I believe that means they decide to live as cavemen on a planet somewhere.
I’m going to be the lone dissenting voice here it seems, and exclaim my extreme hate for this game. There are few games that I pretty much refuse on the spot to play anymore, and this is one of them.
Unless you want to replace the bolded portion above with “troll,” you need to justify that comment rather than hit-and-fading…
Its lots of different things. A small part of it is the people I’ve had the misfortune to play with. They’re the type of people that really enjoy breaking games- figuring out the optimal strategy that pretty much makes the game unplayable. They did it to Puerto Rico, Shadows Over Camelot and they’ve done it to BSG. But even before that, it really just doesn’t work for me.
I like co-op games, I like BSG (well, most of it), I don’t even particularly mind long games. I’m pretty much the target audience for it. I guess I just find it tedious to play, and I recognized the whole Sympathizer role as being flawed from the getgo and just leads to the players gaming the system. It takes entirely too long and is way to fiddly with it’s bits (this from someone who played a four hour game of Indonesia the other night, lost by an absurd amount, and still loved every minute of it, and a game of Twilight Imperium 3 the night before that). I’ll grant that it does do some decent things with theme, but not enough to slog through another game of it.
Your friends sound… fun. Or, exactly the kind of gamers I avoid :)
Note I didn’t say they were my friends. They’re people that play in a couple of game groups I’m in. I tend to avoid playing certain games with some of them, too.
Doesn’t change that the BSG game is full of suck.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you are one of “those” guys? I’m just throwing that out there because categorical rejections of fairly well regarded games are pretty much their bread and butter, and your opening post and this one characteristic of their preferred means of expression.
For instance, I am an unabashed Arkham fanboy, but we had one disastrous session a few weeks where with six players (2 novices) the damned thing dragged on for hours. Having played it with fewer people in the past and had a great time, I can say definitively the quality of the game was not the key variable for me. But it definitely would have been a terrible first impression, despite all of the superficial requirements for a good session being met. Point being, if you have a bad experience with a game that people who aren’t idiots are telling you is ok, it’s probably best to limit your criticisms to clear boundaries (“I have not enjoyed BSG the X times I have played it, because of this this and this”). If you can point to specific mechanics in the game that you believe are broken, then that’s a potentially interesting direction for the conversation depending on how you handle it.
But what you are doing right now is useless.
Other than the people in this thread, I didn’t realize the game was that well-regarded. It pretty much boils down to Shadows Over Camelot without the broken Traitor mechanic but with equally broken mechanics to replace it and a 2X playing length and massivly fiddly bits (the size of those cards is just asinine, especially with how often you have to shuffle them). I’m not trying to say that everyone has to agree with me- I was just trying to provide a counterpoint to all the love that it was getting in this thread. Sometimes people need to hear that it isn’t the perfect game before they rush out and buy it. Sure, in my first post I was a bit flip and didn’t provide any details, but whatever.
My last post however I detailed some of the problems, and here’s some more. Here is a thread on the geek. See that guy in the thread ‘Sean McCarthy’? He’s in my game group. He and Alex Rockwell have pretty much broken the game to the point that the humans can’t lose using the normal rules. And that was just going to the geek and looking at the front page of threads about the game- I’m sure if I dug deeper, that’s just the surface.
I played the game before there was any word of mouth about it- some of the guys in the group got the advance copies that were sold at PAX, and so had pretty much no preconceptions about it. It wasn’t fun my first game, or my second, and by my third or fourth Sean and Alex had cracked it. While they enjoy those sorts of things, I don’t. I’ve successfully ignored their ‘advice’ in the past, but with BGG I just feel it isn’t worth it. The idea that I’m just some sort of troll who’s being contrary for the sake of it without believing what I’m saying is pretty laughable. Sorry to rain on the hivemind’s parade on this one, but there it is.
Yeah, nobody’s enjoying THAT piece of shit. It’s about as relevant as you using your anecdotal evidence to seek to invalidate what everyone else is saying about the game, but there you have it.
No, in your first and second post you said the game was terrible and broken. Or a game you “hate” that “sucks”, to be precise. You weren’t a bit flip, you were useless with nerd rage.
My last post however I detailed some of the problems, and here’s some more. Here is a thread on the geek. See that guy in the thread ‘Sean McCarthy’? He’s in my game group. He and Alex Rockwell have pretty much broken the game to the point that the humans can’t lose using the normal rules. And that was just going to the geek and looking at the front page of threads about the game- I’m sure if I dug deeper, that’s just the surface.
You didn’t detail anything. You said some friends of yours who are into extreme mechanics deconstruction were able to abuse the games mechanics to a point where the game wasn’t fun anymore. That’s as specific as you got.
In contrast, the conversation you linked to is standard fare for the Geek. People who like games critiquing specific features in interesting ways and providing well reasoned counterpoints to them. Similar conversations have been had about all of my favorite games and many of them do, in fact, point out problems in design. Your friend hates the game so much that he came up with a variant for it that he came up with what looks to be a fucking awesome variant for it, no doubt because he’s motivated by its brokenness and quantity of suck.
I played the game before there was any word of mouth about it- some of the guys in the group got the advance copies that were sold at PAX, and so had pretty much no preconceptions about it. It wasn’t fun my first game, or my second, and by my third or fourth Sean and Alex had cracked it. While they enjoy those sorts of things, I don’t. I’ve successfully ignored their ‘advice’ in the past, but with BGG I just feel it isn’t worth it. The idea that I’m just some sort of troll who’s being contrary for the sake of it without believing what I’m saying is pretty laughable. Sorry to rain on the hivemind’s parade on this one, but there it is.
You’re not raining on any hivemind’s parade, and simply declaring that you aren’t being contrary by (yet again) bitching about your circle of boardgame players isn’t the same (yet again) as providing a critique in the style of what you cited. It sounds like your friends have found a comfortable space in which to accomodate their play style and you are the odd man out. And then you take it out on the game.
If you want to not like the game, nobody is trying to take that away from you. If you want to have a conversation where you detail why you don’t like it, that’s great as well. Probably the only thing you’ve accomplished so far is discourage nonconfrontational people from talking about it.
To be fair, he did say the cards were too big.
You’ve got me there.
I believe he actually means that the cards are too small (which they are), but made an unfortunate choice of words preceding the parenthetical.
I mean, I like the game well enough, but fuck those tiny little cards.
Excellent detective work, and that’s probably true. Even in games where it’s simply a rarely shuffled logistical necessity, they drive me nuts.
Ah, you’re right. I was hung up on “massivly [sic]”.
No, I said the cards were too small, but I guess that was implicit- you’d have to know the size of the cards already to know what I’m talking about. They’re just so small, and you’re constantly having to draw and discard and shuffle them and NEEEEERRRRDDD RAAAAGEE. Is that what you want to see? I’m not the one doing point-by-point selective quoting and responding, which I’ve always thought of as a sign of NR. But that’s again just me. But if that’s the game we’re going to play…
I feel these are valid criticisms, and they’re from my second (first non-flippant) post. Do I need to spell out exactly how I think the bits are annoying and fiddly? The Sympathizer had already been talked about in this thread, I didn’t really think it needed more expounding, especially since FFG has released an official variant to mitigate the problem, which is pretty much as good as admitting guilt to me. ;)
Sorry, I don’t look at BGG rankings, I’m of the camp that thinks they’re essentially meaningless. The thread I linked to on the geek was some specific people talking about a specific problem with the game. It was the first one I linked because it was the first one I saw, and only did so because you were asking for details- I certainly didn’t want to stink up this thread with what amounts to boardgame spoilers. You may have decided that I linked it as yet another example of how my friends had broken it, but it was intended as just an example of a single nearly unstoppable broken mechanic. The fact that Sean was in there throwing numbers and analysis of the decks around was just icing on the cake.
And yeah, I knew Sean has come up with a variant to fix the problems he found- my group is all atwitter with how good it is. That doesn’t change the fact that I find the basic mechanics of the game uninteresting and that it takes way, way too long. I can play and even engage with and do well at games I think are bad, as long as they don’t slog on for 2.5-3 hours (and that’s with the ‘shortened’ version that they play with). I’m not the biggest fan of Indonesia, the economic game I was talking about, but I played through close to four hours of it, came in second to last and was engaged and having fun the whole time.
Have you ever taken a reading comprehension class? Seriously, I’ve said several times now that I didn’t like the game before it was ‘broken’. My game groups are big enough that when people want to play BSG or something else equally worthless (don’t get me started on Here I Stand, ugh), I can always wander off and find something less repellent. There’s no rage here, just a simple counterpoint to the gushing love in this thread. Sure, it’s not written in the style of a Wikipedia article, but that’s just me. If you want to fixate on the idea that it’s who I’m playing with and not what we’re playing, fixate away.
(now I’m just waiting for you to pull out the old ‘well, if you think that a certain playing style is broken, don’t play that way’ canard)
I’m not actually sure that there’s much of a “deeper” here. The two mechanics of the game that are of questionable merit are:
-
Sympathizer mechanic kinda sucks and encourages non-sensical play prior to the Sleeper phase (humans TRY to put their resources in the red on purpose).
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XO/Press Room/IC combination which makes it very hard for Cylons to sabotage anything.
That said, there’s an official variant that removes the Sympathizer mechanic altogether, but which makes the game slightly easier for the humans as a result. There’s also the house rule Lizard_King linked to regarding Investigative Committee and Scientific Research which it seems would make make the game slightly harder for the humans (and effectively removes the “broken” combo).
Amazingly, you can combine these two and fix most of the quibbles with the game in one fell swoop. Seemingly, the game magically stops sucking.
There’s a pretty big difference between saying a game sucks, is “broken”, and is a completely worthless waste of time and simply avowing that you dislike the game for reasons you can’t seem to specify. You write awfully long paragraphs for having so little to say.
I have to say, the three times that I’ve played this game the Cylons won. That may be inexperience with the mechanic or not playing to break it but there’s my anecdotal .02: it’s hard for humans to win.
I love this game for the record, and would recommend it to anyone. I’m a little shady about the expansion since it takes us beyond the awesome 1st season that the game is based on towards crappier waters in the show. I have some faith that FFG will do good, but…
Also, my recommendation is based partly on this being the first FFG game I played where I didn’t look at the rules afterwards and say “Huh, guess we totally cheated” because of forgetting one of the niggling details in the rulebook.
I agree about the expansion being questionable, but it is FFG.
Every game I have played has felt like a really good episode of the show. Problems, accusations, quick wit and heroic moments that, more often than not, end in disaster.
While it may not be the most hardcore game out there I say
A+ for making a game themed so incredibly well.
My group and I love this game. BSG can have some true nail biting moments towards the end of the game - several of ours have been EXTREMELY close, where the winning side would have lost if there had been only one or two more turns.
The first time we played (all of us having never played it before), it took us five hours to get through. We immediately re-set it up and played another game (only three hours this time).
I’m not pulling out any canards. All I’ve done is hold you to the evidence you’ve provided for your assertion that the game sucks horribly and is terminally broken, which consists of declaring that it is broken repeatedly and that your friends (who break games for fun) have broken it. Since the latter statement at least has some heft to it (provided by your friends, not you), that’s what I’ve focused on. Oh, and the card size thing, I don’t want to give the full intellectual ramifications of your argument short shrift.
At most, you’ve established what many people who like the game (such as your friends) have found: that it has some questionable design issues that could be dealt with in better ways than the stock rules indicate. Other than that, you’ve just been picking a fight from the beginning and then acting all surprised when you get called out on it. If you had simply modified your initial claim to something reasonable and qualified it accordingly, rather than implicitly declaring everyone who enjoys the game a tasteless moron (call it the wumpus), all of this could have been avoided.
Finally, where do you go to take reading comprehension classes? I understand it’s a facet of special and remedial education tracks, but I have to admit I can’t recall ever taking a class specifically targeted at that. As a point of reference, how many have you taken?