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There is an old commercial for the boardgame âConnect 4â where the sister wins over her brother by the brother just plain not noticing an otherwise plain-as-day and straight-forward, direct victory attempt.
To the consternation of boardgame snobs everywhere, who never want to win via just a blunder, who not only want to capture the king but actually create a checkmate position where no matter what the other player tries to do, itâs over. (âNo, you canât move your knight there, your king is in checkâ.)
Weâve seen this in the eurogame scene, where some game groups have a culture of allowing infinite takebacks and even giving advice. âWe want to play against you at your bestâ, they say, âthatâs why we have this culture.â
But in this era of AI and bots, where a game like Arimaa that was specifically designed to beat the bots barely made it a decade before getting defeated, and even the multi-millenia stalwart Baduk got defeated, that culture feels like itâs missing some of the just plain fun in boardgames.
I played a couple of rounds of 19Ă19 tonight against a friend and I managed to win through complete wack blunders like leaving huge groups in atari just because I could keep my pokerface when noticing my own mistakes after making him, whereas my pal was groaning and facepalming even after making minor mistakes, like âOMG what did I just do!â and I could profit off that. I made even bigger mistakes but he didnât notice them and couldnât capitalize on them. Thatâs the kind of stuff that can only happen at the kyu level, pros would never. But thatâs why I love the game at our amateur level. It feels like the board is an open ocean and every game is wildly different. Itâs just wild creative fun, pictionary in an icon size monochrome pixel grid, a conversation with our hands.
The âI donât wanna win against just a blunderâ crowd, whatâs the next step? Using checkmate as the analogy, they could make matemate chess where âno, you canât make that move, that would lead to checkmate the next turnâ, where the goal is to create a forced-mate-in-two situation because you could otherwise âblunderâ into a checkmate. And then even that version of the game wouldnât be enough, youâd have to make a matematemate version where you have to create a forced-mate-in-three to win, and so on. Why donât you just put the whole world in a bottle?
Blunders are part of the human side of board games. I love âem.
A friend wrote in to point out that super leniency, takebacks, time rewinds, card editing, giving out resources etc can be pretty clutch when designing and playtesting new games. If a game doesnât sing on five doshes a turn, maybe itâll be more fun with ten or twenty, or with one or two. Taking a sharpie to the cards in the middle of the game to change them to work better, tutoring or mulliganing for specific cards etc you wanna try out and so on.