For a long time I had a rule with negotiation games: I would always keep to the letter of my agreements (if not always the spirit of them). Negotiate with me, and you could rely on my word. You could break your word in a negotiation with me–once. Ever. After that, I’d refuse to negotiate with you in a game ever again. My goal was first, because I have a hard time separating word-breaking in a game from word-breaking in real life; and second, to make it clear that breaking an agreement with me had a high metagame cost.
I eventually realized that the rule made me come across as kind of a dick, so I dropped it. I’m still not crazy about people breaking their word in a game, though, and prefer to set limited agreements where terms for withdrawal are clear.
No, I stand by what I wrote. Monopoly is a game of luck. If you get a monopoly, you will beat a player who doesn’t have a monopoly. A player with two monopolies will beat a player with one monopoly. A player with a good monopoly will beat a player with a bad monopoly. This is all basic probability.
That’s not necessarily a sign of bad game. A player with better resources should be the winner. But the distribution of monopolies has nothing to do with the skill of the players. If you play by the rules, it’s based on who lands where which is the result of random die rolls. If you play by your house rule, it’s the result of how the cards are randomly dealt out. In either case it’s a matter of luck.
The only way deal making is a factor is if you’re playing against people who don’t know how to make good deals. If you’re playing people who will trade you a blue for an orange or a green for a red, then yes, you’re going to win every time. But that’s because you’re playing with children.
I know board games. I’ve played literally hundreds of them. And Monopoly is a very poorly designed game.
My rule in negotiation games is that I will never break an agreement unless I think it’s going to get me the win within a turn (maaaybe two turns). I didn’t have a strict “never again” meta policy, but I would definitely consider past behavior in making new deals.
There was a period of time where I was playing Twilight Imperium about once a month (this is a LOT of Twilight Imperium) with a semi-stable crop of players. One game, a new player reneged on a deal with me very shortly after making it. I expressed shock and the rest of the table just sort of looked at him funny. He asked about the sudden change in vibe and somebody else explained that he was breaching the group’s equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. He did something different that turn.
I think the reason it works for me is because “I won’t break my word unless I think it gives me a shot at the win” is reasonable in the context of playing to win.
The new Twilight Imperium has codified rules about binding and non-binding agreements, which I really appreciate. It also retains promissory notes from one of the previous edition’s expansions, which are great for enabling deals with players who can’t otherwise be trusted to keep their word.
Indeed, the last two times I’ve played Monopoly I remember, well one of the times I may have lost due to playing because I had a monopoly. But the other time, I bought every property that I could but lost because two of the other players traded so they both had monopolies which meant I was doomed, which I couldn’t because I had no more than 1/3 of any monopoly.
This reminds me of my friend Candice. People knew Candice was vengeful in a game. If you attacked her, she would become your enemy for the rest of the game. She would attack you back and do as much harm as possible to you for the rest of the game - even if it hurt her own chances in the game.
I could never figure out if this was a terrible strategy or a brilliant strategy. On the one hand, Candice would often do worse in a game than she could have done. She would have done better to have let the earlier attack go and just worked on improving her own position instead. But she would willingly sacrifice her own position just to take you down if you had wronged her. So on a one game level, her strategy was bad.
But, as you note, there was the meta-game. All of us who played Candice regularly knew what she was like. So if we were playing a game, we would avoid attacking her because we knew what the cost would be. Candice, by sacrificing a few games, had established a reputation that made it easier for her to win in most games. Which means in the long term her strategy was good.
But what about the meta-meta-game? What if there were people who avoided playing games with Candice because of her reputation?
It’s highly rated on Boardgamegeek and is apparently especially beloved by fans of solo play. There are games I like that are also liked by people who love Mage Knight, but I don’t know what the common denominator is.
Mage Knight is a sprawling game where your heroes cooperate to explore maps and fight to acquire power. That’s not the problem.
The game uses counters, two-sided tokens, tracking charts, dice, andd cards to resolve things. That (in itself) is not the problem.
The problem is the rules. Twelve pages into the rulebook, one encounters the introduction. But far worse than the huge dense rules is a peculiar quirk of the Mage Knight system: how you resolve an action varies depending on where you are in the game.
So to determine the outcome of Action X, you roll a die. Unless it’s the night phase, in which case you draw a tile instead. Or if you are of some special status, in which case you discard a card and draw a new one. Unless it’s an odd-numbered turn, in which case you DO NOT draw a new card.
Oh my God, the exceptions to established processes seemed entirely arbitrary, as if added solely to overlay a veneer of complexity onto the game. I can NOT understand how this doesn’t irritate the players who claim to love it above all other games.
No, that’s three-dimensional chess, from the original Star Trek. This was just an 8 by 8 (or maybe 6 by 6 or 10 by 10) grid, with steps up to two corners.
Google isn’t being any help, though, since it’s just bringing up games based on the show, not the game they (a couple of times, before they gave up on it) played on the show.
That’s me and Risk. I’ve never lost a standard game of Risk using the world domination victory condition. I don’t know why, I’m not great at strategy games in general, but I’m some kind of idiot savant at Risk.
My strategy isn’t complicated or deep. I set heavy armies on the perimeter of the land I own and sparsely populate internal nations with the minimum. I just turtle up each round staying passive and defending until I feel strong enough and start steamrolling people.
That’s about it. For some reason I’ve never lost. I also haven’t played for many years so I might not be good anymore. And I’ve lost Risk when you have to win in another way than capturing territory (I vaguely recall one version uses spies sneaking into enemy areas, I suck at that).
I probably wouldn’t even like Risk much except I like winning at things.
Risk isn’t a board game, though: It’s a computer game that just had the bad luck to be invented before computers capable of running it. All of those five-hour slogs are much better when it only takes a half an hour, and it’s not due to any change in the rules, just to the computer doing all of the tedious dice-rolling for you.
But that’s pretty much everyone’s strategy who has played more than a handful of Risk games. It becomes quite a slog when you have five players, all playing this style. Basically, the first person to hold a continent is at a distinct advantage at the beginning, and most of the time, that’s the person holding Australia or South America.
Well, yeah - that’s what you’d call the meta of the game, and as in any game that only shifts the meta one space, and then *that *meta gets metagamed and so forth until somebody wins with like a utilities strategy or something :).
But the thing of it is : people who play Monopoly at all likely don’t get that deep into it that such meta or stats considerations apply. If they were serious enough gamers to start thinking on that level, they’d probably play actually good games instead. Monopoly is a family game, is parents playing with their kids to teach them basic math, is playing with Nana because bless what’s left of her heart after that third stroke that’s the only game she remembers the rules to, etc…
Technically correct (the best kind of correct !) but that simply won’t happen, because the edge gained from owning even just one or two Orange (and in a slightly worse but still better than most cases, Red, which has worse ROI than orange but is still one of those “cards make people land there more often” set of squares) should guarantee further purchases and either more monopolies or just denying them to everyone else and playing the waiting game while Orange does its work.
There was a guy like this in our Diplomacy games, and he would carry the knowledge of betrayal long past whatever game it happened in. Over time, however, we all betrayed him at one time or another, and so he grudgingly gave up a little on vengeance (except in the immediate game).
Nobody just “gets a monopoly.” You have to trade for it, unless you’re playing a two or possibly three player game. It’s quite rare to have a four or more player game go with a natural monopoly. That’s the whole fun and skill in the game: the trading and the dealing. If you play with equally skilled players then, yes, luck plays more a part. But a skilled monopoly player will destroy casual players the majority of the time.
I’m amazed that it’s as low as 35%. There are only two continents that can be held at any time before the endgame, Australia and South America: Anyone who tries to hold Europe or Asia is guaranteed to lose, and North America and Africa aren’t much better. So the eventual winner should either be the guy who held Australia or the guy who held South America, so whichever one of them was first should have at least a 50% chance. And on the off chance that someone does actually manage to miraculously hold some other continent, they’re pretty much guaranteed to win: Europe or Asia just give you so many armies, and North America or Africa either one quickly leads to also holding South America. About the only way I can see for the winner to not be one of the first two continent-holders is if everyone else gangs up on that person, and even that is made difficult by the choke-points (they’ll have to continually conquer each others’ territory to get to the target).
My name is not Candice, but that is my strategy. I make it a clear condition of any in-game deal I make: if you break the terms of our agreement, I’ll spend the rest of the game trying to make you lose, even at the cost of mine own win. It’s important your would-be betrayer knows the cost of betrayal. Even ignoring the meta-game, that is a good strategy, since it reduces the chance of a betrayal in the first place. It also encourages making short-term, well-defined agreements as opposed to indefinite-duration, vague ones (for example, one-turn movement agreements in Diplomacy vs promises not to attack each other). The meta-game comes into play as other players learn you’re not bluffing.
