To me that’s a hallmark of a game that isn’t very interesting! If you can discover a dominant strategy in a handful of plays, the game probably isn’t worth your time IMO.
I think there has been a shift in what kinds of games get published that privileges a slim set of experiences that are possible in board games and risks narrowing the range of what people think a board game is capable of. I agree there’s a vast range of different player types and psychological rewards people get out of playing games, but I personally find myself increasingly uninterested in new game designs, because the designs I like are harder to sell to impulsive buyers, players who don’t want to play a game repeatedly, or players who will have difficulty playing games again if anyone has a bad time (which I totally get! But it means designs that might prompt negative emotions are not sought by many publishers). I wouldn’t even say “heavy” games are the problem (I disagree with OP about high time commitment being a problem, there’s many games like that that deliver commensurate value to me).
These are the top ranked games on BGG from 1990 - 2007. Pick a few of these, try to pick games that are highly differentiated from each other by category and mechanisms on their BGG pages (also I recommend you pick ones with under ~2hrs expected play time to start). Read the rules for one, go to your local board game cafe with some friends and play it. Try to recruit friends willing to play a game more than once, even if they initially dislike it (hard ask, I know, but sometimes games only reveal themselves after repeated plays). If you are enjoying this, repeat this with a couple picks and try to determine what are the features of these games that you enjoy (may be shared mechanisms, but eventually I think you will come to a more philosophical understanding of what you enjoy about board games, if you enjoy them!). You may find out early in this, that you don't really enjoy games except for the social experience. That's extremely common.
I do not recommend looking at kickstarters or the current top ranked games on BGG, or looking at recent youtube reviews.
We're living in a renaissance in terms of the quantity of board games being released, but personally I am finding a declining number of titles I'm even remotely interested in each year, and many of the titles I am interested in are remakes/reprints of older titles!
I think with the increased public interest in hobby board games, the pursuit of profit has lead to some really negative changes in the games that tend to get published.
100% agree, I think the past 10-15 years of changes in the hobby have been profoundly negative.
- The trend towards videogame-ifying board games
- The trend towards "cozy" games, i.e. games that are not interactive, have no potential to produce negative emotions, and focus on a solitary optimization puzzle.
- The kickstarter-ification of games that focus on early release exclusives, excessive plastic, aesthetics over game design, etc.
I really urge players today to look at some of the games from the 90s to early 2000s if they're interested in getting into the hobby. Seek out some of the "classic" hobby games. Even some games predating that are fantastic, but you will also run into a lot of over-the-top simulationist war games during the 80s period.
- 18xx games (1889, 1830, The Old Prince 1871, etc.). Basically stock market games built around running train companies.
- Games by the publisher Splotter Spellen (i.e. Indonesia, Food Chain Magnate, etc.). Interactive games, usually with an economic bent. Turn order manipulation is a large part of these games. Splotter games often feel like they are designed in a lineage similar to Uwe Rosenberg games, where you can see threads of design traits shared between games.
- Carl Chudyk designed games (Innovation, Glory To Rome, etc.). Games that feel random and broken but have lots of tactical play embedded in them. Tempo is challenging to figure out in these games (IMO), and sometimes there is a non-linear progression aspect to them.
- Older euros, predating the trend toward solitary play: El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Bridges of Shangri-La, Medina, etc. No single connective feature, but these are games that are more on the combinatorial and strategic side but predate the development of the "personal player board" as the primary place the game is played.
- Pax Games: Pax Pamir, Pax Porfiriana, etc. History-based card tableau games that all feature a conveyer-belt market mechanism (where you buy cards from a market and cards get progressively discounted the longer they're visible and give you turn lookahead). Semi-economic, but more about the interaction of card abilities (and sometimes map play). Very fun weird games, just ignore the footnotes in games designed by Phil Eklund (I also don't love the futurist optimism in Matt Eklund's Pax Transhumanity, but that's me).
- Some abstracts (such a time investment to get deep into these, but they're obviously fantastic games): The Gipf Series, TwiXt, Hive, Paco Ŝako. I'm not yet sure what type of abstract games I most enjoy, still figuring that out.
I tend to like strategic, competitive games with higher interactivity, but with lower amounts of "take that"-type interactivity.
There’s a funny tendency among AI enthusiasts to think any contrast to humans is analogy in disguise.
Putting aside malicious actors, the analogy here means benevolent actors could spend more time and money training AI models to behave pro-socially than than evolutionary pressures put on humanity. After all, they control the that optimization procedure! So we shouldn’t be able to point to examples of frontier models engaging in malicious behavior, right?
It set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now.
I only saw this thread by chance and almost didn't look, because the title made the piece sound like a flamebait blog post. Fortunately I saw newyorker.com beside the title and looked more closely.
There is dwindling space for sincere independent accountability reporting on big tech like this to a) be created, since it's incredibly resource-intensive and so many resources flow from Silicon Valley, and b) actually reach people, since more platforms are now owned or otherwise influenced by interested parties.
Thank you for looking. Please do spread this kind of reporting in your communities, and subscribe to investigative outlets when you can.
> OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams
A paper with "ideas to keep people first" was (coincidentally?) published today:
• Worker perspectives
• AI-first entrepreneurs
• Right to AI
• Accelerate grid expansion
• Accelerate scientific discovery and scale the benefits.
• Modernize the tax base
• Public Wealth Fund
• Efficiency dividends
• Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone
• Portable benefits
• Pathways into human-centered work
You can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments.
But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.
Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here.
Yes, I was surprised that it was downranked when I saw that too. Then I realized it had set off the flamewar detector and it was a simple matter to turn it off. I'm glad we got to this in time, because sometimes we don't, and this was an important case not to miss.
But isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?
I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this.
We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.
I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position you're in.
It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars.
But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a flame war over a title from a flame war over content? That's not a leading question. I don't know.
For us the litmus test isn't the title, it's whether the article itself can support a substantive discussion on HN. If yes, then we'll rewrite the provocative title to something else, as I mentioned. Ironically this often gives the author more of a voice because (1) the headline was often written by somebody else, and (2) we're pretty diligent about searching in the article itself for a representative phrase that can serve as a good title.
If, on the other hand, the title is provocative and the article does not seem like it can support a substantive discussion on HN, we downweight the submission. There are other reasons why we might do that too—for example, if HN had a recent thread about the same topic.
How do we tell whether an article can support a substantive discussion on HN? We guess. Moderation is guesswork. We have a lot of experience so our guesses are pretty good, but we still get it wrong sometimes.
In the current case, the title is baity while the article clearly passes the 'substantive' test, so the standard thing would have been to edit the title. I didn't do that because, when the story intersects with YC or a YC-funded startup, we make a point of moderating less than we normally do.
I know I'm repeating myself but it's pretty random which readers see which comments, and redundancy defends against message loss!
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