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Gareth Madeley
United Kingdom
Wirral
Merseyside
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Hello, welcome to another thing of this blog.
Ok, so how did Monday go?
I'd recently received some new games from GMT: Here I Stand and Formula Motor Racing. I've got the Vassal version of Here I Stand and I've been playing to pick up the rules, and it's really fun and interesting. Unfortunately, we don't really have time to play it at the Lion, and instead we played Formula Motor Racing. It's a quick game with an incredibly quick rules explanation. It is fairly luck based, and one player critised the fact that I played a crash card eliminating one of his cars (he was chosen at random) and that the last card played decided the game. My response to those? 1. It's a 15 minute game. 2. It's a 15 minute game. In a two hour game, those are valid critisms, eliminating half of your position with one card or the last card deciding the entire game, however, with a 10-15 minute game, after the game, there's time for another round.
After this we split up into two fours,and I played Troyes. In this game, as I think I mentioned last time, each player knows a proportion of the final scoring, the problem with things like this is that they distract you from what else you should be doing, I got distracted, and concentrated on my card rather than getting points elsewhere. Differently want to play this more and get a better grasp of the strategy.
We had a few moments before the other players would finish their game, so we pulled out Parade which is a good filler, short, but it is more thinky and brain burning than a card game filler themed around Alice in Wonderland has any real right to be.
We finished Parade just as the other players had finished playing 7 Wonders, they all had to go, so we had a go with it. I was the first player to go into military, at the end of the first age, grabbing some points that turn. There are so many different possibilities of how the wonders will come out (especially when you take the A and B sides into consideration) which probably affects your strategy and the strategies of your neighbours.
I was recently listening to an old episode of the Dice Tower, in particular an old episode of GameTek, where Geoff Engelstein was talking about Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and how rules can't cover everything. An extention of this is that in a set of rules and axioms, there are some things that aren't covered, so they need to add extra rules to cover these points, which is my point.
While software development has the triangle fast-good-cheap, it seems that board game design has the triangle of simple-thematic-balanced (someone who's actually done some design should correct me if I'm wrong). Formula Motor Racing is simple and balanced, Troyes is less simple but more thematic, while Here I Stand is far more thematic, but much more complex (44 page rulebook). Or, if I were to run a contest for the first person to post and wrote it at 8 am GMT, it would be unbalanced in favour against Americans, however it would be incredibly simple. Designers, I'm guessing here, need to have an idea on this spectrum of where they want to be.
And well, this ramble has run out of steam, see you next time (hopefully). Thanks.
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