I like to get a vibe off first player rules. Ah is this game harder or easier to go first in (you can also get this from bonus coins given before starting). If a game says “oldest player goes first” there’s an advantage in going second.
My main preference is the teacher goes first though as I usually need to see a turn modelled reasonably well and I think it works well if it’s the player who knows things.
I hate tiebreakers. So much stock goes into explaining them when you hope you’ve finished explaining and then they occupy a disproportionate amount of headspace for how often they should be invoked. My favourite ones are “play the game again”.
Same for chwazi, but it’s getting everyone else’s finger on the screen, and then the person who took their finger off early to put it back on again, that takes a little more time.
I think the reason I stick with it is that lots of games I play don’t have any player pawns and it’s simpler to have just one mechanism that I use for everything.
Dice are fine of course, though I usually say “1 is me, 2 is [player to my left], etc.” rather than “highest roll starts”.
Sometimes when we do the first player we just do a “first one to pick the X colour out” (eg for something like Orleans - first to pick a red out the bag)
I think Martin Wallace’s Liberte is worth a mention in this thread. It makes a virtue of draws and timing when to use your limited tie break winning cards. The area control and end game scoring works on a 0-3 possible value for each player with limited use of cards to get to those values. Much of the game is managing tie breaks as a result. It’s an interesting notion I’ve not seen in other games much and certainly not elevating it to a core principle.
Chwazi is a parenting tool in my house, it can resolve almost any dispute. The kids RESPECT finger-on-the-phone and never argue with its judgments.
However, it takes about a minute here because there’s a long period of taptaptaptaptaptap as they try to obtain the optimal color for their finger before the phone makes its decision.
One of the things I like about Turncoats is that a significant portion of the game is about manipulating the tiebreakers for control of an area, and to do that you have to put one of your counters on one of two actions which are possibly unrelated to what you want to achieve
I’m not a fan of tiebreakers. There’s nothing wrong with a draw.
I don’t mind (too much, anyway, although we tend to ignore them all) ones that are a perfectly reasonable game-related one (like 'most points wins, if you score the same points then most gold wins), but why have tiebreakers just for the sake of it? Is it that important that someone wins?
(And I really don’t like the ‘share the victory’ thing. Nobody won; there’s no victory to share!)
It’s interesting that Chess ends in a draw quite often (and nobody seems to mind) but I can’t think of any modern head-to-head games that have draw-conditions in the instructions. Feels like the expectation is that someone has to win.
For first player decisions, I usually use my favourite board game accessory, the first player die:
ha, as far as we’ve used it no one has attempted to use anything other than the top one, but there is sometimes some shifting in seats if it points somewhere in between two people (you’ll notice that unless you’ve got everyone very evenly spaced out it’s unlikely to be a “fair” roll, but I think that’s part of the fun)
Interesting question!
Clearly nobody won outright.
Two players certainly lost.
Maybe I’m wrong about the shared victory thing.
I guess it would depend on how much your group needs there to be a winner/winners.
That would be uncommonly generous of you!
If someone tried to claim victory on those spurious grounds, I wouldn’t be having it. Alaska or nothing.
Rules is rules, after all!
Yes, we do teacher goes first if necessary. People who are playing a relatively complicated game for the first time usually don’t want to go first as they have no idea what they should do!
For games everyone knows, we tend to use the rather unexciting method of: “Okay, who wants to go first?”
)