I had a game of Campaign Manager 2008 finish yesterday where I built an infinite deck and lost. I'll need to look into the game more to see what really went wrong but I tried to get aggressive with playing out attack cards once I went infinite and lost control of the game. I scored up several states in a row but ended up behind after that. But what is really interesting about the game is my opponent used a two card combo to pretty good effect against me and I think it might have potential to break open the stalemate...
There's one difference between the two decks that I have yet to cover. Each player has three media support cards in their card pool. Two of these three cards are the standard 'pick what happens when a new event comes up' ilk which seem ok but not overpowering. The third one for Obama makes your opponent roll twice on the 'bad stuff' chart when he goes negative. The McCain card means McCain doesn't roll at all when he goes negative.
This is interesting but I rarely see anyone go negative. The problem is 3 of the 4 'go negative' cards actually require you to discard 2 extra cards to play them. I do this every now and then to win a powerful state but the problem is it sets you back a lot in card quantity. The 4th card doesn't require a discard but doesn't really coordinate well with itself. It gives you 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state.
So what my opponent did was he set up the no roll card and then kept cycling through his very small deck to play that card over and over. The support gains might be unrelated but Obama can't counter both of them. Eventually you'll get into a position to just overwhelm him in one category or the other and he doesn't have a counter. Even if he plays the same card he has to roll for bad stuff and 1 time in 6 McCain will net a support so Obama just loses in this situation...
But is it sustainable? Pretend we hit a 2 card deck with 2 cantrips in the discard. Open with the negative. Then play Oprah into a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. We're back in the same gamestate as at the start except we've gained 5 support over 4 actions. This is certainly sustainable!
Now that I look at it a little more this seems decent even without the right media support card in play. Assuming it's an infinite vs infinite game the extra card draws won't help your opponent and the key demographic swap does nothing so 4 of the 6 outcomes have no game effect. And even when the negative roll hurts you the best it can do is give your opponent back the support you'd gained. Tempo might work out poorly for you but by and large this seems like it should allow you to break out of the stalemate! Time to put a higher focus on drafting that card!
Showing posts with label Campaign Manager 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Campaign Manager 2008. Show all posts
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Campaign Manager 2008: Fair Deck Options
I mentioned the other day that I thought the infinite deck in Campaign Manager 2008 was relatively easy to build and very powerful when built. I fear it may even be unstoppable. Today I'm going to look at all the options available to a fair deck to see if it can possibly have a shot at beating an infinite deck.
As a reminder an infinite deck is a deck which has reached the point where it can play a cantrip card every turn for the rest of the game. It can chose between gaining an economy, or gaining a defense, or shifting the issue track. It can choose the same one over and over again if it wants. Essentially it is a deck which is giving up tempo (it only gets one effect each turn) in order to have complete flexibility.
A fair deck has to spend time drawing cards with the default 'draw a card' action. This means it is taking a few turns off (during which the infinite deck is just churning out economy or defense) in order to build up a string of good turns in the future. In order for the fair deck to have a chance that string of good turns has to be really good. It has to make up for giving the infinite deck free turns. What cards can the fair deck hope to draw in order to pull this off?
The first class of cards are the cantrips which make up the infinite deck's gameplan. I hope it is obvious that these cards can't help the fair deck win. In the best case scenario for the fair deck the infinite deck merely plays the same cantrip and undoes the fair deck's turn. In the worst case the cantrip from the fair deck isn't optimally useful in which case the infinite deck can play a different cantrip for a better effect. To be fair cantrips will help cycle the fair deck into better cards which could help deal with the selection issue of a 5 card hand but as far as power goes they can't help.
Next up are the double effect cards. These cards let you do two unrelated things in a given turn. The potential options are to gain an economy, a defense, shift the issue track, or alter the key demographic. Note that there is a card to shift the issue track two spaces but there is not a card in this class which adds both an economy and a defense. As such your best case scenario is to build up a hand with the right 5 of these and then get 10 effects over 5 turns while your opponent only gets 5 effects. This seems like it should be pretty good but there is one fatal flaw... You can only gain 5 actual support by doing this. The infinite deck has an easy counter... Ignore any issue shifts and just deal with the support you gain. If they spend their 5 turns undoing just your support in economy or defense then what have you got to show for your build-up? 5 demographic swaps or issue track movements. Then you have to spend 5 turns filling your hand back up while they get 5 free support anywhere they want. It doesn't matter how you set up the issue tracks. Because they can take either defense or economy for any number of turns in a row they just get to score up two states while you refill your hand. The end result of playing a bunch of double effect cards? They win two states and you win nothing. Not good.
How about the card drawing spells? Ancestral lets them build up a 7 card hand for a really big sequence of plays but that doesn't help with any of the cards we've seen so far. Same with Oprah. The regrowth style effects are even worse for the fair deck since they cost extra cards to play. Every extra card is an extra turn spent on 'draw a card' and giving your opponent a free support somewhere so what you get out of those extra cards has to be pretty powerful. Just getting to play a card a second time doesn't count since we don't have any cards that help us at all as it is.
There's an interesting set of cards that allow you to get a bunch of effects all at once. Each side has two of them with the Obama set only impacting economy and the McCain set only impacting defense. How they work is you play the card which does nothing on its own. Then you can discard any number of cards to get a support of your type or to shift the issue track towards your type. There's one card for support and one for shifting and you can't mix and match the two. And, as an added drawback, you can only hit each state once. The shifting really isn't very relevant (we saw earlier that the infinite deck will gladly ignore shifts in order to just deal with any support you gain) but getting 4 support from one action seems like it might be what we need to out-tempo the infinite deck. At the most powerful case we've spent 6 turns (5 draws and a turn to play the card) in order to get 4 support. 6 turns for 4 support is actually pretty bad. The infinite deck got 6 support over those 6 turns and they can even put them all into a single state if they want to! In terms of actually helping the fair deck win a state it seems like the best case scenario is actually one where two states exist and you're two support away from winning either one of them. By then gaining a support in each one you put pressure on your opponent. He can only counter one of the moves and then you can play another card to finish off the other state! Yes, we've won a state! On the downside it cost us 6 turns to do so (draw 2 cards and the super-support card, draw the finisher card, play super-support and finisher) and they spent 1 turn countering the secondary effect of the super-support card. They then get 5 more support to do as they will. That's certainly enough to win at least one state. And since they got to choose which state they defended off the hop you're guaranteed to have won the least valuable state of the two while they turned around and won the better one. And that's assuming there are even two states where you're that close to winning in the first place!
What about media support? I haven't mentioned these cards before but they can be decently powerful. The basic idea is every time someone wins a state they get to pick a new state to put into play. Then you flip a random event card form a big deck of them and it does crazy things. Sometimes to the new state, sometimes to all states, sometimes to individual players. (Make Obama discard 2 cards, for example.) If you have a media support card in play then you get to make choices for the event card. Instead of it working on the new state you can choose any of the 4 states in play. One of the events lets whoever controls the media draw 2 cards. Getting one of these into play as the fair deck might give you a little advantage here and there to try to combat the infinite deck. The problem is you simply can't keep one in play against an infinite deck. If they only have 1 card in their discard pile and you play a media support it will kill theirs, putting it in the discard pile. Then they play Oprah and put it right back into play. They still have 1 card in their discard. They still have media support in play. They spent 1 turn. You spent 2 since you have to manually draw the card and then play it. Even if they have 2 cards in their discard and Oprah doesn't hit the media support it will hit a cantrip which gets them the media support to play next turn. Best case you have a 1 turn window to win a state. After they played a cantrip and gained a support. I think you were better off winning the state before they got to cantrip if you actually had any way to make that happen!
What about key demographic cards? These give you a way to get multiple support in a state in one action. This has some potential but it has two major drawbacks. The first is that you only replace neutral dots and can't actually remove anything your opponent owns so they're pretty useless against an established state where the infinite deck has already played some cards. The second is that they're very narrow. Each demographic card works on only a small handful of the states. Often they need the key demographic swapped with another card before they can work at all.
That said, there is some potential here for sure. If your opponent puts a state into play and you have the demographic card in your hand you can often set yourself up to win the state for sure on your next action. If you end up with n-1 support in both economy and defense there's nothing that can stop you. Assuming you have the right cards in hand to follow up you can play a shift + support card in order to win the state no matter what your opponent does to react. Sweet! Unfortunately there are still downsides. For one, you then have to put a state into play and your opponent can guarantee you can't end up in a position to win that state with another demographic card. Also the infinite deck is going to put states into play starting at the bottom value-wise. So even if you can win the state they put out they get to win the next one and it will be worth more. Nevermind the fact that while it's _possible_ to have the right demographic card in hand and the right follow-ups in hand it's nowhere near guaranteed. If you fill your deck up with demographics then you'll be able to win a few states by surprise but then sometimes you'll have a hand full of cards which actually can't impact the board at all. Then you have to waste two turns (one playing it for no impact and one drawing a replacement) while your opponent gets to score up lots of free support.
There's one last type of card. The negative campaign card. These cards let you grab multiple support in a single state in a single action but come with some potential drawbacks. Each side has 4 of them available. One of the cards lets you gain 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state. The other three make you discard two cards in order to gain 2 defense or 2 economy in a single state. If it is defense or economy is determined by the card. Obama has 2 economy cards and 1 defense card. McCain has 2 defense cards and 1 economy card. Every negative attack card has the drawback that you have to roll a die at the end of your turn if you play one of them and your opponent gets a benefit. The potential outcomes are {draw a card, draw 2 cards, do nothing, gain 1 support anywhere, shift a state anywhere, alter a key demographic anywhere}. If your opponent is already infinite then most of these actually do nothing. The only really scary one is giving them a free support since if you didn't win a state straight up with the card they just get to completely undo it with that roll.
Now we're starting to see a framework. Imagine the following set-up... You use ancestral to get up to a 7 card hand. Then you use the super-support to gain an economy in two different states. Then whichever one he doesn't defend against you go negative on for an extra 2 economy. This only requires two states where you're within 3 of winning which doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Downside? You spent 6 cards over 2 turns to do it. You went negative so he gets a bonus. You can only do it when you draw ancestral. And you still only get the worst state of the two.
What about combining the negative card with a demographic card? This costs you fewer cards and wins you whatever state you want for sure. If the state you want happens to match your demographic card...
Also once your opponent sees the negative card once they can work against it. They can start shifting out of the support you can double up on. They can start trading states since it does take 4 turns to pull off a single double card...
Nevermind the true trump they have up their sleeve... They're only dedicating 8 cards to going infinite. They can have 7 more cards in their deck that do things. Often they'll have a negative double card too which they can use to counter yours or to just blow you out on a big state. And while it costs you 4 turns to pull it off it doesn't really cost them anything at all to do it. They lose some of their flexibility from having a full hand to be sure but they're one ancestral or a couple Oprahs from going back to infinite again...
The other negative card (which gives you a defense and an economy but doesn't cost extra discards) just seems bad. It can combo decently with the shift+support cards as you can try to keep your opponent guessing. But generally speaking every time my opponent plays it against me I cheer since it doesn't hurt me at all and I get a free die roll bonus.
Put it all together and what do you get? Well, most of the cards available to a fair deck are completely useless. There are a couple situationally powerful cards that can work together to win an individual state but you end up giving your opponent too many free turns in the process. You're not going to get shut out if you can put together a couple combos but there's no way you're going to actually be able to win the game. I think building a fair deck is basically guaranteeing a loss against an opponent who knows how to build an infinite deck.
As a reminder an infinite deck is a deck which has reached the point where it can play a cantrip card every turn for the rest of the game. It can chose between gaining an economy, or gaining a defense, or shifting the issue track. It can choose the same one over and over again if it wants. Essentially it is a deck which is giving up tempo (it only gets one effect each turn) in order to have complete flexibility.
A fair deck has to spend time drawing cards with the default 'draw a card' action. This means it is taking a few turns off (during which the infinite deck is just churning out economy or defense) in order to build up a string of good turns in the future. In order for the fair deck to have a chance that string of good turns has to be really good. It has to make up for giving the infinite deck free turns. What cards can the fair deck hope to draw in order to pull this off?
The first class of cards are the cantrips which make up the infinite deck's gameplan. I hope it is obvious that these cards can't help the fair deck win. In the best case scenario for the fair deck the infinite deck merely plays the same cantrip and undoes the fair deck's turn. In the worst case the cantrip from the fair deck isn't optimally useful in which case the infinite deck can play a different cantrip for a better effect. To be fair cantrips will help cycle the fair deck into better cards which could help deal with the selection issue of a 5 card hand but as far as power goes they can't help.
Next up are the double effect cards. These cards let you do two unrelated things in a given turn. The potential options are to gain an economy, a defense, shift the issue track, or alter the key demographic. Note that there is a card to shift the issue track two spaces but there is not a card in this class which adds both an economy and a defense. As such your best case scenario is to build up a hand with the right 5 of these and then get 10 effects over 5 turns while your opponent only gets 5 effects. This seems like it should be pretty good but there is one fatal flaw... You can only gain 5 actual support by doing this. The infinite deck has an easy counter... Ignore any issue shifts and just deal with the support you gain. If they spend their 5 turns undoing just your support in economy or defense then what have you got to show for your build-up? 5 demographic swaps or issue track movements. Then you have to spend 5 turns filling your hand back up while they get 5 free support anywhere they want. It doesn't matter how you set up the issue tracks. Because they can take either defense or economy for any number of turns in a row they just get to score up two states while you refill your hand. The end result of playing a bunch of double effect cards? They win two states and you win nothing. Not good.
How about the card drawing spells? Ancestral lets them build up a 7 card hand for a really big sequence of plays but that doesn't help with any of the cards we've seen so far. Same with Oprah. The regrowth style effects are even worse for the fair deck since they cost extra cards to play. Every extra card is an extra turn spent on 'draw a card' and giving your opponent a free support somewhere so what you get out of those extra cards has to be pretty powerful. Just getting to play a card a second time doesn't count since we don't have any cards that help us at all as it is.
There's an interesting set of cards that allow you to get a bunch of effects all at once. Each side has two of them with the Obama set only impacting economy and the McCain set only impacting defense. How they work is you play the card which does nothing on its own. Then you can discard any number of cards to get a support of your type or to shift the issue track towards your type. There's one card for support and one for shifting and you can't mix and match the two. And, as an added drawback, you can only hit each state once. The shifting really isn't very relevant (we saw earlier that the infinite deck will gladly ignore shifts in order to just deal with any support you gain) but getting 4 support from one action seems like it might be what we need to out-tempo the infinite deck. At the most powerful case we've spent 6 turns (5 draws and a turn to play the card) in order to get 4 support. 6 turns for 4 support is actually pretty bad. The infinite deck got 6 support over those 6 turns and they can even put them all into a single state if they want to! In terms of actually helping the fair deck win a state it seems like the best case scenario is actually one where two states exist and you're two support away from winning either one of them. By then gaining a support in each one you put pressure on your opponent. He can only counter one of the moves and then you can play another card to finish off the other state! Yes, we've won a state! On the downside it cost us 6 turns to do so (draw 2 cards and the super-support card, draw the finisher card, play super-support and finisher) and they spent 1 turn countering the secondary effect of the super-support card. They then get 5 more support to do as they will. That's certainly enough to win at least one state. And since they got to choose which state they defended off the hop you're guaranteed to have won the least valuable state of the two while they turned around and won the better one. And that's assuming there are even two states where you're that close to winning in the first place!
What about media support? I haven't mentioned these cards before but they can be decently powerful. The basic idea is every time someone wins a state they get to pick a new state to put into play. Then you flip a random event card form a big deck of them and it does crazy things. Sometimes to the new state, sometimes to all states, sometimes to individual players. (Make Obama discard 2 cards, for example.) If you have a media support card in play then you get to make choices for the event card. Instead of it working on the new state you can choose any of the 4 states in play. One of the events lets whoever controls the media draw 2 cards. Getting one of these into play as the fair deck might give you a little advantage here and there to try to combat the infinite deck. The problem is you simply can't keep one in play against an infinite deck. If they only have 1 card in their discard pile and you play a media support it will kill theirs, putting it in the discard pile. Then they play Oprah and put it right back into play. They still have 1 card in their discard. They still have media support in play. They spent 1 turn. You spent 2 since you have to manually draw the card and then play it. Even if they have 2 cards in their discard and Oprah doesn't hit the media support it will hit a cantrip which gets them the media support to play next turn. Best case you have a 1 turn window to win a state. After they played a cantrip and gained a support. I think you were better off winning the state before they got to cantrip if you actually had any way to make that happen!
What about key demographic cards? These give you a way to get multiple support in a state in one action. This has some potential but it has two major drawbacks. The first is that you only replace neutral dots and can't actually remove anything your opponent owns so they're pretty useless against an established state where the infinite deck has already played some cards. The second is that they're very narrow. Each demographic card works on only a small handful of the states. Often they need the key demographic swapped with another card before they can work at all.
That said, there is some potential here for sure. If your opponent puts a state into play and you have the demographic card in your hand you can often set yourself up to win the state for sure on your next action. If you end up with n-1 support in both economy and defense there's nothing that can stop you. Assuming you have the right cards in hand to follow up you can play a shift + support card in order to win the state no matter what your opponent does to react. Sweet! Unfortunately there are still downsides. For one, you then have to put a state into play and your opponent can guarantee you can't end up in a position to win that state with another demographic card. Also the infinite deck is going to put states into play starting at the bottom value-wise. So even if you can win the state they put out they get to win the next one and it will be worth more. Nevermind the fact that while it's _possible_ to have the right demographic card in hand and the right follow-ups in hand it's nowhere near guaranteed. If you fill your deck up with demographics then you'll be able to win a few states by surprise but then sometimes you'll have a hand full of cards which actually can't impact the board at all. Then you have to waste two turns (one playing it for no impact and one drawing a replacement) while your opponent gets to score up lots of free support.
There's one last type of card. The negative campaign card. These cards let you grab multiple support in a single state in a single action but come with some potential drawbacks. Each side has 4 of them available. One of the cards lets you gain 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state. The other three make you discard two cards in order to gain 2 defense or 2 economy in a single state. If it is defense or economy is determined by the card. Obama has 2 economy cards and 1 defense card. McCain has 2 defense cards and 1 economy card. Every negative attack card has the drawback that you have to roll a die at the end of your turn if you play one of them and your opponent gets a benefit. The potential outcomes are {draw a card, draw 2 cards, do nothing, gain 1 support anywhere, shift a state anywhere, alter a key demographic anywhere}. If your opponent is already infinite then most of these actually do nothing. The only really scary one is giving them a free support since if you didn't win a state straight up with the card they just get to completely undo it with that roll.
Now we're starting to see a framework. Imagine the following set-up... You use ancestral to get up to a 7 card hand. Then you use the super-support to gain an economy in two different states. Then whichever one he doesn't defend against you go negative on for an extra 2 economy. This only requires two states where you're within 3 of winning which doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Downside? You spent 6 cards over 2 turns to do it. You went negative so he gets a bonus. You can only do it when you draw ancestral. And you still only get the worst state of the two.
What about combining the negative card with a demographic card? This costs you fewer cards and wins you whatever state you want for sure. If the state you want happens to match your demographic card...
Also once your opponent sees the negative card once they can work against it. They can start shifting out of the support you can double up on. They can start trading states since it does take 4 turns to pull off a single double card...
Nevermind the true trump they have up their sleeve... They're only dedicating 8 cards to going infinite. They can have 7 more cards in their deck that do things. Often they'll have a negative double card too which they can use to counter yours or to just blow you out on a big state. And while it costs you 4 turns to pull it off it doesn't really cost them anything at all to do it. They lose some of their flexibility from having a full hand to be sure but they're one ancestral or a couple Oprahs from going back to infinite again...
The other negative card (which gives you a defense and an economy but doesn't cost extra discards) just seems bad. It can combo decently with the shift+support cards as you can try to keep your opponent guessing. But generally speaking every time my opponent plays it against me I cheer since it doesn't hurt me at all and I get a free die roll bonus.
Put it all together and what do you get? Well, most of the cards available to a fair deck are completely useless. There are a couple situationally powerful cards that can work together to win an individual state but you end up giving your opponent too many free turns in the process. You're not going to get shut out if you can put together a couple combos but there's no way you're going to actually be able to win the game. I think building a fair deck is basically guaranteeing a loss against an opponent who knows how to build an infinite deck.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Campaign Manager 2008: Infinite Decks
I've completed 11 games of Campaign Manager 2008 on Yucata with two more in progress with what seems to be an insurmountable lead. Assuming I do win those games my record will be 9-2-2. I'd say one of those games was close and that was the game I played with the default decks. Every other game was either a dominating blowout or ended in a draw. It has me really wondering about the balance of the game and if it's actually worth playing. There are a few questions that need to be answered to work that out...
- What is an 'infinite' deck?
- How hard is it to assemble one?
- Is there anything at all a 'fair' deck could do to compete?
- In the infinite on infinite match is there any way to get an edge and break a stalemate?
I'm going to define an infinite deck as one that reaches a point where it can take the same basic action every turn for the rest of the game. It should be able to use any of the three core actions (gain an economy, gain a defense, shift the issue track) on any turn. In order to set this up you need to have two copies of the economy cantrip (cantrip meaning it also draws a card in addition to the first effect), two copies of the defense cantrip, and two copies of the shift cantrip. Then you get up to n-1 cards in your hand. It then doesn't matter what card is in your graveyard as you'll always have at least one of the core cantrip cards in your hand. When you play one of them you get to draw the card in your graveyard putting you in essentially the same game state. You may have a different card in the graveyard but you still have at least one of the core cantrips in your hand.
How hard is it to set up? Well, it turns out that it's pretty trivial if you focus entirely on doing it in the draft and practically impossible otherwise. The key lies in the fact you can't take the default 'draw 1 card' action when you have 5 or more cards in your hand. This means that most people with a fair deck have a maximum hand size of 5. Then you have to play a card which will reduce your hand size down to 4. There are a bunch of cards which are cantrips which maintain your current hand size and 2 cards which might increase it beyond 5. The first is the ancestral type card which lets you draw 3 cards. This takes you from 5 cards in hand to 7 cards in hand. The second is the Oprah type card which lets you draw 2 cards and play one of them. This keeps your hand size even unless the card you play is a cantrip which puts you at +1 hand size.
Assume you drafted both ancestral and Oprah. You can, with a little effort, build a 5 card hand containing both of them. (Just keep playing anything and taking the basic draw a card action until you reach 5 cards with both of them.) Play ancestral putting you up to 7 cards including Oprah. At this point your goal is to chain cantrips back to back to back until you reshuffle and draw your ancestral. If you could run that cycle with a 7 card hand you can definitely run it with your new 9 card hand!
How do you guarantee that you can cycle to the ancestral? By having at most 7 cards in your deck that aren't cantrips. When your hand is 6 cards and Oprah you play a cantrip if you have one. Otherwise Oprah is guaranteed to hit a cantrip putting you up to 8 cards in hand. With at most 7 non-cantrips in your deck you're now guaranteed to always be able to at least maintain your hand size. And each time you draw ancestral or Oprah it gets bigger! You'll get to an infinite size in no time at all...
On top of those both McCain and Obama have an additional card which can work to draw ancestral more often. McCain's guarantees the ancestral at the cost of 2 cards (so if you pick up ancestral you spend 2 actions to gain a maximum hand size). Obama's is a discard X cards to draw X cards. It's much riskier but if you've already managed a reshuffle you can cycle into it for plus one card as well.
So how hard is it to draft ancestral, Oprah, and at least 6 cantrips/regrowths? Well, both decks have 10 cantrips in them. So you essentially need to be able to grab 8 of 13 cards. Even with the worst luck possible you're guaranteed 5 of them. I don't know the exact odds but in my experience it's not hard at all. In the two games I have running at the moment I have 10 and 8. In the finished games I won I had 10, 9, 8, 11, 11, and 10.
8 isn't actually a full requirement either. One of the players gets to keep a card in play permanently. If you're that person your deck is only 14 cards so you only need 7 (and to not have your permanent removed) to pull it off. Obama also has the ability to remove one card from each player's deck. If he plays that card he then only needs 7 to eventually guarantee an infinite deck. 6 with a permanent in play!
It feels like the real danger is to have both ancestral and Oprah in the same draft pack. In that case you should take ancestral and just hope you can pound enough cantrips. (At this point you need 8 cantrips on top of ancestral.)
I'll try to answer the remaining two questions in a future post.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Campaign Manager 2008: Mad Cheats!
Let's say you're playing a card game. In particular I'm talking about Campaign Manager 2008 but it could be any game. It could be Fluxx. It could be Magic: the Gathering. Whatever. It's a card game. One of the cards you can play in this game says 'Draw two cards and play one of them immediately, adding the other to your hand.' How would you assume the following interactions work? (For simplicity's sake I'm going to call this effect an Oprah after the Obama card in Campaign Manager 2008.)
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard two cards in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard a card in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- You have only one card left in your deck and 5 cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. Do you get a card from your discard pile? If so, could you get Oprah?
- You have only one card left in your deck and no cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. The one card you draw also has, as part of its effect, draw a card. Do you draw Oprah?
In the first scenario I'd say there's no way to actually get the effect out of a card. You can't discard two cards to pay the cost for either one. Depending on how the cards are worded you'd either get to keep both (probably having to reveal them to prove you couldn't play them) or you'd have to play one with no effect.
In the second scenario it's tricky. When exactly do you add the second card to your hand? The wording of the card says you play one immediately and tells you to add the other to your hand later in the text. I could see it being ruled either way.
The third scenario is pretty clear I think. You draw the one card in your deck, shuffle the discard, and draw another card. Then you put Oprah in the discard. I can see other ways it might work though. Maybe you should get a shot at Oprah? Maybe you don't reshuffle. (A Few Acres of Snow change their rules such that you don't reshuffle in the middle of a turn, for example.) But in general I'd assume you reshuffle right away and can't draw the card currently drawing you cards.
What about the fourth option? When, exactly, do you end up discarding Oprah. I think Oprah can't draw Oprah because it's 'being played' while you're drawing those cards but is it still 'being played' when you play the second card? Does the answer to the second scenario matter? I'd say if you can't discard the second card then you either can't draw Oprah here (we haven't added the second card to our hand so Oprah has to still be 'being played') or you can draw it off of Oprah itself. If you can discard the second card then I'd say you should probably be able to cycle into Oprah off the second card but I could see it going the other way.
Well, how is it implemented online? You're forced to discard without getting the effect in scenario 1. You can discard the card to get the effect in scenario 2. You do reshuffle in the middle of the turn in scenario 3 (but get no shot at Oprah). Scenario 4? It works both ways depending on how you click...
If you play it out normally you don't get the card. Oprah is in the discard pile when you resolve the second card but the reshuffle doesn't happen. Here's where things get tricky... I didn't put any thought into it and just assumed I should get the card. I thought I must have done something wrong (why didn't I get my card?) so I clicked the 'Reset Move' button to do it again to make sure. It resets back to after drawing the cards off Oprah (and rightly so, after I see what they are I shouldn't be able to undo playing Oprah) and lets me pick which one to play. This time around it forces me to draw a card which has to be Oprah.
Something's wrong here, right? The implementation has to be buggy one way or the other. I did this once in a game last week and didn't even give it a second thought. Maybe I'd screwed up clicking the first time or something but I managed to make it work the way I instinctively thought it should so all is well.
Today I got into a stalemate in a game. We both had all of our cards but one in our hands and were able to cycle the same game state forever. I was wondering about what should happen. Could I have built my deck differently to beat his infinite combo? Did he have anything up his sleeve to stop mine? Did the rules have a chess style draw rule? I opened up the rules and browsed a bit to find the following...
"If a player wishes to draw a card but has no cards remaining in his Campaign Deck, his discard pile is first reshuffled to form a new deck. If this occurs in the midst of a player’s turn, any cards played earlier on that turn should not be shuffled into the new deck."
Hmm.
So the way I thought it worked was wrong. And by finding a way to make it happen I've been cheating...
I reported it as a bug. My opponent also noticed and asked how I did it. I told him I'd reported it and offered a draw since I'd been cheating. Also since the game was unlikely to progress even if I stopped cheating. The odd thing there is we both gained TrueSkill rating for the draw.
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard two cards in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard a card in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?
- You have only one card left in your deck and 5 cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. Do you get a card from your discard pile? If so, could you get Oprah?
- You have only one card left in your deck and no cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. The one card you draw also has, as part of its effect, draw a card. Do you draw Oprah?
In the first scenario I'd say there's no way to actually get the effect out of a card. You can't discard two cards to pay the cost for either one. Depending on how the cards are worded you'd either get to keep both (probably having to reveal them to prove you couldn't play them) or you'd have to play one with no effect.
In the second scenario it's tricky. When exactly do you add the second card to your hand? The wording of the card says you play one immediately and tells you to add the other to your hand later in the text. I could see it being ruled either way.
The third scenario is pretty clear I think. You draw the one card in your deck, shuffle the discard, and draw another card. Then you put Oprah in the discard. I can see other ways it might work though. Maybe you should get a shot at Oprah? Maybe you don't reshuffle. (A Few Acres of Snow change their rules such that you don't reshuffle in the middle of a turn, for example.) But in general I'd assume you reshuffle right away and can't draw the card currently drawing you cards.
What about the fourth option? When, exactly, do you end up discarding Oprah. I think Oprah can't draw Oprah because it's 'being played' while you're drawing those cards but is it still 'being played' when you play the second card? Does the answer to the second scenario matter? I'd say if you can't discard the second card then you either can't draw Oprah here (we haven't added the second card to our hand so Oprah has to still be 'being played') or you can draw it off of Oprah itself. If you can discard the second card then I'd say you should probably be able to cycle into Oprah off the second card but I could see it going the other way.
Well, how is it implemented online? You're forced to discard without getting the effect in scenario 1. You can discard the card to get the effect in scenario 2. You do reshuffle in the middle of the turn in scenario 3 (but get no shot at Oprah). Scenario 4? It works both ways depending on how you click...
If you play it out normally you don't get the card. Oprah is in the discard pile when you resolve the second card but the reshuffle doesn't happen. Here's where things get tricky... I didn't put any thought into it and just assumed I should get the card. I thought I must have done something wrong (why didn't I get my card?) so I clicked the 'Reset Move' button to do it again to make sure. It resets back to after drawing the cards off Oprah (and rightly so, after I see what they are I shouldn't be able to undo playing Oprah) and lets me pick which one to play. This time around it forces me to draw a card which has to be Oprah.
Something's wrong here, right? The implementation has to be buggy one way or the other. I did this once in a game last week and didn't even give it a second thought. Maybe I'd screwed up clicking the first time or something but I managed to make it work the way I instinctively thought it should so all is well.
Today I got into a stalemate in a game. We both had all of our cards but one in our hands and were able to cycle the same game state forever. I was wondering about what should happen. Could I have built my deck differently to beat his infinite combo? Did he have anything up his sleeve to stop mine? Did the rules have a chess style draw rule? I opened up the rules and browsed a bit to find the following...
"If a player wishes to draw a card but has no cards remaining in his Campaign Deck, his discard pile is first reshuffled to form a new deck. If this occurs in the midst of a player’s turn, any cards played earlier on that turn should not be shuffled into the new deck."
Hmm.
So the way I thought it worked was wrong. And by finding a way to make it happen I've been cheating...
I reported it as a bug. My opponent also noticed and asked how I did it. I told him I'd reported it and offered a draw since I'd been cheating. Also since the game was unlikely to progress even if I stopped cheating. The odd thing there is we both gained TrueSkill rating for the draw.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Campaign Manager 2008
Campaign Manager 2008 is an interesting little game on Yucata simulating the 2008 US presidential election between Obama and McCain. The game is essentially a card driven wargame (you play one card each turn to impact the voting in a given state) but it has a couple twists. It's non-symmetrical in that each player has their own distinct deck of cards. It also has aspects of Dominion in that you build your deck at the start of the game instead of always having the same cards available each time.
As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.
The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...
Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!
Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...
The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!
At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!
The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!
But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.
Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?
As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.
The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...
Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!
Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...
The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!
At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!
The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!
But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.
Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?
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