Yeah it’s as surprised as you are! Very few modern board games feel anything like classic board games. Interestingly enough, it thought Scythe would work more as an expansion on a modern board game rather than a classic one. A lot of people get into modern board games and get into Catan, because it was the first Eurogame and got a big headstart on becoming popular. But plenty of games have been made since then using modern game design principles.

Catan has a lot of flaws and it read an article that said Scythe promises to address those flaws. That article was SO misleading. This game does not really capture the appeal of Catan. But it does capture the appeal of chess really well and a lot of the skills are transferable. If you’re good at making sure everything’s protected and making the most board control of your limited movement and know when to use strategy and when to calculate tactics, you’re golden. Just wish you didn’t have to study so many opening lines if you wanted to play this game seriously. Studying opening lines is so boring!!!

If chess is the Chaturanga variant that introduces the powerful queen, Scythe is like if every piece was a queen but took more work to get active on the board beyond just moving a pawn out of the way.

Thank you to both you and @db0@[email protected] for discussing this. This does match with what others have said. That said, it’s okay with roleplaying too, it often hosts roleplaying-only Twilight Imperium IV games, or one-shot TTRPGs (D&D is banned, Pathfinder is banned, any other system is okay).

But yes, a much bigger hole in its heart is competition. Girls just like to have fun, and for some girls, that means merciless (but trauma-informed and respect towards boundaries around competition) competition.

There are some multiplayer roleplaying video games. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been quite engaging. Sometimes just one of us watching the other play Disco Elysium is enough. But competing strategically without it becoming unpleasant…that’s a harder find outside of board games.

Use it/its, please!

Arcs is too new! Not appealing to the tastes of a patient gamer! But also, it is a bit biased against Cole Wehrle :)

Will check out those two games some time, thanks for the recs!

If you think that’s the worst of it, you’re in for a surprise! But yeah, people do lose out on a shitton of science and production because they think generating Great Merchants doesn’t come with a completely random opportunity cost to their science and production. Nonsense game design decision.

Use it/its and not you/your, please. its heard Stellaris has great narrative elements but it’s very hard to play in a reasonable amount of time and there’s some balance issues that can make competition feel really unfair. Maybe will still get around to it some day.

Also, one thing not included here is the AI problem. The 4X games with the best and most challenging, clever AIs, perfect for training competitively when you can’t get together with all your friends, are also single-player. Ditto for 4X games that randomize tech trees and policy trees and the like to make the game more principled.