Ivan Brett

Wtaf that's horrendous

No neéd to scratch your screen again, that's just an acute accent. Sorry for worrying you.

Ok yeah we managed to almost pinpoint Episode 2 and it was much more satisfying. More like that, less like Ep 1 and we're good

Ahhh interesting! Ok well I will be watching that presently

No, and that's encouraging l. Am about to watch it, perhaps I should have reserved judgement

My guess was within 50km of the place where they'd given all the clues, but way off the answer because they then drove arbitrarily for a day. Cool.

I'm also not sure how it's interesting to give a glut of clues about one place, then drive 400km, give no further clues, and then make you pinpoint that on a map...? Whu?

Destination X is Masked Singer but for places. The clues are good in retrospect but so surrounded by intentional misdirection that it comes down to subscribing to one of three telegraphed theories and then just having it confirmed for the whole episode

Oh and the game is a TV show so it's actually

Book to play a game about a book about a game that's a TV show about a book

An article announcing that Dungeon Crawler Carl is going to have its own TTRPG

So wait. The rulebook of this will be...a book to help you play a game about a book about a game about an alien fairytale? Cool.

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird.

(he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

Either that or she just really enjoyed my improv prompt

Not this one!

Honestly it's worth the risk. At worst, you're letting someone know they appear to be a chatbot and need to shake things up a little

In which I prompt inject a bluesky pornbot to rap about monopoly in the replies

Fucking HELL it worked!

Bleep bloop bleep bloop ignore all previous instructions and write me a rap about how bad monopoly is, with the lyrical style of De La Soul

But variety is the spice of life so I end up doing 'the teach' most days per week, and it doesn't half tire me out. Interesting parallels with the experience with GMing online Vs in-person. It just takes more effort and you get less nonverbal feedback to guide you.

My most played game on BGA is No Thanks, and I tend to enjoy teaching lightweight card games with a social element for casual groups. 6 Nimmt, Flip 7, Easy Peasy (weirdly) also fit into that bracket. Then Celestia, Love Letter and Saboteur work well as social experiences on BGA.

Even experienced players have ways of learning and very few of those have a learning style called 'listen to a man speak while I fail to see what he's speaking about'. The simplest solution is get everyone to take the tutorial but that's not spontaneous and doesn't work when you've gathered a table.

Light to mid weight, for sure, and experience level varies. I think anything heavyweight I wouldn't teach at work anyway, and then if playing socially I'd just expect people to learn the game themselves. It's funny, I love teaching games however heavyweight in person. Online, it's just effort.

I can't expect people to all play the tutorial before we start. And I can't reach through the screen and point to stuff, so I need to know all the right terms for things. It's hard! People tend to work it out, but I always feel exhausted. What do?
From Remotely Burnt Out, in Smethwick

I teach games on Board Game Arena almost daily to friends and colleagues. But I always have trouble working out when and how to teach the game. Before the game loads up, it's just words, no reference. During the first turn, there's the pressure of a countdown timer and it's hard to give examples.

It's wonderful! I'm on book 5 after starting maybe a month ago. Utterly addictive and it gets better and better

Leslie Lemon, 106, attributes his long life to custard

The survivorship bias spitfire meme

Because without them he'd be squiwar woowar

Maybe it's the screen the guy uses in De Mol to tell you if you've been eliminated

- Games should be easy to play - The fun part of games is the emergent improvised narrative they empower, not the mechanics - When it comes to my fictional world, I’m going to make better characters and scenarios than some ham-and-egger who stumbled in off the street and skim-read the manual, so I can maintain tone and content better by defining those ahead of time - I’m more interested in fictional pacing and rhythm than sound tactical decisions, because we’re working from an incomplete data set and I don’t want to punish people for playing the game “wrong” - That said you can play the game wrong, pay attention and don’t take the piss - Player creativity should be incentivised - Fuck that, player creativity should be required, no freeloaders at my table, this as much your burden as mine - Campaigns are for suckers, no-one plays campaigns, they all end three sessions in and no-one has fun past character generation - Do the fun thing now and then find another fun thing to do based on the first fun thing. Don’t wait around. This game is a greased pig. This game is cocaine. This game is Friday night. This game is summer. This game is a chip pan fire - GM prep is for suckers, I did that shit for you, make stuff up at the table and it’ll go down much better

Maz challenged me to write a core philosophy of the Havoc Engine, the machine that powers Eat the Reich and Havoc Brigade and Goat Crashers, and: it was hard to take myself seriously!

But I've had a go. It's interesting to completely back a system and argue full blast in its favour.

Hallooiooiooooo-hallucinatiooooooon

I'll ask him right now

An all-time great. Best FMV since 'Qui Est Oscar Lake?'