Autumn is well and truly upon us. The clocks have gone back, and the English fascination with the weather and the many ways to describe rain kicks into high gear.
October was an ok month for gaming.
Two of the new games I tried during the month ended up with copies in my collection. In fact a third has just been ordered after looking at the 3×3 below. I decided to google if it was possible to get a copy, and before I know it I’m getting a Korean/English version off eBay!
I played Phoenix New Horizon (PHN) last Friday on the clubs get it to the table night. But decided not to say anything at the time. I had a good time playing it. However at the end I was left feeling a bit meh! It was fine.
It’s a worker placement game with a paper thin theme. PHN is meant to have a post apocalyptic theme. For this the theme could really be anything. I felt it didn’t come through.
The action select had a new twist with its upgrading the worker mechanic that also saw more powerful actions becoming available.
The game just didn’t knock my socks off.
Anyway enough waffling. Here’s the raw stats for October.
I knew it was going to be lacking on the gaming front.
Work was giving me shifts that really weren’t conducive to playing games with others.
However gaming finds a way, and I managed to play some games. More than I expected.
There was even a last day of the month game session with Diego and Marcin. Which seemed to mirror the last day of May at UKGE and playing games with Ben and Harrison. These two last minute flurry of gaming pushed up the stats for both months making them look less sad than they were.
My 3×3 for June 2024
Luckily after this weeks holiday and four shifts of lates I make the jump back to early shifts. Which means a return to club night and being able to start back up the mid week lcg/ccg night. So there is a silver lining to gaming.
At the start of the month I was a bit down on my lack of gaming opportunities for the month ahead.
But as George Formby’s catch phrase goes “turned out nice again” (this really does age me. Growing up back in the day on the whole 3 channels that we had his movies were regularly shown).
3×3 of top 9 games played in May
In reality this was three gaming sessions and a chance to play some games with Ben at the expo.
Two thirds of the games played this month were new to me. That’s pretty high. Five of the games were trick takers. I like Ben do enjoy a good trick taking game.
My bgstats for the month
I’m hoping June will be a back to normal. But we are now entering that time of year of Summer holidays. So the next couple of months might be just as barren on the gaming opportunities.
Two days off over the Easter weekend have allowed me to get in some late gaming for the March stats.
Saturday saw me meeting up with Jeff and Charlene at the usual place to play a game or two.
Our first game was Arabella. Which if Jeff hadn’t got his final objective card I’d have won. And my victory would have been oh so sweet. Unintentional, and literally the games equivalent of winning Viticulture (base game) by not making any wine (which I have done).
All game I had the starting engine and a level 2 engine. Eventually Jeff and Charlene bought some carriages so my early investment in their shares started to pay off. But still with no carriages my dividends were worthless to them both.
This games end was triggered by Jeff reaching the end of the 10 money track on his sheet.
Somehow until we picked up Jeff was owed another objective card I was winning! It was insane. I would have easily have bet money that Charlene and Jeff were doing much better than me, and I was going to score hardly anything.
So yes Jeff won.
We followed Arabella up with Dandelions. This was probably the worst I’ve done in a game of this. I didn’t score a single majority. Jeff won this too.
The afternoons gaming was wrapped up with me introducing Ship, Captain, Crew to Jeff and Charlene.
Ship, Captain, Crew is fastly becoming a favourite little filler game. Four or five rounds take hardly any time to play. I won this time breaking Jeff’s run of victories.
I keep saying this but it’s true I had a great afternoon gaming with two great friends.
Sunday saw me meeting up with Charlene and her daughter once again at the usual spot to yep play games.
Despite being a relaxed afternoon of gaming we got five games to the table in about two and a half hours.
Our first two games were new to me.
Spots was a cool, light, dice game. It had Roll for it, Age Of War vibes with the completing dogs, with a nice buried dice mechanic that added a push your luck element to the game.
The other new game was Kohaku a tile drafting themed around making a koi pond. This definitely had Kingdomino vibes to it. A very quick light and fun game.
We followed up with a game of all in Parks. So both the Nightfall and Wildlife expansions were in play.
Dandelions hit the table next so that Annabelle could try the game, with a view to them teaching their Nan the game on an upcoming holiday.
Our final game of the fun afternoon gaming was, you guessed it, Ship, Captain, Crew.
New Arrivals
The first batch (there will be more over the years) of a club poker chip arrived.
When it comes to this sort of stuff I’m prioritising those that attend club nights regularly and are long time members.
Fenland Gamers Poker Chip
The BattleTech Alpha Strike Starter Box arrived. I’m writing more about this in another post. The counter pack has also arrived. But it’s fair to say that I’m dipping my toes into this game.
I also picked up a Dice Masters collection which I need to sort through. And I know this sounds like a cop out but this too will be the subject of another blog post.
Finally whilst waiting for repairs to my car I made the mistake of walking into Waterstones. Where seeing they still had a prerelease kit bought into the latest ccg to hit stores Star Wars Unlimited.
I’d tried so hard to not go down this rabbit hole. My wallet can’t take another ccg. But here I am dipping my toes.
Well the late flurry of weekend gaming gave me probably my best months gaming in over six months. The makes me happy.
I couldn’t help quoting Klopp after Liverpool won their sixth Champions League title for the title of this blog post. It just seemed apt.
February saw some gaming. Not much though. Even less than January.
In total six board games made it to the table.
I was glad to get three of them to the table with a higher player count than my initial plays of them. They did not disappoint.
Getting Zombie Dice back to the table was cool. I really do need to leave this in the game bag, along with Sea Salt and Paper. Two nice little filler games for a club night.
With my upgraded dice cups for Liars Dice I need a better storage solution that would allow it with the neoprene mat for tracking bids to also be in the bag.
But as the search for that elusive bag continues I’m grateful that I got some gaming done this month.
Sadly I won’t be able to play any games tomorrow and record some rare plays for that once every four years opportunity.
But that just sums up my new normal. Hopefully Sunday will keep being a thing gaming wise, and with a bit of luck Tuesday will be a thing too.
One of the criticisms by some reviewers about games from Stonemaier Games is that they are unbalanced, not play tested enough.
But how fair a criticism is this?
For this post I’m going to look at Tapestry. Which is a game that has this accusation made against it. And recently had a pack of rebalanced civilisation mats released. I may also use the odd game from their catalog to illustrate a point.
Before I go any further I need to give a disclaimer of some sort. Firstly I have no idea how many play testers, how much play testing was done, or what the play test process is at Stonemaier games. And I’ve made no attempt to find out. I’m also not a mathematician or statistician. So there are likely major flaws in my maths and logic. Please feel free to correct me in the comments. For this post I’m going to ignore solo play testing because I don’t play solo, and I don’t want to look up the solo rules. Oh and I have been accused of being a bit of a Stonemaier Games fanboy.
In Tapestry and it’s three expansions we have 41 civilization mats broken down as follows:
Tapestry – 16 civilization mats
Plans & Ploys – 10 civilization mats
Arts & Architecture – 5 civilization mats
Fantasies & Futures – 10 civilization mats
So to look at how feasible and reasonable it is to play test Tapestry and its expansions I will be working out the number of combinations of civilization mats. For this exercise the order doesn’t matter. Hence combinations instead of permutations.
To work out the number of possible combinations of civilization mats I’m using the following Binomial coefficients formula:
Where n is the set size or in our case number of civilization cards, and r is size of sets we are choosing, aka player count for us.
What follows is the number of combinations for Tapestry and its expansions based on player count.
As expected it’s going to be a lot easier to play test all the combinations once at the lower player counts than the higher ones.
But you need to repeatedly play these combinations to make sure that what would appear to be an unbalanced civilization mat is in fact that, and not just appearing to be so due to other factors.
I would argue that at the higher player counts (4 and 5) it’s unreasonable to expect all the combinations to be play tested. Just from a time and number of play testers basis. Let alone any monetary factor. I’m almost tempted to add in 3 players with the expansions to this statement as well.
So how would you even attempt to spot unbalanced or as some like to call them broken or over powered civilization mats?
You could use feedback from the lower player counts to focus in on particular civilization mats. However this over looks the fact that certain civilization mats might be better against others at lower player counts, but when played in higher player counts actually weaker or on par with others. Or that certain civilization mats are better at higher player counts but poor at lower counts.
Plus in all of this we aren’t even factoring in the random elements of the game such as tapestry cards.
In reality play testing will not just focus on one player count but be a mixture of all of them.
I think the big take away from this is it’s just not possible to play test every combination at all player counts. Just on the base game approximately 8000 games that would need playing to do it once.
There has to be a certain point where you say “we’ve tested as much as we can”. Or the game would never get released or be so expensive to cover the increased testing costs it won’t make any money.
It’s only once the game gets out in the wild and in the hands of lots of players that things start to come to light. I do like that Stonemaier capture play data and feedback this into the design and provide updates to the games.
I can see a follow up argument that some of the civilization mats were obviously unbalanced, just too powerful. That I don’t have a response to. I’d need more info about the companies testing and feedback.
What are your thoughts on the feasibility of testing a game?
Elwes, R. (2010) Mathematics 1001: absolutely everything that matters in mathematics. London: Quercus.
