Tabletop

Doing some research for my side project.
My current top favs - Agricola, Ark Nova, and Terraforming Mars. If any of those are among your favorites:

What are the things that you love about the game? What makes it more enjoyable than many of the other games? Likes? Dislikes?

I'll start. 🧵 👇

Unabashed gaming geek. RPGs, board games, and exploring the intersection of AI, blockchain, and the pen & paper. 

2/ Mars: I admit that I DO reach burn-out with Terraforming Mars sometimes (some games can feel like a GRIND and I need to take a break from it), but I still love it.

3/ Agricola :  initial occupation and minors draft is where the magic is for me. Discovering synergies and planning out your actions / pacing is just FUN. Since Agricola has no continued drafting mechanism, I think Agricola has higher re-playability.

4/ Agricola: You only get to see a small subset of the available cards in a single game (whereas with Mars, it isn’t unusual to churn through all the cards in a game). This only increases with the wild decks. I also love the planning, pacing, and constrained actions.

5/ Ark Nova : Once again, discovering synergies and planning the pace of your game is critical. Not as much card churn as Mars. I love the turn actions - having only 1 of 5 actions to choose from each turn.

6/ Ark Nova: I like the balance of income generation (appeal) with pure points (conservation). There is still some card churn, but it is more minimal and needs to be planned.

1/ Mars : Each game feels different due to corporation, card drafts, variable milestones & awards, and different colonies.

The beginning of the game is the most magical to me, because you're seeing what luck comes your way with drafts, you're picking synergies, and planning out engine-building.

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Oh! I also think Colonies improved energy use quite a bit. I appreciated that...

My favorite TM setup is Venus, Preludes, Colonies...but I admit that Colonies changed the game a fair bit (there are more points in cards, so it deprioritizes actively terraforming and as a consequence lengthens the game)

I appreciate the multiple paths to victory in Mars, timing of achievements, interplay of diff systems (air, energy, heat) meaningful decisions bc actions limited 

Venus expac did a great job of adding additional complexity (asymm player powers) while reducing scope of decisions bc it guides the direction of your focus

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Terraforming Mars doesn't hit the table often (at least, not with my weekly board game group), but I still love it (and will play it at WBC and GenCon). I play a fair bit of Ark Nova on BGA...that is what I have been playing most frequently (as of late).

@v loves Ark Nova, it supplanted TM for him I hear

@rustopian any thoughts?