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Tabletop game reviews enjoyed lately thread
I think I've posted this before, but I have such a mixed relationship with Shut Up and Sit Down. They have such different taste from me that I consider them entertainment and criticism rather than anything that will *ever* inform my purchasing. I found their review of Eclipse incredibly tedious, their live stream stuff was dire and kind of embarrassing given the rest of their content quality, but then occassionally they hit with a really strong review that raises interesting issues.
I quite enjoy this Etherfields review and encourage you to watch it. In particular, I think the issue Quinns brings up about 1/2 of the way through the review about procedural gaming is something I mull over constantly about games. I have, historically, played games with a lot of procedure and enjoyed them. I think it's fair to say that everyone has a threshold of procedure to decisionmaking that might be different. But I think about even the most procedural games I've played, e.g. Fields of Fire or Comancheria, and they still had really high stakes game-making decisions amongst a bunch of pretty procedural or rote decisions to push the game along.
I mean, people play clickers! Similarly, many of the pleasures of an Assassin's Creed or Skyrim game are really about procedurally going through content you know the result of, and not decisionmaking. So I think there's a big space for this sort of gaming.
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- ChristopherMD
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- Erik Twice
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I think their review fell into a common trap when reviewing gamers which is to tack on adjectives instead of verbs or nouns. For example "This is an enthralling, beautiful game which flows perfectly" sounds good but it doesn't actually say anything. This is not a dig at SUSD, it's something that happens to everybody, including myself. It's also more likely to happen when you are writing a very positive review or the game is more of a "best of its kind" type than something unique.
Personally, I think the best line in their Etherfield review is "my critic friends would not spend money on this". I don't know if that kind of line hits hard for a general audience but for me it's telling. The second big thing for me was them recommending a videogame. I believe boardgames and videogames are the same art form and I'm glad more people compare each other.
Regarding procedural actions, I'm a far more radical reviewer than Quinns. The issue is simply that what you do is boring. The issue is not procedure, it's that you move and attack and no game bothers to make that interesting. I don't know how Etherfields differs from Gloomhaven, but for me it's the same issue with all games of this type: They are combat games in which combat is boring. As opposed to wargames, which are combat-heavy games where combat is interesting.
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- Andi Lennon
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playerelimination.com/2020/12/14/downwar...-etherfields-review/
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I really enjoyed this re-review of Sidereal Confluence's second edition from Thurot. God I need to play that fucking game.
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Gary Sax wrote: spacebiff.com/2021/02/08/sidereal-confluence-2/
I really enjoyed this re-review of Sidereal Confluence's second edition from Thurot. God I need to play that fucking game.
If it has a TTS module, count me in.
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- southernman
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For example the SUSD review of Etherfields, (from memory) he basically starts off listing similar games large KS games (including Gloomhaven) and saying Gloomhaven was the only worthwhile one among them, we colours nailed to the mast. And then another reviewer (BoardgameCo) reviewed his Etherfields review and agreed with most of the critiques/complaints but then said he will still be keeping it and be leaving it set up so he can play whenever he has time because he is enthralled with it.
You can really only take notice of reviews from people who you know have a similar outlook to you on the subject, and then take it with a grain of salt.
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Often you can find interesting observations or interpretations that are worth the price of admission, even if you never plan on touching the game.
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But you're right in that I'm not going to go out and buy something that looks bad to me because a reviewer I liked enjoyed it, there's self selection going on for unchallenging opinions.
Weirdly, there *are* some reviewers whom I really like but that I also know I have little overlapping game interest in that I still read and watch---Shut Up and Sit Down, Barnes, It Came From the Tabletop are good examples here. I don't use their reviews to help my purchasing, we have pretty different taste, but I read and watch their stuff.
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- Jackwraith
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Similarly, I pay attention to all of what Charlie and Wade review, not only because they play far more games than I do and have brought things to my attention that I never would've noticed (Lords of Hellas from Charlie and Tournament at Camelot from Wade, to name just two of many, many examples) but I'm also pretty confident that we're in similar Venn diagrams as far as game tastes.
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