Sky Traders and Game Design

Regarding the rules:
Quotes from the rulebook:
"As long as the time runs, players can attempt to negotiate with each other, trying to sell their dice, buy dice from other players, give them away for free, or arrange a promise to use the dice in a certain way. Players can offer any amount of GP, goods, or Crew cards they own. In other words, players should use their best trading skills to get the dice they desire."

"Note: After the player resolves this phase, phases 2, 3 and 4 must be completed within two minutes!"

So I do think those elements are pretty clear in the book. That you are supposed to negotiate and you are supposed to use a turn time limit.

Regarding playing super-fat, I do agree with that. And there is an option to attack another player's ship, pillage some of their stuff and cause them to lose half their gold. But it also doesn't seem like people pursue that option because it comes at the cost of sacrificing your points during the turn to bash on the other person.

Thinking about it, Risk I think falls into the a same trap this game has fallen into. When I play Risk with people the tendency is to build, build, build...But not move towards the overall goal of World Domination - And then the games get blasted for being too long because people are working towards a different goal than the win condition goal.

There is no responsibility to a player to make sure they're playing the game as intended. But it is in the designer's interest to push players into playing the game a certain way...So how does a designer coax players into certain behavior patterns? Because what I've noticed with Sky Traders, it seems like all the bad opinions are by people that either weren't or didn't want to play a certain way.

And after reading the rules, it actually sounds like a pretty fun, simple and straight forward pick up and deliver game. What I've also found interesting is that the designer has released the Director's Cut which is how he claims the game was supposed to be played (kind of throwing the developer under the bus). Also player screens were released as a pdf so you can hid your info which to me only matters when people are ignoring the 2 minute timer and number crunching everyone's current status.

Shellhead wrote: I hate it when economic games use victory points instead of cash to measure winning. Buying victory points is a fundamental failure of theme. Perhaps people sometimes play games differently than the designer intended, simply because the designer did a poor job of designing suitable rules to express the theme.

The theme is that you're buying influence within some sort of traders guild which will raise your rank and once you've contributed a certain dollar amount you've bought the presidency so to speak. So I do think it has a thematic tie.

Also, as you raise in rank it allows you to set your dice (instead of rolling them) which gives you greater control of the market prices in things.

But I do agree with premise that buying VPs to convert them into an unusable commodity is pretty weak.

VonTush wrote: As I was reading I started to see this disconnect between how the designer wanted the game to play and how it was actually getting played.

I often wonder how much of that is due to experience and/or preconceptions.

I've had games of Bohnanza where a player was mad at the end because they couldn't plant any big crops. I've had games of Traders of Genoa where a player was mad because they couldn't complete any orders. I've had games of Settlers where a player was mad because nobody would trade with them. Usually it's because that player wasn't any good at the game, but with repeat plays I think they'd do much better.

My most recent City of Remnants game played out really strangely because two of the players were new. One player declared himself "out of the game" by the 3rd turn because he had gotten hit particularly hard by the Yugai Security Forces draws. I've never felt that City of Remnants is a game you are ever really "out of", simply because there are so many ways to harass the other players and doing so with a little negotiation on the side can almost always get you back in the game. Another strange thing about that particular game was that even though I (emphatically) explained before we started that each player's starting deck tends to be geared towards a certain strategy, and gave an example of the red deck's strength, nobody other than me bothered to do anything with that tidbit of information. I was the only player who did take advantage of my starting deck's strengths and by mid-game half the table was claiming that the game doesn't feel balanced because they weren't able to recruit as well as I was and I had way more units on the board than they did and that yellow probably needs to be house-ruled. It left a bad taste in my mouth about how the game was played, because I suspect at least two of the people at the table won't play the game again and use their experience to play better next time.

For what it's worth: I think City of Remnants is an example of a game where the way the designer intended the game to be played is also the most successful way to play, but people tend to come into it thinking, "I've seen all these mechanics before." Preconceptions and lack of experience result in poor play.

When I learn a game I'll often deviate from what other players are doing just to try a novel strategy even if it isn't optimal. I've also found that not playing as expected pisses some people off, and I wonder if sometimes other players' preconceptions are putting them in a strategy rut.

That's funny about Yellow in City of Remnants...I almost always play yellow, and it's one of the few games I win. If you play yellow as an economic engine, you'll have a good shot at winning.If you try to bully others, you'll lose because they aren't as strong at combat/warfare as red and green.

DUH.

Sagrilarus wrote:

charlest wrote: If you want people to buy VP but they think the cost is just not worth it, then your incentives are not clear enough (or strong enough possibly).

. . . or that you need to play the game at least twice to get the hang of it before going to the Internet to post your opinions on it.

Absolutely. My comment is assuming the players have played the game multiple times and fully understand how it works. Not understanding strategic implications in one or two plays definitely does not mean the game was designed poorly. However, if they've played it 3 or 4 times and still are not finding a good enough reason to buy VP, then something is very wrong.

Soft rules are never going to work these days. You really got to enforce your rules. If you fail to do so and players do not play as you intended, that's bad design. This is especially when you're working with Euros or simulation.

I'm not familiar with the game, but based on your description this is clearly on the designer.

It sounds like there may be a learning curve for the players to learn the strategy involved in the game (when to buy VP's, when to hoard, in this case). But the quality of those first few plays is critical.

It's OK if players aren't close to winning the first few times they play because they're using bad strategy. But it's not good if everyone picking a less-than-optimal strategy makes the game outstay it's welcome. That's clearly a design issue that should have been picked up in playtesting.

And does the game have a two minute timer for that phase? If it doesn't, if the rules just say "this phase lasts two minutes", that's also a bad call either by the designer or publisher. Without a sandtimer or some other thing that says "this time constraint is serious", players won't use it 99% of the time.