Boardgaming in 2018!

Try Dont mess with Cthulhu instead. I really like the twists they put on social deduction.

I will admit that I just jumped to the list without reading, but man this list is even more terrible than the BGG list.

Yeah, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I foolishly thought it was an actual game. Then people just started talking and bullshitting and saying who they were and who they thought others were and it was her word against his and wtf is this game…all after a goofy audio track…yeah I am out.

Probably didn’t help that I didn’t know any of the roles while being the werewolf.

I haaaaaate those kind of games with a passion. In part because some of them are so pointlessly convoluted (Ultimate/One Night Werewolf) and some of them so exact they’re boring (Resistance),

but mostly it’s because they attract the “alpha socialite” type. The kind of people who try to take control of or be the center of attention of every social gathering. In every social deduction game, they will not cease talking over everyone and they are loud, then they try to steer the vote to kill off people who are quiet (the people who couldn’t get a word in because the alpha was such a monopolizing loudmouth) because “they’re not contributing anything to the game!” Real fun getting killed off the first round in a game of Mafia/Werewolf at a party.

Typical social deduction experience:

Me: “I guess I’ll vote this.”
Alpha: “No! Don’t vote that!”
Me: “Why not?”
Alpha: “Because Bob, Shelly, Megan, and Joe were on the first mission but only Shelly and Megan were on the second mission but Bob voted for Shelly on both missions while Joe only voted for Megan for the second mission and Shelly didn’t even argue when Joe wasn’t on the second mission!”
Me: “Uhhh…”
Alpha: “Look, Bob->Shelly->Megan<---->Joe<—Bob---->Shelly back to me<<—Shelly—>you<—JoeShellyMeganJoeBobShellyYouMeShellyBobJoe.”
Me: “…I’ll just stick with my vote.”
Alpha: “Why! That’s so stupid! Stupid!”
game ends
Alpha: “Wanna play again?”
Me:"…"

To sum it up, every experience has been the poison scene from Princess Bride. That’s a fun scene to watch, not to sit through across from a real life Wallace Shawn.

(agreeing to try Masquerade for the first time with 10 people was possibly the most painful boardgame experience of my life)

Oh god, I’m going to pick nits, but that doesn’t sound like an alpha socializer. Sounds like the opposite. It sounds like someone who is overly intellectual who drains the fun out of it by being the deduction master.

God help me, but it’s basically Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. It’s a complete lack of social nuance or understanding (and excessive need to show mental capacity).

ONUW is best played when you’re 2 out of 3 sheets to the wind. It’s a fun game (emphasis added just for Tom) provided no one takes it seriously. I find I am completely awful both at the social deduction and at concocting believable lies under those circumstances, but still enjoy playing. Coup is another great social game that I both enjoy and am horrible at.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf only has one round, so there’s no downtime.

I’d say it’s half Sheldon, half Reese Withersppon from Election.

Social deduction games are fun to play as light filler, but I hate having to play them for an extended amount of time. I think the longer you play them, the more pointless they seem.

Coup is an exception, since I think it’s more about bluffing (a la poker) than social deduction.

That’s the thing. The biggest, most conveniently located board game meetup near me is dominated by the social deduction pushers. It’s 3 games of Secret Hitler every night. 3 games! If not that, then Avalon or one of the Werewolves (One Night is terrible for a different reason: role overload just makes it a headache). They make up 70% of games played there, and it’s a struggle to get anything else to the table.

Just read this article and I wanted to call BS on your criticism here. He never claims to adjust it to match the population. He just said there was an obvious bias, and then rotated the distribution to compensate for it. I don’t think he made any wild claims, as you say (or maybe I just didn’t see them).

However, I think the bias is there not because BGG’ers necessarily like heavy games more. I would argue that heavy board games have fewer plays and fewer ratings than lighter games, and that the people that play them (and rate them) are more biased than the multitude of gamers that play lighter games. Its why many limited-screening ‘artsy’ movies often have inflated scores on IMDB and many indie games have higher scores on Steam.

But BGG specifically corrects for this (or tries to) with its Bayesian system. He even mentions that in the article.

We played Dungeons of Masmorra Friday. I had kick-started it two years ago played it once, and it got put on the shelf. There are three modes: normal, epic, and alliance. The normal mode is a race to 16pts, epic has you kill a boss at the end, and alliance is a co-op. The previous time we played the Epic version and didn’t care for it. It dragged at the end, and because whoever killed the boss would win, we would let other players clear out the trash.

This time we did the race to 16 and liked it better. It has an interesting mechanic where the monsters are dice. You spawn a room with a monster, you roll the monster dice (which has stats and an icon). It’s a fun twist and cuts down on production costs for minis.

Yeah, but as he pointed out, it’s entirely possible that people in general just prefer heavy games. Without sampling the non-BGG population for an objective comparison, it’s impossible to know how that correction should be applied. When Nate Silver publishes corrections to pollster bias, he’s comparing their polls based on how they compare to election results–which is what they’re supposed to predict–not to how much they favor one side or the other. The average poll in the last Congressional election, for instance, would have had about a 9% Democratic advantage. Correcting for that advantage would have produced nonsense.

Social deduction “games” are only as good as the least assholish person in the group.

-Tom

Aye

(also, any social deduction game that isn’t Dark Moon is a waste of time)

They state that the reason complexity and ratings correlate is due to sampling bias, and specifically that: “Complex board games disproportionately appeal to the BGG user base”. They then set out to correct for that correlation, and finally declare it to be a much more reasonable and approachable list than the original one with “inherent bias towards complexity”.

I don’t really know how else to interpret this than that the author thought that the BGG user base had a bias towards complexity (vs the rest of the population) and tried to eliminate that bias.

But OK, let’s say that this analysis was not done with that purpose, but just for the heck of it. What are these results then supposed to mean, how are we supposed to interpret them? I honestly don’t know.

Ratings are statements of preference, and as such each individual rating is correct almost by definition. If an aggregate of ratings is incorrect, it has to be a problem with the sample. But this is not supposed to be an argument about populations or samples, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I played Darkmon yesterday and I felt like a huge asshole, the new guy was playing the doctor who hadn’t played before hummed and ha’ed over some straight forward choices about helping the team. I KNEW he was infected as he did this about 3 times and not everyone was paying attention. So as soon as I got the choice for thetask card that lets you quarantine another player , I played it off as a easy pass event for us…and then quarantined the doctor and told the other players why I did and what I was basing it off of, the new guy playing the doctor looked pissed!

The doctor tried to call a vote on me to quarantine me and that voted failed, he looked sullen till his next turn and revealed. The other infected player was exhausted for a large portion of the game and stayed exhausted because we were fixing the base up and never got around to healing him, he didn’t advocate for it because it was a great reason to submit worse dice having only 2 dice. We won the game and the new gu playing the doctor was very annoyed and said he hated the game.

I felt like a real ass for so quickly crushing his ability to enjoy and interact with the game.

I love Mascarade (which I’m guessing you’re referring to). Probably my favorite game that involves lying assuming we’re playing 4-7 players and everyone is emotionally invested in the game. 10 players sounds like an insane chaotic mess.

However, I wouldn’t call it a social deduction game. It’s not at all like ONUW or The Resistance which is based almost entirely on social cues. I feel like it’s pretty much a straight point acquisition game that happens to involve lying. There’s enough to deduce from game mechanics that I feel like I’m never making judgments based on social cues alone. That said, all that falls apart if one player isn’t playing to win and is just being “silly and random”. Then the game just feels like nonsense.

I really like social deduction games. I don’t play them very often though, and would burn out on them if my game night was anything like @Infested_terran’s. I only play them a few times a year and usually with a fully gregarious group.

Except Battlestar Galactica. I hate that game. It’s like what happens if you take the Resistance and make it 3 hours long. There’s literally nothing good about that.

There is more game to it than the others, there is also more strategy and play options. A player also has agency and the ability to make positive play actions even after being caught or intentionally revealing.

I know, guy who is behind the forum game and responsible for running many of them thinks it is a good game. News at 9.

You’re right. I’m being hyperbolic. My one game I spent most of the time in brig, and it has drastically colored my impression.