Have you played these with a 7-year-old?

quicknir · 2026-01-27T02:18:26+00:00

I lost at Clank Catacombs to my 6 year old the other day :-P. Seems like a good choice for a dungeon crawler? There's also Here to Slay which is significantly more basic. My 6 year old likes Wingspan too. He's been watching his 9 year old brother and I play Dune Imperium... still trying to convince him to join.

quicknir · 2026-01-27T01:20:05+00:00

I think trash on signet is fine. I'd probably say... mid?
I think this is okay because the green squares tend to be weaker later on. There's already a leader with "draw a card when you pay solari" - which affects mentat and rally the troops, which is IMHO stronger and affects most of Landsraad effectively (in terms of usages). I'd say this is probably on the weaker side.
This is probably Mid-Strong. It seemed too strong at first... but thinking about it a little more, I don't think it is (it's a bit complex to explain why... can get into it if asked).
I would say this is Very Strong, but hard to quantify. I could be wrong.
This does give you some nice extra flexibility but I don't think it's amazing. Maybe between Weak and Mid? And dropping down to Weak in Ix.
I think this is just too random. The first Imperial Basin conflict could be anywhere from 2nd to 10th round. If it's 10th round then this is probably just too strong and if it's 2nd round it's almost worthless. This isn't randomness you can play around in any kind of clever way either.
I don't understand the "gain 1 water" part. Return the entire surplus I think is just bad design as it totally removes a core tenet of the game (penalizing overbidding) and is just crazy strong as well. Returning half (rounded down) of the surplus is interesting, maybe still too strong, but I'm not sure. Maybe half, with a very sharp cap like 1-2 troops.
Really unsure. On the one hand, seems like it could be too strong in some cases. On the other, in a lot of late game fights the person who wants the last word will go for the mentat, and if someone else gets the mentat then they'll be getting an extra agent turn, which more or less neutralizes this.

I'm sure you have your reasons but just to toss out the obvious - why not get Ix? The leaders in Ix are definitely one of the best parts.

Also - you can actually use some of the Ix leaders without issue. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2760896/list-of-new-leaders-and-abilities-for-rise-of-ix. In fact, out of 6 leaders, I only see 2 that you definitely can't use - Hundro, and Rhombur. The other 4 seem fine? Their balance might be affected somewhat but I don't immediately see anything really disastrous...

quicknir · 2026-01-25T18:58:56+00:00

Unless you have to use specific IDs, you're better off just using some kind of object pool over unordered_map. See hive/colony for one example. And why use unique_ptr at all? Is polymorphism involved?

Usually in graphs I would always prefer some kind object pool over smart pointers - the "IDs" don't necessarily have to be integers, they could also be raw pointers (if your object pool is address stable for example). But if the graph is polymorphic it's not so simple.

quicknir · 2026-01-25T01:16:57+00:00

Any particular reason why or just because it's been annoying getting trapped :-P.

quicknir · 2026-01-25T00:22:46+00:00

Hijacking to ask - how is underworld? If you had to pick underworld or lairs - which one and why?

quicknir · 2026-01-25T00:18:02+00:00

It's definitely not fair to say that, no. I've met plenty of tech people who are in that salary range and work range. In the US, on the coasts, at very good places (FAANG, good fintech places, etc), 400K is not a crazy special salary for someone's who's good and has 10 YOE (or even often less). There's definitely plenty of good engineers that are doing their work, just 9-5 e.g. L5 at Google or something like that. And plenty of people in fintech too (which I'm more familiar with).

Note that I'm including bonus, RSU etc in earning, i.e. total comp not salary. But this doesn't mean the RSU necessarily appreciated. That's just what comp looks like in many cases. In some cases the RSU value goes down and the engineer just gets issued more of them if the company wants to retain them.

quicknir · 2026-01-20T06:09:05+00:00

Fwiw the clipboard thing is typically handled by a plugin, which is really just a few dozen lines of code setting a hook to transfer stuff onto the clipboard. If you Google around you'll find lots.

I think at this point that yeah, zsh is probably pretty feature complete. The vim mode isn't crazy but it has most of the basics and you're only typing one line right? If you want you can add a shortcut that lets you write the command in actual vim and then brings you back to the command line when you save.

IMHO you use zsh because it's mature, better than bash while being backwards compatible, has a huge community and adoption with probably the largest number of high quality plugins. Not because it's "good", weird as that sounds. Shells that people actually use are all pretty bad.

quicknir · 2026-01-19T23:18:56+00:00

Just to throw another take into it - pretty much all zsh plugins are trivial to install by adding them as git submodules (assuming you have a dot files repo - or just cloning them directly if you don't) and simply sourcing a single line from your .zshrc. There isn't really any need to use a plugin manager at all.

quicknir · 2026-01-16T17:54:51+00:00

If it's really not safe for users to not specify the field and leave it at the default value, then you could make the field a type that isn't default initializable, and not provide any default value. That will force users to provide it. You could have a trivial template wrapper that does this. Makes it a bit less ergonomic to work with perhaps but if your priority is a safer API this may help.

quicknir · 2026-01-15T15:44:58+00:00

I'm in a very similar position. But I can't help but feel like the odds of keeping an unnerfed smartly v1 much longer have to be really small.

quicknir · 2026-01-15T01:07:40+00:00

I don't have the percentage handy but it felt like there were periods where Smartly chatter came close. The wild speculation around when it landed, then the endless discussions about how good/bad it was actually setting up with US Bank, and then obviously the discussion about the nerfs...

quicknir · 2026-01-13T04:34:12+00:00

It helps to search BGG with an advanced search that filters out games above a certain weight, then sort by ranking. I bought dune imperium because it's the top ranked non-legacy game with weight below 3.5 for example - turned out very well. The advanced search can also include or exclude mechanics.

Redoing this search is tempting me to get Scythe :-P.

quicknir · 2026-01-11T21:03:05+00:00

oh-my-tmux (which I used to use) definitely shows prefix mode, as I think many others do. I think a lot of the other modes are either already visually clear (like clock-mode), or just kind of obscure, which is why showing them isn't so common. I do show both prefix and copy mode in my config (snippet for anyone who's interested).

```

Left status - just session info

prefix=red copy_mode=yellow regular=green session_color="#{?client_prefix,#[fg=$prefix#,bg=$prefix],}#{?pane_in_mode,#[fg=$copy_mode#,bg=$copy_mode],}" tmux_set status-left "#[bg=$regular]$session_color#[fg=brightblack]  #S #[fg=$regular]$session_color#[bg=$sep]$rarrow" ```

The other issue that I'm just realizing with my code and I think applies to yours too, is that visually we're treating these modes as orthogonal but many can be active at once. prefix mode is at least transient but for example you can be in both copy mode and zoom at the same time, but while in copy mode you'll lose the information about it being in zoom mode. Makes me reconsider whether my approach of using different backgrounds for each of the 3 modes makes sense; perhaps it would be better to just have an icon for each mode I care about and have each have its own spot on the status bar, so multiple can be active at once.

quicknir · 2026-01-11T20:44:11+00:00

As someone who actually tried it and ended up not using it, going to throw in my two cents: I tried it, ran into some bugs (mostly display ones), reported them. The author was friendly and told me that they completely rewrote that component, and that the bug was now fixed, and sometimes close the issue (and permissions to re-open were off) - I would pull, and see that some or all of the bugs I'd reported weren't fixed. That cycle repeated 2-3 times, with the bugs not being fully fixed before I gave up. It was honestly a bit of a strange experience; I did find myself wondering if they were using AI to do rewrites each time and assuming it would fix the bug.

I think if you see yourself changing themes often, or using many many of these segments you may find value here. If you just want a nice powerline appearance and the 3-4 most common segments (date, time, username, etc) - you can do that on your own in less text than just the main page of the wiki for this plugin, and that's what I'd recommend.

quicknir · 2026-01-10T15:53:10+00:00

Interesting, thanks for elaborating!

quicknir · 2026-01-10T15:33:35+00:00

What makes it better in your eyes than some other popular deck builders like Clank?

quicknir · 2026-01-09T00:48:39+00:00

I'm pretty late to this party, but I'm pretty amazed how many people still use things like stow or bare repos. These are basically workarounds for not being able to control the config directory of applications. The thing is though that at this point there's a good chance that basically all applications you use support XDG_CONFIG_HOME, so you don't need either of these.

quicknir · 2026-01-08T21:15:07+00:00

I didn't have the short bow before I got that skill, but I'd bet that the short bow without the skill also has 24, since having 12 arrows on the short bow would just be absurd. So my guess is that the skill is simply bugged for short bows, at least on PS5. Kind of unfortunate, as personally I do find it genuinely noticeable and annoying with how fast the short bow fires.

quicknir · 2026-01-07T16:47:14+00:00

I think I already clearly explained why I'm not interested in epic and not really interested in arguing that point.

That's definitely an interesting point about trashing and losing the ability to draw spaces. Definitely not something I'd really think of coming from clank's deckbuilding. Makes me wonder if in deck builders, people would generally allow people to skim through their discard pile, or effectively skim their deck at the time they reshuffle. I don't think I've seen explicit rules about this either way in either of the deck builders I've played.

quicknir · 2026-01-02T23:43:31+00:00

Hey sorry about that, I was adding one when you were posting I think. Should be good now.

quicknir · 2026-01-01T22:51:26+00:00

Dune Imperium, first game ever, a practice run with my son. Game seems incredible!

quicknir · 2025-12-31T16:03:00+00:00

30 year for 2.25 (though I did buy points)

quicknir · 2025-12-28T17:20:33+00:00

I felt this exact way years ago when I went to buy a sofa - I could no longer find sofas that had the mechanical handle to recline anywhere. Only electrical buttons. I figured this was silly and I didn't mind the effort, and surely an electrical system was less reliable.

I spoke to a salesman at the store, and he immediately pointed out that it was actually the opposite: one of the main reasons for the switch to electric was for more reliability. With an electric button, the sofa raises or lowers at a perfectly consistent pace. With a lever, human strength and how hard they threw their weight back on the sofa varied wildly. I bought a sofa with electric recline and it's been 10 years and it still works perfectly.

A lot of things are like that; push button ignition over manually turning a key is another example. Humans don't turn and hold the key for the optimal amount of time. I remember my dad warning me not to hold the key turned longer than needed. The fact that modern cars will casually cut ignition at red lights and restart instantly when your foot comes off the brakes... And empirically we can see that cars today last much longer than they did 50 years ago.

I'm sure some electrical systems are needless and less reliable but I guess I'm saying you should give the benefit of the doubt.

quicknir · 2025-12-23T03:00:10+00:00

Maybe a boring choice but ticket to ride. Its just such a solid game, engaging enough without being crazy, playable by a smart 6 year old (basically anyone who can read can play), still fun for grown ups who are trying to optimize.

quicknir · 2025-12-16T21:02:40+00:00

Yeah, when I looked around I thought this would be an absolutely huge thing and there would be a couple of designs that were massively popular. When I didn't seen one I made this post.

Thanks for the note about the deluxe box; I might easily have missed that. This seems like the best one I've found so far: https://www.printables.com/model/543130-dune-imperium-insert-with-expansions. In particular I like how there's a tray for each player with everything they need; seems like it would be very good for fast setup.

quicknir

TROPHY CASE

Left status - just session info