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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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The previous post set the foundation for the mathematical “ANAlysis” of the States of Siege games. In this post we’ll see how we can build on that foundation to launch math attacks to get a leg up against the games.
While this post contains a lot of math, you can ignore that it if you want to and still be able to understand the conclusions.
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Thematic Solitaires for the Spare Time Challenged
A blog about solitaire games and how to design them.
I'm your host, Morten, co-designer of solo modes for Scythe, Gaia Project, Wingspan, Glen More II, and others.
Archive for States of Siege
11
Comments
Tue Jun 21, 2022 8:31 am
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Morten’s guide to the States of Siege series – part 10: The currency of the States of Siege
16
Jun
2022
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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Today’s post marks a milestone in this blog series: It’s the 10th post, if we don’t count the three interlude posts that weren’t about the games themselves and we’re well over halfway through what I think will be a 16-post series – again excluding interludes.
That aside, let’s move on to what I think is one of the most interesting and crucial topics for understanding the States of Siege games. Not only that, it’s also important for game design in general. So, I hope you’ll read along even though this post is more complicated and theoretical than any of the previous ones in the series.
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Thu Jun 16, 2022 1:06 pm
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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With the 8th States of Siege game, Ottoman Sunset, a new feature was added that influenced several of the later games in the series: Embedded minigames. As with most other things in life we’re of course not talking about a clear binary distinction and some features of earlier SoS games could be argued to be minigames, but I think that Ottoman Sunset was the first game that had a minigame which stops the main game flow for a while to play out a minigame with its own set of rules.
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Mon Jun 13, 2022 6:48 am
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Morten’s guide to the States of Siege series – interlude 3: Release into the public domain
09
Jun
2022
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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While writing the next post in my States of Siege blogpost series, I realized that I don’t know what the default copyright is for blogposts are on Board Game Geek and after some quick Googling I still don’t know. If you do, then please let me know.
Either way, I think that a blogpost series like this belongs in the public domain.
So, as the author I hereby release all posts on this blog whose name starts with “Morten’s guide to the States of Siege series” into the public domain in perpetuity.
This means that anyone at any time can do anything they like with it. Copy it, tweak it, sell it, or whatever they darn well please
. I’d prefer to be given credit as the original author but that is not a requirement.
This of course does NOT extend to the images in the posts that are not made by me. I have made sure to include image credits for all images that aren’t my own, so that it’s easy to tell which go into the public domain and which do not.
To make sure that the waiver of rights applies in as many jurisdictions as possible the above-mentioned work is also released under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 license.
Preliminary table of contents for the series
1) The boring introduction
2) Event deck structures
Interlude 1: Sad news about VPG
3) Designer control, storytelling, and pivotal events
4) Tension vs. variation
5) Dice, event resolution, and combat
Interlude 2: It's alive!
6) Track systems
7) Representation of player and enemy units
8) Sidetracks
Interlude 3: These posts are in the public domain
9) Embedded minigames
10) The Currency of the States of Siege
11) Math attacks
12) Defense against math attack.
13) Are the States of Siege games luck fests?
14) The three production processes
15) Sort of the end
Appendix: BGG rankings and publication order.
+ potentially a new series of posts with my ranking and mini-reviews of the games.
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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Israeli Independence had five tracks for the enemy armies and that was basically it. Soviet Dawn expanded this by adding a non-enemy-army sidetrack representing the political power of the communists. If the counter on this track goes to one end, you immediately lose and if it goes to the other, you immediately win.
In some ways it’s like the normal tracks: 1 token moves along it, event cards can affect it, you can push it in the favorable direction by spending an action to make a die to roll and compare to a threshold number, and you lose if it reaches one end. All features of the normal tracks.
It’s a different in how it regresses, though, and the fact that you can win by getting to one end of the track is an important difference compared to the normal tracks.
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Thu Jun 9, 2022 6:25 am
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Morten’s guide to the States of Siege series – part 7: Representation of player and enemy units
25
May
2022
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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Today we get to what I think is one of the most interesting topics covered by this series of posts: Representation of the armies, monsters, and heroes on the board as well as them being named units with distinct traits.
Being able to see a named hero on the board with their own special rule makes the theme come alive to me in a way that instead of them being abstract concepts with no actual presence in the game.
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Wed May 25, 2022 6:43 am
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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I finally got back to working on this series of posts about the States of Siege games and realized that apart from a brief update about Victory Point Games as a company it’s been more than two years since my last post. That was most definitely not how I intended to publish this series, but I think that you can follow along even though it’s been so long.
If you’re new to this blog and are interested in the States of Siege games you can go here to start at the beginning but if you know a bit about the games, then you can jump in here if you prefer.
Today we’ll talk about the various track systems in the series.
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Fri May 20, 2022 9:54 am
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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A few days ago, VPG’s new owner, Dan Yarrington sent out a newsletter which as far as I know is the first time the new VPG has shown any signs of life since firing the old create staff.
By this time many of you probably already seen the news, but just to make sure that everybody who’re following this series I’ll repost the relevant parts.
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Morten’s guide to the States of Siege series – part 5: Dice, event resolution, and combat
08
Aug
2019
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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After a long vacation I’m back with the next installment of my guide to the States of Siege series of games. This time the topic is dice, event resolution, and combat.
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Thu Aug 8, 2019 2:07 pm
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Morten Monrad PedersenDenmark
Automa Factory
Automa Factory
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Some of my best experiences of solitaire gaming come from periods within a session where I’m constantly teetering on the brink of oblivion, where I feel like I could lose the game every single turn but manage to hang on until I finally succeed or get crushed. On the other hand, I also like games with a lot of variation.
Often high-tension and high-variability gameplay are at odds with each other. The tension zone is generally narrow and it’s hard to keep the game there as a designer if you don’t keep a tight control of the gameplay and that tight control is hard to maintain if there are many highly variable factors in the game.
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Thu Jul 11, 2019 11:20 am
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