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Crackbone posted:Just gave them a once-over. The (non-icon) keywords are mostly for consistency and will probably get easier to digest once there's a legit tutorial in place that eases everything in. What did you find most difficult to understand? To answer your question, "Kind of!" (I had a game called Go-Time! which was a timed, simultaneous-turn, deckbuilding coop for 2-5 players where you were a bunch of generic goons trying to commit a random heist when suddenly a randomly selected superhero busts in and starts wrecking everything.) Final Attack! started as a hit of inspiration in the car, so I recorded the idea on my phone and fleshed it out in my notes over a couple of weeks. It initially had more "simultaneous playing of cards" and way less real-time resource management than the version you see, now. Eventually, I streamlined the cards by cannibalizing the keywords system from Go-Time!, some rejected stages from Power-Up! (wow, all my game names end in exclamation points), and made the audio track determine how charged the weapon was (details about this in a later post). If I ever decide to make Go-Time! there's a good chance that it'll end up completely different from the version I was playtesting a year and a half ago since Final Attack! took all the good parts.
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Dec 17, 2013 02:39
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On second readthrough everything makes more sense. The hurdle, I think, is that you're using a lot of names that are just wierd and/or unweildy - Kaiser Limb Hands, Impact Rounds, Generic Systems, Evolution Analysis. I get that you're trying to evoke a bit of the bad translation/Engrish of the genre but it makes things a bit harder to follow. Not horrible, and like I said, more passes on the book may help greatly. And given there's no examples or pictures and I groked it that's a good sign. One thing that I'd say is I'd change "hands" to "decks" in the terms, or very specifically explain that all card a player has can be looked at/played. It threw me off as "hands" almost never refers to something that's not in a player's hand - then add in the body part cards and "Kaiser Limbs' Hands" gets a little loopy. My biggest beef is the "collective phrase" requirements. Again, I know you're going for theme, but making people shout the phrase altogether as a requirement to win strikes me as a bad rule - mainly because of how subjective it is. What qualifies as simultaneous? What counts as the full correct phrase? Who wants to be the rear end in a top hat that points out you lost because one person didn't shout the final attack name? If you really want to include something like that, I would build it so that each player must say something individually in turn, "for great justice!", "the power of love!", etc, and if they do they get a bonus. That way you don't get into subjective timing issues, and it's a bonus rather than a penalty. It also means everybody has to be embarrassed individually. There's room for game content there as well - you could have a lot of different phrases that each offer unique bonuses, perhaps getting stronger the sillier the statement?
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Dec 17, 2013 04:27
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A couple of months ago I won a design contest to have one of my designs made into a professional prototype, artwork an all. Quantuum Magic (company in question) just sent me this as a sample and I'm just incredibly stoked. They are also kinda considering publishing it :shh: Edit; For comparison, by the way... 
Nemesis Of Moles fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 15:14
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What is it about?
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Dec 18, 2013 23:17
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The Leper Colon V posted:What is it about? Its kind of a mashup of Ghost Stories and House on Haunted Hill. I babbled about it in here before (and stole everyones great feedback wholesale), but basically its a resource management co-op game with some push-your-luck elements in the meta game. You and your buds enter the house with the goal of being the one to slay the most ghosts. Ghosts spawn each round and move toward players of matching color at the end of every round. Ghosts can only be exorcised with the right 'materials' (Incense, Holy Symbol, Blessed Salt, Prayer beads), which each player generates based on their character, or they can search for one as one of their actions. The co-op part is my fave bit. The game requires you to band together to survive in the early stages, but you have to shoot off on your own eventually to score those sweet ghost points. Picking your moment so you survive and make it out of the house (which is slowly falling apart every turn) is integral. Its my most 'successful' game in that several publishers are semi-interested. But that's been going on for a while now.
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Dec 18, 2013 23:29
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So I had to wipe my loving hard drive due to a power surge hitting during a Windows Update, but Final Attack! Print and Playtest kits have been sent out to those who volunteered. It contains the 92 cards, updated manual, and 4 audio tracks with which you can play the game. Discuss away!Crackbone posted:On second readthrough everything makes more sense. The hurdle, I think, is that you're using a lot of names that are just wierd and/or unweildy - Kaiser Limb Hands, Impact Rounds, Generic Systems, Evolution Analysis. I get that you're trying to evoke a bit of the bad translation/Engrish of the genre but it makes things a bit harder to follow. Not horrible, and like I said, more passes on the book may help greatly. And given there's no examples or pictures and I groked it that's a good sign. I changed "hands" to "decks" even though "Hands" aren't actually a limb ingame purely for you. On the collective shout, though, I absolutely refuse to budge on that particular aspect of the game. In practice it's not that hard, it's incredibly fun to do, simultaneous is pretty easy/obvious to achieve (although I could just put solid guidelines on what counts in the rulebook), and it's easily the most important part of the game. Shouting stupid attack and transformation names as a group is literally the reason why the game exists. edit: That probably came off way more hostile than intended. Trust me when I say that the "collective phrase requirements" are the backbone of the game and great in practice. I think you'll change your position once you actually play it. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Dec 19, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 04:59
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What's the smallest marker/token that's still pretty easy to handle? I want to mark damage onto playing card sized units, and was trying to work out if 18mm is too small. If it helps, I'm thinking of using glass/acrylic domed beads (like aquarium/florists beads) for weight, and I'm trying out a design which has little circular spaces to cover up when the unit gets damaged.
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Dec 20, 2013 11:00
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Quick field report on Final Attack!. We did 2.5 games, restarting a game because I hadn't had the chance to give the rules a thorough enough read before playing. Everyone loved the soundtrack (all big fans of Space Alert on a side note) and the group shouts. The first form rules also got everyone laughing quite a bit, particularly IT BURNS. We did agree that for the systems cards, the Power and Boost keywords should be switched around so Power is at the top of the card, which would have been a bit more intuitive for us. Some kind of incoming notification sound effect on the soundtrack would be nice as well. Other than it being too easy, we all had a great time with it!
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Dec 20, 2013 16:09
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If you find it too easy, lower the number of Events used (during setup). I actually had to jump through a lot of hoops to make the game playable for "normal" people; most of my playtesters have been Space Alert vets. The POWER/BOOST placements have come up, before. Your concerns have been added to my notes.
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Dec 20, 2013 16:14
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This might be of interest to the thread; http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/cones-of-dunshire-parks-and-recreation-game-oral-history.html quote:The idea was that this would be a kitchen-sink-type thing; it would have elements of Dungeons and Dragons where there were dice, and Catan elements where there would be actual hexes and resources. We all talked about our favorite games, like Dominion and Ticket to Ride, and what elements we could borrow from those. We just wanted to paint the picture that he had spent a week in a rabbit hole of gaming and come out the other end with no clear game — just like a hundred game pieces that vaguely fit together.
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Dec 20, 2013 16:34
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Oh, taser rates and everybody else who matters: If you do not finish a game, please post why. If you hosed up a rule and started over, let me know which rule and how you hosed it up. If you finish a game, I need to know how. If you won, please post what track was used and the final score (Will+HP, keep them separate for now). If you lost, please post the track, what Stage you died on, combination status, and remaining stats (Will/EN left when you died). You have my permission to increase the difficulty level at this point. On POWER/BOOST and how they're written... The visual indicator that BOOST is on top of POWER is supposed to mirror that of the EN chips (the bottom chip corresponds to POWER and all chips on top of it BOOST the System). This is something that came as intuitive to me, but a lot of people take the "basic to advanced" top-to-bottom reading other games use and immediately apply it to Final Attack! out of habit. The final versions of the cards will have POWER/BOOST/NEEDS/OOPS as quadrants (POWER to the left of BOOST) to both make room for artwork on the top half and to eliminate this conflict once and for all. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 17:31
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Broken Loose posted:If you find it too easy, lower the number of Events used (during setup). I actually had to jump through a lot of hoops to make the game playable for "normal" people; most of my playtesters have been Space Alert vets. Yea, we actually increased the difficulty on our second game (to 2 or 4, I forget) and still didn't have too much trouble, but one of the events we drew was the one that blocks an attack, so luck of the draw I suppose. Quadrants for the card rules sound perfect. Will definitely try and get more games in on Monday and keep notes.
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Dec 20, 2013 18:34
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Lichtenstein posted:Hey xopods, Sorry I've been gone from the thread for so long, I just saw this now! The answer is that this is basically true, but depends on the exact dimensions of the cards. Press sheets come in a few standard sizes, and cards come in a few standard sizes. Publishers prefer to use standard sized cards because it's easier for players to sleeve them and they can save money on the dies to cut them out... and of course you want to make the best possible use of your press sheets; you definitely don't want to have a few cards that fail to fit on the first sheet and force you to do a second, since that basically doubles your printing cost. So, for instance, my game Cash or Crash requires 10 cards per player and so we were originally going to make it a game for 2-6, because 60 cards is, as you say, the most common standard. But the publisher felt that a game which can handle up to 8 was a good selling point, and I felt that square cards were more aesthetically pleasing given the information that was going to be displayed on them, so we went with square cards and that let us fit 80 on the sheet. It meant he needed to pay a bit more to have a non-standard die made, but compared to printing twice as many sheets, it wasn't a big deal. I would guess that for publishers who do a lot of games in different shapes and sizes, the exact number of cards in a deck isn't going to be a deal maker or breaker because there are numerous different dimensions you can go with, so you've still got options if the game absolutely requires 80 or 90 cards. But if it's a publisher whose games all come in the same sized boxes and all have the same sized cards, it may be that they're saving money by standardizing everything and in that case, you're probably right that they'd reject a game if the deck size was slightly larger than (but not close to twice) the number of cards which fit on one of their standard sheets. Incidentally, there are solid game design reasons for the fact that you see so many 60-card decks as well, namely that it's the lowest common multiple of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. That's convenient both for game balance (making sure there are equal numbers of cards of various types) and for handling different numbers of players, especially if the game requires all the cards to be dealt out, or if e.g. it's a game where one card is drawn per turn and the game ends when the deck runs out, to ensure that everyone gets the same number of turns. xopods fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 21:07
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Death of Rats posted:What's the smallest marker/token that's still pretty easy to handle? I want to mark damage onto playing card sized units, and was trying to work out if 18mm is too small. Little plastic cubes like you have in King of Tokyo or Dungeon Lords are fine, and they're probably only 8mm or something. If you were going with discs, then yeah, 18mm or so is probably the smallest you'd want to go.
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Dec 20, 2013 21:19
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Yay, xopods is back  On the topic of decks of cards, what would you say is "too many" cards for a single deck? I know it's generally best to avoid having a million decks of cards, but how big should a deck be before a designer starts considering cutting down the size of it? I'm designing a board game based on traveling on Boston's subway lines (I talked about it some on last page) and cards are used to give players objectives and things to buy. I'm planning on having two decks - one for objectives, and then one for things to auction over and for random events. However, I feel like the second might be getting too beefy and may wind up going well past 60. Would it be better to trim it down to 60, or try to pad it up to 100? Or would 100 be too much?
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Dec 20, 2013 22:30
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Internet board game forums notwithstanding, most people don't sleeve their cards, which in turn means that most of them are riffle shuffling. For that reason, my personal upper limit on deck size would be the point at which a half deck is sufficiently hard to bend and hold that riffle shuffling becomes awkward and annoying. Which would be around 80-90 cards I'd guess. Above that, I'd be looking for ways to either scale back or to replace the cards with some other sort of component, e.g. a bag of tokens.
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Dec 21, 2013 18:55
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Ticket to Ride: Europe (with the full sized cards) has too many train cards for me to shuffle them in one go. Apparently there's 110 of them.
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Dec 22, 2013 18:20
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Morholt posted:Ticket to Ride: Europe (with the full sized cards) has too many train cards for me to shuffle them in one go. Apparently there's 110 of them. Yeah, games with giant decks exist... TtR is one example, Ascension is another, especially with expansions. Forcing players to resort to creative shuffling techniques is not the end of the world, but it's a pain and something you'd probably want to avoid if possible. If I were designing TtR for instance, I might have considered imposing some kind of hand size limit instead of using a massive deck to deal with the card-hoarding problem. I suspect that the reason they didn't is that a reasonable hand limit would have to be at least 12 cards or so, and forcing players to count to 12 all the time is at least as much of a pain as shuffling a big-rear end deck. It's not like a hand size of 5 or 7 or whatever, which you can see almost at a glance.
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Dec 22, 2013 19:14
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I have a map I'm working on for stealth-game (see my post history), inspired by HeroQuest's modular map, because that feels like it could solve a lot of possible issues. (Also, as a concept, it pleases me greatly.) So, what I've done is throw together a quick and dirty mock-up of how something like that might work. Edit Removed for being obsolete. Newer one below. My goal was to make every single room's pattern at least reasonably distinguishable for everyone, regardless of colorblind status. And, if this works, I'd have four colors that I know (with some tweaking), I could work in as 'primaries'. So, my question, which is a bit odd, I suppose, "Can I get some opinions on the color clarity of this map?" girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Dec 25, 2013 |
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Dec 25, 2013 05:27
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As a first step, have you tried running it through a colour blindness simulator like this one? http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ Depending on your operating system, there should also be various simulators or (photoshop) plugins that you can get to see the effects of your colour choices in real-time. If you don't have one already, I highly suggesting picking one up if you're into visual design since it can really help you avoid some huge (un)obvious traps down the road. As for your image, a brief look at it makes it seem like some of the chequered rooms might be a bit too similar — they all tend to resolve to some kind of grey + one other colour that depends on the blindness type.
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Dec 25, 2013 06:06
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Tippis posted:As for your image, a brief look at it makes it seem like some of the chequered rooms might be a bit too similar — they all tend to resolve to some kind of grey + one other colour that depends on the blindness type. I still feel like I might be able to manage slightly better, especially if I work patterns into it, but for something I just threw at the wall, I'm very happy with how it's working. Edit  Here's the full-sized prototype map. I added patterns to each of the colors, so they could be distinguished sufficiently even in grayscale. I did this so that I could leave the properly-different colors fooor...  Things like this. It's literally a screenshot of part of a map, zoomed in to double 'full' size. Threw it into the first colorblind simulator I could find that didn't insist on converting it to a JPG, and everything seems to work pretty well. The four 'path' colors are Red, Yellow, Pale Blue, and Grape, and all stand out acceptably well against each other and the backgrounds in every simulation I could find. They are of course just simulations, though, so actual feedback would be much appreciated. Fake Edit Yes, this is how I spent my Christmas Eve. And I enjoyed it. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Dec 25, 2013 |
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Dec 25, 2013 08:18
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OH MAN OH MAN. BRILLIANT IDEA. 2-5 PLAYER TRAITOR GAME Each player has 3 facedown cards in front of them. The cards have no text on their faces. 2 of them have pictures of poop. 1 of them has bubbles that represent a fart. There is a deck of cards that all have water on their faces. The start player is given a token or card to indicate that he is the start player. The players are all sitting in a jacuzzi. The start player draws 1 card from the water deck to "turn up the jets." The water card drawn serves as the jacuzzi hand. When it is your turn, you may exchange poop cards freely with the water cards from the jacuzzi hand. Also, once per turn (before you do any exchanges or look at the hand), you may turn up the jets which draws an additional water card to the water hand and then you shuffle the hand. If you do not turn up the jets, you are allowed to look at the hand while you do any poop/fart exchanges; otherwise you do it blind. At the end of your turn, you pass the jacuzzi hand to the next player. Immediately upon receiving the jacuzzi hand but before starting your turn, you may panic. If you panic, you identify somebody who you think pooped into the jacuzzi and then you spread the jacuzzi hand onto the table. Then a scoring round begins.
If the jacuzzi hand ever makes it back to the start player, automatically add 1 water card to it before his turn. If the water deck runs out, the next player in line must panic. I AM GOING TO PROTOTYPE THIS RIGHT NOW. EDIT: http://www.anthonyshine.com/misc/poopjacuzzicards.pdf HERE'S ENOUGH FOR 5 PLAYERS, SHITLORDS. GET CRACKING. EDIT 2: Updated the rules to fix some things. EDIT 3: Included 2P rules and full setup as follows: 2-Player rule: When you panic, you do not try to guess who pooped, but rather if your opponent has pooped more than you (read: if they have fewer poop cards in front of them than you do). Best 2 out of 3 rounds instead of first to 5 points. Setup: 2 Players - 3 Water Cards 3 Players - 5 Water Cards 4 Players - 7 Water Cards 5 Players - 9 Water Cards Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 09:56
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What's the point of adding water, just a timing mechanism?
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Jan 2, 2014 10:35
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The Leper Colon V posted:What's the point of adding water, just a timing mechanism? There's a limited amount of space to poop in. If you want to poop twice for maximum points, you have to add more water. Also, if you're adding water, since you have to exchange blindly there's a slight chance that you might exchange a poop with a poop (be constipated?) which makes for ridiculousness. And since everybody's going to want to poop, you're gonna want to add water, which is only riskier because that means you can't see what you're pooping out. It is also a timing mechanism. Hoooooly poo poo this game is actually kinda deep. edit: Also, keep in mind that turning up the jets in such a way that you run out of water forces the next player to panic, which is great if (A) they don't have any information and have to make a bad guess or (B) they're the only one who's been making any efforts to take a dump in the jacuzzi which forces them to blame innocent players and lose poop points. edit 2 unrelated: I'm crying and my face hurts from laughter. I'm trying to plot out example plays in my head but they usually involve rear end in a top hat players ripping gigantic farts into the hot tub in an effort to make the other flinch Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 10:51
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You need to talk to your publisher. Because seriously, if there's one thing that can top Coup, Love Letter, and Click Clack Lumberjack as the king of opener games. It's gonna be something called "Poop In The Jacuzzi!" (Which, might I add, works as both a statement of panic AND an imperative.) Edit I can actually see the box now. It's got a picture of, obviously, a Jacuzzi. Three people are leaping out of it frantically, but the fourth is just sitting there, looking pleased with himself. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 13:20
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Are the fart cards there to fake people out?
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Jan 2, 2014 16:43
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I'm laughing so hard on the inside (at work). Brilliant. Make it. Do it. Sell it for 10 bucks a pop/poop.
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Jan 2, 2014 16:45
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My issue with the game is that the fixed, symmetric setup means that most of the choices made by the players (turn up the jets or not, how many cards to swap) should always be the same in the first orbit for a given player position, with only the decision of whether or not to include a fart to be made probabilistically. It's only once you've gone around the table that the contents of a player's hand start to impact their decisions, and that you can start to deduce things based on that... and yet, the round may often end before that happens, because it's also necessary to panic occasionally to keep people honest. Panicking should never be a profitable move in the first orbit, but it should be about break-even if people are usually pooping but sometimes farting, and they likewise want to make sure they're keeping their poop-to-fart ratios such that they're about breaking even when your panic frequency is taken into account. I started doing a bunch of analysis of the various options, but then I realized that the basic objective in the first orbit is just to make sure that the statistical odds of your poop being in the pool are a touch over 60%. Anything lower and you're passing up pooping opportunities, while if it goes over 67% the next player can gain points on average simply by panicking every time. There are multiple ways of achieving the golden poop ratio, but usually the best choice is going to be turning up the jets and exchanging two, either a shart or a double-poop. Player 1 has no choice. There's only one jacuzzi card and he's always going to swap with it, and fart like 36-38% or so, poop 62-64%. Player 2 has to turn up the jets, or else he's only going to be able to rid himself of a poop 36-38% of the time, which isn't enough. So he turns up the jets. He can now either swap a single card, or two. On analysis, he should always swap two, and make it a shart around 60% of the time and a double-poop 40%. Since the shart results in getting P1's poop about 63% of the time (thus leaving P2 with 2 poops still), and the double-poop always results in P2 getting rid of some poop, that gives us a likelihood of 40% + 60% * 37% = 62.2%. Player 2 could also exchange one, and make it a poop 90% of the time to achieve a similar poop probability, but this is inferior, because it only ever gets rid of one poop, while the two-card exchange will allow you to get rid of both poops about 15% of the time. Player 3, meanwhile, doesn't care whether you've got one or two poops in the pool in deciding whether to panic, only whether or not there's any in there. From Player 3's perspective now, it's very likely there's one poop in the pool, pretty likely that there are two, and extremely unlikely that there are none. I don't feel like crunching any more numbers, but chances are that his optimal strategy is going to be to turn up the jets and swap two as well, choosing between the shart and the double-poop with probabilities that you could work out mathematically, again. Furthermore, I suspect that the water gets considerably poopier as you go along and therefore, that your odds of getting two poops back when you exchange go up. With enough players, that would mean that the last players to act in the first orbit could simply turn up the jets and then double-poop every time, and the odds that they got two poops back would be sufficient that it still wouldn't be correct for the next player to panic. ----- Now, it's true that the second orbit seems like it might get more interesting, as players will have different hands, and different information about the contents of the jacuzzi, and you might be able to deduce who has pooped and who hasn't based on their actions. On the other hand, there's no reason to want to have exactly one poop, since you lose just as much if someone calls panic on you, but don't gain as much if you get away with it. Thus, I feel like the only correct thing to do on the second orbit is for everyone to peek at the cards instead of turning up the jets, and then exchange so as to leave themselves with zero poop 62-64% of the time, and two poop 36-38% of the time, again just trying to make sure that it's not favorable for the next guy to panic on you. ----- Maybe you could improve on the game by breaking the symmetry of the initial setup and increasing hidden information by having one or more polite bathers who start with one fart, one water and one clean bathing suit, which can't be exchanged and is kept to identify themselves at the end of the round (so that you know that guy didn't poop because he didn't have any to begin with). They'd need to have slightly different scoring rules, and I'm not sure what they'd be... maybe they gain points if accused incorrectly but lose points if they end up with any poop on themselves at the end of the round. Maybe the farts should also differ from clean water in some way. Perhaps you score bonus points if you have no farts AND no poop at the end of the round, so you want to collect the clean water cards if you can, or something. xopods fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 17:23
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I think I'd support making the starting hands asymmetrical, but not sure how that could work with the nature of the game. Always having the same starting cards means players could just work stuff out like xopods did. I like the idea of passing a hand around and trying to figure out who swapped what cards, but I'm not sure how I feel about the current setup? Have you tried having the first player start with maybe 3-5 water cards? Could complicate things just a bit more so that first round isn't quite so obvious. Also, since you don't look at the cards before panicking, what's the reasoning behind panicking besides pure chance calculation? I haven't playtested the game yet, but I'd imagine that it'd be more interesting to try and work out in your head who may have pooped in the jacuzzi based off of the current hand after you've seen it, rather than just guessing.
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Jan 2, 2014 18:41
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Exactly. For a game of deduction and deception to work, you need to be able to infer something about another player's information from his actions. Like, in poker, you might make the same move with multiple types of hands (e.g. your bet might be a bluff, it might be a semibluff, or it might be for value) but you're not always making the same moves with the same probability regardless of your cards, and since your cards change, so too will your likelihood of choosing various actions. Thus, not every hand plays out the same, and it's possible to infer the likelihood of your opponent's various possible holdings based on the line he takes through the hand. Here you can't do that, because it's always correct for e.g. the second player to swap two. Which two he swaps is what matters, but you have precisely zero information about which he chose, only the likelihood with which he should have chosen each if he's playing correctly. If you had at least two types of player with different starting hands and different optimal starting moves, but each of which would like to be mistaken for the other, then you're starting to have a game. Like if the honest, non-poopy bathers would prefer to peek and/or swap only one card so as to minimize their chances of getting poop on them, but for whatever reason wants to be mistaken for a pooper (e.g. because they want to get incorrectly accused), then when you see someone peek and swap one, it might be an honest bather doing what's best for him or a pooper trying to come off as an honest bather, and if you see someone swap two, they might be a pooper playing his optimal line or an honest bather trying to pretend to be a pooper.
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Jan 2, 2014 19:34
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Thematically, wouldn't it make the most sense for players to NOT want to poop in the pool, but if they do then instead blame it on another player? It seems like right now players want to poop as much as they can, without being caught. What I'm thinking is players are dealt a hand of, say, 4 random pool toy cards, and then the Jacuzzi starts as 6 random toys. There would be various types of toys, each worth different amounts of points. The first player swaps a card (or maybe has the option to add a toy to the Jacuzzi from a central deck) to try and eventually get 4 of the same toy. The first player then adds a poop card (worth negative points) to his personal hand and passes the Jacuzzi on. This would mean the game would start pretty tame with players just trying to get specific toys, but as the game goes on it'll be more and more likely that someone will try to get rid of a poop card, since if you wait too long and get too many poops you won't earn any points at all. If someone gets all 4 of the same toy, maybe they can reveal it to instantly cash in those points, but then lose points for each poop card. Or when someone notices a poop card, they can panic and accuse someone - since everyone's had the same number of turns, you know how many poops they SHOULD have. If they're short one, then you earn points for all of your toy cards, regardless of whether or not they're the same. If you're wrong, then the person you accused would earn their points. The major downside I could see to this system is it waters down your theme some (  ) and with big groups of players, it'd be more difficult to try and figure out who took what cards since the last information you had on the Jacuzzi was 4-5 turns old, so you'd still kinda have the problem of it being more of a guess as to who dropped the duke, but at least there's be more choices to the primary game. Players would still want to get rid of poop, but pooping in the Jacuzzi wouldn't be their primary goal, and would be fairly risky. But accusing another player could be risky as well.
CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 20:52
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It's also a bit complicated. Part of what I like about Jacuzzipoop as-is is that you can fit the rules on a business card.
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Jan 2, 2014 21:57
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The Leper Colon V posted:It's also a bit complicated. Part of what I like about Jacuzzipoop as-is is that you can fit the rules on a business card. I guess, but that's probably just cus I always wind up vomiting up too many words. Essentially it's just "swap cards from a central hand to try and get 4 of the same card to score points, but each turn you get poop cards worth negative points - try to get rid of your poops without getting caught"
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Jan 2, 2014 22:05
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xopods posted:I started doing a bunch of analysis of the various options, but then I realized that the basic objective in the first orbit is just to make sure that the statistical odds of your poop being in the pool are a touch over 60%. Anything lower and you're passing up pooping opportunities, while if it goes over 67% the next player can gain points on average simply by panicking every time. There are multiple ways of achieving the golden poop ratio, but usually the best choice is going to be turning up the jets and exchanging two, either a shart or a double-poop. Maybe I'm not understanding something about the game, but can you really run probabilities like this? If a big part of winning is not doing what your opponents think you're doing isn't the concept of an average action completely meaningless? My biggest worry was kind of opposite of your 'ideal action is always exchange two' idea--isn't exchanging two too early just an easy way for someone to call you out on making GBS threads the pool? Both sharts and doubleshits leave you vulnerable to panic accusations.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:16
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You're not considering players who (A) don't swap ANY cards during their turn and/or (B) players who swap the same card multiple times as a bluff.
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Jan 2, 2014 22:37
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OtspIII posted:Maybe I'm not understanding something about the game, but can you really run probabilities like this? If a big part of winning is not doing what your opponents think you're doing isn't the concept of an average action completely meaningless? Read up on mixed strategy equilibria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Mixed_strategy Perfect play still exists in games of hidden information, it simply requires that you play probabilistically. For instance, in poker, the correct move in most positions won't be something like "always call," or "always fold," but rather "call 70% of the time, fold 30% of the time." Ideally, to be unexploitable, you choose randomly with those probabilities, but in practice humans are bad at behaving randomly so you'll make the call or not based on gut, though if you're a good player you'll still end up calling 70% and folding 30% in the long run (in this hypothetical spot, of course... the weighting of options obviously depends on your cards, the bet, and how the action played out). If you call too reliably, you get value-towned, if you fold too reliably, you become a target for bluffs. Same thing here. There's a certain amount of pooping you can get away with and your opponents shouldn't panic on you or they'll be wrong too often, but if you go over that, then they'll notice and start panicking at you until you adjust down. But if you don't poop enough, then you'll fall behind those who are pooping optimally. Broken Loose posted:You're not considering players who (A) don't swap ANY cards during their turn and/or (B) players who swap the same card multiple times as a bluff. It doesn't matter. The game is very simple when you look at the fundamental mechanics: (1) You want to poop as much as possible if you can do it without getting caught. (2) You don't want other people to call panic on you. (3) You only want to call panic on other people if you think it's sufficiently likely that they've pooped that you'll come out ahead or at least break even in doing so. Since you get 1 point for being right and lose 2 for being wrong, you only want to call panic on someone who's 67% likely to have pooped. Therefore, as a pooper who wants to avoid being called out, the long term winning strategy, for the first time around the table anyway, is to have your poop in the pool just slightly less than 67% of the time. It's therefore not worth it for someone to panic on you, and you'll get away with it. If they insist on calling panic on you anyway, then they're going to be losing points too - that is the unfortunate nature of multiplayer games, that sometimes your optimal play can be ruined by someone else's suboptimal play. Meanwhile, since the penalties for getting caught don't depend on whether you pooped once or twice, there is never any reason to have one poop in the pool if you can have two. So whatever mixed strategy you choose should also allow you to do as much double-pooping as possible. xopods fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 22:54
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Don't get me wrong, I think the basic idea is great, but in its current form the correct mixed strategies are scarcely more complex than rock-paper-scissors. It needs maybe a bit more of a position space, and probably some way of getting additional information, or of forcing players to give some up. For instance, some mechanic which had players guessing about how much poop was in the pool as well as who it came from would help. Like, maybe you have a second choice, instead of calling panic on a specific person, you could also call "general panic." If you do that, and there's at least as many poops in the pool as there are players in the game, then everyone who double-pooped loses points, while if there's less poop, then you lose. That would also fix the "no reason to single poop" problem, since single-poopers get away with it in a general panic situation.
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Jan 2, 2014 23:08
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xopods posted:Read up on mixed strategy equilibria. I think you're totally correct in saying that good players will inevitably average out to a very specific ratio of card plays, but I just don't think it actually means anything in moment to moment play. There's at least one big difference between this and poker--the probability that you'll win an action is based 100% on the actions of other players, not the random distribution of cards. True randomness is impossible for a human to achieve without a physical aid, and if you have that concept of "oh, my last five moves were 40% fart, 60% poo poo--this time the optimal strategy is clearly to poo poo" you're just going to become more predictable, not less. This is a yomi game, where you have a strategy (poo poo the jacuzzi), a counter-strategy (panic), and a counter-counter-strategy (don't poo poo the jacuzzi)--understanding the weighted values of each of your possible actions is an important baseline to being able to play well, but it isn't the only (or even the most important) part of skilled play. Edit: xopods posted:Don't get me wrong, I think the basic idea is great, but in its current form the correct mixed strategies are scarcely more complex than rock-paper-scissors. It needs maybe a bit more of a position space, and probably some way of getting additional information, or of forcing players to give some up. Ooh, adding too many mechanics is really dangerous for a game like this, but something simple like that 'general panic' rule could be exactly what this game needs.
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Jan 2, 2014 23:17
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I guess that means it's time to introduce the variant rule that I thought of in the car this morning! If you have 3 farts facedown during scoring, +2 points Anyway, xopods posted:Since you get 1 point for being right and lose 2 for being wrong, you only want to call panic on someone who's 67% likely to have pooped. Therefore, as a pooper who wants to avoid being called out, the long term winning strategy, for the first time around the table anyway, is to have your poop in the pool just slightly less than 67% of the time. It's therefore not worth it for someone to panic on you, and you'll get away with it. If they insist on calling panic on you anyway, then they're going to be losing points too - that is the unfortunate nature of multiplayer games, that sometimes your optimal play can be ruined by someone else's suboptimal play. It goes like this: Pooping twice counters the risk of a bad panic. However, it comes with the risk of giving free points to another player. The water deck is small enough that it's realistic to attempt to force a bad panic. Whether or not it's worth it doesn't matter if you're out of water. There's not enough water for everybody to poop at once. I'm not understanding how you're including hand and deck size into your calculations. In order for EVERYBODY to poop, people have to start turning up jets, which is risky in of itself because you're swapping cards blind at that point AND it provides greater control to the next player who wants to force a panic. xopods posted:For instance, some mechanic which had players guessing about how much poop was in the pool as well as who it came from would help. Like, maybe you have a second choice, instead of calling panic on a specific person, you could also call "general panic." If you do that, and there's at least as many poops in the pool as there are players in the game, then everyone who double-pooped loses points, while if there's less poop, then you lose. That would also fix the "no reason to single poop" problem, since single-poopers get away with it in a general panic situation. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 23:17
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So help me god, I am going to run this game on the forums right now. xopods, I want to see if your numbers will take. I need 2-4 more players.
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Jan 2, 2014 23:23
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