Too high and we risk disappointment. Too Low and we are surprised. How much does your level of expectation drive your final opinion of a game? I look at four titles. Or 3. I cant recall your Honour.
Kevin, you are striking the head of so many nails. Your posts are always lectures at a higher cognitive level enlightening us into thinking about this community of gaming from obscure angles. I appreciate your intellectual discussions about this hobby I love.
Fields of Fire is an outstanding game. My Desert Island game. The rules have their problems and make a fairly easy game seem like a really hard game. They are, thank god, producing a new updated manual which is meant to be leaps and bounds ahead Expectations versus reality...I had high expectations of Decision Games D-Day at Tarawa because it was created by the excellent creator of RAF: Battle of Britain. So high were my expectations, I bought D-Day at Omaha and D-Day at Peleleiu. I couldn't have been more wrong. Sold them pretty quick...just not my bag. They're wasn't really a whole lot for the gamet to do
The final new rules and, more importantly, final field manuals (the new way to learn the game), were posted on GMT's Field of Fire Deluxe page. You should definitely pull them and work through the field manuals, as the rules direct, before using any of the old books.
Kevin, the maps for Desert Fox Deluxe were traced off the originals (where they existed-map A is brand new), so they should be exactly the same as the old ones. As to the rest, I can never seem to get started with game play for the entire campaign game. The reinforcement and withdrawal/event cards still mystify me.
Good video, cuts to the chase! I`m generally happy to cut designers plenty of slack if they continue to support/improve their game should it have issues on release. Expectations are now pretty low bar for a polished, fully completed game outta the box these days. In many ways this is linked to forensic level playtesting, or lack of it. Games with plenty of scenarios, variants and large lengthy campaigns are simply NOT going to get tested fully, as its not really practical or realistic to hold a game back for a year+ of testing. As long as the mechanics work well and edge cases are limited, some issues can be tweaked later. Interested to hear more about your slimmed down Air & Armor rules Kev, will they go up on BGG or somefink? Planning to get balls deep into this in late Oct with a Vassal oppo. Cheers.
The One that comes to mind for me with high expectations was Absolute War! The Russian Front 1941-1945.It's a 2 player game but says it solo's well...NOT!..Worst rulebook I've ever seen.I't's a shame because the Designer has a very successful No Retreat! Series...I really tried to like this game but just didn't work for me solo.
It was a terrible rulebook. Also, the designer DM'd me to stop posting about rulebook mistakes because it made the game look bad. Now my old BGG account is deleted so you couldn't find those posts anymore.
Oh, I should have mentioned that he even asked me to delete posts that I had already posted. He initially promised to send me a free copy of the game, but that request was offensive to me so I declined his offer.
