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February Q&A Video (Patreon)

Published:
2015-02-28 22:32:05
Edited:
2017-12-05 22:43:24
Imported:
2022-01

Content

If you want to catch up on February's Q&A, check out the archive link here! Link: http://www.spreecast.com/events/extra-history-q-a-february-28-1pm-pst Note that the archive is only available for two weeks (silly Spreecast) so don't let it sit too long. Hope you enjoy it!

Comments

Manfredi

You should look into boardgames a bit, there are a few interesting things that relate strongly to things you guys talk about a lot. Here are a few examples to get you excited (hoping to say things you don't know already). I'm not even going to recommend the games I like best, just the ones I think are interesting based on your EC episodes. Freedom: the Underground Railroad is a cooperative game about freeing slaves in the US. It is historically accurate, and captures many ethical problems through mechanics. Risk: Legacy is a very experimental project that had a HUGE success, which is being expanded with new titles such as Pandemic: Legacy. It resembles roguelikes, except even more extreme and personal (and as with all boardgames, a very social experience). 1960: The Making of the President is a (very good) game about the 1960s US elections. If that doesn't pick your interest I'd be surprised. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is similar to a choose your own adventure book, except it comes with actual newspapers, a map of London that you use to choose where to go in order to solve the cases (with paragraphs for EVERY choice)... it really puts you in the shoes of a consulting detective. Tales of Arabian Nights (mentioned in the Q&A) is similar, but it supports more players and is... I don't know. I like it less somehow, and I am unsure why. Perhaps the setting. (The other game mentioned, Mice & Mystics, is D&D for kids with minis in a box. It is absolutely EXCELLENT for kids, I can't really recommend it enough. I wouldn't play it with adults though.) BattleCon: Devastation of Indines is interesting to compare to fighting videogames. It is basically street fighter in tabletop form. It captures the essence of fighting games beautifully, and it's very very interesting how it manages to do so (base + style selection). I always wondered what would happen if someone turned that game back into real time videogame form (media-translateception!). Nexus Ops does tactical skirmishes better than most other games I've played (video games included, although I still like Fire Emblem and FF: Tactics more in the abstract). It's really elegant, and I always thought a few games would have improved massively by learning from it :/ Betrayal at the House on the Hill is a masterpiece in storytelling and a terrible design at the same time (controversial statement). You all play a character in a classic horror movie, exploring the very very spooky house on the hill. At some point, the other shoe drops, one of you becomes a traitor and you face off in one of 50 different horror scenarios. I always wondered how it managed to still be interesting even though for half the game you are literally doing nothing.

ExtraCredits
>>365845

Betrayal at House on the Hill was a game that I tried to play at GenCon a few years ago, but I'd never been to GenCon before so I didn't realize you have to reserve a spot if you want to guarantee you can play. Alas, the table filled up, and it's been my dream to come back to it ever since! Sherlock is one that my current roommate has been playing (I believe she just finished the set) and it sounds amazing. I may steal it from her and start an EC Sherlock group. The rest are new to me, and appreciated! I'll make sure the team sees this list... especially Dan, since he's usually the best at organizing group get-togethers to play that sort of thing. :D -Soraya

Anonymous
>>365845

Great examples. I wish I had time to play them... more tabletop games should be ported to computers/phones. It'd be nice if Tabletop or some other web series would cover them, so I could see what it's like to play.

Anonymous
>>365845

Tales of Arabian Nights is a fun chaos thing, which attempts to piece together some sort of causality between independent, very random events, via status effect cards, and kinda fails. CYOA on crack and without any meaningful decisions, but it works despite this and makes for a beautiful whole; sort of a relic of it's time (I think it was originally published in the 80s) but very much worth playing the current version with a much larger book. I think Dead of Winter and Robinson Crusoe give a better sense of causality within tabletop procedural storytelling for me than Tales, DoW via conditional event cards, RC via cards that do different things depending on where they're drawn from, and often give you a choice to put them into the other deck that will have consequences down the line - So you can steal these eggs for extra food, but then the mother bird will attack you at some point later in the game. But... Neither have the sheer awesomeness of having a giant book as a game componant that you basically are spending 45-90 minutes just reading stories to each other from. I think it's currently published by Z-Man, who I think have apparently been working on a King Arthur/Camelot/etc version for a few years now? Mice and Mystics, meanwhile, is easily one of my favourite two games - Really strong story driven, light, coop dungeon crawl with the USP of "You're all mice!" - I wouldn't describe it as a storytelling game, however; it handles story the same way a video game does - You play through a pre-written story with very little narrative impact on it (there are a couple of optional quests that give you a harder mission now for an easier task in a chapter or two, mind, but... Mostly linear). Going to wind up starting a new campaign of it solo because my fiance doesn't do coop games and I want to get started on the first expansion but the people I played through the base game with are no longer easily available, so I'm doing a lot more solo gaming, mainly with the coops that I used to play with others, but I've picked up a couple of dedicated solo titles as well. I strongly disagree with 'don't bother playing with adults' - When I was moving further than about 5 miles away from my parents place, so we wouldn't be able to get together on a consistent basis to socialize and play games, my father made /damn/ sure to finish the campaign of it, seemingly for himself as much as me. A good children's story is enjoyable by adults, and Mice and Mystics is a damn good children's story in board game form. The Dune boardgame has been reimplemented without the license as Rex by Fantasy Flight, incidentally, since they managed to secure the rights to the game but not the rights to the Dune IP. Really funny story about Dune, actually - They technically didn't have the license for one of the factions, since that faction was introduced in the second book but they only licensed the first book. Reportedly (This might be covered in the Ludology episode Olotka Encounter, which is an interview with Peter Olotka who is one of the designers of Cosmic Encounter and Dune - <a href="http://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-episode-91-olotka-encounter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://ludology.libsyn.com/ludology-episode-91-olotka-encounter</a> - but that's certainly not the first time I heard this sotry) they got a Cease and Disist notice due to that. This was resolved by I believe Frank Herbert hearing about this nonsense, and phoning up someone involved in the game in the middle of the night to tell them "I hate lawyers, don't worry about it." Onto games mentioned by Manfredi: 1960: The Making Of the President is out of print at the moment, and 'tricky' to acquire at a reasonable price point. I believe it uses the same system as Twilight Struggle, which is... Basically 'The cold war, in a box' - 3-4 hour, back and forth, GMT game. Very intuitive for a game with a a rulebook that reads like a technical manual, and the card histories section at the back of the rulebook is a fair few pages long, which goes into more detail than some syllabuses into the event depicted by the card. 1989: Dawn of Freedom is similar, but specifically focused on the fall of the . I prefer Twilight Struggle (1989 has a weird almost trick taking minigame whenever someone plays a scoring card that doesn't quite gel with the rest of the game for me), but both are excellent games - I think they both made my top 20 games of all time when I did my Dice Tower Top 100 People's Choice voting last year. Betrayal At House On The Hill is an unbalanced mess, which requires a splitting rules in a way that causes rules ambiguities that are nightmarish to resolve since your half of the scenario specific rules (Either Traitor or Survivor) is secret information... The componants are, frankly, crap - To the point where the debate isn't 'is the first or second edition better from a component standpoint?' the debate is 'which version has the worse components?'... But it's tons of fun, especially to play while drunk (Which... Doesn't help the rule splitting thing). Especially since you often get situations in the game that are highly riffable, like B horror movies tend to be. And, honestly? For a game that's basically giving you 'every B horror movie in a box'... I don't think I'd have it any other way - The fact it doesn't quite come together into a coherant game is almost evocative of the theme, B movies never quite come together, that's half the joy of them.

Anonymous
>>365845

Search youtube for Rahdo Runs Through if you want detailed explanations from your run through (He doesn't do complete games, but he explains them as he goes - Typically about an hour fifteen minutes per game, it takes him longer to do his run throughs than it would to play through the period of time covered by the game usually. Games that have real time elements are often the most interesting, since instead of playing for both himself and his wife in those he's playing with his wife in them). Meanwhile The Dice Tower does occasional live plays of games if you just want to watch people playing games and don't mind if they're making the sorts of rules mistakes that can happen when playing board games.