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26

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Power Levelling Guide

« on: January 17, 2015, 03:00:14 pm »

What I *am* interested in exploring is what the actual median or average skill level of a f.ds poster is. Because THAT is provable, AND the answer says a lot about just how effective this forum is as a teaching tool.

That's a rather strong assumption as well. I would certainly count as f.ds poster, but I do not typically read the strategy discussions, individual match threads, the strategy articles, etc. In other words, I am not here to become a better Dominion player (and I have zero interest in that anyway), but instead I just want to keep updated on what's happening in the Dominion world, I want to see how a community built around a single game thinks about games in general, and I actually like reading the RSP forum because of the funny US-centric content there.

Also, even if I were here to learn more about Dominion you still could not attribute my (mediocre) skill to the forum. By the time I joined, I had already been playing Dominion for years and had even won a national championship title, and quite likely similar story holds for a lot of people -- they come here because they have played Dominion a lot, instead of first coming here and then playing a lot. How could you tell how much of their current skills would be because of the forum?

27

Goko Dominion Online / Re: strange ratings

« on: January 17, 2015, 02:04:49 pm »

Goko ratings:
- Include games against bots I think
Isotropish ratings:
- Don't

Isotropish also includes games against bots. However, it ignores all 3+ players games.

28

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Data Mining: Cards that correlate with skill

« on: January 11, 2015, 08:12:37 am »

A correlation of +/- 0.100 would be about 10 standard deviations from the mean, so it's pretty safe to say that none of the results in the first post are due to chance.

How do you come up with that?

Can't say how he did that, but generally permutation tests are very good for questions like that. Simply randomly permute the player IDs so that no information about the true good/bad player dichotomy remains and re-compute the correlation. Repeat 1000 times or so. This gives readily both the mean and the variance for the null-distribution and (if one is into such things) enables trivial statistical significance testing by counting how many of the 1000 replicates are above the observed value.

It rarely pays off to do any other kinds of tests, and the only thing one has to think about is what exactly to permute (for example, here it probably makes a difference whether the permutation is for each player-rating pair of for each individual match).

29

General Discussion / Re: How do I even start to solve this math problem?

« on: January 02, 2015, 08:53:09 am »

You're right, of course. With this particular problem though, as blueblimp demonstrated there are a lot of constraints. My guess is that trying to do something in MATLAB wouldn't be fast. I may very well be wrong.

This particular problem indeed is not the most suitable one for integer programming, but I would not call 1050 constraints a very large number. I'm definitely not expert enough to say anything about how well generic solvers solve problems with very few variables but some orders of magnitude more constraints, but it does not sound too difficult. That said, the only reason I replied was the thing you agreed with.

Matlab wouldn't be the right tool anyway.

30

General Discussion / Re: How do I even start to solve this math problem?

« on: January 01, 2015, 04:38:17 am »

There is a fast method for optimizing an objective function subject to a systems of inequality constraints (the simplex algorithm), but doing it with integers is NP-hard (i.e. it isn't likely that MATLAB will be able to solve it for you quickly).

It is still good to remember that NP-hard does not mean slow for small problems. State-of-the-art integer programming solvers (CPLEX and others) would solve problems this small probably immediately, and more generally a lot of NP-hard problems can be solved efficiently for surprisingly large number of variables unless you start explicitly constructing the hardest possible instances. Consequently, one shouldn't automatically assume NP-hard problems to be too slow to compute. Too often people say "this is TSP, so there's no hope" whereas in practice TSPs of modest size are easy with standard solvers and even problems with tens of thousands of nodes can be solved exactly (this is naturally slow).

31

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: A Mythological Deckbuilder (tentatively called Mythos?)

« on: December 16, 2014, 04:14:52 am »

Anyone have any comments or thoughts?

Some quick comments:
1) This sounds rather complex, and at first glance probably too complex. Multiple resources types cause problems at two levels: They are hard to balance, and they make the game hard to play. It might be possible to get around the first issue with enough effort, but the latter one needs to be taken seriously. Even though I've played some 500+ different games of varying complexity and I actually like fairly complex games, I would be hesitant to even try this one out after having read the description; in addition to having not just 2 or 3 but even 4 different resource types, it also has in the order of 30 different cards displayed on the table, only 1/3 of which is retained from game to game.

Game design is tricky business in the sense that people have natural urge to add more and more stuff, thinking it improves the game. It very, very, rarely does, but instead the real effort should go into streamlining. Before adding any new element you should think hard whether it is actually necessary and improving the game, and after finally making a decision of adding something (say, a 3rd resource type) you should re-visit all the previous elements and think which ones perhaps could be removed after the new thing was added.

2) The Gods are both the means to winning (via points) and powerful cards at the same time. This can easily lead to issues with run-away leaders; if someone gets a nice God relatively early on, then they both have a lead in points but also a stronger deck. This is not necessarily a critical problem, but as a starting point it sounds dangerous. We've seen this problem in many deck builders (say, the DC Comics deck builder), and always it is motivated from the perspective of the theme, not mechanics. Sure Gods are powerful, but it does not convert into good game-play; maybe they should require constant sacrifices to avoid their wrath or something.

3) The game end condition sounds broken. Wouldn't the winner often be determined way before all Gods have given out their favors?

4) Do you have a novelty factor? I don't see anything that would not already exist in some deck builders. It's okay to go without new mechanics and ride with the theme, but mythology and gods is perhaps not that novel as a theme either...

32

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Guess the card in a different language!

« on: December 16, 2014, 02:39:24 am »

I won't do a full set (especially as I have no access to the physical cards right now), but here are two quick ones for Finnish to start with:

Tilitoimisto
Katso poistopakkasi kaikki kortit ja paljasta siitä haluamasi määrä Kupareita. Ota paljastetut Kuparit käteesi.

Suurlähettiläs
Paljasta kortti kädestäsi. Palauta enintään kaksi kappaletta paljastettua korttia kädestäsi Varastoon. Tämän jälkeen kaikki muut pelaajat ottavat yhden kappaleen palautettua korttia.

33

General Discussion / Re: Tell me what you think about board game tables!

« on: October 10, 2014, 03:27:53 am »

My name is Andrew. I am a senior in industrial design and for my thesis project I have chosen to design a table for board games. I'm currently in the research phase and have some questions I'd like to throw out to the community. Please feel free to answer any number you want/feel comfortable answering, I know there are quite a few so any feedback would be great!

I won't provide a set of full answers to your questions since I've recently notably changed my gaming habits, but I provide replies to a subset. Nevertheless, I wanted to point out that none of your questions explicitly consider the size of the games or the table -- to me this sounds like a rather critical dimension. I'll answer this issue in the last question.

36yo male.

1. Where do you most often play board games? e.g. home with friends, local game store, etc. why do you like to play there?

Primarily in dedicated (semi-)public spaces that host gaming clubs. The most common sites are a class room at a local library and a club room of a building complex (a smallish room open for tenants to book and do various things). Pubs and at (friends') home are close second.

2. How many people do you play with? Do you have a preferred number of people or game size you like to stick to?

These events typically have anything from 4-10 people, with 3-6 sitting around one game. The space rarely limits the size of the players, so it all boils down to the game itself. The biggest games are played at the homes of friends who happen to have the biggest tables.

4. Do you have a committed space at home for playing board games?

Not really, but gaming has been taken into account when deciding what kind of a dining table to buy (though in the end it had no effect on the decision; see my reply to the last question). The living room (which is where we Finns keep our dining tables) is anyway rather optimal place for gaming, since it where everything else happens too; not everyone present needs to be playing but everyone can still interact with everyone else.

8. Have you ever run into troubles setting up and playing a board comfortably? if so, what were the issues?

Sure. Typically the issue is running out of space when playing bigger games in non-dedicated places. Sometimes lighting is also an issue, especially when playing in pubs in the evening.

9. How did you solve or deal with the issues?

Either don't play the big game in a small space, or just suffer the limited space. For very big games (say, the largest 18XX variants like 18C2C) we always go to dedicated spaces with big enough tables, but occasionally still need to use an auxiliary table for holding some rarely used components.

13. What would an ideal gaming table look like/do for you?

Now this is where we get down to the business, and unfortunately my answers are probably bad news for a designer: What I describe as optimal is pretty much exactly a stereotypical Scandinavian dining table design.
- The table should be a rectangle; round tables simply do not work except for special cases (Crokinole and some other dexterity/balance games really call for a round one)
- It should be as plain as possible; a flat surface with absolutely nothing else, no seams, no wrinkles, no cushioning like the ones surrounding poker tables, no specific elements designed to help playing board games, etc. This holds also for the space beneath the table; no drawers or anything there, just four (preferably straight) legs close to the corners.
- It should be solid wood, definitely not having a soft surface like felt. Glass is also bad.
- It should be large enough, but not too wide. In practice something like 2x1 meters is close to optimal as it can fit 6 chairs either as three per side or as 2 per side and 2 in the ends, but for a big enough space perhaps something like 2.2x0.9 or 2.4x0.9 would be okay as well. One rarely needs anything bigger than that.

34

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bot "Pro" Games Effect Leaderboard

« on: October 01, 2014, 08:48:48 am »

I've also been using the Play Bots button lately and have never been matched against Serf Bot. I think they automatically match you against the bot who's closest to your rating, so you would only play Serf Bot if you have a Goko rating <2000 or something like that. Otherwise I'd consider this a bug...

I tried twice, both time getting Serf bot. My Pro rating is around 4700, clearly above all bots, so apparently it is not choosing the best match at least according to that rating. It could use the Casual rating for making the choice, despite the result influencing the Pro rating; it wouldn't make sense, but this sounds like a rather easy mistake to make. My Casual rating is as low as possible, since I haven't played any games in that mode in ages.

35

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bot "Pro" Games Effect Leaderboard

« on: October 01, 2014, 02:52:12 am »

i I suppose it makes some sense to have the option to play bots on the pro leaderboard, but for now, if I want to play casual games against bots it is veryrelatively laborious (must do it thru the multiplayer interface).

It indeed should be possible to do both, with equal easy.

For a long time it was laborious to play with the pro ranking, using the same multiplayer interface trick. in fact, I had not even realized I don't anymore need to do this but can use the Play bots -link instead.

Edit: Apparently one still needs to use the multiplayer interface. I just tried with Play bots and it put me against Serf bot, which is not really a bot at all. The other bots are not great either, but at least they attempt to play and hence a match against them can be justified as reasonable use of time. Playing against Serf bot does not qualify for that.

36

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bot "Pro" Games Effect Leaderboard

« on: September 27, 2014, 12:07:34 pm »

This is just selection bias: you won't notice the hundreds of guys who play a bunch against bots and achieve nothing spectacular, but you will notice the one guy who runs extremely hot.

Indeed.

I play almost exclusively against bots on Goko, for the simple reason that I mostly play in situations where I cannot play a full game in a row but can guarantee that I (usually) manage to do my next turn before the time out. In other words, I could not play against humans but bots don't mind my slow-playing.

After quite a bit of games, my isotropish rating is at 28 and has been fluctuating between roughly 25 and 30 all the time. When Isotropic was still around, my rating hovered between 27 and 31. The final rating was 29, after roughly as many games that I have now played on Goko.

Even though I'm just another isolated example, for me the rating system seems to work very accurately despite playing only against the bots, giving me a rating that is practically indistinguishable from what I had on Isotropic playing only against humans (and in general the two ratings seem to be quite comparable). I guess I could improve my rating on Goko a bit by trying to game the bots, but I have zero interested in doing that.


Edit: ...and I would hate to have games against bots removed from the ranking. If I have an opportunity to play against humans it's way better that my rating is roughly at the right level so that I can get right opponents via automatch.

37

Other Games / Re: Race for the Galaxy?

« on: September 05, 2014, 03:59:59 am »

I think anyone who likes Dominion is highly likely to enjoy Race.

It depends a lot on what you like about in Dominion. Even though these two games are often mentioned in the same discussions, it is largely because for a long time they were the two highest-rated card games that also happened to be released roughly the same time (nowadays Android: Netrunner is ahead of them, and 7 Wonders is quite comparable in popularity amongst players in general). The games have very little in common, so I don't see any particular reason to expect Dominion-fans to like RftG any more than any other group of boardgame fans. Both games fit fairly similar occasions, taking roughly as long to play and both being good games only for small groups of people, but this is roughly where the similarities end.

Also BGG stats support this. The list of games rated high by Dominion fans has RftG only on the 4th page of results (two of the expansions are a bit higher, as expansions usually are, but still not even within top-100). This compares very poorly to the fact that RftG is ranked 24 overall in BGG. The highest positive correlation Dominion has is naturally with its own expansions, but a lot of other games rated by hundreds or thousands of Dominion players are ahead of RftG, including most of the games ranked above RftG in BGG in general. This result suggests that Dominion fans do not like RftG any more than other gamers, but also that they do not hate it either -- it's just another game out there, liked by some and not by some others.

I personally do not like RftG that much. It was good around the time it came out and one of the expansions made it better, but in the end I have no urge to play it as it feels a bit boring and repetitive (whereas Dominion I would still play any time). Compared to Dominion it loses big time in two important things. First, it is way harder for new players, so it cannot be played casually. For expert players, in turn, it reduces too much into a game where you have to pick your strategy based on whichever cards you happened to see during the early game. The game has a lot of powerful combos and strategies just like Dominion has and I can understand how learning those could be interesting for people who like Dominion, but the big difference is that the game does not offer as convenient way of learning these things. In Dominion you see the whole kingdom and can always choose at the beginning of the game a strategy to try out, to learn more about it or any of the individual cards. In RftG you cannot do that, but instead you might end up playing 5-10 games before you get your first chance to even try out some particular strategy you are interested, or 10-20 games before you see some particular card for the first time. Of course you can still learn the game, but the process is very different and hence likely to attract different kind of players. Because of this observation, I have actually converged to saying that San Juan is better game than RftG (for me), because it feels much more friendly as a learning platform.

38

Introductions / Re: Would you use a free website to track the results of board games?

« on: August 29, 2014, 05:44:48 am »

Hello everyone I am trying to gather feedback for a new website I am building to track the results of board games! Obviously feedback from gamers would be tremendously appreciated as I try to build something that would work great for you (us).

I would say that such a site would need to be coupled with carefully chosen statistics in order to be useful. I can already write down the results quickly with various score sheet -type applications, typically on a phone, but to start using a specific dedicated web service I would want to get more analysis out of the plays. Your site seems to have some kind of player rankings, which is in the right direction, but most ways of presenting that information are uninteresting because the usual statistics (winning percentage, total number of wins, etc) do not mean much when the statistics are over a wide range of games (two-player games have much higher expected winning rate, the role of luck varies from game to game etc). A site that manages to provide an interesting ranking over the players would be useful, but I presume doing that would actually require developing a new variant of something like TrueSkill, a ranking tool that can handle multiple games with multiple levels of luck, while smoothing out the skill levels of players across similar types of games. I guess this is beyond what you can do for your hobby project, but nevertheless I would suggest seriously thinking about how to show the rankings when most players will only have played one round of each of the games.

A friend of mine has been keeping up similar log of his own games for a decade or so. His statistics show what kind of distribution for player and game counts one might converge to over the years; he has played more than 650 different games against more than 350 different opponents, and most gamers I personally know would be having similar statistics. I notice you said "against relatively stable group", which means people like these (or me) might not be your real target audience, but it could be worthwhile to think whether you can provide something interesting for this kind of gamers too? I can't imagine wanting to use a service that did not stretch out to cover proper statistics of everything I play over the years. His stats also show nicely why things like "winning percentage" really mean nothing as the top list of players is populated solely by players who have played exactly one game, yet there are clearly differences in the player population (the winning percentages of players with 100+ games range between 12-33%, partly because the players tend to play different kinds of games but partly because the player skills really do vary a lot -- that list has both regular drunkards but also people with continental championship titles in boardgaming).

Another practical thing is seamless integration with BGG. I anyway log everything there, and I definitely would not want to log anything twice. In practice, I would need a system where I can type in the results of arbitrary game and the play-counter in BGG for that particular game would then be automatically incremented by one (at least for me, but possibly also for the other players). Also, smooth mobile access is crucial; I never play around desktop machines.



(Now that I think of it, I probably should make the TrueSkill extension mentioned in the first paragraph. I've had the basics figured out for quite a few years already, but never bothered to actually implement and test it. If anyone is willing and capable of creating a publication for ICML/NIPS on this, I'm willing to collaborate. The model is effectively just a combination of Gaussian processes, collaborative filtering and TrueSkill, so nothing an ordinary grad student in machine learning couldn't handle...)

39

Other Games / Re: Good "strategy" games

« on: July 04, 2014, 04:32:47 am »

Board game publishers don't get their games in to chain stores = the average person never sees or hears about them.

Are things still that bad in where you come from?

In Finland a typical chain store would have at least Ticket to Ride, Catan, Dominion, Carcassonne and then a few games of similar depth published during the last 1-2 year -- the kind of stuff that ranks high in Spiel de Jahres usually ends up in chain stores until the print runs out. That would include stuff like Kingdom builder, Pandemic, etc. Most people would naturally not recognize the newer titles, but they are still buying them as gifts etc, and most seem to recognize Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride as classics almost in the same boat as Monopoly and the likes. Dominion is also rather close to that status. My experience is that the situation is quite similar in most of central Europe.

So, the offering is still classics + subset of newer titles, but the classics already include quite a few proper strategy games and the newer titles are available for limited (but usually sufficiently long) time.

40

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Unity mobile app?

« on: July 02, 2014, 02:03:35 am »

All of the software in Linux comes bundled with the OS? Really?  A full-fledged Office suite, AdobeCS, language-specific IDEs, Steam, dozens of games... all come with a Linux distro?

Of course not all of the software in the world, but the kind of software one is expected to use in that OS.

It's naturally not the right platform for games and specific software by MS/Adobe/whatever, but that's not because it would be somehow tricky to install them but simply because those programs are not available at all. The stuff that is, however, is easier to install and keep updated than in other systems. I can't remember when was the last time I installed anything outside the standard repositories for my work machine, and for my home machine the only such case over the past few years was when I started using Netflix. For my work laptop (OSX), on the other hand, I could easily list dozens of examples -- just yesterday I had to re-install two separate pieces of software to fix a program that had suddenly stopped working. For me it's merely an inconvenience, but for my grandmother I'd rather install a system that does not require stuff like that. Hence, I tend to see Linux as the choice for the least tech-oriented people, the ones that want easy maintenance.


The issues of "what is available" and "how easy things are for the stuff that is available" really should be treated separately. Both usually influence the OS choice, but only the latter is relevant in the context of the post I replied to.

41

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Unity mobile app?

« on: June 28, 2014, 03:42:59 pm »

I just wanted to know why one would commit to such a thing as an OS that requires fiddling and usage of third party software if you're not that happy using it.

For most of the stuff, Linux is the OS choice that requires the least of that. Effectively all of the software comes directly bundled with the OS, so whenever you need a tool you just click once and it's right there. So, I can well understand why someone who does not enjoy trying to make 3rd party software work would choose Linux -- most users can often go years without ever installing anything outside the standard repositories.

For Windows in particular, but to some extent also for OSX, you always end up installing lots and lots of 3rd party stuff, so those are the OS choices for people who actually enjoy playing around with their system. In the past it also meant a lot of fiddling around to get everything working, but I presume it has become a lot better past few years. I stopped using MS after XP so I don't know for sure about that, but at least my OSX laptop requires almost as little maintenance/tuning as a regular Linux distributions do. It's not quite as automatic and safe, but close enough.


It's then an unfortunate thing that some specific cases, like Silverlight, are rather tricky for Linux. It's understandable that people who chose theirr OS because of wanting to never bother searching for 3rd party software are puzzled when they have to solve installation issues more complex than what you would typically encounter in the OS choices that are otherwise more high-maintenance.

42

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion in the Classroom

« on: May 26, 2014, 08:19:37 am »

I think this would definitely work, and I don't think the rules would be too rushed. I think we sometimes overestimate the complexity of basic Dominion concepts since we spend 99% of our time thinking about the crazy complex aspects of the game.

I know one teacher who has been organizing a board gaming club for their students. That's not quite the same as using them for teaching, but his feedback should nevertheless be relevant for the question of how easy it is for semi-random students to grasp the rules of various games. The phrase "semi-random" is because we are here talking about students interested in maths, and in the other example about students willing to attend a voluntary (but school-organized) board gaming club. The club was primarily for kids around 15-17. The general impression is that one indeed should not attempt the most complex of games, but things like Peloponnes, Race for the Galaxy, Kingdom builder, Notre dame, and Dominion (a random set of games mentioned in the last few reports) have caused no trouble for the students, and in this group Dominion is definitely not the most difficult game. Many kids seem to have trouble paying enough attention to learn the rules themselves, but this will not be a problem here as the teacher can spend any amount of time teaching the rules just for this one game.

Another teacher I know has been using various board games during maths lectures, for roughly 14yo students. He has used for example Las Vegas and Liar's dice for teaching probabilities, apparently with good success but noting that some students do have trouble grasping even the simplest of games like Liar's dice. I guess this has a lot to do with the fact that some kids of that age simply are not that interested in anything that happens in the school... The same guy has had good success with a board gaming club already for 12-13yo kids.



On a more general note: Dominion is not, rule-wise, complex at all. I have never met a person who would not have been able to play it (at least almost) correctly after a few minutes of rules explanation, even though I'm often playing with people who need several clarifications and reminders for more complex games. A person completely unfamiliar with board games might have a bit more trouble, but as a general rule I would call Dominion easy to approach. Donald did a terrific job in making the wordings clear, which really helps, and the basic rules are very simple.

43

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Legal Advice

« on: March 08, 2014, 04:38:05 pm »

I dunno... the thing I was reading said BG was "affordable" in the sense of $40 per person for meal, drink, and dessert.  Most normal people can't afford that except as a very special treat...

Sure, it can be around that. The thing is, in Finland the run-of-the-mill chain restaurants are also close to that, so it is hard to consider the slightly more expensive places exquisite in any way. I know the difference is bigger in some other countries, but I was hard-pressed to notice a huge difference for example in NYC between BG restaurants and the other places a regular tourist would consider.

The places I would call fancy dining, or splurge, would often start above $100 without drinks... All big cities should have plenty of restaurants in that range, and those are indeed the places regular people would not be going to (if paying for themselves) -- especially as the food is rarely that much better (if any) than it would be in the $40 range.

Part of the problem may be different views of what "normal" is.

Obviously. Also, eating out with a family is definitely quite different from a dinner for two.

And no one at the median is going to pay $50 for a meal for two any time soon.

I hope they don't come to Scandinavia then, for the would starve... Just the main courses for two in a chain restaurant would cost around 35-40 euros (*), and if a meal includes desserts or starters and maybe a beer/soda then there is no way two persons would stay below 50. That's for the kind of places also people well below the median salary would be eating at least every now and then. Pizza and beer for two would already be around 40 euros, in almost any place that is not a fast food pizzeria.


(*) Euros and dollars can in this context be converted one to one, since the US tax+tip roughly balances out the exchange rate.

44

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Legal Advice

« on: March 08, 2014, 04:07:43 am »

Fancy dining (?):  I'm not actually sure exactly what I'd call this category.  Looking over the Michelin stuff quickly, this category starts at the Bib Gourmand level.  Normal people simply don't eat at these restaurants; they exist only for the wealthy or perhaps businesspeople when the meal is being paid for by the business to impress clients.

I know you said "starts at", but even mentioning Bib Gourmand in this context sounds so wrong. One of the key definitions of BG is that it is affordable, so it is definitely not to be associated with the places normal people would not go into. While there are some fine dining places with BG label, many of them are simply good-quality casual places. There are BG sandwich places (like Katz's deli), breakfast places with BG, and so on. The BG listing is something completely ordinary people can well be using as a restaurant guide when visiting a new (big) city -- it gives a list of restaurants almost guaranteed to be good, and helps in avoiding chain restaurants.

Most big cities would also have Michelin starred restaurants that are near the casual dining places in atmosphere. It's just that the food is better and the price is (usually) higher. They don't need to be fancy in any way.

45

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles

« on: March 01, 2014, 02:07:42 am »

Without Fool's Gold: You are 5 points behind, buy the last Province and lose. How can that happen? There are at least three different solutions.

Something I actually once did: Use your last Spoils to buy the Province, returning it to supply and losing 2 points per Fairground.

46

General Discussion / Re: Math: How does it work?

« on: January 29, 2014, 09:13:06 am »

In the Netherlands I believe the rain percentage is based on this simple formula:

They might do something like that for collecting monthly averages etc, but the percentages they report as part of the forecasts go well beyond that.

Weather forecasts are in general made with extremely sophisticated models (actually simulators) that use a lot of local sensor data but also take into account very large-scale weather patterns. The probability of rain in Netherlands depends naturally on whether it was raining yesterday across the border but more generally also on the pressure distribution (and other things) around the whole Europe and large parts of the Atlantic, and all of these are factored into the numbers they report. The resulting predictions are dramatically more accurate than simply looking at what usually happens in "similar conditions".

47

General Discussion / Re: Any interest in an IRC channel?

« on: January 29, 2014, 09:04:16 am »

I'll join if it has a trivia bot. 

I guess you can use Awaclus as one.

There are now five people on the channel and even some chatting has been observed.

48

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: January 22, 2014, 02:47:20 am »

Thematically, it can turn ruins into their non Ruined counterparts (unless your Market was Grand or your Village was on the Border).

This sentence in the Rebuild-thread suggests a natural continuation for cards that convert "ruined X" into "X", nicely fitting the naming convention for the re-family and only slightly outranking Rebuild in power:

Regexp
$11 - Action

Specify a regular expression. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal a card with a name matching the expression. Thrash it and gain a card with a name matching the expression. Discard the other cards.

49

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 21, 2014, 10:52:43 am »

You can add/remove rounds with wacky rules to your liking.

Related to this, a few games go really wacky with the rules while still not falling to the "completely chaotic" category.

Friese's (the guy who designed Power Grid, and a bunch of bad board games) Stich-Meister has separate rules deck and cards from that deck also dealt for the players. Before every hand all players simultaneously play one of their rules, and these rules specify various things for that hand, such as the trump(s) and scoring (plus or minus points for various categories), but also a bit more weird things like "the 2nd largest card wins", "the winner of the trick gives the cards to the player on the left", or "before the hand, everyone passes three cards to the right" etc. It naturally becomes very chaotic, but there's still strategy.

Ebbes specifies trump and scoring (which suits are positive/negative points) in the middle of the hand, based on the order cards of a certain number are played during the hand.

I also had a third game in mind when starting to write this, but I already forgot what it was.

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Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 21, 2014, 07:39:01 am »

It would still be around the best trick-taking games, simply due to the fact that you have information of the distribution of half the cards (yours and dummy's) and so you are able to infer a lot.

I'd agree that it is interesting for the people very familiar with the game. We wouldn't have newspapers publishing Bridge puzzles if it wasn't.

However, I'm still talking about people new to the game and the entry barrier is not just in the bidding part. For me the asymmetric play does not make it inherently better or worse, since in my opinion it has both positive and negative aspects. In particular, the added information can be viewed as something that makes it more interesting, or something that makes it less interesting when you suddenly have too much information during some stages of the hand or when the game gets too close to a solitaire puzzle. As a consequence, for me the actual gameplay is hence quite comparable to a very straighforward trick-taking game with one trump, the simplest of lead/follow rules you usually see, and uninteresting scoring system with a very steep step (*). I agree it's a bit more interesting than that and that the simple choices are actually often amongst the best ones for trick-taking games, but I would not rate it near the top in that respect alone. Of course that's a personal opinion, of someone who enjoys trick-taking games in general but has limited experience with Bridge.

Also, I think that being excluded from play for 25% of time inherently makes the game a bit more boring for new players. If you don't quite understand the game yet, there's not that much you can learn/enjoy while the others play.



(*) Of course that kind of a scoring system is not uninteresting as such, but isolated from the bidding system it is. If people don't have a good feeling of how strong their hands are, aiming to collect a specific number of tricks is usually not as interesting as some more detailed scoring systems (say, collecting specific cards or avoiding specific suits) would be. Too often you realize early on that you are either going to fall clearly behind of take way more than that. It still matters how well you play, but not as much as it would be slightly different scoring.