2004-03-17 RussCon Report

Game Results

Durch die Wüste was a good close contest. I was pleasantly surprised to achieve second place; I didn't do well with sealing off areas, but I managed to have the largest white caravan (with only 4 camels!) and tie in another. MarkG walled off the most territory and was the leader in my mind, but at the last minute he lost control of the red caravan and actually earned no bonus points for any largest caravan.

Two more games of Domaine tonight! In the first one, I repeated my performance of last week's game: MarkG was clearly winning, and I realized my best hope was to secure second place, therefore I made it so, making a move to push past the 30-point mark and ending the game. In the second game, Mark was clearly in last place and, frustrated at JP's early lead and (perceived/alleged/whatever disclaimer) early malice toward Mark, cooperated in pushing me from second place to victory over JP. On JP's turn before Mark's, JP placed a couple fences which Mark could have used to make my castle have a tiny domaine and not end the game; JP said something about how he could only hope that Mark wouldn't do the "cheesy" thing and help me win, since as Mark had said earlier, the only rational course in a game is to keep someone from winning if they're about to. (Of course from my point of view, that is not necessarily the only rational course; if you are only delaying the inevitable while hurting your own rank then banging on the imminent leader is not necessarily rational, I'd argue.) Anyway, this launched a mercifully brief conversation about kingmaking, grudges, playing for rank versus win, and all that, which I give thanks to Zoltar's divine guidance only lasted a few sentences, instead of twenty or thirty minutes like often happens after a controversial game of Drakon... A less controversial topic that arose concerning Domaine is whether the game has a problem, in that both times one player got an early domaine formed which gave them income and pulled them ahead of the others. In the first game, this led Mark to easy victory. In the second game, it would have led JP to easy victory had not Mark decided he didn't mind me winning instead of JP. It seems possible to me that this effect was only due to our inexperience with the game, and that more experienced players might have a more balanced opening, but I'm not sure. In any case, I am willing to play the game more to find out since I still find it interesting, even if it does have a "rich get richer" problem. (Kind of like Outpost in that regard, but much shorter playing time!)

Bluff was fun with the large number of players, and a brilliant new decision making technique was pioneered by MarkY; I will call it stochastic modeling and simulation, since it deserves a hifalutin impressive name. If there are n dice unknown to you, then simply roll n dice and pretend that this is the actual distribution of the hidden dice, making your raise accordingly. This is an especially potent and entertaining technique when your simulation predicts all the hidden dice are the same, for instance.