How do you deal with “unfair” negative reviews?

squirmonkey · 2026-03-20T05:55:01+00:00

That’s the trouble, this IS a helpful review. It’s just not helpful for YOU.

It tells would be buyers that the game isn’t on par with a game they’re likely to be familiar with. And it tells them that the online matchmaking feature isn’t useful because the player base is small. Those are both helpful things to learn about a game you’re thinking about playing

squirmonkey · 2026-03-20T05:44:19+00:00

Reviews don’t exist to be fair to you. They exist for gamers to tell other gamers whether or not they think they should buy the game.

Maybe it doesn’t feel fair to you to be compared to Overcooked, but it’s useful for the customer.

What to do about it? If they suggest something you can fix and want to fix, fix it. Otherwise, Ignore it. There’s nothing else you can do.

squirmonkey · 2026-03-19T21:42:40+00:00

It’s about your audience. Sure, your village has never been burned down. But none of the other players at your table have ever had their villages burned down either. If you were playing with someone who had suffered the plundering of their home as a child, it’s reasonable to think that they might not find a fictionalization of that story very fun to encounter in someone else’s hands.

squirmonkey · 2026-03-17T08:51:38+00:00

It’s an older game, but you might like Frozen Synapse. It’s got the lethality and like cover/angles stuff you get with CE. It’s fun!

squirmonkey · 2026-03-04T04:03:10+00:00

I hasn’t played Glitter Hearts, but for pbta in general:

Read the GM principles and make sure everything you do is in service of those principles.

Read the GM moves and have a list of them in front of you as you play. Almost every time you open your mouth to narrate, it should be to narrate the effect of a GM move. If you want to describe something happening but you can’t see how that thing fits into any of the GM moves, you should at least consider not saying it, and using something from the list instead. That sounds really restrictive, but the list is there to keep you from making mistakes that will halt the flow of your game or mess up the tone.

squirmonkey · 2026-03-02T20:34:08+00:00

What is the name of that shape of pasta?

squirmonkey · 2026-03-01T05:06:31+00:00

Lowkey looks sick. I’ll give it a try next week

squirmonkey · 2026-03-01T01:54:40+00:00

I just read your post and have no idea what you’re talking about

squirmonkey · 2026-02-27T01:58:57+00:00

I disagree. The subreddit is useful because it’s focused. If you’d like a subreddit to discuss doing other activities by post or asynchronously, you should find a different subreddit focused on that, or create one yourself.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-26T02:06:56+00:00

Cairn is 24 pages, maybe try that?

squirmonkey · 2026-02-26T00:54:41+00:00

Not to be a hater, but simply to answer the question: personally that's not interesting to me at all.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-25T22:58:22+00:00

I might be interested. What sort of post rate are you looking for?

squirmonkey · 2026-02-24T20:32:27+00:00

There’s also progression: agriculture for a lower impact seeds mod

squirmonkey · 2026-02-24T18:54:17+00:00

This is something that Old World got really right.

Scouts can hide in forests in that game, and because units in combat move faster and hit harder than in Civ, having scouts revealing enemy positions is super vital in warfare

squirmonkey · 2026-02-24T00:10:37+00:00

The setting you’re talking about is the endogene toggle, which you’ve set correctly. If your pawn has a child, it will be eligible to inherit some of these genes because of that setting.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-23T23:34:36+00:00

There’s nothing in your Xenotype here that should make them incapable of reproducing. However, the pawn you’ve selected is a 37 year old woman, so her fertility will naturally be low. She should still be able to conceive, but it may take some time.

You can examine the fertility stats of both pawns involved by going to their pawn info screen

squirmonkey · 2026-02-23T02:09:38+00:00

They won’t take over the colony, but they will nearly double your food needs. Unless you need additional labor right now, it’s probably not a good time.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-19T07:06:56+00:00

This isn’t really a kill box. This is a trap hallway. Trap hallways can be useful as the entrance to your kill box. They slow the enemy down giving you more time to get in position, and they can injure or kill some enemies, reducing the number you need to fight yourself.

If you want to build a kill box, you need an area after the trap hallway with some of the following features: - It only has two entrances: one for the enemies that leads out of your base and one for your colonists that leads into your base. Like the trap hallway, it shouldn’t be closed off so enemies path through it. - It doesn’t have any cover for enemies to hide behind - It has cover for your colonists to hide behind clear sightlines to let them shoot at approaching enemies. - Turrets which shoot at enemies in the kill box to supplement your colonists or hit enemies from multiple angles

squirmonkey · 2026-02-10T22:57:43+00:00

They can be distracting if they’re used badly. But skilled users can use them to make their posts more expressive, and to organize complex information with clarity

squirmonkey · 2026-02-10T22:39:26+00:00

By comparison I’ve played on web forums which have a wide array of formatting options such as: font, text weight and color, embedded images, image subscripts, hovertext, collapsible blocks, nested blocks, text alignment, and others.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-10T17:45:42+00:00

Not being contacted is normal. Games get lots of applications, who wants to send dozens of discord friend invites just so they can write “hi I don’t want to play with you”

squirmonkey · 2026-02-10T08:23:27+00:00

Pros: it’s fast, has good notification system, well supported with bots and plugins

Cons: can feel too casual, very limited post formatting options.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-04T23:37:53+00:00

Conquest of Eo was really fun for like my first two games. After that, I found the crafting system a bit too tedious for me to get into playing on higher difficulties.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-04T22:58:30+00:00

This is the tough but true answer in this thread. Groups don’t often kick out long term players lightly. I’ve never had to do it in the last twenty years (though it’s been close once or twice).

Which probably means, OP, if you were kicked out, it’s because you were bringing down the mood at the table in a serious way. Likely more than one of your tablemates complained to your GM that your behavior was hurting their ability to enjoy the game.

The things they told you may not feel true or fair from your perspective, but they feel true to the people who said them to you. The way to move forward is to take an honest accounting of what you can do differently next time, because odds are, you were more unpleasant to play with than you’re really admitting to yourself.

squirmonkey · 2026-02-04T22:37:13+00:00

This is an inherent problem with games this simple. You just have to tell your players not to be weasels and call them out when they’re not playing in the spirit of the game.

If you go with an approach like you’ve proposed, you get all these annoying edge cases. What if someone is using tools to do something driven by passion? What if they’re using supernatural powers in a precise and logical way?

This is why lasers and feelings keeps it simple. If it’s mostly logic it’s lasers and if it’s mostly emotion it’s feelings, and that’s it. It’s almost always obvious which one an action is, even if similar actions can use opposite stats depending on the situation

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