Podcast Episode 28: How To Not Be Awful At Board Games

Ever feel like you’re just not doing as well as you should at games? Want that secret sauce so you can beat your friends? Marc, Orion, Matt, Matt’s secret brother Dave, and another Matt who we call Bubba are here to help! We’re sometimes not bad at games and we have a variety of tips to help you out.

4:17 – Find The Bottlenecks

9:06 – Understand Resource Values

15:30 – Identify Action Loops

22:23 – Digression – Who Is This Advice For?

23:32 – FOO Strategies

33:34 – Be Aware Of Remaining Time

42:58 – Always Draw First

44:31 – Sports Digression

45:05 – Deck Efficiency

53:22 – Figure Out If You Should Differentiate Or Follow

56:31 – Disguise Your Strength

1:01:35 – In Co-Ops, Maximize Your Offense

1:04:50 – Leave Your Options Open

1:16:16 – Subvert Common Expectations

1:22:34 – Reverse Engineer From The Victory Condition

Music: Sailing The Solar Wind by Abstraction

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1 thought on “Podcast Episode 28: How To Not Be Awful At Board Games”

  1. Fantastic stuff. I’ll be re-listening soon. The idea of efficiency as the curve, and victory points/winning conditions as the area under the curve, is such an interesting insight.

    One thing about the cooperative games: the Legacy versions of games seem designed to make you agonize even more about “letting things burn” and pursuing victory conditions, because the “burning” (the outbreaks in Pandemic Legacy S1, the plague cubes in S2) have lasting effects on future games. And, unfortunayely, my current PLS2 group is having a very hard time specifically because we keep trying to get each other the cards, and the Infection deck just wipes us out, or at least creates a lot of long-term future issues. Sadness 🙁

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