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Co-Opportunistic Game Questions
Erik Twice wrote: Even if the rules state otherwise? The rules of most games with this kind of mechanics do not say there's a tie, they say you lose, to the game just like you would lose to another player. I mean, when you lose at Pandemic, do you lose or do you "tie" because the non-human opponent doesn't count? Same concept.
That analogy doesn't work because Pandemic is a co-op game where all players are on the same team. We're talking about a game where someone at the table is the winner, meaning it is competitive. Once we've established that the game is competitive, my only goal is making sure the other players lose.
Obviously, there's varying degrees to this. Say the game is 10 rounds. If I make some sort of strategic misstep in round 1 and then have to spend the next 9 rounds doing nothing but working against everyone to achieve a tie, then yes, I'm an asshole. But if say by the end of round 8 I see that I'm in dead last and I know that in round 9 I can effectively make the game a tie, then I'm going to choose that option.
SuperflyTNT wrote: This is kind of a new thing in my experience so I just want to understand the motivations and design mechanisms which can stop those sorts of people from having that as an option while still having a fatal conclusion possible for the planet.
Yeah, I really see it as up to the designer to constrain the players in some way if you don't want them acting in a certain way. I just don't think it's fair to give player's a tool and then not expect some of them to use it, even if doing so is somehow in poor taste.
I think the hidden scoring may be a good way to do it. If the game is only an hour long, I don't think being "cheated" by drawing too many 1's while your opponent draws 3's is that big a deal. Obviously, you get to seed the VP deck to make it as swingy as you want.
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- SuperflyPete
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Sagrilarus wrote:
SuperflyTNT wrote: Playing really well but losing because your shit luck drew you all 2’s vs 2’s and 3’s is a truly shitty way to lose and, I’d argue, a weak design in a game that relies solely on them.
That rules about about 90% of all games in existence, including most of what are considered the best of breed.
For a straight strategy game where luck is a very limited and mitigatable, I meant.
You can’t mitigate drawing all 2’s. Unless there’s a way to mitigate that, it would be a weak game design.
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engelstein wrote: I think plenty of people feel this way, and plenty feel the opposite, and there's no 'right' anwwer. Are you playing this as a competitive contest or a light role-playing experience? As long as the game has all 'type A's' or 'type B's' it can work. The problems start if you have a mix of the two, and they don't know that going into the game. Then punches get thrown.
Now that I think about it, this may have something to do with it. I think I skew a little younger for this site (31) so me and my playgroup's avenue into hobby games were the CCG's of the 90's not the RPG's of the 70s/80s. Not that we haven't played RPG's but few in my group were ever really into them. So making decisions in a board game as if I was a character in universe would never even cross my mind.
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- hotseatgames
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ufe20 wrote: I think I skew a little younger for this site (31)
GET OFF MY LAWN
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SuperflyTNT wrote: Jim - once I’ve got it closer to where I want it to be, I’ll send you a copy. Probably 2 weeks. Maybe I’ll come out and play it with you. If you like it and think it will sell, you can have it royalty free.
Thanks, Pete! I'd love to see it and play it with you. But I'd never take anything without appropriate compensation. That's just not proper.
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- Sagrilarus
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SuperflyTNT wrote:
Sagrilarus wrote:
SuperflyTNT wrote: Playing really well but losing because your shit luck drew you all 2’s vs 2’s and 3’s is a truly shitty way to lose and, I’d argue, a weak design in a game that relies solely on them.
That rules about about 90% of all games in existence, including most of what are considered the best of breed.
For a straight strategy game where luck is a very limited and mitigatable, I meant.
You can’t mitigate drawing all 2’s. Unless there’s a way to mitigate that, it would be a weak game design.
Well, then you've painted yourself into the Tragic Euro Trap™. You've created a game where you're providing your players with sufficient information to understand that they are in a losing position, and you've provided no way for them to take increased risk to get increased reward in order to catch up. You appear to be removing the ability for fate to provide a lucky break as well. You've added the ability to unilaterally tank the endgame. You've created an incredibly fair game, where any player can drop a grenade on the board. That's not going to work much of the time, even with players that don't tank the game. They'll just mark time until the end.
In Chess it's a 1 vs 1 play and you can have that level of determinism. When a game goes south one player can resign. That's not going to fly in a four person game where one player can resign the entire game when the other three may be in the hunt.
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- SuperflyPete
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Now, Hoodrats you would love. Imagine a much grimier, much more knife fighty worker placement where murdering opponents’ dudes is encouraged and stealing is almost mandatory. Hoodrats is easily my favorite worker placement game. There’s no other word to describe it: grimy. The setting is seedy, the theme is fully confrontational, and the gameplay is fast and bloody. It’s basically a free market game with a legitimate supply and demand system (with a second subset of demand economy beneath). It’s so gangster that I enlisted a drug dealer to help me make it more realistic
I wish I could publish it because everyone who has ever played this version or the previous has loved it. Had a publisher interested but they wanted to neuter it and I refuse to allow that.
If you ever hook up with Phil Sauer, he’s got the only full copy in the wild.
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- Sagrilarus
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SuperflyTNT wrote: Nah, there’s events every other turn which turn the tables on things pretty significantly. I also have the die roll mechanic for wanting to place things (>= current track level to place it) but I don’t want a luckiest.
Now, Hoodrats you would love. Imagine a much grimier, much more knife fighty worker placement where murdering opponents’ dudes is encouraged and stealing is almost mandatory. Hoodrats is easily my favorite worker placement game. There’s no other word to describe it: grimy. The setting is seedy, the theme is fully confrontational, and the gameplay is fast and bloody. It’s basically a free market game with a legitimate supply and demand system (with a second subset of demand economy beneath). It’s so gangster that I enlisted a drug dealer to help me make it more realistic
I wish I could publish it because everyone who has ever played this version or the previous has loved it. Had a publisher interested but they wanted to neuter it and I refuse to allow that.
If you ever hook up with Phil Sauer, he’s got the only full copy in the wild.
Contact Hollandspiele.
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- Erik Twice
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The reason I mention Pandemic, if you can lose to the non-human opponent in Pandemic, why wouldn't you be able to lose against the non-human opponent in The Republic of Rome?
I feel very strongly about this because if you don't accept the rules that state (or should state) that tanking the game results in a loss and a victory for the non-human opponent then every single game in the subgenre is broken. Every single one becomes unplayable and not worth playing. So I truly see no point. For me it's just that, if you want to play RoR or Superfly's game you have to accept that the non-human opponent can win or the game won't work.
EDIT: HARD FEELINGS ABOUT GAMES
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- SuperflyPete
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I think that this is a key consideration I’ve got to try to wrap my head around. I considered adding cardplay to the game early on - taking the Finance Minister role gives you a card (hand limit 3) which would have some powers like “Veto”, “Backroom deal”, “Eugenics” and more which allow you to stop a player from
moving a track, allow you to move a track on someone else’s turn instead of them moving it, and allow you to remove someone else’s meeple from the board, respectively.
I ended up not doing this because of a few reasons:
1. Development time would be expended as I’d have to make cards, test them, and balance them.
2. Turn length would be increased.
3. It would allow you to potentially do things that would be detrimental to the overall game state.
I had 15 cards worked out for a deck of 36 mini cards:
5x Eugenics
5x Veto
5x Backroom Deal
5x Legal Holiday (allows you to increase the Civil Unrest track by 1...mostly this was a power to help defuse a situation where a city would be lost to riots)
5x Voting Irregularities (allows you to choose a role already chosen that year)
5x Technological Breakthrough (allows you to develop a Tech without meeting the education level)
3x Martial Law (locks down all tracks for until the end of the year, stopping tracks from adjusting due to placing population, factories, and power)
3x Forecasting (allows you to change one die face after the event rolls)
I may end up having to develop these and use Veto to stop irrational play, but the opposing side is that Veto can also kill the game if someone uses it to stop a planet-saving move.
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The thing is: You cannot tie by tanking the game. Tanking the game makes the non-human player win and puts you in last place. Hence, tanking the game is an irrational move. And this is something defined (or that should be defined) in the rules of the game. Most notably, RoR does not have ties, only winners and losers and if you tank the game you are a loser.
This is just my take on it, but it's a pretty strong one for me. A game isn't ever a 'player' to me, unless it's acting as one a'la COIN or the Scythe Automa. The game as a whole is opposing players, rules, and win/lose conditions. I might say, "The game wants to <blah>," but it's not an opponent. So like ufe20 above, I'm going for a win against the other players if I can get it, and tied with the other players if I can't. The game can't win because it's not a player (again, COIN/Automa situations excepted). I don't really GAS about what the tied state is called.
SuperflyTNT wrote:
if you play a game that’s semi-cooperative like Dead of Winter and there’s no “if everyone else loses, you win” type role card, the game is unwinnable by any player if all players view a group loss as a tie.
That's why there's an Exile (I think that's what it's called, I ain't looking it up) mechanism. If you're hurting the rest of the players as a betrayer or as someone playing for a tie, the other players can vote your ass out, and you get to try to win on your own.
The moral that I keep coming up with is that if you're playing a game which can be blown up by a loser to get a tie, the leaders better keep the losers sweet on their chances to win, or else be prepared to take a tie.
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- SuperflyPete
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It’s maddening to balance a game like this
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