I think it’s better to approach John Company as a simulation more than a game. You’re right that the lead player has an incentive to wreck the company if it will give them the win. That’s Dehli, baby!

At the time, the idea behind !strategygames@sopuli.xyz was two-fold. First, it would be a general place to talk about all strategy games, serving as a “bridge community” until Lemmy was big enough to support more specific communities focused on individual games. Second, it would be on sopuli.xyz to discourage consolidation on the lemmy.ml and lemmy.world sites. It’s debatable how successful it’s been in those two things, and I’ll admit I haven’t been super active.

I’m open to modding people for the !strategygames@sopuli.xyz community, as the intent was always to develop the community rather than control it or camp on the name. Let me know if you’re interested.

I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way. My preference would be to let the communities exist and develop naturally.

At this rate, we’ll be back to everything being hex-and-counter, not that I’m complaining…

Looks nice! 3D does seem like like the natural next step. That said, I hope they do more with it than just everyone running around the same ol’ 2d plane.

To be fair, the OG Hitler was also pretty open about his goals.

You can put me down in the meaningless distinction camp. Back in the day, it was a useful designation to separate “American” board games like Sorry, Monopoly, Scrabble, and etc from “European” board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and etc. As a whole, though, the hobby has moved on. Today, it’s more useful to define games in terms of specific mechanics and level of interactivity, with similar games being grouped in genres. A few examples would be trick takers, deck builders, worker placement, auction games, and cube rails, though there are many more.