I headed down to the Snakes & Lattes Agricola tournament yesterday after work. They ended up playing 4 player games, not 5 player games, which was both good and bad. It was good in that I prefer to play 4 player games, and that the tables they have are dimensioned well for 4 players, and the games are just faster. It was bad in that we had more first round winners and fewer spots in the final.
Yesterday I mentioned that ideally I'd want the games to go fast in order to squeeze an extra round it but it turned out that really wouldn't have been feasible. I'd forgot just how slow some people can be, especially in a more casual setting. My game was the first one finished and the estimation was that there'd be another hour before the slower table would finish up. (I used that time to get a burger from Hero Burger.) S&L runs these tournaments more as a way to have fun and encourage people to show up than they do to actually determine a champion and I completely understand the logic which is why I'm not surprised or disappointed that some games are just way slower than others. But an extension of that is cramming more rounds in can't work.
They ended up with 7 tables with a cut to top 4. The idea was just to advance the top 4 scores which ended up with an interesting dilemna... The first and third best scores came from the same table. Do you advance people with wins first (with total points as tiebreaker) or do you advance people with total points first (with wins as tiebreaker)? In general I think you should advance winners and in this format for Agricola in particular I think you have to advance winners. The order of the actions and the cards dealt to each player are a big deal in terms of total points available at the table.
To makes things more complicated the 4th and 5th best scores were a tie. So if you do include the guy who came 2nd at his table you then need to break that tie in some previously undefined way. (Flip a coin? Play a 5 player final?) They ended up excluding the guy who came 2nd at his table which I think made sense.
I ended up winning my table in a fairly low scoring game. (43-41-23-21) Family growth came up at the last available time and we ate a lot of animals. And by we I mostly mean me. I ended up building up to a size 5 house pretty quickly and got family growth on turns 8, 10, and 11. I ended up scoring a lot of animal points with 8 sheep, 3 boars, and 4 cattle.
43 was the highest winning score when my game ended as we were the first game done, but after 4 games were finished I was in 4th. 53-44-44-43. The last table was the aforementioned table with the best and third best scores so I got bumped out. Oh well. I probably could have squeezed another point out somehow but it would have been easier with a different board setup!
A bunch of people started up second games of Agricola afterwards just for fun but I didn't get a spot in any of those games. Instead I learned a new game with Sara and Duncan. Kingdom Builder from the designer of Dominion. It felt like a game with a low amount of strategy where you mostly just flip up a card and make the 'obvious' choice. Not a terrible game but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who likes to make relevant choices as they play a game. I suppose it might actually be a decent game for older children?
Showing posts with label Snakes and Lattes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Snakes and Lattes. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Agricola Tournament
Snakes & Lattes is holding another after work tournament later today and the game of choice is going to be Agricola. This is by far the longest and most complex game they've run a tournament for thus far. (Previous tournaments have been for Dominion, Settlers, Ticket To Ride, Carcassonne, Seven Wonders, King of Tokyo, and Puerto Rico.)
I really like Agricola and will use almost any excuse to play the game so I'm certainly going but I have reservations about the tournament format. Agricola is a long game and it's not going to start until after 6 so there's really not enough time to play 3 games. So there's going to be 2 games, and there's 27 people registered so far. The game plays at most 5 to a table... How do you determine a winner?
You could play two rounds of random pairings and hope to only have one person win two games, but that doesn't seem great. Agricola has a high skill threshold so I would imagine there would be multiple two game winners.
You could pair the winners up against each other in some manner but since there are going to be at least 6 winners how do you divide them up? 3 winners playing 3-player games with two people winning the tournament? 3 winners playing 5-player games with some spoilers with the hopes that exactly one table has a double winner?
Put 5 winners at one table and declare the winner of that game to be the overall winner? Has the advantage that you should get a 'good' final table and an undisputed champion. Has the disadvantage that someone who won their first game actually can't win the tournament.
How would you even pick the 5 who advance? Highest score? Largest margin of victory? Largest percentage of second place's score? Largest percentage of the points at your table? None of those options are very good in Agricola since the games play out very differently based on the cards dealt to each player.
Highest score in particular has problems since a game with a lot of food generating cards rates to eat fewer animals/vegetables and therefore should just have more points scored in it than a game where people get most of their food by eating points. It's the same sort of problem that Dominion has with comparing scores between games.
That said, I don't know what I'd do if I was making the decision. (And I don't currently know what decision has been made!) Ideally I'd want to have the games go really fast so there'd be time to play a third game for the 'top five' after two preliminary games with some non-perfect but reasonable way of breaking ties to determine the top five. Possibly you could fix the cards for each seat of the first game to try to deal with the variation from cards and then use largest percentage of points at your table to determine the finalists.
I wouldn't go with a plan that didn't result in a final table. One of the things I like about board game tournaments is the (generally) high quality play that exists at that final game. It's one of the reasons I think the World Boardgaming Championships is so awesome and why the Great Canadian Board Game Blitz is, while fun, not as awesome. I knew when I walked away with 3rd place in Le Havre that I'd gone up against the best and legitimately didn't deserve to win. This year when I came 3rd at the GCBGB (both the Toronto one and the Fan eXpo one) I didn't play a single game against the people ahead of me. Was I better that day than they were? I don't know! I didn't get the opportunity to find out.
At any rate I enjoy playing Agricola so I'm going to go and have fun building an awesome farm.
I really like Agricola and will use almost any excuse to play the game so I'm certainly going but I have reservations about the tournament format. Agricola is a long game and it's not going to start until after 6 so there's really not enough time to play 3 games. So there's going to be 2 games, and there's 27 people registered so far. The game plays at most 5 to a table... How do you determine a winner?
You could play two rounds of random pairings and hope to only have one person win two games, but that doesn't seem great. Agricola has a high skill threshold so I would imagine there would be multiple two game winners.
You could pair the winners up against each other in some manner but since there are going to be at least 6 winners how do you divide them up? 3 winners playing 3-player games with two people winning the tournament? 3 winners playing 5-player games with some spoilers with the hopes that exactly one table has a double winner?
Put 5 winners at one table and declare the winner of that game to be the overall winner? Has the advantage that you should get a 'good' final table and an undisputed champion. Has the disadvantage that someone who won their first game actually can't win the tournament.
How would you even pick the 5 who advance? Highest score? Largest margin of victory? Largest percentage of second place's score? Largest percentage of the points at your table? None of those options are very good in Agricola since the games play out very differently based on the cards dealt to each player.
Highest score in particular has problems since a game with a lot of food generating cards rates to eat fewer animals/vegetables and therefore should just have more points scored in it than a game where people get most of their food by eating points. It's the same sort of problem that Dominion has with comparing scores between games.
That said, I don't know what I'd do if I was making the decision. (And I don't currently know what decision has been made!) Ideally I'd want to have the games go really fast so there'd be time to play a third game for the 'top five' after two preliminary games with some non-perfect but reasonable way of breaking ties to determine the top five. Possibly you could fix the cards for each seat of the first game to try to deal with the variation from cards and then use largest percentage of points at your table to determine the finalists.
I wouldn't go with a plan that didn't result in a final table. One of the things I like about board game tournaments is the (generally) high quality play that exists at that final game. It's one of the reasons I think the World Boardgaming Championships is so awesome and why the Great Canadian Board Game Blitz is, while fun, not as awesome. I knew when I walked away with 3rd place in Le Havre that I'd gone up against the best and legitimately didn't deserve to win. This year when I came 3rd at the GCBGB (both the Toronto one and the Fan eXpo one) I didn't play a single game against the people ahead of me. Was I better that day than they were? I don't know! I didn't get the opportunity to find out.
At any rate I enjoy playing Agricola so I'm going to go and have fun building an awesome farm.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
King of Tokyo Results
On Monday I headed down to Snakes & Lattes to play in their tournament for King of Tokyo. They've apparently acquired the adjacent store and have been working to use that store to expand their space. They held the tournament in the new store which was a pretty sweet space.
I think they had around 24-25 people and played mostly 5 player games. 3 rounds, cut to top 5 for a final table. I hadn't really played before and decide to go with a brawling strategy. Getting points seemed pretty random and smashing faces seemed really awesome so I went for it. It turns out that's not a very good plan at all. I eliminated many people in the 3 tournament games I played, and never died myself, but someone always managed to score enough points to win.
I played most of a game before the tournament in a teaching game for a new player and also played a game during the finals. I've come to the conclusion that trying to kill everyone is not very feasible. The problems with trying to kill people is you can't choose who you attack unless you try to attack everyone at once. But in order to do that you first have to let everyone else attack you AND you can no longer use the healing result on the dice. Maybe it's better in a smaller player game but in a 5 player game it really felt like everyone was just rolling for very random points while doing enough damage to anyone who thought about being aggressive to shut them down.
People seemed to _really_ like the game. People were talking about how it's in their top 5 of greatest games of all time. I'm not a fan. The fact that you often can't make use of any of your rolls makes it feel really hard to control what's going on. Contrasted with Roll Through The Ages, for example, where the faces all do different things but they almost always do _something_ so no matter what you roll you can make some choices and further your board position.
The turnout was really varied, too. There was a 7 year old kid and a large number (for a board game tournament, anyway) of cute young women. Everyone seemed to be having fun despite all the randomness and the fact that there's a lot of attacking going on. (I could have imagined people getting really bitter when I kept re-rolling points in order to try to eliminate them from the game but no one seemed to mind.) I was pretty much playing kingmaker by eliminating a couple people who were trying for points each game. But since I wasn't actually choosing who to attack it doesn't seem as bad, I guess... It helps that the flavour of the game is large monsters brawling each other!
After the tournament I hung out for another hour and a half and taught Tichu to Duncan and a couple other guys from the tournament. It's been a long time since I'd played that game and enjoyed playing it more than King of Tokyo. A good evening in all!
I think they had around 24-25 people and played mostly 5 player games. 3 rounds, cut to top 5 for a final table. I hadn't really played before and decide to go with a brawling strategy. Getting points seemed pretty random and smashing faces seemed really awesome so I went for it. It turns out that's not a very good plan at all. I eliminated many people in the 3 tournament games I played, and never died myself, but someone always managed to score enough points to win.
I played most of a game before the tournament in a teaching game for a new player and also played a game during the finals. I've come to the conclusion that trying to kill everyone is not very feasible. The problems with trying to kill people is you can't choose who you attack unless you try to attack everyone at once. But in order to do that you first have to let everyone else attack you AND you can no longer use the healing result on the dice. Maybe it's better in a smaller player game but in a 5 player game it really felt like everyone was just rolling for very random points while doing enough damage to anyone who thought about being aggressive to shut them down.
People seemed to _really_ like the game. People were talking about how it's in their top 5 of greatest games of all time. I'm not a fan. The fact that you often can't make use of any of your rolls makes it feel really hard to control what's going on. Contrasted with Roll Through The Ages, for example, where the faces all do different things but they almost always do _something_ so no matter what you roll you can make some choices and further your board position.
The turnout was really varied, too. There was a 7 year old kid and a large number (for a board game tournament, anyway) of cute young women. Everyone seemed to be having fun despite all the randomness and the fact that there's a lot of attacking going on. (I could have imagined people getting really bitter when I kept re-rolling points in order to try to eliminate them from the game but no one seemed to mind.) I was pretty much playing kingmaker by eliminating a couple people who were trying for points each game. But since I wasn't actually choosing who to attack it doesn't seem as bad, I guess... It helps that the flavour of the game is large monsters brawling each other!
After the tournament I hung out for another hour and a half and taught Tichu to Duncan and a couple other guys from the tournament. It's been a long time since I'd played that game and enjoyed playing it more than King of Tokyo. A good evening in all!
Monday, September 12, 2011
King of Tokyo Tournament
Snakes & Lattes is holding a tournament for the new game, King of Tokyo, today at 6pm. I'm planning on heading down and giving it a spin despite barely knowing how to play and with no expectation that I could win. (See, I play games for fun, honest!) King of Tokyo came out this year and is riding the wave of 'dice games' that have seen success recently. It is designed by Richard Garfield which is a good indicator that the game should be fun.
Now, I've always had a thing for rolling dice. I played an awful lot of Titan in my 20's and a lot of that was the desire to attack with a serpent. (Serpents tended to only hit on a 6 but you got to roll EIGHTEEN dice when you attacked!) From Kismet and Yahtzee through triple-WotC and into the more recent dice games like To Court The King, Ra Dice, and Roll Through The Ages... I love rolling dice.
King of Tokyo doesn't disappoint in that aspect since on your turn you roll six dice and can re-roll any number of those dice twice. It's not quite attacking with a serpent but you can roll eighteen dice on your turn if you want. Instead of rolling normal d6s you roll special dice with weird symbols on them that let you either score points, accumulate power-ups, deal damage, or heal damage. I have no idea what the best plan of attack is and I have hopes that it depends on what the rest of the table is doing. I think you probably want to be doing things they aren't doing. Unfortunately since you're rolling dice with very different possible results it seems like you can't actually plan on doing something specific...
The interesting twist to this game compared to other dice games is there's actually two ways to win. In pretty much every other dice game you're just playing solitaire. Sure, there are some interactions, but you're all just racing to get the most points in the same ways that everyone else is scoring points. King of Tokyo has a standard 'first to 20 points wins' goal but it also features player elimination. You have a fixed amount of health (one of the die faces will heal you) and if you run out you're eliminated. Be the last player standing and you win! This means that accumulating points is good if you can both get to 20 first and survive long enough to get there... But otherwise they're pretty much worthless. If you're trying to just kill everybody then buying powerups and doing damage seem like the ways to go.
Player elimination is a mechanic that has pretty much been eliminated from games I play, and with good reason. Telling someone who made a mistake early that they can't win anymore is one thing, telling them they need to sit and watch for an hour is something else entirely. I don't get to play Titan anymore since if people are going to drive an hour to get to my place they're going to want to play games the whole time. Not some of the time and then just watch for most of the time. I worry that it makes King of Tokyo fun while you're playing and a bit of a bore after you lose which is not good, but maybe the interesting tension in game of the two winning conditions makes up for it.
I'm not sure if the game will work well as a tournament game because of the player elimination. But I guess I normally play games really fast and finish before everyone else does so I have waiting around built in to tournaments anyway...
Now, I've always had a thing for rolling dice. I played an awful lot of Titan in my 20's and a lot of that was the desire to attack with a serpent. (Serpents tended to only hit on a 6 but you got to roll EIGHTEEN dice when you attacked!) From Kismet and Yahtzee through triple-WotC and into the more recent dice games like To Court The King, Ra Dice, and Roll Through The Ages... I love rolling dice.
King of Tokyo doesn't disappoint in that aspect since on your turn you roll six dice and can re-roll any number of those dice twice. It's not quite attacking with a serpent but you can roll eighteen dice on your turn if you want. Instead of rolling normal d6s you roll special dice with weird symbols on them that let you either score points, accumulate power-ups, deal damage, or heal damage. I have no idea what the best plan of attack is and I have hopes that it depends on what the rest of the table is doing. I think you probably want to be doing things they aren't doing. Unfortunately since you're rolling dice with very different possible results it seems like you can't actually plan on doing something specific...
The interesting twist to this game compared to other dice games is there's actually two ways to win. In pretty much every other dice game you're just playing solitaire. Sure, there are some interactions, but you're all just racing to get the most points in the same ways that everyone else is scoring points. King of Tokyo has a standard 'first to 20 points wins' goal but it also features player elimination. You have a fixed amount of health (one of the die faces will heal you) and if you run out you're eliminated. Be the last player standing and you win! This means that accumulating points is good if you can both get to 20 first and survive long enough to get there... But otherwise they're pretty much worthless. If you're trying to just kill everybody then buying powerups and doing damage seem like the ways to go.
Player elimination is a mechanic that has pretty much been eliminated from games I play, and with good reason. Telling someone who made a mistake early that they can't win anymore is one thing, telling them they need to sit and watch for an hour is something else entirely. I don't get to play Titan anymore since if people are going to drive an hour to get to my place they're going to want to play games the whole time. Not some of the time and then just watch for most of the time. I worry that it makes King of Tokyo fun while you're playing and a bit of a bore after you lose which is not good, but maybe the interesting tension in game of the two winning conditions makes up for it.
I'm not sure if the game will work well as a tournament game because of the player elimination. But I guess I normally play games really fast and finish before everyone else does so I have waiting around built in to tournaments anyway...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Puerto Rico Results
Yesterday I played 3 games of Puerto Rico in the Snakes and Lattes tournament. At one point I was talking with the guy who came second and he asked a question about if PR just wasn't my type of game. (I didn't win any of the rounds.) I told him I found it a bit too random and he disagreed saying even with people taking completely random actions he found it fun to try to figure out what they'd do anyway and position himself to take advantage.
I can recall thinking similar things about the game a while ago. When I first played PR I hated it because it seemed too random. (And I played exclusively 5 player games which didn't help matters.) Then I started really liking it and eventually felt like I could make the game flow the way I wanted. And then I started thinking it was too random again. So did I learn something or did I just get worse? It's hard to say. I certainly haven't played much recently and was very surprised at some of the moves people made yesterday. Some of which I'm pretty sure were just terrible but others might have been smart and I just missed how.
I certainly lost one game just by not paying enough attention. The guy to my right wasn't announcing what he was doing. He was just reaching across the table to grab things and such, and I completely missed that he'd picked up a coffee plantation. He was constantly leaning over his board and I couldn't see what he had unless I asked him to move. So when he called settler and I had the money to build coffee I grabbed a coffee plantation and immediately built coffee. If I build tobacco instead I may well have won. Instead he spent the rest of the game trying to screw me. (Because he wanted to sell coffee himself, see, even though it was another 3 rounds before he even had a roaster.) If I was playing tighter I'd have known what he had or would have forced him to announce his moves like everyone else. But I guess I didn't really care and the result showed.
On the plus side I got to play two games of Factory Fun afterwards. I love that game. I think I may go on an adventure to see if I can find a copy...
I can recall thinking similar things about the game a while ago. When I first played PR I hated it because it seemed too random. (And I played exclusively 5 player games which didn't help matters.) Then I started really liking it and eventually felt like I could make the game flow the way I wanted. And then I started thinking it was too random again. So did I learn something or did I just get worse? It's hard to say. I certainly haven't played much recently and was very surprised at some of the moves people made yesterday. Some of which I'm pretty sure were just terrible but others might have been smart and I just missed how.
I certainly lost one game just by not paying enough attention. The guy to my right wasn't announcing what he was doing. He was just reaching across the table to grab things and such, and I completely missed that he'd picked up a coffee plantation. He was constantly leaning over his board and I couldn't see what he had unless I asked him to move. So when he called settler and I had the money to build coffee I grabbed a coffee plantation and immediately built coffee. If I build tobacco instead I may well have won. Instead he spent the rest of the game trying to screw me. (Because he wanted to sell coffee himself, see, even though it was another 3 rounds before he even had a roaster.) If I was playing tighter I'd have known what he had or would have forced him to announce his moves like everyone else. But I guess I didn't really care and the result showed.
On the plus side I got to play two games of Factory Fun afterwards. I love that game. I think I may go on an adventure to see if I can find a copy...
BMI: 22.01 (0)
Wii Fit Age: 28 (-3)
Monday, May 16, 2011
Puerto Rico Tournament
Snakes & Lattes has taken to holding various board game tournaments every month or so. To date the games have been on the easier end of the spectrum with Dominion, Settlers, and 7 Wonders. Today they're running a Puerto Rico event which is certainly wading into the deep end of complexity. (Boardgamegeek gives it a 3.3 on the 'game weight' scale. Dominion is 2.4, Settlers is 2.4, 7 Wonders is 2.2. So, a pretty significant bump if you believe the bgg ratings.)
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this game. It has my second least favourite game mechanic (public-private information) and I often find you play the game for a while and then someone chooses who wins. Because people rarely accurately track the 'hidden' victory points the result can seem pretty random. (And if they are properly tracking points, well, it just becomes king-making entirely.) Also, during the game, the actions people take can drastically impact who does well. I wish I had some numbers in terms of winner's position relative to where craftsman in particular gets called.
On the positive hand it's relatively short, every decision matters, has many feasible strategies, and is pretty fun. Even with it being removed from BSW for years it's still my 4th most played game. (And really it should be 3rd. It counts each hand of Tichu as a full game in the stats.) Only Can't Stop and Backgammon are ahead of it and they're realistically both 2 player games so Puerto Rico is my most played multi-player game by far.
I like to play it and feel I have a decent grasp on how to win. I just get frustrated when I lose for reasons outside my control. Or at least, for what seem to be outside my control. Maybe I need to re-examine how I'm playing after I lose to see if I could have done something better...
At any rate, I'm heading there right after work and could well be there until tomorrow so I'm probably going to miss my weigh-in today. Oh well!
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this game. It has my second least favourite game mechanic (public-private information) and I often find you play the game for a while and then someone chooses who wins. Because people rarely accurately track the 'hidden' victory points the result can seem pretty random. (And if they are properly tracking points, well, it just becomes king-making entirely.) Also, during the game, the actions people take can drastically impact who does well. I wish I had some numbers in terms of winner's position relative to where craftsman in particular gets called.
On the positive hand it's relatively short, every decision matters, has many feasible strategies, and is pretty fun. Even with it being removed from BSW for years it's still my 4th most played game. (And really it should be 3rd. It counts each hand of Tichu as a full game in the stats.) Only Can't Stop and Backgammon are ahead of it and they're realistically both 2 player games so Puerto Rico is my most played multi-player game by far.
I like to play it and feel I have a decent grasp on how to win. I just get frustrated when I lose for reasons outside my control. Or at least, for what seem to be outside my control. Maybe I need to re-examine how I'm playing after I lose to see if I could have done something better...
At any rate, I'm heading there right after work and could well be there until tomorrow so I'm probably going to miss my weigh-in today. Oh well!
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