Worst community for a game, no. Perhaps worst for a video game. Essence knows the worst for a game. (So does mining.) That community is so awful you just hope the worst they do is curse you out. But that simply does not happen when they are not diverted to something else.
I swear to my fuzzy little feline monstrosity that you do not want to go there... I will send you a PM.
I'd say its not the worst, just the one where your actions are most visible. You're less likely to get cussed out for being bad on, say, TF2, because your team can't necessarily see you dying over and over and giving the enemy more and more gold.
It takes a long time to learn the game if you don't watch some fancy schmancy streams/youtube guides because you have to know "this vampire guy can flip me with a tornado" "this tree bearded guy can capture me in a ring of trees" and how to avoid devastating attacks which you will not learn until you've had some time to play. Personally I don't think its really worth it unless you have some friends to play it with.
I had the first one on PS3. Didn't play it too much since my brother took it to College with him. If no one else wants it I might nab it.
You aren't talking about my kinds of games, but in general, that's never anywhere near my curve in any game. I'm the type of person who starts to lose interest once I feel either I've mastered a game, or I reach the point where learning more stops being fun. I quit chess mostly because I felt that to get better, I'd actually have to work at it.
IMO speed chess is the most fun chess - you get better every game, it's impossible to master, and it's really hard to get the feeling you need to work at it - worst case you just throw a move down.
I've played speed chess as well, and it can be fun. I actually kind of prefer Team Chess (aka Bughouse, aka Siamese Chess). Both games benefit from favoring being aggressive over being analytic, because most games end because one side or the other runs out of time. I've been told that playing a lot of speed chess can really screw up your normal chess. But I guess you have to be good enough first at normal chess to notice the difference lol. I actually have played a LOT of pretty good players. All of the best chess players in my student house at College were in my hallway, and a few other good players from campus would show up for games. And if one of the good players wasn't around, I made a good enough stand-in (it's one of those things that you have to have a bit of humility to admit to). But I actually was comparatively much better at Team Chess, probably because there were no books to study, I was more on an equal ground with everyone else, plus I figured out that whole aggression vs. analysis thing, something that the really good chess players had a harder time with.
I'd rather play speed Go, I'm fast anyway, but in speed Go, the key things are playing by shape, knowing some basic standard plays, some clever moves, but mainly pattern recognition.
Pattern recognition is important for any kind of fast game. Though, tbh, I've played very little Go at all in my life. A friend taught me the game when I was a kid or teenager, but he was the only person I ever played with, and I never really pursued it. I'm sure I was a lousy player because I had no idea what I was doing most of the time lol. I did play a whole lot of chess variants in my day. My favorites included: Bughouse (aka Team Chess, aka Siamese Chess) (which I've explained elsewhere somewhere in this forum). Technically, you can play it with just one opponent, and two chess boards and clocks, but my brain really could not handle that. Best way to play is with teams of two, but I've also played with as many as 5 or 6 people sitting in two circles facing inward or outward, depending on which team you were on. It's a Crazy, fast, chaotic game, which is why I love it. If you have a really good partner, where you both know how the other think, you can totally reduce the amount of chaos and at that point, you feel like you are two parts of a a winning machine. Another thing I love about Bughouse is that standard openings are simply a bad idea in it because if you open up too much, your opponent can simply drop pieces into your back ranks, and that can be a really bad thing (a pawn appearing out of nowhere on the 7th rank can be a nightmare). Kriegspiel -- a variant where, essentially, you don't actually know your opponent's moves. It requires a third player as a judge, with his own master board, showing where all the pieces really are. It's one of those variants that can give you headaches, from too much thinking lol. Dice Chess -- you have to roll a die before you move, and that determines which piece you must move. If it tells you to move a specific piece, and you don't have that piece anymore, or you don't have a legal move with that piece, then you can make any move you like. 8 pawns vs. a Queen -- I don't know the official name of this variant, or if it even has an official name but essentially, one player gets 8 extra pawns, set up in a specific way in front of his normal setup, but he doesn't get a queen. Reverse Chess (aka Polish Chess) -- essentially, a variant where you must lose all your pieces or get checkmated to win. If you have a possible capture, you must make it. If you have more than one possible capture, then you can select which one to make. Knightmare Chess -- Steve Jackson Games published a couple of different decks of cards that you could incorporate in your games. You built a deck (kind of like in a CCG) and drew X cards. Every turn, instead of making a normal move, you could play a card, which did chaotic stuff to the game, or gave your pieces special abilities, special moves, etc. I thought it was a lot of fun, in any case.
You want headache from too much thinking? Try white Go, or blind Go. In white Go, both players play with white stones. You have to remember who owns each individual stone. Blind Go takes it a step further. Requires a third player as judge as well. Both players say their moves out loud, and the third player places them on a board the players cannot see. You have to remember where every piece on the board is. And remember, Go boards are 19x19.
I've got a spare copy of Torchlight, two copies of Torchlight II, Cthulhu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII, and two copies of Wanderlust: Rebirth that I'd love to trade off. Or give away. I'm not greedy.
I was never capable of playing blind chess. I tried once with a friend, but I couldn't do it. I got completely lost after like 5 turns. in Kriegspiel, though, the moves are secret. The players play back to back. So it's impossible to have a visual picture of the board in your head, because you have no idea which pieces your opponent has moved, whether he's castled or not (and on which side). There's a lot of guess work, risk taking, trying moves that you HOPE are illegal, because knowing that a move is illegal tells you something about your position (if a pawn move is illegal, for example, it's either because it puts you into check, or because the opponent has a piece blocking the pawn. As the game progresses, each turn becomes kind of a logic puzzle, where you try to divine where your opponent's pieces are by virtue of what moves are legal or illegal.
I got DotA2, but I'll never play it because I've seen some guides and most are like "You are gonna screw up your first round, you always will" and "It will take you about 6 months to play every class, and that's just the beginning".
Torchlight 2, you say? Hm. I wouldn't want to take it for nothing, so I'd be curious as to what you'd be wanting to trade for it.
I haven't tried blind go either... but I have played white go, and I lost track about 40 moves in. There's team go as well, which is fun, but can be unpredictable(we're so going to kill his group next turn! *teammate plays elsewhere* *enemy lives* *bleeeeep*). There are some joke versions of go as well, there's one with a deck of cards, containing shapes of stones. You draw a card each turn, I don't remember max hand size... but you can either play a card or play a stone normally. Another hard one is double move go. Each player gets to place two stones down at once, so now groups need _3_ eyes to be alive.
I was really unaware that there were so many different Go variants, but knowing that boardgamers are always making up variants of their favorite games, it makes perfect sense. For example, one of my favorite board games has been "Axis and Allies", and I've played SO many unofficial variants of it (to be fair, a few of them were by people at game conventions hoping to eventually get them published). Then there's Cosmic Encounter, where almost every player has their own rules variants as far as (among other things) how alien powers are distributed. Also, some of the later publishers had to print blank cards because of popular requests because so many people had invented their own aliens for the game. Of course, there's also the various variants of Risk (nuclear risk, etc.) that I THINK Parker Brothers (or whoever now owns the game) have appropriated as 'semi-official' variants. And lets not forget Monopoly with EVEN IF you follow the official rules to the letter, there's enough leeway in the interpetation of the rules that you can get away with a lot of very strange gameplay (enough that I've seen people have total hissy fits).
