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Jul. 11th, 2005 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progI 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2005-07-11 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-11 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-11 07:17 pm (UTC)