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June 29, 2004

TrashCon

Matt's regular TrashCon party was over the weekend and I made it on Friday evening and Saturday. I had a nice time with the board games and a bunch of close Tichu games with comeback wins but the party games (Celebrities on Friday evening and Rob's Haste Worte game on Saturday) I didn't think went great. This turns out to be a quite long commentary about why; sorry about that.

For Celebrities, the same problems as usual come up: 1) The game result is almost completely determined by the random team selction - I got two partners who knew very little and we did poorly every round as expected. 2) The 'theme decks' people put in do NOT help the game. Jerry put in 6 baseball players and it isn't much fun trying to distinguish between them. People also put in obscure people that almost nobody has ever heard of (and not uncommonly make it worse by getting their names wrong) so that drawing these people is a disaster and hugely benefits the person who put it in since he is the only person in the game with any real chance of guessing it. 3) The crowd at this event has a few people who really want to engage in petty rule arguments that drive 90% of the people absolutely crazy and unfortunately as I know the game best I often get drawn into these arguments despite my hate for them. This time I at least avoided that. I think with this group a moderator with total authority is the only solution to this. The difference between the quick, laid back, no rules arguments game of this (well, Time's Up) the prior week in Atlanta and this was like night and day - the Atlanata play I'd rate a 9 and this one like a 4.

Rob's Haste Worte game unfortunately also had some issues, some of which were problems Rob could avoid and others probably not. First off, for every category Rob needs to be really clear about the rules, particularly the IMHO stupid rule about shared words between answers eliminating ALL of those answers. I would suggest just tossing this rule but Rob does the worst thing of all and sometimes applies it and sometimes doesn't. I understand why he does this but if he is going to do this, he needs to be incredibly clear when announcing the category what the ruling on this issue for this category will be. He also needs to be incredibly clear how specific answers must be and then consistently apply that ruling; both of these things turned out to be a huge issue for the Olympic Events category. Another issue is that he needs to have arranged all the possible answers into a listing where he can check answers incredibly quickly as the answering part of the game massively slows the game down. For the Olympics question, he claimed at first the USA didn't win a medal in Sydney in the Decathlon which I knew was wrong but despite an objection, he didn't find this and fix it until several teams later. Eliminating the duplicate word rule would also speed this up. He also needs to accept answers not on his list if a large group of people on multiple teams agree they are a legitimate answer - with a good category this shouldn't be any issue as he should have a definitive list. In a 150+ minute game, teams spent like 24 minutes thinking of answers and this just won't do.

I was personally also pretty annoyed with my team over the bidding. On the very first answer I, who was definitely the most experienced at the game and who best understood the bidding scheme, told them that we should go 4 as we would definitely get it but 5 would be quite risky (and this is an all or nothing game). They decided to go 5 and we got only 4 (and would have trivially gotten 4 if we had bid that as would have gone much earlier). However, having messed this one up, they then wanted to be conservative which is the wrong approach as we are now in last place and need to catch up. I was fortunately able to convince enough people to make a reasonable bid most times although sometimes had to guarantee in advance we would make it (which was always correct, although sometimes very close). However, when it came to the WorldCon Guests of Honor question, a question which I was almost certainly the most knowledgable person in the room about, a majority of the team refused to bid more than 3 when I had no doubts whatever about 4 and felt we could go 5 with little risk. We of course made our 3. However, after ALL teams had scored their points, I looked at Rob's list and it turned out we had 5 more answers nobody had said so we could have gone 8, not that even I wanted to do that.

Posted by aarondf at June 29, 2004 02:40 PM

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