SOTM #17 on Dice Tower People's Choice Award

If you are a fan of the Dice Tower(like me) SOTM is #17 :  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLIJnImKBBI   

Great Job Greater than Games!

Let's keep voting for them next year!

Woohoo! Thanks for the info!

Good to see SotM is still getting the love.

How are there 16 other games better than SotM?  Mindboggling.

Since it is based on votes, some people must have never heard of SotM. No other explanation.

Whew!  I was experiencing some intense cognitive dissonance over that!  Thanks for clearing that up, Pydro!

There are definitely other games that are better than SOTM, at least in certain ways.  Not a lot of them, but they exist.  Most of them have certain other deficits, such as excessive playing time, rules complexity/ambiguity, or cost to acquire a sufficiently playable amount (MTG, I'm looking at you!), but they also offer strengths which offset the handful of weaknesses SOTM itself has (such as the fact that the game sometimes tends to play itself, offering the players relatively few meaningful choices).

Monopoly is better, might be the best game ever made.

Also Chutes and Ladders, although that game has been solved, so I might have to rethink that.

*cough* noughts and crosses *cough*

Chutes and Ladders isn’t a game, it is an activity. You need a choice of some sort to be a game.

Snakes and Ladders is a bastardised form of the original "game". The original game was Indian and was a morality lesson, there were pictures on the squares at the bottom/top of the ladder/snake, virtuous deeds meant you went up and giving into vices meant you went down. Square 100 was enlightenment/understanding.

It was an early form of teaching/behavioural aid.

There was an awesome podcast on the subject of board games and their history with an interview of a professor/historian who worked at uncovering this kind of stuff, it was a single episode in a usually videogame related podcast and I can't remember what it was to link to it, anyone happen to know what it was?

I found it, anyone interested can listen to it here http://hatchetjob.libsyn.com/hatchet-job-77-the-dna-of-gaming- warning, it’s long and densely packed.

And go Sentinels!! (Now I don't have to watch the dice tower videos)

For reference, SOTM was 57 last year and most games move down, so a 40 spot pretty impressive and I'm glad.  I couldn't be happier for GTG.

There is a choice.  You can choose to play the game or tell your daughter that she can choose another game or go to bed.

Also during the game there is the ever present "Flip board and drink more" option.

Aaactually… this is kinda fun

https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/tic-tac-toe-ception/1676336506

Yes that is.

@ Tic-tac-toe-ception:  Neat!  I'd imagine it's still a "solved" game or at least a solvable one, but at least it has some depth which would take time to plumb.  I'm sure my extremely brainy friend (who played Absolute Zero in his first ever SOTM game, and had little trouble succeeding with him) will get a kick out of it.

An interesting definition!  Not sure I completely agree, but it makes a lot of sense.

That is some really cool history, and kind of makes me want to design my own version.  It's also interesting to reflect that in order to turn C&L into a "real" game by Pydro's definition, all you'd have to do is replace the die roll with, say, choosing to play a card numbered from 1 to 6, all of which must be played before you can play any of them again.  It'd still be fairly dull and solvable, but it'd offer just enough depth that it might make the thing interesting for a little while, especially combined with a nice illustrated board or the like.

Pydro is correct. There needs to be some minor skill element to be a game. Chutes is stricktly a game of chance. 

Side stepping for a moment, there was a time in the US that pinball machines were illegal. Yes. Pinball was a federal crime. They were considered games of chance that you paid to play so it was considered a form of gambling. So they started adding small flippers to the machines to subvert the illegal gambling status of pinball machines. It's a very interesting history that not many people realize. 

But the fact that you've called it a 'game of chance' surely means that it's a game then?

Depends on "let's flip a coin, heads I win, tails you win" counts as a game.

There does not have to be any amount of skill required to be a game, games can rely on skill, or chance, either way they are a game.

Solitaire is a game, as is War.  Game is a huge overarching term.

A game requires some form of competition, and that is abour it.

Ahh. Semantics. Fun

It was more to use the figure of speach correctly. Some people see no need to draw a difference between "games" of skill and "games" of chance. Colloquially they are just all called games. But thats not historically how the US legal system has defined it. Without some notion or requirment of skill, those games have not been classified as "games", but as gambling systems. The US government has a long history of frowning upon any sort of gambling that isn't State sanctioned, and the history of Pinball machines being outlawed in this country between 1940 and the mid 1970s is a prime example. 

If Chutes and Ladders is a game, then flipping a coin is a game. Neither take into account skill on any level. 100% chance. I do not know if I would ever consider coin flipping a "game" personally.

Solitaire and War have some semblence or notion of skill. You can certainly play your solitaire cards incorrectly and lose because of it. Same with War.

Competition is interesting. I disagree slightly, but there is no competition without a skill element present to compete over.

If Chutes and Ladders is a game, then flipping a coin is a game.

Of course it's a game.  If I want to flip a coin over and over to see how many heads in a row I get, that's a game.  A game is anything you do for fun.  If someone feels their games have to include a skill component to be fun, that's perfectly fine, but it doesn't invalidate every other kind of game in the world.

I'm actually not familiar with War, but according to its Wikipedia article, whether it's a game of skill or chance depends on what rules you're using.  If you can choose the order that cards from a war are put back on the bottom of your deck, there is a skill element in deciding what order you want them in.  If the order is preserved unchanged from when they were revealed, the only skill is memorization and card-counting.  And if they're shuffled before being put back, the game is completely random and skill-less.

Very fun!

Honestly, I wouldn't even rate Sentinels as my favorite game. Top 5 for sure, but BattleCon at least trumps it.