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I'll also chime in with my usual point that Team 7 Wonders is a lot better game than regular. Running two kingdoms, and deciding how to split strong incoming cards between you, means that there's very rarely "autopilot plays". It becomes a very interesting and quite social game.quote:It's a weird combination of too random and not random enough. Everything is fixed bar the opening hands and the Wonders, but if the hands don't match the Wonders or fall in the wrong place you can be screwed. 7 Wonders holds up to reasonably serious play - yes, you can open bad hands or stumble into good combos, but it's not like Magic where someone just "opens a bomb" and wins. Drafting is a skill intensive mechanic; if you keep an eye on the table, and a have a basic knowledge of what cards exist, you can outperform people pretty well. My biggest luck complaint would be with regards to Guilds (and to a lesser extent, Leaders). Lots of guilds are only going to do well for people in certain scenarios, and that can skew the draft somewhat when they show up or don't. The leaders, for their part, are generally just not as well balanced as the main card body; they're also more prone to "big combo" play, which is unsatisfying given that you pick them at the very beginning. In terms of variety, though, Leaders and Guilds are both great. And in general the game plays very different not just based on Wonders, but on the whole combination of Wonders. You play very different sitting next to Giza than you would sitting next to Rhodes - and that all cascades out into a lot of variety. We've slowed down playing 7 Wonders, but it's a really strong game.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:54
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quote:King of Tokyo/New York? Hard to find a 10-year old that doesn't like big monsters and smashing stuff, though it might be a little too complicated for the 6-year old. My 6 year old plays King of New York. He doesn't get everything perfectly (and I have to explain each card as it comes up), but he definitely likes playing. On the "recent games for young kids" front, I'll also say that he really liked Machi Koro (and could actually play it quite well, though his strategy was very static).
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Dec 16, 2014 17:14
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quote:It's the sort of thing you only really want to do against an AI, because I can only imagine how annoyed human opponents would get watching you take ten turns in a row while they can't respond in any way and, indeed, aren't going to get another turn of their own at that point. I really like the Agricola app for this. I very rarely play it normally against the AI (the AI is kind of OK at 2 players, but is really weak after that), and even if I do I never play fair. I just repeat the draft until I get a bonkers combo. Like, with enough cards you get so you can build rooms for 1 wood each (and then you add plasterer + animal tamer so you can have a weird clay zoo) - or you ultra-stack one space so that every time you "take a grain" it's 5 grains, 2 vegetables, a food, you plow a field and build fences. The other thing I like doing is seeing how bad I can starve the AI's family. You can't really make it happen consistently (sometimes the AI plays conservatively), but if they get an aggressive card like "Lover" or "Wet Nurse", you can hand them all the rope they want, and then murder them by hoovering up food (even more effective if you buy out all the cooking improvements!). A bit ago, I had the Apprentice AI end the game with 24 begging cards (-72 points). In a way it's really a dumb way to spend time, but for some reason it's super entertaining. I just wish they'd release more decks (it's just E, I, and K available at the moment). jmzero fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 21:39
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quote:If those hands were reversed, I'd have won. If a 5 or a 10 comes in the next three rolls, I get my wheat and I win. Otherwise I lose. Those are absolutely the typical endings of those games. But it kind of ignores how we got there. Personally, the big problems I see in Catan: 1. The initial settlement placement draft thing is incredibly swingy - and often person C, picking last, will essentially be choosing whether person A or B will start with a big advantage (by having lots of space, or being trapped without good expansion options). Often this decision is going to be hard to predict, but will have a huge effect on the game. 2. The randomness creates a lot of hard thresholds through the game. 1 more brick and you can build a town... but don't get it and someone else wins the race to a spot and you're screwed. In many other games, randomness makes for smaller swings (eg. I have to buy the 4 cost OK thing instead of the 5 cost thing I wanted). Here they're big, and... 3. ...those thresholds are magnified through snowballing. People in the lead get more income, and drastically more options on what to buy and where to expand. You don't get the kind of trades you see, in say Agricola where buddy got to grow family first, but at least that meant I got the big pile of wood or whatever. Winners "take all" way too much in Catan - and don't get any real extra pressure except via... 4. ...politics! Because the deck is so stacked in leaders' favor, for the game to work at all people have to play politically - and that leads to wanky VP hiding, n-way ties at 9 points, and all the other boredom of a political game. What would I change in Catan? 1. Some different way of managing expansion. As it stands, especially as you add players, the game quite often becomes a land-grab race, and those thresholds (which are often completely out of the players control... you just have to hope you get wood) dictate far too much of the outcome. Lots of games have found a way to manage this kind of resource conflict in area based games (eg. you can build past me, but for an extra cost or something). 2. Tune down the politics. Change to a Glen More market-based-trading sort of model. Trading can be fun... but it slows down the game and distracts from the part of the game that's not a political screwfest. Have the robber be less localized screwage and more about changing the game for everyone - eg. when the robber is on this spot, that means everyone pays more to build roads (or whatever). People being able to tune the environment is fun interaction. Deciding to screw Bob is lame in a multiplayer game. 3. Move purchases to some kind of market/auction or something - or limit players to one purchase a turn and always have "something" available. This means players way behind aren't completely snowballed out of existence - they have options; maybe they don't get what they wanted, but they at least get a dev card or something. (eg. Look at how Machi Koro, a game with many similar mechanics, functions here). If the intent is to have this game be about risk management, then let that actually work by giving trailing players the kind of "Hail Mary" options that might luck them back into the game. Catan was a very important game, and a lot of the innovation in modern games can likely be traced back to people looking at Catan and seeing what worked and didn't. But I don't see much reason to recommend it in this day and age. quote:Nothing you have said addresses the central problem with Catan. In most games, both bad luck and bad choices can result in you losing. In Catan, bad luck and bad decisions can result in you being unable to play the game. Well yeah, this. jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 22:04
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quote:Jmzero, of your 4 points, the first three very obviously apply to Dominion. Most games will have some amount of all this stuff. Games will all have thresholds of some sort. Some snowballing should absolutely exist; otherwise what does it mean to be in the lead? Even non-political games like Dominion have a certain amount of politics. None of this is absolute - it's about degree, and it has to be evaluated in context of how a game plays out. As to the specific points: your third point is totally a valid complaint about Dominion. It's very much a game of positive feedback. I think that's perhaps its biggest design problem (meanwhile its biggest popularity problem is that its dry as hell). On thresholds: In Dominion, sure there will be some kingdoms where $5 is awesome and $4 is much worse (and there might not be a corresponding inequality at $2/$3), but the gameplay ideal in Dominion is that there wouldn't be a huge threshold here. That is to say, in a "good" setup, you should usually want a potential $4 option only somewhat less than the $5 - and ideally there'd be more one than viable-looking one option at many of the price points (and Silver is often a fine consolation prize). Obviously sometimes $7 vs $8 is going to decide the game, but ideally that luck should only be deciding close games - and before that end, hopefully there's many opportunities for ideal and unideal hands for all the players. Dominion isn't perfect (and I don't play it often, honestly), but in its design it was clearly meant to be a game of small thresholds and small swings. I like small swings: if randomness distinguishes between two players who have generally played reasonable strategies, that seems right to me. If anything, I wouldn't mind Dominion being more swingy; it would help mitigate its tendency to snowball. But if, at times, players are locked out of a Dominion game by their initial draws, that means Dominion has a problem - not that it's desirable to have that sort of luck based swing in a game. The thresholds in Catan, meanwhile, seem more stark and more permanent. If you build on a spot we were racing to, my "next best option" might be terrible (or non-existent, as the game goes on), and that might have been the only important race for me that game (ie. there may not be later chances for that luck to fall the other way). There's lots of dice rolls in Catan; but in many games only a few will really be critical. Catan feels very swingy to me, and when Swingy + Random get together, I tend to have a bad time. But I'll admit I'm no master of either game. jmzero fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 23:25
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quote:I've watched every single member of my gaming group who liked it go from red hot to ice cold on that game in the space of a year. Every single one. We're in much the same boat. We enjoyed the discovery phase of Sentinels - and this took a while, as between us we got all the expansions and what not. It's been loaned out a lot, some times we were running 2 or 3 games at once right after we got it, and a lot of people have got some enjoyment out of it... overall, I don't think it's a bad thing to buy, as long as you have a bunch of people who'll want to give it a try. But none of us have really gone back to it, other than when new stuff comes out. I think for many groups, it'll be mostly a discovery game, where you try out the different characters/villains a couple time to see how they tick, and then put it away. Honestly, there's lots of "good games" we got much less value out of. For us, Tragedy Looper was a discovery game, where everyone wanted to play it 2 or 3 times, but nobody stuck with it. Lots of better designed games (eg. Trajan) have ridden the shelf much more than Sentinels. But for all the good (and potential) of Sentinels, I don't know how anyone wouldn't find it fiddly. It varies (with the boss/characters/environments), but at its worst it is the fiddliest game I think I've ever played - and it's not unusual you spend more time resolving the villain's turn than you do on all the player turns together. The frustrating part is that most of this is unnecessary waste - the effects are seldom complicated, the time is just in reading the paragraphs of text on all the cards (because nothing is standardized or done with icons or keywords - and because every stupid generic henchmen works slightly differently in terms of when they attack or whatever you can't even just skim). jmzero fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 02:32
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quote:In the context of other games I've played, like Mansions of Madness, Arkham Horror, Mage Knight, and particularly virtually any CCG, Sentinels of the Multiverse just doesn't register as particularly fiddly. You're resolving one card at a time and most of the time there are only a few applicable modifiers if any. I'm apparently better at remembering these than some people because I've never found the need to use the various markers they included in my Kickstarter copy (aside from health tokens), but it's still not like trying to decipher an attack on Volkare's army in Mage Knight, or untangle a priority chain in Magic. It's also not particularly difficult to understand why villain turns would take longer, because there's usually more characters acting than during a given player's turn. I think you're confusing "fiddly" with "complicated" (or at least what I'm trying to say with "fiddly" in this instance"). Fiddly means that you're spending time maintaining or evaluating the board state (the kinds of thing a computer would do, or help you do, in a computer version). MtG can get complicated, but is seldom fiddly. Even when the board is packed with stuff, their deft use of keywords, design consistency, and text templating mean that you can read the board state quickly and can usually resolve effects without much diggling. If anything, Magic is impressively not fiddly - for example, other similar games make you track damage with little counters on each creature, while very seldom would you have to do that in Magic. On the other hand, Mage Knight I would agree is somewhat fiddly - but I'd still say it has a better "deciding what to do"/"resolving that on the board" ratio than Sentinels does. Arkham Horror.. well, there, maybe that's a game that's more fiddly than Sentinels. But even if Arkham Horror was universally beloved (it's not, and its fiddliness is one of the prime reasons) it being fiddly wouldn't necessarily excuse another game from having the same flaw. quote:(And icons would be actively harder to parse, as far as I'm concerned.) It doesn't need to have some complicated symbology language, or replace the text - it just needs consistent callouts for things like "BEGINNING OF VILLAIN TURN" (so you can quickly scan all the cards in play and resolve those effects) or "TRIGGERED EFFECT" (so you can quickly find where that bit was when somebody does the thing). Or maybe have a mark on cards that you need to search the deck for so they stand out a bit. This isn't rocket science, just basic usability. I mean, I'm sure this pain lessens once you have played the same villain/environment 10 times and remember crap... but it's crazy bad when you're just starting - and it makes these phases take way longer to resolve. Even if they just followed the Magic pattern of Keyword (what the keyword does) it would make the game much faster to play. You could also say some of this is just a symptom of a bigger problem: they needed more design space so they could do something besides spam cards and modifiers. quote:It's also not particularly difficult to understand why villain turns would take longer, because there's usually more characters acting than during a given player's turn I didn't mean the villain took longer than one player, I meant they take longer than all the players combined. Quite often your turn in Sentinels can be done in 10 seconds - especially if you're pumper truck'ing (eg. every turn you're using your power to make sure Jinx isn't going to get a "lucky" card next draw); meanwhile, many villains are crazy spam happy. Worse, sometimes the environments can get out of hand, and you're spending 2 minutes simulating some gun battle between outlaws, counting how many bits of cover are out right now, and in the end it often doesn't affect the "real" game much at all. Of all the games I've played more than a few times, Sentinels has the worst "time playing my turn" to "time spent fiddling/watching" ratio. That doesn't mean it's a crap game - but I think it'd be better if it was streamlined. jmzero fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 06:13
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quote:Has anyone had experience using alliances with 7+ players? The more experienced amongst our group had no enthusiasm for playing with them, so we left them out. The only time I ever used them was in a 4 player game, which ended with the two most powerful empires just joining together and leaving the rest of us to wither. I decided after that not to have them at all unless there were significantly more players. With even number of players, I prefer Eclipse with 2 pre-set permanent alliances, each alliance having one side of the starting map. Having a teammate allows you to specialize from the start a bit, and the potential team synergies/matchups mean the game has even more potential variety. Ad-hoc alliances quite often end up with the game anti-climaxing mid-way through, somehow; whereas if this happens with set teams (ie. one team is way behind) then the situation is more resolved and one team can just concede.
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Jan 6, 2015 18:37
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quote:Turns out Tigris is going to have plastic in it after all I would like to be mad, but the board actually looks pretty nice. I don't prefer it, but I don't think it's terrible. I was expecting them to   it out at least a bit.
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Jan 7, 2015 21:55
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Played a game of Tiny Epic Kingdoms. At 3 players, at least, it feels much too Risk-ish, with combat being a real drain for both parties; it feels like too often the winner is going to be "whoever got involved in the least fighting" (certainly was the case today, where I won by not participating in anything and stockpiling mana). That works and you can play a game like that, but it feels like a shame as there's other more interesting stuff in the game that this tramples over. It also feels like a real step back compared to other recent games, many of which have put in useful effort to avoid this problem. Combat sucks mechanically in Eclipse, but participating in early combat doesn't automatically screw you. You get VP on both sides, and if you lose you effectively get some "free" production. In Kemet, there's VP going around so that combat is less negative-sum, and there's lots of rules to make combat less crushing for the loser. Going even further, you have stuff like Tash Kalar, where losing some "dudes" often doesn't feel like a loss at all. In all these games, combat feels like a normal move rather than something spiteful/desperate that will end up hurting you both. It feels like we've reached a point where a direct-interaction game needs do be doing something about this problem, even if it's not fully effective, or its just not worth playing. As it stands, we'll probably play TEK a couple more times to try the races and then sell it. jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jan 7, 2015 |
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Jan 7, 2015 22:22
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quote:how is side B overpowered in the late game, it's one stage. One. And while it's a very good stage, it's still only one stage. It's strong precisely because it's a single stage. Wonder'ing cards is sometimes handy for denial - but especially as player counts go up, denial tends to be overrated. In particular, Wonder-denying science is overrated (just build Science yourself, even if you're not focusing on it - and this is easy with Mannekin since you'll need grays anyway). With many civs, it's quite often that I'm wonder'ing a card I would have liked to build, especially when I'm resource heavy and can build most cards. You feel this with, say, Gaza, where you have the resources to build lots of stuff, but often you can't proceed with your stages until late Age II (because you're bottlenecked on something). At that point, Wonder'ing cards is often competing with other good potential uses (and sometimes, particularly in III, with cards that are outright scoring more). I mean, if you split Mannekin into two stages - one for 7 coins, one for 7 VP, would that somehow be better? Of course not; even though those would both be reasonably solid stages, having them together saves you a card at the time in the game when you need to be maximizing efficiency. I also think you're underrating the single military. Having a potential military play makes life harder for the guy on your left coming into the end of 2. No longer can he count on completely cutting off military, and if you can keep 1 shield ahead you'll often intimidate him out of a fight because he knows you're likely to Wonder whether you need the shield or not (you feel this "potential military" threat even stronger with Rhodes, but even having 1 shield on tap is definitely still significant). Similarly, 7 coins at the end of Age II is often huge; it means you can Leader flexibly while still being able to deal with potential coin attacks/resource-buying-needs at the beginning of III. I don't think Mannekin B is overpowered. It forces you into a pretty narrow build (you need to go resource heavy, which if you miss you're really boned), but it's not at all underpowered. It's best if there isn't another civ that's going to go resource heavy near to your right, so you can maximize your big blues/guilds in III. I'd say it's kind of B+ tier. jmzero fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 04:16
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quote:Especially true if you go against the grain, so to speak. My only interaction with using those forums was to jump in and defend a friend of mine who posted some negative thoughts on Dead of Winter when it first came out. I used to spend a little time there printing and playing games, and writing honest feedback. I often had more negative than positive things to say, because the "Game Designer Badge" squad is terrible at design, and usually the response I'd get would be: 1. "Well, thank you for your OPINION  ", from the author in the forum2. Four more people saying I don't get understand the subtle flavors of the game 3. Eight people, including the author, PM'ing me to ask why I'm such a jerk Now, if I'm tempted into posting there somehow, I usually just cut to the chase and straight-up aggro troll people.
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Jan 14, 2015 00:04
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quote:But also I'm terrible at explaining games so it's probably my fault. It mostly doesn't matter how bad someone is at teaching, 2 people explaining is almost always worse. If someone tries to "help" me explain a game, I usually just let them finish by themselves because team-teaching is bloody awful for everyone involved. And if someone else is explaining, I'll shut up unless they are actually wrong in an important way (usually means they don't know the rules well enough to be explaining) or until they're absolutely finished and they've missed something important. As to methodology, I think it really depends on the game. There's some games where I think it's best to explain the overall objectives, make new guy go last, and just start playing; they'll figure it out (eg. Lords of Waterdeep, Castles of Burgundy); games like this are often loose enough that they can be legitimately "played to win" on a first try, even if it's not terribly likely. Other games are best with a full, up-front "here's all the rules" (eg. Tash Kalar), with the understanding that new players can fully grasp the rules before they start, even if their actual play is poor. Other games are best if you just say "this is a practice game, don't worry about winning we'll just work through your turns together", and start playing (eg. Mage Knight), with the new player unlikely to get all the rules to start or be competitive. Games like Mage Knight do create problems with some people though - I can't stand people who insist on knowing every single possible rule and variation before they'll start, or who'll complain about something they didn't fully understand part way through their first game (often the real problem here is the "teacher helper" who wants to keep going on "rules you missed" before the first turn). But for the complaining new player, the implied complaint of - "oh, I totally would be winning my first game of Agricola if I'd just known about possibility 1245" - can really ruin a game for everyone. There's lots of games where a full rules explanation (and definitely a "normal tactics" summary) is going to take a lot less time and make a lot more sense if it's done part way through (or after) a casual first play through.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:53
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quote:Yeah, you're right, gently caress game store owners. I'm torn, because I like the game store owners I know... but the good things they provide for me (eg. my FLGS has a Pokemon League I go to with my 6 year old) have become increasingly disconnected with how they make money (selling games). When I was starting in the hobby, it worked out that I could trade "paying higher prices" for the "convenience of seeing all this stuff available, getting advice, and getting the game I want right now". Everybody won. Now that there isn't such a backlog of games I want, and I don't need help picking a game, the trade is "wait an unknown long time to try a new game I want, then pay more for it", for the benefit of "feel like I'm supporting a good store". It doesn't feel sustainable (and, indeed, the store seems to brink on collapse whenever Magic has a dull year). I'd much rather they shifted to a different business model - something more like a board game cafe where "what I get from them" and "how they make money" line up a bit better. Right now they do kind of a half-arse job of the things that matter to me (providing a fun place to try/play games), but I can't really blame them because those things don't make them money (not that anything is providing them all that much money - again, I don't know how the owner has stuck it out for 25+ years). I also have no idea what the economics of a boardgame cafe look like - but if I'm paying money out of a desire to see a business stay afloat, I'd rather that business was actually catering to what I want, rather than having that as an advertising sideline that doesn't get much attention or budget. jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 22:15
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quote:How is paperback? It looks interesting It's quite good - I've brought it out in a lot of different settings, and it's usually quite popular. We usually play with a "simultaneous play" variant where you all take your turn at once, with the first person to complete their word getting first shot at a "one-big deck" market. We also up the starting hand size to six. These changes make the game go quite quick, and makes the focus a little more on building big words. With the base game, you can quite often do well making repetitive short words if you're good at deckbuilding in general (which doesn't really suit what we're looking for with this game).
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Jan 15, 2015 06:20
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quote:The biggest load of bullshit was the diplomacy though, with no shared victory it seemed like there was little reason not to throw away your ally at the first moment you could take advantage of it. With an actual alliance, there is shared victory and there is a VP penalty for breaking an alliance. I think alliances were just in the expansion (I haven't played base Eclipse in a while...)? Diplomacy is a more temporary, breakable arrangement by design.
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Jan 20, 2015 07:21
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quote:Isn't an alliance in Eclipse only worth 1 point when all the combat result tiles range from 1 to 5? I haven't played in a while, and only once, but I remember thinking that making it 2 points, rather than equal to literally the worst possible combat outcome would make it more appealing. There's a twist, though, in that some of the "VP holes" only fit combat vps and some only fit diplomatic VPs (and this varies with races). The vanilla race, humans, has one slot that can only be filled by diplomatic VPs (I think, I haven't memorized the boards), so you're actually getting a small bonus for a bit of diplomacy rather than a hit. If you have no diplomatic-only VP holes, that means your race is themed as proud warriors or something, so it makes sense that diplomacy won't optimize your VP. In general, though, I'm glad the game rewards combat as well as it does - too many similar games make combat a black-hole for all participants. I actually quite like the diplomatic options in Eclipse (and the full-on alliances, so much so that we often have pre-set start-of-game alliances when we play). Overall, other than the terrible dicefest combat resolution, I find little to complain about with Eclipse. Oh, and if you want to dumpster the Eclipse app AI, you can use the same strategy you use against humans in base Eclipse - rush Plasma Missiles, then turtle with complete immunity or push people off whatever you want. For whatever people say, they were totally a problem in the base game, and bullying the AI with them is a fun way to prove this to yourself.
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Jan 20, 2015 08:39
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Magic Talk Duels of the Planeswalkers works OK as a single player campaign game. It's fun to try to build a deck out of the crap they give you to start, the game plays smooth, and Magic is - at its best - a really interesting game. As mentioned above, I'm not a fan of the "AI is really dumb, but has way better cards" method of balance - and against some enemies you pretty much just have to restart a few times until they get a bad draw (I don't think they ever get straight-up mana-screwed, they cheated this somehow, but sometimes the computer does draw bad) or make bad plays against a good draw for you. That said, I didn't find any of the enemies too overpowering or frustrating (ie. nothing as annoying as, say, some of the Naxxramas bosses in Hearthstone). My main complaint is that the out-of game UI (particularly the deckbuilding UI) was clearly a console afterthought, and takes forever to navigate through. The card pool isn't really good enough to support interesting multiplayer play; I wouldn't buy this if that's what you're after. It's a single player campaign. That said, it would be amazing if they found a way to make online, multiplayer drafts work well, at some kind of reasonable price. Magic Online works OK and is fun, but is way too expensive to play often. Various, dubious free options don't work well because people have no incentive to finish out a draft. I understand they don't want to cannibalize their other business - but surely someone at Wizards must feel bad when they look over at Hearthstone, and see how well their drafts work and how much money they're raking in (with what I think is a much less interesting game). If Magic had a Hearthstone-esque "open draft" sort of format you could play for $1, I'd play the heck out of it.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:04
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quote:I'm in Sweden, but I called my FLGS and they said they can't take it back since they can't sell it again since it's opened. For that matter, why would Best Buy want a DOA TV back? Why would a store buy a broken TV from you, when they can buy a new, unopened one from the manufacturer, and for cheaper? Who would expect them to do that? It's also probably a real expense for them to have to stock games, have employees there to ring them up, and what not. Be a dear, please: just order the game online and then send your store a cheque for their cut. I know, yeah, game stores aren't profitable and what not. I just wonder how much of it is "we can't run like a normal retail business because we're so tight on money" and how much is "we're so tight on money because we don't run like a normal retail business".
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Jan 21, 2015 22:46
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quote:Hmm, perhaps. Maybe what feels passive aggressive about it is the fact that retaliation isn't as easily done as a more conflict heavy game. Additionally, to use my shark analogy again: you know the shark (your opponent in Magic or Chess or whatever) is your enemy. There is no option to simply leave you alone. Whereas these games sort of make an illusion of the option of simply not interfering with other players, or only doing so coincidentally. You can play a mostly non-cutthroat game of TTR -- you choose to screw with the other players in many circumstances. The phenomenon you're describing is called "politics", and it's one of the more central properties of a multiplayer (>2 players or teams) game. So we end up discussing it every hundred pages or so. Politics is the measure of the extent to which a player can choose to harm or benefit specific other players. Magic and Chess obviously have direct conflict, but they're not political by definition because they're 2 player games. Once you're into multiplayer games, it's not trivial to make a game that's not either political or uninteractive (multi-player solitaire). Many of the big ideas of modern gaming are ways to build interaction that aren't political, and there's lots of approaches: - Limiting interaction to all or none: You don't choose who to attack in Dominion, generally the things you do affect everyone the same way (though sometimes it effectively hurts/helps one person more than others, and sometimes you'll know that going in). - Worker Placement/scarce resources: when you take wood in Agricola, you can't choose who you're depriving wood from. You deprive it from everyone. Still, often it can feel political when there was only one guy who wanted it anyway. This is the kind of slightly masked political interaction that feels passive aggressive. - Directly rewarding "spreading it around". You could choose to only attack a specific player in Tash-Kalar deathmatch, but you wouldn't score well doing so. You need to attack different players to get your points up in all your colors. There's also flares to limit the amount to which you can harm a player by eliminating their pieces. - Mitigating the harm/benefit done to other players - for example, Eclipse has a bunch of mechanisms that are meant to make "being attacked" less painful, so much so that combat is often close to a wash for the attackee, and sometimes even mutually beneficial. - Rotating 1vMany: In King of Tokyo, you can only control who you're attacking indirectly - you're either attacking Tokyo, or you're in Tokyo attacking everyone outside. You have a choice of how much to attack, but you usually can't choose who - so you get very "direct conflict" without it feeling political. - 7 Wonders: most of your "direct interaction' is limited to your neighbors, and the most direct "war" is not voluntary. You interact with the general table only via draft, and the general points race... but the game still feels interactive. To be clear: politics isn't all bad. It tends towards balanced games (as everyone chips away at the leader). Too much politics will tend to overwhelm other game mechanics (eg. Risk, Munchkin, etc..) - but many players don't mind that either (they like the political games of "flying under the radar", etc..). Strong politics also allows for the possibility of truly spiteful play, where players potshot another not to slow down the leader, but just to mess with somebody - or, the reverse, they play "kingmaker" by supporting/not-attacking a leading player and handing them a win. Either way, managing politics is one of the core concerns of modern game design. Except for crappy designs like Tiny Epic Kingdoms where they didn't think about it at all and so the game is garbage. Of course the other pillar of modern game design is getting art from a popular webcomic.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:59
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quote:Did Room 25 turn out to be any good? I ordered it when it first came out and didn't hear anything for months until they said "hey sorry we can't get any more copies of it ever again" and refunded my money, which was a bit odd. Not really? It was good for a couple plays in each mode (there was like 9 modes) - but none of the modes really worked. Some fun ideas, but they couldn't really make it all work. quote:My impression is that actively blocking other players is a pretty strong strategy in 2-3p games of Agricola. Keeping opponents out of animal food supply and room building actions (even doing poo poo like building a fence for no reason!). I'm not a pro though. At 2 players, denial is absolutely key - and lots of the game come down to a kind of denial chicken (or, in a way, a time auction). You had the first fireplace... how many sheep will your opponent let pile up before he just releases them into the wild? It's often a really tight call, and you have to get good at judging the value of resources at different times. Despite some interesting decisions, I don't like 2P Agricola - too much positive feedback looping (if your opponent has more family, they can often use those dudes to hold you down), and too big of a swing based on when Family Growth flips... often you need to go really hard to be ready/first on round 5 and/or 6. This will either work and you'll be way ahead, or it'll pop sometime else and you've often put yourself way behind. At 3 player you have a much more normal game, where you have some risk to manage about how much you expose yourself to a spite move (especially just before feeding) - but most of your moves are going to be planned around "what do I want, and how contested are each of those things likely to be based on what other people need", rather than specifically denying other players. You can go after someone, but it's usually not worth it unless they've really played risky (again, usually this is something like "I figured I could get sow/bake as the last action in round 11, FML" or something).
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Jan 22, 2015 22:51
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quote:You're right the temptation is there. The point I'm trying to make is that I do not think that behind the screen cheating benefits the cheater is much as it seems I think it's a negative when a game allows for hidable cheating.. but I'm less worried here as the cheating would have to be real brazen. You can't just be like, "oh, I didn't notice I'd already built one of those" or something. It's not omission or peeking at something you shouldn't have seen or whatever - it's straight up, "Here it is, I'm cheating now, I'm just going to lie to these people and say blue is yellow" or "I'm going to change the result on this die to be something better for me" - and while it isn't caught by default, it would be very possible to catch, and very embarrassing if you were caught. So much so that I don't think many people would do it. I think it's worse to have a game where, while cheating is technically visible, it requires everyone's attention to avoid (and you might suspect someone is accidentally on-purpose screwing things up). I think these games have more potential for cheating and hard feelings, even in a group where everyone's honest.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:53
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quote:But AI is hard, even for videogames. Board game automated opponents mostly boil down to glorified timers and big piles of dumb resources. I think what most board game opponents need isn't more intelligence but less options. In a game like Flashpoint, the "opponent" often has very strong moves available, but randomly may choose to do a weak one instead. That signal, the strength of the board's moves, often overwhelms the player input (for good or bad, and neither is satisfying). It's like the "good and bad things deck" problem; for every time it evens out to a good experience, there's another game or two that's wrecked by being too easy or too hard. And it incentivizes unsatisfying play, where to play effectively you often have to take risks and hope the opponent does something dumb - and the game success comes down to whether it does or doesn't (post-choice, did-I-win randomness). Without a proper AI, it's difficult to have any sort of randomness without effectively randomizing the result. Some games manage this by minimizing the opponent's choice space. For whatever else is bad about Sentinels (and there's lots), I think they actually got close here (excepting some really imbalanced and timing dependent stuff). The AI has a reasonably small set of stuff they're going to do, and the only random variance is order. At its best, you're presented with a fairly consistent level of challenge for a given villain/hero setup. And it can go further, to no randomness. The opponent in Theseus and the Minotaur has no choices, but the game (or puzzle, if you want) works really well. The problem with something like Theseus is that it requires a lot of information for setup (exact placements for walls, etc) to effectively convey the opponent from designer to player. What I'd like to see (or see more of), is games where the AI plays out predictably for a given setup - but where there's ways of specifying setup "seeds" quickly, so that you can play against "known good" boards with minimal setup and without necessarily being able to see from the seed what's coming. Like, we usually play Dominion with someone's recommended list of kingdoms. I'd like to see more co-ops where you could get this kind of set scenario, specified without that much information, and play against a fair, consistent challenge. (Another possibility here is a game AI book - something like Tales, but for opponent behavior? Have some decision points, maybe even some semi-responsive story.)
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Jan 27, 2015 19:38
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quote:In good news, I got my copy of Dominion today. Is there a way to play solo with the actual cards? Obviously you'll need to choose boards without interactive cards (attacks, etc..), but it's easy enough to just race yourself to 6 Provinces (or whatever) - see how few turns you can finish in. This is actually a reasonable way to get better, too, as in real games you often get a wrong idea about how you played based on where you finished. Obviously there are some interactive skills to Dominion (and it's important to know how fast you need to be, and which interactive cards are coming out)... but learning "how fast would this deck goldfish" is a really interesting puzzle, and something playing solo can give you a good feel for.
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Jan 30, 2015 06:13
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quote:That game may have been an anomaly but I ended up with something like 58 points, 6 stone rooms, 5 family members, 2 pastures with stables, 2 plowed fields, 3 cattle, 7 boar, 1 sheep, 8 grain, holiday house, and the super oven (2 grain make 5 food each). I really took advantage of the axe early on, building three rooms for six reeds and six wood and then upgraded all of them to stone at once after I let the stone accumulate. I also had the occupation that allows you to plow a field whenever you take grain which, in combination with the super oven, seemed OP. If I got the excess food rule right I probably would have had a couple more points worth of animals and maybe another major improvement. 58 is a very good score in a multiplayer game, but kind of middling for solo where you can take very efficient plays by letting stuff pile up (without someone else grabbing it). But yeah, Axe and Field Watchman are both very strong - and if you get more than one "take a grain" bonus (Market Crier, Grain Cart, Grain Scoop, Seed Seller, Fence Builder+Hedge Keeper, etc..) you can take care of your food needs for the game with very few actions (while often getting full field/grain/veg score as a bonus). Depending on the number of players and what you draw, you can put together strong combos for Day Laborer, Fishing, Sheep, or various other spots too. But yeah, Holiday Home is almost always weak, and is one of a bunch of cards I hardly even notice while drafting. In general, it seems the card balance was based around the expectation of smaller families than you'll normally end up with with "standard" play. And, unfortunately, there is kind of "standard" play: it's very easy for the actual "game" part of Agricola to fall into a rut. When you first play the game, it seems like there's lots of decisions to be made in terms of how to lay out your farm, etc.. - but many of these become non-decisions quickly (at least when playing with the base card sets). You end up building your fields, rooms and fences in about the same place every game, and there's little reason to change unless you get one of a few specific cards (eg. Window Planters or whatever it's called). There's decisions, sure, and very nuanced play around positioning yourself to, say, snag early Family Growths... but you quickly find out that lots of overall game paths just don't end in you winning often (eg. you're very seldom going to want to rush fences and start your animal farm in Stage 1). I really, really like the draft in Agricola (often it's the most interesting part of the game), but even that can get samey if you play with the same cards often; whatever the specific cards are, you default point to the same sort of overall composition: some way to rush building or cheat Family Growth, a few cards to help your food engine, and then tuck in whatever general efficiency or random bonus points fall your way. VVVV: Yeah, I haven't ever tried Farmers of the Moor - sounds good. jmzero fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 18:27
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quote:Doing one big quest instead of two small ones saves you the action collecting the other quest, too. At the beginning, you really want to get some lingering effects out of your quests, and at the end bigger quests are risky, and still generally less efficient than small quests that match your Lord. Sometimes you'll end up taking them and they can be OK, but they're not spectacular, and they expose you to really getting hosed by colliding on resource needs (or mandatory quests), and generally they limit your choices. For the most part my complaint isn't so much about direct balance between individual quests (though there is issues), it's that "getting the quests you want" is such a big contributor to the game's outcome, and you have so little control over it (especially if the players before you in turn order share your quest types).
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Feb 2, 2015 03:17
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quote:Also, if you know a lot about your hand, your group is probably wasting clues. Give people just enough to give them plays. If you don't know a lot about your hand, you're not playing very seriously. That's fine, and many clues you give should certainly be directed toward "what to play/discard right now", but there is deeper stuff in the game if you want there to be. When you get a clue, you usually get with it a ton of information about your other cards. Sometimes this is direct: "he pointed out that this card is red (because he clearly wanted me to play it) but that also means these other cards (which I might end up holding for the rest of the game) aren't red". If you remember this stuff, it's often very valuable, but it can be burdensome to remember that "card 1 is not blue or green and is either a 2 or a 4". More difficult is to remember what other people know about their hand to that same level. I need him to play one of his two 5s, and green is the only open 5. If I tell him he has two 5s, does he know (and will he remember) that his first 5 can't be green? And lots of times the stuff you know comes less direct, based on your knowledge of how people prioritize clues. Often you can see "he just told the person past me X; if this 2 had been red he would have told me that". But it means knowing the people you're playing with, remembering exactly what you have, and often remembering what they know about their own hands. Anyway, all I'm saying is that you should expect remembering information to be a challenge if you're playing seriously.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:01
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Anyone else want to chime in on X-Com? I'm right on the edge as it sounds like people have generally had fun, but it also doesn't sound like anyone has spent much time with it... my group loves X-Com (the tactical video game) but is also immediately suspicious of FFG. Just need one more opinion to push me one way or another. Also, any thoughts on Concept? The premise sounds clear enough, but I can't really picture how it actually plays and whether that makes for a fun game. Thoughts? VVV: Hey thanks guys, super helpful opinions! jmzero fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 22:15
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quote:But their top tens are horrible. Yes, they really truly are. Mostly I find them really strange in that, after all that time playing board games, you'd think they'd start to see some sort of patterns in the games they play, and develop some way of talking about those patterns. At the lowest level, you'd think they'd at least see that in new game B you do the same kinds of things as you did in game A. But they don't even do that: when they do compare games, it's at a hopelessly superficial level like "this game has a similar name or theme to this one" or "both games have cards?!?" or "it's fun". I find this bewildering; it's like when we have someone experienced apply for a programming job, and when we do the programming challenge it appears they've never programmed before. Even just little things, like they can't find the plus key on a keyboard, and are mystified by what an empty project looks like in their supposed language/editor of choice. Well, and the fact that they can't program... But even if you're a moron and you're not interested, wouldn't you pick up something related to your job over the years, just by accident? If I found myself in a plumbing job it'd be rough for a while, but if I somehow kept at it eventually I'd be able to do routine stuff just by trial and error, and because just doing it would be easier than trying to fake it somehow. I don't think a reviewer needs to be an expert on game design theory or something, but, again, wouldn't a normal person be expected to intuit some, after years and years and hundreds of games? My suspicion? First: they're not bright. Second: they don't actually play that many games - they make videos and go to conventions and read rules and whatever, but they're not playing games with any regularity (or at least any variety). VV: Yeah, sure, that didn't really come out how I meant it - what I meant to say is something like "they don't play games for the sake of playing games", which would be how they'd actually get good at games, learn how they work, etc.. jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 18:11
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I liked Tragedy Looper, and everyone should try it out because it's unique, but we sold it after we'd each played a few times. Once we'd sort of been through the paces and done it as an experience, nobody really wanted to go back and play it as a game. I think, similar to Mice & Mystics, that many groups will get some fun out of first plays but never get through all the scenarios.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:56
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quote:This was actually answered on the comments section of the Kickstarter and I think the answer is no. Both the final attack and combination phrases are exempt from restrictions. Boo. Attempting to inflect out "Let us final combination?" while shouting would be, uh, thematic.
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Feb 14, 2015 21:56
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Elder Sign isn't like Yahtzee at all. Yahtzee is, at its core, a resource management game (where the resource is 'spaces to fill'), and the dice are rolled as much before your decision as they are after. Your rolls gradually narrow your option space about which space you can choose to fill and for what value. The important choices in Elder Sign are all pre-rolling, in which mission to take with which character. During an encounter you have some decisions about committing more resources, but for the most part what you want is clear and you're just rolling resolution to see whether you succeed. The fact that you get multiple rolls just makes it take longer (and allows for some design space in terms of designing resources). King of New Yokyo is much more like Yahtzee, in that your dice rolls tell you what options you have on your turn, and those options shrink with rerolls - that's the Yahtzee mechanic. Getting 3 changes to roll a static target is not Yahtzee, it's just rolling a variably sized dice pool. (Overall, Elder Signs has enough interesting decisions in terms of character/mission assignment that it works as a single player 15 minute game. For 4 players/90 minutes, those decisions are spread far too thin. The game also has TERRIBLE feedback problems - if you do poorly, not only does the board get away from you quickly (which makes future missions harder by itself and drains your health/sanity) but you don't get the new resources that make missions easier. So if you do poorly early, everything is harder and harder - while if you have some good luck early, you develop a stock of crap, the board stays clean, and you have a boring cakewalk. It's kind of a terrible design, really.. but again, those problems don't feel so bad when it's over in 15 minutes). VV: It shouldn't be an insult. Yahtzee is an OK game, and King of Tokyo is quite good. "Elder Sign is C'thulu Yahtzee" isn't a hyperbolic insult, it's false advertising. jmzero fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Feb 17, 2015 |
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Feb 17, 2015 22:54
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quote:You must be much faster than me - it takes me ages to properly cut that stuff It takes me forever too, if I print on cardstock. And the result is usually poor visually, problematic to shuffle, and wears out quick. It works, and I'll print on cardboard for some types of components, but I don't understand how people do this for big games with lots of cards. What I usually do is print on thin paper, and a little bit small. Then you leave the paper in piles and cut like 8 sheets at once (guillotine is best, but even just with scissors this is fine). It doesn't matter if it's ragged or whatever, since it'll be undetectable once it's opaque sleeved with a MtG land or whatever. The end result is easy to shuffle, feels right in your hand, looks OK, and lasts as long as you want it to. I wouldn't want to do thousands of cards like this, but I've done a couple hundred before.
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Feb 18, 2015 00:45
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quote:I still have my copy of David Sirlin's Pandante in shrink wrap. I don't remember hearing much about it here. Is it worth opening, or should I gift it away somewhere down the line? I've tried it with a mix of Poker players (including one regular/successful tournament player) and non-Poker players. Nobody liked it! It takes forever to play a hand, it's fiddly, it rewards really repetitive/boring strategies, and has way too much randomness right up to the final resolution. Skip.
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Feb 18, 2015 01:53
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Machi Koro is a great game to play with a six year old.. Or very casually with unambitious adults. Its success demonstrates how underserved the "very light game"market is.
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Feb 18, 2015 03:31
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quote:Tiles are placed orthogonally even though they're hexes, creating little square gaps in the board I spent too many brain cycles trying to figure out what this would look like (before clicking on the screenshot and seeing that they are octagons  ).
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Feb 18, 2015 19:39
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quote:Should I wait for that then? I'm not so strapped for cash that I can't indulge myself with a $50-75 purchase now and again but I'd like to know a bit more about what I'm getting into before I do so. Can someone give me the score? BattleCON works fine and I know lots of people here like it, but I'd hesitate a bit depending on your group. If you approach BattleCON like most games - someone reads the rules, then you sit down, grab a dude out of the pile, and try fighting... you end up with kind of a random mess, at least to start. Until you have some sense of how the characters work and how things play out, it feels kind of baffling/arbitrary to play. Personally, I couldn't find a satisfying middle ground between "thinking out every possible thing they could do" and "just grabbing some cards to play" - though I'm sure with more play I would have got a better feel for what stuff to expect and how to deal with it. Everyone who played figured it could be promising, but in the end nobody really got further than that, and we ended up getting rid of it pretty quickly. Again, this is not to say it's a bad game. We had kind of the same problem with both the Lord of the Rings LCG and Netrunner (both of which are favorite games for lots of other people). There's just some startup costs involved in getting into these games, and if nobody is enthusiastic/committed from the start, they can end up gathering dust pretty quick. Anyway, you probably have a sense of which kind of group you have - I'm just throwing some thoughts out there.
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Feb 20, 2015 08:15
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quote:Seems like this is always a possibility in games where there is an "everyone loses" condition. Well.. just like the prisoner's dilemma, these "semi-maybe-coop" games might be more interesting if you had more than one iteration of the core game somehow? I mean, the dominant strategy for one round of Prisoner's Dilemma is DEFECT all day. The strategy for 100 rounds with repeating players is much more interesting.
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Feb 20, 2015 23:35
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quote:I'd imagine the inner sectors are a lot more contested, so is a more aggressive play style effective? It's one of the reasons I'm thinking of going Mechanema. Planta/Plasma Missiles is pretty bonkers. Mechanema/Missiles is crazy too (you spam out little plasma ships that are resource efficient against anything). The expansion has some plasma missile counters, but they're all in the form of specific techs - and buying them is going to make less sense (for your opponents) when they're only good against you - and, from your perspective, only one of your opponents will likely have a counter. This is one of those "there are no wrong threats, only wrong answers" asymmetries that's more effective in a bigger game.
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Feb 23, 2015 21:42
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quote:For some reason this kinda makes me like him/Argent more. Maybe just general props to go against the general circlejerkish nature of BGG while not sounding like an outright angry gamer stereotype. Yeah, I'm happy to see anyone daring to challenge the "game-quality-relativist"/"why are you hating on this guy's hard work" perspective on BGG. There's this notion that games are not really bad (or, by extension, good), they're all just perfect snowflakes waiting to exactly match some particular taste or preference. And this is made worse by the follow-ups: that the designer - or any designer - has a privileged position of omniscience about the game design decisions made for their game, and generally that if a design required work, it must have value at least proportional to that work. Obviously it's true that people want different things out of gaming - but the prevalence of these views makes any game criticism/analysis on the site mealymouthed and useless. I think lots of published games are terrible - and even many good games have properties that are the result of design laziness, lack of creativity, or straight up blundering (just like any other medium). Imagine if movie makers were afforded this kind of default respect? "Well, Disaster Movie isn't the absolute deepest film out there - but this movie isn't really about story or humor or characters or that kind of elitist stuff. It's just, you know, if you just want a light movie to watch with your friends and eat some popcorn then you should have fun. Lots of people have seen it and some of them liked it, so if you didn't like it then you probably just aren't good at relaxing and liking movies."
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Feb 25, 2015 21:51
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