A "hidden gem" is a game that is considered to be great but not well-known at all. It's something you believe deserves far more recognition and reach than it currently has. A diamond in the rough.

Though a hidden gem certainly can be a highly polished experience, the term also allows a bit of roughness, leaving room for clunkiness or flaws on account of the game's scope and production values (hidden gems are rarely, if ever, big-budget). It also seems to place a slight premium on novelty and innovation, favoring but not requiring games to be fresh or experimental for their time.

With this in mind, I'm curious to hear people's opinions and hopefully get some new stuff to check out for when I find myself needing to take a break from Crash and Spyro.

• What games would you consider "hidden gems"?
• Why do you feel they fit the criteria?
• Why do you think they aren't more widely known?

I apologize if this is a topic that has been covered before. I haven't really been able to find anything and I'm not really sure what a good search keyword is. But I noticed this as part of the Hearthstone player ban thread.

On a traditional bulletin board forum it's not really an issue because the conversations unfold chronologically anyway. When you have the atemporality of threaded comment chains that gets disorganized fast.

Basically, it's a "still developing" story where more events and news keep happening that's germane to the discussion. As the news comes up, people who already read the thread might not see the comments being posted about subsequent developments and be able to follow it because each piece of additional news or info. ends up happening in a comment/sub-thread that ends up arranged in fairly arbitrary, rather than chronological order.

The Democratic Debate threads have been similar, where the reactions and consequences of the topics being discussed can keep a discussion going for a long time, but it all happens in sub threads that people are unlikely to see. Many of these developments don't really merit a thread of their own, but after a few days or so it gets hard to actually have a big-picture discussion because the news has overtaken the scope of the discussion thread.

In a thread with an active OP, I've noticed what tends to happen is the OP will steadily edit new developments into the main post to update it. I think this has actually worked pretty well BUT edits don't bump posts as far as I can tell. Also, the people posting the updates aren't necessarily getting as much credit (in terms of votes, exemplary labels, or whatever) and, insofar as that matters to people that's a thing. Do you think this is adequate as things scale or would some novel design or subcomment system be needed?

This topic is part of a weekly series where we can talk about board games. Feel free to talk about any aspect of board gaming you'd like. Here are some potential talking points to get you started:

• Are you looking for a recommendation? Tell us a game you'd like, and we'll see if we can think of one that may suit you.
• Have you tried something new and want to chat about it? Tell us about why you like a particular board game!
• Did you have a particularly interesting tabletop gaming experience? Tell us about your 9-point swing in Catan, or the time you managed to finish off the entire village in Ultimate Werewolf!

A little over a year ago I created an unofficial matrix room for the tildes community. I believed at the time, and still do, that the infrastructure supporting the community should be founded on open, sustainable software, and matrix was an interesting new solution in this space similar to the Discords and Slacks of the world. Though the room is bridged with the IRC chat activity has remained relatively low compared to Discord.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to properly moderate this channel. Though the community's involvement there has remained civil I do not think I'm active enough to ensure things stay that way.

As such I am looking for an interested person or persons to take over this channel over the next week or so and if no suitable replacements are found will be shutting the room down until further notice.

Thanks everyone,

Short link. Probably more to follow.

The Swedish Academy handed out two prizes this year, after they were forced to suspend the prize last year amid a metoo scandal which saw most of the Academy’s members either resign voluntarily or be forced to resign. There’s been a lot of speculation about how they were going to restore their reputation this year, and they spent a long portion of the press conference explaining their new process, whereas in past years they haven’t felt compelled to do so.

It was expected that at least one of the two prizes would go to a woman, with Margaret Atwood being one of the odds favorites (the bookmakers’ picks never win, so I don’t know whether we should put much stock in them, but they do reflect pre-award buzz). I’m not too familiar with either author, but it’s interesting that they chose Peter Handke. He’s one of Europe’s most controversial authors for his decades-long support of Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic’s actions during the Yugoslav Wars. He once compared Serbians to the Jews during WW2, visited Milosevic in prison when he was on trial for war crimes, and spoke at the man’s funeral. He’s also hailed as one of the greatest living German-language authors. It’s like the Academy decided to throw feminists a bone by awarding a woman the prize, but then couldn’t resist jumping headlong into controversy again right away.