Sometimes I don’t want to write (or work on game design) because I’m afraid that whatever I end up creating will suck.

Other times, I don’t want to play a game because I’m afraid I’ll embarrass myself through poor play. This isn’t a dispositional trait or feeling about any one game; it’s a (thankfully rare) mood.

Computer games usually pull through thanks to the mercy of a difficulty slider or suchlike–it can always be made easier. There’s no such switch available in tabletop games!

Not an essay today, so much as tossing out my own experiences and seeing what anyone else has to say.

The two games I like most but are worst at are Poker and Hearts. I was going to say “at least I haven’t thrown too much money away”… well, not on equipment, anyway. I’ve certainly lost my share at Poker.

For Hearts, I feel like I’m missing something big when it comes down to deciding whether and how to shoot and how to defend against shooting. I seem to pass the exact wrong thing all too often.

Poker is frustrating because I’ve seen my skill improve more than most other games I play. Unfortunately, it’s a game with a lot of very deep strategy, and the skill of my opponents has improved more. There’s a tight relation somewhere outside of my grasp that relates reading people and probability. Maybe it’s because the announcers on TV poker seem to assume the players are psychic, I feel that I should be myself… I also need to gain a bigger picture of the larger game–where a single hand fits in terms of my chances to win the table.

Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of the holiday I have given this riddle a gratuitous and certainly unnecessary theme. Several of you may have seen this riddle before; I think it’s on the less difficult side.
You are a turkey slated to be eaten for Thanksgiving. However, it turns out you can talk and have pleaded for your release. Your captors are inclined to pardon you; on the other hand, they are still hungry, so they have proposed a game of chance:

You are provided with 100 balls, 50 white, 50 black; and two urns. You must put the balls into the urns. One of the urns will randomly be chosen, and then a ball will be randomly chosen from that urn. If a white ball is selected, you will be pardoned; but if a black ball is selected, you will be eaten. You can’t leave an urn empty.

How should you divide the balls to maximize your chance of survival?

In the Legend of the Five Rings CCG (L5R), players choose one of about 10 factions to construct a deck around. This isn’t unusual; except for Magic, most CCGs do this to some extent, whether an alien race in Babylon 5, Light Side or Dark Side in Star Wars, or a fantasy kingdom in Warlord. The factions in L5R are mostly Great Clans (Crane Clan, Lion Clan, etc.) plus the Ratlings and Shadowlands.

What’s unusual about L5R is the high degree to which players are encouraged to identify themselves with their factions. When registering for the fan club, players pick a Clan and get special story-related material specific to that Clan. The Great Clans are composed of families, and on message boards and personal Websites nicknames corresponding to those families are very common—perhaps 75% or more of L5R players use a faction-specific handle. T-shirts, hats, and highly decorated boxes and decks are all commonplace at tournaments.

More so than other games I’ve seen, players are encouraged to pick a faction and stick with it, like you would a sports team. In other collectible games, moving to the latest powerful faction is pretty ordinary. In L5R, “bandwagoners” are rare and scorned for their disloyalty (although often respected for skill; these players tend to care about winning and put lots of energy into deck construction and strategy)

What does this do for the game? On the good side, it makes people very excited in the game and ongoing storyline. Players maintain Clan-specific fansites, host popular forums that cater to players of that faction, buy faction-specific merchandise, look for canonical fiction that involves their favorite characters, write fanfiction… this keeps them excited in the game and, most importantly, buying cards.

On the other hand, it means that players feel very personally invested in their faction. If a faction is weak, players will become discouraged; hopefully they stick with it like loyal fans through a bad year (or decade), but they might also change factions or, worst of all, give up on the game entirely. In addition to the necessity for balance, every expansion must contain something new for every faction; if it’s not there, why should those players buy any new stuff, even if they’re still excited about the game?

In what I consider to be a terrific misjudgment, the Blizzard-sponsored World of Warcraft forums require you to log in as a specific character. The faction and class of the character show up as an avatar next to the discussion, which is 99% metagame. Added to what would already be the hostile and juvenile atmosphere of a large Internet forum dedicated to a computer game, players tend to pigeonhole one another as “typical” members of the class they happen to be posting as. Furthermore, players get very excited and angry when they feel that “their” class has been unfairly ignored or nerfed (reduced in power).

(In my opinion, a much better system for this board would be for players to choose a nickname not necessarily related to any one character. Then players could add “badges” that indicate that they have reached a certain level with various character classes, while not having to use any one of those characters as an avatar.)

The Thurn and Taxis game against myself is over. The Blitz player won in a tie score game, the tie being broken by the player to finish the game. I believe the Blitz strategy is strong but not overpowering. Lessons learned:

• Playing against myself is boring. Geez. I wouldn’t do it again.
• The Blitz strategy is strong no matter what, but even stronger the more people are in the game. In this one the Normal player only lost one point to getting to tiles late. In a regular game he probably would have lost more.
• For Blitz play, stay the heck away from the eastern side of the board. You need to ensure that you can either draw two cards or play two every turn. This game, I had to clear the draw pile with the Administrator twice to avoid having to throw away a partly-finished route. As a result, the Blitz player had a 6-city route bonus!
• Neither player managed to get all the cities in Baiern. If any player is hurrying doing this would take quite a bit of luck, to get the cities you need when you need them.
• If you’re not playing Blitz, it might be best to save Baiern for later in the game. Here’s why: Nowhere else is it so worthwhile to string many houses together, and nowhere else can you actually gain from adding just one more house. If another player is threatening to end the game, you don’t need to worry about only putting together short routes; you can put together one route and finish it at the last moment.
• If you can, focus on scooping up one bonus at a time. If you do several halfway, you’re likely to lose points by getting them after other players and are in danger of having to make silly routes later on just to finish up those bonuses or lose them entirely.
• I don’t believe the all-provinces-but-Baiern bonus is viable if any player unless everyone is dawdling. Also, I’d be really startled to see a player get this and not have at least one house in Baiern.
• I’d like to try a house rule where all players get a once-a-game ability to use any city card as a wild card. This would encourage players to go for long, complicated routes even if it would rely on having to draw one specific city. Putting together big routes that complete several objectives at once is a big payoff for me, and I suspect it might be for others, too.

I am planning something a little different: a series about the strategy of specific board games. It’s surprising how few strategy resources are out there for board games. It’s even more surprising that there’s no central repository for board game strategies. The boardgamegeek.com forums are the best thing there is, but there’s certainly no organization there. Perhaps one day I will have enough of a collection here…

I enjoy Thurn and Taxis and have been thinking about a “blitz” strategy for that game: rush to get the value-7 carriage in the minimum number of turns. This seems like a powerful strategy for several reasons:

• Likely to have a 10-point carriage where other players have only 5
• Likely to finish Bayern first, getting a large bonus, as well as the game-end bonus
• Other players can only make short routes near the end of the game for fear that you will finish the game and stick them with wasted cards. This advantage might be much bigger if you play late in the turn.

The weakness of this strategy is that it foregoes the smaller province bonuses and the long route bonuses. It is also likely to place fewer houses because it will be choosing the Cartwright three or four times and may end up duplicating towns more than other strategies.

To test this out I will play a two-player game against myself. The two players will use the following strategies:

The “Blitz” player will:

• Concentrate on finishing the game as soon as possible. Close each route as soon as it will provide the next carriage, using the Cartwright if necessary.
• Draw extra cards instead of using the Cartwright is OK if those cards will not be discarded.
• Focus on Bayern, where the towns have many connections and it will not be difficult to draw something that fits. If it is convenient, grab the Green provinces too, or the Purple ones. The Blue cities have too few connections to be worth the risk of taking their cards unless both are available at once. The Red/Orange cities require builds spread across too many turns.
• Not be in a rush to end the game; if the other players can’t usefully close a route, wait a turn if it will help place more houses.
• At the end of the game, should have the following points: 10 for a rank 7 carriage, 5 for first to finish Bayern, possibly a couple for the Green provinces, 1 for ending the game.

The “Normal” player will:

• Look at the cards available and see what opportunities are available.
• Look for efficient ways to scoop up province bonuses. If it is convenient, also go for long route bonuses.
• Not waste time with the “all provinces but Bayern” bonus, unless it’s too close to pass up.

In addition, the game will have the following parameters:

• Between the players’ turns, a “phantom player” will remove and refresh either 1 card or 2 city cards, (50/50 chance) which will be replaced as normal. The cards will be chosen randomly by the roll of a d6. This is to simulate the effect of other players taking the cards they need for routes.
• After the Blitz player gets the 5-length carriage, all province and long-route bonuses will be worth 1 less to simulate the effect of other players having already got those bonuses.
• The Normal player will go first. If it looks like the turn order played a serious role, another game will be played with the Blitz player going first.

My prediction is this: For the first player, the added advantage of being half a turn ahead of everybody else makes a mixed, go-for-lots-of-bonuses strategy worthwhile. For the last player, the threat of being able to end the game when you want is so powerful that a blitz strategy is more worthwhile.

Does this seem silly? I want to get my predictions out in the open before I actually run this test to keep myself honest in how I interpret the results.

A quick one to get back into the swing of things. Paraphrased from a riddle that is, I believe, from a book by Raymund Smullyan. The answer to this one is very simple but eluded me for a long time. It finally hit me in a flash of insight as I was walking around; intrepid reader John, who related it to me, ended up putting together a truth table.
In a certain mental hospital, there are doctors and patients, all mixed together. Some of each are insane and others are sane. Sane people always tell the truth, and insane people always lie.

There is an investigator in this hospital whose job it is to release sane patients. (He has another job, which is to admit insane doctors as patients. That isn’t relevant to this riddle, but it may come up in a sequel.) Sane doctors are not released (they are supposed to stay around and help the patients.)
You are a sane patient in this hospital, and you want to be released. The investigator does not know that you are sane, nor that you are a patient. Making only one statement, how can you convince the investigator that you are a sane patient?

Rule 0 will return on Tuesday.

On a recent post on Gone Gaming, writer Yehuda talks mentions briefly an alternate universe where the goal of the game Puerto Rico is not stated as part of the rules. Could it be turned into a cooperative game, he wonders?

This question isn’t really the point of his article, but it drew my attention. Could Puerto Rico be turned into a cooperative game? Let’s take a look.

Zeroth: What will the goal actually be? Attempting to maximize the score seems like a reasonable goal. Even better, you could have titles like “Manager”, “Governor,” and “Viceroy” if certain point thresholds are reached. Scoring (say) 142 instead of 139 does not seem like a big deal, but if we called 140 a “winning” threshold (unless you get 140, you lose), people would take whatever risks were necessary to cross the line. Having a series of achievement ranks seems like a neat compromise with titles that add some fun flavor.

First: Something will need to be done to prevent stalling. In my experience, the game ends in at least 80% of games by running out of colonists and the last 20% of the time by one player filling up a city. I have never seen the VP chips run out. If players were working together, none of these things ever has to happen, so players could make sure all the buildings were bought, all colonists distributed, and all VP chips awarded on the same, final turn.

A limit to the number of turns, either “hard” (i.e. 10) or “soft” (if 6 + a 2d6 roll is greater than the turn number, end the game) is the obvious solution,  but this feels contrived and boring to me. The game is still just a static exercise in optimization. I would rather see a “evil” deck like in Shadows over Camelot, where every turn something bad happens that makes the game closer to over and gives the players a reason to hurry. Examples include: Remove 10 colonists from the store; remove 10 VP chips from the store; each player adds a 0-point building  to his town (it just takes up space); subtract 10 from the final score of the game; and so on.

Second: Some unpredictability in the play of the jobs would be nice too. I suggest this mechanic: After the last player moves, but before money is added to the jobs, a “phantom player” chooses the job with the most money (choose randomly if there is a tie). All players perform that action as normal. This could be helpful (giving the players a free move) or harmful (if they were hoping to stall the game by not picking the Mayor or buy warehouses before calling the Captain). It would also restore the urgency of needing to pick jobs with money before “someone else” gets the cash.

Third: I would like each player’s score to be important. It seems like a good strategy would be for a couple people to specialize and the rest to take the scraps. I think this would feel unsatisfying for those players, even though it’s theoretically a cooperative game. My best idea so far is this: The highest-scoring player’s score is reduced to the score of the lowest-scoring player. (The second and third players are unchanged.) Letting one person score a runaway total doesn’t do any good, and finding a way to give points to the last player would count “double” (because it also increases the first player’s score.)

A huge amount of tuning is needed, of course, but I may give this a try sometime.

In the comments to yesterday’s article, John reminded me of a phenomenon that is common, but by no means exclusive, to Magic and other CCGs. I was about to bust out Play to Win and come down with a furious indictment of the practice of using the term “fun deck” as the antonym of “good deck,” but I had a change of heart. See below.

I still object strongly to the term “fun deck” to refer to a deck build poorly or built around some interesting but suboptimal feature. First, it implies that your opponent’s deck is by its very nature not fun, which is kind of a rude insult. Second, it’s vague. Back when I played Legend of the Five Rings, players would often complain that their opponents’ decks were not “interactive” enough. Sound innocuous? Read between the lines: “interactive” means “puts up a fight, but not so much of one that I can’t overcome it.” Landing a bass is “interactive.” Sure, it’s fun, but body is under the illusion that the fish is going to win. Don’t let your opponent call your deck “non-interactive.” That means they want you to roll over and die.

In the hands of jaded enough players, “fun,” “interesting,” “novel,” and “interactive” are all synonyms for “weak.” Don’t force your opponents to use these terms disparagingly about yours by claiming that their decks are none of these things.

In fact, I think it’s downright unfair to call a deck “not fun” or to claim that you have a “fun deck” while your opponent doesn’t. Clearly this is a category that 1) you just made up, 2) you’re not going to bother telling your opponent what it is and 3) your own deck, of course, is a perfect examplar. You owe it to your opponent to come up with a more concrete set of construction guidelines and share them. How about:

• Highlander-style (no more than one of a specific card)
• No more than X uncommons or Y rares
• Spend no more than 3 minutes thinking up the deck (and no using the Internet)
• Make a deck that incorporates two cards you didn’t consider usable before

…Or some combination of these.

So, the biggest reason I didn’t want to lay down a crashing indictment of the “for fun” mentality is that there are a lot of interesting cards that don’t see play because they just aren’t good enough. It seems like a shame to just have them go to waste. To get them to see play, though, you would need some highly restricted environment, and you need to tell everyone exactly what you mean. You could come up with your own format (“make 3 decks using a grand total of no more than 2 of any card from the last 3 expansions”) or play some kind of sealed-deck or booster draft environment. As far as I can tell the only downside to these is the slightly higher cost, but if you were going to buy the cards anyway you can’t go wrong.