Vinci by Descartes... rule discussion

As I mentioned over on the Geek, I've not played by this rule. I bet I would beat the players who do better than 70% of the time, though.

Vinci is a game that rewards establishing a solid civilization and then spending a number of turns accumulating the VPs it provides, and then establishing a new civilization and accumulating points from the remnants of the old one.

For those not familiar with the game, in general it takes around 2 - 5 units to take over a province on the board, most of the time. In order to expand your civilization, you pull of the "extra" counters in each province and use them to expand. If you managed to expand (or at least maintain) your civ for several turns, you'll gather a ton of points. To abandon the previous effort, though, is a huge waste of resources. To pick up all your counters and "teleport" to a different area means giving up all those victories you had before and not earning the VPs for them.

Personally I have no problem with the rule, as it's a losing strategy. Against even moderately experienced Vinci players, if you perform this maneuver even once you'll be lucky to win. If you do it more than once, you'll be lucky to score half the high score. It's only when everyone's doing it (or when the people who aren't doing it also aren't executing good strategies) that it can work.

And I agree, it's an awesome game. One of my favorites.

-- Matthew

I thought the question here was not whether it's legal (as that's a question better served by the Geek), but whether it was a good design idea. And, as it doesn't benefit the players, and it keeps the rules streamlined leaving it as legal, it seems fine in the design.

There's nothing in the rules that suggests you'd be able to teleport, even if you abandoned all provinces. Entering from off the board is covered under newly picked civilizations.

Interpretation number 2 seems reasonable, although rarely useful.

I like rule books that cover all the fiddly exceptions, so if Vinci were my game I would include a line like "you cannot abandon your last province" (perhaps in a questions section).

Yogurt

In that article, under clarifications, it says "using your current provinces as bases". My interpretation of current provinces would include those you had taken all your pieces off.

On a more general note, the game should encourage reasonable tactics, and discourage unreasonable tactics. Otherwise civilisations will not grow and shrink in ways similar to real civilisations, which is at least part of the point of the game. I would classify coming on anywhere on the board as unreasonable tactics (not backed up by real life), and thus not allow it.

Ugh, I really wish designers wouldn't do that. That's a new rule, not a clarification of anything existing in the game. I'm fine with designers adding new rules as patches, but they should be flagged as such, preferably with a little designer's note explaining why the change was needed.

Martin Wallace did something similar for Struggle of Empires with the 20 Unrest rule.

Anyway, I'll go with (b) which I'll diplomatically rephrase as "out of keeping with the theme."

Yogurt

In the published rules, if you have 20 unrest at the end of the game, you lose.

Wallace's change was that if you cross the 20 threshold at any point during the game, you lose immediately. This means you can't take Government Reform to get back below the 20 barrier before the game ends. (It also means you have carefully audit your unrest to avoid accidentally cheating.)

The ruling was apparently added to make it impossible to be a spoiler who pulls a million unrest and then gives all that money to another player. This is understandable, although I prefer simply to tell players not to be jerks.

The ruling would rarely come up, but it chafed on me a little that Wallace presented this rule (in the discussion I saw anyway) as though it were inherent in the rulebook, especially since it changes the strategy of the game a little.

I'd rather he just have said "Yes, I suppose a player could take advantage of that loophole. Well, in that case, I'd rule that..."

(That said, I don't have the page in front of me, so it's possible I just saw a quote from a longer discussion. Designers' comments do get cut and pasted all over the place.)

Yogurt

You lose if you have 20 unrest at the end of the game.
At any point in the game, if you have over 30 unrest you are eliminated.

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