Board Games!

[Debonair Danny DiPietro]

Yeah, I was just about to post what Flay said, they might not be obvious enough but very clearly they are marked in more than just color.

[GreyICE]

As an unrelated pet peeve, it's completely unplayable in my group because we have a colorblind player and it makes zero attempts to respect that color blindness is even a thing (would you like to build on the red route or the green route? How about the middle finger route?). Literally none. I have very rarely seen a board game that makes so little acknowledgment that color blindness is even a thing (and it would have been very simple to do).

Except that EVERY route color has a separate and distinct symbol? On both the card and the route, last I checked (we only own the American version).

I mean, I get that it's cool to hate on TTR, but let's at least hate on it for things that are true.

Uh... where, Flay? Where is this magical symbol?

[Axxle]

Also: http://boardgamegeek.com/image/1927859/ ... e=original

[Gammagooey]

yeah the newer versions have the symbols like a cross on white and a swirly thing on blue like on axxle's picture

Spoiler: USA version with symbols

[GreyICE]

Okay so later (in a new edition of the game I'd have to give them more money for) they added... an invisible dot to the center.

I greyscaled it. Anyone wanna play this game?



And yes, later versions they offered a very sad 'fix' for this issue, but frankly I'm not giving them more money for a game I didn't like very much in the first place.

[GreyICE]

I mean if it was some minor portion of the game, okay, we've worked around that in the past. Or if it was some game with shitty components we paid $10 for we could scribble all over the board without worries.

But how do they make a huge title like this where the central mechanic is color matching and never get around to asking "hey, what about 7% of the male population?" They could have just made every track a different shape and solved the entire problem...

[quadz08]

I don't really know why it matters if ticket to ride is technically a train game or not?

[GreyICE]

I don't really know why it matters if ticket to ride is technically a train game or not?

Well it's useful to categorize games because there's an awfully large number of them, and when you're introducing them to new people it's good to have useful shorthands. So there's "worker placement games" and "deckbuilders" and "wargames" and "bluffing games" (such as Mafia) and so on and so forth.

Ticket to ride is most certainly a very simple set collection game (where you collect sets of things). Those can be extremely fun, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but if you tell people "Ticket to Ride is a train game" and they go and buy a Train game because they liked Ticket to ride, they're gonna be out some money and probably quite annoyed.

[Sudo_Nym]

It only kinda matters because Train games are a genre all their own, and TTR is a game about trains that isn't actually part of the Trains genre. It's curious, but it doesn't actually matter a ton. Unless you go to a gaming con, and sit down to an actual train game thinking that it'll be like TTR.

[Chevre]

OK, I guess I get that, but if someone is buying a real "train game" thinking it'll be like Ticket to Ride without any sort of research I think they have it coming. When I buy games I try to read as much information and review as possible and even then I still stress over multiple choices or whether to even get the one game or not.

[Sudo_Nym]

Absolutely. I think that if you're dropping $50+ on anything, you should do research in advance. But you'd be surprised at the number of people who buy games based exclusively on the box art.

[Mr. Flay]

Okay so later (in a new edition of the game I'd have to give them more money for) they added... an invisible dot to the center.

I greyscaled it. Anyone wanna play this game?

It's not invisible in person, your image is pretty small. Also notice how Red is much darker than Green? (Riga/Wilno, Wilno/Warsaw). I don't think your suggestion of making the 'tracks' different shapes would work, that would be an even smaller difference than the symbol currently, and harder to see. Plus you have the Locomotive/Tunnel mechanic in some later versions that already uses the track edge to convey information.

I will concede that I did not know that early versions didn't have the symbol. Sounds like they ARE paying attention to the problem, then.

[zoraster]

Does it matter? TTR is a great game, and so what if it can be rethemed? When I play TTR, I still think I'm laying track and can imagine trains running back and forth between them.

If you want Steam, you buy Steam.
If you want Ticket to Ride, you buy Ticket to Ride.

[xRECKONERx]

TTR is a great game

zoraster the false prophet strikes again

[zoraster]

Rocking it since 600 BC

[GreyICE]

TTR is a

Spiel des Jahres

Game of the Year award winner. That should completely and compactly summarize what you'll be getting when you buy it.

[zoraster]

Not really. Dominion isn't the same game as TTR isn't the same game as Alhambra

[xRECKONERx]

Yeah but so were Dominion & Carcassonne yet those games don't suck donkey dick

P.EDIT: yeah Hanabi was a winner too and it's not awful

[chamber]

They are pretty consistently -not- the best game that came out that year, on the other hand, they are also still pretty consistently enjoyable games.

[zoraster]

I wouldn't expect a board games award to cater any more to your personal preferences than you would the Oscars, Emmys, etc.

[GreyICE]

Spiel der Jarles

GotY games are all extremely tight mechanical packages based around a central theme with no extraneous parts and deep tactical play. Dominion is the closest to violating that rule, but Dominion is literally revolutionary (it started the entire deckbuilder game set on its own, and it's still the tightest and best-designed deckbuilder out there - you might enjoy others more, but I can tell you exactly why Dominion did everything it and other games cannot say the same).

Alhambra - tight mechanical package, simple game with deep tactical play (often compared to Go)

Hanabi - central theme, extremely tight mechanical play, no extraneous parts

Kingdom Builder - central theme, extremely tight play, no extra parts.

Etc. All of them look like that. There's no room in

Spiel der Jarles

for the sprawling craziness of Archipelago, the 'oh fuck why not' design of Seasons.

[zoraster]

I agree with that. And as a buyer of games, that makes it pretty useful. You don't go to Spiel der Jarles if you want an Ameritrash games, for example.

But that's a pretty different than "completely summarize what you'll be getting."

[GreyICE]

You'll be buying an extremely tight package with one central theme and one major mechanic.

[zoraster]

right. i agreed with that. But that's not a particularly complete summary. What if I don't like that mechanic? Because the mechanics differ quite a bit. Reck doesn't like TTR, which he compulsively has to mention each time the game is brought up. I don't like Settlers of Catan. These both fit the typical Spiel game (and that description of it), but doesn't provide sufficient (and thus complete) information about the game.

[GreyICE]

Okay, I'll toss in a sentence covering the mechanic.

Ticket to Ride: Collect colored sets to advance board control based on a set of controllable random objectives.