Re: piecepack design workshop #2: Stations v1.2 by Michael Schoessow

["Mark Goadrich" <mark.goadrich@...>]

I finally got a game of Stations in on Monday, after reading through
the comments already made to make sure I had the up-to-date version.
Counting the corners around a tile as spaces made sense, I'm glad the
change was made. There's definitely some details to wrap your head
around with the negative space of network connections, I'll have to
play it again to see how different strategies work out; somehow Brett
scored about 30 points, while I was at 120...

I think it would be helpful to have a picture showing how there could
be two disconnected networks.  From the starting board position, it
wasn't immediately obvious to us, only near the end of the game when
we could seal off a pocket of roads in the middle due to earlier
shifts did this rule make sense.

It seemed as though a first-player advantage would be mitigated by the
second player making the last move, which could be devastating (as in
our game making every path doubled for me) with the first player not
having a chance to respond and repair their network.

It felt like I should be trying to bluff somewhat, since I was putting
my coins face-down, but that didn't enter into our game at all. But if
we had put them face up, we wouldn't know who actually played which
coin.  Maybe each player could use one set of coins for the numbers,
and another set for marking their suit, so a move is placing two coins
on a tile, one faceup with a number, one facedown for your suit. I
didn't try any variants, but I would be in favor of having the
standard game be the old Variant 2, where all coins are worth 1, and
plan to try that version out next.

Thanks for the intriguing game, Mike, hope these comments are helpful,

Mark


--- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, "Mike Schoessow"
<mikeschoessow@c...> wrote:
>
> Thanks Clark for the additional comments. I'm not sure that my
preference is necessarily for the simplest version being the standard
game, although that becomes attractive if the simplest version is also
one of the better versions.
>
> ....