More thoughts about Tactego.

Memorization: I don’t like having to remember what my opponent’s pieces are. It feels too much like work. When pieces are revealed in battle, they will stay revealed.
Bluffing: On the other hand, the bluffing element of Stratego is neat. Some pieces will be face-down so an opponent doesn’t know what’s coming, and there will be the opportunity to turn more face-down during play (along with the chance to mix them up so it’s not just a challenge for the opponent’s memory).
The Role of Pieces: I do not intend for this game to be “chess-like” or to compete with Chess. However, it has certain similarities: pieces exert a certain amount of power by their very presence, but only one can be moved at a time. Thus, like Chess, having material power on the board is generally good, but having your pieces well-positioned is also important.
The Number of Pieces: 12 to 16 per side seems about right, with 3 or 4 “kinds” and 3 or 4 strengths within each kind.
The Moves: Players alternate turns, of course. On a turn you may move one piece twice or two pieces once each, but you may only attack once. (The attacker already is taking the initiative–we’ll avoid a blitzkrieg effect.) You attack by moving a piece into an occupied square. You may not have two pieces on the same square, but if you move the same piece twice it can move over a friendly piece. (This is a response to the cramped feeling of Stratego, in particular. Chess has a lot of deep strategy relating to the fact that you need to not cage yourself behind your own pieces, but we don’t have a thousand years to come up with good strategies and balance our game perfectly.)
Where’s Defense? OK, this kind of lets pieces run around everywhere. To remedy that we’ll use a “zone of control” rule that I first encountered in Civilization (the computer game) but have seen elsewhere: You may not move from an enemy-adjacent square to an enemy-adjacent square unless you are attacking. This lets you move a unit out to screen units behind it. And it allows for a special unit power to break this rule.
What if that unit is face-down at the time? To avoid confusion and the possibility of inadvertently breaking rules, we’ll say whenever you use a unit’s special power, you have to turn it face-up.
Powers: We’ll need to brainstorm some powers. There will definitely be more here than I would consider using in the game; I expect to use no more than 4 distinct kinds of units, each with one or possibly two powers.

• A unit that can turn itself, and another adjacent unit, face-down. When it does this you get to take the pieces off the board and switch them if you want. As such, this will take two moves, or one if both of the pieces involved have this power.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking. It might lose power when defending.
• A unit that gains power when it is attacking face-down
• A unit that ignores zones of control
• A unit that can move 3 instead of 2
• A unit that can move directly over an enemy unit without entering combat
• A unit that can reveal the identity of face-down enemy units without entering combat
• A unit that doesn’t die if it loses a combat it starts
• A unit that gains power from nearby friendly units
• A unit that gains power from nearby enemy units (BERSERKER!)
• A totally expendable unit
• A unit that you gain some benefit when it dies
• A unit with no special power that happens to be naturally stronger than other units
• A very powerful unit that moves more slowly
• A unit that can’t be disengaged from (anything touching it is immobile)

I haven’t played Stratego in some years, but I dreamed about it last night. (I used telepathy to find my opponent’s flag, but lost my Marshal to his Spy. I was planning out how I was going to get a Spy-supported General across the board one move at a time when I woke up in boredom. I swear I am not making this up.) Anyway, thinking about the game, such as it is, gave me the inspiration to design another game.

As you may have noticed, I’m usually a fan of multiplayer games with mostly indirect interaction–Euros, as it were–and the idea of a deeply strategic, confrontational two-player game doesn’t really get me going. But I had some ideas that seemed interesting. So I’ll lay them out here; I have no promises to ever finish or even prototype this game, but we’ll see where it goes.

Codename: Tactego
Players: 2
The Promise: Like Stratego, a skirmish-level confrontation between two equal sets of units. Also like Stratego, there will be an element of hidden unit identity. Unlike Stratego, unit mobility will play a much greater factor, allowing more tactics and less strategy (hence the codename.) Also, because I dislike the memorization aspect of Stratego, units will spend some of the time revealed.
Desired Play Time: 15-25 minutes
Setup: To reduce total time and the learning curve, initial piece locations will be predetermined or mostly predetermined. At least some, perhaps all, will start face-down.
The Board: A grid about the size of Stratego’s–10×10, say. Diagonal movement will be allowed, unlike Stratego. If we get as far as a prototype and hexes seem like a good idea, we’ll try that as an alternative.
The Goal: I like the “capture the flag” idea, but to create a more dynamic game with fewer pieces, we’ll make the flag piece weak but mobile. Since pieces will be more mobile in this game, we may need to give it some kind of resilience, too.
The Pieces: Clearly pieces will need to have some kind of innate combat power that determines who wins a combat. To add flavor and a hook for theme, they will also have some additional abilities, probably either relating to mobility or situational attack power adjustments.
One More Decision With The Pieces: At the risk of adding a small bit of complexity, we’ll divorce the raw combat power from abilities. For instance, in Stratego, all 8’s are miners and all 9’s are scouts. In Tactego, if there’s a piece called, say, a Knight, with the ability to jump like a chess knight, we might have one with a strength of 3 and one with a strength of 1.

Next time we’ll consider, among other things, some ideas for pieces.

Take this hypothetical but non-farfetched situation. It takes the form of a Settlers of Catan game but should generalize without much trouble.

It’s your turn. You have 7 points and a hand full of resources, but only enough to get you to 8 points. With reasonable trading you could have 9. Opponent A, to your left, has 9 points and several resources, but not in the right combination to win without trading. Opponent B, to A’s left, will certainly win on his turn (say 8 points, 2 soldiers and 2 face-down cards, or whatever.)

Your options are:

1. Build your 8th VP and wait to lose to Opponent B
2. Trade with Opponent A for your 9th point and wait to lose to Opponent A
3. Trade with Opponent A for enough resources to buy 3 development cards and hope for the 1-in-1000 shot at victory (if all 3 are VP cards)

I don’t think any one of these answers is particularly bad. My instinct is to go with Option 3–my objective is to try to place first and unfortunately for Opponent B, only by handing A the victory can I have even a hope of this. But some players might feel that “maximize your expected score” is a better goal and choose Option 2. And some might feel that they should try not to be a kingmaker at all and choose Option 1.

My argument here is not that one of these is better, but that it’s a good idea to think about what you would do beforehand. If you have a goal going in, your actions will look less like kingmaking to the other players, reducing the potential for indignation.

We can also pose two more questions:

• What if Opponent B also is willing and able to trade? (He’ll match any trade Opponent B will or even donate resources to keep you from trading with A)

In this case, if you want to maximize your score or play for the long shot win, you have to explicitly decide which opponent will win. Trading with B goes against the principle of not trading with the runaway leader, but this rule seems worthless if trading with the other player would just reverse their roles.

• What if Opponent A denied you important resources via Robber or Monopoly earlier in the game? (Or B, without loss of generality)

Some would argue that retribution is unjustified. I disagree, especially if it costs you nothing to enact it. If it helps, don’t think of A as your enemy–just think of B as a closer friend. It makes sense to help those who have done you no wrong first.

Obviously I don’t expect everyone to start a Web page just to put down their own kingmaking policy, but in the interest of disclosure and discussion, I’ll codify mine here:

1. Play for the best chance to win.
2. If this is not possible, play to maximize score.
3. Other options being equal, favor an opponent who has not acted towards me with betrayal or aggression.
4. As a final tiebreaker, choose the most passive option.

With deep, dynamic strategy, plenty of player interaction, and great pacing, Puerto Rico is a deservedly popular game. If you’re looking to practice or get your fix in at 1:30 AM when everyone is asleep, try our the Puerto Rico Evolver.

Cool things about this program:

1. It’s an Excel spreadsheet/macro that certainly pushes the limits of that environment.
2. It plays very well. I consider myself a strong intermediate player and feel very pressured. I have beaten it (once out of several tries, and in the advantageous third seat) but there is not much room for error.
3. It learns its strategy from a genetic algorithm. How cool is that? You actually get several different opponents, with different strategies, each picked from its own pool of contenders. You can even evolve your own opponents, if you have a few trillion CPU cycles to spare.

There are a lot of gaming blogs out there but Yehuda says a lot of interesting things and says them well. There are plenty of good articles there, with the highlights nicely noted for your convenience. The same author some time ago compiled a list of koans from the ancient gaming masters.

I played Tigris & Euphrates again last night. This time at least I felt like I understood what was going on, even though I didn’t do very well. The game is certainly more exciting with four players than two–there are more opportunities for conflict and if you start losing on one front, it’s more reasonable to go somewhere else.

Reader Fuleng posted a link to an annotated game of T&E in the suggestion box. I’ve moved the text here:

For an annotated games of Tigris and Euphrates, check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/170187
and http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/170597.
T&E is one of my favorite Eurogames, but I’ll admit that while extremely deep. it’s not very accessible to new players. While the rules are relatively simple, there are just enough exceptions to be confusing, and the strategy is ‘emergent’ - ie, not immediately obvious from reading the rules. It took me a few games with the online version before I started to ‘get it.’ The annotated game does a decent job at getting some of the basic principles across, I recommend it to any one interested in or frustrated with T&E.

He’s very right about the “emergent” strategy. What’s frustrating is that nearly all of the strategy is emergent. This is unlike, say, Puerto Rico, which has a lot of very subtle strategy, but you can feel like you’re making progress all along, and the development patterns that winning players use are pretty clear.

I liked Bang! when I got it. I thought it was an excellent party game. But unlike most games, which have grown on me as I have played them repeatedly, I’ve been enjoying Bang! less and less.

The weaknesses which have become increasingly apparent over time:

• Player elimination. In general I am opposed to this.
• Player elimination… before that player ever gets to take a turn. I have seen this more than once. This is not forgivable. What’s more, the bonus for eliminating outlaws makes it more likely to happen.
• Wildly varying play time. From five minutes to over an hour. You can’t start a “filler” game and be confident of finishing in a reasonable length of time. Very frequently one player is eliminated quickly and the rest of the game drags on for over half an hour. Great if you really wanted to get some pizza instead of playing a game. Bad if you sat down to play a game with the intention of playing.
• Unhelpful card text. “But, ” you say, “the cards have those helpful little icons on them.” Except that still nobody remembers how Panic works, and oh yeah, the six or seven difficult cards don’t even try, they just have a little icon meaning “see rulebook text.” Which defeats the damn purpose. Especially when the rulebook is a flimsy, tiny-print foldout piece of paper.
• Did someone else say the rules were easy? Except that every character gets a special power, which isn’t obvious from looking quickly or from the name or from anything except reading the card carefully. And they can’t be ignored or glossed over, because many affect the way people shoot you. (e.g. the character that has a built-in Mustang, the character that allows you to steal cards when shot, etc.) So everyone is tired of listening to blah blah character descriptions before the game begins, and then once play starts people lose track and need to be reminded.
• Whoever gets blown up by the dynamite, loses.

Pillars of the Earth is an economy/resource game with a novel auction mechanic.

The economy/resource portion is solid if unremarkable. You deploy laborers (you get 12 every turn) to acquire raw materials (wood, stone, sand) and feed these resources to craftsmen to earn VPs. Craftsmen are like technologies; they stick around.

The auction mechanic is the neat part, and the one that really makes you think. There are about 15 privileges available, and each player will eventually get three of them. Some are decidedly better than others. For each player, three markers are placed into a bag, and one is drawn out. That player has the opportunity to either pay 7 gold (which is a lot) for the opportunity to choose any one privilege, or pass, which effectively boots that privilege-choice to the very end of the line. The next marker drawn costs 6 gold, the one after that 5, etc. The last few all cost nothing, and after that, passed markers are placed.

The game looks way more complicated than it is–it “fell into place” for me around halfway through the first game. It took 4 first-timers 2 hours to play; with veterans it would probably be 90 minutes, with setup, or 75 if you hurried. Production quality is good  but not great–I didn’t much care for the decorative little wooden cathedral. On the other hand, the cards look nice and are helpfully backed.

Can be found here.

I don’t usually discuss RPG reports here, but I ran a session today that was a little different. It was using the Engel Matrix system, rules available here. The Engel Matrix system is fascinating, but only arguably even counts as an RPG–it truly is the group storytelling system that other games claim to be.

In my experience today, the game’s major strength is that every player has a large degree of control over what happens and there’s very little downtime. It’s three hours of constant activity for everyone. The weakness is that because every player is narrating “what happens,” but sometimes those things just don’t end up occurring, it’s easy to get confused as to what actually has happened and what hasn’t. We all got lost at points.

For your amusement, the game setup information for my session, the jumping off point my players used, is given below the cut.

(more…)

No, I still haven’t played it.

But here is enough information to pique my interest even further into BoardGameGeek’s #4-rated title.

Samples:

• Caylus comes in a box, but it cannot be contained.
• Caylus can levitate up to three feet off the ground, but Caylus chooses not to.
• Caylus drives a van and is here to pick up your daughter.