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The bullshit was your own chronic failure to get yourself together.
Some of my favorites that have a higher frequency of "major upset" events. It really depends on your group, and how they like to play.
I stick with pretty quick and accessible games, because we frequently have to teach new people and I hate spending 3 hours on one playthrough of a huge game and then the newbie never gets a chance to try again with their new understanding.
Favorites:
- Wizard reliably makes our whole table lose their minds
- Love Letter takes sudden drastic turns and is so quick to play
- Bang! (the dice version) has as much treachery as it does chaos
- No Thanks! is an exercise in collective sadism
- Nanuk has perhaps the best "oh shiiiiiiiiiiiii-" moments with a combination of hidden information, bluffing, push-your-luck, pleading for help, backstabbing, and high-stakes card flips
Bluffing games:
- Coup
- Skull
- Cockroach Poker
Card games with sudden win conditions:
- Five Crowns
- Mahjong
- LLAMA
Asymmetric information games:
- Secret Hitler
- Codenames
- Mysterium Park
Not as frequent, but sometimes perfect for the right crowd:
- Three Dragon Ante
- Get Bit!
- GUBS
- Ca$h n Guns has foam guns that the whole table points at each other at once, Mexican Stand-off style
Board games have been a pretty effective way to recapture that feeling for me. When a single dice roll or card flip wrecks everyone's plans and the whole table erupts at once, that's a good time.
Video games, especially online, feel a little too disjointed these days -- like our consciousness isn't synced up the same way as it is when we all know we're looking at the same thing at the same time and holding our breath.
They did issue a fix: "Buy a new CPU please!"
That's why they don't mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they're still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won't forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.
I think that might worsen my problem lol
I was a game developer for a while. I’ll sometimes buy a game just because I want to see the devs keep making cool stuff, with no intention of actually playing it.
If it’s a corpo AAA title where private equity has already demolished the dev team and there’s no chance my $50 will make it past the publisher and financiers’ cut, I have no compunctions about pirating.
But that’s pretty rare for me. Indie games are where it’s at. Maybe a F2P live service game here and there.
I’ll spend 6 hours researching whether I really wanna spend $1.99 on a Steam game that’s 90% off for the first time after I nearly bought it 4 times before at 50% off.
Then when my cell phone bill comes and I’m like “Yeah, I’m definitely overpaying by like $70 here…” I go “Well, too late for this one, I’ll handle it sometime in the next 30 days.”
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
Kind of.
Harris: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678
Sanders: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/bernard_sanders/400357
There are some who voted ideologically closer. But the fact that she’s somewhere between Sanders and Warren is reassuring.
Requires 3 lanes of clearance to turn right.