UniLang

So, does anyone here like tabletop games and pencil and paper games? Do you have favourites?

Can’t go wrong with “x’s and o’s”.

I play this sometimes:

Osias' post reminds me of when I went to Cape Breton to take some Gaelic summer classes and our teacher had made a Gaelic Monopoly game with all the properties named after places in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia using their Gaelic placenames, and we had to use Gaelic for everything in the game. All us students absolutely loved it.

But not counting that, I haven't played any tabletop in...wow, decades now. LOL. The last time, I played Magic: The Gathering with some college friends in the 1990s. Before that I used to play D&D and later a sci-fi tabletop game called Rifts with a bunch a seriously geeky Red Dwarf-loving, Mountain Dew-chugging guys. With that Rifts group, I remember we had to meet at this one guy's really dilapidated Houston-area house that really didn't have proper A/C and it always reeked of dead rats. It was pretty gross. Not surprisingly, I was the only chick in the group.

But now, well, I don't have any IRL friends where I live today, let alone any who would like tabletop.

Osias wrote:I play this sometimes:

Thank you - I was talking to my wife yesterday about how we were passing by the street that is the most expensive one on the Irish version of Monopoly, but she didn't seem to know what Monopoly was and asked if it was like Banco Imobiliário, which I had never heard of. Now I kmow what she was talking about.

Also, Risk is a great game, I used to be quite into Warhammer too.

I never got into Risk myself but I used to play some Axis and Allies with my friends when I was in high school. I was terrible at it. That's why my friends always let me play--because they knew they could beat me.

As far as table top games, sometimes my cousin talks me into a board game, but as far as tabletop games I care about:

I've been known to whip out a deck or two of Magic: The Gathering and play a game or two. Though I don't get to play nearly as much as I'd like.

Two of my cousins and some random friends are starting a romp through some tabletop RPGs, starting with D&D. We've also looked at The Dark Eye too, but haven't started anything yet.

For those of you familiar with The Witcher universe, I also play the physical version of Gwent on occasion. Much like Magic I don't get to play a lot though.

My brother-in-law is a huge boardgamer. He literally owns hundreds of games and has played hundreds more. Every year he and my sister attend a local convention just for boardgamers. Every time I stay with them, I play at least one new game I've never played before.

My friend Joe is the same. He had a high-paying job for many years and used that to kickstart several boardgames, card games, and tabletop RPGs. He's the chief GM for the RPG group I've been involved with the last few years. His favourite RPG system is Powered by the Apocalypse which emphasises roleplay over game mechanics. Most recently we played a team of teenaged superheroes.

As of this Christmas, I'll have been playing RPGs for 35 years. (My brother brought D&D home from his first quarter at high school.) My siblings and I started out with mostly TSR games. In college, I fell in with a group whose GM was a huge Call of Cthulhu fan so his games tended to use some variation of the Chaosium system, though we also used GURPS and Ars Magica (and once the two in combination).

I'm hoping to run a game for the group myself soon and I'm looking at using DramaSystem. I need to give some real thought to what kind of setting I want to run though.

But "board games" is more specific than "tabletop games". Tabletop RPGs, for instance, generally don't need a gameboard. Neither do most card games.

linguoboy wrote:But "board games" is more specific than "tabletop games". Tabletop RPGs, for instance, generally don't need a gameboard. Neither do most card games.

What if we changed the thread title to "board & tabletop games"? I didn't go through all the posts in the "Tabletop games" thread, but there seemed to be talk about Monopoly and Risk, which are board games. You're right that board games is a narrower category, but would you say that tabletop games could subsume all board games? Because there are definitely games that fall under tabletop that also fall under board.

dEhiN wrote:

linguoboy wrote:But "board games" is more specific than "tabletop games". Tabletop RPGs, for instance, generally don't need a gameboard. Neither do most card games.

What if we changed the thread title to "board & tabletop games"? I didn't go through all the posts in the "Tabletop games" thread, but there seemed to be talk about Monopoly and Risk, which are board games. You're right that board games is a narrower category, but would you say that tabletop games could subsume all board games? Because there are definitely games that fall under tabletop that also fall under board.

Literally the first sentence in the newer thread is "So, does anyone here like tabletop games and pencil and paper games?"

If you want to know what certain terms mean, why don't you consult a lexicographical authority?

Like other discussions on this forum (such as the recent one about Hochdeutsch and Standarddeutsch), there are times where those who are not familiar with the intricacies of a subculture's jargon will rely upon what they know or have learned growing up, which is essentially general knowledge and colloquial usage. So, in this case, because I am not a big fan or board games or tabletop games, prior to this discussion, for me, colloquially the two words were synonyms. Which is why I asked my question, deferring to someone who is more into the subculture than I am. I'm sorry that I don't stop to look up every single English word I decide to use or engage in discussion about, in order to make sure that I am using the terms according to their strict definition. A simple response that tabletop games subsumes board games would've sufficed.

(Clearly, I am not the only one who thought according to colloquial usage that tabletop and board games were synonymous, since a report/recommendation was made to merge the two topics. However, in future, I will first poll the thread about possible merging to see if those active in that thread agree.)

dEhiN wrote:I'm sorry that I don't stop to look up every single English word I decide to use or engage in discussion about, in order to make sure that I am using the terms according to their strict definition.

You're neither simply using the terms or engaging in a discussion about them, you are moderating the thread. And if you're going to be making decisions about whether to merge this thread with others or not, it is not unreasonable at all to expect that, as part of your due diligence, you will actually familiarise yourself with the terminology. Honestly, I don't know what to tell someone who thinks taking ten seconds to look something up on Wiktionary is too high a bar for administrative work.

You don't need a poll, you just need to default to not merging threads unless there's a really good reason to do so. I've never understood why the moderators here get so merge-happy. Threads are not a finite resource; it's not like we hit 300 (or whatever) and then have to start deleting them.