LogFAQs > #898638307

Enjoyment - I played a lot of Mafia on B8 and AIM back in the day, but I mostly stopped. A few years after that, I introduced it one day with some casual friends after a cookout one day. Then one of said casual friends' roommates joined in - she also played online, but on a site specifically designed for Mafia. And that was that, a nice one-time thing.

Months later, out of the blue, she messaged me about playing this new game Avalon. I played five times that first night (and drank a good amount of beer), and it's how I met the core of my gaming group. From there, we'd have occasional Avalon nights - four or five or more games a night. After the original friend moved away, I got a copy as well, and the group still stayed together.

After I became a hobby gamer, I played with a mostly different group that was primarily into playing lots of different hobby games. And somehow, they didn't all like yelling at each other or grilling each other about their allegiances. A lighter, more concrete experience like Blood Bound was about as deep as they wanted to go with serious confrontation. The downside of Avalon is that it can be immensely unsatisfying if the players don't engage, or play without thought (random approvals where they don't bother justifying anything... augh). So it was Avalon with the old crew and different games with the new.

My appetite has also changed over time. I still like the idea of Avalon to end a game night if we have seven or more people (and they're all fans of Avalon), but the constant grind of confrontation now often feels like it's got too big an opportunity cost (in terms of trying out new games, or getting reps for a broader set of games). I no longer have much desire to play Avalon with strangers - unless I luck into the right crowd, I tend to find a lot of people's personalities grating, and I seem to lose a lot in games with lots of new players new players, too. It has to be a group of people I trust to play an enjoyable game of Avalon, and at a meetup, that's gonna be rare. I almost never had a bad Avalon experience at one point, but that has changed with lots of mediocre ones from playing with the wrong people.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness