Topic of the Week: Splotter

Boardgames
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(Splotters don’t really sound like my sort of game; usual disclaimer, that doesn’t mean I think anyone else shouldn’t enjoy them.)

I like every turn to matter. If I’ve made a fatal mistake on turn 2, I shouldn’t have to play it out to turn 10. Two-player games have a resignation mechanic; it’s hard for more than two. (Arguably this is one of the problems of Monopoly.)

A game with no randomness seems as though it can easily become chess: I.e. there’s no point in new player A playing experienced player B as anything other than a teaching game, and you start to need ratings and so on just to set up a game that’s going to be fun. How does Splotter deal with that (if it does)?

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I’m afraid at age 11 I was really put off chess by a bad teaching experience and already liked painting miniatures so those worlds are alien to me and always have been.

I can see the theory though that those games encourage study and determination for self improvement at ones skills playing them.

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You kind of have to accept that a game can end when someone loses, just like chess.

As for experienced vs. inexperienced, I’d just say that’s a problem with all games that involve skill. It’s more of a problem with games that involve more skill (or just more knowledge, as is common with a lot of complex games). Randomness doesn’t change this at all - except that it may help people feel that less of the result was of their own making (I recognise that is significant for many, but I also think it should make no difference). For example, I think it is largely accepted that poker or Twilight Struggle - two games featuring a large amount of randomness - can be very one-sided.

I’d say Splotter games are actually improved over completely non-random games by the small amount of randomness (or simultaneous hidden action selection) they do contain, but not for reasons of making new players feel like they have a chance.

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I really dislike the notion that randomness in a game means skill doesn’t matter. Also this weird thing about input vs output randomness where if it’s output randomness then there’s definitely no skill. All the years playing miniature wargames have taught me that’s nonsense, I’d assume Twilight Struggle would be one example of your games.

Roger does have a point though about playing out a loss. I don’t mind it as I feel one should be respectful of those still duking it out and happy to let others have that fun on occasions where my plays haven’t worked well. If there’s one obvious winner then it’s easy to call for me and we have done so a few times recently. Trying things out while losing seems a fun sort of play pen without the pressure of a winning position slipping to me. The balance though may be not being too chaotic to skew the balance at the top.

A note on 18xx. While there’s much humourlessness in the online discussion I feel that 1830 is an effective satire of the Robber Barons and the financial misbehaviours that enriched them. I think it’s similar but less obvious than what’s going on in Food Chain humour wise.

Edit: my reference to Twilight Struggle added here before I saw @Benkyo ’s reference added in edit

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Good point. Food Chain Magnate does feel this way where you have to think about several moves ahead and experience players can tell you their openings step-by-step like Chess - albeit more reactive to opponent moves. On the other hand, there’s Indonesia, where who you give your money to is more important than Chess-like multi-step-moves.

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Assuming a 4-player game, if I’m about as good as my friends I’ll be losing three-quarters of the time—so one of the things I look for in my (competitive) game purchasing is a game that’s still fun to play while you’re losing. That can come from theme, or from relatively low player interaction (so I can admit that I’ve lost and try building my own little empire over here just to see what’ll happen, without spoiling the game for the other players).

(Again, my opinion only, not saying anyone else should feel this way.)

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I feel the same. But there is a very noisy group of gamers on BGG that imply that playing a losing position is a waste of everyone’s time— presumably because, when playing from a losing position, a person is more likely to do weird things, which moves their cheese.

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I think Quinns did a good job of theorizing this. Chess isn’t Monopoly, obviously, as it’s a game of study and skill rather than roll and move. But they are both a) zero sum, meaning I win by making you lose, b) monolithic, meaning one path to victory (though in Chess this path is obviously wildly textured, and c) snowbally, meaning often the games are decided somewhere in the middle and leave the other player(s) with an extended, tortuous period of slowly having your limbs cut off.

Go is a nice counterpoint to this. First, you win primarily by area rather than capture, so it feels less zero sum. We are both “taking” from the spaces on the board rather than from each other - except when we want to squabble, but then it’s a tacit agreement to fight over some spaces we both think we have claim to. There are two modes of play, you can attack and capture or define and defend your area. Even just that bifurcation, rather than the monolithic “attack and kill” makes the game more textured. Thirdly, the board is divided into areas that do relate to each other but also turn into individual battle grounds. You can lose one corner and still be perfectly set up to win the next corner. It’s even encouraged, once you’ve passed that point of no hope, to just leave and focus elsewhere on the board. There’s little “slow death” in the game.

All this comes together to make Go a wildly different game than chess.

Xiangqi was a fascinating little thing. Obviously more chessy, as they both come from chaturanga, but I also enjoyed it more. The pieces are pretty universally limited compared to their European Chess counterparts, leaving the board more “hole-y.” I found aggression was more awarded. Those holes in the board also left more space for a-ha moments - I think the board state just has more options and more likely one of them will do something interesting, whether it’s blocking a horse or elephant, or shifting the attack range of a cannon. In the end it was still chess but if I had to choose one to really learn it would definitely be xiangqi over chess. Maybe xiangqi is just a bit easier, that’s a possibility too.

Shogi completely baffled me. I have the least exposure but something about it left me lost from turn three or so.

I forgot why I wrote all that. Gamers? I definitely find that Go is a game I want to learn while the others feel like chores. So that’s one question, why do the chaturanga derivatives feel like chores? I think it’s a, b, and c above. Lumping in Go, the other problem is the required focus, which is also what Quinns articulated. If you want to play Go, you Play Go. That’s your free time. It’s hard to do it just a bit. Maybe that’s the problem - these ancient games have a sweet spot at play 300-1000 when you really hit your stride, which is perfect when you only have that one game for your life. Hive has a sweet spot at plays 10-50, which means I’m going to be in the sweet spot. In Go, they say “lose your first 100 games quickly” and I don’t have the time for that kind of learning curve these days.

So maybe Splotters fit into this space as well but also let you really settle into plays 10-100. I think of Hive as Chess-lite and Tigris as Go-lite, and those both took root in the hobby. Maybe it’s primarily a learning curve scaling issue?

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Yeah. I mean, our games are like food. Some days I need a salad. Some days I’m up for cracking a lobster. Some days make me a gosh darn sandwich so I can get my entire meal in a few bites.

This is one of my criteria as well and games can get there a lot of different ways, either through the Euro engine thing where I’m satisfied building regardless of what place I’m in, or (good) rubber banding mechanisms that ensure I’ll get back in arms reach at least before you cross the finish line. Maybe it comes down to, do you want your game to be fun or fair? One doesn’t dominate the other, it depends on the mood, the group, the occasion.

Regarding randomness, it does so much for us. For one, it ups the fun for games that are doing fun well. In a “fair” game you’re likely to get someone letting out a long breath and slowly nodding… in a “fun” game you might get the table flipped and people shouting at each other. Maybe what Splotters and 18xx do well is create those big moments by using player interaction rather than randomness.

I also like how randomness invites me to think on my feet. It’s like skiing moguls, where the mountain keeps throwing chaos at me and my job is to quickly react, with precision, to each unexpected thing, whether it’s a card draw or a lost battle. Not every game needs randomness, it’s just one spice that helps make one category of dish.

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There are two ways to get “big highs”. And both involve having “tragic lows”.

  1. Let a player exploit an advantage using skills
  2. Random chance.

For both “highs” and “lows”, I feel better when it’s because of something a player did than when it’s something that happened to the player.

This is, mostly, lost in modern “euro game” design space where all the corners need to be smoothed out and everyone gets a trophy, sort of thing. Splotter, 18xx, and a certain cadre of “old school” game designers are keeping the faith when everywhere else, “euro game” has started to mean the opposite of what it once did – approaching ever-closer to (I hate the term, but its bite seems appropriate) “ameritrash”.

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Can you elaborate on this and give some examples?

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Putting on my economist hat for a moment, it feels a little like a low level of inflation—it doesn’t matter exactly what prices do, but if everyone knows that they move, that allows an individual actor to change a price without everyone assuming they’re just profiteering. It agitates the box a little and lets things move around without that necessarily being part of someone’s grand strategy.

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True that, I remember having a very meagre score at the end (7 or so?). But as a rule I am pretty bad at games on my first play, so no surprises’ there.

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You may lose 3/4 of games, sure, but you don’t have to have given up on winning for 3/4 of your playtime. The oft-misunderstood Splotter quote about losing on your first turn doesn’t mean that should happen, it just means that the decisions you make at that point should matter. As long as everyone plays competently, there are no foregone conclusions until the final round.

OK, sometimes, at some point in the game you might find there’s no way of coming back. You blew your chances, made some mistakes that sunk you, were outplayed, whatever. Ideally, that happens later rather than sooner, and for the sake of players still in competition you can play through to the conclusion. In a worst case scenario you made a horrible mistake early, presumably because of a massive experience gap, and in those scenarios, in a Splotter-style or chess-style game, there are a couple of options - allow a redo, pointing out the mistake, end the game and restart, or play through to gain more understanding of how the game develops. They all seem like fine options to me. The option of optimizing your remaining turns to see how you do is present in some Splotters, just not in FCM specifically, which more people here seem familiar with and so a lot of discussion is centering around.

@COMaestro I’ll let pillbox answer for himself, but Tigris & Euphrates is a good example of an old-school eurogame - a relatively simple game with dramatic conflicts that can wipe out a players’ position on the board, spiky, not smooth. I think that used to be common. Modern euros trend towards optimization puzzles and complexity, not sure I need any examples there.

@Chewy77 that can be a winning score in Bus!

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It definitely wasn’t for me at the time.

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So, I’ve been reminded of this sort of thing by watching some episodes of Bluey, lately. I can elaborate on that if necessary.

So, what creates a “high” moment in gaming? Needing to roll 12 on 2d6 and doing it? Yes, I guess. For some people, that’s the pinnacle of a gaming achievement. Certainly you can imagine people leaping to their feet and throwing their arms in the air with amazement at such a feat. But, in my mind, a better “high” is when a player tactfully noted and then exploited a gamestate or another player’s misstep. And in these cases, it’s probably not a leaping-to-your-feet-arms-in-the-air wild celebration; in many cases, it’s a:

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In older designs, there were more “a-ha, gotcha” moments; yes, one of the cornerstones of the “German/Euro-style” game was that there was not head-to-head adversarial competition – but that’s not to say there weren’t sharp edges on which to snag; or sharp elbows to throw and snag your opponent at the opportune moment.

There’s a survivorship bias, certainly, but looking at the games from 1995-2005 I see a better dichotomy between “Euro” and “Ameritrash”

Top 45 Games on BGG published between 1995 and 2005

45 because that’s how many I could grab with a copy/paste between a couple of sets of banner ads.

BGG Rank Game
13 Twilight Struggle (2005)
42 Puerto Rico (2002)
60 Power Grid (2004)
92 El Grande (1995)
100 Caylus (2005)
104 Tigris & Euphrates (1997)
109 Twilight Imperium: Third Edition (2005)
119 Age of Steam (2002)
148 Ra (1999)
152 Ticket to Ride: Europe (2005)
171 War of the Ring (2004)
176 Memoir '44 (2004)
182 Railways of the World (2005)
212 Carcassonne (2000)
223 Paths of Glory (1999)
226 YINSH (2003)
228 Ticket to Ride (2004)
243 The Princes of Florence (2000)
250 Goa: A New Expedition (2004)
255 Glory to Rome (2005)
262 Samurai (1998)
280 Battle Line (2000)
288 Hive (2000)
291 Indonesia (2005)
321 Tikal (1999)
327 For Sale (1997)
329 Lost Cities (1999)
330 Antiquity (2004)
351 Chinatown (1999)
366 Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (1996)
377 San Juan (2004)
395 Saint Petersburg (2004)
399 Schotten Totten (1999)
412 Arkham Horror (2005)
458 Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (2005)
460 Heroscape Master Set: Rise of the Valkyrie (2004)
465 PitchCar (1995)
477 Amun-Re (2003)
488 No Thanks! (2004)
491 Citadels (2000)
500 Shadows over Camelot (2005)
503 Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2005)
506 Blood Bowl: Living Rulebook (2004)
517 Bohnanza (1997)
523 1846: The Race for the Midwest (2005)

EDIT: used a logged-out browser to pull the 1995-2005 games to avoid BGG attributing version Years with the first-published years.

We could pick apart this list and find things that meet any number of criteria. But something I’ve noticed in these older titles, among other things, is that there are stakes at risk when playing these games. These are games that you can lose on the first or second turn.

But how has that changed?

I tend to ignore a lot of modern “euro” games for a number of reasons, so I will pick on one that I actually played: Carnegie.

I don’t think you can lose Carnegie on a “bad turn”. Each turn, you do some things and you get a non-zero, positive number of victory points as a result; maybe not immediately, but eventually they’ll materialize.

This is the gentrification of euro-games I was alluding to previously.

Maybe the Agricola vs Caverna discussion is the most apt. In Agricola, the competition for worker spaces is vital and brutal. In Caverna (and more recent Rosenberg titles), sure, it might be a little inconvenient, but there’s another space that you can use. And yes, there are specific micro-game-states where quasi-equivalent worker spaces aren’t actually fungible, but overall it’s a kinder, gentler Euro design sphere we see today compared to 20 years ago.

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Okay, now you simply must elaborate on this. Is it Obstacle Course? Magic Claw? I am trying to think of episodes that might tie into this thought process

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The Claw was one, absolutely. There are no “highs” without the potential for “lows”, as demonstrated excellently. Also, Magic Claw has no children. His days are free and easy.

This one was not in my original thoughts, but absolutely applies.

The other one on my mind, though, was Pass the Parcel. Lucky’s Dad, “Pat”, is more and more becoming my favorite as I absorb and actually get to watch the episodes.

Early in the episode, it’s expected that at kids’ birthday parties, they’ll all play Pass the parcel (which, for the record, is foreign to me, but my partner did do something similar as a holiday family activity for a pre-COVID Christmas). In this version that the kids were accustomed to, the parent running the music would ensure that each child would get to unwrap one layer, and claim the minor prize within. There was no build-up because all of the prizes were effectively the same “value” (fungible, even) – and because each child would be guaranteed a turn, there was no crescendo or drama. Very hum-drum.

Enter Pat. When he was a child, apparently, there were no intermediary gifts; only one “big” prize at the end, once all the layers were unwrapped. He ran the game his way and it ended the way you would expect: every child upset and crying that they didn’t get anything. But: one child got an exciting gift. Exciting because it was a great gift? Or because he was the only one to get it?

Eventually, each child in the neighborhood would request “Lucky’s Dad’s Rules” for their Pass the Parcel game for the upcoming birthday.

Because to get big highs, there need to be stakes.

EDIT, because I forgot I had more to say on the subject:

Also, suggested by some of the action in the episode, it appears that when playing Pass the Parcel with stakes, there seems to be a bit of strategy involved. A strategy that formed intuitively by the players as they tried to figure out how to best position themselves to get the chewy nougat present at the end.

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I was thinking of Pass the Parcel as well, but for the life of me I could not remember if it was an episode of Bluey or something else. :slight_smile:

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So Splotters allow players to make mistakes.
That’s not bad. That allows us to quickly increase our skill-level by not making the obvious mistakes anymore.

But I am also not averse to having options for a Verlegenheitsaktion like taking that one spot in Beyond the Sun (where my friend coined the term) that just gives you some resources because you messed up and can’t take a more valuable action. It’s embarrassing but it does give you something.

Games that do not allow me to get better at playing them have a much shorter shelf-life.
At first I thought the TM solo was impossible. Then I played it 50 times now I am disappointed if I only get 70 points… (I still lose some). At first winning Spirit Island seemed quite daunting… now I need to play with some modifiers to make it the right difficulty level. Our first time playing Gloomhaven was terrible, we lost in the first room. But the gameplay was such fun that of course we tried again. Cascadia would be pretty boring as a solo if not for the challenges. I might be ready to tackle the Agricola solo again (ca. 13 years later)

As for losing/conceding… I knew I was losing Antiquity very quickly. But I still wanted to see how it would turn out. I still wanted to see how well I could do and how the puzzle was going to go. The turns were still fun to take. That’s what makes a good game to me.

In multiplayer conceding is hard. But as those games tend to last longer, so does the prolonged defeat, I have no great solution to that. I used to think that player elimination was the worst mechanic ever… but I’ve seen situations where a rule for someone to fold out of a multiplayer game could have saved the day (and the game).

One more thought… when I am on the losing side which happens enough, alternate victory conditions sometimes provide a beacon of hope that I might still be in the game and I pursue those… although so far in my losing streak of 7 Wonders Duel I have not managed any … quite the opposite. And I don’t seem to be getting better at the game. My opponent is always just 1 step ahead of me and making twice as many points :wink:

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