If you think thousand dollar games are a necessity for modern publishing, I’m sorry there’s absolutely no common ground your or i have. Buh-bye.

After many years of working marketing for high tech firms, with an ever-increasing salary until it hit mid six-figures, I had a complete meltdown and dropped that work entirely, with no employment prospects and no idea of what to do for money, living off my savings for a year.

This enabled me to finally take the plunge and move half a world away (teaching English at first) to reconnect with my roots. I’ve been here now for almost 24 years and haven’t been happier. I even returned to marketing (well, market consultation) in 2016 and managed to somehow not have a second meltdown.

The smell of fresh tea when the package is opened.

“Stinky tofu” when passing the street carts selling it.

Freshly-made lard-cooked french fries.

A “strong-scented” baijiu.

A good Indian restaurant, that moment you walk inside and breath.

The point is these are games MADE FOR RICH PEOPLE. You know, like I said at the beginning of your blank incomprehension:

If you’re “appealing to a larger market” by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?

$150 for an all cardboard game. Now let’s talk Star Wars: Imperial assault:

• core game: about $110
• dice for everybody? That’s an extra $12 per.
• want expansions? That’s $50 to $75 each. If you want all of them, that’s about $375
• want the “ally and villain packs”? That’s $15-$22 each. If we just count the ones still in print: That’s about $598

Fortunately all of the skirmish maps (at $25 each) are out of print so we’ve saved ourselves a further $325.

So the complete game, with all published parts currently available, is over a thousand bucks, which is utterly ludicrous for a mass market game that won’t even be remembered in a couple of decades (and whose components will have long rotted away before a century is out.

How ludicrous am I talking? For the price of this game that won’t survive a century as any kind of cultural icon (and whose components likely won’t last more than 30 years) I can buy a bespoke Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) set made of knotty red sandalwood with ornate, handmade mother-of-pearl inlay.

But this isn’t the entry price to play the game. If I just want to see if the game is even something I’m interested in, I can get a perfectly functional set for a little bit over fifty cents:

And even this el-cheapo set will outlast, probably, the thousand dollar Star Wars game aside from the thin board (which you can replicate easily with a piece of scrap wood, a pencil, and a ruler). And I also know the actual game will have legs considering the first known set of components was found in the archaeological record at 900 years ago or so, while mentions of it in literature go back almost 2500 years.

So here we have a game accessible to literally anybody ranging from the budget-conscious to the æsthetic fetishist, and that has proved popular across wildly different social classes for well over a thousand years. THIS is the kind of thing I wish the game industry would return to instead of ludicrous stuff like Star Wars: Imperial Assault, or Kingdom Death: Monsters, or Cthulhu Wars, or even the humble old Ogre. (In defence of Ogre, though, I have to say that at least it once had a cheap edition, and may still have.)

TL;DR summary: Stop making games for just rich folk if you want, you know, to expand the hobby, especially now that Trump’s tariffs are killing everything.

I’m pretty sure that any murder is a death sentence.

(Hint: check your assumptions.)

$150 for a game consisting entirely of cardboard, essentially.

How much did the deluxe version of Ogre cost again?

Yes it is, actually.

So you got permabanned for using code used by white supremacists and literal Nazis to identify Jews and you’re surprised?

You’re not even trying to pretend at good faith, are you?

If you’re “appealing to a larger market” by making the game so expensive that only a few can afford it, are you really getting a larger market? Or are you just deciding you want to cater to rich folk?

I’m with @drolex here. I think it may be time for board/card/whatever game designers to return to basics: making games that people play, not the board game equivalent of a coffee table book.

No, I meant real RPGs, not the computerized abominations. Pencil, paper, optionally a randomizer, and imagination.

Coming across as victims.

“I’ve got new socks on.”

I find it very strange that with all the people complaining about being banned from Reddit or subreddits, they never actually share details. Almost as if they know the details would undermine their position.

Pick up a new language. A whole language in the course of a normal hospital stage is not really plausible, so narrow the goals. Like only learn how to swear in another language, say. Or learn how to say all the sexual acts you can think of in another language fluently.

Pick up a solo RPG and start playing when you get bored.

Edit Thanks for the report @lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone I tried not to frame this in a controversial manner.

Dude! If anything were to show that this post was done in bad faith, doing what you just did was beyond the pale in proving it!

I’m with you on Shogi. I find that it’s on the least-elegant side of the chess spectrum and I just never managed to internalize the rules. I’ve tried it a few times, but I return to Xiangqi as a good, fast-moving game (that I completely and utterly suck at … but enjoy to pieces nonetheless).

A friend has an eastern European neighbor move in. He says he’s glad they are that instead of American white.

Have you ever been in a gathering with just plain, white-as-in-bread Americans (especially the middle class on up, but not exclusively so)? They are boring as all fuck! They eat boring food, have boring conversations and are in general just tedious to be around when that’s all that’s present. (Part of this is, naturally, contempt for the familiar, but the other part is that yes they really are that boring!).

I’d much rather live in a neighbourhood that has a dozen different cultures (note: I’m not saying “races” here because “races” are nonsense) than a bunch of middle-class, white-as-in-bread Americans. So if I’m living in a neighbourhood that is mostly just plain-as-pancakes (minus the syrup) white folk, I’ll celebrate an Eastern European family moving in too!

Feeling they are individually responsible for what their ancestors and/or rich and politically affluent white people did in the past.

If they genuinely feel individually responsible, that’s just idiocy. The kind of idiocy that the privileged can express because there’s no real cost to them, in fact.

If they are, however, just acknowledging that they have privilege based on their artificial elevation over others (c.f. “redlining”) through systematic racism, and you’re interpreting this as feeling individually responsible, you likely need to have an awareness adjustment.

Acting as if white people anything is bad.

This is just stupid with no qualifiers like the previous one.

Making jokes at their own expense but won’t dare say the same thing to another ethnicity.

Well fucking duh! Self-aware, self-directed humour is the high road. Punching down on someone else for their differences is the low road. (Punching up is the middle road.) I’ll take it from my angle:

• German jokes: I’m half-German ethnically, and spent some of the most important formative years of my life living in Germany. When I’m making jokes about Germans, it comes from an informed position with at least a degree of sympathy for the targets of my jokes. When some American dude from the middle of Montana does the same, they come at it from a position of ignorance and stereotype that is usually a) ignorant, and b) hostile, rather than sympathetic.

• Chinese jokes: Where Americans (not of German descent, and even many who are) make German jokes have at least some cultural warrants in common, there are almost zero cultural warrants in common with Chinese people. White Americans are so incredibly ignorant of Chinese culture, society, behaviour, and beliefs that they think “Ching Chong” sounds like Chinese (protip: not even fucking close!) and they think “Confucius say” jokes¹ are a) plausibly real, and b) funny (protip: neither is true). Use either of these in my presence and you’re going to get the stink-eye and a confrontation you will not enjoy. Yet … I can tell jokes about Chinese people because, again, I’m ethnically half-Chinese, I’ve lived in China for almost a quarter of a century now, and my jokes will actually a) be based on knowledge, and b) be based on sympathetic sharing of values while poking fun at idiosyncrasies.

• Jokes about white folk: Here’s where you’re going to probably find it “unfair”, but the fact is that white folk are the dominant folk in Europe and North America. All y’all’s culture is everywhere, overriding everybody else’s. And all y’all’re the culture with the greatest proportion of money. And here’s the thing: minorities punching up is fine. Indeed laudable. Every king needs his jester to prick his ego and make fun of his excesses. The jester making fun of the king is laudable and brave. The king beating down the jester is not. So like it or not, not only is it bad for white folk to be making fun of minorities, it’s cowardly. And the reverse, however, is fine (and brave). I already know from the nature of your question that you’re absolutely going to hate that I said that, but it’s true nonetheless. Punching down is mean-spirited. Punching up is not.

¹ Consider how typical Americans would react to someone making “Yeshua ben Yusuf” jokes about Christ’s purported sayings that are as offensive as these “Confucius say” jokes are. Now flip the script. Yeah. That.

Methings someone doesn’t understand what “evidence” and “sources” are.