Tonight on GeekNights, back from PAX Unplugged (which live streamed one of our panels), we review Marc Paquien's wonderful Treasure Island (2018), which we both played for the first time at PAX. In the news, Epic Games is taking a shot at Valve, Smash Brothers is coming, and Rastakhan's Rumble came!
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I feel like I’m living, eating and breathing Treasure Island at the moment. Perhaps I should be playing it too. (And not in the sense that I’m playing Squire Trelawney in the local pantomime.)
lol your monitor story. If people only saw the gchat convo we all had about it.
We recently played a 4p game of Treasure Island where Long John Silver won, but it came down to a 50/50. I had been a centimeter off on a previous search, and used my final action to dig in the wrong place (trusting the crowding behavior of the other pirates, assuming they had a district hint), rather than the sliver I had missed.
One minor (but impactful) rule I missed last weekend is that Long John doesn’t start with all 8 compass tiles in his hand - he only has 3+#pirates for the entire game (which makes 7 at the full player count).
I don’t believe number of players changes the chances of Long John winning. Long John progresses every time any player takes a turn. Two searchers instead of four just means each searcher gets twice as many actions before John breaks out of prison. With more actions, though, each searcher will have more private info.
They seem to have designed it so that Long John will be left with a sliver of space just as the last moment. That’s a pretty tight calibration that is a praiseworthy design. Still, I think you need to give the player who is up against a whole team of opponents a greater advantage. Pro searchers will rarely/never lose at hide and seek games. If I had my way, beating Long John/Dracula should be hard like beating Super Meat Boy. Possible, but extremely difficult, and you players lose most of the time.
I know I hate optional rules, but maybe you need one to make it harder when you know players are pro.
I’d like to play as Long John Silver now that I understand the game enough to make up for my terrible lying skills. I can poker face a lot better once I have some heuristics.
Being Long John silver is hard, but using a bluff token as a “maybe” gives you just enough wiggle room beyond using it as “no.”
Rym was only two hops from digging up his treasure because I chose to randomly roll which prison Long John starts in. It could have be a little bit worse, turn-wise, for him.