engine

Attention over time

7-day rolling share of analyzed posts/comments mentioning this entity · 90 daily points ending 2026-08-02

Final complete day: 2026-08-02. Attention was 0.4% — this entity appeared in 34 of 9,589 analyzed posts/comments in the seven days ending that day (47 mentions).

Each point is a seven-day rolling window of complete UTC days; a point is comparable only when at least 100 analyzed posts or comments fall inside it. A day with no analyzed records counts as zero; missing coverage is marked and never shown as zero. The series ends at the latest complete analyzed day — it never extends into the current incomplete day. How attention is measured.

Recent mentions

1. 2026-07-31 23:38 UTCComment

   Kanban is basically 100% about maintaining a satisfactory engine while pushing the game state to dodge penalties or push them on others.

2. 2026-07-31 18:06 UTCComment

   \> where the main strategy is “make sure that my engine is not impeded by the other players” I wish! In most of these games, other players can’t impede or interact with your engine even if they spend the entire game trying to do so. It’s just not baked into the design.

3. 2026-07-31 08:49 UTCComment

   The industry is also to blame, for for a big part of the last decade, the industry had been dominated by multiplayer solitaires, victory salads, and optimization exercises, where the main strategy is "make sure that my engine is not impeded by the other players", and dismissing reactive player interaction as player chaos. It is also why I like innovation because it is an inherently chaotic and tactical game.

4. 2026-07-31 01:51 UTCComment

   Here's my feeling on 5-player games: It's hard to make a 5 player game better than a 4 player version of the same game. You've got two options: 1) Set a fixed number of turns, so that the game doesn't drag. Advantage: Adding a fifth player doesn't make your game longer. Disadvantage: Every player gets less things to do. Everyone has 25% less fun. This is what Apiary does. Apiary at 5 is much less satisfying than Apiary at 4 because no one gets to get their engine going. Verdict: These games are better at 4 because it feels like a more fulfilling experience. 2) Everyone still gets the same number of turns regardless of how many players. Advantage: everyone still gets to run the same engine and run basically the same strategy regardless of the player count. Disadvantage: the game fucking DRAGS. You'd think that it's only 25% longer, but by experience it seems like adding the extra player slows it down way more. That's one more player to fuck up the turn you were planning meaning that you have to spend longer fixing your plan on your turn, and it takes so long for it to get back to you that you forget what you had planned in the first place. Ugh. That fifth player can almost double the play time, I swear. This is what happens in Obsession, Terraforming Mars, etc. It just drags it out. So unsatisfying. Games that work at 5 IMHO are going to be lighter games like card games, trick takers, etc. (Flip 7, Skull King, etc). Anything with a board and tiles and cubes and meeples and shit usually plays best at 3-4.

5. 2026-07-30 18:59 UTCComment

   Hit the Silk! Second edition was just released. Semi Co-op. You play a crew that has hijacked an airplane to steal money from a casino and pay off a mob debt. Unfortunately the pilot wasn't sticking around for this nonsense, damaged the engine and bailed out of the plane with one of the extra parachutes meaning your crew is one parachute short for everyone to survive. Work together to find a parachute and enough cash to pay off the mob (or this was all for nothing) but be careful because your teammate without a parachute may be holding a knife or a revolver and is probably upset you're leaving them behind.