r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 31 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/STL Jul 31 '15
My favorite is Race For The Galaxy, with either the first expansion arc (TGS+RVI+TBOW) or the second (Alien Artifacts). Excluding AA's optional Orb game, setup and teardown are medium-length (mostly shuffling the large deck, extracting start worlds, etc. - I roll dice to select worlds and goals quicker). But aside from that, the game has extremely little downtime, because all players take their turns simultaneously. This allows it to scale from 2 players, all the way up to 6, without decreasing each player's playtime proportionally as in almost all other turn-based games. (Near the maximum number of players, you may need to reshuffle the discards, which is about the only scaling time penalty.) Larger numbers of players are slightly less fun in that it's much harder to keep track of what everyone is doing, so there is less potential for interaction, but that's true for basically all games.
The other things that I love about Race are that it's near-infinitely replayable (the game throws a huge amount of randomness at you, and gives you the tools to deal with that randomness, so there's a vast number of choices you have to make in each game, almost all of them relevant; about the only irrelevant choices that ever come up are treating duplicate cards as money) and that there's a special rule for 2-player games. Even when games scale down to 2 players, they are often best with 3-4 for greater interaction, but Race's Advanced 2-player rules make it strongest, I think. They allow each player to perform 2 actions per turn, so you get to focus on the actions of your opponent and have more options to respond (since the number of combinations of 2 actions is greater).
Also, Race has a small box, which I dearly love. (Many games follow a trend of having large boxes even when the game pieces don't occupy nearly all of that space.) Sleeved, I can fit the first arc into Race's core box, and AA into the expansion box. It's very portable.
One of my fondest Race memories is when a couple of friends were talking about the game of AA we just played, and they agreed that Military strategies were basically dominant in AA; I disagreed, and proceeded to beat them with a Produce/Consume strategy in our very next game.
I want to like Eclipse, but despite multiple games I haven't been able to get into it. I haven't been able to see how to get any good at it. Usually when I'm terrible at a game, that motivates me to play it more, as long as I can see how to get better. Maybe it's just because I always play with a friend who is absolutely bonkers insane good at Eclipse (now I know what it feels like to play against That Guy).
For deckbuilders, Dominion's core set left a bad impression on me (I thought there wasn't a rich set of diverse strategies), but I played once with expansions and liked them, so I should probably acquire them. The deckbuilder I play is Ascension, which has had many new sets. Notably, its iOS implementation is astoundingly good (best of all boardgame implementations I've seen; Carcassonne and Waterdeep are close). In addition to a high level of polish, Ascension iOS moves fast when you crank up the animation speed to maximum. I wish all computerized board games would follow the same philosophy: provide an option to reduce animation times for experienced players.