I am back from the world boardgaming championships, towing a 2nd place plaque and many good stories. One of the best stories involves a complicated semi final table where we had to make tough choices about who to send on to the finals.
The setup: We are playing Vegas Showdown with 5 players. I am player 1. We finish the final turn of the game, with me buying an overpriced Lounge, hoping to hit Lounge Lizard and lock up a victory with my many Lounges. Players 2, 3, and 5 just Publicity, and Player 4 buys a Five Star Steakhouse with only 1 dollar remaining.
The card flip ends the game, giving 3 points per Restaurant, which is a disaster for me because I only have one Restaurant. I score up the game giving putting Player 2 at 46, myself and Player 5 at 47, Player 3 at 49, and Player 4 at 62. Crushing victory for P4, and we start to pack up.
Partway through packing up I realize that P4 has a Space Age Sportsbook on his board, and he does not have the prerequisite, so it is an illegal play. When I point out this he is genuinely shocked - he certainly didn't intend to cheat, but he played illegally and this has to be fixed somehow. We call the GM over and he stares at the boards trying to figure out what to do.
Clearly the SASB has to be removed from P4's board. This isn't hard to calculate, and leaves P4 still on top. However, the SASB got P4 two dollars worth of income, and without that he couldn't have bought the Five Star Steakhouse. If he didn't buy the Steakhouse, then the game wouldn't necessarily have ended!
The GM is clearly completely unsure what to do. P4 is obviously unhappy about his own mistake, and insists that he shouldn't move on, no matter what the result of the recount. But who does move on then? P3 is in second if we don't recalculate any final turn scoring, so sending him onto the finals is a reasonable choice. But if we remove both of the problematic tiles from P4's board, then I get two more points on endgame scoring and end up at 49 points with a superior tiebreaker, so I would be up for advancement. On the other hand if we roll back to when the SASB was bought and cancel that purchase, then P5 would have scooped it up and then she jumps into the advancement seat instead.
Compounding the struggle is the fact that the GM's son is one of the people at the table! He was P2, and had no reasonable argument for his own advancement, but this sort of personal connection just makes sorting out these thorny issues even more difficult.
So what do you do as a GM when you have plausible arguments for four different players advancing from a table?
First thing you do of course is tell all the players that they are damn fools for not checking other people's boards and making sure people play legally. Then glare at them for putting you in such a challenging situation. (At least, this would be my first response.)
Thankfully the GM didn't have to make a concrete call to decide who won the game. The 5 players all agreed that P4 cheated (accidentally) and so he couldn't advance. Then we talked about how the game would have gone if he hadn't done that and generally agreed that P5 would have won it. All four of us voted to send her onward, and the GM seemed seriously relieved that he hadn't had to cope with picking a winner himself. That is the sort of thing that usually leads to hurt feelings and bitterness, and I know I wouldn't want to have to do that. He was a little surprised that we all approached it this way I think, but he was happy to take our vote as a final answer and P5 moved on to the final table.
I am so happy to report this. I wanted to move on myself certainly but I am quite confident that if the only change in the game is that I say 'yo dude, you can't even place that tile' then P5 beats all the rest of us handily. So I am comfortable with the result, and extremely pleased that everyone was able to get past this sort of situation without yelling or fussing or any sort of unpleasant behaviour. We had a fun game and everyone tried hard to win but didn't make anyone else's life difficult in order to get there - an ideal circumstance.
This is the best kind of experience. I got plenty of tough tables and enjoyed the opposition, but combining a tough table with people who believe that you first make sure everyone has fun and second try to win is the shining moment of the con for me.
Thurn and Taxis faced a similar situation several years ago. The illegal move was the final move of a semifinal game, which would have continued at least one more round if the illegal move had not been made, and was not detected until the game had been scored and packed up, and players were walking out of the room. Reconstructing the position and determining what would have happened if the game had continued was attempted and proved impossible, and the player who made the illegal move did not offer to concede .
ReplyDeleteWhat I ended up doing was asking the players "Before I tell you how I would rule if players do not agree to this, would you all agree to throw out the game completely and replay the game from scratch?" They all agreed, once we found a time to reschedule the final to that worked for all four players in this semifinal and the other three finalists, so that's what we did. So even though I was not at the table, I was able to find a solution as GM where the person most harmed by the ruling was me, since it meant that I had to play the finals while GM'ing another tournament, one where lots of rulings were needed, so it hurt my concentration a lot.
Sky, my plan was to include a link to this in my event report, if that is ok. I also link to geeklists that describe goings on, but those are more easily seen by anyone, so I consider that fair game without explicitly asking permission. You summarize the situation much better than I could have.
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