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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Game Flaws

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of the games that I enjoyed playing a lot was Game Designer's Workshop's Fifth Frontier War, set in their Traveler Universe. It was a fun game, having only two major flaws:

Flaw #1: One side could not lose.

Flaw #2: One side could not win.

Even so, the game was fun. Partly because you had to figure out your maneuvers five turns in advance, i.e., record that Fleet X was going to move to location A, then to location B, then to location C, then to location D, then to location E. At the end of Turn #1 you would record where the fleet would move on Turn #6. Of course you could plan for a fleet to simply remain at a location for a couple of turns. Each side had a number of admirals who, if joined with a fleet, could make decisions in less time (including one or two each that were "0" planning, i.e., every turn you got to decide where they would go, you did not have to decide in advance for them).

The above meant a lot of figuring out, visualizing how things were going to be. And you had to be careful how your own fleets moved (the "senior admiral" if two fleets were co-located would take the majority of the ships, and your best maneuvering admirals tended to be junior).

So, why could one side not lose and the other not win?

The problem was that victory was determined by capturing planets and using their Technology Level to see how many victory points they were worth. And the side that started "on the defensive" was both outnumbered in total ships, outnumbered in the number of fleets (no ship, except scouts, could move unless it was part of a fleet), and almost every planet, no matter its technology level, had no defenses. So the attacker would set up two fleets with nothing but troop ships, and wander them from planet to planet dropping off a division to "garrison" them. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, the defender could do about it.

Still, it was a fun game. Dave Grossman and I invested a lot of time searching for a way for the Defender to win in the way the game was set up (i.e., not changing any of the rules or adding our own), but never succeeded.