Lurker > Naye745

the us map is undoubtedly the worst ttr map, though i've only ever played through us/europe/asia

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funnily enough, i also won a random old game at the origins game room a few years back and when i looked it up on bgg it was not good lol. i have kept it in shrink in case i ever get a chance to offload it somehow

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i have been fairly underwhelmed by everything about machi koro in my experiences playing it. there are more compelling engine building games out there - light ones like splendor or gizmos are much more interesting, and of course beefier classics like race for the galaxy are fantastic.
the main factor that mitigates the randomness in catan (trading) is not present. plus the game has a little oddly take-that-y vibe with a handful of the cards that i don't really like.
i've heard the expansions do some work in making it a better, deeper game, but with so many better games out there in 2019 and no dearth of good or easily accessible options, why even bother?

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i think 7 is pretty good! at least the ending is really enjoyable

9 i am not a fan

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i thought tar13 was pretty underwhelming, go figure!

it was definitely better than the tar8-11 era though my goodness

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whether you consider the trading and negotiation of catan to be a big part of the depth of the game is going to influence where you have it on the strategy scale. expansions for catan also beef up the game as a whole, while ticket to ride's mostly go sideways (different maps, same amount of complexity)

i definitely agree with carcassonne having the most of the three though, especially when you get to 2-3 players.
and even though the amount of high-profile gateway games has increased a lot since when i started almost a decade ago (splendor, azul, pandemic, and some others have great claims for a spot) i still view ttr/catan/carc as the "big three".

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i think a personal dislike for me is games that feel "extraneously" lengthy for what they are. obviously this is hugely subject to opinion and personal taste, but my main problem with munchkin is that for a game of silly card interactions and mountains of relatively random take-that interaction, it just takes too damn long. similarly, i love simple card games that are quick turns of draw a card/play a card-style interaction, but usually those games are <30 minutes in length and individual rounds are even shorter. ticket to ride feels like that kind of game (with a board of course) but padded out to 60-90 minutes.

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if catan, carcassonne, and ticket to ride are the staple "modern" euro gateway games, ttr is easily my least favorite of the three. it's just kind of a boring game - 90% of the time you're beefing up your hand, before you actually do anything.

it's still a pretty good game though! and some of the maps (i've heard PA/UK is stellar) are really neat and offer some different stuff to play with. but overall it's the least compelling and strategically interesting to me by a long shot

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honestly catan is pretty good for what it is

some games where the numbers line up just wrong can devolve into one person getting cities fast and running away, but usually the player interaction (via trading and the robber) helps balance the game out and savvy negotiation is key

i don't really play it anymore (i've played it out at this point) but its expansions are all pretty decent and do a good job at moving the game in different directions if you want more catan

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bohnanza is great, it's my 2nd favorite uwe rosenberg game (and my favorite that isnt about farming somewhere) but it's certainly dependent on both your taste in "trading" games and the group you play with

for what its worth, one of its many expansions (high bohn) is really good and helps give the game a little more heft and depth for a group of experienced players

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also on your strategic note, carcassonne functionally plays up to 6 (!) but really works best with 2 and 3. any more players and you start to lose a significant amount of strategic agency.
the 2p game can get really tight and cutthroat and i enjoy that. trying to sneak on a farmer or block off an opponent's city is much more viable when they're the only competition.

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carcassonne is great. i dont have it among the top of my personal favorites list but i still love it a lot.

that said, it's probably the very best game to demonstrate why more expansions are not necessarily a good thing. inns & cathedrals is perfect, one might even say essential. traders & builders is generally pretty good, as is the river (which i think is now included w/ base games). everything else is...either extraneous or actively bad, depending on your tastes. stuff like princess & dragon and (infamously) the catapult are so far away from what makes carcassonne what it is that you wonder why they even exist.

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fake artist is pretty great but i generally appreciate it most for the ridiculous drawing at the end moreso than the game portion.

take that for what you will

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i love pretty much every metroid game so i have no excuse for having not played it!

i just sort of fell off the video games wagon pretty strong throughout much of the 2010s, and i'm only recently getting back into things

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super metroid is the all-time most influential game for my personal tastes and the sheer number of games directly inspired by it

but i'll be damned if zero mission isn't the game that i pick up every now an again and replay...several times, within the span of a week. i'd bet i've beaten mzm close to 50 times, many 100%. it's just so damn easy and enjoyable to play through.

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tetris has grown on me as i've gotten older, and of course it's a timeless classic

but man tetris attack/puzzle league/panel de pon/whatever the heck it's branded as now is by far my favorite puzzle game of all time, and it's not even close. it hits that competitive puzzle spirit much better than tetris does for me, because it really feels designed around the back-and-forth of a 2-player versus match

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ori is on my shortlist of "games i need to get and play now that i have a switch"
looking forward when i get around to it

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this isnt anything new but your take on mm2 lines up with mine 100%
there are better designed mega man games out there, but there's something about all the pieces (the music, the weapons, the flow of the game) that just adds up perfectly

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f-zero gx is one of the greatest goddamn games of all time

it's so stupidly good i have no way of understand how the series never got another console release, even 16 years later

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innovation is a game that i think is pretty good and well made, but it just doesn't do what i want out of an engine-building game and it suffers from that

i just don't like my engine creation/interaction to be so volatile, it makes for a seemingly chaotic and random experience

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i went through a big mega man phase around then where i was powering through all of the gamecube anniversary collection for the first time, so there was probably a degree of mega-burnout after the release of mm9

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mm9 felt like a real labor of love from people who adored mm2 and 3 and it basically hit everything perfectly

i havent played it since it came out though, go figure

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i played ikaruga like 3-4 times and thought it was pretty great!

i sure did suck at it though!!

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sagrada is pretty great. by the time i first got to try it i already had and loved roll player, so it kind of came and went without much attention from me, but its a good game to play with relative newbies who just want something fun and pretty and it does that well

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munchkin is mildly fun for about 2-3 plays as you're seeing the cards for the first time
there's really nothing interesting about it beyond that

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i cant agree more that 1-4 is the most important case in all of pw, even if its not the one i rate the "best"

up until that point i was somewhat entertained and amused by what was a pretty clever but not terribly memorable game
1-4 turned everything around and at that point i was hooked

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with one night werewolf you have to be willing to accept that sometimes the lack of information (due to the way the "night" played out) is beyond your grasp and may sometimes result in something seemingly completely random happening

it's not a great game but it is certainly more fun than munchkin, and a heck of a lot shorter
also a nice icebreaker game for groups with many strangers

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man, i really want to get into slay the spire but i'm hesitant because it's a rabbit hole i'm not sure i'm willing to go hundreds of hours into right now lol

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for a game that gets praise for being thematically strong, i actually really struggled with the theme in dead of winter, precisely because its mechanics seemed so at odds with the setting it's trying to portray - that you are some nameless leader commanding a changing horde of survivors...who might actually be evil? and the gimmick of getting you to hide information (the secret personal goals) feels like an awkwardly forced way to make the hidden traitor mechanism work. it's just done so much better in other (better) games.

also that last game sounds like an inferior version of the invention/presentation game (whose name i forget) from jackbox 5.

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sheriff of nottingham is pretty enjoyable, but i do wonder if i were pickier about bluffing games that its problems (too long for what it is, too dependent on playgroup and metagame as you said) would really kill it for me. there are undoubtedly better bluffing games out there

dead of winter on the other hand never did anything for me. it's not really a great game and relies on its narrative and setting to sell itself, which is good enough for some people! i found it either really formulaic or boring or both.

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20xx borrows from both mmx and original mega man (and roguelikes of course) i feel like, but its a neat enough game, especially in co-op

i really ought to pick up mm11 now that i have a switch though

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out of curiosity, have you played 20xx? not sure if that's shown up on your lists before but i've had a decent time playing it with friends, despite its flaws

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i think you summed up all my feelings on fusion pretty well

both of the gba games play REALLY smoothly, and that has helped them age pretty gracefully i think
and since there have been plenty of subsequent games (both in and out of the metroid series) that capture the classic metroid formula, fusion's deviation is a lot easier to take for what it is now

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lots of nice number representation in that tier

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i love ff4's action movie approach to the story, which is to resolve every plot point in the most ridiculous over-the-top way possible

for being relatively straightforward in its battle systems, boss fights are still really satisfying, or at least they were in the mid-2000s when i last played this

on the other hand, it felt like you needed to do a healthy bit of grinding on your party throughout the game to get to the finish, which just feels like something i'm not compelled to do in a game in 2019

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crystalis is one of the first games i remember really standing out to me when i was a kid. the scope of the game, combined with its relatively simple controls and feel, still holds up super well 30 years later

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also while i prefer resistance/avalon and think it's undoubtedly the superior game, there is something to secret hitler actually giving you actions to do (picking out policies) because it gives new players something to discuss and argue over. the more abstracted missions of resistance/avalon seem to be hard for a big group of new players to get a handle on, in some games i've had

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i havent been quite as on top of new games this year, but there's one that i absolutely love that i think is light years ahead of anything else i've played in 2019 lol

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i watched one of my roommates play nier automata (at times) and though the story seemed pretty neat it never caught my interest as far as being a game i wanted to play

i think as i get old i am just particularly particular about my game interests

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i have a lot of feelings about level design in mario games but i'll just tag this list and silently read everything instead lmao

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also that dvg premiere episode is absolutely incredible

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to be fair, i dont think anyone would've wanted to see dan's incident "in action"

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jeff varner absolutely sucks as a human being and his takes are worth even less than a pile of shit

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i mean A

i dont watch the foreign survivors
i'm sure some are p good but you've gotta draw a line somewhere

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i'll defend morgan being a good character for a pre-merge boot and there were some more indefensible choices on that list that multiple people supported tbqh

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i'm honestly looking forward to the all-winners season

as weird as it is, i think it helps that i have no one or two people i NEED to see win this season - i'm pretty happy with just about anyone doing well and going far, and even though i have a few favorites, i could totally see myself getting won over by someone i have less immediate love for, like danni or michele or wendell

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you are going to be severely disappointed if you never want to see rick devens again lol

(i would pick ron clark as a potential returnee from eoe over pretty much any other guy though)

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yeah all the interesting characters were basically thrown under the russell train for like 14 episodes. it sucks

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eaedwards6400 posted...

I don't have it dead last, the premerge was too fun for me. But it is down there because of this dark cloud more than in reality.

EDIT: This is actually how I describe South Pacific. Perhaps a measuring stick?

south pacific gets more hate than i have for it, but it's got a hugely satisfying ending in its favor, which IoI lacks completely. i don't think i can think of a season whose entire final boot episode order and way of playing out happened exactly like i thought it would coming into the finale.

Underleveled posted...

I once saw somebody suggest a season in which everyone starts with one hidden immunity idol that is non-transferable and there are no other HIIs hidden in the season. So everyone gets one chance to save themselves.

while i am amused by the novelty of this idea, what's to stop the person who's the first boot target (or targets) to literally play their idols, followed by everyone else saving themselves, and everyone at the first TC being immune? i feel like this is far more likely to happen than not.

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yup that sounds right. Elizabeth and Jack (and dan of course) were entirely missing

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