The sharper of my Gentle Readers will no doubt have noticed that I have returned, and am posting again. Whew. I should be back to more regular postings now, although I may still have sudden breaks. My actual life is rapidly approaching one of those points where Big Things Happen, which is exciting and takes precedence over this Tohu Bohu.
While I was away, however, I appear to have won the big Valley of the Drupes playtest. This is a little disconcerting, as the game ended suddenly (there was about a 1/9 chance of it doing so) just as I had taken the lead. Taking the lead also involved a random event, although a far more likely one; I expected that lead-taking to be brief. I suppose it was. Anyway, my avocados were triumphant, so everything is all right.
OK, here are my impressions of the game:
First, on the four chosen test conditions, neither the third nor the fourth had an appreciable impact, so I can’t say I have much to say on those. I think they are fine, but that’s not really based on the test run. As I will lay out below, I think the crows are too much of a factor, so I’d be against using 11 or 12 to make them even more of a factor, but then 11s and 12s don’t come up much. The second choice, to make the new fields opaque until played, worked well for me. It added an element of risk without being too random. In particular, in turns four and five (and to a lesser extent three) I was able to judge the odds of the new field being a high-value field, which made a difference in where I wanted to place it relative to the other players’ tents.
Which leads me to that first choice, to play with tents. I liked it. I particularly liked the strategy element. Eric, who I’m afraid I still think ‘ought to have won’ in some sense, played a very nice bottleneck strategy that made it very difficult for any of us to compete with him for the fields he chose. In the end, Eric only left one stone in a field he didn’t get points for, and that was a three (and was affected by crows). Of course, in the end, I only had two, on a five and an eight. Still, that was through luck and crows, more than anything; I think it was Eric’s deliberate strategy.
In fact, my own strategy was to try like hell to get to Eric’s neck of the woods before April (combined, of course, with fighting for that 10-spot). My fourth move was short, so that I could build up some stones for my fifth. As it turned out, I still didn’t have enough stones (17), so I tented nearby for what I assumed would be a futile April assault. The crows and the dice changed that, but I enjoyed making the strategy anyway. If I play again by these rules, I’d probably try the bottleneck strategy myself, depending of course on how the first two moves went. I was thinking, by the way, that Dan’s fourth move was also set up to prepare an assault on Eric’s neck, but he either changed his mind to try to fight for the ten, or that wasn’t what he was thinking in the first place. Anyway, one of the things I enjoyed the most was the strategy around who had a tent where, and therefore who could be expected to move where next turn.
My main problem with the game was how much the crows affected the play. As it turns out, this isn’t the whinging that I expected to be doing about how I got screwed by the dice, but it’s still a concern. On the whole, I’d be inclined to make the crows stop at only one field per turn, rather than all of the fields of its rank. On the other hand, this was the first time I’d played with crows, so it’s absolutely possible that after a few times around, I’d learn to play the crows more effectively, making them a part of the game rather than an intrusion. Dunno. Taking the crows into account might well mean giving higher value to stones on, say, the three (which got whacked). On the other hand, the ten is already so high-valued the fact that it’s marginally less crow-prone won’t signify.
By the way, out of the twenty rolls, the crow came up twelve once, three twice, four twice, ten twice, five twice, nine twice, six four times, eight twice, and seven three times. It was the four sixes that did in Eric; he lost nine stones on those four rolls. In my experience, that’s not a wacky curve; I would expect that in any game with a small number of rolls, one of the less probables will come up more often than one of the more probables. The question is whether that curve changes the game so much that it screws up the whole strategy thing, making it very hard to tell whether a move is good or not, as it depends on a difference in odds that is so slight.
Really, the question is how it affects the MFQ. I wouldn’t be surprised if Eric’s a trifle miffed that his plans were upended like this. I enjoyed the game, but I would certainly have enjoyed it more if I had won following a really clever move. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had lost following somebody else’s really clever move. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it more if I had lost following my own foolish mistake, or my own high-risk high-reward strategy that failed to pay off (which is what I usually call my foolish mistakes). It’ll take a few more games to get a good sense of that. The good news is that I’d be willing to play those games.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.