As a reletive newcomer to this group, I've noticed a lot of folks seem to
hate any kind of chance element in thier gaming.  Dice seem to be the most
hated, with cards and other randomizers rating the angst of some.  My
question is - why?  I can at see liking a game because it involves pure
skill, but some here arbitrarally dismiss anything that thinks of using dice
(the recent "Ameritrash" thread being perhaps the most asinine example of
this) or luck.

Now, I've always liked dice.  Rolling dice is fun for many folks, including
myself.  But- what's the morbid facination with lack of luck?  It's not like
we're playing for blood here...

In article <85fgs4$nl...@nnrp02.primenet.com>, "Chris Keil"

Chance elements in gaming aren't a bad thing so long as they don't
override the skill of the player. I will quite happily play Titan,
which involves a fair amount of dice rolling, but I avoid History
of the World which has much less dice rolling. Why? Poor play in
Titan results in loss, but all too often superior play in HotW
does not result in winning.

Donald

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In article <85fgs4$nl...@nnrp02.primenet.com>,

As a probabilist and gamer, luck in games interests me a
lot. Personally I do prefer games with less luck, but even games with
no apparent luck can be analysed probabilitstically too!

Eg as a chess player I believe in luck - I can 'luckily' play the
right move for the wrong reason, or 'luckily' my opponent doesn't see
the flaw in my plan and hence it succeeds, whereas against correct
defence it wouldn't.

If games involve a lot of luck I find they can get boring, it feels I
am merely rolling the dice, not playing a game, I could just as easily
leave the dice rolling to someone else and go do something else... ;)

But, each to their own, of course, and I'm not gonna bash anyone for
their gaming style/preferebce or anything. Just, if you ask me if I'd
like to play a game with you, I may suggest non-luck ones, and decline
offers of more luck-based ones. But that'sno skin off anyone's nose (I
hope)! ;)

Happy gaming, and may the dice be with you!

Owen
--
Dr. Owen D. Lyne, Division of Statistics, School of Mathematical Sciences,
University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD.
Telephone: (0115) 9514937 (direct-line) Email address: o...@maths.nott.ac.uk
http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk/personal/odl/index.html

Because they assume that they're the smartest people at the table and that
victory is theirs by right, and they can't bear being robbed of that by a
crucial die roll. :-)

I'm exaggerating, but not much, I think.  It's actually perfectly
understandable that when you're looking for a battle of wits, you would
want the contest to be decided by wits alone.  Personally, however, I
think that die rolling demands that you bring another intellectual skill
into play: risk assessment.  And since I tend to be better at risk
assessment than at bare-bones strategy, of course I like to have dice in
the game. :-)

--
"I wish EVERY day could be a shearing festival!" -- The 10 Commandments
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Keith Ammann is geen...@albany.net   "I notice you have a cloud of doom.
Live with honor, endure with grace      I must admit it makes you seem
www.albany.net/~geenius * Lun Yu 2:24         dangerous and sexy."

In article <85fgs4$nl...@nnrp02.primenet.com>,
  "Chris Keil" <cjk...@primenet.com> wrote:

I enjoy games of chance when I'm drinking alcohol.  I seldom, if ever drink
while playing games which require lots of thought.  I grew up in Wisconsin.
Every bar had a dice cup and deck of cards sitting on the back bar.  I have
many good memories of great dice battles over a mug of cold beer.....  Games
of chance have their place...as do games of pure skill....

                                                       -- Jeff

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

People just have a threshold at which a game seems pointless to play.
This threshold can differ from person to person but once it's reached
then the game seems like "let's roll a die and whoever rolls highest
wins."

I'm pretty tolerant of randomness in games but I too have a threshold.
I find Talisman to be pointless to play with the random movement,
event rolls and then combat rolls.  It seems like you are just playing
Candyland or some other mainstream random movement game that allows
for little decision making and no real drama.

When everyone starts to play a game they should enter a kind of
suspension of disbelief that the game actually does matter.  Even
though we are not out for blood in a physical sense we are out for
blood on a symbolic level.  Someone has to win and the players have to
care about winning and that's what makes games fun.  If you have no
power over the outcome then any effort seems pretty pointless and thus
all the drama gets sucked out and the game isn't any fun.

You probably find that there is going to be complaining on this group
because everyone here plays games far more frequently than the
mainstream public.  I wouldn't be surprised if some people here sit
down a thousand times a year to a boardgame and go at it with another
player.  Playing that many times will probably find someone being more
satisfied with games that reward skill over chance.

I think what Richard was complaining about is the monopoly like
structure of Dog eat Dog.  I doubt monopoly is highly regarded among
the rgb group because of its random nature.  Random movement doesn't
sit well for a lot of gamers since not having a choice over moving
your piece on a board probably gives one of the biggest senses of not
having any control in a board game.  Despite this, most american games
you'll find in the mainstream market don't allow for players to have
any real control over how they move.  There is just something
unintuitive about not being able to choose where your piece is going
to move, since it is supposed to represent you in some manner and
since all you can do is wait for you position to become profitable it
really undermines a sense of strategy.  Even if the game does having
balancing factors and takes the randomness into account it still feels
like players are getting cheated out of a course of action.

Anyway, YMMV but you can defintely see that mainstream american games
trend towards lots of randomizers while the hobby and import games
tend towards allowing more decision making.  If you play enough of
both designs then players most likely get a sense that less luck =
more dramatic payoff.

Neil Carr
Dallas MetroGamers
http://www.earthsea.com/metrogamers/

Who said anything like that?  The "Ameritrash" thread began
with a complaint about American games that are *dominated* by
luck - not games games that merely involve randomizers.

As mentioned above, it's not whether luck/chance/randomness is
involved, it's (IMO) whether they are the primary determinant
factor in winning the game.

I wonder if the answer lies in the fact that the
"American" game companies are catering to the tastes of
J.Q. Public, while the smaller "German" game companies cater
more to gamers?

(Yes, yes, I know the German companies are marketing "family"
games, but they are for the most part, family *strategy* games,
and I think that may be quite different from what most
Americans/American game producers think of as a "family game".

--
The CROKINOLE Board
http://www.frontiernet.net/~crokinol

As someone who dislikes too much randomness in games (i.e., Monopoly,
Axis vs Allies, War in the Pacific, etc.), I am a little surprised by
some of the comments about Dog Eat Dog and the luck factor.  Compare it
to Rail Baron.  In Rail Baron, couple of bad rolls early in the game and
you're sitting around for hours waiting to lose.  One of the reasons I
dislike Mississippi Queen and Settlers of Cataan is that I find bad die
rolls to be crippling.
Obviously, we have played Dog Eat Dog many times, with many different
groups of people. (We have been working on it since 1982!)  I agree that
at first glance, or even second or third, it seems that die-rolls can
hurt your chances to win.  But what we have discovered is that the game
is tremendously forgiving of bad die rolls, when you know the system
well enough to exploit it.  And while this might make it a tougher entry
level game for some, it means that replay value is very high.
At one point, we were toying with the idea of using 1-3 dice for
movement, allowing players to choose the number of dice to use each
time.  We even thought about letting them choose how much they wanted to
move entirely.  (Admittedly, the board squares were a little different
then.)  While seasoned gamers thrived with those rules, beginners and
mainstream gamers were totally lost.
There is a familiarity to dice rolling games where you move around the
board that seems to be necessary for mainstream acceptance.  So we chose
not to buck the current, and instead to make the game more challenging
on the high end, in strategy and rules exploitation.  I know this is a
pretty strong statement, but none of the games I have played in since
the final design (well over 100) were the same as any other.  We have
put in so many checks, balances, punches and counter-punches that even
the same group of players, playing the same divisions, end up playing
each game differently.
When we demo the game and are there to show new players all the ins and
outs, they seem to uniformly love it.  Some players grasp the nuances
instantly, and are stabbing their best friends or spouses in the back
before the first round is even done.  Other players take longer to
figure it out, but by the last few turns are so good at blocking others,
using red tape cards to overturn advantages, and cutting deals that
exclude leaders that dark horse upset victories are frequent.
What we tried to create was a game that was inviting to newcomers, but
would be satisfying on a repeat basis to seasoned gamers.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw my two cents in.

--
Jeffrey Simons
President,
Q.E.D. Games, Inc.
Makers of Dog Eat Dog, Blue vs Gray, and STASH
"We're Game If You Are!"

In article <387C4059.C37F7...@qedgames.com>, Jeff Simons

<snip>

I know what you mean. Time after time I have lost Mississippi Queen on a
bad die roll. And there are so many of them in such ugly colors. If I hit
one more Huck Finn raft because I rolled a 7 I don't know what I'll do....

   Another factor is the "seriousness" of the game.  Bohnanza has a fair amount
of luck involved, but I don't seem to mind much since it's a relatively quick
and easy game to play. However, other games such as Advanced Squad Leader or
Star Fleet Battles (games where the mental as well as the monitary commitment of
the owner is substantially greater) the luck factor is considerably more
scrutinized. I remember a long time ago when battle cards were just introduced
in SFB (back in the early 80's) and I went to a SFB tournament. While I didn't
expect anybody to use the cards in their games, I did ask how they felt about
them. I was surprised at how viciously the cards were attacked as "luck based".
Luck based? In a game where the difference between a die roll of 1 & 6 can cost
you everything? Puh-leeese! And don't bother to mention the "critical hit
cards", because even if they were removed, it didn't change anybody's mind.
   Still, I can understand why some people go bonkers over luck.  Although I
have noticed that the concern over luck has gone down in the last ten years.

My two cents
Ken

I've always defined a "Beer & Pretzel" game as sort of a fun
conversation piece - it's something to talk about, something at least
somewhat fun to do while the primary activity - socializing ("haning
out") goes on.  Beer & Pretzel games, or the "too random"
"Ameritrash" games are good at this.

However, the heart of a really good non-B&P game is decision making.
In a good game the decisions each player must make are important
(significant) and interesting (require
intelligence/insight/experience/problem solving).  Much of the fun
and satisfaction (lets say "enjoyment") of playing such a game is
making good decisions - figuring things out, being smarter (this
time) than your opponent, or putting together a plan and pulling it
off.  The trouble with dice is that they can so easily replace
decision making, or make decision making insignificant.

Simple example of dice being too important:  Take chess, but before
the game each player draws a card.  Who ever draws the highest card
gets to make 2 moves for every 1 of his opponents moves.  Sound like
fun?

(Ooh, ooh!  Another one:  Lottery games, or
look-at-the-cap-and-see-if-you've-won-a-free-soda games.  So much
luck that I don't think they should be called "games" at all.)

The problem isn't that randomness is _present_, its just that
randomness can be overdone.  A "hardcore" gamer is probably going to
find Monopoly, for instance, far too random.  Sure, there are
decisions to be made, and they are often "interesting" by my little
definition above, but the element of chance is _very_ important, and
in fact can easily dwarf the significance of any decisions made.

                                           Tarquelne
                                       <os...@apk.net>
        I know how God can make a rock so big He can't move it.
                                  ************************
"I've gone into thousands of [fortune-tellers' parlors] and have been
told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her."
--NYC detective                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Oops.
I should have said "random chance/bad die rolls."
Thanks.

--
Jeffrey Simons
President,
Q.E.D. Games, Inc.
Makers of Dog Eat Dog, Blue vs Gray, and STASH
"We're Game If You Are!"

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000 10:11:01 -0500, "Chris Keil" <cjk...@primenet.com>
wrote:

There are two basic issues when dealing with luck games, IMHO:

1. The well laid plan problem:
To a certain degree I play games to develop sound strategies and
effective plans. It is a pleasure to see a good plan develop and
succeed, and bad luck takes away a lot of that joy. Unfortunately, I
tend to only remember the times when that 1% chance of failure
happened, so the other 99% I tend to forget. The main complain I hear
about Andromeda is not the luck of the card draw or other such things,
but the fact that a well laid plan will collapse because a player
needs good luck to win. In a game without a random element, I can
sometimes guarantee a victory at a given point. On top of that, a
truly random game can often reach the point where it really doesn't
matter what I do or how I do it, so even taking the effort to try gets
annoying. At times this is exactly what I am looking for, but not
often.

2. The bragging moron problem:
I personally believe I am a good game player. I also believe if you
sat down and played me at a game, I would give you a good challenge or
possibly even beat you. A few games I am probably even pretty cocky
about. But there always seems to be somebody who is a perfectly
terrible game player who has played far too many games of Risk against
bad opponents who just HAS to tell you about it. In my experience,
such a person has a tendency to avoid games without luck and instead
sticks to highly random simple games that they can win at often. The
classic example to me is Monopoly. Monopoly is a game that the truly
great players can probably win much of the time, and I don't want to
disparage such good players. But they are stuck in a game that if the
dice don't go their way, they are dead. And yet I can't tell you how
many 'expert' Monopoly players I run into. I will then indulge them
for an evening and discover nothing in their play besides the tendency
to get lucky or the tendency to convince bad players to make terrible
trades that a good player would never make. Most annoying is that if
my dice are bad, they will defeat me and I will hear about it
everytime we get together (which will be as rarely as possible).

Both of these things are quite annoying, and I am sure I could think
of others given the time. There is just something about a game where
you know that the better player will win more often than he loses.

- Drew

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So, bearing in mind that you're using a shuffled deck, and the cards come up
at random, is Poker a luck based game - obviously it is, but the game
mechanic allows you to (nay is based around) making intelligent choices
based on the odds. However, Snakes & Ladders allows no such decisions.

Settlers seems to be a clasic example of where the cross-over point between
control & lack of it comes, though people seem to differ which side of the
line it actually sits.

--
Regards
Julian
Melbourne, Australia

Neil Carr explained in message <387d753b.15142...@news.supernews.com>

<SNIP>

I may not be paying close attention here, but arent most new "American"
games moving, or completely moved away from the die roll/track moving
concept?  I can mention a number of new American games that dont use a
die at all.   Or is everyone basing the quality of American based on
Monopoly, Sorry and PayDay?  (All of them old games.)  

I personally think that the views of a predominate amount of this
group are prejudiced, or skewed, to favoring a new game that comes
from a German company over a game that comes from an American
company.   "Ameritrash" is at best an unfair term.   I might point
out that Settlers is overtly influenced by the die rolls and many
find it too luck based.  I guess thats why America liked this
German favorite eh?

Jim Shumaker

--
  Jim Shumaker         |
  ja...@phantaci.com   |
  Mountain View, CA    |

Some do, though.  An old friend of mine was a heavy drinker and liked to bring
out the chess set when he was good & plastered.  He usually beat me, too,
whether I was drinking or not.  IIRC, the world chess champion Alekhine showed
up drunk for a tournament at least once.

--P. C.,
Minnesota

. . . and the players engaged in the game *want* skill to be the overriding
factor.  Some don't.  Some social groups want a game where there's a chance
that a newbie can beat an old master, just by a stroke of "beginner's luck."

--P. C.,
Minnesota

Chris Keil schrieb:

Dice are a nice element in board games, but they shouldnt be the only element in
a game. You should play a game and the game shouldnt play you! Most game
developers found that out, finally.

--
Mit verspielten Grüßen,

                               Andreas Keirat

      Claudia.Sch...@t-online.de
      http://SunSite.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.de/luding

Try multiple sessions of Snakes & Ladders.  And with a doubling cube.  :-)

--
Wei-Hwa Huang, whu...@ugcs.caltech.edu, http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~whuang/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you count to a hundred without thinking?  No; it's the thought that counts.

Well said.

I would add (or reemphasize) that risk is made up of probability and
Significance/hazard.  So a game with lots of die rolls (like AH's
Tobruk) has less of a luck element because each die roll doesn't decide
much, and, on average, the die rolls even out.

Risk might fall into this category, but I bet the die roll that decides
who goes first is very significant.

Pax

In article <Pine.GSO.3.96.1000111111058.26862D-100000@merlin>,
  Geenius at Wrok <geen...@albany.net> wrote:

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

news:387b7dbc.10243168@goliath2.newsfeeds.com...

The solution to this problem is to relax and acknowledge that you're playing
a game, not Charting the Future of the Free World with Literally Billions of
Lives Held in the Balance.  If a well-laid plan breaks down because of a bad
die roll, live with it.  Enjoy the process and not the end.

The solution to this problem is to a) don't take it so hard if you lose a
game (and don't gloat if you win) -- in other words the same as the solution
to problem 1 -- combined with a policy of not playing games with assholes
who themselves don't adopt the solution to problem 1.

--
Michael T. Richter    <m...@ottawa.com>    http://www.igs.net/~mtr/
"get a life. its a plastic box with wires in it."
-- Nadia Mizner <nad...@onthenet.com.au> (in private correspondence)

In article <387C4059.C37F7...@qedgames.com>, Jeff Simons

OK. I sort of started this "bellyaching" in some quick comments about the
game. In my original comments I admited that one sampling of playing was
not enough and that maybe it was because I lost that I was bellyaching
(who here has never done that before? : ) ). I think the game is
interesting but I prefer elements of luck and skill that resonate better
with me. The arguments in this forum over Lost Cities come to mind. I like
the simplicity of that game but I also like Siedler KartenSpiel for it's
complexity. Different elements appeal to different people...Remeber that
comments like these are simply my comments and not a grand statement
attempting to undermine your (or anyone's) game.

I think you  did this pretty well and I'm glad that some people here like
your game. AS I said in my first posting I like the tongue-in-cheek theme.

I'm also glad that game designers are looking in the right places to learn
about how well their games go over. Thanks.

-->Paul

--- an extremely clever signature goes here ----

Napoleon was reviewing candidates for high rank, and there was one who
received incredible reccomendations. Brilliant, eduacated, capable.

"Ah," replied Napoleon, "But is he lucky?"

In other words, meaning "is he among the best?"  No doubt Napoleon, who
had crowned himself Roman emperor, was harkening back to the times of
ancient
Romans who believed that Luck or Fortune was a goddess who favored the
brave, the
strong, the deserving.  For example, Lucius Cornelius Sulla who gave
himself
the additional surname "felix" meaning "Fortune's favorite."

Say, in DOG EAT DOG, as a variant, how about letting players decide how
many
spaces they want to move, but they must pay a dollar for each space
moved?  That
should give them a feeling of being in control of their own destiny, but
at a price!
Let them go either clockwise or anti-clockwise and since now no one will
ever pass
the taxes space, instead put taxes on a regular schedule, say every 4
turns. Taxes
come on a regular schedule in real life of course. Naturally,
some of the effects on some of the spaces may need to be toned down.

"No doubt"?  I doubt that very much.  In fact, I'd call it ludicrous.

I find it a lot more plausible to attribute to him some perfectly
rational, common sense observations and beliefs.  Some people have great
credentials, but have achieved poor results, which they blame on bad
luck.  Other people have no credentials, but have accomplished a lot.
Despite the random elements, looking at past results is very often a
better predictor of success than looking at credentials, because
such recommendations are inherently subjective and biased, while actual
results largely speak for themselves.

                                        David desJardins