Stegmaier announces tweaks to Tapesty to address balance

ubarose wrote: Oh, okay.

See, I feel Michael's comments are mischievous and purposefully ridiculously hyperbolic, rather than authoritative and arrogant. .

That’s how I read it. Absurd in the hyperbole, with a nugget of truth — namely, gnashing teeth over the balance of this game is likely not going to matter in the long run since nobody is going to be heavily invested in it in a year (which may or may not be an accurate prediction)

But again, asymmetric powers invite this kind of imbalances

Well, in the OP's defense, I'd also be annoyed if I started a topic and someone effectively posted, "Who gives a shit??" twice.

Asymmetry is hard as hell, and if your name isn’t Michal Oracz, you probably aren’t going to get it right.

Shellhead wrote: That's an interesting angle that I hadn't previously considered. I wonder if anybody else has done some serious research into what women board gamers might like. Maybe they don't want games with conflict. Do they want games with minimal interaction?

Some thoughts:

1) Most stats and commentary on the topic is heavily incestuous. That is, most take data from heavily biased pools (BGG, Reddit, American Facebook) and reach conclusions without taking those biases into account.

2) I think the biggest difference between men and women in boardgames is how involved they are in the hobby. I don't see much of a difference between male and female players of similar involvement levels. However, women have been denied the opportunity to be as involved as men.

The result is that there are fewer women playing games and they are less involved than men are. This results in a discrepancy in the kind of games they would play. For example, few women play Bios: Megafauna despite them heavily outnumbering men in biological fields.

3) Women's skills are constantly underrated and they face a lot of misinformation. I think gaming has a serious problem with underrating the abilities of new gamers and women have it worse. Seriously, my girlfriend has been playing Dune several times a month and people still suggest to play light games with her and stress how easy they are.

Really, it seems to me that women are constantly being told what they should play in both direct and indirect manners. This hobby is very paternalistic and women are painted this picture of games being harder to play than they actually are. I often find that people have wildly unrealistic ideas of how complex and difficult games beyond the mainstream are.

4) I believe many people "prefer" games with less interaction because they play with terrible people. Really, go look at Reddit threats about why Catan or any other negotation game sucks, the most common comment will be a variation of "people picked on me even when it didn't make sense to".

Women are more likely to suffer from playing with terrible people or to see it as a reflection of their place in the community and their gaming skills.

5) Current design trends point towards low-interaction. Hence, people who prefer newer games (most people) will also prefer low-interaction games.

6) Most gamers are poor players. I find that many gamers struggle to understand and play well at games involving negotiation, risk management or simply interaction. I don't think the current culture of games is helpful towards making people play well and understand games better. Hence, people who are newer to the hobby or prefer newer games might be ill-equipped to play other kinds of games.

Two more notes to keep in mind: League of Legends, Overwatch and other big videogames are extremely popular amongst women.

Kind of makes me wonder how many games should receive these tweaks. Most of my gaming lately has been collectible, lifestyle games where repeated plays quickly reveal dominant strategies and force regular designer oversight to maintain a healthy play space. Tapestry’s point changes aren’t a big deal from that perspective. When the designer of the Arkham Horror LCG did a similar thing earlier this year, he was roundly applauded. Maybe we should be more excited when designers do stuff like this. It suggests they’re in these games for the long haul and not just turning their attention to the next Kickstarter campaign.

I get the distaste for starting the worst factions a few points ahead as the bluntest of tools, but what’s the alternative? Waiting eight months for the expansion that allows a more nuanced approach?

When I think of these issues, maybe I'm used to them because of my background in wargames which I used to play a lot more than I do today.

Wargames (which are often very asymetric with lots of rules) often get these tweaks in second editions. Usually they'll do setup or other rules changes in living rules for really bad balance.

I played twice. I did not enjoy the first time because, as the isolationists, I felt as though I did not have a chance to explore the game since I was stuck digging through the map tiles. There was also not a single attack on the map.

The second game had all 4 of us rushing for the island victory condition which is a multi-turn land grab. I was there first and got the prize, but then I was immediately attacked with little recourse which was really annoying. This is because once you "lose" a territory, you must create a new path and this is very expensive. The person attacking you, however, can continue to push forward.

So, while I enjoyed exploring the game, the first place winner doubled my score and removed nearly every income building on their board. Given that is even possible, it is not a game I care to play again.

It sucks that my game group enjoys it.

Just to reiterate: I don't blame Stegmaier for making adjustments. In fact, I applaud it. My comment about GW is the pointed one. They often refused to see that their designs needed some tweaking, believing that everyone playing should adhere to Jervis Johnson's vision of what the game was supposed to be. Stegmaier coming out right away and trying to patch things is smart and should be appreciated by players. These things happen. As I think Erik quoted upthread: No plan survives contact with the enemy.

My complaint is that is if you're acknowledging that some of your factions are so flawed as to have no other recourse than to give a flat VP bonus, you have a larger problem. It's not that those factions don't work in this or that era or taking this or that path to victory. It's that those factions don't work, period. If you're running a 400m race and you have to start a couple of the racers 50m ahead of everyone else, then those people simply shouldn't be in that race, because they're not able to compete.

The question of what he could do as a quick patch other than the head start is a valid one. I don't know because I haven't played the game at all; much less enough to properly analyze the factions and systems and know how adjusting one or two of them would help. But, to GW's credit, their later habit of adjustments took a cue from video game designers, who rarely overhaul a faction/class/whatever, but instead choose to adjust a point cost here, a speed factor there, a damage factor elsewhere. Small changes makes big ripples in tight systems. But making a system tight means having a good system in the first place and that's open to question here if the only feasible adjustment was an outright lead in the sole measure of victory.

Not to pile on, but my friend, Leah, got a chance to play it at U-Con and her feedback is much like some of the more prominent criticism around here. The person hosting had removed the flawed factions from the game, so there was no issue there. But Leah won, in her words, "without having to try much." The game kind of piloted itself and players basically didn't know what each other were doing or how to impact it even if they did. In short, the multiplayer solitaire phenomenon. She said that she spent the last several turns "grinding out pointless stuff to give me more VP." Leah is not a very critical person, so this kind of commentary is pretty damning, coming from her. Take that FWIW.