There Are Pandas, and Then There Are Pandas.
And this isn't either of them! The Pandas we're talking about here, are watches, not bears. And what got me thinking about them (again) was a link posted this morning by @cm.rook who pointed a few of us to the very attractive (and not terribly priced) Yema "Rallygraph" Panda which, in it's most traditional arrangement, looks like the one on the left, but can also be had in the version on the right: The model on the left is a true Panda, while the model on the right is called a reverse Panda. The reason for that distinction is clear--Panda bears, only come in the first arrangement. Now at this point, everyone should be thinking about the most well-know Panda, The Rolex Panda, which is actually a Daytona, and among Rolex Daytonas, the most famous of which is the Paul Newman Daytona, which was famous first, because it was Paul's, and second because it sold at auction for $17.8 million (US Dollars). The story of that auction is well-known so I'll only...
Nov 8, 2019
I'm so obsessed with this game it isn't even funny.
Things I love about the game: 1) There's no RNG. (Unless you consider the random order of player seating at the start of the game - over hundreds of games with the same group of players, we have found no correlation between starting position and outcome) 2) It's a game about supply chain management, which tickles my economics nerdiness fancies 3) There is very little asymmetric information, which means decision making is incredibly subtle. 4) There are many different auction bidding strategies to consider. 5) Specialization and gains-from-trade are essential, yay free trade! 6) There are basically three rules to the game, so it's really easy to learn 7) There's nothing to memorize (I hate games where you have to anticipate 'he's probably holding the Thief card so I have to play around it, even though this is my first game and I've never seen the Thief card, or the 60 other mystery action cards').