(no subject)

MLGN went fairly well last night. At least a couple of new faces. Cthulhia, being out of town, didn't get a chance to do her usual round of mailing list announcements, so I tried filling in with an early-afternoon post to s_______, but for some reason it didn't get propagated until an hour after we started. I guess that the list is still in human-moderated mode after that one fellow's recent experiment in sociopathology. Ah well.

Two of the three hours were, from my perspective, filled with a fine game of Gnostica. We ended up not really testing the proposed rule tweak (which states that, if someone fails to have nine points after they challenge, they still lose, but all other players immediately win the game together) because the first person who challenged also succeeded in defending it. This person happened to be me, ho ho. I ended up winning due to a rather Zarcanian strategy of building up my own little peninsula of the board, but it wasn't so easy; I was lucky to start out with sword-heavy territory, making it easier to defend my position from the start (and hack away at neighboring territory to burn bridges), and I also time and again happened to have just the right cards in my hand to foil my opponents' many clever attempts to swipe my turf. I guess I can credit myself for knowing to play the cards at all, since I know that I tend to overlook my full range of available tactics and go for the "obvious" (and usually incorrect) moves when I'm not playing my best.

Gnostica lesson OTD: I think it's worth "wasting" a trump card from your hand (using only one of its two granted powers, for example) if doing so represents your best move that turn, rather than doing some second-best maneuver and holding onto the trump for later. It is a worse error to waste opportunity, since all resources in Gnostica are usually very scarce, and time is of the essence.

Also: The Fool is really fun to use over and over when it's on the board and you have a piece on it, but I'd advise against using it as a replacement for the discard-and-draw turn option. One player in last night's game fell far behind becuase he used Fool repeatedly, hoping for a particular suit to appear, and ended up spending several turns basically doing nothing. As he was in a strong defensive position, I think he would have been wiser to draw and keep six cards for his next turn, rather than draw (and immediately play) two possibly useless cards for his current one.