Anosognosia, unknown unknowns, aka my experience in Macao

Anosognosia is a disability where part of the disability is the inability to perceive the disability itself. This article was spun off of reading the first in a series of posts about stupidity not being able to see itself. (Link on the side.)

Donald Rumsfield got harassed for talking about "unknown unknowns" in a press conference at one point - at the time, I was willing to perceive it as political mumbletypeg from a person I disagreed with on politics. Of course the unknown is unknown! Except when it's not, apparently.

Here's how it goes in games: everyone who's played with a deck of cards, knows what cards are in a standard 52-card deck. We don't know the top card - that's a known unknown. We can assign a probability to it, or guess 1 of 52 different cards...but we don't know it.

Unknown unknown is like learning a new game. The first time you played Monopoly, you had no idea what was in Chance or Community Chest. If you played Race for the Galaxy, you probably didn't learn all of the cards directly.

I played Macao for the first time yesterday. It's a dice game where resource generation is mostly the same for all players...just what they choose to generate from the same pool may or may not be different. I felt lost a little - not knowing any kind of strategy, but knowing the basic concepts of play is tough if you want to play well.

You want VP. (Technically it's PP, but victory points is what my head remade it as.) You get it by buying it, getting real estate next to each other, shipping well, or card combinations. The quick breakdown: Buy, Hacienda-reference, Puerto Rico-reference, San Juan/Race-reference. My tutor Steve painted it as a Puerto Rico-style game, but it's a lot different - PR has a lot of known knowns.

There are 12 turns, each turn has 2 cards that are known known. Another 4 (in a 4-player) from the top of the deck are unknowns. This is the unknown unknown for players who haven't seen the deck...for those that have played, it's a known unknown - you just don't know what's coming.

After players choose a building to be drafted, the table rolls 6 dice of different colors. They're all six-sided dice, representing different colors of goods. The goods are used to activate buildings, build buildings, or buy real estate. You get to choose 2 colors - the higher the number, the more cubes...but you also don't get them for that many turns. (6 cubes is great, but you get them in 6 turns...how efficient are you going to be able to plan for it?) It's really one turn less...if you choose 1, you'll get that one cube in the same turn. This is a known unknown.

The dice make it tough to plan. I spent half of my game trying to get a red and two purple cubes show up on the same turn. (I ended up doing a huge kabuki dance on the 2nd to last turn to get two purple cubes.)

As a first time player, I couldn't know what was in the stack of random cards - how many game end bonus cards? What different effects could there be? What color combinations would I need? The deck is large - I'd guess about 100. You'll only see 36 at most in a game, and you won't know when it will show up or if you'll be in a position to get it. (Pretty random I'd guess, even for expert players.)

So, you won't be able to know what buildings to draft in the beginning. You might be able to draft good midrange cards to supplement the early cards you have randomly chosen. You also won't know what numbers will be on the dice until after you've drafted for the round. Tough loves.

I primarily focused on avoiding penalties - if you don't have any cubes to spend on a turn, it means you do nothing and you get a -3VP chit. If you don't build your buildings fast enough, you also take a chit. And finally, any buildings you drafted but didn't build is also another -3. I had -6 at the end from one unfinished building, and one turn of no actions (whoops!).

I did find a couple of buildings that helped me in the mid-game, but I think everyone had that. I didn't worry to much about actions 2-3 turns away...they were more hopeful than anything else. Shipping takes a lot of cubes to move them - I ended up saving that until the end of the game (I had the two cheapest paper...it would have been expensive for someone to move their ship, pay a lot for the final paper, just to get a some points, and deny me some as well.)

Finally, with the die rolls I chose a short and a long roll. (Hopefully a 3 and a 6.) occasionally it was jostled around, so I could have certain colors in certain amounts show up at the same time. This is really basic. The long roll let me move ships more efficiently, but it meant it was too far to be useful in planning more than that.

Macao definitely has a lot of random elements to it - each of the cards are unique. Dice are difficult to forecast, and players are jumping around trying to maximize the gains or minimize their losses - how much of their seemingly chaotic responses going to affect your built-out game?

Overall, I want to play it another 6-10 times.
How much do the known unknowns affect play?
How much skill comes into play with the degrees of known unknown from the cards and dice?
Is there time for player interaction, with the amount of other stuff going on?

It's interesting - definitely not a heavy game due to the lack of accurate future planning, but it is kind of fun trying to figure things out on the fly.

Finally, unknown unknowns in gaming: this occurs in many games, primarily during the first game(s). After you've seen the game played several times, things are reduced to merely known unknowns. It would be challenging to make a game that consists of unknown unknowns every game...hmm...