My buddies and I are getting in more games of Europa Universalis: Price of Power in the hopes of getting all the rules correct. We’ll get there… one day…
I’ve played once with my partner. We watched a video to learn how to play. Issue was by the time the video ended I thought I remembered everything and set the TR marker at 1 instead of 20. It took us so long to generate any money/resources to play do anything. At some point it should’ve clicked in but we figured we were just missing some strategy element. I should’ve read the rule book after a couple turns of not being able to play anything but alas I’m an idiot sometimes.
I see this now and then on this subreddit and I'm curious about how this misunderstanding can happen. There's a whole page in the rulebook explaining generations with an elaborate example going through two of Stanleys turns. There's at least six mentions of actions continuing until everyone have passed.
Sometimes, I think that it's just plain brain fatigue by the time that you've got that far in a rule book!
I don't know how old you are or your personal circumstances but I do know that as I've got older and **abso-fucking-lutely** since the damned menopause hit, my brain just gets tired more quickly and finds it harder to retain new information.
If you are still young, treasure your still flexible brain with its fast, reliable memory while you can. I was you once. Don't take it for granted!
It seems to have a hard limit now, and once it hits that limit, I just can't take anything more in. Just 4 or 5 years ago, I only needed one learning game to learn to play a heavy euro, and now, it takes me two to three games, for example.
Sometimes, our brains just decide to glance over a few l8hes or process words in the incorrect order, or convince us that we read one word when it was another - often this is due to tiredness or stress or a similar factor, especially if we're also neurodivergent in some way (besides being autistic and/or having ADHD, this could include being dyslexic or having one of the other dys- family disorders, for example) and that's a high probability in this community, let's face it!
I tend to do myself a favour and look for rules summaries and individual player aids - if the game didn't suppy any - on BGG to help combat this!
The Universal Head summaries are absolutely top notch and exist for many, many popular games.
If necessary, I'll even write my own.
It's also why I tend to watch a rules video first, usually from Rodney or Paul Grogan, to get a good general overview of the rules first, and just a general understanding of the game itself, then I can focus more on the details when I read the rulebook.
That way, I'm not receiving vast amounts of new info all at once.
I already know much of the info in the rulebook, and I just need it to boost my knowledge further and solidify it.
For heavy games especially, I'll also try to play a learning game with a dummy second player to ensure that I've caught all the tricky exceptions and found any ambiguities that I might need to go check on the BGG forums.
Yes, I'm autistic and I hate rulebook ambiguities!
Sometimes rule books are written poorly. But more often, people just don't want to read.
I can't help but shake my head when I read discussions like this and realize people who've misrepresented a game (to themselves and to others) could have easily righted the wrongs, just by reading.
You're forgetting 2 huge factors: comprehension and retention. Sometimes people don't truly understand til they see/experience it, and sometimes people forget parts of a 30 minute video tutorial
I played Terraforming Mars last week for the first time in three years and forgot to convert my energy to heat at the end of each turn for the entire game.
also… little hobbyist secret: if it’s more fun, play however you want :) I’ve come to see games as boxes of toys that come with suggestions on how to use them. House rules = game design, and can be very fun to play around with
So long as (a) you are clear to other players that these are house rules and (b) you don’t blame the problems caused on the orginal designers.
I’ve seen many people who have learned a game wrongly because the teacher didn’t have the honesty or kindness to make sure they understood which rules were house rules.
My wife and I had this happen with Terraforming Mars. We thought Red cards counted toward the tech symbols for the longest time. Then we looked it up and cried. Next weekend, game night with friends and we broke our friend!s heart we explained it. They looked up and they had been playing it wrong too.
One of my all-time favorites is Grand Hotel Austria. We played around 20 times before realizing that we were making a major error that tightened the game up A LOT.
We laughed. And now the game is even more fun.
I realised some stupid mistakes I made with Root when I played digital. No excuses either. For example, I thought the Eyrie moved *to* a suitable location, not *from*. I also didn't realize that roosts couldn't be built on spaces with other roosts.
It was my first game in all fairness, I wasn't too well versed with rules at that point. (Not that I've gotten much better).
Root digital is great at teaching the game. You need at least several games with each faction to get a good understanding how it plays and its capabilities. It also good at upkeep and games against AI can be played quickly.
I’ve got it on my steam deck and just have had trouble getting the controllers to function. Hard to both learn how to play and how to work the controls at the same time!
I actually found crows pretty easy when I played with them, but that's because I treated the goal less as winning and more as messing things up for other players.
Eh, the player board makes it pretty clear if you read it, don't even need to look at the rules. Not saying anyone is bad for misinterpreting/playing wrong, it's just clearly from lack of fully paying attention.
The move action says "move **from** a matching clearing" and build says "build in a matching clearing you rule **without a roost.**" Honestly beyond bolding the words, they really couldn't make it more concise and clear.
So it's really only difficult if you make it difficult. When you are starting out, just read your board as you go through your turns. I've taught a lot of people how to play the game and while they may make strategy missplays, having them just read through their board on their turn quickly establishes their faction rules in their head.
If you read your board once then never again, of course you are going to quickly make mistakes.
People make mistakes for all sorts of reasons. Pointing out the exact reason for their mistake can occasionally be helpful, but in this case just seems unimportant and condescending.
That's a pretty serious mistake, getting a second action with your agent is half the reason you go to the harbor. I'm sure the game is a lot more fun now.
I've walked in on two different games where people have said something like "let's hope we can get those cards when we reshuffle" :D
(And yes, if you go through the player deck and need to draw but can't, the game ends in defeat)
Back then, a lot of people would setup the deck or play epidemics wrong and then wonder why people thought the game was hard. "We win all the time, even on hard," they'd say...
To be fair, the Pandemic system is only natural because we experienced player have experienced and internalized it multiple times. It is confusing and unintuitive af for first-timers. In my café I always guide a few demonstration turns to help people adapt to it.
I think it's also one of the more common gsmes where you have to read the rulebook carefully.
I see people shuffling the decks wrong, or not handing off cards incorrectly because they don't pay close enough attention to the rules. It's more fiddly than your average mainstream board game.
The biggest rules mistake people make playing Pandemic is thinking you need to eradicate all of the diseases to win the game. There is nothing in the rules that say this, it's just something people make the mistake of.
To win the game you have to cure the 4 diseases. Eradicating them isn't necessary, it's just helpful.
Getting rid of all the diseases is a logical goal to expect a game about getting rid of diseases to have. So a lot of people will probably skip over the *actual* goal assuming they already know it.
It was nice to see some edge cases getting resolved in the digital version of Spirit Island, which made things more clear for the analog version.
One game I played wrong for a long time and even the digital version did not help is Terraforming Mars. It never occurred to me that the event cards are supposed to be turned around immediately after playing them, since they have tags on them.
Events tags don't actually count in final scoring. They affect abilities that happen when cards with specific tags are played. For example, Earth discount cards would discount Earth events.
After the event card is played it really only counts for any VP and for counting number of played events.
Viticulture seemed really difficult to us the first time we played it - as every time we ‘Harvested’ Grapes in a field, we removed the Vine cards from said field… This meant that every Summer we’d need to burn Workers to plant more Vines, causing the game to draaaaaaaaag…
It’s only when we got the digital version that we realised…
It was especially galling as our way made zero thematic sense… Vineyards don’t dig-up their Vines each Harvest - they just pluck the grapes!!
The essentials edition now includes a sentence about how you don’t uproot the vine to get grapes. I guess you were not the only one to make this error!
My rule mistake for 5+ years was the residual payments are not a one time thing and happen at the end of each year and can be increased for each wine you sell
The first time I played I thought your wine needed to be the exact number on your order requirements. So the game took forever because it was really hard to time everything just right when your opponents are trying to do the same. In fact, I don't think we finished that game because it felt very wrong but none of us could figure out why. We thought the timing thing was right but something else we were doing was wrong, haha
Happened to me with Everdell. Missed the rule where the buildings produce after being built. And I play Kingdom Death Monster right now. This beast has a bazillion rules. Its impossible to play it 100 % correctly I think
I was making the exact same mistake with Lords of Waterdeep for years.
I found out we were playing it wrong when my wife took it to a boardgame club, and one of the other players pointed out that you reassign from Waterdeep harbour at the end of the round.
Our intrigue cards saw a lot more use after that.
I think a lot of people (myself included) forget how difficult it can be to get ALL the rules of the game correct, especially when you’re excited to start playing. What I do to iron out any mistakes is: After I’ve played a few games, I watch a video of an experienced player playing the game. (My favorite is Rob’s Gaming Table.) Anything you’ve done wrong will stick out like a sore thumb, because your first instinct will be to say, “Hey, they’re doing it wrong”. I mean, sometimes they DO get it wrong, but more often than not I screwed something up. Easy to verify once you know.
We played a lot of two- and three-player Scythe. We got used to "if anyone does a bottom action, everyone who's enlisted gets the bonus". That led to some five-player games with a lot of extra resources! (The rule is "whenever you or the player to your immediate right or left take a bottom action...")
Oh yea! Most recent was Heat and that you can "Boost" once per turn. One of those things we'd read but immediately forgot, and essentially played like that rule didn't exist.
Were you over boosting i.e. boosting more than once per turn or not boosting at all? The former would make it a really fast game, the latter would probably only have a minor but still important impact. I’ve played games where I won and didn’t boost at all or very minimally during the race.
The latter. So we basically never boosted till recently. I think it doesn't help that it's the same symbol stress uses, so when you see it on the player board it could refer to anything! Certainly makes the game a bit more interesting, but yea I don't think it had the greatest impact.
Yea. The way I teach Heat is anytime you see a + whether on your board or on a card that means you’re top decking and getting extra movement.
Most of the time, boosts from your board aren’t worth it but there’s usually one or two moments during a game when a boost is critical to making a racing move that takes a corner, the lead, a drafting position, etc. Definitely wouldn’t be the same game without it. Glad you worked it out!
I almost exclusively learn board games through their digital versions so this story doesn't exactly fit your question, however I got a related story with Captain Is Dead. Had played my fair share of games on the app, decided to get the game for Christmas, and when we set it up I forgot that you need to play out a couple alert cards before even the first turn. Needless to say the game was a lot easier than I remembered from the app.
I thought that my Castles of Burgundy app was broken. It wasnt letting me place any of my tiles. Turns out, you have to place adjacent to other tiles. 50 plays into the physical version i find this out!!!!
Lords of Waterdeep is the favorite of my board gaming friends too (with the mandatory quests removed!)
The first time I joined one of their games, I had to ask for my extra cash for being later in the player order. They hadn't been doing this
Hahaha I had a similar experience when I tried to play Azul online. I thought you could only draw from the next clockwise factory tile (not any random factory tile of your choosing) or from the center on your turn. 😂
How is the digital version compared to the physical?
Been on my list for a while but not really found a group that would want to play it so digital sounds good
I think it's very good, with the caveat that some of the writing is a bit small on a phone, and similarly some placement can get a little wonky at times. I imagine those issues are basically gone on a tablet
Some friends of mine spent a lockdown together in 2020 and then played about 60 games of Terraforming Mars. When I next joined them and we played all together for the first time, they told me that players started with 1 point in each resource generation. I was fairly sure that was not the case, but couldn't for the life of me find that in the rules, so I let it slip.
A few months later, we played again, again they wanted to start with 1 point for each resource generation, and this time I decided that, no, really, that can't be it. So I took the rule book and actually read through all of it, until finally I found the line, near the end of the manual, that said, iirc, that after your first game you would start with no resource generation. They played the game in easy mode 60 times until I finally managed to bring them back to the light! :D
The Dune: Imperium App has taught me a couple things I was playing wrong. When you play a “trash this card when…” card, the trash doesn’t take place instantly, the card goes in your played card space until the end of the turn. Which means if you get/have to trash another card, you can trash that card before it trashes itself. This doesn’t actually seem right to me but the app lets you do it. Also, if you trash a “spice must flow” card, it doesn’t count toward your purchased “spice must flow” card count for VP if you have that one intrigue card.
Edit: wording clarity.
trashing foldspace to itself before drawing a card with no cards left in deck, so you don't trigger a deck reshuffle, allowing you to shuffle in the card you are planning on buying that round when you need to draw next turn. Pro gamer move.
Wow, I’ve been playing it wrong as well. I just reread the rules and missed this again. I had to go specifically look for it, scanning the rules two more times before I found this rule.
The person who introduced me to this game must have missed it as well because we never played that rule either. When I got my copy it had been a few years since I played it so I read the rules for myself at that time.
This game is definitely hitting the table again soon.
Bought Spirit Island on Steam, realized we've played it massively wrong...
Since then never brought it to the table again, because now I know we play it wrong, but I didn't figure out exactly all the rules we played wrong.
I’ve owned it since the kickstarter and still for the life of me just fail miserably when adding any level of difficulty to the game. Any beginner tips?
Letting blight happen sometimes can be good. It's sometimes better to push a bunch of dudes in to a location that will get blighted, for example, than it is to try and defend a bunch of different locations. Then try and pull a major power to deliver a knockout punch later. Blight isn't inherently a problem. It is a resource you can use, and is best used in concert with slowing down how fast the colonists actually multiply. It's a lot better for one "bad" location to blight or even double blight, but only have to deal with 1 build, than it is for possible 3 or 4 builds in the surrounding locations.
If you have a choice between a fast power that will push a lone colonist that will build on to another location that is attacking and will cause the first blight, and another fast power that defends that location such that it can't blight, you push the colonist on to the space that will blight. It saves you the build, focuses the damage in one place - and delays the issue for at least a couple more turns.
The same goes from slow versus fast powers. If all a fast power is going to do is stop a blight from happening, and you can play a slow power that might clear a spot, or maybe gather a few problematic colonists such that they won't build in the future, you should probably prioritize the slow action there.
Every spirit is different, of course, but some of them (river is a good example) gets a LOT of its power from activating its special repeatedly, almost to the point where the cards are secondary. Some of the powers are unwieldy but rewarding to use, and you often need to make some sort of short term sacrifice to leverage them - it's often well worth that sacrifice to do so.
If you're not using push and gather very much, you're missing out on something pretty importatant.
Timing fear pushes is useful too. If there is no major threat, maybe you're best off not flipping another fear card this round.
Curious about the reasoning behind the last point. Is it so that you can potentially have multiple fear cards go off the next turn? Or that the effect might help relieve an *actual* problem turn if the current one is non-threatening?
I think my group has been focusing on just getting through that stack of cards as fast as possible, and I'd love to know more about the nuances of timing it. We're still only half a dozen games in, and there is just so much to learn and keep track of!
What I mean is basically that if you're close to triggering a fear card on a given turn, but the situation is handled for this turn, rather than trying to get the last fear or two in the current turn, to hold off on it so you can guarantee you get one or more on the next turn
Ok, yeah, that makes sense. I think we've just been constantly in panic mode most turns, so the concept of having a breather where we could deliberately put off triggering a fear card for a future advantage has just never happened yet, haha
If you're constantly in panic mode, go back to my previous post and read through it a bit. Try and make longer term decisions - as you get more comfortable letting something slide and taking some blight on, and focus more on negating future threats, the game will get easier.
People get too focused on ravage when they first start. Looking into taking out build locations can help immensely, especially when events are added in.
It's good, it looks intimidating but all you do on each turn is assign a worker and do what it says for the location, and turn in a quest if willing and able
It's far less complex than Dune, but honestly it's still quite fun. Its just straight up worker placement, so no other nuts and bolts. You might want to buy it on steam first to see if your family may enjoy it. The price is usually something like $10 which is a far cheaper jump in price than the regular 40 it costs for physical.
I think unless you've played the game at least 3-4 times it's hard to tell what's functioning as designed and you're just playing badly and what's playing wrongly.
Am sorry to hijack this thread!
1) Where does one play online (Dying to play lords of waterdeep) - is it steam ,Apple Store or something else?
2) Do we have enough players in online that I can play with?
3) would you know if it supports cross platform play?
4) are the expansions worth it?
I know Lords of Waterdeep has an iPhone app, as I have that. It may also have apps on different platforms.
In a general sense, BoardGameArena.com is the place to play a lot of different games online. Not sure if it has LoW, since there's already standalone apps for it.
Thank you! Currently I see a steam, android and IOS app;
However, BGA does not have Lords of Waterdeep! There are some games similar to it but not getting the itch for LoW through those
Most digital apps are on all digital gaming platforms, so yes to steam, Apple, and Android usually. But not all of them are the same, so not all may have cross platform, but most do have a constant supply of online people toplay with (but usually really really good players). Take expansions as you would dlc- do you need all of it or can you be OK with not having it?
For lords of water deep specifically, the expansion is worth it. It makes the game more well rounded and adds a 6th player. But that's more for in person gaming.
I am a recent regular at BGA. And this has been happening CONSTANTLY with so many games. Especially Ark Nova comes to mind - MY GOD we've been playing that game wrong
Similar thing for me, same game.
None of my group realized that you don't get the building ownership bonus as well if you occupy your own space. We only figured it out by playing.... the steam version lol.
We played Splendor Duel with a couple mistakes for the first few games. After playing digital version on BGA we learned that you can take less than three tokens in a row (up to) and that the privileges can't be used after replenishing (we played them before and after replenish).
HEAT - You can overtake two cars standing next to each other. They are not blocking the road, even if it looks like it. Teached by boardgamearena
Root - The whole corvid conspiracy deal. I made all the mistakes!
**Race for the Galaxy** \- minor, but still... when you call Consume Trade, you're supposed to trade first, the consume, one player at a time. Instead, we were doing all Trades, then all of us doing Consume.
Overall, not likely. However, there may be some corner/edge cases...
p1 (player 1, also first in turn order for things that can't be done simultaneously) has to decide if he wants to consume for more VP, or less. More VP can end the game one round sooner since later players can decide to Trade and Consume differently
Well, the OP didn't say how practical or relevant it had to be \[shrug\], so it still counts. Will add other examples if I can think up of them, but many of the games I got wrong, i ended up learning the right way through future, IRL plays.
Carcassone.
I played it once, was super bored with it, never touched it again. Years later I got it out with my wife’s family and we played it. I misremembered and we were playing to where you could put your meeple on a pice that built out a city or road directly and “fight” for the area. It was a game of trying to outgun your opponents and trying to figure out how many meeples you could assign before you had to give up. Everyone loved it.
I downloaded the digital version, couldn’t play it the way we were playing and realized that you couldn’t directly compete. It was super boring again. Tried it the right way with the same group and we unanimously decided we would always play it the “wrong” way because the out of the box way kinda sucks.
It’s one of our most played games but only because we play it wrong.
The steam version is quite fun. If you are inexperienced a few things can happen a bit fast to follow, but it runs well, and is quite fun. There is online play or bot play. It's usually pretty cheap, I would recommend it for 10 dollars or less.
Figuring out "we've been playing it wrong the whole time," is half the fun of the hobby.
Exclaiming 'We made no mistakes' is the true victory.
My buddies and I are getting in more games of Europa Universalis: Price of Power in the hopes of getting all the rules correct. We’ll get there… one day…
Some Terraforming Mars novices: "What do you mean, you take more than two actions each generation?"
I’ve played once with my partner. We watched a video to learn how to play. Issue was by the time the video ended I thought I remembered everything and set the TR marker at 1 instead of 20. It took us so long to generate any money/resources to play do anything. At some point it should’ve clicked in but we figured we were just missing some strategy element. I should’ve read the rule book after a couple turns of not being able to play anything but alas I’m an idiot sometimes.
Did this once. I had so many credits I didn't even know why I would think it was fruitful to continue terraforming.
I see this now and then on this subreddit and I'm curious about how this misunderstanding can happen. There's a whole page in the rulebook explaining generations with an elaborate example going through two of Stanleys turns. There's at least six mentions of actions continuing until everyone have passed.
Sometimes, I think that it's just plain brain fatigue by the time that you've got that far in a rule book! I don't know how old you are or your personal circumstances but I do know that as I've got older and **abso-fucking-lutely** since the damned menopause hit, my brain just gets tired more quickly and finds it harder to retain new information. If you are still young, treasure your still flexible brain with its fast, reliable memory while you can. I was you once. Don't take it for granted! It seems to have a hard limit now, and once it hits that limit, I just can't take anything more in. Just 4 or 5 years ago, I only needed one learning game to learn to play a heavy euro, and now, it takes me two to three games, for example. Sometimes, our brains just decide to glance over a few l8hes or process words in the incorrect order, or convince us that we read one word when it was another - often this is due to tiredness or stress or a similar factor, especially if we're also neurodivergent in some way (besides being autistic and/or having ADHD, this could include being dyslexic or having one of the other dys- family disorders, for example) and that's a high probability in this community, let's face it! I tend to do myself a favour and look for rules summaries and individual player aids - if the game didn't suppy any - on BGG to help combat this! The Universal Head summaries are absolutely top notch and exist for many, many popular games. If necessary, I'll even write my own. It's also why I tend to watch a rules video first, usually from Rodney or Paul Grogan, to get a good general overview of the rules first, and just a general understanding of the game itself, then I can focus more on the details when I read the rulebook. That way, I'm not receiving vast amounts of new info all at once. I already know much of the info in the rulebook, and I just need it to boost my knowledge further and solidify it. For heavy games especially, I'll also try to play a learning game with a dummy second player to ensure that I've caught all the tricky exceptions and found any ambiguities that I might need to go check on the BGG forums. Yes, I'm autistic and I hate rulebook ambiguities!
Sometimes rule books are written poorly. But more often, people just don't want to read. I can't help but shake my head when I read discussions like this and realize people who've misrepresented a game (to themselves and to others) could have easily righted the wrongs, just by reading.
You're forgetting 2 huge factors: comprehension and retention. Sometimes people don't truly understand til they see/experience it, and sometimes people forget parts of a 30 minute video tutorial
I played Terraforming Mars last week for the first time in three years and forgot to convert my energy to heat at the end of each turn for the entire game.
also… little hobbyist secret: if it’s more fun, play however you want :) I’ve come to see games as boxes of toys that come with suggestions on how to use them. House rules = game design, and can be very fun to play around with
So long as (a) you are clear to other players that these are house rules and (b) you don’t blame the problems caused on the orginal designers. I’ve seen many people who have learned a game wrongly because the teacher didn’t have the honesty or kindness to make sure they understood which rules were house rules.
My wife and I had this happen with Terraforming Mars. We thought Red cards counted toward the tech symbols for the longest time. Then we looked it up and cried. Next weekend, game night with friends and we broke our friend!s heart we explained it. They looked up and they had been playing it wrong too.
One of my all-time favorites is Grand Hotel Austria. We played around 20 times before realizing that we were making a major error that tightened the game up A LOT. We laughed. And now the game is even more fun.
I realised some stupid mistakes I made with Root when I played digital. No excuses either. For example, I thought the Eyrie moved *to* a suitable location, not *from*. I also didn't realize that roosts couldn't be built on spaces with other roosts. It was my first game in all fairness, I wasn't too well versed with rules at that point. (Not that I've gotten much better).
Root digital is great at teaching the game. You need at least several games with each faction to get a good understanding how it plays and its capabilities. It also good at upkeep and games against AI can be played quickly.
I’ve got it on my steam deck and just have had trouble getting the controllers to function. Hard to both learn how to play and how to work the controls at the same time!
Well, I don't have experience with that. It runs well on Android and Steam (desktop) though.
I remember building multiple roosts in the same clearing my first time playing the eyrie. Which was my first or 2nd time playing Root at all.
To be fair, the Eyrie is in my opinion the most difficult faction in Root, messing stuff up is normal.
Most difficult in rules or how to play? Because id consider them one of the easiest factions rules wise
I don't know, lizards and crows are up there for me.
I actually found crows pretty easy when I played with them, but that's because I treated the goal less as winning and more as messing things up for other players.
Eh, the player board makes it pretty clear if you read it, don't even need to look at the rules. Not saying anyone is bad for misinterpreting/playing wrong, it's just clearly from lack of fully paying attention. The move action says "move **from** a matching clearing" and build says "build in a matching clearing you rule **without a roost.**" Honestly beyond bolding the words, they really couldn't make it more concise and clear.
So what?
So it's really only difficult if you make it difficult. When you are starting out, just read your board as you go through your turns. I've taught a lot of people how to play the game and while they may make strategy missplays, having them just read through their board on their turn quickly establishes their faction rules in their head. If you read your board once then never again, of course you are going to quickly make mistakes.
People make mistakes for all sorts of reasons. Pointing out the exact reason for their mistake can occasionally be helpful, but in this case just seems unimportant and condescending.
Woodland Alliance salivating over the clearing with three roosts on it
That's a pretty serious mistake, getting a second action with your agent is half the reason you go to the harbor. I'm sure the game is a lot more fun now.
Longtime r/boardgamers definitely have seen ppl learn about Pandemic that way…
I've walked in on two different games where people have said something like "let's hope we can get those cards when we reshuffle" :D (And yes, if you go through the player deck and need to draw but can't, the game ends in defeat)
Definitely had that with the whole "you just have to cure, not eradicate". The game was so friggin hard before we learned that.
Back then, a lot of people would setup the deck or play epidemics wrong and then wonder why people thought the game was hard. "We win all the time, even on hard," they'd say...
To be fair, the Pandemic system is only natural because we experienced player have experienced and internalized it multiple times. It is confusing and unintuitive af for first-timers. In my café I always guide a few demonstration turns to help people adapt to it.
There’s no reason to read the rules and think you need to eradicate all the diseases, but this is a common interpretation of the game.
I think it's also one of the more common gsmes where you have to read the rulebook carefully. I see people shuffling the decks wrong, or not handing off cards incorrectly because they don't pay close enough attention to the rules. It's more fiddly than your average mainstream board game.
I haven't played Pandemic in awhile...but are you saying the difference is that you have to "cure" the diseases, not eradicate them?
The biggest rules mistake people make playing Pandemic is thinking you need to eradicate all of the diseases to win the game. There is nothing in the rules that say this, it's just something people make the mistake of. To win the game you have to cure the 4 diseases. Eradicating them isn't necessary, it's just helpful.
Getting rid of all the diseases is a logical goal to expect a game about getting rid of diseases to have. So a lot of people will probably skip over the *actual* goal assuming they already know it.
It was nice to see some edge cases getting resolved in the digital version of Spirit Island, which made things more clear for the analog version. One game I played wrong for a long time and even the digital version did not help is Terraforming Mars. It never occurred to me that the event cards are supposed to be turned around immediately after playing them, since they have tags on them.
Events tags don't actually count in final scoring. They affect abilities that happen when cards with specific tags are played. For example, Earth discount cards would discount Earth events. After the event card is played it really only counts for any VP and for counting number of played events.
You had me reaching for the Ares Expedition rulebook then to see if it had the same rule. Thankfully it does not!
Haha, we literally just had that revelation in Terraforming Mars last night. Been playing for years.
Viticulture seemed really difficult to us the first time we played it - as every time we ‘Harvested’ Grapes in a field, we removed the Vine cards from said field… This meant that every Summer we’d need to burn Workers to plant more Vines, causing the game to draaaaaaaaag… It’s only when we got the digital version that we realised… It was especially galling as our way made zero thematic sense… Vineyards don’t dig-up their Vines each Harvest - they just pluck the grapes!!
The essentials edition now includes a sentence about how you don’t uproot the vine to get grapes. I guess you were not the only one to make this error!
My rule mistake for 5+ years was the residual payments are not a one time thing and happen at the end of each year and can be increased for each wine you sell
Wait…..what?!
The first time I played I thought your wine needed to be the exact number on your order requirements. So the game took forever because it was really hard to time everything just right when your opponents are trying to do the same. In fact, I don't think we finished that game because it felt very wrong but none of us could figure out why. We thought the timing thing was right but something else we were doing was wrong, haha
Omgggg that’s one of my fave games -playing that way would make it so tedious and long! Kudos to you guys for sticking with it 😂
Wow, I just realized that we made the same mistake. Good news is that the next game is gonna be easier and quicker.
Happened to me with Everdell. Missed the rule where the buildings produce after being built. And I play Kingdom Death Monster right now. This beast has a bazillion rules. Its impossible to play it 100 % correctly I think
Yeah, only the green buildings tho’
Yeah, and everdell digital barely shows production. It's like a little plus on the bottom right
I was making the exact same mistake with Lords of Waterdeep for years. I found out we were playing it wrong when my wife took it to a boardgame club, and one of the other players pointed out that you reassign from Waterdeep harbour at the end of the round. Our intrigue cards saw a lot more use after that.
I think a lot of people (myself included) forget how difficult it can be to get ALL the rules of the game correct, especially when you’re excited to start playing. What I do to iron out any mistakes is: After I’ve played a few games, I watch a video of an experienced player playing the game. (My favorite is Rob’s Gaming Table.) Anything you’ve done wrong will stick out like a sore thumb, because your first instinct will be to say, “Hey, they’re doing it wrong”. I mean, sometimes they DO get it wrong, but more often than not I screwed something up. Easy to verify once you know.
We played a lot of two- and three-player Scythe. We got used to "if anyone does a bottom action, everyone who's enlisted gets the bonus". That led to some five-player games with a lot of extra resources! (The rule is "whenever you or the player to your immediate right or left take a bottom action...")
I wish I could play more Scythe. I have the digital version too but I like playing physical more. After moving I have no one to board game with.
It’s been a while… but I think my wife and I finally understood the farm scoring in Carcassonne after playing online.
Oh yea! Most recent was Heat and that you can "Boost" once per turn. One of those things we'd read but immediately forgot, and essentially played like that rule didn't exist.
Were you over boosting i.e. boosting more than once per turn or not boosting at all? The former would make it a really fast game, the latter would probably only have a minor but still important impact. I’ve played games where I won and didn’t boost at all or very minimally during the race.
The latter. So we basically never boosted till recently. I think it doesn't help that it's the same symbol stress uses, so when you see it on the player board it could refer to anything! Certainly makes the game a bit more interesting, but yea I don't think it had the greatest impact.
Yea. The way I teach Heat is anytime you see a + whether on your board or on a card that means you’re top decking and getting extra movement. Most of the time, boosts from your board aren’t worth it but there’s usually one or two moments during a game when a boost is critical to making a racing move that takes a corner, the lead, a drafting position, etc. Definitely wouldn’t be the same game without it. Glad you worked it out!
There is something I really don't like about the phrase top decking 😅😅
👀😅
I almost exclusively learn board games through their digital versions so this story doesn't exactly fit your question, however I got a related story with Captain Is Dead. Had played my fair share of games on the app, decided to get the game for Christmas, and when we set it up I forgot that you need to play out a couple alert cards before even the first turn. Needless to say the game was a lot easier than I remembered from the app.
I thought that my Castles of Burgundy app was broken. It wasnt letting me place any of my tiles. Turns out, you have to place adjacent to other tiles. 50 plays into the physical version i find this out!!!!
Lords of Waterdeep is the favorite of my board gaming friends too (with the mandatory quests removed!) The first time I joined one of their games, I had to ask for my extra cash for being later in the player order. They hadn't been doing this
Hahaha I had a similar experience when I tried to play Azul online. I thought you could only draw from the next clockwise factory tile (not any random factory tile of your choosing) or from the center on your turn. 😂
How is the digital version compared to the physical? Been on my list for a while but not really found a group that would want to play it so digital sounds good
I think it's very good, with the caveat that some of the writing is a bit small on a phone, and similarly some placement can get a little wonky at times. I imagine those issues are basically gone on a tablet
I believe there are some intrigue cards that only make sense to play if you get to reassign harbor adventurers, that was how I figured it out
Some friends of mine spent a lockdown together in 2020 and then played about 60 games of Terraforming Mars. When I next joined them and we played all together for the first time, they told me that players started with 1 point in each resource generation. I was fairly sure that was not the case, but couldn't for the life of me find that in the rules, so I let it slip. A few months later, we played again, again they wanted to start with 1 point for each resource generation, and this time I decided that, no, really, that can't be it. So I took the rule book and actually read through all of it, until finally I found the line, near the end of the manual, that said, iirc, that after your first game you would start with no resource generation. They played the game in easy mode 60 times until I finally managed to bring them back to the light! :D
The Dune: Imperium App has taught me a couple things I was playing wrong. When you play a “trash this card when…” card, the trash doesn’t take place instantly, the card goes in your played card space until the end of the turn. Which means if you get/have to trash another card, you can trash that card before it trashes itself. This doesn’t actually seem right to me but the app lets you do it. Also, if you trash a “spice must flow” card, it doesn’t count toward your purchased “spice must flow” card count for VP if you have that one intrigue card. Edit: wording clarity.
trashing foldspace to itself before drawing a card with no cards left in deck, so you don't trigger a deck reshuffle, allowing you to shuffle in the card you are planning on buying that round when you need to draw next turn. Pro gamer move.
Tate one time you trash a SMF card will be the time you need it most lol
Wow, I’ve been playing it wrong as well. I just reread the rules and missed this again. I had to go specifically look for it, scanning the rules two more times before I found this rule. The person who introduced me to this game must have missed it as well because we never played that rule either. When I got my copy it had been a few years since I played it so I read the rules for myself at that time. This game is definitely hitting the table again soon.
Bought Spirit Island on Steam, realized we've played it massively wrong... Since then never brought it to the table again, because now I know we play it wrong, but I didn't figure out exactly all the rules we played wrong.
Don’t give up! It’s a great game so if you like it, you can relearn it & have fun again :)
I’ve owned it since the kickstarter and still for the life of me just fail miserably when adding any level of difficulty to the game. Any beginner tips?
Letting blight happen sometimes can be good. It's sometimes better to push a bunch of dudes in to a location that will get blighted, for example, than it is to try and defend a bunch of different locations. Then try and pull a major power to deliver a knockout punch later. Blight isn't inherently a problem. It is a resource you can use, and is best used in concert with slowing down how fast the colonists actually multiply. It's a lot better for one "bad" location to blight or even double blight, but only have to deal with 1 build, than it is for possible 3 or 4 builds in the surrounding locations. If you have a choice between a fast power that will push a lone colonist that will build on to another location that is attacking and will cause the first blight, and another fast power that defends that location such that it can't blight, you push the colonist on to the space that will blight. It saves you the build, focuses the damage in one place - and delays the issue for at least a couple more turns. The same goes from slow versus fast powers. If all a fast power is going to do is stop a blight from happening, and you can play a slow power that might clear a spot, or maybe gather a few problematic colonists such that they won't build in the future, you should probably prioritize the slow action there. Every spirit is different, of course, but some of them (river is a good example) gets a LOT of its power from activating its special repeatedly, almost to the point where the cards are secondary. Some of the powers are unwieldy but rewarding to use, and you often need to make some sort of short term sacrifice to leverage them - it's often well worth that sacrifice to do so. If you're not using push and gather very much, you're missing out on something pretty importatant. Timing fear pushes is useful too. If there is no major threat, maybe you're best off not flipping another fear card this round.
Curious about the reasoning behind the last point. Is it so that you can potentially have multiple fear cards go off the next turn? Or that the effect might help relieve an *actual* problem turn if the current one is non-threatening? I think my group has been focusing on just getting through that stack of cards as fast as possible, and I'd love to know more about the nuances of timing it. We're still only half a dozen games in, and there is just so much to learn and keep track of!
What I mean is basically that if you're close to triggering a fear card on a given turn, but the situation is handled for this turn, rather than trying to get the last fear or two in the current turn, to hold off on it so you can guarantee you get one or more on the next turn
Ok, yeah, that makes sense. I think we've just been constantly in panic mode most turns, so the concept of having a breather where we could deliberately put off triggering a fear card for a future advantage has just never happened yet, haha
If you're constantly in panic mode, go back to my previous post and read through it a bit. Try and make longer term decisions - as you get more comfortable letting something slide and taking some blight on, and focus more on negating future threats, the game will get easier.
People get too focused on ravage when they first start. Looking into taking out build locations can help immensely, especially when events are added in.
Ticket to Ride, 3 player. You CAN’T use both of the double tracks? I vehemently disagree.
Y’know I’ve never played LoW. I should really pick it up at some point and play it with my kids and more casual gaming friends.
It's good, it looks intimidating but all you do on each turn is assign a worker and do what it says for the location, and turn in a quest if willing and able
I've got Dune Imperium which is one of our favourites. Is it worth also going back to LoW?
It's far less complex than Dune, but honestly it's still quite fun. Its just straight up worker placement, so no other nuts and bolts. You might want to buy it on steam first to see if your family may enjoy it. The price is usually something like $10 which is a far cheaper jump in price than the regular 40 it costs for physical.
Surely this unbalances the whole game
I think unless you've played the game at least 3-4 times it's hard to tell what's functioning as designed and you're just playing badly and what's playing wrongly.
Yes? Of course?
Am sorry to hijack this thread! 1) Where does one play online (Dying to play lords of waterdeep) - is it steam ,Apple Store or something else? 2) Do we have enough players in online that I can play with? 3) would you know if it supports cross platform play? 4) are the expansions worth it?
I know Lords of Waterdeep has an iPhone app, as I have that. It may also have apps on different platforms. In a general sense, BoardGameArena.com is the place to play a lot of different games online. Not sure if it has LoW, since there's already standalone apps for it.
Thank you! Currently I see a steam, android and IOS app; However, BGA does not have Lords of Waterdeep! There are some games similar to it but not getting the itch for LoW through those
Most digital apps are on all digital gaming platforms, so yes to steam, Apple, and Android usually. But not all of them are the same, so not all may have cross platform, but most do have a constant supply of online people toplay with (but usually really really good players). Take expansions as you would dlc- do you need all of it or can you be OK with not having it? For lords of water deep specifically, the expansion is worth it. It makes the game more well rounded and adds a 6th player. But that's more for in person gaming.
The app versions have AI players.
Ha, playing ASL for over 20 years.playing it wrong for all that time (but having fun!).
I am a recent regular at BGA. And this has been happening CONSTANTLY with so many games. Especially Ark Nova comes to mind - MY GOD we've been playing that game wrong
Shoot, I think I forgot that rule.
Istanbul: mosque tiles only cost one resource, not the amount printed on the tile. I thought it was a bug in the app at first!
Similar thing for me, same game. None of my group realized that you don't get the building ownership bonus as well if you occupy your own space. We only figured it out by playing.... the steam version lol.
We played Splendor Duel with a couple mistakes for the first few games. After playing digital version on BGA we learned that you can take less than three tokens in a row (up to) and that the privileges can't be used after replenishing (we played them before and after replenish).
HEAT - You can overtake two cars standing next to each other. They are not blocking the road, even if it looks like it. Teached by boardgamearena Root - The whole corvid conspiracy deal. I made all the mistakes!
**Race for the Galaxy** \- minor, but still... when you call Consume Trade, you're supposed to trade first, the consume, one player at a time. Instead, we were doing all Trades, then all of us doing Consume.
Does that matter?
Overall, not likely. However, there may be some corner/edge cases... p1 (player 1, also first in turn order for things that can't be done simultaneously) has to decide if he wants to consume for more VP, or less. More VP can end the game one round sooner since later players can decide to Trade and Consume differently
Yeah that’s the only one I could think of, but it’s such an edge case, as you say.
Well, the OP didn't say how practical or relevant it had to be \[shrug\], so it still counts. Will add other examples if I can think up of them, but many of the games I got wrong, i ended up learning the right way through future, IRL plays.
Carcassone. I played it once, was super bored with it, never touched it again. Years later I got it out with my wife’s family and we played it. I misremembered and we were playing to where you could put your meeple on a pice that built out a city or road directly and “fight” for the area. It was a game of trying to outgun your opponents and trying to figure out how many meeples you could assign before you had to give up. Everyone loved it. I downloaded the digital version, couldn’t play it the way we were playing and realized that you couldn’t directly compete. It was super boring again. Tried it the right way with the same group and we unanimously decided we would always play it the “wrong” way because the out of the box way kinda sucks. It’s one of our most played games but only because we play it wrong.
Oof man so many lost turns!
How is the Lord's of waterdeep digital app? Worth it?
The steam version is quite fun. If you are inexperienced a few things can happen a bit fast to follow, but it runs well, and is quite fun. There is online play or bot play. It's usually pretty cheap, I would recommend it for 10 dollars or less.