Mike brought up the point that playing not to suck hasn't worked for him, so excuse this stream of conscious babbling while I try and explain it better using examples from games I know this tactic works reasonably well in.
Ra: Ra is about a pure of an auction game as you are likely ever to find. Every bid is simply an opinion. One of the factors when placing a bid is you know which token you are getting next round. Too many times this paralyzes players. It is much more important to get tiles you want than it is to have better bidding power next round. Also, you really need to spend all your bid tokens every round. This is strictly anecdotal, but I don't recall too many Ra winners who played 'guts' with the round end winning many games.
Alhambra: Alhambra is a two pronged draft game. You draft money cards and use those monies to buy tiles. So playing not to suck means early on you don't care too much what type of tiles you get. Yeah color types and wall length are not trivial, but the most important thing is to get your tableau started before the scoring card hits. Round 2 it becomes at least a little important to keep track of your opponents tiles, but don't get paralyzed by that either. Its not difficult to pass the color leader in round 2. The point is that every tile is an asset, even if it just stopped an opponent from getting points.
I guess this game theory can also be written as: Its better to do something constructive when you have the chance then missing out waiting for the best move.
No comments:
Post a Comment