Macao, Part 2 (Alien Frontiers)

If you missed my earlier Macao review, you can click on the label below to find it.

Alien Frontiers follows the "dice is your life" mechanic, that Macao and Stone Age adhere to. You don't know how the game is going to play, because your dice do their own thing...and so do other people's dice.

It was funded as a Kickstarter project - interesting. It's already sold through the first print run on a small press, so they're going back again. The first print run has some unique things to it, and the second one will have some cleaned up parts. Fun. (As of this article, first printings go for $100, preorders for second run are $39, for sometime in 2011.)

I played two games, over a Buy Nothing day game celebration. The first one was a 4-player game, where I struggled to build ships. You start off with three - represented by your 3 six-sided dice. You can build 3 more, each one costing slightly more...but they are your game. A person with 6 dice (maximum) is doing slightly more than twice as much as someone with 3. The extra dice give you better number spreads to do bigger things...as you can see, building ships is mandatory.

The goal is to place colonies on a moon. Each colony is a VP, and if you have the most in a territory, you get another one as well as a special ability unique to that territory.

There are methods for stealing from other people, varied alien technologies to research, getting fuel and rock, and a couple of ways of building colonies...all of which use your ships/dice in different ways. Triples, doubles, 3-dice runs, as raw dice, as numbers...and you'll block up those choices for others, until your turn comes around and you remove your dice from where they were.

I think 90% of this game is the interaction with other players. Yes, rolling your dice and getting good numbers is necessary for a smooth game. But placing your colonies to mess with other players, or bumping people around...destroying another player's ship - the interaction feels like little bumps as you nudge your way through the racecourse. (Destroying a ship is more like shooting out their tire, but it's almost like bumping.)

It's fun with the right people. And the table circles around tearing down the current 1st place player, which has its own issues. And if you believe that you have bad dice luck, you'll be suffering the whole time. But I won't turn down playing it another 2-3 times, for sure.

The flood of games, aka PAX.

I haven't posted in the past several weeks - too busy.

First, the Penny Arcade Expo. Crazy busy. 3 days of games and gamers. Friday: everyone walks around and sees things. That must have been where Richard Garfield was, because he didn't make it to the Game Design 101 panel. James Ernest filled in, and he's fun. Steve Jackson was there, and wasn't a king-high know-it-all this time...he was actually pretty cool. James Portnow was a good moderator, keeping the topics moving. Nichole Lazzaro presented a strong "emotion" emphasis to game design - lots of focus testing. I left early to go sightsee, and the panel wasn't exciting me. (I still need to check out Lazzaro's master-powerpoint slide. Too dense for a normal slide though.)

I wandered. A lot. Exhibition Hall, trying to catch up with friends, canvassing for guests in Dragon Quest 9...I did get a half hour of multiplayer in with a new player. We tried tackling a grotto in his game, but he didn't bring along companions...he wasn't quite strong enough, and in the end we had to let him die, while I battled it out mano a mano with the end boss. (Finished with 5 of 700 hp, and dregs of my magic pool.) But we won, and it was kind of thrilling for the first run.

There were board games day and night - some Race (practicing for the tournament the next day), and some Dominion-clone that Dan Tibbles tricked us into playing. (Slow game.) The Race tournament the next day turned out weak - the organizer wasn't familiar with scoring for it...we did base set, 3 rounds for 24 players - no finals. Match points were 3/2/1/1 and tiebreaker was total points. 5 of us tied at 7 points, top 3 got medals. (I finished 1st, 1st, 3rd. 3rd place overall finished 1st, 1st, 4th.) I either finished 4th or 5th, because the two games I won - players closed out the game when they were losing. There's only one way to score big points in base set, and that means you have to be a consumer, every time. Even if you win with military, you lose on tiebreakers. (As a recommendation, go 4/2/1/0. Winning is the most important thing. You can weight the tiebreakers in different ways, depending on how you want to encourage play. And a final table.) BUT! One of the cardinal rules, is to talk about scoring and number of rounds before the tournament with all of the players. I'm looking at you, Mr. Organizer from Games & Gizmos. :)

Saturday was much like Friday...more games. More DQIX. I played a painfully long game of Settlers of America: Trails to Rails at the Uncle's Games section (they did demos for Mayfair). Demo person: you didn't relate to the table, instead focusing on winning the game. SA is a mix of Settlers and a train game where you deliver goods. It's one of those awkward things to see - Settlers (let's also include Seafarers and Cities & Knights) is a great game. But repeating the mechanic over and over is beating a long-dead horse. If I'm going to play a train game, I'll fit in a train game. I missed a panel on Saturday night because of it, so I made plans to see the same (GeekNight podcast) people on Sunday. After the missed panel let out, I met up with friends and played more board games - Tigris and Euphrates, as well as Galaxy Trucker.

Sunday was the winding down day. I checked out a little more of the exhibition hall, chatted with some of my friends at their less-busy booths, went out to a relaxed lunch with my friend Chris to talk about game design...and played some more games. Dragon Quest IX has a bunch of event-only maps that players could trade, so I tracked more of those down, as well as exchanging contact information with my new friend Keegan.

Late Sunday afternoon was the second GeekNight panel, Egregiously Unrealized Potential...basically a panel talking about how sequels to video games generally suck, and how game companies don't take advantage of all the material available to them. Board games and RPG were fine (as long as it wasn't D&D, Shadowrun, or GURPS). I disagree with board games being exempt, and they singled out Nintendo as the most grievous offender. (I loved Zelda Four Swords and FF: Crystal Chronicles too, as a disclaimer.) I'm trying some of their podcasts, but not sure for how long. Egos aren't always practical things.

I think some of the side discussions were the best part of PAX. A how-to for *organized* organized play? Practical game design. How players can lock themselves into playing a game just one way.

Every year is better, without making the previous years look bad. In the end, I was glad to wrap things up at PAX...Labor Day has become the relaxation day, post-PAX. You definitely need it.

Collusion, Part 2 - Fighting it

Collusion is the bad form of cooperation, as discussed previously.

I started actively fighting collusion as its evil self, when I was active as a Magic judge. Players would collude to set a certain match result - maybe Alice pays Bob to lose to her, or maybe Bob offers her packs of cards to draw so that they both make it into the top 8 cut. It had to be secret, because it was illegal.

It was illegal, because it cheated others of a fair chance to get into the finals. It was illegal in the finals, because it cheated the system of its purpose - get the best player.

Fighting collusion took a lot of time and energy. It's secret, so you have to puzzle out if collusion is happening. It helps to know what benefits players would get for colluding, who would gain benefits from collusion, when collusion would take place, and where the bargaining would take place.

If there is still a large event going on, there won't be collusion at the lower-finishing tables. It won't affect prizes - they're playing to play. The top tier and near-top tier players are the ones who could possibly gain from collusion. Collusion will typically take place at the end of the event, so that settles the when - the colluding players would need to know what their odds are, and they can't know until the end. This also limits the "where" - they need it to be secret (as it is illegal), which generally means if you see pairs of players heading away from the event, it's not because they both just got a phone call.

Sometimes collusion happens because the players don't want to beat each other. Some top competitors might think, well...if we draw intentionally in round 1 when we're paired up, maybe we can still both make it in the finals. (Or they're friends, and don't want to knock their other friend out of the running.) A lesser form of collusion, and not always illegal.

A story - in high school chess, I remember playing a 30-minute round against a good friend of mine. The tournament director told us we weren't allowed to take a draw (it was okay in the rules, but he wasn't as well-versed in the tournament rules). So we played. During the event, he came by and insisted that if we weren't playing to win (we were), he would kick us out of the tournament and report us to the USCF for cheating. With 5 minutes left on the clock, we both started playing lightning-fast chess, making bad plays left and right. And several minutes into it, he came over and stopped the clock, calling it a draw. Ugh. Compounding his lack of rules.

So what happens when collusion isn't spelled out in the rules of the game? If you're playing in a tournament, you can call over a judge/referee - there's a higher authority. The average board game, you're playing with the people at the table.

1. Public discussion. Collusion requires secrecy for it to be effective in a game. Players can stop their collusion, or others could join forces for their own collusion.
2. Private discussion. It's possible that the players are not colluding on purpose. Talking with one or more of the participants could end it without a fight.

Either way, it's a tough sell. The players might not even think they're colluding, if they didn't have a verbal agreement. This can happen in war games - I attack Alice, Bob thinks "Jimmer is weak after his war efforts on Alice." Bob joins in when Alice counterattacks. And possibly Alice and Bob don't attack each other, because they perceive the other one as slightly better, or an even match. The result ends up with Jimmer always being tag-teamed. In a 3-player game, a recipe for bad games.

If players are actively colluding, there might be a measure of denial just to preserve the gaming atmosphere. Nobody wants to play with cheaters, right?

You'll have to work out what's best for you - indirect discussions, direct discussions - you know your group of friends better than I do. And hopefully the game spells out what limits exist for collusion. ;)

Collusion, Part 1

Collusion - it's not a word I was familiar with when I was a kid, but it happened often.

The definition from my Mac: "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others"

You can talk about collusion in games such as Diplomacy. Actually, Diplomacy could just be renamed to be Collusion: The Board Game, because that's pretty much the entire game mechanic. But collusion is generally considered cheating, if not just really bad form.

1. It's generally secret, which means you established some kind of alliance even before the game started.
2. If it's not secret, it's illegal - if not by rules, by general game conduct.
2. It's generally an alliance, which is not how most games are played - one winner.

My friend JW and I were debating this topic over beers and pool the other night. He hates collusion, in most of its forms. Specifically, in Settlers of Catan - you know, the point in the game, where the last place player also has longest road. The person who has a solid shot at winning is closing in on longest road. Everyone makes "friendly" trades to last place, so that they can keep longest road away from the potential winner.

For me, the secret alliances bug me. They might even be secret to the players themselves, that they key-in on the same things in the same way. I remember my first game of Twilight Imperium - be the best aliens you can be! It's a longer game, with the standard (what I call) Risk-diplomacy. You know the kind - "Attack this other guy, not me, for these reasons..."

W & K were the primary gamers in this circle of friends. They knew what buttons to push, what they could get away with, and who they could wipe out. Sitting in on Twilight Imperium, was a clear game of "their sandbox". Imagine a table of 6 players...2 hustlers, 2 regular victims, and 2 outsiders (where the outsiders are not aligned together). It quickly evolved into 4 on 1 on 1, where W & K maneuvered their semi-willing tools into place. At the end of the game, there were only two possible winners - guess who they were?

I've called it Risk-diplomacy for other reasons as well. Risk was really my first board game exposure to how someone can play favorites inside a game. Secret alliances happen amongst kids, where they do it to find boundaries...or even just to mess with their friend(s). It's a practical secret, not the secret that has no effect.

Alliances don't even have to be secret, but they work better that way. If W & K had made a pact in the beginning of the game in front of the others, it could have changed the dynamic into 2 on 4. W & K probably didn't even have to make a secret pact, if they always play games that way - it could have become a regular habit in that group.

So there's the illegal part, the secret part, and the alliance part. Next, we'll talk about fighting collusion...this bit was short, but fighting collusion is its own thing!

When is too many?

I've recently been on a kick to trim down my game collection. I had more than two closets full of games, and established a fast goal of 1 closet. I don't think I'll make it though.

Criteria for what games to trim down:
* Games that were played several times, but stopped soon after
* Unopened games that never made the cut to being opened
* Games that hadn't been played in several years
* Games that require a huge chunk of time to set aside

I'm keeping 2-3 games that take more than a couple hours to finish - more than that...most of my gaming time is limited. Hopefully we could play two games of something in the time it takes to play the super-endurance games.

Some of the older games just seem dry, when compared to some of the more recent games - they lacked the uniqueness to start. They had enough of something for me to pick it up, but the mechanics aren't elegant or engaging enough to drag it out of the dustbin.

Unopened games, really shouldn't exist. Sometimes I'd pick up a game to get free shipping or a game-design friend tells me to get it. I picked up a copy of Siena in Essen, based on what I witnessed of the demo - maybe I won't sell it. (Based on this, I think the packaging didn't sell me on the game that I had already bought on other criteria. Tough love!)

The largest category is the 'several times played' category. It was good enough to try again, but in the end not addictive enough to keep. Ideally a game has something to bring a player back to the table with it. I'm not a super-fan of Agricola, but it has a lot of replay value with the amount of occupations and minor improvements. It could also be a case of playing the game - let's face it, not all mechanics have the same kick to them...and perhaps I sometimes buy a game before it's been thoroughly reviewed.

Reading over that, you can see some emerging criteria on how to buy games.
1. Check for reviews, and play it with friends several times if possible. Some stores have demo copies lying around...less of a financial risk for you, and saves on shelf space. (And the employees might know the game if you get stuck on a rule.)
2. Don't buy games that won't get played immediately. Buying online means that you sometimes pay extra, just to get free shipping - if you're going that route, talk to friends if they're looking for anything. Not quite as good as buying at your local game store, but people do it. And by immediately, I mean something in the next several weeks - you might not keep the passion you had when you picked up the game.
3. This is a hard one. Older games can completely be an equal to anything put out today. Caylus led to Le Havre - both games are solid in their own right. But average games from 5 years ago will not improve. Check out BBG for game reviews, and it'll save you questioning your value system.
4. Long games are fine, if you have the gaming crowd that likes that kind of thing, and have time to play it. If you're all young professionals with boyfriends/girlfriends/Xboxes and 8-5 jobs, you'll find yourself with less and less time for heavier games. Having a collection of 10, playing 1 every two weeks means that you might get 2-3 plays of each game in a year.

With those ideas in mind, it affects what type of games I like to develop on my personal time. A strong set of mechanics, good replay value, attractive to the eye, and 2 hours or less to play.

Overall, board games have solid entertainment value - you might spend $30 for movie tickets/snacks for two...2 hours of enjoyment, compared to multiple plays of a good board game...I know which one I'll choose.

Calculating Winning

So previously discussing using unknowns as well as making the calculation of the winner (during the game) tricky, there's also a system of obfuscating the score by making it tedious.

Ticket to Ride won a huge game award in Germany (Spiel de Jahres, 2004). It allows for quick play, interesting player interactions...great! As you play trains, you score points for them. You also get bonus points (or penalties for not completing them) at the end of the game. I'm a stickler for keeping track of points during the game. I want to know who's ahead...if I have a chance to cut them off, I'll consider it. (Likewise, I want other players to elevate their game by knowing that information as well.)

We can't know their tickets - they get scored at the very end, when it's too late to interfere. Those are a known unknown. Even knowing what's possible is kind of a help - I keep my 1910 copy around, so that they represent more of an unknown unknown for me...a little more of an equal ground. But this is all a sideshow, for the main topic today.

What happens if people aren't sticklers for keeping track of the score? Some play groups don't bother keeping track - just count it at the end. They seek to avoid bad information...if Alex appears in last, but he's actually in first all due to bad scorekeeping...some say it's an unacceptable risk. In my mind, they then miss out on part of the game.

In this regard, Ticket to Ride (for them) is suited for obfuscated scoring. Everyone knows people have points, and they could add them up if they wanted to. It would slow down the game, so no one does. (If they do, maybe they keep it to themselves.)

Other games hide the data by overloading players with information. In the Thebes game last night, nothing stopped us from figuring out how much the other players had...except for the amount of little chits that each person had. My final game had 57 points in chits, primarily in values 1 through 3...some as much as 5. None of us were counting chits, beyond seeing what colors were still 'rich' in points.

In computer games, it's assumed that the computer will keep track of everyone's score - and if they are known quantities, it's assured. Some of my friends love playing Race for the Galaxy on the computer, as it keeps track of a tempo of the game...should they end it or not? An accurate count of points is key...but they're reluctant to stop a game in real life to manually count points. (Jason, I'm looking at you!)

When designing (and playing) a game, it's important to see how points flow during the game. You can have players generalize 'first place' if you want to avoid the 'hit first place' default strategy...or if you just want randomize acts of intervention-interaction between players.

When coming in first isn't enough

First place - it's what you strive for when playing a game, right?

Let's talk about a framework for the discussion. You call up some friends, and get together for an evening of hanging out. People might do a variety of things to hang out - go for dinner (out or in), see a movie, watch a DVD, hang out in a bar, see a rock show...maybe hang out and play some poker.

Board games serve a function similar to a "guy's night out for poker". Part of it is just hanging out, a loose competition, or maybe a slight edge putting some money out there...not so much for board games. It provides a social structure, a reason to hang out, and something to build an evening of conversation with.

As such, there's a certain amount of give in trying to win. You might be playing to win at any cost, but you'd probably put the breaks on anything that would destroy the group's hang-out dynamic. But generally it's agreed that you're trying to win at least a little.

Within a game, coming in first can be accomplished different ways in each game. Some add mechanics to make first place a little more dicey - we'll use Cleopatra and the Society of Architects as a model. It's a game put out by Days of Wonder, and each player attempts to be the best builder. Cleopatra loves builders. You have the occasional opportunity to cut some corners and take some corruption.

At the end of the game, she shows favor (you win!) if you're the best builder. Except before that happens, she kills off the most corrupt player. It's interesting because the game offers you risky paths (how much risk do you take to win), but offers a certain punishment to one unlucky person.

Some games offer other mechanics to trick the appearance of first place. Allowing multiple end-game conditions is common, but multiple win conditions is less so. Poker, you always win with a Royal Flush. Nothing beats it. If you read my earlier review of The Princes of Machu Picchu, I skipped over the end of the game. Usually the winner is determined by standard scoring, based on cards picked up during the game. Produce lots of shirts? Get goal cards that reward that. The players can also angle for it to end on a different scoring mechanism - all of a sudden, first place isn't first because it uses a new system to calculate winning.