handicap

Attention over time

7-day rolling share of analyzed posts/comments mentioning this entity · 90 daily points ending 2026-10-04

Final complete day: 2026-10-04. Attention was 0.1% — this entity appeared in 9 of 9,434 analyzed posts/comments in the seven days ending that day (13 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. 2026-10-04 19:37 UTCComment

   Genuinely one of my favourite things in gaming in recent years is essentially a handicap (the Shift system), but it's only found its way into 2 games TOTAL, with the first of them being 5 years old. In Mind MGMT, the losing side gets to pick more optional modules than the winning side next game, with the difference being higher if they lost several in a row. In Fugitive (2e), you play a best of 5, and the loser just picks a bonus card to keep for the rest of the match. Mind MGMT went all out, sure, but Fugitive proves you don't have to (it only had a total of 18 effects on those cards), but it didn't really catch on anyway.

2. 2026-10-04 18:28 UTCComment

   People mentioning handicaps is good, another idea could be alternate/additional win conditions for him. Maybe a "side quest" he has to complete before doing something or in addition to the regular win condition.

3. 2026-10-04 16:58 UTCComment

   I pretty much quit playing International Chess in childhood, when my maternal grandfather (my main opponent) passed away. As a consequence (and perhaps because the game just doesn't 'click' with the way my mind works), even the weakest setting on any computer program regularly trounces me. When invited to play by a child even younger than I was back then, I feel a duty to inform them that it's likely to be a very boring exercise for them unless they take a handicap. For me, the fun is **in the journey, not the destination.** The victory that matters is improving on **my own personal best.** It stands to reason that, as with other talents, adopting this attitude is easier for some of us than for others. For technical guidance on how to get better at it, look into the Buddhist tradition (or related Hindu, Taoist, Christian, Muslim, etc.) of meditation. (The process of observing one's mind, and by practice becoming master rather than slave to unconscious drives, does not require subscription to any supernatural postulate; religions just happen to be the cultural enterprise in which the discipline is most developed over thousands of years.) That noted, certainly part of why Go/Weiqi has more appeal for me is that it's relatively easy (and even a formalized protocol, among people who have gained tournament ratings) to come up with a **handicap** to make a game between opponents of disparate skill fairly competitive. Today's 'eurogames' overwhelmingly **determine the winner by points,** and tendering the weaker player(s) a 'kicker' of points often suffices. More expert players should be able to come up by Mark I Eyeball with a close approximation to start with, which can then get "walked in" over the course of subsequent games.

4. 2026-10-04 16:04 UTCComment

   This is the solution and has been for 300 years, but offering a handicap is typically on the better player. I genuinely think the only reason it isn't more widespread is there's a number of maladjusted people into this hobby that would rather stomp people less skilled than them and feel good about being able to do that

5. 2026-10-04 13:46 UTCComment

   30+ year professional game designer here. I see a million comments on here about "just have fun anyway, that's the point"... Yeah, fundamentally true, but also I disagree to a good extent. Losing over and over and over... and over and over... simply sucks the fun out of someone's ability to enjoy a game. Many games and sports have handicaps for different skill levels, and many boardgames do as well, and should be used in situations like this. I have one single metric for a "good game', and it's this "Do people want to play again?" I'm not at all competitive, in fact I genuinely hate winning a game I'm teaching other people to play. "Hey, let me show you all how to play Blargle Dungeon! Wooo! I smoked you all! Haha!" is a crap feeling to me. I want other players to win, so their enthusiasm is there to play more; because again, the goal is them wanting to play more. A situation like this, someone is saying they're not wanting to play more (or as much, anyway), and the response can't be "just enjoy it more". This person has clearly been doing this already over and over and over, or they wouldn't be playing. Play coop games, or play with handicaps.