Classic Traveller: Mayday!

Previously in this series reading the rules of the Classic Traveller boxed-set games: Snapshot, Azhanti High Lightning.

Summary:

Mayday! is an alternate starship combat system for Classic Traveller.  It hews very close to CT Book 2's starship combat system; some pieces seem identical to me.  Where things differ, they are mostly simplifications.  There are some simplifications in the damage model and hit tables and in the starship stats, but the biggest change is that movement, time, and space are managed with hex-grid and counters rather than minis on a tabletop with tape measures.  The way that vector movement is tracked with just counters on the grid, requiring no paper notes, is very clever.  I suspect it might not scale very well up to large numbers of ships, but this is a system that seems quite targeted at engagements between small numbers of small ships; the sort of fights and escapes that a Free Trader might find itself in.

One oddity among these mostly-simplifying changes is the addition of missile design rules, with a design space of about 4300 possible missiles.  I'm not really sure why this is here but it does look fun to fiddle with.

Like Snapshot, though, Mayday neglects human factors like morale and fatigue.  I don't know how many turns a typical Mayday combat lasts, but with 100-minute turns, fatigue and crew rest seem like they might be worth considering.  Almost no consideration is given to crew matters here; you should know what part of the ship your Traveller characters are in when damage is being allocated, and Gunnery can give a bonus to hit, but that's about it.  Certainly this system doesn't even begin to address the niche protection / social problem of starship combat in RPGs - the party seldom has more than one ship, which means a small set of decisions to make per round and huge stakes for everyone (all eggs in one basket, so to speak) but no real way for many characters to contribute.

But for such an early work, and for a lower-complexity system aimed at being a standalone boardgame and supplement to Book 2, I think that's pretty forgivable.  I think the movement rules alone are good enough to justify this book (maybe not at $20 on DriveThru, but as part of one of FFE's CDs, definitely).

Minis-and-tapemeasure was never going to fly with my groups, and Mongoose's maneuvering system was a bit too abstract and never really clicked for us.  But I think this hexgrid system looks much closer to the platonic happy medium.  I only found one or two rules that I would feel compelled to change or ignore outright (like running into planets); this looks good enough to me to give a serious run with very little modification.

Raw notes:

The whole rules pdf is only 20 pages, including front and back covers, hex sheet, and some counters

I like the subtle dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot Morse-code "mayday" signal worked into the cover's design

Copyright 1978 - so this predates Snapshot, even.

"Book 2 of Traveller details the resolution of starship combat using miniature figures; Mwday utilizes many of the same concepts to present a board game with a hex map and die-cut counters. Thus, in addition to the scenarios provided in this game, many adventures in Traveller can also be played out using the system provided here."  So like Snapshot, pretty explicitly integrated with Traveller.

"The nature of the vector movement system requires three counters for each ship (one for each of the past, present, and future positions). which are then differentiated by color codes."  I do love me some vector movement systems, and this sounds like an interesting tracking scheme in the absence of a note-sheet per ship.

Even small craft and missiles have this three-counter past-present-future thing going on.  No wonder the game came with 120 counters!

"Randomizer counters feature a large number from 1 to 6. The twelve counters serve as a substitute for dice when necessary."  Kinda curious how the math works on drawing twice from two copies of 1-6, versus rolling two independent d6s.

"Blank counters are provided without any markings or color. They are used primarily t o indicates the presence of protective sand clouds around ships."  Interesting.  I had been thinking of sandcasters as like micro-grapeshot fired directionally at incoming missiles, rather than clouding.  Do sand clouds make sense in a vacuum, without an atmosphere...  ?

"Four geomorphic (or perhaps astrornorphic) game map sheets are provided as the surface on which Mayday is played. Each map sheet (approximately 5% by 8% inches) represents a two-dimensional expanse of interplanetary space."  Cool, so you don't need a whole 6' x 10' or whatever table like you did for CT Book 2 combat.

"Each game-turn represents an elapsed time of approximately one hundred (100) minutes."  A lot can happen in an hour and a half.

It's been a while since I looked at CT Book 2, but the turn sequence here (Movement, laser fire, counter-laser / anti-missile fire by other player, ordinance launch and impact, computer programming) feels pretty familiar.

This vector movement procedure / implementation is delightfully simple.

"Any ship may land on a world by moving onto the wortd counter at
one hex speed. Entering a world counter a t a speed of greater than one hex results
in an impact which destroys the ship." lolol.  But since you accelerate from gravity for passing through a hex adjacent to a planet...  you'd basically have to stop / stall in an adjacent hex, right?  Is there another way to set this up?

"At the end of every movement phase, if two present position counters occupy the same hex, the vessels have intercepted each other. Missiles may detonate; ships may collide.
At the end of the movement phase, i f two future position counters occupy the same hex, Ithe two vessels will intercept each other in the next player-turn. The interception is unavoidable, and consideration should be given to the launching of lifeboats or other protective measures."  Oh come on, they're 1 light-second hexes, you aren't going to run into anything by accident.  Honestly even running into Earth-sided planets accidentally seems rather unlikely; Earth has a radius of like 6400 km, so a cross-sectional area of pi * r^2 = 129 million km^2, whereas a square light-second is like...  almost 10^11 km^2.  So your odds of hitting Earth while traversing a random line through a cubic light-second volume containing it are like...  1 in 1,000 ?

"When both the present position counters and the future position counters of ma ships share the same hexes, courses have been matched, and boarding operations are possible."  That is slick, though.

By page 5 we're through the turn sequence and movement, and now getting to firing sequences.

What is this missile design system.  4 options for guidance type, 4 options for propulsion type, 4 options for detonation type...  plus, presumably, options for payload and max acceleration rating?

"Homing: The missiles homes on a target specified at launch, constantly altering its future position at least one hex per turn in the direction of the present position of the target."  But...  if you aim where they are, how are you going to hit where they will be?

Interesting, sandcasting is primarily an anti-laser defense with a small benefit against missiles.

"Any ship which receives four or more hits in a single player-turn has been destroyed. A hit is considered a consultation of the damage table; laser hits count as 1 each, proximity missile hits count as 2 each..."  So there's no "hull damage" track or equivalent!  It's like Chainmail HD, where you needed 4 hits in the same turn to kill a Hero!

Optional simplified computers rule - program-shuffling not mandatory.

Computers only go up to rating 3?  I guess this really is focused on small starship engagements.  None of these big fancy navy ships with their big computers.

Similarly, only jump-1 and jump-2 computer programs at listed, nothing higher.

Interestingly, small craft do not take to-hit penalties for their lack of computers here; they do take -1 in CT Book 2.

By page 11, we've gotten through all phases of the combat turn, the list of programs, and are now into special rules like damage control and missile design.  Missiles have another stat which I did not anticipate - number of turns of thrust.

A note that High Guard's combat system can be adapted to use Mayday's movement system.  I don't think I've read CT High Guard's combat system; maybe that's next on the docket.  Mongoose's High Guard combat system was a bit...  abstract, if I recollect rightly?

Page 13 has the list of available ships for Mayday; it goes up to the 400-800 ton range (corsair, colonial cruiser).  So definitely not intended for the dreadnoughts.

Small craft also have limited turns of thrust!

One of the scenarios is a yacht race, to learn the movement system.  Clever!

Several of these scenarios have interesting things going on and are very much not just stand-up fights.  Smuggling has an iterated component within a single scenario.

The attack and damage tables on page 15 are better-documented than in eg Azhanti High Lightning

Overall I like this a lot.  I think the use of color to indicate past/present/future markers was a questionable decision vs having past/present/future text or something on the markets, but maybe there were manufacturing constraints.

Do lasers have a max range?  Ah, they take a penalty to the hit roll per hex of range, limiting their max effective range.

Classic Traveller: Azhanti High Lightning's Combat System

Background:

I've taken an interest recently in the "boxed set" Classic Traveller games from the late 70s and early 80s.  Previously, I looked into Snapshot, a board game about starship boarding actions using a fine-grained action-point economy.  A comment on boardgamegeek suggested that Azhanti High Lightning had a more refined boarding combat game along similar lines, so this week I sat down and read the rules.

Summary of findings:

This seems like a much more reasonable system than Snapshot.  I like that you never need to handle more than six action points at a time.  There are some rules here that are novel and weird (like having to commit your characters to courses of action for the turn and then sticking to those courses through five 6-AP "phases") but mostly I like they direction they're going here.  Compared to Snapshot, a morale system has been added, damage to structures has been clarified, ammunition tracking has been made optional, some of the extraneous counters like target markers and explosion markers are gone, and overall things do seem improved.

There are still a couple of rules I would change.  Stacking up four combatants in a 1.5m square seems at the very least clunky from a book-keeping perspective, and the explosion damage rules and scatter probabilities are a bit wonky.  In terms of play aids, the weapons table is terribly opaque and requires reference to a couple different places in the rules text to make sense of; I'd definitely be penciling in some notes on which columns mean what there.

I think this exists in a bit of a weird place as a boxed-set game.  On the one hand, it is mechanically less integrated with Traveller than Snapshot was, because the stats on the chits are derived from Traveller stats rather than being literal Traveller stats.  The damage model has also diverged from attribute damage to accumulating "wounds", and the action points don't depend on your Dex and End.  So this might make it a bit uncomfortable to use as an alternate combat system for Traveller.  But it also has some features that might make it uncomfortable as a stand-alone boardgame; the biggest thing that springs to my mind are some ambiguous rules like morale checks for taking "unexpected" fire, which seems like the sort of thing you might want a referee for.

There's a note about integrating with Book 4: Mercenary, and I think this game makes a lot of sense in that light.  This is a slightly higher-abstraction game than Snapshot (or Traveller's default combat system, outside of grids-vs-range-bands) with a lot of support for heavy weapons (like automatic grenade launchers) and heavy armor (three armor types: cloth, combat, and battle dress.  No fine distinctions between cloth, jack, and reflec here...).  This seems like a really good fit for supporting Mercenary play, where you have a slightly higher number of combatants than a party of four PCs and a similarly-sized opposition force (hence wanting less detail per combatant in their stats and ammunition counting and such) and they're armed with military-grade hardware.  I also like that this personal combat fire sequence is nearly-identical to Striker's (released one year later), so there's some consistency and carry-over; if you have spent the time learning AHL's fire sequence for your small-unit mercenary actions, and then you accumulate more troops and more hardware through your successes, it slightly lightens the lift to migrate up to Striker.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing about this is the name - "Azhanti High Lightning" sounds like the name of an adventure, or a book detailing a class of ship (which, to be fair, half of this book is), or maybe a ship combat system for High Guard.  Infantry combat system would have been far from my first guess.

Raw notes:

Published 1980, so just one year after Snapshot.

Only one set of playtesters credited.  Uh oh.

Same 15-second rounds as Snapshot

1.5 meter squares.  Weren't Snapshot's 1-meter?

As with Snapshot, only about 25 pages of rules, then some scenarios.  The second part of this book, originally published as Supplement 5, deals with the eponymous ship class in great detail (the name and date laid down of every ship of the class build in the Third Imperium, for example).  Also, of course, deckplans.  Lots of deckplans.  I'm going to focus on the system rules here and maybe examine the deckplans and other supporting material some other time.

"No square may contain more than four active characters at a time".  Good lord that sounds tough to keep track of.  And on tiny 1/2 inch squares!  With facing!

Turns are cut up into five action phases.  Each phase, each character gets 6AP.  So this still provides a large number of AP per unit of in-game time (30 AP per 15 seconds - double that of Snapshot) but cut up into single-digit installments so you aren't doing double-digit arithmetic constantly.

They've abandoned the inverted high-optionality initiative system for simultaneous action within a series of steps within each phase within each round.

In general I love systems where you write down orders secretly before all players reveal them simultaneously (including spellcasting commitments in TSR D&D), and this sort of has one of those.  This is an odd one though, because the commitments you make are 1) quite vague, just one of three general courses of action (move, covering fire, aimed fire), and 2) binding across all five phases of a turn.  My first inclination is to think that that sounds like a long time to be stuck with one plan, but maybe the plans are loose enough that it's OK?  I really don't know if 15 seconds an unreasonably long time to re-evaluate your plan of actions - how long is an OODA loop cycle in actual combat?  And the good news is that if you pick move, you can still take snap-shots - but you'll shoot last.  Maybe being stuck in aim/covering fire mode is the worse end of the deal, since then you can't move (I think?  There is some ambiguity here around what exactly each course of action prohibits you from doing).

Climbing ladders is really slow.

Elevators have RNG for how long they take to arrive.  Love it.

I'm confused about this note about covering fire on exposed characters on page 9.

This is possibly the simplest set of range band DMs I have ever seen in Traveller (8+ to hit at effective range, 10+ at long range 12+ at extreme range).  I like this.

Reloading is gone but you have to commit to ammunition types at the beginning of the game.

Cover gives a penalty to hit but a bonus to damage as "only the vital areas of the target...  are exposed."  Battletech "You were behind a hill so the odds of a headshot went from 1 in 36 to 1 in 6" vibes.

Three levels of wound - light, serious, and instant death.  Light wounds do give penalties to actions, while serious wounds put you out of action.

This wounding system reminded me of Striker so I dug up Striker and had a look:

Looking at Striker's fire combat procedure, this is very similar, with slightly different DMs for eg cover and concealment, but also significant use of some shared terminology like Danger Space.  Same range bands and DMs, and the example of the RAM grenade launcher with flechette rounds is even the same.

And Striker's personnel injury rules are also very similar (including an identical example), though the bits about exposed vs in cover are organized a bit differently.

What year was Striker?  1981.  OK, that tracks.  So they borrowed some of the infantry fire procedure from Azhanti High Lightning for it.

End Striker digression.

Returning to Azhanti High Lightning, they do clarify this idea of being in cover but exposed; the difference between crouching behind something, unable to fire or be fired upon, and putting your arms and head up over it to fire but also be fired upon at a penalty to hit (but a damage bonus if hit).

Stray shots against certain backstop objects can cause them to explode.  Love it.  "The explosion of red-coded equipment is equivalent to the strike of a fusion gun".  Oh boy!

Grenades with a 3.75m radius seem...  a little on the low side?  And even if you're in a 1.5m square adjacent to an exploding grenade, you still only get hurt on 10+, so your odds if you aren't in the same square as the grenade are pretty good.

These grenade scatter diagrams are a bit wonky.  They definitely thought about the probability distribution on different directions, but I'm surprised they weighted it in favor of overshooting rather than undershooting.  Grenades also scatter 2d6 1.5m squares, which is...  a long way, and a weird distribution of distances.

Melee seems pretty straightforward and a little higher-abstraction; no parrying, your melee rating is just subtracted from the other guy's attack on you.

This morale system is...  interesting.  Needing to make a morale roll to stick your head up into covering fire makes a lot of sense.  Needing to make a morale roll to move into melee is not unreasonable.  Needing to make a morale check for taking "unexpected" fire seems like it might be contentious to adjudicate in a board game, rather than in an RPG with a referee.  Having all of your dudes have to make morale checks before any of them move is interesting but seems like it kinda doesn't capture the collective nature of morale as a phenomenon.  Having morale check results interact with the rank system, where your high-rank dudes have to roll first and then their results influence the results of the rolls of their subordinates, is probably a decent fit for military actions but tougher to fit to PC crews operating on informal lines.  But I guess I haven't gotten to the bit on integrating with Traveller campaigns, who knows what they'll say about the interaction between PCs and morale.

I suppose I should be happy to see a morale system included at all after Snapshot, really.  Progress!

That brings us to the end of the core rules of the game on page 17, and to the beginning of special rules for unusual situations, like energy weapons, fighting oozes and robots, vacc suits and explosive decompression (incidentally, it's surprising to me that they say that the interiors of starships are usually pressurized - I thought there was a note in Classic Traveller's combat system about pre-emptive venting before combat to prevent fires?).  Rules for structural damage are much more developed than in Snapshot, though they have their quirks.  If you set the timer right on your satchel charge, you can guarantee that it can't be disarmed because there won't be enough time.  Grenades might be better at damaging hardware than at injuring combatants.  I went down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out grenades' penetration values and ended up discovering that the weapons table is quite inscrutable; documentation on what the columns mean is solely embedded in the text for the fire combat rules, nowhere near the table itself.

After "Special Rules", we get "Advanced Rules", which are actually just ammunition/reloading and zero-g combat.  So ammunition tracking is still here, it's just optional.  Zero-g combat looks broadly similar to Snapshot's.  I do like that you can injure yourself by running into things while moving in zero-g.  I find it a bit odd that you can't make melee attacks while using a hand-hold?  I feel like "hand-hold in one hand, cutlass in the other" isn't deeply unreasonable?

Finally, on page 23, "Integrating with Traveller", which has a couple of interesting bits in it.  There's a note about changing the ground scale to meters "if using this system for outdoor battles".  The "melee value" on the counters is derived from the Brawling skill and no mention of Blades is made.  There are some bits about higher-range and higher-rate-of-fire weapons like VRF gauss guns, which I don't remember being in CT Book 1.  And then finally at the end, "Morale and leadership bonuses...  are generated as specified in Traveller Book 4, Mercenary."  Which might also be where the gauss guns came in, and provides a good reason to want a combat system aimed primarily at handling high-powered weapons against combat armor and battle dress.

Classic Traveller: Snapshot

The recent transfer of Traveller to Mongoose caused me to finally get off my butt and get a CD order to Far Future Enterprises in for pdfs of a whole bunch of Classic Traveller materials.  Mongoose's FAQ said that FFE would continue selling CDs but hey, the future is a big place and things can change.

I was particularly curious to get a look at some of the "alternate combat system" CT boardgames like Mayday and Snapshot.  I have heard that Warhammer 40k has some roots in early Traveller material (Games Workshop had the license to publish Traveller in the UK in the early 80s; I don't think it's a coincidence that the Imperium of Man looks a bit like the Third Imperium with the madness dial turned up to 11), and when I heard that Snapshot is a game of close-combat boarding actions using action points, well, I couldn't help but think of Space Hulk and was very curious to see if there were any resemblance.  I think there's some GW Traveller material on the Apocrypha 2 disk that I look forward to taking a look at (and even some Judge's Guild Traveller material!)

Anyway, Snapshot.

It's a surprisingly-short rulebook, only 43 pages in pdf including cover material and reference tables.  Two pages of introduction to the premise and die-rolling conventions, five pages of basic rules covering the action economy, facing, and movement, four pages of rules dealing basically with resolving attacks (to-hit and damage, including several sources of circumstantial to-hit modifiers like firing in zero-G), and two and a smidge pages of "special rules" for things like encumbrance, autofire, and darkness.  After that we move basically into scenario setup (including character generation).  So the core of the game is really only about 10 (dense) pages.

This density leads to some brevity, and there are definitely some points that I'm not clear on.  How much damage does it take to breach a wall?  (aha, it's in the section at the end on reading the starship maps)  Are explosion markers purely informational or do they have effects?  What about casualty markers?

The "cover" action is implemented in a very interesting way, where you place a "target" marker to indicate the line of sight that you are covering, and then you can take attacks on enemies crossing your line of sight to the target marker.  But there are some curious edge-cases here too - you can fire on any number of enemies crossing the line (up to your available ammunition), but you can only fire on each enemy once, even if they're eg advancing up the line of fire directly towards you?

Generally I think the action points here are maybe a little too fine-grained.  An average character has 14 action points per turn (the sum of their Dex and End scores)!  That's a lot.  Many actions take fairly large numbers of points - aimed-firing an automatic weapon costs 12, opening a hatch is five, and reloading is a variable amount depending on your ability scores.  It all seems rather fiddly against Space Hulk's single-digit numbers.  On reflection, since Space Hulk came out about a decade later, it makes sense that even if it were descended, we should expect it to be more polished.

On the other hand, with 15-second rounds, 14 action points per round means that an action point is about one second for an average person.  Which is an interesting concrete point of reference.

The initiative / action order system is also a bit curious.  The character with the fewest action points goes first, but any character with a higher action-point total can pre-empt them and take their turn before any character with a lower action-point total.  I think this is roughly morally-equivalent to Domains at War's strategic initiative, where characters with high initiative act first but can delay down to an initiative count equal to -1 * their initiative score.  But framing it as pre-emption rather than delay is an interesting choice; the order starts out inverted.

This action-point-economy and initiative system seem like the main changes over stock Classic Traveller combat (well, that and putting it on squares instead of loose range bands).  Damage is largely the same as in CT (damage to ability scores) and there are big tables of weapon-vs-armor and weapon by range band to-hit DMs.  It's possible that there are subtle differences here from CT's tables but I am unlikely to find them or to appreciate their full effects.

Moving on to character generation, there's a one-page simplified chargen system which deals purely with combat skills (randomly-rolled on one of two chosen tables, naturally) and physical ability scores.  It's actually rather neat to see generation of broadly-Traveller-compatible characters boiled down this far.  There are also very cursory rules for stats for animals who have gotten loose in the hold or who are the pets of crewmen.

Four scenarios are presented in some details over a couple pages, plus short sketches for a few more.  I don't envy the player who has to go up against pirates in combat armor with some deckhands with shotguns and pistols.

There were a couple of omissions here that surprised me.  Sneaking is an action you can take that inflicts a to-hit DM on fire against you, but there doesn't appear to be any hidden information here (besides "are these guys in combat armor pirates we should fight or actually customs agents like they say?") even though I could certainly see some interesting gameplay arising from information asymmetries between eg a crew with a guy watching cameras from the cockpit and a bunch of boarders who don't know the layout.  There's also no psychology; no morale, no panic, no hesitation.  It's an interesting contrast with the finely-detailed timekeeping; the characters may fumble to pick up a weapon off of the floor or whiff a shot, but they never hesitate to turn a corner into gunfire.  It's also particularly strange with the animals rules; they're played much the same as humans with different stats and have no instinctive behavior like fleeing / recoiling from gunfire.

(Fun fact: Alien came out the same year as Snapshot.  Coincidence?)

So, conclusions.  Would I use these rules as written?  Probably not; dealing with two-digit AP totals per round sounds like a tough sell.  It's an interesting idea though, and I'm told that Azhanti High Lightning is also a CT boarding combat game and improves on Snapshot, so maybe I'll read that next.  Also, is Space Hulk a knock-off of Snapshot?  No - if it is descended, it has definitely sanded down many rough edges and added significant innovations (like the hidden information of blips, board segments used to define flamer area of effect, and weapons and actions rosters cut down to the essentials).

Boss Monster and Budget Dungeons

A friend mentioned a card game today that I hadn't heard of called Boss Monster, and described it as a game where each player is building a dungeon and whoever ends up with the deadliest dungeon wins.

It got me thinking about building dungeons on a budget.  Part of the reason One Page Dungeon Contest has had the success it has is that the constraints it imposes encourage a certain amount of creativity.  What other constraints might we consider?

The first that springs to mind is literal, in-game budget.  Work out prices for 10'x10' squares of cleared area, doors, monsters, traps, etc, and see what people can come up with when their scale is limited by that resource.  But that's a very accountanty approach.

A time budget might also be interesting.  One Hour Dungeon Contest, anyone?  Even if the products themselves end up not being very interesting, I could see such a thing leading to the development of tooling and processes optimized for saving time.  Maybe one hour isn't really reasonable - maybe three is enough to get something interesting but still constrained enough for it to matter?  I dunno, might take some tuning.

Mahjong a la Hamming

This post is absolutely unrelated to D&D.  It is also not a particularly sober post.

 

I was introduced to mahjong last week (first the Old Hong Kong rules, then Japanese riichi mahjong) and it is surprisingly interesting.

 

I've never gotten into a traditional (pre-20th-century) game before.  I learned a little about the theory of chess while writing a chessbot in school, but I don't really enjoy trying to play deterministic, perfect-information games many moves deep; it has always felt sort of like fencing, in trying to make the second-to-last mistake (and then your opponent makes the last mistake).  I tried to wrap my head around go briefly but that was as deterministic and perfect information as chess, with even more spooky action at a distance (pieces influencing actions across the board via laddering potential, for example).  Poker was a little more to my tastes, because it is probabilistic with hidden information, so the best you can do is math rather than tree-search to infinite depths, but the betting strategy and deception are too central for me.  How can I deceive when others expect me to deceive?  I was into blackjack as a kid, which was nice because it was partial information and random but not entirely adversarial, but not really that interesting because relatively soluble and simple.

Mahjong, though.  Like poker, it is probabilistic and partial-information.  Unlike poker, betting strategy and deceiving your opponents are not so central; reading your opponents is useful (particularly for not losing by feeding them tiles that they need), but in order to win you pretty much have to be able to "play your own game" of building up a good hand from the drip of random tiles given to you, balancing the speed with which you can get a hand to a "victory if I draw the right tile" state against the probability that that draw will happen against the value of the hand if it is drawn.  So it's a game about a partially-controlled traversal of the lattice of hands; you don't control your draws, but you do control your discards.  As with forking in chess, there's a fair bit of trying to build win-win structures into your hand; if you have a 2-2-3 of the same suit, you can turn it into 1-2-3 if you draw a 1 and discard a 2, 2-3-4 if you draw a 4 and discard a 2, and 2-2-2 if you draw a third 2 and discard the 3.  So you try to build these structures that maximize your options for capitalizing on randomness.

It reminds me of Hamming's lecture, You and Your Research (Hamming, for those unfamiliar, did computing at Los Alamos and then Bell Labs, invented the error-correcting codes whose descendants are used to detect cosmic-ray-induced bit flips in your RAM, and has a lot of stuff named after him in computing).  Hamming remarks that a lot of people think success/fame is all luck, but that "luck favors a prepared mind...  you prepare yourself by the way you lead your life from day to day, and then luck hits you...  It is luck, but it isn't luck."  The mahjong player might say that luck favors a prepared hand, and you prepare your hand by the way you discard from turn to turn.

There are a number of other odd parallels between mahjong and Hamming's talk.  Hamming discusses the Matthew Effect - those who have had success have an easier time having more success, while those who fall behind tend to fall further behind over time.  Many mahjong variants have a rule where if the dealer wins a hand, he gets more score than he would if he weren't the dealer, and he remains the dealer for the next hand.  So one success at the right time can enable a string of high-value successes.  So the Matthew Effect is built in, beyond the usual level of "oh I'm up, I can afford to absorb some losses".

Another remark Hamming makes is that it isn't enough to do good/novel work quickly, to be prepared for the lightning - you have to do the work in a way which makes it valuable.  The story he tells is about an engineering problem that he was solving, which had wider implications for the debate over the primacy of analog vs digital machines for solving certain kinds of problems.  He could have just solved the problem for his use case, but he realized he was on to something more general and more important, and put the extra work in to elaborate on that, and consequently his work was of greater value.  The parallel in mahjong is that creating a hand which satisfies the constraints for winning a round is not that hard, but a hand which only satisfies the winning constraints is of low value; it scores you few points.  Recognizing the potential for high point-value structures within the hand and bringing those to fruition yields exponentially more points.  The exponential scoring system is terrifying and wondrous; it means that you can afford to make exceedingly low-probability plays and have the expected value still work out, because the payoff can be exceedingly huge.  But I think Hamming would absolutely agree that the impact of science and engineering work is scored exponentially; he talks about how Poincaré had relativity figured out before Einstein, but his formulation wasn't as clear, while Einstein's formulation was in a relatively accessible style and that made all the difference.

The correspondences continue.  Hamming's remark that you can't be working on important problems all the time, you have to pick small, insignificant problems that will grow into important problems, parallels the strategy of growing a lone middle tile into a group.  His remarks on having a direction that you're going in and not vacillating are absolutely a problem that I have in developing hands, where I try to pursue too many directions for development at once.  His discussion of courage vs stubbornness and Shannon's willingness to hold out for good randomness in his technical work correspond to the potential big payoffs of the scoring system for holding out rather than abandoning a potentially big hand.

 

Hamming tells a story about how Bell Labs wouldn't let him have enough programmers.  Eventually this led him to ask the question if he could get the machine to do the programming, which "put me immediately at the forefront of computing.  What had seemed to be an obstacle turned out to be an asset.  Admiral Hopper has said similar."

And then in mahjong, what seem to be obstacles can often turn into assets in scoring, like pinfu (a hand with no tiles that are worth points on their own, which instead earns bonus points as a whole) or a hand with too many winds and dragons (which has the potential to become a very high-scoring "13 Orphans" hand).

"Is what you're working on important, or likely to become important?  If no, why are you working on it?"  "Is the hand structure that you're building one that lets you either win quick or win big?  If no, why are you pursuing it?"

It's just bizarre to find a game where a philosophy that I recognize as legitimate is so...  embodied.  If Hamming's views on the world are accurate, and mahjong is applied hammingism in the small, then...

There is a moment in Iain Banks' The Player of Games where the protagonist observes that the society with which he is interacting treats its central game as descriptive of life, and thinks of life in terms of the game.  I am, obviously, the rankest of novices, which makes this obvious cringe, but: I don't think I've ever met a game with the same potential to correspond to reality as mahjong seems to have.  An abstract tradgame has never hit me in the gut like this before.

Maybe part of the staying power of traditional abstract games is that like the abstractions of mathematics, you can understand more situations through their lenses / metaphors than through the lenses of more concrete games; the mahjong lens is more general than the D&D lens or the Stargrunt lens, because there are parts of the D&D lens or wargaming lens that obviously do not apply to most situations.

Perhaps when I say that perfect-information deterministic games are "not to my taste", what I really mean is that I believe that they're sort of irrelevant because life is subject to a great deal of chance and uncertainty about the world beyond just what is in the head of my opponents.  Perhaps when I say that poker is not to my taste it is because I believe that generally there are things that you can do to strengthen your own position besides communicating, that randomness isn't so strong in reality as it is in poker, so poker is likewise not a very good model of reality.

But if a traditional game does seem to correspond to reality, then one of the things which was an obstacle to me in chess, learning the opening books and studying the accumulated understanding of the game, seems much less burdensome.

Weekend with Dad, Nightblade Playtest Notes

It was good to see him, and there was much gaming and playing with my cat (who, we discovered, rather likes shredded coconut).

Taught him (dad, not the cat) Race for the Galaxy friday night, and played quite a bit on saturday too.  I learned that I really like trade-focused strategies, but neither of us are at the level of quickly reading our opponent's intentions for the upcoming turn yet.

We also played one game of Carcassone, which I had not played before.  Interesting, would play again, still not really clear on all the rules.

Saturday evening was a Pathfinder Society event.  Dad plays a lot of PFS and I decided to come along.  A very different style from my usual; lots of boxed text, skill checks, and name-drops of NPCs and places with which I was unfamiliar.  I wonder if there's something in the nature of large-scale company-backed organized play that leads to settings which are both highly detailed and kitchen-sink in their approach to new material - perhaps the players demand kitchen-sink and the business demands volume of setting book sales?  Notable counterexample - the Legend of the Five Rings large-scale play organization seems to have done a decent job of maintaining thematic consistency.

Anyway, we brought a party full of diplomats and ended up accomplishing our objectives without killing anything!  Probably a first in my gaming.  The space they were running the game in (a church basement) was really nice, and my fellow players were fine folks, but there was a lot of organizational / administrative paperwork and general powergaming (both of the game rules and the organization's rules).  Not my cup of tea at this point I think.

Today, there was more Midnight-esque (Midlite?) ACKS!  Dad playtested my nightblade mods and the Bear God's Rebellion engaged the two biggest, scariest threats in the first level of the mountaintop monastery they've been working on for the last couple of weeks - a group of four mummies, and a young dragon.  Their original plan for dealing with the mummies involved a ward scroll against undead, a pair of bearsarkers (who, being immune to fear, are not "paralyzed with dread" when confronted by mummies), and a blindfolded wizard who knows burning hands.  This plan did not survive contact with the mummies, who acted more offensively than expected (I'm still not really sure why the party didn't use the ward scroll, though).  There were many failed paralysis saves and webs and fire and shape strength and in the end nobody died, though the nightblade and the vaultguard PCs both contracted mummy rot, which the witch circumvented with Delay Disease.  There was much loot (including two magic shields) and rejoicing, and after sending the nightblade on a gaseous, infravision scouting spree (during which they learned that the rumors of a dragon in the tower were true, of a secret door in the abbot's quarters, and that the monastery's well leads into a caverous lake), they hauled the holy relics of a forgotten sun god down the mountain to Bearholm, there to level up their henchmen.

While in the nearby market village of Ostergot trading gems for alcohol, the PCs learned that yetis and ghouls are eating the local farmers.  The PCs feel somewhat responsible for this, since they did recently kill the local constabulary.  The PCs were coming down the mountain and met the constables coming up to check on a burning building at the dungeon site.  When the constables caught one of the bearsarkers in a lie, they demanded the party's weapons and (gods forbid) taxes!  This did not end well for them, and now the village lies more-or-less defenseless save for its wooden palisade walls.  The PCs resolved to look into these unintended consequences next session.

After three days in the market and levelling, back up the mountain they went to fight the dragon.  They gathered outside its tower, and sent the wizard up the tower alone with a vial of yellow mold spores to throw down into the tower.  Unfortunately, the dragon heard his climbing, and was perched on top waiting for him on his arrival.  He stalled with diplomacy long enough for the nightblade to come check on him invisibly, and the rest of the party rushed into the tower to distract the dragon.  One of the berserkers hit it with a yellow mold vial, but it made its save and replied with a breath weapon.  Shortly it was laid low by well-placed arrows from the two explorer henchmen and a barrel of lamp oil thrown with shape strength by one of the berserkers, while the wizard fled back down the side of the tower during the chaos.  There was more loot, and nobody died (again...  I need to step up my game.  On the other hand, pretty much everybody has levelled since that dragon was placed in that tower, and they were playing a man up, so...  I'm going to need to make the mushroom-men in the second level tougher).

Notes and feedback on nightblade performance:

•  Jumping into the enemy rearline is very tempting, and there is probably a right time for that maneuver.  Fighting mummies is not that time.
• Today I learned that ACKS' infravision has a 24-hour duration.  I'm not sure how I feel about giving it as a power to the nightblade.  On the one hand, infravision encouraged PCs to split the party for scouting.  On the other hand, giving the thief infravision+gaseous form at 5th level could just operate as a hard phase-shift away from dungeon exploration towards wilderness play.
• It was remarked that one use of invisibility per day is enough to get to the target or away from the target, but not both.
• Acrobatics+Jump generates a lot of pretty reliable backstab, such that the nightblade was trying to stand in front with the fighters.  The primary incentive to not do that was that her AC was not front-line material.  This session's structure of "two monster hunts against things that paralyze you and things that breath fire" was not really conducive to having the nightblade out front in the zone of shadowy illumination, so being in melee range entailed being in a dangerously well-lit position.
• Did not have enough combats in any single day of adventuring this time for resource constraint on number of 1st-level spells to come into play.  Part of this is the structure of this dungeon, part of it is just the place this party is in the exploration process for this level.  Happens.
• ACKS' stealth system continues to be tricky for me to use in practice, and I think this trickiness is part of why we have "thieves are bad" as a meme.
• The dragon made its Hear Noises throw to hear the wizard climbing the tower.  All well and good.
• I don't remember if it made a surprise roll to see if the wizard got a round to act before it did, but it was fast enough flying to beat a climbing wizard to the top of a 40' cobblestone face handily.
• When the nightblade snuck up on it invisibly, she failed her Move Silently roll by 1 and in play was detected immediately upon reaching the top of the tower.
• However!  The dragon should've made another Hear Noises throw to see if it detected her moving less-silently than intended.  In practice, it probably would've failed this (it's an 18+ roll, maybe 14+ if dragons have super-senses like my players expected this one to).  Which I guess might be canon now for dragons in this setting, because man this one was pretty good at detecting sneaking characters.
• Even if the dragon had made the Hear Noises roll, the nightblade should've gotten a surprise roll against it, which had a 33% chance of giving her a surprise round to either freeze (which, being invisible, would've taken her off the radar) or close and backstab.
• So what we see here is the interaction of several mechanics (thief skills like Move Silently, everyone skills like Hear Noises, combat mechanics like Surprise, and their attendant class features and proficiencies like Naturally Stealthy) put together is a way that is not necessarily intuitive.  It's not a bad system, just very different from the 3.x stealth systems of our youths, where rolling a 4 on a Move Silently to sneak up on a dragon meant you were toast.  Instead of an opposed roll, we have several boolean rolls whose results are interpreted together.
• We did do multiplied-damage in the correct way this time at least, and at one point the nightblade rolled a 6 on a d6, multiplied by 3 for backstab against a mummy.  Under our previous crit interpretation, that would've been a 1 in 216 event; this time it was a 1 in 6 event.  And it was good.

More Boardgames, Four-Hero SDE

Last night, more boardgames were played!

We began with another game of Red November.  Matt drowned, as he passed out due to grog in a compartment that filled with water shortly thereafter.  We failed to stop the accidental launch of the ICBMs, thereby precipitating global gnomish thermonuclear warfare.  As a result, the ship which was supposed to come rescue us did not arrive, and we lost.

Then we played two games of space alert, both of which we lost.

After this we played two games of Super Dungeon Explore, with Drew as consul fielding a fire elemental spawner, a bramble knight spawner, and two spawners of kobolds.  We fielded the bearman berserker, the sniper, the thief, and the ember mage.  The first we lost in the first room due to over-aggressive tactics, while the second we lost in the first room mostly due to abominably poor rolls on our part and excellent rolls on Drew's.

We switched Matt to playing consul, and brought the paladin, the lancer, the ranger, and the ember mage.  Matt fielded a pair of turtleman spawners and a pair of plant spawners, and stacked all the troops of each type on only one of their spawners, leaving the other undefended.  We could not attack the undefended spawners, as we would then have to fight a miniboss with no loot, so we instead attacked the stacked plant spawner.  We drew a fortuitous environment card, which spawned some enemy squirrels who were quite annoying but also gave us temporary treasure items when we were in the plant spawner's tile.  These proved very useful, and let us destroy the plant spawner and hunt down the succubus miniboss that Matt subsequently spawned.  Ultimately, however, the game was too slow and we called it a Probable Hero Victory after that, because we all have to work today.  There was some discussion of how to speed up games, but the only definite conclusion drawn was the four hero-players is definitely too many.  We did reach the consensus that the early game and the late game are both interesting, because the heroes are in consistent danger, but that the middle-game is a slog where the heroes are under little threat except by minibosses.

But yeah, our track record for cooperative games this weekend was preeetty atrocious.

SDE2 After-Action Report and Red November

Played another game of SDE2 last night.  We had the Questing Knight, some sort of elfy scout, and a healer princess against a mixed force of turtlemen and fire elementals.  We opted to spawn into the room with the fire elementals, in hopes of knocking the spawner out before it could spawn an enormous beetle of fire.  We achieved this, but this aggressive strategy did not bear fruit.  One of the types of fire elementals, when killed, spawned two smaller and weaker elementals which the Consul could activate for free every turn and which did not provide loot when killed.  We were not aggressive enough in eliminating this disparity in the action economy; individually the small elementals were weak, but there were lots of them and we had little defensive gear this early in the game.  Likewise, killing the spawner on turn 1 resulted in an immediate miniboss spawn.  Matt elected to spawn the succubus.  The succubus seems like very much a support miniboss; she can move players out of position and steal health, and her defense is excellent.  Being pulled into burning terrain doesn't feel like she's doing damage, but it was a substantial contributing factor to one PC kill, and between the high defense and health stealing we barely managed to injure her (spoilers: we lost).  It also allowed individual PCs to be isolated and beaten down by the gang of tiny elementals.  We did try to push towards one of the turtle spawners, but were forced to retreat by bombardment from a turtle cannon.  This, combined with our elimination of the remaining tiny elementals, heralded an advance by turtleman reinforcements which in combination with the succubus pretty well wrecked us.  The turtles, like the tiny elementals, also had extensive loot-denial in play, because turtles killed by being thrown (or by area damage from thrown turtles) provide no loot.  We did have a little bit of bad luck with the loot we drew (no strength items), but at the end of the day we just weren't generating enough of it.

Overall, the conclusion was that our hero selection was OK but not amazing.  Questing Knight's lance ability is good, but it's tricky to set up a line of foes to hit it with.  I think most of the time you'll end up settling for hitting two targets at a bonus to hit for two actions, which is good but not amazing.  His massive damage attack is also kind of swingy and very action-expensive; this would have been more worthwhile with more strength boosters.  The healer princess' Regenerate ability was very swingy; she tried it once, healed none of her three wounds, and promptly died.  The rest of her capabilities were not amazing; perhaps she'd be stronger in a party larger than 3.  The scout's abilities were sort of a mixed bag.  We were trying to build him as a dex character, but his bomb relies on strength, so we had some multi-ability distribution issues (also: no strength items).  His boomerang ability would probbly support aggressive treasure-grabbing tactics, but we were not in a position to do that.  Good (healing) potion, though.

After some discussion, we concluded that a good "core" party is the Ember Mage, the Paladin, and the Sniper, with possible additions or substitutions of the Ranger for the Sniper and the Sorceress for the Ember Mage.  The Ember Mage, Paladin, and Sniper all have healing potions.  As we play, it's been pretty much a necessity to have a healing potion character in the party, and redundancy in this area is good.  The Ember Mage and the Sorceress are the only two heroes with one-action status effect attacks, which means that they can apply status effects without compromising their ability to deal damage (status effects are weaker than they were in SDE1.0 because monsters can heal them off, but still useful).  The Paladin has one of the best raw melee statblocks, as well as one status-effecting special attack, one defensive area buff, and the best healing potion.  The Sniper has some status effect stuff and the healing potion, while the Ranger has an area attack at range (the Ember Mage's area effects are only up-close) and a unique ability to remove all status effects from a nearby friendly as an action, which is situationally very strong.

One alternate party composition we were also looking at is Barbarian, Druid, and Sniper.  The barbarian kills things with strength and the Berserk ability, the druid plays defense/tank and makes area attacks at range with will, and the sniper attacks with dex and potion-heals the barbarian.

After concluding our discussion of SDE party composition, we decided to play a game of Red November, wherein a crew of alcoholic gnomish submariners must try to avoid asphyxiation, crushing pressure, reactor meltdown, unintentional ICBM launch, being devoured by the kraken, and other hazards until they can be rescued from their sinking vessel.  This was sort of like Flashpoint, but with more randomness, many more ways to lose, and more grog.  Matt spent most of the game stuck in an airlock with a jammed hatch, Ethan passed out on the missile controls right after stopping the launch sequence, and ultimately we all suffocated because everything was on fire.  There was much laughter.

Super Dungeon Explore 2.0

Last night there was boardgaming!  It had been a long time since we played Super Dungeon Explore - apparently the unclear rules led to huge piles of errata which eventually became unmanageable and required a total rewrite of the rules.  That rewrite has now arrived, and it's pretty good.

I don't have a complete changelog, but here are the things I noticed:

• The damage tracker / countdown to endgame is gone.  Instead of minibosses and bosses spawning at points along the damage track, a miniboss spawns each time a spawner is destroyed, and the boss spawns when the last spawn point is destroyed.  This makes the first miniboss fight much earlier in the game than previously.
• Rules for consul's spawning of monsters are way clearer.  As his whole turn, he can spawn from a spawner, which inflicts a point of damage on that spawner (pushing towards endgame), and he can't spawn two turns in a row (to prevent endgame from arriving very early).
• Loot has also changed in the absence of the damage track; it's generated per monster killed, up to a maximum of three pieces of loot per player turn.
• Fewer status effects.
• Chests now have keys and locks and things.  Killed minibosses drop keys which let you unlock chests at low risk; failure to pick the lock on a chest turns it into a mimic.
• Spawners drop coins when destroyed, which allow a full heal or a respawn.
• Characters can heal themselves and remove their own status effects by rolling (based on Wis and Armor respectively) at the cost of an action.  Bosses and minibosses can also remove their own status effects in this way (and with hearts rolled on successful attacks).

It was a very close game, but we made a mistake in party composition - two dex characters and a strength character meant that we were competing for dex items.  We drew a ton of wisdom items, particularly treasure (the higher-teir gear) and lacking a wizard these went to waste.  Still, the end of the game was very close - it came down to our treant with one HP left vs the bossdragon with 1 HP left and a pair of kobolds.  The last attack of the last kobold took the treant out, but if it had missed, it probably would've been able to land one hit on the dragon and win the game.  Honestly I was surprised that it was that close - the dragon gets a piece of treasure that it can use, and drew an axe that gave it double damage, which was one of the worst possible outcomes for us (and contributed to my rapid vaporization fairly early in the bossfight).  If it hadn't drawn that, or if we'd had a wisdom-based attacker instead of two dex-based attackers, I think we probably would've won (granted, Matt wasn't pushing aggresssively for endgame via spawning).

I think my only complaint is that it was a very long game; three players+consul took about five hours (including hero selection, setup, and ordering food), and four or more players would take even longer.  I'm not really sure why it was as long as it was.  It definitely wasn't rules-confusion; lookups into the rulebook were fairly infrequent.  We were fighting kobolds, and kobolds are relatively strong on defense compared to some of the other monsters released in the expansions (like turtles and elementals).  We also played very defensively, with our two rangd characters hiding behind the treant, who pushed into rooms through kobold phalanxes.  More aggressive, high-mobility play on both the PC and monster sides might shorten the game (on the other hand, high-mobility play for the players means that PCs are easily isolated and destroyed in detail.  Surviving high-mobility play probably requires mutually supported 'bounding' fire and motion; troublesome, because having enough ranged characters in a party for that means you're competing for items).  Consul spawn-rush could also shorten the game considerably; the interesting question to my mind at the moment is "is the game winnable against a spawn-rushing consul?"  I'm curious what sort of tactical innovations and party compositions would be required on the player-side to accumulate the necessary gear to win an earlier bossfight.  Ethan argued against spawn rush, saying that as consul, it was important to give the players a chance, but I prefer to look at it as a gauntlet which has been thrown.  Maybe it is actually practically unwinnable despite being totally legal (much like four-howitzer in OGRE), but I have insufficient data to draw that conclusion yet.

Board Games V: Pathfinder Adventures Card Game, Alchemists, Pandemic

And lo, there were games!

Pathfinder Adventures Card Game (hereafter PACG): Jared picked this up recently and was very excited to play it.  It was interesting and fairly fun if not what he expected (something closer to Sentinels).  Six locations, four PCs.  Each location and each character has a deck; a PC's deck represents their available HP, and their hand provides them resources for exploring locations.  Each location deck contains monsters, obstacles, loot, and either a henchman or the adventure's villain.  Defeating a henchman closes the location where it was found, which means that no further exploration there is possible and the villain cannot flee there if he is defeated.  If you defeat the villain without closing all the locations, he gets shuffled into a random one, along with divine blessings in the remaining locations.  It's possible to temporarily close a location when the villain is defeated if you have a party member there, which encourages the party to spread out; our D&D mentality and some of the mechanics (bard's support ability, ability to pass cards to other players at same location) encouraged us to bunch up, two players at each of two locations.  We fought the villain twice before we ran out of time (there's a turn limit), and because we were concentrated we were unable to close many locations to him.  As a result, we lost.

There is a campaign mode, where you alter your character's deck over iterated games (and also alter your character's limits on certain types of cards in your deck; ie, I had a ranger, and with sufficient experience I could gain access to spell cards).  I think there's some promise in the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but I'm not sure I'd want to play a proper campaign; there's a lot missing compared to the RPG experience.  Fun, but not the same sort of fun.

Alchemists: Took a benadryl before this and was pretty fuzzy; came in last by a fair margin.  Oh well.  It seems the meta has developed since last I played, with lots of turn-3 debunks where the debunker didn't actually know if they were correct, and used it to gain information.  There was some discussion of playing Master Mode next time, where this is not feasible.

Pandemic: An unforeseen chain outbreak in Asia got us.  So it goes.

Board Games IV: OGRE, Lords of Waterdeep, Alchemists

Was at the Gamerhaus yesterday for a playtest of an RPG combat system some friends are working on, and ended up also playing videogames and OGRE and then coming back today.

OGRE: Matt played defense again, this time with three howitzers clustered in the rear-center and six heavy tanks spread out in front of them, with infantry in front of them.  I considered attacking straight down the centerline, but shifted to attack from the left when I reached howitzer range, and was engaged first by three of the tanks and supporting infantry.  I burned my missiles to disable two of the tanks, and lost my main gun to the first round of stacked fire.  I overran probably three tanks in the next two turns and surrounded three hexes from the howitzercluster at 31 tread units (ie, the least possible number of treads with which I could reach and overrun them in one move).  Matt had some horrible luck attacking my treads that turn, and so I did succeed in overrunning one howitzer and destroying the other two with my secondary weapons, leaving three tanks and some infantry on the field.  The tanks did a number on my secondary batteries, but because they had to be at range 2 to fire I was able to chase them down and ram them.  The infantry then succumbed to antipersonnel fire.  At the end of the game I think I had one secondary cannon and seven AP weapons left, and was probably at 25ish tread units.  A much better showing for the defense than last time; heavy tanks mean business.  I think three potential mistakes were not engaging and doing tread damage before I was in howitzer range, not moving the right-side group sooner (which let me engage the two groups not-exactly separately but also did not force me to ever engage his entire force at once) and clustering the howitzers so tightly that if I got one of them I was going to get all of them.

Today, we played Lords of Waterdeep, Sentinels, Niagara, and Alchemists.

Lords of Waterdeep: This was my first time playing.  I enjoyed this game; it was slightly work-replacement-y, and felt sort of like a cross between Manhattan Project and Colosseum, in that the worker allocation model was similar to Manhattan Project and the many-resources allocation model for completing quests felt somewhat similar to Colosseum's resource allocation to shows.  My Lord gave bonuses for commerce and warfare, but I drew a thief-engine plot quest in my opening pair and so ended up doing a lot of skullduggery instead, which ended up hurting me a little; I had a good lead in the midgame, but after lord bonuses were factored in I tied for 2nd/3rd of four players, with 1st place winning via completing a pair of 25-point quests in the last two turns.  Honestly saving up adventurers and then nabbing a pair of good quests near the end, rather than completing lots of small quests, is probably not a bad strategy.  The game also left me with some food-for-thought regarding the ACKS domain game, namely that a simplified subsystem for resolving "we hire some adventurers to take care of X for us" would be pretty handy.  I also sort of wish I'd taken the time to read the flavor text and have a chuckle at the emergent narrative (of, for example, the City Watch building a thief engine), but it was a long enough game as it was.

Sentinels: We got wrecked by villain board-clear after a fairly promising start and due in part to lack of board-clear or healing of our own.  Happens.

Niagara: First time playing this as well, and was not a fan.  Felt very treadmilly; oh I'm down at the top of the falls again, maybe I'll actually make it one tile upriver this turn...  nope.

Alchemists: A relatively new game, and a pretty hilarious simulation of academia.  The conference deadlines are always one turn too close, and the results you end up publishing to meet them are usually wrong, but the grant committee doesn't care.  I'm not a huge fan of the reliance on a smartphone / mobile app, but the "information hidden from all players, which they must actually deduce for themselves" element that it made possible was really good.  It was the first real game for all of us, and Mistakes Were Made - Drew used the wrong two ingredients for something, Matt misrecorded an experimental result early in the game and ended up with some incorrect deducations later, I misunderstood the rules for debunking an incorrect published result...  but these things happen.  I was behind all game because I was focused on correctness over meeting conference deadlines, and was pleased to discover that this actually worked out alright at the end of the game, when my fewer-but-correct publications were worth more than inaccurate publications that were produced early for grant points, and so I came back to second place by a point (it was a very tight spread overall, with third and fourth only a few points behind me).  Would play again.

Pandemic, 5e Multiclassing, OGRE

Last night there were games!  And it was good.

First was a game of Pandemic with the In the Lab expansion active, and we actually won on the last possible turn.  Having never won a Pandemic before, that was pretty neat.  Part of it was obviously that we didn't need five cards of one color on a single person and could spread them out over multiple people, which helped, but I think part of our success was also that we built more research stations than we usually do, which made getting to troublezones easier than it is in most of our Pandemic games.

Then I read 5e's multiclassing rules while others played Smash.  I approve of these multiclassing rules - spell slots scale with multiclass total caster level in a Trailblazeresque fashion, you don't necessarily get all the proficiencies with your first level of a new class, and there are minimum ability score reqs to multiclass - 13+ in all of your classes' main stats (typically one per class).  I was originally skeptical of the minreqs, but on further reflection this seems like a good way to reign in the "dipping for class features" issue common in 3.x, since your odds of having a 13 in everything are fairly low.  Sort of a blunt/brute-force solution, but I can appreciate that.

Finally, there was a game of OGRE with Matt.  We rolled for it and I drew the OGRE.  His armor picks were two GEVs, two howitzers, two missile tanks, and four heavies.  I initially wanted to go down the left flank, but he came after me there.  The GEVs engaged first near the edge of the howitzer bubble and did a little tread damage before being chased down and destroyed.  Meanwhile the rest of his armor moved forward, and I caught some of his infantry and two tanks without having to come under howitzer fire.  I moved back around to the other flank, hoping to spread his units out a bit, and then pushed down the one column of hexes on the right flank that were outside of the range of the left howitzer (so as to only take fire from only one howitzer as a time).  I managed to spread out being engaged by the remaining tanks over two turns - took fire from the lead elements, overran and destroyed them, took fire from the tail elements, then overran and destroyed those too, with a missile for the right-flank howitzer.  This reduced the firepower that could be stacked against me on any one turn; I did still lose my main battery to heavy+howitzer fire, but with all of my other systems in good order and no remaining mobile armor units, we called it.

We concluded that the main tactical error was Matt's eagerness to engage me at the edge of the howitzer bubble rather than making me "tower-dive" into howitzer fire in order to attrit his mobile units (at which point I might as well just go for broke and drive for the command post...).  Concentration of force was an issue too, as with splitting firepower across turns.  There was some discussion of running a very GEV-driven defense, possibly foregoing howitzers, for a "light cavalry" mass of GEVs that could encircle and engage as a group, stack firepower, and then scatter out to the sides, requiring the OGRE to move laterally / not towards the objective in order to attrit the armor.  Such a force would work much better with an "offensive defense" posture than a howitzer-bound one could.  On the other hand, the OGRE counter to such tactics is probably to hug the edge of the map, to limit the number of directions you can be engaged from and force the GEVs to get in each other's way.  This does suggest a deployment area for the defense's infantry deployment, I guess.

On the other end of the scale, I think a fixed-ish defense of howitzers and missile tanks with a mobile reserve of GEVs might also work.  We're still not really sure what to do with infantry; there was some speculation about using them en masse to attack treads.  I definitely think it's winnable for the defense, but it also seems to me that you want to have everything hit the OGRE all at once to improve your odds.  At the end of the day the main asymmetry is in concentration of force - the OGRE is inferior to the defense in terms of total firepower, but it's much more concentrated.

In any case, an interesting game; would play again, though I should probably play defense next and give someone else a change to OGRE.

Board Game Tuesday

Playing new boardgames with a different group on a weeknight?  Scandalous!

Manhattan Project - This struck me as a well-designed game.  Uranium and plutonium seem balanced against each other (uranium is faster but more money-expensive both for production and loading bombers and lower-yield, but the plutonium path is slower).  A number of rules prevent the game from deadlocking (mandatory placement or retrieval, bribe pool).  Was fun, would play again now that I have a better understanding of the mechanics and tactics. A little bit on the long side (about 2.5 hours I think?), but that was with some stalling plays and lots of inexperience.  Overall I feel the game was well-worth the time.

Coup - I was hesitant as I expected this to be a Mafia / Werewolf / Bang style deception game, but was pleasantly surprised.  Maybe I was thinking of the larger variant with Monarchist / Rebel cards.  I enjoyed this game more than I expected; it is very satisfying to pull off a bold-faced bluff.

More Board Games

Folks were in town this weekend, so many games were played.  I probably don't remember them all, but here are some that I do:

• Pandemic: We played with three normal players and a malicious bioterrorist player.  I drew the Generalist for my role, and quite liked it.  We did pretty well, with cures for two normal diseases and the bioterrorists's disease, and another cure forthcoming, but ultimately lost as usual by running out of cubes during the last epidemic.  The bioterrorist made the game take longer, but all involved remarked that it was somewhat more satisfying to lose to a human than to the unyielding and impassive system.
• Bang: I do not make a very convincing deputy, especially when I am actually the deputy.
• Flashpoint: We actually saved almost everyone before the building collapsed, despite drawing through all the dummy markers / not-people tokens.  My first successful game of Flashpoint, though I did get blown up by explosions three or four times.  I continue to like the Generalist.
• Hanabi: One perfect game with four? players.  Then we decided to quit, because we weren't going to be able to outdo ourselves.
• War on Terror: Not a great simulation, and not a very playable game, but sort of amusing.  General consensus was "would not play again."
• Tsuro: New to me.  We played one regular game and one game with the optional dragons-who-eat-everything.  The more players are still in the game, the more disruptive the dragons get, leading to a chaotic early game and a relatively sedate endgame.
• Sentinels: Played one game as Knyfe, in which I was killed but we ultimately won, and one as Ra, in which we won fairly handily.  I rather liked both Knyfe and Ra; direct damage is pleasingly direct.
• Race for the Galaxy: We played much faster than I'm used to; I failed to track what other people were doing and take advantage by leeching actions.  Had a decent military start with New Sparta, Mercenary Fleet, and Imperium Troops but failed to turn it into points very well.  Did poorly as a result.
• Power Grid: Managed second place of six by pushing for endgame a turn earlier than most other players were prepared for, despite it being my first game and competing in close proximity with another player during the early game.  Might shouldn't've stockpiled as many resources as I did; I tended to keep a turn's worth of resources in reserve, by buying when they were cheap, but probably could've just kept one or two resources available to reduce the cost of resource price spikes and then reinvested the rest.  The resource market presented a very intuitive and playable model of supply and demand; well done.
• King of Tokyo + Expansion(s): I sat this one out, but the evolutions from the expansion made it look like something I might enjoy slightly more.