Test 25 April

[Jubal]

So, had a rarity - a win with a two-player game. One of the things I want to do if I make a new edition is make the scenarios balance better.

We played the bounty hunters scenario, with me playing a philosopher (who, in a vain attempt to produce a bounty hunter/philosopher pun, first became Bobagenes Diogenes and thereafter somehow Bobbity Dobbity, with TP playing a cyclops who, in Diogenes trivia references but also excellent cyclops naming, became The Barrel. (I think I choose to believe that the name Bobbity Dobbity is in fact The Barrel's invention).

Our early game was very much dominated by finding too many small tunnels that Barrel could not fit down, and then eventually finding a village of kobaloi who tried to slit Barrel's purse only to find it empty.

We then found an Olympian Shrine, followed by a nest of Stymphalian Birds. This meant that we had essentially stumbled across an unusual situation where there was a clear dominant strategy: The Barrel was strong enough to punch the birds flat, so it was basically a case of wait, punch, capture, repeat, until we had enough birds that we could cart them slowly back to the kobalos village and deposit them to win the scenario.

I'm not sure if there's a good way to prevent this kind of dominant-strategy run in some multiplayer scenarios: the randomness means it'll just happen sometimes, I think. I also suspect that with more players we'd have explored faster, and the occasional simple winning game is fine.