On Gamer's Games

Similarly some pretty convincing arguments were made that I should check out Bios: Megafauna. I probably will at some point in the spring.

Trajan is still on my must play again list.

The whole interaction of the Mancala-like action selection versus pursuing a strategy on the main board just fascinates me.

Pretty soon, you are going to have 3 copies of The Manhattan Project!

I don't know anything about Vital, but CO2 and Kanban are both interesting from their themes alone. I've had my eye on them for awhile.

Whilst you and I both like deeper games, our selection methods seem polar opposites! I take a more try it and see approach, rather than selecting games to try based on who the designer was or what mechanisms are ensconced therein.

Thus your style often comes off as somewhat sniffy to me, whereas I don't think that's who you are or how you're trying to be here.*

Time passes... the other day I started incorporating my version of the RondCala mechanism into a game idea I had a couple of years ago about The Knights Templar. I have a good feeling that this could turn out to be a great, involved game, and I hope to get it to a point I can try it out soon!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog comment thread. So as not to be entirely off-point, I'll comment on Jesse's list:
The Great Zimbabwe sounds pretty neat, I'd never heard of it but I'll watch out for it now.

Also, I very much liked The Manhattan Project on my first play at BGG.con. I expect there to be some AP going on, as the options of where to place your workers increases exponentially over time (with the Espionage action, you have to look at all players' boards to see where you want to place workers).

Honestly, I am okay with coming off as sniffy or pompous or whatever. I think by having fairly strong opinions while being clear about why I have an opinion I should be a useful for metric for people in making their own decisions, even if they do not always agree with me. Equivocating about things I dislike does not help people who are reading my contributions.

Trajan is still on my must play again list.

The whole interaction of the Mancala-like action selection versus pursuing a strategy on the main board just fascinates me.

Not to further sidetrack the convo, but there isn't really a "strategy on the main board." Each instance of taking an action is a relatively isolated event where you gain a handful of points. Whoever gains the most handfuls over the course of the game wins. There is a little more to it, but most players take most actions multiple times per game, and the order in which they are taken rarely matters (other than in a very tactical sense).

...and the next Andreas STEDING game to come Five Points (but there is not that much info about this game).

I disagree strongly with this assessment.

It's true that you end up taking each of the actions over the course of the game, but in fact the order you take them in is extremely important (like with any Rondel game), and what you do with that action is also extremely important.

For example, while you have to take the Military action once in a while, there's a big difference between taking it just to get a tile (and in that case timing can be important to reach the tile you want while it's still there), and pursuing a militaristic strategy wherein you will score a large number of points through the Military action.

Similarly, you could consider the Craftsman action a kind of throwaway action, take it less often or only when forced to (to make the rondel work out for example), or you could concentrate on that action, doing it more often and reaping better rewards. And in that case you have the choice between diversity of tiles for more actions, or specialization for more points.

One of the things I like about the game is that there are many different approaches, and they are overlapping - you and I might be concentrating on different approaches,and yet we might be in competition for the same action.

If you're finding that "Each instance of taking an action is a relatively isolated event where you gain a handful of points. Whoever gains the most handfuls over the course of the game wins" - I'd suggest that's naive in 2 respects:
1. Each instance of each action is not isolated... the Trajan action informs and affects your color bit placement and in fact action ordering down the road, the Craft and Military actions are tied together geographically as well as that they build on each other, the card drawing set collection builds on previous card draw actions... etc. They're all related, not isolated.
2. If you're not coordinating your "handfuls of points" then you will lose to someone who is. Your description only fits if players are playing randomly, and one would think that players trying to win will not just play randomly.

Honestly, I am okay with coming off as sniffy or pompous or whatever. I think by having fairly strong opinions while being clear about why I have an opinion I should be a useful for metric for people in making their own decisions, even if they do not always agree with me. Equivocating about things I dislike does not help people who are reading my contributions.

If you replaced the Mancala mechanic with a worker placement mechanic, I would hardly qualify it as a game.

Ben, while I totally sympathize with your complaints about Trajan - I haven't played it, but I got the same impressions - I don't think this characterization is a fair one.

Feld tends to design games where the central mechanic is all about limiting your ability to take certain actions. Notre Dame would be a crappy game if you replaced the card draft with worker placement. ItYotD would be even crappier if the actions weren't grouped, forcing you to make tradeoffs.

So, while I think the Mancala is a gimmicky mechanic, manipulating it to get what you want more so than the others players *is* the game.

Trajan is still on my must play again list.

The whole interaction of the Mancala-like action selection versus pursuing a strategy on the main board just fascinates me.

In fact, this game cuts so strongly against my preferences in game design that I often find myself getting upset seeing other people say nice things about it. Despite owning the game, I have had to unsubscribe from the game's forum because people's praise of it sounds so inane and misguided that it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I enjoy the game much more when I don't have to think about how utterly stupid it is.

[I too have cooled on Alien Artifacts. My main gripe is that it won't be compatible with my other expansions, which seems a whole bunch of tear down and set up to play it.

In that case, Ben, I'll try to stay our of your line of sight when I play Trajan. Obviously, our opinions about the game differ, as I consider it one of the best designs from last year. It's possible that your feelings about it are due to a different play experience between the 2 and 4 player games, but I suspect it's just not your cuppa tea.

Are there any Feld games you like? Even though his games are all quite different mechanically, the general feel of his games are much the same. For the most part, if you've found you dislike a couple of them, you'll probably dislike them all. (Fortunately for Herr Feld, the opposite tends to be true as well.)

I was trying to point out that, outside of "the Mancala-like action selection," I didnt experience anything that felt like "pursuing a strategy on the main board.". Compared to, say, Dominant Species, where the action selection feels like merely the means through which an interesting, strategic majorities game is effected, Trajan feels a bit like it is missing half a game: it has an interesting, challening way to pick actions, but resolving/implementing the actions doesn't stand on its own as a payoff.

I don't mind most action selection mechanisms, but the whole mancala bit seems extremely contrived to me.

Most of the people I know who plan to buy it also plan to buy an extra copy of the base game.

Given how many hours for the dollar Race for the Galaxy and its expansions have given its fans, I don't think that's an unreasonable position.

I'm tracking that one as well, though I guess I'd be surprised if it's released in 2012. Still, if it's tied into NYC history, I'm obliged to check it out. And I loved Steding's Hansa Teutonica and appreciated aspects of Norenberc.

In my hands !!!!

Kogge is masterpiece.
Hansa Teutonica is a gem.
Norenberc is underrated and deserves a closer look.

Yeah, I kinda hate them all.

Norenberc is underrated and deserves a closer look.

Not to sidetrack the convo, but as a side note on the subject of the Rond-cala mechanism...

When I first read about Trajan and this Rondel/Mancala mechanism I assumed it would work like this:

1. Choose an action with cubes in that action's bin
2. Resolve that action with strength based on the number of cubes in the bin
3. Distribute cubes from that bin Mancala style, thereby incrementing the strength of the next few actions.

I was obviously incorrect - instead it's:

1. Choose a bin and distribute the cubes from that bin Mancala style
2. Do the action associated with the last bin you put a cube into.

While that's very interesting, I was disappointed in how difficult it seemed to be to chain actions in an order I wanted to. This was frustrated further by making it matter whether you drop off White-Blue-Red vs Red-White-Blue vs Red-Blue-White, only you don't have any real way of knowing which of those orders will be useful and which will not when the time comes for it to matter.

I actually very much liked the rest of the game, and as I've only played once I'd very much like to play some more. However, I can't help but think that my incorrect assumption (noted above) could make a much smoother action selection mechanism.

Time passes... the other day I started incorporating my version of the RondCala mechanism into a game idea I had a couple of years ago about The Knights Templar. I have a good feeling that this could turn out to be a great, involved game, and I hope to get it to a point I can try it out soon!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog comment thread. So as not to be entirely off-point, I'll comment on Jesse's list:
The Great Zimbabwe sounds pretty neat, I'd never heard of it but I'll watch out for it now.

Also, I very much liked The Manhattan Project on my first play at BGG.con. I expect there to be some AP going on, as the options of where to place your workers increases exponentially over time (with the Espionage action, you have to look at all players' boards to see where you want to place workers).

The fact that most actions gain more value if you take them repeatedly doesn't mean that choosing to focus on repeatedly taking the same actions over the course of the game is a particularly strategic decision.

Perhaps this is simply a function of player count (my plays so far were all two player), but there is nothing interesting in the decision between (1) taking military a lot or (2) taking the builder a lot or (3) taking shipping a lot or (4) taking the senate a lot.

For me, the game boils down to: pick an action, do it a lot. When you can't (or it isn't advantageous) do whatever is tactically best.

There are no real risks, no clever moves, and no trade-offs or interrelationships tied to whatever minimal path dependence exists. If you replaced the Mancala mechanic with a worker placement mechanic, I would hardly qualify it as a game.

EDIT: In fact, this game cuts so strongly against my preferences in game design that I often find myself getting upset seeing other people say nice things about it. Despite owning the game, I have had to unsubscribe from the game's forum because people's praise of it sounds so inane and misguided that it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I enjoy the game much more when I don't have to think about how utterly stupid it is.

Maybe we're not using the word "strategy" or "strategic" in the same way?

Heh, one could distill any game to this description

I still disagree here... as the game was designed around that mechanism, is it really fair to say "replace that with some other mechanism the game wasn't designed around, and you wouldn't call it a game?"

Out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about other Rondel games?

If you do not want your copy of the game, is there something you'd like to trade it for? Having only played once, I would like to explore the game further!

Probably not. To me, choosing between performing action A a lot and performing action B a lot feels arbitrary. Unlike in other games, the way you implement your game-long plan doesn't appear to change with what you pick, and there also don't appear to be significant ripples w/r/t other actions that emanate from your choice. (there may be, but I certainly haven't experienced them)...

If I were designing Trajan, using the same action-selection mechanism and the same components, I would have rule changes similar to the following (I have no idea if these are balanced, they are just for example):

Military
- The territories are only seeded with food, soldier, and fire tokens. These now represent the increasing demand of the populace as you expand.
- When you move your military leader into a new territory, add the token in that territory to the face-up circular demand tokens for this quarter year.
- in order to place a legionnaire, a player must move back one space on the Senate track.

Ships
- Ships start grey-side up. This represents your limited trading opportunities at the start of the empire.
- Each time a player places a legionnaire in a 3, 5, or 6 VP territory, he or she must flip one ship to the gold side, if possible. This represents the expansion of trade opportunities as the empire expands.
- Selling goods works as in the base game, except that a player may only play cards by selling them to a ship.
- When a player draws cards, he or she may either draw 3 from the top of the face-down deck and then discard a card from his hand, or the player may take all the cards in one discard pile.

Forum
- The Forum is seeded only with votes and with extra action tiles.
- in order to take a tile from the forum, a player must move back one space on the Senate track.
- Untaken extra action tokens remain at the end of the quarter-year.

End of Quarter-Year
- The players tally votes, cashing in vote tokens acquired at the forum, if they so wish. The player with the most votes chooses one of the face-up bonus tiles and passes it into law. At the end of the game, that tile will provide bonus scoring applicable to all players. The ore tile is discarded.
- The player who is furthest ahead on the Senate track (ignoring vote tokens) is named Consul. He or she chooses whether the just-passed law will be emphasized (gold side) or ignored (grey-side). If ignored, the Consul moves back one space on the Senate track.
- Players do not reset the Senate track at the end of the quarter year.
- The players then determine which needs of the people are the most prevalent (counting both circle and square tokens equally). For each completed Trajan tile of a particular type, discard one token of that type. - Players score based on how well they satisfied those needs. For the most prevalent need, the first, second, and third best players score 6/3/1 points. For the second most prevalent need, the first and second best players score 3/1 points. For the third most prevalent need, the best player scores 1 point. (Any player with no contribution toward satisfying a need scores 0, even if multiple players are tied with zero).
--- For food, players consider the number of food cards (wheat, cattle, wine, etc.) that each has played.
--- For soldier, players consider the number of each of their legionnaires + military leader in the territories.
--- For fire, players consider the number of building tiles that each player has obtained.

I would make some changes to the construction action, too, but I hope this gives you the gist of what I am complaining about.

- I want individual actions that depend on my prior actions (e.g., expending Senate influence in order to deploy a legionaire) and have repercussions for my future actions (e.g., flipping ships when establishing legionaires). In Trajan, actions feel isolated ("score x points," or "take one tile").
- I want strategies to have subtleties (do I take low-value territories to open shipping lanes or go right for high-value territories?) and risks (racing to high-value territories means greater demands that you are less likely to satisfy because you have spent all your actions on expanding).
- I want players to have common goals to foster competition (demand majorities and shared bonus scoring) and to be able to set those goals (through the competition for votes).
- I want different strategic paths to feel different, to have different risk profiles, and to require different skills.

The closest analogue is probably Homesteaders. I like Homesteaders, but was very underwhelmed when I first played it. I got to the end of the first auction, asked "What's next?" and was told, "Another auction.". I was confused. The auctions are just a means of acquireing something; surely the game let's you do something with the building you just acquired, right? (Answer: not really)

Trajan is like this. It has a cool way to pick what you are going to do. But the game should be in the doing (or at least a significant portion of it). This is yet another reason that thematic integration is also very important to me: I want the substance of my actions to tell the story of the game. Trajan doesn't feel like it has a story.

I am hoping to sell it, but if I don't get any takers by Unity Games (Feb. 4th), I'll shoot you a Geekmail to see if you are still interested.

This has been fun. I hope you take my commentary in the good nature intended.

Yes! I played it last night. It seems reasonably solid but I am not certain where it will end up in the overall universe of CDGs until I have played it more. There are a few shifts that seem significant enough that they are going to take some plays to absorb.