Long ago, the four players all lived in harmony. But everything changed when Marta attacked. Only Theo, master of all four railroads, could stop her.
(I am going to take Monday off for the Christmas holiday folks, so please have a wonderful weekend, a merry Christmas/happy holiday, and I will see you next Wednesday!)
I like The Last Airbender a bit too much.
Selkie is an ABBA fan? Awesome! 😀
Monopoly seems like a bad idea. There’s some raw edges on a few of these people and Monopoly isn’t going to help with the effort to keep things civil.
Have an awesome holiday, Dave!
I don’t know that you need to be an ABBA fan to enjoy one song of theirs. Mostly because that one specific song was overplayed at the local roller rink while I was growing up, so it’s like the one song of theirs that I know….
Kind of like how the one Bee Gees song I know (and adore) is “You Win Again.” Well, and obviously “Stayin’ Alive.”
I will never play monopoly with my other half, as he once put it “that’s how you end relationships.”
Merry Christmas and I hope it’s a good one!
Catan is the friendship ender.
No, Diplomacy is the friendship ender. Catan just wings it.
Neither hold a candle to Munchkin, that thing is a nuclear bomb when it comes to ruining friendships.
Supposedly Divinity is the relationship ender.
But I dunno…My husband and I streamed us playing it to the delight of several friends after much needling about how we needed to play it to “test our relationship”…It went fine. :\ We split up to get quests done then teamed up for combat or anything else we needed the other for. Most of the decisions we agreed on because “for the lulz.”
That’s kind of funny to me, because I both gained and then lost a friendship to Divinity: Original Sin.
Basically we met at a doctors office, chatted about games and traded Steam IDs. Divinity sounded fun so I got it and we did some co-op to teach me the ropes. Also joined a couple of his DnD Skype sessions.
Unfortunately I wasn’t always able to join in when he invited me and he started getting pissy about it (I had conflicts with comic-drawing and girlfriend time), and we lost touch. Such is life.
I refuse to play Monopoly with house rules. At least that way the pain ends in an hour or so.
Yeah, there’s multiple YouTube vids out about how the rules were originally intended to work (including that the number of houses/hotels is limited for a reason, and that when someone doesn’t buy a property, it goes up for auction and anyone, including the person who passed, can bid on it).
Me, I’ll stick with the modern games that have managed to make Monopoly look old and boring by contrast. Stuff like Machikoro, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Sushi Go, heck even Talisman (for all that we never seem to get to the end so much as wander uneasy circles around the outer ring). There are countless options for board/card games that you can’t generally buy at Fred Meyer or WalMart.
In addition to the comment I posted (in the wrong place, see GallowsNoose’s comment below), let me point out that some people are terrified of learning new games and would rather play the same dusty old crap they played when they were kids. Monopoly-with-rules-as-written is a half decent compromise.
Friends don’t let friends play Talisman, as we used to say back in the early Nineties.
I used to not understand why people don’t like Monopoly, then I learned of some of the house rules people put in…
I am looking at at least 10 games right now in my room more fun than monopoly. I have another 12 behind me on a shelf. Even more in this room if you count my Infinite Board Game games individually.
Agreed.
That said, even Walmart is getting better at stocking non-traditional board games. (Heck, last time I was there they had Pandemic and Ticket To Ride.) Target is even better… they even stock Cards Against Humanity, for crying out loud.
I’ve been going to a weekly game meetup. Last night I played:
* Alien Frontiers
* Secret Hitler
* Kill Doctor Lucky
* Werewolf
And I have a small but growing collection of my own. This is the subset I bring to the meetup, all of which are more entertaining than Monopoly: http://imgur.com/jJJNjMO (The board in the bag on the right is a go board. There’s a smaller board hidden behind it and stones underneath.)
… how did this end up here? It was intended as a reply to Kilyle’s comment above.
I’m magic! I took the comment away with my less than useful super power of taking over comment destinations.
i feel marta´s pain – no one ever wants to play monopoly with me either. as if its my fault they can´t handle their money and end up to the eyeballs in debts….oh well. sometimes, i still manage to find a poor fool who hasn´t been warned yet and sucker them into playing *evil chuckle*
as for the last airbender, can you even like it too much?! its awesome!! mind you, i´m talking about the series, not that lousy movie….mention that crappy excuse of a sequel an i´ll be forced to hurt you
I happened to LIKE Legend of Korra, thank you very much. Granted, parts of it (like most of Spirit) could drag on and weren’t very well written, and I didn’t really care for the bit about Avatar Wan (lame pun notwithstanding), due to feeling like it went against the series’ own canon, but, other than that I enjoyed it.
Welcome to Lake Laogai. There is no Last Airbender movie.
Regarding Korra, I liked the first season okay but it felt a bit rushed. Season 2 was better I thought, but they played the climax completely wrong to me. I feel like they could have made better use of the fact Korra was fighting a member of her family, because as is by the end of the season you can entirely forget Unalaq is her uncle.
The Origins sequence didn’t bother me, it made the whole bending concept a bit more mystical-feeling than the first series canon of, “we learned it from observing animals”. And it explained a bit more where that giant lion-turtle who taught Aang chibending came from. Although the whole “spirit of light and peace vs spirit of darkness and chaos” thing was leaning a bit much on tropes.
I’ve heard seasons 3 and 4 were better but I still haven’t seen them. Got the DVDs sitting next to my desk right now actually, but I keep spacing out on watching them. I already know 1/3 of what happens from internet spoilers by now anyway.
I love ATLA, love Korra, but I thought Korra Book 2 was the worst season across the two shows. Honestly, if you liked Book 2 at all, then I feel like you NEED to see the last two. Korra Book 3 is really strong, and Book 4’s ending just makes me REALLY HAPPY. (I assume you’re already spoiled on what I’m referring to.)
I actually know some people who prefer Korra to ATLA– like, people who are serious fans even. I prefer ATLA myself, but I have to give a lot of love to Korra as well. Especially with THAT ENDING.
4 was one of the best, with 3 being the second best, in my opinion.
As to the making bending feel mystical part, honestly, I don’t really think it needed to feel more mystical. It was people manipulating the environment around them, and, really, I likes that it felt like a natural part of the world, something developed over time, rather than most fiction’s handling of magic as something basically handed to humanity by the gods/spirits/aliens/time-traveler/janitor’s uncle, and discovered in the way humans often discover things: by trying to mimic nature. The spirituality attached to it was mostly understated with the exception of the Avatar, who was built up as being a force of balance. It also explained the different styles in that the different animals/aspects of nature moved in different ways (the grace of the moon, the rough, efficient power of the badger moles, the efficient and flowing flight of dragons, the agile, flowing speed of the wind), kind of like how some real-life martial arts try to emulate aspects of nature in their movements. Retconning that to the rough equivalent of, “Lol, we stole it from the spirits!” kind of takes away from that, for me, and makes it seem more like every other magic system out there than something naturally developed from that world.
As for the lion-turtle, I always saw him as more of a spirit specific to the Avatar and the duties thereof, a sort of guardian spirit/guide for when the Avatar was stuck in a way beyond their own means to fix. To me, he didn’t really need any further origin story
My headcanon is that the original benders couldn’t actually teach their descendants, and it wasn’t until much later that humans began to properly *learn* bending instead of having it zapped into them. So there would have been a long time when the Avatar was the only bender, possibly being infused with the knowledge by their previous lives.
the big problem with korra in my country was the way they introduced it – there was this big promotion thing, they repeated the three ATLA books/seasons (one per day, but who needs sleep anyway?) and promised that now on the fourth day we would finally learn what happens next…..everyone expected to see book 4: air, with them rebuilding their world after the war, we were particulary desperate to learn just how aang would rebuild the airbenders out of nothing….but then we got korra. tons of new characters, and none of the answers we had been waiting for. needless to say, everyone was pissed off, and didn´t even give korra a chance. and because the quotes were so lousy they didn´t risk a rerun after everyone had calmed down again.
You CAN Dance Selkie! You CAN Jive! Have the time of your life!
see that girl dig that scene being the dancing queen
Mamma Mia, but that girl can dance. 😉
Ugh, monopoly is a horribly designed game. Just awful.
Monopoly is perfectly designed. It was created to show how bad capitalism can be, so if you are miserable it is working. No matter how the dress it up, the fundamental goal of the game is human misery.
Somebody tld me once that Monopoly works better when you don’t add House Rules to it. The “fees and fines go to Free Parking and whoever lands on it gets the whole wad” thing being the most egregious offender, due to dragging out the game with sudden huge influxes into the player economy.
Yeah, House Rules definitely prolong the game, but there’s so little actual choice it’s almost completely on-rails. Too much luck, not enough strategy and skill for my tastes. But hey if someone enjoys it, more power to em.
When I was in high school economics, we had a day where we played Monopoly and then a day when we played with an alternative set of rules called “Communist Monopoly.” Anyway, I did better at the communist version– enjoyed it more and won. Was like, “Was this what I was supposed to get out of this?” afterward.
Generally speaking, I hate playing Monopoly, so if you’re like me, you might need to try it out communist style.
Actually, that was the original point of Monopoly.
It’s more fun when you cheat. Goes faster too. XD But Monopoly wasn’t intended to be fun though. The creator intentionally made it unfun.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/10/lizzie-magie-invented-monopoly-landlords-game
Monopoly’s core design has been improved upon by other games (in particular, I find Fortune Street is much more balanced with its introduction of a stock market) but that doesn’t mean Monopoly’s design is poor. We just have better alternatives, and so Monopoly feels less fun by comparison.
I also don’t believe that Monopoly, at least the Parker Brothers version, was designed to be intentionally bad as a critique of capitalism. Perhaps the original design by Elizabeth Magie had this intent, but Parker Brothers clearly marketed the game as fun for the whole family, and the game would not enjoy its current iconic status if people did not enjoy it on some level.
We long ago learned that the best way to play board games at our house is to all switch strategies midway through the game and all play to support the same possibly random player. This is usually my daughter as she ends up just sitting there with a confused and beaming smile on her face.
On the other hand two person games like chess and stratego have been abruptly cancelled by an “accidentally” tipped board to prevent shame, long held grudges and siblings who won’t speak to each other.
My group’s rendition of games like Risk and Monopoly often end with the majority of the players pooling resources to help the guy most likely to topple Tristan.
Tristan being my friend who tends to win all the games, on account of having better-than-average strategy in mind, from the start of the game if I’m not misjudging his abilities.
Occasionally I beat him by sheer unpredictable lunacy. Which is a factor that sort of stands in for actual strategy. (My decisions almost always sound sane to me at the point that I make them.)
On the one hand, it can get unfun pretty quick if one person dominates all the time. On the other hand, it can become pretty unfun and just downright mean if people constantly gang up on someone who happens to do well, especially if its supposed to be a competitive game and they start coordinating their actions against you rather than individually all try to beat you. IMO the best solution is to find a game where one person doesn’t constantly dominate so everyone can enjoy.
The greatest discovery I’ve made since diving into the world of board games: cooperative games.
Pandemic, Forbidden Island/Desert, Spaceteam, et cetera… either everybody wins or everybody loses.
Then there are traitor mechanic games (Werewolf, Secret Hitler, Betrayal at House on the Hill…) in which a small group of players are working against the rest. Often the goal of the game is to identify and eliminate the traitors.
Both of these work better than every-player-for-themselves games in that sort of scenario.
Oh, yes, indeed: Cooperative games were awesome once we added them to the lineup. I think I first realized that with Pandemic.
“Bang!” is the neatest guess-the-traitor game I’ve played so far. Everybody claims to be the deputy; failing to claim to be the deputy can cost you your life even when you ARE a deputy; I’ve seen sheriffs kill their own deputies and, on one memorable occurrence, a deputy kill his sheriff because he’d forgotten he was a deputy XD
I do like co-op games, but one limitation I keep seeing in them is that they are less games of individual action and more games of group decision. It can quickly devolve in to “hey its your turn, here’s what we think you should do for the best outcome for the team” so it feels like one or two dominant personalities begin playing everyones turns for them. I’m still trying to find a co-op game that allows players to have meaningful control over their own actions and still allows them to play the game together, so that each person has something to actually add, rather than merely be a placeholder who could just as easily walk away and let one person control all the pieces.
Merry Christmas everyone.
I don’t think its possible to love Avatar: The Last Airbender too much.
Liking A:TLA “too much”?
NO SUCH THING.
I’ll drink to that, and I don’t even drink.
Wishing each and everyone a wonderful Holiday/festive end to the year, and a safe slide into the New Year 2017(C.E. Gregorian)
Mexican train-dominoes, FTW! Though Uno and Mille Bourne conspires to entertain us. Does anyone remember Slap-Jack?
Merry Christmas! May everyone’s wishes come true. Unless those wishes are for explodey head powers, because I called dibs on those first. 😀
This year I missed out on three major holiday events: Thanksgiving trip to my aunt’s (canceled), Thanksgiving service at church (too sick to attend pot luck), and now Christmas service as well (coughing and sneezing way too much to attend pot luck).
I started a Facebook post to kinda mope about these losses. But after posting them, and a couple other sucky things that have happened in the past couple of months, I ended up just listing off every cool thing I could think of that’s happened in my life, either in the past couple months or just generally during this year. And that ballooned up into a list of 33 things to be grateful for (not even counting my final rundown of stuff like a warm house, good clothing, and general good health).
The list included being able to get my YouTube channel going with regular updates since the start of November, finally getting some sales on my Zazzle store, getting some cool gifts, having good friends, receiving some memorable compliments online, being able to participate in multiple charity events with little warning, etc. And that list really changed my outlook as I typed it. On balance, my life is very blessed, even if sometimes I don’t stop to see it.
I am grateful to be a part of this wonderful community right here. And my wish for each of you this Christmas — or whenever you happen to read this — is that you experience gratitude, the kind that’s both pleasurable and humbling. Merry Christmas!
The whole C.E. thing never made much sense to me. I get that some people feel uncomfortable with the religious aspects of A.D. (though our days and months in English and other languages are often also tied to Dieties) so coming up with an alternate, non-cultural/religious biased system is understandable. However, C.E. isn’t actually a new system, its still the same date system, just hiding the origin. Why does CE start 2017 years ago? What was the event we are counting forward from? Isn’t it still the alleged birthdate of Jesus of Nazarath (divine or not)? I feel like if there’s going to be a push for a completely secular system it should be pivoting on a secular event. The birth of a significant person, a critical event in history, a key scientific discovery, etc. You could use Einstein or Newtons birth. You could use the creation of the printing press. The first written record, anything meaningful. But to just relabel the existing system seems unnecessarily complicated and confusing to me.
Disco on Selkie, disco on. ABBA is pretty awesome.
Monopoly is only fun when ya cheat. Otherwise it takes forever.
I’ve only played one game of Monopoly that took forever. (Actually, when we realized it would never end, we called it quits.) My brother and I sometimes played it (original rules) growing up, and one time we came out even enough after all the property had been bought and all the hotels and houses built that while one of us was gaining on the net property rents the other was still accumulating some money each round. So neither one would ever go broke and loose. Once we had been around the board a few times and it was clear we were both gaining money, we called it off.
Cue:
“This is the game that doesn’t end,
It just goes on and on my friend.
Some people started playing it not knowing what it was
And they’ll keep playing it forever just because
This is the game….”
That’s kinda why I’d prefer not to play by the rules. XD Cuz the rules are just evil.
House rule of ANY game in my parents’ house:
You are allowed to cheat as much as you want, as long as you are not the person who advances from it.
Kinda like being able to vote for anyone who’s not yourself? That’s a pretty neat rule.
The other day I tried to make the kids stop squabbling over which show to watch by telling each to consider, if they were the other sibling, what they would choose if they were trying to choose something that both parties could enjoy.
It TOTALLY did not work. They were stuck between being stubborn about what they were willing to watch, and having total stereotypes about what the other person would be willing to watch. I was disappointed (and just made them watch RWBY).
Perhaps next time make it a simpler goal: Pick something you both can agree on or there’s no TV. If they are too stubborn to compromise its their own fault. If you REALLY want to motivate them, put some sort of time limit and failure condition: Either agree on something or you have to clean the bathroom or something.
One observation I have to make about games in general: Whatever game it is, it can never end a friendship or partnership. The thing that does that is when one person –
Forgets that it is Just A Game.
On a lighter note:
I have a picture of some friends playing Risk in a dorm lounge at college. There’s nothing remarkable about the picture, except that it was taken between 4 am and 5 am during the middle of finals week. (Well, we know what’s important, right?)
I was also the triumphant loser of an epic game of Risk. When the cards were dealt to start the game, I had the whole continent of Australia. The other players realized the strategic advantage this gave me and immediately formed a 4-way alliance against me. It took almost as long as an average full game, but the four of them together did manage to take me down. Then they could get on with fighting each other so that one of them could win.
I think there is some truth to the “Forgets its just a game” as being one source of strife, but I have encountered another: When one person (or multiple) forgets/doesn’t realize/doesn’t care that THEM having fun at the expense of the other player/players stops it from being a game. I’ve had games absolutely ruined by people who are technically operating within the rules of the game, but doing so in such a way as to cause grief for other players for the sole purpose of amusing themselves, completely discarding the actual objectives or intent of the game.
I’d say that while these people technically are remembering that they’re playing a game, they’re using the game as a weapon. So they aren’t using it as a game. If everyone else remembers that it is just a game the solution is either not to play this game ever again with this person, or not to play with this person at all… ever. Granted that when someone plays this way they can often push another player into the ‘this is not a game’ mindset. I categorically refuse to accept the logical solution that one who repeatedly plays in this way should be, uh, ‘permanently removed’.
Me, my preferred board game is Scrabble. Failing that, Monopoly is a good second choice. I also like chess, but people tend to get fed up because I take so long to make my moves sometimes.
It is not possible to like The Last Airbender too much. …well, unless you totally hate Legend of Korra, and then I will look askance at you.
Around here we play Talisman. For hoooooooours. x.x
Merry Christmas, and happy holidays!!!!
Ah, monopoly. No, that’s not the game where relationships go to die- you’re thinking of Mario Kart. But it helps.
My strategy for monopoly is to make a rainbow. Grab as many properties of a different color, and by the middle of the game, when everyone realizes that you have the piece they need, let them fight over it like seagulls with a hotdog. Whoever gives you the best offer gets it, of course. And once I’ve sold all the properties, I throw all my money into the pot, and bow out with dignity.
Everyone hates playing monopoly with me.
Actually, it might be better if Selkie danced instead of playing Monopoly … I can see a rerun of the “Treasure of Dragon Mountain” scenario.
Merry Christmas, all.
Merry Christmas, everybody! I hope everyone had a great day today. 😀
“a friendly game of monopoly”. There’s an internal contradiction if I ever heard one 😛