Foray of a Feather Snake

Quick games rundown:

Gaming Friday started with three rounds of a Kickstarted werewolf/mafia variant called Fox & Chicken. Round one was with standard rules, rounds two and three had some players with special abilities. It went as well as I could have expected. I’m ordinarily not a fan of purely sociopolitical games because they require a skill I don’t have: convincing people of things. And they’re so random. For example, if you go two games without someone suspecting you, then someone does in the third, defending yourself looks suspicious because you’re suddenly insisting on your innocence a lot more than normal. Others view this as an interesting challenge, and the entire point. I just find it frustrating.

I came in third in the seven-player 7 Wonders game that followed, behind the 2nd place player by about 3, who was in turn about 10 points behind the winner. I had a ton of pure VP blue cards, which worked well enough, but I had no second focus. A single late-game military card gained me 10 VP off my defenseless neighbors, but that wasn’t enough boost. The winner went full military and supplemented with, I think, lots of VP-granting market and guild cards. I’m still unclear how she got so many points out of that. Military in particular is an unstable and limited source of points. It’s worth 18 points maximum; worse, it’s worth significantly less if you play too few cards and nothing extra if you play too many.

Today was another game industry board game night at PopCap’s main office. I got there late and only played one game, but it was a good one: Fish Cook (a.k.a. “Yum Yum Super Fish Delicious!”) It’s one of the new round of designs from the re-invigorated Cheapass Games company, and I’ve been looking forward to it since I heard it was in early playtest. Players take the roles of sushi restaurant operators. Every day they take turns buying ingredients off a varying market until something runs out, then at night they cook what they can with the ingredients they bought. Cooking your own recipes gives you bonus money. Cooking other players’ recipes gives them a small payment but may also let you steal it. Whoever makes the most money in five days wins.

The Steam summer sale hasn’t drained my wallet too too much. So far I’ve only picked up:

• The Binding of Isaac
• Endless Space
• Farming Simulator 2013 (yes, really...more on that later)
• Hotline Miami
• Mark of the Ninja

Oh, and my Kickstarter pre-order dice for Castle Dice arrived, but it'll be a couple of weeks before anyone will have time to play it.

I got to Gaming Night late and got to watch the tail end of Channel A. Basically, take Cheapass Games’s The Big Idea, mix in a bit of subjective judging like in Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, and make it about pitching anime shows.

Second was a five-person game of Citadels — one of the smallest groups more than one of us remembered ever playing that game with. Points-wise, I ended up dead center in a tight pack flanked by a runaway expert and a newbie. Dave trounced everyone by more than ten points due to being the only person to get an 8-city-cards bonus and one of only two players to get an all-5-colors bonus. Orbus squeaked past me into 2nd place by a single point with the help of a big last-turn play. I, in turn, edged out the 4th place player by two points. I’m sure I would have done better if I’d correctly judged who I should’ve been trying to hinder (and been able to actually do it, which is hardly a given, seeing as that game’s core mechanics intentionally make it tricky to sabotage specific players).

Third was 7 Wonders with the same five people. We stuck with mostly core set rules due to the presence of new players, but we did allow some expansion monuments. Again, Dave blew everyone out of the water the way he usually does: with a big Science score. Now, the best way to prevent someone getting lots of Science cards is for other players to use them too, but I was in a lousy position to do that. I sat directly to his left, so for two-thirds of the game I’d be getting cards from him. And the one phase where the direction was reversed, I did intentionally discard Science cards rather than feed them to him, even though I had to neglect my own development to do so and was confident I’d guaranteed myself a dead-last finish. In hindsight, I think I robbed him of about 15 points — a lot, but not enough.

As for submarining myself: I came in 2nd. A very close 2nd, but still 2nd. It boggled me. A ton of fortune and unexpected factors added together in my favor. I lucked into three high-value pure VP cards and two Guilds that matched what my neighbors had done. Many other players were playing expansion Monuments that give more special abilities but fewer VPs than basic ones do. The only unusual act I can say was a clever play on my part was that, when I built a special Monument step that removed me from military contests and left my neighbors to fight each other instead of me, I stayed quiet about it. The move did, in fact, go unnoticed, and my neighbors mis-planned their militaries as a result, which saved me 2 VPs and cost Dave 6. But I didn’t consciously stay quiet. It wasn’t a smart, deliberate decision to be sneaky. I just…did it. So there’s that.

Game night was just me and Orbus, so we dipped into his pile of favorite two-player games.

First up was Hive. It’s an abstract, vaguely chess-like game. Both players have a variety of hexagonal pieces with distinct movement rules. The first player to surround the opposing leader piece wins. The entire match was a tense game of “Oh god, oh god, I can’t do exhaustive brute force lookahead in my head because I’m human but if I don’t I’ll lose!” Neither of us made any serious blunders that I can tell. I managed to press to an advantageous board position by the midgame, but due to inexperience on both our parts, finishing him off took a dozen more turns of flailing on both our parts.

It’s a tight, brain-bending game that benefits from full focus. It’s good for when you really want to concentrate. It doesn’t need a board either, and the travel version has pieces small enough to play on half a restaurant table.

Second was Lost Cities (the two-player card game, not the two-to-four-player board game it inspired). Two players alternately play numeric cards on five different board locations. You get points for every card you play, but you must play cards in ascending order, and once you commit to a site you need to accumulate a certain minimum there or you lose points. I lost the first game by, I think, about eight points, but squeaked by with a one point win in the second.

It’s simple game, quick to learn, and has ample room for bluffing and risk-taking. It strikes me as very well suited to families, as it’s about the same complexity and challenge level as rummy. Kids can play it, but it’s not a kids’ game.

Last night’s gaming night was mainly social. It was just me, the host, and two rare visitors.

Game #1 was Puzzle Strike: Shadows. I fared better than I did my first time, ultimately placing second after a game that ran into a satisfying early end stage with conservative play from everyone. I’m ambivalent about my performance. On the one hand, I kept my damage down, and I had a shot at winning in the late midgame, which I took (as I should have), but my intended target had the countermeasure that I figured he had about a 50%-66% chance of having. On the other, I still focused too much on special actions over basic ones, and I didn’t leverage my starting character’s special abilities particularly well. (Two of the three went unplayed all game.) Oh, and I bought a 4-gold gem early, and although I felt like it wasn’t showing up often enough, I didn’t consciously realize I was never drawing it. I found it stuck in a deep fold in my shuffling bag after the game ended.

Game #2 was King of Tokyo, which Orbus bought for himself after enjoying my copy so much. The winner snuck up on victory points while everyone else was busy trying to knock people out.

Game #2.5 was an experimental game of Strut between me and Orbus after the other two guests left. It’s a Slapjack-style pattern-matching dice game I picked up a while ago. I didn’t expect it to be great, but it has a matching mechanic I wanted to see in practice and it was on sale. Every person has a hand of cards with dice combinations on them, like “three-of-a-kind” or “two 1s and two 6s”. Each turn, the active player rerolls exactly two dice, and the first player to play a card with a matching pattern scores it. Whoever empties his hand first wins. The core element is being first to recognize that one of your desired patterns is hidden in the roll somewhere, with a minor dose of deciding which dice to reroll for the best chance of getting a match. Those two elements seemed pretty solid. There are also reaction cards you can play against another player’s scoring, but they seem overpowered and add little to the game but chaos. The scoring system is problematic as well. It does two useful things — it allows players to have a manageable hand size of three without winning after playing only three cards, and it makes easy matches worth less toward winning than hard matches are — but it feels tacked on, and it’s strange to track points when having the most doesn’t make you win.

I did a small amount of gaming at FC, though not with anyone new. There was a round of Quiddler with Shaterri, which I won by a large margin almost entirely due to luck. We both agreed there was very little he could have done in any round to achieve more points. Then I taught him Roll Through the Ages, which I ended up losing despite being slightly ahead most of the game. I let too many bad skull rolls slide and accumulated negative points for them, and my plan to build lots of monuments and get the advancement that gives bonus points for them fell through when I only managed to build one before the game ended.

Last night was the resumption of a friend’s regular biweekly gaming night. First up was a four-player game of Pandemic to playtest a house rule that added anti-vaccination propaganda to the game. Pandemic is a cooperative game: either everyone wins or everyone loses. It’s a hard game to begin with and this add-on makes it harder. The idea is that healthy cities can accumulate anti-vaccination activism tokens, and if the city ever gets infected, those tokens make it worse. The game was hard-fought from beginning to end and came down to a coin flip even with good play. On the turn before we could make the winning move, we were one outbreak from losing and had two cities that might suffer one at the end of the turn. The next-to-last player could treat one of them but not both. With no way of knowing which (if either) was about to break out, he treated one arbitrarily, and it turned out he guessed right. Afterward we discussed the new rule. Most of us thought it added a novel and fair amount of additional difficulty. One player disliked how the rules for propaganda spreading encouraged players to leave cities partially infected, which is not something actual disease control specialists would do when fighting a worldwide epidemic, so we brainstormed alternatives a bit.

After such a tense game, we unwound with a round the 2012 re-issue of the non-serious, beer-and-pretzels Dungeon!, which goes back to 1975 originally. And it shows. The rules are lightweight with lots of randomness. Orbus ended up winning. I was on my way back with enough treasure, but I had at least three turns and a tough fight between me and victory. The third player may or may have not been right behind Orbus, and the fourth had virtually nothing, having lost it all getting beat up by monsters (which I subsequently killed and took).

I had the privilege of playing a couple of board games with my almost-middle-school-age niece over Christmas break.

The first was the classic Sorry! In short, I have little to praise it for. It looks and plays like the 80-year-old game it is.

It has a couple of official rules kludges to make it less clunky. In the “quick start” version, everyone begins with one pawn already out. I’m not surprised to see this rule since only 24% of the deck actually lets you begin playing in the standard game. If no one else has moved yet either, that drops to 16%.

There’s also a “Variation for Adults” (their term, not mine!) that combines the above rule, a five-card hand to play from instead of requiring random plays from the top of the deck, and a scoring system for tracking performance over multiple games to a finer degree than simply counting wins. It’s allegedly actually interesting for experienced gamers, according to comments on boardgamegeek.com. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that the basic game is not a good game for kids. It’s not just the rules. It’s everything.

It’s frustrating for kids (and anyone else!) to do nothing. In basic Sorry!, players are able to move on fewer than half their turns throughout the early and late stages of the game.

It’s frustrating for anyone, especially kids, to be set back. There’s a lot of setting back in Sorry! (In fact, that’s its tagline.) It’s also frustrating for kids to need to set each other back because a lot of kids don’t enjoy doing things that feel mean.

The movement cards are poorly designed in the edition I played. The most prominent element on them is the main movement number. That’s horrible when half the cards have an alternate use that’s equally important, usually unrelated to the main number, and represented only as a small text message. Oh, also one of the cards only moves you backward, but its number is displayed just like all the forward-moving ones. And some of the cards with multiple uses require you to use any legal option whether you want to or not, while others don’t, and you have to read the rules to know which are which.

There was one bright moment: my niece is a game designer! She explained the Police variant she created. Take the four red pawns and put them on the corners. Any player who lands there gets sent home. She was inspired by Monopoly having a Jail on a corner square. (Yes, yes, I know landing on Monopoly’s Jail by a normal move does not penalize you. Work with me here. She’s only ten.) Obviously it only works with less than four players, and no one can play red.

The other game we played was the fully card-based word game Quiddler, which I brought deliberately as an extra Christmas present because A) I know my niece is a precocious reader, and B) I know her parents buy lousy games like Sorry! I played by custom kid-friendly rules: only go five rounds instead of eight, ignore the bonus point rules, and don’t bother shuffling between rounds — just keep digging into the deck. It was fun for all of us, and she actually edged me out 85 to 82 through sheer luck. I don’t even think I could have Scrabble-cheesed her and come out ahead.

My two-word summary of Burning Wheel: too complicated.

The longer version:

Burning Wheel is a strange hybrid of Gamist and Narrativist approaches (I say cautiously, knowing that that taxonomy lies somewhere between outdated and obsolete). On the one hand, there are explicit rewards for roleplaying well, as judged by the entire group and not just the GM. GMs are advised to let actions automatically succeed when they don’t involve conflict, compromise, or crisis. Players are required to define their characters’ beliefs and philosophies, and are rewarded for playing according to them or in dramatic ways against them.

On the other hand, the book contains explicit instructions to resolve all conflicts with dice rolls rather than roleplaying, GM fiat, group consensus, or other story-centric methods. Although there are roleplaying rewards, nearly all permanent skill & stat improvements come from attempting challenging tasks, where dice, not drama, determine success or failure.

This focus on rolling is something the author is frank about wanting. There are tons of things to roll dice for — tons of different things, to be rolled on in different ways. It’s intentional, and I understand his goals, but the outcome is an overly-complicated set of rules. His stated intent is for the player to roll dice only when doing something important, but for lots of things to be important. In that light, making the game too simple would have made all that rolling repetitive, but the overall result of what he did instead seems more broad than deep.

There are separate methods dedicated to resolving haggling, ranged weapon fights, arguing, and melee fights. All but haggling have the same basic structure: the two sides pre-plot three moves in secret, then reveal their moves one at a time and cross-reference them to determine how to resolve that round’s outcome. Although the foundations are similar, the sets of moves you can make during these different conflicts vary greatly, and the number of interactions is a combinatorial explosion. Ranged positioning has three basic moves (although each has three variants). Arguing has seven moves, all specifically strong or weak to subsets of others. Melee has thirty action maneuvers, plus four additional positioning maneuvers that are handled in parallel and modify the former.

You don’t have to go to this level of detail to resolve every skirmish and squabble. In fact, you’re not supposed to. Sideline fights can be dispensed with by a single Weapon skill vs. Weapon skill roll. The in-depth rules exist so the game has a sliding scale of focus — when a tense, one-on-one manhunt or winner-take-all political negotiation are the crux of the story, you can give them more screen time than if you’re hunting a random deer or fast-talking a constable. But that means you’ll only occasionally have to dip into the official rules on chariot racing, or dog shows, or what have you. I expect so much unfamiliar detailed material either slows the game down or encourages the GM to ignore it and improvise.

Through the magic of the Internet, I reverse-engineered the rules for a simple push-your-luck dice game called Sutakku I saw for sale at a game store. I’m glad I didn’t make it an impulse purchase. It was shallow, with less interesting roll-or-stop decisions than Farkle or Cosmic Wimpout. Most of the game’s $25 price tag was wrapped up in the fancy dice with Japanese numbers instead of pips.

I borrowed the Burning Wheel rulebooks from a friend to see what’s up with all that. Also, two things at Foolscap: I picked up an old copy of Ars Magica from the give-a-book/take-a-book table and I attended a panel on the current state of non-mainstream narrative-centric RPGs. It went into detail on Fiasco, Do, Microscope, and Polaris (specifically, Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North), and mentioned Psi*Run and several others I don’t recall.

I have not been bitten by the Guild Wars II bug yet, nor am I likely to, given I’m in crunch mode at work and that I was pre-emptively — and finally — bitten by the Steam bug and picked up both Deus Ex: Human Revolution and FTL, which is a roguelike spaceship combat and crew management game. Also, I am apparently pretty bad at Team Fortress 2, which comes as no surprise to anyone.

Sometime next month, the Sifteo cubes I ordered should come in, and I’ll lose even more time playing and making things for those.

Back in 2005…

City of Heroes Developer #1: We need to figure out what classes to put in City of Villains. It launches this year.

Developer #2: How about something like an assassin? We can call it a Stalker. It’s villain-y and players are familiar with the concept from D&D and World of Warcraft.

Dev #1: Good, good. How would it work?

Dev #2: Well, we already have support for double-damage criticals in the combat engine. We could let Stalkers become invisible in a special way that guarantees their next attack crits. They can’t stay Hidden all the time, though, for balance reasons. They’d come out of Hidden if they get hurt or after they make an attack, even if it misses.

Dev #1: What about area attacks? Auto-crits against entire crowds are pretty strong.

Dev #2: Good point. New general rule: Stalker area attacks will have half the crit chance of their one-target attacks.

Dev #1: Done. But…is what we have so far unique enough to base an entire class on? We already have Controllers with an auto-crit in the right circumstances.

Dev #2: Oh! Right. Hmm. What if Stalkers had a signature Assassin’s Strike attack that took a reeeeeally long time to perform, but critted for massive damage? Not two times normal — I’m thinking ten times! And if you move at all or anything disrupts you in the middle of it, it’s ruined. That’s balance and theming.

Dev #1: Nice! Just one last tweak and we’re set. We don’t want thematic powers to be too good when used outside that theme. Better make this Strike’s normal damage really low, so it’s only useful when you’re invisible.

Dev #2: Not invisible. “Hidden”.

Dev #1: What’s the difference? Doesn’t their stealth power hide them?

Dev #2: Yes, but the mechanics are separate. “Hidden” is just a marker. It’s too computationally expensive to check everyone around the Stalker at any given moment to determine whether any of them can see him.

Dev #1: So you can still Hide against things that see through invisibility?

Dev #2: Yes.

Dev #1: And you don’t become Hidden if some other power makes you invisible?

Dev #2: Correct.

Dev #3: Shouldn’t we call it something like “Poised” or “Prepped” instead, to avoid confusion?
[Historical Note: There was no Dev #3.]

Dev #1: Fine, fine. Works for me. Ship it! Now off to the launch party at Alcatraz!
[Historical Note: The CoV launch party really was at Alcatraz.]

fast-forward…

Player: Hello, City of Villains dev team?

Dev: Hello! How are you enjoying the game?

Player: Well, see, I’m playing a Stalker, and it’s a pain in the neck using Assassin’s Strike in combat. Even if I’m not interrupted, I often get un-Hidden by splash damage and fail to crit, so my performance drops through the floor.

Dev: Well, we didn’t intend for you to use it throughout the fight. Just at the start.

Player: But I really want to use it! It’s a defining characteristic.

Dev: Okay. How about this. We’ll raise the normal damage to something significant. Of course, we’ll have to drop the bonus to compensate so your total on a crit stays the same.

Player: Cool with me. Thanks, devs!

fast-forward…

Player: Hello, City of Villains dev team?

Dev: Hello! How are you enjoying the game?

Player: I’m not.

Dev: Sorry to hear that. What seems to be the problem?

Player: Well, I play a Stalker, and when I’m on a team, no one wants to wait for me to re-Hide myself all the time. They just steamroller everything. I never get a chance to crit, so I’m not good at killing things and they don’t invite me back.

Dev: Okay. We have a plan for that. You know how you have to Hide to get crits right now? Well, we’re going to give you a 10% chance of critting even when you aren’t Hidden. Even better, we’re going to raise it by 3% for every teammate you have.

Player: Great. Thanks, devs!

Dev #2: Psst! Hey! That new 10% + 3%/teammate crit chance…that’s halved on AoE attacks, right?

Dev: Nope.

fast-forward…

Player: Hello, City of Villains dev team?

Dev: Hello! How are you enjoying the game?

Player: I’m not. I’m playing a Stalker in PvP and I never get crits against other players except when I Hide. Shouldn’t I get them at least 10% of the time?

Dev: Actually, no. We balance PvP entirely differently. See, we noticed that Controllers and Dominators don’t PvP much. They muttered something about their power sets being too focused on incapacitating opponents and not enough on, well, beating them. So what we did was take your attacks and instead of having them crit players 10% of the time no matter what, we made them 20% likely to crit players who are Asleep or Held. We call that “synergy”! Controllers and Dominators have more reason to PvP now.

Player: But what about me?

Dev: Have you tried finding some Controllers or Dominators to team with?

Player: *click*

Dev: Hello?

fast-forward…

Player: Hello, City of Villains dev team?

Dev: Hello! Your voice sounds familiar.

Player: Listen. I play Stalkers, and there’s a problem. When I’m picking targets for my opening Assassin’s Strike, I don’t want to waste all that damage on an injured or unthreatening target. It’s overkill. But I don’t want to aim for the biggest threat either, because I probably won’t do quite enough damage to defeat him and his counterattack will eat my face. Help!

Dev: I see what you mean. That’s a tough one… A-HA! Picture this: you’re a minion. A toady. You and your fellow goons are minding your own business milling around a streetcorner, when all of a sudden: WHAM! Sword through your boss’s chest. You’d be scared, right? So here’s what we’ll do: if your AS crits but doesn’t kill your target, every enemy nearby will be…we’ll call it Demoralized. They’ll briefly have lowered accuracy and some will be gripped by fear. Sound good to you?

Player: Sure thing. Thanks again!

Dev: Any time.

fast-forward…

Player: Hello, City of Villains dev team?

Dev: Hello, Stalky McStalksalot. What’s going down in villain town?

Player: I still really, really wish I could use Assassin’s Strike more in the middle of the fight. I never got over that, and your first change you made wasn’t enough.

Dev: What about the second change? The one where AS doesn’t un-Hide you if you miss? Did you forget about that one?

Player: No, but it wasn’t enough. The whole interruptibility thing is a real PITA.

Dev: You drive a hard bargain, so let me tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to make the un-Hidden version of AS a brand new attack. You almost won’t recognize it. It won’t be a crippling pre-emptive strike. It’ll be a knockout punch at the end of a slugfest. Follow me point by point now. One: no long interruptible windup. Two: it won’t crit based on team size. Instead, making other attacks will build up your Assassin’s Focus—

Player: I don’t have an Assassin’s Focus.

Dev: You will! It will be the chance for your new un-Hidden ASes to crit. Your regular attacks will each raise it by 33% for a brief time.

Player: All my regular attacks?

Dev: Kind of. Slow ones will always raise your Focus. Fast ones usually will. Now back to the count. Three: the un-Hidden AS will only crit for double damage. Four: no Demoralization.

Player: That actually looks pretty good overall. Keep up the good work!

Another inexplicably poor board gaming performance from yours truly. I came in dead last at Small World Underground, despite having played the nearly-identical Small World numerous times and having two of my four opponents be new to the game and not avid gamers in general. I made a common newbie mistake that I’ve personally warned novice players against, and I failed to keep track of everyone’s points so I’d know who was in the lead (and thus who I should harass most).

I can address the latter if I can find some method of mentally tracking eight frequently-changing numbers over the course of two hours that frequent mental arithmetic on different numbers can’t disrupt. As for the former, there’s really no excuse.