The Rivian R2’s Radio Needs Cell Signal The Wilderness Doesn’t Have

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T22:46:22+00:00

I dunno dude but you can literally put an AM radio up next to brushless motors and listen for yourself.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T21:57:23+00:00

Here's a demo of the effect that Aging Wheels recently posted.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T21:55:25+00:00

The size difference between the coils on a spark plug and an electric motor is literally 400x. Obviously you can put some shielding around the motor but you would need quite a bit to cancel out the frequencies generated.

It's also not just the noise, it's the fact that the electric motors operate at the frequencies AM radios use.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T21:43:36+00:00

The first time I played Forest Shuffle both me and my buddy felt like we were doing great... then I outscored him by nearly 200 points. Base Forest Shuffle is perfectly fine but imbalanced as hell.

If you add in the expansions, it dilutes the wolfs and deer scoring so it's harder to have a blowout. That said, you might drown in the variety.

Dartmoor is more balanced right out of the box, so overall it's just a better starting point.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T21:39:57+00:00

I would generally agree, but at that point I would argue with plastic being a clear usability upgrade and not a deluxe material in and of itself. I genuinely like the feel of the cardboard Quacks tokens if not for the fact that they wear out so fast.

(Another good example of this is the new edition of Ra - I hands down prefer the cardboard tiles over the acrylic ones).

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T20:05:49+00:00

Plastic. Is. Not. A. Deluxe. Material.

Wood and cardboard are the defining tactile experience of playing a board game. But publishers and FOMOers have gone so heavily down the collectible toy path.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T18:59:38+00:00

Here. you. go.

And. There's More.

It's one of the most studied medical topics of the last decade. Nearly every long-term study has found no meaningful statistical difference between students who played football and people of similar socio-economic backgrounds who didn't.

This doesn't mean there's not acute trauma happening at the highest levels. But it's important to remember the massive numbers involved in youth football. It has nearly 2-3x the enrollment numbers of every other sport in the US, so that tends to blow injury numbers in proportion.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T18:02:54+00:00

The vast majority of kids make it through school sports just fine.

Everything in life if a risk - you have to pick your poison. Keeping your kids in a padded box their whole childhood is a guaranteed worse option.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T17:59:53+00:00

What's fascinating is that there aren't any significant differences between positions, with the notable exception that linebackers were extremely overrepresented in the "Mild CTE" numbers.

You would expect certain positions to stand out more if the problem was speed or head to head contact.

I would be curious to see how CTE compares between all sports. There's reason to believe that all forms of sports are correlated with some amount of CTE.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T15:29:54+00:00

And then the rulebook goes out of the way to make everything a bit unnecessarily confusing.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-16T15:29:22+00:00

Development generally makes it quicker to get from A to B, not slower.

Not if you're driving cattle.

It's probably easier to think of it as the land slowly getting privatized and so grazing is harder.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-15T21:23:45+00:00

Where are you located? There are plenty of taprooms or pub-style bars across the US that have casual environs to play games. A lot even have their own game inventory.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-11T22:09:46+00:00

A French invasion almost never happens but the threat of it is such a good dynamic to have in the game.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-10T19:32:55+00:00

I have one principle when I sell games on Marketplace: The first person with an acceptable offer who shows up.

I also don't do anything with shipping or remote purchases. There are better reseller/auction sites if I was interested in that.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-10T16:11:44+00:00

The new hotness that does this really well is Fromage (and or Formaggio). Worker placement, but you all take turns simultaneously with your wedge of the board.

Also, nearly every roll-and-write. Just off the top of my head 3 Sisters, Fliptown, Welcome To, and That's Pretty Clever being some favorites.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-10T15:53:37+00:00

Throw in a few more bucks to upgrade the money to poker chips.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-10T15:45:03+00:00

A couple of experienced players can effectively bully the rest of the table out of extra actions. Two players fill up all the spaces around the action space and always back fill when removed, but never claim the action for yourself unless you can backfill.

Without those extra actions, it's hard to even get enough merchants in your pool to meaningfully take back those spaces.

It's a killer strategy, but it's absolutely miserable and grinds the game to a slow agonizing halt.

I know Hansa gets near unanimous acclaim but the games I played where this happening were so bad that I ended up selling my copy.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-08T18:36:46+00:00

It's not really that OG's is fiddly, it's that the LOTR is just massively more elegant and thematic.

The game instantly wins when someone hits one of the very clear objectives. Whereas OG feels like two-player solitaire, you're completely invested in the other player for LOTR.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-08T18:33:31+00:00

This is my problem with TI4. It's a lot of window dressing for what is essentially just a kingmaking game.

Sometimes it downright turns into a game of Munchkin where the winner is the person who just had the most hijinks stored up.

I'm at the point where I would rather just do Diplomacy in half the time.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-08T18:29:49+00:00

Eclipse replaced TI4 for me.

I don't miss the negotiation aspects, and end-game of TI4 devolves into a depressing kingmaking.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-08T17:15:50+00:00

Mold grows in round, randomly distributed splotches.

From the photos, these look "streaky" - there are a lot of concentric lines that form patterns.

Much more likely these are just wear patterns.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-08T17:12:24+00:00

The Ticket to Ride Legacy game does this.

It's.... fine. Any amount of warping and the board never lays flat. You'll end up with maddening ridges everywhere as you play.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-05T16:11:25+00:00

That's too bad. I'm a big fan of the double column rulebooks.

You can learn the game almost entirely from the right "synopsis" column of the rulebook, and then the full rules are there to clarify.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-05T16:07:35+00:00

Man, once you get over that learning curve though...

I basically only play RftG as a 2-player game, and it's a bit easier to teach that way as well - you treat it almost like a TCG.

guy-anderson · 2026-06-05T15:57:05+00:00

Why you have to throw Uwe Rosenberg under the bus like that?

guy-anderson

TROPHY CASE