New Angeles Forum Game: Capital, CAPITAL!

And I still pass.

I don’t know what this means…

To win the Asset, popularly known as the golf clubs.

Oh, in that case it’s fine, I don’t care.

Been attending the film festival here, so no updates.

Looks like it is @Tim_N’s offer vs. @soondifferent. Support phase starts with @rowe33, unless someone wants to trigger their asset?

Specifically whether or not @soondifferent wants to use Locust Company.

I completely missed this one. Sorry!

I think that basically concludes it, I don’t think there’s anything else anyone has that will affect things?

I’ll pass @rho21

Yup I think that’s it, everyone is free to join me for one last round of golf on earth gravity before the world ends. BYOlightsaber.

I probably won’t have time today, but wrap-up and AAR tomorrow.

OK.

What happens in Production doesn’t really matter. The last event is this one, which will push Threat to 25 and trigger game end:

As the organized crime gangs of Laguna Velasco and Nihongai rise up and cause a lot of trouble, the Federal Government has had enough and assumes direct control of New Angeles. The squabbling rivalries of the Corporations are of no interest to the State, only that the flow of goods continues. With the failure of the establishment there is time for a novel approach.

Some of the previous Captains of Industry retreats Off-World, while others return overseas in disgrace. That said, there is some continuity in the new order. The Weyland Consortium has always provided the citizens of New Angeles with affordable and comfy prefab housing, and will continue to do so in the coming decades.

To the surprise of no one, @rowe33 was:
https://forum-cdn.quartertothree.com/uploads/default/optimized/3X/d/9/d9e8bcc75f2c22df4f3f4639b4b6d68916d91dc9_1_321x500.jpg

Congratulations!

Thanks for playing everyone! I am not sure if you want to reveal your own rivalries or not?

Some thoughts:
I made some mistakes early on, with forgetting the discard step and that Districts with Strike/Outage tokens are still exploited. I also had some issues with the bookkeeping. I think there were some others as well, but I have forgotten them.

I think the setup in my google sheet was also not the most effective. If I run this again I will rework the public information sheet so that it shows all information and Assets owned by each Corp on their own line.

Timing is an issue in this game since there are so many possible interrupts. I stated this would be a slow burn (which it was), but at the same time there is a drive to not hold up the game that people experience. I think I will add in a checklist with everything that can trigger for any future games so that information is easily accessible.

There is a lot of information, so it is easy to miss stuff. I think a more clearly stated bolding protocol is needed. Discord has really made that simpler with ** text here ** bold.

I’ll probably remember more things later.

Thanks so much for all of your effort, @Jorn_Weines! I had alot of fun. @rowe33 revealing himself as a Cylon was the best part of the game, he deserves to be the sole winner. The passive aggression (and naked aggression in the last round) between @soondifferent and I was great too.

One thing I am not sure about is the number of players. Is a full set of six too much for an online game? Or is it okay? I am not sure if the game works as intended with only 4, but maybe 6 crowds it a bit out?

On my strategy for the game:

I chose to start with an investment for enemy units, so I could profit while not advancing my company’s standard agenda. Thus hopefully being able to co-operate with lots of others and build some relationships. With the early events not looking for units to be cleared, this worked nicely.

My rival was @Perky_Goth, so I was happy to be able to secure victory for the counter-offer in the first deal. I had the position of power as last player to support, so it was just a matter of getting what I guessed was a reasonable (if slightly low) price for discarding most of my hand. Tricky to tell on a first play, though; in hindsight cards in hand mostly seemed much less valuable than I’d anticipated. Perhaps because most of the assets were only situationally useful (unlike the awesome first asset which was on show at the time).

It was a shame the critical moves in the game happened over the holidays when I was away from my notes… I discovered afterwards I had noted a suspicion that @rowe33 was the federalist. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so keen to hand over the keys to the city if I’d remembered that, but probably I would have risked it anyway.

Really well played though, @rowe33. That was a remarkably effective backstab.

Tough game to play first time, though. Very difficult to judge when we could afford to make money and when we needed to devote our time to saving the city.

As far as the game itself goes:

The restriction on saying anything about your cards feels rather artificial. BSG’s equivalent limitations work a lot better, as they’re just to stop Cylons being discovered by being forced to give out too much information. Here they appear to be necessary at least some of the time, but serve to make various bits of the game rather clunky.

The victory conditions of the game as a whole are rather strange. They seem almost ideally suited to king-making right at the end. Of course you can’t know for certain what investments are paying off, but as beating the person who has you as rival isn’t important, there’s often no reason to lie. It certainly feels as though a majority bloc could form quite easily and take control of the game, sorting out a final distribution of capital right before the end.

As an experience, though, I really enjoyed the game. Trying to get hints on hidden roles, swing deals to your favour, make some profit while New Angeles burns… but only burns a little bit.

I’m not sure how enjoyable it is for someone who is a distance behind, or for the federalist (particularly once revealed).

Playing the game on the forum:

The biggest difficulty was the speed of replies (and being sure that other players had had the chance to reply if they were silent). This serves to push against deals getting done, as a complex negotiation could take days. It also makes it trickier to handle activation triggers. I’m not sure whether fewer players would make much difference to this.

Other than that, I didn’t think the game felt very distorted from how I imagine it plays face-to-face.

The whole thing dragged a bit at the end, when it was clear (at least to me) that there was no way to recover the situation. The pace seemed reasonable before that though.

Overall:
I think I’ll give the game a cautious 6/10 for now, almost solely due to my concerns about the victory conditions; perhaps more plays will reveal those to be unfounded. I could see that rising to 8/10 if so.

Anyway, I had fun, so mission accomplished. Many thanks to @Jorn_Weines for introducing us to this and for doing a great job running it despite the complexity of the rules.

Good game all! I had no idea what I was doing most of the game, just trying to get some capital and waiting for a chance to do some evil. The Federalist is definitely pretty ho-hum, once you’re known. Not much I could really do at that point except pretend I knew exactly how to fend off your attempts to save the city.

Thanks for running it, Jorn!

It’s a bit hard to remember what happened so long ago. Clearly, I needed to be much more aggressive to get anything from the start, and that’s just something I’m not used to doing. Surprisingly, that was even harder to do in the forum as I’ve been able to acquire some skills in reading people face to face, but it just doesn’t apply. I’m sorry for not being really in it, I constantly felt just a spectator to events. As discussed with @soondifferent earlier, part of it was how people dealt with the map and the need for production, as well as the lack of reference for how the game plays out in general. But I still sucked.
Double boo for my rival, @rowe33, bested clinically twice in a row by that fracking toaster. Congrats, mate.

Oh yeah, before I forget, thanks for putting up with us and our constant rules mistakes (still less than a typical BSG game, though), @Jorn_Weines

Good game everyone! Much thanks to @Jorn_Weines for running this, I henceforth name our last Arcology the Jorn Weines Panopticon in your honor!

It’s always tough (if exciting) to jump into and try and figure the systems on the first go. Yeah, that 5 capital asset turned out to be pretty good huh? At least the RNG decided to instruct us on the game economy pretty quickly, with the 5 capital asset, then the 10 card asset, etc. Sunny turned out to be awesome, but Rachel wasn’t really well matched for Melange, since I always had relevant cards to hoard. The balance between assets is pretty out there, with Tanaka on one hand and stuff like Eiko on the other.

I had suspected Rowe for the Fed (though I thought Perky_Goth was more likely) but I also underestimated the damage he could do with the spike - had expected the outages to be removed at least, and didn’t think we would fail both the event and the demand. I thought that a higher threat would be advantageous since it would guarantee the fulfillment of my contract, but that turned out to be the fatal mistake for the game. This tanked my investment as well, which lead to the ill-fated hostage taking in the last act. That was a decisive blow, congrats @rowe33!

I actually had 2 information procurement going into the last round, so I’m relieved to see that it wouldn’t have made a difference (@Jorn_Weines what were the next few event cards?) Again, I can’t imagine playing this game face to face - stage is set for things to get cutthroat near the end, and as rho21 said, I can see voting blocs locking players out (if lower threat) or hostages and ultimatums (if higher threat.) But part of that is probably from forum-game-overthinking as well.

Ultimately was a lot of fun, thanks everyone!

Thanks @Jorn_Weines! This was tons of fun and a good adventure through a more complicated board game. I enjoyed it all, even in failure.

I think that it flowed pretty well. The reality is regardless of the complexity or simplicity it is just going to take some time. I do think that we probably were a bit slower just from it being new to a few of us. I know I had a handful of times where I felt like I couldn’t respond on my phone because I needed to wait for the time to really look at the board and cards and try and puzzle it out.

I honestly (and probably obviously to observers) only really started to get my head around the balance of threat and enrichment right after rowe did his classic thing he does and wrecked us all. I do wonder if voting blocks becomes a big thing since it seems like you can feel out who is neutral towards you by mid-game most of the time. Of course that probably just means the meta game evolves.

I sadly don’t have a lot intelligent to say, but I absolutely enjoyed it and thought it held up will to a forum play through. Thanks once again @Jorn_Weines for running this! And thanks everyone else for playing it and helping me w/ figuring out how to play.

I can really see how falling behind early can hit motivation, especially when a game takes a while to complete. I think the dynamic of equalizing in order to avoid someone tanking Threat might happen when people know the flow better. Maybe? The possibility of a federalist can impact that as well. The parallel to Archipelago is visible here.

I can look up the coming events @soondifferent. I think it is probably a good idea to share the gallery in future games. I am not sure, though. There are only 16 events, 4 of each type. Not sure if that might trivialize the uncertainty aspect, but obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation is silly.

How fast Threat can accumulate didn’t dawn on me until the mid-game. I think the only way to learn that at first is through experience. In hindsight that is also quite similar to Archipelago.

I had trouble keeping track of deals with favors, and I think that must be somethings players do themselves. It might be a good idea to decide on a clear markup for card-plays and such.

As for the game stalling a bit in the end, the last couple of weeks have been really busy, so I feel like I contributed a lot to the slow going.

Again, thanks everybody! This does feel a bit like a test-run, though, and I will probably run another game at a later time.

The next couple of events triggered on Outages, Human First and Unrest. Some Threat from them might have been avoided, but the 7 hit from not meeting Demand would have finished it. I think that the lack of Deals on many of the events really hurt the non-federalist efforts. Although there are eight 3s, five 4s and three 5s.