Reader Nathan & the Cynic (that’s one reader) pointed out that when referring to games but especially when doing review-esque writing, I should include a link to BoardGameGeek for the game in question. Sheesh. You’d think getting me to complete unpleasant but important chores was part of his job or something. He’s right, of course. For some time I’ve been throwing around the idea of making an expanded version of that article for all of the games I can remember playing, and putting a sidebar link to it. I’ll try to make a Labor Day Weekend project out of it (it’s like labor!) and add links, of course, since that would be immensely helpful to those that are curious about the game.

Upon consideration of the rating scheme I proposed in my last article, it seems that using decimals to express an intermediate opinion suggests a lot more granularity than I actually feel. What is the difference between a 2.6 and a 2.7, anyway?

I had previously considered using plus/minus scoring (possibly using letters instead of numbers, a la letter grades for class) but dismissed this as excessively loaded with connotations I don’t want. What does “average” or “good” mean, anyway? I want for these new ratings to mean something quite specific about how much a game makes me want to play it.

I think zero-to-three pluses gives enough lets me express the distinctions I want to make clear, without forcing me to think really hard about whether a certain game really deserves a .7 or a .8. In addition, it makes the important thresholds more clear (Will I willingly play the game? Will I suggest the game myself) instead of mimicking a 50-point scale.

In response to DrObviousSo’s question about Winner’s Circle: Aside from games that can be played with 2 or more-than-2 players, this game is the one I was thinking of when I mentioned that a rating is specific to a certain number of players. For six players, I give it a 1+. For four, I give it a 3. In the larger game, it feels like I have frustratingly little control over what’s happening. In the four-player game, there is much more control over the horses (you get to make at least one meaningful decision every round!) and because of this, more interesting decisions to make in the betting as well.

It’s like bonus day! Four mini-essays, in response to the excellent comments to Tuesday’s article here.
To Fuleng, who indicated displeasure with secret scoring in Knizia games: Secret scoring does seem to be out of line, in particular, with Knizia’s intent for Tigris and Euphrates, which, (I hope!), was to be a deep and intensely strategic game. Perhaps my opinion of the mechanic has been colored by too much Puerto Rico. (Is there such a thing?) Taj Mahal certainly copes well without it. And your point about the penalty for interruptions is well-taken, because it’s everyone who suffers. El Grande is particularly nasty in this regard, because while the number of soldiers you put into the Castillo is public, they’re kept hidden once there.

To John, who commented that Settlers seems to have a “secret scoring” feel to it: You’re right in that a lot of players don’t tend to watch what others have in their hands even though it matters a lot towards opponents’ threat to win. Part of the reason might be that in the beginning of the game, it’s not as big of a deal unless you are directly competing for expansion space with a particular opponent. It might be a neat advanced strategy to count how many resources, if they were the ideal ones, a given opponent would need to reach 10 VP, and use that as an internal victory meter.Of course, you would then need to adjust for things like a excess of unneeded resources, other players’ willingness to trade, the presence of ports, and so on.

To Nevin, who expressed discontent with scoring rules that “string along” players who have little chance of actually winning: This business of how much an early lead should help later play is certainly a difficult one from a design perspective. Ideally, there would be tradeoffs available; for instance, in the early Puerto Rico game, you can try to rack up a VP lead shipping cheap goods like indigo and corn, or you can try to develop and trade more expensive goods in the hopes of being able to buy large, useful buildings later. If these tradeoffs don’t exist at all then you’re completely right: you might as well just play two separate games, one for the beginning and one for the end, and declare a winner of each separately. Can you list a couple of games you’re particularly dissatisfied with? I find that in Catan, even if I get a really lousy start due to poor luck or poor strategy, I can have a satisfying game by making a personal goal to reach a “respectable” number of points, say 8, by the time the winner finishes.

To J. Vogel, who asked if there were games where players don’t know where they stand: I saved this one for last because it’s something I’ve thought about before when trying to design games. It’s certainly tricky, because the paradox is that the players need to be able to work meaningfully towards a goal, and yet not know how close they are. One way this can work is when the goal is “beat the other player or players”, but you don’t know what they have. In Poker it’s a matter of how much you’re willing to bet that your cards are better. In games like Gin and 31 you need to find the right moment at which you believe your hand is better than the other person’s; both games, since they have a large penalty for being wrong, also have the element of “how sure am I?” The intuitive way to get a game element like this is to have some component of the score be secretly chosen; perhaps score chips are secretly chosen or you choose a goal randomly and get bonus points for meeting it. The goal could even be revealed to the other players. However, this seems like it would add a dissatisfying element of chance to the game.
This is actually going to tie in with an upcoming article, when I talk about how games are ended. To spoil it a bit now: Evo handles this creatively, because the goal is “have the most points at the end of the game”, but you don’t know when the end of the game is going to be. The game proceeds for 6-8 turns, depending on the number of players; after that, after each turn, the game has an increasingly likely chance to end right then. It works particuarly well in Evo because that game provides many chances to make short-term gains at the cost of long-term growth.

In what was nearly a grievous oversight, I at first gave only a quick glance to reader DrObviousSo’s comment on my recent article hashing out a game idea. After all, I thought, this was basic economic stuff, like the second chapter of an Econ 101 class.

Then I realized the inherent assumption he was making, that I hadn’t been. The assumption was that every player can perform a finite amount of work on each turn. I had been assuming players would gain full resources from every controlled territory, like Settlers of Catan or Diplomacy or Axis & Allies. That left me with the thorny problem of how to keep the game one of trading and tactical aggression, rather than conquest. However, if you can only exploit a certain number of regions per turn no matter how many you own, the impetus for conquest is gone!

I’ve been thinking about this proto-game more and now have many more points:

• Players have 5 or so “workers.” Production is determined by where you have your workers go (forest, hills, etc.), the quality of those regions, and possibly other factors. However, you cannot increase your number of workers. So conquest may allow you better choice of resources to produce, or the opportunity to maximize production of a certain resource, but it won’t provide you a momentum-building resource advantage.
• Moving workers requires some small amount of resources. If a region you are working is “captured,” that worker doesn’t help on your next turn, but you get to move it somewhere else for free.
• The resources might include:
• Wood: Easy to anyone produce lots of, but needed for many ventures. Produced in forests, obviously.
• Iron: The cheapest way to improve your ability to attack or defend. However, not all players may have ready access to satisfactory amounts of iron. Produced in hills.
• Food: Important in small quantities everywhere. Can be produced pretty much anywhere, but some players may choose to take advantage of fertile locations or economy of scale, make extra, and trade it around. Unlike other resources, food spoils—a certain fraction of it is lost at the beginning of your turn if not spent. Produced in plains.
• Books: An abstraction for research and logistical planning. Produced in cities.
• Some other resource—perhaps Commerce, Trade Goods, or some other physical good?
• Some regions might produce more of a resource than others. For example, there might be particularly productive mines, dense forests, or large cities.
• To win the game, you have to complete five sub-goals. Three are common to all players. Two are drawn from a deck. There is a certain order they must be completed in, although you might be able to spend, say, Books to waive this restriction.

Intrepid reader John Rhoadhouse pointed out that “research” makes a bad resource because, after all, if a city is attacked, your scientists could just leave the city rather than continue doing research for your enemy. I think the “workers” mechanic makes this okay—you can just move your researchers to another town. And after all, the “workers” is just an abstraction for “where am I putting the strategic tax-collection and logistical resources of my government?”

Now that I have another board game backed up in my head, are you likely to see a prototype for it any time soon? No. However, you are a lot more likely to see a working prototype for Invasion as I get increasingly guilty about producing nothing on that front. Stay tuned.

There is a popular conception in culture that a game of Chess represents a purely intellectual match between the players; that the winner will be the player with the best intellect, strategy, insight, and patience. This belief is held almost exclusively by nonplayers, or players with only the most tangential exposure, because it shows false so readily with just a little exposure to the game.

As an example: I’m a smart enough guy, but have no particular aptitude for Chess. I played semi-seriously in a mostly scholastic field (but with some open tournaments) several years ago. Although I’m rusty, I could probably get back to as good as I ever was with a month or two of practice, which would probably put me somewhere near a 1200 USCF  rating. For a club player, 1200 is embarrassingly low. (A rough scale is 1000-2000, with masters at 2200. Usually only novice scholastic players usually end up below 1000, and this is due largely to “rating deflation” [a subject I might cover later].)

Still, if you pitted me against a dozen players of equal intelligence, but with no particular Chess experience, I’d bet you $50 that I’d beat them all. Maybe even with a time handicap or drunk. As far as I can tell, Chess skill is about 30% innate Chess-specific aptitude and 40% practice. 30% is left for some combination of intellect, patience, insight, psyching out the opponent, and whatever other factors are popularly believed to go into the game.

This is salient because the other day, I linked to a source that correctly pointed out this effect for Chess, and then incorrectly claimed that Go would make a better test of intellect. Ack. As nefarious reader Fuleng pointed out in the comments (read his last paragraph especially), skill at Go is just as highly bound to the amount of practice players have. Aptitude, intelligence, and patience are important insofar as they determine how much benefit players get from practice and how fast they improve.

All right. Weekends seem to be better for most people. Since Origins is this weekend, we’re going to shoot for 1KBWC next weekend, so that’s Sunday 7/8. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly invited. Please let me know so I know how many snacks to acquire.

Now for the riddle:

Due to their use in dice, most gamers will be familiar with the 5 convex regular polyhedra: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. The riddle: Why are these 5 the only regular polyhedra that can exist?

Simultaneous Limitation and Hint: We’re only talking about Euclidean space here.

[Edit: Comments contain a solution. It’s involved enough that a quick glance probably won’t spoil everything; just so you know.]

Reposted with kind permission from reader DrObviousSo. The original is here. (This reader  also posts as The Hermit on the “ZoD“.)

My wife and I have a competitive conflict. GK is very, very competitive. At her best, she’s driven to win, at her worst; she’s a mean spirited, vindictive meany. At my best, I’m a cooperative, socializing team player. At worst, I’m a wishy-washy looser.

We’ve always had a hard time playing games together, and I know this really bugs her, because she comes from a family that enjoys a lot of competitive game playing. Trust me; you don’t want to play Sorry with any of them. I, however, prefer social, cooperative games like RPGs.

I’ve always like poker, however, and have finally gotten around to introducing GK to the game. I think the fact that it’s as much a social game as it is a game of chance attracts me to it. I know what attracts her. We’ve had a couple of nights playing in the last couple weeks, and it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve either been playing for single denomination chips, or the quarters we have for laundry. Tonight, we decided that the looser had to get the other one a bowl of ice cream. Don’t ask me to explain it, but this is always something we’ve pawned off on the other. I think having these little favors attached to winning will give me enough motivation to be as competitive as GK will want, and it will attach greater social meaning to the game for me.

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.

I got the chance to talk to reader Shruti in person yesterday about her comments on Play to Win. Some points I thought of:

It is not necessary to play to win in a multiplayer game if the goal you set for yourself is not disruptive to the rest of the game. For example, in Settlers of Catan, “acquire as much sheep-producing capacity as possible” is a goal which is very compatible with others playing to win, because acquiring these sheep means building roads, settlements, and so on, probably playing with something resembling an ordinary sheep-port strategy. (Evidently the sheep are fed to stuffed lions.) In the best case, it would be good to announce this intention to the other players beforehand, but let’s face it: even hardcore  gamers have done way sillier things at the spur of the moment, whether intentionally or due to momentary lapses of reason.

Secondary goals can even be downright beneficial in multiplayer games if there is an element of kingmaking. For instance, I (and, I imagine, many others) play with the unstated secondary goal of “all other things being equal, assist the player who has harmed me the least.” This can happen in a game like Power Grid. Players A and B are vying for the win, and one will win this turn; Player C won’t be able to power enough cities to win, but can block a critical build point for either A or B, making the other player win. If, earlier in the game, A had happened to buy resources for no other reason than to drive C’s price up, or had inflated the price of an important auction, C is certainly justified in handing the win to B, even if A would have won had C acted passively. In the end, this causes less hostility over the outcome, because C’s actions look justified.

Playing with house rules is something like playing a different game. Therefore, house rules have a very different role in board games than in video games. Board games are often played with friends, in a small social circle; so introducing a set of rules tuned to the preferences of your group makes sense. On the other hand, video games are more likely to be played with a wider group of people, people who you don’t necessarily know, and why would they want to play your game? They want to play the game you both know, the one without the house rules.

More to follow.

Reader John Rhoadhouse currently has read-only Internet access, but made a comment to me that cut to the heart of the Dragon Storm problem.

CCGs are fundamentally competitive. You build your best deck with your neatest tricks and show off to your friends as you try to beat them.
By contrast, RPGs are fundamentally cooperative. In most, the characters are part of some kind of party or team; balance is important so that everyone gets to have some time in the spotlight. In the few instances when they’re working against each other, balance is all the more essential. The idea of buying more cards to make a better character runs directly counter to the idea of balancing an RPG.

This is not to say that cards are a lousy mechanic for an RPG, and John and I were musing about the possibility of a noncollectible card mechanic for some hypothetical RPG. For future consideration.