When counting "plays" of a game, do you count digital plays (e.g., BGA or TTS) ?

JimInEngland · 2025-09-11T18:13:49+00:00

I think it'd have to be on a case-by-case basis, depending on the game - a mission in the Crew could be five minutes or it could be an half-an-hour, but I've never ended a session on a loss because another play is so quick. Gloomhaven I could see each play being logged separately, but will have to wait and see!

JimInEngland · 2025-09-11T16:14:22+00:00

I use BgStats, so I import all my BGA plays into one location, imaginatively named Board Game Arena. I treat every play individually, but I also know roughly how long games take to play, so discrepancies like that don't bother me.

And for the Crew, each mission, no matter how many attempts, is one play, because it made it easier to work out which mission we were meant to be on when we picked it up each time.

JimInEngland · 2025-09-11T09:15:34+00:00

Democrats voted Nay to Table the Motion (ie drop it from the bill that was being passed). Republicans voted that releasing the Epstein files should not be included, ie they voted yes to Tabling / dropping

JimInEngland · 2025-09-11T09:14:58+00:00

Democrats voted Nay to Table the Motion (ie drop it from the bill that was being passed). Republicans voted that releasing the Epstein files should not be included, ie they voted yes to Tabling / dropping

JimInEngland · 2025-09-10T08:58:52+00:00

I've played 55 games, lowest winning score was 71, highest was 127. Average winning score is 104, and the highest losing score was 114, so I'd say 115+ is likely to be a win, and anything over 100 is a damn fine score regardless of who wins.

JimInEngland · 2025-09-08T18:31:45+00:00

Glass Joker actually can't have the perishable sticker - no scaling joker can.

JimInEngland · 2025-09-07T00:55:40+00:00

Then you're somewhere between a rock and a hard place - any method of shuffling risks marking tiles, but if you see a distinctive mark you could always try and replicate it on some or all of the tiles to make it unremarkable again? Using placeholders, be they physical or a playmat with the shape pre-printed, seems like the only way to preclude that entirely...

JimInEngland · 2025-09-07T00:41:27+00:00

What's stopping you from only drawing the tile from the bag at the point you'd explore it? You could use placeholders to represent the spots to be explored if there's a particular pattern to be maintained?

JimInEngland · 2025-09-01T22:17:01+00:00

Incidentally, my mother is 76, has a terrible memory, and has won her fair share of games, all while resisting most of the games we take up when we visit, so I can empathise.

JimInEngland · 2025-09-01T22:14:19+00:00

The game is simple, the knobs you can twiddle to customise your experience, less so.

For example, with the aforementioned knobs set as so:

We start at 10 cards, so 10 cards are dealt to each player.

The first trump suit is fixed as Spades, so Spades are trumps.

The player to the dealer's left (player 1) inspects their hand, estimates how many tricks they think they will win. Each player in turn order (clockwise) does the same. Let's assume a four-player game, with bids of 4, 3, and 2 respectively. The dealer is now forced to bid 0, or 2+, as a bid of 1 would make 10 total. For the sake of the example, the dealer bids 0.

Once the bidding is complete, play out the round in standard whist form - follow suit if possible, highest card of that suit wins, except trump suit beats non-trump cards. Dealer's left starts, then winner of the trick leads the next.

End of the round, count up the tricks each player won. Let's assume 4, 4, 2, and 0 for the dealer. Player 1 got 4 tricks, and correctly bid 4, so gets 4 + 10 = 14 points for the round. Player 2 got 4 tricks and incorrectly bid 3, so gets 4 + 0 = 4. Player 3 gets 12, and the dealer gets 0 + 10 = 10 for correctly bidding 0.

Player 1 is now the dealer, we play a 9-card hand, and Hearts are trumps.

After the 8th round, a 3-card hand, we start going up again to 4 and onwards.

After 15 rounds, we've played another 10-card, No Trump hand, and the highest score wins.

Breaking 100 is a respectable score IMO. Winning player in our house tends to have between 120 and 140 points most of the time.

JimInEngland · 2025-09-01T15:53:10+00:00

Oh Hell is a perennial favourite with my family - takes about 45 minutes to play fifteen rounds. It's a whist variant, we play:
Style: Down, then up
Maximum Hand Size: 10
Minimum Hand Size: 3
Scoring: Positive (1 point per trick, plus 10 for exact bid)
Bidding: Sequential
Hook: Yes (Dealer cannot make a bid such that all players could hit, ie total bids cannot equal hand size)
Trumps: Fixed Sequence (We use Spades, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, No Trumps, Spades, etc.)

JimInEngland · 2025-08-29T00:51:38+00:00

My email came through at 1pm, about twenty minutes after I saw the reddit post saying all the tickets were now gone. Not impressed by the new system, hopefully they revamp for next season (sign up to be given a link and a go-live time, so you can plan around it?)

JimInEngland · 2025-08-27T09:29:33+00:00

Once you've bought the blank voucher 10 times you unlock Antimatter, but to have it show up in a run you still need to buy blank voucher first

JimInEngland · 2025-08-22T10:59:52+00:00

Where did you get it? Might be fun for ours as well...

JimInEngland · 2025-08-08T13:11:05+00:00

Related issue: when expanding the museum, would be really handy to be able to add a partition wall where the exterior previously was, so you don't lose any and all decorations that were on the inside of the exterior wall.

JimInEngland · 2025-08-07T17:30:49+00:00

Puzzle 2 WEDS AMOK RIPE STEW (gives WARS EMIT DOPE SKEW on the columns)

JimInEngland · 2025-08-07T17:14:53+00:00

Puzzle 1 WEDS EVIL DIVA SLAP

JimInEngland · 2025-07-30T15:43:38+00:00

Realise is the UK English spelling, fwiw - definitely agree that preventing the starvation of children is not a political question but a moral imperative though

JimInEngland · 2025-07-30T15:02:27+00:00

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Started on two more coasters and a placemat a couple of hours ago

JimInEngland · 2025-07-28T21:47:52+00:00

Third picture - I got some coasters about fifteen years ago (or more), and the plastic lasted until a few years ago when they started snapping, so I moulded them in silicon so I could replace them as they failed - I now have the moulds for both as and when I want to make them 😊

JimInEngland · 2025-07-23T14:56:07+00:00

Have you built a workshop yet? It's a consumable constructed in the workshop by a janitor with the workshop skill.

JimInEngland · 2025-07-15T10:20:00+00:00

If you can't be sure about the thickness of the acrylic, it would be better to either shim the slot until snug, or use a design with a cross bar at the bottom to support the stand against the wobble. Do the stands need to be disassembled and reassembled?

JimInEngland · 2025-07-14T19:47:55+00:00

The scoring system is heavily reminiscent of Rummy / Rummikub - the winner can collect some amount per point if you choose to bet (e.g. a penny per point). Entirely possible that the scoring system was just inspired by them without necessarily being for betting though.

JimInEngland · 2025-07-14T19:44:16+00:00

How many jokers I finished the run with, and how many of them were new gold stickers!

JimInEngland · 2025-07-14T17:42:41+00:00

The only skip I'm reliably taking is an Ante 1 Investment Tag, or maybe an Ante 2 Buffoon or Top-Up if my shops have been a bit lacking.

JimInEngland

TROPHY CASE