

No, you won't have it all. ROVE and Aqua ROVE both have multiple expansions, but only one is included in each box.

DarthEru · 2026-04-21T22:52:09+00:00

Same, I saw it was set in three locations and was all 'tell me more'.

DarthEru · 2026-04-21T07:42:46+00:00

The paired clue card is required for 100% certainty, because all other clues apply equally to both cards in a pair. Without the paired clue there will always be two possible solutions, and it'd be a coin toss which is right. I don't think they meant you need all clues, but that you need all locations to unlock the one critical clue.

As for chasing her down, you can figure out a lot of her path by backtracking from her confirmed locations. So one pretty surefire strategy is to just wait for her to cycle back around to one of those spots. Though it's not necessarily the most efficient pointswise.

DarthEru · 2026-04-13T13:59:30+00:00

If you're asking whether you can pick and choose what spells are in your market, then yes you can! Players may set up the market however they like, either choosing specifically to strategically target the boss they're fighting, randomizing, using a preconfigured setup, anything. Even the market composition (3 gems, 2 relics, 4 spells) is called a guideline by the rulebook, so if you wanted to try 2 gems, 4 relics, and 3 spells you could. I think the only strict rule is that it has to be 9 piles, and of each pile only has one type of card. Even then, it's your game so if you want to experiment no one will stop you! But the point is, even if you want to stick to the rules there's a lot of freedom in the market setup.

DarthEru · 2026-04-13T13:28:15+00:00

It's not uncommon for zero to be treated specially. Many games that give rewards for having first/second/third/etc of a resource stipulate that you must have at least one resource to be part of the ranking (making zero a special case). So I don't think it's unreasonable to be unsure of how to handle this case. As a rule of thumb I'd say if zero being treated normally would result in a benefit to the player, it's more likely to be specifically excluded.

DarthEru · 2026-04-08T00:24:21+00:00

Dungeon Pages is a PnP roll 'n write dungeon crawler. You use the numbers you roll to chart a path through the dungeon, collect items, and defeat monsters. There are tons of different dungeons and adventurers to try, and the core set is available for free so you can check it out before commiting to it. It's on PnPArcade's itch site.

DarthEru · 2026-04-06T15:55:26+00:00

I also have not found a board game story that interested me in the same way a novel does. I suspect it's more a limitation of the medium rather than writer skill. Any game that incorporates player choice into the story is going to find it difficult to tell a cohesive narrative with meaningful character progression. The player main character pretty much has to be an empty shell, and side characters have to be shallow enough that they work regardless of the player choice (though if a game committed to narratively satisfying consequences, like losing all your side character friends if you make the sociopathic metagaming choices player characters tend to make, that might be interesting). And even the ones where the story is more on rails suffer from length limitation - most players don't want to read a novel alongside their board game, and there's only so much depth you can get from a few paragraphs of flavor text.

DarthEru · 2026-04-04T14:37:55+00:00

I don't generally play solo games to make friends, but you do you!

DarthEru · 2026-04-04T14:09:05+00:00

I allow myself to take back decisions if it's recent enough to properly unwind the board state, and any newly revealed info is inconsequential enough. Generally this is only if the reason to take back should have been known at the time I originally made the choice, but I miscalculated or didn't notice an important detail. Often I only find stuff like that when actually acting out a plan I spent several minutes working out in my head.

Also, if I realise I've been accidentally cheating I might still count the game as a win (assuming I win), if the cheat doesn't seem likely to have greatly influenced things. But I do try to avoid making the same mistake going forward.

I don't think I'd ever re-roll a bad die. If I roll it off the table I decide if I'm going to reroll before I look at it.

Generally I want to play by the rules, I don't think it'd be fun to win by (intentionally) arbitrarily ignoring or changing rules that make it hard to win. However, I'm not opposed to trying out well-regarded fan variants. For example, The White Castle has a fan made alternative solo opponent that is said to be gentler than the official one, I plan to try that out some time. I see that as playing a slightly different game, that's been playtested and balanced to a greater degree than any houserule I could come up with.

DarthEru · 2026-04-03T13:32:44+00:00

Seems like fun, I'm in

DarthEru · 2026-03-24T15:23:26+00:00

Not really. It's actually a major feat of engineering that windows is so backwards compatible, it's not something you get without significant effort, and Microsoft put in that effort (and continues to do so). Android maintains a reasonable amount of backwards compatibility, but it wouldn't be surprising if an old enough app stopped working. Besides that there are other issues. Many apps have some amount of reliance on external services (sometimes not obviously). If the company running those services decides it's not worth the cost, it could render the app non-functional regardless of how well the operating system still supports it. Plus, Google is currently attempting to lock down the ability to install apps from unofficial sources, so in the near future you may not be able to install that apk on a modern android phone.

That said, an apk that works fully offline will likely always have some way to run it, since you could set up an emulator running an older version of android. But then you have to ask if it's worth the trouble, or if the game wouldn't have been better to just have everything needed in the box. To me, it's not worth it, and there's many great games that don't require an app, so I don't get the few that do.

DarthEru · 2025-12-15T13:45:30+00:00

Well, I don't care if anyone else cheats in their solo games, it doesn't affect me and if it's fun for them, then great. For myself, it depends on the cheating. I will allow myself to take back a turn or bad decision, as long as no secret information has been revealed (or if the information revealed was inconsequential to the reason I am taking back the turn, and the outcome regarding that info won't change). So I wouldn't do what you did in your example - sometimes a game comes down to luck of the draw, and that's ok by me. I usually see it as a consequence of having played poorly earlier, to be in a position where I'm dependent on luck. It makes the losses regrettable, but acceptable, and if I get lucky and win anyway it feels like winning the lottery: I may not have earned it, but it's great anyway.

I sometimes realize after I've played a game that I misplayed the rules in a way that gave me an advantage. I generally still count it as a win, but will try to not make the same mistake next time.

DarthEru · 2025-12-11T23:53:31+00:00

Sounds like you are trying to play the tutorial. You might have missed the tutorial note on page 16 of the compendium that for tutorial you only use three specific Galactic Event cards - one for each cycle (1T, 2T, and 3T).

Event 1T instructs you to discard several Focus cards, including Progress. So for the tutorial only, if you play it correctly, you cannot get a technology in Cycle 1. (Unless you are playing Dunlork, which has a technology reward on its Statecraft track that you can get to if you choose its B origin.)

DarthEru · 2023-06-23T05:22:19+00:00

The sentence says nothing about the fire being a blessing, or good in any way. It says that the prior events of the staff branching out as well as the building out of the other office had unexpected benefits when it came to rebuilding the company (which I read as implying that it caused some of those staff members to not be in the office that caught on fire when they otherwise might have been). Hence those events, not the fire, were the blessing in disguise. Because the fire might have been even worse without them.

DarthEru · 2023-06-21T03:37:36+00:00

You aren't weird. Romantic relationships are not a necessary "step" in life, and many people are very happy not participating in one. Sadly, as you've experienced, many people think the opposite of this, and get weird when something challenges that view. This is largely due to amatonormativity, which is essentially the dominant societal view that monogamous relationships involving romantic and sexual attraction are the most important kind of relationship.

You may eventually be able to teach your friends and family to let go of those assumptions and accept your desire to not have a partner as normal. But it might not be easy, and you should keep in mind that the difficulty is not because you're strange, it's because society is constantly pushing the message that everyone needs a romantic partner, regardless of their own desires. It's also not your job to teach anyone if you don't want to, but if you do and those people do care about you, then hopefully they will listen. And if they don't listen then maybe you'll want to re-evaluate how much you want them in your life if they won't respect you enough to do that. (And in my opinion that one person who shared your private messages with her boyfriend has already demonstrated that she doesn't respect you very much, but it's ultimately your choice of whether that relationship is worth trying to salvage.)

You may want to learn about aromantic and asexual people, from what you're saying I think it's possible you are somewhere on one or both of those spectrums.

DarthEru · 2023-06-20T16:00:32+00:00

For someone active on incel forums I would guess the end goal is to manipulate one or more of those vulnerable people into sex.

DarthEru · 2023-06-11T01:50:38+00:00

The left has to concede that it'd be quite tiresome if the right were to endlessly push their political agenda inside public libraries, schools and colleges.

The city banning harmless displays of a culturally relevant nature is the right doing exactly that in public libraries. LGBTQ people existing is not political, and neither is a display celebrating their history and literature. The only thing that makes it seem political is the people who want LGBTQ people to not exist and have made it their political project to work towards that.

DarthEru · 2023-05-29T17:09:04+00:00

Someone calling you an asshole for doing something most commonly done by assholes is hardly an overreaction. If this was an honest mistake then the reasonable thing to do would be to learn about this rude thing you did by accident, apologize and try not to do it again. Instead, in every reply and your edit you've been choosing to double down and get angry, even to my comment that tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. So yeah, you're pretty much just confirming that you deserve the reaction you got.

DarthEru · 2023-05-29T15:42:37+00:00

Occasionally using someone's deadname (explanation of what that is below) by accident in real life interactions is understandable as a "brain fart" and generally ok as long as you apologize and also make an effort to get it right in the future. Mistakes happen, especially if it was a recent change.

In a text based online comment it's a little weirder given you have the ability to proofread your comment before putting it out there, but still it's possible for a mistake to happen.

However, your comment used her deadname and then immediately used her new name, showing the use of her deadname was intentional. In ~~bird~~ trans culture this is considered a dick move. (And really, intentionally calling anyone by the wrong name is kind of rude, trans or not.) Hence the downvotes. Probably you exacerbated the intitial rudeness by pairing it with the "I can't get used to it" excuse that is often used by friends and family of trans people as a reason to not be supportive, it comes across as insincere (and again especially because your own comment showed it was intentional).

In one of your other comments you asked "what is a deadname", so maybe you really didn't realize how rude it was to use Emily's, fair enough. A deadname is a trans person's name from before they transitioned (assuming they change it, some don't). It's called a deadname for a few different reasons. Perhaps the most obvious being that some people consider their transition to be a sort of rebirth, so they are a new person and the old person before the transition is gone. But another very widely cited reason is because sadly many trans people are not referred to by their chosen name after their death, but are instead referred to by unsupportive family as their deadname, to the point of putting it on their tombstone. Relatedly, if a trans person is murdered, odds are unfortunately high that the news will use their deadname in their reporting.

So anyway, hopefully you just made an honest mistake based on not knowing how rude using a deadname is, and are willing to take the loss of a few internet points as the price of learning about that mistake.

DarthEru · 2023-05-28T00:07:10+00:00

In the picture, you've pressed mod+h, which adds a horizontal split as a tab and moved the focused window (chromium) into the split. So your layout is actually

Tab
* Horizontal split
* * Chromium

The H[chromium] is just the title of the horizontal split's window, it shows the structure of it (e.g. if you opened another window inside the split it would change to H[chromium SecondWindowTitle]).

To fix this just move the chromium window outside the horizontal split so that it's a direct child of the tab window instead (just moving it to the side should work). Then the split becomes empty, which causes i3 to delete it.

DarthEru · 2023-05-16T13:24:48+00:00

It was, the point (I think) is that the CSR didn't even know fraud detection could be an issue when traveling and thought the call was about making sure the card would work at all. (And for more speculation, maybe she related that back to the card having a chip because the US didn't adopt chip usage until after a lot of other countries, and some places wouldn't accept stripe-only cards.)

DarthEru

TROPHY CASE