I super recommend Innovation. If you enjoy nuanced gameplay like in TCGs, this is for you. Everyone starts in the Stone Age and the goal is to race to 4-6 achievements, advancing through technological ages. Cards represent technologies and they have powers, like drawing cards, forcing other people to give you cards, score points, etc. It's a great game of resource management, politics, and sabotage.
Innovation is worth playing but it’s a Chudyk game. Perhaps with a lot of plays there is more strategy and nuance, but even with experienced gamers, I find Innovation much too swingy. With the right mindset to embrace the chaos, and players with the same level of experience/skill in the game, it can be fun though.
Terra Mystica, Brass Birmingham, Scythe, Root, ARCS and its expansions, Nemesis: Retaliation and SETI would all get shouts from me for that sort of thing. Slightly depends on your definition of complex and sophisticated, but I'd put all of those in that list.
I think the most complex board game I've really played any amount of is Carcasonne (Not particularly complicated). Often, if I'm playing a board game, I prefer it to be on the simpler end, more of a relaxing thing.
One memorable board gaming experience I had was playing Splendor (I believe) with my cousin, and it ended up being almost completely silent, just passing tokens around and the occasional "oh..." when another player did something undesirable.
Pit is also popular in my family when there's a gathering of us, with rounds often lasting only a minute or so, and getting quite frantic, and it is a very simple game
The article is more about a certain style of "modern" games, which is an interesting strand but does not exhaust the category: classic games (chess, go, shogi, backgammon), card games (bridge, poker), TCGs (magic the gathering, hearthstone) often are as complex and sophisticated as any of those.
If you're looking specifically for games in that style, Twilight Struggle has been studied extensively and there's significant competitive play and a well-developed theory. 7 Wonders Duel and Dominion also have significant depth.
Dominion has a fair amount of depth, but it seems common for individual player groups to get hung up on a particular play style and decide that they've found the ultimate strategy.
- 18xx games (1889, 1830, The Old Prince 1871, etc.). Basically stock market games built around running train companies.
- Games by the publisher Splotter Spellen (i.e. Indonesia, Food Chain Magnate, etc.). Interactive games, usually with an economic bent. Turn order manipulation is a large part of these games. Splotter games often feel like they are designed in a lineage similar to Uwe Rosenberg games, where you can see threads of design traits shared between games.
- Carl Chudyk designed games (Innovation, Glory To Rome, etc.). Games that feel random and broken but have lots of tactical play embedded in them. Tempo is challenging to figure out in these games (IMO), and sometimes there is a non-linear progression aspect to them.
- Older euros, predating the trend toward solitary play: El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Bridges of Shangri-La, Medina, etc. No single connective feature, but these are games that are more on the combinatorial and strategic side but predate the development of the "personal player board" as the primary place the game is played.
- Pax Games: Pax Pamir, Pax Porfiriana, etc. History-based card tableau games that all feature a conveyer-belt market mechanism (where you buy cards from a market and cards get progressively discounted the longer they're visible and give you turn lookahead). Semi-economic, but more about the interaction of card abilities (and sometimes map play). Very fun weird games, just ignore the footnotes in games designed by Phil Eklund (I also don't love the futurist optimism in Matt Eklund's Pax Transhumanity, but that's me).
- Some abstracts (such a time investment to get deep into these, but they're obviously fantastic games): The Gipf Series, TwiXt, Hive, Paco Ŝako. I'm not yet sure what type of abstract games I most enjoy, still figuring that out.
I tend to like strategic, competitive games with higher interactivity, but with lower amounts of "take that"-type interactivity.
There is a lot of love in my group from years of MtG for drafting games, so 7 Wonders and Dune Imperium are consistent favorites. When we have the time, we'll do Twilight Imperium. We've enjoyed all three Nemesis games. We are currently also really enjoying Spirit Island. We've completed Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and put in some serious time with regular Gloomhave as well. As LotR fans, we've also enjoyed the LotR LCG and War of the Ring.
Ark Nova. It's not Agricola-scale, but it has some similar "move maximization" vibes.
You can also play it on Steam if you can't find a crop of folks to sit down for three hours with you (though you can run through a full game against the computer in 35 minutes).
Does anyone here use 8k display for work? Does it make sense over 4k?
I was always wondering where that breaking point for cost/peformance is for displays. I use 4K 27” and it’s noticeably much better for text than 1440p@27 but no idea if the next/ and final stop is 6k or 8k?
Even 4k turns out to be overkill if you're looking at the whole screen and a pixel-perfect display. By human visual acuity, 1440p ought to be enough, and even that's taking a safety margin over 1080p to account for the crispness of typical text.
1440p is enough if you haven't experienced anything else. Even the jump from 4k to 5-6k is quite noticeable on a 27" monitor.
I switched to the Studio Display XDR and it is noticeably better than my 4k displays and my 1440p displays feel positively ancient and near unusable for text.
I've only had to do a major token optimization once. It reduced my memory, claude.md, mcps, etc... that's usually the big issue. but of course it gets dumber without the context of the tools but smarter with the cleaner window. so you have to find your balance.
But like most challenges with claude, if you can just express them clearly, there are usually ways of optimizing further
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