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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
Was thinking about what I play board games for (fun + collecting mechanisms and their intuitions), in light of what I hope those mechanisms can do (empower the disadvantaged), and it started making me wonder if you could make a board game where: 1. Players start with deliberately unfair distribution of points/resources. 2. Resources could be purchased directly from other players at agreed/colluded prices. Could we start a genre that develops the muscles for coordinating under severe imbalance? Seems like it could develop more relevant skills than the normal ("zero to win") type games today.
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Trigs
@trigs
I would say you do this with Catan. It sometimes ends up being this way, depending on the board layout; players can start with very unbalanced resources. Or you can intentionally set it up that way for various reasons. But, since Catan allows for unrestricted bartering, player's starting resources often do impact collusion. Players that start out strong are more likely to do trades that greatly benefit the players that start weak, unless they see them starting to catch up. Multiple weak players band together against the one player with a clear resource advantage. It was always one of the aspects of the game I really liked. It rarely was "fair". It usually was more about social games between players. Sometimes we'd all just pick on someone because they won too many times in a row.
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iSpeakNerd 🧙♂️
@ispeaknerd.eth
if you host for others who dont know each other, you get ganged up on as the one everyone has an established rel with
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
Yeah the unrestricted barter of Catan came to my mind too. Seems like an aspect that didn’t get adopted in many other games. Could be a fun sub-genre to explore.
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