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Settlers is indeed a game of strategy. It's not a game of strategy on in the same vein as chess, but a good Catan player will beat a bad Catan player most of the time. (A friend who's a self-proclaimed master has a 50% win rate in four player games.)

 

Dominion is almost nothing like Settlers, but it's very fun. It's like a trading card game, except you have the same starting decks and you buy cards during the game from the bank. Then they started releasing expansions, so now you have to collect again.

 

Bang! is a fun party game. It has no pretense of balance, but you can play with large numbers of people and you can play very loudly.

 

—Alorael, who cannot stand Carcassonne. It falls into the category of games that require you to memorize the game in order to be skillful, and he finds that property infuriating. He also can't enjoy NetHack.

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Originally Posted By: one dollar per day short
—Alorael, who cannot stand Carcassonne. It falls into the category of games that require you to memorize the game in order to be skillful, and he finds that property infuriating. He also can't enjoy NetHack.


My friends and I typically play the big box version of Carcassonne, which includes all of the expansions, though we don't use all of the expansion rules, mainly just all of the extra tiles. With that many tiles, memorization is somewhat moot.
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More or less agreed, especially about NetHack being infuriating in a bad way. Other games I'd toss on the pile:

 

- Modern Art (essentially a bidding game, but with interesting interactions; even better if you play with the rule that every painting put up for auction must first be named)

 

- Guillotine (slight luck, more emphasis on card valuation, and with hilarious illustrations, especially in light of History of the World Part I)

 

- Blue Moon City (all about card management and adapting to different situations)

 

- Samurai (a very smart tile placement game -- but don't worry, Alorael, the tiles are placed on a pre-existing map and there's nothing to memorize)

 

- Race for the Galaxy (I initially hated this one due to its absurd overreliance on complex iconography over English words, but this is a robust, remarkably well-balanced and replayable game. As a reference point, it is a card game with some similarities to Puerto Rico, because it was made by one of the developers of San Juan (the card game version of Puerto Rico) after some of his ideas were rejected as being too complex.)

 

- Purely for flavor I'll throw in Lunch Money: there aren't a lot of games whose cards feature Blair Witch-style pictures of little girls along with phrases like "Jesus hates you and so do I."

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Yeah, Settlers is very much dependant on luck, a bit too much in my opinion. But even so, there's strategy. For a common example, think poker. Duck luck will win you the hand, but strategy will win you the tournament. At any rate, Settlers is not LCR.

 

Originally Posted By: Alorael
Alorael, who cannot stand Carcassonne. It falls into the category of games that require you to memorize the game in order to be skillful, and he finds that property infuriating. He also can't enjoy NetHack.
Carc usually acts as a filler game, so counting tiles has never come up before in my games (but then, my family doesn't like playing with those complicated farmers, so your experiences might be different). If it's a problem, either establish an honour system of 'no tile counting', or print off a sheet of all the different tiles and give it to each player.

 

(Also, good to know I'm not the only one on the Geek.)

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I don't want to count how many of each tile has already come up either, honestly. It's for similar reasons that I can't really enjoy playing bridge.

 

I've played Guillotine, Samurai, and Lunch Money. The first just seemed too luck-based, the second was excellent the one time I had a chance to play it, and the third would be fun if the mechanical effects of the cards were actually printed on the cards.

 

—Alorael, who in fact owns only Guillotine of the three. It was a gift, and it's one he could live without since he'd rather not have other people ask to play it. Oddly, while Bang! is just about as random, more of the randomness is based on human decisions made from incomplete information, so it's somehow more fun.

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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Originally Posted By: VCH
Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES


a good theory-relevant game like Settlers of Catan


You're joking right? That game is all about getting the best spots on the board early.

If you think Settlers is only about getting the best spots on the board early, then you haven't been playing against strong opponents.


I would crush you

that is a challenge

Socratic moment: if you are so certain that you can crush me, then surely the game isn't all about getting the best spots on the board early. Or did you mean "I would crush you... unless the turn order is more advantageous for you"?


I would crush you because I'm a master cheat, think David Blaine skills. cool


I've always found Dominion to be too much of a loner game. There isn't enough interaction with your opponents.
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I like Carcassonne because I like the look of the tiles. All those goofy little brown cities, close together. It seems like a place I'd really like to live. Or visit as a tourist.

 

I visited the real Carcassonne once. I had never heard of the place, and this was before the game came out. My wife and I saw it out the window driving past on the Autoroute, and we decided to come back to check it out the next day. It's quite cool. The cafés there also offer cassoulet, which is a bean and duckleg casserole whose active ingredient is apparently some very tasty kind of grease. Delicious, but it's not trivial to finish a bowl.

 

Anyway, Carcassonne is this little walled city on a hill. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, and this one really stands out. You don't see things like that much anymore. It actually looks quite a lot like the cities in the game. Except it is not surrounded by lots of other similar cities of really weird shapes, or encircled by ridiculously twisty roads. Nor are there any gigantic wooden people in it.

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Originally Posted By: Andraste
Get the Intrigue or Alchemy expansions. There's plenty of interaction cards there. Like Possession. Soooo awesome.


it's a pity some of them actually make the game less fun in practice

people don't complain that you're not allowed to trip up your opponents in a 100-metre sprint
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Having played Dominion with very different sets of cards, I have to say that while I wouldn't always want to play without interaction, it's fun to play unimpeded races for points. It's interesting how differently games can play out depending on the cards available. Some are long and carefully calculated, some are mad dashes for land, and some are just all about spite.

 

—Alorael, who should also plug Ra. It's a simple bidding game. It's a game that some people just will not understand or play and some people will love. Possibly it's also a litmus test for some sort of fiscal or business acumen.

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My favourite game of Dominion had both the Witch and the Sea Hag from Seaside. The winner had -1 points. (Was Chapel in the game? I think so, but not sure.)

 

I haven't played Intrigue or Alchemy -- I know there are cards that let you pick on the player to your left. Are there any cards that let you pick on whoever you want? I hope not; ignoring that design space is one of the interesting things about Dominion. Players can't just hose the winning player, they actually have to change their decks to discourage the winning player's strategy.

 

Ra is the only bidding game I don't outright dislike. I don't mind if bidding is a component of the game (Chicago Express, Power Grid, A Game of Thrones, even Santiago with its bribes). But I usually don't like it when the entire game is bidding. I'm a terrible Fist of Dragonstones player.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Originally Posted By: VCH
Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES


a good theory-relevant game like Settlers of Catan


You're joking right? That game is all about getting the best spots on the board early.

If you think Settlers is only about getting the best spots on the board early, then you haven't been playing against strong opponents.


In fact, there actually is a Settlers of Catan World Championship. I'm not making this up. laugh
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Man, competing in the rock-paper-scissors world championship would be such a huge mistake. Because somebody is going to win it, and they are going to win by having a highly improbable string of victories. And so if I compete, I am very likely to lose miserably against a guy that is apparently practically unbeatable. At rock. Paper. Scissors. I would feel so bad.

 

Until the next year, when that same guy most likely tanks, and somebody else appears unbeatable. It's a lot like running a mutual fund.

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http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html

 

For such a simple toy game, it's pretty nifty. The Nash equilibrium is simple: play each option with probability 1/3. So if you're making a RoShamBo bot that will be facing bots made by people as intelligent or more than you, you'd want your bot to play randomly. The fun part comes in when your bot is in a tournament filled with both 'intelligent' bots and deliberately suboptimal bots. How can your bot's strategy exploit the 'stupid' bots without opening up a weakness to the 'intelligent' bots?

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Well, but Dintiradan does have a point about exploiting the idiots instead of beating the smart people. There's probably a Nobel Memorial Prize waiting for the first person to convincingly model stupidity. There may well be a lot more money in artificial stupidity than there will ever be in artificial intelligence.

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