New rule!

You are not allowed to complain, whine, or base all or part of a “comedy” routine about the following aspects of Starbucks, or similar coffee shops:

• The price
• The fact that you cannot get “just a cup of coffee”
• The complicated multi-word nature of the drink anyone, including the guy in front of you, gets
• The nonstandard names of the drink sizes

If these things bother you, you have entered the wrong store. The fault is yours. It is like complaining that at Nordstrom, you cannot get “just a t-shirt and jeans.” What the heck were you doing at Nordstrom when you should have gone to Wal-Mart? If the concept of a raspberry latte cappuccino offends your delicate blue-collar sensibilities, what were you doing in Starbucks? You should have been in Dunkin’ Donuts, which caters to exactly the people who don’t want Starbucks. Or Denny’s, Waffle House, or IHOP, any of whom will sell you enough caffeine to make a lab rat burst into flames for less than $2.

I’ve posted the first game I designed, Satori, in complete print-and-playable format; it has a special place of honor in the sidebar. If you’re not in the habit of scanning the sidebar every day for changes (go figure), here’s the announcement.

A little while ago I observed (didn’t actually play) a game of Graenaland (Greenland). The promise of Greenland is to be a trading/negotiation game like Settlers, but with extra complications and subtleties. The board is divided up into region in which players can build multiple settlements; settlements give voting rights to the resources in a region.

In practice, players didn’t seem so enthusiastic about the negotiation, which was a practice of last resort, preferring to dominate areas and eliminate the dependency on other players’ goodwill.  All of the complications made the game see very inelegant; this wasn’t helped by the rulebook, which was unclear in several places, poorly organized, and lacked helpful diagrams.

Theme-wise, you play Vikings, but you don’t fight. Is this historical? I don’t care! In my book, Vikings fight! Clearly this Greenland is populated by some weird non-confrontational Euro-vikings that would rather settle their differences with voting and diplomacy rather than fighting it out. Too weird.

Apparently someone is trying to organize a gaming convention here in Cleveland. Looks interesting and low-key; I’m not planning to go to GenCon, so perhaps this will do instead. Link: AnCon

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.