Last Speed Circuit Rule Change of 2007, Promise

Last week I alerted Speed Circuit fans to the mods I plan to make for the upcoming WBC tournament. Well, I have an update.

I've got a small change to the last order of movement tie-breaker. I long ago replaced the old inside-of-the-track rule with an inside-of-the-upcoming-corner rule. Well, I thought of a mod to that. Now we will use an inside-of-the-corner-you're-in-or-the-upcoming-corner rule.

We will use the inside of the previous corner to break ties for movement until the last row of spaces with an arrow from that corner. If two arrows from different corners overlap, we will use the upcoming corner.

This may all sound very confusing, but it will not be because of my other great idea. I'm adding a gray bar to the side of the track that gains the tie-breaker to the tracks we will run at the WBC. So you really don't have to know this rule, just stay next to the gray bar and you can go first.

Tikal

Lots of people know and love Tikal, its really a very good game and a classic example of modern German game design with the whole 10 points to spend on differing actions every turn mechanic.

As usual I will not bog myself down in describing the game, other people can do that:

Rainy Day Games

Board Game Geek

I've never played the auction variation because I play rarely enough that I feel I like I should just do the basic version. I've also not felt like I needed something extra with the strategy. That said, I have found that the 2-player version of the game can be a little lacking.

The problem with 2-player is that you aren't forced to compete as much with your opponent for temples (and treasure to a lesser extent). I think this happens because two people can very easily use all their expeditioneers to simply cover "their" half of the board. When there are 3 or 4 people you are almost forced to try to steal control of temples from others.

What's the fix for that? Making the board smaller seems like the obvious play. However, if I take tiles out of the mix (thus reducing the size of the board) I will also be reducing the the length of the game. I'm not sure what affect that will have, but it should be worth a try.

I'll keep you all informed.

Annual Speed Circuit Rule Update

I've made some draft changes to the Speed Circuit rules I'll run at the World Board Gaming convention this summer. Included are an interesting tweak, a correction of a modification from last year, a table re-configuration (with minimal odds changes), and a tournament structure change.

The Sprint

The interesting tweak was a suggestion from Christine Hancock, who has raced at WBC for several years. Having witnessed in person the mayhem that is the first corner at the Indy F1 race, she suggested that all front straights should be effectively 1 space wider at the very start of a race.

I like it.

That said, some tracks effectively already do this. [ See Estoril, Hungaroring, Kyalami, Monaco, and Ricardo Rodriquez. ] So we need not add a column of spaces to the front straight for any track that already thins right before or in-side the first corner.

Slipstreaming Adjustment

Last year I increased the range of possible start speeds. An unintended offshoot of this is that you can now buy a 100 start speed, push it to 120 and have someone get a slip when the car in front was at a standing start the turn before. That seems a bit wrong and also brought up, yet again, the fact that you can theoretically get a slip if you spin out right behind a car that goes 120 or more the next turn.

So the adjustment is that neither car involved in a slip can be plotted 0 mph the turn prior.

Passing Table

Blame Darin for this one. He's been harping on me to adjust this for years. I resisted for logical reasons I've gotten over. The passing table is now configured the way all the other tables are: good results are low and bad results are high.

The raw odds on this table remain unchanged, but when the passer uses more skill chips then the passee the chance of a collision will go down. This is the part that bothers me a little, but like I said, I'm over it. Really.

Long Live the Semi-Finals

I liked the semi-finals we ran last year. I really did. I liked the smaller 10 car fields of the last two races. I liked the greater challenge (even though I became a finals spectator last year). But, we also saw a drop off in attendance. Who knows what the other factors were, but having a semi-final does up the commitment level required for the tournament. So, out it goes. I didn't like it that much.

Full Speed Circuit Rules for WBC on my Speed Circuit Web site.

MTG Proxy Ante

I've been playing a regular Magic game for years with a couple friends. We're old school so we like playing with ante related cards. We also have a closed universe because we started burning out around Ice Ages. We combined these two elements into what we call Proxy Ante.

We all go in on a box of cards.

Then we start playing like we are playing for ante. You remember those rules: after you deal a hand you place the next card off your deck in the middle of the table, winner gets the cards. Except, for each card dealt into the middle of the table, we draw a card out of the ante box and place that on top of it. We are really playing for those cards... the proxy ante. At the end of the game, that card from our deck goes back to us.

So, this way, ante cards can be used but none of us risk losing really nice, expensive cards. Although we all do have the possible problem that a card we want and like ends up out of play in the middle of the table instead of in our hand.

The other aspect of this system is that it introduces new cards into our limited universe without causing the usual arms-race problems. All proxy ante is marked on its face to show that it is legal in our limited (Ice Ages and before) format. In order to spread the wealth a little, while also rewarding good play, the winner of a game gets first pick of available proxy ante, not all the proxy ante.

In fact, we recently decided to up the ante by dealing out roughly 3 proxy ante for each real ante. In addition to allowing the winner to pick first, the winner also gets more ante then the rest of the table, selecting one more card then the 2nd place finisher and 2 more then the 3rd place guy, etc.

Phantoms of the Ice

Also known as Slapshot. This hockey game is (I think) out of print but is a fun game if you ever see it.

Card based, each manager draws cards from three different piles -- goalies, defensemen, and forwards -- until they have a complete team of 6 players. Each player is rated 0 - 11, with 11 being the best players. On each subsequent turn you have three options: a) discard a player to the bottom of his pile and draw a new player from that same pile; b) draw a random card from an opponent's hand then give that manager a player from your team of the same type; or c) challenge an opponent to a game.

The games are basically modified versions of war. Each manager puts one of their players face down in front of them and the highest number value scores a goal. Each game lasting only long enough to run through your hands once (6 cards). There are some other rules, but...

The season ends when one team wins 9 games. The basic rules then call for a 7 game playoff between the top two teams to determine the champion. With no opportunity to improve your team between games.

So, I played again last weekend and had two thoughts.

1) I continued to test my main strategy in this game: bruisers rule. There are a handful of defensive players that are marked as bruisers. They play like normal players except that whomever they are matched up against during a game must be discarded and replaced afterwards. My feeling has always been that this is crucial, especially during a long play off series. If you can pick-off a team's best players in the first couple games, they have no way to recover from that during the playoffs.

At one point during this game I had two bruisers at the same time. While that did help me tear apart the roster of the best team during the first half of the regular season, one of my bruisers was also a "0" player so he was also a liability. I lost him later in the season and ended up with a better rated defensemen and eventually won the championship.

2) We tried something new at the end of the regular season. the problem with the 7 game championship concept is that it makes the end of the game unfun for the rest of the people who played.

So we tried a playoff involving all four of us (something that is actually suggested in our copy of the rules as an alternative). We also shortened the series to best of 3.

This worked well.