Organized Play at PAX

Have you played in events at PAX? If so, you have learned of the chaos that it is.

My three primary complaints:

1. Lack of preparation
2. Lack of organized play "best practices"
3. Lack of game knowledge

This isn't rocket science. It's not the first organized play event that has ever taken place. Magic has a pretty clean system - play in a couple of those events at PAX, you'd probably see a well-oiled machine.

• Judges are clearly defined
• The event staff have a process on taking match results, signing people up, dropping people out, etc.
• There are pre-published floor rules for tournament structure (in general)

I've played in several events spanning multiple Penny Arcade Expos. A Pokemon video game tournament (called off due to bad wifi), a couple of Race for the Galaxy tournaments, Galaxy Trucker, as well as a recent experience with Lords of Waterdeep (this one run by WotC volunteers).

Each of those events were flawed. I have a decently strong background in organized play, and part of what dragged me into it was the dislike of badly-run tournaments.

Talking about how bad things are and listing complaints is not necessarily a productive fix. Let's talk about general improvements, and assume there are lots of small improvements that I won't cover at this time...

1.  Each event should have a break-down of the basics of how the tournament goes. What the format is, how many rounds, if the rounds are timed, how people are assigned to matches, are there breaks, how do people make the finals, and what the prizes are.... (This sheet should be available for anyone signing up to play, and ideally something they can take away so they can refer to it before the event or between rounds.)
2.  A quick summary for the event staff on how pairings are done, how points are tracked between rounds, and how to handle breaks for the staff. Can players concede a round and still stay in? How long can a judge step out of an area?
3.  The head judge for the event should have knowledge of the game. If they aren't an expert in the rules, one should be found before the event. In no circumstance should players at the table have to decide "what's fair". (If they don't have expert knowledge, they should at least be good at running events, and have read through the 'rules questions' thread on BGG.

Players in these events are giving up multiple hours of their time at PAX to play in poorly conceived tournaments. You could just as easily have played a couple of games in the board game area, and had a vastly superior time.

Here's to hoping for next year...

Game Review: Eclipse

A space game! I love space games. 2-6 players is good - one of my game nights hits the 5-player mark, which limits the number of games available to us.

This was first produced as a Kickstarter game - sadly I saw it after it closed, and didn't get one of the few first-runs that made it into stores. The second printing is supposed to come out in April/May 2012.

My first feel of the game was that it was Through the Ages in space, which would be perfectly fine. Everyone has a scorecard that tracks their space civ - your bank of Science, Materials, and Money. It also keeps your blueprints for your 4 different ships/battlestations, as well as the technologies you've bought.

We played a 4-player game, all of us being humans. There's an option to play alien races with different powers, but we stuck with the basics for the first game.

It's a dense game, but good. There's a space map that is built as you explore - certain stacks of tiles go for the inner, middle, and outer rings of exploration. A map is useful for explaining locations of planets and ship fleets. (It's 2-D, not a brain-buster.)

Each player takes a turn, in clockwise order. You take one of your order markers and put it on an action on your scorecard...exploring, researching, updating your blueprints, moving markers around, building ships...etc. Sometimes you'll also put an extra order marker out from your scorecard onto the table, to take control of a system. Each marker uncovers more and more Money cost - if you settle a bunch of systems, you might start with quite a deficit, just starting the round!

You spend Research on picking up new technologies...finding better ship technologies (important for battles), reducing costs, finding more order markers...that sort of thing.

You spend Materials on building your military fleet, as well as some of your economy devices.

At the end of the round, after everyone is done passing, you gain Materials/Research/Money based on what you've developed. (It's a nicely elegant system.) Start player moves to the person who passed first...which can be a tempo decision in the early game, to get a better pick of the technologies. The game ends after 9 rounds of play...it took 4 novice players awhile to finish our first game, but we all had fun. Maybe we could have skirmished more, but fair for the first game.

This is definitely a game I want to add to my collection. The mechanics are nice, the game play is interesting, and the system is fairly unique. It's not a casual pick up game...but for one group of gaming friends, I'm betting it will be a regular on our occasional Thursday game nights.

(I'll do a follow-up of the games beyond the initial plays.)

Game Review: Eminent Domain

It's a space game - great!
It's a deck-building game - overdone!

Card games are awesome because they are pretty inexpensive to make. They also have to be innovative to stick out, but familiar enough that you don't feel like you're learning all of the rules by heart...it could flow!

I wish it had been better named. Eminent Domain exists as a specific phrase in the US system, where the state can take over property if it's in the best interests of...well, whatever. The game has NOTHING to do with it.

It was produced as a Kickstarter game for 2-4 players, and the second (larger?) printing is in stores now. You can still pick up some of the promos from the manufacturer - I found a store on ebay. $5 gets you 9 planets.

The game's premise is that as you go in a direction, your deck evolves in that direction as well. Research a lot? You'll get more research cards in your deck, thus pushing you to research more, because that's what you'll be drawing.

You start off with a basic deck - 2 Produce/Consume cards (which have almost no value in the beginning), 2 Colonize cards, 1 Military card, 2 Research cards, 2 Survey cards, and 1 Politics card (which gets changed into one of those previous types early.)

Each card in your deck has an Action listed on it, as well as one or two symbols from the basic cards. You get to play one as an Action to start your turn, and then take one of those five basic cards from the stock as a Role. So for example, you could play Survey, where its Action is "Draw 2 cards". You can also play Survey as your Role, taking the card from the center. To boost that Role, you can also discard cards from your hand to expand what Survey does for you...in this case, look at more possible planets.

Your turn ends, discarding all of the cards you picked up this turn, discard any number of cards from your hand, then draw to your hand limit. (Or just discard down to your hand limit.)

To add some interaction, the game also adds this: whatever your Role you chose for your turn, players can either do the same Role (with slightly less options) or draw an extra card. In a 2-player game, there isn't much to it...multiplayer adds some more choices.

Research is pretty awesome. As in, super great. When you buy a research card, you put it into your hand...helping you set up for next turn. At higher research levels, you can even buy cards that are worth extra VP.

In general, for your first several games, I'd recommend going either Military or Colonize for your method of taking over planets. Simplify your deck by getting rid of the ones you don't plan on using, as well as getting rid of Produce/Consume cards in the early game...you can get them again later. Plan on surveying up to 4-5 planets, and researching cards that give you some extra kick. Producing/consuming goods is complex, and difficult to manage when you have survey/research/colonize cards in your way as well.

Victory points come from consuming goods, settling planets, and adding special research cards worth VP to your deck. The game ends as a stack or two is gone, or when the VP chips are out.

Overall, it's a fair game. There are bits that don't feel like they flow for me...maybe it's just that I haven't played the same similar games to this. We've played by incorrect rules a couple of times (the designer haunts BGG, so there's a good chance to find an answer)...but I'll say this - if you answer someone's question regarding their confusion about the rules - IT ISN'T THEIR FAULT.

[design rant] As a designer or developer for a game, you have insight into the choices that went into the process of the game. YOU know that colonize was broken, and that you went back to the rulebook and changed one sentence to reflect a new difference between colonize and other cards. Saying something like "I wrote a concise and accurate rulebook, thus I didn't need to explain x" doesn't fly. You don't get to brush off their concern as if they're a lesser being. (And this wasn't even a question I asked on the 'geek.) This is a pet peeve of mine - you, the reader, don't need to embrace it.

After 15-20 games, I still feel like I haven't figured out the game. Somewhat refreshing, but irritating - I don't feel like I am playing the game well.  (The Utopian planets from the promos are...really useful to the game overall. Much better flow.)

Game Review: Lords of Waterdeep

We've been playing several new games lately, but the current one I'll be chatting about today is...Lords of Waterdeep.

It's a worker-placement game for 2-5 players put out by Wizards of the Coast. Yes - Wizards makes a non-roleplaying game, and it's a Euro-worker placement game. Two tastes that go...great together?

When I've been teaching this game, I've been offering several ways of learning. First, story. Second, mechanics. It's more about how your fellow players learn, opposed to being only one way to see the game.

The overall story is that you and your fellow players are Lords of Waterdeep. In the roleplaying game, the identities are hidden...in this game, it's basically a hidden bonus to make the end-game more exciting. You take a color for your agents - they've taken 5 different guild-like groups from the world...it doesn't have an impact on the game...just flavor.

Depending on the number of players, you start with 2-4 agents. There are 8 turns - each turn, the starting player places a single agent (worker) into a space...no one else can go there. It goes clockwise, with players continuing to place agents until they run out, at which point you collect the workers up again to play again next round.

The agents run around Waterdeep - picking up different assortments of adventurers (orange for fighters, black for rogues, purple for wizards, white for clerics)...as well as gathering money, quests, and Intrigue cards (aka chance cards). You can also purchase more buildings, so that there are more places to go in the game - the person who purchased the building gets some kind of perk when a different player puts an agent there.

The game is fine for 2 players - the intrigue cards are less powerful, but the flow is still good. The more players you add, the more value the intrigue cards have. (Do X, and everyone else does Y. When it just sabotages one player, not very tough. 4 others? quite good.)

It's not to say there aren't issues. Buildings are pretty good. Getting something from the bank every time another player uses your building is nice. One of the 11 different Lords you can draw gives you 6 bonus points for every building you control at game end...in a 2-player game, it's always a blowout. Even in 3-player, it was really good. The bonuses at the end of the game for the other Lords...lets say, Khelben Blackstaff. He gets 4 bonus points for each Arcana and Warfare sub-type quests he finishes. In practical terms, it's not that big of a difference. If you have the most points before counting bonuses, you'll probably keep your edge.

Recommended changes to balance your experience:
In 2-player, we drop the Mistress of the Buildings...whatever her name actually is. The person who draws her gets a bonus 2 points, and draws another Lord. We're thinking about dropping her bonus to 4-per-building for more than 2 players. We're also considering raising the bonuses for doing the quests that your Lord favors...6 bonus points per quest! This makes the game a lot more interesting - if you think Alice is getting bonuses for Skullduggery and Commerce, it's worth a little more effort to block her from getting them.

My girlfriend and I have probably played about 20 games of 2-player, and another 3-4 as 3-player games. 4-player...played once, I can kind of imagine 5 players. The game itself takes us 45 minutes, with the 4-player game being 75 minutes with 3 new players.

Quarriors, Part 2 (Spells)

So it gets a fair number of plays...

The green Growth dice are generally always the most useful. If the Portals are gone, the Growth ones is gone soon after. The weakest one lets you buy a second die - sadly, the game doesn't reward a lot of low-cost dice...you end up with a lot of dice, and you can't get a reliable spin. The favorite? The "Dark Ritual" (Growth Charm) lets you save the die for a turn where you can buy something big.

Death Charms come in second. Killing off other people's summoned dice comes second only to summoning monsters that are able to kill off other people's dice. In 2-player, the Death Incantation is pretty sweet - 5 for kill a level 2 or any level if you get the best version. But I like the Death Cantrip the best - it's hard to pull off a Stampede effectively, but it can take out all players' creatures.

The Victory and Shaping ones have nice dice - minor portal effects. As long as the dice are cheap - awesome...otherwise, they're tough be useful. The Shaping Cantrip is easily my favorite - bringing a just-killed creature back to your Ready Area is pretty broken in 2-player...dropping to pretty good in 3-player, and weaker in 4-player.

The Life and Corruption dice are my least favorite. Defense is pretty difficult to have be effective (plus, you're needing to knock out others' monsters). And finally, Corruption dice are pretty limp. Corruption Cantrip is probably okay if there is a lot of corrupted quiddity to give away. Otherwise, it just becomes extra space in your bag.

Overall, half of the spells could be tossed. They don't have enough "oomph!" when compared to VP-gaining monsters. Some of them make for some interesting combinations, but it's not easy to have enough time to buy the right dice (or even have the right dice to combine in the game). Adding a mechanic of "whenever you buy a spell, you may get rid of a basic quiddity", might make it more approachable.

Tough loves.

Why I don't like Caylus

There's a Thursday night game night, where we frequently hit 5 players. This means Le Havre, Caylus, Puerto Rico, Imperial...but normally Le Havre. I picked up Imperial, just because I loved the elegance of Antike, but Imperial doesn't have the same elegance for me.

Caylus I have, but it's not going to get dusted off, anytime soon. My last several experiences were pretty much identical (and miserable).

Caylus has a primary flaw - most of the game is placing workers - gaining special powers for a turn, gathering resources, building buildings, and making bricks for the king's castle. There's a gap after you place workers, and before you start resolving them...and this is where it gets to be a bully contest. Provost time!

Up to this point, there's no table talk. It only happens at the gap. Suddenly, you're trying to make deals with others players to sabotage another player or multiple players. It's tough to hit multiple players, as a tug of war rarely results in a big delta (change of position). So what typically happens, one person gets screwed.

This is why I associate it as the bully step. 2 or more people gang up to thwart one person. It's not a quick hit though, the bullies need to talk about how much they're going to spend amongst themselves, bullying their victim...and making sure that the victim can't fight back. (And the victim gets the extra pain as the bullies rationalize their behavior. Even the discussion becomes part of the act.)

Typically it's not the first place person, as the first place person doesn't need to take the outlier risks that can get burned. The anti-blue shell, the one that can only hit people not in first place. Normally, an interactive step might require 2nd and 3rd to combine forces, just to slow or stop 1st...not here.

That's my disappointment post with Caylus. Bullying and poor risk design. The rest of the game, great.