apost8
4701
I wouldn’t call this “gaming the system” at all, at least not in a pejorative sense. It seems to me to be within the spirit of the game. I’ve done the same thing, but with literature. If one of the images can refer to a particular novel, choose another novel by the same author and reference it. However, I too have had people exhibit unexpected literacy to the detriment of my strategy.
Spent the evening with a couple of friends last night. Initially the plan was to play Catan, but our group went from five to four to three, at which point Catan was off the table. I looked over my selection of games and took over Dominant Species, Quarriors and Citadels, none of which they had ever played. In fact, Catan was really the only non big Hasbro-style boardgame they’d ever played. This, combined with the fact that I’d never actually played Dominant Species, kept it off the table. A five hour first game didn’t seem likely. So instead we played a silly trivia game they’d gotten for Christmas called Bezzerwizzer. After two rounds of that, it was decided to tackle something I’d brought.
Needless to say, LK’s right on this one. Citadels was a huge success. It was fantastic with three people (and though I’ve never played it with four, I can’t imagine four being better, though five would probably be fun) with everyone getting two roles, making certain no one is ever out of the game even when the Assassin strikes. We played two games and while I won both, by the second they were clearly beginning to pick up on the strategies and came much closer to victory. Fortunately, their love of alcohol lead me to victory.
A quick round of Quarriors was fun, but then I had to go. It was agreed that the game was tremendously silly and highly random but a good time when you’ve only got twenty minutes or so and feel like throwing around a fistful of colorful dice.
We’ve agreed to all read the rules for Dominant Species and meet back. They were not intimidated when I opened the box and showed them the vast amount of scary bits within.
Mmmmmm…vast amounts of scary bits. :) Generally the primary ingredient in any reciepe for a good time.
Straight from Settlers/Citadels to Dominant Species? Hardcore!
apost8
4705
Indeed.
On New Year’s Eve, some friends invited me over for Settlers – which I am not a big fan on, but I recognize it as an important gateway game – and I at least got the chance to introduce them to Pandemic. With any luck, they’ll be playing Caylus and Tigris & Euphrates and Age of Steam in no time, but I didn’t want to throw them directly in the deep end like that.
“Milk Before Meat,” as they say.
7 Wonders is my new gateway drug.
The rules are actually pretty straightforward, once you read them. (And say what you will about the formality of wargame companies’ rulebooks, they’re at least logical and organized, unlike the typical Fantasy Flight monstrosity.) The concept of dominance (which is really weirdly handled), and the use of the term “species” to refer to an individual cube rather than to all cubes of the same color, are really the only two things that are likely to bite you.
The difficult thing with Dominant Species, based on the unsuccessful game we attempted, is that you start off not really knowing what to do, or why. Should I wanderlust? Um, maybe, I guess. Unless I shouldn’t. Should I glaciate something? It seems mean, and that guy will hate me for life plus retaliate next turn, but it WOULD hurt him a lot. Which I think is good? What you end up with, if nobody’s played it, is a bunch of people taking random actions and doing random things, without any idea whether what they’re doing makes sense at all, even while they understand the rulebook.
Contrast that with 7 Wonders, where your actions are all clearly motivated. You may not know which is OPTIMAL, but you know exactly why you want to do everything: Every single card you play makes your civilization awesomer somehow, by providing it with more resources, more money, more culture, more science. There’s no way to accidentally hurt yourself and make things worse than they were a minute ago, your position is getting constantly better and you’re just picking which way you want to see it get better more.
Lorini
4708
In the end, the player that wins Dominant Species is the player who is most successful at getting and keeping their pieces on the board. Our group never had an issue as to what to do, because it seemed clear to us that we wanted to get pieces on the board.
The biggest problem (and this is even bigger in Urban Sprawl another of the designers games) is determining who is really in the lead. The score at any given time is not necessarily indicative of who is leading and that leads to some strange plays. Only experience will help with this, but Dominant Species was my favorite game of 2010 and has made it to my top 10 games of all time.
Not sure if this came up (it didn’t for me with early games since I played with 3 so infrequently) but I like the alternate 3p rules at the lower right of Faidutti’s rule supplement here. I like to present it as “advanced” rather than “fixing broken stuff” but I like the way it handles uncertainty better than the standard approach, plus I like the artist as something you can get a lot of mileage out of at the right time. I’m glad it worked, as I also had to go with Citadels (this time with an unprecedented 7 players of which 5 were new) a fair bit this vacation and it was pretty successful if not really comparable to the 5 and below experience. Also I got a lot out of Guillotine and Corsari, and I’m kicking myself for not getting more copies of the latter since it’s out of print.
Reldan
4710
The main issue with RftG is that it’s a game where employing strategy requires additional information not available to new players. It’s frustrating for new players because it’s a game where maximizing your limited turns is all about setting yourself up for synergies that, quite frankly, it is impossible to know exist without having advance knowledge of what card combinations exist and how likely it is that you’ll be able to play them.
I’m not a fan of Dominion, but that game has all the cards that can be used during play as public information. It also is much easier to pick up than Race, although I don’t think it’s really that much simpler mechanically.
LK has a printout of all of the different roles in Citadels that he gives to new players so they can see what possible powers are out there and can deduce what other players may have taken without having to have already memorized the deck of role cards. I think that’s a huge boon for getting people into the game even though you might say that remembering 8 cards isn’t that hard. The issue is that while knowing who picked what role is hidden information, knowing what the possible roles are clearly is not. RftG needs players to know what possible cards are out there, but provides no clear mechanism to do so aside from just expecting people to have studied the game and have an innate understanding of what’s possible.
Yeah, simply photocopying the role cards onto a sheet of paper and having a couple on hand changes things for the better in the early going, and even later on. It’s a great starting step so that people can focus on strategy and psyching people out rather than memory.
I finally played 7 Wonders this weekend and liked it, although pretty much nobody else did. They were putting way too much thought into what I felt was a fairly simple game where you’re just going to get screwed (or blessed) by the cards sometimes.
I also broke Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries out of the shrinkwrap and played a two-player game. Maybe we were doing it wrong, but it played like a much less brutal version of the Swiss map, with fewer chokepoints and less gambling on tunnel (and ferry) routes. If you like the elbow room and relative simplicity of the base game, this one comes closest to emulating that for two people. The Swiss map is still best for two cutthroat players.
I also tried to play Blood Bowl: Team Manager but we ran out of time and only managed to get through the first turn since we spent so much time getting the damned thing set up and reading through the convoluted rules. I liked what I saw, but we couldn’t figure out if player Skills can be used every time it’s your turn or only when that card is played. For example, I had some guys with the Tackle skill, and the wording on the card indicated you could use that ability every time it was your turn, but that seemed incredibly silly. Anyone know how that works?
I was lucky to play it with a group where everyone played it as a light game, but yeah, you could really get nailed by AP people, especially in the later game.
Which especially sucks because it fills a void as a real game for groups that are large enough that the only viable option under normal circumstances is a party game. It could play lightning-fast thanks to simultaneous turns and only six turns per round, but even a few people staring at their cards for three minutes really bogs things down. Maybe it’ll go a lot faster next time since everyone now knows what the symbols mean and how the scoring works.
Bamboo
4715
The use of Skills happens during the “Commit One Player to a Matchup” step. That step includes the the bits that say “He then resolves the player’s card as follows,” and “The manager uses the player’s skills in order from left-to-right.”
It’s just referring to the committed player, as far as I know. If there’s wording on a player’s card that indicates otherwise, it might be a special ability.
Thanks, Bamboo. That makes the most sense, so I should have gone with it, but I have a bad habit of over-interpreting rules. Especially with FFG products.
Tackle is definitely only used when you commit a player (like any of the other skills). It would be overpowered otherwise.
Bamboo
4718
The rules could definitely be tightened up a bit. For example, Guard is a common ability that says:
“When an opposing player successfully tackles one of your players, you may apply the dice result to this player instead.”
It doesn’t say the Guarding player needs to be in the same matchup as the tackled player. (At least not anywhere that my group could see.) That’s a pretty important detail! We went with a common sense interpretation, but that’s not always an option when you’re knee-deep in a game and people are feeling competitive.
Very happy with the game overall though.
There is a clause buried in the rules that abilities have to (unless specifically overridden) only affect the highlight/tournament the owning player is in.
It’s quite a pain in the ass to find if you’re looking for it though, as the rules are written by someone too close to the game. Important but “obvious” assumptions are left out or buried, and as a result the game benefits unduly from reading the rules, playing it once, then rereading the entire booklet. :-/
Still a great game though!
This is a question about 7 Wonders, but really its a question about board gaming with kids.
Having no local group, my board gaming is limited to games my wife and 11-year old daughter are interested in (or solo gaming). What has worked (other than Monopoly/Apples to Apples, etc.) has been Carcasonne and Ticket to Ride. My daughter particularly loved Ticket to Ride.
For Christmas arrived LoTR:LCG (which I am playing solo, wouldn’t expect either to get into that), Castle Panic (a big hit with my wife and daughter) and 7 Wonders.
I thought 7 Wonders would work wonders with my daughter. But the minute it was unwrapped I could tell by her expression she wasn’t interested. She had literally judged the game by its cover. The three of us sat down one afternoon last week and tried playing, and we asked her to keep an open mind, but her mind was made up: she wasn’t interested. After an hour or so, she wasn’t even paying attention, and we gave up.
I was pretty disappointed, particularly after spending $35 on a 3-player game. My hunch is that the art design made her think it was too much like school, too serious.
Ah well. So now I have this award-winning game, sitting unloved. Should I: a) keep it, and try to learn the two-player variant with my wife or b) put it away for two years, then see if my daughter would be interested at age 13 or c) trade it at BGG.
Anyone else have experiences like this?
