an on that note, lets talk a bit more about board games
to me thay are way better than RPGs, specially as of late that in pop culture d&d and others are treated more as a tool to make long form improv storytelling with friends than actually... playing a game
but when i play games i like to engage in games as systems, not as stories, stories an be a neat cherry on top, a bit of sprinkle for flavour but the actual meat and potatoes for me is the numbers, the conections, the rules, the interactions between complex agents. and i feel boardgames, particularly euros, are the perfect distillation of that. even better than videogames in that regard because you can interact with the system in such a tactile way, you are personally, with you own hands, pulling the levers and turning the cogs of the machine.
i dont even care about winning or losing, im happy just getting into a complex algorithm with other people and we are all on the same page and we are all checking each other and excecuting the sequence together. to me playing a board game is more about that than competition.
i noticed the other day while playing anachrony, we were elbow deep into the session, on the middle of phase 4 (out of six) of round 5 (of seven), a perfectly choreographed sequence where i was refilling the mines, the other player was refilling the worker drafting pool and someone else was refleshing the available building to build, all in synchronicity. at one point i went to pick up thre uranium for my resource pile but then my friend reminded me that in this turn i could only pick 2 but then i told them with the engineer bonus i can actually bypass that restriction and then a third friend was checking the manual to make sure that that bonus applied if i was cloning the engineer skill with the genius in phase 4 and then the fourth one was like actually that doesnt matter because i activate my trap card which allows me to block other players skills but then i told them that we should check anyway because that card has limited uses and i didnt want them to waste it if it was irrelevant anyway
and it was like that for four solid hours
and i loved every second of it
