I’m moving, so riddles will be the order of the next couple of updates. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

You start at a particular spot on the Earth. You walk a mile south, then a mile east, then a mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Desctibe the set of all points where you could have started. Assume the Earth is a sphere.

Hint: The number of points is not 1.

I was having a discussion about Reiner Knizia the other day and, upon reflection, I think of him as the Isaac Asimov of board gaming. I hope he would not object to such a comparison! By it I mean:

• Both are vastly prolific, each producing output at a startling pace.
• The love of creation is readily apparent in both.
• Both have produced masterpieces (among them: Foundation and I, Robot; Tigris & Euphrates and Taj Majal) that are widely regarded and will be remembered as enduring classics.
• Both might be criticized for publishing material that isn’t necessarily first-rate; material that might not be picked up if it came from a lesser-known author.

As someone who would like to be one of these lesser-known authors, this at first seems unfair! On the other hand, I understand the phenomenon of having all these ideas running around in one’s head. If you can write it down, that helps. If people want to buy it… so much the better! To say that it’s being phoned in for a paycheck would be an injustice. The ideas are there! The only difference is that the ideas that you or I might put on a shelf thinking “this will take too much effort to make truly exceptional” can be released as “this can be made good and worthwhile quickly enough, while I wait for my next truly magical idea to come along.”

This was originally posted as a comment to this article. With the permission of erudite reader Beaker, I have moved it here for the reading pleasure of all. Beaker is a demon at Catan, by the way; the rule of thumb when determining how big of a threat Catan opponents are is to credit him with two extra VPs.

I have spent a few days thinking about the role of luck in Catan (hence the delayed comment), and I think I react differently. I play Catan on different levels depending on whom I am playing with. I play very friendly and helpful if my wife is playing. If I am playing with some serious veteran players who are my friends, I tend to concentrate harder and trash-talk a lot. If I am playing at Origins in a tournament, I am outwardly friendly while counting every card and paying very close attention to the precise rules with a win at any cost attitude as long as it does not involve cheating.

If I lose in any of these I feel bad. If I lose against my wife (because she monopolied all the brick and put down 5 points in 2 turns) I tell myself I could have won if I had really wanted to at any cost. If I lose to friendly veterans I tell myself if I was concentrating harder and not egging them on I would have won. If I lose in a tournament, I tell myself that they were just better. In any of these situations I could also lose because of bad luck. In all of these cases (except the tournament) I can maintain that I am the best Catan player in the world, so my ego is salvaged, but I do not really worry about my ego that much. I play Catan because I enjoy the friendly competition, the trash talk, and the huge adrenaline rush of a close no-holds-barred game.

So how does luck fit in with all of this? If I am playing Catan and the numbers are very unbalanced I feel cheated. This holds true whether I win or lose. I am being cheated out of a competitive game I enjoy. My skill and planning become less important. If I end up winning, I feel empty, because anyone could have won given that degree of luck. If I lose I feel angry, because no matter how good I was I could not have won. Either way I maintain my ego, but I lose the competitive joy of the game.

This only really applies to egregious examples of improbability. I enjoy the nail-biting final rounds where whoever’s number is rolled first will get that final point. Losing a close game is more fun for me than winning a blowout. Even winning the Origins Catan tournament felt a little cheap. I had won several of those nail-biters in the quarter and semi finals, but the finals I won by four points and it was not much of a game, so I always question whether I earned it.

I guess the point of all this is that I find too much amount of luck in a game to cheapen the experience. Saving my ego is not something I really worry about. That being said, regular Catan is the best game ever and usually has the perfect amount of luck and skill for me, while the other variants like starfarers are fun once and a while but have too many luck factors to give me the enjoyment Settlers gives me.

One of my few acquisitions at GenCon was a copy of the recent Spiel des Jahres winner Thurn und Taxis. (In English it’s for some reason translated “Thurn and Taxis,” which makes no sense because Thurn und Taxis is a family name.) The SdJ is a prestigious yearly award given to an outstanding family-style German boardgame (so the most complex games don’t tend to win.) I myself find the SdJ winners hit-and-miss (Settlers of Catan, El Grande, and Carcassone are great; I don’t much care for Alhambra, Elfenland, or Tikal) but Thurn und Taxis is by the designer of the excellent game Puerto Rico, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

(How El Grande won the SdJ while Puerto Rico didn’t—presumably it was deemed to complex, but El Grande seems crunchier to me—is a mystery. More information about the SdJ.)

Anyway, the idea of T&T is that you build routes from city to city in a large network. The map is divided into several regions. You gain points for hitting every city in a province or pair of smaller provinces; you also gain points for building routes of a certain length. The catch in play is that you can only connect cities that you have a corresponding card for, which you pick from a “menu” of six; the catch in scoring is that the score for each goal reduces with every player who completes it. So, for instance, the first player to connect every province in Bayern (Bavaria) gets 5 points, but the third gets only 3.

Similar games: While mechanically T&T is very different than Puerto Rico, and it is much lighter, the elegance of the rules feels very much the same. Also like in Puerto Rico, a player can work towards bringing the game to an end earlier if that would be advantageous. It’s often compared to Ticket To Ride. In theme and mechanics they are indeed similar; T&T has more of a focus on efficiency and is less confrontational, and you focus more on your own route than competing with your opponents. It is reminiscent of Elfenland in the “trying to hit all the stations” sense, but feels much “cleaner” and frustratingly luck-bound than that game.

Strengths: The game is simple and the rules seem incredibly natural. There are four “special actions” you can choose from every turn, and it seems completely obvious that these are the four that should exist. The conflict that occurs is mostly in a “racing” rather than “competing for resources” sense, so hostility and aggression are minimal. There is plenty to think about and the strategy is reasonably deep, but as long as you avoid the deadly pitfall of having to discard a partial route, you’ll be competitive. There’s a strong sense of seeing your plans come to fruition, which is a big payoff for me. Like in Puerto Rico, there are several different broad strategies that can be effective; deciding which one will keep you away from competition and works with the cards available is a key to victory.

Weaknesses: Player interaction is pretty minimal. If the opposition is particularly soft or nonconfrontational it could feel like Solitaire. More so than Puerto Rico, one game plays pretty much like the next.

Thursday’s discussion of decision paralysis in RPGs left me thinking about something else that sometimes bugs me in character generation: Flaws. For the uninitiated, most modern RPG systems let you build a character using a system of points to buy skills, abilities, powers, and so on. To encourage players to play characters with interesting weaknesses, they often award extra points for accepting character flaws. That’s the idea, anyway. However, the flaws almost always have flaws of their own…

Shy. Biggest mistake ever. No amount of points are ever worth this flaw, because it prevents you from entering the most interesting part of the game: interacting with other characters. If you are naturally shy it will exacerbate the problem. The only time I can see this being acceptable is for a very loud, forceful, experienced player who’s trying to restrain him/herself and give less experienced players a time to shine.

Bad eyesight, correctible with glasses. Quick. Tell me the last time a character’s glasses got knocked off, resulting in penalties to Perception? I thought you couldn’t. I joke that among all my friends, I alone forgot to take this flaw for the cheap points.

Enemies. What, like your character wasn’t going to make enemies? Did we end up in Peace and Harmony: the RPG? Besides, your problems are your party’s problems. Everyone shares the pain, you get the points.

Dark Secret. Character hook, plot time, and extra points too? Probably a lot of them? Sign me up, baby!

Berserk. Or any Flaw that your party is going to pay for as much or more than you yourself. If anything your friends should get points for the Flaw “Forced To Hang Around With Lunatic.”

Any Flaw worth the same as an equivalent Merit. Ooh. I can take Inept (Driving Trucks) and use it to pay for Born Natural (Driving Cars)? I’ll take 15 of those, please, because it’s easy, in an RPG as in real life, to make sure you’re in the situation that’s advantageous. 99% of the time you’ll be at an advantage, and when for whatever bizarre reason there’s nothing else but a truck to drive, someone else can do it. When balanced Merit/Flaw pairs like this exist, the Flaw should be worth much less than the Merit. The exception is that if this kind of specialization is an integral part of the skill system, as it is in, say, Paranoia.

Quirks. These I don’t actually mind. Many games provide you the chance to take little quirks, like “hates beer, only drinks whiskey,” “always wears red shoes that match her eyes,” and so on. The idea is to reward you with a small number of points for thinking about your character enough to come up with these little touches, and I approve.

Incorrigible reader Nathan remarked in regards the What Is Rule 0? article,

“It seems you should be able to tie Rule Zero into a clever law of gaming as an Asimov reference.”

So here goes.

First Law of Gaming: A game may not harm a human being, nor through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

So maybe this is why my Looney Labs rejected my idea for Punch in the Face: The Boardgame?

Second Law of Gaming: A game must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

The Laws of Robotics weren’t just guidelines—they an integral part of the way a robot had to be designed for its positronic brain to work. This doesn’t appear to be the case for games, and clearly we have a long way to come in this regard. For instance, this very day I was demanding that Settlers of Catan give me the nine I desperately needed for road-building materials, but it came way too late.

Third Law of Gaming: A game must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This seems to be pretty well upheld, notwithstanding the old story about tearing up a Chaos Orb in a Magic game. I can see how my idea for a card game you play with flashpaper cards and burn them when you capture a trick got rejected.

Then we arrive at Rule 0 of Gaming: A game must not allow humanity to come to harm.

This means ixnay on:

• War games with real nuclear weapons
• Dating/relationship sims so good they make actual reproduction obsolete
• Games that teach players how to subjugate humanity under an iron heel.

As Steven Colbert would say: Steve Jackson, you’re on notice!

A while ago I talked about luck and its importance to games. Most games, of course, require some combination of skill and luck to win. One point I missed in that first article is that the element of luck can reduce the ego-investment in the game; it can make you feel better about losing. Consider Settlers of Catan, for example. You’re down 5 points to 6 and things aren’t looking all that great; suddenly, 6 3’s are rolled out of 7 turns, and you don’t have any settlements on a 3. The guy who just happened to build two cities on a 3 soars into the lead, of course, but you won’t feel bad if you lose the game. “Nothing I could have done to plan for that,” you tell yourself, and it’s probably even mostly true.

By contrast, one of the good things about playing a game that involves considerable skill and thought is that you feel a sense of accomplishment if you win. Settlers of Catan is a shining example here, too. There are so many opportunities and decisions, in building and trading, that as you succeed you can feel the plans you’ve made fall into place. Sure, you’re also getting decent dice rolls, but not much better than you would expect by chance alone. Right?

In this way, Settlers of Catan really shines. All players get to have accomplishments as they go, whether or not they end up winning; the winner feels the win was a vindication of skill, and the losers can point to some run of bad luck or another to soften the emotional blow. Everyone walks away having had fun, and I think this is an important part of the game’s enduring popularity.

This is on my mind because reader Fu Leng picked up a game at GenCon that seems to somehow get this exactly backwards. The game is Gold Digger and here’s the rundown of the rules: There are six mines. Each mine can hold five gold cards. You have a hand of three cards from a deck that contains half gold cards (of varying values from 0-8) and half cards that entitle you to place one claim, if you wish, on a certain mine. You have only 3 claims all game and playing them is irrevocable. And the end of the game, the gold on each mine is divided evenly among the claims to that mine.

The mechanics seem sound and they are; it’s a Knizia game. Here’s why the game is frustrating to me. There are several opportunities for luck, but they mostly involve you (or someone else) having the right card at the right time, and you won’t realize that luck is involved at the time. For instance, you lay claim to an unused mine when nobody happens to have any low-value gold cards to waste on it; by the time somebody else draws a card that would let them stake claims on it, they’re out of claims or they think they have bigger fish to fry. Or, let’s say you happen to get 12 gold on a mine you claim and the neighboring mine only has 10. Great! Except that then your opponent, who has cards for both mines, will claim yours, splitting it, while the 10 would have gone uncontested. But you didn’t know, when you claimed that mine, that it would have 12, and you couldn’t have waited, because your ability to keep cards in your hand.

Are there opportunities for both skill and luck? Certainly. But sometimes when you win, it’s because you drew the really high-value gold cards, or exactly the right claim at the right time; and sometimes when you lose, you just can’t figure out what went wrong when. It’s certainly interesting to play and think about, but I don’t… want to play it.

Next time, I think, I will talk about a similar, contemporary, game—with the same play time and same author, no less—and try to understand why they’re different.

I am back from GenCon and I return with renewed excitement about both the design and play of board games. Also, I return with the knowledge of how to pronounce famed German designer Reiner Knizia’s last name. It’s “kuh-NIT-zee-uh.”

Two things about GenCon are really stunning. One is the program of events. I’m guessing that on the average about 100 events run every hour from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. You get a book with a tiny blurb for each of these events, listing the name, location, cost, a couple of codes for suitability (experience required, PG-13 or R rating, etc.) and maybe a one-sentence teaser about the game itself, all in glorious tightly kerned 7-point font. Unless you know going in what you want to play, I have no idea how you’d make a decision. There’s just too many options to browse through. Through my two days, the only organized events I hit were a Euchre event, a demo session for an upcoming Playroom game, and a seminar on game design.

The other is the Exhibitors’ Hall, colloquially known as the Dealer’s Room. It’s the size of several gymnasiums and entirely packed with retailers selling games and gamer-interest stuff (T-shirts, swords, jewelry…) and gaming companies showing off their latest products. In terms of crowd and noise, think of a really busy cafeteria—then multiply the size by 200.

Did I mention I’m an introvert?

I walked through, trying not to run into people. My budget for Stuff was flexible, maybe $100 or so, and I was definitely interested acquiring some interesting gear. But as I walked through, I saw so many things, so many games, that I had no idea what I wanted. Taking 30 minutes to research a game, to test it and find out whether I really liked it, would mean that I could only ever see like 5% of that huge exhibit hall. And the sensory overload was pretty overwhelming.

So when I stumbled out to meet friends, 90 minutes later, one of them asked me whether I saw anything good. “Heck yeah,” I replied, “but… I have no idea what it was or where to find it.”

This is sometimes termed “decision paralysis” and it applies at a much smaller scale too: within a single game. It is particularly harsh for new players, because what you get with experience is the ability to quickly weed out the 95% of choices that are very poor. For instance, in the middle of a game of chess, it’s not unreasonable that a player could have 80 moves available. Novices get lost and confused and, after what seems like too much thought, often end up playing moves that don’t help the situation or are just plain wrong. By contrast, an experienced player can quickly find the four or five moves that are likely to do any good and consider the implications of each of them, drawing upon memory of similar positions or plotting several moves ahead. Go has a similarly large decision tree.

With examples like these, I clearly don’t mean to say that decision paralysis makes games unplayable, just that it steepens the learning curve. Pointing players to the good moves makes the first few games more enjoyable for the learning players (who feel less scared and frustrated) and any experienced players (who have the game move faster.)

For example, consider the opening moves of the game Power Grid. On the first turn, all players are required to buy one power plant. Most of the power plants are shuffled into a deck, but the first 8 in every game are fixed, and only 4 are available at any one time. All are cheap plants that will leave the players plenty of cash for fuel and expansion, and so there is no need for fretting over which one you end up with or fighting hard in an auction. By the time serious decisions are needed, the players have had a couple turns to see how the game is working out.

Even cosmetic factors can help. For instance, consider the little pips on Settlers of Catan resource chits—the ones that remind you that a 6 is rolled 5 times in 36, while an 11 is rolled only 2 times in 36. Is that difficult math? Does it need to be there? No and no, but it helps new players overcome the decision paralysis by driving home the fact that only the intersections at good numbers really need to be considered.

I’m posting this from my hotel room at GenCon. More on that when I get back! The article for Sunday has been given a link off the front page where people who stumble in can find it more easily. Here you go.

As promised, an extension of the Island of the Logicians riddle. Intrepid reader John Rhoadhouse and I seem to have a solution (the credit is mostly his) but are not 100% convinced. So here you go.

As before, there are 100 logicians on an island. This time, instead of distinctively colored eyes, each logician has a dot, red or blue, on top of their head. Furthermore, the logicians are all different heights. Each logician can see the dot on the top of every shorter logician’s head, but not the dot on any taller logician.

As in the previous riddle, every night at midnight, a ferry comes and takes away any logician that knows the color of his or her own dot; and logicians don’t talk about the color of one another’s dots.

One day, in a crash of lightning, a stone tablet appears. This time it has two statements. Both are true. The first one is: “This information will enable all of you to leave the island.”

The riddle is, if you can, to find a second true statement that enables all of the logicians to leave the island, but not all on the first night. You may distribute the red and blue dots however you wish. If this cannot be done, and John and I believe it cannot, explain why.

If you’re having a tough time trying to wrap your head around this, you’re not alone. Consider the statement: “Exactly one of you has a red dot.” What you will discover is that if both statements on the tablet are to be true, only the shortest logician is allowed to have a red dot! Since the logicians know this, they are all able to leave the first night.

It’s maddeningly tempting to forget about the first statement on the tablet, especially since it’s easy to come up with configuration/statement pairs that allow everyone to leave the island.

This seems to be related to the paradox of a professor who promised to give his students a surprise quiz at some point the following week. The students’ reasoning goes like this:

1. The quiz can’t be on Friday, because if Thursday rolled around and the quiz still hadn’t been given yet, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
2. So the quiz can’t be on Thursday; because if Wednesday rolled around and the quiz still hadn’t been given, since Friday has been eliminated, the test would have to be on Thursday. But then the quiz wouldn’t be a surprise.
3. So the quiz can’t be on Wednesday, because if Tuesday rolled around and the quiz still hadn’t been given, it would have to be Wednesday because Thursday and Friday are out. But then the quiz wouldn’t be a surprise.
4. …And so on for Tuesday and Monday, and the students determine that a surprise quiz cannot be given at all.

This paradox derives from an unusually literal meaning of the idea of “surprise,” but has the same idea that the advance knowledge that something will happen affects its ability to happen in that way.