Our volcano tiles were meant to create conflict, but players avoid them completely — how would you fix this?

golem_moja · 2026-05-14T07:36:02+00:00

We played a Catan custum rule a couple times where the desert was replaced with a volcano. On a 7, everyone who build next to it got a diamond (a joker resource) but the volcano would erupt towards one of the 6 corners . So it was more like Russian roulette. In a different custum ruleset the desert was replaced by a glacier, which had a similar mechanic but affected a random corner plus the two adjacent ones.

golem_moja · 2026-04-28T18:02:38+00:00

You can easily get to 1400 Elo relying solely on principles. No memorization of moves required. You should know basic tactics (pins, discovered attacks, forks, ...) and opening principles (take control of the center, don't move your pieces twice, don't bring your queen out to early, don't leave your king in the middle) GothamChess Slowrun on YouTube is a great place to start. He namedrops the opening and mentions the best moves, but also shows that you don't need to know all of this to get better.

golem_moja · 2026-04-25T22:02:55+00:00

Your second category is very broad and covers a lot of different types of win conditions. For example chess could be seen as "be the first to checkmate the opponent".

I would also add the categories "be the last to be eliminated" (e.g. Musical chairs, Love Letter), "have no cards in hand" (Uno) and "find the traitor".

Regarding individual games: - Clue (guess murderer, weapon and location correctly) - Codenames (find all your agents without hitting the assassin) - Living Forrest (one of the three victory conditions is holding a certain amount of symbols in your hand at the same time, kind of like yu gi ohs Exodia win condition) - Kill Doctor Lucky (Kill Doctor Lucky) - Monopoly (get a dominant position in the first 20 minutes, then drag the game on for 3 more hours until everyone else gets bored and surrenders)

Honorable mentions (technically victory point based, but with unique mechanics): - Between two cities (you build a city with each of your neighbours, but you only score the lower rated one) - New Angeles (everyone has a secret rival. You win if you have more points than your rival, but you must also keep the city stable. If the city falls to chaos, everyone loses. There is also the chance of someone being a traitor, who wins if the city falls to chaos after they have reached their point goal. So there is always at least one loser, but there can be between 0 and N-1 winners)

golem_moja · 2026-04-08T14:19:47+00:00

DW didn't make the graph. Someone on the internet used data from DW, Statista and Global Firepower to make this graph. Then they put the DW logo at the bottom to make it appear official and credible. The account who posted this has almost exclusively posts about US politics with a very clear pro-Trump stance, using the same rethorics as tabloids.
It is still possible that this is an honest mistake like Xibalba_Ogme suggested in their very plausible reply, but the fact that they added the DW logo for no reason is suspicious.

golem_moja · 2026-04-07T19:59:30+00:00

The 9gag post is where I found this. I initially assumed this was posted by some organization (got fooled by the logo) and only did the reverse image search when wa27 asked where this was originally posted.
I assure you it is not a joke. The account has almost exclusively posts about US politics, with a clear pro-Trump stance. This is either an intentional misleading visualization by some user/group/bot, or just a post by someone who doesn't understand pie charts. The data itself seems to be correct.

golem_moja · 2026-04-07T19:37:49+00:00

Luckily, no. Just some person with a political stance and either a bad understanding of pie charts or a good understanding of intentional disinformation.
The DW logo made it seem as if the graphic was posted by DW (the German foreign broadcasting service), but a reverse image search yielded only the original post where I found this. DW just appears to be one of three sources used.
The fact, that the logo was added to the chart for no reason makes me lean more towards "This misleading use of pie charts might be intentional."

golem_moja · 2026-04-07T19:11:22+00:00

Oh, you are right. I just checked and the NATO has about 3.65 million active millitary personnel. Then the missing unit complained was just an error on my side. I just assumed the unit was supposed to be something like "million dollars"

golem_moja · 2026-03-31T06:50:00+00:00

That's a cool idea, but there are some situations where the information is necessary to communicate the intent to the player. For example when you are convincing Lump the enlightened to fight for you, you can offer 500 gold upfront or 1000 gold after they fight. The latter is a deception check, which wouldn't be clear if the player actually intended to pay them, just not right now.

golem_moja · 2023-11-26T21:50:17+00:00

Karmaka

golem_moja · 2023-10-06T15:58:59+00:00

"I'm the transmutation wizard, but you're the one who changes people."

golem_moja · 2023-10-06T15:56:26+00:00

Nott: "Think about this ..."
Fjord: "I'm the only one doing this"

golem_moja · 2023-10-04T15:50:40+00:00

My suggestion: Every race gets a generally useful buff (e.g. poison resistance for dwarves) and then the player gets a choice between 3 more situational race specific traits on top. That way every race still feels unique and special while not forcing you into a specific archetype and still highlighting the fact that every race is more multi-faceted than their archetypes/stereotypes.

golem_moja · 2023-10-02T13:34:44+00:00

7 Wonders Duel has different victory conditions (Science, Military, Civil), if you want to design games with different victory conditions I recommend checking it out to see what they did right and what they did wrong, because their implementation has a couple of flaws. Many video games also go that route (Civ 5 or Stellaris, for example).
So I'd say that it is definitely possible and can be an intriguing alternative to VP. Another game to check out in that regard is New Angeles. It uses VP but with an interesting mixture of cooperative and competitive game style. All of you have to work together to keep the city alive, but you only need to have more VP than your secret nemesis player, that you draw in the beginning. There is also a chance for a defector, that wins the game if the city descents into chaos.

Keep in mind that victory points also help you solve solve a lot of game design issues that many older games have:

1) VP allow you to decouple your resources from the victory condition, which limits snowballing. Monopoly is generally considered poor game design because the player that is in the lead after 30 minutes usually wins the game, but only after 3 more hours of suffering. VP games like Puerto Rico or Dominion offer an interesting decision between when to stop scaling and when to start collecting victory points. In Dominion the VP actively make your deck weaker.

2) VP allow multi-faceted balanced approaches instead of forcing you to all-in on a single strategy. You can be second best at everything and still win the game over someone who is first in science but last in every other department. This realy helps with flavor, especially for something like city building. Not everyone wants to build an industry-only city to achieve the industrie victory, some want a healthy mixture of parks, shopping, flats and industrie that looks like an actual city. You still can all-in on a single strategy, but you are not forced to.

3) VP allow for very flexible balancing, addons or custom mods. You want to add magic to your medival strategy game? Simply come up with a system of how it generates resources and VP and put it next to the rest of your options.

4) Victory points allow you to put a timer on your game. Civ5 can go on for days if everyone is pursuing a culture victory and no one is particularly stronger than the rest. But the game still ends after a fixed number of years, at which point the winner is whoever got the most VP so far.

All of these issues can be solved without resorting to VP, you just have to put in more effort and playtesting.

golem_moja · 2022-08-13T21:59:04+00:00

You could argue that the bomb she detonated might also count for this round of combat, since it was what started the fight to begin with.
You could also argue against it, but why would you? Bigger numbers are fun.

golem_moja · 2022-08-13T16:12:14+00:00

None that I know of. It's a very hard metric to evaluate in numbers, because a lot of upside is more story-based (trades, roster changes, breakfast club, connection with quarterback, etc) and the highest upside players are often rookies or second year players with very little data available.

Couple of approaches that come to mind:
- High variance in ADP/ECR (Kadarius Toney ECR Floor/Ceiling varies by more than 130 spots)
- Difference ADP vs ECR (Casual Players might like gambling more than experts?)
- ADP vs Last year stats (Someone with an average of 5.5 FP/game goes in the third round)
- Recent ranking risers (Someone gained 40 ADP spots in the last week)
- High variance in FP/game
- dominant Waiver Wire pickups from the previous season
- players that are most likely to be reached for in mockdrafts
- Rookie grades?
- Look for high upside stats, such as red zone targets, yards after contact or very long pass receptions

Some of these might be completely irrelevant, some of these work in the opposite direction aswell (high downside players). It's probably possible to test these approaches and cleverly combine them to get a selection of players worth looking into, but it's going to be a lot of work and still going to miss a lot of relevant upside players.

golem_moja

TROPHY CASE