I’ve been watching an awful lot of playthroughs of The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game by Fantasy Flight Games. I have recently bought the revised core set together with The Dark of the Mirkwood expansion, and the starter decks:
- The Elves of Lorien
- The Defenders of Gondor
- The Dwarves of Durin
- The Riders of Rohan
This game is quite complex, there are lots of phases of each round, and so I’ve gone onto YouTube to see others play the game.
While the playthroughs are generally pretty good, there are consistent mistakes that they all seem to make. Namely these are:
- Getting the rules wrong
- Pronouncing the names of the cards incorrectly
I find the former annoying, as it invalidates the entire game they are playing after that point. For example, if the player is facing a tough enemy and applies the rules wrong, such as using an exhausted character to attack and kill that enemy, then the rest of that playthrough is ruined as it builds off of something that should not have happened.
Do these content creators not watch other people playing the game first so they do not need to learn the rules for the first time? Why do they film themselves staring blankly at the cards as they try to understand what it says?1.
Also, why do they do not watch their play-through back? Surely they would pick up on these mistakes in the post-production stage, and then decide to re-film their scenario? That’s what I would do2 if I were creating a video that I couldn’t edit later.
The latter I find infuriating, to the point where I sometimes can’t even watch the rest of the video. One of the worst offenders for this type of thing is “Nelson All Over”. I don’t dislike the creator himself, I think he has great enthusiasm for the hobby, and obviously puts a lot of time into his production, but I think he needs to spend even more time editing out the pauses. Seriously. However the absolute worst offense his commits is absolutely butchering the pronounciation of the card text. For example one constant name that he says wrong every single time is “Beravor”. There are no funny letters, no accents, no ambiguity on how to say the name, but he cannot help but say “Beravir” each time. I mean, can he not read? Can he not see that the name is VOR and not VIR? Maybe the first time you can say it wrong and then correct yourself, but thirty times in a single video? Also, he is clearly spending time sleeving and ordering his cards into binders, but has never spent any time learning how to say the words? What is wrong with people.
It’s not just him though, Colin over at the One Stop Co-op Shop and Meet Me At The Table really struggles to say “Gondor” and “Aragorn”. Colin consistently says “Gun Door” rather than “Gone Door”, and “Eragon” or “Aragon” instead of “Aragorn”.
Dale the Casual Gamer says “Un-Goal-Eye-Ant” for “Ungoliant” rather than “Un-Go-Lee-Ant”3.
Why does this bother me so much?
Maybe I should just make my own YouTube channel instead, and it would be way better than everyone elses’, naturally ðŸ¤
11th August 2024
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This is down to editing, obviously. I cannot understand why the YouTubers think I want to watch them not understand something on a card. Seriously, just cut out all that dead reading time and silence where you make choices ↩︎
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But won’t, as it seems like a massive ball-ache, and I can barely be bothered to type this footnote as it is ↩︎
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Turns out he doesn’t upload to YouTube any more ↩︎