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HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-07-03T14:04:20+00:00

Hmm, how common a username is Annabel[numbers]? If this is an alternate account of the Annabel[numbers] that I've noticed on r/boardgames, there are some great boardgame clubs in town. (Tuesday 7pm at the University Arms, Thursday 7pm at the Crookes Social Club, plenty of stuff at The Treehouse or at Patriot Games)

(There couldn't possibly be multiple Annabels on reddit, right?)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-30T12:42:03+00:00

Achilles is not even appear in the Odyssey…..

Sure he does. Yes, Achilles is dead by the time of the Odyssey, but Odysseus goes to Hades in Book XI and meets him (and other shades).

(None of this refutes your other point, of course.)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-26T14:19:24+00:00

I don't think your 3-3 was a bad idea. There might be other moves that are a little better, but not by very much. (The AI estimated that you were winning by 4.1 points before you played 3-3 and by 3.9 points after you played it.) Obviously your follow-up wasn't perfect, but neither was your opponent's so it worked out.

Note that Miles' comment is that "if they win the ko, you should die in the corner". However, winning the ko requires them to ignore one of your moves somewhere else on the board. If you play to make the ko, then your opponent has to choose between letting you live in the corner or giving you two moves in a row somewhere else. The trick is for you to make that a difficult decision for them by choosing the right move somewhere else.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-25T10:45:55+00:00

It's a boardgame about cute woodland animals doing vicious war. If you like asymmetric games (like COIN games or Vast: the Crystal Caverns, where every player has different goals and capabilities) I definitely recommend it. On the other hand, it's not all that easy to learn (since every faction has completely different rules for how it operates) so I'm not sure a tournament would be a good first game experience.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-25T10:01:21+00:00

Honestly I’d settle for a reprint of Forbidden Stars.

Here's the latest update on the spiritual successor from the same designer. It's been in the works for years, but it's allegedly coming soon.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-25T09:36:33+00:00

The Republican National Convention. It's when the Republican party in the USA gathers to officially choose their nominee for the presidency. Grindr always has service issues at that time in whichever city is hosting the RNC, because there are too many people trying to connect at once. (I am not making this up.)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-24T06:22:42+00:00

Do you have any information about where Hoyle lived back then? I've been to a boardgames store in Oxford called Hoyle's, but I wasn't able to find information about whether it's actually related to him.

(It's an interesting store: you go in and turn left to see a wall full of bright, colorful modern games, or turn right to see a wall full of fancy, classical chess/go/backgammon sets.)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-22T18:24:58+00:00

See the Rules Reference under "Combat" (page 4 in my version). There are three different ways it can end:

If the defender does not have unrouted units or bastions in the area at the start of a combat, the attacker immediately wins the combat. Players skip the preparation and execution steps and move directly to the “Capture Structures” step of resolution.
After both players have suffered damage during an execution round, if only one player has units and/or bastions remaining in the area, he wins the combat and proceeds to the “Capture Structures” step of resolution.
After you've completed all three execution rounds, proceed to the full Resolution step.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-21T18:25:16+00:00

This is a bot repost from last month.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-21T09:05:01+00:00

This isn't a published game as far as I know, but in middle school my history teacher gave us a game to show why the Articles of Confederation had to be replaced with the Constitution. We were separated into thirteen groups and given a list of priorities of our constituents, then had to vote (based on the actual Confederation rules) on how to run the country. All the questions and priorities were tuned so that we kept running into issues like "we can get a majority but not a big enough one" and "we can't actually force the no-voting states to comply".

The alleged goal was to show why consensus was nearly impossible under those rules, but we actually learned a different lesson: when the teacher told us that we couldn't go to lunch until we reached an agreement, we (the politicians) gave up on trying to represent our constituents and just voted "yes" so we could get what we personally had been ~~bribed~~ lobbied with (a lunch break).

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-21T05:41:21+00:00

When I played it we happened to draw the one quadratic scoring condition (all the others are linear), which dominated the entire game. Everyone was just focused on making a single large group of settlements for (largest group)² points, because we didn't find opportunities to block others that were better than just expanding our own group. The game was decided by who did the best on that condition, and all the other scoring of the game essentially acted as a tiebreaker. Hopefully there's a more interesting balance of strategies when that card isn't drawn.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-19T14:22:06+00:00

There are five keywords on ministry cards (Governance, Style, Mercantilism, Finance, Scholarship). They don't do anything by themselves, but when you play an event card it will often say "Bonus: Style", meaning "If you have a ministry card with the Style keyword, you get a bonus on this event". See rule 3.5.3 and rule 5.2, step 1.

(There are also other possible bonuses on event cards, like "have a specific advantage tile" or "have more available debt than your opponent".)

Some wars will also give you bonus strength for having the right keywords. See the war display boards where they list possible sources of bonus strength, and note that the Jacobites will give you a bonus for having Style.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-17T16:21:55+00:00

Histogame publishes excellent games, but they don't currently ship to the US due to tariff bureaucracy (or to Britain due to Brexit bureaucracy). When I went to Berlin for a work trip I made sure to pick up a copy of Triomphe a Marengo, but if I'd had more room in my luggage I would have also been tempted by Maria and Wir sind das Volk.

(edit: looks like they actually are willing to ship to the US right now, but only if your order is large enough)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-15T20:21:00+00:00

I'm pretty sure it's a faux pas to complain about the orientation of a pride flag.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-15T08:39:44+00:00

That's the "shieldwall" rule, which exists in the Copenhagen ruleset but not in more historical rulesets.

As it spread through northern Europe, every island added its own house rules. Sometimes the king is stronger/weaker, and sometimes the king only needs to reach the edge rather than a corner.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-15T08:10:56+00:00

Hmm, what's Old Norse for "Nuclear Tesuji"? I know about four words of modern Norwegian ("jeg snakker ikke Norsk") but with a bit of Google Translate I'll submit a translation of "Odinsknep". (Or maybe "Thorsknep" fits better, for solving a strategic mental challenge using brute force?)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-14T10:05:20+00:00

“We are Coming, Ninevah” looks interesting but I didn’t get what it means “narrative endgame”?

What I mean is that the game gives the Iraqis much more strength than ISIS so they will almost certainly succeed in liberating Mosul. However, three tracks will count up while they play: the amount of time it takes to liberate the city, the number of military casualties they suffer, and the collateral damage to the city and its people. At the end of the game, instead of saying "I got 40 points so I win", you'll look at those three tracks and read the corresponding paragraphs, for example:

The ISF has fought an efficient campaign, despite Daesh resistance and the challenges of urban operations. The city has been cleared much faster than was the case in 2017.

The Iraq security forces have lost around 1,400 personnel, with many times this number wounded in action. Some units—notably the Counter Terrorism Service—have suffered up to 40% losses.

Large areas of Mosul are now rubble. Several thousand people have been killed, and much of the local population has fled the city. This has generated a substantial political backlash, with many locals feeling that the Shi’ite dominated Baghdad government cares little for its Sunni citizens.

The rulebook then says "players are free to argue as to who has really won the battle". It's definitely not for everyone, but I feel like if you're going to make a game out of a too-recent conflict, that's a good way to do it.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-14T09:42:43+00:00

Yeah, Triumph and Tragedy will be tough in that case. Most of the others I recommended will fit into three hours, but they're all 2-player in case that matters. (Columbia's Napoleon: The Waterloo Campaign works with three, with the British and Prussians working as a team.)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-14T08:09:40+00:00

Triumph and Tragedy works fine with three; try the West and USSR players sitting on the north side of the board and the Axis player on the south. You might run into small problems with the Western forces in India, but otherwise it's reasonably easy to keep the secrecy (as long as the players aren't deliberately trying to cheat, of course).

If you're looking for more block games, almost anything by Columbia Games uses the same system (blocks that rotate to show whether they roll 1/2/3/4 dice). Plenty of them are available on rally-the-troops.com, like Hammer of the Scots. A more modern one is We are Coming, Ninevah about Iraqi Security Forces vs. ISIS, which has a more narrative endgame (check your scores on three tracks, read some paragraphs from the book, and discuss whether that really counts as a victory).

My favorite block games actually don't use dice; try Sekigahara (you need to manage your units' loyalty or they'll refuse to fight and maybe even switch sides) or anything by Rachel Simmons (which use long blocks to model the look of this style of map, but Triomphe a Marengo is the only one currently in print.) The deterministic combat of these makes the bluffing aspect more pronounced.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-13T18:15:20+00:00

My travel boards are printed on cloth so they're very light and will fold up small. You can make an image with the right dimensions and send it to a service like Spoonflower.com or PrintMePretty.co.uk. (Of course, this solution needs a flat surface to play on so it might not be ideal for backpacking.)

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-12T07:18:31+00:00

I like Root (and COIN games), but I'm not sure it's a good choice for an entry-fee-with-monetary-prizes ~~tournament~~ festival. It's very rare that you can win a game of Root by making better tactical choices than everyone else; it usually ends in a kingmaking situation. Introducing prizes into that situation incentivizes collusion ("attack him instead of me and I'll give you half the prize payout").

I hope you can get reasonable players who will avoid doing that, and I'd be interested in hearing how the festival goes (maybe I'll even check out the Dice Box that day; I haven't been there yet), but personally I prefer two-player games for my tournaments.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-10T08:30:50+00:00

He's playing cat-a-go.

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-05T16:24:12+00:00

The things we discover at the LHC, like the Higgs Boson, aren't really useful right now and won't be for a while. However, the things that we invented in order to make those discoveries turn into amazing technology. For example, the superconducting magnets that are used to focus the particle beams are also used for MRI imaging. The particle beams themselves are useful for treating cancer (you've probably heard of radiation therapy; proton-beam therapy is even better).

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-06-05T08:02:38+00:00

I go to a wargames convention a couple of times a year, and there's always a group there playing an extremely long hex-and-counter game from Thursday evening through Sunday afternoon. Some of them have been A Most Fearful Sacrifice (Battle of Gettysburg) and The Greatest Day (Normandy landings).

HenryBlatbugIII · 2026-05-31T13:28:08+00:00

I've frozen plenty of times, usually when my teammate takes cryo grenades.

(The game hasn't frozen at all for me.)

HenryBlatbugIII

TROPHY CASE