[GDS] July 2011 "Europoly" - Comments and Questions

I am no frequent Monopoly player, but did you not miss out the hotels and houses from your component list?

This list I found when searching for Monopoly rules on google:
The equipment consists of a board, 2 dice, tokens, 32 houses and 12 Hotels. There are 16 Chance and 16 Community Chest cards, 28 Title Deed card (one for each property), and play money.

And a question to the people who have played Monopoly: what really is the feel or Monopoly we should keep?

I was wondering if someone could explain these "Eurogame mechanisms":

-Role Selection
-Worker Placement
-Area Majority
-Dice Drafting
-Deck Building

Thanks.

If I'm understanding the mechanics correctly, doesn't Monopoly already have Worker Placement and Area Majority mechanics? The workers are houses and hotels instead of meeples, but it seems the concept is the same. Collecting all or most of the properties of a given color seems like Area Majority. For example, owning three out of the four railroads gives you an advantage over the player who owns the fourth.

There ARE a limited number of houses and hotels. Though its a global limit as opposed to an individual limit.

Taltosvt,

I'd say that the "Area Majority" aspects of Monopoly are better described as Set Collection. The swing between owning individual properties (low rent) and owning ALL the properties of a given color (double rent, plus the ability to place houses and hotels) is where the meat of the game lies. Owning two properties when someone else owns one (majority!) isn't significantly better than owning one property each, except that your overall property is twice as likely to be landed on in a given round.

Something I (foolishly) left out in my description of Worker Placement and Area Majority is that generally these are fluid, and that the key to a game that uses them is figuring out when to heavily invest in X at the expense of Y. In Monopoly the properties, once purchased, generally don't move around too much except in extreme circumstances (ie to avoid bankruptcy). Not to give you too much in the way of ideas, but if you incorporated WP and AM into Monopoly on a property level, you might have players trying to wrest control of properties from one another by placing meeples or something. That's really the key difference.

As to the other poster who talked about randomness, saying Euros don't have it, that is false. Most Euro games have plenty of randomness. The difference is that in Euro games the randomness is limited, and controlled. For instance, Settlers of Catan (the quintessential gateway Euro Game) has a 2-die roll every turn which determines resource output. So you know, when you place a settlement, the odds of a given number coming up (6s and 8s are much more common than, say, 11s), and therefore the odds that the settlement will give you a resource. Over the course of the game, or many games, the output will approach predictability (a bell curve). But on a given round the dice are of course random. The number of development cards is small and there are only five types, of which one (the knight) is much more common than the others. So while you purchase them blindly (random!) you have a pretty good sense of what you're likely to get, and what the other players are likely to have in their pile of dev cards.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, Settlers is at its heart a trading game. Trading is, of course, not random. Each turn there is a random element (the die roll) but the player has many choices about what to do, and can even, with skillful knight-use, alter that landscape to his advantage before the roll even takes place.

In Monopoly, and other games who are, at their heart, roll-and-move games, the randomness is what I would call "unmanaged." A player's path around the board is more or less completely unpredictable, because each die roll starts from the location of the previous roll. So there is no clear advantage to owning X property instead of Y property, in terms of their likelihood of being landed upon. The chance and community chest cards are shuffled and drawn one-by-one, with wildly swinging results from each, and in any case there is no choosing -- if you land on the location, and only if you land there, you take the appropriate card, which takes effect more or less immediately (unless it's a get-out-of-jail-free card, which you hold until the one circumstance under which it is useful).

My own confusion comes from the term "may" in the context of this sentence. Contextually, you would expect the term "must". But you use the term may. As a result, it sounds like all these criteria are optional and I can use components from El Grande, Axis & Allies and Magic the Gathering if I want to.

Personally, I think that a requirement restriction that you must use the same set of components as monopoly, (property cards, six sided dice, house tokens, player tokens, community chest cards, money, a board, etc.) but you can alter the text on them, their frequency and/or their function is a clear set of requirements. That way, you are only talking about modifying the items in monopoly, not including other components from other games.

But even then, taken to extreme, it is still not very restrictive. Ie. If you add twenty more dice, each with different text on their face, print up five different boards and separate the community chest into 15 different draft piles, are you talking about monopoly bits anymore?

How strict is the 800 word limit :-/

I will never give votes to any entry which doesn't follow the rules (<=800 words, <=3 images of no more than 400 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall). And yes, I've copied and pasted and counted. No matter how good a game it is. I put a lot of effort meeting the limitations myself, and I usually have to cut a lot of stuff (including fun backstory and jokes) to get under the 800-word limit. Why should I vote for somebody who hasn't?

The particular theme or mechanics restrictions each month are usually less definitively clear, but I also don't vote for entries that I don't think have followed them.

I would hope others uphold the rules too, but it doesn't always happen.

About eight design challenges into things, I have discovered that there are three things that I want out of an entry:

Clarity
Brevity
Originality

But, you can only ever get two.

I have been punished by others for lack of brevity and for lack of clarity, but I refuse to compromise on originality. So... what would you have?

I'm not sure clarity, brevity, and originality are all there is to it, but here's my answer to that:

1) Brevity is in the rules. 800 words. Clear as day.

People complain about that all the time, and I chafe at that limit every contest. My entries would always be better, clearer, funnier, with more words. But it's the rules. Can't break it. I wish entries with more than 800 words were summarily rejected, or at least flagged, but that's putting too much on the already-volunteer organizers. As it is, I won't vote for >800 word entries, because they're cheating.

2) Originality often wins these contests.

And it shouldn't necessarily do so. Because the games aren't actually able to be played by the judges, and because you often can't even see all the pieces or parts (hypothetical decks of cards are the worst for this), I think the true measure of a game is often impossible to gauge. As readers, we can spot an original concept pretty easily, but we have a harder time figuring out if the game would be fun to play, or a bore, or fatally flawed, so we often go with what seems most original.

3) Clarity is tricky.

What's there should be completely clear, but you can't write a clear set of rules for most games in 800 words, nor would you every try in a situation other than this contest. The key is in figuring out what you can gloss over or leave out and still get the sense of your game across, and answer potential questions. I've voted for ideas that weren't completely defined if they seemed neat, but I've also neglected ideas that sounded cool if the rules don't give me enough info to see how the game works or leave major rules or components questions unanswered.

So, for me at least, your three-part conundrum is easily reduced to two parts. Brevity is forced, so you only have clarity and originality left to worry about. Furthermore, these remaining two parts are not in opposition to each other (although both run counter to brevity), so there's no more conundrum.

I said I wouldn't vote for games over the 800 word limit, not that I would never vote for games with cards, or games that aren't completely defined in the entry. I think it's nearly always impossible to define a game completely and fit within the restrictions, so you're always faced with a dilemma - violate the restrictions or sacrifice clarity/completeness. In my view, deciding to relax the restrictions for yourself while everybody else tries to obey them is cheating, and I don't vote for cheaters.

I've often voted for games where the idea sounded cool, the design original, and the parts workable, even if a lot of it is still hypothetical or undefined. That said, I'm less inclined to vote for games that invoke a deck of 150 unique cards and only give me 3-4 examples, or invoke a board that they don't show me or describe, because in that case, a huge part of the design is in the missing components and not in evidence.

I totally agree that the restrictions limit the kinds of games you can reasonably submit. To that, I'd say what I said above, which is if you don't like the restrictions, propose new ones.