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GeekNights Tuesday - Homesteaders and Tammany Hall
Tonight on GeekNights, we review two board games after some first playthroughs: Homesteaders and Tammany Hall. They're both pretty good. Check out some memories of Doom and the 3DS gets an update that almost no one will care about.
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Seeing how he valued the different resources while designing the game helps explain why turn 2 steel mill has worked so well for me in the past (turn 7 silver worth of resources into 36 silver worth of resources over the course of the game with no prerequisites, don't mind if I do!), and the paragraph about flexibility is why I got fucked by not generating any trade chits or purchasing a River Port in our game ;]
In his current life, the designer (Alex Rockwell, aka Alexfrog) writes Netrunner strategy articles for Stimhack, which is how I found his game in the first place.
The hard part is to get most of the games that they should play to work on modern machines since most people who need to be in the club are not technically savvy.
DERP DERP DERP.
If you get into the political aspects it makes the game even more exciting. If you contest another player in two different areas you can try to make "deals" where you split the two regions and gain them for little to no influence disks rather than fight over both regions. However, you can easily backstab the other and take both. Very entertaining.
Is it because of the diving or it's more fun to play then watch or both?
I still like watching the NBA highlights on and off but find the College Basketball to be the most entertaining because you can tell those kids are playing their hearts out rather than dependable cushy salaries.
With the Esports variations, you do get this when tournaments move around different countries. The mostly Russian pro team gets way more applause when they are in Russia (to the point that they don't lose when they have home games), the Spanish players get more chanting when they're in Spain. The phenomenon does exist as Scott postulated.
I don't follow American football too well but do know they play in the similar weather and conditions as rugby and soccer (as they are winter sports). Having said that I've not seen a game televised in a blizzard.
The variance of how wet or dry (based on the climate and season) affects Cricket even though games are often shut down in rain and the pitch protected.
Dry weather with flat hard pitches are good for fast bowlers.
Humid or moist weather will produce soft pitches which favour spin bowling.
My other idea, which is not mutually exclusive with that one, is to raise the rim. Many people disagree with this. But remember, basketball was originally designed such that dunking did not exist. People were not 6 or 7 feet tall. Shooting was the only way to score. You can't shrink the people, so raise the rim, at least at the pro level, to put basketball back as it was originally designed. You have to shoot to score.
Making the court bigger is also not a bad idea. Properly enforcing traveling and foul rules is also a must. When I played basketball as a kid, you couldn't move even one step without dribbling. NBA guys take like 3+ steps no problem. It's horseshit. If you're not dribbling, you can't move. End of story. If you make the court bigger, this will give much more exciting play in terms of just trying to get the ball close enough to the basket to take a shot. Lots of turnovers and passes.
What is the most awesome part of basketball? The last five minutes in a close match. And buzzer-beating shots. But buzzer-beating shots that decide games only happen very rarely in very close games.
My improvement:
- All rules remain the same for general play, including size and shape court and markings, the height of the hoop, etc.
- Play a five minute "set" of basketball. In this time there are no timeouts, no swapping of players, and generally all is done to keep play going smoothly (stopping the clock for fouls and such proceeds as usual).
- The winner of each "set" gets one point.
- First to seven points wins.
(The time of the set and number of sets needed to win are up for experimentation.)
Benefits:
- Every five minutes is equally important! Not just the last five minutes of the whole match, but each set.
- Meaningful buzzer-beating shots are possible once per set, not just once per match.
- A match where one team is waaaay better than the other, the play will last 35 minutes. This is similar to the current 48 minutes.
- A more equal match might have 45 or 50 minutes of play.
- Unlike tennis, where games length is variable (leading to 5+ hour matches), even the most equally balanced match will have a maximum of 65 minutes play (at 13 five minute sets).
- Timeouts make the last 2 minutes of any current match the longest and most boring part of the game. Throughout the game, television timeouts are annoying too. Current NBA matches have mandatory timeouts called at the first dead ball after 6:00 and 3:00 in each quarter. Why break up quarters into smaller chunks? Why not have smaller chunks as the unit of the game?
- Commercials can then run after each set. Between sets can be time for a commercial break, then highlights and discussion, then another commercial break, and then the next 5 minute set begins again. This will allow for roughly the same number of commercial breaks as a current NBA match.
That's about it!
The benefits of this change to basketball compared to others is that it doesn't change the test of skill. The players who are good now will be good under the new rules. The goal is also still "get the ball in the hoop as much as possible".
Records broken under one rule set won't transfer very well to the new rule set, but this is the same in all sports. New statistics will become available, like most sets won in a row, most sets played by a single player in a season, most 7-0 (shutout) matches, etc.
A dunk is basically an undefendable shot. If someone like Shaq gets close enough to the basket, there is no way to stop him from dunking it without fouling him or physically getting in the way so that he fouls you. Getting that close isn't necessarily trivially easy, but it's not nearly as hard as having to shoot.
If you really want to keep dunks in the game for the spectator appeal, make them worth 1 point only.
Also the College Basketball, I think it's advertised as "Mad March", (I can't remember the exact name).
All the rules were followed much more closely by players plus umpires, no one dives, the competition is fierce because these guys are looking to be noticed by scouts and want to be on the court for the whole game.
However you can stop dunking, Lebron James would do it quite often when he was playing for Cleveland, by running behind the potential dunker than knocking the ball into the backboard out of the opponent's hands.
The reason that he is the exception to the rule is that he's still a big guy but at the same time plays very athletically unlike other tall players who tend to be static.
The 1 point dunk would also assist in making good shooters to pass to early on and then transition to the dunking when a team pulls ahead.
On the flip side you isolate the opposing team's 3 point stars and shooters.