Gheos: playtest session

It's been a while since I read the rules to Gheos, but it seems like there could be some additional strategic planning added to the scoring, something with game-wide goals like (for example) creating a certain number of continents, or such. It could involve different goals for different players (balancing, yuck) or it could just be end of game bonuses for "player with most x" and "player with least y," that kind of thing. While it wouldn't be dramatically more strategic, it might add enough.

Of course my memory (and laziness of not clicking the link) could be failing me, and either it's already in there or it can't be done in the game. Or maybe it's just lame. :)

-- Matthew

This is one of those games I've been itching to see the rulebook for a while, and hoped it would get picked up and published so I could finally see it!

I think your post raises an interesting issue for me. As I've said before, I don't really view games as "art", yet I do in some sense see the designer as an "artist" who has final say over the status of the game. It's kind of like if you take your album to the record company and they say "no, it's not radio-friendly enough; go change it." I think there's a sense in which games are the same way; certainly, if a publisher tells you "it's broken; such and such strategy is too powerful", that's a concern and flaws do need to be addressed. But what if it's just an aesthetic point? Like, "we want the game to be more [insert adjective: strategic, chaotic, gamer-friendly, non-gamer-friendly, whatever]"; what do you do about it, if you consider the game "done", a masterpiece that needs no further brushstrokes? Do you "sell out", or maintain your "integrity"? This isn't a question for which I expect there to be an objective answer, just a point of discussion that I find interesting -- how much should you modify your game to accomodate the desires of the publishers and make it more likely to get picked up? Is there a line that you shouldn't/won't cross?

Anyway, continued best of luck with the game, you sound like you're very close to breaking through with a publisher, just keep trying! Can't wait till the published copy hits my table over here!

-Jeff

[OT]
Yeah, but Elfenland won the SdJ, so who cares about "critical acclaim"? :-)

Speaking personally, I think that Elfenland + Elfengold makes a nice short game overcomplicated (rather like Cities & Knights makes Settlers overcomplicated.) That doesn't make it a bad game, but I can play plenty of other overcomplicated games, given the choice.... Whereas I will play Elfenland with non-gamers (it's excellent for that, since final scores are usually very close and it takes a bit of experience to realise that the gap between, say, 17 and 19 is actually a vast gulf, so everyone can feel quite good about it. Amusingly, the last time I played Elfenland was to teach it to a German family!)

This is a very interesting issue. What happens if a game your playtesters enjoy gets turned down by a publisher? How much do you change it?

This happened recently with "Get Nifty," which will be the official Sluggy Freelance card game. Rob Balder (cartoonist of the very funny "Partially Clips" webcomic) was designing the game, and Steve Jackson was prepared to publish it.

Apparently, Steve Jackson wasn't happy with what Balder submitted. But Balder and his playtesters were quite pleased with what they submitted, and didn't like Jackson's proposed changes.

So instead of having a long, drawn-out argument (perhaps ending in court), they have decided to part amicably. Balder is looking for a publisher, Steve Jackson won't release a game he's not happy with, and Sluggites everywhere will have to wait.

Rene's situation is a little different, because Hans Im Gluck wasn't on board to publish the game originally. I understand that many game companies are very liberal when it comes to changing game elements... not just theme, but rules and mechanics!

Geez, I hope I don't sound like an ogre here, but I think if Hans Im Gluck liked your game enough, they may have taken it and made the tweaks they wanted to. They may have felt that turning the game into something they wanted to release (not necessarily "better," just something that fit in with their previous games) would have been too much work and negotiation.

I wouldn't be surprised if they got the rules wrong. And either way, publishing companies in the role of "gatekeeping" have blown these kinds of calls before. Remember Decca records, which told a young Liverpool quartet that they wouldn't be signed because guitar rock was out of vogue? ;)

The main problem with Gheos the way I've played it (i.e. without the pyramid chits) is that every single turn, every single player counts every single player's score to determine if they should play ascoring tile. This is a real drag in an otherwise very elegant game.

I have not tried the new changes Zaiga made, but I have a suggestion that might help (in either case).

At first I thought as nifty as the mechanic is, the player decided scoring rounds needed to go. BUt then I had an epiphony. Keep the player edtermined scoring, but make it hard or impossible to know exactly how many points everyone will get!

In other words, make followers hidden information.

In addition to that it might (or might not) be a good idea not to cap the total number of followers of each color at 5. Although if you do, then you can tell if someone's cheated (accidentally or on pupose) whena civ dies- wouldn't want followers hanging out behind screens. Potentially an increase in the cap might be in order.

So the idea is, you'd have to decide to score based on YOUR situation, not everyone's score.

Hey, just thought of another option... if there were 2 or 3 different things which scored, then you could invoke the scoring round and choose one of them... like "I'll score cups." Thus, you'd want to have a presence in each scoring type (in case someone else scores), but you also want to have a bigger presence than others in one so you can score.

... Just some ideas. Let me know what you think.

- Seth

While it may have been an exageration to say that people would count all the scores every single turn, it's not a huge one. In my experience, each player counted the score a far greater times then he or she played a scoring tile. It contributed to a large portion of the game time. At least 1 of the playtesters commented to me about it as well.

And how are you supposed to know when to play a scoring tile without counting up the scores? You seem to suggest that playing scoring tiles later is better than sooner, which may well be true, but that doesn't say amything about the decision at the end of your turn to score or not.

I prefaced this by saying I hadn't played under the new rules, however I fully expect the same issue to occur. Your play (however good or bad) neither confirms nor denies the length of time it takes nor the process of deciding to play a scoring tile or not.

Your conclusions don't follow from your arguments, logic boy ;)

Heh, that's one way to approach selling games. As it turns out the problem isn't with the fact that I might want to count points frequently to decide weather I should score or not. The problem I'm talking about is the ability for people to count points, meaning that SOME PEOPLE will, which might be slowing the game down unnecessarily. I know it slowed our games down.

Like I said, I haven't played by the new rules, but I understand the scoring works the same way, which means some people will count points frequently rather than play the game.

I'd like to know what Zaiga thinks of all this, as it's his game to begin with. Maybe his intention was for people to be able to know the possible scores at all times.

I'll also note that when I first played Peurto Rico, my friends had the rules wrong- we played with face up VPs. It took forever for people to take their turn because they were constantly counting each other's scores.

- Seth

Fair enough, it's intended. And perhaps the changes you mention are enough to alleviate any perceived problem.

Just out of curiosity, what did you think of the other idea, where you score a particular type of thing... like say there are Cups and Gems (or maybe 3 different things), and you choose one to score when you play the scoring tile.

It's even more of a deviation than the other change I proposed, but it's prettyinteresting I think.

regarding remembering who has what... have you played El Grande? In that there are regions where you put your cubes, and then you score based on who has the most cubes in a region. There's one region where you can't see who has what, you only are told who put what in there when they place them. This seems like a lot less to remember than how many followers EACHPLAYER has, and yet it's a successful mechanic.

- Seth

Only if you can see how many followers each player has.

- Seth

I heartily agree that a memory mechanic like you describe would be terrible. I don't think it's as clear if hidden followers would turn into this mechanic or not. Having not tried it I can't really say.

Again, crap shoot scoring would be unsatisfying, for sure. But then again, people like Ticket to Ride... heh.

But again I'm not convinced hiding followers would turn it into a crap shoot. Especially in the case where you'd choose what kind of scoring to do out of 2 or 3 options...

Well, except it is designed to work with hidden VPs, so people spend their time playing the game rather than counting the points. This is where I was coming from in the first place.

On a completely different note, another part of the game (which is hidden, isn't it?) is the tile hand/draw. Last rules I saw each player had a hand of 3 tiles- though that may have changed. The last game I played with 2 others, we tried instead a face up pool of 3 tiles. I wanted to see if it allowed people to know some of their opponents options and better plan their plays. I'd say it wasn't really that great, but it wasn't really worse than an individual hand of tiles either.

More recently I was thinking perhaps a better way to both reduce the possible plays (reducing analysis time), and inject a little planning, players could have a face down hand of 1 tile, and there could be 1 tile face up. Then your turn could be basically pick up the face up tile and then play either it or your other tile. At the end of your turn you'd flip a new tile face up. This seemed a little nicer with regard to Epoch tiles (though they may be gone now) as they'd come up face up, and one at a time... doesn't really make a difference in truth, but anyway...

I know privately you mentioned that you didn't like the idea of faceup tiles. I wondered about the details of that. Especially in such a 'perfect information' game ;)

- Seth

I haven't played Gheos yet, and I haven't read the latest version of the rules, so, grain of salt and all, but I think Seth raises a legitimate point that, in general, a perfect information game in which players initiate scoring could lead to AP. A perfect example of this is Vinci, which is one of the worst AP games out there. Now imagine if, in Vinci, you were tracking how much everyone else was going to score as well. What a nightmare!

I'm sure Gheos has this problem less than something like Vinci, and indeed, if you haven't seen it yet, that's a necessary -- but not sufficient -- condition to demonstrate that it may not be a problem. But zaiga, I hate to use this line of argumentation on you, but a while back you complained about Balloon Cup being "flawed" because, on occasion, the game can lock up. Isn't it a flaw that, when played with counters, Gheos can bog down? It's not the same category -- a semantic flaw rather than a game breaking flaw -- but still, there's some similarity.

Anyway, if it does become a problem that counting slows/ruins the game, possible routes you could consider:

-- Make tracking easier. If I'm not mistaken, scoring works by each Civ paying out VPs to the people who have the most stake in each. What if you simply tracked, via a scoring track, how much each Civ would pay out at any given time per influence token or however they pay out? This would require some more effort during the game, but would make the scoring computations much faster.

-- Make scoring more uncertain by only scoring a subset of the scoring avenues per scoring event. Maybe instead of across-the-board scoring, you only trigger scoring in one Civ, or in one category. This could amp up the tension: "Joe is heavily vested in Blue, so he's likely to score them; I need to get in on Blue so I can get points off of Joe's scoring event as well."

Think of the Action Cards in El Grande that trigger partial scoring events; what make those interesting is that there's some tension as to who will take them based on the kinds of regions they score. I'm not advocating such a model here, so much as saying that subset based scoring is potentially interesting. You could even drive strategies by having, say, 8 different scoring cards, which score different things, and give each player 2; that way, they'd seek to be vested in Civs based on what their scoring cards are.

-- Players only trigger their own scoring. This makes the game more of a "press your luck" factor. It certainly makes more sense mechanically, and could mitigate a runaway leader. After all, there's nothing more frustrating in PR than having to choose captain when everyone else is going to get more than you. I could see Gheos having a similarly frustrating scoring.

Just some ideas, if it becomes a problem. In general, though, I think Seth hit on an interesting consequence of player triggered, across-the-board scoring events. Even if it doesn't affect Gheos, it still might be helpful to someone at some point.

-J

Well, obviously the intention isn't to produce more problems.

I imagine it would be unsatisfying.

Actually, the reason I was thining about it was this: HiG said the game was "not strategic enough" or "too tactical" or whatever. Along those lines, if you could see some of your opponents options when placing your tile, then you could make a better informed decision- maybe that could add srtategic depth. Then again maybe not.

I did try it with a pool of 3 faceup tiles and no hand tiles, and I didn't like that much. It did definitely add an element of 'I can't do that or it gives the next player a great move', but that's not exactly what I was after. So I thought about a few other ways to have some of the tiles 'public' and some 'private' so you could have a couple options but also have an idea what someone else could do.

Evidently that's the opposite of what you intended:

More accurately, what I was trying to do was focus the analysis on playing the game rather than on scoring.

Those are all interesting ideas which address the comment I made, good ones Jeff!

With respect to scoring 1 civ only, there are several ways that could be done. Which is the most interesting?
[ul]
[li]Each player gets one of the 5 colors at random (face down), each scoring tile is to be used only once each game
[li]Each player gets 1 each of the 5 colors, each scoring tile is to be used only once each game
[li]Each player gets a couple (3?) scoring tiles in one color, each to be used once per game (i.e. they always score Red when they score)
[/ul]
I'm sure there are others as well.

It might be difficult to impliment 'everyone has to use all their tiles each game' unless the game didn't end til they were all used- but without some method to force scoring then the game could drag.

Another idea along this line is each time an Epoch tile comes up (or whatever), each player chooses a color- that civ gets scored. So not all civs will score. If the same color is chosen more than once, you'd probably not double score it. This choosing should be simultaneous I think- it would be neat to be in a position where 2 people benefit equally from scoring Blue, so they have to decide to choose blue and make sure it scores, or choose something else and count on the other player choosing blue.

This would involve counting up scores, but only at scoring instances, I think it would be pretty interesting (and El Grande-esque, which could be good or bad depending on your opinion of El Grande).

I'm glad I started this discussion, even if it has ne end effect on Gheos.

- Seth