Board Games

A buddy’s been hosting a board game birthday for ten years now and I wanted to bring some fun printed stuff. Have trophies for the most and second most wins, plus the green one for him as it’s his favorite color, and one for whomever plays the most games that day. Also printing out assorted little meeple with the ten/X on them.

Major points:

• Price increases are coming.
• They will pause producing most games except for cheap to manufacture, card-only games.
• For games with app adaptations, upcoming expansions will get a digital release before physical.
• They will design, develop, and prepare future games to hit the ground running when tariffs come down.

To be clear: They are joining an existing lawsuit for businesses that are being impacted by the tariffs

Darrell Louder confirmed in a pasted screenshot

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/157533

Less than two weeks after the Trump administration’s announcement of historically high tariffs on virtually all goods imported into the United States, the board game industry appears set for an unexpected reckoning. An ad hoc industry survey conducted by Cardboard Edison reveals that nearly a quarter of publishers polled will simply stop making board games. A majority believe that prices for board games that do get published will go up, and that the size and complexity of those games will go down. It’s a dismal state of affairs for what was once a blossoming part of the larger tabletop games industry, one that has for decades generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the United States economy.

Cardboard Edison is a small publisher best known for its annual game design awards. Its survey, conducted April 9-11, collected responses from 62 publishers. The company claims that “about 90%” of respondents said they expect consumer prices on board games will go up because of tariffs, and “about two-thirds” of publishers said print runs for those games will be smaller. 62% of publishers said they plan to sign fewer new games to their catalogs, meaning fewer opportunities for tabletop designers who traditionally operate as independent contractors. Most tragically, the group says 23% — nearly a quarter — of respondents said they’ll just stop making board games altogether.

The biggest red flag in the survey, however, is that those publishers who want to try and stay in the board game business are actively seeking ways to cut distributors and retailers out of the equation. As margins fall due to the cost of tariffs, which are a tax, selling games at retail using traditional logistics simply won’t be an option. Brick and mortar stores, including thousands of independent local game stores all around the country, likely won’t have as many board games to put on their shelves going forward.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

I played Undergrove for the first time today and it was really fun. It's developed by the same person who designed Wingspan. I really like the natural world themes she uses in the games.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376740/undergrove

#boardgames #undergrove #wingspan @boardgames

Just wanted to let everyone know that there's a campaign going on for one of my favorite games, Dragons of Etchinstone, it's one of those 18 card games that you can play without a table, like Palm Island, so you can play on the bus or train on your way to work.

I really like that you can take a couple of fast turns here and there and whenever you wanna stop, you just chuck all the cards in your pocket and you're good to go.

I have no relation with the guys that created it, but I really like several of the games this designer has made, like Gloomhaven Buttons and Bugs and other micro games, so I wanted to give a shout out.

SPOILERS AHEAD SO READ NO FURTHER IF IT MATTERS FOR YOU . . . . . .

So we've played through the Dunwich, and Path to Carcosa campaigns and had a grand time all the way through them. Then we started on the third campaign The Forgotten Age.

Things were definitely trickier with the new explore mechanic but manageable for the first two scenarios. We definitely felt a large step up in difficulty.

Then we got the Boundary Beyond and just got like totally smashed with almost no headway towards finishing the second act. Like we retried it twice but the results were nearly the same we got one maybe 2.5 locations cleared out before our situation became obviously hopeless.

The costs to explore each location are just so punishing and leaves you with no gas to handle the mythos that ultimately ushers us to our doom.

It's really soured our group on the game in general and I'm not sure they'll want to continue at this point. Is there something we're doing wrong?

The last 5-10 years have seen an uptick in the trend of games having nicer and shinier bits and pieces. In my mind, the trend is best exemplified by Wingspan, which to me was a fairly average game wrapped in a beautiful package of glossy Cadbury eggs and pretty birds. I'm personally in favour of getting nicer bits and pieces for my games, but they are undeniably having an impact on prices (how much of an impact is something I'd find really interesting, let me know if any publisher has discussed the issue).

What do you think of this trend? Are you in favour of moving back to 100% cardboard chits, or do you like the newer, prettier boardgames?

(Link to the discussion that prompted this post)

Edit: Title was changed since many people don't seem to get the term 'hilariously incompetent'.

We both play Grand Austria Hotel on yucata.de all the time, this will be the first time on cardboard for us.

(An exceptional gaming experience, with plenty of opportunities for chaining. You can remove the Kitchen-Hand card for a more balanced game.)

Also saves on wrapping paper ;-)

Was very excited to get this expansion as it added some elegant additions to the well-crafted formula. I managed to play 3 games since Friday with it (3pl) and the experience solidified my view on it and its place as one of my favorite board games.

Pic is from the first game we played.

The Sardaukar Commanders add a much needed early tempo option for Solari. Normally you don't really have anything to do with Solari in the early term, as it's usually not worth spending it for 1 water when you could be saving it for a council position or a swordmaster. However now with the Sardaukar in play in some easy to reach positions, it gives players an incentive to spend their early money to quickly grab one of them before they're all snatched away.

Likewise in the late game, once you have your council seat and swordmaster, Solari didn't have that much impact outside the occasional conflict or card. Now if you have a few Sardaukar in your employ, they give a significant power to your combat efforts by quickly translating your spare change into extra reinforcements, plus some good abilities. I really like the difficult decisions this opens.

Likewise Technologies give more versatility to spice. Without them, someone who didn't have a lot of access to the influence side of the board, didn't have a ton of options for using spice, other than going to the guild now and then. The Ix tech now allows someone who didn't get access to a lot of influence cards, or who doesn't care about combat as much, to use green cards to utilize their spare spice as well. I am always up for giving more options to the players. The tech effects can also be quite powerful when paired with the right leaders. I won my second game handily by making a tech-intrigue combo and just spamming troops out constantly through it.

Finally the new leaders are all quite nice, and I like the more unique directions they took with some of them like the Guild Navigator.

Ultimately, very very happy with this addition, even if some of my playing mates were more muted in their appraisal.

About a year ago I put together this 2-sided reference card for Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition to help teach some friends and family how to play (and to remind myself of some of the new keywords in DE). While talking with someone recently, they suggested I actually publish it somewhere online (which I probably should have done a year ago, but oh well).

PDF and LibreOffice Draw files for printing/editing.

When I printed it, I ended up folding/cutting the sheets into quarters and gluing them together to get a thicker card. You could probably just duplex print them if you had thick enough paper though (bleed-through is a concern).

Fair warning: I think I was a little aggressive with the page margins; I was trying hard to avoid shrinking the text more/packing it too tightly to be easily readable.

I did my best to be concise but accurate, particularly with the glossary (some rewording was necessary for space). I also tried to match the colors and style of the game for the Phases sidebar (as much as I could, anyway). The Damage block was added largely in response to getting asked several times what the different damage types "meant".

Though I'm probably done working on this, I would still love to hear any feedback anyone has. If anyone knows other lemmy communities or similar that this would be a good fit for, please let me know as well (but fuck reddit).

Picture shows the end state of a three player game. So much fun!

Nominal price of $2, free shipping worldwide.

On a blustery autumn evening, five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance — from all corners of the world — to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 — 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days. When the story of Fogg’s triumphant journey filled all the newspapers of the day, the five attended University together. Inspired by his impetuous gamble, and a few pints from the local pub, the group commemorated his circumnavigation with a more modest excursion and wager – a bottle of good claret to the first to make it to Le Procope in Paris. Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) with a new wager (always more expensive) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century, it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition.

The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America — in just 7 days. The journey would begin immediately…

Taught the game to literally dozens of people, today I find out there's an actual interesting lore / backstory tidbit I could have been using to intro it! Damn!

Business Insider published an article today titled "An ex-Facebook exec said staff let Zuckerberg win at board games. But now the plot thickens."

TLDR for the article:

• In her new book "Careless People", a former Facebook executive recalls a SPECIFIC game of Catan played on an Indonesia trip in October 2014. She writes that other Facebook employees let Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan by never stealing from him and failing to block his victory.
• Another player at that game is refuting her assessment and saying that it's actually WORSE - that Zuckerberg enlisted the other players to gang up on him in order to secure the win.

What's funny to me about this article is that I'm sure we've all had at least one game session that has gone down in infamy due to it's contentiousness. It seems this specific session of Catan in Indonesia was THAT game for the players at the table that night. Over nine years later, they still recall the details of what went down. Excerpts from the article:

• She called out at one point when she saw one "particularly egregious" move and others flashed her looks.
• When she asked Zuckerberg if he really wanted to win that way [i.e. by others letting him win], he seemed "perplexed"
• "I feel the dynamics in the room shift and not in a good way."
• Hunter-Torrick said his tactic was to eliminate weaker players so he could then go after Zuckerberg, "who was the toughest player." But then something "more interesting" happened. "Zuckerberg said he was tired and wanted to sleep, and convinced the others to gang up on me so he could win! That's actually a much better story showing his ruthlessness," 

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that doesn't let these things go! (kidding/not kidding)

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Credit u/UlisKromwell