Let's talk about RISK. You've played RISK, right? Everybody has. You take your armies and you conquer the world, only someone backstabs you and it all ends in tears. I've even talked about it once or twice on the blog here.* I've played a lot of RISK, probably running the gamut of potential game states. I've played innumerable games, including the time I brought it winter camping with the boy scouts. I've made alliances and nonagression pacts, been backstabbed, broken up other people's alliances, had bitter arguments over the rules and the terms of agreements. I kicked the board over once when I got eliminated on the first turn. I've played once on a double world with two boards, and I even organized my own RISK tournament. (Napoleon won. Oh, don't bother sending in for their tournament information; it's useless. The only thing I learned from it was that the proper spelling of RISK is in all caps.)
Given my longstanding connection to the game, it might come as a surprise when I tell you that the game sucks. Ok, not that much of a surprise, it's not like i didn't foreshadow it by telling you I'd be surprising you. But back to the point. Judging by the standards of today and the other war games you can find on the market, it's a wonder that anyone plays the game at all. Quick rundown of the problems with it:
-Australia. Friggen Australia. You get someone set up there and it becomes prohibitively expensive to go in and root them out. Meanwhile they're getting extra armies every turn.
-The cards. In the long term, it doesn't matter what else you do, the cards is all that matters.
-Diplomacy. I gotta say, I learned a lot of things about negotiations from this game. Trouble is, a lot of those lessons came via harsh penalties; you table talk because if you don't you're screwed. You don't form alliances because if you do, they screw you. You don't break a promise because that's a great way to lose friends. In a permanent sense.
-Only one kind of unit. Makes the strategies pretty straightforward.
That'll do, for now. The point is, while RISK was innovative and exciting when it was introduced what, seventy years ago? Game technology has moved on since then. You've got dozens and dozens of more modern war and strategy games that are a lot more interesting to play. There's a reason why we never seem to stop talking about Axis and Allies here. So why do we still play RISK?
Because everybody plays RISK. Everybody's got at least a passing familiarity with the game. So if you're forced to socialize with those long lost cousins, and they're having trouble coming to grips with the fact that you don't go to the bars for a good time, instead you stay up all night pretending to be a wizard or some such, well, it's something that they'll play. And it does have some merits. I griped about only one kind of unit above; inasmuch as that bothers me as an advanced gamer, the simple rules structure that that entails makes it a lot easier to play with just about anybody. The fact that at least one of them has probably played RISK before is also huge; it's always harder to get your foot in the door with an unknown anything; it's why I've played so many Axis and Allies franchise games, it's why comic book movies are the thing this decade, and it's why when I go to the grocery store and want pickles, I pick up Vlasic ones. Not because I know anything about pickles, but because I've seen their adds before and the comforting warmth of already knowing the brand name is enough to steer me in their direction. I hate advertising so much.
That brand name recognition is huge in terms of marketing the game. RISK is never going to leave the Walmart shelves because of that. Supposing your nephew is turning eight. You don't know a thing the kid, so what do you get him? Maybe you want to get him a game. If you know absolutely nothing about board games you wander into the toy aisle and look at the familiar names, and get him one at random. You pick one you recognize, maybe you dimly remember playing twenty, thirty years ago. What did you pick up? Monopoly. Or Clue. Or RISK. Maybe Yahtzee. Scrabble is for a more mature audience. You know- when they're old enough to snigger endlessly about spelling out dirty words. But back to the point; these games generate huge amounts of revenue for the companies that publish them.
So we've got a cycle going on; kid plays RISK, kid grows up, kid buys RISK for his kids. And while the player base is large enough that you can get steady revenue from this cycle, well, wouldn't it be better if you could turn these kids into true gamers, people who will shell out again and again for your games? To that end, Parker brothers, or Hasbro, or whomever, anyways, they've been publishing variants on RISK to patch up some of the rules, and to hopefully convert their occasional customers into more steady sales.
The first one of these that I ever played was called RISK 2210. "OK, so, you're in the future, right? You fight with giant robot armies. And you get generals with special powers and stuff. Oh, and you can conquer the moon."
Conquering the moon is one of my longstanding goals.
Later I got to play RISK Godstorm. In this one you're in the ancient world, and you summon gods. Which interact much like the generals. Come to think of it, it's suspiciously similar to RISK 2210. Anyways, in this one when your armies die, they get sent to the underworld, where you get to fight it out. When they die there? Then they're really dead.
I gotta admit, being able to sink Atlantis is pretty cool.
While these games are all right, they haven't exactly revitalized my interest in the brand. Sure, I'll play them, but they aren't exactly as exciting as I'd like.
Now, now a new one comes along. RISK Legacy. This one promises that the game will change, irrevocably, depending on how it's played. Interesting. I wonder how they'll do that. Or at least I wondered. I'm five games in now, and some interesting things have gone down. But I've spent too much time yammering about RISK in general, so I'll talk about that. Next post. Which won't take three months, I swear.
*For the people who are bored enough to click and are still curious, I haven't gotten much further with my Markov Chains. I've done some fiddling with simulations rather than actual solutions, which has met with limited success. Unfortunately, I don't trust computer simulations almost at all.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Hey Kids! What time is it?
Time for more Axis and Allies blogging!
Yes, we do go to this particular well quite often, thank you very much for asking. But today is gonna be different, because this time, we played Axis and Allies Revised!
I expect at this point, some people are asking, "What's so different about Axis and Allies Revised, as opposed to Global 1940?" If this is the case, you probably haven't played both of them, and I'm glad to offer my services as one of the players, assuming you have a free weekend or two, and a large surface area on which to put the 1940 board.
The major differences, other than board size, include fewer rules and abilities for Revised, a later starting date (1942), with Panzer divisions poised to parade victoriously through Red Square, Japan more or less ascendant in the Pacific, and fewer nations. 1940, in a historically accurate but otherwise misguided move, also includes France, however in most iterations of that version Germany at the least takes Paris on the first turn, dooming them to well-deserved irrelevance.
For the first time in a long time, we managed five players, but since I'm too lazy to give a nom de blog to any of them, I'll be referring to them as the countries played. Havoc Jack commanded the Imperial Japanese forces, and in a stunning departure from normal roles, I was in charge of the American armed forces.
Having made that long prelude to the actual meat of this post, I find again that I should've taken notes if I wanted to do a proper blog about it, and probably have done it in two posts, if only to boost my count. At any rate, starting from the end, the Allies were victorious due to having mostly locked down Germany; the Japanese forces were nearly poised to backstab Russia however their forward bases (one of which was provided by me, necessarily or not) could not have produced enough to cause too much devastation before Germany went under.
Some other items of note from the game:
After Germany successfully invaded Egypt, the UK attempted to take it back, and failed miserably. This temporarily led to them losing both India and much of Africa, however they were able to offset it somewhat by taking Norway and by the US launching an early invasion of Africa.
Japan did well on its early assaults, however as tends to happen they lost most of their ground forces. Had they more land units to take and hold territory they may well have wreaked more havoc then what they did manage.
In a spectacular bout of bad rolling in one round, Germany, rolling for 10 tanks attacking at 3 or less, managed a single hit. While they did win the battle in the end, due to at best average defense from Russia, it's still worthy of a mention.
The US didn't get nearly as much action as they could have, I probably could have just gone straight for Europe and had better results, especially vis-a-vis Japan's poor showing in terms of infantry.
Germany did a fairly effective job of protecting its air force up until near the end, when it was found that owning Denmark does NOT protect the Baltic sea from being invaded. Which it shouldn't really, given that here Denmark is grouped into Western Europe. When this was discovered, the Allies could have gone for the quick victory and taken Germany, which at this point was covered by only a single fighter, however we allowed a redeployment. Instead an attack was launched at most of the German air force, which happened to be unprotected by infantry, and actually succeeded in taking the territory.
Anything else? Oh, right: I don't like playing as the U.S., especially in this version. They hardly ever get any of the epic die rolling you can expect from the Eastern Front.
Also, when in doubt, buy infantry. I saw two examples of what happens when you don't, an example of why you need to do so, and, full disclosure, one minor counter-example. (To be fair, I wasn't expecting Germany to launch a more or less all-out air assault on the Royal Navy, but that's because I wouldn't do it.) WARNING: That link is to TVTropes. Go through at your own risk.
Yes, we do go to this particular well quite often, thank you very much for asking. But today is gonna be different, because this time, we played Axis and Allies Revised!
I expect at this point, some people are asking, "What's so different about Axis and Allies Revised, as opposed to Global 1940?" If this is the case, you probably haven't played both of them, and I'm glad to offer my services as one of the players, assuming you have a free weekend or two, and a large surface area on which to put the 1940 board.
The major differences, other than board size, include fewer rules and abilities for Revised, a later starting date (1942), with Panzer divisions poised to parade victoriously through Red Square, Japan more or less ascendant in the Pacific, and fewer nations. 1940, in a historically accurate but otherwise misguided move, also includes France, however in most iterations of that version Germany at the least takes Paris on the first turn, dooming them to well-deserved irrelevance.
For the first time in a long time, we managed five players, but since I'm too lazy to give a nom de blog to any of them, I'll be referring to them as the countries played. Havoc Jack commanded the Imperial Japanese forces, and in a stunning departure from normal roles, I was in charge of the American armed forces.
Having made that long prelude to the actual meat of this post, I find again that I should've taken notes if I wanted to do a proper blog about it, and probably have done it in two posts, if only to boost my count. At any rate, starting from the end, the Allies were victorious due to having mostly locked down Germany; the Japanese forces were nearly poised to backstab Russia however their forward bases (one of which was provided by me, necessarily or not) could not have produced enough to cause too much devastation before Germany went under.
Some other items of note from the game:
After Germany successfully invaded Egypt, the UK attempted to take it back, and failed miserably. This temporarily led to them losing both India and much of Africa, however they were able to offset it somewhat by taking Norway and by the US launching an early invasion of Africa.
Japan did well on its early assaults, however as tends to happen they lost most of their ground forces. Had they more land units to take and hold territory they may well have wreaked more havoc then what they did manage.
In a spectacular bout of bad rolling in one round, Germany, rolling for 10 tanks attacking at 3 or less, managed a single hit. While they did win the battle in the end, due to at best average defense from Russia, it's still worthy of a mention.
The US didn't get nearly as much action as they could have, I probably could have just gone straight for Europe and had better results, especially vis-a-vis Japan's poor showing in terms of infantry.
Germany did a fairly effective job of protecting its air force up until near the end, when it was found that owning Denmark does NOT protect the Baltic sea from being invaded. Which it shouldn't really, given that here Denmark is grouped into Western Europe. When this was discovered, the Allies could have gone for the quick victory and taken Germany, which at this point was covered by only a single fighter, however we allowed a redeployment. Instead an attack was launched at most of the German air force, which happened to be unprotected by infantry, and actually succeeded in taking the territory.
Anything else? Oh, right: I don't like playing as the U.S., especially in this version. They hardly ever get any of the epic die rolling you can expect from the Eastern Front.
Also, when in doubt, buy infantry. I saw two examples of what happens when you don't, an example of why you need to do so, and, full disclosure, one minor counter-example. (To be fair, I wasn't expecting Germany to launch a more or less all-out air assault on the Royal Navy, but that's because I wouldn't do it.) WARNING: That link is to TVTropes. Go through at your own risk.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Design blogging: The Zombie Game
All right! We're back in action in 2012! Okay, enough of that, tonight we're going to be live-blogging our design meeting on one of our games, currently titled "The Zombie Game". Whatever merits we may have as game designers, coming up with good titles is not one of them. The idea for this game came about after watching the movie "Zombieland", and a discussion about why military forces always seem to be unprepared for zombies.
The premise of the game is such: zombies have overrun China, and the other powers of the world are attempting to end the threat before it becomes uncontainable. Why China? Mainly the large population to be zombified and government censorship to prevent the news from getting out. The playable nations are the U.S., India, Russia, and the Arab League, a loose and probably unfeasible coalition of Muslim nations. We originally included the European Union but discarded it as they don't have much viable territory on our game map, plus their military response would be pretty anemic anyway. (Havoc Jack adds there's some doubt it will exist by the time the game is published.)
Gameplay is similar to the Axis and Allies model, with specialized rules for the expansion of zombies and event cards which do things like add random zombie outbreaks around the world.
With the basic explanations out of the way, let's talk about the changes that are being made after our few initial rounds of playtesting, with random excerpts whenever.
First things first: we got rid of the U.N., or at least the game version. As its purpose was more or less similar to the actual U.N. (i.e. condemn Israel and the U.S. and give diplomatic cover to random dictators) it was an unnecessary mechanic and the only reason we could find for keeping it in was to continue to make fun of them. Since we don't need the game to do that it went.
The premise of the game is such: zombies have overrun China, and the other powers of the world are attempting to end the threat before it becomes uncontainable. Why China? Mainly the large population to be zombified and government censorship to prevent the news from getting out. The playable nations are the U.S., India, Russia, and the Arab League, a loose and probably unfeasible coalition of Muslim nations. We originally included the European Union but discarded it as they don't have much viable territory on our game map, plus their military response would be pretty anemic anyway. (Havoc Jack adds there's some doubt it will exist by the time the game is published.)
Gameplay is similar to the Axis and Allies model, with specialized rules for the expansion of zombies and event cards which do things like add random zombie outbreaks around the world.
With the basic explanations out of the way, let's talk about the changes that are being made after our few initial rounds of playtesting, with random excerpts whenever.
First things first: we got rid of the U.N., or at least the game version. As its purpose was more or less similar to the actual U.N. (i.e. condemn Israel and the U.S. and give diplomatic cover to random dictators) it was an unnecessary mechanic and the only reason we could find for keeping it in was to continue to make fun of them. Since we don't need the game to do that it went.
We also removed the oil purchase mechanic we borrowed from the game Powergrid, which mirrors a basic supply and demand function, raising the price as barrels are purchased from the market. While it is admittedly an awesome mechanic, it adds unnecessary complication to the game. With any luck we can get it back in the game later on.
...insert distraction by Youtube here.
Okay, back. Decided to test out various battle scenes. After about 50 test battles against five zombies, it was determined that three tanks are the minimum necessary to have a decent chance of winning a battle. Two infantry and two tanks both only managed to win one battle out of 10, three infantry managed two of 10, and the three tanks won nine of 10.
Last but not least we worked up some notes for national abilities, although these mostly haven't changed much. Still happy with the Arab League having martyrs, although it could be likely to get us in trouble with someone. Being able to take out zombies without fear of losing troops to make more zombies is quite useful, IMO.
...insert distraction by Youtube here.
Okay, back. Decided to test out various battle scenes. After about 50 test battles against five zombies, it was determined that three tanks are the minimum necessary to have a decent chance of winning a battle. Two infantry and two tanks both only managed to win one battle out of 10, three infantry managed two of 10, and the three tanks won nine of 10.
Last but not least we worked up some notes for national abilities, although these mostly haven't changed much. Still happy with the Arab League having martyrs, although it could be likely to get us in trouble with someone. Being able to take out zombies without fear of losing troops to make more zombies is quite useful, IMO.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Q: How is Italy like the Chicago Bears?
A: They both still suck.
In an attempt to generate some new content, we're gonna reuse some old content. Recently we had another go-round on the old Axis & Allies Global battlefield, so it's time for a few quick ruminations on what went down.
1) In an astoundingly bad play by Havoc Jack commanding UK Europe, the UK was left nearly undefended and overran by an amphibious Nazi invasion. The next turn Germany invaded Russia. After feinting towards Leningrad and handily defeating a Red Army counterattack, the Wehrmacht swung south into the richer lands of the Ukraine, headed towards Stalingrad.
2) After negotiating a five-turn ceasefire with Russia, Japan launched an all-out assault on the US on the first turn. After successfully taking both Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as a daring sweep into Alaska, the Japanese offensive bogged down while battling UK Pacific. This was entirely due to a foolish decision on my part to allow UK Pacific to collect the African IPCs of UK Europe, although I was swayed by a Churchill quote, that wily old bastard.
3) While the American counterattack was defeated, the Axis were not able to build up quickly enough to overcome the American income, and thanks to a slightly problematic purchase for Japan that didn't protect the home island enough the US was able to take Japan for a split. (After about the second round we had to break for the day and picked it up on a second day at which we engaged the UK Pacific collecting African IPC rule.)
4) Italy still sucks. During the first round, the Italian fleet had as good a chance as it would ever have to overcome the British fleet, and failed to roll a four in three consecutive rounds. The remaining fleet and air force were unable to drive the British remnants out, and later a newly built Italian fleet failed miserably at defending itself, as well as the Italian army being hammered by an extremely lucky British defense. Given the final outcome of the game, I can't say that it was Italy's fault this time, but had they done better it might have drawn more US interest and/or allowed them to put auxiliary pressure on Russia.
In an attempt to generate some new content, we're gonna reuse some old content. Recently we had another go-round on the old Axis & Allies Global battlefield, so it's time for a few quick ruminations on what went down.
1) In an astoundingly bad play by Havoc Jack commanding UK Europe, the UK was left nearly undefended and overran by an amphibious Nazi invasion. The next turn Germany invaded Russia. After feinting towards Leningrad and handily defeating a Red Army counterattack, the Wehrmacht swung south into the richer lands of the Ukraine, headed towards Stalingrad.
2) After negotiating a five-turn ceasefire with Russia, Japan launched an all-out assault on the US on the first turn. After successfully taking both Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as a daring sweep into Alaska, the Japanese offensive bogged down while battling UK Pacific. This was entirely due to a foolish decision on my part to allow UK Pacific to collect the African IPCs of UK Europe, although I was swayed by a Churchill quote, that wily old bastard.
3) While the American counterattack was defeated, the Axis were not able to build up quickly enough to overcome the American income, and thanks to a slightly problematic purchase for Japan that didn't protect the home island enough the US was able to take Japan for a split. (After about the second round we had to break for the day and picked it up on a second day at which we engaged the UK Pacific collecting African IPC rule.)
4) Italy still sucks. During the first round, the Italian fleet had as good a chance as it would ever have to overcome the British fleet, and failed to roll a four in three consecutive rounds. The remaining fleet and air force were unable to drive the British remnants out, and later a newly built Italian fleet failed miserably at defending itself, as well as the Italian army being hammered by an extremely lucky British defense. Given the final outcome of the game, I can't say that it was Italy's fault this time, but had they done better it might have drawn more US interest and/or allowed them to put auxiliary pressure on Russia.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Rocking the Innistrad Prerelease
Before I get into anything else, a quick correction. In my last article I reported that it took Doyt three months at 8 hours a day to achieve the Insane. Actually, it only took him three months at five hours a day. Plan your achievements accordingly.
This previous weekend Fountain of Youth games held a prerelease for Innistrad, the latest Magic the Gathering set. Like many good things, this story starts with waffles.
At the Friday Night Magic before, I made an agreement with one of the locals to make waffles. At the prerelease. At 10:00 am, when the doors open. So I bring the wafflemaker, I get there at 10:00 and he's nowhere to be seen. At 10:40 I'm sick of waiting, and I haven't had breakfast yet, so I make a run to the local grocery store and pick up what's necessary. As usual, I forget some important components, so I'm mixing with a plastic fork and I have to send another guy out to find me some syrup. Luckily the gas station down the road had some.
At noon the other guy shows up. With 32 double stackers from Burger King. Turns out it's free waffle free burger day at the game store. Which is awesome.
This is critical to the gaming narrative because providing waffles to the populace at large seems to have given me a karmic boost that I rode the rest of the day. In my sealed pool I pulled a new Garruk, and plenty of red and green stuff to play along side him. I ended up with a super aggressive deck and I handily dealt with most opponents. My favorite play of the day:
Turn three I drop a Kruin Outlaw. He doesn't have a play. On my upkeep he transforms into a 3/3 evasive double striker. I play an Inquisitor's flail, equip and swing in four twelve. I won that game the next turn.
I went 3-0, at which point I was able to intentionally draw with the other players into the top eight. Now, I can go either way on that sort of shenanigan. On the one hand it seems cheap for me to guarantee my way into the top eight draft without any risk. On the other hand, well, drafting is pretty awesome. A free draft is even better, and if you can get into the prize support (Fountain of Youth has a very vertical prize structure; only the top 4 got prizes), the prize support makes things better. After drawing with my opponents I did play out the matches "just to see", and I would have ended the day at 4-1, which would have gotten me into the top eight anyway, so my conscience is assuaged. Maybe I'll go into more detail on this subject later.
In the top eight, I wanted to draft red. My brother tells me that red is going to be one of the more powerful colors in the format, and I tend to believe him. However the consensus around the store is that red is a weak color in the format. So I intended to force red, prove my brother right and take all of them down. Based on the packs and the cards available I went blue black tribal zombies. It turned out much worse than I expected. The blue zombies are good, but they require you to lose creatures from your graveyard. The black removal is ok, but it also wanted me to lose creatures from my graveyard. And I had a couple powerful raise dead effects, but that resource was pretty darn low by the time I got around to those. Best card in the deck was, unsurprisingly, Evil Twin. Which, incidentally, is my favorite card in the set. At one point I copied a 5/5 regenerator, and was having to block something else every turn and try to shoot the regenerator, holding them both off. I won one round and lost the next, leaving me in 3rd or 4th overall, and with 4 packs of prize support. Huzzah!
The other high point in the day (and a day that has both waffles and a prerelease ranks pretty darn high already) there was a wizards representative at our store. Mark Gottleib, of the Innistrad development team (and much other experience at WOTC) had other business in town, so he showed up to gunsling at the prerelease. For reasons which I can't fathom his table wasn't incredibly busy all day, so I got to hang around, take on his sealed deck (I won, like I said, my deck was good), and so forth. I got him to sign my Living Wish. You see, Mr. Gottleib was rules manager when the M10 rules changes were enacted. One of the changes took "removed from game" and replaced it with "exile". Since the wishes got cards that were outside of the game, they could no longer retrieve cards that were exiled. Instead you get stuff out of your sideboard or collection. As Mr. Gottleib physically wrote on my card "Exiled cards aren't really out of the game". Though I have some lingering resentments over the M10 rules changes (and not very many; really they did an amazing job with that set in general), I was glad for an opportunity to meet one of the developers.
On Sunday I came back, but made no waffles. My sealed pool pushed me into Jund colors (Red Green and Black), with three shimmering grottos to fix mana. I got a first round bye, and then proceeded to go 1-3 the rest of the tournament. Sad.
Not that many people showed up on Sunday, so the store had extra product, so they were able to schedule an impromptu prerelease draft. Cost more than usual, with some prize support, but most interestingly it's a chance to draft the new set. Once again, I tried forcing red. This time I ended up in red green, very aggressive werewolf deck. I didn't draft any of the enablers (moonmist, for example), but I did have a solid wall of creatures to keep dropping. I narrowly won out the first match against another werewolf deck. I narrowly lost the second match against a mono black deck. It came down in game three to him having the second Bump in the Night to burn me out the turn before I would have killed him. Round three I lost against a guy who had the Sturmgeist I couldn't deal with. I probably would have had him anyhow if I could have dealt with his Crab Fortress
Net outlay $80 on games, for a total of 22 packs. I beat the Wal-Mart $4.00 a pack price, but only just. While I enjoyed myself immensely, I'm frustrated that I haven't yet mastered the format. Looking forward to more drafts.
This previous weekend Fountain of Youth games held a prerelease for Innistrad, the latest Magic the Gathering set. Like many good things, this story starts with waffles.
At the Friday Night Magic before, I made an agreement with one of the locals to make waffles. At the prerelease. At 10:00 am, when the doors open. So I bring the wafflemaker, I get there at 10:00 and he's nowhere to be seen. At 10:40 I'm sick of waiting, and I haven't had breakfast yet, so I make a run to the local grocery store and pick up what's necessary. As usual, I forget some important components, so I'm mixing with a plastic fork and I have to send another guy out to find me some syrup. Luckily the gas station down the road had some.
At noon the other guy shows up. With 32 double stackers from Burger King. Turns out it's free waffle free burger day at the game store. Which is awesome.
This is critical to the gaming narrative because providing waffles to the populace at large seems to have given me a karmic boost that I rode the rest of the day. In my sealed pool I pulled a new Garruk, and plenty of red and green stuff to play along side him. I ended up with a super aggressive deck and I handily dealt with most opponents. My favorite play of the day:
Turn three I drop a Kruin Outlaw. He doesn't have a play. On my upkeep he transforms into a 3/3 evasive double striker. I play an Inquisitor's flail, equip and swing in four twelve. I won that game the next turn.
I went 3-0, at which point I was able to intentionally draw with the other players into the top eight. Now, I can go either way on that sort of shenanigan. On the one hand it seems cheap for me to guarantee my way into the top eight draft without any risk. On the other hand, well, drafting is pretty awesome. A free draft is even better, and if you can get into the prize support (Fountain of Youth has a very vertical prize structure; only the top 4 got prizes), the prize support makes things better. After drawing with my opponents I did play out the matches "just to see", and I would have ended the day at 4-1, which would have gotten me into the top eight anyway, so my conscience is assuaged. Maybe I'll go into more detail on this subject later.
In the top eight, I wanted to draft red. My brother tells me that red is going to be one of the more powerful colors in the format, and I tend to believe him. However the consensus around the store is that red is a weak color in the format. So I intended to force red, prove my brother right and take all of them down. Based on the packs and the cards available I went blue black tribal zombies. It turned out much worse than I expected. The blue zombies are good, but they require you to lose creatures from your graveyard. The black removal is ok, but it also wanted me to lose creatures from my graveyard. And I had a couple powerful raise dead effects, but that resource was pretty darn low by the time I got around to those. Best card in the deck was, unsurprisingly, Evil Twin. Which, incidentally, is my favorite card in the set. At one point I copied a 5/5 regenerator, and was having to block something else every turn and try to shoot the regenerator, holding them both off. I won one round and lost the next, leaving me in 3rd or 4th overall, and with 4 packs of prize support. Huzzah!
The other high point in the day (and a day that has both waffles and a prerelease ranks pretty darn high already) there was a wizards representative at our store. Mark Gottleib, of the Innistrad development team (and much other experience at WOTC) had other business in town, so he showed up to gunsling at the prerelease. For reasons which I can't fathom his table wasn't incredibly busy all day, so I got to hang around, take on his sealed deck (I won, like I said, my deck was good), and so forth. I got him to sign my Living Wish. You see, Mr. Gottleib was rules manager when the M10 rules changes were enacted. One of the changes took "removed from game" and replaced it with "exile". Since the wishes got cards that were outside of the game, they could no longer retrieve cards that were exiled. Instead you get stuff out of your sideboard or collection. As Mr. Gottleib physically wrote on my card "Exiled cards aren't really out of the game". Though I have some lingering resentments over the M10 rules changes (and not very many; really they did an amazing job with that set in general), I was glad for an opportunity to meet one of the developers.
On Sunday I came back, but made no waffles. My sealed pool pushed me into Jund colors (Red Green and Black), with three shimmering grottos to fix mana. I got a first round bye, and then proceeded to go 1-3 the rest of the tournament. Sad.
Not that many people showed up on Sunday, so the store had extra product, so they were able to schedule an impromptu prerelease draft. Cost more than usual, with some prize support, but most interestingly it's a chance to draft the new set. Once again, I tried forcing red. This time I ended up in red green, very aggressive werewolf deck. I didn't draft any of the enablers (moonmist, for example), but I did have a solid wall of creatures to keep dropping. I narrowly won out the first match against another werewolf deck. I narrowly lost the second match against a mono black deck. It came down in game three to him having the second Bump in the Night to burn me out the turn before I would have killed him. Round three I lost against a guy who had the Sturmgeist I couldn't deal with. I probably would have had him anyhow if I could have dealt with his Crab Fortress
Net outlay $80 on games, for a total of 22 packs. I beat the Wal-Mart $4.00 a pack price, but only just. While I enjoyed myself immensely, I'm frustrated that I haven't yet mastered the format. Looking forward to more drafts.
Friday, September 23, 2011
The Joys of Meaningless Rewards
Today we talk about filling bars. The meaningless rewards that games give you to make you keep playing the game. I'm even going to go one step further than that. Your standard fantasy RPG, you get experience points until you level up, and when you level up you gain new abilities and get more powerful and all that. That's your traditional leveling structure. The thing about that is that it actually lets you play the game more efficiently. I'm going one step less useful. The Cheevos.
World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.
That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.
This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.
This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31
I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.
World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.
That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.
This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.
This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31
I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Replays and Replayability
(No, this isn't going to be a what-if featuring Jane Austen playing D&D. -ed) (Hey, that's not a bad idea! -B) (No! -ed) (C'mon! -B) (Dammit, I said no! -ed)
Warning: This post will contain links to game wikis. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest not following those links through.
So yeah, this issue's been bugging me for a while, and if I can't get a suitable discussion out of it, I can at least get some content in here. First of all, what makes a game re-playable? Using some of our standard examples, in Kingdom of Loathing, once you beat the final boss, you are given the option to ascend and start at level 1, keeping one or more skills from your previous run, and doing the new run in a variety of different ways. In Fallout: New Vegas, and the other Fallout games to varying extents, you can play through using different skills and/or make different choices, leading to other endings. Another option used in New Vegas is that of achievements, giving you some sort of boost to your fragile ego by giving you awards for things that you either might normally not do, or for doing a lot of the things you would usually do. If you have a couple spare hours, you might ask Zerg_Rush how he got the title "The Insane" for one of his WoW characters. I'm sure you've run across these tactics to squeeze more playtime from other games, I'm just using the examples I've run most recently. Some, of course, are more effective than others.
The more philosophical question is what actually causes one to replay a game? Havoc Jack just spent at least one post talking about how he's restarted Diablo II, but I can't normally seem to muster up that much desire to replay a lot of games, especially after I just finished it, whereas I've seen him finish a Starcraft I campaign and immediately start replaying the same campaign. Every once in a while, I will go back into the vaults and work up some game I haven't played in a while, but for the most part I don't replay games that much. Starcraft II was pretty awesome, but after playing it once I haven't really gone back to it at all, except for running a few missions trying to get achievements. I haven't actually finished Fallout: New Vegas yet, but I don't really plan on playing through again once all the DLC comes out and I actually do finish the game. I ran though Fallout 3 twice, although that was primarily because I got DLC for that and decided it would be simpler to play through again. On the other hand I play KoL all the time, and am constantly ascending. Perhaps it's just that easier accessibility to a wiki and easier character optimization makes me want to play it more, although according to Steam I have played New Vegas for 62 hours, so I guess that's a decent amount of time spent on it. And of course, I did end up reading a lot of the wiki, and sometimes I find that reduces my desire to actually play the game.
I'm not sure why this single-play tendency only applies to video games, though. I've played any number of board games any number of times, I've watched many movies as much as I could stand, and nearly all the books on my bookshelf have been read dozens of times.
Insofar as no one else can answer the question for me, perhaps if anyone actually reads this blog instead of it being a vanity project for us they can attempt to answer the question for themselves.
Warning: This post will contain links to game wikis. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest not following those links through.
So yeah, this issue's been bugging me for a while, and if I can't get a suitable discussion out of it, I can at least get some content in here. First of all, what makes a game re-playable? Using some of our standard examples, in Kingdom of Loathing, once you beat the final boss, you are given the option to ascend and start at level 1, keeping one or more skills from your previous run, and doing the new run in a variety of different ways. In Fallout: New Vegas, and the other Fallout games to varying extents, you can play through using different skills and/or make different choices, leading to other endings. Another option used in New Vegas is that of achievements, giving you some sort of boost to your fragile ego by giving you awards for things that you either might normally not do, or for doing a lot of the things you would usually do. If you have a couple spare hours, you might ask Zerg_Rush how he got the title "The Insane" for one of his WoW characters. I'm sure you've run across these tactics to squeeze more playtime from other games, I'm just using the examples I've run most recently. Some, of course, are more effective than others.
The more philosophical question is what actually causes one to replay a game? Havoc Jack just spent at least one post talking about how he's restarted Diablo II, but I can't normally seem to muster up that much desire to replay a lot of games, especially after I just finished it, whereas I've seen him finish a Starcraft I campaign and immediately start replaying the same campaign. Every once in a while, I will go back into the vaults and work up some game I haven't played in a while, but for the most part I don't replay games that much. Starcraft II was pretty awesome, but after playing it once I haven't really gone back to it at all, except for running a few missions trying to get achievements. I haven't actually finished Fallout: New Vegas yet, but I don't really plan on playing through again once all the DLC comes out and I actually do finish the game. I ran though Fallout 3 twice, although that was primarily because I got DLC for that and decided it would be simpler to play through again. On the other hand I play KoL all the time, and am constantly ascending. Perhaps it's just that easier accessibility to a wiki and easier character optimization makes me want to play it more, although according to Steam I have played New Vegas for 62 hours, so I guess that's a decent amount of time spent on it. And of course, I did end up reading a lot of the wiki, and sometimes I find that reduces my desire to actually play the game.
I'm not sure why this single-play tendency only applies to video games, though. I've played any number of board games any number of times, I've watched many movies as much as I could stand, and nearly all the books on my bookshelf have been read dozens of times.
Insofar as no one else can answer the question for me, perhaps if anyone actually reads this blog instead of it being a vanity project for us they can attempt to answer the question for themselves.
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