Author: Zubon

.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Countless Generations Unfulfilled

This weekend, I was in the mood to play a worker placement game. The question dawned on me with rising horror: how many generations now lie buried and insensate, gone to their biers with a nameless ache because worker placement games had yet to be invented?

Have you ever gone to the kitchen, in the mood for something, but nothing looks quite right? You are hungering for a dish that does not yet exist. The plant that would placate your eager taste buds has yet to evolve. And there you stand, wondering if a little more mayo would do the trick.

When you are bored on a Sunday afternoon in the long, dark teatime of the soul, those hours are stolen by your need to do something that does not yet exist, for a career in a field requiring another century of technological advance.

And there lies your bier, wondering whether you took the time to play a worker placement game.

: Zubon

[TT] Upgrade Kits

Under the heading of “cool but impractical”: Meeple Source sells game upgrade kits. Replace the standard meeples that come with your tabletop games with pretty, custom ones. Now, you know that I love pretty, custom meeples, but generally under the idea that you buy one really nice set and use it for everything.

Meeple Source takes that in the opposite direction, in the way only a fanatic can really indulge in. If you are a hardcore player of a particular game, I can see buying a set. If you play Agricola every week, it could be nice to get pretty resources or farmer families. They won’t take up much more space than the circle tokens, and let’s be honest, the Agricola tokens for wood and clay are annoyingly similar. But replacing everything would cost $77, and the game itself costs $49 on Amazon (as I type this). The Lords of Waterdeep upgrades cost 3.8 times the game itself (and lock you into the theme of the game). My favorite example is Tiny Epic Kingdoms, where you can get a custom set of 112 meeples for 5.5 times the cost of the game itself. Also, that would be way bigger than the box itself.

I am not saying the prices are unreasonable. About a dollar for a custom meeple, or a quarter for a resource, does not seem like much given costs of production and running the shop. I have some of their meeples, because I think they are cute and neat (and some work nicely for multiple purposes). It’s cool stuff if you want to pimp out a game for the premium nerd experience. And by the way, Tesh’s latest Kickstarter for metal steampunk meeples is in its last week, if you want to be more cool but less custom.

: Zubon

[TT] Deceptively Simple

I recently learned to play Inis and Lords of Waterdeep. These are both strategy games, gamer games in that they come with rulebooks instead of a page of instructions. Despite the number of pieces and pages of rules, these are both surprisingly simple games to learn and teach.

Lords of Waterdeep is the clearer example. This is one I hesitated to learn because (1) themed tie-in games are usually crap; (2) anything with that many moving pieces must be over-complicated instead of elegant, right? I mean, it comes with a 24-page rulebook! But no, the actual rules of play are about 2 pages of the rulebook. You could get by with the reference page on the back of the book. Those 24 pages are mostly explaining setup in detail, reprinting text that is on the cards, and fluff. Maybe they thought D&D gamers insisted on a rulebook. If you have ever played a worker placement game before, this is ridiculously simple, with only two agents to place in each round (with max players).

And the fluff is pure fluff! We had one player explicitly refuse to learn which cubes were fighters or rogues or whatnot. “They’re orange cubes and black cubes.” And he is right! Give me some backing and an artist, and we can re-skin this game to any theme. I walked someone through how you would re-skin this as My Little Pony: Crusade for Canterlot.

Inis is a bit more complicated, but again the rules of what to do each round fit on a page. The rules there are more complicated, in that the rulebook has a dedicated column for reminders, clarifications, and explanations of edge cases. That was a little bumpy for first time players, wondering if we were missing something or if the rulebook effectively had errata.

Here, the fluff fits the game well. It is not Blood Rage levels of perfectly merging fluff and crunch, but the game mechanics tie in to the theme of Celtic competition for rulership. There are battles and bards and blood feuds of the clans.

A primary means of simplifying the rules is putting them in-game on the cards. All the action in Inis is in the cards that you draft each round, and Lords of Waterdeep does the same with having your worker placement info on the board. Inis adds a lot of text in its epic cards, as Lords of Waterdeep does with its intrigue cards. There is a downside to this, in that players are stopping to read mid-game, which can drag out turns and kill momentum. The upside is that you can teach everyone the game in a few minutes and get them rolling. Players tend to tolerate having lots of cards to read much better than getting a 10-minute block of instructions. This does give some advantage to return players, because they know what is in the deck, but it also gives new players the joy of, “Whoa, you can do that?” when cards come up. It feels like the early days of Magic the Gathering, when we thought anything could be in the cards.

Fun games. I enjoyed both, albeit with one play of each. Inis seems like a stronger and deeper game for dedicated strategy gamers, whereas Lords of Waterdeep is simple enough to loop in non-gamers. It’s D&D theme, however, probably reduces that general appeal, but it makes it good for your more casual gamers who like the theme but may not have the attention span for long rules.

: Zubon

Partying at the End of the World

Researchers got ahold of the record from the end of beta in ArcheAge and asked whether the usual Prisoner’s Dilemma outcome holds: when the endgame is in sight, you defect rather than cooperate. Short story? “Apparently most folks would be nicer to each other.”

As reported at Reason, a little less than one half of one percent of players committed murder during the last two weeks of play. Leveling and questing fell off. And the longer people stayed, the more social they were.

: Zubon

Retention

The University of Essex is trying to trying to increase student retention. That is where Richard Bartle works, and he notes:

The thing is, all the ways that the document listed to increase retention among new students were straight out of the MMO newbie-retention handbook. A place where people can hang out between teaching events and make friends? Check. Organised groups led by experienced students that you can join? Check. A communication channel for students just like you? Check. A method of finding other people who are interested in the same things you are? Check. Fun tasks for people with different skills working together ? Check. Easy challenges with small rewards to get you into the swing of things? Check.

Remember your gaming insights at work. Games are designed to be more enriching and enjoyable than real life, so why can’t we take the lessons of games to make real life more fun? I currently work in educational assessment, and we are looking ahead to games as teaching and testing tools.

: Zubon

10%, 50%, 90%

How many games do you have nearly completed, but just never got around to finishing because you got bored?

I have a bunch of games dropped in the first 10%, either “crap” or “not my thing.” I have another stack somewhere around 50%, a mix of neat ideas with poor execution, promising starts that went nowhere, and generally games that just stopped being worth the time.

And then there are the 90% games. The ones that needed to have 40 hours of play, so they padded in 10-20. The ones with an unreasonable last level that did not seem worth suffering through. The ones where you really did like the puzzles but they were so similar that after 90, you could not muster the energy to finish the last 10.

After bingeing heavily, I am starting to get burned out on Renowned Explorers at exactly 90% of the way through the achievements. Since each set of 5 expeditions is its own game, you’ve beat the game once you do that once, and you’ve seen all the possible expeditions after you’ve done that a half-dozen times (although probably not all the encounters). So a bit of that is burnout, a bit is having used the captains and crews that interested me the most.

Looking at my other installed Steam games:

  • I still have Borderlands 2 going. I think I still have a DLC campaign there I never played, and a bunch of 90% achievements. You kind of enter a Borderland sequel burned out from killing that same bandit in the previous game.
  • The Talos Principle has many interesting puzzles, some BS puzzles, and so many variations on the same theme that I wonder when I will finish map C. Again, in my usual pattern, I binged heavily, but now I can maybe do one of the puzzles and be all set for a couple of weeks. And there are mutually exclusive game/achievement paths, so how about doing all of them again for slightly different story text that you could just as easily YouTube?

I have a category in my Steam library called “shelved” for those 50% and 90% games that I may get back to someday. Steam Cloud is freeing, in that I feel free to uninstall the game and walk away. If I ever get back to the game, great, but having those kilobytes saved on a distant server is all I need to feel free to do the digital equivalent of house cleaning.

: Zubon

I also have a category for those 10% games called “crap,” so that I do not accidentally reinstall them someday.

Tinker Steampunk Meeples 2

Our dear friend Tesh is launching another Kickstarter for metal Steampunk meeples, this time with the Mad Scientist and the Tinkerer. The detail is nice, like the wrench and dagger on the back of the Tinkerer. I am personally more fond of the Mad Scientist, with his lab coat, goggles, and rumpled hair. I have a friend who wants this look IRL, so maybe I well get them some meeples.

And now: steampunk fairies, too.

I enjoy Tesh’s projects, and I encourage you to check it out. Comments are open if you have a crowdfunding project going or want to note exciting ones you’re supporting. (If the spam filter eats your link, please e-mail me, and I will dig through the filter.)

: Zubon

Renowned Explorers: International Society

From the makers of Reus: REIS!

My usual reaction to roguelikes is, “Well that was some BS.” This one I am really enjoying.

The theme of Renowned Explorers is adventure and discovery, under the banner of lighthearded Victorian imperialism. You are gentleman adventurers, heading to darkest Africa, the voodoo islands of the Caribbean, or mysterious lost lands. It plays tropes of the era straight with a joyful lack of modern sensibilities. Occasionally someone tells you off for plundering their cultural treasures, but mostly you are pacifying the natives, making off with the treasures, and working on a good story to tell upon your return. The artwork feeds into all this.

Like Reus, REIS enjoys sets of three. You have a team of three explorers. You can be aggressive, devious, or friendly. Some situations are better solved with charm, others with fisticuffs. There is a rock-paper-scissors relationship among the three, and some enemies will turn that on you. Continue reading Renowned Explorers: International Society

Decks and Pets

Tobold posted about “The Grizzly Bears deck,” which of course reminded me of a Duelist article from 1995. Because you come to this blog for notes on how recent gaming events relate to forgotten gaming history.

The idea is to have some cheap-to-assemble “computer” decks to test your deck against. The variety of them listed in the article give you a range of challenges like you could expect to see in play, although the state of the game has changed a bit since 1995. The two I remembered best were the goldfish and angel decks

The goldfish does nothing, nothing at all. If you cannot beat a deck that does absolutely nothing, quit the game. If you cannot do it in 7-8 turns, fix your deck. (With some exceptions for decks that are doing fancy, slow, safe things.)

The angel decks does nothing for four turns and then gets a free Serra Angel every turn forever. That is your “slow deck” opponent. There are similar decks for defense, weenie hordes, etc.

There is not a lot of point to this post other than to point to history. That is one part “isn’t that neat,” another part that history keeps coming back around. That was an article from 1995 that was mentioned in a Wizards post in 2010, coming up in a variant in 2017. I have several times recommended reading Jessica Mulligan’s archives from Biting the Hand because so many of today’s issues were also yesterday’s issues. We are not just fighting the last war, we are doing so with the strategy that lost the last war.

: Zubon

Matchmaking

I have played a bit more Overwatch, and the only time the matchmaker seems to put me in a game with even levels is weekend prime time. As I mentioned earlier, either I am good enough to get matched with players 200 levels above me, they are just that bad despite time spent, or the matchmaker algorithm is just saying, “Sure, this is fine, why not?”

This post from Jeff Kaplan has a lot going on. There is a very good bit here and a “eh, whattya gonna do” bit, where the latter is frustratingly fair.

If I were to summarize match results into 5 broad buckets it would be these:

  1. My team won. We beat the other team by a long shot.
  2. My team barely won.
  3. My team barely lost.
  4. My team lost. We lost by a long shot. It wasn’t even close
  5. It was a broken match somehow. Maybe someone disconnected, was screwing around or we played with fewer than 12 people.

(of course there are more cases than this – I am overly simplifying here)
Most players will say that they want a match to be either type 2 or type 3 as I described above. Those sound even. Barely win or barely lose. But I believe when psychology comes into play, most players actually expect type 1 or type 2 to be the result. Even an amazingly close type 3 match can turn into a highly negative experience for a lot of players. And if you keep “barely losing” it’s not a very fun night. Winning is fun and good. Losing is less fun than winning.
So waiting a really long time to lose by a long shot is obviously not good. But waiting a really long time to barely lose is also a negative experience. And if we assume that your chances of winning are 50%, that means that even waiting a really long time for a “better” match means that you’re going to wait a really long time to probably lose half the time…

There are some rather good insights here.

First, we say we want 2 or 3 (a good fight), but in practice we want 1 or 2 (to win). 2 is always good, but all things being equal, most people prefer 1 (big win) to 3 (narrow loss). And we all like to think we are above average and should win more than 50% of the time, even though perfect matchmaking would lead to 50% 2s and 50% 3s.

Second, most people will feel bad about a 3 or 4 and good about a 1 or 2. Despite our ideal of wanting 2 or 3, many (most?) people would probably rate a 3 about the same as a 4 in terms of how much fun they had. Winning is more fun.

Third, given that, the matchmaker really does say, “Sure this is fine, why not?” Because there is no perfect game for you once all things are factored in, and if it were perfect you would have a 50% chance, so why try to wait several minutes to find that perfect game when odds are you are not going to find it any more fun? And you still have multi-minute waits, so how much longer do you want to wait way outside prime time?

There are other good thoughts in that post, like how many random variables there are in the game, notably if you are a highly ranked player because you are a great tank and you feel like playing a sniper tonight. Most of my ranking must be based on playing support, but I don’t always want to play support. Overwatch is probably worse for that than other games; having a couple dozen classes to play introduces more noise.

But again, players like shiny, noisy, and random. Most people would be unhappy with a game where the more skilled player won 100% of the time. You are not the most skilled player out there.

: Zubon