Small World
Among my goals at PrezCon this year was to learn Small World, which my buddy Grant Greffey is running as the Game Master. I participated in his demo for new players, which was well-attended by upwards of eight people crowded around the table. Small World is a relatively easy game to pick up. Grant is especially fond of it for its replayability. The random combinations of races and special abilities make for some dynamic game interactions.
Later that evening, we played the first heat in the tournament. I placed fourth at my table and learned (as I have so often heard but failed to incorporate) the importance of timing when it comes to placing a race into decline and starting the ascendancy of a new one. I did reasonably well with "forest orcs" in the first several turns of the game but held on too long to "wealthy wizards," whom in retrospect I should have placed into decline after just a turn or two in favor of some more effective race. The winner was Nathan Twigg, a regular face at PrezCon and a fun opponent.
The bottom line of course is that I learned how to play SW and found it to be a fun, light game.
Can't Stop
After my exhaustive statistical analysis of Pass the Pigs and the stark realization that I am mathematically too cautious in my approach to push-your-luck games, I vowed that I would approach Can't Stop with a more aggressive style. That approach did not serve me well at all late Thursday night, where I busted on countless attempts to close out a category. I really have to spend some serious number-crunching on that game to figure out the right approach.
Midnight gaming
My friends and I have taken to meeting at midnight to play together because, you know, 14 hours of gaming can't possibly be enough for one day. So Grant, Keith F., Brian G., Tom S. and I were joined by Michelle H. (who was at my Can't Stop table) for a six-player round of Alhambra. I did abysmally poorly. It was so bad that at one point after the second scoring round, Eugene Y. (a very experienced and knowledgeable player) looked at our table and was astounded at how low the scores were - mine in particular at about nine points. He asked me if I'd ever played before, or if I even knew how to play. I told him that I'd placed in the semifinals the previous year, and he was just dumb-founded that we could have been so far into the game and have scores so low. It was about the strangest game of Alhambra I'd ever played.
After Alhambra, we still weren't satisfied, so Keith, Brian, Tom and I stayed up for a round of Citadels. None of the three of them had played a four-player round of Citadels before; Keith and Brian had only ever played three-player games. The dynamic is completely different with four players (and a better game, really) since each player gets only one role, and two roles are visible face up and known to be out of play. I built some substantial high-scoring buildings, but had only got to five districts before Keith finished with eight and won the game.
[Next post: Friday's experiences going down in flames, settling Catan, learning to acquire, and bringing more people aboard trains, planes, and automobiles]
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
PrezCon 2012 - first day
Risk
Randy Dean found himself running the Risk tournament, and he hadn't even brought his copy of the game (nor had I brought my son's), so he ran out to Target and picked up a copy of the current edition before yesterday morning's first heat started. I had assumed, since only two hours had been scheduled for the event, that we would play the new, objective-based rules. As it turned out, neither Randy nor any of the other players at the table had ever seen the new edition before. They were all surprised at the arrow-shaped armies and had no interest in playing anything other than conventional Risk. So we adapted the new-edition components to the original rules. Since the new-edition cards don't have the 19th-century infantry-cavalry-artillery symbols for reinforcement turn-ins, Randy established the rule for this tournament that four cards yields armies on the original progressive scale of four armies for the first turn-in, six for the second, then eight, ten, 12, 15, 20, and so on by fives thereafter.
The result was an old-style game in which I started with positions in South America, North America, and northeast Asia. Randy got knocked out of the game by Joshua S., who took Randy's cards and ended up getting two consecutive turn-ins for armies. In retrospect, I was in a position to try to knock off the other player at the table (whose name escapes me) to go after his cards and then face off Joshua in a super-power slugfest. Instead, I tried to knock down Joshua first, which I didn't yet have the strength to do. At the height of my position on the board, I controlled Europe, North America, and South America, while Joshua was holed up in Africa and the other player in Australia with a stronghold in southeast Asia. But I couldn't deliver the knock out, and Joshua was able to get another big turn-in, break out of Africa, and take me out of the game. At that point, the other player conceded the game, and Joshua won the heat.
Our game did in fact exceed two hours, so I was unable to make the first heat of Down in Flames. I expect to play that later this morning.
Although the session was fun in its own right, I stand by my often-repeated position that the newer edition of Risk is a much better game. I don't expect to return to any later heats of the tournament here at PrezCon.
Command and Colors Napoleonics
I attended a demo of Command and Colors Napoleonics in my effort to learn at least one new game and to play at least one wargame this year. C&CN appears to be a more complex iteration on the series of Richard Borg card-driven wargames. It includes the attached-leaders element of Battle Cry (as you might expect in a 19th-century wargame) as well as some of the command card innovations and unit-type specialties of Memoir '44. The handling of infantry vs. cavalry seems particularly interesting, as well as the counter-strike element of close combat.
Unfortunately, my schedule did not allow me to participate in the tournament itself. It may have been just as well. Again, the game master was thrown into the event at practically the last minute, so he made the decision that the tournament would be handled as a single-elimination event. My limited experience in competitive play suggests that a single-elimination format is not well suited for a two-player game, but I didn't stick around to find out how well it went.
A Few Acres of Snow
At the adjacent table to the C&CN event, my friend Keith F. was trying his hand at the hot new game A Few Acres of Snow. What was disappointing to him, though, is that the game master, Bruce Reiff, told participants that AFAoS is "a broken game," that the British player can not be stopped if he uses a strategy called "The Halifax Hammer," and that even three or four recent game modifications to mitigate the problem do not fix the game. Although Bruce felt that the game was not well suited for competition, he continued to run the event "for fun" and to teach it to newcomers like Keith to familiarize them with it. Keith ended up playing as the British against a very experienced player; I think his experiences with it were mixed. He said the comparison many people make to Dominion holds up as deck-building wargame. For my part, the bottom line of this event is that I am taking AFAoS off my wishlist.
Chicago Express
I got very excited about Chicago Express when Kathy and I played with our friends Sheila D., Keith R., Rebecca E., and Jeff W. some weeks ago. It struck me then as the perfect capitalist game in which players invest in railroad companies and direct their development in an attempt to maximize income and make the most money.
I got to play in the first heat of the tournament here yesterday against Jim [missed his last name], Pat D., and Demy McB. As it happens, Jim and Pat had played once before each, and Demy had never played before (but is a quick learner, as I've played her in a number of other games over the years), so the level of competition was fairly even among us. I ended up owning three of five shares of the New York Central plus one share of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and I won the game in a fairly close finish.
[More entries to follow as time allows, and I will add pictures, links, and details to this entry as well. PrezCon continues...]
Monday, February 20, 2012
Personal Pre-PrezCon
PrezCon open gaming and pre-cons started this evening (President's Day, hence the name), though I won't be arriving there in Charlottesville, Virginia, until Thursday morning. But I had the opportunity to play a lot of games this weekend in a kind of home-style pre-PrezCon warm-up.
My 15-year-old's friend from Maryland spent the weekend with us, so Saturday afternoon started off with a reprise of our three-player Risk session from last July. Last time, my son and his friend got pre-occupied with Asian occupation, and I ended up achieving an objective in each of the first three turns and winning the game in short order. This time, I was not so fortunate, and they were not so inattentive. My capitol was in New Guinea, and my dice luck prevented me from seizing control of Australia in the first turn. It was all slow going from there. My son gained control of South America and Africa, his friend dominated Europe, and I could do little more than throw roadblocks in the path of one and then the other. Eventually my son rolled up the "Control two continents," "Control 18 territories," and "Control Asia" objectives to win the game. I definitely prefer Risk (designer Rob Daviau, publisher Hasbro) in the new objective-based format (rather than the old-style player-elimination global-domination victory condition). I haven't decided whether to throw my hat into the Risk tournament at PrezCon, though.
That evening my wife and I played a two-player game of 7 Wonders (designer Antoine Bauza, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Repos Production). It's not quite the same crazy free-for-all that a four- or five-player game can be, but it's still a nice way for us to pass the time. She had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; I had the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. I won by a fairly narrow margin, as I recall.
Yesterday, our friend Sue C. came to join us for a couple of days, and we started with Cities and Knights of Catan (designer Klaus Teuber; artists Volkan Baga, Harald Lieske, Franz Vohwinkel, and Stephen Walsh; publisher Mayfair), an expansion that I actually prefer to the original Settlers of Catan but which requires considerable familiarity to play. Maybe I can develop some interest in C&KoC among my gaming friends. With barbarians, knights, walls, commodities, city developments, and progress cards in lieu of development cards, the game takes on a richer level of complexity. Dice luck is still a factor, but sound planning counts for a lot. Kathy kept me from building a settlement on a contended road junction by occupying the corner with a knight. Although I had a more powerful knight on the same road network, I hesitated to spend precious wheat to displace her knight and then have to move my knight out of the way again to make room for a new settlement. My hesitation cost me in the end; she ended up building the settlement there instead, which left me to have to build new roads elsewhere and develop less productive locations. Ultimately it was Sue, however, who stole Kathy's longest road and ended up winning, despite my late-game move to build a cathedral and get within two points of victory myself.
Next was Citadels (designer Bruno Faidutti, numerous artists, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), always a favorite of mine, and one that Kathy had never played three-player before. I think that assassins and thieves are particularly dangerous in the three-player version, because when the roles pass around the second time, each player knows two roles that have definitely been chosen by someone - so the assassin and thief can guarantee that a target is in play. I ended up running away with the win this time, in part because of an excellent hand at the start of the game. Although I think Citadels is primarily a game of getting inside your opponent's head, card luck is still a considerable factor.
Today we opened with another favorite, Puerto Rico (designer Andreas Seyfarth, artist Franz Vohwinkel, publisher Rio Grande). Kathy and I seldom get to play it in its original intended format of three to five players. I had a pretty strong engine going with corn, sugar, and coffee, plus a factory and office that helped with the cash flow. Kathy put her hospice to good use (as she likes to do), ending up with three occupied quarries that enabled her to pick up the fortress and capitalize on her excess population. Despite one captain phase that saw me spoil a ton of product, I was able to eke out a one-point victory, helped by the guild hall.
After Sue left this afternoon, Kathy and I enjoyed our customary cocktail hour with a game of Ingenious (designer Reiner Knizia, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), which was a PrezCon acquisition last year and which I still appreciate both for its elegant gameplay and for its aesthetic appeal. Kathy won, as she often does. Although tile draw luck is a factor, I think Kathy did a better job keeping an eye on my scoring track and anticipating what I needed to do better than I did on hers.
So I got to spend this three-day weekend sharpening my teeth on some friendly competition before heading to Charlottesville later in the week. I have to admit that I'm a lot better prepared to go have fun than I am to beat anybody; I think I'm a far cry from winning anything at the tournament level of competition that I expect to encounter. But heck, it's all about having fun, meeting people, learning new games, and engaging with other designers and publishers. I expect to do plenty of all of that.
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| My son's red empire extends from Buenos Aires to the ends of Asia |
That evening my wife and I played a two-player game of 7 Wonders (designer Antoine Bauza, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Repos Production). It's not quite the same crazy free-for-all that a four- or five-player game can be, but it's still a nice way for us to pass the time. She had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; I had the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. I won by a fairly narrow margin, as I recall.
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| Image (c) Mayfair Games. Used by permission. All rights reserved |
Next was Citadels (designer Bruno Faidutti, numerous artists, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), always a favorite of mine, and one that Kathy had never played three-player before. I think that assassins and thieves are particularly dangerous in the three-player version, because when the roles pass around the second time, each player knows two roles that have definitely been chosen by someone - so the assassin and thief can guarantee that a target is in play. I ended up running away with the win this time, in part because of an excellent hand at the start of the game. Although I think Citadels is primarily a game of getting inside your opponent's head, card luck is still a considerable factor.
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| Box cover image courtesy of Rio Grande Games |
After Sue left this afternoon, Kathy and I enjoyed our customary cocktail hour with a game of Ingenious (designer Reiner Knizia, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), which was a PrezCon acquisition last year and which I still appreciate both for its elegant gameplay and for its aesthetic appeal. Kathy won, as she often does. Although tile draw luck is a factor, I think Kathy did a better job keeping an eye on my scoring track and anticipating what I needed to do better than I did on hers.
So I got to spend this three-day weekend sharpening my teeth on some friendly competition before heading to Charlottesville later in the week. I have to admit that I'm a lot better prepared to go have fun than I am to beat anybody; I think I'm a far cry from winning anything at the tournament level of competition that I expect to encounter. But heck, it's all about having fun, meeting people, learning new games, and engaging with other designers and publishers. I expect to do plenty of all of that.
Friday, February 17, 2012
PrezCon: The first casualty of battle is the plan
PrezCon! I get excited just thinking about the name. My favorite convention. So convenient to northern Virginia, such a friendly and yet competitive gaming community.I felt a little burnt out after five solid days of PrezCon last year, so this day I'm going for just four days; I'll arrive on Thursday and go through Sunday. My gaming friends Keith F., Brian G., and Tom S. will arrive a day ahead of me, on Wednesday. My buddy Grant plans to arrive in time for the first events on Monday evening and stay the entire seven days. Hard core, baby. I don't know how people do a solid week of intense boardgaming. People like that must pace themselves better than I do.
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| Excerpt of my PrezCon schedule ... for now ... |
I've written this before, but I'm not afraid to repeat myself. The best advice I ever got when approaching PrezCon came from Convention Director Justin Thompson: "Learn at least one new game; buy at least one new game." I have three demos in mind for games that I want to learn this year:
- Acquire
- Small World
- Command and Colors: Napoleonics
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| 1976 3M Edition |
Grant is running Small World (designer Philippe Keyaerts, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Days of Wonder) at PrezCon, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never actually sat down and played the game before. So I'm setting SW as a specific "learning goal" for PrezCon this year.
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| Cover Design by Rodger B. MacGowan Copyright ©2010 |
As for buying at least one new game, well, I'll bring my wishlist, but there's no telling what I'll come home with. Here's my top seven, in no particular order:
- Fairy Tale
- Le Havre
- Chicago Express
- Traders of Carthage
- Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War
- High Frontier
- Saint Petersburg
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The game of marriage ...
... or (to paraphrase the immortal question posed in the introduction to The Odd Couple) "Can two people live together without driving each other crazy?"
Today I direct you to the blog of my lovely wife, K.B.Owen Mysteries, where she and I exchanged, you know, "observations" on each other's behaviors, those little things that make life together, well, interesting. I hope you get a chuckle out of it.
As you read it, bear in mind that this is the lovely face that gazes at me from across the dining table and smiles sweetly just before she crushes me to fine grains of dust in Agricola, or Jaipur, or Citadels...
Today I direct you to the blog of my lovely wife, K.B.Owen Mysteries, where she and I exchanged, you know, "observations" on each other's behaviors, those little things that make life together, well, interesting. I hope you get a chuckle out of it. As you read it, bear in mind that this is the lovely face that gazes at me from across the dining table and smiles sweetly just before she crushes me to fine grains of dust in Agricola, or Jaipur, or Citadels...
Friday, February 10, 2012
Gold on Mars: It's been done
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| The game that burst my bubble |
So, bottom line, I'll have to get a copy of HF. It looks like fun.
*Heavy sigh* Meanwhile, back to the drawing board.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Discovering Bohnanza
I'm a big fan of Uwe R. because of Agricola, and I look forward to trying Le Havre sometime soon when I have the opportunity. Bohnanza is in a completely different category, though, and I was surprised to see that Uwe R. had designed it. At first glance, I was reminded more of Empyrean Inc. than anything else, but even that comparison is weak. I'd read a number of reviews of Bohnanza, and while they were largely enthusiastic, none was particularly positive on it as a two-player game, so I hadn't really given it much thought.
Based on our session this evening, though, I've bumped it up on my wish list. Bohnanza is a clever little game of shifting relative values among cards and tight decision constraints. A lot of the fun is in the wheeling and dealing to trade off unwanted bean types for better prospects. Whereas we tended to play a semi-cooperative, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" approach, I can see how this game could be very cut-throat in a competitive environment (like a tournament). As a social gamer, I appreciated the "benevolent negotiator" approach that we took at the table this evening.
I would imagine that a lot of the fun elements would be muted in a two-player game, which has no trading, but Stephen and Shelly insist that they have a lot of fun just playing the two of them. Their copy of the game is "well-loved," which shows that it has had a lot of play. So I think Kathy and I will have to give this a look. Many thanks for Stephen and Shelly for turning us on to this new discovery!
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Chicago Express: Where has this game been all my life?
Sheila and Keith hosted a dinner party last night, and we got to play a six-player session. None of us had ever played before, so I read the rules beforehand. The game struck me as the perfect implementation of capitalism in game form. Railroad company shares are sold at auction. Company dividends are distributed among shareholders based on earnings. Stockholders - or board members, if you like - direct the investment of capital raised from the sale of shares to invest in railroad expansion and development to improve the company's earnings. I have never played an 18xx railroad game, but I have the impression that CE is a kind of "18xx light."
We had a really great time with this game. I was very pleased that it was a relatively easy game for all of us to learn even though we had no one at the table who had played before. (The only open rules question for us was whether money is "hidden" or "open"; the boardgamegeek consensus seems to be that money in any game is open unless the rules specifically provide for hiding it, as in St. Petersburg.) I think as we played, we all overbid pretty heavily for stock certificates. More players chasing a fixed number of shares, which were the only source of income - supply and demand at its finest. We had so many auctions that three railroads had only just reached Pittsburgh when Rebecca triggered game end with an auction of the last share of the New York Central after the Pennsylvania and B&O had already sold out.
Part of what struck me about this game is a complete absence of luck. I didn't really think about it until the game was over, but there is not a single card draw, dice roll, or bag pull in the entire game. As one reviewer mentions, the only "random" element (if you can call it that) is the seating order around the table and determination of starting player. The rest of the game is determined entirely by the decisions of the players at the table. Even more than Puerto Rico (which I consider a brilliant design), CE is entirely in the hands of the players.
The more I think about CE, the more excited I am about it. I've put it on my "must have" short list.
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| 1962 3M edition |
So many games, so little time.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Games for four-year-olds
[This is a re-post of an entry originally published on 2 February 2012. The post was somehow corrupted, so I am restoring it for accessibility.]
I was recently asked about games for very young kids. I haven't looked at games in this age range in a while (since our youngest is eleven), so it was interesting to revisit the gamescape for the booster-seat set.
We still have two in our house that our kids enjoyed back before kindergarten:
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Husker Du is essentially Concentration in a kid-friendly format. The board consists of a number of small round "windows" through which symbols on a single rotating disc are visible. Game set-up consists of covering the windows with checkers, then rotating the disc so that new symbols are lined up in the windows under the checkers. Players remove checkers two at a time looking for matching symbols. If they match, they keep the checkers; if not, the checkers cover the symbols again. An old standard memory game, always a good parent-child past-time.
Launch Across is a cross between table-top basketball and Connect Four. Each player has a launcher that propels colored balls against a backboard and down into one of several stacking columns. The first to get four in a straight line row (horizontal, diagonal, or vertical) wins. I'm not usually a fan of dexterity games, but this one is entertaining.
A search of the boardgamegeek.com database turned up a number of good options that are still available on the market:
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I was recently asked about games for very young kids. I haven't looked at games in this age range in a while (since our youngest is eleven), so it was interesting to revisit the gamescape for the booster-seat set.
We still have two in our house that our kids enjoyed back before kindergarten:
Launch Across is a cross between table-top basketball and Connect Four. Each player has a launcher that propels colored balls against a backboard and down into one of several stacking columns. The first to get four in a straight line row (horizontal, diagonal, or vertical) wins. I'm not usually a fan of dexterity games, but this one is entertaining.
A search of the boardgamegeek.com database turned up a number of good options that are still available on the market:
- "Animal Upon Animal is a simple stacking game, listed for ages 4-99, with 29 cute wooden animals."
- Kids of Carcassone is a tile-laying game patterned after the phenomenally popular Carcassonne with simpler dynamics but, according to some parent reviews, engaging gameplay.
- "Viva Topo! is a [roll-and-move] family game that has players balancing risk and rewards as they attempt to outrun the cat and score for cheese. Players attempt to advance their mice to various goals. The further the goal, the more cheese it is worth. Pursuing the mice is the cat that removes the mice from the game should it catch the mice. Movement is regulated by a die that also moves the cat. Initial cat moves are only 1 space, but become 2 spaces after once around the track, so when the cat speeds up, it's almost all over!"
- Boo Who? (originally Geistertreppe, now available as Spooky Stairs) has a clever feature in which players' pieces are magnetic and become hidden by "ghost" pieces over the course of the game. Players try to remember where their pieces are and get them to the top of the castle stairs to win.
- "Being afraid of monsters is a normal part of growing up. Go Away Monster! encourages kids to conquer that fear by acting it out and taking control. It also lets them experience some of the apprehension and excitement in deciding what is real and what is imaginary. Reach in the bag to find the puzzle pieces that fit your bedroom game board. Try to distinguish between the different puzzle pieces and decide which one feels like the size and shape of a piece you need. If you pull out a monster, don't be scared... You take charge, and the monsters will take off!"
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
A couple of funny little card games
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| Kathy's winning manipulation of the time continuum in Chrononauts |
Although some of the alternate timelines in Chrononauts are a bit tortured, the game itself is fun. Besides manipulating history, the game can be won by collecting artifacts from history (or the future), some of which make me laugh every time I see them (such as the "Obvious Forgery of the Mona Lisa," depicted with a mustache). The fairly simple gameplay features some tricky decision-making and risk-taking, which makes for a good overall card game.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Gaming in a hospital room - Monopoly Express
Some months ago I wrote a post on what kinds of games work when keeping someone company in a hospital room, and what kinds of games don't. I had the occasion this week to while away time in similar circumstances, and we settled on Monopoly Express (designers Garrett Donner and Michael S. Steer, publisher Hasbro) as a not-bad alternative when conditions don't allow the kind of space that board and card games typically require.
First published in 1991 as Don't Go to Jail, the dice game Monopoly Express was re-released in 2007 in a round plastic container that is rather difficult to open. This inconvenience is a blessing in disguise, because it allows ME to be thrown into a bag and taken anywhere without concern for lost pieces. The container also serves as a dice tray, and it was this feature that made the game work so well in a surgery waiting room. My wife and I were able to play this game on the seat between us without worrying about pieces rolling onto the floor.
The "board" is a round plastic disc with recesses for placing dice to score points. The game itself is a "push your luck" game along the lines of Pass the Pigs, $GREED, or Can't Stop. Three dice have only "Go to Jail" policemen, "Go" green arrows, or blank faces. Seven other dice have colors and denominations on each face that correspond roughly to familiar properties on a Monopoly board. A player's turn consists of rolling the dice, putting any policemen on the board, and then also placing on the board a combination of colored denominations that offers the best prospects for scoring points. Completed sets are worth more points than the sum of individual dice and also offer the opportunity to add the "house/hotel" die to the mix on the next roll; houses and hotels add greatly to the score. A player can re-roll remaining dice or stop at any time and score the results of the turn, but if a roll turns up the third policeman, then the player scores nothing that turn (like a "pig out" in PtP).
The value in this game isn't the twist on the push-your-luck format, and certainly not its very small addition to the deluge of Monopoly titles in the world. Its real value is its extreme portability and quick play. This week it got more action than PtP because it doesn't even need a flat playing surface. At a time when we all needed a little cheering up, ME helped pass the time in a pleasant, undemanding way.
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| Monopoly Express photo Hasbro 2007 |
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| Monopoly Express board photo posted to boardgamegeek.com by Chris Blakely |
The value in this game isn't the twist on the push-your-luck format, and certainly not its very small addition to the deluge of Monopoly titles in the world. Its real value is its extreme portability and quick play. This week it got more action than PtP because it doesn't even need a flat playing surface. At a time when we all needed a little cheering up, ME helped pass the time in a pleasant, undemanding way.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Agricola close-up
Spanish boardgame geek Roberto Méndez has started a game photography project he calls, "52 Weeks 52 Photos." This week's photo of Agricola reminded me that I'd taken a few photos of a game Kathy and I had played recently but never posted.
So here's today's Agricola close-up, inspired by Roberto Méndez.
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| Kathy's very successful wild boar farm in our Agricola game two weeks ago |
So here's today's Agricola close-up, inspired by Roberto Méndez.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Tsuro close-up
I've been trying my hand at some boardgame photography, so tonight I thought I'd post a shot I took at the end of our game of Tsuro (designer Tom McMurchie; artists* Shane Small, Cathy Brigg, and Sarah Phelps; publisher Calliope Games).
I have to say that this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games we own, and I'm very fond of it. As a game, it is a very quick play with only a few decision options each turn, but it certainly requires some thought and planning ahead.
Tonight I gambled on having the right tile come up to extricate my piece from a bind into which I'd put myself, trying to corner my wife's piece and lock her out of the more open side of the board. My gamble didn't pan out, and she ended up beating me with just one open space left.
Since Tsuro ostensibly accommodates up to eight, I'd love to play this game with a bigger group, but seldom do we get more than three to the table for it.
*Boardgamegeek.com entry gives artist credits to Franz and Imelda Vohwinkel. I can't figure out why.
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| Kathy's winning position at the end of Tsuro. My just-eliminated black stone languishes on the board edge in the background. Had I been able to last one more turn, she would have been eliminated on her next tile play. |
I have to say that this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games we own, and I'm very fond of it. As a game, it is a very quick play with only a few decision options each turn, but it certainly requires some thought and planning ahead.
Tonight I gambled on having the right tile come up to extricate my piece from a bind into which I'd put myself, trying to corner my wife's piece and lock her out of the more open side of the board. My gamble didn't pan out, and she ended up beating me with just one open space left.
Since Tsuro ostensibly accommodates up to eight, I'd love to play this game with a bigger group, but seldom do we get more than three to the table for it.
*Boardgamegeek.com entry gives artist credits to Franz and Imelda Vohwinkel. I can't figure out why.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Design inspiration
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| Working trademark for "Gold on Mars" |
Space travel is still my major sticking point, and I wish I'd spent more time on it. I think I finally settled on some rules for how much fuel is required to get to each planet, and how much fuel must be carried (or produced in situ) for the return trip. I just don't want to get hung up on making players do too much math, or end up with such widely disparate transit costs among planets that a degenerate strategy develops to ignore distant mining sites in favor of those closer to Earth.
Another concern I have is the risk of a jackpot mining operation resulting in a runaway leader. Mining is necessarily speculative, and has to have a major upside potential to justify the expense and risk of space travel, but if one player hits it big and others have mines that run dry, then the game simply ends up being an exercise in dice and card luck. So once I do have a prototype, the first few playtests will have to expose the luck factors and point me in the direction of redesigning and reworking game elements to make it a contest of thoughtful risk management, more than just luck or puzzle-solving.
I do love a challenge.
***
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| Beer, wine, and Citadels |
Friday, January 13, 2012
Risk management and pigs: Running the numbers
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| Pig on left demonstrates the very difficult "leaning jowler" while pig on right wallows on table, unimpressed |
My habit has been to stop rolling when I've reached a score of 11 or higher (unless I'm behind, in which case I'll take a chance on catching up). Kathy's personal threshold is a score of 15. Our friend "SPC" commented back to say that his threshold is 18. But all of that was pretty much based on a qualitative sense of risk tolerance, not any real actuarial analysis.
As it happened, back in October, the intrepid boardgame geek Mike W. actually kept track of 895 rolls of two pigs over ten games and posted the resulting statistics. These data provided a golden opportunity to do some real optimization analysis. Release the spreadsheets!
I started with Mike's breakdown of 1790 individual pig results:
Result, Number of Occurrences, Percentage
On Side, 1243, 69.4%
Razorback, 388, 21.7%
Hoofer, 112, 6.3%
Snouter, 30, 1.7%
Leaning Jowler, 17, 0.9%
I broke out the "On Side" results and assumed half were on the left, half on the right, then made a matrix of all possible combinations of two pigs:
| Probability | Left side | Right side | Razorback | Hoofer | Snouter | Leaning jowler |
| Left side | 0.120409 | 0.120409 | 0.075299 | 0.021861 | 0.005899 | 0.003123 |
| Right side | 0.120409 | 0.120409 | 0.075299 | 0.021861 | 0.005899 | 0.003123 |
| Razorback | 0.075299 | 0.075299 | 0.047089 | 0.013671 | 0.003689 | 0.001953 |
| Hoofer | 0.021861 | 0.021861 | 0.013671 | 0.003969 | 0.001071 | 0.000567 |
| Snouter | 0.005899 | 0.005899 | 0.003689 | 0.001071 | 0.000289 | 0.000153 |
| Leaning jowler | 0.003123 | 0.003123 | 0.001953 | 0.000567 | 0.000153 | 0.000081 |
Now, given a starting score s, I treated a result of one left-side pig and one right-side pig as have a value of -s, and all other results having the positive score value in the game (five points for a razorback, 20 points for a double hoofer, etc). The expected value of a roll of two pigs is the linear combination of probabilities and corresponding scores, where the "pig outs" have a value of -s for a given starting score s.
For the first roll of the turn, s = 0, and the expected value turns out to be +4.17. For every point of s at risk, the expected value goes down by 0.24 (the probability of a "pig out"). So for any initial score s, the expected value of the next roll is
s
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Expected value
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0
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4.17
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1
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3.93
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2
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3.69
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3
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3.45
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4
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3.21
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5
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2.97
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6
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2.72
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7
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2.48
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8
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2.24
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9
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2.00
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10
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1.76
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11
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1.52
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12
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1.28
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13
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1.04
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14
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0.80
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15
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0.56
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16
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0.32
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17
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0.08
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18
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-0.17
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These results really surprised me. They indicate pretty clearly that my instinct for stopping at 11 points is way too conservative. With only 11 points at stake, the next roll still has an expected value of 1.52 - better than a sider. Even my wife's threshold of 15 is a bit safe, since the subsequent roll would still have an expected value of 0.56. But most amazing is that "SPC's" risk tolerance is perfect (according to these data). If he rolls on 17 but stops on 18, he is playing PtP right down to the tip of the snout. On scores of 18 or higher, the downside risk outweighs the upside, and it's time to stop (unless the opponent has a significant lead and the game is in jeopardy).
This revelation of my own conservative play reminds me again of my poor showing in Can't Stop at Congress of Gamers (and before that at PrezCon). I think I'm going to have to run the numbers on CS some time and see what I can discover about my risk threshold there.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Luck, risk management, and pigs
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| Beer, wine, pretzels, and pigs - my final losing "pig out" |
What a great question. I don't like games based on luck - games like Life, Sorry, War, and any other game in which luck renders decision-making moot. But I certainly do like risk management games, and PtP is squarely in that category. I've posted before about my early observations on how the teenage brain works in assessing risk. In our first family game of Incan Gold,
[My son] bolstered my working hypothesis on teenagers and risk assessment. He was always still in the expedition when the second monster of a suit came up, so he ended up with no treasure after five rounds.On the other hand, I remember getting my butt kicked in Can't Stop at Congress of Gamers last fall because of that very phenomenon.
One brilliant element of PtP is that since the pigs aren't really dice, it's very difficult to calculate probability in the conventional sense. The pigs are oddly shaped, and because I'm too lazy to run 1000 trials of pigs to estimate the expected value of a roll (although somebody else wasn't), well, I just wing it on the risk assessment. My "wing it" threshold for PtP is typically eleven points. (Actually, maybe I shouldn't post that number online.) If I'm significantly behind, I'll take bigger chances, but overall, I'm still pretty conservative. My wife said her threshold was 15 points, but after I told her mine was eleven, she started stopping at eleven, too. And she won. So what does that tell you?
***
So now that I've been thinking about the fact that somebody else actually did run the numbers on the pigs, my inner mathematician compels me to calculate the optimal threshold for rolling again vs. not rolling again. I think that will be a topic for a future post...
Friday, January 6, 2012
Playing with Christmas toys
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| 24/7: The Game - near the end of this evening's session |
Our second game was a gift that I picked up for Kathy based on a recommendation (I wish I could remember from whom) as a "spouse" game - 24/7: The Game (designer Carey Grayson, publisher Sunriver Games). This game for two to four players appeals to me in two respects - the gameplay challenge and the physical quality, much as do the two-player games Quarto and Hive. In 24/7, players take turns laying tiles onto a board in a kind of crossword fashion, similar to Scrabble, except that the tiles are numbered from one to ten, only one tile is laid in a turn, and scoring comes from completing runs, matching sets, or sums adding to seven or 24. In our game this evening, again, the importance of not leaving the opponent an opportunity to score became evident. I had one big bonus score - completing both a seven and a 24 on a double-score space - that turned out to be the game-winner. (In the photo, that was the '6' tile in the upper left corner of the picture.*) I have been pleasantly surprised that my right-brained mystery-writer wife likes this arithmetic-dependent game as much as I do.
Incidentally, I'm inspired by GamerChris's new Picture of the Week series and Roberto Mendez's 52-weeks-52-photos geeklist to renew my amateur interest in boardgame photography. So I hope to have the camera out more often and resort less frequently to stock box art images in the future.
*The astute observer and aficionado of 24/7 will observe that one of us made an illegal tile placement at some point during the game. I will leave it to the reader to find the error.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Family games - what works for both adults and kids?
As parents of boys spanning eight years in age difference, we've struggled to find family activities that work for all of us. Naturally, my first choice for an indoor occasion is to play a boardgame - anything we can all agree on and enjoy. In my experience, a game that appeals to kids as well as the adults in the family does not come along often.
The other day we tried a little game that my son got for his birthday called Pictionary Card Game (designer Brian Yu, publisher Mattel). Unlike the original Pictionary, which requires players to draw diagrams and pictures, the card game has a set of pictographs - little cards with icons, sketches, and other abstract or symbolic drawings that can be combined or manipulated to prompt teammates to come up with the intended answer. There are two levels of play - adult level, where the answers that teammates need to guess require a certain familiarity with culture and turns of phrase (like "Yellow Submarine"), and kid level, where the answers are more generic (like "ruler"). Each answer has an associated category (like "school supplies" for "ruler") so that players have a general idea of what they're trying to guess.
What we found was that when adults play with kids at the kids level, the adults will start shouting a range of generic answers to the category before the "clue-giver" has much chance to assemble the pictographs into any kind of clue. For example, when "school supplies" was announced, people started calling out "paper," "pencil," "eraser," "chalk," etc. In several cases, the right answer was stumbled on in a matter of seconds. So the conclusion I reached is that PCG probably works well for kids among kids, and for adults among adults, but not in a mixed setting of adults and kids. Other word-association games that have not always succeeded to bridge the adult-kid gap include Catch Phrase (which the kids love but which the adults tend to dominate) and Taboo.
Games that have worked well for us in a broad age range setting include Clue, Apples to Apples Junior (though not the original Apples to Apples), Pirateer, and Guillotine. In larger groups, we've had success with Are You a Werewolf? as long as the participants are comfortable in a player-elimination game. (If the group includes kids who are sensitive about getting "voted out," then Werewolf won't work.)
Trains Planes and Automobiles fits the bill as a family past-time in a group spanning a broad mix of ages - even more successfully than I expected when I first conceived and developed the game. I am frequently and pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions I get from both children and adults when I demonstrate it at conventions or hear from people who have played it at home. I mentioned in my last post that it had become a favorite of our friends' son and that they love the fact that they can get together and play it as a family without having to drag people to the table. I think the principle reason is that TPA rewards good decision-making enough to keep grown-ups engaged but also has enough luck and balancing elements to keep everybody in contention for the whole game. Kids feel as though they have a good chance to win, while adults enjoy playing a real game that is more than just a roll-and-move luck exercise.
Familia quod ludit una manet una.
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| Sample pictograph cards used in Pictionary Card Game |
Trains Planes and Automobiles fits the bill as a family past-time in a group spanning a broad mix of ages - even more successfully than I expected when I first conceived and developed the game. I am frequently and pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions I get from both children and adults when I demonstrate it at conventions or hear from people who have played it at home. I mentioned in my last post that it had become a favorite of our friends' son and that they love the fact that they can get together and play it as a family without having to drag people to the table. I think the principle reason is that TPA rewards good decision-making enough to keep grown-ups engaged but also has enough luck and balancing elements to keep everybody in contention for the whole game. Kids feel as though they have a good chance to win, while adults enjoy playing a real game that is more than just a roll-and-move luck exercise.
Familia quod ludit una manet una.
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