if you're a game designer, when do you put in a rock, paper, scissors? Pretty much every game.
It makes games feel very tactical. You feel very accomplished when you build up a bunch of anti-aircraft and you take out those bombers that are coming in. You feel really good when that happens. Even like World of Warcraft, right? It's like, okay, he's playing that class. I know what abilities he has. I'm playing this class. So, I know what abilities I have that are better, that counter his abilities. And people friggin love that shit. It's the greatest. So, let's move on. Surprise events. Not used often enough, nearly. This us Starfarers of Catan. And in this game, there are certain things that can happen, where you draw a card and the card will be like... So, another player will hold the card and be like...https://www.casinoslots.co.nz/bonus-bets Okay Rym, we're going to do this one. - Ready? - All right, we'll do it. A space pirate attacks you. Do you flee, yes or no? No! You must fight. The second player to your right takes on the role of the pirate. You must each roll your mother ship and add your canons. - Is the other player stronger? - No! Victory! Place a trade ship on one of your open spaces. If you've played FTL, the same thing happens. You hit random events, but they're 100% random. There's a set of events. It's like, "Oh, it's the space pirate event." But there's like 5 different flavors of the space pirate event, and you pick at something. Maybe you get extra options, maybe there's a skill, you have to fight the dude. But it's basically that, and it's used primarily in space games like this. - I don't know why. - Paranoia... Not Paranoia. Pandemic. You're flipping the cards over. - True. - You get the surprise events. Like, "Oh shit, viruses everywhere." Well, in the next panel I'll talk about that. A lot of cooperative games and why they need that mechanic in there. So, if you're playing a game with surprise events, memorize all of them. We've played this game with some people who had played it 100 times, and it's like, "A space pirate attack." It's like, "Yes." They just know everything that's going to happen on every one of these cards. There's only a deck of them, right? Memorizing them is good, but a lot of them have random possibilities. Like in FTL. So, it's like, you have to know that when you find a crazy old man abandoned on a planet, if there's a 60% chance that he'll go crazy and kill your crew You have to know that and it sort of becomes now gambling. When you know the odds. If you're a game designer, when do you put in the surprise events? You put in the surprise events to a game that pretty much... It's easy to insert into almost anything. It's just to spice it up. Any game where things are sort of just going flat, where everyone does the same thing every game. It's like, you know, Okay, on turn one, you always do this, and turn two, you always do that You need some sort of surprise. Even in Puerto Rico there's a surprise. It's what settlements are going to show up, it's not an event necessarily, but it's still this surprise into something that doesn't have other kinds of randomness. And the surprise affects all the players equally. It's not like, some random thing where you got screwed because you were rolling dice to shoot and you lost, and the other guy rolled dice, and he got all hits. It's, some random thing happens to sort of stir it up, so every game is not the same. In Agricola, everyone starts with a fistful of cards. That's the surprise event. What 7 cards do you start with? Now, surprise events, as a game designer, serve a few purposes. One: injecting randomness basically makes a pseudo catch-up mechanism. Randomness is the bane of players who are already ahead. So, players who are further behind, like I said before, want randomness just coming all the time. So, if you have random events periodically that serves to sort of keep the boundary of the first place player and the last place player close enough, to where the game still feels exciting. So, it basically provides a catch-up mechanism. It also vastly increases the replay value. Because you're not going to have the same random events every time you play. ??? crazy wormhole the other game. But at the same time, it decreases the replay ability in that this game, this Starfarers of Catan is super fun if you play it once every few months. If you play it every day, you're going to get really tired of those events. You'll have them all memorized. All the sort of fun of the flavor text and the sort of non-game elements of it are lost.
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