Thursday, April 20, 2017

The New Characters miniexpansion - The Voyages of Marco Polo initial thoughts

After my last article about Marco Polo here, someone suggested looking at this expansion, too. I have personally only played with proxied version of this and only one game playing each character, so unlike the previous article, this won't be base upon any kind of serious experience, but it will be more of a theorycrafting exercise. What I am about to share is just my opinion, and might turn out to work pretty differently in an actual game. So, let's have a look at what the expansion brings:


Gifts
The first thing you probably notice besides those new characters are the new round tokens. Those are called gifts, and can be obtained by completing some new contracts, by travelling to a small city with the new small city bonus tile, or by being one of the new characters. More about the characters will be said later, but let's have a closer look at those gifts first. There are two kinds of gifts. The first one has a lightning bolt depicted on it (Harry Potter reference) and the bonus depicted on them is acquired as soon as you get the gift. The other kind is kept in front of the player until he decides to use the gift, at which point it typically allows him to "one time use" an ability of one of the characters from the basic game. The gifts seem to be pretty neat bonuses and those contracts (especially the non-gold ones) appear to be really good! The only problem is randomness, but imagine the 1 camel 3 pepper quest getting you a reward of 2 camels, 2 points and a black die, or 5 coins, or a free travel, a resource of your choice... No matter what you receive, you cannot really end up being too unhappy, unless you were looking for a specific thing. Since you have to plan ahead in the game, that might be the case quite often, but you can keep track of which gifts are left in the pile and then take say 2 out of 6 chance of getting camels or so, obviously depending on the situation. Design-wise, I think this adds more randomness to the game, but given the amount of those contracts, I do not think it is gamebreaking. What sucks for me is that Berke Khan, Rashid and Wilhelm von Rubruk each have 1 specific gift that doesn't do absolutely any good for them, as it represents a one-time use of their existing abilities. Similar feature appears in Bang! Gold rush, and I like it, because it "stacks" in Bang!, but in Marco Polo, those gifts are worthless to their respective characters. They could have just added an option to say discard a gift to get a camel instead or something like that, or just add this to those three specific gifts. Plus as you will soon discover, it is not a good time to weaken the original characters, as they might find themselves struggling against the new ones.

Characters
To me, the more appealing part of the expansion, those characters once again bring some "out of the box" thinking, as they get quite nice and not previously seen abilities. The thing is that those abilities seem quite strong as far as I am concerned. I will rate them as was the case with the original characters, but again, this isn't really something I could back-up with some serious stats or experience, just my estimation, or as one could say, best guess. Anyway, here they are!

Altan Ord
Let me put this clearly. I like building an engine and improving it every time I move on the board. This character lets you do exactly that! In theory. The ability says "after placing the first trading post, gain a victory point. After placing a second trading post, get a coin and all previous bonuses. After placing a third trading post, get a camel and all previous bonuses. And so on as shown in the picture. If you place all seven, or even eight or nine posts, you get yourself a total of 7 Vps, 6 coins, 5 camels, 4 sacks of pepper, 3 pieces of silk, 2 gold pieces and a single black die. This is your ability at its best. 
Note: For placing the 8th and 9th station, there is no additional bonus to the usual 5, respectively 10 victory points.
It seems overwhelmingly good, as it allows you to complete about 2 contracts for free just for travelling around. It essentially gives you an increasing one-use bonuses in every city on the map just for you. The problem I have is that there is nothing at all that will help you get this running at the start of the game. If you play against characters focused on travel, you might find yourself being too slow compared to their start. Or at least that is what I am concerned about. I would still love to pick this against Kubilai, just because I think this suits my playstyle more, but I believe this is just average. The one think really worth mentioning is that as long as you can guarantee that you will travel to a city (see what I said about travelling in my previous article? :D ), you can also guarantee getting the specific bonus. And if your opponents somehow do not mess up with you in the first round or two, the game might be over. For this hopeful line, I will estimate a rating 3/5. 

Fratte Nicolao
Here is the "one more monk/priest joins the party" package. His ability gives him a choice of three random gifts at the start of each round. He picks and keeps one of those gifts and discards the other two. To increase his power a bit, he may once per game keep two of those instead. So he gets six free gifts a game. How powerful are the gifts? I think they are pretty solid. The fact that he gets to choose makes it so that he might be able to get what he needs, like the money +5 or the 3 camels. I would generally say that the gifts are worth one die. If there was an action that says "place a die of any value here to get 3 gifts, then choose one and discard the rest", I would say you would try to squeeze a die there here and then. Problem is that anything you might get can be somehow achieved on the board without having to worry about random gift distribution. Yes, you theoretically get every gift in your games during the game, but will you get the free move now, or in round 4? Nobody knows. And while I said I like the gifts, they do not do enough to make this the best character. However, I think he is slightly above average to potentially very good, if you get lucky. I rate him 3/5.

Gunj Kököchin
Finally! A female character was given to us! And more good news coming, because I think this is a pretty awesome girl (and just by a coincidence happens to be a Mongol princess). She has 2 main actions just for herself through the game. Both are simple, the first one turns any single die into 2 camels and two any resources of her choice (they can be both the same kind). Then everyone else receives any single resource from the common pool of resources. This feeds your opponents resources, but can give you invaluable gold or silk for a single day AND it gives you camels. Use this carefully, but without any doubt, this can get you a contract done for a single die without having to worry about your opponents dice. The second action requires one die of any value too, and gives you a single free move. This is huge in my opinion and can get you to a lot of places, especially combined with your ability to get camels no matter what everyone else does. Yes, both of those are uncontested actions at all times. I just think that if you get a solid bonus in Anxi (+5 money or the "?" bonus in this case, but camels aren't bad either), then you should be able to place all stations, travel fast AND do a contract here and there. It all sounds ambitious and maybe gets slightly worse if against characters that travel a lot, but I think she isn't meant to be a purely contract-based character as Mercator is, even though she could probably slow down travel-wise and roll contracts. Maybe she will turn out to be the jack of all trades and master of none, but my rating for now is 5/5.

Khan Arghun
Kököchin's would-be husband and a mighty ruler, he surely had a lot of influence. Game-wise, his influence is represented by 6 city action cards randomly drawn from the deck, known to the players before the characters are selected. He can use one of those cities once a turn as a if it was a bonus action, then discard the card. He doesn't need to use any die on this and he counts as having played a six-pip die when using any of those city actions. Basically, he has a kind of round bonus. Now there are 9 city cards that require nothing (well, one of them takes a coin) but a die. I am talking the take 2 coins for each pip on the die you place here action, the actions that give you resources (and are great if you have a 6, which you "have"), and the small city activators. I think that very often, he bad cards will be drawn and he won't be picked. But if you see like 2 or 3 good cards and or a solid combo, I think he comes into a consideration as on of the stronger characters. Ideal scenario might be round one +12 coins, round two +3 gold, round three +3 silk and then convert them into quests and get +6 victory points for the 1 point a quest card in round four, then perhaps activate 2 small cities for free AS A BONUS ACTION. I just feel that this won't really happen very often, and even though those actions are uncontested, you still have to pay for them to activate most of the time, because most require camels and something else. If he gets picked with the good cards, he might very well be one of the best characters in the game, but other than that, I think he has effectively no ability most of the time (like Kublai) without getting much of a compensation. I will consider the average state of things and rate him 2/5. 

Conclusion
The expansion brings new things without really changing the way the game feels. The characters are fresh but compatible with the old ones, albeit some of them seem bit too strong, but they certainly have weaknesses and can be beaten. Any character might still end up being THE best one for some particular setups. The gifts mechanic seems a bit random, but I think it is an acceptable level of randomness which also brings some new options into the game. I wouldn't mind some slight adjustments, most notably the three gifts mentioned above, but even as it is, I think this is a must-have if you like the game. 

Rating
+New characters are cool and bring new options and playstyles
+The gift mechanic is quite nice
-Questionable balance of the characters
-Some gifts useless to certain characters
-Not widely available yet
Overall: 8/10, appears to be a great mini-expansion 

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

The Voyages of Marco Polo tips and tricks


Today I have played several games of this online on the Yucata website and finally achieved reasonable TrueSkill rating out there (1000+). It is time to share some tips and thoughts on this game, then play some more. I think the following should really cover the basic strategy, but I am looking forward to proving myself wrong as I hopefully progress through the ranks online and improve my live play as well. As a side note, I would like to mention that always follow your playstyle, as each game is different and unique. In fact, it might be a very foolish thing to try to come up with a comprehensive strategy for a game such as this one, but guess what? I will try anyway. :D

Strategy twists depending on the character
One of the main pros of the game are it's characters, each possessing a very unique ability. The immediate questions is which one is the best? There is no clear answer to this, but I will share my thoughts on every character and maybe add my personal subjective "rating" based upon my experience. Keep in mind that it all heavily depends on the particular setup of the board and is by no means a strict order. I will also consider a 4-player game, but most characters and mechanics work similarly anyway.

Berke Khan
This guy allows you to place your die/dice on an occupied space without paying the additional cost. He is arguably one of the strongest characters, because his ability allows you to do one great thing: stop caring about what your opponents do. Sure, you still want to get your hands on the black die as often as possible, but you no longer have to worry about running out of money if someone travels first. Voyages of Marco Polo is a game with a lot of imperfect information given to the players. You do not know what travel quests the opponents have and therefore how fast or where do they want to travel. With this character, you simply do not have to care. You can focus more on your own game plan, hoard camels to convert to the black dice and so on. Also try to pick this guy if you anticipate weaker actions in the cities and bad options to earn money. If there are good city actions that generate money in easily reachable cities, there is a chance that this guy will be worse, because nobody will care that much about money anyway, making this ability less useful.
This character is slightly countered by Mercator Ex Tabriz as he tends to feed him a lot of camels and other resources. But it is easy to play and quite powerful no matter who you are facing. I will just point out here that for me it is relieving to play this character, but sometimes it actually turns out to be a bit boring experience and I also think he isn't the absolute best. My rating is 4/5.


Johannes Carprini
Second character is a bit of an odd guy. He doesn't seem to get picked very often and when he does, he performs just right, but not really much more than that. He gets you 3 coins at the start of each round, effectively getting you a 15 coins bonus thorough the game, and can jump from oasis to oasis anywhere on the map. Bear in mind that this usually requires a move of 3 or more to be useful, as you simply do not want to move in any way but from a city to a city. The ability allows him to fulfill any pair of travel quests and reach Beijing pretty conveniently. I would still recommend not to pick the two highest value quests blindly at all costs, just because some destinations (Kochi in particular) just take a lot to get into and out of. The idea with this one is to grab some money first, then pick the good "!" bonuses and travel around the map using those oasis that can be accessed easily. Remember to grab contracts that reward you with a bonus move action. Those are very strong almost in any position for pretty much any character. It is worth mentioning that he gets countered by Kubilai Khan, who makes it less profitable for Johaness to get into Beijing first, as he steals the 10 point trade station spot. Overall, I like Johannes, but I do not consider him to be too strong and he doesn't fit my personal playstyle that well. I rate him 3/5.


Kubilai Khan
Historically a ruler of vast empire, Kubilai starts in Beijing (represented in the game by a fictional city of Bejing AKA Misprint City), the seat of power of his dynasty in China. He starts with one station placed in Beijing on the 10 pts spot. That is it. This ability seems a bit underwhelming and truth to be told, I think it is. But let's try to evaluate what it does. You get 10 automatic points, but the value is relative, because any time a player arrives to Beijing, it decreases, as he gets some points for this, points that you cannot deny them. The ability effectively gives you a 3-point bonus against whoever comes to Beijing second. You also get quite important head start by having 1 station placed on the board. Makes it seem bit less impossible to place the remaining 8 I guess. Now consider the location on the board. You are only 1 step away from Xian, a small city with a recurring bonus. You are close to Sumatra, but movement from there is impractical and pricey, as well as from Kochi (especially in the first few rounds). I just think that no matter how you play this, even in the ideal scenario, this character just has limits to what it can achieve. I do not like this, as it kinda says "you might end up being second with a nice score, but you won't win". It is an interesting design and  I love how it influences other players, but sitting here without any real ability and a minor one-time advantage isn't good enough for me. In fact, I think this is the worst you can get more often than not. Honestly wouldn't pick him if I were aiming for the win against experienced opponents. Might be just my opinion tho. My rating is 1/5.


Matteo Polo
Next up is the uncle of Marco Polo himself, Matteo Polo. His ability gives you an extra white die at the start of each round and an extra random contract. Having a total of 30 dice minimum over the course of 5 turns is an advantage on it's own, but he also gets a free contract every round. Sadly, his white die counts towards the 15-pip limit, which in turn screws him up a bit. To me, this guy seems to be the one to get his quests done, give up any points for the 8th and 9th station, and do his homework, or contracts to be more Marco Polo-related. I am the kind of guy who thinks that building a solid engine on the board is better than occupying the market. This character does absolutely nothing to promote that strategy. I find him very luck-dependant, if you roll low, it isn't low enough for the compensation, the contract doesn't seem to matter all that much as if you take new contracts, you get 2 most of the time, if you do not, you still only got one contract you probably do not focus on anyway, and those contracts are random, so they do not end up being very good too often. He might shine and he might sometimes beat Rashid in the beginner game, but I still think he is bad against solid opponents. My rating on this one is 1.5/5.


Mercator Ex Tabriz
Let my put this clearly. I hate this guy. He is the parasite, the bad guy, who gets something for your effort while smiling and doing nothing. Every time someone takes and action in the market area, he gets one piece of the respective resource. Now what this ability really does? Let's say that it is a 4-player game, that is what we are considering anyway. Yes. The picture is technically incorrect, ignore everything but the first ability. Anyway, on average, you get about 3-4 resources a turn in a 4-player game. You clearly want to block the Favour of the Khan action, as it takes the player's attention away from the market, and you also hope that there is no good way to get resources and camels in the cities. Unless this is true, you won't be getting all that much. Also you get countered pretty hard by some characters that focus mainly on travel (notably Wilhelm von Rubruk or perhaps Nicollo and Marco Polo). The strategy should be to complete your quests and start a solid contract-fulfilling machine in the process. The good think is that others inevitably help you, even though you do not have much of a control over the timing of their unintended aid. I do not like to play against him, but he isn't extremely powerful unless in a very specific setup. I think he is easy to play to get a solid result but pretty tough to win with. I will rate this one 2.5/5.


Niccolo and Marco Polo
Father and a son, and also an interesting set of abilities. This character offers you two separate meeples to move around the map instead of the usual one. This allows you to move to two cities at the same time using two dice only. The second ability seems very minor but it is in fact huge. You get a free camel at the start of each round. Now that includes the first round, which is where it matters the most, because 1.) you can guarantee a black die no matter what the first turn 2.) you can get yourself to both Alexandria and Moscow using a total of 4 dice, then perhaps get some pepper and fulfill the movement quest with black die+camels or just use those camels to get some dice in return and steal those nice one-time bonuses. The first ability also almost guarantees the placement of all 9 trade stations. The 12-cost move actions are your best bet.
I love this character for it's explosive start potential and I almost auto-pick it if I am to go first and there are some decent sources of money. You can dictate the tempo of the game, get to Beijing, easily complete your travel quests, do a contract here and there and build a healthy base. The disadvantage is that some players will block you and this strategy isn't suitable if there is an extremely money-dry scenario where you just do not get what it takes to travel for 12 about 4 out of 5 times you travel using the action. To me though, this is "objectively" the best one. My rating 5/5.


Rashid ad-Din Sinan
This is the most overpowered ability according to the first-time players. He may set the value of his dice to whatever he wants. This sounds incredible, right? I say that his dice have "high value". That means that he gets a lot done with one die, or more specifically gets to use each action to it's maximum potential, where other characters must roll well to do so. The question stands. Does it win you the game, if you can theoretically use each action to it's maximum potential? If we take them one by one and determine whether you profit a lot from this ability. The market-yes, always getting the optimal value helps. Take 5 coins-slightly, usually helps you get a single coin, almost insignificant. Travel-slightly, again, usually saves you a coin or two compared to your average character. Take contracts-quite a lot, allows you to generate camels this way. The Favour of the Khan-a lot, you can block this action and monopolize it, getting yourself a lot of resources. City actions-varies, generally those requiring higher values suit you better. Conclusion is that about 2/3 of actions are better for you with this character, however most of those get blocked easily by the other players. One think this guy doesn't have is money. Try to get the black die, contracts that reward cash and travel a bit to get your hopefully not too difficult quests, then contract the heck out of your opponents. Aiming for points rewarding for placing 8th and 9th station is IMHO almost always a bad idea and too ambitious of a plan with this one.  Nonetheless, this is a solid and challenging character to play. I rate him 3.5/5.


Wilhelm von Rubruk
This monk brings 2 additional black stations with him and a potential 10 point reward for placing them on board. Note that you must place them as your 10th and 11th station. He also only needs to go through a city to place a station in it. I think this character is very tough to play and quite easy to stop from winning, but if there is a decent source of money, you can still pull the win off. You want to make a big jump or two in the game, 5 or 6 steps each. That takes a lot of money and camels, so you'll need to prepare for this. It is a great idea to get the Anxi bonus ASAP, unless it is something like 3 VPs, because that is surprisingly no good to you at the start of the game. Also, you only have 2 realistic routes to take in my opinion. The first one is the upper route from Venezia to Moscow-Anxi-Karakorum-Beijing-Xian-Karachi-Ormuz-Alexandria-Adana-Kochi-Sumatra. The other one and the suboptimal one, but probably less contested one, is Alexandria-Ormuz-Karachi-Xian-Beijing-Karakorum-Anxi-Moscow-Venezia-Samarcanda-Kashgar-Lan-Zhou. The first one requires a total of 17 steps, 13 or 16 camels and 27 or 22 coins. The second one requires 19 steps, 22 or 25 camels and 12 or 7 coins. If we assume a camel is worth about 1 and a half a coin, the second route seems slightly more favourable. But the two additional steps and the relativity of this "exchange" rate make it less suitable, but not an impossible way to place your 11 trading posts. Overall, I think he is just average. Like him tho. My rating 3/5.

Plan ahead
With characters out of the way, let's get into those tips. The first one is maybe the most important one. After you roll the dice, come up with a plan. A series of things you will do either no matter what (in other words, nobody can mess it up) or a series of plays you make if the previous scenario isn't possible. If the second point is the case, you will usually end up with several lines of play, based upon what you opponents has done. Also, at the beginning of the game, you should chose a path you will follow when travelling almost blindly. This isn't a game you can play without planning ahead. The order matters and to minimize the amount of things your opponent can do to mess with your actions, there is a concept called contested and uncontested action. The uncontested action is such action that will just sit there unoccupied and unused for you to be used at any time you choose. Provided you do not need the things you would gain by performing that action, this can wait. The contested action, on the other hand, is typically the camels in the market, if you do not take it, someone else will. If you had a plan at the start of the round, you should be able to determine which contested action to go for. Also, if you can afford and plan on paying money for performing an occupied action space, then this action should probably again be considered "uncontested", in other words, it can wait. Unless you need what you would normally gain by performing the action of course.

Luck pushing
Never push your luck, and if you are going to reroll any dice, take it into consideration as soon as the round begins. As a rule of thumb, you should reroll a die only if you are desperate, have a useless 1 or maybe 2, or if you need anything else but a 6 (being too high for you to pay for placing a six on somebody else's die). If you have a one or two and need specifically a one-pip higher value, it might spare your money and camels if you just use the +/- 1 value of the die action. If you have a useless one and anything else somehow helps you without really aiming for anything specific, reroll it. You may keep rerolling as long as your overall amount of camels is sufficient for executing your general plan or you do not have any other choice. Other than losing the game.

Contract priority
So there are good contracts and the bad ones. Each contract serves a different purpose. The generally good ones are the ones rewarding camels, resources of any kind, the travel action ones. The bad ones are the random contract ones and the ones rewarding only a single resource. The money rewarding quests seem situational. Of course, you may still pick any quest if it denies your opponent or serves your goal (simply because you might only be capable of doing one specific contract). If you focus on winning the contract game and not so much on the travel, the ones giving you extra resources are perfect as they allow you to chain contracts without much effort.

Travel strategy
I have already mentioned this in the article, but you shouldn't really ever find yourself outside of a city. It just isn't efficient to travel to an oasis and end your movement here. You do not place a station, do not get a bonus, no additional action unlocked, simply bad for business. Plan in such a manner that any movement you do, be it a travel action or a contract reward, will get your guy to a city. The honorable exception might be Nicollo and Marco Polo, as it doesn't make sense to place two 4s on the travel action and then only move 3 spaces with one guy because of this rule. The other exception might be Johannes, as he kinda likes oasis.

City actions
First of all, let's establish that those are contested actions as soon as there is more than 1 player in the city. There are some really good ones and then there is the thrash. Yes, different actions suit different characters, but the absolutely thrashy ones are: Anything that rewards both points and coins (with an exception of the gold one, that one is just bad). Anything that converts 2 same resources into points. Anything that converts only camels into points. Those should be avoided unless it is like the last round and they present the best way to make some final points. Also, actions that aren't listed here aren't always great. The really good ones are the money gainers, the small city bonuses activators, and the gold+camel=4 VPs, especially later in the game. Resource generating cards tend to be quite good and favour Rashid while simultaneously screwing up Mercator. The bad ones you should be avoiding are marked by a red "X" in the picture bellow.



I will add to this article as I progress in the game and get some more games under my belt, even though I think I got a solid foundation. Anyway this is my take at the strategy, hope you find it helpful. Feel free to discuss those and stay tuned for an update!

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Play games online - Yucata

Have you ever wondered whether you can play your favourite board games online? Now you are thinking that I must be joking, because the social interaction with people sitting at the table with you is what makes playing games fun. And interactive (duh). But let's say all your friends are unavailable for some reason, yet you really, REALLY want to play a game of Port Royal or something. You may take the game out of the shelf and play solo-mode against yourself, but that is a bit unsatisfying, isn't it? For those of you who do not already know about this and sometimes find themselves in a situation similar to the one I just described, the Yucata website is your saviour. After a free registration, you get access to more than 120 famous games taken directly from the board to your computer. Now you may notice that 120 games is in fact quite a low number, but it is enough for an average gamer to find something of note. The list includes but is not limited to two versions of Carcassonne, Port Royal, the classic Othello, and many other good and quite widely known games. There are some hidden gems, too. Games like The Castles of Burgundy, Hacienda or The Voyages of Marco Polo are transformed into their online versions without losing much of their complexity, clarity and fun aspect. 

There is a concern about the quality of the gameplay itself. I do not claim to have played all games available on this website, but I was impressed by all the games I have tried so far.
The details of vital symbols and actions are pretty well done, so you always know what do you get from performing any given action, everything is clean and smooth. If you do not know the game, there are thorough rules that go with each game before you even start playing, and you can also check the rules at any time while playing, as they are included in the game manager even during play.
The animation is ok and it also supports replays, which allows you to quickly recapitulate the events in the game that happened while you were having a bio break or something. You can even undo your most recent action should you happen to misclick. To help keep the game clear and prevent confusion in more complicated games, your options are usually marked in some manner, usually a coloured frame appears over them. You therefore do not wander the board with fear of mistakenly choosing the wrong button.


I have never encountered any adds while playing this, which helps the overall very enjoyable experience.
But the site has to live from something so there is a system of voluntary donations, you can basically donate any amount and you receive a certain site supporter badge based upon how much you have donated. Nonetheless, you can keep playing for free. There is a whole ranking system and some stats, which both keep track of your performance in both ranked and training games and somewhat motivate you to play better, you can add people to your buddies list and play with them again and create an invitation to get people to play the game you choose.

All in all, this site is an absolute blast. The only problem for me is that some people just won't play more than say two turns a day, which doesn't really serve the purpose of playing a quick game of something online before I get to play it live somewhere. But I guess that this is up to us, the players.