1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Next » [874]
-
Patrick Carroll
United States
Carver
Minnesota
"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." (GK Chesterton)
"That's how the light gets in." (Leonard Cohen)
-
I saw a comment in a GeekList this morning, and I just had to reply to it. The list was about the perfect game collection, and the exchange went like this:
Patrick Carroll wrote: Gergle wrote: The perfect collection would have one (or more) of everything, you could accomodate your guests that way. That's perfection--being ready to accommodate all one's guests? Are we professional hosts or what? I take the opposite tack. The perfect collection is the one that completely satisfies me personally. I'll go looking for other players after I've found the right game(s).
I was probably overreacting and being unfair to Gergle, who'd only tried to be helpful--and who was speaking in the language of his fellow BGGeeks. But his comment got me thinking. And I'm still thinking about it.
Read more »
-
Michele Esmanech
Italy
Milano
Milano
-
Here are more Iron Lily Map tiles:
Locker room with equipment to gain
Cafeteria at lunch time
Lab 4 with the 4th piece of intel
I have begun making the airshafts: not an easy task (especially game-wise), but here is a test tile:
The agent will be able to get in and get out from the vents.
Moving within them will be done using a broad action (since shafts share the same rules as for Blue lines (with the exception that the player cannot shoot or do a melee attack - as there is no LoS outside of them).
These tiles will be placed OVER the room tiles (both the explored AND the non-explored ones).
When the agent will get out of a shaft, through the vent, he will explore an unrevealed tile, by entering an area the vent is ON (as if he entered from a door).
Normal spawning will occur, and normal area effects take place.
Ultimately, shafts are good for moving into tiles that would be otherwise hard to reach, or to avoid many pesky guards, but they come at a price, as moving within them takes time, and we know a shadow agent doesn't have much of that.
-
W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
-
• Dungeon Twister will arrive on Playstation 3 "this summer in the USA, Europe and Australia", according to a press release on DungeonTwister.com. Here's the launch trailer for the video game, which does not feature designer Christophe Boelinger dancing, alas:
• Dan Misener at Gizmodo explains "How Kickstarter Hides Its Failures from the Internet". The short answer: Commands to search engines not to catalog pages for failed projects. As Misener notes, based on the advice of an expert, "if you're going to use a crowdfunding service like Kickstarter, it's important to figure out what's worked for others in the past, but also to figure out what hasn't worked for others in the past. If you hide failure, it's hard to learn from others' mistakes."
Anyone want to take a crack at calculating whether board and card game projects on KS beat the 44% success rate mentioned in that Gizmodo article?
• BGG user Timothée Licitri has posted numerous pictures of what might be the most elaborate 3D recreation of a game ever, a recreation of alea's Notre Dame from designer Stefan Feld. Licitri notes that the game boards are wood with Styrofoam layers on top of them, while the buildings were first sculpted in polyurethane foam, then cast in polyurethane resin. Time elapsed since the start of the project: two years.
Better prepare a price list, Timothée, in case someone wants to throw a huge project your way...
• Riffing on an article I linked to in March 2012, designer Jeffrey D. Allers writes about how to design game endings in his Berlin Game Design blog. An excerpt:
Quote: [W]hen we test prototypes, if the thing works but still isn't great, it's usually the end of the game that needs work. It drags, it's the same-ole same-ole, or there's a convoluted scoring system created in the name of balance that makes the final math exercise anti-climactic. There have been times when we've intentionally tried to create a scoring system that avoids "adding up victory points."
Designing a satisfying end to ones game really is the hardest thing to get right. If a designer is looking to separate his or her work from the increased competition, this seems like one of the best ways in which to do so.
One thing I've noticed after describing many, many games over the years is that all competitive games can be divvied into three categories:
-----• Whoever has the most victory points wins.
-----• Whoever is first to some goal wins.
-----• The last player standing wins.
Since I prefer to launch a game description with the goal of the game in order to let people have that in mind for everything that follows, I always find myself leading with one of these three statements. (In the first category, you can replace "victory points" with "money" or some other countable unit, while in the second the goal can be either a physical location or a VP/money/unit total. And just as some players and designers contend that every game is an auction game in disguise, the third category above could be recast as either of the first two categories.)
When Jeff talks about "a convoluted scoring system", he's talking only of the first category since the other two are immediately recognizable: Am I the only one still in the game? Did I reach the finish line first? Bam, I win! Resolving the first category, on the other hand, can be as simple as looking at a score track or counting money or as laborious as the 7 Wonders and Agricola tally charts I mentioned in my original post.
Any other victory conditions I missed for competitive games?
-
sean johnson
United States
avon
Indiana
-
In April we had a local no-ship math trade. As part of that trade, I traded several old hex and counter war games that my wife will never play with me. I know that value speaking, someone probably got a good deal when I traded Starship Troopers for this game, but it was fine by me. This is a game that I had regretted not backing on kickstarter. A local game store carries it as well, and on more than one occasion I was tempted to buy it, because I really love the concept of the game. So trading a game that I thought was OK but will never play, for a game that I was excited for seemed like a good trade. So was it?
Game Overview
Forceball is a card game that simulates a game of a futuristic sport that appears to have some similarities to Lacrosse. The game has like five layers of difficulty, with each new level adding another element to the game. I believe that we focused on playing at the "junior league level" which has all of the basic rules in play, but does not mess with the advance rules.
A face off determines who gets the ball. One that has been established, players start taking the turns. First, both players draw one card. Next players set their speed. All cards have a speed rating of 1-3. To play a card a player must have cards in their speed pile equal to their speed rating. During this phase, players may add one card to their speed pile, remove one card, switch a card out, discard one card and then take two, or switch cards out of their hands.
Then the player with the ball players an offensive card. All cards have a rating of 1-5. After the attacker plays a card, the defender must respond by playing a defensive card equal to or higher than the attacker card. The attacker must respond in the same way. This continues until one player can not play. Players may power up their cards by playing cards from their speed pile or hand on to their played card. Cards added in this way increase the cards value by one.
Once a player can not respond to a card then the last play card is resolved. If it was an attack card then it will either score a goal, be a pass (+3 cards from deck into hand) or dribble (+2 cards from deck into speed pile). If it was a defender card then it is either an intercept (get control of ball), block (+3 cards from deck into hand) or tackle (+2 cards from deck into speed pile). If it was goal or intercept then ball switches sides.
After the current play is resolved, a new turn begins. When the deck runs out it is the end of a quarter. The game is played over three quarters.
The Game We Played
My wife began with the ball, and I blocked the ball and tackled before trying to intercept. Once I intercepted, I had more cards than my wife so I used them to power up a shot and she could not stop it. I then followed up by intercepting the ball and scoring again. The first quarter was extremely rough for her, and I was leading 4 to 0 by the end of it.
At this point she wanted to quit. She claimed the game was broken because she kept getting a hand full of cards she could not play (offense cards when she needed defense cards and the opposite). She had forgotten that during the speed step, one of the options is discard cards and draw new ones.
Given this forgotten rule, I convinced her to play one more quarter, and we would call it a half. Thus, we only played through the deck twice. The second half was much more balanced we each scored one point. This made the final score 5 to 1.
Our Thoughts
My Rating: 4 (Like it)
My Thoughts: What I really enjoy about this game is how a game the size of a deck of cards actually feels like playing a sport. The theme really comes through. It has a lot of back and forth. It is a card game, so there is some luck, but I feel like there is also a lot of depth here. This is especially true, because we did not even touch the more advance rules that adds things like goalies, lucky shots, and fouls. This is a game I could personally see myself really enjoying and wanting to spend some time with.
Her Rating: 1 (Never want to play again)
Her Thoughts: This game may capture it's theme well, but I do not like it. I found the game boring, frustrating, and not any fun to play.
Verdict
Combined Rating: 5
This is another game where we are completely at odds. I think the last game that we were in this much disagreement might be ElfBall, which is also a sports game. I think in general, my wife just does not like sports games. Sports games, are by their nature, head to head where one person directly interferes with what their opponent is trying to do. This leads to a back and forth, that I find exciting but she clearly finds frustrating. I know in the first quarter we played, she got very frustrated and made up her mind about the game. Personally, I am not sure if this game got a fair shake, but she never wants to play it again so I guess that means I will not get to play it much either and need to look to trade it. That is a little disappointing, but I would rather have a game we enjoy together than have a game I like but never play.
-
Arthur O'Dwyer
United States
California
-
The Little Axe is one of the two items a computerized Adventurer can't afford to be without (the other being the Brass Lantern).
As you can see, the Little Axe hasn't changed at all over the course of CC:TBG's development; but, as with the Lamp, there used to be two of it. The original thought was that you'd be a sitting duck for Dwarves without it, so I'd better allow two people to have the axe at once. But that just opened up a whole can of problems: what if you "acquire" the Little Axe and two people have it in their hands? can you ever have both axes in front of you at once? can you reveal both of them to "defend against" a single Angry Dwarf?
(Of course in those days I was calling it "play to counter", not "defend against", but it worked the same way. I changed the wording when I realized it was unclear whether "play to counter" counted as a "play". (These days, it does not.))
So anyway, here's what's special about the Axe:
* It's playable anywhere except the Well House. Thematically, you get the axe when you meet your first dwarf, and dwarves only appear below ground.
* It defends against Angry Dwarf. This is actually a little interesting, because there are two different cards named "Angry Dwarf": one Action and one Reaction. The Little Axe defends against both of them.
There's one other name shared by multiple cards: Lost in Maze. No card currently interacts with Lost in Maze by name, but I'm seriously considering it, either for the ADV550 expansion or as a promo.
* Like any non-treasure item, the Little Axe can be stolen by "Steal a Keeper".
* Like any item, it can be discarded by "Tight Squeeze" or "Out of Orange Smoke", or voluntarily discarded to counter "Lost in Maze (All Alike)". This last property is interesting because the Little Axe is one of only two items playable in the Maze of Twisty Passages (All Alike); the other is the Empty Bottle.
Sorry for the total lack of updates lately; I've been moving, and working, and also working on my port of David Platt's Adventure 550 to the Web. It's finally playable now, at http://quuxplusone.github.com/Advent/play-550.html. But there are a lot of bugs remaining to be found. If you find one, please let me know! (If you report a bug, please include the "magic number" printed at the start of the game.)
One neat thing about Adventure 550's axe: The game recognizes commands with embedded commas, such as DROP KEYS, LAMP, AXE. And, like Woods' version (although I didn't realize this until very recently), Platt allows you to type LAMP GET instead of GET LAMP. You can combine these two parser features to construct the dwarf-killing supercommand AXE THROW, GET. (Try it!)
-
Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
-
So tomorrow is the great day at last: Elemental Clash will be available at The Game Crafter!
I would like to remind you one last time about the EC Raffle being held on www.facebook.com/elementalclash. If you want to win a copy of the Basic Set, go "like" the page and send me an email to andreas.propst31@gmail.com with the subject "Raffle". The Raffle will end today noon GMT+1. So be quick if you want to enter! 
Furthermore I am very pleased to announce the release of the third expansion "Elemental Clash: Tribes" for 1st September 2012!
I am looking for people willing to playtest, so if you are getting EC fom TGC and would be interested to participate in the development of the next set shoot me a geekmail!
(As you might understand I can NOT provide you with free playtest copies, as my budget is very limited...)
-
Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
-
In which I finally catch up with myself, and report on my recent trips to the Fira Jugar X Jugar in Granollers, Spain, and the UK Games Expo 2012 in Birmingham. What japes!
Last year, as regular readers will know since I have hardly failed to mention it, my game Oracle Pathway won the game design contest in Granollers, Spain, putting it on a path to publication by Asmodee as Divinare. The game is now available in Europe and the UK, and is currently being launched in the US at Origins.
I couldn’t visit Spain last year to receive my prize and see Oracle Pathway enjoy its celebrity (the dates clashed with the UK Games Expo), so I was very excited and honoured to be able to visit this year — invited by Oriol Comas i Coma, Director of the Fira Jugar X Jugar, and Haritz Solana of Asmodee — to see Divinare given a really fantastic and generous reception by everyone in Granollers.
But stepping off the train at Granollers Centre station I didn’t really know quite what to expect. Would the locals be friendly to the English interloper? Would the people collecting me even be able to spot me? (I needn’t have worried about that: I was the idiot who took three attempts to correctly put his train ticket into the barrier.) I was warmly greeted by Jordi and Stephane, who kindly ferried me to the hotel and then on to the fair on the other side of town.
The Fira Jugar X Jugar is just one part of the much larger Fira L’Ascensiò, so in addition to boardgames there were fantastic food stalls and markets, local and regional businesses, Catalan TV (more of them later), cars, a funfair and even some goats, cows and pigs — which, to all the gamers present, appeared to be some sort of live-action Agricola.
I arrived on the Thursday evening, the first day of the fair and just after opening, and was warmly greeted by Oriol, a game designer himself and a force of nature in the Spanish gaming community. One of the first people I was introduced to was Bascu, an illustrator whose credits include the artwork for the Fira Jugar X Jugar itself — a last-minute addition to which was his brilliant mini-portrait of me for the fair’s flyer! Bascu was also their volunteering along with many other enthusiastic gamers for the charity Ayudar Jugando whose goal is to improve the lives of disadvantaged children through games and other forms of play.
I also had the great pleasure of meeting and being entertained by the utterly irrepressible Magic Andreu who, for the sake of an expedient shorthand for UK readers, one might describe as Spain’s answer to Paul Daniels, but with better jokes. His daughter Joana, also a professional magician, was there too, entertaining the visitors and supporting their charity Sonrisas Sin Fronteras (Smiles Without Borders) which goes into hospitals to help children affected by cancer and their families.
So you see, within an hour of arriving in Granollers I had already met some amazing people! All of them welcoming and open and full of the joy and potential of games and playfulness.
A little later an entourage of local dignitaries moved through the marquee — shepherded by Enric Brufau the Director of the Fira de l’Ascensio (another force of nature!) — stopping to be amazed by Andreu and Joana, and then admiring the Spanish edition of the new 2-player Agricola published and demonstrated by Pol Cors of Homoludicus. I was introduced to them also, and shook everyone’s hands, although I could not tell you now who was who!
In another corner Toni Serradesanferm, the designer of 4 Monkeys, had pulled from his exceptionally large bag of prototypes a colourful, compact and inventive abstract called Skyline and had plenty of people ready and willing to play. There were lots of other Spanish game designers (both published and unpublished) at the fair, and the game design community seemed very strong, friendly and collegiate. Over the two days I was there, I got to play prototypes from Toni (Skyline and Sapiens), Diego Ibañez (Bajooli Xeel) and Pau More (Herbolaria) amongst others — apologies to those designers I have forgotten!
Haritz Solana had made the trip from Madrid by road (a 6-hour run, albeit one driven by his remarkably accommodating girlfriend Ainhoa!) and arrived a little later in the evening armed with boxes of games and a large quantity of Divinare posters. I was introduced more formally to the cheerful crew of 5 Minutos Por Juego — Stephane, Ribo and Israel — who were getting ready for a busy recording schedule of reviews and interviews over the coming days, including one with with me and Haritz.
So the scene was set for Friday, a local public holiday, when a much bigger crowd was expected (bigger still on Saturday). Haritz, Ainhoa and I enjoyed a late snack (well, late for an Englishman; Spaniards would think differently) from one of the amazing food stalls — I couldn’t tell you what I ate, but it was delicious and very Spanish. And while we were eating Enric bounded over and insisted on bringing us all a glass of the local bubbly, which was also delicious, and exceptionally Catalonian! Thank you Enric!
On the Friday there was lots to do, but the main event for me and for Divinare was a formal presentation in the smaller marquee. This was an rather grander affair than I was expecting, and a lot of fun. I lined up with Oriol, the Mayor of Granollers and Haritz to introduce the game and say a few words to the expectant audience (photo below is from Games & Co.). I am not now sure exactly what I did say, but I hope I adequately expressed both my excitement and my gratitude to everyone there. There is video of this event, but I don’t think it’s online just yet. Watch this space!
What is online however, is a segment broadcast on Catalan TV and recorded after the presentation. They interviewed me (with Haritz doing a great job as translator) and Oriol, and also filmed us playing a quick game — which, history should record, Oriol won easily! In the clip, I do look inexplicably glum while playing, which profoundly misrepresents my mood. The whole thing was fantastic, if slightly bewildering, and the reception to the game was universally enthusiastic. All day (and this continued on Saturday) people were coming up to me and asking me to sign their box of Divinare — and this experience taught me a very important lesson. I am afraid that several of the boxes I signed were done so in apparently effective but actually impermanent ink, a mistake we only realised the next day. Speak softly, designer, and carry a good pen!
Haritz and I had a great time being interviewed by, and introducing Divinare to, Stephane and Ribo of 5MPJ — the next edition of their webcast Mag 5 isn’t cooked yet, but watch out for it! — and Ribo sprang some interesting questions on me at the end. The final one was “What is your favourite game theme?” which caught me a little off guard. Stumbling around for an answer I eventually came up with “Landscape”, which on reflection I am rather pleased with. Good question, Ribo!
I had a great time playing a 6-player game of Toni Serradesanferm’s Sapiens, which, to use a crude analogy, was a sort of multiplayer Top Trumps. Given that the topics included the Spanish football league, I think I pulled off something of a coup to win, especially to win by such a large margin!
The fun and games continued, and in the evening I had a great time at the large dinner hosted by 5MPJ in the Hotel Granollers. It was fun chatting with Ribo and Israel about, amongst other things, J.K. Rowling, LOST and European politics, although not necessarily in that order. One thing: I’m not sure who actually paid for my dinner, but thank you to my unnamed benefactor!
We’d arrived back at the hotel to discover the lobby suddenly full of not only new guests but police officers. We later discovered the King (or possibly the Prince?) of Morocco, and clearly quite a few of his closest friends, had all arrived for a night or two. This put a crimp in our late-night gaming plans, since the conference room was unexpectedly full, but some of us did find space in the lobby. I broke out my prototype of Runaway Rabbits (more about that in Part 2!) which everyone seemed to enjoy, and we also played several different prototypes brought by Josep M. Allué — who I have so far forgotten to mention!
Josep is a very creative designer from Barcelona, and was another guest of the fair. His brand new game is Jinx, published in Spain by Homoludicus (and curiously marketed everywhere else as Dixit Jinx). He came armed with lots of great prototypes, including a neat card-based storytelling game, and also a fantastically silly card game about making facial expressions (a simple game whose rules I nevertheless found surprisingly hard to grasp at 1 o’clock in the morning!).
Saturday was my last day in Granollers, but my flight left Barcelona in the late afternoon so I had plenty of time to enjoy more of the fair and play more games, including a play of Pau More’s Herbolaria with Haritz and a profoundly unlucky Josep, seen below rolling a ‘1’. Again.
Oriol was keen to give Josep and I a personal tour of the old centre of Granollers, including its famous medieval covered market, the Porxada. This was a tour we undertook in some style, ferried there and back in a lemon-ochre, tank-like military bus: What else!?
But soon enough my Spanish adventure was coming to an end. It was a fantastic experience for me to see Divinare being played and enjoyed by so many people, and my heartfelt thanks goes out, once more, to everyone in Granollers who made me feel so welcome, with special thanks reserved for Haritz, Oriol and Enric for looking after me so generously!
You can look forward (if you want to) to news of my exploits at the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, in Part 2: Half a Pint of Cider.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
-
Dork Fest
Canada
Newmarket
Ontario
-
[ImageID= http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BktSlrCER-0/T4XEq3ZowzI/AAAAAAAABB...]
Originally posted on our little blog: www.boardgamesminisandmore.blogspot.ca
Josh, Nathan and I have been playing Warmachine/Hordes for a few years now and we have a few friends now who are getting into it. To help them get into it, I've ordered the Journeyman League Kit and will be starting up a League soon!
We will be playing every other week in person and on Vassal. Points will be earned for:
Game Points, Hobby Points, and Journeyman Points.
Game Points are earned for playing against other players in the league using that week’s rules
Hobby Points are earned for painting models
Journeyman Points are the sum of Game Points and Hobby Points.
Some of the players are in other provinces, so we will be using google hangouts to show off models and play online using www.vassalengine.org
So far we have the following players:
Player Faction Warcaster/Warlock
Jeremy Mercenaries Captain Damiano
Nathan Trollbloods Marak Ironhide
Mark Cygnar Coleman Stryker
Ryan Khador Kommander Sorscha
Josh Cygnar Constance Blaize
Adrian TBA TBA
Here's the schedule of games:
Official Rules can be found here: http://privateerpress.com/files/CompleteJourneyman.pdf
We will be augmenting the rules slightly to fit our crazy schedule.
Wed May 30, 2012 11:56 pm
-
Brian Pilnick
United States
Santa Clara
California
-
This past weekend, my girlfriend and I attended KublaCon. This marks the first convention either us have been to for the primary reason being boardgames. Not an important note, just tracking my descent into the hobby.
I initially wasn't going to post anything about our experiences as I'm sure better writers have already written enough about anything we saw. A friend asking if I was blogging the con and seeing a lack of info on some of the games I saw both turned me around. I will keep this fairly brief but (that failed) please feel free to ask for more details or clarifications on anything.
First, we'll start with the name-dropping. Martin Wallace and James Ernest were both special guests of the con and I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time with both of them and play some of their prototypes. We also bumped into Scott Alden and Seth Jaffee but never had a chance to go beyond some quick conversations.
It actually felt like I spent half of the con with James Ernest who you may know as the founder of Cheapass Games. I spent a couple hours each day on Saturday and Sunday playing his prototypes and made three or four of his seminars. I'm sure he was tired of seeing me walk in the room but he was always friendly and approachable. His seminars were mostly about aspects of his particular design process like designing to a theme, how to include luck in a game and how to bake fun into a game. I've toyed with the idea of designing a game (and have a notepad with a bunch of ideas) and his talks were very useful in diagnosing my own reasons for never getting past that first idea.
I got to play three of his prototypes were were in various stages of completion. Get Lucky is going to be the most recognizable and also the game I enjoyed the most. Just like the boardgame it's based on, in this card game, you're trying to kill Doctor Lucky. Instead of bouncing around rooms in his mansion however, he is taking turns visiting various guests in order, of which each player may control two. It makes a good balance between chaos and order that he is taking a predictable path (until people mess with it) but that path is totally unrelated to the player turn order. On your turn you try to beef up your characters so that your future murder attempts, which occur whenever he is visiting you during your turn, will be more powerful. During an attempt, everyone else then gets one opportunity to play cards, as luck, to fowl the murder attempt. There are of course a couple extra details, like certain cards being an instant quash for certain characters and attract cards to bring the doctor to you, that add enough chaos to foil any well laid plans and of course to add in a bit of hilarity. Also of note is that James made a few significant changes Saturday night based on our feedback and the game on Sunday was a much better game. Even as is, it's a game I would recommend keeping an eye on and I'm sure James will still be improving it.
We also played a stock trading game called Panic! (unrelated to Panic!) which, on the surface, looks a bit like Pit. There are N+1 commodities, each with cards valued from 1-10 and your goal is to hold cards with the highest value. You bid for the right to peek at a few cards in the marketplace which gives you an idea of what will be worth less (and very likely negative). You pay your bid by then publicly locking in cards into your final hand. You pass cards around then do the next round. After three of these, everyone discards a bunch of cards to the market and you see where prices landed and the value of your hand. The game worked but it did feel like it was missing a little bit of something. James informed me the next day that he actually remembered a rule wrong so it could easily have been because of that. I think the greatest thematic touch in the game however, is that since you're all investment bankers, you each get a million points each round plus or minus your final hand score. This leads to final scores like 3,000,021 to 2,999,993. Completely pointless but completely hilarious.
The last game I played with James was called Acolyte. This is a Cthulhu themed party game that plays like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity. The judge will play a card that they feel is what is wrong with the world and the others will play a card that they feel would be the best solution. The game is still very early but I will point out a few things that make it stand out from the two games just listed. First, the solutions and problems are all from the same deck. This sounds simple but it mixes it up a bit and, when you see the topics on the cards, says a bit about the humor in the game. Second, each player also gets a "junior god" that they are an acolyte of but their exact purpose is being tweaked. Third, the judge each turn can modify pretty much any rules they want. During our session, we had judges allow two solutions to be played together, a random solution from the draw pile be allowed, or the rule I tweaked, that the judge played a solution and each player had to play a problem that solution may fix. (Yet another reason a combined deck makes sense.) Finally, whenever you win a hand, you get a card to track your score but these cards also add a rule or restriction to the game. Some may make you pass point cards around or force you to stop arguing about rules (yes, seriously) while others are far more silly and require you to name-drop a celebrity every turn or continually remind people there are ten minutes remaining. If you fail to follow the rules and someone catches you, they can steal that card, and the corresponding point. This wasn't quite my cup of tea but my girlfriend actually commented two days later that she really enjoyed it and was still thinking about it.
Ok, this post is already far longer than I anticipated so I'll come back with a couple follow up posts to cover Martin Wallace, including impressions of Doctor Who: The Card Game(!), impressions of some already released games we were able to try from the library, and other random notes from KublaCon. That will also give me a chance to upload the few photos I took over the weekend and hopefully drop them in the blog.
Wed May 30, 2012 10:02 pm
-
B. Hebert
United States
Davis
California
-
This is the third in a series of posts I've written about problems that I've encountered when playing multiplayer games with two.
In the comments to my last post (about the problem of "looseness") Kevin Smith said he rarely had a problem with games becoming too loose when played with two -- just the opposite:
peakhope wrote: When playing with my wife, it's rare that a 2p game gets "too loose", but I can see how it could happen. Usually when reading reviews or comments that complain how it's no fun for 2 because you lose the competition, I say "Yay, a game that might work for the 2 of us."
I have enjoyed my two 2p games of World Without End, and find it to have a good level of competition. Someone proposed a 2p variant that would turn it into a brutal bloodbath due to the lack of resources. It might work for them, but I would hate it. In other words, the definition of "too loose" or "too tight" is highly subjective.
Perhaps you can do a future installment: "Why Two-Player Games Fail: Zero-Sum Cutthroatiness". That's the problem I have seen with several games, and is almost the opposite of today's topic.
That resonated a bit, because I'd already been thinking about how "take that" mechanisms can sometimes break down when playing with two. That can lead to "zero-sum cutthroatiness." But, as discussed below, I think it can also lead to a dull, narrow, tug-of-war.
A lot of multi-player games include catch-up mechanisms that can be used to impede or harm other players' positions.
In a multi-player setting, these mechanisms operate as designed. They're often used to "catch the leader," with everyone throwing crap at the perceived leader until that person has fallen back into the pack. If other leaders emerge, they get targets on their backs. If there is no obvious leader, you're likely to use your attacks in a strategically rational way (e.g., against a player who is ahead of you or has something that you need). Failing that, you'll at least spread them around so as not to make anyone especially mad at you (you don't want that person targetting you for the rest of the game, out of spite). In my group, this sort of thing is talked about openly. "I'm using this against Steve because I got Erica last time" or "I'm not picking on you, I just need to clear you out of that space so I can go there." The result is that the attacks are spread around with some evenness (except for the leaders, who deserve what they get).
But when you're playing with two, there is only one target, your sole opponent. Every attack power that you possess will be used against that person, whether they're ahead or not. In a game with a strong take-that element, this can lead to a Three-Stooges-like experience. I poke you in the eye, so you hit me on the head with a hammer, etc., ad absurdum.
Although I love Discworld: Ankh-Morpork multi-player, I've never played with two for that very reason. I expect that the game would be reduced to tit-for-tat bashing, with little subtlety or range of action.
Aside from excessive "cutthroatiness," two-player tit-for-tat can be just plain boring. When I move, you make a countering move, which I counter, which you counter. It's like trying to beat your partner in a three-legged race. Or playing a board game version of ping pong (is there such a game?)
I'll probably get some crap for this, but that's how two-player Rattus felt to me. It's been a while since I tried it, but I seem to remember a lot of "I'll take the King, thank you." "Fine, then I'll take it back." "Okay, hand it over." etc. Maybe that was just groupthink, and we should have seen more creative alternatives to just swapping things back and forth, but I've read others reporting the same basic problem.
I generally like in-your-face confrontation games, so a game would have to be pretty cutthroaty for it to be a problem for me. For example, my wife and I have just started playing two-player Troyes, which I absolutely love. Yes, there's a lot of opportunity to screw your opponent, but there are so many different ways to do it and they're so interesting, that it doesn't bother me (it's so much more than just playing a card that says,"go to jail").
That said, I don't like a game that's been reduced to a long series of back and forth incremental countermoves. If I wanted to play that sort of game, I'd play Go (which is a great game, but not what I'm looking for when playing a Euro). If a multi-player euro is reduced to that dynamic with two, I'm not interested.
Game on!
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Next » [874]
|
|
