[Erased for breaking Forum Rules]

If you were really editing that post to make sure you didn't break any forum rules, maybe you would have noticed the very first rule under Guide to Forum Use: "1.Write your messages to the appropiate forum." This forum is a Rex discussion board, not the "Taunt FFG about all sorts of unrelated nonsense" forum. You can find that forum here .

Adam said:

I would completely "Give this a thumbs-up" if I could.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure why you think that CP wishes he could take back anything he said just because Tycho likes Flash Duel enough to give Sirlin some space to write a guest piece. Be that as it may, whether or not you agree with Sirlin that his tacky little derivative games make him the Tarantino of game design, or whether you even accept his overstated claims of what he was actually being accused of, are you really going to boycott all of FFG's games just because its founder expressed a concern in a public forum?

I'm sorry he (arguably) criticized a game you enjoy. Maybe you should learn not to take things so personally?

Curator is a troll. In this particular case, he appears to have some bait with at least a little substance to it, but he's still just being a troll.

Don't feed the trolls.

Indeed. The sheer OTness of the post should have been an indication, but having seen Curator around the AH forum before he went off the deep end, I had no idea that he was just spamming boards left and right with this diatribe. I shouldn't have dignified it with a response.

Anyways, back on forum topic, how about that Rex? Is it seriously only 2-3 hours? The play time was the one thing that had me worried about whether I can interest my friends in it.

Off topic: I do have to agree with Curator on his assesment of how peterson handled the situation over at BGG. I'm all for expressing your opinions (adam) and holding to them despite what others tell you is an appropriate or inappropriate forum for that opinion. But to insinuate that someone is "stealing" something from another designer is something that should have been done in a less public way. That could also be seen as "trolling". It appeared as though he was picking a fight just for the hell of it. Looks bad on his part. Not the type of behaviour one would expect from the CEO of a succesful business. Bad form.

On topic: My brother-in-law bought Rex and we played our first game last night. It was a well thought out game and we finished in three hours despite it being the first game. I think we could get it down to 2-2 1/2 hours after knowing the rules better. That said, we did only play a 3 player game. Game length will likely increase with more players. But, I don't think it would be by very much. The turns are simple and there is not a lot of downtime. Looking forward to playing it again.

For the record, I have nothing to say on the subject of En Garde vs. Flash Duel. Just reporting the forum rules since he said he was trying not to break any. If he's still fine with it, that's between him and moderation.

Anyway: I just played my first game, too! It was only four-player, but blocking off one stronghold made it much more fun than four-player Dune. We got down to turn 8 (could have won turn 7 if my ally had listened to me... of course, I had a betrayal card to top him anyway), when I won as Emperor in an alliance but used a betrayal card (Control the Populace -- control more territories than your ally). It was a blast for all involved. My ally pointed out on my last battle that if no one won, I'd win on my own due to the victory rules (Sol player didn't meet his special victory condition, and I had the most strongholds), so I could have dialed 0 and intentionally lost to win without him, which would have been hilarious, but since I hadn't noticed it on my own, I just used the betrayal card so he could at least feel like he won for a few seconds, haha.

We felt like all the changes were positive. I'm not sure if we'll use betrayal cards all the time in the future. I don't want to count anything out based on a four-player game, but I kind of feel like, when you play 2-3 hours, it might be a letdown to lose by someone getting an easy card at random in the beginning and you getting stuck with the difficult 8 card (what my ally had). Cool concept. We'll see.

Our game lasted at least three hours, but no one there but myself had played Dune more than one-two times, and not recently, and I had to look up some rules like how Informant worked and some other things.

My ranks were filled with traitors. Lost a huge battle because of a trecherous Captain. Found out at the end of the game that I also had a scheming Admiral. I had them all shot. The lazax won in the 7th round.