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51

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why trashing attacks reveal two cards?

« on: January 19, 2014, 03:52:29 am »

There are a number of diceless RPGs but the customers generally want dice.

That's not what I meant. I meant that even RPGs that involve dice rolls, possibly even a lot of those, should often be played so that the critical parts of the scenario are still (almost or completely) deterministic. If the characters are chasing a person running away you would not roll dice to see whether they can catch him, but instead the gamemaster would set up the scene so that e.g. trying out outrun the person fleeing would always end up as a failure, but stealing the nearby bicycle and using that for the chase would lead to success. I know some people will simulate also mental capabilities (e.g. whether the characters should realize the bicycle idea even if the players wouldn't) with dice and doing that has its place in RPGs as well, but I hope you still get the point: If the rest of the scenario heavily depends on the outcome of this event then it should not be left at the will of the dice.


Also, the RPG cultures in different countries and age groups are quite different. I'm here talking about RPGs that actually are about playing a role. Of course the same systems can also be used for pure 70s hack-and-slash action as well, but calling that kind of pastime role-playing would make a bit of injustice for the term -- that's actually much closer to a (bad) board game.

52

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why trashing attacks reveal two cards?

« on: January 18, 2014, 04:09:05 am »

I'm pretty sure the old Tomb of Horrors had traps where you didn't even get to roll.

Which actually fits my argument nicely. Not having a chance to survive a trap is, arguably, better than having a small chance of surviving. It means that you can only thank/blame your own actions when avoiding the trap. That said, I guess most (modern) people would agree Tomb of Horrors was horrible.

Setting aside the way D&D and the like used to be played in the 70s and 80s, and could actually argue that roleplaying games are better approached as mostly deterministic systems. Sure there can be random elements in meaningless small things (though some games have stripped those out as well), but the big decisions are often determined directly by the conscious choices of the players. Many classical hack&slash gamers will perhaps treat combat as a special case, so that the characters indeed have probabilistic chance of dying or being severely injured if they enter combat, but even there the basic rule is that most of the time the players will know in advance that the chance of failing will be extremely low if not zero (and/or the game is equipped with means of reversing the outcome, such as resurrection or some stupid healing potions).

53

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why trashing attacks reveal two cards?

« on: January 17, 2014, 01:34:15 pm »

Dungeons and Dragons works OK. (Of course, a typical game of D&D will have tons of d20 rolls, no one of which is absolutely critical, which tends to work no matter what your die sizes are.)

It works, but not really as a game in the same sense I meant in my argument. Role-playing games typically aim at a completely different kind of experiment compared to board games. Also, while they (well, at least the old-fashioned ones) often involve a lot of randomization, the key decisions are actually fairly deterministic, at least if the gamemaster knows what she is doing.

Anyway, applying that role to D&D would mean something like that one should never create scenarios where the success and failure depends on one such roll; having some stereotypical dungeon crawling scenario that ends in one roll of d20 where 1 means all characters die would simply be horrible. Then again, that would be equally bad even if d6 was used.

54

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 17, 2014, 08:37:58 am »

Maybe the reason Tichu is popular with board gamers is that it uses a custom deck instead of a regular (Bridge) deck?

Even though that basic principle indeed holds, it's not quite a sufficient explanation. There are tons of designer card games with custom decks, none of which reach the popularity of Tichu.

In fact, Tichu is way ahead of the rest. In BGG it ranks 52nd amongst all games, whereas the next "proper card games" (that is, excluding games like Dominion and 7 Nations that are listed as card games) would be Battle Line on 107th position and Hanabi on 111th. One has to go down to roughly ranks of 300-600 to find most of the more famous other card games (Mü is 393th, Sticheln is 474th, Bottle Imp is 676th, and so on). Bridge is actually ahead of almost all of these, ranking 225th and outranking for example Chess.

55

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 17, 2014, 02:07:19 am »

To me, the relevance is that they're both partner card games that take a similar amount of time to play.

Sorry. I only now realized we weren't actually talking about the same game. I briefly mixed up Spades and Hearts; Spades is really not that popular in Finland and I didn't think of checking the rules. My apologies for the confusion.

So, just ignore all my comments regarding the simplicity of Spades as well, but replace them with arguments on Spades being harder to approach.

Yes, one is trick-taking and one of building, but I tend to think about them pretty similar, and I think there's enough similarities between the two that people who would want to play one type of game generally want to play the other.

Even though I agree that the same players will usually like both kind of games, the choice between trick-taking and climbing probably is here the key that explains the difference in popularity. Besides the entry barrier, I feel that climbing games usually feel more social because they result in more interesting drama.

I personally actually prefer trick-taking, and given enough time and dedicated co-players would probably play something like Doppelkopf more than Tichu. However, Tichu seems to generate more laughter and discussion when playing in a bar after a few pints of beer, which is the usual context here. I know a lot of people who play on average 50+ games of Tichu every year, but I doubt any of them considers it as a game they spend a lot of time to master. It's simply light pastime that fills the evenings, in contrast to Bridge/Chess/Go/whatever one would actually practice to become better at.

56

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 17, 2014, 01:53:02 am »

This is just false. That's like saying, "Once I analyze the kingdom, the rest of Dominion is so dull. I could never enjoy it unless I master the ability to analyze kingdoms first."

Maybe I was a bit too brief there. What I meant was that unless you can connect the information obtained during the bidding into the actual play, you are effectively playing a very simplified trick-taking game. It won't be a bad game, but definitely not the best trick-taking game there is. At least according to my own experience, a typical player would usually enjoy more a game that focuses more on the trick-taking part, for example by having trick-specific scoring system or something like that. In other words, I did not mean to imply that playing the Bridge hands well wouldn't be an interesting challenge, but instead that stripped down to the core the game has a bit less going on than some of the other games where the key elements of the game were designed to be within the trick-taking part. Already something like Spades would often be considered more interesting, or one could try the more modern designer games like The Bottle Imp or Ebbes. A new player will simply have more decisions to make during the hand, and has more small goals to aim at instead of just waiting for a badly bid hand to end.

Getting back to the Dominion analogy, my stance would be that Dominion is exactly the kind of a game where the interesting parts are within the actual game-play. It was specifically designed to have low entry barrier, by always limiting the set of cards within one game to a small set that is public knowledge and not having any pre-game choices. An imaginary drafting variant of Dominion that would start with the players somehow choosing which Kingdom cards to use, maybe even picking some of the piles for oneself alone, but that would have somewhat simplified action phase would be closer to Bridge in this analogy. It would probably still be a good game and might even become the preferred variant for high-level competitive play (especially if the action phase was simplified so much that some other deck-builders would otherwise be considered better), but it would require a lot more expertise and be more boring for players that do not master the selection phase.

57

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why trashing attacks reveal two cards?

« on: January 17, 2014, 01:09:42 am »

Besides "this was good enough in beta testing", one rather apparent reason for choosing two would be that it is the lowest number that is not way too swingy. Going from one to two makes the cards notably better, whereas going from two to three would have a smaller effect. Hence, three would just increase the complexity, at least in terms of playing time, unnecessarily.

One can also use a purely probabilistic argument. If Thief revealed just one card then an early-game Thief that attacks a deck of, say, 13 cards out of which 9 are treasures would have a probability of 31% of not hitting any treasures. With two cards this probability dramatically reduces to just 8%. This is a qualitative change, making a fairly common event a rare occasion that still happens (barely) often enough to be meaningful. For 8 treasures in a deck of 13 cards the numbers would be 38% and 13%, respectively.

With three cards we would be down to 1% (or 3% with 8 treasures). The probability would already be so low that anyone suffering from such a bad luck would rightfully feel pissed (assuming they thought playing Thief was a good idea in the first place). A better way of implementing a similar card would be to go with the Saboteur idea and just make it find a treasure every time; it would work quite similarly but not have this very low probability of sometimes not working at all. Of course this only holds for the early-game -- against engines such a Thief variant would be a different beast altogether -- but I guess you get the point.


My personal opinion on game design in general is that one should rarely design mechanics that use very small (or very high) probabilities for the basic outcomes. Instead, most of the random events should fall into roughly three categories: Those with roughly 50-50 odds, those with roughly 70-90% probability, and those with roughly 10-30% probability. If one has a desire of implementing something with just 1-10% probability of success/failure then it usually pays off of to think whether it should be just 0% instead. This doesn't mean the games should not have low probabilities for outcomes of series of actions, but one should be really careful when designing individual mechanics that operate with single digit probabilities.

The above argument relates nicely to dice games. With d6 all the possible outcome probabilities are quite okay; you cannot model anything with less than 17% probability. However, a game that used d12 or d20 as the dice and had individual outcomes for (some of) the dice results would usually not work that well.

58

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 16, 2014, 08:33:56 am »

Tichu is more like The Great Dalmuti than any other card game perhaps, but it's probably the other way around (TGD is more like Tichu).

Haggis is definitely a lot closer to Tichu. After all, it was explicitly designed as a 2-3 person version of Tichu, trying to capture as many aspects of it as possible (such as bombs) while losing the (fixed) partners (similarly to how Mü was an attempt of creating a "Bridge" that does not require as much study for the bidding phase and that can be played also with not exactly four players).

I'd say quite a few other climbing games are also closer to Tichu than Dalmuti. In fact, almost all of them are, since Dalmuti focuses so much on the metagame and because it only covers sets as possible hands. That said, I find it interesting that we haven't seen that many commercial climbing games. On top of my head I could only name Frank's zoo in addition to the ones already mentioned in the thread. Perhaps there would be room for a few more.

59

Other Games / Re: Why is Tichu so popular?

« on: January 16, 2014, 05:10:01 am »

Yeah, my main point of comparison is with spades and bridge.

That explains a lot. After your first post I thought you referred to games like Gang of Four or Haggis that are mechanically similar to Tichu. In comparison to those the answer would be easy; the key difference is the partnership which e.g. makes the playing experience more social; otherwise the competitors are indeed almost as good. There are *very* few good partnership games so Tichu can kind of dominate that market.


Spades simply has nothing in common with Tichu (besides the fact that both are card games) so I don't see the relevance of the comparison at all. The same guys that play Tichu probably would be happy to play a lot of trick-taking games (unless they view the partnership part as a key), but you should try selling them something else than one of the simplest ones. Even though Spades is a good game, there are quite a few more interesting ones out there. As Tichu is considered the pinnacle of climbing games then the relevant comparisons amongst trick-taking games would perhaps be more in the line of Tarot, Skat, Doppelkopf, Mü etc. Offer those for the guys who enjoy Tichu and the response might be better, but expect to run into the problem theory referred to: they are considerably harder to learn, partly because some of the pearls of this genre are very old and partly because it simply is quite hard to come up with very elegant and streamlined scoring systems for trick-taking games (without getting perhaps slightly too simple like Spades or Sticheln; these are good games but somewhat lack competitive element and become slightly repetitive after tens or hundreds of games).

Playing Bridge makes no sense if you haven't spent a lot of effort learning it, since it is so much a game about the bidding system. The rest of the game is dull, so there is nothing to enjoy unless you master the system.

if I was going to want to devote so much time to a trick-taking game, I'd rather try to learn bridge than spending so much time on Tichu.

The thing is, you don't really need to spend that much time with Tichu. Like theory said, it's the kind of a game that is easy to learn and actually not that hard to master either. A newbie can easily join a game of three Tichu-veterans and enjoy the game almost right from the start, and quite likely the pair can even play relatively well.

60

Other Games / Re: Recommended board games?

« on: January 14, 2014, 03:09:48 am »

Since Memoir'44 has been mentioned a few times, I guess it is worth mentioning that it has kind of been made obsolete by a few newer games, at least in terms of mechanics and balance. The newer games in the Command & Colors series, especially C&C Ancients and C&C Napoleonics, are quite a bit more interesting while having the same basic mechanics, and are generally considered better games at least in the sense of BGG ratings. They are somewhat more complex (Napoleonics being more complex than Ancients), but also not so clearly luck-based; to my knowledge Memoir lacks depth for any kind of competitive play and I've heard that the winning stats for the online version are not very promising regarding the skill/luck balance. That said, I could not find any hard evidence right now.

I guess Memoir'44 is still worth trying out if one prefers the WW theme and is happy with a bit lighter action, but otherwise I would recommend C&C Ancients instead. It shouldn't be any harder to learn and it should not take longer to play. Napoleonics is even better, but with the extra complexity and length it enters slightly different competition.

61

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Petition for the return of Isotropic

« on: January 10, 2014, 04:12:14 am »

It's illegal because it's a copyright violation. You're making a copy of the card text and images (by printing them out) and you aren't licensed to do that. Pretty simple. It's the same reason it's illegal to torrent a book and print that out to read, even if it's just for your personal use.

Interestingly enough, under Dutch copyright law you are allowed to make/own one copy (and one copy only) of whatever copyrighted material you own, provided it's for personal use.

This sort of a copyright law is apparently fairly common in Europe, so it's more like the US law is the exception. I guess their copyright laws are quite a bit stricter than in most other countries. Also, to me it sounds like the Dutch law is also quite a bit more restrictive than the Finnish one. We are also allowed to make personal copies, but we are not required to own the product. It is perfectly fine to borrow a CD from a library and convert the songs into MP3s for personal use. There is also no (arbitrary) limitation to just one copy, and you can also make copies for your family members and friends (but not further than that).

My understanding is that majority of countries would see absolutely no problems with blueblimp's example of printing out the cards and playing with them. I can absolutely borrow Dominion from a friend or library (yes, we have board games in libraries), scan+print the cards and play with my copy. I can even make some extra copies for my close friends. Even though the material is copyrighted, there is simply no violation of anything since personal copies are permitted. Torrenting the e-book would, however, be illegal because distributing the e-book (which happens in torrent automatically) is illegal. Also, the source has to be legal so already downloading a copy of the book from some piracy server would be a violation, even though the user would otherwise be allowed to make a personal copy of it.

It's an old law and as far as I know (I'm not a lawyer) it hasn't really been updated in a long time and since people only ever get sued for very blatant violations there is little jurisprudence, but it supposedly extends to digital material as well, in the sense that owning a physical book makes it ok to either scan it or download the e-book version from an "illegal" filesharer.

The Finnish law was updated a few years ago, so it explicitly covers also the new stuff. Even after the (quite disputed) changes it is perfectly legal to make copies for one's personal use, even of digital products. However, one is not allowed to break any "sufficiently advanced" encryption while doing so, which means that e.g. copies of Blu-ray discs are not legal even if taken for personal use. This criterion is quite suspicious and raised a lot of objections, and it remains to be seen whether the law will be fixed in the future.

Getting back to the e-book example, I could hence buy an e-book from Amazon and then give some copies of it for my friends, assuming I can do it without circumventing a sufficiently advanced technical protection. I have no idea whether the e-book protections fall into that category, and I think nobody does.

62

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko ranking

« on: December 05, 2013, 02:25:36 pm »

I've gotten up to ~5500 before, but I'm not even level 30 on the isotropish leaderboard.

It's swingier, but that's probably the main difference.

There's some sort of a bias as well, though I don't quite know where it comes from.

I'm constantly around 28-30 on the isotropish leaderboard, yet around 4500-4800 in Goko, roughly never reaching 5000. Compare that with sudgy's figures and you see a clear difference. What makes this notable is that I have mostly played bots (since I can take breaks when playing against them), which hints that the Trueskill-based ranking treats someone constantly playing against average players (the bots are between level 10-15) more favorably than the Goko ranking does.

63

Other Games / Re: Trains

« on: November 25, 2013, 02:24:41 am »

But still, why purchase a vp card when you can just build a railroad on a bonus square for the same or more points (and less waste and money)?

Given those exact two options you would of course lay railroad, but you are not that often making that choice in isolation.

Remember that laying railroad requires a card and that you have to be close enough to the bonus square (or some other good location) to be able to do it. Both of these require additional work that you could have spend increasing your buying power instead. Hence, whenever you have the opportunity to lay railroad on a good location and think that it is so much better than buying a VP card that costs a bit more, you have to remember that if you had not bought those extra track laying cards and spent a few rounds getting close to the bonus square (and collecting waste while doing it) you might have way more money to buy the VP cards.

You should not take the above as an indication that one should never lay track; it's almost always a good idea to pick the low-hanging fruits, the bonus squares are indeed very good, and depending to the set of cards it might be easy to lay a lot of track without needing to worry about waste. Instead, it's just a reminder that being able to collect a lot of points using the map usually means sacrificing on something else and hence you cannot directly compare the cost of buying a VP card and laying track on a good location. If you originally aimed at buying VP cards then you will typically have more money as well when you start buying them.

64

Other Games / Re: Any Nomic players?

« on: November 21, 2013, 07:45:02 am »

Somewhat related to the topic (of Mao, not Nomic), one can build this kind of a "learn the rules while you play" event on top of Sticheln.

Sticheln is a trick-taking game where you are always allowed to play any card. Hence you can never break the rules and the explanation "We play a trick-taking game where the winner of the trick always leads the next trick and the goal is to collect points, and before the game you place one (or two, depending on the variant) card in front of you" is sufficient for valid play. The guessing game is then in learning how tricks are won and how scoring works (at least one player naturally has to know these to moderate the game), and an observant gamer should be able to learn both after a few rounds.

The actual rules are simple but somewhat unusual for trick-taking games:
1) The trick is won by the highest non-zero value in any suit other than the lead suit (first one winning the ties), or the highest number of the lead suit if everyone followed. That is, all cards not matching the lead suit are trumps.
2) Every card won is plus one point, except for the cards matching the suit of the card placed in front of the player that score minus their number.

The 2nd rule is naturally very easy to learn if you announce points after every trick, so for a harder task they could be announced only at the end of the round.


The game itself is quite fun, and everyone who likes card games should own it since the deck comes with exceptionally large range of suits and card values, making it perfect for playing several other games that require numbered cards in several suits.

65

Other Games / Re: Nations

« on: November 04, 2013, 02:00:01 am »

(Note that I still haven't played the game. Let's see if I have a chance in the weekend, though after reading through the Essen reports of various friends I have several other games I will prioritize above this one.)

Okay, it is good. Possibly really good.

I did not play it myself during the Con in the weekend, but that was purely because there are so many copies of Nations available in the local clubs I play and people were so enthusiastic about it that I will have plenty of opportunities to play it to my heart's content during the following weeks. A lot of people who are big fans of Through the Ages (including also guys who play it competitively) and other games of similar scope (say, Terra Mystica, Eclipse etc) liked it a lot and many of them played several rounds during the weekend. I listened through one rules explanation and the game certainly sounds almost like a clone of TtA in terms of concepts, but seems to play differently enough. It also seemed to work quite well with 4 players too, in contrast to TtA that is purely a 2-3 player game when playing live.

The reason I didn't want to "waste" my time with Nations was that during the Con there were several new Essen releases that will be harder to find in the future, including some esoteric Japanese cards games etc. The best of the new releases I tried were perhaps Concordia, Prosperity, Yunnan, and Russian Railroads. Rampage was another hit, but it's maybe more a fun toy than a game. The low-point of the weekend for me was Packet Row; I can't imagine people actually release that kind of stuff anymore.


Edit: Some more comments about Nations. One strong point is that the rules are much cleaner and easier to explain compared to TtA. The biggest issue some people commented about was rather high degree of luck in terms of the event decks. The event decks are large but only two cards of each type will always be used in a single game. Furthermore, some of the events are very cruel, whereas some others don't do much. If one tries to play the game with low stability or military they will expose them pretty much to the luck of draw; if some cruel event related to that category comes up then they are screwed, but they might just as well luck out and go through the whole game without ever needing the track for clearing events. More generally, the card distribution seems to cause huge variance, making the game very tactical instead of strategic. It seems one cannot decide in advance things like "I will concentrate on the books/stability/military/whatever in this game", but instead one needs to really adapt to the choice of cards. However, you do not see the cards of the future ages so you can only hope that the tactical choices you made during age X will still be valid during X+1.

As a practical example of the variance, someone tried focusing fully on the books in two different games. In one game they managed to reach less than 20, in another game 75. In the latter game people not even trying to maximize the category reached more than 40. Apparently that focusing paid off a lot more in one of these games, and it was purely determined by luck of draw.

66

Other Games / Re: Nations

« on: October 30, 2013, 09:06:07 am »

Just been told my Nations has survived the storm and has arrived in York! My girlfriend's working late for the next couple of nights so I'm going to solo it to death. 5 o'clock can't come soon enough.

Might not matter that much for solo games, but apparently you should take seriously the recommendations for the setup. The game comes with a huge pile of cards out of which only a subset are being used for each game. The rules go with the usual "beginners should start with this kind of a setup", which most serious gamers ignore completely because usually the simplified setups are for people new to the whole boardgaming industry and often make the game considerably worse. For example, think of the standard setup for Imperial, or the basic games for TtA, Opera or Steam -- there's simply no reason anyone familiar with modern boardgames in general should ever try the "basic" versions, but instead one should immediately take into use all of the mechanics and components.

According to the comments I've read/heard this should not be done with Nations. Instead, you really need to stick to the suggested setup as you might otherwise completely throw off the balance by omitting critical elements.


(Note that I still haven't played the game. Let's see if I have a chance in the weekend, though after reading through the Essen reports of various friends I have several other games I will prioritize above this one.)

67

Other Games / Re: Nations

« on: October 25, 2013, 02:24:13 pm »

I've not seen anyone talking about it here yet but I've been getting pretty excited for it. I'm not at Essen but a friend is going and will be buying me a copy of the game.

Hope your friend was quick; apparently the English versions were sold out very early.

I haven't played Nations myself, but I know quite a few people who have played prototypes at various stages as it is a local game. Most seem to rate if fairly high and the overall comments have been positive, but I haven't heard the kind of praise the Finnish community had for Eclipse at the same stage (then again, the designer was also a lot more closely tight with the community). It's definitely on my radar, but sounds awfully difficult to balance.


The biggest hit at Essen would seem to be Amerigo by Feld. I should have chance to try out most of the new releases around Halloween; the biggest Con in Finland is always right after Essen and there are enough crazy people who go there to buy effectively all of the new games.

68

Other Games / Re: Trains

« on: October 23, 2013, 02:23:49 am »

Another issue is that they're aren't any attack cards (or at least I haven't seen them). This makes it easier to just build up a super-deck and not have to worry about what everyone else is doing.

From the perspective of providing a streamlined gaming experience that focuses on the key elements it makes perfect sense for the game to not have attack cards. For Dominion you (kind of) need them for added interaction to complement the implicit pressure of competing of limited piles, but Trains has another form of direct conflict in form of the map (that has spatial constraints and limited space in each hex) and hence the game is more elegant when it does not have further direct attacks.

Of course the above does not imply the constraints imposed by the map would be perfectly implemented in that game, but as a basic mechanism it well covers the need for paying attention to what others are doing, usually much better than what a few attack cards (that might or might not be in the setup) would. The whole point of the map is to force people to act before others can launch their super-decks, which means you have to balance between building your own deck and capturing the key locations on the map. At least in principle the amount of interaction is much greater than it ever is in Dominion, except perhaps for some very specific kingdoms, but in practice the map might need to be a bit tighter and more important for scoring to achieve that.

69

Other Games / Re: Trains

« on: October 22, 2013, 02:26:53 am »

Has anyone else played this one yet? It's a deckbuilder that also has a board that you can get points from. You can also choose to avoid the board entirely and buy victory point cards.

I played a few games in 2012, right after the Japanese version was released. Adding the board (or any other type of spatial dimension) in a deck-builder was something I had been waiting for some time already when the game was launched, and I think Trains does it quite well. Both the board and the regular VP cards are feasible ways of obtaining points and usually it is a good idea to invest a bit on both, so at least the basic balancing is fairly okay.

As a deck-builder the game is quite ordinary. It uses confusions and has semi-efficient ways of getting rid of them, as well as decent enough trashing in general to attempt some sort of engines. However, the engines never get quite as extreme as in Dominion, probably largely because of the simplified gameplay that allows infinite actions. In as sense, it's a bit like playing dumbed-down Dominion just with the base set. I did like the game, but I'm not sure whether there's enough depth for very long-term playing.

Based on the three games that I have played of this, your best bet I'd to almost completely ignore the board, which kind of defeats the purpose of the game in my opinion.

A few notes on this: There are certainly setups for which this holds and the feasibility of the map also depends on the number of players. However, I do think there are also setups with efficient map-building engines (for example the cards that avoid waste when laying track should help here; then the points on the map become almost like VP chips). I might be wrong though, since I definitely have not played enough to claim reasonable knowledge of the strategies.

70

Other Games / Re: Escape the Curse of the Temple

« on: October 17, 2013, 08:10:30 am »

I played Escape and i love it.

Just to balance things out: I hated it.

My biggest problem was that the game does not result in a proper feeling of playing a game. Everyone just sits there throwing their dice as quickly as they can, occasionally shouting something at the others and taking a quick glance at the board. Already during a single game you feel several "maybe this went right, maybe not" moments when you discarded some black dice thanks to possibly having heard a fellow player say that they threw a sun, or when you knocked over a dice and remember that it was maybe the fourth torch someone was asking for (without having even a chance to check whether they have the remaining torches needed for something)... At least for me those moments give a very strong negative feeling.

I'm definitely not a fan of real-time games and I have no intention to ever play Escape another time so my negative comments should not be taken too seriously, but I found this one considerably worse than Space Alert. Not because of the simplicity -- it is here a positive thing -- but because the real-time mechanic works even worse for this game. Repeated re-rolling of dice works much better for games that do not have the time pressure.

71

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Please Do Not Say "GG" Before the Game Is Actually, Literally Over

« on: October 16, 2013, 02:07:44 am »

Of course you are welcome to converse about the game state, and I am have no problem with good-natured fretting over luck or complimenting of superior play or what have you... but if you said either of the things you wrote above, it would sound to me like you intend to resign.

Is it about the exact phrases then? I mean, to me those sentences look exactly like what you describe first but then somehow you still manage to take them as an indication of resign intention.

I would never even consider resigning a game without being very explicit about it, and I would expect the same from others. Something like "It seems my odds a effectively zero, would you mind if I resign or would you want to play until the end to see how many Provinces you get with those HoPs in a single turn?" is what I would say (yep, I would always ask for permission), and I would be puzzled if someone else resigned after just having started a discussion about the game state, even if the comment was a superficial one. What if I had a counter-comment, for example a suggestion of how they could play next time with a similar board? It feels bad to not be able to continue the conversation.


I guess the overall consensus of the thread is that people simply have very different habits regarding the chat, probably largely because of different backgrounds (e.g. competitive MtG compared to social live board gaming). I kind of understand it when it comes to the canned responses like GG, but I really could not have thought that someone might consider also proper sentences like mcmcsalot's examples to so directly mean something that is not said.

72

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: An Attempt at a Victory Card That Cares about The Trash

« on: September 27, 2013, 09:11:07 am »

Imo, if no other alt victory (namely, gardens/silk roads) this is kinda.. a worse Bishop?

The card stacks so it would be a lot more like Silk roads or some other card where you worry about the split, not Bishop.

Bishoping a Province costs you 1VP and gets rid of one junk card. Thrashing one with this costs you 3VP is you have only one copy but nets you 3VP for every extra copy you have upto +18VP if you have the whole pile in a two-player game. I don't think it makes much sense to compare the two.

73

General Discussion / Re: An interesting article against asymmetry in game design

« on: September 26, 2013, 03:56:26 am »

Disclaimer: I did not have time to read the full story behind the link and even then I spotted some obvious issues, like the comment about Dominion, but overall I tend to agree a lot with his main argument.

I've never thought about skirting any sort of line; my objective is always just to win.

...and my objective is always just to have fun, despite the fact that I also play (board) games competitively. I can well relate to his argument about games where I am forced to make that choice being unsatisfactory. It feels bad needing to, for example, exclude some options because they would break the game down. Ideally, the choices resulting to most fun game should also be the ones that lead to victory.
     

But a badly designed game is a badly designed game.

This, as well as your previous comment on minimalism not being necessary for elegance and your following comment on forced and emergent asymmetry not being mutually exclusive, seem to miss his point. While it is indeed true that it is *possible* to create immensely deep games with lots and lots of options that are still perfectly balanced, it is certainly equally true that it is considerably harder (and quite likely exponentially so). Since harder tasks tend to take longer and still have higher chance of failure, it is very reasonable to advice the game developer community in general about the dangers of choosing such path.

Most considerably asymmetric games are fundamentally broken as serious games, either because they were intentionally created to be such (say, Cosmic encounter) or because the developers lacked skill/resources to balance them. Often this issue is sidestepped by introducing some arbitrary mechanics for "balancing" it out, such as allowing arbitrary direct interaction in a multiplayer board game and hence leaving the effort of balancing the game for the players. This could be seen as intellectual laziness from the developer, but in practice it is often because solving the problem in a meaningful way by introducing better mechanics/balance would really be too difficult. In many cases the game would have been way better if the designer had thought a bit more in advance and had made the game more symmetric or otherwise reduced the complexity of the design space. It's a pity for the gaming world in general that way too much effort is wasted on trying to design too complex games that end up as failures.

74

Game Reports / Re: Um... how do people get such high Goko ratings?

« on: September 13, 2013, 01:56:46 am »

Wrong! I am having a devil of a time staying above 5000, but Isotropish says I'm level 24 and I think I was level 22 when iso went down. Now, I know for the elite players here a level 23ish person is not competition, but I'd hardly call them "new to Dominion"!

I'd have to agree here. I'm constantly below 5000 in Goko ranking, but I was around level 30 in Isotropic and currently I'm level 32 in the Trueskill ranking for Goko. I wouldn't say I'm good and I will definitely miss obvious strategies fairly often, but after some 2k games since 2008 I'm not that new to the game.

It's simply that the rating system in Goko is not a good estimate of one's skill. There are ways for good players to have low rating (e.g. infrequent playing, playing against others around specific skill levels), and consequently there are ways for not so good players to have high ratings as well.

75

General Discussion / Re: Games with hidden loyalty

« on: August 23, 2013, 08:03:42 am »

I highly recommend Castle of the Devil.

I was about to suggest the same, but didn't manage to spell the original name "Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg" well enough for google to correct it, and the last time I played was well before the English version was released so did not know about the alternative name... No wonder they didn't go with the German name.

I don't personally like the game that much, both because I don't like the hidden team mechanic but also because the game is otherwise not perfectly balanced, but it indeed sounds like a good match for the OP. It's not bad, just not for me.