This guy would be such an insane complement to our top 6. I’m full Stenny at this point unless we can trade down for great value. BPA at 2.
I really like playing bigger campaign games. I really enjoyed Sleeping Gods and am currently playing through Oathsworn. But I find it hard to play with just how long it takes to play through a session. Oathsworn says it's 30 mins for the story and 90 mins for the encounter (and I know boxes usually underestimate), but last night it took me close to 5 hours to play through Chapter 3 including setup and teardown. And this is also playing solo which tends to be faster than with multiple people because there's less time negotiating decisions. I have a cat who would mess up anything if I left it out so I kind of have to play entire sessions at once and I have a really hard time carving out that much time to regularly play.
With digital implementations, it's nice because you can kinda pause anywhere and the game will easily remember the game state for you, and you don't have to worry about putting things away.
Do folks who play these games just leave them set up for long periods of time as they play through? Or are there other tools / tips you have for being able to shorten sessions? I admit that this particular session of Oathsworn might have been extended a bit because I had to refresh myself on a handful of rules, but part of that is because new rules / systems were introduced...
What do y'all think?
Thought this was a very interesting read and data point in the discussion on Stenberg vs. Reid. A lot of folks have been discounting the points difference as a kind of “points aren’t everything” argument, but this analysis shows that NHLe is by far the single most important metric of success for drafted players. Other analytics improve the model but drafting by points alone is almost equivalent to standard NHL-level drafting success.
So, some people have been discussing the 2003 NHL draft since it was the last time a top-3 pick was traded (let that sink in, 23 years since it has happened). What I find hilarious is that apparently the only reason it happened is that the Florida GM who traded from 1OA back to 3OA thought they could pull a fast one and draft Ovechkin a year earlier than he was eligible at 3OA because he was technically only 2 days too old to be draft eligible in 2003 and he tried to argue that if you didn't count leap years that he was technically draft eligible.
This obviously didn't work and Ovi was drafted 1OA in 2004 but I find it hilarious that not only was the only top3 draft trade 23 years ago, but it was ALSO based on a farce that ended up blowing up in the trading down team's face.
So I think we can stop mocking trades down from 2... it just ain't gonna happen.
ETA Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_NHL_entry_draft
At his end of year presser, GMMG stressed that the main thing he was wary of and trying to avoid was rushing the rebuild. I’ve now been seeing all of these posts about getting Stenberg and immediately packaging Ekky and Musty and 20OA for a 1D but I think much more likely is that this doesn’t impact the immediate plan too much.
We take Stenberg at 2OA because you don’t pass on an elite 2-way prospect like him and then mostly stay the course. Let Cags and Pohlkamp get their shot at the NHL roster, pick up 1 or 2 more marginal D upgrades and let it ride another year.
It’s also extremely unlikely that we trade down. That just doesn’t really happen in the NHL
So I wanted to poke around a bit at our cap projections to think about likely roster planning for next year. One thing that has really driven some of the roster decisions these past few years has been the need to hit the cap floor, due to not really having any big contracts on the books (our biggest contracts are Cooch and Carey Price, two medically retired guys). That's really driven the need to sign guys like Klingberg and Leddy who actually have a bit of a price tag on their contracts while all our Rooks are still only making ~$1M AAV.
This is the last year we even have to worry about the Floor rather than the ceiling, with Mack and Will's contracts kicking in in 27-28 season, but one thing I found interesting is that we also might not need to worry about it too much this year either.
Next season's cap floor is $76.9M. Making some reasonable assumptions about extensions for Mukh, Graf, Ostapchuk, and Desharnais (and assuming we give Reavo 1 more year as GMMG has implied), and with Cagnoni and Pohlkamp filling in D spots, puts us at about $75M with 1 more roster spot for a 7th Dman. The point of this isn't to say that we're not going to sign anybody, but that it might be the first season in a bit where we're not literally forced to take on some dead weight to meet the floor. If GMMG wants to let it ride with Pohlkamp and Cagnoni, he'll be able to. Obviously if we sign Rasmus or Raddysh to $7-9M+ AAV then it's all moot but in some ways I think it increases the odds of us actually getting a season where they let the kids have a shot at the blue line.