Games: Dominion, Agricola
Apr. 28th, 2010 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThis one's for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
simont who expressed enthusiasm when I mentioned it as a possible topic.
I've been playing semi-abstract games since MK introduced me to Settlers of Catan in the 90s. (Being German himself, he was deeply into Settlers in its really early days, before it was a big thing outside Germany.) And the past year or so has given me a few opportunities to discover new exciting ones, of which I'm most excited about Dominion and Agricola.
I discovered Dominion at a Bab5 party when I was staying withdarcydodo. I was extremely taken with it, and then jack's mother gave me a set for Christmas. (I think jack probably had a word in her ear to help push her in the direction of choosing me the very thing that was sitting at the top of my wanted list, just a smidgen below wanting it enough to actually go out and buy it for myself.) And I've had a lot of fun with it since, introduced mathcathy to it, and a few games with the gaming group.
When my Dad was staying here, he picked up the instructions and remarked that it had too many rules, and he prefers games where the gameplay is based on a complex strategy that emerges from a few simple rules. In reality that's exactly what Dominion is: the whole gameplay is that you draw a hand of five cards from your deck, play an action card and do whatever the instructions on it say, and at the end of your turn you use however many money cards you end up with to buy further cards for your deck, some of which are victory points that count towards your final score. That's the whole game; the thick rule book is just there to clarify edge cases when there could be some ambiguity about how to interpret the instructions on each card. What makes Dominion interesting is that everything in the game is also a card which goes into the deck; action cards, money, and victory points. That means that if you have a lot of victory points you have a high probability of drawing a useless hand, if you have a lot of money you are unlikely to draw the most powerful combinations of actions, and if you have a lot of action cards you don't have enough money to buy victory points.
The available actions are very well thought out, and since each game starts with a set of ten action cards out of 20 (or more, with the expansions) available to buy, the different combinations give quite a variety of game play. The cards are also pretty, and the detailed rule book that put my Dad off means that everybody is playing exactly the same game. The game could easily have been unbalanced or just shoddily made, but having the details right transforms a simple concept into a really enjoyable game. The role of chance in the game is surprisingly limited; obviously your success is going to depend on which random hands you draw, but since you build your own deck you set the probabilities and it mostly does come down to skill over the course of the game. (With two players it can be a bit more down to luck, but it's one of the few games of this style that's playable at all with just two.)
I haven't played the expansions all that much, but so far I think the Seaside set really adds a new dimension to the game, whereas the Diplomacy set mostly just has more permutations of the same kinds of things that are available in the original. But so far there's been an amazing amount of replayability, mainly down to the range of starting sets. Usually the game isn't very long, about 45 minutes to an hour with experienced players, and it's easy enough to be fun rather than frustrating, but requires plenty of thought and always leaves me feeling satisfied at the end of a game.
I met Agricola atalextfish's games evening, and fell in love with it. I think it may actually be the pinnacle of semi-abstract games; the one thing it doesn't have is any element of trading and diplomacy, it's all strictly single-player. But just really challenging and exciting to play! The game setting is that you have to set up and run a Mediaeval-style farm, while making sure your family don't starve, which sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it's actually great fun.
Since playing Agricola I've discovered that this game didn't invent the basic game mechanic, but I think Agricola uses it more successfully than anything else I've tried. The idea is that in each turn there are a number of actions available towards improving your farm, but each action can only be used once in each round. So you not only have to plan the optimal strategy, you have to make sure to get the actions you want ahead of the other players. (One of the actions available is "take first turn next round", but if you do that you give up the chance to use the action for any other purpose.) And each action needs a family member, so the bigger your family, the more actions you get in a round, but the more you need to spend on food, housing etc. Also "have babies" is an action, so expanding the family is very much part of the strategy.
What makes Agricola work so well is that it's exquisitely well balanced. For most of the game you're always on the very borderline of being able to produce enough food, (whereas if you devote enough resources to food production not to be constantly marginal, you neglect other areas, and surplus food doesn't score much). Any time you miss out on the action you need, it's a major setback, but there are lots of actions to choose from and the optimal strategy is not at all obvious, so it rarely happens that all the players are fighting over the same action. The scoring works so that you do a lot better if you balance all areas than if you put all your eggs into one basket, but that's amazingly difficult to do.
Now, I will admit that Agricola is a fairly complicated game. Probably more complicated than chess, which is unusual when each rule actually dramatically changes the game-play rather than being cosmetic. I don't think it has quite the scope of chess, but there's a lot more possible variety than in most semi-abstract games. This is partly because again there's a random selection of bonus cards, so each game is slightly different, but it's mainly the detail of the core game strategy. There's also a range of difficulty levels at the initial set-up, an aspect which is particularly well handled, there's a real difference in feel depending which level you're playing at. And honestly, even the "family" level is fairly challenging!
It's a game I find completely absorbing, because competing over very limited actions and resources (but rarely being in an absolutely hopeless situation) makes it very tense. And deciding the best use for each action constantly stretches my brain (you can't really plan in advance because you don't know what earlier players in the round will take). It's enjoyable in the same way that doing maths right at the limit of my ability is enjoyable. The down-sides are that it takes a long time to play, and it's expensive; the latter is understandable because it's a highly crafted game, a lot of time and skill has gone into both making the physical set and particularly designing the rules. I do intend to save up for it and buy it for myself when I really feel I deserve a special treat, though!
Talking of Settlers, I don't suppose anyone wants to set up online games, do they?
simont who expressed enthusiasm when I mentioned it as a possible topic.I've been playing semi-abstract games since MK introduced me to Settlers of Catan in the 90s. (Being German himself, he was deeply into Settlers in its really early days, before it was a big thing outside Germany.) And the past year or so has given me a few opportunities to discover new exciting ones, of which I'm most excited about Dominion and Agricola.
I discovered Dominion at a Bab5 party when I was staying with
darcydodo. I was extremely taken with it, and then jack's mother gave me a set for Christmas. (I think jack probably had a word in her ear to help push her in the direction of choosing me the very thing that was sitting at the top of my wanted list, just a smidgen below wanting it enough to actually go out and buy it for myself.) And I've had a lot of fun with it since, introduced mathcathy to it, and a few games with the gaming group. When my Dad was staying here, he picked up the instructions and remarked that it had too many rules, and he prefers games where the gameplay is based on a complex strategy that emerges from a few simple rules. In reality that's exactly what Dominion is: the whole gameplay is that you draw a hand of five cards from your deck, play an action card and do whatever the instructions on it say, and at the end of your turn you use however many money cards you end up with to buy further cards for your deck, some of which are victory points that count towards your final score. That's the whole game; the thick rule book is just there to clarify edge cases when there could be some ambiguity about how to interpret the instructions on each card. What makes Dominion interesting is that everything in the game is also a card which goes into the deck; action cards, money, and victory points. That means that if you have a lot of victory points you have a high probability of drawing a useless hand, if you have a lot of money you are unlikely to draw the most powerful combinations of actions, and if you have a lot of action cards you don't have enough money to buy victory points.
The available actions are very well thought out, and since each game starts with a set of ten action cards out of 20 (or more, with the expansions) available to buy, the different combinations give quite a variety of game play. The cards are also pretty, and the detailed rule book that put my Dad off means that everybody is playing exactly the same game. The game could easily have been unbalanced or just shoddily made, but having the details right transforms a simple concept into a really enjoyable game. The role of chance in the game is surprisingly limited; obviously your success is going to depend on which random hands you draw, but since you build your own deck you set the probabilities and it mostly does come down to skill over the course of the game. (With two players it can be a bit more down to luck, but it's one of the few games of this style that's playable at all with just two.)
I haven't played the expansions all that much, but so far I think the Seaside set really adds a new dimension to the game, whereas the Diplomacy set mostly just has more permutations of the same kinds of things that are available in the original. But so far there's been an amazing amount of replayability, mainly down to the range of starting sets. Usually the game isn't very long, about 45 minutes to an hour with experienced players, and it's easy enough to be fun rather than frustrating, but requires plenty of thought and always leaves me feeling satisfied at the end of a game.
I met Agricola at
alextfish's games evening, and fell in love with it. I think it may actually be the pinnacle of semi-abstract games; the one thing it doesn't have is any element of trading and diplomacy, it's all strictly single-player. But just really challenging and exciting to play! The game setting is that you have to set up and run a Mediaeval-style farm, while making sure your family don't starve, which sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it's actually great fun.Since playing Agricola I've discovered that this game didn't invent the basic game mechanic, but I think Agricola uses it more successfully than anything else I've tried. The idea is that in each turn there are a number of actions available towards improving your farm, but each action can only be used once in each round. So you not only have to plan the optimal strategy, you have to make sure to get the actions you want ahead of the other players. (One of the actions available is "take first turn next round", but if you do that you give up the chance to use the action for any other purpose.) And each action needs a family member, so the bigger your family, the more actions you get in a round, but the more you need to spend on food, housing etc. Also "have babies" is an action, so expanding the family is very much part of the strategy.
What makes Agricola work so well is that it's exquisitely well balanced. For most of the game you're always on the very borderline of being able to produce enough food, (whereas if you devote enough resources to food production not to be constantly marginal, you neglect other areas, and surplus food doesn't score much). Any time you miss out on the action you need, it's a major setback, but there are lots of actions to choose from and the optimal strategy is not at all obvious, so it rarely happens that all the players are fighting over the same action. The scoring works so that you do a lot better if you balance all areas than if you put all your eggs into one basket, but that's amazingly difficult to do.
Now, I will admit that Agricola is a fairly complicated game. Probably more complicated than chess, which is unusual when each rule actually dramatically changes the game-play rather than being cosmetic. I don't think it has quite the scope of chess, but there's a lot more possible variety than in most semi-abstract games. This is partly because again there's a random selection of bonus cards, so each game is slightly different, but it's mainly the detail of the core game strategy. There's also a range of difficulty levels at the initial set-up, an aspect which is particularly well handled, there's a real difference in feel depending which level you're playing at. And honestly, even the "family" level is fairly challenging!
It's a game I find completely absorbing, because competing over very limited actions and resources (but rarely being in an absolutely hopeless situation) makes it very tense. And deciding the best use for each action constantly stretches my brain (you can't really plan in advance because you don't know what earlier players in the round will take). It's enjoyable in the same way that doing maths right at the limit of my ability is enjoyable. The down-sides are that it takes a long time to play, and it's expensive; the latter is understandable because it's a highly crafted game, a lot of time and skill has gone into both making the physical set and particularly designing the rules. I do intend to save up for it and buy it for myself when I really feel I deserve a special treat, though!
Talking of Settlers, I don't suppose anyone wants to set up online games, do they?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 08:21 pm (UTC)Well, not quite; that is the "starting player and minor improvement" action. I always feel that one of the most satisfying things in the game is getting that little edge on the other players by the skilful use of the small number of action spaces that achieve two useful things at once. (Sow & bake, plough & sow, starting player & minor improvement, etc. And one shouldn't underestimate the reed+stone+food action.)
I play it semi-regularly with some friends of mine. The player to watch tends to be
leveraging synergiesmaking good use of the ways in which the various cards' benefits can be made to reinforce each other; sometimes this process allows him to construct a decent farm by means other than the usual gradual buildup, whereas sometimes it allows him to get a competitive score purely or mostly on bonus points despite having very little actual farm. By contrast, I tend to do a basically orthodox farm-building strategy, with a little boost here and there from playing one or two of my most useful-looking cards. My approach seems to more dependably yield a reasonably good score, whereas Ben's sometimes works and sometimes doesn't – but it's always fun to watch, and when it does work he can pull off some impressive victories. In one recent game, he miscalculated on food in the last but one round, and had to take three begging cards for a nine-point penalty, and still managed to win!An interesting thing I've noticed in the months we've been playing Agricola is a tendency to exponential acceleration. Initially, we would tend to build up stuff in a fairly linear manner – since sheep and fences come up early, there'd be a mad scramble for wood, people would build a small pasture and get a couple of sheep in it, there'd be one field planted and a grain sown, and then later on when more stuff came up people would get a bit of that too. Now we're getting the hang of the game more, it seems to be much more the case that most players' boards stay mostly empty for the first half of the game and then quite suddenly turn into great big thriving farms near the end – and doing it that way tends to lead to higher scores overall. I think partly that's because of economies of scale (e.g. saving up lots of wood and then building all your fences costs fewer actions than fencing a pasture here and a pasture there as each animal type becomes available), and partly because that way not everybody is scrabbling for the same resources at the same time; but even now I recognise this tendency, I feel nervous every time I'm 2/3 of the way through a game and have almost nothing on my board. On Sunday I felt like that and turned out to win by loads, but I'll undboutedly feel the same next time regardless!
Dominion, on the other hand, I've never played.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 08:41 pm (UTC)I've never played the big board Settlers game, just the card game, which works brilliantly for two people if you tweak the rules a little bit.
I'd love to find a group of people interested in board games; I miss playing.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 09:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-28 09:22 pm (UTC)Me: Can I be an organic farmer?
R: Yes, it's set in midevil times, everyone is an organic farmer.
Dominion and Agricola are both games I really like.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-29 05:01 pm (UTC)