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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • Somewhat of a fair point. I was more so referring to back in the day where it was not a given that a game would release on steam. I clearly remember the old videos from Totalbiscuit where that was a point worth mentioning. Asset flips and the like just couldn’t be released on steam, as everything had to go through at least mid sized publishers (not an ideal solution by any means). This meant that you couldn’t get many indie titles and some bigger publishers didn’t want to use steam either, but those games that were available on the platform, while not guaranteed to be good, were at least not broken or complete trash. This changed with the introduction of steam greenlight and the later removal of almost any barrier to entry to release something on steam and that bothers me a bit.


  • You do know that you can disable that popup in the settings, right? You can also decide on which page the client opens. So if you set it up right you won’t see an ad inside the client unless you consciously open the store page. And I would think that ads on a storefront are somewhat the point of the storefront.

    Yes, you can be bothered by how much of a cut steam takes, or how they no longer curate what gets on their store, but compared to what’s happening on consoles it’s in another league. If you don’t want to use steam, go ahead and try GOG Galaxy, it’s a bit rough around the edges and doesn’t have every game, but those it has don’t have DRM.


  • I mean, it is tempting if you are a soulless politician that only thinks as far as the next reelection. In 2008 the economy and therefore city finances were just a tiny bit under the weather. If you are then able to pull a deal that nets the city over a billion dollars, that’s great. You won’t be there to see the repercussions and you bolstered the balancesheet for a year, what’s not to like? /s


  • Nah, they would be out for blood in this scenario, otherwise the premise of fighting them wouldn’t make any sense. The bigger problem for the tiny horses is their inability to reach the upper parts of your body. Sure, they probably have a mean bite, but because of their size and the shape of their teeth they most likely won’t be able to enclose your leg. A horse bite crushes, so keep your fingers away and you are most likely fine.

    They also have hooves, so no scratching and climbing. Horses hooves are dangerous because they have a massive horse behind it when it comes flying towards you. Take that away and they could be baby fist for all you should care.

    If you look at their jumping capabilities, yea they ar impressive for an animal of their size, but once you are 30cm tall it’s much less impressive to jump as high as you are tall (and horses really don’t jump all that high, most of it comes from tucking their legs).

    If you compare the tiny horse to a cat, the cat would be much more dangerous, because it has claws, sharp teeth and can reach your face. As long as you wear heavy boots and have a good stomping/kicking technique you should be fine versus duck sized horses.







  • In Wingspan there are only very limited ways of “destructively” interacting with other players, to me only two come to mind:

    1. You take away birds someone else wants to draw, either by taking them yourself or by refreshing the birdbath with an ability. You can’t steal from someone’s hand or board (not that I think you should be able to). This usually hasn’t that much impact, because there are many birds with similar stats and/or abilities and there are so many birds, you can’t really play for a certain combo anyway.

    2. You limit someone’s ability to take or use the food they want by (a) taking it from the pool of rolled dice, but similarly to 1., there are several ways to roll them again or generate them directly. Or (b) take their acquired food with a bird’s ability, but they always get something in return, either a specific resource or they can draft from the pool, it’s rarely punishing und usually at least neutral.

    Apart from that there is nothing that would impact your gameplan that is in the hands of another player. You always get the same amount of turns, always at the same time and the first player marker moves predictably. The last round is also pretty lame if you play with the basegame, because laying eggs if you’ve got the space is the best move to take at the end - the expansions fixed that though by giving you less eggs.

    Terraforming Mars on the other hand (I haven’t played the others more than once) let’s you compete for bordspace and the resources on them, which already makes it way more important and competitive to get established on the board early on, at least if someone else is doing it. You also compete for the progression track bonuses that directly give more VPs and influences the game’s length. If everyone pushes temperature/O2/oceans early on and you know the game will end around round 11 instead of round 14, you will have to adapt your strategy quite a bit.

    I still think Wingspan is a great game, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. Imo it would have fit in better into the normal “Spiel des Jahres”-Category instead of the “Kennerspiel” one, that probably rubbed some people the wrong way/set wrong expectations.