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Billionaire, Board Game God and Tech's Hidden Disruptor (2019)
- colmvp 6y agoThe fact he has Gloomhaven to the right of him made me chuckle. I've only had one chance to play it, and it took hours of fumbling around with the instructions with my friends (who also hadn't played it) but once we got the hang of the instructions it was very, very fun.
- prepend 6y agoI liked that, to his left, he had Fortress America, Shogun, and what I think is Conquest of the Empire, the three other games in the same series as Axis and Allies.
- Aeolun 6y agoPersonally I was pretty happy to see Risk. Not many people seem interested in playing large strategy board games.
- PakG1 6y agoThere are a lot of large strategy board games that are much nicer than Risk these days. The world has come a long way since Risk was created. Risk 2210 A.D. is much greater, and there are other games even greater than that. I think large co-op board games can be especially fun.
- kmonsen 6y agoAny examples of large co-op board games that you find interesting?
- zeisss 6y agoPandemic
- alasdair_ 6y agoI really like Mansions of Madness as well as Dead of Winter. Both are co-op but both have a mechanic where it’s possible one of the players is actually a betrayer out to defeat the others. My problem with pure co-op, especially pandemic, is that what usually happens is one player ends up doing most of the actual “playing” and the others just provide a few suggestions here and there. Both MoM and DoW limit the things you are allowed to share with the other players too, which makes this happen less often, and in DoW every player has a unique hidden agenda in addition to the group goal - which gets fun if they do something weird because you have to work out if they are a betrayer or just have a weird agenda.
- kmonsen 6y agoI have played Pandemic a few times, and it ended up like you mention. 1-2 players took control while the others were mostly passive. DoW looks interesting, but not sure how possible it is with 2-3 players and it is harder to get a larger group now in the middle of the pandemic.
- alasdair_ 6y agoIt’s fun with even two players but it’s definitely more interesting with four or more. The expansions allow twelve players, which I strongly recommend only doing with experienced players - it takes a whole day and people give up if you have to explain all the rules over and over.
- dwd 6y agoRisk seems to get a lot of hate these days. BoardGameGeeks rankings push it way down, which seems to be a common theme for popular mainstream games. Though the ones at the bottom like Monopoly and Game of Life are truly horrible and give board games a bad rap: fulling deserving of their ranking. To the right of Risk looks to be Stratego which was a fun game when I was a kid.
- cosmodisk 6y agoI appreciate there are more sophisticated games out there but what's the issue with Monopoly?
- chottocharaii 6y agoPure dice roll & has a trivial strategy for perfect play
- PakG1 6y agoYou can add in more stuff if you want. Mergers and spin-offs, player-to-player loans with various interest rates, bill payment schedules, etc. :)
- cosmodisk 6y agoBeing simple and linear doesn't make it bad: I can equally enjoy playing super mario and Fallout,even though they are quite different in terms of gameplay.
- tomgp 6y agoThe linearity and randomness aren’t the main problems. Play length and run-away winner are far worse issues. It’s possible to lose the game in the first couple of trips round the board and still have a couple of hours of slowly being ground down. One person might have fun no one else does.
- prepend 6y agoSome people have different tastes, like asking what’s wrong with vanilla ice cream. I like board game geek, but it has a bit of a movie critic problem in that the most popular, most played, and most fun games aren’t necessarily highest rated. It is also very well known, so any negative reviews have the added bonus of extra attention. And the criticism was novel a few years ago.
- Aeolun 6y agoPossibly, but I’ve only had people refuse to play Risk with me without suggesting any alternatives, so I have to assume it’s aversion to that kind of genre in general. My biggest problem with risk is the huge element of chance.
- busterarm 6y agoI'd reach for Empire Builder or Nippon Rails or something like that before Risk. Even though it's a different theme, they end up being much better games.
- empath75 6y agoRisk is a terrible game for anyone who cares about strategy because it has a kingmaker problem. Someone who is terrible at the game can still easily get mad and cause one player to lose by throwing all their armies at them. Monopoly has a similar problem with the ability to trade all your properties to someone for a dollar because someone else pissed you off.
- Aeolun 6y agoThat’s why Risk is more of a social game than a strategy game. Though I assume the same thing is true for global politics.
- pixelpoet 6y agoI thought this article would be about Demis Hassabis, but I guess he's not a billionaire.
- CamperBob2 6y agoWasn't he thrown out of a Go tournament for running a bot? Seems like I read something to that effect.
- pixelpoet 6y agoWell there was his company DeepMind developing a Go AI (AlphaGo / AlphaZero) that can beat pros, at least 10 years before anyone though it would be possible. He doesn't strike me as the kind to cheat at tournaments, being one of the best general game players of all time as I recall.
- gazzini 6y agoThe segue from winning at board games -> winning at business is great, but then it goes into slightly too much detail about Appian. I‘ve accepted that native advertising & PR are everywhere, but still... I wish it could just be a cool story about a billionaire board game champ (awesome!) without the embedded enterprise software ad (lame!). [edit: typo]
- MithrilTuxedo 6y agoThat was my takeaway too. What games? I assume the author of the article wouldn't have recognized the names of any good board games.
- busterarm 6y agoSekigahara, as a board game duel, is an experience approaching the divine. It is a very, very, very fine game. Pictured behind him is a fine collection. A lot of great and interesting games, though I would have expected more war games...stuff like Fire In The Lake, Sword of Rome, etc.
- cthalupa 6y agoSekigahara is excellent, and yeah, I am surprised there is not more of a GMT collection behind him. After having designed Sekigahara, it seems like most everything they publish would be up his alley. Which reminds me, I need to go look at what GMT has in P500 now. It's been a few months...
- busterarm 6y agoHeh, this article also prompted me to order some new things, like the new edition of Labyrinth and the P500 for Sword of Rome, which I've wanted for a while. That Risk is present in the photo but not Diplomacy is a tragedy. :D
- qznc 6y agoI gave away my Diplomacy box after playing it once. It is so much easier to get a round started online. On the other hand, a wall of board games is for signaling as well and thus your lament is valid.
- Schwolop 6y agoIt seems a fair few tech entrepreneurs and folks in the software industry are also into designing games. I have several in the works, and one that’s very slowly building a following: https://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-battle.html https://www.drtomallen.com/half-the-battle.html
- thecupisblue 6y agoI believe it's because our brains get dopamine out of successful predictions - more so than others.
- cableshaft 6y agoI'm in the software industry and I design board games. Of course I used to develop video games before that, so it wasn't a huge leap, although I didn't really have the urge to start doing it until I had gone down the board game rabbit hole for a few years and played hundreds of modern board games. I have one game signed, but not yet released, by a publisher, and another game was selected as a finalist in the Cardboard Edison design contest this year. It's basically a lot more fun way to do system design. You can take a lot of the same processes and apply it to board game design.
- rhlsthrm 6y agoCan you give an example of how you can apply software system design principles to boardgame design? Genuinely curious.
- 9214 6y agoI second that, extremely interested myself. Also if insights into board game design can be adapted in a software engineering setting.
- cableshaft 6y agoI replied and gave a few examples to the parent comment, if you're interested.
- zingar 6y agoI followed links to find out more about the games referenced and I’m astonished to see a two player game that advertises 180 minute duration. Anything that long would have to be multiplayer to justify its existence in my schedule. Terra mystica is hitting the multiplayer sweet spot at 90ish minutes, and I’m a beginner.
- busterarm 6y agoA lot of two player war games are a full 8 hours of play for experienced players, if not multi-session. In my Battletech tabletop (which is a very simple game...) group, with 6 players around the table and a full day we can usually only get 12-15 turns in, without advanced rules. That's partly why the "Grinder" format is so fun. If there's such an event at any conventions you attend, I strongly suggest trying it.
- cableshaft 6y agoIt's a war game. War games are allowed to be that long. I've played games of Terra Mystica that have taken 3+ hours, just depends on the group. Although they were at least 4 player games. Twilight Struggle can easily take that long, and it's only a 2 player game. If it doesn't take that long, someone probably lost early on, or both players know the game really well and can play it quickly. Longest multiplayer game I've ever played was Diplomacy. We played for 12 hours, and had to call it early at that point. Even with it being that long, I felt the game was going at a breakneck pace and I didn't feel like I had hardly any time to grab food or go to the bathroom, because I had to talk to everyone and figure out what the hell to do for my next turn (and make sure I heard as much as I could from other people talking). It was an awesome experience I'm not in a hurry to do again anytime soon.
- busterarm 6y agoIn college we would have marathon weekends where we'd stay up for three days and play multiple games of Diplomacy, Big Two and Mahjong. We generally ended up with a 2 or 3 player victory in Dip after about 7 or 8 hours. Very rarely did we push those solo victory games, but we would play a few times a week besides those weekends. I must have played 50 in-person Diplomacy games in one year and another 100 or so online. It became an addiction. Lost thousands playing mj too. Fun times.
- spapas82 6y agoThe company I worked for before ~ 8 years (a bank) was using Appian for a bunch of its non-core workflows and actually was in the process of using it even more. Appian is a strange beast: It's a BPMS written as a Java web application that has an in-memory kdb (the db of the K programming language which is well-known in HN) for storing all process data. The greatest advantage of Appian as compared to other workflow systems I've used (Activiti, jBPM etc) is that it offers a really complete environment for creating a more or less complete workflow without the need to write code. So you can actually teach non-technical people to do it. I remember we had a couple of Business Analysts that were creating very complex workflows back then. The didn't have any technical knowledge; their background was mostly on economics. Of course, for integration with legacy systems or relational databases or doing some tricky UI you'd still need a developer. But most of the work could be done by a not so tehnical guy which is the holy grail of such systems. Also, it was a really complete system where you could rather easily implement all your workflow needs (workflow design, user tasks, notifications, exceptions, integrations, reporting, authorizations, business rules, subprocessing, parallel execution etc). After some initial configuration you'd rarely need to touch code unless you needed some custom bpm nodes. Appian was also claiming that because it was using the kdb as a database backend it was very fast. I don't have an opinion on this; it wasn't slow but wasn't blazing fast. And also when the kdb size grew too much (we're talking some tens of GBs) it was taking a really long time to start (half an hour or something) and needed the same amount of memory from the server (IIRC we had 64GB back then) because it needed to load the kdbs into memory. Also I remember that we had a constant fear that the kdbs will be compromised somehow (for example if the server rebooted unnormally) and we'll lose data. Or maybe I had that fear; I was never able to "trust" it as I could trust the good-old IBM DB2 database the bank had. Concerning data-loss, we had a bunch of incidents that were related to having configured appian as a cluster; after we switched to a single server it was better. The good thing (or maybe bad because I was never able to learn K) is that it had a complete API in Java so we didn't actually need to touch the kdbs; I remember with awe however when we had a support request where an Appian engineer was using K to actually query the kdb and see the status of our server. In any case, the main drawback of Appian is how expensive it was. I don't remember how much but I remember that the bank had a special agreement to have a low price for Appian (don't exaclty now the details); buying it fully was too expensive even for the bank (!) (especially if it was to be used by all employees since it had a per user fee). Beyond all these, I belive that Appian is a solid product and deserves its success in the enterprise world.
- irrational 6y agoI see Concordia right behind his head. A man of good taste. But I also see light party games like Dixit, so he doesn’t just play cerebral euro games.
- Ftuuky 6y agoUnrelated to the article itself but that fossil behind him in his home is gorgeous and super cool.