Reader John Rhoadhouse reported that he tried The Number Game recently. Unsurprisingly, he found the early game to be very easy. For an extra challenge, he tried playing without running numbers together. This adds a lot of challenge to the early game! Exponentiation becomes very important. With this extra restriction, he got stuck at 143 (142 = 5³ + 4² + 1).

There is a neat little game out there called Slay. It plays like a board game: turn-based, little pieces that you move around. It’s not a board game, which is good, because the bookkeeping details would be prohibitive. (It’s easy to get a general idea of what’s going on, but counting the exact size of territories would be a pain.) As a multiplayer game, it’s hampered a little bit by slow play and inherently unfair starting conditions; but the game is simple enough that the AI is very respectable and it will happily fight you as long as you desire. A free demo is available; the full version is a little pricey, but the game really is surprisingly fun.

P.S. I have a guest article lined up for Thursday, so swing by anyway, to read the article and see if I managed to set up the autoposting correctly.

P.P.S. I got my first comment spam last week. I’m a teeny tiny bit honored and I’m sure that’s the best that’s ever going to come of it.

A few months ago, I was playing Boggle nearly every day with Alyx. Work and other circumstances have brought the frequency down, but we still play. It’s a good two-person game and you can fill up any amount of time you happen to have; we usually played a best-of-three series. All trash talk aside, she probably won a little more than half of our matches, although I think it’s been closer to even recently.

I find more words in most boards, and I tend to get a good start in the first 90-120 seconds (the round is 3 minutes), but I tend to find more short words and lose steam in the final minute. Alyx usually misses quite a few of mine, but is much likelier to find the big words that are worth 2, 3 or 5 points.

We play with the house rule that words that are formed just by adding an S to an existing word are illegal, both for nouns and verbs. We’re decent players, and this keeps the easy boards (with a good mix of common consonants and vowels) that happen to have an S from determining who writes fastest, since if these words were legal, you’d never have to stop. Adding –ES is fine as is –D or –ED or any other trivial-ish suffix. I suspect this rule slightly favors me, because I would typically gain only 1 point by adding a new word with an S, while Alyx could fairly often pick up an extra 3 or 5.

We also like to play with other people when they are around. Inexperienced people favor Alyx, because they’re more likely to find my short words than her long ones; experienced people don’t have a predictable influence, except that they will predictably be the scapegoat for the loser.

Like Scrabble, Boggle isn’t really about having a big vocabulary. In my experience, Scrabble is about strategic positioning, making the best of the letters you happen to get, and if you happen to be in a multiplayer game, sitting to the right of the weakest (or most reckless) player.

Instead of being about positioning and hooking onto existing words, Boggle is about quickly picking out familiar patterns from the jumble of letters, and recognizing that some patterns tend to imply the presence of others. For instance, if you have TOOL you definitely have TOO, LOO, and LOOT and you should look for other nearby words that like LOON, TOON, TOOT, POOL, etc. ATE is worth EAT and TEA as long as the letters are arranged in a triangle instead of a line. That’s my strategy, anyway. Alyx seems to find a lot of her good, long words by stemming off consonant blends like STR-, SCR, THR, and so on. With luck, she’ll share some of the rest of her secrets in a comment.

To tie why the Deck of Many Things back into board games, consider the following variant rule for Chess:

Once per game, instead of making a move, you can roll a die. On a 1-3, you have to remove one of your rooks from the board. On a 4-6, you get to replace a knight or bishop. (Your opponent gets to choose what square in your back row the piece appears in, so you won’t be able to use this for immediate tactical advantage. You can’t use the ability if you have no rooks to sacrifice)

Is this fair? Well, in a sense, yes, because it’s available to both players, and you stand to lose more material than you gain. But the game would be no fun, because the randomness introduced by the new rule would dominate the game. Consider equally matched players. The game would progress until one player gained an advantage that looked decisive. At that point, the losing player would exercise the special option. If the roll turned out badly, no big deal; the game was going to turn out badly anyway. If the roll succeeds, the tables are suddenly turned (adding a knight is usually more than enough to turn a decisive loss into a decisive victory) and the other player is suddenly forced to use the option. If the other player also succeeds, the effects of the special rule are meaningless. If the other player happens to fail, the game is finished.

So, the final net effect of this optional rule is to add a flat 25% chance that the losing player wins the game instead. Like the Deck, it’s sudden and immediate; if you win, you don’t feel like you deserved it. It’s a little different in that you don’t have to be desperate to draw from the Deck, although that would certainly be the best use of it when considering risk vs. reward.

The second part of the computer/board game series is on indefinite hiatus until my ennui is dispelled.

I played Sequence, which is new (to me) last night. It’s a mainstream commercial board game that you can get at Target. The board is made up of a large (10×10) grid of playing cards, which are laid out in a semi-regular manner. (The card images are shrunk, so the size is reasonable.) There are no jacks, though, and the corners are wild. The game ships with an ordinary double deck of playing cards. On your turn, you play a card from your hand (hand size depends on the number of players), place a token on a corresponding space on the board, and draw a replacement card. The idea is to make a run of 5 markers in a row (the Sequence from which the game derives its name).

The game is fun and exciting enough, although it’s kind of light on strategy because you don’t have many options—only one card changes every turn—and it’s very unlikely that the order you play your cards in will actually matter. To me, a bigger turnoff was the jacks. Jacks are wild; one-eyed jacks allow you to remove any enemy marker, while two-eyed jacks allow you to place a marker on any space. Both, of course, are devastatingly powerful. The two-eyed jacks make finishing a sequence trivial when you might ordinarily have to wait a long time for the card you need; the one-eyed jacks let you ruin your opponent’s formations, and the damage is almost impossible to repair, because the card that allowed the marker to be played in the first place is gone!

The jacks are so powerful that it’s almost impossible the player who gets the most not to win the game. It’s infuriating to draw no jacks while your opponent gets a bunch and gets to do whatever s/he wants, and winning because you drew a couple at the right time isn’t very satisfying either. The huge arbitrary element introduced by these is a big turnoff for me, which is why I’ll be advocating for the following house rules the next time I play:

• All jacks can be used either to play or remove a marker, but only for their own suit.
• You can’t use a jack to finish a Sequence.

Hopefully, these rules will make the use of jacks more interesting, instead of just “save them until you have enough to win.”

(There’s also a team game, which I’d like to try. Teams share markers but aren’t allowed table talk. I assume this is to keep the game moving, but it seems strange.)

My usual gaming group plays Settlers of Catan with two house rules. One is pretty common and one, I think, originated with us; the other is pretty widespread. Both aim for an effect of smoothing over the early game.

Friendly Start: is pretty common. For the first two passes around the table, 7’s are rerolled.

Build Roads Last: When placing your settlements on the board, you place only the settlements, not roads. Then, in the same order the settlements were placed to begin with, the roads are placed. This helps players make their placing decisions faster (no agonizing over what directions are likely to be free) and makes it less likely that a player will be in the frustrating position of wasting an initial road. For this reason, it is very novice-friendly.