…
Yeah, OK, that’s pretty obvious on further consideration.
This is like a unique special case for a rondel, or Puerto Rico role selection, or the action limits on Chicago Express (only 3 auctions/round and 5 builds/round). Definitely unique though… pairing it with the turn order track makes it pop in Mini Rails.
There aren’t many outside of dice. Impulse has the ship lying down/ship upright. COIN games use two-sided pieces to show whether insurgents are underground or activated. Lots of games change state by moving pieces to a different location, instead of changing how they sit on the table.
The Duke also has two-sided pieces with differing states. But it does seem to be an infrequently-used mechanic. Like, I rarely see multiple die settings used to represent different types of functions.
That might be an interesting way to implement that 4X game that Scott came up with in my Impulse wank thread. Might fuck around with that at some point.
Are there any games where win% is directly exposed to the player? I.e., instead of HP or victory points, your health is just a number between 0 and 1. If you ever hit 1, the game immediately ends and you win. Hit 0 and the game ends, you lose.
Instead of leveling up, your win% just goes up. Take some damage, win% goes down.
It would also make it trivial to create difficulty levels. Just pick a number to start at.
Could arm wrestling qualify?
Calculating a % chance to win at any given state of a game is difficult and subject to a variety of arbitrary assumptions and historical data.
The less directly comparable historical data you have, the less accurate such a number would be. The models aren’t really that precise in any meaningful way.
E.g., a simple model for an NHL hockey game:
https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir%3A108029/datastream/PDF/view
It would be difficult to make a game where that number is all of reasonably accurate, relevant to the current players, and calculated quickly.
The 0 and the 100 are objective and calculable. The rest is pretty fuzzy.
There is one way I can immediately think of to design a game where you always know the percentage chance of winning at any given moment.
First, get one of those rolls of raffle tickets. You know, this kind:
Tear off a number of them so that they can be evenly divided between the players available. Take the Ticket side and put them into a well-shaken opaque container. Distribute the Keep this Coupon sides evenly amongst all players.
Then play a game. The coupons the players were given are the only points/currency in the game. They may change hands, but none may ever enter or leave the game’s economy. It’s a zero-sum game.
When the game ends, randomly draw a ticket from the opaque box. Whichever player holds the matching ticket is the winner.
This means that at any given point in time you know any players exact chance of winning assuming the game were to end immediately. It’s equal to n / t where n is the number of tickets a player holds and t is the total number of tickets in the game.
The problem is to calculate the actual chance of winning you need to be able to predict when the game will actually end, and what will likely happen between now and then.
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I like your thinking, but no. It only holds true if both players exert full strength and have equal endurance. Someone could hold back their full strength and now the position of their arm does not accurately represent their chance of winning.
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And everyone knows it is but mere courtesy to withhold your true power until the last possible moment.
That reminds me of the absolute shitshow that is Killer Bunnies.
The winning raffle ticket is chosen at the start and then you play to get as many raffle tickets as you can. In the game I played at a convention someone else won the very first ticket and then I won every single other ticket in the game after that. There were maybe 4-6 players in this game. The card was revealed and the winning one was the very first ticket so the game was a foregone conclusion from the point that first ticket was taken.
The other players thought the game was amazing because it defied the expectation that I would win. I thought it was bullshit but of course I was just being a “sore loser”.
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On the one hand. Yes, that’s a bullshit game of random chance. The solution is, do not play such a silly random game.
On the other hand, sorry, but it sounds like you were being a bit of a sore loser. It’s a game of chance. You know it’s a game of chance. If you don’t have 100% of the raffle tickets, there’s a chance you lose, and you did. It was out of your control. It could happen, and it did happen. No reason to be mad about it. You knew what kind of game it was from the start.
It’s interesting how things that don’t technically matter to the mechanics of the game can effect how we think about them so much. I bet you things would feel very different if the “winning ticket” was chosen at the end of the game rather then the beginning. Mechanically, there isn’t really a difference, but the player experience is incredibly different.
Are there any games where you can go into negative HP (or victory points, or whatever) but you don’t die if you get out of the red before your turn ends?
Yes, I’ve definitely played some but I can’t be absolutely sure which ones without research.
The one that comes to mind first is D&D 3rd Edition which lets you have negative HP. -1 through -9 are considered “dying” and -10 or less is considered “dead”.
There are others I’ve seen where all effects happen simultaneously, and as long as you are above 0 after all that, you are OK. I remember a scenario in Slay the Spire where I attacked a spiky enemy that obviously damages you when you attack it directly. You want to use AoE on it. However, I attacked it with a vampiric ability that healed me. The damage would have put me below 0, but the healing brought me back up above 0. I don’t absolutely remember if I died or not, but I’m leaning towards not. I’ve seen very similar scenarios in many games, I just don’t remember which specific games those are. Other games give you a game over as soon as you hit 0, regardless.
Earthbound has a rolling counter so if you act fast enough you can counter a mortal blow with a healing spell.
Most things that could go one way or the other in StS round to “help the player”. I bet you lived.
I had an idea for how you might mitigate the first-turn advantage. Any games that use a cake-cutting mechanic?
E.g. with chess, player 1 makes a move with white, and player 2 has the option to accept white’s position, black’s position, or pass. If they pass, player 1 makes a move again. Maybe if player 2 doesn’t accept a position within N moves, they lose. Once they accept, the game begins normally from that position.
Your implementation feels weird, but I’m also not a big enough chess expert to make a qualitative comment.
I could absolutely see something like this implemented on deck building games. For example in Mash Up, player 1 creates the deck combinations, then players 2 through X select which decks they want to play with. Player 1 is incentivized to create as many viable decks as possible to ensure their final pick is good.
This mechanic does rely on all players having adequate skill or it could feel superbly unfun. As the “cake cutting” player, can I use excessive skill to create a cake slice that appears the best but is actually inferior? As the “cake selecting” player, a cake cutter with no skill is going to serve me up a superior starting position that may be mathematically impossible to overcome.
“Child 1 cuts the cake in half, child 2 picks which side of the cake they want.”
In a nutshell, that would be a good mechanic in a game.
With chess, it would be “White makes the first move of the game, then black decides if they want to turn the board 180 degrees and play on from white’s position, or remain black and just counter the move”.
However, I don’t think it is the very first move in chess that has the advantage, but probably the third move.
The first-move advantage in chess is about 52-56%, but that is distributed across many games in a series, where the players take equal number of games as white and black.
I think a game with a first-move advantage of above 60%, or where the game is just played once, would work better with the “children cutting a cake in half” mechanic.
Because Go ends with points, rather than the complete removal of all the opponent’s pieces, the first move advantage to reduced by giving extra points to the second moving player. Currently the agreed upon numbers are between 6.5 and 9.5 points.
(The half point is to eliminate draws)