{"id":13911,"date":"2011-11-22T17:40:01","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T22:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/11\/22\/13911.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:40","slug":"i-regret-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/11\/22\/i-regret-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"I regret nothing!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has been playing a lot of Sorry!<\/a> lately. Mostly, the games have been two-person affairs with YHB and the Youngest Member, who is nearly five now and understands board games without being able to really choose and implement any complicated strategy. I have found that Sorry! (the game of sweet revenge)<\/i> is almost ideal for adult-and-child play, because the game is designed to help the last-place person catch up.\n

The next bit will be obvious to people familiar with the game, but I want to go over it anyway: almost all the special cards (that is, the cards that do something other than move a piece n<\/i> spaces forward) are tilted to help the player in last much more than the player in first. The Sorry!<\/i> card itself, of course, is effectively a lose-a-turn card for a player doing well enough to get his last piece out of Start. The 4 is really only bad for someone whose only move is to back out of the safety zone. Also, once your last piece is in the safety zone, the high-value cards are lose-a-turn cards for you (but extremely valuable for a player who is on the last lap. Even the 7 card that is so wonderful in the middle game is not helpful on the last piece. All of those combine to make unlikely that the player who gets out to an early lead will win before the other player(s) at least get very close to victory themselves.\n

Game-players may well be thinking that it sounds terrible. If you use whatever strategy is available to you to gain a significant lead, you are punished; if I play poorly and fall behind, I am rewarded. This is true. Sorry!<\/i> is not a good strategy game, even when compared to other board games (such as Careers<\/i>, obviously, or Monopoly<\/i>). It does, though, have strategy choices, unlike the Uncle Wiggly Game<\/i> or Hi, Ho Cherry-O<\/i>, or (shudder) Candyland<\/i>. It’s an intermediate game, which is exactly what is needed. Pretty soon, the Youngest Member be on to Careers<\/i> and whatnot. Or we can start doing the hand-of-cards version, I suppose, which I have never tried.\n

Anyway, I wasn’t actually going to write about game-playing with five-year-olds, but if GRs have any suggestions for board games that would work with a precocious kid and an adult (or a card game for that matter—he seems too young for Gin, if you know what I mean, but perhaps ready for Casino), I’d love to hear them. Mostly I was wondering what people’s take is on this balance of making it possible for an early trailer to catch up and versus rewarding good play. It has always seemed to me that games that allow one player to dominate the whole game are low MFQ, and even more than that, games that frequently have one player essentially eliminated early in the game are low MFQ. On the other hand, Sorry! (the game of sweet revenge)<\/i> clearly goes too far in that direction (for adults who are at least a trifle serious about strategy). What medium-length games that get the balance right for grupps? What medium-length games have a clever way of avoiding the problem altogether?\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger unfortunately is not given his choice of color, but must use the pawns the little momzer wants me to, because pick your battles, you know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puff-piece"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19460,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13911\/revisions\/19460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}