Luck. The Fog of War. The Wind Gauge. Twists of Fate. Why we never play games involving dice with Chris Brown.In general I like games that involve some luck. I don’t like set choreography that gets featured in games without some chance. The trade off is that I lose some games I should win (BOO!) and I win some games I should lose (AWESOME!); games like this drive some players crazy and I can’t really blame them. A carefully constructed strategy hours in the making is turned to ashes by hot dice. Lame.
However, it is my contention that they are playing the wrong luck based games. The best games with chance allow for a certain amount of risk management.
One way to minimize luck is to have the luck/chance referenced a lot. In Face-Off Hockey (FoH), there are about 300 dice rolls per game between the two players, and the Ravens Loft Hockey League (RLHL) season lasts 44 games. With 12 teams in the league and 2 players per game, that is about 80,000 (300*44*12/2) dice rolls per season of which 13,000 directly affect your team.
By the way, there is no such thing as the law of averages. If you flip a coin 10 times and the first 9 are heads, the next flip is still a 1 in 2 chance that heads will turn. What actually exist are odds. When you start flipping that coin, with no preconditions, the odds of flipping heads 10 times in a row is 1 in 2048.Back to hockey. While it’s true that some unlucky results may cost a game here and there, the best teams will overcome that over the course of a season, simply because the sample size is big enough that the trends are a lot more important than any single event.
FoH is an extreme example, but there are a lot of games that use trends as a way to minimize luck. NoThanks! also does this but in a different manner. A game takes so little time to play, that while luck will have a big impact on any individual game, over the course of a No Thanks! career, skilled players will do better. I feel that Brass also does this. Everyone gets worthless cards, but even worthless cards can be used for generic actions. While it’s true that awful enough cards will kill your game, the best players consistently make good use out of bad cards.
So the other general method for luck management is to design a game where luck doesn’t impact the game a whole lot, and is only in there to give a little bit of flavor or replayability. Of the games I have reviewed, I think Olympos gives the best example (or at least the most recent). That game features two decks. Deck 1 triggers events. And the events may have an impact on the winner, then again maybe not. Events do affect the game, but what usually determines the winner is interactions between the players. Deck 2 a player uses tactically. And while some cards are better in certain situations than others, even unused cards are worth something. So the impact of luck is quite minimal.
7 Wonders also fits in this category. It’s true that an awful draw can cost a game, but that’s actually quite rare. Skill and awareness of what the rest of the table is doing is a much bigger factor than luck of the draw.
No the games that are awful are the ones that don’t have big enough sample sizes for trends and then being unlucky results in catastrophe. Enter Car Wars.In the Thanksgiving Turkeys article, Mike hit it on the head. The best strategy in Car Wars is to avoid making die rolls. The sample size for rolls is way too small, and the consequences are way too big. A missed driving check, while not necessarily killing you, can leave you a spectator for turns at a time as your car spins out of control. In the glacially paced Car Wars, turns can be HOURS! That is one hell of a consequence for missing a single roll on a six sided die. Car Wars also has something similar with weapons. A lot of the heavy hitting weapons are one-shots. So an all or nothing proposition, either your barrage of rockets hammers the poor bastid in front of you, or you have shot yourself dry and need to spend the rest of the night avoiding the dude you just pissed off.
Nice post!!!
ReplyDeleteThere are good games that have no chance or almost no chance. But they tend to be deep game. Chess for example :)
Puerto Rico gets along with almost no chance. Each turn opens with the draw of some random resources, but other than that, it's driven by the players. There a reason it's been rated so high for so long. Puerto Rico is also about as far from a game I'd play with casual board gamers as I think I can get.
Through the Desert has no chance once player order is determined. Each player just slap down a couple camels each turn and you see how it finishes. Each board is different because the VPs are spread about it randomly, but that is just to give it replayability, it doesn't add chance to the gameplay.
Thebes on the other hand is destroyed by chance. You get to draw from the bags of victory points between 5-10 times per game. And there is SO much variance in the model they use that it's not fun. Unless you're under 12.
Like you, I like games with limited chance like the ones I listed. Like you, I also like games that involve so much chance that you can, over the course of time, manage risk effectively (like No Thanks!, good players of that game will have success over their career, if not in each individual game). I don't like games that have catastrophic results for one bad roll...but those games exist, and there are people who like them. Those people can die two times in the face.
Without the element of randomness, then all games are pretty much chess, which is a really boring game. So go randomness!
ReplyDeleteThe argument about NoThanks! doesn't stand the smell test. Or... by that same logic, playing enough games of any game would show you the best player... including Car Wars.
ReplyDeletein our brief experiments with Car Wars last year we did show who the best player was, Mike, the guy with the experience. And Mike knew to not make any driving rolls.
ReplyDeletei see what you're saying juan, but clearly there's a difference between no thanks and car wars. what do you think it is?
ReplyDeleteI've won 100% of my Car Wars games
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly the the sample size is...challenged
ReplyDeleteI like games with catastrophic results as long as there is the possibility to overcome them. A lot of people don't like that there are these kinds of results in Blood Bowl for example, but really, when you get an incredibly experienced and developed team there's nothing in the random chance results you cannot overcome so long as the odds are in your favor most of the time you are trying stuff. I like a healthy mix of chance with skill in a game. RftG is very chancy as it is a card game, but it's a lot of fun.
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