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Games you didn't "get" on your first time through but now resonate
playerelimination.com/2018/05/21/high-society-a-sobering-fill/
Charles talks about how he didn't "get" high society the first time he played it. Crucially, he's not talking about that he didn't like his first play, but something a little different---he missed the point or didn't understand the subtext the first time. He only really got it when he came back to it much later as a different gamer/person. I think this is a fascinating idea.
Has anyone else had this experience?
I think the closest I've come to it is Settlers. I've never totally not "gotten" it as in I disliked it, but my initial read on settlers was that it's a trading game. I've come to realize that it *is* a trading game, but not in the purest sense as wheeling and dealing (see Sidereal Confluence). You want to extract advantageous trades, but that's not decided by some sort of skill at carnival barking in the trading phase. You only have 1-3 opponents, the trades are pretty static vis a vis what they'll offer. The game is about supply/demand positioning to *get* good trades but the trading phase is largely a fait acompli, it's rare you're going to get some sort of unusual trade terms you couldn't have predicted in advance.
Even then, though, this realization is hardly at the level of getting the theme that the OP is about.
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I think I'm relatively young compared to many FATties (I'm 33), and while I was gaming during the 90s and the birth of the modern tabletop scene, I think there's a few titles there I could definitely return to and appreciate in a deeper way.
I went through three phases with Catan. First contact was great, and it pulled me away from my main hobby at the time - RPGs. Later when I was getting into the FFG rennaissance, I thought poorly of Catan and cast it off. Later I would come back to it and appreciate what it's done and what its gameplay has to offer. Now I'd happily play it.
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- Matt Thrower
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Seriously, though, while it's a facetious answer, what kind of game doesn't reveal new layers over the first few plays? A crap one, that's what.
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MattDP wrote: All of them.
Seriously, though, while it's a facetious answer, what kind of game doesn't reveal new layers over the first few plays? A crap one, that's what.
Sure, but I think the norm is developing a greater understanding of strategy/intracacies as a gradual process. I think Gary's talking a more significant change than that between plays, possibly with a large distance of time in between.
Cosmic is a good one, that happened to me too. First play felt like something was missing. Second play (a couple of years later), was very different.
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- hotseatgames
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charlest wrote: I went through three phases with Catan. First contact was great, and it pulled me away from my main hobby at the time - RPGs. Later when I was getting into the FFG rennaissance, I thought poorly of Catan and cast it off. Later I would come back to it and appreciate what it's done and what its gameplay has to offer. Now I'd happily play it.
I just love the way you describe the Catan player evolution since it describes many of us.
The game that I didn't get on my first time through was Reiner Knizia's Battle Line. I think that it's one of the best two-player games made with a small foot-print; and, though it's very simple to teach and play, it always presents interesting decisions. The more that I've played it, the more I continue to appreciate it. It's always in my hiking and camping kit and I've even made an all-card print-and-play version which is themed with stock-photos of WWII. I'm very tempted to make the print-and-play Dune version out there somewhere.
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You could insert several Eric Lang designs as I find many of his games are hard to swallow at first. Usually, the theme and lavish presentations obfuscate the relatively abstracted/simple mechanics. Blood Rage in particular sets up your expectations for this long slog of a conquest game. You first set it up and everyone is ITCHING to unleash your dudes or recruit some of those monsters. Then you play it and in the blink of an eye it ends. Your head is left spinning trying to comprehend what the hell just happened. Blood Rage is essentially the world's most lavishly produced card drafting game. The beating heart that drives the entire game is that card draft. You need to understand what to draft, when to draft it, when to take something to block someone else from getting it etc... Then you need to make smart plays on the board to compliment your draft choices. It's all very simple, but deceptively deep. It's like looking at a puddle in the road and not realizing it's actually 5 foot deep pot hole.
My first impressions of the game were not favorable. Once I understood what Blood Rage was instead of what it wasn't, my appreciation for it drastically improved. I still don't think it's the end all be all Eric Lang design, because frankly I'm not the biggest fan of drafting games (I generally suck at them). But I still really dig it and when I'm done I usually want to play again because I'm convinced I'll do better next time (I never do better).
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stoic wrote: I've even made an all-card print-and-play version which is themed with stock-photos of WWII.
I would LOVE a PnP version that I could actually shuffle. Dang, those cards are thick!
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bendgar wrote:
stoic wrote: I've even made an all-card print-and-play version which is themed with stock-photos of WWII.
I would LOVE a PnP version that I could actually shuffle. Dang, those cards are thick!
For my camping version of Battle Line, I just pasted these WWII images onto a deck of regular playing cards and then placed each army into different color cheap Ultra Pro colored sleeves: one side red, e.g., one side black. I made flag cards and placed those into sleeves--I printed the fog of war cards and placed those in sleeves. I store everything in an Ultra Pro deck box and throw it into my backpack.
boardgamegeek.com/filepage/62343/world-w...re-theme-battle-line
Better versions might be on Artscow etc.
This game can be rethemed into just about anything. I've seen BSG, Dune, Simpsons, Buffy, Super Heroes, Batman, what-have-you. If you're creative and you can cut and paste images, then the world is your oyster.
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- san il defanso
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I only ever sat down to a second game because the friend who owned it wanted to teach it to someone else and asked if me and my then-girlfriend-now-wife would serve as players 3-4 for a teaching session. For whatever reason, this game went much better, and I went from actively disliking the game to thinking it was alright in just a single session.
It took me years before the more nuanced theming became obvious to me. The way empires rose and fell in Mesopotamia, all due to subtle factors like political, mercantile, religious, and agricultural factors, all of that is present in Knizia's design. I like that the game is still kind of prickly and non-intuitive, where it encourages the player to ride with the waves of history rather than mold and shape them overtly. It's a staggering design, even moreso because the hobby still hasn't managed to really make anything else like it. It remains basically unique.
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I remember Barnes ragging on Knizia's LotR game when it first came out (Jesus fuck -- 18 years ago?!?), then having a come-to-Sauron moment when the abstraction and player communication parts clicked for him. I need to try that one with my kids, but its main drawback is that it only really sings if you've read the books.
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- Erik Twice
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That said, there a couple games that took a while for me to get:
Cosmic Encounter: Sure, I had a lot of fun. I liked it, I thought it was cool and so on and even rated it an eight. But I didn't get it because I thought that, ultimately, it was just a silly game.
But it isn't! There's some real strategic depth on it. Every game is engaging and different and fun. It's really a game worth playing over and over and over.
1830: Railroads and Robber Barons: The first times you sit down to play 1830 you aren't actually playing 1830. You are not skilled enough to play 1830. All that famous stock manipulation won't be there in your first game and chances are you are not even raiding companies yet.
Anyways, that's not the real learning curve. The actual difficult part of learning the game is learning the right mindset and truly realizing what the game is about. This is an hyperaggressive game where most games should end in bankrupcy or with players barely eeking through the train rush. But some people play it safe or try to play it as a building game and then it isn't as good.
It's also slighty odd from a strategic perspective. At first I didn't like it much because it's extremely focused on stock market manipulation. You cannot win by running your companies better or blocking other players, most of the track building is binary: Do trains get to New York? Can I get to Chicago? It seemed heavily patterne and boring.
But it's not quite true. The patterns are actually very broad and only seem similar at a glance. The more you play it, the more you realize how things change. It's not just "oh this company gets there and becomes better", there's real nuance and many strategies here. The Baltimore & Ohio player plays a game completely unlike the others
And yes, it's extremely focused on the stock market, the track building is almost vestigial and kind of obvious. And I used to dislike that but..well, I have other 18XX games to play, I'm fine with 1830 being an extreme just like 1853 is. It's an incredible series and I'm happy to be able to play them all.
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Jason Lutes wrote: Knizia's LotR game..... I need to try that one with my kids, but its main drawback is that it only really sings if you've read the books.
I have only read the Hobbit with my kids, they've not read LOTR or seen the films. They LOVE this game. They love the approaching doom of Sauron and all that tension of the stack of tiles and the joy of making it to the end. They get it, even if they don't know the ins and outs of the story.
So you're probably right in that the events don't make a lot of sense but it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference. I have even managed to ensure that they don't know that Gandalf comes back.
The only disappointment they are going to have I think when they eventually do read the books is that Fatty Bolger is not in it much.
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