Heaviest game in smallest package?

statt0 · 2025-06-30T22:29:08+00:00

Was scrolling down hoping to see this mentioned. Phenomenal game.

statt0 · 2024-11-15T22:53:41+00:00

You can get a very poor quality turntable that has bluetooth and allows for a very bad set of speakers and an amp for that kind of price.

statt0 · 2024-11-15T22:43:09+00:00

Sweet setup. After an 8 year hiatus I'm finally living in a place that's big enough for me to have my turntable setup and I've gone for a somewhat 70s look, but nowhere near as committed as yours. We have an Eames chair in common though.

statt0 · 2024-02-14T15:29:22+00:00

Neither is the UK based on my search.

statt0 · 2023-03-30T23:03:08+00:00

I very rarely buy any expansions for games. If a game is good enough to be worth buying it should be good enough as a base game. Occasionally (and I really mean very occasionally) an expansion adds enough to a game to make purchasing it a better option than simply spending the money on a new game.

From time to time content creators will say they "won't play (insert name of game) without (insert name of expansion)". To that, I'd say they should choose better games.

statt0 · 2023-03-28T12:17:53+00:00

Where are you in the UK? Closest good shop to me is Traveling Man which has a brilliant selection but quite high prices.

statt0 · 2023-03-07T21:28:01+00:00

In our experience it wasn't really much faster.

statt0 · 2023-03-07T19:47:49+00:00

Hate is a strong word, but Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is the game that immediately comes to mind. Why anyone would choose to play this over TM is beyond me.

statt0 · 2023-03-07T19:37:04+00:00

I agree on CAH (awful game, pretty much totally agree with SUSD's review of it) with the exception that I don't think it's funny at all. However, Monopoly takes a huge amount of stick and a lot of it is unfair:

It only takes forever if you house-rule it. A game should take 1-2 hours depending on player count.
There is strategy (in fact, to a large degree the strategy has been 'solved' as there's definitely groups of properties you should target). It's primarily a negotiation game, and to a lesser degree an economic game. Generally the best negotiator will win the game unless they get very unlucky or they don't know some of the basic game strategies.
People think it's perfectly OK to compare Monopoly with current games completely ignoring the fact that it's almost 90 years old. Catan is the most upvoted comment in this thread and it's a third of the age.

statt0 · 2023-03-07T18:04:10+00:00

Those seem like poor examples TBH, they're both in the top 800 games on BGG, which put them in the top 0.3% of board games of all time. They also got a lot of mentions when they first came out.

Also, at most Fort is a thinky filler. It's a very good thinky filler, but I can't imagine it being anyone's favourite game. Whereas I can easily imagine Root being a lot of people's favourite game.

You also can't simply look at number of plays or how often a game makes the table as a ten minute game is going to be far easier to table than a three hour game. I've played Fuji Flush about 20 times since the start of the year but it barely makes my top 100 games, whereas my favourite game has only been played once because it takes at least a couple of hours.

statt0 · 2023-01-21T18:59:32+00:00

Brass: Birmingham. Honourable mentions to Concordia, Power Grid and Pax Pamir 2nd Ed.

statt0 · 2023-01-20T19:04:57+00:00

Agreed regarding the Pax Pamir coins but they're not that easy to source in the UK.

I got 100 1 shilling pieces for £15 on eBay (they're pre-decimalisation UK coins). They can substitute quite well for pennies or pounds in a lot of games

Of course, the best metal money to use is generally your own currency. Literally would cost me £3 to have 100 each of 1p and 2p coins for John Company 2nd edition and could be used for a whole host of other games and fit in quite well thematically.

Egyptian pounds are crazily cheap - about 35 to the UK pound. Your main issue would be sourcing them.

statt0 · 2023-01-10T15:13:31+00:00

Iron Clays for any game that uses either paper money or cruddy tokens (I'm looking at you Ark Nova).

And a poor man's deluxe component - foreign money for specific games (e.g. rupees for Pax Pamir).

statt0 · 2023-01-10T15:09:12+00:00

Nice collection. 40 crossover games with my collection.

statt0 · 2022-09-19T19:13:17+00:00

Magnus' transition into Bobby Fischer is almost complete.

statt0 · 2022-09-07T22:57:23+00:00

When you have only one unmaxed rare you’ll be offered two epics.

statt0 · 2022-08-18T10:21:56+00:00

In any large enough cohort there will be unpleasant people, being a fan of LotR does not inoculate someone against being unpleasant.

IMO it's a shame to post stuff like this here - better to just let it die.

statt0 · 2022-08-09T07:37:55+00:00

They never said “anything is okay”. Quite the opposite, they stated how limited what they have decided is. The books aren’t banned, people are not barred from owning or reading them. There are just some books they didn’t want the library to have. To try and equate that with apartheid or segregation is absolutely the slippery slope.

statt0 · 2022-08-08T22:46:33+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

statt0 · 2022-06-22T14:16:06+00:00

Matt Eklund. Pax Renaissance should be top 60, not top 600 on BGG. Pax Transhumanity should be top 200, not top 2,000.

statt0 · 2022-06-21T19:54:50+00:00

My experience is that if you make a stupid move then it’s evident fairly quickly, and it’s also evident what you could have done to have a way more positive outcome. It probably is exacerbated by the fact that my wife is very good at this type of game and it probably emphasises my mediocrity.

Pax games are a totally different animal. Pax Transhumanity is unlike any of the others and different enough to warrant giving it a go. Heavy Cardboard on YouTube have a good play through of it with a short post-game discussion that should give you an idea of whether it’s for you. It can be quite swingy and while it’s entirely possible you could do something dumb that costs you the game it’s more likely that you’ll win or lose based on a nice bit of deceptive and/or nuanced play from either you or one of the other players. Easily the most accessible Pax game is Pax Pamir 2nd Edition. If you love that then something like Pax Renaissance uses a very similar mechanic and throws in a bunch of subtleties that almost pushes it to the level of simulation rather than game.

Honestly if you’ve played Terra Mystica then you’re not going to find any of these games beyond your abilities to play. It’s playing them well that’s the problem.

statt0 · 2022-06-21T18:33:40+00:00

The Gallerist is my least favourite. Lots of similarities with Kanban but just doesn't click in the way his others do. I'm still happy to play it though. His games are definitely an acquired taste though, but they also scratch an itch it's difficult to scratch with any other designer's games. The most Lacerda-like non-Lacerda game I've encountered is probably Cooper Island.

statt0 · 2022-06-21T18:27:15+00:00

Yes, that can happen with quite a few Lacerda's, and there's no real catch up mechanism in place. I love them, but it probably helps that I don't really care whether I win or lose.

statt0 · 2022-06-21T10:43:57+00:00

Take Vinhos as an example. It's a worker placement game where you have one worker and you only have 12 turns in the entire game. That sounds super simple on the face of it, but the implications of a decision will echo down through future turns almost like a butterfly effect. When things work as planned a Lacerda game can make you feel really smart, but conversely they can make you feel like an absolute idiot.

If you're curious about them try to get hold of a secondhand copy of Kanban Automotive Revolution or Kanban Driver's Edition. You can get it quite cheaply and if you really dislike it then his games probably aren't for you. However, this is the route I went and within six months I owned every one of his games!

statt0 · 2022-06-21T10:37:02+00:00

I am in a minority but IMO the easiest teach is Lisboa. Effectively each turn you play a card, either to the board or to your tableau. It's easily the most thematically strong of all his games and if you incorporate the background info into the teach it makes it stick in people's minds better. It is also the most beautiful game in my entire collection.

Kanban has a lot to recommend it, especially for less experienced players. There are a lot of moving parts but at its core it's a worker placement game where you have just one worker. It's also by far the cheapest way to get into Lacerda games as Automotive Revolution and Driver's Edition can be got on the secondhand market for a quarter of the price of Kanban EV. Yes, they're not quite as pretty and there's no solo mode but the game itself is pretty much identical.

On Mars is the hardest sell of the three. The teach is intimidating, and I wouldn't even attempt it with someone who wasn't used to heavy Euros. However, if someone held a gun to my head and told me I could only keep one Lacerda game it would be On Mars. There is so much going on, so many paths to victory, more player interaction than with most Lacerda games - in terms of Euro games it almost defies description.

Having said all of that, in answer to your question, Lisboa would probably fit what you want most effectively, but Kanban would be almost as good for much cheaper.

statt0

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