I think the bigger flaw is Year of Plenty being so weak. You spend 3 resources to get 2 in return... lame. Needs to be upped to 3 or 4 resources in any combination, or maybe 5 or 6 of a single resource.
Catan: Cities and Knights puts a cap of 2 resources per person on their equivalent of the monopoly card.
Having played both versions of Catan roughly 200 times during Covid-times, my family has come up with several good changes to the games.
1) We add a development card to the deck that allows you to block the robber from stealing half your cards.
2) In Cities and Knights, we have flipped the green (really valuable) progress cards with the yellow (far less useful) cards because the green progress power (take a card, no matter what the die roll may be) is so much more powerful than the yellow one (2-for-1 trade).
3) In Cities and Knights, we do not allow the robber to steal cards or cover up a number until the first time the barbarians hit because it can be just devastating to get robbed early in the game and can totally take you out of the game if you cannot prevent the barbarians from stealing your city. If a player rolls a 7 prior to the barbarians hitting, they do still get to take a card from a player.
I played Cities and Knights one time where we rolled the black die like 10 out of the first 12 rolls and the barbarians struck so quickly that it just destroyed 2 of the players who were playing. Nasty!
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I think the bigger flaw is Year of Plenty being so weak. You spend 3 resources to get 2 in return... lame. Needs to be upped to 3 or 4 resources in any combination, or maybe 5 or 6 of a single resource.
Love this fix. Will get family to implement next time we play.
Which game?
And yes, it is about 200. With both sons home, we played almost every night. My oldest, who is about to become a lawyer, is obsessed with the game. There is some huge international online/mobile Catan gaming community and he is ranked in the top 5 players in the world. He is constantly busting out new strategies on the rest of us that seem bonkers, but work more often than not. The other day he played a game where he got nothing but wheat, iron, and sheep the entire game -- just constantly taking development cards -- and he murdered us. We were busy building roads and he suddenly had largest army, a few cities, and victory points. It was brutal.
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Ok, enough diversion, back to the midterms --
I'll go on the record right now and say that the New York Attorney General helped out the GOP today. Her lawsuit is going to drive the "Trump is being persecuted and attacked by lefty law enforcement" narrative which is a motivating factor for Republicans who feel like their side is being treated unfairly. The people who will be outraged at Trump's alleged fraud and inflation of his wealth were already voting for Democrats anyway.
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Eh. My prior is this is a high turnout election and the bases were going to show up anyway. The question is: does this prive undecideds and unaffiliated voters to the Republicans? I don't see that. The repealing of Roe seems to have done that and I don't see this swinging things the other way. People were already in their camps in whether or not he should be prosecuted. I don't see this moving the needle.
I must admit, unlike most political scandals which often seem to confuse the general public, some basic aspects of this one appear to be a bit easier to understand. I mean, if Trump said on bank loans and tax forms that his Trump Tower apartment was 33,000 sq feet and was worth over $300 million, but it is actually 11,000 sq feet and is worth a couple hundred million less, that feels like something normal people can grasp and be at least a little bit angry about. It is also something harder for Trump to explain away. I know we have trouble, as a nation, agreeing on facts these days but the apartment is either 30k sq feet or it is not, right? Is there really going to be a debate about that?
Does this also maybe bite into the narrative that he is a brilliant businessman too? I dunno... I guess it is possible.
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Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
Well, I suppose some might suggest, in his unflagging defense, that it depends on whose feet are being used as the standard for measurement. Right?
I'm guessing that this lawsuit is unlikely to dislodge those who are already firmly embedded in their sentiments towards Trump. The interesting question to me is whether it might influence some of those who could be characterized as "Persuadables." If the NY AG succeeds in proving that Trump lied extravagantly and repeatedly to fill his own pockets at the expense of others, that might tip the scales for some voters who prefer his policy positions but are genuinely agonizing over whether to look past his personal indiscretions and support him for a prominent position of public trust again.
Since this is the mid-term thread, and not the POTUS thread, I'll make your question/comment more relevant to today.
Will those who are currently running with Trump endorsements be affected? Will the "Persuadables" look at tight races such as Warnock/Walker in different lights? Does showing up to vote for Oz in Pa make less sense now, if you were doing it as your main reason being "He's Trump's guy"?
I'm not saying that those voters will switch party allegiances. That's not going to happen with anyone that was on the Trump train. But it is possible that they simply stay home.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
For the midterms, any time Rs are being forced to talk about Trump as opposed to inflation or crime is a lost opportunity.
I don’t think this does anything election wise. Yes the GOP will weaponize it as a personal vendetta, witch hunt, more evidence Trump is being persecuted by Dems run amok, all to rile up their base — but they already have plenty of material to do that. And I don’t think any undecided voter is going to suddenly go the other way, realizing Trump is ethically challenged and only now turn against him. Again there have been mountains of evidence of Trump’s lack of personal ethics around for years. No, the midterms will be decided by core issues the average undecided/swing voter sees as directly affecting him/her - worries about abortion, taxes, inflation and possibly immigration policies.
Key words being "I would posit" which introduces the element of doubt. Clem is merely stating an a priori belief. I fully expect Clem to change his mind if the data do not support this belief. Collecting the data might prove too difficult leaving this speculation to forever remain exactly that - a speculation.
I think today's announcement about Trump's finances will affect his political future but not so much the midterms. I could see some candidates being less excited about having Trump campaign for them though because Trump isn't going to talk about anything else. Who cares about Candidate X - look what the State of New York is doing to me!!
I think the net effect may well be to increase his chances in the future. I haven't counted, but this is about the 17th time "the walls are closing in" on Trump. Each failure to convict (used very broadly here as most of this is political, not criminal) may be seen as another case of the boy crying wolf. Also note that I haven't read the complaint itself yet. I am assuming that there is specific and verifiable details of fraud.
Off to go read now. CNN has the pleading if any one else wants to delve deeper.