(no subject)

[prog]

I have played Shadows over Camelot three times now. I am worried that the game is broken.

The "don't talk about your hand" rule, which looked good on paper and even an improvement on LOTR's "talk about your hand but don't show it" rule, is looking very sickly. You can't say "I need someone to play a 5 [the highest 'Fight' card value] here", but you can say "I need someone to, er, lead the mightiest of their forces here" (or even "I require a medium amount of assistance, if you catcheth my drifteth, good sir, huzzah") and one of the game's designers confirms this on forums. After having seen it in practice, it strikes me as just lame, and a waste of time.

The rabid fans of the game insist that this sort of thinly-veiled table-talk, while literally legal, is against the spirit of the game, and it reminds me of the defense that Icehouse is great so long as you're "cool", which AFAIC means looking the other way when the seams in the rules are showing. (Refereed tournament play to one side.) When pressed further, the fans all start singing the song of "Well, smartypants, if you don't like how this game works, why don't you go play something else?" This is, I'm convinced, the Godwin's Law congruent of boardgamegeek.com.

Furthermore, there is apparently an optimal strategy for the traitor, especially in 3- or 4-player games: mechanically dropping a siege engine every turn, from turn 1 to turn N, and continuing to do so after their cover's blown. If true, this (as one poster put it) forces a traitor-player to choose between playing to win and actually having fun.

One BGG forum poster (who may have been a DoW employee, but this wasn't clear) actually said "The rules say that the traitor must pretend to be loyal and avoid suspicion. So if you're playing a siege engine every turn, you're acting suspiciously, and therefore breaking the rules." Um, OK.

The forums are abuzz with repair suggestions. I have faith in Days of Wonder and hope they can work it out, releasing a definitive FAQ. (They're already released an errata that weakens the traitor in 3-player games, but many posters say that it doesn't really affect anything.)

But now that I look at DoW's official responses to the communication question, my heart sinks when I see the company's online ombudsman define the game as "a role-playing experience in a box." Erm, I did not want that. I wanted a board game in a box. Sigh.

Seriously, you want me to role-play my Chess games too? "Aye, sirrah, your stinking cavalry may be fleet of foot, but it cannot possibly withstand the fearsome piety of Cardinal Black, who shall cut a diagonal swath through your territory, thus and thus!" Never you mind that I might talk like that anyway. If I ever played Chess. My point, though, is that if I had to do that as a kludge against the game being broken, then I wouldn't play it even more than I already don't play it. Hence my giant uh-ohh over dropping a Ulysses on the game.

---

In other news, a blurb I wrote about Icehouse three years ago is on the http://wunderland.com front page this week, which explains why I got mail from one of the Gnostica designers this morning suggesting a new endgame variant to try. I got mail from a different Gnostica designer a couple of years ago with a different-again endgame the last time one noticed my page. I'll give it a whirl next time someone physically near me me wants to play that game. (It doesn't happen much.)

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

I'd play Gnostica, though I'd definitely need to refamiliarize myself with the rules...

[prog.livejournal.com]

That's probably the main problem with Gnostica, in a nutshell. :)

(There was a brief time I knew what all the trump powers were without looking, but I dunno if anyone can keep all that in their head for more than a little while without practice...)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I like it, though. I like games where there are a bunch of options of how to play each turn, and figuring out which is best. Not that I ever got very good at this for Gnostica.

[misuba.livejournal.com]

It's all about the stickers. They totally help.

But after weighing Zarcana and Gnostica and even trying to make another foray into that gamespace and find a balance between the two, I've decided that the optimal choice between Gnostica and Zarcana is Homeworlds.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

What's "dropping a Ulysses"?

[prog.livejournal.com]

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was thinking of the Odyssey protagonist and the James Joyce novel.

President Grant is my 5th cousin, thrice removed.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

One thing I noticed about Shadows is that all three games ended exactly the same way. There were 10 or 11 swords out, only one or two black. Nearly everyone was at the Round Table, fighting off siege engines and hoping that one more sword would materialize before we got overrun. Also, no one died.

This says to me that our game strategy might be flawed. We had a casual approach to placing siege engines at the beginning of the game, instead all running off to complete quests. I wonder if it would work better to avoid playing siege engines at the beginning of the game and play more black cards, and also to spend more time at the beginning just drawing white cards.

I don't know if that would make the game play out differently, but it's worth considering.

I do agree that if the game mechanics depend on the Traitor not playing to win, that's a serious balance problem. However, if players are generally more reluctant to play siege engines at the beginning of the game, playing too many is a suspicious act, which may mediate against playing too mechanically.

After playing as the Traitor once, I can't say I know what the optimal strategy is, but the psychological impact of trying to keep the secret and still undermine the group was powerful.

I'm not willing to write off the game yet.

I'm sort of indifferent on the not describing your hand thing.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about the communication thing. You'd hear no protests from me to lift the ban on not outright referring to your cards, but without some tuning that would make it even more difficult to play the traitor (unless the traitor doesn't care about being found out, as with the catapult-every-turn strategy). The first player unwilling to describe their hand, or who plays cards that don't match what they describe, will get accused.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I posted an essay about precisely this to the spielfrieks Yahoo group, but maybe I should re-post it in my journal.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Please do. I am too lazy to sign up to that mailing list. (And I predict I'd end up unsubscribing from it after a while anyway.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, you can join the group without getting email. But it's a mild pain to join, you have to email one of the admins. (Due to a freak web accident several years ago and Yahoo's bizarre refusal to fix it.)

[queue.livejournal.com]

I would also be up for some Gnostication.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Count me in for Gnostica (time permitting). I've long been planning to search for a nice tarot deck that's both aesthetically pleasing and stickerable.

What's the new endgame variant?

[prog.livejournal.com]

A few rules changes:

1. You score a card's full value if you have minions on it, even if opponents' minions are on it as well.
2. At the start of your turn, if you have 10 points, you may declare the game immediately over.
3. At the end of the game, everyone with at least 10 points wins.

On the off chance someone in LJ-land hasn't heard of this variant and plays it before I do, please tell Jacob what you think of it.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, how did the shoot go?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Pretty good, I think. Messed up the audio due to my own dumbassedry; what I thought was a bad mic was me not knowing what camera settings to use... I was shown today how to do it right when I returned the equipment. Haven't really gone over the footage yet.

Had a good shoot on Sunday, too, filming the video game "Rampart", which honestly surprised me... I thought it would be humorous filler, but we discovered that it's actually nice little multi-player arcade game, of finite length and with a clear winner. How often does that happen?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

And yeah, those posts (from the Eric Hautemont, head of Days of Wonder, and from Bruno Cathala, one of the designers) saying that it's not a game for "statisticians" and "rules lawyers" is just depressing. And it's okay to make statements that imply a specific number, but using words that are almost equivalent to numbers is like looking ahead to the last page of a book? Huh??

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't know Eric was the head of the company... I like that he posts a lot across all the forums! (And on BGG too, if I'm not mistaken.) But yes, uargh.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Man. It sounded like such a cool idea...but. I was going to try to say something intelligent about it, but I think you've covered it nicely.

I thought you had liked this one

[zyxwvut.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning before I got to it.

Z

P.S.: Well do I remember the tournament experiences that led to your writing that blurb. %-}