I am running a single-elimination tournament with 64 players. The seeding is random. Assume the teams are totally ordered in skill (no two have the same skill, and the “is more skillful than” relationship is transitive) and that the more skillful team wins every game.

The tournament determines the most skillful team, of course. After it’s over, how many games are needed to determine the second best team?

Play against AIs. Nowhere near as good as the real thing, but when it’s 2:30 AM and you gotta have your fix, it’s available here.

http://snapper.rooms.cwal.net/games.html

The interface is very nice. The AI is decent but has a couple weaknesses that can be exploited:

• It won’t call Ra with the intention of buying the lot with its non-highest sun. This means you can often get some good bargains on lots of 5-6 decent tiles early on each epoch.
• It doesn’t take into account the value of holding onto a high-powered sun into the next round. For instance, if the Ra track is all-but-one, it would rather buy a single Pharaoh or River with its 13 -valued sun than either hold out for a good lot or be willing to take its 13 into the next epoch.

I intended to post this as the first article when I got back from Origins, but somehow it fell through the cracks. I would ordinarily not be attracted to Exalted: War for the Throne because it looks so much like Risk, but I wanted to try it out for the redoubtable J. Vogel, a fan of the RPG.

Time: 1-3 hours. The people I demoed with confirmed that they had seen very short games as well as games where a balance of power was reached, forces built up, and the game ended up taking a very long time. I think this is a problem–I want to go into a game knowing about how long it’s going to take, and a two-hour swing is a big deal. In particular, in almost all cases “three hours” translates to “the rest of the night.”

Central mechanic: Massed armies in regions, like Risk. There are differences: you can attack from nonadjacent regions (using “ranged attacks” and “sorcery”). The attacker is not at risk for casualties but has only one attack per turn, so the attack isn’t taken lightly.

Theme and mechanics integrated nicely. I haven’t played a lot of Exalted but I recognized the “Charms” (magic techniques) and artifacts and it looks like they pulled this off pretty well. The foundation is a wargame where soldiers are moved from region to region; Charms grant special abilities that can be used every turn, while “Event Cards” are one-time special powers that can be used in or out of combat.

There are two resources: money, which is used to pay for units, and Essence, which can give temporary boosts to offense and defense or power Charms. They seem to be of about equal value.

(If you were looking for cinematic, over-the-top personal combat, that’s not really included.)

Luck: Uncomfortably heavy. The resolution mechanic is taken straight from the game: roll a certain number of d10; 7-9 is a success and 0 is two successes. In an attack, both attacker and defender roll; defender’s successes are subtracted from the attacker’s and the difference is the number of casualties. It turns out that this is not only a lot of dice to roll, but the variance is very high. Attacks can go unexpectedly fall completely flat, even if you have invested a lot in them, and likewise seemingly small threats can bite hard with a lucky attack and bad defense roll.

Elimination and near-elimination. Not unexpected, but: once you’re out, you’re out, and if you lose most of your territory, you’re crippled until someone decides to put you out of your misery. There’s not much of a chance to have a serious impact on the game if you lose most of your territory or forces, but you’ll be asked to keep playing to avoid tipping the balance of power…

Defense = numbers. This worries me the most. The more armies you have in a region, the more difficult they are to kill. This makes the game feel “unbalanced” to me.

Verdict: Let R be the your rating on an arbitrary scale for Risk and E be your score for the Exalted RPG. Then your rating for this game will be (2R+E) / 2.9. (The quotient is 2.9, not 3, to reflect the “neat” aspect of bringing the games together.) Then penalize yourself 10% for every person less than 5 who would be difficult to find to play. (This is not a game you can occasionally get nongamers to play–especially not after the first time.) It’s not an easy sell, but a group of Exalted fans who like Risk as well will probably dig it.

Suggested and written up by reader Nevin; I have cleaned it up a little, but the ideas are his.

Synopsis: A hybrid of Coloretto and Ra, showcasing the fundamental idea of both: that different cards have different values to different players.

Setup: From a Ra set, remove all the gold, three floods, and one of each civilization tile. The suns are not used; the board is only used for the Ra track.

Play: As in Coloretto, there is one “row” of tiles for each player that can hold a maximum of three tiles. On your turn you may either pull a tile from the bag and add it to a row, or you may take one of the rows and be out of the round until all players have taken a row.

Gods only count for (2, as usual) points and cannot be used to take tiles as in Ra.

Disasters do not have their ordinary function and do not count against the “three tiles per row” limit. They count only after the third epoch, at which point each player scores -1 for having 1 disaster tile (of any kind), -3 for 2, -6 for 3, and so on.

If you pull a Ra tile, add it to the Ra track and draw another tile. If the Ra track fills up, as in Ra, the epoch ends immediately (players who haven’t taken a row yet are out of luck) and is scored exactly as in Ra. The game is over after the third epoch.

I don’t like the magical combat in the Harry Potter universe. It’s more like a gunfight than a wizards’ duel, decided who can use dexterity and a quick tongue to land the first incapacitating hit first. And you can dodge curses, like they were Star Wars blaster fire or something!

Give me a one-syllable incapacitating spell (it doesn’t have to last for more than two seconds) that doesn’t shine a brightly colored tracer beam to dodge and I’ll rule the world of wizarding in a week.

They’ll probably accuse me of being gay.

At Origins I picked up Coloretto. I wholeheartedly recommend it. There are lots of decisions to make (but none of them brainburners), no waiting, plenty of opportunities for calculated risk-taking. Interaction? Hell, yes: whenever you add to a stack of cards, you’re the last person who is allowed to take it; so keeping track of what every other player wants is all-important. The estimated playtime of 30 minutes is a dirty lie–15 is more like it–and to top it off, it’s dirt cheap. Go order yourself a copy.

(I also demoed the 2007 Spiel des Jahres winner, Zooloretto. The basic mechanic of the game is the same but it’s been “bulked up” into a full-length, 45-minute Euro. It’s a fine game but I feel it lacks both the elegance and intensity of its older, leaner sibling. Plus it costs four times as much.)

It’s not dissimilar to my Favorite Game Ever, Ra–more on this next time.

Nefarious reader Fu Leng pointed me to the way alliances work in Dune. I like it a lot. Broadly:

• There is a formal game mechanic for alliances. Alliances can win as a team, help each other in certain special ways, and allies may not attack one another.
• Intermittently throughout the game, an event happens where all alliances are automatically dissolved. They must be created again–then there is no more opportunity to create then until the next such event.

This appeals greatly to me because it allows for a shifting web of allies and enemies without the constant worry of a knife in the back (or the need to backstab for victory); I think I could get much more into this game than, say, A Game of Thrones or Diplomacy. I would definitely use this mechanic, or something similar, if I wanted to design a game where alliances between players factored significantly.

Consider a (fair) six-sided die with four sides red, two sides blue. That is, it has a 2/3 chance to roll red, 1/3 blue. We are playing a game as follows: One of us picks a sequence of two outcomes (like “blue, red”), and then the other picks a different sequence of two outcomes. We roll the die as many times as necessary until the most recent two rolls match one of our sequences, at which point that player wins.

(Example: you pick red, red and I pick blue, blue. The rolls come up 1. red, 2. blue, 3. red, 4. blue, 5. red, 6. red, at which point you win.)

Because I am magnanimous, I will allow you to pick the sequence first or second, as you like. What is your winning strategy?

Edit: I should credit the source, which is here. I recast the riddle because I feel that the die is more intuitive than a “biased coin flip” and to try to avoid what I feel is a major hint in the wording of the original.

To my surprise I got to try out Twilight Struggle last night. (Thank you J.K. Rowling for distracting the others.) Long story short: Playing as the USA, I lost in turn 4 (like 1955 or so) so we’re all speaking Russian now.

I definitely made some serious mistakes; there’s a lot going on and a lot you have to think about. The theme works surprisingly well. I only caught the end of the Cold War during my conscious lifetime (born 1980) but I really felt like I was watching freedom and democracy slip through my fingers as I lost.

I had read the rules enough to be pretty familiar with them (although I still needed a couple clarifications and made errors, like forgetting to update DEFCON when staging coups), and managed to get the first (and only) half of the game over in not much more than an hour and a half.  So the three-hour stated time is accurate; if we had more experience I think we’d spend more time planning things out, and a game that actually lasts until the end would take the full three hours.

There’s definitely going to be an enormous learning curve on this one, not in terms of rules (actually pretty easy) but in terms of being familiar with the cards and events and what you need to watch out for. I think it’ll be worth it in the end, though.

That’s not spam–that’s the name of the game. A cheap one I picked up at Origins.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that the game is… not bad. But too dry, like a wine that everyone agrees would be really great for someone else to drink. Nobody actually likes it enough to want to play it. Which is a shame, because it’s not bad. But I think it’s gonna stay on my shelf.

The game itself is like a mini-biathalon–a dry, inoffensive bidding game followed by a slightly less dry bluffing game. The bidding game seems gratuitous and uninteresting, and doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on the game. (I think the bidding falls particularly flat because all the cards have essentially the same value to all players.) The bluffing game is marginally more interesting, but every step feels anticlimactic. “Oh YEAH! I got… what appears to be… a slightly better value …on my goods… than you did there. Chew on THAT.”

Not bad. Just not good enough for anyone to want to pull it out. Sorry.