While No Thanks! can be exactly simulated with any set of cards with straight numerical values (such as Take 6), you can play a substantially similar game with one deck of cards and some tokens. Play with 3 to 5 players, maybe 6.
Remove the J through A of each suit, leaving 36 cards, 2 through 10 in each suit. Shuffle and remove nine cards without looking at them. Give each player 11 tokens, as usual.
To play, the starting player flips up a card and either takes it and goes again, or puts a token onto it in which case it's now the next player's turn. The next player has the same option. When you decline to take a card, you add one of your tokens onto the card. When you take a card, you take all the tokens on the card along with the card, and then go again. If you have no tokens, you must take the card when it's your turn. Continue until all cards are taken.
Club cards are worth their value in points, diamonds their value + 10, hearts +20, and spades +30. Any chain of cards is worth the lowest card in the chain. A chain is a series of cards that descends in value as a straight flush, or as a kind, or as combinations of both. E.g. 9H-8H-8D-8C-7C-6C is a valid chain. You may assign your cards as you like at the end of the game, but any card can only be assigned to a single chain, and chains cannot branch.
Tokens you have remaining are subtracted from your score, as usual. Lowest total wins the game.
Yehuda
Showing posts with label geschenkt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geschenkt. Show all posts
Friday, February 13, 2009
Monday, August 21, 2006
No Thanks: A study in Mechanics
Classifying mechanics has a lot to do with the way the mechanic is described. In other words, classifying mechanics is subject to a thematic bias.The rules of No Thanks are blindingly simple. The game is for 3 to 5 players. The game consists of a deck of 33 cards numbers 3 to 35, and a sufficient number of tokens. Each player begins with 11 tokens.
The cards are shuffled and 9 cards are removed the deck. On a player's turn, if no card is currently flipped up, flip up a card. The player then either takes the card and all tokens on the card, or places one of his tokens on the card. If he takes the card, he goes again. If he places a token on the card, play passes to the next player.
At the end of the game, your score is the face value of your cards minus the number of tokens that you have. However, if you have any cards in sequence (e.g. 9-10, or 20-21-22-23) you count only the lowest valued card of each sequence (e.g. 9 or 20). Lowest score wins.
What mechanics does No Thanks use?
This is a matter for interpretation.
Action Points: Each player is given 11 action points to start with. During your turn, you can use one of your action points to avoid taking the current card. Or, you can take the card and gain additional action points from the tokens on the card.
Area Control: The game consists of 33 areas, 24 of which come into play each game. Each area you control is negative points. However, if you control contiguous areas, only the least negative area counts against your score.
Auction: Each time a card is up for sale, you raise the ante of how much you are willing to pay not to take the card. The first person to decline to up their bid takes the card, as well as all other players' bids. All other players lose their bids.
Betting: You pay money into the pot every time you don't want to take the current offering. If a low card comes up, or a card that fits into your sequence comes up, you can win the card and the pool.
Card Drafting: You are trying to form the best hand at the least cost. The best hand is an arrangement of sequences, where the lowest card of each sequence is less than anyone else's, combined with your remaining tokens.
Commodity Speculation: You are trying to buy cards of approximately equal values. A single card is worth its value. Sets of cards are worth only the lowest value among them. Buying these commodities comes with cash incentives. Each game has up to ten commodities, depending on which cards were removed before starting.
Delivery: Each player pays money to not deliver a load. If you don't pay the fee, you must deliver the load for however much payoff is allocated for that load.
Hand Management: You are trying to manage cards as you collect them, hoping to buy necessary cards with limited resources.
Pattern Building: You are trying to complete card patterns, the least number of, and the least valued, patterns.
Route Building: You are trying to create a travel itinerary on a budget. The cheapest itinerary, with the least number of jumps, while saving the most amount of money.
Set Collection: Collect sets of sequences cards at the least cost.
Stock Holding: Buy losing stocks. The least losing portfolios at the end wins.
Trading: Each player contribute tokens that they are willing to trade to whomever agrees to take the card. In return, they agree to take other cards in the future, once they agree to its price.
Unit Deployment: Battle opportunities arise, and you can fend them off or fight them, gaining all spent resources in the process.
Variable Phase Order: Each player gets a turn, but can take additional turns if they agree to take the face up card immediately after it is revealed.
Variable Player Powers: There isn't, but there should be.
Voting: Each player casts votes on issues with political penalties. A player can accept the issue, and gain all political influence spent by other players as a result.
No Thanks uses all of these mechanics? No. But there is a lot of overlap between what we think of as mechanics and the thematic description behind them. If I had to pick the most intuitive mechanics to assign to the game, I would probably choose auctions and set-collection. But it really depends on the theme.
Yehuda
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Weekend Gaming
My father is weak, which was expected, but he is also losing weight, which is bad. Unless something changes, back to the emergency room on Sunday.
Gaming over the weekend with David, Sharon, and kids went well. Their house is the local teen hangout. Most of the teens who hang out also know me and know I'm the game man. So a few of them joined in the games.
Before I forget, David and Sharon had dinner guests on Friday night who don't know any of the new games. They were describing the problems they had while playing Monopoly. Apparently, the husband always plays viciously. He believes that alliances, promises, and deals which are not part of the game rules can be broken at will. For instance, the "we won't attack each other for three turns" rule in Risk is something that he will make with another player and then break at his own convenience, not waiting three rounds. His defense of this horrific breach of etiquette is a) his opponents should figure it out, and if not, they will learn fast, and b) people shouldn't take games too seriously.
I argued that he should at least tell people before the game begins that this is the way that he plays, to no avail. My arguments that his style of play is a effectively a set of rules, and that others may want to play by different rules, didn't help. As far as he is concerned, if they don't like the way he plays, they shouldn't play! And stop taking games too seriously! I suggested to them to try Settlers of Catan, which they might.
After dinner, I started out with a game of Dvonn with one of the teenage guests, while we waited for the rest of the players to coalesce (they were walking the dog). Ari has been to my game group once before; he is a sharp kid, but not too happy with being in the army. I am happy to give him some opportunity to get his mind off of it.
Unfortunately, although he picked up the rules, I happened to win with a wipeout. I reminded him that my understanding of the game's tactics is still so infantile that this is more likely the result of chance than any skill on my part.
The party returned and I brought out my game prototype #1. It was a hit - we played four-player four times in a row. The next day, Galit (their daughter) played with Tal (my daughter) two-player two times, and then we played two more four-player games. Eight plays in one weekend.
The family/friends all thought that one small part of my game was not to their liking, so we tried changing it a bit. I have to say that I still like the current design best. They also managed to play the auction in the game in a way I had not at all expected nor experienced in my previous plays. It still played great; it was amusing to see this after I had already played the game about fifty times.
I also introduced to them For Sale, one of the games which Chris Brooks brought me. They enjoyed it, and we played four times. I never won once, nor came close. I'm still not sure why. After that I taught them how to play Geschenkt using the For Sale houses as cards (1-30), six players, and eight tokens each. We played four games of this, too. Geschenkt has a great little mechanic that can be played with almost any set of cards and tokens, anywhere. It is very adaptable.
I was actually played out with all of these short games. I said my goodbyes, and went back to my parents to rest.
Yehuda
Gaming over the weekend with David, Sharon, and kids went well. Their house is the local teen hangout. Most of the teens who hang out also know me and know I'm the game man. So a few of them joined in the games.
Before I forget, David and Sharon had dinner guests on Friday night who don't know any of the new games. They were describing the problems they had while playing Monopoly. Apparently, the husband always plays viciously. He believes that alliances, promises, and deals which are not part of the game rules can be broken at will. For instance, the "we won't attack each other for three turns" rule in Risk is something that he will make with another player and then break at his own convenience, not waiting three rounds. His defense of this horrific breach of etiquette is a) his opponents should figure it out, and if not, they will learn fast, and b) people shouldn't take games too seriously.
I argued that he should at least tell people before the game begins that this is the way that he plays, to no avail. My arguments that his style of play is a effectively a set of rules, and that others may want to play by different rules, didn't help. As far as he is concerned, if they don't like the way he plays, they shouldn't play! And stop taking games too seriously! I suggested to them to try Settlers of Catan, which they might.
After dinner, I started out with a game of Dvonn with one of the teenage guests, while we waited for the rest of the players to coalesce (they were walking the dog). Ari has been to my game group once before; he is a sharp kid, but not too happy with being in the army. I am happy to give him some opportunity to get his mind off of it.
Unfortunately, although he picked up the rules, I happened to win with a wipeout. I reminded him that my understanding of the game's tactics is still so infantile that this is more likely the result of chance than any skill on my part.
The party returned and I brought out my game prototype #1. It was a hit - we played four-player four times in a row. The next day, Galit (their daughter) played with Tal (my daughter) two-player two times, and then we played two more four-player games. Eight plays in one weekend.
The family/friends all thought that one small part of my game was not to their liking, so we tried changing it a bit. I have to say that I still like the current design best. They also managed to play the auction in the game in a way I had not at all expected nor experienced in my previous plays. It still played great; it was amusing to see this after I had already played the game about fifty times.
I also introduced to them For Sale, one of the games which Chris Brooks brought me. They enjoyed it, and we played four times. I never won once, nor came close. I'm still not sure why. After that I taught them how to play Geschenkt using the For Sale houses as cards (1-30), six players, and eight tokens each. We played four games of this, too. Geschenkt has a great little mechanic that can be played with almost any set of cards and tokens, anywhere. It is very adaptable.
I was actually played out with all of these short games. I said my goodbyes, and went back to my parents to rest.
Yehuda
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Rules mistakes, games played.
OK, it turns out that I'm not the best rules reader. Someone else should really check me.
Traumfabrik: Reading more carefully, it seems that the extra indivisible amount of contracts ends up in the middle of the board, and not on each particular space. These extra contracts are added to and divided along with the next bid.
Geschenkt: The original rule was that the player who wins the bid starts bidding on the next card. We all seemed to think that this is a terrible idea, because if you take a card with no tokens, and you have no tokens, you must take all of the remaining cards in the game. Well someone on BGG pointed out the should-have-been-obvious to me: This is impossible. The first player to play has 11 tokens. Every time you take a card, if you weren't the one that flipped it, it must have at least one token on it. Ergo, you will always have at least one token to play.
Last Wed's session report on my website, as usual.
Thursday I played my usual 2 player PR with expansion buildings with my wife, Rachel. Some buildings are just included standard, now: Large Business (privilege of Captain and Builder) instead of Harbor; Small Wharf, or something equivalent, instead of Large Warehouse; Small Fashion District (sell indigo at +2), or equiv, instead of Construction Hut; also replacements for University and Office, whatever comes up. Very typical buildings include Large General Production Building (8/3, produce two of anything with corresponding plantations), Exchange House (swap barrels with Trading House at the ed of the Trader phase (a good answer to LGPB, but somewhat powerful in 2 player)), Surveyor's House (2/1 choose any plantation from supply, instead of turned up one), plus a few variant large buildings (vps for building types, or plantation types, of empty spaces or circles, etc...)
Shabbat I played.
- Traumfabrik twice, this time with the correct rules. The first time intruducing my daughter aged 11 and her friend and my mom to the game. They enjoyed it. The second time introducing my friend and several other guys in their teens. They also liked it.
- Anagrams, twice. Tough games, playing with my friend, who won the National Scrabble tournament, once. I lost the first game, closely, but won the second game even more closely (something like 49 to 47 tiles). While he has a ridiculously larger vocabulary for dumb words (like eau, aquae, and zoea), I am a hair quicker on the draw, better prepare myself for particular letters I am on the lookout for, and not bad at anagramming, myself.
- Dvonn. First time play, I was wondering if it would suffer from the same problem that I have with the games I tend to design, namely that there are so many choices that it seems random. Fortunately, while it did seem a little random, that was more because I had no idea what I was doing, rather than that I had too many choices. Nevertheless, any game where all pieces are essentially shared, is very hard to wrap your brain around. For the rules, see BGG.
We place our pieces, and I thought I was doing better since I had more pieces on the outside and therefore more liberty and choices. It didn't help, as gradually all of my pieces were either recaptured or simply removed from the board. I had a wipeout at the end, with no pieces left. Ugh.
- Torres. My friend tried it, and surprisingly to me, didn't really like it.
Yehuda
Traumfabrik: Reading more carefully, it seems that the extra indivisible amount of contracts ends up in the middle of the board, and not on each particular space. These extra contracts are added to and divided along with the next bid.
Geschenkt: The original rule was that the player who wins the bid starts bidding on the next card. We all seemed to think that this is a terrible idea, because if you take a card with no tokens, and you have no tokens, you must take all of the remaining cards in the game. Well someone on BGG pointed out the should-have-been-obvious to me: This is impossible. The first player to play has 11 tokens. Every time you take a card, if you weren't the one that flipped it, it must have at least one token on it. Ergo, you will always have at least one token to play.
Last Wed's session report on my website, as usual.
Thursday I played my usual 2 player PR with expansion buildings with my wife, Rachel. Some buildings are just included standard, now: Large Business (privilege of Captain and Builder) instead of Harbor; Small Wharf, or something equivalent, instead of Large Warehouse; Small Fashion District (sell indigo at +2), or equiv, instead of Construction Hut; also replacements for University and Office, whatever comes up. Very typical buildings include Large General Production Building (8/3, produce two of anything with corresponding plantations), Exchange House (swap barrels with Trading House at the ed of the Trader phase (a good answer to LGPB, but somewhat powerful in 2 player)), Surveyor's House (2/1 choose any plantation from supply, instead of turned up one), plus a few variant large buildings (vps for building types, or plantation types, of empty spaces or circles, etc...)
Shabbat I played.
- Traumfabrik twice, this time with the correct rules. The first time intruducing my daughter aged 11 and her friend and my mom to the game. They enjoyed it. The second time introducing my friend and several other guys in their teens. They also liked it.
- Anagrams, twice. Tough games, playing with my friend, who won the National Scrabble tournament, once. I lost the first game, closely, but won the second game even more closely (something like 49 to 47 tiles). While he has a ridiculously larger vocabulary for dumb words (like eau, aquae, and zoea), I am a hair quicker on the draw, better prepare myself for particular letters I am on the lookout for, and not bad at anagramming, myself.
- Dvonn. First time play, I was wondering if it would suffer from the same problem that I have with the games I tend to design, namely that there are so many choices that it seems random. Fortunately, while it did seem a little random, that was more because I had no idea what I was doing, rather than that I had too many choices. Nevertheless, any game where all pieces are essentially shared, is very hard to wrap your brain around. For the rules, see BGG.
We place our pieces, and I thought I was doing better since I had more pieces on the outside and therefore more liberty and choices. It didn't help, as gradually all of my pieces were either recaptured or simply removed from the board. I had a wipeout at the end, with no pieces left. Ugh.
- Torres. My friend tried it, and surprisingly to me, didn't really like it.
Yehuda
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Another Fine Mess
About a year ago, I started a hot discussion with, what I thought would be taken as, a slight personal question. I had not yet bought Amun Re, and I was considering doing so. However, for various reasons which I won't repeat here, I asked if there was a way of blacking out all references to sacrifices in the game, as I thought some members of my game group would feel uncomfortable with that theme during play. I would instead come up with some other reason to explain the mechanic. (I did - we now all pay money to the corrupt government official in charge of irrigation.)
For the entire thread, look here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com, look for Amun Re.
Well, I posted last week's blog entries on Spielfrieks (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spielfrieks) and started another storm. The object of this storm was my statement about Geschenkt: "I can't see why one would buy the game unless you have lots of disposable income." Geschenkt is a game played with 33 cards numbered 3 to 35 and 55 indistinguishable tokens.
The following points ensued:
- That I was implying that those who bought the game were saps for spending their money. (point taken, my bad. I should only have said, "I can't see myself buying the game ...")
- That people buy simple games for many reasons: They want the nice game bits. They want to support the designer, publisher, etc... That playing the game with your own bits after reading the rules could be a form of stealing. That publishers won't realease good games like Geschenkt if people don't buy them. That publishers will stop releasing rules free to the internet. That simple cheap games make nice gifts.
- Some said that they would make a mockup to play a game only: to test the game. if it was out of print. not yet available where they are. etc...
- Very few people outright supported me, I think largely because I didn't really make any particular statement, other than that I wouldn't buy a game with simple components that I could create, and I didn't have a lot of money.
- A few people did mention that many games are available for free on websites, such as BrettSpielWelt, publisher websites, etc... I'm sure there are plenty of people playing online who have no immediate intention of buying all these games.
Some questions are still unanswered:
- If you play the game 100 times with a mockup and then get bored with it, can you then decide not to buy the game? Is it ok to play with a mockup, or is this like a movie, where games are only expected to be enjoyed a certain number of times, anyway?
- Does your own income level factor into this? I wouldn't condone one rule of ethics or law for poor people versus well-off people, but if you know the rules of a game, and you have components to play it, are you forbidden from playing it if you don't actually own the game, because you can't afford to buy it?
- Should we really be encouraging game after game published with the same components just because the idea is good? How many five suited decks do we really need to buy, just because someone came up with a new idea of how to play with them?
- Are we obligated to support the game industry? Doesn't buying only games that we feel are worth it count? Does the game industry really need are support? Is supporting the game industry really going to get us better games, or would it be better to expect publishers to realize that the public will only buy games that include substantial components?
- Are game ideas patentable?
Questions go on and on. The notable aspect about both of these discussions, with a very minor exception or two during the Amun Re discussion, is that much of the discussion was high level and without rancor. I think that says a lot about the people in this community.
Yehuda
For the entire thread, look here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com, look for Amun Re.
Well, I posted last week's blog entries on Spielfrieks (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spielfrieks) and started another storm. The object of this storm was my statement about Geschenkt: "I can't see why one would buy the game unless you have lots of disposable income." Geschenkt is a game played with 33 cards numbered 3 to 35 and 55 indistinguishable tokens.
The following points ensued:
- That I was implying that those who bought the game were saps for spending their money. (point taken, my bad. I should only have said, "I can't see myself buying the game ...")
- That people buy simple games for many reasons: They want the nice game bits. They want to support the designer, publisher, etc... That playing the game with your own bits after reading the rules could be a form of stealing. That publishers won't realease good games like Geschenkt if people don't buy them. That publishers will stop releasing rules free to the internet. That simple cheap games make nice gifts.
- Some said that they would make a mockup to play a game only: to test the game. if it was out of print. not yet available where they are. etc...
- Very few people outright supported me, I think largely because I didn't really make any particular statement, other than that I wouldn't buy a game with simple components that I could create, and I didn't have a lot of money.
- A few people did mention that many games are available for free on websites, such as BrettSpielWelt, publisher websites, etc... I'm sure there are plenty of people playing online who have no immediate intention of buying all these games.
Some questions are still unanswered:
- If you play the game 100 times with a mockup and then get bored with it, can you then decide not to buy the game? Is it ok to play with a mockup, or is this like a movie, where games are only expected to be enjoyed a certain number of times, anyway?
- Does your own income level factor into this? I wouldn't condone one rule of ethics or law for poor people versus well-off people, but if you know the rules of a game, and you have components to play it, are you forbidden from playing it if you don't actually own the game, because you can't afford to buy it?
- Should we really be encouraging game after game published with the same components just because the idea is good? How many five suited decks do we really need to buy, just because someone came up with a new idea of how to play with them?
- Are we obligated to support the game industry? Doesn't buying only games that we feel are worth it count? Does the game industry really need are support? Is supporting the game industry really going to get us better games, or would it be better to expect publishers to realize that the public will only buy games that include substantial components?
- Are game ideas patentable?
Questions go on and on. The notable aspect about both of these discussions, with a very minor exception or two during the Amun Re discussion, is that much of the discussion was high level and without rancor. I think that says a lot about the people in this community.
Yehuda
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