Howdy everyone!
Academic:
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>BA Econ — Bard College</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>MA Social Science — UC, Irvine</p>
Career (main):
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Statistician — US Gov</p>
Career (errata):
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Actor (specializing in immersive theater)</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Circus (fire breathing)</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Former horse trainer</p>
Personal:
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Currently Northern Virginia, grew up in SoCal.</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Diehard agnostic.</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Relationship Anarchist.</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Swing dance enthusiast.</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”>Aspiring game designer (Tabletop/LARP)</p>
<p style=“padding-left: 40px;”></p>
Happy to talk about the above or any manner of other topics. What are y’all’s interests and passions?
What board games do you play?
I play them sometimes. A few I play most often are:
- Lords of Waterdeep
- Alhambra
- Century Spice Road
- Puerto Rico
- Carcassonne
- Bohnanza
- Onitama
- Kingdomino
- Call to Adventure (just bought it a few weeks ago)
- Azul
- Catan
- Dominion
I've played lots of others, but those are the ones I play the most.
I definitely enjoy boardgames when I play them, but they aren’t a big passion of mine. When I say ‘tabletop’ I’m referring mostly to tabletop RPGs like dungeons and dragons, etc.
The thing I really like about them is that the rules that govern each game differ from person to person (and often unintentionally session to session) and I’m enamored with systems which operate under variable rulesets. Otherwise I often get bored when it feels like “ah, I’m no longer discovering the nature of the rules, I’m merely trying to optimize within the fixed space the rules create” and I find optimization tedious.
My son plays D&D. I was huge into Forgotten Realms books back in the 80’s and 90’s, but never knew anyone who did D&D, so never tried. I encouraged my son to play it, and he found a few friends willing to try. The imagination required is what I love hearing about. When my son plans a game, he spends hours researching creatures and thinking about what cool things he can get his friends to do.
I find some tabletop games to be quite variable each time I play, because the good ones have lots of choices, and your opponents can force you to adopt a completely different strategy than you were planning to use at the start. Yes, some are simply math and algorithms that you need to figure out (I suck at those ones), but we play mainly for fun, so members of my gaming group often chooses suboptimal moves or strategies that are simply fun and make winning extremely difficult (but when you pull it off, everyone congratulates you).
Welcome and have fun around here.
I used to play several role-playing games years ago – Dungeons and Dragons, Marvel Superheroes, James Bond – but I don’t have enough friends these days who enjoy that kind of thing. I agree that it’s no fun playing with somebody who memorizes the rules and calculates his moves for optimum advantage. The rules of a role playing game (or the interpretations of the rules by the game master) should be flexible enough to make it feel like the real world, allowing you to instinctively react to the situation your character is in.
I really have never heard of those board games that 3point14 mentioned.
<p style=“text-align: left;”>Most of those are pretty popular games.</p>
<p style=“text-align: left;”>I hadn’t heard of any of the games either until a friend introduced me to one. We loved it so asked what other games he had. He showed me his wall of games and spent the next hour lovingly explaining each of th many dozens he had.</p>
<p style=“text-align: left;”>I was quickly hooked.</p>
<p style=“text-align: left;”>There are thousands of games and more every month. It’s a huge and pretty fanatical community.</p>