100% true. Note that I was responding to someone who called it quick and fun, so the lack of choices seemed like a relevant point there.

Monopoly has one great rule (or lack of specificity), that it doesn’t put any restricting on when you are able to trade (doesn’t even say it has to be your turn!). This creates a great ten minutes or so when most of the properties are bought and people are making interesting deals with each other.

Everything else in the game is bad because there are very few interesting decisions to make. The dice tell you where you go and the space you land on tells you what to do. Strictly you “decide” whether or not to buy an available property if you land on it, but it’s virtually always a good idea. In the rare auction case you can decide your bid. You can decide which order you mortgage off your properties if you are out of money. I think one of the chance/CC cards has a choice on it? Even buying houses is kind of dull since you have to build them evenly across the block.

Truly it’s a hard game even if there were no cylons. Humans rarely win in my games. Alas, it’s out of print 😭. Its spiritual successor Unfathomable seems good as well, though I’ve only played it once

Then you discover the board game and it’s a whole new level of great

I have a colleague who is trying hard to do it, but it isn’t good enough yet fortunately. I point out as many issues as I can to deter him but it ain’t working.

They also rescued Ruto, so must have finished Jabu Jabu on that basis too

My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.

There is an addendum to his plan that might have made it make sense. If he had said something like “I’m giving the universe the chance to make better decisions”, suddenly having half as many people means (probably a little more than) half resource consumption, half the carbon emission, and more time to figure out and implement solutions to these problems. I’m not sure how the housing crisis would pan out, I expect it would get worse. It also makes more sense that he destroys the stones after “I gave the universe its chance, now the ball is in its court”.

This also solves the doubling resource problem. His motives are to pressure people to change their ways. Giving them more stuff might cut hunger, but you’ll just have that hunger again in 50 years and we’d probably increase carbon output to boot, and destroy more environment to get these doubled resources.

I don’t know enough about the stones to say whether “infinite resources” or whatever cheat code would have worked, but they certainly could have dropped a line that it wasn’t possible, or that it would cause more problems than it solved (how does chemistry even work in this universe? If nothing ever gets used in reactions then the chemistry that makes our bodies work is borked)

But anyway, as the Russos did not put this line in, the premise was flawed