Last time I played Gloomhaven with my four person group we got beat. It was our first loss, though I have seen three other occasions where we won the game on our last action, so we have had our fair share of tight victories. I couldn't quite figure out how we were supposed to win as there were 15 enemies on the map at the start and while we managed to defeat them all we were absolutely ruined by the end of it. Two of us staggered across the line into the final room and immediately exhausted and the third had only one action before keeling over. Needless to say the single remaining person (who had lots of cards left because he never took a turn getting pummelled) was unable to defeat the last room solo.
But it turns out we screwed up. There was a tile in the middle of the two rooms that was supposed to act as a doorway but we treated it as a pillar instead. We should have had a room with 5 strong enemies and then another room with 10 weaker enemies in it, and given that we survived fighting all of them at once I am sure we would have defeated the scenario handily if we weren't cheating terribly in the monsters' favour.
This has gotten me thinking a lot about the difficulty level of the game. We are currently playing on normal difficulty and it seems far too easy. While there have been some close shaves they have been close mostly because we have been playing like garbage much of the time. We are often taking terrible actions just to farm experience or fighting one another over loot. Instead of really pushing ourselves to fight optimally we fuss over battle goal and life goal progress. This is what has led to us having several extremely close wins when we clearly could have clobbered the zone if we just worked together.
The contrast to my 2 player games is stark. When I have been playing Gloomhaven with OldHobo or Wendy we absolutely smash the monsters. It feels like a seamless team effort where we grab money and experience when it makes sense to do so but we focus on winning as cleanly as possible. A part of this is just that we are happy to watch anyone advance so if one of us vacuums up all the cash in a scenario that isn't a problem - we know that someone else will do it next time. Nobody is wasting actions trying to grab a coin from somebody else. Why would we do that, when a coin in my friend's hand is one that will buy them better gear to fight the monsters with?!?
The end of the two player games is almost comical. We always end up with one monster left alive haplessly chasing us around the dungeon while we wander around picking up every piece of loot and farming experience with move actions. One of my characters even has the goal of watching 15 exhaustions, which would take a lot of time in a 2 player game, except that we just let the last monster beat my friend into exhaustion while we pick up the loot and I kill it at the end.
Gloomhaven is so well balanced that I don't think this is just 2 player mode being super easy. I think it really is about cooperation being stronger than competition. There is also an argument to be made for experience, because Wendy, Oldhobo, and I have all played a lot more Gloomhaven than the other 3 players in my 4 player group. But the key to my mind is that when people are focused on their own advancement and keeping themselves safe rather than trying to maximize the group's effectiveness the group suffers greatly. When everyone plays together the increase in group power is incredible.
The question is, what is the goal? If we are all trying to roleplay greedy, morally questionable mercenaries with a specific life goal that takes precedence over all other things, then we should be competitive. That description really does fit with the way the characters are portrayed in the intro to the game, so it seems quite reasonable. But it is certain that playing this way makes us vastly less effective and honestly isn't as much fun.
I really like it when we play a cooperative game rather than a cooperative/competitive game. I have found that true with many other games that are mostly cooperative but involve competition at the end where it ends up feeling crappy. I don't mind pure competition, or pure cooperation, but when we cooperate until defection I don't much like it. There are some examples that are fine, like Diplomacy, because that game is a pure competitive game where cooperation is allowed, but mostly I want my games to be neatly divided between coop and competitive.
In any case I may need to ratchet my 2 player games up to a higher difficulty level. It is fun to smash things but at some point I crave a properly challenging opponent. On the other hand our 4 player group of greedy backstabbing mercenaries certainly can't handle more difficult opponents as we spend too much of our time fighting amongst ourselves!
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
A wondering about identity
When I was at WBC playing Spirit Island I had to choose a spirit to play. I immediately gravitated to a lightning spirit, one that obviously spent its time blowing up the enemies. My cards all smashed and I had powerful AOE so it was clear my job was to PEW PEW.
I wasn't trying to build up. I wasn't trying to do a combo. I was purely going to beat down as hard as possible as fast as possible.
Thief said that he was not at all surprised at my choice, and seemed to think this is exactly the sort of thing I do.
Which is strange to me, because I see myself as a control player, not a beatdown player. When I was playing Magic I constantly gravitated towards control decks, and in fact I was well known in my hometown as being *that guy* who just counterspelled everything you tried to do until my Serpent Generator snake tokens would eventually poison you to death. I didn't take a controlling spirit type in the game of Spirit Island because I figured I would have to know how the games works to do that properly, but any fool can point lightning bolts at an enemy and watch them burn.
Today I was playing Hearthstone for the first time in awhile and I immediately built a control warlock deck. Mostly people just conceded to me once I built a sufficiently large wall of taunts, but my final game tonight involved me killing everything. I was up against an elemental mage who dropped Jaina early on and manufactured endless water elementals. But finally in the end they played their last minion and I killed it and watched them die to fatigue. There is nothing quite so satisfying as killing every last thing an opponent has and watching them just fade away to black. YOU HAVE NOTHING. I KILLED EVERYTHING!
Beatdown is never, ever as satisfying to me as that feeling of weathering every storm and watching an opponent crumble, flailing, with nothing left.
So I don't think I am a beatdown player. And yet people who know me pretty well seem to think I gravitate towards beatdown styles. I wonder if it is just Thief who thinks this, or if other people agree.
If anyone has an opinion on this, I am curious to hear it. I think of myself as a total control style player, in virtually all games... but maybe I am not seeing myself objectively.
I wasn't trying to build up. I wasn't trying to do a combo. I was purely going to beat down as hard as possible as fast as possible.
Thief said that he was not at all surprised at my choice, and seemed to think this is exactly the sort of thing I do.
Which is strange to me, because I see myself as a control player, not a beatdown player. When I was playing Magic I constantly gravitated towards control decks, and in fact I was well known in my hometown as being *that guy* who just counterspelled everything you tried to do until my Serpent Generator snake tokens would eventually poison you to death. I didn't take a controlling spirit type in the game of Spirit Island because I figured I would have to know how the games works to do that properly, but any fool can point lightning bolts at an enemy and watch them burn.
Today I was playing Hearthstone for the first time in awhile and I immediately built a control warlock deck. Mostly people just conceded to me once I built a sufficiently large wall of taunts, but my final game tonight involved me killing everything. I was up against an elemental mage who dropped Jaina early on and manufactured endless water elementals. But finally in the end they played their last minion and I killed it and watched them die to fatigue. There is nothing quite so satisfying as killing every last thing an opponent has and watching them just fade away to black. YOU HAVE NOTHING. I KILLED EVERYTHING!
Beatdown is never, ever as satisfying to me as that feeling of weathering every storm and watching an opponent crumble, flailing, with nothing left.
So I don't think I am a beatdown player. And yet people who know me pretty well seem to think I gravitate towards beatdown styles. I wonder if it is just Thief who thinks this, or if other people agree.
If anyone has an opinion on this, I am curious to hear it. I think of myself as a total control style player, in virtually all games... but maybe I am not seeing myself objectively.
Monday, August 6, 2018
Burn the townspeople!
At WBC this year I was introduced to the game Spirit Island. It is a coop game for 1 to 4 players that is not for beginners or casuals - this is a hardcore gamer's coop game.
I like it a lot.
There are a couple different axes upon which a game can succeed or fail and Spirit Island wins on all of them. Firstly I look at theme. Spirit Island is a game where players represent a variety of powerful nature spirits defending an island from invaders. There are natives on the island who are the allies of the spirits, and the spirits need to protect the natives and keep the land from being blighted by the colonizers. It all feels great. The colonizers start off pushing further and further, but the spirits have just awakened and over time they get more and more powerful. The game becomes a rush to see if the colonizers can take over and blight the land before the spirits become so powerful they wipe the colonies out.
The spirits have wildly varying mechanics and powers. Some of them come out of the gate great, and don't have much ramp up, while others are slow to develop but go nuts when they hit their stride. I only played once but it is clear you could play the game over and over with different spirits combinations and have all kinds of different play experiences. The feel of the game absolutely hits the theme they are going for and it works.
Mechanically the game is complicated enough that I didn't even completely understand it after our first playthrough, which we won. I picked a simple spirit to start off and figured out that my job was to blow stuff up. I was a lightning spirit and it was clear that what I needed to do was blow up the towns put up by the colonists to keep them in check and hope that the other players would set up a long term plan and do something busted. This is exactly how it played out - I fried people and houses with lightning, barely keeping a lid on things, and then eventually another player did something totally absurd and we won. I don't know what he did really, but I am sure I would figure it out on my next couple plays.
The choices are well executed. Figuring out what an ability does is easy. Figuring out which is the best ability to use is HARD. I can't speak to balance because I have played so little, but since the game comes with a ton of different difficulty settings I don't think it matters that much. If you want to play busted spirits, then ratchet up the difficulty.
I also love the game from a political standpoint. So many games are themed around the idea of colonizing new lands. Sometimes you have to murder the natives to do so, and other times you are just moving into 'empty' territory. Of course 'empty' territory is a fantasy created by either pretending other people don't count, or conveniently forgetting genocides. A game that explicitly flips the narrative and puts the players in charge of pushing back against colonial invaders is a thing we need more of.
I like the politics of anti colonialism. I like the theme of magical spirits and I enjoyed the obvious flavour differences reflected in mechanics. The simplicity of effects which still led to complex choices was well done. The game is hard, and not for casual gamers, but this isn't a criticism, just a note, because I like coop games that require serious thinking.
Spirit Island gets a huge thumbs up from me, and I will be playing it again.
(Also I really liked the way I was taught the game. I was given a simple spirit, a bare overview of the rules, and then we started playing. I figured out how the game works as I went. Much better than an hour of rules slog that I can barely remember.)
I like it a lot.
There are a couple different axes upon which a game can succeed or fail and Spirit Island wins on all of them. Firstly I look at theme. Spirit Island is a game where players represent a variety of powerful nature spirits defending an island from invaders. There are natives on the island who are the allies of the spirits, and the spirits need to protect the natives and keep the land from being blighted by the colonizers. It all feels great. The colonizers start off pushing further and further, but the spirits have just awakened and over time they get more and more powerful. The game becomes a rush to see if the colonizers can take over and blight the land before the spirits become so powerful they wipe the colonies out.
The spirits have wildly varying mechanics and powers. Some of them come out of the gate great, and don't have much ramp up, while others are slow to develop but go nuts when they hit their stride. I only played once but it is clear you could play the game over and over with different spirits combinations and have all kinds of different play experiences. The feel of the game absolutely hits the theme they are going for and it works.
Mechanically the game is complicated enough that I didn't even completely understand it after our first playthrough, which we won. I picked a simple spirit to start off and figured out that my job was to blow stuff up. I was a lightning spirit and it was clear that what I needed to do was blow up the towns put up by the colonists to keep them in check and hope that the other players would set up a long term plan and do something busted. This is exactly how it played out - I fried people and houses with lightning, barely keeping a lid on things, and then eventually another player did something totally absurd and we won. I don't know what he did really, but I am sure I would figure it out on my next couple plays.
The choices are well executed. Figuring out what an ability does is easy. Figuring out which is the best ability to use is HARD. I can't speak to balance because I have played so little, but since the game comes with a ton of different difficulty settings I don't think it matters that much. If you want to play busted spirits, then ratchet up the difficulty.
I also love the game from a political standpoint. So many games are themed around the idea of colonizing new lands. Sometimes you have to murder the natives to do so, and other times you are just moving into 'empty' territory. Of course 'empty' territory is a fantasy created by either pretending other people don't count, or conveniently forgetting genocides. A game that explicitly flips the narrative and puts the players in charge of pushing back against colonial invaders is a thing we need more of.
I like the politics of anti colonialism. I like the theme of magical spirits and I enjoyed the obvious flavour differences reflected in mechanics. The simplicity of effects which still led to complex choices was well done. The game is hard, and not for casual gamers, but this isn't a criticism, just a note, because I like coop games that require serious thinking.
Spirit Island gets a huge thumbs up from me, and I will be playing it again.
(Also I really liked the way I was taught the game. I was given a simple spirit, a bare overview of the rules, and then we started playing. I figured out how the game works as I went. Much better than an hour of rules slog that I can barely remember.)
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