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GeekNights Tuesday - Impressions of Android:Netrunner
Tonight on GeekNights, we talk a bit about Android: Netrunner, which we've been playing of late. In the news, HOOOOCKEYYYYY is back, Kotaku has some forward looks at five coming tabletop games, and Dungeons & Dragons classic books are available online as PDFs for reasonable prices.
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I'm not a huge fan of Kotaku, and I'm not even a huge fan of Shut Up & Sit Down (the guy who was given a regular contributing role on Kotaku to cover board games is a co-host of that web show), but I'm really glad that a website has committed to some regular coverage of board games.
I got really deep into the weeds of what makes for good journalism over the past 3 years, and have determined that there are basically zero consistent sources for good board game journalism. There ARE a few for video game stuff though: Gamasutra, Penny Arcade Report, Chris Kohler over at Wired Game|Life, Jeremy Parish and most of his 1UP crew, etc. I'm convinced that video game sites giving board games serious coverage will allow people to actually step in and tell the real stories of the board gaming industry.
I tried quite hard to get PAR to hire me (can you blame me?) but they ultimately decided against it, and of course, less than 1 in 20 of Ben & Sophie's posts are about tabletop even though they have a whole section dedicated to it. Oh well.
I'm hoping to have my Kickstarter games of The Duke and Ground Floor delivered and played a few times to bring to East.
The biggest problem I see with Netrunner right now is that the luck factor is high. You have to play a lot of games to really weed it out. It needs a best of 7 world series instead of a one game Super Bowl to really see who is better. But the tournament structure you play each opponent just once on each side, which is not enough.
Too many tutors means you might as well give someone the card they want. None at all means it's random. The randomness in a tutor-less environment is mitigated slightly by card draw itself.
The decks are also small enough that if I can have card X and 3 tutors for card X then you're narrowing your own strategic options. If someone happens to have all the silver bullets for your cards, it merely becomes more of an exercise in randomness (Who can draw card X or its tutor).
I'd be surprised if more than a few tutors were printed. Of course that number rises over time and the game it too young that I don't think it really needs one yet.
So I assume a "tutor" is a card that goes through your deck to find another card? There are already quite a few of these in Android: Netrunner.
There are a couple, and another one on the way in the next data pack! (sorry, no imgur)
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=3898
Test run!
So this indicates to me that FFG are going to slowly release the tutors. THEN you will get some nice deck consistency, and be able to execute on your strategy more often
Can get it from the trash too, lol. Tasty.
Tutors as a card mechanic are interesting. I've talked to people who think it's awful in that you can always have the card you want which defeats the idea of a card game. Others have said that they are fine with them and love them (who doesn't love having what you want, when you want?!). They do open up certain avenues of strategy in deck design and play which all depends on what the designers want.
Magic with all of it's ebbs and flows over time has had periods where there were tons or none in Standard (latest 2 big blocks only). I prefer the idea of the all powerful, one tutor to get anything you want. I've never really enjoyed the "silver bullet" tutors.
EDIT - A direct link the the card InvaderREN was referring to.
EDIT EDIT - A direct link to the card teh Scottz was referring to.
Yes, it's a very fine balance. AFAIK, Netrunner, the LCG will always let you play ALL cards?
Or will there be tournaments where you can play base set + Current cycle only? To keep it fresh? Unlike M:TG, sets (and broken cards - aka Jace, Skullclamp) the cards won't rotate out after time.
So... eventually we will have a huge pool of cards and only play the best ones? Unsure.
At any rate, I prefer more cards to less, give each deck your own personal touch. Make it exactly how you want.
There are some cards from original Netrunner that they will NEVER print, because they are broken. I could post one later.
But as for "cycles", who knows. In the interest of keeping a tournament fresh, or themed, they could declare a specific cycle to use? Down the road.
1) High luck and high skill are not mutually exclusive. Mathematically speaking, luck increases variance, while skill shifts the mean. Yes, the more luck is involved in a game, the more likely it is that a weaker player will beat a stronger player, but in the long run, on average, the stronger player wins out. Poker is a great example of this.
2) The statistical strength of one deck depends on the distribution of other decks it is up against. As such, there cannot be a single "strongest deck" as long as there is a deck that beats it, because if everyone took the "strongest deck", you would simply take the one that beats it and have a clear advantage. That said, there can be a Nash equilibrium, but as long as every deck has at least one counter (i.e. a deck that beats it more than 50% of the time 1v1), the Nash equilibrium must involve multiple different decks - e.g. 30% of one deck, 30% of another, 30% of a third, and 10% of a fourth.
3) It doesn't take much apparent complexity to make it highly difficult to find an optimal strategy, especially in the presence of randomness and hidden information. As such, it's not guaranteed that the game will devolve into a pure deck-building game (except perhaps after quite a long time), especially if cards continue to be released.
For example, optimal poker play is currently still quite far from being a solved problem, despite how old that game is. Moreover, most of the time the space of possible heuristics is very large, and yet optimal play often comes up against the limitations of the human brain, which means that there's a lot of room for coming up with optimisations.
If it's anything like Magic, there will probably be one or two Eternal formats (Like the Type 1 thing Rym was talking about, which is now called Vintage and nobody plays it because a few highly broken decks basically define the format and all the cards "needed" to play are hundreds of dollars). Then, there will probably be a "restricted" format, like Standard (which used to be called Type 2). With this, I can see them saying the core set and the last year's worth of cards and keeping the format reasonably small. I feel like with the sets being more reasonably balanced, and it being reasonable to expect everyone to have every card, any Eternal format is going to be far more successful than it is in M:TG. If you have that card, and don't want it any more, it's money in the bank, depending on the set. Alpha/Beta is > $100, Unlimited/Revised copies are about $20.