Dang, that game Yogi sounds very fun, but doesn't seem to be available in the US.
How to play with people who are better than you
131–140 of 190 posts
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. There are strategies to almost surely win but it makes the game boring and even annoying for everyone involved. So we usually added rules to prevent those strategies. If someone 'is better at that' it means he/she is a boring/non-fun player and no-one will play anymore a…
I'm curious to learn more about those monopoly strategies and rules against them. I think there are times for both kind of play. It's annoying when people only play one kind of way. It's like beating you is all that matters to them.
I have not played it with only adults for a long time, only with (young) children mixed and parents/family; there are a lot of examples to ruin the game (for me and kids and most adults except 'the winners' (woohoo! I beat some kids at a boardgame!)); one of them (one of the most annoying imho) being that if you pick up (at least) 1 of every monopoly and then refuse to trade/sell unless it's for crazy amounts. So no-one can have a monopoly; then it's just a tiresome waiting game, so people (esp kids, but me too as i'm bored already thinking about it) are going to forfeit or will just buy stuff at stupid prices hoping to get lucky (which they won't usually). You don't need to do that and you can just 'sit it out' but it ruins the game element completely. Ofcourse this requires luck with the dice but more often than not, the monopolies are quite evenly distributed in my experience. It depends what you get, but if you have this hand, then you will probably win by tiring everyone else out (especially because really no-one else cares about winning; we were just wanting to have fun).
> It's like beating you is all that matters to them
It does, which is weird considering this is not actually real life or real money; it's (can be anyway) a nice boardgame on a rainy sunday.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the point of Monopoly is to learn that monopolies are not fun, or fair
The point of Monopoly is to make money for the owner of the trademark, and condition people to buy games based on inertia, advertising, and nostalgia rather than complexity, balance, or fun.
Fortunately we have a plethora of much better games now. I think monopoly will be a quirk of history soon. How many boomers have never played monopoly (and hopefully never will) because they have so many other games to play.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want to get better, train up. This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time. I would rather play basketball against someone my level than Steph Curry playing all out. I'm not playing to win or even to get better (getting better is fun, but isn't the point). I just want to have fun. For many kinds of play, if you have to train for it, you may as…
At least for me, part of the motivation with playing things is the idea that it is practice, and discipline, and improvement. Part of it is escapism, to be sure, but not all of it.
I'd add to that. I think this doesn't just vary person to person, but also game to game, and even moment to moment. I'd compare it to food, in that it's not one size fits all, even for a given person and a given point in their life. Sometimes you want steak. Sometimes you want ice cream. You ought to eat some veggies. Sometimes you just need a damned cup of coffee.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're just playing to pass the time, why does it matter if you lose to Steph Curry or not?
It doesn't matter if you lose - what matters is that you feel like you have some involvement in the game. Good games are like conversations - you can enjoy a conversation with someone who's way more knowledgeable/smarter than you, but not one where you don't get a word in at all
The better player needs to agree to play or converse at a handicap for this to work.
I can have a fun conversation with my two year old, but it's going to be pretty limited in depth.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isn't a very good comparison. Lifting weights isn't a competition in the way that basketball is. I want to say the latter is more "zero-sum", but I'm not sure if that's correct terminology.
There are plenty of competitive weight lifting sports. CrossFit, Olympic lifting, powerlifting...
I would probably have fun shooting free throws with Steph Curry, even though I would be lucky to make as many as he missed.
That's more like the weight lifting you're comparing it to - the competition involves artificially choosing the other person as a benchmark, and I can work against whatever internal benchmark I want.
This is very different than a game of one-on-one, where it's his job to change how I interact with the ball (which he would, to the point of meaninglessness) and vice-versa (which I would fail at to the point of triviality).
It's not strange (or a personal failing) to find that less interesting.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#137I never liked the idea of explicitly changing the rules in order to make a game more fair for new players. If you become accustomed to changing the rules whenever you find yourself outmatched, and then find yourself in a situation where the rules can't be changed for whatever reason, then you're not going to enjoy yourself. It's much more enjoyable for everyone, in my opinion, to play by the same rules as the group,…
Many boards games attempt to make things fun even if you’re losing. One of the best games for this is Concordia, where you don’t count up the points until the end. You always feel that you have a chance. Once you get fairly good however, you can scan the board state and do some rough guesstimating to see who is in the lead. Other games can be quite brutal. You make one wrong move and you know you’re in for 2.5 hrs of…
I think most board games do this relatively poorly. But this is also the reason I think Betrayal at House on the Hill is the most fun board game I have played. 80% of the game is a sort of arms race, which is fun. You want to be the strongest but because of the randomness of teams at the end you don’t really want any particular individual to have bad luck; and if you’re doing poorly it doesn’t really guarantee your loss later on- it may even be made irrelevant.
The latter 20% is suddenly competitive and full of bullshit, and maybe by chance feels completely unfair but it’s short, has lots of hidden information, and everyone is usually happy to play it through even if they lose.
It’s a really good game design. Even if not especially strategic.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#138Interesting take! I know a bunch of people who don't like to play games because they think it's stressful and put too much pressure on themselves to win, therefore games aren't "relaxing." But I always think playing with people who are better than you make you smarter even if you're losing. And though it all, at least you're still learning and bonding.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want to get better, train up. This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time. I would rather play basketball against someone my level than Steph Curry playing all out. I'm not playing to win or even to get better (getting better is fun, but isn't the point). I just want to have fun. For many kinds of play, if you have to train for it, you may as…
And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. There are strategies to almost surely win but it makes the game boring and even annoying for everyone involved. So we usually added rules to prevent those strategies. If someone 'is better at that' it means he/she is a boring/non-fun player and no-one will play anymore a…
I find scrabble that way too. When people start blocking good letters just so that you don't use them, it starts to lose it's appeal.
Re: How to play with people who are better than you
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming you can keep getting better is a bit of a fallacy too. If that were the case everybody would be challenger!
It's not really a fallacy. However most people think playing == improving. This is not the case. The best players I know, and the fastest improving players I know, all review their gameplay and take notes on the mistakes they made. They watch other high skill / pro players and take notes on what they do. They practice PERFECTLY, over and over and over (i.e. executing a combo flawlessly 20 times in a row, if you make…
Almost nobody does what you suggest and even doing this does not guarantee you will consistently improve. You don't know what you don't know, and masters are often not vocal about intricacies of their strategy. Many of them are geniuses, particularly in strategy type games, and as such people with much lower G factor probably have a slim chance of ever reaching that level. I know several of them myself. Gave them visual IQ tests like ravens progressive matrices. I know the validity is not very high but of the 6 people diamond 1 or higher in League of Legends I gave the test to, not a single one scored below 135.