Aren't We All Minimaxing?

I played Steam last night, and when it came to deciding whether to outbid the high bidder for first in the initial turn order I had to consider how important the locomotive action was to me. I reasoned with myself that I would need to be first in the turn order to get locomotive; however to take first I would have had to bid $4. The cost to upgrade the locomotive would have been another $6 (to level 2), meaning I was capitalising twice to get that extra link’s shipment. This would have been break-even on the action, with the added benefit of first in turn order for this turn. However, the available goods at the start only allowed for a single two-link shipment wherever I built; this meant that there was more benefit at that point in not paying for a locomotive upgrade at all ad using an action to upgrade instead.

I then realised I had been minimaxing heavily to arrive at that conclusion. Now, me personally, I’ve never seen minimaxing as a pariah, but I hear tell that some do. Minimaxing is the act of working out the best possible action to choose with the intention of maximising benefit and minimising cost. Minimaxing is conducive to analysis paralysis (AP), a much-feared condition of the strategy game; but surely AP is a necessary evil, especially if we’re all going to insist on playing games requiring any level of planning? And regardless of what the game system encourages, aren’t we all just minimaxing anyway?

This is probably less obvious when the game is not directly employing an economic engine of sorts. A trick taking card game; Wizard for instance. The resource is your hand of cards and you have to best play those cards to maximise the tricks you win (or in this case get as close as possible to your target). Or how about a wargame? The cost is your forces, the benefit is some objective (be it territorial or something else).

I mean, surely this is exactly what strategy games are all about. You’re given a situation, a problem or set of problems if you will; you then set about dealing with that situation in order to put yourself in a potentially winning position. So perhaps we’re all just minimaxing, even if we don’t always know it?

Failure is an Option?

I'm sure many gamers out there are familiar with the word "broken". In general when we're talking about games it should only ever apply to games which do not work because it is too easy for one player to exploit a flaw in the game's system and produce the most undesirable effects which render the game unplayable.

However, a lot of games carry similar features which actually don't break the game at all. Take for instance Royal Palace; if a player should happen to move all of his servants off the stairs, there is no way he will be able to move any of his servants for the rest of the game. I've been thinking about this for a while; there have been lots of games where suicide moves can be easily arranged which will throw the player making them into a guaranteed losing position.

You may have noticed a sort of counter-culture emerging in society that goes against the grain of the ever-prevalent blame-culture. This is the train of thought that if some system, method or legislation allows for almost obvious mistakes to be made, then somebody goes ahead and makes them, it is the fault of the system, method or legislation. It's conveniently forgiving sometimes, mainly it's acceptable because the reasoning would follow that if a system allows something to happen the system is flawed.

So my question is this: should game rules or systems exclude the possibility of suicide moves by ruling against their occurrence, or should the problem with such decisions be completely left to the players?

Things Which Are Starting to Really Annoy Me in Boardgames

Arbitrarily Unpredictable Elements

I'm not talking about dice here; you see dice and you know what to expect. I'm not necessarily talking about the draw of a card, though in some games the element is represented as such. I am talking about in-game situations, in a game which can generally be cosidered a controlled game, which allow one player to blow the opposition out of the water simply because they met the right conditions at the right time without any real prior planning. A case in point is the Coal Trader card in Le Havre, the problems with which have come to light almost half a year after the game went into general circulation.

Redundant Components

There seem to be more and more of these lately; they seem to be the result of game publishers or manufacturers simply wanting to bulk-out the box contents. Why do I need the board in Le Havre? Why the scoring track in games where progressive in-game scoring is not used? Why the extra part or parts which indicate your intentions for an action you are about to carry out anyway? In some cases (Cavum comes to mind - I ought to review that one) it's the box itself, though I tend to be more lenient on that as long as they don't decide to bump up the price for something which could have been boxed for less.

Wrong Components

Why is it that some games seem to use the most impractical parts? Take the scoring device in Capitol; a complete design flaw which would have worked much better had it been a track around the outside edge. That was a long time ago in terms of the hobby; yet there are still mistakes like this made constantly. Oversized empty city markers in Railroad Tycoon, flimsy tiles in Galactic Emperor (though I acknowledge an upgrade is now available - got one, thanks), the locomotive pieces for track ownership in the new Age of Steam reprint, i'm sure you get the picture.

Post-Release Development


I don't have a problem with, say, the concept of living rules. I do have a problem with having to change the components I use in a game I bought in its first (or at least early) edition because somebody found out there was a problem later on. It's really, really irritating; furthermore arguments such as "wait for the second edition" or "don't buy games you haven't played, then" really don't cut it. There's a subtle but important difference between improving a game and releasing an underdeveloped game. Which brings me to...

Unnecessary Necessary Expansions

I like expansions, but I'm getting ever more aggravated by the constant flow of incomplete boardgames just so the publishers can give you the rest of it in expansion form. Absolute rubbish is often made good by an expansion, which makes me wonder why they didn't release it that way in the first instance. The real answer is because they want to milk the consumer of more money. This is acceptable from the business viewpoint, but it's only going to work with me short term. If I buy one more game which needs expanding before I can play it properly the publisher concerned is going to be sorry (well, perhaps not - there are bound to be other mugs like me to take up where I left off).

Retheming

A slightly milder rant here; I'm actually not that upset by retheming most of the time, especially if it means a rare game being reprinted. What I do have a problem with is the recycling of old games with different themes just so the publisher involved can make more on it at the gamer's expense. Like I said regarding expansions, I have no quarrel with somebody who is running a business making such decisions normally. However there's always the instance where you buy a game thinkig you are getting something different only to find it's nothing more than game X rethemed to make game Y. It brings even more confusion if the new theme and title chosen make the game look almost exactly like the game of the same name you were after for years (as in Razzia, and the remake of Ra, Razzia). Alright, like I said it's only a mild rant, but it's a problem all the same.

Reworking

It's not the reworking that's the problem so much as how so many games end up in umpteen different versions. I mean, what if there is a rules dispute and one of the players (who thought he knew the rules since 1995) finds his whole game strategy was screwed by the changes in the rules which weren't immediately so apparent?

Required Strategies

Leaving aside the broken games in which there is always a killer strategy (because I'm not likely to play them more than once), games in which there is a dominant strategy are really starting to get me riled. The requirement to follow a particular series of actions to stand a chance to achieve victory often boils a game down to a single key point in the game. In some instances, this is not an issue because of the fun ride to get there or the short game length. However, I find it more and more irritating that everything else is just a tie-breaker. The more concrete examples could almost appear to be broken, but they are not; it's simply a matter of coming first in something only mildly influential on the entire game. Recent offending examples would include Senji and Princes of Machu Picchu (though I'm not entirely sure of the latter example yet).

This Game Could Senji Mad!

There are a lot of games about feudal Japan out there and the latest in this long boardgaming tradition is Senji from Asmodee. I first took an interest in Senji during the omnipresent hype, generated for a myriad boardgames, by various voices of the gaming world prior to Spiel at Essen, last October. The game looked like a fairly interesting game of military strategy and political intrigue (a term not originally mine; I think it comes off the side of Waddington’s Campaign which is another game lacking the “intrigue” on the side of the box); both my interest and that of a friend were piqued because it looked like somebody had taken the old-fashioned strategic wargame and swept away the requirement to win solely by military means. So the plan was, when I wnent over, I would buy a copy as part of my friend’s shopping list. The problem at the time was that the only copies available at Essen were German-language copies; having been informed much of the in-game information would be affected by this, I passed on it.

Earlier this year, I came across the English-language edition and bought a copy. Again, the base-box blurb convinced me it would be the kind of game I would like (and if I’m putting it like that, reading this you just know what follows is not going to be pleasing). I bought a copy, took it home, read the rules and, after around six weeks, finally got to play it last night.

So that’s the background, now onto the game itself. The components are not too bad but not really impressive either. Drool-worthy miniatures of castles and samurai are accompanied by punch-out cardboard disks to represent players’ military units. There is also a colourful playing board and good quality hanafuda card decks (a Japanese card game; the cards are used as commodities for trading and gaining honour points), player diplomacy cards (used for making deals with other players) and samurai (which enhance your forces and give an added benefit using their special ability). Altogether the presentation is quite nice; my one complaint in this regard was a lack of province names which made indicating a province difficult without having to point directly at it (something you don’t want to do if you are trying to be secretive).

The game is, basically, about gathering “honour points” in order to be appointed Shogun by the Emperor. In the first phase of the turn, the player with the most honour welcomes the Emperor into his home (which is a posh way of saying they get the added benefit of deciding in which order play will occur). In the second phase, players enter into diplomacy with other players; a four-minute period is started and enforced by the player welcoming the Emperor. Next orders are placed in the provinces, each province being able to trade, move or recruit. Then the player welcoming the Emperor decides the order in which orders are resolved. Finally there is a round of trading and purchasing in which players may, for example, use trade cards from others, build melds from hanafuda cards for points or samurai, or return cards to other players for points. If nobody has met or exceeded the sixty-point target, then a new turn will being; otherwise the player who scores highest wins the game and the title of Shogun.

It all sounds very much like an interesting game; the problem is that it isn’t. Take, for instance, the map in the middle. One would think there would be strategic value in certain areas; there isn’t as such apart from the minimal positional effect between players. In fact, the use of a board at all seems rather tangential to the actual scoring of points. The vast majority of points can be scored from continually trading and producing; the whole prospect of attacking another player seems slightly pointless in comparison. There is just too great an imbalance there; what we really have is a Rummy-style game with combat thrown into the middle.

Combat itself is interestingly unpredictable. Enough dice are rolled that any military advantage could be instantly rendered arbitrary to the result. Furthermore, the rewards are only great if you either attack early enough in the game that you will get more from the territory taken, or attack with a strong enough force against a strong enough force that would infer a great gain in honour. Either way, should you lose it is your opponent’s gain. The greatest points gain would be as a result of an even battle at the maximum allowed strength; a successful attack brings 26 points for the attacker. But if the roll just doesn’t go your way then your target is getting 13. Furthermore, both sides will lose everything (except the victor’s samurai); and building up that army again will take more time than it would to, say, build up a set of cards scoring at least eight points and possibly more.

Clearly, combat is on the periphery in this game; so what it comes down to is clever diplomacy and getting the right cards to score higher sets. However the only way diplomacy can be clever is if you exchange the right cards at the right time. It’s a shame, because the whole diplomacy idea is quite interesting, despite it sitting in the middle of a sea of arbitrariness. For the way diplomacy works, I just feel four players isn’t enough. I concur with the premise that this may change with more players, but I can’t ever see it working as well as it seems to have been intended.

Then there is the trade itself, and cashing in those hanafuda cards; realistically this is the only part of the game that works as it should. But in conjunction with the other key strategies this just doesn’t fit. Collect cards, create melds and score points. I hate to say it, but I might as well play Ticket to Ride. Nothing else is as important as this action; taking territory from a player removes some capability for production, however the benefits to the individual for invasive action is (as I have discussed) limited.

To improve this game, I would like to see the following:

1. Make the gameboard more useful – attach direct value to the territories, or dispense with the whole strategic layout; put names in provinces so we know where we are.

2. Make the combat less nonsensical – I don’t necessarily want a “sure thing” but having to sacrifice an entire army because the roll didn’t go your way seems a touch ridiculous.

3. Allow less points for melds – extends the game a bit, but also allows the game to develop rather than revert to Rummy status.

In summary, I don’t like this game. I abhor the fact I parted with good money for it, but even worse I detest the fact that the game doesn’t behave the way it looks like it should. For a moment you think that clever diplomacy and trade present alternative strategies to the usual militaristic game style; in reality they render the militaristic element irrelevant – almost to the point that the whole board is chrome. My advice to the uninformed is as follows; if you’re after a grand strategy game based in feudal Japan pick Samurai Swords or Samurai & Katana, if you want a Rummy variant with bells on, pick Ticket to Ride or any of the myriad card games that perform a similar function.

What's in a Name?

Much fuss was made when Ameritrashers demanded an identity on Board Game Geek; there was quite a furore, a few sharp-tongued show-offs got banned and others less vocal left in disgust. It was because some of us (and I include me in that group) were not prepared to accept their genre actually existed. Their concern about identifying the games they prefer from a single term probably came from the hobby itself; wargamers were quick to dismiss the games they liked as non-wargames, strategy gamers said they were too random, Eurogamers said they were just too - well - trashy. As much as I dislike the term "Ameritrash", it seems it was all this group of gamers could find to identify themselves.

Recently some have questioned the term "Euro", or "Eurogame", for almost exactly the same reasons I personally questioned the validity of Ameritrash as a genre - the usefulness of the word in defining the games it is meant to encompass. The trouble is that, as Euros have become more prolific, their consistency has diversified. Where we could once look at our copy of El Grande or Settlers and say "That is a German Game" or "That is a Euro", it is proving more difficult to correlate newer titles to the moniker they have been assigned.

Way back when I started getting involved in the Internet, gamers were getting irate over other words, such as "Kingmaker" and "Elegance". In all honesty, these were rather petty squabbles (at least on my part) which could clearly have been settled if any of us involved accepted that it is possible to have more than one definition for a single word. To be quite frank, I find that very difficult. I understand a word can evolve to mean something other than it originally did; I accept words often have more than one meaning and I can see where it can be useful to use a particular word for the sake of convenience. My problem is that if we can't tightly define a word as representing something as particular as possible then it's not going to be a very useful word. I was once, as a child, told I was silly for implying that, if we were brought up to believe "blue" actually meant "green" then green would actually be blue. That precise difficulty is what is happening here; we can't leave such terms ill-defined or there will be naught but confusion.

However I also feel that as a genre there can be more than one interpretation so perhaps it is best if we simply leave the Euro to evolve into subgroups - much in the way rock-and-roll evolved into heavy metal and progressive variants around the same time. So for the sake of keeping a definition as loose as possible we must qualify the word "Euro" with something else. I don't precisely know what, but I'm sure over time I will.

A Festive Tale

Wrapping his scarf ever tighter, Bob Crotchet made his way through the wintry streets. The dark, Christmas Eve sky was even darker against the fresh white landscape of the city rooftops and he was weary from being worked ever so hard by his employer Ebenezer Scrote. With Christmas so close, old Scrote had been more and more keen that Bob push the sales of the new Pinkermon card game; a collectable card game about a celebrated detective agency capturing strange animals to train them. Bob had always learned in the past that, despite his strong desire to persuade old Scrote to embrace the new, European designs, it was best to keep his mouth shut and carry on. As he taught all the snooty children about the patented mechanism called Tipping, where cards are angled at approximately sixty degrees to indicate they were ready to be used, Bob had thought about Tiny Tom, his youngest son, who had suffered a serious accident involving a Monopoly board and a stack of roast chestnuts a few years before. Now Bob was on his way home, to his loving wife and large family.

Yes, the Crotchets were poor, very very poor, and although Bob worked long hard hours at the ULGS (Unfriendly Local Game Store) he found he could bring little home to them. And yet Bob knew, deep down that there must be some goodness in Ebenezer somewhere; even if the only bonus he got was the odd five-sided teetotum or a spare copy of Unclear War. Still, as he picked his way along the icy backstreets towards his house (which he had to build himself from unwanted copies of Eagle Games) he could not find a nice word to say about old Ebenezer Scrote and his ULGS – Marty and Scrote – named for both him and his partner Marty Hopkirk (long since passed on – to Coronation Street). In fact, as Bob contemplated what the family would be playing after their Christmas lunch of roast wadjet, he kept his mind and his mouth tight shut. “If I can’t say nothing nice, I won’t say a thing!”

“My, what a lovely meal, my sweet,” said Bob to his wife, “I would wager you’ll find trouble topping those sparrow hearts and rat tongues tomorrow, my dear!” It had taken Bob over an hour to stomach it all, eleven of his children were also having trouble; but Tiny Tom had single-handedly (as he was single-handed) raked through the entire goose served to him without even blinking, his huge engorged gut rumbling at the prospect of another plum duff all to himself.
“And how is my special son Tom, then?” asked Bob.

“Two hundred for passing Go!” shouted Tom, continuing with “That’s fifty pounds for landing on Mayfair – oh no, you can double that because it’s undeveloped!”

“Poor thing,” said Mrs Bob Crotchet, “he’s been like that ever since the accident. Have some more cranberry sauce you poor boy.”

Tom belched and proceeded to stare with a large grin across his moon face towards his doting father. At that moment there was a rap on the door (which was a cardboard flap made from a Conquest of the Empire box lid).

“Whoever can it be?” enquired Bob and his wife together. They carefully removed a few pieces from their sprues and peered outside.

“It’s old Scrote! Whatever is he doing here?” panicked Bob’s wife.

“Best open the door and let him in, wife,” said Bob, “it may be that the economic downturn we’ve all experienced has forced him to close down the ULGS and he has had to make me redundant.”

Scrote stepped languidly into the low light of the Crotchets’ dining room (which was a copy of Eagle’s American Civil War with the board for a table). Bob immediately pulled up a copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization – The Board Game for Scrote to sit on; so old Ebenezer sat.

“I have grave news for you, Crotchet,” he said in a low, ill-tempered voice. Then suddenly, his face changed. Ebenezer’s expression went from stern to pleased so quickly Bob had to check he hadn’t given him a real chair to sit on. “Oh it’s no use; I just had to let you know I’ve ordered heaps and heaps of Eurogames! I have even brought the first batch with me!”

From under his coat, Ebenezer whipped something out. No, not what you think; it was a copy of Carcassonne. Then he produced a box marked “Settlers of Catan” and another labelled “El Grande”.

Bob could hardly believe his eyes, nor could he believe his ears when Scrote leaned over the table/ACW gameboard and said, “So, Tiny Tom; what do you want to play”. Tiny Tom’s piggy eyes glimmered from behind the folds of flesh, as a chubby finger pointed towards El Grande. “So be it,” said Ebenezer as he assembled the Castillo.

As he did so, Tiny Tom started to turn blue. It seemed like he was gasping for air, and as his eleven brothers and sisters looked on, and as Bob and his boss Ebenezer set up the game, Tiny Tom keeled over, no longer breathing. As he hit the hard wooden floor (made from all of the cubes of every copy of Age of Mythology: The Boardgame that the ULGS had thrown out), something fell from his open mouth.

“I seem to have lost the King piece from this game,” said a concerned Ebenezer. “Ah, here it is!” chuckled old Scrote loudly, as he stooped to pick up the object that Tiny Tom had deposited in his dying throes.

And as Scrote dealt the cards and Bob distributed the caballeros, together the Crotchets said, “God bless us, every one!”

A Brick Too Far?

One of the games I brought back from Essen this year was A Castle for All Seasons. It was clear from the description I had before the fair that this would be a game of resource gathering and building – a core subject that has been used again and again in a myriad of ways. To be fair it is a theme that will never tire; there are so many possible ways of doing this. But has A Castle for All Seasons gone a brick too far?

The game comes with a two-sided game board (representing the seasons and allowing the choice to play one of two different ways), a set of resources (surprise surprise) representing sand, wood, brick and stone, a set of silver ingots, building tiles (represented like architectural plans) and cards for the players to use in their action selection (different characters allowing different actions). Of course there are also a set of cards to use with the “Winter” side of the board, which every so often throw a random spanner in the works just to make things interesting; this review does not cover how they work – I don’t think I can bear the thought of adding more chaos to a game like this.

In the four-player game (which is the only way I have played), there are twelve rounds in total; for each round a player has to choose one of eight actions, recycling his character cards only when he plays his Master Builder as an action. The implications of this are that each player should carefully consider their actions working towards maximum points at the end of the last round. Naturally, this isn’t that straightforward; some character actions depend entirely on what other players play, and there is a strict order to execution. The result can often be that the action you expected somebody else to play does not materialise – nobody builds when your Master Builder is actioned, or your Stonemason cannot buy resources because there are no workers, for example.

So unlike its older brothers Caylus and Pillars of the Earth, A Castle for All Seasons suffers the vagaries of the “blind bid”. That is not necessarily a bad thing and it does add to the challenge trying to second-guess what other players are about to do. But for a lot of people this will be very off-putting; if you like total control and/or open information in your game you best pass this one over.

The key ways to score in the game are to build buildings and populate them. Building scores are instant and applied immediately whereas the placement of a “helper” in one of the built buildings, which together form the castle of the title, will not be scored until the last round is completed. Therein lie the subtleties of the game; while building is a guaranteed fixed score, population is indeterminate until the game is over. Of course, there are some situations which bring guaranteed scores ; if all the towers have been built before the gates are populated, then the players will know the gates are going to score the maximum, for example. However getting your helper in those locations before somebody else does is all a matter of timing. Another way to score involves the Master Builder – he scores when any other player builds in the same round. I feel this is a little hit-and-miss; if one player is lucky enough to time this right and the other three build then he’s just got fifteen points. Another player might luck out and get nothing. Sure, if you know the others are probably about to build, that is when you play it, but with blind action selection there’s no guarantee - and fifteen points is a big swing.

The big picture is that Castle is an excellent combination of building and blind action selection; there are numerous challenges there and attempting to strike the balance between building and populating the buildings (though you must always build before you can populate). However the game is yet another resource gathering and building experience; if you feel you have enough of that kind of game already then it’s perhaps best to give this one a miss.