Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Home Field Advantage

Transcript

Home Field Advantage · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:00
  Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step
• 0:07
  out of the store and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.
• 0:11
  I'm Brendan Riley.
• 0:15
  Well, good afternoon listeners.
• 0:22
  It's a cloudy day here in suburban Chicago.
• 0:25
  I've just finished running some errands.
• 0:26
  I'm on my way home.
• 0:29
  And I thought I would talk to you about some board game stuff.
• 0:32
  I was playing a game of fantasy realms recently and it became evident that one of the challenges
• 0:39
  of that game is having a sense of the scope of the cards.
• 0:44
  That the more you've played it, the more you have a sense of like which cards can come
• 0:47
  up how often, where they can go, and how likely you are to find say a pairing to go with
• 0:55
  one of the cards that you have.
• 0:57
  Like if you're fishing for a combo, how likely are you to get that combo?
• 1:00
  It got me to thinking about something that happens that I am often concerned about when I am
• 1:05
  showing people a game that they haven't played before.
• 1:10
  And that's what in baseball they call the home field advantage.
• 1:13
  I guess they call that in most sports that are played on fields.
• 1:16
  And I think the idea of home field advantage is
• 1:19
  that you might have a sense of how to play in your specific venue that there might
• 1:27
  be a spot where the grass is a little squishier or where the sun shines at a certain time
• 1:31
  of day or there might be aspects of the physical playing on the field or you have an advantage
• 1:37
  if you're on your home field.
• 1:38
  Similarly, generally in a professional sports capacity, you also have your fans in the
• 1:44
  stadium.
• 1:45
  In the field of mobile home field, we know human beings, we are emotional creatures that share
• 1:50
  our emotions with one another.
• 1:52
  We're communal in that way.
• 1:54
  And so the shared emotion of cheering for a group or booing a group or whatever rubs off
• 1:59
  on the players, I think.
• 2:00
  So there is home field advantage.
• 2:02
  So I got to thinking about what does that mean in board games?
• 2:04
  What are the different ways that board games have home field advantage?
• 2:08
  Have experience that they privilege experience?
• 2:12
  Obviously, the first way would be understanding the systems of the game.
• 2:17
  Just generally, that on your first play of a game, you don't understand how all the systems
• 2:23
  interact.
• 2:24
  You have a theoretical view of it.
• 2:27
  You've been taught the rules.
• 2:28
  Maybe you've watched a video.
• 2:30
  You have a sense of how they're supposed to work.
• 2:33
  But you haven't actually seen them in action.
• 2:35
  You haven't wrestled with the challenge of manipulating the components or moving your
• 2:40
  piece or doing whatever it is you need to do in order to make the systems work and work
• 2:45
  them well.
• 2:46
  You have an idea of how it works, but you don't have the practicality.
• 2:50
  That is just the advantage of experience.
• 2:52
  I'm not sure you're necessarily talking about that per se, but rather which games are more
• 3:00
  attuned to that kind of privilege in which games are less attuned to it or have more
• 3:06
  room for inexperienced players to do well.
• 3:10
  Of course, one of the main ways that this happens or doesn't happen is in luck.
• 3:18
  The more luck a game has, the more the more chance an inexperienced player has to keep up with
• 3:25
  an inexperienced player.
• 3:26
  So I would say that's one part of it.
• 3:28
  I would also say the easier a system is to grasp and grasp fully the better chance that a
• 3:35
  player has, a new player has to keep up with an inexperienced player.
• 3:40
  Along those lines, I would say push your luck games with relatively simple mechanisms, something
• 3:44
  like flip seven or skull.
• 3:48
  skull is a bluffing game, not a push your luck game, but still.
• 3:51
  Those games you should be able to be playing them very well your first play.
• 3:56
  I wouldn't point to those games as ones where an inexperienced player has a dramatic skill
• 4:02
  benefit over a new player.
• 4:04
  But there are plenty of games where different aspects of the game mean that having played
• 4:10
  at a bunch gives you an outsized advantage beyond just the you're familiar with the game.
• 4:17
  Or maybe the kind of familiarity you build with the game from playing it far out ways,
• 4:23
  the kind of familiarity somebody is going to get from going through a normal teach of
• 4:27
  a game.
• 4:28
  I'm setting aside somebody who looks through all the cards and watches some playthroughs
• 4:33
  and kind of vicariously develops some experience with the game.
• 4:36
  I'm thinking of somebody who sits down at the table with you to play the game, maybe they've
• 4:40
  heard of it, but they don't know anything about it.
• 4:42
  You teach them how to play, maybe they watch your rules video, maybe both, and then they
• 4:46
  play.
• 4:47
  So, I thought of three different ways that home field advantage emerges in games like that.
• 4:52
  The first one I'm just going to call cards index.
• 4:55
  And this is a metonymy for a larger issue of understanding all the things the game has
• 5:01
  and the way those pieces interact mean that you have an advantage over somebody who is new
• 5:06
  and just hasn't seen things come out.
• 5:08
  The game that I think I feel strongest about this happening in is London.
• 5:14
  London is a game from Martin Wallace.
• 5:17
  I really like it.
• 5:18
  It's a very interesting game where you are giving cards and using those cards to interact
• 5:22
  with the board and so on.
• 5:24
  But each card has a slightly different power in it.
• 5:26
  So when you go to play it, if you are playing carefully, you have to read every card that
• 5:31
  comes out to think about what's going to happen.
• 5:33
  That means new players, there's a lot of information overload and a lot to deal with.
• 5:37
  On top of that, you have to constantly be discarding cards.
• 5:40
  Every time you play a card in London, you also have to discard a card of the same color.
• 5:44
  So you're taking in twice as many cards as you're going to play.
• 5:47
  Meaning that you're reading all these cards and then you're going to have to decide which
• 5:50
  of them you're not going to use.
• 5:52
  It's a delicious tension, but it really bogs the game down in terms of how long it's
• 5:57
  going to go, how quick it's going to be, and how hard it is or not is.
• 6:01
  To hold info in your head.
• 6:03
  And then on top of that, there are some cards that just have value if you play them in a
• 6:07
  certain way, but the value they have isn't immediate or easy to understand.
• 6:12
  I think you could find the same experience with race for the galaxy.
• 6:16
  People who've played race for the galaxy a lot really understand the nuances of how the
• 6:21
  cards interact and they know what to look for if they have a particular card or a particular
• 6:26
  combo.
• 6:27
  Being able to interact with those cards and anticipate what's coming really goes a long
• 6:32
  way toward finding yourself winning the game versus if you don't know what's there, it's
• 6:38
  much harder to do.
• 6:39
  Another game that I would put in that category is Everdell.
• 6:43
  Everdell again has a big stack of cards.
• 6:45
  If you have all the expansions, the stack of cards is bigger and bigger.
• 6:48
  There's a bunch of different villagers that all do different kinds of things because
• 6:52
  the game has a hard hand limit of eight.
• 6:54
  You're not allowed to draw cards if you have eight so you can't go over and discard down.
• 6:59
  So the game prevents card cycling in pretty important ways.
• 7:03
  You also have a limit to how many cards you can play so every card you play is an important
• 7:08
  choice.
• 7:09
  There are ways to get rid of cards, but if you haven't played before, it's not clear to
• 7:12
  you how important that is or not.
• 7:14
  And as you think about your strategy, you may or not understand why you should be thinking
• 7:19
  about getting rid of cards from your tableau.
• 7:22
  For example.
• 7:23
  So all of that means that the nuances of what to do with the cards are somewhat obscured
• 7:28
  by the complexity and the volume of different cards that can come out.
• 7:33
  A couple other games that have similar things.
• 7:36
  Fantasy Realms is another one where every card has a power on it so every card might be
• 7:40
  useful to you.
• 7:41
  Meaning every card that comes out in the market has to be read.
• 7:45
  Elysium, the Dunston and Gilbert game, which I really, really like and haven't played
• 7:50
  for a very long time.
• 7:52
  That one also has this problem of every card does something so everybody has to look at every
• 7:56
  card that does something.
• 7:58
  That one also has the challenge of having a huge market of cards that everybody has to
• 8:02
  look at and then you're all drafting those cards.
• 8:05
  So the need to understand what the cards are is a real challenge.
• 8:10
  And then I will point to Res Arcana and Villagers as two more games where understanding what
• 8:16
  cards are available and how they can be used really gives players with experience and advantage
• 8:23
  over new players.
• 8:25
  The second way that Home Field Advantage or Experience in a game emerges I think.
• 8:29
  This one's probably closest to, well if you've played the game a lot you'll understand.
• 8:32
  But I think I'm thinking of it in specific ways.
• 8:34
  And this is mastering complex systems.
• 8:37
  So if three games here, Dunston and Point 2, through the ages, Arc Nova and Terraforming
• 8:42
  Mars.
• 8:43
  Each of these games has a whole bunch of different systems which have generally different weight
• 8:50
  in terms of how important they are for winning the game.
• 8:54
  Often the mix of systems allows you to win the game in different ways.
• 8:58
  So there is an element of choosing your path that works best tactically as well as strategically.
• 9:04
  But there is also an element of just understanding the way that resources move where points come
• 9:11
  from.
• 9:12
  All this can be explained in the abstract and often is, but Experience players come to
• 9:17
  understand the interaction of the systems just in a lot more depth than people who are
• 9:23
  new to the game.
• 9:24
  And so the likelihood of somebody who is new to the game outpacing an Experience Player is
• 9:29
  pretty low because there's just so many different nuances to understand.
• 9:35
  And you come to understand those nuances by mastering the complexity of the system.
• 9:39
  Through the ages, I've talked about playing that literally hundreds of times now.
• 9:44
  And that game is very challenging because there are a whole bunch of different currencies
• 9:50
  to keep track of.
• 9:52
  And as you compete with other players, if you get behind or ahead in some of those currencies,
• 9:57
  you can dramatically affect your ability to do well as you interact with those other players.
• 10:03
  You can affect your ability to score cards.
• 10:05
  The interactivity of the military, for instance, if you let yourself get behind in that, that
• 10:10
  can be game-roaning.
• 10:11
  At the same time, if you spend too much energy on the military, military is generally not
• 10:16
  giving you a ton of points.
• 10:18
  It can, if you get way ahead, but it won't always.
• 10:21
  The end game movement is really interesting as well.
• 10:26
  Kind of understanding how to build a robust base on which to move toward that end game
• 10:31
  is a big challenge.
• 10:33
  And I think it comes with time, even if you've had it explained to you.
• 10:37
  Arcanova has similar considerations than I would say so to terraforming Mars.
• 10:42
  All three of these games, plus there was one more that I named, which I have now forgotten.
• 10:48
  All of these games, I think, really benefit from repeated plays, of course, but also just
• 10:54
  very specifically the home field advantage of understanding where the complexity lies
• 11:01
  and the hidden implications of that complexity is really important and it's something that
• 11:08
  you only get through practice.
• 11:09
  And thus, experienced players are going to win against new players much more often than
• 11:15
  in games that don't have that same facet.
• 11:18
  All right, the third way I would suggest that games have this home field advantage is in
• 11:25
  the nature of efficiency.
• 11:26
  Now y'all know, I love myself a good Euro game.
• 11:30
  Most of my top games are, in fact, Euro games.
• 11:33
  If I were going to pick a short phrase to describe most Euro games or what makes them Euro
• 11:38
  games, I would say, efficiency puzzles.
• 11:41
  Euro games are about finding and maximizing efficiency in order to accomplish things.
• 11:48
  Some games, that efficiency is razor tight, something like Tricarion or a Gricola.
• 11:53
  These are games where if you haven't maximized your efficiency going into play and you're
• 11:59
  playing against someone who is, they are going to roll you because the game is so tight
• 12:05
  that a misstep can make you fall behind.
• 12:08
  Anyway, that's very hard to catch up.
• 12:10
  And again, like the Mastering Complexity piece, understanding where the efficiencies of
• 12:15
  these games lie and how to maximize them really becomes a home field advantage because while
• 12:21
  you can in the abstract acquire this knowledge, I think most of the time with games like Tricarion
• 12:26
  or Gricola.
• 12:27
  And to some degree of session, although obsession is heavily luck driven or there is a significant
• 12:32
  luck component to it.
• 12:34
  As you play these games, I think they are really compelling in how they reward the home
• 12:41
  player advantage.
• 12:42
  The last game under efficiency that I wanted to talk about is a slightly different one.
• 12:45
  This is Century.
• 12:47
  Century is an interesting example for me because I think it does not have a ton of home
• 12:51
  field advantage.
• 12:52
  It has some because the first time you play it, you might not really see the nuances of
• 12:58
  how pieces go together.
• 13:00
  But I have discovered that new players, if taught well, can really have a significantly
• 13:06
  strong chance at succeeding at century.
• 13:10
  Because I would say the way the economy works in that game is visible in its entirety.
• 13:17
  Unlike other games that have a more obscure economy or have enough complexity that it becomes
• 13:24
  very hard to understand where the different pieces go and where they come from.
• 13:29
  In century, it is a narrow enough window of things that you really do have the opportunity
• 13:34
  to succeed in gaining the most efficiency.
• 13:39
  So those are my three thoughts about kinds of games or ways that games provide home field
• 13:45
  advantage.
• 13:46
  I'm curious, what other things do you have to suggest?
• 13:51
  Does experience, is this really just a way of saying experience?
• 13:55
  Having experience playing the game gives you an advantage.
• 13:57
  What are the other ways that having played the game a bunch of times gives you dramatic
• 14:01
  advantage beyond just experience with the game or ways that you can characterize the experiences
• 14:06
  of the game to capitalize on them?
• 14:08
  Share those thoughts over on board game geek and guild 3269.
• 14:10
  I hope to see you there.
• 14:12
  In the meantime, thanks for joining me on my walk today.
• 14:14
  I hope you're next one.
• 14:15
  This is Palsies Mindless.
• 14:16
  Bye bye.
• 14:41
  ♪ I know, I know, I know ♪