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

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27350429

Hello, I've had this French edition of root since Christmas and I've been having plenty fun with it.

Anybody knows what these extra tokens are for?

There is:

• a bear
• the dynasty leaders
• a cat leader
• 5 castles
• 2 rivers with a riverfolk
• 4 animals with a wheelbarrow

I don't need them for playing the game so I'm guessing they're here for bonus rules, but I've never seen anything mentioning them. Is this for house rules?

Hi all,

I'm not one for self-promotion usually but just started my own book and board game shop in Amsterdam. It's online only at the moment but am looking to get a physical location up and running before the year is out. I ship anywhere in Europe and for the rest of the month have a 5% off deal going on (10% for orders over €100).

Spelenenspellen.nl

It would be convenient to leave board games out without them being in the way. Board game tables that have a sunken play surface and a removable cover are common solution. However it seems annoying to have to reach down to interact with anything. I’m also concerned about spills ruining game pieces if the table is used for dining when the cover is on

Shut up & Sit Down lads take the "Fromage" for a spin.

While I'm disappointed that this isn't my cut, this review made me laugh and cry (often at the same time).

Now that we've had a bit of time to play stuff, what do you think was the best release of 2024? Note this is addressing games that came out last year, not what you added to your collection in that time :)

alt text: special edition of the board game "Secret Hitler". there is a sticker sheet allowing for mods to the game including a sticker of Donald Trump's face

To me, Haiclue feels like the missing link between something like Codenames and 'serious' boardgaming (non-party games). The emergent poetry is sometimes quite striking, but it's still accessible enough that I've been able to introduce it to friends who don't play anything heavy.

It's also free to play on BoardGameArena, and I can't recommend it enough.

Some personal examples:

Dice forge has its way of handling dices that felt incredibly smart the first time I played it

Same for Codex Naturalis, I was impressed by the simple way they printed the cards to allow for modularity, obviously the game is a lot simpler than I thought but it gave me some interesting ideas with how to overlap cards

Or the boards in Fort that have this double layer so that you can nest your pizzas and toys in there, so cozy!

For the first time, I played an entire game of Wingspan and never took the lay eggs action. Pileated Woodpecker was the MVP of the game.

#boardgames #wingspan @boardgames

How would you define an eurogame today? Or do you think the distinction has become meaningless?

Credit u/benjaneson

A couple issues, like playtime being pretty subjective and Eclipse showing up twice in the same category, but still pretty cool.

Though this is satire, we've all had that experience where we played a game (many times, even!) and only found out later that we got the rules massively wrong. Share your experience!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25896521

Hi everyone,

i recently started playing AHLCG and found a lot of help and exchange for it on reddit. Now i wanna switch away from reddit and found AHLCG Community here on lemmy, but it seems to be super dead.

Would anyone be interested in creating/moderating/joining a new AHLCG community? Would be great to be able to talk about it on lemmy :)

Credit u/ShelfClutter

Feel free to message me if you have a game launching in the future!

Tags:

• * - Added Late
• #bg - Board Game
• #cg - Card Game
• #e - Expansion
• #wg - War Game (or similar)
• #rpg - RPG
• #rw - Roll & Write (or similar)
• #pg - Party Game
• #dg - Dexterity Game
• #d - Dice
• #c - Component
• #o - Other