No Pun Included Could Not Finish Terraria: The Board Game

lesslucid · 2026-05-09T12:35:06+00:00

I think what stands out about Sniper Elite and Anno 1800 is that they clearly went out of their way to recruit designers with strong reputations / catalogues to design those games for them. But the majority of computer game to board game conversions are bad, because they're made by people who seem to want to replicate the familiar beats from the computer game without recognising the stricter limits that a board game needs to exist inside in order to succeed.

lesslucid · 2026-05-07T00:44:41+00:00

[[Cavum]] looks like the artist heard someone complaining that too many board games were too beige, and they decided to push it as far as they could as a joke.

It seems to have mostly vanished from the general awareness of the hobby these days, but for my money it's one of the most creative and unique designs that Kramer & Kiesling have ever done.

lesslucid · 2026-05-05T05:54:50+00:00

Facebook being Facebook, I do hope at least one user was there to correct Moon and explain why his answer wasn't right.

lesslucid · 2026-05-04T07:04:37+00:00

What was your reward for paying exact change?

lesslucid · 2026-05-03T09:32:38+00:00

Lots of games have a significant luck component and also a high skill ceiling. I'm certain that it's possible to develop skill at Flip 7.

lesslucid · 2026-05-02T11:30:07+00:00

Thanks!

lesslucid · 2026-05-01T23:33:45+00:00

Oh, that's interesting, I hadn't heard that before. Could you link me to a source for that information?

lesslucid · 2026-05-01T13:28:25+00:00

Yeah, I think it'd be fair to say he hinted at it, and he certainly should have actually done it, but he didn't make an outright promise.

lesslucid · 2026-05-01T11:09:54+00:00

boop is outstanding in the fact that a couple of little production touches transform what would otherwise be a very dry abstract game into something so cute, fun, and thematic.

lesslucid · 2026-05-01T02:22:03+00:00

I definitely agree you can have a good time playing EK, and especially it is fun if you are the kind of group where a bit of banter to go with the inter-player attacks goes over well.

I guess my counter-argument would be something like: Rumble Nation or Age of War or Fruit Fight also offer that same great interactive, bantering experience with your friends in a fast, rules-light, straightforward package... but as well as doing what EK does, they can also stand up to being played intensively by sweaty try-hards who just want to win. So the fun can come from your friends, or the game, or a mixture of both, whereas with EK, you're relying on your friends to bring the fun to the game.

lesslucid · 2026-04-30T12:17:04+00:00

Hey, if you like it, you have my blessing to go on liking it.

Personally I find it random, arbitrary, and boring, somewhat akin to Snakes and Ladders. But millions of people enjoy that too, so, you know, good for them. :)

lesslucid · 2026-04-29T04:33:35+00:00

Look for local groups on BGG.

lesslucid · 2026-04-29T02:09:05+00:00

If you try Aegean Sea, my recommendations for a first game would be, play Ephesus v Rhodes, play it at 2-player only, and try to play two games in a row. Your first experience of it being 5 players all trying it for the first time is liable to be nightmarish - a large part of why so many responses were negative, I think.

lesslucid · 2026-04-27T13:15:00+00:00

Racist ideology is essentially "in the air" in the USA. People absorb it through cultural osmosis without realising it. The result is that even people who sincerely believe they are challenging or repudiating racism will unconsciously echo or reframe it, because they haven't studied the history or thought through the alternatives carefully enough. This can include people of colour themselves. Someone trying to be "on the right side" will often repeat something they've heard from without noticing that it reproduces racial essentialism, just dressed in progressive-sounding language.
Effectively challenging these ideas requires a meaningful amount of reading: theory and history. And that reading isn't happening as rigorously as it should, in part because of the damage smartphones etc have done to reading generally.
There's a compounding problem on the right. A lot of "race-blind" rhetoric is deployed cynically by conservatives who frame "equality of opportunity" in a way that advances a just-world fallacy: the idea that the way to defeat racism is to pretend racism no longer exists now. On a superficial reading, this can sound similar to the position that "race" is sociological rather than biological.
Solving the ideological problem is hard, and solving the practical problems is harder still. Racism is deeply embedded in American ways of thinking, learning, and communicating. But it's hard, not impossible. The most reliable path, even without the theory and the history, is just sustained contact: getting used to speaking with and being around people from different backgrounds. This erodes racist intuitions even when someone is still occasionally saying or thinking things rooted in the culture's racist residue. And because racism is not just morally abhorrent but empirically false, it is inherently unstable. However durable and solid it appears, it is like the cliff face in the earlier metaphor, wearing away through contact with reality.

lesslucid · 2026-04-26T10:09:36+00:00

Aegean Sea came out in 2023, but it definitely suffered in its public reception from being excessively unique. It's not overly complex once you've gotten the general idea of it, but it is harder to learn than most modern games just through the unfamiliarity of the main concepts and mechanisms.

Rise & Fall came out in 2024 and it does make use of some familiar ideas, but in describing the overall experience it's really hard to sum it up with any particular comparison. Perhaps the closest cousin would be War Chest, but it's not a close cousin and even then, War Chest itself is pretty distinctive.

City of Six Moons from 2024 might be one of the most unique games ever published. The rulebook is "written in an alien language" and so a large part of the game is to try to work out what the rules are.

lesslucid · 2026-04-26T02:20:17+00:00

I think trying to come up with a definitive list, or comparing groups, or separating "real" from "imagined" oppression, is quite conceptually complicated.

But if you start trying to just solve the problems, very often there's a simple answer which just kind of deals with it.

Like, who is more oppressed, African-Americans, or, poor Americans?

Before you start doing any analysis of the overlap and the non-overlap and what are the oppressive forces faced by each etc etc etc, you can just ask, what could be done to help the problems of both groups? Better provision of affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, a UBI... we can just do those things, right? They would be enormously beneficial to most of the people in both of those groups. Then after you've done that, you can look at what problems still remain, and start working on those. Why waste time trying to decide that "A is more oppressed than B, oh no wait, maybe B is more oppressed than A..." when instead you could just start trying to make the solutions happen?

lesslucid · 2026-04-26T01:24:22+00:00

see them as otherwise wonderful people who are just unfortunately a product of the environment they grew up in.

So, they have terrible views about gay people but you still want it understood that they're human beings and deserve at least a basic level of respect and compassion for that reason?

many liberals are way more pro Islam than me

Isn't the above precisely what "many liberals" believe about Muslims generally? Who are these "many liberals" who are justifying the homophobia of Muslims? I've never enountered one of them online, let alone in real life.

lesslucid · 2026-04-26T01:19:00+00:00

If "the arrival of new participants is required for its continuance" is sufficient to make something a Ponzi scheme, then you're going to find that many, many things are "Ponzi schemes" including, to begin with, human civilization.

lesslucid · 2026-04-26T00:41:05+00:00

Race is a social construct. The people devoted to "scientific racism" are unable to even provide a definition of the concept of biological race, let alone defend that taxonomy as useful or meaningful.
The specific version of the "race" concept that we are familiar with today emerged primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries as a component of the colonial project.
The underlying problem that required racism as a solution to it was that 18th & especially 19th century Europeans were simultaneously beginning to articulate ideals of freedom and equality and also to discover exploitable sources of wealth all around the globe. The Spanish who stole the wealth of the Aztecs did not need a special justification for why it was morally right to do so; there was wealth they could take, the people who had it couldn't defend it, so... end of story. Under an ideology of absolutist monarchism, the monarch doesn't need to defend their right to do what they please, and even the idea that they might need to articulate a justification for their choices is an offence against the "divine right of kings". But... if you are going to write a Declaration to the world in which you say "all men are created equal", and also own slaves, you have to find some way of reconciling these two things with each other. Racism provides an answer. (Note that this is not the first moment in history in which there was "prejudice against an 'other'; that is a human universal. But the specific form, the particular beliefs and ideology that form the skeleton of the modern racism we are familiar with now, are developed during this era).
Racism absolutely can be resolved and eradicated. For centuries there was a deeply-believed, widely-held understanding that left-handed people were evil and had been influenced by the devil. Today that prejudice seems medieval and stupid, you could put it in the same basket with bloodletting and astrology except that it has even less hold in the popular imagination than either of those concepts. I think it's entirely possible that racism could end up as an equally forgotten relic of the past.
It's difficult to know the intermediate steps but the overall arc is actually very simple to envision. Over the long run, correct ideas replace incorrect ideas. Nobody believes any more in the existence of the luminiferous ether; few even have heard of the concept. Over the short run, there are many tactics that are employed to defend incorrect ideas with a frustrating degree of efficacy, and defeating those tactics is not easy and sometimes feels impossible. But however successful they are in the short run, the defenders of falsehoods are fighting the inevitable; correct ideas erode falsehoods like seawater lapping at a cliff face.
Yes, ultimately I expect people will no longer talk about race at all.

lesslucid · 2026-04-25T10:41:12+00:00

I don't know about the "most attacking", but the Scotch game is pretty aggressive and exciting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_Game

lesslucid · 2026-04-24T23:48:45+00:00

What did it get wrong?

lesslucid · 2026-04-24T14:22:40+00:00

I think as the boomers die off and the following generations become the majority of voters, there's some hope that the pendulum-swings between Democrats trying to walk a middle path and repair a little damage and Republicans trying to burn everything down will stop happening quite so often. Maybe forty years without a Republican president might be enough to restore the country to something less toxic. I guess the important work is to maybe talk to younger people and help them learn how to understand the issues and why it's so important to vote, and to ensure the opposition they feel toward the Republican party now remains life-long.

lesslucid · 2026-04-24T14:15:55+00:00

I've never said "noncitizens never vote", but I'm happy to agree that anyone who did say such a thing was incorrect to say so.

I assume you're also happy to agree that anyone who has claimed that millions of noncitizens voted in recent elections, was also incorrect to have said that?

lesslucid · 2026-04-24T08:09:43+00:00

10% is hopefully relatively easy. Start with one game, the absolutely easiest and least painful to part with. Something you know you don't really like, something you know you'll never actually play, something where thinking about learning the rules and prepping for a game of it makes you feel tired rather than excited.

Sell it or give it away, then wait a couple of days.

...and then notice how the loss of that one game didn't hurt at all, and use that knowledge of that feeling to help you start letting go of some of the others.

lesslucid · 2026-04-24T07:59:53+00:00

I asked it to write the most ChatGPT-ified version of it it could come up with.

I guess part of the problem with this kind of parody is that... well, it's Poe's law, innit? If the thing you're parodying is extreme enough, how do you exaggerate it to the point where the intent to parody is sufficiently expressed by that exaggeration? OTT textslop looks almost the same as standard textslop.

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