The chutes were originally snakes. (I see just above that **merrick **has called the game by its original name, Snakes and Ladders). Speaking of propaganda, the game was invented in ancient India to teach Hinduism or Buddhism or Jainism. Each of the squares represented some spiritual concept on the way from samsara to nirvana.
They changed snakes to chutes (playground slides) in order to mass-market the thing. What, somebody got a problem with snakes?
Chutes makes more sense as you cannot slide down snakes unless you’re Jim Morrison.
For video games, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Desert Bus yet. (I’m sure The Dope is where I first heard about it.)
When I read the rules to Betrayal and House on the Hill I thought it was going to be a terrible game. But I played it and I had a really, really good time. It’s not a game I want to play over and over again but I’ve really enjoyed the few times I’ve played it.
Yes. That’s why they’re not doing draw poker, because that would introduce an element of skill (no matter how small), no longer making it a “coin flip.”
ETA: Sorry, I didn’t see Calavera’s follow-up, explaining it.
I don’t think it’s fair to include Desert Bus, because that was deliberately designed to be a bad game.
It’s kind of a dick move, but one sure way to win Monopoly is to hoard houses. If you trade higher monopolies for lower ones, people will usually bite, and hand over some cash as well. The suddenly you have Baltic, Mediterranean, the light blues, and the purples, and cash on hand, while the other players have Boardwalk & Park Place, the greens and the Yellows, and no cash. You load your properties up with houses, and then there aren’t enough left for anyone else to get hotels. Suddenly your cheap properties with 4 houses are worth more than the “good” ones with no houses.
This is why you must INSIST on no house rule where you use dried beans, or whatever for houses if they get used up.
Yeah, but that was more of a practical joke (for a Penn & Teller game called Smoke and Mirrors that was unreleased, anyway.) I know it ends up on “worst game ever” lists, but it’s was purposely designed to be mundane and boring. Hell, I’d almost defend it as a kind of a conceptual art piece.
And, the plus side of it, is Desert Bus has been used as a way to raise money for various causes with “Desert Bus marathons” in the way you may have a walk-a-thon or some such fundraiser, so good has come from it.
I cannot find anywhere that clearly explains what “Dice drafting” is. Can you explain?
Dice drafting is when the players are selecting their dice from a pool of already rolled dice rather than each individually rolling a pair of dice on their turn. This allows players to have more control over their movement around the board, while still having some degree of randomness.
Here’s an example of how it could work for a four player game of Monopoly. Take ten dice and have the first player roll all of them. The first player then selects two of the rolled dice and combines them as his move. He, obviously, has a lot of choices and has pretty good control of where he moves to this turn.
The second player then selects two of the remaining eight dice and does the same. The third player selects two of the remaining six and the fourth player selects two out of the remaining four. We’re now back to the first player, who has to use the final two dice as his move. The ten dice all then get passed to the second player, who repeats the whole process.
So throughout the course of the game, players are going to have varied amounts of control over their movement, which means they will be able to make some choices about what properties they land on. And they will have some influence over where the other players land by choosing dice that limit their choices.
What I’ve described is just one possibility. You could instead roll the dice as pairs and draft a pair of dice instead of two individual dice. Or instead of drafting by turns, you could roll the dice and then auction off the order in which they are chosen. Or each player could have their own pool of thirty-six dice, roll them all, and then each turn they have to choose two dice from their pool as this turn’s movement, with each turn giving them fewer choices.
Chronos:
Candy Land has that possibility too…you could get a card that sends you back to one of the earlier picture spaces if you’re close to the end.
Yes. That was a legitimately broken game. At least ET was not.
You missed the main point.
Stud poker involves multiple rounds of betting, just like Hold’em. If you’re only trying to imitate a coin flip, there’s no reason to do 5-card stud.
If you want to make it completely luck, you just deal five cards straight out. There’s no reason to have hidden cards like you do in stud. There’s no reason to have multiple rounds of betting because you are only betting on one thing.
That’s my point.
Playing it as stud poker makes no sense.
Also, many people seem to forget that houses and hotels are sold off at half-price. So if you drop a house on Boardwalk and then have to sell it back, that $200 house only gets you $100 back.
You’re overcomplicating their overcomplication.
In my family, we play nickel-dime-quarter poker (with chips). Everyone buys in for some dollar amount. At the end of the evening, all the players gather their chips to a whole dollar amount and shove the remainder into the center. We then deal a round of five card stud and the winning hand gets the pot (which is always at least a dollar). We could just deal pure showdown, but each player revealing their hole card adds a little, so we deal stud.
Dealing out two hands of 5 cards is going to be as random as a coin flip. And it’s Nevada, so a poker hand has some symbolic and historical significance. Dealing the hands as 5 card stud doesn’t change the randomness and it sounds better than saying they’ll deal a hand of showdown.
I’m interested.
My vote would be SimCity (the reboot) for EA literally crippling it at launch just so they could sell you the stuff you want at a later date (which they never wound up doing anyway)
If I did, you made your point poorly by mentioning 5-card draw.
Five card stud with no betting is exactly the same as just dealing five cards out and the best hand wins. There’s a little more drama to it, I guess, but it’s the same thing. Why didn’t they just say deal out five cards and best poker hand wins? I dunno? Like I said, it’s Nevada and maybe they like the drama.
And do we know this to be true? I only quickly looked into it, and saw some Nevada jurisdictions simply breaking electoral ties with a draw of cards from the deck.
Or Mowgli.