Stronghold-An AT/Euro Worker Placement Game?

Well, the bird has most certainly flown the coop. You mean here I am, on a F:AT forum and everyone is OK with this???? I am actually having to try and convince people of this?

Sorry not me. Wooden cubes and victory points to me are inexpensive and often thoughtless ways to reduce the theme,cost, visuals, story arc and the objective of a game.

I can't believe I am making that point...here.

Am I on "opposite" day????

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BTW, I think wooden cubes and victory points are OK for a lot of games. Ticket to Ride is one of my favorites. But c,mon guys... Really. Tom Vasel might has well just commandeer the joint.

Well, he can't..because that would be an actual objective.

So 25,000 F:AT Victory Points for Tom instead.

IS RYAN B. IMPLODING?

Come on Bretsch, you know that we're probably the most tolerant bunch of gamers out there...as long as the game is good and actually means something.

Sorry not me. Wooden cubes and victory points to me are inexpensive and often thoughtless ways to reduce the theme,cost, visuals, story arc and objective of a game.

I agree, but I don't think they're willfully used as a reductivist element outside of cost-savings. I'd really rather see something like this game with cardboard counters, but in wooden cubes' defense (!), they are easy to see and identify without going whole hog into plastic miniatures. I'd rather the game be done in full 3-D with a giant castle wall and fully scuplted minis, but it ain't gonna happen.

Michael Barnes wrote:

IS RYAN B. IMPLODING?

YES! I am!

BOOM. Wooden cubes everywhere.

I really like this bit from the second design journal

In the beginning I’m not worried about the mechanics in the slightest. I don’t make a draft for a nice bidding idea, nor do I take notes regarding an interesting way of drawing cards. I drive my car, listen to some nice music, and imagine people playing a game. I think about what emotions I want to achieve, I think about what I’d like them to be doing during the game. I imagine the whole match. Afterwards I will come up with rules, which will provide the sensations and emotions that I dreamt about.

It sounds like I really need to play NS Hex.

Michael Barnes wrote:

but in wooden cubes' defense (!), they are easy to see and identify without going whole hog into plastic miniatures.

What????

metalface13 wrote:

You should check out the Designer Diaries on BGN

Designer Diary 1

Designer Diary 2

The inspiration comes from a famous WWII battle where a few Polish soldiers held off a lot of Germans for a real long time (sorry I'm skimpy on the details, I'm no WWII historian).

For me victory points make sense in a siege setting. But I always think they do in war oriented games because there is more to war than just killing all the other dudes on the map.

Um, both links take me to Dale Yu telling me about how he's going on a cruise.

Let's try this again

www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgam...ournal_1_stronghold/

www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgam...the_eyes_of_my_soul/

metalface13 wrote:

I really like this bit from the second design journal

In the beginning I’m not worried about the mechanics in the slightest. I don’t make a draft for a nice bidding idea, nor do I take notes regarding an interesting way of drawing cards. I drive my car, listen to some nice music, and imagine people playing a game. I think about what emotions I want to achieve, I think about what I’d like them to be doing during the game. I imagine the whole match. Afterwards I will come up with rules, which will provide the sensations and emotions that I dreamt about.

It sounds like I really need to play NS Hex.

Neuroshima Hex! is awesome. Players need to adapt to a changing board, make most of tile draws, time fights and big moves carefully, and all while taking into account the assymetry of forces. Lots of flavour and variation in the game.

Michael Barnes wrote:
" The VP thing makes perfect sense for a siege game. If one side manages to incur enough VPs, they either break the siege or cause a surrender or overrun. Blow up a wall, 5vp. Archers take down the whole battering ram crew, 3vp. Enough VPs and you win. That makes sense to me on a thematic level."
Perfect sense? Rubbish! How does this work on a thematic level? A siege is very black and white, either the castle is captured or the siege is broken. Adding VPs just to give shades of victory or defeat is merely adding fiddliness just for the sake of it. (Very Knizia.) What is the purpose other than something artificial?
" What's more, the worker placement thing actually works. You've got X number of defenders or attackers, and you can assign them to different positions. Boiling oil, trebuchets, archers, door-bracers, whatever. If you lose guys throughout the course of the game, that will make the decisions tougher."
Totally agree with this though, it has a basis in reality.

metalface13 wrote:
" For me victory points make sense in a siege setting. But I always think they do in war oriented games because there is more to war than just killing all the other dudes on the map."
Not for me on this scale. For Siege of Jerusalem it works okayish, Stronghold looks a lot smaller. Thanks for the links by the way, I'd already found the first, but the second was more interesting.

I wish it didn't have a fantasy element though, I'd much prefer it to be plain medieval.

Notahandle wrote:

Perfect sense? Rubbish! How does this work on a thematic level? A siege is very black and white, either the castle is captured or the siege is broken. Adding VPs just to give shades of victory or defeat is merely adding fiddliness just for the sake of it. (Very Knizia.) What is the purpose other than something artificial?

Actually, a siege can be won without losing a single man. It's was a very common strategy to merely surround the castle and cut off their supplies. How do you abstract that in to a black/white game? Also, if the besieged repel an assault, do they win? What about two assults? What's stopping the attackers from coming at them again? The difficulty in designing a true siege game is that it's tough to define when the siege is successful. You could have the attackers sitting back trying to starve them out, and at the same time, have the defenders sitting back and turtling in their castle. Everyone sitting back makes for a pretty dull game.

Provided there's a battle, it's pretty obvious that a breach in the wall equals good things for the attacker. Although, if it's anything like Helms Deep, the attackers breaching the walls does not necessarily equal victory. The defenders can close the hole, support troops can flank the attackers, etc... So does two holes in the wall equal victory? Three?

I always thought of Twilight Struggle scoring as a teeter-totter instead of VPs. Rather than moving the VP chit you're putting more weight on one side or the other. How bitchin' would it be to have a teeter-totter and set of red and blue weights and have it all calibrated so that it tips over when one side has 20 more than the other?

clockwirk wrote:
" Actually, a siege can be won without losing a single man. It's was a very common strategy to merely surround the castle and cut off their supplies. How do you abstract that in to a black/white game?"
Because the defenders surrender, obviously!
" Also, if the besieged repel an assault, do they win? What about two assults? What's stopping the attackers from coming at them again? The difficulty in designing a true siege game is that it's tough to define when the siege is successful."
If the attackers withdraw from the field then it's over. If they're still around the castle readying for another assault then it clearly is still besieged.
" You could have the attackers sitting back trying to starve them out, and at the same time, have the defenders sitting back and turtling in their castle. Everyone sitting back makes for a pretty dull game."
Both are realistic tactics. For a game, I'd choose not to play in such a boring way and avoid opponents who did. (I'm not keen on rules that are there just to prevent boring play.)
" Provided there's a battle, it's pretty obvious that a breach in the wall equals good things for the attacker. Although, if it's anything like Helms Deep, the attackers breaching the walls does not necessarily equal victory. The defenders can close the hole, support troops can flank the attackers, etc... So does two holes in the wall equal victory? Three?"
No.

generalpf wrote:
" I always thought of Twilight Struggle scoring as a teeter-totter instead of VPs. Rather than moving the VP chit you're putting more weight on one side or the other. How bitchin' would it be to have a teeter-totter and set of red and blue weights and have it all calibrated so that it tips over when one side has 20 more than the other?"
Beseige has something like this. It's a track and you play cards to move the attacker forward or backward. Attacker starts in castle A, defender in castle B. If the marker gets to the defenders end then the attacker wins and he then attacks castle C. If the defender wins then the roles are reversed and he attacks castle A. The game winner is therefore the one who successfully attacks two castles in succession.

Ryan B. wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote:

but in wooden cubes' defense (!), they are easy to see and identify without going whole hog into plastic miniatures.

What????

I've had to *add* wooden cubes to a few games--Twilight Struggle being the most notorious--to replace unidentifiable cardboard counters. [To mark control in the case of TS.]

And, in fact, since I pillaged my wooden cubes from a vintage 1965 copy of Risk instead of buying precision-cut cubes from some online vendor in Germany, I think I get MORE AT points for tying the Alpha and Omega of world domination games together in a single box.

So there!

ubarose wrote:

Wouldn't this be a military unit deployment game, rather than a worker placement game?

And why is it that assigning dudes to man a wall, or ram the gate is more exciting and thematic to me than sending a dude to gather sticks? Maybe worker placement games would be less boring if your dudes could get attacked by bears while gathering those sticks, or get crushed mining for rocks.

Well...if you use the X-deck from Spielbox, your 16th century German dirt farmers can be abducted by aliens. What could be more AT than a game that turns rectal probes loose on your poor unsuspecting avatars?


I can't actually believe I typed *any* of that....

Dogmatix wrote:

And, in fact, since I pillaged my wooden cubes from a vintage 1965 copy of Risk instead of buying precision-cut cubes from some online vendor in Germany, I think I get MORE AT points for tying the Alpha and Omega of world domination games together in a single box. So there!

2,000 F:AT Victory Points awarded.