BGI 397 The One About

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

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Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

BGI 397 The One About

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

I mentioned Feral Historian last month …. his video on Buckaroo Banzai pointed out something that I’d never noticed (despite many rewatches, including one during Covid): It is a Cold War Allegory. The Red and Black Lectroids fight using proxies, but the proxies are the US (via Buckaroo) and the rest of Earth. The US is forced into the war by the “good” side threatening nuclear annihilation unless they are appeased.

“never ask a highway engineer to dispose of a whale corpse. Those are words I live by, every single day.” — Dave Berry

“It’s time to move on, it’s what Shelly would have wanted…. Well, Shel said the only person I could move on with was Keira Knightley …” (British Commercial-slash-RomCom)

Google is no longer avoiding evil (as per their original slogan), but still sometimes does good (or at least tries). Google aggressively going after text messaging scammers. Also, I didn’t realize that private parties could bring RICO suits.

It’s time for your pet Racoon — Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication (Sci. Am).

Good news — Scientist have figured out how super recognizers are able to distinguish faces with such accuracy. Bad news (same article) — it seems to be at the retinal encoding stage, not something you can learn. More Bad News — You can’t learn it, but computers can. (Then again, since that particular genie is out of the bottle, at least it may prevent the number of false accusations based on bad facial recognition that have made the news).

An article (and paper) arguing that between 700 and 1850 there was a large growth in genes that lead to educational attainment, priming the Industrial Revolution. Also, the Black Death might have helped.

Begun, The Orca War Has … (Episode IV, Episode V)

A new paper showing that AIs vary their strategy (in the game theory classic “Guess 2/3rds of the average guess”) based on who they are told their opponents are, and that they view themselves as most rational, other LLMs as mostly rational, and humans as irrational, and that this is an argument for self-awareness.

Marginal Revolution links to a study showing that those who are wrong are often more confident and includes a reminder that “A Bet is a tax on bullshit.” (“Caplan’s law”).

Also Marginal Revolution — UC San Diego students (many of whom got As and Bs the entire way, including pre-calc and calc) can’t do elementary school math. Seriously, go look at some of the problems and pass rates. Some of these students are trying to be engineers. This is making the rounds. Slashdot story. Actual report from UCSD

Anton Video — Math suggests We May Be The Only Intelligent Life (also discusses some rebuttal papers). The very next day — A Sabine video highlighting a model suggesting the opposite (by asking “if we assume that each planet has the same independent chance of life, what are the odds that it only happens once.¹”

AI Tools are making (some) people hyperproductive. Related — My Programming Career is a Historical Artifact.

Voyager I will be a light-day away from earth next year.

1. If you believe the rare earth hypothesis, then that’s a bad assumption, but ignoring that seems just a reasonable approximation as the Drake Equation and it doesn’t seem like you need a uniformly equal chance on each planet. I’m sure there’s some math handwaving I’m missing. ︎

The post Resurrection Games Opens Pre-Orders for the Iyanu Tabletop Game Collection appeared first on Graphic Policy.

Resurrection Games has partnered with Lion Forge Entertainment to bring the epic world of Iyanu to life

Before the fall fair and convention circuit is coming to an end, I had the opportunity to attend Süddeutsche Spielemesse (Southern German Game Fair) in Stuttgart. As when I went last time, it was a pleasant, laid-back experience.

The game fair is part of a conglomerate of hobby and leisure related fairs which are all held over the same long weekend in neighboring fair halls. As the ticket covers all fairs, you are free to explore everything. That’s great if you go as a group or family with differing interests: Your creative-minded daughter can get all inspired at the arts & crafts fair, your animal-loving son will try to make friends with the cats, rabbits, and camels at the animal fair, your gourmet spouse samples their way through the food fair, and then everybody meets at the game fair because you all love board games. Right?

With that setup, Süddeutsche Spielemesse’s target audience is broad, from the hobbyist to the very casual gamer. Consequently, you’ll find a lot of games outside of the hobby board game niche – from classics like chess and go over sports games to role-playing games. The exhibitors are usually either vendors (game test opportunities are rare), clubs looking for new members (like many of the role-playing clubs), or, my favorite, the big gaming island run in the middle where you can just borrow a game and play it free of charge which gives Süddeutsche Spielemesse a certain convention feel.

At this point, it is tradition that the gaming island remains open until 10pm on Friday, allowing for a beautiful evening of gaming. I met with a friend there and we played three different two-player games:

Rival Cities (Andreas Steding, Pegasus)

Northern German cities Hamburg and Altona try to outdo each other – yet while the usual victory point collecting occurs, these only matter if the game runs its full seven rounds. And it is much more likely that one of the cities will decisively outdo the other in one of the four areas of competition (alliances, ships, lawsuits, and prestige) and score an instant victory. With such a plethora of instant victory conditions, you will always feel the thrill of chasing one yourself and being threatened with another by your opponent.

In our game, we both started conservatively, getting a little bit of everything. Then my friend made a play for the alliances and was only one of them short of victory… but I could stave off defeat and counter-punch with ship dominance. I guess more experienced players would be at each other’s throat from the get-go which should make for exciting gaming and high replayability (at a very moderate complexity).

Solstis (Bruno Cathala/Corentin Lebral, Frosted Games)

Two players chart their path up a mountain built from a shared supply of tiles, each of which has a unique combination of a color (indicating its row) and number (indicating its file). Thus, you always know that a tile you took cannot be accessed by your opponent – and vice versa. This kind of very abstract game with almost-perfect information is usually not up my alley, and Solstis proved no different. We were both unenthused by its mix of logical planning and high randomness in the rare case of placing a nature spirit. However, each play only took 10 minutes, so we didn’t spend much time to gain the valuable knowledge of what’s not our jam.

Agent Avenue (Christian Kudahl/Laura Kudahl, Nerdlab Games)

Maybe our highlight of the fair: Agent Avenue pits its two players against each other as retired secret agents trying to catch each other. To unveil the other’s identity, they enlist their suburban neighbors, all of which are anthropomorphic animals, from daredevil wolves over codebreaker owls to double agent vixens. The recruitment comes by “I cut, you choose” – but as one of the two cards the active player offers to their opponent is face-up, the other face-down, there is a spy-appropriate amount of bluffing and deduction. Pair this with a varied, but not overwhelming amount of instant victory/defeat conditions and card effects, and you have a light, but tense contest which resolves in no time at all (we played three times in 40 minutes).

Any games of these that sound like your cup of tea? Have you attended any cool local conventions or fairs recently? Let me know in the comments!

The post Gift Guide: Restoration Games’ Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appeared first on Graphic Policy.

Looking for a gift for comic fans that's not just another comic book? Check out Restoration Games' Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

BGI 396 The One About The Size Of Your Deck

Board Games Insider – Join our Guild on Board Game Geek Guild | Like us on FB

Social media:

Ignacy Trzewiczek / Portal Games: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Corey Thompson / Above Board TV:  website | Youtube

Stephen Buonocore / “The Podfather Of Gaming”: website | FB | Twitter | Youtube

Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com

Caylus was one of those games that burrowed into my head and held on for years, although it doesn’t seem like it when you search my archives. That’s because Caylus shares a problem with full information, zero luck games — the best player wins.

And I played perhaps 100 games on BrettSpeilWelt¹,². So in my FTF games I would often take a handicap of 25% (or more, with fewer players) and win. PLUS the no-luck aspect meant that games became somewhat samey.

So I switched to Caylus Magna Carta, which constrains players by their card draws. This comes close to violating my rule stating that “For any original game X,’X: the card/dice game’ is always worse.”

Caylus Magna Carta is certainly much more approachable than Caylus³. I recently acquired Caylus 1303, a re-implementation of the original. It does a number of things well:

• Instead of having 4-6 workers and paying $$ for each placement, you have up to 15 workers but pay one worker if nobody has passed and two workers otherwise.
• The provost resets to almost the end of the track each round, and there are only nine rounds.
• In addition to setup buildings, a random wood and stone building start built.
• Each player starts with a special power (drafted in reverse order on the first turn)
• One of each building type⁴ is not available; but can be accessed via the favor system.
• You do not need a building to build a monument, they are built in a special phase each turn.
• A favor lets you a) steal a special power or b) use a building and take an unclaimed special power if one is available (three start unclaimed each game).

So Caylus 1303 is still a full information, zero luck game … but with a variable setup. I have high hopes that this will help bring it to the table. So far my first game was well received (although I forgot the initial draft of special powers).

The one issue (for some people) is that the favor system has been simplified and one of the favors is “Steal a special power.” This is a direct take-that; it’s not like Caylus had a care bear style, but the attack was more about moving the provost, which is something you can plan for. There are some powers that are much more likely to get stolen, but it would undoubtedly chafe a bit if you lost a power when they “should have” taken a different power. Still, in my first game there was no whining.

Rating — Enthusiastic

1. Still around! Who knew! ︎
2. If you don’t know what it is, a) think of BGA and b) get off my lawn. ︎
3. Probably they are the same in terms of rules, but by constraining options with cards you simplify the decision space for a new player. ︎
4. Setup, Wood, Stone ︎

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Looking for something comic related for that fan in your life for the holidays? Then consider the board game, Corps. of Discovery from Off the Page Games.

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Modiphius Entertainment Ltd. has announced that it is developing new games for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, set to be launched in 2026.

The post PAX Unplugged 2025: Board Game Veterans Reveal Song of the Wildkin, a Co-Op Dungeon Crawler for All Ages appeared first on Graphic Policy.

Bōken Games has revealed Song of the Wildkin, an upcoming co-op dungeon-crawling adventure board game set in a rich fantasy world of anthropomorphic animals and nature-based channeling

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Raybox Games is heading to PAX Unplugged 2025 from November 21–23 in Philadelphia, and attendees won’t want to miss Booth 3039.