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Friend Loss over Illuminati?
Will this happen? I picked it up cheap at a game store. Seems innocent enough, but I tend to heed warnings from random podcasters, so I'm posing the question here.
Comments
But seriously, if you actually legitimately lose a friend because you screwed them over at Illuminati, good riddance.
Is Illuminati a Facebook game of something of the sort?
Squirrelly as in they lack the capacity to sit still and learn rules.
Fire Emblem obsessed lunkheads, the lot of them.
If they made a game in this genre that was always winnable no matter what random encounters appear in what order, then the game would be so easy as to be boring. That's just the nature of the mechanic. Therefore, they always make them really hard, so you are always on the edge, and there isn't even a guarantee that even half of the possible configurations are winnable. Obviously if you make bad decisions you will lose even in a winnable situation, but sometimes no matter what decision you make, you will still lose.
I played Arkham Horror only once, and with a default configuration. It wasn't fundamentally much different than Pandemic or others. It has the same problems, just magnified. The decisions available to you are much fewer and more obvious. Achieving victory takes longer, and is more tedious than in similar games. I guess it's thematically appropriate, but the game is really stupidly hard. There are many difficulties and players have very few resources.
As far as beat the game games go, I'm a bigger fan of Space Alert. The problem is that Space Alert is a real-time game that involves the equivalent of computer programming and true collaboration with imperfect information. It's always winnable, but you'll actually win it less than you will win a game like Pandemic or Arkham Horror if you aren't playing with really smart and quick people. I just like it more because it is skill, not luck, that determines victory.
I also prefer Fury of Dracula to Arkham Horror and Pandemic. While Fury of Dracula has a huge flaw in the stupid rock/paper/scissors combat system, at least you are facing off against a human intelligence, Dracula, as opposed to a deck of random cards.
For example, your typical chess problem is a single-player beat-the-game game, and yet the solutions to chess problems are not necessarily easy to find.
Think of Tetris. Theoretically the tetrominoes are selected at random. That means you could possibly get all S pieces, and would die very quickly. The same applies to a game like Pandemic. The deck of cards determining where the next breakout will occur is random. Imagine if an evil person stacked that deck for maximum difficulty. The players would have no chance regardless of their algorithm. Even with random selection, the players often have no chance.
In Fury of Dracula, Scotland Yard, etc. the game is always winnable. The result is that the players who are cooperating win every time, if they have the necessary skill level. They know the algorithm, and it always works. Mr. X and Dracula can only win against players who screw up big time.
In Pandemic, Lord of the Rings, Arkham Horror, etc. the game setup is random. It's not always winnable. The same players cooperating with the same high skill level will win only a percentage of the time with an optimal algorithm. It's a Catch-22 situation. If you make the game always winnable, then it becomes too easy because the algorithm always wins, and it's boring. If you make the game harder, it won't always be winnable. Then it's bullshit that you lost even though you played optimally.
The only way to have beat the game games I feel is to have the challenges be scripted, like Space Alert, or to have a human opponent.
With scripted challenges the game will run out of replay value after you beat all the challenges, but there are a lot of them. They are also quite difficult, and the physical non-broken limits on information sharing (take a lesson Shadows over Camelot!) limit the ability to achieve an optimal algorithm by slowing down cooperation, which matters since the game is timed. Scripted challenges are also good excuses to sell expansions.
With a human opponent, the game can also be quite good. You just have to not make the mistake of unbalancing the game towards one side or the other, as in Dracula and Scotland Yard.
However, my point is that the point of this kind of game is to find that optimal algorithm. Once you are able to execute the optimal algorithm perfectly every time, there's no point in continuing to play, but it's not easy and boring until you've done so. If the optimal algorithm isn't trivial to find and execute, there is still a point to this kind of game.
However, the issue is not with the genre of game, but with the majority of the individual games within it. It may be very difficult to design a nontrivial beat-the-game game, but that doesn't make it impossible.
For example, Desktop Dungeons is a pretty decent beat-the-game game with nonrandom mechanics applied to a random starting configuration. Sure, there are unwinnable situations, but there is a solid challenge in working out how to play it optimally.
Unfortunately, many people seem to like cooperative games for no reason other than that they are cooperative, which could be the main barrier to people making cooperative games that are actually any good.
Also, I think my main disagreement with Scott was probably over the definition of the term "beat the game game".
EDIT: Nah, I'm giving Scott too much credit. He was probably just making an overarching generalization as usual.
The only fun part of the BSG game beyond the superficial theme is the Mafia element. So, why not just play Mafia? Call it BSG. Call the "mafia" Cylons.