This week on Tabletop, Alan Tudyk, Jon Heder, and Felicia Day join me for a cooperative game that’s devilishly hard, Forbidden Desert!
A couple of notes for you all, before I get back to preparing for this afternoon’s bacchanal, starting with a comment on r/boardgames, with my reply:
> You move the tiles according to the card you flip, not the “storm”. Nothing too important. But they excavate (flip) tiles that they are not on. This one makes it easier.
I’m really unhappy and annoyed that this happened. I can’t remember every single rule for every game, and if we were playing at home, we’d have the rules next to the table to be sure (we also wouldn’t be playing 21 games in 10 days). I have a producer who is supposed to catch all of this stuff, and ensure that we don’t make mistakes like this, and I think he was stretched a little too thin this season, so if we do a fourth season, I’ll make sure that we hire someone *specifically* to keep an eye on the rules.
I’m annoyed and disappointed that we’ve aired two episodes this season, and we’ve made a rules error on each of them (not such a huge deal in Tokaido, but a huge deal in this one, because we unintentionally made the game much easier on ourselves.) I know there’s a big mistake coming up later this year in Stone Age, too.
Ultimately, the goal of Tabletop is to be entertaining, to introduce people to boardgames, and to get people excited about playing games. If we misunderstand a rule here and there, it’s not the end of the world, because that happens in real life when we play at home, but I do hold my show to a higher standard, for obvious reasons.
I don’t think this is going to get in the way of anyone’s enjoyment, except for the übergamers who nitpick and complain about every mistake or sub-optimal play we make, but I’m honestly not making this show for them, anyway.
That said, I regret making such a massive and fundamental mistake.
Also, you may notice that someone in our graphics department wrote Forbidden Dessert on the thumbnail, instead of Forbidden Desert. On the one hand, this is a simple and basic grammar error that should never have happened. On the other hand, it is pretty hilarious, will obviously be corrected, and gives us something to never let that department live down until the heat death of the universe.
For some of us, today is a holiday about being thankful. For others, it’s a day off from work or school and a chance to eat a lot of food. For the majority, it’s Thursday. Well, whatever today means to you, I hope it’s a good one.
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Ive seen other play-throughs of FD where the movement was done the same way, it does feel more on theme that the storm is the thing that moves and the sand is the consequence, not the other way round.
Really fun episode. Lucky enough to be given FD as a gift a few weeks back, cant wait to try it out even more now.
Forbidden Dessert = tiramisu.
Quite frankly I’m about to institute the excavate neighboring as a house rule so I have a of winning a game of forbidden dessert for once.
“Forbidden Dessert”… My kinda game.
I second that! I nominate the “Camarel Crunch”.
I really just thought you were making a Thanksgiving food joke of some kind with the “Dessert” typo.
Watching Tabletop is awesome and fun (and definitely one of things I’m thankful for). So thanks for the episode!
Mistakes or not, I truly enjoyed watching this game. And that’s really what counts imho.
Keep up the great work!
Sometimes being a rule stickler makes games less fun to play (and watch), so let the rules go south if you want! Its your game and your show, so have fun with it. Two thumbs up for making table top games fun again for everyone!f
It is great seeing another game that has a weather aspect. We are trying to create a miraculous conclusion to our game that has even more weather. Weather Zen is pretty important to our founder… take a look if you would: http://www.krellware.net/HolidayMiracle
I really want to play a game called Forbidden Dessert now. Anyone care to design it? 🙂
“Forbidden Desert” may be great, but I really want to see the game with the dessert! The only ones worth eating are the “forbidden” ones, after all!
I don’t think the mistakes really matter. You can just mark them in the show notes on Youtube if folks really flip tables over it, but as you said, the goal of Tabletop is entertainment, and that’s what the show achieves.
Who really minds? It’s about fun, and gaming, and happy times, and a good bunch of people making us all laugh and want to support the board gaming industry. No-one gets it right all the time. I had a blast watching it on my TV, thank you Wil 🙂 x
It was a great episode indeed. You do a great job entertaining people and introducing them to boardgames and showing gamers like me new fancy stuff to buy (bought so much awesome games from the earlier seasons).
Your passion for gaming is very inspirational so keep up the good work and PLAY MORE GAMES
FORBIDDEN DESSERT DEMANDS A REMATCH!
No biggie. I think the episode gives enough of an idea of gameplay that viewers can decide for themselves if this is a game that they would enjoy. IMO FD is the best of Matt Leacock’s big 3 (FI, FD, Pandemic). It’s not ridiculously hard, and it does something a bit different with ramping up the pressure. FI always felt a bit like Pandemic Jr, with very similar mechanics in play and FD just feels a bit fresher.
However I do believe that Matt has a right to lodge a grievance to challenge the 1-2 standing – it should really be 0-3 for Team TableTop.
Seconded.
Our overarching house rule is that if a rule is overlooked or misapplied, as long as it’s overlooked or misapplied consistently, it’s not a problem, provided it’s still fun… and we try and remember it next time.
I reckon Matt Leacock is, by rights, 3-and-0, but who cares, it was a really fun episode and I think put across the enjoyment of playing this game. Good work. 🙂
Also, you missed a trick by not calling Felicia’s character a moisture farmer. 😉
Not a problem for me regarding the rules. as a fellow commenter JonMWilson said, you at least applied the rule consistently, rather than varying throughout the game. Good episode and can you just have Alan on EVERYTHING?!?!:)
For some people (and I’m carefully not saying I’m one of them) spotting rules errors is half the fun 🙂
Moving the storm rather than the sands is a moot point – since the setup is symmetric, even if there weren’t equal numbers and types of move in each direction, it wouldn’t matter so long as you’re consistent about it.
The flipping of adjacent tiles did make a real difference, so TableTop loses points in that game.
Or is this not one of the “more” games we should be playing? ;P
I really regret making that comment on the rules on youtube now, cos I did in fact enjoy the show immensely and a big fan of Wil and Felicia’s efforts… #sorry.
Honestly I think I would apply that house rule since otherwise the game borders on to hard to actually enjoy for me. Also you really need to do Firefly the board game with Alan and Nathan and anyone else from the cast you know, even if its just a tabletop day special or something it would be epic to watch that.
Don’t be too hard on yourself or producer, (on the other hand never let the grafic’s department forget) the episode was very entertaining, one of the absolute best, and instructive that anyone can make a mistake and the point is its a game for us to enjoy as a group.
Thanks again for doing these and helping us convience others that these are a fun way for friends to get together.
Next season you should place an awesome cake in the graphics department, but forbid that anyone should eat it.
The storm should be acting between each player’s turn as well. This game is rough, but that’s why it’s fun.
Hmm… Intriguing. Better yet, put a box in the graphics department and tell everyone there’s a cake in there, but they are forbidden to eat it. When they look inside, it turns out the box is empty. Portal reference, yo.
Hey Wil, this little error isn’t too bad. I’d be pretty annoyed as well, for me it’d be a hollow victory, since without this error, I might have lost.
From the “broadcasting to tons of people”-perspective, I couldn’t care less for this error. As you said: TableTop is supposed to introduce board games to people and it should be entertaining.
Minor mistakes might fundamentally change the outcome of a session, but don’t really impact the general gameplay. If I were to buy Forbidden Desert after watching the episode (which I won’t, since I don’t need another copy), I probably wouldn’t even notice the actual rules and what I saw days or even weeks ago don’t match perfectly.
That said, I agree with you that there shouldn’t be any easily avoidable mistakes in TableTop (or anywhere, for that matter). They do happen, you guys are only human.
What I strongly disagree with you, is that it was a “massive and fundamental mistake”. Flipping neighbouring tiles instead of only tiles you are standing on is not that big of a deal. In Forbidden Island you are allowed to flip neighbouring tiles and even in Forbidden Desert you may remove sand from neighbouring tiles. So it is an easy assumption to make. If this had happened to me, I’d think “Oh, I remembered that wrong” or “Oh, I got that mixed up”, but nothing like “Wow, I screwed that up big time!”. Though the latter happened to me with one or two games, where I realized I was playing something completely different.
Long story short, I’d say it was an “honest mistake”, it shouldn’t have happened, but it’s nothing world-ending. Of course, this is just my opinion and I haven’t even watched the episode yet.
It was a pretty nice episode, but the rule above isn’t the only thing that was wrong in this game. I believe you are not moving the tiles correctly when there’s a storm (but maybe some moves have been cut, dunno). Also, the 2nd and higher sand tile should be red side up, indicating that you cannot move on top of that tile until you dug every red tile off.
Still, I watch Tabletop for amusement and seeing others play, rules are meant to be broken, I guess.
Figures, I should have commented after watching the whole clip. Once I submitted it, you turned the sand tiles. d’oh.
Mistakes are mistakes. Not a big deal. But as the mistake let you guys use about half the amount of moves than would have actually been needed, you guys totally would not have won 🙁 unfortunately.
So… Gonna have to take your trophies away and Matt Leacock is actually 3 and 0. Sorry Wil.
Friday here, and I’m thankful I have some forbidden dessert waiting for me when I get home. ^_^
Thank you, Wil, for a vastly entertaining experience to brighten up my Fridays for half a freaking year. And thanks to everyone (which includes me, I guess, yay) who helps make that happen.
Perhaps you could get the game manufacturers or designers involved (after game selection so there is no conflict of interest). Based on how Tabletop has improved sales I would guess most would be more than willing to provide a rules prompter and /or tutorial. Maybe using the web communication tech used for tabletop day.
As you correctly point out, Tabletop is entertaining. There are other much drier videos available when needed for rules tutorials. For example, I recently tried to play A Study in Emerald (by Treefrog games). It made a lot more sense after a few YouTube videos. It is a deck building game with area control with thematic elements of Lovecraftian horrors vs bomb throwing anarchists. So the second time around (after research) we had a great time.
Joining the crowd praising the start of season3 …
And putting Diplomacy on the wishlist for season 4!
Mistakes or no, doesn’t matter to me! You all had fun playing the game, and I had great fun watching it. I’m “playing more games” because of you guys.. thanks!
Hmm, If we are talking about the same Diplomacy (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/483/diplomacy), I doubt it will be on TableTop. It plays best with seven Players and takes ages (if you’re lucky). The diplomacy part of the game requires semi-confidential areas. In my experience most of the time is spent away from the table. On top of that it has player elimination (I’m looking at you, Austria) and many games end in a stalemate. Last but not least, it is very high strategy and very low luck.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun game, but it doesn’t really fit the TableTop format.
i agree, but it could work as an ‘other kind after dark’ special.
Some of the players that we saw on Table Top (Tokaido?) would give a very interesting Diplomacy session. But the program format would indeed need some adaptation to visualise it …
The game was made rather easier with the rule oversight of only excavating tiles that you are on top of. This means you can excavate a maximum of four tile per turn instead of a maximum of two (in perfect conditions).
I am not here to bring you down, Mr Wheaton, so I hope my comment does not do just that.
Keep the games coming…
(psst – @PinothyJ — read the blog post. I think Wil pretty clearly states that they are aware of that.) 🙂
Now just hear me out…
I’m saying you need to have a game ref. Who looks like Master Thrall Galt. You can put him in standard ref stripes, but the red collar stays. He’ll just stand there glowering until he needs to enforce compliance.
It’s dealer’s choice as to whether all of the gamers at the table are required to wear pain restraints.
Also, if you look closely at his red collar (indicated in image below), it appears to be some sort of bowl. Therefore, entirely practical to place chips and dip in there. He doesn’t have to be all business.
http://i60.tinypic.com/vy0bas.jpg
Wil, question about your RSS and then a comment: do you know why your RSS feed doesn’t work anymore? it never loads in My Yahoo, and last week I tried deleting and re-adding the feed, and it won’t re-add this blog. Says the feed won’t load.
Its fun that you released Forbidden Desert on Thanksgiving. We were playing this very game while our turkey was cooking, and made our own rule mistake. Once we caught it and started playing correctly halfway through the game, there was no way we could win.
I chalk it up to being part of the fun for these cooperative games…I’ve “won” at Forbidden Island, Pandemic, and Forbidden Desert, and then after rereading the rules and realizing mistakes we’ve never played where we beat the game in any of them. Just means you have to strategerize better.
Your loyal fans will forgive you the rules mistakes, everyone’s human after all. But if you can, add a short clip to the beginning of the video acknowledging them, and you can probably avert most criticism.
You should be able to use either:
http://wilwheaton.net/feed/
I hope this helps!
Thanks Wil. The first link finally fixed it. The second link doesn’t work for some reason. I had used that originally to add your blog to my My Yahoo page, but it stopped working, and no longer loads correctly. But the first one did work right, so now I won’t miss any updates!
Just a note, there’s no link to the episode on Geek and Sundry yet.
Also, I’m afraid you and the others will just have to return your trophies. Hand them back over to Matt Leacock, and take a victory photo of the game. There’s no other way to go about it (except perhaps, a group Seppuku).
Best of luck on the next episode.
I’ve played FD maybe a dozen times (though I don’t own it) and I certainly couldn’t remember the rules well enough to know. I did think it was playing easier than I remembered.
The program was still entertaining as all get out, so there’s that.
Oh, BTW, if you feel like doing some sort of penance you should do an entire season that does nothing but follow you and six friends playing a game of Diplomacy. Sure, not many people would watch it but it would be the BEST THING EVER.
Tabletop is more about the interactions between the players than it is about learning the rules. I know you hold yourself to a high standard, but I would much rather watch a bunch of funny folks having a good time playing a game than watch a dryly (no pun intended) delivered rules breakdown.
The essence of Tabletop is being well met this season already… keep making us laugh and love games.
Never played the game, but it looked fun, that is what I watch for; that and the banter, don’t chew out your guys (or yourself) on the rule thing, that is just the sort of thing that would happen to anyone if they got together with some mates for a games night; makes the show seem more natural
Okay, it was a mistake, but it’s one people might accidentally make on purpose. My son, for example 😉 Thanks for adding some entertainment to our Black no-way-we’re-leaving-the-house Friday
While I don’t mind seeing a few rules errors here and there in the games, I would kind of appreciate a “list of goof-ups we did” somewhere. If I’m watching a video for a game I’ve never played, I might decide to pick it up, and if I’m using the video as a tutorial for how to play, I’d like to know what you did wrong so I don’t end up learning and teaching the game wrong as well.
Otherwise, wonderful episode. Can’t wait for the next one!
From Gamewright’s Facebook page a couple years ago:https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151348438640753&l=65e2a2345a
I was kinda distracted by the rule errors, too, not so much because I’m a rule stickler but because I started doubting that we’d read the rules right and thought we might have played the game too hard all this time (because with four people, you never ever win argh). By the time the third rule error rolled around I actually got up and dug out our rule book. So yeah. 😀 This is one of the hardest games we know to win with four people (Pandemic is a joke against it), so I’m saying you can’t really count your win here. That said, we love Tabletop. We will always love Tabletop. We will always watch Tabletop. We have no idea how to buy games that we haven’t seen on Tabletop anymore. So it’s all good. Bye bye now, we’re going to play a round of Candy Crunch, I mean, Forbidden Dessert. 🙂
I just watched the Forbidden Desert episode, and then I switched to reading some comics and I came across this in the newest issue of the Unity comic book, issue 12….
"Look at all those celebrities that peak so early.And then they're coasting downhill the rest of their lives. You don't want to peak too soon. Like Wil Wheaton. He was just a kid on Next generation and he was so crazy famous and popular. Then where do you go after that? But he did it. He fell of the radar for a while, and then he came back with a beard and everything and a little older and so, so cute. And now he's better than ever."
This week on Tabletop, Felicia does her best Stefon impression
http://evolver.fm/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/stefon.jpg
The only sad thing is we still don’t know off tabletop can beat Matt
Don’t sweat it.
I’ve been playing Monopoly wrong for years – in fact any game my Mum introduced me too. She was never one for reading rules and a years of awkward silences when I’d do something “wrong” when playing with friends
probably been stated already, but you can optionally “move the storm” (which to me, thematically, still makes more sense) by simply flipping around the Storm Moves cards (compass on top instead of bottom). it’s the same thing for those that think of the storm moving instead.