Last night I played Castles of Burgundy in person for the first time. I have been playing a bunch on the board game site boiteajeux but this was my first experience with the board and physical pieces. I must say I really enjoy the functionality of having the computer handle all the randomization and point counting but I think I should really play games in person the first time. It helps a lot in figuring out how all the mechanics work when I have to maintain board state myself. I finished a couple of games of CoB online without even understanding how the turn order worked!
I won the game by about 30 points, roughly 256 to 226/215/205, which is a pretty large margin of victory for that game. Funny thing is that I honestly can't pin down why I won by so much. I had the least tiles on the board of anyone with 9 empty spaces at the end, and although I completed a full 5 field of sheep two of the other players completed 5 fields of cows and pigs respectively so they were keeping up. I never got a mine, so you can't chalk up my victory to an early mine snowball.
P C C Y
P P C Y B
P P B Y B B
W W W C W W W
B B M B B P
B M Y B B
M Y Y B
This is the board I was on. I filled everything except the lower yellow section, the lower left brown section, and the mines.
You might wonder if I only won because of miscounting points. That is a reasonable suspicion, but I do not think it is right in this case. Naked Man is good about maintaining board state and scoring correctly, and he was watching me like a hawk.
One thing that went really well is my boat usage. I kept two boats ahead of the others for most of the game and this let me scoop up 2 resource tiles on 4 of my 6 boats. I hadn't really considered how powerful it was to always be ahead and have the best selection on grabbing tiles like that, but it certainly came home.
I think the best way to attribute my win is simply to efficiency. My 3 yellow tiles were worth 16 points (animal activations), 8 points (animal types), and 8 points (tower x 2). That is a fantastic set of tiles, and exactly filled my size 3 yellow group. I sold 13 resource tiles over the game, most of them in sets of 2 or 3. That is an extremely high number for a 4 player game.
The early part of the game didn't look too exciting for me as I was just putting down boats and sheep. Other people were doing the mining thing and getting yellow tiles that gave them workers and it seemed like they were building powerful engines. I was just getting points.
But I think just getting points is how this game works. Most brown buildings give zero points, but I had 2 watchtowers giving me a total of 8. I got tons of points from selling stuff, maximized my completion bonuses, and had only a single tile that gave me workers because I was super tight with my workers all game.
I didn't try to build any sort of engine, I just rammed as much point generation into my board as is possible, and that led to a big margin of victory. I honestly thought that the guy who got to 3 mines and had the mines -> workers yellow tile super early was going to walk away with it but he ended up coming third, though admittedly since it was his first game it was unlikely he would win. He did manage to vacuum up 4 large bonus tiles and 1 small though, which is phenomenal for a first outing.
I guess the lesson in this game is that there is no engine. The important thing is simply turning every resource into points as efficiently as possible. It feels exciting to chain buildings with bonus actions on them into one another but that doesn't actually make you win. In the end if you complete a size 5 group of brown buildings in only 5 actions you still only get ~20 points for them, and 4 points per action is weak. That can be good enough if you can get a bunch of the same building and grab the associated yellow point tile, but otherwise isn't exciting.
This doesn't make me dislike the game though. It just means I have to play it differently than I had thought and continue to iterate on my strategies. It certainly does make me less inclined to take mines at the outset though if I have to expend a lot of resources to do so.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Fighting women
I am running an ongoing campaign using my RPG system Heroes By Trade. My players are Wendy and Pinkie Pie, and I am running an NPC to go along with them. My character is a large furry troll who is really good at being tough, breaking things, and doesn't talk much. A perfect NPC. :)
One of the things I am making a point of is making the world have lots of women in positions of influence and importance. Fantasy worlds are usually terrible at this and have men doing everything. This is something I would think about a lot in any case but it is particularly important because I want Pinkie Pie to have the experience of adventuring in a world where women aren't relegated to support roles all the time.
I have actually found it pretty easy to do this with the important people. There is an Empress, not a King, and keeping some kind of gender balance among the powerful and wealthy has been simple. I even have one race in the game that has no sex or gender at all so non gendered people are a thing this society is used to and they appear here and there.
But I find it takes a lot more concentration to not default to male pronouns for random dorks. When I am building people with motivations, names, distinguishing features, these people end up in some kind of good gender spectrum. But when the characters get attacked by a bunch of random gangsters I find that I default to calling all of them 'him' as they get mowed down like chaff.
Isn't saying 'mowed down like chaff' kind of ridiculous? I haven't ever mowed down chaff! I have no idea how easy that is. Maybe it is actually really difficult and I have been lied to by this saying all my life. I wouldn't know if that was the case. Now I need to head to wikipedia and look this up...
I don't think this is a huge problem, because I try to stay on top of and mitigate it, but it is interesting that this is the way my brain processes it. I am probably inured to this norm by all the action movies I have watched, which certainly have a huge male bias for the main villains and heroes but a much larger bias among the henchmen. Specifically, that they are henchmen, not henchwomen.
There are lots of reasons for that, and I am sure at least a part of it is that you can't sell a male hero who busts into places and then punches all the women he sees in the face until they are unconscious. You can have a male hero do that to men no problem though and audiences won't freak out about it.
Pinkie Pie doesn't obviously react to people in the game based on gender. I was a bit surprised by that because she is really focused on gender in real life, and being a girl rather than a boy is a huge part of her identity. I am creating a world for her where violence solves most problems and societies need singular powerful people to save them from evil, and those aren't exactly things I want to impart even if they are fantasy staples. But I can avoid making the world she romps through full of just men though, so I am going to do that, if nothing else.
One of the things I am making a point of is making the world have lots of women in positions of influence and importance. Fantasy worlds are usually terrible at this and have men doing everything. This is something I would think about a lot in any case but it is particularly important because I want Pinkie Pie to have the experience of adventuring in a world where women aren't relegated to support roles all the time.
I have actually found it pretty easy to do this with the important people. There is an Empress, not a King, and keeping some kind of gender balance among the powerful and wealthy has been simple. I even have one race in the game that has no sex or gender at all so non gendered people are a thing this society is used to and they appear here and there.
But I find it takes a lot more concentration to not default to male pronouns for random dorks. When I am building people with motivations, names, distinguishing features, these people end up in some kind of good gender spectrum. But when the characters get attacked by a bunch of random gangsters I find that I default to calling all of them 'him' as they get mowed down like chaff.
Isn't saying 'mowed down like chaff' kind of ridiculous? I haven't ever mowed down chaff! I have no idea how easy that is. Maybe it is actually really difficult and I have been lied to by this saying all my life. I wouldn't know if that was the case. Now I need to head to wikipedia and look this up...
I don't think this is a huge problem, because I try to stay on top of and mitigate it, but it is interesting that this is the way my brain processes it. I am probably inured to this norm by all the action movies I have watched, which certainly have a huge male bias for the main villains and heroes but a much larger bias among the henchmen. Specifically, that they are henchmen, not henchwomen.
There are lots of reasons for that, and I am sure at least a part of it is that you can't sell a male hero who busts into places and then punches all the women he sees in the face until they are unconscious. You can have a male hero do that to men no problem though and audiences won't freak out about it.
Pinkie Pie doesn't obviously react to people in the game based on gender. I was a bit surprised by that because she is really focused on gender in real life, and being a girl rather than a boy is a huge part of her identity. I am creating a world for her where violence solves most problems and societies need singular powerful people to save them from evil, and those aren't exactly things I want to impart even if they are fantasy staples. But I can avoid making the world she romps through full of just men though, so I am going to do that, if nothing else.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Boss fight
I played my second game of Gloomhaven last night. The first game I played a few weeks ago we eked out a victory over the forces of evil by the tiniest of margins - it all came down to a 10% chance of victory on the final roll. Last night was the opposite experience. We smashed the dungeon easily and wasted lots of resources at the end trying to vacuum up loot while disrespecting the last couple of enemies.
This scenario introduced us to boss mechanics and overall I quite like them. At first reading the rules seemed to suggest that the boss would attack us and use both of his special abilities every round. We couldn't see any possible way to win against that setup because one of the boss' abilities was to summon about 10 health of creatures, the other was to attack us with 20-30 health of creatures, and then he still had his attack. We can't possibly beat that much health since we only usually output about 15 damage a round.
But after looking at the cards we hadn't flipped over yet we realized that the boss does only one of those things each round. This is still a really scary enemy, but only facing one attack or ability every round made the fight seem possible instead of ludicrous.
It turned out to be far easier than that. We cleaned up the dangerous monsters quickly and then blew the boss up. Massacreing all the remaining enemies turned out to be a trivial affair and then the only trick was trying to collect every treasure in the game before somebody killed the last enemy for experience and we ended up leaving only a single treasure token in the dungeon. Much profit!
This left me wondering why this scenario was so much easier than the last one. There are a few reasons for sure, and one of the biggest is that in our first outing we cheated a lot... in favour of the monsters. When we flipped over their action cards we had them always attack and move in addition to whatever the card said, but they aren't supposed to do that. When the monsters get extra moves and attacks for no reason the scenarios suddenly seem a lot rougher!
In our defence Gloomhaven has a *lot* of rules.
We also played a lot better. We used our elemental bonuses effectively and combined our attacks in powerful ways. We also stopped wasting our cards on Lost abilities early and took it easy, which really helped us have the time we needed at the end of the game. Funnily enough I was actually playing too cautiously because I had a battle goal to only have 3 cards left in my deck by the end of the game and I nearly missed it. I had to throw away multiple cards for no benefit at all in order to get my hand size down enough on the final turn.
I wonder now how the first scenario would have gone if we went back and redid it with our newfound expertise and understanding of the rules. Would it still be hard, or would we just clean the place out easily? I suspect the second, but I don't know for sure.
One thing that I found interesting was that even when we were absolutely certain of victory there was still lots of tension in our choices. Everyone was trying to maximize their experience and gold gain so even when the only enemy left was a slow melee enemy that was ineffectually wandering towards us we still were thinking hard. I do like that about the game. It would be easy to make this sort of game work like DnD does, which is that when a fight goes well in the early going the last half of the fight is a boring slog towards inevitable victory. You know you will win, you just have to beat through all of the hitpoints the enemies have remaining.
Gloomhaven doesn't allow that, long, irrelevant grind to occur. You are going to run out of cards, and as the fight comes to a close everyone is in a mad scramble to use all of their high experience cards and grab loot, which often means that you are playing badly and risking losing it all. Having multiple dimensions of success (victory, loot, XP, battle goals) means that no matter how well the run is going you still really want to think about how you will play and the choices matter. I like that a lot. This means that Gloomhaven is still a blast whether or not you are getting your asses kicked, having a tight encounter, or just steamrolling on through.
The game is ridiculous in many ways. The amount of stuff you keep track of is hilarious. But the core mechanics are really excellent and the game is delivering on tactical fun in a way that is rare. Games with this much fluff rarely have such satisfying crunch. I approve.
This scenario introduced us to boss mechanics and overall I quite like them. At first reading the rules seemed to suggest that the boss would attack us and use both of his special abilities every round. We couldn't see any possible way to win against that setup because one of the boss' abilities was to summon about 10 health of creatures, the other was to attack us with 20-30 health of creatures, and then he still had his attack. We can't possibly beat that much health since we only usually output about 15 damage a round.
But after looking at the cards we hadn't flipped over yet we realized that the boss does only one of those things each round. This is still a really scary enemy, but only facing one attack or ability every round made the fight seem possible instead of ludicrous.
It turned out to be far easier than that. We cleaned up the dangerous monsters quickly and then blew the boss up. Massacreing all the remaining enemies turned out to be a trivial affair and then the only trick was trying to collect every treasure in the game before somebody killed the last enemy for experience and we ended up leaving only a single treasure token in the dungeon. Much profit!
This left me wondering why this scenario was so much easier than the last one. There are a few reasons for sure, and one of the biggest is that in our first outing we cheated a lot... in favour of the monsters. When we flipped over their action cards we had them always attack and move in addition to whatever the card said, but they aren't supposed to do that. When the monsters get extra moves and attacks for no reason the scenarios suddenly seem a lot rougher!
In our defence Gloomhaven has a *lot* of rules.
We also played a lot better. We used our elemental bonuses effectively and combined our attacks in powerful ways. We also stopped wasting our cards on Lost abilities early and took it easy, which really helped us have the time we needed at the end of the game. Funnily enough I was actually playing too cautiously because I had a battle goal to only have 3 cards left in my deck by the end of the game and I nearly missed it. I had to throw away multiple cards for no benefit at all in order to get my hand size down enough on the final turn.
I wonder now how the first scenario would have gone if we went back and redid it with our newfound expertise and understanding of the rules. Would it still be hard, or would we just clean the place out easily? I suspect the second, but I don't know for sure.
One thing that I found interesting was that even when we were absolutely certain of victory there was still lots of tension in our choices. Everyone was trying to maximize their experience and gold gain so even when the only enemy left was a slow melee enemy that was ineffectually wandering towards us we still were thinking hard. I do like that about the game. It would be easy to make this sort of game work like DnD does, which is that when a fight goes well in the early going the last half of the fight is a boring slog towards inevitable victory. You know you will win, you just have to beat through all of the hitpoints the enemies have remaining.
Gloomhaven doesn't allow that, long, irrelevant grind to occur. You are going to run out of cards, and as the fight comes to a close everyone is in a mad scramble to use all of their high experience cards and grab loot, which often means that you are playing badly and risking losing it all. Having multiple dimensions of success (victory, loot, XP, battle goals) means that no matter how well the run is going you still really want to think about how you will play and the choices matter. I like that a lot. This means that Gloomhaven is still a blast whether or not you are getting your asses kicked, having a tight encounter, or just steamrolling on through.
The game is ridiculous in many ways. The amount of stuff you keep track of is hilarious. But the core mechanics are really excellent and the game is delivering on tactical fun in a way that is rare. Games with this much fluff rarely have such satisfying crunch. I approve.
Friday, April 6, 2018
The big choke
I did well in my Thurn and Taxis and Agricola leagues last time. In both I was promoted and I was feeling good about my chances this time around and hoping to put in a good showing, if not get promoted again. My feelings of confidence were unwarranted as I look likely to be bumped down a rank in both leagues.
In Thurn and Taxis my problem is kind of ridiculous. One of the players in one of my games never accepted the invitation, and then we remade it and it still didn't get accepted, and then all of the other games were done and this one game was still not complete. The game being incomplete is partly my fault as I should have gone to the moderators about it instead of just shrugging and waiting. I don't quite know how to apportion blame here because the person who simply ignored the invites and refused to acknowledge the emails is at fault, but I have some degree of fault for not getting on it and pushing it harder.
Now I may get relegated to a lower league simply because our game is never going to get done in time and so the people being bumped down will end up being selected from that group of players. I don't envy the moderators that have to sort out this crap because there are no good solutions. It sucks extra hard to get bumped down based on this kind of thing rather than just plain ole' getting beat but there aren't exactly a lot of other options available to the mods, so no blame there.
Definitely not the triumphant romp I had hoped for.
Agricola is going badly for entirely different reasons, mostly to do with the interface and me screwing it up. One game I came third 47-42-39-38 on the back of a disastrous play where I Renovated before growing with Farm Steward in play, turning the Steward from a strong power play into a total waste. Throwing away a high draft pick, an action, and a food is terrible, especially considering Church Warden was in the game so doing this cost me an extra 3 points just for fun. I would have easily gotten second place without that terrible blunder and could have threatened for first.
In another game I had a plow down that lets me plow three times when I take the plow action, and I could do this twice a game. After I plowed the second time I realized that I had only five fields - which shouldn't be possible when I get to plow three fields two times! Somehow I had managed to only click twice to plow fields so I just missed out on an absolutely free point. And of course that single point mattered in the end, and it may get me relegated.
Both of these errors are things I could have easily fixed in a live game. I realized my disastrous mistake with the renovate just seconds after hitting Confirm, but in a game in person I would simply have taken the renovate back and done it properly. Same with the fields, I would just have put the extra field on. But you can't do that online, once you hit that Confirm button it is all over.
That isn't to say I have played perfectly otherwise! Far from it, I am still learning. But it seems like I may get bumped down in both leagues and in both cases meta issues really influenced the outcome. I guess that is the struggle with a game run by the computer. You get all kinds of benefits but the rules are enforced in the strictest possible way, so you have to play right.
All my fault, no doubt. But these sorts of errors are the most annoying kind!
In Thurn and Taxis my problem is kind of ridiculous. One of the players in one of my games never accepted the invitation, and then we remade it and it still didn't get accepted, and then all of the other games were done and this one game was still not complete. The game being incomplete is partly my fault as I should have gone to the moderators about it instead of just shrugging and waiting. I don't quite know how to apportion blame here because the person who simply ignored the invites and refused to acknowledge the emails is at fault, but I have some degree of fault for not getting on it and pushing it harder.
Now I may get relegated to a lower league simply because our game is never going to get done in time and so the people being bumped down will end up being selected from that group of players. I don't envy the moderators that have to sort out this crap because there are no good solutions. It sucks extra hard to get bumped down based on this kind of thing rather than just plain ole' getting beat but there aren't exactly a lot of other options available to the mods, so no blame there.
Definitely not the triumphant romp I had hoped for.
Agricola is going badly for entirely different reasons, mostly to do with the interface and me screwing it up. One game I came third 47-42-39-38 on the back of a disastrous play where I Renovated before growing with Farm Steward in play, turning the Steward from a strong power play into a total waste. Throwing away a high draft pick, an action, and a food is terrible, especially considering Church Warden was in the game so doing this cost me an extra 3 points just for fun. I would have easily gotten second place without that terrible blunder and could have threatened for first.
In another game I had a plow down that lets me plow three times when I take the plow action, and I could do this twice a game. After I plowed the second time I realized that I had only five fields - which shouldn't be possible when I get to plow three fields two times! Somehow I had managed to only click twice to plow fields so I just missed out on an absolutely free point. And of course that single point mattered in the end, and it may get me relegated.
Both of these errors are things I could have easily fixed in a live game. I realized my disastrous mistake with the renovate just seconds after hitting Confirm, but in a game in person I would simply have taken the renovate back and done it properly. Same with the fields, I would just have put the extra field on. But you can't do that online, once you hit that Confirm button it is all over.
That isn't to say I have played perfectly otherwise! Far from it, I am still learning. But it seems like I may get bumped down in both leagues and in both cases meta issues really influenced the outcome. I guess that is the struggle with a game run by the computer. You get all kinds of benefits but the rules are enforced in the strictest possible way, so you have to play right.
All my fault, no doubt. But these sorts of errors are the most annoying kind!
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Thieve and keep thieving
Last night I played my second 2 player game of Terraforming Mars against Naked Man. I won, and it was an absolute rout - the score was 104 to 64, partly on the back of me getting 3 milestones and the first 2 awards, leaving only the last and most expensive award for Naked Man to collect. We both felt throughout the game that I was ahead but I honestly had no concept of just how big the lead was until the final score landed.
We were both musing on how exactly I won by so much. There were two things that really stood out, one of which was Naked Man focusing too hard on a single strategy, the other of which was just me getting a ton of punish cards. Naked Man went for a heavy space strategy, starting with titanium income from his corporation and adding on a ton of additional titanium income throughout the game. He ended up at 6 titanium per turn, and that is way too much. Most of the time you can just count titanium as being worth 3 bucks each, and as long as you find enough space cards to spend it on that is accurate. Unfortunately for him we got fewer space cards than we rated to and so he had 30 titanium sitting in front of him by game end. It was pretending to be worth 90 bucks but nobody was buying the act.
This is an important lesson. There isn't really much of a 'space/titanium strategy' exactly. If you go all in on titanium you will likely end up with far too much and it will be thoroughly wasted. The first chunks of titanium are pretty good, and can reasonably be thought of as being worth 3 bucks. However, as you stack more of it the chances that you will have to sink it into a weak card just to use it up rises, as does the smaller chance that it will be wasted completely.
The punish cards in Terraforming Mars can make dabbling in lots of things a risky business. When you do that you are basically opening yourself up to every punish card out there. However, going all in on titanium or steel is a different sort of problem because you risk having a stack of resources you can't profitably use. I think in 2 player dabbling is probably best because you will get to snag half of the punish cards if you want to, and you only get through half the deck anyway so many punish cards won't even appear. Going all in on a resource just means your opponent has a huge incentive to hate draft your payoff cards, no matter what sort those might be.
I got lucky getting some of the punish cards like Hackers to steal his income, but a couple of them got passed to me. I think I dropped seven total punish cards, and all of them got full value. It doesn't seem that exciting to take a card that costs you a net 0 but takes 4 bucks from your opponent but long run that squeeze on their output is brutal. Terraforming Mars, like many games, has lots of big plays that are exciting and swingy, but it seems even more effective to take a continuous stream of small plays that are strict benefits to your situation.
So in short, you definitely need to avoid going too hard into a single resource when you can't guarantee a good use for it, and in the 2p game the punish cards are just amazing and you have to draft them highly.
One thing I found really funny is that because I had never read the rulebook I didn't know what the default game was actually like. In the base game everyone starts with one production of every resource, and in the game I was playing that rule is taken out. My impression right now is that this makes the game worse, largely because of punish cards. If everyone has a bit of everything you can actually aim your punish cards at the people you think are winning instead of just hitting the only person who happens to have the thing you are punishing. Plant strategies become more tenable because everybody is going to have some plants so meteors that blow up plants will often get aimed at people who aren't focusing hard on plants instead of always hitting the plant person.
Keeping that extra production in the game will certainly speed the game up but I have no issue with that, and I would really like to try it out and see if my thinking on punish cards works out the way I want it to.
We were both musing on how exactly I won by so much. There were two things that really stood out, one of which was Naked Man focusing too hard on a single strategy, the other of which was just me getting a ton of punish cards. Naked Man went for a heavy space strategy, starting with titanium income from his corporation and adding on a ton of additional titanium income throughout the game. He ended up at 6 titanium per turn, and that is way too much. Most of the time you can just count titanium as being worth 3 bucks each, and as long as you find enough space cards to spend it on that is accurate. Unfortunately for him we got fewer space cards than we rated to and so he had 30 titanium sitting in front of him by game end. It was pretending to be worth 90 bucks but nobody was buying the act.
This is an important lesson. There isn't really much of a 'space/titanium strategy' exactly. If you go all in on titanium you will likely end up with far too much and it will be thoroughly wasted. The first chunks of titanium are pretty good, and can reasonably be thought of as being worth 3 bucks. However, as you stack more of it the chances that you will have to sink it into a weak card just to use it up rises, as does the smaller chance that it will be wasted completely.
The punish cards in Terraforming Mars can make dabbling in lots of things a risky business. When you do that you are basically opening yourself up to every punish card out there. However, going all in on titanium or steel is a different sort of problem because you risk having a stack of resources you can't profitably use. I think in 2 player dabbling is probably best because you will get to snag half of the punish cards if you want to, and you only get through half the deck anyway so many punish cards won't even appear. Going all in on a resource just means your opponent has a huge incentive to hate draft your payoff cards, no matter what sort those might be.
I got lucky getting some of the punish cards like Hackers to steal his income, but a couple of them got passed to me. I think I dropped seven total punish cards, and all of them got full value. It doesn't seem that exciting to take a card that costs you a net 0 but takes 4 bucks from your opponent but long run that squeeze on their output is brutal. Terraforming Mars, like many games, has lots of big plays that are exciting and swingy, but it seems even more effective to take a continuous stream of small plays that are strict benefits to your situation.
So in short, you definitely need to avoid going too hard into a single resource when you can't guarantee a good use for it, and in the 2p game the punish cards are just amazing and you have to draft them highly.
One thing I found really funny is that because I had never read the rulebook I didn't know what the default game was actually like. In the base game everyone starts with one production of every resource, and in the game I was playing that rule is taken out. My impression right now is that this makes the game worse, largely because of punish cards. If everyone has a bit of everything you can actually aim your punish cards at the people you think are winning instead of just hitting the only person who happens to have the thing you are punishing. Plant strategies become more tenable because everybody is going to have some plants so meteors that blow up plants will often get aimed at people who aren't focusing hard on plants instead of always hitting the plant person.
Keeping that extra production in the game will certainly speed the game up but I have no issue with that, and I would really like to try it out and see if my thinking on punish cards works out the way I want it to.
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