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Messages - kothmann
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151
« on: August 02, 2022, 12:13:53 PM »
I'm hoping to have a few games with the Wheel of Fortune soon, and I'm wondering about tips for tactics and also what expansions work best? Here are my thoughts, but would love advice from those who have actually played. Adjustments to Basic Play:- Be more eager than usual to have two knights in a city, particularly when there are multiple pennants in that city.
- Place farmers earlier--you will probably have chances to remove them later and they can bring you points from the wheel even if you aren't winning that field.
- Similarly, be more likely to place monks, because you can get points from the wheel and have a chance to remove them.
Placing a Meeple on the Wheel:I started with some math. The distribution of pig motion distances are: 11 one tiles, 5 two tiles, and 3 three tiles. So, the chance that the pig hits the next space around the wheel when the first wheel tile is drawn are 11/19, or 58%. The chance that it hits the second space on the first tile is 5/19, or 26%, but it will also hit the second space on the second tile 58% of 58% of the time (33%), so the total chance for hitting the second space on the first two wheel tiles is 59%. By similar math, the chance of hitting the third space on the first time around is 65%. Since you don't want to wait too long to get your meeple back, you should always pick the first or second spot after the pig, preferring the one that pays 6 points if there is no other meeple on that spot? Expansions to Use- Magic Portals Because of the Pestilence wheel space, there will be empty features, so these should 6 tiles should be useful?
- Traders & Builders Because 17/19 wheel tiles are roads, it would be good to make cities more exciting?
- Flying Machines Because of the city-heavy Traders tile mix, it might be good to add some more roads and open fields, as well another way to sneak into features?
- Shrines Still more tiles that are heavy on roads and fields and create empty features after a challenge? (I'll actually be using the volcano tiles from P&D as surrogate shrines.)
Looking forward to hearing other thoughts. Thanks!
152
« on: July 29, 2022, 02:27:41 PM »
Nice house rules. One clarification: Microbetile:
Placing a follower on this tile opens up new options for further placement. Tiles adjacent to microbetile (not diagonally) are now legible for follower placement, but only to an unclaimed, unfinished feature. Placement on previously placed tiles in the growing “microbezone” is limited to one meeple per subsequent turn, when the player on the microbetile does not take any other “moving wood” during Step2 of the turn?
153
« on: July 28, 2022, 02:08:36 PM »
Allow me to present my masterpiece…
Indeed! +1 merit from me. House rules? Also I somehow missed your amazing meeple tile! Love that one, too.
154
« on: July 23, 2022, 04:05:27 AM »
And I need to stop postponing with all my projects, your tile looks smiliar to one of mine from and unannounced yet big fan expansions, it will have wild flowers, there will be 4 different types of flowers, tokens for players, and similiary they will give +2 for farmers, even without majority + mechanic for other features that I will explain in separate topic. This sounds great! Love the sample tile, I bought these tokens a while ago and did lots of experiments with deploying them to tiles, instead of making new flower tiles. But nothing resulted in a compelling addition.  I’ll be eager to see what you’ve come up with!
155
« on: July 23, 2022, 03:42:07 AM »
I am slightly confused at "in addition to, or instead of,", when would the "instead of" case come into play?
If the player does not score farm points because they do not have majority control, they still get the beekeeper points. I had initially written “…regardless of farmer majority” but thought it wasn’t clear.  I’m open to suggestions for how to say this clearly and concisely. The only suggestion I can think of is maybe making the bees bigger? On a printed tile, they will probably be tiny.
Thanks. I guess since you can’t use the the same scale as the pigs on two of the FRRR tiles, inevitably the bees will be huge, so you may as well just make them clearly visible.
156
« on: July 22, 2022, 10:11:33 PM »
I’ll take a FRRR, please.
File attached 900x900 pixels and also linked from google drive. I tried to keep it simple, using only red poppies hand-sketched in Notability on my iPad, plus a free and unrestricted download from kindpng.com, with everything else done using basic drawing elements in PowerPoint. Comments or suggestions welcomed!  (EDIT: Bigger bees. Smaller bee tile here.) House Rules: - Player may not deploy a thief to any road on the tile for fear of being stung by a bee.
- Player may deploy a farmer in any field on the tile, with the usual restrictions. At final scoring, a farmer on this tile scores +1 for each completed city, regardless of who scores the farm points for having majority control of the field. Everyone loves honey!
people can have more than 1 tile, so we don't have to force 72 people into joining in 
I have a couple more ideas  , but I'm also totally okay if you don't use whatever I end up making. I'll wait to claim the other tiles until I actually do the "art", but they will definitely be just road and field tiles.
157
« on: July 22, 2022, 07:55:39 AM »
One tile per person I presume? We all need to cajole our friends!
158
« on: July 22, 2022, 06:40:13 AM »
+1 merit from me for keeping this alive.
I’ll take a FRRR, please.
159
« on: July 21, 2022, 08:51:00 AM »
@Willem, we're overdue to see a photo (photos?) of the complete museum....
160
« on: July 15, 2022, 12:18:57 PM »
After @Decar convinced me to get a copy of Fjords, it was inevitable that this post would happen. But it isn't mere compulsion: I think the information is also interesting. Here are the tiles, organized by topology of features (Plains / Mountains / Oceans):  The lovely artwork varies on repeats of a given tile type, but the feature connectivity is always the same on a given tile type. Unlike normal Carcassonne and Land vs. Sea, the topology here is best described by focusing not on the edges, but rather on the corners of the tiles, like the 45-Deg Rotated Carcassonne variant of @wolnic. So, the tile in the top right is PMMPOO. Incidentally, in my limited experience, focusing on the corner compatibility makes it much faster to figure out where a tile can fit on the landscape. With three feature types on a six-sided tile, someone who understands Burnside's Lemma (not me) can tell you that there are 92 possible corner configurations, excluding rotational symmetries (assuming I googled it correctly). But the photo above shows only 23 types of tiles! Pretty interesting that the gameplay allows such a limited set of tiles: mountains and oceans are essentially just dividers for the plains and all tiles have a single plains region (except the MMMMMM). Rather than estimating quantities from the shadows in the image above, here is a table of the distribution (some tiles are marked with a small "3" or "4" indicating the minimum number of players for which that tile is to be used):  The rules require that all tile placements touch at least 2 other tile edges, which means they touch 3 corners. So, here is a table of the percentage of tiles on which each of the 27 possible three-corner sequences occur:  One potentially useful fact: if a tile is to connect oceans and mountains, there must be plains between them. Also plains alone or any non-alternating combination of plains and mountains (PPM, MPP, PMM, MMP) are roughly 50/50. One limitation of the table is that you are not allowed to create a disconnected landmass, so even if a tile fits, it might not be playable (e.g., a POOOOO tile cannot be placed in a 2-tile OOO hole, because the land would be a new island). I haven't played enough yet to glean much else from this. The only other observation I'll share is that the revised (2022) rules call players to choose a tile from a "shared hand" of 4 tiles placed face-up on the table. Having watched several YouTube videos of games being played, this really seems to slow things down. I'm going to start learning and playing with the original Carcassonne-like rule of drawing one tile and discarding it if it cannot be placed. Curious to know if anyone with more experience has other insights about the tile distribution. Thanks.
161
« on: July 14, 2022, 09:48:09 AM »
The closest thing I can think of is The Signposts mini expansion, which awards points for roads that continue in the direction indicated at the edge of a tile (left/right/straight). There is no new “mechanic”, just scoring points. Good luck with your development. Be sure to share when it’s done! Also, welcome to the Forum!
162
« on: July 13, 2022, 03:31:38 PM »
…It looks like you're definitely in hex-mode. You should try and play Fjords too!
Great idea: my copy of this year’s Kickstarter Jarl Edition just arrived from ebay:  Here is what it looks like when you put all the wood and tiles in bags (the acrylic runes didn’t come with a bag, so I used the canvas bag I had on hand):  I self-play tested a mini 3-player game. I love it so far: 
163
« on: July 13, 2022, 03:22:44 PM »
@Scott, love the banknotes! Expansion rules forthcoming?…
164
« on: July 11, 2022, 09:41:39 AM »
Oops! A couple of important mistakes in the original post. There are also optional rules for Ship/Caravan and Waypoints, but we didn't use these. Interestingly, when these rules are omitted, the final board position contains all the information to determine the score If you connect two coral tiles with another coral tile to create a 3-tile Reef, you only get the 3 points for that turn. So, the sequence of placement of tiles matters for the Reefs and Ridges: the final landscape does not tell the whole story. I think in our game it was close to the right score when I checked, so I jumped to this conclusion. ...having the right tile is not nearly as important and exciting in this game as it is in a typical Carcassonne game. This is very misleading! In (base game) Carcassonne, if you are get the RCCx tile you are waiting for, you will always connect the two city edges. So the excitement is mostly about whether you get the tile before someone makes it a RCCF hole that you can't fill. That kind of tile-type tension is not nearly as exciting in Land vs. Sea. Occasionally, we had interersting 4-sided or 5-sided holes develop, but the much more common tension centers on dividing neighboring same-type features. In other words, suppose there is an SSSxxx hole and you want to connect two of the "S" sides but isolate the other one, because the two edges complete a Sea area, but the one edge leads to a huge and likely unfinishable Sea. There are plenty of tiles that do this, but no guarantees. Unlike Carcassonne, there is no trapped meeple, so you are only waiting to ensure that you get your points. I think that is a favorable difference for players who don't like "trappy" play--the consequences of incomplete areas are less bad in Sea vs. Land. But the other player can still place a tile that joins all three edges and foils your plans. So, there is tile-drawing tension, but my edge-combination analysis doesn't really help you understand it.  There is more work to do...
165
« on: July 11, 2022, 07:15:55 AM »
Wife and I finished first game with official rules last night:  The game is elegant and beautiful and quite a lot of fun. Think Carcassonne without meeples! Simple summary: - Players maintain a hand of 2 double-sided tiles and take turns placing a tile. Some tiles allow a player to take 2 turns (like the builder) or "steal" a tile from their opponent's hand.
- Players score 1-point/tile when their type of area (Land or Sea) is completed.
- The player who completes an area scores 1-point for each "X" in the area. (Like trade goods except immediate points.)
- The Sea player scores 1-point per connected coral tile when either player places a tile with a coral edge that joins another coral edge. Land scores for connected mountain tiles.
There are also optional rules for Ship/Caravan and Waypoints, but we didn't use these. Interestingly, when these rules are omitted, the final board position contains all the information to determine the score [Edit: this is wrong; see reply]! Tile Description & DistributionThere are 60 double-sided tiles in the box, with 58 tiles placed in two stacks for "drafting" into the players' hands. You can see the top side of tiles in both stacks when drafting, so you have partial information. Players must keep their tiles in front of them with that side face-up, but they may look at the back side. The two non-drafted tiles are: - Start Tile: this is a LLLSSS tile on both sides. I thought it would have been more clever to put a LSLSLS tile on the reverse side, to allow a choice of beginning conditions, particularly because there is no LSLSLS tile in the game!
- Vortex/Volcano Tile: this is the only LLLLLL/SSSSSS tile in the game and it is placed automatically any time a player creates the corresponding hole. I thought this was clever and novel and might be an interesting Carcassonne variant, perhaps with the Cathedral and a RRRR cloister.
There are 14 ways to place two edge types on a hexagonal tile. Here is the distribution, showing both sides of the tiles, as well as the total number of each of the 14 combinations. The non-drafting tiles are omitted, so there are a total of 116 = 2*58 combinations:  I made this figure before playing the game, hoping to get some insight. But it turns out that it didn't seem to matter very much during play. You have four tile sides to choose from on most turns, and my crude "probability of getting a matching tile" analysis showed that the odds are generally very good, so having the right tile is not nearly as important and exciting in this game as it is in a typical Carcassonne game. At least as far as I can tell so far [Edit: this is misleading; see reply] Notes on 2-Player Game Play- Upon reading the rules, I really disliked the two-tile hand. Experience with Carcassonne suggested that this could slow the game terribly, particularly with a few members of my extended family with whom I might try to play the game. I also just thought it was inelegant and unnecessary. I was wrong. I discovered through self-play testing that without the two-tile hand, areas are too difficult to close and the game devolves to a battle to close one huge area. So, we played official rules, as noted above. It turns out that often having the tile you want actually allows play to move plenty fast.
- The "X" rule is great. You can often complete an opponent's small area to minimize a loss, or even score a small win, because some tiles have 2 or 3 X's on them. Note that 5X's represents a 10-point swing in relative score.
- Although the Coral/Mountain rule is optional, it is really essential. Building a Reef/Range really racks up points: in the game shown above, Sea scores 2+3+4+5+6+7+8=35 points total for the 8-tile Reef, while Land scores 2+3=5 several times for Ranges. The threat of a massive scoring run should compel an opponent to block a growing Reef/Range, leaving a player time to complete a large open area, particularly if they get a "Play Again" tile.
This last point and many others are in an amazing post on BGG, by someone who is somehow associated with the game. In addition to a nice summary of tactics and strategy, the post says that a strategy book is in development as well. Multi-Player VariantsI haven't tried the asymmetric 3-player game yet, nor the 4-player team version. Since I strongly prefer to play Carcassonne as a multi-player game, I'm really interested to see how this goes. I know a lot of folks on the Forum prefer Carcassonne as a 2-player game, and I think many of you would really enjoy Land vs. Sea as well.
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