PAX 2014 Highs and Lows

Wow. Pax was mostly pretty wonderful, though I did have one ugly Enforcer incident, and one very failed demo, both of which I'll whine about below.

Dragonflight is more my speed (the crowds of tens of thousands at PAX were at times overwhelming) but I certainly had a great deal of fun.

High Points:

• Flying Frog Productions blew me away with their sheer power of their awesome friendliness. My wife and I really connected with Scott Hill and Mary Beth Magallanes, and we gabbed with them quite a bit. They gave us lots of free stuff, a great deal on something too big to just give away, and then they go their whole staff to sign everything, and then gave us more free stuff so they'd have an excuse to sign some more things. It felt like we were reconnecting with old friends, not having our first real conversation with total strangers. It's cool to learn that the designers of some of my favorite games (I love A Touch Of Evil, and the demo I played of Shadows Of Brimstone was great) are such friendly, excellent people.  If you have money burning holes in your pockets, might I suggest you spend it on a Flying Frog game?

• Games On Demand was great. For those unfamiliar, Games On Demand is like going to the library during the con, except you're not checking out a book you're checking out an RPG to play, and the GM to run it.  My wife and I were volunteers. I ran three tables of Psi*Run for total strangers, including two amazing incredible games, and one just merely solid and enjoyable. My wife ran three tables of Microscope, which were, to quote one of her players, "Fucking _Metal_ As Hell!"  Good times.

• So many awesome things to spend money on! Dice, T-Shirts, RPGs, board games, video games, you name it. Expect a series of posts about all the cool stuff we bought, at least until the check for our internet bounces. Then expect smoke signals.

Low Points:

• Overall there weren't enough chairs or tables, and the lines were too long. With 70,000 people out there, it's hard to find a place you can just catch your breath for a moment. Random chairs in the various nooks and crannies and back passages would be wonderful. I don't quite get why they stuff 50 bean bag chairs into two places, rather than spreading them out across 10 or 20 different spots across the various floors, which I think would be a huge improvement.

• Absolutely pathetic demo of the Netrunner card game from FFG. The guy from FFG forgot to tell me two really important rules that resulted in me actually losing during my first turn, and then couldn't shut up about how he'd never seen anyone lose that quickly or make such a big mistake.

• One of the Enforcers (a bearded guy in the Indie Megabooth area sometime between 2 and 3 on Friday afternoon) was a total asshole too me, screaming in my ear from well inside my personal bubble because the heel of my right foot was across a line of pink tape I hadn't even known existed. When I tried to apologize, he flailed his arms and yelled more like he thought I was starting shit. His aggression actually drove me out of the convention center for more than an hour till I could calm down and cheer up, and I stayed out of that part of that exhibit hall for the next two days in case it was his assigned area. If someone on my staff behaved the way he did, I'd fire them immediately. The Enforcers don't have badge numbers or name tags, so there was nothing I could do to report him. I suspect his blue uniform labeled "Enforcer" had gone to his head. Seems like that word is just asking for trouble. At the very least that term has some risk of attract raging jerks to the position, and I suspect it was provoking a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment mentality too. I would strongly encourage the PAX organizers to change the labeling of their staff, but they'd probably just tell me I should just be happy the shirts read "Enforcer" not "Dickwolf". 

A Touch Of Elders

I was thinking about the board game "A Touch Of Evil" the other day, and trying to figure out the math of the big showdown at the end of the game. In particular, I wanted to know how many dice should really be applied to any given Evil Elder, so I started looking at the math behind it all.

The conclusion I've drawn from this is that what the game presents as a strategic decision is actually more of a sucker's bet. It gives you the option of rolling very large numbers of dice against the Elders, but doing so is very likely to do exactly the opposite of what you expect it to. The whole point of targeting Elders is to reduce the damage you're taking, but if you put more than a die or two against them, you'll run a good chance of doing exactly the opposite.

Those pie charts show the results and percentages of rolling various numbers of dice against a single Evil Elder.

• The green section represents the odds of rolling a single success - exactly the amount you want to roll.
• The red section represents the chance of rolling two or more successes. You'd much rather roll 1 success than 2, since the extra successes are just wasted. That same die, if applied to the main Villain instead of his Evil Elder helpers, would have been 1 more step towards winning the game.
• The black section represents the chance of total failure - not killing the Elder.

So how many dice are the right number to roll? The answer is almost always 2, with only a few exceptions. If you're feeling cautious, dropping it down to 1 die is perfectly fine.

Silver Shot is one of the main exceptions. If you're using Silver Shot, you should only roll against the Villain, and never worry about the Evil Elders at all. Silver Shot doubles the damage of 6s rolled, making even a single die on an elder has nearly a 17% chance of wasting a hit, and you're as likely to waste a hit as make a normal one. Better to pour all your Silver Shot into the Big Bad, then to waste those juicy 6's blasting a single Elder into mincemeat.

Without Silver Shot, you can always afford to put one die against each Elder with no chance of it causing any side-effects or wasted resources. One die per Elder can only help your situation, or break even, it can never hurt you.

The winning strategy is to eliminate Elders quickly, but do so while minimizing the number of wasted extra hits. Every wasted success has the potential to make the fight last one extra round - and in that extra round the Villain will roll at least 5 dice, possibly 8 or more. On average, the Villain will do more damage in one round than any single Elder does in the whole battle. As helpful as it is to pick off Elders and reduce the damage you're taking, you should never lose sight of the fact that killing the Villain is the real goal. There's no better way to reduce the damage you're taking than to just win the game.

Wasting one or two hits total during the whole fight is probably not going to cost you an extra round of fighting, however, because you don't often win by rolling exactly the number of successes needed in the final round. This is especially true in the Cooperative game, where all the players get to roll in each round, and thus as a group average somewhat higher damage per round. If a group of heroes is averaging 4 or more damage per round (and they should be) then they can afford to waste one or two points without it usually dragging the fight out into extra rounds... most of the time.

Wasting three or more hits over the course of the battle, however, runs a big risk of extending the fight by a whole extra round. So, if you were facing just 1 Evil Elder then it might be worth rolling three dice (as a single roll of 3 dice can only ever waste 2 hits). But if there's 2 or more Evil Elders, it's very risky to apply more than two dice against each of them. Resist the temptation to pile dice up on an Elder "to make sure" you take them out. You can never completely eliminate the possibility of failing against an Elder in a given roll. Both 2-die and 3-die rolls have the exact same odds (44.44%) of scoring precisely 1 hit, the only boost that's gained by rolling the 3rd die all comes in the form of wasted successes, which you don't really want. With four dice, you're actually more likely to score 2 or more successes than to score only 1. Personally, I would never roll 4 or more dice against an Elder, as the risk-to-benefit ratio is too high. Those dice are just better if applied to the Villain.

Advanced A Touch Of Evil

I played several more games of A Touch Of Evil over the recent holiday. We broke out the advanced rules and added them in.

With all those Advanced Abilities on the villain, I thought for sure it was going to boost up the difficulty a lot. To my surprise, we're still winning the cooperative game just as often as we had been when using the basic rules instead of advanced. The villain's Advanced Abilities are basically watered down by the additional Secrets cards, that make treachery less likely.

In fact, we've only lost the game twice total, once to the scarecrow on Basic, and once to the Dellion Dryad (a "web extra" downloadable villain) on Advanced. That's out of more than a dozen plays. We've had a few close scrapes, but as long as you get to the showdown, it seems the PCs are almost certain to win out in a cooperative game. The villains just aren't as powerful as you imagine them to be. We've decided, starting with our next play, to start using the Optional Showdown Chart to spice it up and add to the difficulty. I'm really glad they provided that chart, because as you get better at the game, it needs a little boost to the tension.

Now that we've transitioned to the Advanced rules, I'm really glad we're playing the cooperative version. If not, I think my opinion of the game may have suffered when we hit Advanced.

In particular, the new Secrets cards have an annoying amount of "gray area". I'm specifically talking about "Hero of the People" and "On The Hunt". In our most recent game, the Lair was in the Fields. Those two secrets cards had assigned one town elder to the PC who was about to encounter the Lair, and another town elder to the Fields space. Both those cards allow the PC to use the town elder's stats in interesting ways. Problem is, neither the cards, nor the rules, nor the FAQ at the manufacturer's website, explain if those interesting abilities apply during a Showdown or not. They also don't indicate whether the elder being with you or at the site of the Lair includes them in the Showdown / Hunting Party, and whether or not you can still bring along other elders in the Hunting Party.

Since it was a cooperative game, this was no big deal, we made a ruling based on objective play balance and variety of play experience. But if we'd been playing competitively, this would have been ugly. In this specific situation, how you interpret it would mean the difference between the PC having +2 dice or +9 dice on the fight, whether the villain split his dice between 3 targets or 5, and whether or not we had to take our chances on revealing the secrets of 2 more town elders. That compiled list of differences is pretty huge, and I could see where that would result in an otherwise enjoyable game ending in a rules argument. Glad we dodged that bullet.

Similarly, we also had a situation in another recent game where a card had resulted in a town elder having 2 secrets. When they were revealed later, that one elder had both "Hero of the People" and "On the Hunt". There were no clear rules in the game to dictate which card takes precedence, and whether the elder ends up in a space or attached to a player. Hopefully, Flying Frog will issue some errata or clarifications about those two cards.

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf, only a lot less fiddly and complicated than that implies. That's how to best describe "A Touch Of Evil", a relatively new boardgame from Flying Frog Productions. The plot is very reminiscent of Brother of the Wolf, complete with muskets, tri-corner hats, an evil monster, and conspiratorial noblemen. The main game comes with four big villains - vampire, werewolf, headless horseman, and evil scarecrow - each with it's own minions and events to shape the play experience of that particular session.

It's got all the flavor of a game like Arkham Horror, without the maze of rules to wade through. The turns play out faster, and there are fewer counter-intuitive rules ripples to have to sort out. It's got the same "build up your character so you can defeat the big bad" dynamic of Runebound or Talisman or Arkham, but without the 3+ hour play time that those games demand. It's got scenario variety, unlike Arkham Horror where every big bad uses the same chaotic pool of events. A Touch of Evil doesn't feature as much as scenario variety as Betrayal At House On The Hill, but then it doesn't suffer from Betrayal's completely random balance issues either.

Overall, A Touch Of Evil is a triumph of storytelling in a boardgame. Despite having lighter rules than the aforementioned games, it's got more flavor, and tells a better story. As much as I love Arkham, it's such a chaotic mess of monsters and gates that there's rarely a coherent story out of it, and Allies are mechanically indistinguishable from Guns or Skills. Not so in A Touch of Evil, where the "NPCs" have secrets, different from session to session, which you must ferret out lest they stab you in the back. Will the Reverend be a stalwart ally, a craven coward, a book-burning demagogue, or a traitorous pawn of evil? That varies from game to game, and has a lot more impact than just being "+2 vs Vampires".

The game has Competitive, Cooperative, and Team options, depending on the play style you and your group prefers. Team up to defeat the monster, or seek to impede the others and get all the glory for yourself.

Have I mentioned that I really like the game? 'Cause I do. The gameplay is sweet.

It is not, however, completely without flaws. So far I've found three, none of which is major. Here's the problem areas, and how we dealt with them in the two games we've played so far:

1. Tide of Darkness: This Mystery Card can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either you place one monster in 1 space, and some investigation points in three spaces; or they might mean you place both a monster and investigation points in each of three spaces. We were playing the cooperative game, and wanted the bigger challenge, so we placed three monsters. It worked well, but that interpretation seems like it would be a very swingy card in competitive play, shutting off half the board to the player(s) who were already behind in the arms race.
   
2. Muskets: There's no rule stopping you from using 2 muskets at once. Setting this up is relatively difficult (much easier in cooperative than competitive play), but seems cheesy. It'd be easy to house-rule this for the sake of reality, but the absence of fiddly corner-case rules about item stacking is part of what makes A Touch Of Evil so much more elegant than Arkham and it's ilk. Since the musket bonus isn't huge, we chose to just hand-wave it and assume the die bonus didn't represent actually shooting, so much as the fact that you were equipped and ready to take a second shot if the opportunity presented itself. The first musket's bonus is the potential damage of a gun shot. The second musket's bonus represents the reduced psychological pressure of knowing you aren't screwed if your first shot misses.
3. Lair Cards: You can only have one Lair Card, which makes sense, since it represents tracking the Villain to their den of evil. But there's this unfortunate sentence in the rule book that heavily implies you can buy another lair card and discard whichever is worse. Late in the game, the Lair Cards are cheap. In our second game, Sarah discarded about 6 Lair Cards in one turn. Nothing in the rules stopped it, but it felt lame. If swapping Lairs is that simple, you'd never use the more harrowing lairs, at least not in Cooperative play, because someone will always have the spare Investigation points to keep discarding till you get an easy Lair. So we house-ruled this for all future sessions: you can't buy a second lair card, but can still get a second one via the particular Event that gives you a free Lair, which shouldn't come up too often.

If you like flavorful, story-driven boardgames like Arkham Horror, Runebound, or Betrayal at House on the Hill, you should check out A Touch Of Evil. I don't know just yet if it has as much replayability as those games ('cause I've only played it twice), but it's faster and more approachable, which is a huge plus. It strikes me as being the best of the bunch thus far.