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Scanability · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorders,
• 0:08
  I head out for a walk and deliver an episode you while I stroll
• 0:10
  around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a
• 0:22
  gloomy day here in suburban Chicago. We've got that sort of modeled gray gross
• 0:27
  blanket sky overhead. Doesn't look like it's going to rain, but it does
• 0:30
  look like it's going to be relatively unpleasant weatherwise, although the temperature is fine.
• 0:35
  The home hub said it would be nearly sixty degrees at the high today
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  and right now it's just crested fifty. So I'm not wearing a jacket,
• 0:44
  but I did bring a cap and I'm wearing that and it will see how
• 0:47
  I If I get warmed up, I can take it off. Well,
• 0:50
  this is you may have noticed there haven't been very many episodes this week.
• 0:52
  In fact, this is the first episode this week, and that's because I
• 0:56
  recorded one and it failed. I got home and listened and somehow I had
• 1:00
  clipped the lav mic on my jacket in such a way that it just every
• 1:03
  step I took, the jacket and the lav mic scraped against each other.
• 1:07
  So all you heard for the whole episode was and you could barely hear me
• 1:11
  talking, and I don't want to put that out, so I had to
• 1:14
  scrap that. So I'm remaking this episode, and hopefully this one will be
• 1:18
  audible. So today's episode comes from a conversation I had with I believe Jason
• 1:23
  Keglovitz somewhere. If I'm wrong about who that conversation was, I apologize,
• 1:29
  Please let me know by message or in the forum. Jason. If it
• 1:33
  was you, there you go. I think it was you. And Jason
• 1:36
  was talking about Praga could put Ragni the Vladimir Succi game, and specifically how
• 1:42
  Jason found it difficult to play that game in some ways because he didn't find
• 1:49
  the scoring particularly scannable. It's the phrase he used. And wanted to know
• 1:55
  what I thought about the idea of scannability meaning, I think the way I
• 1:57
  took it, or the way I understood this sort of meaning the ability to
• 2:00
  look at the state of the game and tell how well you're doing. And
• 2:05
  I thought, yeah, that's an interesting thing to talk about. And here
• 2:07
  we are from his lips, see your ears. So I thought I would
• 2:10
  talk about three or four games that I thought were hard to scan, three
• 2:15
  or four games that I think are easier to scan or easy to scan,
• 2:19
  and then three or four games that I think are tricky to scan. So
• 2:23
  hard easy, tricky, And by tricky, I don't mean difficult, That's
• 2:27
  what hard means instead, I mean deceptive. Okay, So let's jump into
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  it hard. The four games that I want to talk about today being hard
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  to scan, I'll start with progre Canpote Regny, but I also want to
• 2:38
  mention Obsession, seven Wonders and welcome to so Praga. If you haven't played,
• 2:42
  it is a game of many different scoring channels. There are something like
• 2:46
  five different ways you can score points, plus some things that just score your
• 2:51
  points as you go along. There's the building the wall around your personal action
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  board. There's moving up the cathedral steps, there's moving up the city wall
• 3:01
  steps for the Hunger Wall, I think it's called maybe, there's building the
• 3:06
  King's Road. There is building buildings inside the city of Prague generally, and
• 3:12
  there are points earned for developing technologies and getting really high on the university track.
• 3:17
  So all of those different things can score you points, and with the
• 3:22
  exception of the road, and even that gets you endgame points. There are
• 3:29
  also points you can earn as you go along the game, and in any
• 3:31
  given game, you know, if I'm playing a game that's can I score
• 3:34
  one hundred and fifteen points? Maybe thirty to forty of those points I scored
• 3:38
  during the game itself and the other sixty come from endgame scoring or seventy and
• 3:43
  so it is a game that has a lot of different ways that you can
• 3:47
  score, and a lot of things that sort of multiply together, so it
• 3:52
  can be very difficult just glancing around to tell who's got very many points and
• 3:57
  where they're coming from. Now, as you play a bit, you get
• 3:59
  used to sort of looking for those things, but it's not easy to grab,
• 4:01
  hence why it's on this list. So I put Seven Wonders on here
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  for the same reason that I put Praga on here, because there are lots
• 4:10
  of different ways to score points, and you can be pretty good at some
• 4:13
  of them, or very good at a couple of them, but it's often
• 4:16
  really difficult to on the fly look at your tableau and look at someone else's
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  tableau and know who's winning. I will say Seven Wonders does have a I
• 4:25
  don't know, a higher flood mark. I don't know what you call it.
• 4:29
  Seven Wonders has a bigger area in the game where you can tell that
• 4:35
  you're doing badly, So you know, you can tell you're doing badly compared
• 4:39
  to other people, but you can't always tell how well you're doing. I
• 4:42
  will say case in point one of the recent more recent games I played of
• 4:45
  Seven Wonders, I was like against four or five other people. I thought
• 4:47
  I was doing okay at best, and I won. And there's another game
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  recently where I thought I was doing pretty well and I lost significantly, like
• 4:56
  like third or fourth place. So I find Seven Wonders kind of in scrutable
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  when you're glancing at it. And then Obsession and Welcome to are both games
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  that I find difficult to scan because all the scoring comes at the end,
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  and a lot of the scoring is kind of buried in what your opponents have.
• 5:14
  So in Obsession, your points are buried in. The points are on
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  the tiles that you buy, they're in the cards that you draw, they're
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  in the bonus cards that you get, and they're in the reputation that you
• 5:27
  develop. Now, the reputation is visible, but all the other things are
• 5:30
  either permit highly or partially obscured just by distance or by the fact that they're
• 5:34
  hidden in your hand, and so it's really hard to keep track of how
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  well somebody's doing. You also don't know what their secret goals are, and
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  the secret goals vary widely point in point value, So somebody could have a
• 5:46
  really good secret goal and get it and have a big swing in points at
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  the end. There's a lot of points to be had in obsession and so,
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  and it's often really hard to tell how well somebody's doing so Obsession and
• 5:58
  then finally, welcome to become to as an excellent flip and write a game
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  in which you are building a neighborhood. If you haven't played it, you
• 6:04
  should. It's great. Like many of the other games I've given an example
• 6:09
  of Difficult to Scan, it is a game that has several different ways to
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  score points, and the number of points you can get from those things varies
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  widely wildly. I would also say, like Seven Wonders, it has a
• 6:19
  fairly high floodwater range, meaning if you're doing badly, you can kind of
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  tell you're doing badly. If you're having trouble getting anything to go, or
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  that sort of thing. Yep, other people are beating you to the interim
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  goals. But if you're making if you're doing decently, if you're doing reasonably
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  well, it's really hard to tell are you doing better than other people?
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  And you don't know until you get to the final accounting and then suddenly you
• 6:43
  learn how well you've done. So those are the games that I find hard
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  to scan. I think the overlapping similarity. There is lots of different ways
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  you score points, and it's not always easy to tell what your score is
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  currently or what your opponent's scores are. By contrast, I would point to
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  four games that I think are easy to scan for different reasons. I'll start
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  with another Vladimir Succi game, and this is Underwater Cities. Now I first
• 7:03
  thought Underwater Cities might appear to be difficult to scan. There are, like
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  progu Regne or most Vladimir Succi games, there are a number of different ways
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  you can score points, and they're kind of all over the place. However,
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  I find that because of the interim scoring, where you're scoring in the
• 7:21
  middle of the game, generally the people who are doing better are scoring better
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  in those sections, and often by the two thirds point the person who's leading
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  is probably going to win the game. Not always, but often it's really
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  hard to come back from behind, and so you can tell just looking at
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  the board and looking at the scoring position who's probably going to win pretty early.
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  Now, Underwater Cities is really satisfying to play and really fun to do
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  even if you're losing, and that's why one of the reasons I enjoy it
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  so much. But and it's really hard to tell, like what someone's exact
• 7:53
  score is going to be, and certainly there can be turnarounds, but I
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  feel like most of the time when I'm playing Underwater Cities, I can probably
• 7:58
  tell by the two thirds mark who's win just by looking at the current scores.
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  I'd be interested to hear from other people if you agree with that,
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  And I will say, this is not a scientific study that earned me that
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  idea, I instead of just thought of it off top of my head.
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  So I'm gonna have to try that the next two times I play Underwater Cities.
• 8:13
  When we get to the two thirds scoring point, I'm going to see
• 8:16
  who's winning and see if that person wins the whole game. So I think
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  I feel like Underwater Cities is easy to read. Another game that I feel
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  is easy to read for similar reasons is a Gricola. Now, Gricola,
• 8:28
  probably at high level play, is harder to read because strategies are more complex.
• 8:33
  There is a question for you, listener. I'm all about trying to
• 8:37
  help people find their belongings. So if someone loses a phone, loses the
• 8:41
  wallet, loses a backpack, even like a hat or glasses or something,
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  I will leave them in a place where I think they're easily found. So
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  like I once found a pair of glasses on the sidewalk, and I kind
• 8:50
  of put it on a prominent piece of furniture right next to the sidewalk,
• 8:56
  so that the people who glass as it was, if they walked by there
• 9:00
  again, they would see these glasses sitting there and maybe they find them.
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  I'll do the same thing with hats or whatever. If I find belongings in
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  a building, I'll tournament in the lost and found that sort of thing.
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  Well, walking along the sidewalk here I just found like twelve dollars, a
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  ten and two ones folded up laying on the ground right in the middle of
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  the sidewalk. There's nobody else around, and I suspect if I had to
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  guess that that is money. A child was given to take to school and
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  they pulled something in their pocket and dropped the money. So the question is
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  what do you do. Do you leave the cash on the ground do you
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  take it? Those are really the only two options. There's no way to
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  give the cash to someone who lost it. That's not a thing. It's
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  not enough money you'd make it worth going to the police over. If I
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  found a thousand dollars or something, I would certainly take it to the police
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  and make sure that you know somebody had it back. But for twelve dollars,
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  no one's going to go to the police to look for twelve dollars if
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  it's lost. So what do you do just leaving it there in case they
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  come back. Yes, they might come back and find it, but it's
• 9:56
  just as likely that someone else will walk along and take it, because,
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  unlike belongings, there is a clear value to taking cash. So I'm curious
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  what you do, listeners, If anyone inquires about it, I will let
• 10:05
  you know what I did. In a later episode. So all that happened
• 10:09
  while I was talking okay we're on too easy to read games, I was
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  saying I think I find Agricola pretty easy to read as well. One of
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  the things about Agricola is because it is a slow burn, difficult slog.
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  When someone gains an advantage and starts, you know, ratcheting up things,
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  it's often really hard to catch them. And I feel like most of the
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  time when I play a Griccola, by the time i'm sort of halfway through,
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  I can generally tell who's winning or not. The problem is, most
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  of the time I play Agricola, I'm playing online where it's tallying the score
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  for me, whereas Agricola does not have any real time tally. The problem
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  is you can kind of see the score as you're going along. You can
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  see how many spots someone has covered. You can see how many resources they
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  have, how big is their house, how many children do they have.
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  You know, it's a sliding scale that's relatively easy to assess at a glance,
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  And so I feel like a Gricola is one of those games where usually
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  I can look around and tell how everybody's doing. Not always, but usually.
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  Now again, I don't play at a super high level, and my
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  guess is people who play in tournaments are really good at a Griccola. It's
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  a different story, but at my level of play, I find a Gricola
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  pretty scannable. The next two games I think are slightly easier. This is
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  res Arcana and Baron Park. Now, res Arcana is meant to be scannable.
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  The points are these big red circles, and the way that you score
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  points as a relatively small number of things you might do, and I find
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  that as I'm playing, you're constantly checking to see how many points people have,
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  looking at what possible engines they might have in case they're about to,
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  you know, cascade into victory, that sort of thing. And so I
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  think with the public nature of the scoring cards in rez Arcana, most of
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  the time you can see somebody's victory coming or tell sort of how you are.
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  The one place that's different is if you are running an engine that's going
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  to have a big output. Sometimes that's not as obvious. And also I
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  think playing online it's excuse me, not as obvious unless you're really focusing on
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  what the other person's doing and really scrutinizing it. Because online it's very easy
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  to not notice that someone's gathered up a huge pile of tokens such that when
• 12:24
  they expend those tokens, suddenly they have a lot of stuff that happened in
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  the game. I was playing a couple of weeks ago. I had gotten
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  an engine that allowed me to just dug, just pile up a huge mountain
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  of blue and green tokens. Are huge for my level of play anyway,
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  doesn't compare to the people who are really good, but a big mountain of
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  these tokens. And then on the last turn, when my opponent had I
• 12:50
  think just crossed ten and I was at six or something, then I expended
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  all of these tokens and ended up at seventeen points, just because I had
• 13:00
  this huge pilot tokens that I was working with, and my opponent hadn't really
• 13:03
  noticed that I was building those up, so to them it looked like I
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  went from six to seventeen in one turn and they couldn't see how, which
• 13:11
  is a little a little confusing, But I think generally resarcana is pretty scannable.
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  You can usually tell how well you're doing compared to other people. It
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  also has a very predictable arc. Good players finish the game in four or
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  five rounds, and so probably five rounds and so you can kind of tell
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  am I on track to finish the game in that many rounds. If not,
• 13:31
  well, probably need to do better, all right. The last game
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  I mentioned here is Baron Park. I find Barren Park very scannable because you
• 13:39
  can usually just look at the other person's board and see how close are they
• 13:43
  to completing their board? How many of the expensive statues have they gotten?
• 13:48
  How many of the scoring objectives have they gotten? Right? Like those things?
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  There's only like four ways to score points, and all the points are
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  on the board, so it's literally a matter of moments to actually add up
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  their or even if you didn't want to go that far, it's not too
• 14:03
  hard to get a good sense of their score just from looking at it,
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  and you can often tell how you're doing. Now. I will say again,
• 14:09
  at very high level play, and I can't say that I'm super good
• 14:13
  at this, but I am. I do win most of the games of
• 14:16
  Baron Park that I play, so I would say I am pretty close to
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  high level, at least in my circle. There a lot of times there
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  isn't It isn't clear who's going to win until the last turn, right,
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  because things get super tight. Most high level games I've played with Baron in
• 14:31
  Baron Park, Me and my opponent finish our boards on the same turn,
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  or maybe the person who's in the second play or who person who didn't finish
• 14:39
  would have finished on the next turn. Often very close. We're often competing
• 14:43
  for the statues and for the bonuses. You know, we're splitting the bonuses,
• 14:48
  and so yeah, Baron Park usually pretty scannable. All right, So
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  now I want to take a couple of minutes here as we're wrapping up,
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  to talk about some games that I find tricky. Tricky games are one is
• 15:00
  where if you are looking at the board, you can feel like you're doing
• 15:05
  well or think you're doing well, but then it could turn out that you're
• 15:07
  not. The first example I want to give is Quest for Eldorado. This
• 15:13
  is a deck building game, and this game, because of the way the
• 15:16
  deck building part works, can be really swingy. You can be kind of
• 15:20
  running ahead and feel like you've got everything made, and then suddenly you get
• 15:22
  a couple bad hands, or you're drawing only money cards, or you're you're
• 15:26
  just not really making any forward progress and you meanwhile, your opponent draws out
• 15:30
  a couple expensive cards. They bought and suddenly they're shooting ahead. This has
• 15:33
  happened to me a number of times. Maybe I'm bad at it, but
• 15:35
  mostly it just means I can't tell how I'm doing, and I feel like
• 15:39
  I'm doing better than I am. I would say both Magic the Gathering and
• 15:43
  net Runner have an experience where there can be a turnaround as somebody's gimmick or
• 15:50
  somebody's twist in their deck or move that they're trying to build up hits,
• 15:56
  you can suddenly have a big reversal in fortune that can make it very tricky
• 16:00
  to read the board state. Now, sometimes you can just tell, okay,
• 16:03
  I'm losing. There's nothing I can do. But often the mix of
• 16:10
  different things that can happen in the board make it really hard to tell how
• 16:14
  you're doing or make it seem like you're doing better than you are. Another
• 16:18
  game that can seem like you're doing better than you are and can have a
• 16:19
  late game twist as MATYNI now, matyn I maybe isn't fair to put in
• 16:23
  the scannable category at all. It's pretty unscannable because there's so many different ways
• 16:27
  that things can happen, and you can have these big turnarounds moments in different
• 16:33
  turns, but ultimately Matyni is interesting because of those swingy elements and kind of
• 16:38
  understanding what does and doesn't work about them is a key part of what makes
• 16:42
  them makes the game interesting. But I also mean sometimes you feel like you're
• 16:47
  winning and then your opponent pulls off something that gives them a huge swinging points,
• 16:52
  or sometimes there's a card. There are actually cards in Tyni that just
• 16:56
  let you win regardless of points or at least one, and there's enough sort
• 17:00
  of wild stuff in the game that you could ultimately have a really weird swingy
• 17:06
  round, which is kind of why I like it, but it really does
• 17:07
  mean that the understanding the gameplay is tricky. And finally, the last one
• 17:12
  on point two is through the ages. Now, through the ages of the
• 17:15
  game I've played more than one hundred times. I really really like it a
• 17:18
  lot, But the end of the game is often really swingy for me because
• 17:23
  all of the third age cards that get put in pay off for the players.
• 17:30
  Sometimes you have a good idea of what's coming out, and sometimes you
• 17:33
  don't, and if you don't, there can be a huge swing in what
• 17:37
  happens in the game because those endgame, those level three politics cards come out,
• 17:42
  and sometimes they just help your opponent a lot more than you. Now,
• 17:47
  I would say again, this is probably a matter of poor strategy more
• 17:49
  than poor scannability, because Through the Ages does keep score as you go along,
• 17:55
  and you can often tell. But I certainly I've had games where I
• 17:59
  feel like it's close, or I'm even winning by ten, twenty thirty points,
• 18:03
  and then we get to the end and there's a big reversal of fortune.
• 18:07
  And if that doesn't fit tricky scannability, I don't know what does.
• 18:11
  So that's my thinking on the idea of scannability in board games. I'm curious
• 18:17
  what are your favorite games and how scannable are they. Do you feel like
• 18:21
  you can tell from looking at the board state how well you're doing, or
• 18:23
  do you feel like it's kind of a mystery till you get to scoring.
• 18:26
  You can share your thoughts on that over on board game Geek can guild three
• 18:29
  two six nine, or you can send me a message directly Wombat nine two
• 18:32
  nine at onboard game Geek. You can email me Brendon at rattlebox games dot
• 18:36
  com, or you could reach out to me on board game Arena Boatazou for
• 18:41
  however long it stays up, and you caught a dot D in all three
• 18:45
  cases. My user name is Wombat nine two nine. If you have comments
• 18:48
  or thoughts about games that you think would make for a good hey Brendon and
• 18:52
  talk about this for twenty minutes suggestion. I'd also appreciate hearing those either in
• 18:56
  direct message or over on the forum. I would like to hear you listener
• 19:00
  feedback about different kinds of conversations that I'm having on this podcast. That's about
• 19:06
  it for me today. Thanks for joining me on my walk. I hope
• 19:08
  that your next walk is as pleasant as mind walks. Bye bye. Brought
• 19:33
  to you by rattle Bogs