Ownership vs. Building
Posted by Rob Herman at October 22nd, 2006
I played another new-to-me game the other day: the Spiel des Jahres winner from a few years ago, Torres. It’s definitely a solid game, and one of the mechanics reminded me again that I need to write this article. The topic: Building vs. Ownership.
In most games, when you, on your turn, put a piece onto the board, that piece is yours forever. Often it is even your color. Settlements in Catan, Caballeros in El Grande, trains in Ticked to Ride… these all stay yours. Or there might be another means of tracking ownership, like the deeds of Monopoly. In other games, like Puerto Rico, you even have your very own board.
By contrast, in Torres, you can take actions to place or heighten towers, but the towers and castles can be used by any player. (Torres is Spanish for “towers”.) You can also deploy knights which establish your stake in towers. The number of points you score for a given castle (collection of adjacent towers) is the height of your highest knight in the castle, multiplied by the surface area of the castle. Knights keep other players’ knights from sharing the same space, but as castles increase in size and value, it becomes harder to keep opponents from climbing up on the unused sections of “your” castles and gaining points.
So what do you gain by placing towers? Two advantages. First, because you add the towers on your turn, you get the first chance to move a knight to a good spot on that tower. Second, you can make sure to add to places where you will have the advantage—ones that may be difficult for your opponents to take advantage of, or you might, for example, add to the surface area of a castle where all players have a knight, but yours is the highest.
In many ways it’s not like you’re placing pieces that you don’t have any control over—it’s like you’re laying out your pieces and the board at the same time, and you get to try to make board configurations that are to your advantage. There are some other games that work in a similar way:
In Carcassone, any player usually has a chance to put a meeple on a field, city, or road, but the player who plays a tile that creates that region has the first chance to do so. To contest your ownership, a rival player has to put a meeple on a different field, city, or road and then connect them, which is usually pretty difficult. (Although it can certainly be worth it, especially for fields!) Also, as in Torres, you can try to enlarge the areas you already have some control over to try and increase their value.
Tigris & Euphrates has a similar mechanic, although I haven’t played that game in a long time. Part of my frustration with the game was trying to figure out how I was supposed to parlay all of my construction efforts into a good score.
Acquire isn’t very far off from this idea, but may be a bit more abstract. Players take turns building “corporations”, represented only by squares on a grid. Their stock value is directly related to the number of squares that corporation is made of. In Acquire, however, the square placement phase comes before stock buying. This means, naturally, that stock should be purchased pre-emptively to increasing a corporations size. This also means that opposing players can see what stocks you purchase, and based on that, 1) build corporations that are disadvantegous to your plans / hold onto pieces you need / cause a bigger corporation to swallow yours, or 2) assist your build plan, and race to purchase all available stocks in said company.
I’ve not played Acquire, but I’ve heard good things about it. Supposedly it’s due to be reprinted soon.
What most people don’t realize is, the game can be played on a single piece of graph paper with 2 six-sided die (depending how you want to roll to represent random retrieval of game pieces) and maintain all of its elements. I hope it to be my next foray into DS development, as the Avalon Hill box is large enough to bludgeon a wild puma to death with, and does not travel well. Please note that I only condone bludgeoning wild pumas to death with Avalon Hill games in self defense.
I looked at the rules and:
1) It looks like you’d be better off with a d10 and a d12 than two d6, so you can simulate tile picking in a natural way.
2) It looks like there’s a significant amount of bookkeeping required in terms of stock ownership and keeping track of which chains are worth how much–and this might be a lot easier with preprinted materials. Ne?
An computer adaptation does look pretty reasonable, definitely.