also, i was playing netrunner at this NETRUNNER PARTY this guy was having, not sure if its still ongoing or not, but my brother played mysterium or something exactly like it and said it ruled, very interesting to me! but anyway this guy had hundred and hundreds of games still after a big GAME CULLING lemme give you pics
These two seem like polar opposites. Carcassonne is almost entirely challenging because the scoring is semi-hidden, anyway.
the whole point of hiding how many VPs a player has is to dissuade players from attack-the-leader mentalities, and from king-making. Itâs a basic anti-politics mechanic. point-counting score algebra shit that players with analysis paralysis engage in on their turns usually canât happen when scores are hidden.
how is the scoring semi-hidden? itâs only semi-determinable who has the fields, but everyoneâs aware how many points are at stake, at least, and how each player can attempt to get in on it if they want.
will concede that my criteria are not fully thought out, i am working with maybe 10 or so euro-ey games under my belt. also of course what is desirable could be undesirable in another context! so grain of salt me please.
puerto ricoâs âyou publically collect your score but after that itâs secretâ is extremely bizarre (balancing your game around an idea of a typical humanâs memory span) but i enjoy that the choices are forced and desperate enough to motivate purely selfish behavior. i could see attack-the-leader stuff growing but it was rapidly defeated by forced self-interest.
edit:
i suppose what i dislike further is someone âcashing inâ an absurd and uncountable amount of point (i.e. i understand the difference between 1 and 2 and 4 and 7 points but what is â26 pointsâ and â71 pointsâ especially). (also catan sucks but knowing that someone COULD have a 1 or 2 point lead on you is tension-increasing, not deflating). stone age was truly egregious because i could countmy opponentâs max hypothetical points each turn, not even what was on the board.
i mean, everyone agrees that the scoring is the most boring part of scrabble, right? the moment of word creation IS THE GAME but actually⌠no, itâs not, to actual scrabble players the entire game is geometry. and yeah, in stone age what do you get when you win, thematically? you become the chief? the other cavemen starve?
sorry this post is all over the place. i am trying to explain my essential problem but lack the experience and vocabulary i guess⌠i wonder if someone has a game that is my cure-all in mind maybe.
What I mean when I say hidden scoring is that the ranking of the players is mostly indeterminate until the end of the game. Which I suppose isnât strictly intuitive but thatâs why the way scoring farms works in Carcassonne makes it feel more like a hidden-scoring mechanism than not. The scores of the farms is known but it is the very fact that farm ownership is indeterminate until the game is over that makes it feel âhiddenâ from the players. Compare to a game like Agricola where it is always apparent how every other player is doing and scores can be calculated at literally any point by anyone looking around the board.
Occs and Improvements are played face up and the text must be read out loud, so theyâre not really hidden in any sense. Once they are in play they offer a determined effect on scoring. The gamestate remains almost ninety percent known (with scores being able to be at least estimated to a high degree of accuracy, generally very low swinginess between estimated pre end-game scores and end-game scoring)
Still, Iâll grant that Agricola doesnât give absolutely perfect information, since someone with 900 improvements can play the Braggart on the last round to win the game but I still feel like Carc has more ambiguity about who is winning and who is losing, which is definitely to the gameâs credit.
Same. I played a lot with people who were way more experienced than me, so that sucked in exactly the ways you described. Itâs still fun to play casually with other farm enthusiasts.
hereâs a list of the games in my house, ownership of which is spread among my friends who come over to play
dominion +seaside, intrigue, prosperity, darkages
marvel legendary +dark city, fantastic four, paint the town red, secret wars 1 + 2, villains, fear itself
elder sign +unseen force, gates of arkham
call of cthulu living card game
arkham horror
machi koro +harbour
munchkin adventure time
gang up
burgle bros
10 to kill
quest: a time of heroes
bread
wcw superslam
wwf battle for the belt
ticket to ride europe
warriors and traders
web of gold
risk
upwords
tanto cuore
alhambra the card game
industry
dc deck building game +crisis
boss monster +tools of hero-kind, boss monster ii
monster mansion
atmosfear khufu
avalon
splendour
battle bowl
fluxx
thatâs everything off the top of my head (because iâm still in bed as i type this)
This is my collection. Nice how you can simply export from BGG and how this forum software lets you add bullets to all instantly. If only it could also add BGG links for each.
