A while ago I talked about Gold Digger and how I don’t much like it. At the time I promised to contrast it with a contemporary Knizia game that I liked much more, and at long last, it’s here.

The game is called Dead Man’s Treasure. For one thing, it’s got a pirate theme; evidently pirate + ninja is the Super Meme of the Year, so it has that going for it. I can’t help thinking this was an easy call for the art and design folks considering that, as a Knizia game, it could have pretty much any theme they wanted.

A quick rundown of the play: There are about 20 treasure tokens of varying values divided up among 6 islands. Every player has a set of cards of a corresponding color, ranked 1-7, as well as a bomb. On your turn, you play a card face-down on one of the islands and reveal any card already on that island. (If a bomb is revealed in this way, the bomb and card that revealed it go away.) At the end of the game, each player counts up their total strength (in ranks—higher is better) for each island. The strongest player gets the highest treasure token from the island, the next strongest gets the next, and so on; the winner gets any leftovers too.

So when does the game end? Well, that’s the last little wrinkle. There are also two magic pawns (a pirate captain and an evil ghost) that travel around the islands in a circle. One counts as a special 10-point treasure token; the other makes all treasure where he lands worth nothing. They move when a card is revealed at the island they are at, and the game ends when either one gets back its home island. (The game also ends when all players are out of cards, but I have never seen this happen.)

The game is reminiscent of a much lighter Taj Mahal (a game I don’t talk about, or play, nearly enough) in that you have a choice of battles to pick from; the key to victory is to win the battles you fight and to not fight too hard battles that won’t do you much good. Scooping up “cheap” points with second and third places is a valid supplementary tactic but won’t win you the game. The other big consideration are the pawns. Getting the 10-point guy to land on an island you’re winning is probably worth 5 points or so, which is very nice; but the real killer is the evil ghost, who will completely sink your chances for winning if he lands on an island you care about. The upshot is that you need to care very much about who can end the game, when, whether or not it is to their advantage, and what that means for your score. Then you can decide whether or not you should be hurrying the pawns along or playing somewhere else.

Except for the choice of who plays first (an small but unmitigated advantage as far as I can see) there is no random element once the game starts. That said, your ability to outguess the other players and hope they don’t decide to fight on your turf—which sometimes certainly feels a lot like luck—plays a big part in determining the victor. Still, from the beginning to the end, you feel like you have a good measure of control over the way the game turns out, even if it doesn’t end up being enough. For me this makes it a very satisfying, if light, game.

I’ve had the skeleton of another game kicking around in my head for a couple of days now, and figure, heck, might as well share. Right now it’s just a set of bullet points because I don’t have a clear picture for how it will fit together just yet. The working title in my mind is “Give Peace a Chance?”

• Players: Three to somewhere between four and six. The dynamics I hope for won’t work with two. As for the upper limit, we’ll see how much of an issue crowding and a long time between turns are.
• Setup: A board—either a hex or square grid or a large assortment of regions/provinces. I think I would like about 12-15 regions per player, so about 40-60 total. Like Catan, regions produce a certain resource and have a widely varying quality. Unlike Catan, regions are controlled and can be captured. Control is exerted through meeples which double as soldiers when it comes down to conflict—you can have more than one meeple in a region.
• The board might be fixed or might be randomized in some way. Randomization gives extra replayability to the game, which is good, but it might be at cross purposes with making sure every player has surpluses of some resources and shortages of others.
• Goal: Unknown. It may be to control a certain region or collection of regions, to collect a certain number or resources, or, preferably, something altogether more original. I would like the goal to be a race or struggle for a certain Thing, rather than a victory point showdown.
• Play Points:
• Different resources should be worth different amounts to different players at different times.
• To encourage players to specialize, there may be an “economy of scale” factor that makes it very difficult to produce just what you need of everything. You should have to either fight or trade to get all your needs met.
• Trade is vitally important, because you’ll have a surplus of some resources and want for others. However, you have to work to set it up—it’s not free. Perhaps you have to buy a caravan or convoy token; perhaps it’s easier if you share a border.
• Aggression is tactical, not strategic in nature. Wars of conquest aren’t worth the effort; you attack because you need a specific resource In A Hurry and can’t pay the price to trade for it.
• Being attacked should drive you to aggression yourself—perhaps it gives you a bonus to your own attacks in the immediate aftermath. However, because of the varying values of resources, the reaction to being attacked should not necessarily be “I want that back!” but “what can I best take, and from whom, with this offensive power I now have?” I would rather not include a heavy-handed “no takebacks” rule.
• Resource investment will not be military vs. industrial in nature but rather short term vs. long term. In other words, can I use this short term purchase to build the momentum to make bigger long term gains, or should I just start a safe investment right now?

It’s happened a couple of times now that I’ve mentioned Go in an article and nefarious reader Fuleng has stepped in to offer a much better, deeper explanation and correct my misperceptions.

The truth is that I don’t know much about the game—the rules and a very little bit about the strategy and the culture—just enough to be dangerous, really. Still, it interests me and looks really pretty. It’s difficult for me to mention Chess without also mentioning Go, and clearly one or both are going to come up pretty often when I’m trying to think of examples of games that are familiar to the most readers possible.

I’m going to keep mentioning Go and hope my readers keep commenting with valuable information. One reason for this is that I like to learn and like hearing interesting things from you all. Another reason is that… well, I like Chess a lot. I’ve played it for a long time, it’s beautiful and fascinating, and it suits my aggressive, impatient personality better than Go. Here in the USA, Chess is vastly more popular. And yet, check out these quotes, all taken from the front page of the Google search for “chess go”

• “though, like Chess, it is a challenge to players’ analytical skills, there is far more scope in Go for intuition.”
• “Like chess go offers a player rating system. But unlike chess go offers a well balanced handicap system which allows a stronger player to play evenly against a weaker player and be fully challenged.”
• “Chess is a doddle compared to this ancient oriental game of strategy that has programmers and scientists scratching their heads.”
• “Despite [Go’s] simplicity it allows for more strategy.”

There’s definitely an underdog complex going on here—all these pages are Go pages, while Chess pages don’t tend to mention the lesser-known rival. I’m have little interest in determining which game offers more strategy—clearly, both offer way more than I can handle. Here I’m more interested in the flow of the games and the culture around them, which are very different.

A couple of the points touted as Go selling points are double-edged as well. The lack of computers means that good players can’t get a decent game against one; and despite the much-touted handicap system, running tournaments with cash prizes is apparently very difficult.

This comparison page, by the way, starts out snarky but eventually becomes thoughtful and reasonable.

This might be the first time that I have really completely dropped the ball on an R0 update. You have my apologies if not my regrets. Watch, though: my love for gaming and for all of you is so strong that I will parlay this very setback into an update.

Within about the space of a month, I’ve lost a roommate who was one of my best friends, moved across town into a new apartment, and acquired a new girlfriend. On the one hand, this feels very much like the beginning of a new chapter in my life. So much has changed! On the other hand, many things are basically the same: same job, same city, and I still have most of the same friends as before.

What the heck, you ask, why do I even care? Well. One really neat way a good game can have depth and maintain interest is if the game takes a major shift at some point during it. To my mind it contributes to the elegance of the game if this shift is implicit, a change only of tactics and strategy instead of a change in “phase”; but this is certainly not required for a good game.

• Chess and Go both have a distinct opening (both players playing familiar moves), midgame (working to expand and exploit the opportunities set up by the opening) and endgame (fighting desperately or mopping up.) The rules of the game neve mention these phases, but the differences are clear. In a time-controlled setting, experienced players will try to spend most of their time in the intricate, unfamiliar midgame.
• Although not every game of Settlers of Catan features this pattern, many times you see an initial land grab where players rush quickly for the few remaining decent production spots, followed by a period of building cities and marginal expansions, followed by a desperate push to eke out the last point or two before anyone else. You can tell the last phase has been reached because of players’ sudden reluctance to trade with players perceived to be a threat to win imminently.
• Power Grid features explicit phases. Each one is marked by its own land rush as players vie to be the first to the desirable cities and regions. It’s neat, though, because if you are beaten to a city, it’s not lost for good; you can look elsewhere and eventually still build there, just later and for a higher price.

Oops! Saturday’s article was supposed to be published today to keep up with the Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday schedule, but I somehow I forgot how to read a calendar.

In other news, while browsing at Target, I saw Qwitch and MyWord. These games are designed by Maureen Hiron (Abridged and other games) and Reiner Knizia, respectively, and they’re credited on the packaging. I would like to hope this is a sign of hobby gaming gaining wider popularity!

In the last article, reader Post commented that he ended up not getting second interview based on the fact that he couldn’t solve one of these riddles. That’s unfortunate. I dislike riddles as a test of mental ability (as opposed to an exercise of mental ability) because the one thing they really test really well is “have you heard this riddle before?”

That said:

A dragon and a knight agree to fight a duel. The duel will be “fought” in the following manner:

• There are six poisoned wells available to both the dragon and the knight, numbered 1-6.
• There is a seventh poisoned well, numbered 7, which is located high on a mountain and available only to the dragon.
• The poison works in the following way: If you drink water from a poisoned well, you will die in 24 hours, unless during that time you drink from a higher-numbered well. If this happens, the poisons cancel one another out and you are fine. There is no way to determine whether or not you have actually consumed poison or what kind, until you either die or fail to die.
• On the morning of the duel, the dragon and the knight each bring a glass of something. They consume each other’s glasses, and then go their separate ways, leaving plenty of time to drink from any wells available.
• The dragon’s behavior is unknown, but you may assume that he is not necessarily stupid or blinded by hubris.

Here is the riddle: Why is the duel not quite as unfair to the knight as it seems? What gives the knight hope that he can win? Just how unfair is the duel, anyway?
For people who enjoy ruining riddles with inane nitpicks: The dragon and knight won’t physically interfere with each other in any way. No poison will be used except that which comes from the wells. If poisons are mixed in the glass, assume they have no potency.