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September 15, 2005

CTIN 534 -- Pachisi Mod Review

For Bernie's class last week, we made our own mods of Pachisi and playtested the mods created by other groups. My thoughts...

Cops & Robbers

A classic chase theme that fits with the simple mechanics of Pachisi. However, our playtest group had a difficult time with this game because the board was not clearly marked, which made it difficult to determine the objectives, which in turn made it difficult to determine what strategy, if any, could be used. On first glance, it seems as if the game was stacked against the cops given that the robbers only need to have one piece escape in order to win. However, due to chance in our particular game, all the cops got out early while most of the robbers remained stuck at their starting point because of unlucky dice rolls, and the game balance quickly tipped in the other direction, becoming nearly impossible for the robbers to win. Additionally, the incentive for creating blockades or starting fires never seemed to present itself. The game would have benefited greatly from some preliminary playtesting.

On another note, I noticed that players for the first game of Cops & Robber filled up early because of the donut snack, and ensuing players were eager to play for the same reason. Goes to show what marketing and tie-ins can do.

Coattails

The action of getting ahead at the expense of your opponents quickly generated a lot of competitive spirit. However, without a mechanism for players to defend against this (other than your opponents getting crappy die rolls), our game degenerated into a cycle of players continually being sent back to the center, never really able to make much progress on the board.

The mechanics of this game seem to lend itself better to a "Backstabbing" rather than a "Coattails-Riding" theme (i.e., "you can get ahead by harming your opponents, but what comes around goes around"). Perhaps a better general mechanic that would fit in with this theme would be that, rather than allowing you to bowl through opponents before you, each die roll (and subsequently steps advanced) you make also advances everyone in your lane that's behind you.

Pachisi of Verona

The fiction for this game was quite creative and thought-provoking. On first glance, the idea of coupling pieces seemed quite cute and whimsical, but on further inspection, it became apparent that the theme was cynical, and even mildly disturbing when projected on certain game scenarios. Granted that pieces "in love" advance around the board faster than other pieces but here in this game world, once they are coupled, they are uncontrollable and all player strategy goes out the window (which in my mind, is a bad thing, especially when the only action available to the player to combat this loss of control is also predicated on a slim chance), and if they "elope" there is absolutely no benefit to the player, essentially disappearing from the game world.

In my game, I was doing everything I could to prevent my pieces from "falling in love" and running off like idiot children into the vortex of nothingness that awaited them (if another relative didn't intercept them and knock some sense into their heads in time). The only strategy I could think of that would take advantage of this couples mechanic was to send a piece far ahead, then have a lagging piece "fall in love," and hope that the advance piece could catch the couple as they raced by to their doom. So during the game, I did my best to avoid the dogged marriage attempts of the preceding player (Mihai, you bastard), while frantically racing one piece ahead. When I finally decided that the advance piece was far enough ahead to be in place to blockade the running couple, of course that's when he lands on another piece and has the misfortune of "falling in love" himself (I could imagine my piece screaming, "I am fortune's fool!" as, after all his efforts to save his siblings, he reluctantly begins his own race into oblivion). Ah, the foibles of love.

Posted by hyang at September 15, 2005 09:17 AM

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