Larry mentions that he's written about classics. Of course, only fools and small children challenge the Emperor. But let's talk Acquire. Larry thinks it has "a little too much luck and not enough control." That seems fair, normally one player doesn't get tiles and sits. But any game that has luck is going to have that. Settlers often has the same thing (which, to be fair, Larry points out). That's one of those "flaws magnified by time" I mentioned.
My particular way of dealing with this is to let people start with seven tiles and then pick the tile they want to seed the board with (simultaneously, natch). This gives players a chance to split their pairs on the first turn, which lowers the chances that they can't open a company. A player without a pair can aim for their lowest tile to go first, to get an extra turn. And, if worst comes to worst, each player may still get a playable hand once the board is seeded.
But even that (or Sackson's "Power Variant") reduces luck. I think Acquire's (and Settlers problem) is that when you get unlucky, you have to sit. Consider three games where luck causes a player to lose X% of the time, which is better:
- The loser is eliminated and leaves?
- The loser keeps playing, but has nothing to do?
- The loser keeps playing (perhaps unaware of impending doom)?
Euros prefer the final answer, but this answer leads to kingmaking. Elimination is clean, in that the player is free to start up a new game, and doesn't influence the outcome, but this is "rude."
But I think elimination's bad rep is tied to other aspects of "American" or Avalon Hill style games ... long, highly variable game length. Consider Titan.
If you are eliminated, it could be another hour. Or eight. If the order of the boot hit at the 30 minute mark, what do you do? Now Imagine a game of Settlers (etc) with elimination. You buy the farm at the 20 minute mark. In this case, you know that you have a free hour.
Am I secretly longing for player elimination to make a comeback? Not really, but games that keep players involved past the point of no return often can't disguise the issue...
In any case, Larry's article is good, with plenty of oxen gored. But he goes too far —
What does the U.S. presidential campaign, root canal surgery, and the World Cup have in common with the Spiele des Jahres? In each case, the process takes too damn long!
I'm no fan of soccer, but you are complaining about a month-long championship involving 32 nations that occurs every four years? You could finish two world cups during the NBA playoffs! And the World Cup only takes the top 1/6th of nations. [Perhaps Larry is talking about the qualification process....]
As for the games, I don't get spittin mad at any of his comments, and agree with a few. [Better luck next time ...]
Update: I noticed that Lewis Pulsipher blogged about this a few days ago.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Larry Laughs at Naked Emperors
- Acquire
And it's that frustration factor that bothers me more than the "dead man walking" of a player forced to continue playing a lost position. Ironically, I don't mind bad breaks if I'm fighting from behind and need things to go my way to compete--in that case, I knew winning was a long shot, so I accept my fate with equinimity. It's when I'm doing well and all I need is some average luck that bad breaks frustrate me. And in both Settlers and Acquire, you can win the game and still have periods when you're sitting on your hands due to poor rolls/draws, which I don't like no matter how well I'm doing. So to me, it's more of a matter of lack of control than being bored playing to avoid last place. (I actually rarely find myself in a position where I feel I have no chance to win--whether that's a function of skillful play or a poor sense of evaluation, I leave as an exercise to the reader.)
The smack at the World Cup is due more to it being in the news and my impatience at the "instant experts" I keep encountering, the ones who had never heard of soccer two months ago and now quote you vital statistics until you want to give THEM a head butt. (I have similar problems during the Olympics. Maybe I need to explore my inner curmudgeon.) I was just very happy when it finally ended. I agree that the NBA playoffs are far more guilty of excessive length, but with humor, current events always trump logic.
* Play for yourself and enjoy it? (This was one of Francis Tresham's goals when he designed 1829 and Civ., to make games that players would enjoy playing even when they were out of contention.) This isn't easy to do, particularly because many competitive players do lose interest when they are out of contention, but I would say that many 18xx games seem to succeed in providing fun without much kingmaking for players who, say, screw up the train rush and put themselves out of the running.
* Shake the box? Try something drastic that is unlikely to win, but might provide a chance to do so as players react to the suddenly changed strategic situation. In 18xx, this is often achieved by a player deciding to start/take on 2 or 3 new/looted companies, especially after having had one looted company dumped on you (which usually takes you out of contention). Having a lot of corporations in your hands, even without many assets among them, can often allow you to manipulate payouts and train purchases to climb back into a contending posistion. You often don't win, but you're not sitting there doing nothing, either.
* Play for variance? In Titan, try a low-odds attack on a player's titan. In Can't Stop, go for an extremely low-odds take the leader's almost completed column. There was also an Acquire-like eurogame, whose name escapes me, that allowed one to swap around your stock holdings to invest in a non-performing stock in the hope that a couple lucky tile draws would put you back in the running.
How does one provide enough fun "process" for players who are behind to enjoy while, at the same time, streamlining a game's mechanics? How do you keep players in contention? How do you provide comeback mechanisms without having them turn into "rich-gets-richer" mechanisms for the leader or introducing so much "beat-on-the-leader" that the game becomes essentially a diplomacy game? These are tough design problems, but they are, in my opinion, worthy ones.
And the 'high variance' strategy implies that you have a losing, not a lost, position. There certainly are many games where a losing player can have no hope (barring a mistake from an opponent). In a two player game, resigning is an option, but it often isn't a multiplayer game.
Now, if a game has a 'clearly lost' player on the last turn (or so), that's fine, because it means that early decisions matter. Many games just fudge this with a "double scoring in the last round" mechanic. [I'm thinking of Royal Turf, but Indonesia does it, too.]
So I think those are all fine points, but tangential to what I was aiming for. There are games (sometimes good ones) where "try to win" at some points is meaningless. How to personally deal with it is one issue, but how should designs deal with it ... no doubt it depends on a lot of other issues, but in general the Euro approach is to try to keep everyone in it (or hide the elimination so that you have to be paying attention).
I've certainly been in games with reasonably good players who have the traits "easily frustrated" and "somewhat inflexible" where, after some move took them out of their normal playing space for that game, concluded that they had lost and wanted to halt. I then convinced them that there was more play left in the game and pointed out some lines of play they might consider pursuing. After resuming play, in some instances, these players then have proceeded to -- with a bit of good luck -- win.
Now, I personally tend to be pretty far on the flexible, willing to think outside the box end of things, but I rarely conclude that I've lost (as opposed to being far behind) until pretty close to the end of many games. So, turning your question around, how can one design good player elimination mechanisms which distinguish between "far behind" and "hopeless" positions and which do not, in turn, distort the game?
As a designer, I do tend to think about avoiding player frustration and catchup properties. In Age of Exploration, I allow players to abort their current expedition. This achieves both objectives, since in addition to avoiding expeditions that have turned into long, slow deaths, it allows a player to immediately switch from a low-risk expedition to a high-risk, high-reward one (such as the Northwest Passage) if that's what it takes for a player who is far behind to catch up to the leader before the game ends.
Some games automatically end when a player is eliminated. Many 18xx games do so. I intentionally chose in 1846 to have player elimination without ending the game, as I felt this rule led, in many other 18xx games, to very "artificial" play as players jockeyed to go bankrupt with just the right amount of assets rather than build a long-term position.
Since playtesting had shown that players went bankrupt only when they got greedy and tried to start more too many corporations with middling capitalization than they could actually sustain, I viewed this mostly as a learning problem (compounded, perhaps, by not realizing that many "standard" 18xx heuristics don't work in 1846). With experienced 1846 players, player elimination rarely, if ever, occurs.
In this case, I was willing to trade off some moderate player frustration (being eliminated 2 hours into a 3-4 hour game) over greater player frustration (having to play out a lost position under some receivership rules without any real chance of winning) or distorting the intended game (by halting it prematurely). Was this the correct design decision?
Where I do think Brian is spot on is on connecting player elimination to game length. Being eliminated too early in a long game is generally much more frustrating that being eliminated near the end or in a short game.
But there is also another related problem: many games simply go on far too long after the winner is decided.
During the playtesting of an early version of Fast Food Franchise, we noted that the winner at the half-way point was almost always the winner at the end. So, I ended the game half-way through (and multiplied all the $ amounts by 2 so that your goal was still to make a million $). Now, players typically get eliminated only 10-15 minutes before the game ends on money (if it ends on money and not successive eliminations). Not always, but most of the time. And so, the player elimination in this game doesn't bother me.
There is definitely luck in Acquire, but a fair amount of it -- more than may be apparent at first blush --is "manageable luck". Now liking manageable luck in a game is still a matter of taste, of course (and I suspect I enjoy manageable luck more than Larry does).
Brian's setup variation isn't bad, but, while the free share for starting a hotel is nice, it's not drawing hotel creation tiles that is vital in Acquire, it's having the merging tiles that usually allows one to control and win the game.
Note that I said "having", not "drawing", the merging tiles. What many players miss in Acquire is that it is often possible to promote seemingly useless tiles in your hand into merging tiles by playing other tiles that will often induce other players into creating hotels nearby (increasing the odds that your tile becomes a merger tile). Players also often waste potential merger tiles by instead playing them to grow the size of their hotels.
There was once a simple computer program called "Hotel", an Acquire knockoff. You could easily play a complete game of it in under 10 minutes playing computer opponents. The AI was pretty primitive, so an experienced player could trivially win a 3 player game.
However, as I increased the number of AI players and my control over the board decreased, I started to lose more games, dropping to about 50% at 5 players and 30% at 6 players. One very slow week, I played a lot of 5 and 6 player games, working on my tile placement skills. By the end of it, I was winning over 80% at 5 players and about 55% at 6 players (yes, I played enough games -- over 300 that week! -- that these %s are meaningful).
Ever since, my tile placement skills in Acquire have been much, much better. I also don't play Acquire with 6 -- your board control just isn't good enough; the odds are pretty good that someone other than you will draw just the right tiles when they need them.
The other typical mistake many make in Acquire is to spend all of one's initial cash too soon.
Yes, if you can fully invest and then immediately pull off a merger to get more cash, you shouldn't forego buying shares. But, if you're not sitting on an initial merger tile that is favorable to you, passing early on and ending up with cash to invest when the board situation is clearer and no one else has any cash will often outweigh not having any immediate merger tiles.
Too many players invest all their cash and play potential merger tiles too soon and then find themselves in the boring and frustrating position of having to draw just the right tile before the player with spare cash and merger tiles takes control of the game.
If you ever try Acquire again, Larry, I would also recommend trying it with 3 players. The fewer players, the more control you'll have over board position.
And the fact that Acquire plays so well with 3 is yet another sign that, as Brian points out, it was really the one of the first "Euros"...
I've always suspected that I haven't truly given Acquire a fair shake. One thought is that I don't do the money management particularly well (I tend to deplete my initial stake pretty early), but now you also raise the point that I may not be planning for the mergers properly, either. My concern has always been that I've given the game so many chances that either I'm right about it or I'll probably never master it. Maybe I just need a few hints, like the ones you've given today.
The biggest problem is that Acquire rarely comes out these days, so it may be a long time before I can try out these new tactics. Still, if the opportunity arises (and there's only three or four players), I'll give it another shot. I never mind being proved wrong about a game if it turns out to be better than I thought it was.
Which brings me to Kingmaking. My MTG group in grad school fell apart because of player who insisted on metagame strategy for multiplayer games. Simply put, if you had a choice on who to knock out, and you selected him, he would devote the following game to attacking you at any cost. We argued (he was in law school...so we argued a lot) and then I simply explained that there was no point in playing him because our philosophies were too different for us both to enjoy playing against each other. Fundimentally he wasn't playing to 'win every game' but instead to win a specific game at the cost of a future game. This, and other events, led me to codify my rules for Kingmaking...aka how to play when your actions strongly affect who the winner of the game will be, and it's very unlikely to be you.
1) Always play to win, if winning is possible. This includes actions such as attacking a superior force even though you need to roll 6 6's to win and the attack might weaken the 1st place player enough to cause them to lose. I try to be very sure I'm right before trying something this crazy.
2) If winning is impossible, play to improve position, but not at the expense of a player who might be able to win, unless you could overtake his posiiton. E.g. I was once thrilled when on the last turn I beat up on the 3rd place player allowing me to finish tied for 4th, rather than alone in 5th (in a 5 player game). I wouldn't have done it if I'd had to beat up on the 1st place player and kept him from winning. I would have done to the 2nd place player though if it would have let me get up into 2nd.
3) If winning, or increasing position is impossible, do something to differentiate yourself without affecting the other players. Finish the game with the most money, finish the game with a hand of 8 sheep, etc. Basically, keep yourself entertained.
Well, I'm working under reasonable assumptions -- no sudden collusion for one player (although ganging up on leaders is OK, etc). No egregious errors by the leader(s), p(lucky break) < epsilon (In english - required luck must be described as "Un-#$(-ing believable").
In well regulated games with equal players, it's pretty rare. But take, for example, Caylus. I've played plenty of games where a player is eliminated by the end of the second stage (or first).
More later
But the above is a 'strong' condition of "lost game." A weaker condition occurs when the losing player could theoretically win, but isn't skillful enough.
After all, from the point of view of the player, it's a lost game. If i'm playing chess down a rook, I may be theoretically able to win or draw. But if I'm against a Grand Master (and there's no forced line) that's not likely. In fact, if I'm a strong player, it's downright insulting to continue. The same is true for some Euros, but resignation isn't often an option because they are multi-player games. Sometimes the lost position occurs due to luck, sometimes due to skill.
Lou wrote:
Someone who can't recognize a lost position won't likely be frustrated. But a player who (incorrectly) believes its hopeless may throw away a potential win and kingmake, whine, etc.
The reaction is up to the player; but how should the design mitigate this? The point that Lou raises means that designs should not only make a reasonable effort to keep all players involved, the players should believe it. There are bad ways of doing this and good ways ... (Tom discusses several above).
Our Thursday night group ranges from rank beginners to old hands, and allowing gangups in this way makes it more competitive. It's an expected and fun form of handicapping without tweaking the rules.
Bam, out, wander around. I had some fillers in my bag, so I did get in some open gaming.
If not for that, coulda been a slow night.
I know one Titan group that played entire games of Magic during other people's fights.
I actually commented about that in my reivew of Titan (lo these many years ago) that gmaes like that helped it gain in popularity.