The Reddit Report: It's Good To Be the Kingmaker!

(The Reddit Report is a weekly look at the most interesting and informative Reddit threads & comments, published every Saturday.)

Here are 5 great topics from the past week on Reddit…

 

  • Can you make your own Dixit cards?

Um, … yeah! Check out some great photos and maybe you’ll be inspired to make your own!

Custom Dixit Cards
submitted by thumpasorus2

 

  • You can’t win the game. But you can determine who does win. What do you do?

This is one of the best threads I’ve seen on Reddit in a long time. Boy, is there a wide range of thought on this.

Here are the basic options the OP laid out…
–Play to maximize your score, ignoring how the others are doing.
–Make your best moves while not showing bias between the players.
–Do what you can to stay out of their way. Let them decide the winner.
–Whoever helped you earlier should be rewarded, whoever got in your way should be punished.
–Pick your favorite and help them win.
–Tell the others that you’re in a kingmaker situation. Call it a draw, or flip a coin. move on to a new game.

Which one would you do?

Kingmaking etiquette
submitted by blanktextbox

 

  • How many different ways are there to determine the First Player?.

You’d think there’d be a simple answer to this question. After all, many games today include some lame suggestion for picking the first player. (“The player who most recently had tabouli in a French restaurant owned by a left-handed Shrimp fisherman.”)

There are commercial answers, from a deck of cards (Start Player) to dice (Go First Dice) to an app (Chwazi). There are classic answers (everyone put up a meeple and draw one randomly), selfless answers (“Sweetie, do you want to go first?”), logical answers (new players go last), financial answers (whoever paid the pizza guy).

And then there’s “The Remainder Game.” The OP did ask for “creative ways” to determine First Player… and this is definitely the most creative. Just scroll down the page and enjoy how efficiently a committee of boardgaming’s best minds solve the First Player problem.

What are your creative ways to determine first player?
submitted by gatesofwrath

 

  • Team games are not to be underestimated. But they are underrepresented.

There’s a lot of fun to be had from a 2-on-2 tussle. I’m not referring to semi-cooperative game where it’s “us-versus-them,” but a game where two sides (or even 3 or more) combine their resources to share in victory.

TEAM GAMES
Some great examples of true team games are Ticket to Ride: Asia and classic card games like Bridge and Euchre. Also, a lot of games have team variants, like Crokinole, Cosmic Encounter, RoboRally and Mage Knight.

NOT TEAM GAMES
Letters from Whitechapel and Betrayal on House on the Hill are not team games. “Hidden team” games like Battlestar: Galactica and Bang! don’t count either. Games with shifting alliances (Game of Thrones: The Board Game and Diplomacy) don’t fit in this category, either.

You know, there are just so many good suggestions for Team games, that you should skim the thread yourself.

Do you know of any real team games?
submitted by apreche

 

  • How do you fix the awful clips on the character tracker in Betrayal at the Hill?

I haven’t met a single player who’s been happy with that part of the game. Some have used a special app for tracking a player’s status. But that’s a complication. It’s better to simply fix what’s broken. This thread has a couple interesting solutions. Yeah, you could bite down on the clips to tighten them. You could simply use paper clips instead.And there are a few more good DIY solutions you should definitely check out.

Betrayal’s black clips are so loose
submitted by Darth_Bowie

 

Are you a Redditor, too? If I missed something interesting from Reddit that you want to share, let me know in the Comments!

(Reddit logo is in the Public Domain.)

  • Drew is a contributor to the Board Gamers Anonymous podcast. He's a curator by nature, compulsively reading and obsessively organizing what he's read. He's also been a gamer since the age of 3, which means he's been playing board games for... let's just say more than 40 years, and leave it at that...

  • Show Comments

You May Also Like

2018 Board Game Bracket Contest

It’s that time of year again – when we pit 64 games in a ...

2nd Annual Extra Life Charity Event

2nd Annual Board Gamers Anonymous Extra Life Fundraiser When: October 26, 2014 Where: Gamer’s ...