Tobold's Blog
Thursday, December 30, 2021
 
Cleaning up my Steam Wishlist

I don't know how you handle this, but I tend to use the Steam wishlist to mark games that I hear about and am interested in, but don't want to immediately buy. When there is a sale, I check which of the games have a good discount, and then decide whether I actually want to buy them. From time to time, I have to clean up my wishlist, because games tend to accumulate there faster than I want to buy them. I had over 50 games listed there now, and just managed to eliminate several.

One thing I thought about this time was to check my Steam wishlist against my PC Game Pass. I had games like Astria Ascending and Warhammer 40K Battlesector on my wishlist, but it turned out that I have free access to these games via the PC Game Pass. Sometimes I play a game on the PC Game Pass and then remember to mark it as "Ignored - Played on another platform" on Steam, but it is better to check than to buy a game I could have gotten for free.

One other game I eliminated from my wishlist for the simple reason that the developer studio had stopped making it, and there was a message from the publisher to that effect on Steam. But more often I eliminate "abandonware" by looking at the user reviews: If as game isn't at least "mostly positive", I kick it from the wishlist, and abandoned games tend to get negative reviews quickly.

Unfortunately my wishlist is still rather large. However, 15 games on it are "coming soon", so they haven't even been released in Early Access yet. Another 21 are in Early Access, and I tend to be a bit more careful before buying these. With the exception this year of Wartales, which I bought in Early Access this year on a recommendation, and it turned out to be one of the best PC games I played all year.

One sad record on my Steam wishlist is Warring States. A turn-based, hex-based, historical war game that looks quite interesting, but just not interesting enough. Steam tells me that I added it to my wishlist back in 2014, and I still haven't decided to either buy it or to remove it from the list. Well, probably better than having added it to my large library of shame of bought but unplayed Steam games.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:56 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
 
An interesting offer from Epic

Most of my PC games are on Steam. However, like many people, I do also have an Epic account, because they give you a free game every week (and more frequently during these holidays). And when "buying" such a free game today, Epic game me a $10 coupon for their current sale. You get a $10 coupon for every purchase, but that weirdly includes $0 purchases. This is not the first time they do that, the last time ended up buying Assassin's Creed Valhalla for $25.

This time I went for one of the most-maligned video games in history: Cyberpunk 2077. Which of course never was quite as unplayable on PC as it was on PS4. And has been repeatedly patched since it came out a year ago. Now the game is half price on both Steam and Epic, and with the $10 Epic coupon added, I ended up paying just $20 for the game. Which is about the level which I thought I could risk on it. I don't have plans to immediately play it, but I doubt it will be much cheaper anytime soon.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Saturday, December 25, 2021
 
Merry Christmas!

Just a short post to wish all of my readers a merry Christmas! Santa brought me the board game Roll Player Adventures. Very large and heavy box, with good quality components and luxury like trays for everything, for both storage and use during gameplay. Looking forward to play this!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Thursday, December 23, 2021
 
Aftermath - undervalued

So I received my cheap copy of Aftermath and progressed on the question why it is so cheap. There are two main reasons: One is that the first wave of customers who played the game only had the rulebook to find out how the game plays; and as the rulebook isn't great, and some rules are not in the rulebooks but distributed over the adventure book or some of the cards, some people had a really hard time with their first playthroughs of the game. Obviously not a great situation, and one that is likely to seriously dent the user ratings of a board game on BoardGameGeek. However, that was back in 2019; today there are multiple videos on YouTube explaining in detail how the game plays, and you can even follow playthroughs of various people through the first mission. There is even an Enhanced Rulebook on BoardGameGeek, plus other helpful files. So, in 2021 it has become significantly easier to understand the game and play it without stumbling over the rules.

The other potential reason for Aftermath being so cheap is that the original developers, Plaid Hat Games, lost the right to the game when they split away from the giant overlord of the board game publishing world, Asmodee. Aftermath went to one of the Asmodee companies, Z-Man Games. While the new owners duly posted the usual corporate speak announcement of "The entire team is thrilled to be the new home of the Adventure Book games and continue to support them as well as explore new possibilities in that space.", the simple fact that the developers of the original game are still with Plaid Hat Games makes it unlikely that the planned expansions for Aftermath will ever see the light of day.

As I said in my previous post, you can pick up Aftermath today on Amazon for $50 in the USA, or €60 in Europe. That is not only way below the MSRP of $84.95. It is also dirt cheap considering the number of sundrop washed, large sized miniatures the game comes with, as well as the quality and quantity of the other components. And even if there will never be an expansion, the core box of Aftermath has 18 missions and 5 side missions in a kind of open world sandbox campaign that can keep you occupied for many hours. So if narrative dungeon-crawler campaign board games are something you like, I would really recommend picking up Aftermath.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
 
Armchair game designer

I like games. I also like finding out how things work. So, after playing a game for some time, I do understand certain things about how the game is designed. Pool the understanding from playing different games from board games to video game over many year, and I can claim to have some knowledge of game design. Probably not enough to design my own game, but at least enough to be able to understand not only how a rule works, but also why it is in the game.

The first use of that for me is for tabletop roleplaying games, in my case Dungeons & Dragons, when I am the Dungeon Master. A DM needs to make situational rulings, and he needs to present, or even create, the adventure. Those are all game design problems, so it helps to understand what the likely effect of something you say is on player motivation. If the halfling rogue in your party wants to jump on the chandelier, from there onto the ogre's back, and then cut the ogre's throat, both saying "you can't do that" and saying "okay, the ogre is dead" are probably bad solutions. The good solution is to require one or more checks, and on success allow some sort of bonus, like an automatic critical hit. You need to understand the game design of combat to be able to balance the difficulty of the checks with the benefit of the bonus that could be gained. You would want to reward the player from doing something beyond "I attack", but don't want to create a precedent for an easy and repeatable overpowered action.

But I also use my knowledge of game design to modify games, some people might call it cheating. Cheating is a tricky business: Some video games have built-in cheat consoles, that for example let you activate a "god mode", in which you are invincible; not a good idea in most cases, as it could easily kill all the fun of a game. But when you understand the design of a game, you also understand that it is possible that some things are in the game purely to make the game longer. If a game element is clearly a grind, I don't feel bad about modifying it. I recently saw a YouTube video where somebody said that he didn't like the Tainted Grail board game, because the grind necessary to re-light the menhirs took the fun out of the game for him. I haven't started playing Tainted Grail yet, it is on my board game shelf of shame, but I already know how it plays. The menhirs are important enough for the game that I wouldn't remove them, but I wouldn't feel bad to change the rules to make them stay alight longer, giving the players more time to explore. Tainted Grail is a €100+ (and even more expensive in the US) board game; if there is a rule in it that makes the game not fun for you, would you rather change the rule, or give up on playing the game?

I feel the same about some video games, for example I remember in Assassin's Creed Odyssey hating the collection of wood, because it was a grind that for me wasn't the part of the game that I was playing it for. But there is software like Cheat Engine or WeMod that allow me to cheat and modify such game elements. The trick is to use your knowledge of game design to understand what the actual game and challenge is, so as to not destroy that, and what the grindy content is where there is no harm in skipping it.

Even more tricky than eliminating grind elements is the modification of difficulty. Unless a game is PvP (and I rarely play PvP games), the challenges in both board and video games can be somewhat arbitrary. You never want to modify those to be completely trivial, but different people have fun at different difficulty levels. Video games have made great advances in game design over the last decade, so for example games that have a lot of story and exploration these days often offer a "story mode", in which the challenge is minimized. For the people who play the game for the story and exploration that might be the perfect solution, while others play for the challenge and can instead choose one of the harder modes. With board games, variable difficulty level is not as common; but it is far easier to modify the rules of a board game than to hack a video game. You just need to understand enough of the game design to know whether changing for example the healing potion to give you back one more health is something that would make the game slightly easier or whether that would make the game trivial.

The purpose of a game is to have fun. It is possible that a game isn't fun, either because of a flaw in game design, or because of a game design element that might be fun for other people, but isn't for you. We live in a world with such a huge supply of games that there is a temptation to just move on to the next game if something isn't fun to you. But in some cases I find it worth while to modify a game to make it fun, rather than giving up on it.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:28 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Sunday, December 19, 2021
 
Why is Aftermath so cheap?

Once upon a time, Kickstarter board games were a good deal and comparatively cheap. Take for example Gloomhaven: If you had participated in the Kickstarter, the regular version with plastic miniatures would have cost you $79. If you buy Gloomhaven today on Amazon, you pay $116.99, and that is already discounted from a $139.99 MSRP. In 2021, I pledged €99 for a base copy of Agemonia without miniatures (except for the heroes), because I didn't want to pay €149 for the version with miniatures. Games that aren't crowdfunded aren't much cheaper, so I didn't pick up the new Descent for $175 MSRP (or about $140 discounted).

So I was watching a YouTube video about the best narrative games, and stumbled upon Aftermath from Plaid Hat Games. Now I did like their Forgotten Waters, so I checked some gameplay videos and really liked what I saw: You play a group of rodents in a post-apocalyptic world, with missions that involve stuff like getting a pack of snacks out of a vending machine. The game has various missions, variable encounters even if you revisit the same map, and a colony management system between missions. Reminded me of Kingdom Death: Monsters in the cute and more casual-friendly version. The game comes with 23 plastic figures of heroes and monsters (and cardboard tokens for less monsters), and those plastic figures are surprisingly large. And what does the whole thing cost? $85 MSRP, but discounted to under $50 on Amazon.com. As that would be a lot of delay and shipping cost from the USA to Europe, I ended up buying an English version on Amazon.de for €60, which is still a steal.

Why is this game so cheap, compared to games with similar amount of components and fewer / smaller miniatures? One possibility is that this is because the game is from 2019, before inflation and shipping cost exploded, and nobody has adjusted the price to the new reality yet. The other possibility is that some board game companies with games that aren't crowdfunded are still conservative with their pricing. While all the hype of some Kickstarter board game projects and an increased demand during lockdown periods has maybe persuaded some other companies that they could gouge their customers some more, pocketing the money while blaming inflation. I must admit that I backed some of those games at prices I wasn't sure were justified, even if I mostly limited myself to the basic versions of the core pledge. But with a growing collection, and rising prices, I might skip more crowdfunding campaigns next year.

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:44 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, December 16, 2021
 
Weird VPN use

When I am not in a mood to play a game, or feel too tired, I like watching YouTube videos, mostly about games. But as YouTube Premium is excessively expensive, I am using the free version with ads. The only problem with that is that most of the ads that YouTube shows me are in Dutch, and I don't speak that language. So at first I tried to fiddle with all sorts of settings in YouTube and Google to tell them that I don't speak Dutch, but would be okay with German, English, or French. Nothing worked. My IP address in Belgium is in a Dutch-speaking location, and what all my experimentation showed me is that this is the one and only factor that determines advertising content. Which is stupid, but not unusually so. A lot of stuff on the internet completely ignores the possibility that you might be an expat who doesn't speak the local language. And in a place like Belgium, where language is a highly complicated topic (I do speak 2 Belgian languages, just not the third), I often run into language problems, because apparently the "inter" in internet doesn't stand for "international".

But a few weeks ago I signed up again for a VPN service, ExpressVPN, because that one works with Netflix, and I wanted access to the Netflix libraries of other countries. And I just realized that I can use that to solve my YouTube problems: If I pretend that I am in Germany, or England, or France, YouTube finally shows me advertising commercials that I can actually understand. Yeah, I still skip them as soon as possible, most of the time, but the bits I do see or can't avoid are a lot more interesting in a language I actually speak.

I admit that this is a very weird use of a VPN service. YouTube / Google should be interested in showing me advertisement that I can understand, so there not being any language option for ads is really counterproductive. I am now basically using a paid-for VPN service to overcome a settings design flaw of YouTube. This is the wonderfully weird world we live in.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:36 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
 
Roleplaying game in a box

While Dungeons & Dragons is a great game to play in a group of 4 to 7 people, you can't really play it solo, and it isn't working all that great for just 2 players. So, many of the board games I played this year, solo or with my wife, were of the "roleplaying game in a box" kind. These games emulate the experience of a roleplaying game, to some extent, without the need of a dungeon master or larger group. And it is interesting to see how they do that.

One of the first board games in which one could be a warrior or a wizard that I played was Talisman, back in the early 80's. There are a lot of games these days where you play some sort of fantasy hero, one game of that type I own but haven't played yet is Altar Quest. But in this post I don't consider these games, because they aren't story-based. There are numerous "dungeon crawler" games in which you don't take any story decisions, but just fight random monsters in a random dungeon. That can be fun, but here I would like to talk about games in which the story is more prominent.

If the story is an important part of the game, the game needs a way to tell you that story, and ideally in a way that allows you to make decision and get a different story outcome based on those decisions. The classic way to do that is in a book with numbered sections, like a Fighting Fantasy / Choose Your Own Adventure book. For example Legacy of Dragonholt is very close to just being such a book. Probably the best game with a book I played this year is Sleeping Gods, which has a good mix of board game elements like worker placement and cards with a storybook that tells you the story, and a very original one at that. But I also played Folklore: The Affliction, which has a dark fantasy theme. I haven't gotten around to starting Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but that one is based on a book as well.

Another way to tell the story is via cards. The 7th Continent does that very well. One advantage is that you can have more than one card with the same number, so you can get a random result by drawing "card number 10", while "read paragraph number 10" will always have the same result. The system that The 7th Continent uses, with one or more green cards potentially followed by a golden card, and different instructions on whether to "return", "discard", or "banish" a card is quite intricate. It basically creates a sort of story-telling algorithm with some variability of outcome. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - The Adventure Game, seems to use a much simpler card based story system.

These days more and more games use an app to tell the story. Sometimes you still get a book, but have the option to have the text read to you via the app. In other cases there is only the app. The obvious advantage is that getting the story read to you by a professional voice actor in a 2+ player game is better than one player having to read the story aloud. The disadvantage is that you don't see the algorithm anymore, and don't even know if the result is always the same or there is a randomized outcome possible. We liked Forgotten Waters, and there you can even buy a DLC online and get more content without needing to get additional physical components to the game. Destinies even promised to release a "community editor" software at some point, which would allow players to make their own scenarios. The Destinies app has only minimal voice acting, but then Destinies is by far the cheapest option of the games mentioned in this post. Tiny miniatures too, but still rather good value for $45. Forgotten Waters is about the same price: An app is cheaper than printing a book or cards, but Forgotten Waters has fewer game components and no miniatures. Note that some games come with a book, but you can use a third-party app like Forteller to get the voice acting.

The game that reminds me the most of Dungeons & Dragons is the recently released Roll Player Adventures, which is on my Christmas wish list. It is book-based, but every scenario comes in a separate booklet, which resemble very much the softcover booklets that D&D adventures used to come in before 5th edition. Not sure why all the D&D stuff is hardcover these days. Roll Player Adventures, like Sleeping Gods, uses a book of maps as well as a story book. That allows for more map variety than a single game board like Altar Quest, but is faster to set up than tile-based maps like Destinies. I am looking forward to Roll Player Adventures, because it combines the "roleplaying game in a box" experience with the dice manipulation gameplay of the original Roll Player board game.

While I do like these kind of games, they admittedly do have one big disadvantage: Lack of replayability. Roll Player Adventures costs $150, and comes with 11 scenarios. Yeah, you could play through the campaign maybe twice, choosing to support a different faction. But these games inherently don't have the same replayability as typical board games without a story, which you can play over and over. On the other hand, I already have too many games and too little time, so I'm okay with playing each of these games a limited number of times.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, December 13, 2021
 
Curse of Strahd - Session 12

In the previous session, the group reached level 9 and arrived at the main attraction of the Curse of Strahd campaign: Castle Ravenloft. Now the original Ravenloft adventure module contained only the village of Barovia and Castle Ravenloft. The new 5E campaign added a lot of other locations to the lands of Barovia, in order to get players to the level where they can face a vampire lord. I understand the idea, but there are obvious flaws in that campaign structure: Curse of Strahd is a relatively open world, sandbox style of game. Castle Ravenloft is a large dungeon crawl, with 88 rooms plus 40 crypts to explore. The styles are very different, and it isn't obvious to change the complete play mode from one to the other.

As a result, the group did something that is rarely seen in a large dungeon adventure: They ignored all the lure of exploration and possible treasure, and instead went for the most efficient way towards their final goal: Beating Count Strahd von Zarovich. This was especially remarkable in the Brazier room:
This room is thirty feet square, rising to a twenty-foot-tall flat ceiling. A stone brazier burns fiercely in the center of the room, but its tall white flame produces no heat. The rim of the brazier is carved with seven cup-shaped indentations spaced evenly around the circumference. Within each indentation is a spherical stone, twice the diameter of a human eyeball and made of a colored crystal. No two stones are the same color.

Overhead, a wood-framed hourglass as tall and wide as a dwarf hangs ten feet above the brazier, suspended from the ceiling by thick iron chains. All the sand is stuck in the upper portion of the hourglass, seemingly unable to run down into the bottom. Written in glowing script on the base of the hourglass is a verse in Common.

Two nine-foot-tall iron statues of knights on horseback, poised to charge with swords drawn, stand in deep alcoves facing each other. The brazier sits between them.
[SPOILER warning] This is actually one of the deadliest rooms in the Castle. Groups might be tempted to try to destroy the brazier, hourglass, or statues. In which case the two statues animate as iron golems, likely to decimate the party. Other parties might end up not touching anything in the room, because it is a bit of a leap of faith to use the brazier. But my group read the inscription on the hourglass, correctly interpreted it, activated the brazier, and teleported straight to Strahd's tomb, where they wanted to go.

After removing the grave earth from Strahd's coffin, thus making it impossible for him to regenerate after dropping to 0 hitpoints, the group left his tomb and went into the large catacombs, the one with the 40 crypts. They looked only at very few of them, before finding a staircase up and deciding they now wanted to go straight for the boss fight. Between the Fortunes of Ravenloft tarot reading having told them where to find Strahd, and their knowledge of the castle from finding the architects model in the Amber Temple, they advanced without delay to the study. They found the secret door, and the second secret door behind the false treasure chamber, and are now right before Strahd's location. So we ended the session there, as boss fights tend to take some time.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Sunday, December 12, 2021
 
Western Digital NAS forced downgrade

I have two network attached storage (NAS) devices from the Western Digital My Cloud series. They are not only useful for backup, but also enable me to access my files from a mobile device, even if my PC isn't running. They came with some free software, namely WD Sync, a software that can be set up to automatically back up whatever folders you have on your hard drive to your NAS. And all that was running perfectly well, until recently.

I received a string of threatening e-mails from Western Digital over the year, that I would absolutely have to "upgrade" from My Cloud OS 3 to My Cloud OS 5 to keep using my devices after the end of this year. So I went through all the necessary firmware and software updates. And WD Sync stopped working. If you look very closely and follow through all the links in the article on the OS 5 upgrade, there is actually a table that says that OS 5 isn't supporting WD Sync anymore, but that information isn't exactly easy to find. So then Western Digital tells you that you should install "GoodSync for WD" instead, which I did.

After a few weeks, I suddenly get a popup message. GoodSync for WD is not actually a product of Western Digital. Nor is it provided for free to Western Digital customers. The download link on the Western Digital site actually just provides you with a free trial software. And once that free trial runs out, you are supposed to pay $30 per year to keep using it.

What a shitty move! Western Digital just forced me to downgrade my NAS storage from a perfectly working free version to a version which I will have to pay $30 a year for, just for the most basic functionality of their hardware. I'm not paying that! I'll use other solutions, although it appears that Windows Sync Center only comes with Windows 10 Pro, not the Home version. And SyncToy for Windows 10 appears to be rather complicated to install. But I will find some free solution, because I am not willing to support this underhanded tactics of Western Digital to force me to move from a free service to an expensive paid for subscription.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:47 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Saturday, December 11, 2021
 
The Sad Reality of Fantasy Worlds

I am six month into a one-year subscription to World Anvil, and have barely used it. I was checking the software out to see whether I would like to use it for my next D&D campaign, to build a corner of a fantasy world. But in practice it turns out that a world building tool isn't all that useful; the sad reality of fantasy worlds is that only a tiny portion of each of them ever gets used.

Take a well-known fantasy world, like Westeros from Game of Thrones. If you watched all the episodes of all the seasons, you might think that you know that world pretty well. From the wall in the icy north, through the seven kingdoms, from Winterfell to King's Landing, and onto Esteros, with its city states in the desert, you have seen a lot of it in the series. How? Well, Game of Thrones uses a clever trick of having a huge number of characters, and you've seen the world of Westeros through the eyes of all of them. But now try a thought experiment: Pick a single character in Game of Thrones, and imagine you only saw all the scenes of the series in which that character takes part. Even if you pick a "major" character, you will have seen a lot less of Westeros. Some minor characters stay in one location all the time. And for all intents and purposes, the parts of Westeros you don't see, might as well not exist.

That is an old problem for D&D world building. Is your group really going to see all the places you created? If you created a history of the kingdom your group is in, where does that history actually matter for the adventure you are playing? Yes, World Anvil allows you to create a full Wiki-style encyclopedia of the world you created with hundreds of articles. But unless you want to bore your players with hours and hours of exposé, you can play a campaign for a year and only touch a small handful of those articles. Your fantasy world is a Potemkin village, and any work you put in beyond the facades is wasted.

Instead of preparing every detail of your world, you can simply make up those details on the spot once you need them. The smith in the village doesn't need a name, until the players decide to visit him. A random fantasy name generator will help you make one up quickly, and then you just need to note that name down, in case the players ever come back. That method is a lot more efficient than having pre-determined all the names of all the villagers, only for your players to decide that they are not going to visit the village at all. Honestly, nobody was interested in the genealogical tree of the king anyway.

Of course, you could use World Anvil to write down the most necessary information about your world, and then add notes from the information generated during your play session. But do you really need a subscription service for that? Generations of Dungeon Masters have managed to keep their fantasy worlds in a binder, because frankly, if you have more than one binder of information you already way overdid it. I like World Anvil as a concept, but practically I don't really need it for my campaign.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:57 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, December 06, 2021
 
Wartales - A rough, low-fantasy gem

I've been playing a lot of Wartales over the past week, and am up to 35 hours now. Enough to give my first impressions. Not review, because Wartales simply isn't a finished product. It has a *lot* of rough edges, the level cap is relatively low a 5, and pretty much every quality of life feature you can think of is missing, including a tutorial. Well, the tutorial is announced for the next update, and the level cap rise for Q1 2022, with full release planned for end of next year. Right now the game definitively is still "early access". So why should you play that? Because Wartales has arguably a better tactical combat gameplay than XCom, and that is quite a high bar.

In Wartales you play a group of mercenaries. They ain't heroes. The have humble backgrounds, like having been farmers or caravan guards. They don't have special destinies or prophecies attached to them. They are just armed guys trying to make a living in a very harsh world. So harsh that learning "Cannibalism" as a skill to cut down on food cost is actually an option. The start of the game is particularly difficult, and refugee caravans are the easiest targets around (and unlike merchant caravans they don't rise your wanted level, although you might still end up paying for stolen items). Oh, and by the way, there is no magic in the game, other than a bit of alchemy. In short, Wartales is a low fantasy / dark fantasy world, which feels quite refreshing after so many high fantasy / heroic fantasy games.

But the real reason to play Wartales is the tactical combat, which is excellent. There are some really innovative things here, like characters being able to "engage" only one enemy instead of having a zone of control. Despite the low level cap at the moment, there is already quite a good variety of different skills and abilities, that can be combined in interesting ways. Also, each weapon comes with its own fighting ability, so some two-handed axes might do area of effect attacks, while others don't. Instead of having "action points" per character, each character can move and do his base weapon attack every turn; if he wants to do more, he needs to spend valor points. Each character has ways to gain temporary valor points by specific actions in battle; you can also recover your valor point reserve between combat by resting. This makes combat quite interesting: For example, you are well advised to use a skill that costs a valor point if the use of that skill will kill an enemy, and you have the ability to get one temporary valor point each time you kill an enemy. But if you use all your valor points without gaining any back, you might well miss them later in the combat, because even first aid requires them. Combat has a lot of factors, from area attacks to increased damage from behind, especially for rogues (who are called "rangers" in the game, probably a translation error). Unlike XCom, there is no chance to miss in Wartales, only a chance to deal more damage with critical hits, and slight variability in damage output.

Due to the early access status of the game, some people will want to wait until the game is more polished. But then I'd definitively recommend to putting the game on your wishlist and getting it later. I am very much enjoying this game right now, and I have only finished 2 regions out of 3 of the current version yet.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:14 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Thursday, December 02, 2021
 
Social contract for board games

More than 4 decades ago, when I was at university, a group of more experienced students went once a year with the freshmen students to a chalet in Switzerland for a weekend. And I used to bring the board game Junta to these events, as the game plays best with 7 players. The only problem with that is that some people agreed to play without knowing the game, and there was no discussion about what to expect. We explained the rules of the game, but didn't talk about the social contract. Junta, like Diplomacy, is mainly a game about negotiation and betrayal. In order to play well, you need to be able to stab your friends in the back at the right moment, when they least expect it. Not being prepared for this, we had more than one case of couples breaking up after playing Junta, because one of them felt so betrayed by the other, and projected the resulting lack of trust onto real life. This is the sort of game I wouldn't play with friends anymore these days, and especially not with partners. It would need people who are very well able to separate trust in game from trust in real life, and that isn't that easy.

In pen & paper roleplaying games nowadays there is frequently a "session zero", in which the social contract of playing the game together is discussed. That avoids conflicts later, when some people in the group wanted to play one way, and others in a very different manner. It allows you to discuss what sort of behavior is acceptable, and what not. But for board games I have never heard of anybody doing something similar.

My wife and me don't like to play competitively against each other, so I mostly buy cooperative or solo board games. But even there we don't necessarily have exactly the same motivation: My wife is mostly playing for the experience of playing, while I can't always switch off my "gamer genes" and also try to play well. I like to understand complex games well enough to be able to play them competently, to understand the underlying gameplay mechanics. For example I wrote a blog post over a year ago on how to win at The 7th Continent; and sometimes I see YouTube videos of people playing the game, not understanding how it works, and then giving it bad review marks for being too hard. I find that somewhat annoying.

But then it is surprisingly hard to find good sources on board game strategy. I recently started to play the digital version of Wingspan, which is excellent, but didn't have much luck finding good advice on how to play the game better. When you search about strategy advice for Wingspan, you will find lots of discussions on which individual birds are overpowered, but as you don't necessarily find one of these overpowered birds in your starting hand, that advice isn't all that helpful. After a number of games I understand the mechanics of the game well enough to get to over 90 points, but I haven't breached the 100 point barrier yet. But then, 90 points seems to be the "competent player level" of the game, I've seen the designer play Wingspan on YouTube and get 93 points. I can see how Wingspan would be fun to play as a board game with a group of people all playing at that "competent player level". But I could also see a group of friends or random stranger sit together and them having very different level of competence and experience with this particular game, and that then not being much fun at all. Wingspan is an "engine building" game, and if one player builds a far inferior engine than the others, his turns will be much shorter, give much less resources, and feel much less fun.

It is easy to see that players will often have different levels of experience with a competitive board game, and possibly different motivations. If one player not only knows the game much better than the others, but also has a competitive motivation to crush his opponents, chances is that nobody will have much fun in the end. Cooperative games and pen & paper roleplaying games are a much safer ground. But maybe talking about the social contract before starting to play would be a good idea too.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:46 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
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