At Origins I picked up Coloretto. I wholeheartedly recommend it. There are lots of decisions to make (but none of them brainburners), no waiting, plenty of opportunities for calculated risk-taking. Interaction? Hell, yes: whenever you add to a stack of cards, you’re the last person who is allowed to take it; so keeping track of what every other player wants is all-important. The estimated playtime of 30 minutes is a dirty lie–15 is more like it–and to top it off, it’s dirt cheap. Go order yourself a copy.

(I also demoed the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner, Zooloretto. The basic mechanic of the game is the same but it’s been “bulked up” into a full-length, 45-minute Euro. It’s a fine game but I feel it lacks both the elegance and intensity of its older, leaner sibling. Plus it costs four times as much.)

It’s not dissimilar to my Favorite Game Ever, Ra–more on this next time.

Consider a (fair) six-sided die with four sides red, two sides blue. That is, it has a 2/3 chance to roll red, 1/3 blue. We are playing a game as follows: One of us picks a sequence of two outcomes (like “blue, red”), and then the other picks a different sequence of two outcomes. We roll the die as many times as necessary until the most recent two rolls match one of our sequences, at which point that player wins.

(Example: you pick red, red and I pick blue, blue. The rolls come up 1. red, 2. blue, 3. red, 4. blue, 5. red, 6. red, at which point you win.)

Because I am magnanimous, I will allow you to pick the sequence first or second, as you like. What is your winning strategy?

Edit: I should credit the source, which is here. I recast the riddle because I feel that the die is more intuitive than a “biased coin flip” and to try to avoid what I feel is a major hint in the wording of the original.

To my surprise I got to try out Twilight Struggle last night. (Thank you J.K. Rowling for distracting the others.) Long story short: Playing as the USA, I lost in turn 4 (like 1955 or so) so we’re all speaking Russian now.

I definitely made some serious mistakes; there’s a lot going on and a lot you have to think about. The theme works surprisingly well. I only caught the end of the Cold War during my conscious lifetime (born 1980) but I really felt like I was watching freedom and democracy slip through my fingers as I lost.

I had read the rules enough to be pretty familiar with them (although I still needed a couple clarifications and made errors, like forgetting to update DEFCON when staging coups), and managed to get the first (and only) half of the game over in not much more than an hour and a half.  So the three-hour stated time is accurate; if we had more experience I think we’d spend more time planning things out, and a game that actually lasts until the end would take the full three hours.

There’s definitely going to be an enormous learning curve on this one, not in terms of rules (actually pretty easy) but in terms of being familiar with the cards and events and what you need to watch out for. I think it’ll be worth it in the end, though.

That’s not spam–that’s the name of the game. A cheap one I picked up at Origins.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that the game is… not bad. But too dry, like a wine that everyone agrees would be really great for someone else to drink. Nobody actually likes it enough to want to play it. Which is a shame, because it’s not bad. But I think it’s gonna stay on my shelf.

The game itself is like a mini-biathalon–a dry, inoffensive bidding game followed by a slightly less dry bluffing game. The bidding game seems gratuitous and uninteresting, and doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on the game. (I think the bidding falls particularly flat because all the cards have essentially the same value to all players.) The bluffing game is marginally more interesting, but every step feels anticlimactic. “Oh YEAH! I got… what appears to be… a slightly better value …on my goods… than you did there. Chew on THAT.”

Not bad. Just not good enough for anyone to want to pull it out. Sorry.

Today, I was contemplating the idea of creating a Ra computer game. One hypothetical feature of this game would be to “auto-pass” a worthless auction. Turns out this feature won’t be seeing the light of day…

For both of the riddles below, you may use any play situation you can imagine, and you have complete knowledge of the game state; in particular, you can know exactly what tiles are still in the bag as well as each player’s face-down suns and score.

Riddle 1: The auction track contains one tile, Unrest (AKA Death of Civilizations). The sun in the middle is worse than any of your remaining face-up suns. You pull a Ra tile. Come up with a situation where you would want to bid on this auction. Make no assumptions about your opponents’ strategy–assume that whatever they do will be bad for you.

Riddle 2: The auction track contains nothing at all. The sun in the middle is worse than any of your remaining face-up suns. You pull a Ra tile. Come up with a situation where you would want to bid on this auction. For this one, you may make reasonable assumptions about opponents’ strategy; they may want, say, to maximize their own score or winning chances, not just hurt you.

I had a great time at Origins and have several new games and articles to write.

First, I demoed a game called If Wishes Were Fishes and wrote a short review at BoardGameGeek because they didn’t have one yet. It’s available here. Short summary: gameplay is solid but uninspired; theme makes it look much lighter than it actually is.

Among game designers there is disagreement about the importance of the theme. Some say that it should come before everything else and drive the design of the mechanics; others, that you should come up with the best mechanics possible and then put on an acceptable theme.

Here I’d like to argue a point that only sounds trite at first: The theme should be added as soon as it is needed. So, for instance, if the designer is inspired by a certain theme, well, then that theme should be there from the beginning. Goodness knows the inspiration is critical! If the designer is inspired by a certain set of mechanics or idea in the game flow, and the game can be designed entirely without a theme, then the game can have a theme added at the last minute or even left abstract.

In the design of Tactego, I now find myself with many ideas for units to use, certainly many more than can comfortably fit into a game. Doubtless a decent game can be made with several combinations of these; but who has the time or inclination to try every single one of them out? Even if we could, that wouldn’t tell us which is best or most fun. Therefore, I believe that this is the time to pick a theme, and let that help guide my choice of which pieces to use.

(Reader Ephraim Glass’s favorite units also sound like a good place to start to me; we’ll probably start there.)

As for what theme to use? The Napoleonic theme of Stratego definitely doesn’t excite me. I’m a big fan of fantasy but I think it’s overdone. One idea I kind of like is rival bandit lords fighting over stolen treasure in pre-Renaissance Europe. Another is a much more abstract game focusing on competing tribes of animals (cats are stealthy, wolves like being in packs, elephants are just big, etc.)

A continuation from the previous article.

Probable

• Santiago, on Yehuda’s strong recommendation, although someone else in the group might end up buying it
• Tichu, on the recommendation of many people and its low cost
• 6 Nimmt/Category 5, ditto

Possible

• For Sale (cheap to boot)
• Hive
• Ys

Stretch

• Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. Looks like not my thing in general, but comes deeply themed and highly recommended.
• Hey! That’s My Fish! Looks fun but not compelling; but possibly fun filler.
• Wallenstein/Samurai; supposed to be a very good wargame/Euro hybrid.

More thoughts about Tactego.

Memorization: I don’t like having to remember what my opponent’s pieces are. It feels too much like work. When pieces are revealed in battle, they will stay revealed.
Bluffing: On the other hand, the bluffing element of Stratego is neat. Some pieces will be face-down so an opponent doesn’t know what’s coming, and there will be the opportunity to turn more face-down during play (along with the chance to mix them up so it’s not just a challenge for the opponent’s memory).
The Role of Pieces: I do not intend for this game to be “chess-like” or to compete with Chess. However, it has certain similarities: pieces exert a certain amount of power by their very presence, but only one can be moved at a time. Thus, like Chess, having material power on the board is generally good, but having your pieces well-positioned is also important.
The Number of Pieces: 12 to 16 per side seems about right, with 3 or 4 “kinds” and 3 or 4 strengths within each kind.
The Moves: Players alternate turns, of course. On a turn you may move one piece twice or two pieces once each, but you may only attack once. (The attacker already is taking the initiative–we’ll avoid a blitzkrieg effect.) You attack by moving a piece into an occupied square. You may not have two pieces on the same square, but if you move the same piece twice it can move over a friendly piece. (This is a response to the cramped feeling of Stratego, in particular. Chess has a lot of deep strategy relating to the fact that you need to not cage yourself behind your own pieces, but we don’t have a thousand years to come up with good strategies and balance our game perfectly.)
Where’s Defense? OK, this kind of lets pieces run around everywhere. To remedy that we’ll use a “zone of control” rule that I first encountered in Civilization (the computer game) but have seen elsewhere: You may not move from an enemy-adjacent square to an enemy-adjacent square unless you are attacking. This lets you move a unit out to screen units behind it. And it allows for a special unit power to break this rule.
What if that unit is face-down at the time? To avoid confusion and the possibility of inadvertently breaking rules, we’ll say whenever you use a unit’s special power, you have to turn it face-up.
Powers: We’ll need to brainstorm some powers. There will definitely be more here than I would consider using in the game; I expect to use no more than 4 distinct kinds of units, each with one or possibly two powers.

• A unit that can turn itself, and another adjacent unit, face-down. When it does this you get to take the pieces off the board and switch them if you want. As such, this will take two moves, or one if both of the pieces involved have this power.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking. It might lose power when defending.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking face-down
• A unit that ignores zones of control
• A unit that can move 3 instead of 2
• A unit that can move directly over an enemy unit without entering combat
• A unit that can reveal the identity of face-down enemy units without entering combat
• A unit that doesn’t die if it loses a combat it starts
• A unit that gains power from nearby friendly units
• A unit that gains power from nearby enemy units (BERSERKER!)
• A totally expendable unit
• A unit that you gain some benefit when it dies
• A unit with no special power that happens to be naturally stronger than other units
• A very powerful unit that moves more slowly
• A unit that can’t be disengaged from (anything touching it is immobile)

I haven’t played Stratego in some years, but I dreamed about it last night. (I used telepathy to find my opponent’s flag, but lost my Marshal to his Spy. I was planning out how I was going to get a Spy-supported General across the board one move at a time when I woke up in boredom. I swear I am not making this up.) Anyway, thinking about the game, such as it is, gave me the inspiration to design another game.

As you may have noticed, I’m usually a fan of multiplayer games with mostly indirect interaction–Euros, as it were–and the idea of a deeply strategic, confrontational two-player game doesn’t really get me going. But I had some ideas that seemed interesting. So I’ll lay them out here; I have no promises to ever finish or even prototype this game, but we’ll see where it goes.

Codename: Tactego
Players: 2
The Promise: Like Stratego, a skirmish-level confrontation between two equal sets of units. Also like Stratego, there will be an element of hidden unit identity. Unlike Stratego, unit mobility will play a much greater factor, allowing more tactics and less strategy (hence the codename.) Also, because I dislike the memorization aspect of Stratego, units will spend some of the time revealed.
Desired Play Time: 15-25 minutes
Setup: To reduce total time and the learning curve, initial piece locations will be predetermined or mostly predetermined. At least some, perhaps all, will start face-down.
The Board: A grid about the size of Stratego’s–10×10, say. Diagonal movement will be allowed, unlike Stratego. If we get as far as a prototype and hexes seem like a good idea, we’ll try that as an alternative.
The Goal: I like the “capture the flag” idea, but to create a more dynamic game with fewer pieces, we’ll make the flag piece weak but mobile. Since pieces will be more mobile in this game, we may need to give it some kind of resilience, too.
The Pieces: Clearly pieces will need to have some kind of innate combat power that determines who wins a combat. To add flavor and a hook for theme, they will also have some additional abilities, probably either relating to mobility or situational attack power adjustments.
One More Decision With The Pieces: At the risk of adding a small bit of complexity, we’ll divorce the raw combat power from abilities. For instance, in Stratego, all 8’s are miners and all 9’s are scouts. In Tactego, if there’s a piece called, say, a Knight, with the ability to jump like a chess knight, we might have one with a strength of 3 and one with a strength of 1.

Next time we’ll consider, among other things, some ideas for pieces.