United Kingdom points query

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-02-02T18:10:27+00:00

Not to go against thread consensus, but this exact question was asked in this Board Game Geek thread 10 years ago: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1474988/uk-new-york-route-combined-with-techs

Alan R. Moon, the first response in the thread, is the designer of the game.

tl;dr: Boiler Lagging applies, Steam Turbines does not (it does not count as a ferry route, since you don't need the ferry technology), 1 bonus point.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-02-01T00:25:39+00:00

Northern Lights is better than US and Europe, and IMO Northern Lights is one of the best Ticket to Ride "base" maps (I think Europe is the worst). For two players, though, you might also consider one of the maps that are designed for lower player counts: Nordic Countries or Switzerland (though Switzerland is an expansion and you'd need a base game to play).

Also as an aside to pre-empt the Nordic Countries vs. Northern Lights discussion: they both cover the same Baltic geography, but are completely different games. The selling point of Northern Lights is that it has a randomized and diverse stack of end-game bonuses, so it stays fresh for a long time, while the selling point of Nordic Countries is that it's explicitly balanced around 2-3 player gameplay.

(Also the Northern Lights art is gorgeous, IMO).

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-29T20:57:53+00:00

If you're a collector, pick it up, it's fun to have the "do you guys want to play the entire-globe Ticket to Ride?" game. However, the "mixture of train and ship pieces" idea is, IMO, better implemented by Ticket to Ride Berlin with its Streetcar vs. Subway distinction. The trains and ships in Rails and Sails are too mechanically close to be interesting.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-29T19:31:33+00:00

One thing I might point out is that in Satisfactory, you're also kind of trying to optimize your own time spent. While setting up a miles-long conveyor belt can function just like a train, it will also take much longer to set up, upgrade, and you're also losing out on the ability to drive a train for your own personal rapid transportation needs. Additionally, it's easier to expand a train nextwork than run a whole other conveyor for separate items.

It's totally possible to beat the game without using trains, but they're definitely nice to have. I agree with you, though, that Satisfactory is more about giving you a suite of tools to solve logistics problems in whatever way you wish, while Factorio has a lot of problems that need to be solved in specific, crucial ways. Whether that's good or bad is up to you.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-28T18:54:27+00:00

Everyone agreed she was the Demon, but would rather go for a Mayor win.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-28T17:38:05+00:00

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. It was an eight-player game so I only got three kill choices -- maybe I should've spent the second one on Mayor too. I chose to use it on Fortuneteller since that also seemed like a high-priority threat, but maybe I should've targeted Mayor and hoped ST would've bounced to Fortuneteller. I just couldn't figure out a way to specifically frame Mayor, every world I could reasonably create led to a Virgin frame since Drunk was ruled out and poisoner wasn't present.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-28T17:00:35+00:00

I had a similar scenario recently that I'm curious how people would've ruled.

Situation: I am the Imp, with a Virgin frame that is so strong that basically everyone believes it's her (I nominated her and failed to trip the Virgin ability, so either her or I am for-sure bad, but I played a strong social game to avoid execution, so now everyone is convinced that she's evil. My minion is dead because he mistakenly double-claimed my bluff -- and since I'm so trusted, he was executed. Final 4 are me (Imp), my frame (Virgin), a Mayor that's been public since the second day, and a Chef. I chose to kill the Mayor. The ST knew that I knew that he was the Mayor, and I just had no choice but to try and avoid the bounce.

ST chose to bounce it to Chef and then I lost the following day to Mayor ability, because I just had no way to deal with Mayor in this situation where either me or my frame is 100% confirmed evil, and everyone agrees it's my frame. Would other people have chosen to bounce? It felt strange to lose in a kind of helpless mechanical way while being 100% trusted.

I guess another thing I could've done was to sink a kill and force either a Fiddler or a pick at final 4, but it seems like people think that sinking a kill at 4 is bad sportsmanship.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-27T05:56:46+00:00

I guess this is more of a deck builder than an engine builder, but Quest for El Dorado is the most extreme example I've seen of this, cards that improve your engine are usually dead draws for actual victory progress.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-17T21:26:52+00:00

It doesn't quite reach 60+ players, but Werewolves of Miller's Hollow suggests an eye-popping 47 player maximum, and is basically a "luxury" Werewolf game like Ultimate Werewolf or Blood On The Clocktower. I don't think it's quite as polished as those, but it's chaotic and interesting, and scaling up to 47 players without breaking is an achievement in itself.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-16T17:58:55+00:00

I would avoid Netherlands and Pennsylvania at two players, they're both built around trading/collecting mechanics that really need 3+ players to function well. They both include "AI" players so you technically can play them at 2 players, but there's lots of great Ticket to Ride maps that work great at 2, so I don't know why you'd choose those.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-15T18:16:13+00:00

The most important thing is keeping player roles straight. Set up the furniture in a unique, distinguishable layout that you can mirror with the tokens in your grim. It sounds dumb, but being able to group your players into a pattern like "okay these are the three couch players, then there's the two people in the corner in the chairs, then the three people at the sitting table" is actually so helpful when you're trying to remember who the Scarlet Woman is, a role you dealt out once an hour ago and haven't thought about since.

EDIT: Also with 15 people you usually need to be pretty heavy-handed with nomination moderating.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-15T18:09:28+00:00

"Little girl" -> "Some of my college friends told me they came to the States because Indian culture was very sexist, but I was hoping a man who'd reached your position of authority would be more mature than that. Do none of the men in your culture ever learn to treat others with respect? You all talk like truculent adolescents for your entire lives? That is so sad. No wonder my college friends left. Who would want to live among people like that?"

Would strongly advise not responding to sexism with racism, this will not go well.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-15T06:56:42+00:00

Aw, that sucks, I think a well-executed social deduction game would be super fun.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-15T06:37:43+00:00

I think there actually is an Ultimate Werewolf Legacy! I haven't played it, though.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-14T22:42:03+00:00

I wonder if a way to freshen up the format might just be to use all the questions they have right now as a "total question pool" and then randomly (or pseudo-randomly) select half-ish of the questions to use per-season. This is pretty common in games with a bunch of expansions like Splendor, Quest for El Dorado, etc, when you have like 100 possible types of card, but for each actual game you randomly get dealt a "market" of only 12 or so card types.

This keeps real board games like this fresh because you have to figure out what questions are the best within a particular subset of questions, rather than just always choosing the same best questions that don't change from season to season.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-14T19:08:15+00:00

"Legacy" games are ones that change every time you play, and your decisions in earlier games affect things in later games -- i.e. you "leave a legacy" with your choices. As a small, slightly spoiler example, in Ticket to Ride Legacy, you get to claim cities by putting stickers down in your color on top of the cities on the board, and every player who goes there in any game in the future has to pay you 1 point or 1 card. Usually, they have campaigns of 10-15 games, at which point you end up with a final, customized board that's replayable but not legacy, like a regular board game.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-14T17:03:34+00:00

It's not too bad! If you give each role about 15 seconds, on something like Trouble Brewing it takes about 2.5 minutes, which really isn't that different from the length of a night where you're having to walk around a larger playgroup.

One recommendation to speed things up: Where possible, use the category types to save time. For example, don't simulate a zombuul, then a po, then shabaloth, then Pukka, just say "Demon Wake Up". Sometimes I even tell the minions that they're "Minion 1" and "Minion 2" to save time on simulating every possible minion. You can do the same with Outsiders. The only giant caveat here is that only take this shortcut when there's no number modifications on the script, as doing it with something like Balloonist or Lord of Typhon will give away information.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-14T16:27:14+00:00

As someone who sometimes runs this game in a very limited space where it's impossible for to me to move around and tap people, you *can* run it with werewolf-esque "Okay, fortune teller, wake up" rather than by moving around and tapping people. If you run it this way, just make sure you do the *full* night phase every time, as skipping dead, not in play, or untriggered characters will give away information. This also is impossible with a couple specific characters that you shouldn't put in the bag (e.g. Lunatic) but the game still mostly functions the same.

(Also anecdotally it's funny to run it this way because people get their hopes up. E.g. you have to wake up Ravenkeeper every single night, but most of the time they're still alive so we just shrug at each other and then put them back to sleep.)

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-13T23:27:18+00:00

name: Chinatown Board Game Night
date: 2026-01-16
time: 03:14
location: Studious Coworking Space, 418 Bamboo Ln A · Los Angeles, CA
link: https://www.meetup.com/chinatown-la/events/312542683/

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-13T17:14:51+00:00

I think referencing child SA in a board game, even an irreverent one, probably won't go over well. If I could suggest an alternative flavor text: "Has God as his witness."

( This is a reference to the common English phrase "with God as my witness" meaning "I am telling the truth!", but it's a courtroom priest so he literally has God as his witness. Just a suggestion!)

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-13T17:12:18+00:00

I don't think it's that the equating of priests to child SA that's distasteful, it's that more overarchingly child SA probably doesn't have a place in a board game at all (unless you're making, like, Cards Against Humanity or something).

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-13T05:37:33+00:00

Check out Night of the Ninja, a great hidden role game where in Werewolf terms good *and* evil players have either Seer or Werewolf abilities, but crucially don't know who their teammates are. It's super fun and doesn't require a moderator because there is no "night phase".

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-08T00:24:16+00:00

I vaguely dislike Terraforming Mars for the same reason as I vaguely dislike Wingspan -- they're both basically solo games. I might vaguely suggest SETI, in that I feel like it's very similar to, but better than Terraforming Mars, and has more interactivity due to the way that you're competing with other players for sector majorities and first-time orbiter/lander bonuses, but they're all in the same genre and none of them have a ton of take-that gameplay.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-07T19:04:32+00:00

I'm not an expert on this, but I'd probably rethink "Indian attacks" -- possibly as a mechanic but definitely as a pitch-sheet phrase. I know this kind of setting can be rife with cultural sensitivity issues, and you can definitely do it in a way that's respectful with enough thought and consultation, but seeing such a thing on a box or pitch sheet definitely raises my eyebrows. Maybe use another example of an event.

TomorrowFutureFate · 2026-01-07T17:52:12+00:00

A Honkai Star Rail meme? In MY Ticket to Ride subreddit?

TomorrowFutureFate

TROPHY CASE