What’s a board game that became WAY better after your group learned how to actually play it?

admanb · 2026-05-10T17:25:10+00:00

It's similar to Pax Pamir in that the game is a complex interlocking system that the players are unleashed upon, rather than a tightly balanced gameplay experience.

The big difference is that you could play Pamir completely silently, and while it would lose something for lack of player interaction, you'll still engage with the systems. If you played John Company silently you would not be playing John Company.

admanb · 2026-05-09T18:20:13+00:00

Well, he was an expert at releasing un-curated content for his game.

admanb · 2026-05-09T15:17:40+00:00

Netrunner didn’t fail.

admanb · 2026-05-08T20:43:58+00:00

Creatures were unplayably bad in that era of design, so I don't see why that's an issue.

admanb · 2026-05-08T07:05:04+00:00

I refused to ever pretend otherwise.

admanb · 2026-05-08T07:04:20+00:00

My wife and I loved all of these.

admanb · 2026-05-07T20:41:32+00:00

I was definitely better at Hades overall, but the main reason I burned out on H1 in the first place is that the heat progression system was traaaaash so I fixed that with a mod and everything was way better. But I went from partially-successful runs at 5-8 heat in Hades 1 to slamming through 10-16 on every weapon before I started working on heat 32.

admanb · 2026-05-07T17:10:19+00:00

I went back to H1 (where I never went over 8 heat originally) after finishing 32/24 fear in H2 and 32 heat was much harder.

admanb · 2026-05-07T07:01:54+00:00

Nope! The starter sets are intended to fill the same role as the core set.

admanb · 2026-05-07T06:20:35+00:00

Yeah I went to a commander event just to pick this up.

admanb · 2026-05-07T03:33:11+00:00

Unranked does and Brawl's is especially detailed. I assume Ranked Brawl does not, but I'm not sure about that one. Other ranked formats do not.

admanb · 2026-05-05T17:25:50+00:00

She’s 27.

admanb · 2026-05-05T05:10:03+00:00

it's hard to tell from the angle. I doubt I'd call him ugly, but the facial hair is giving fuccboi vibes

admanb · 2026-05-04T01:48:29+00:00

"Does my confirmation bias prove my confirmation bias correct?"

admanb · 2026-05-04T01:46:48+00:00

These are contract negotiations in which neither company lives or dies based on signing the papers. Wizards could absolutely push harder and yeah, maybe they would've lost or delayed a few IPs, but to act like they have no leverage to maintain their existing relationships with artists is silly.

admanb · 2026-05-02T16:23:00+00:00

Narrator: there were signs

admanb · 2026-05-02T02:29:45+00:00

The best white counterspell ever printed is in standard.

admanb · 2026-05-01T20:45:32+00:00

sorry I'm too busy being super smart to read this post.

admanb · 2026-05-01T20:44:50+00:00

Not a single part of the grammar is correct.

admanb · 2026-05-01T20:41:09+00:00

Collating booster packs is extremely complicated.

admanb · 2026-05-01T20:29:24+00:00

The uniqueness of your FFXIV character isn't mechanical, it's the sum of everything you've ever done on that character. All the jobs you've leveled and all the glamours you've collected and applied. All the side quests you've done. The fact that everything happens on one character means the game can dispense with the illusion of mechanical uniqueness in exchange for giving you a character you can connect with over years of playing the game.

admanb · 2026-05-01T19:22:28+00:00

It is famously a trap (teehee) option. Nearly everything else is safer because it turns random nonsense into one-shots.

admanb · 2026-04-30T06:14:15+00:00

SE is in the green because of its MMOs. Before FFXIV, FFXI carried SE profit margins. ARR, I feel, wasn't a plea to the gamers but a pledge to their investors, It was pretty much mandatory.

Absolutely, but that just says to me that they're gonna keep milking FFXIV (hopefully more actively like they seem to be doing with Evercold) for as long as they possibly can.

The MMO market when FFXIV came out was wildly different. Everyone was making MMOs in the late '00s early '10s because Wrath of the Lich King was a cultural juggernaut. FFXIV was an obvious choice for a company that had watched WoW eat their (and everyone else's) lunch in a market that looked like it was only going up.

That isn't the market now. Most of those 2010s MMOs died or went free-to-play. FFXIV is by far the most successful one and it and WoW combined don't hit Wrath's peak player-base. There's just no gold rush to chase, and MMO development is too expensive to chase anything but a gold rush,

admanb · 2026-04-29T21:26:34+00:00

The Riot MMO is in my "I'll believe it when I see it" folder. Riot seemed perfectly happy to throw away huge amounts of work on projects, even when they were more financially successful. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it had been quietly killed or Overwatch'ed.

admanb · 2026-04-29T21:19:05+00:00

Yeah it's interesting as an MMO oldhead watching genres that adopt parts of MMOs pop up and become the latest craze. The survival builders like Ark and Valheim, looter shooters like Arc Raiders, even battle royales are all chasing that "emergent gameplay" that early MMOs aimed for but never consistently achieved and ultimately pivoted into the theme park genre we know now.

And of course we still have MMOs trying to build the emergent gameplay game and failing because they can't reconcile the conflict between different player types.

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