So, I'd actually planned on writing a different article tonight, but I guess given the events of the day, this will do instead.
In a two player game, you have a number of things that you need to worry about. But basically, you are always trying to control things, so that at the time the game ends, you are in the lead. You need to control both your own scoring mechanisms as well as the tempo of the game in order to do this. Now, you have a certain amount of control over the tempo, but so does your opponent.
The more players you add, the less control you exert over the tempo. Actually, you get less control over the whole game. There are more chances for your opponents to attack and disrupt you. There are more people competing with you for the limited supplies of the kingdom piles. And three pile endings can happen much faster.
All of this means you have less control. And that can really suck. I really hate that feeling. But you know, there's nothing malicious about it. It's just a much tougher game to win, for anyone.
So, people complain about kingmaking. But this isn't really a big deal. They'll bring up situations, like not ending the game while behind, which lets the guy in 2nd come back and win. Or ending the game while in 2nd, which stops the guy in 3rd who was building an engine from making his huge comeback. Or similar things. But, the thing is, these are strategic moves. Sure, they're not the strategic moves that allows the player making them to win the game, and at the same time, they do have big impacts on who does win. So what gives?
Well, the thing is, there's still strategy here. The guy in second is playing to protect his 2nd place, figuring the chances here are better than if he goes for the win. The guy in 3rd isn't ending it because he has to hope that the game will go on longer, if he's going to have a chance. So these are rational, self-interested actions of people simply trying to get the most out of the game.
And this is NOT kingmaking. Or at least, not the kind that is a huge problem in lots of games. Now, yes, it can still be very frustrating, that the reason I didn't win is because of something a third person, other than myself and not the person who did win, did. But, all of the other players' actions are just as important to the result. Not to mention the shuffle luck aspect. So, yeah, it can be extremely frustrating, and I don't think I'm ever going to like it nearly as much as I do 2-player, largely for this reason. But it's not the kind of kingmaking where player C says, hmm, I'd rather have player B win than player A. Not that this CAN'T happen, because it can, but player C almost always has to do this to his own detriment. And if people aren't playing out of their own self-interest, you're going to have problems anyway.
But what about those cases where people commit hari-kiri, ending the game with themselves in last, or something similar. Yes, this can happen. In fact, it can indeed even come up in a case where it's not a worse strategic move than some other action, simply because you're locked in last place. Yep, it can happen, though it's extremely rare to not have this somehow impact the hari-kiri person's winning chances negatively. But ok, even here, the point is you have to plan for the possibility. As a player in a multiplayer game, you need to base your strategy not only one what's coldly best in a vacuum, but what your opponents do. When do you green? It really really really depends on your opponents' decks. You need to build up longer the more they're languishing, and go for green quicker to compensate for them as well. And you want to have enough of a lead so that whenever one of them ends the game, you can have the lead then, and enough of a long game so that if they hit bad streaks, you're ok there, too.
Now, sometimes, you've got to weigh one option against another. But here, you've just got to take a stand, make a choice, pick a play based on what you think they're going to do. There's some game theory involved. In fact, you can really make the argument that there's MORE strategy involved here, because it's not just a cold calculation of the numbers, you actually have to read what decisions they're going to make. And make the best choice you can based on the information presented.
Now, can people collude? Of course they can collude. Can they collude without hurting their own chances of winning? Not really. So basically, just like in the two-player game, you need to throw games in order to collude. And you actually have to do this in a pretty skillful way in order to really throw it towards one of the players or the other (note to self: team dominion where you take the higher score of one of the players on your team, but it looks individual - very interesting and fun looking). And so, if you're doing this anyway, it might be a bit easier in multiplayer, it might have a little more direct impact within a single game as opposed to in a metagame standings sense, but it's not really qualitatively all that different from fixing results in two player games.
I'll give a couple caveats. Masquerade is the big thing here. You can pass cards that make super huge changes in the game, which can really be cripplingly warping if you're not playing self-interested. Same goes with decisions on contraband and envoy. But you know, these are going to be pretty obvious. Possession might have some issues too, but I think largely with this card, as well as things like smugglers and tribute, it's just that there's a qualitative difference based on seating order, which we don't like because it seems random, rather than actually like a collusive effect going on.
If you want to talk about competitive dominion, there are a few big things then. You want to make sure that people are self-interested and actually trying to win. You want to have very large numbers of games, because the inherent luck is going to not make reliably repeatable results otherwise (a problem that's exacerbated in multiplayer). You want to think long and hard about what bonuses, if any, you give to 2nd place vs 3rd place, or incentives to try to score as many points as possible, which I actually think might be a good thing in the tournament setting if you only do it for losses, and have wins be way more important than that. There are a number of ways you can do something like this to help control endgame behaviour a bit, but the important point is that your tournament rules WILL affect endgame behaviour. You probably also want to make sure everyone is pretty competitively even, and possibly more importantly, good. Because bad play does throw things off a little, not that there isn't strategy to be had there, too.
Furthermore, you definitely want to have separate events for 2-player, 3-player, 4-player. I do think 2 player is the most interesting here, because there's the most individual control, but the other things are viable too, as long as you get people playing to win. You probably also want to take reasonable measures, like recording the actions taken somehow, so that you don't get people like passing colonies on masq plays (though actually, you DO want to do that sometimes, though very very rarely).
Is it easier to collude in 3 player? Yeah probably. But I would not say it's qualitatively different, and I do think the biggest issues are that a) people don't like that the person who does worst has such a big impact on the game, when they aren't that person, and b) people don't understand that you need to take all the possible actions of your opponents, and their decks' capabilities, into account when you're pursuing a multiplayer game, much more complicatedly than in 2p. And without actually playing multiplayer, I don't think it's very easy to grasp this stuff. Not that it isn't still extremely frustrating at times. But then, I think we'll see this more later on in IsoDom Challenge.
