Re: MG Design Contest winner

["mschoessow" <mikeschoessow@...>]

--- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, Dave Boyle <dboyle@...> wrote:
>
> The winner:  Piecepack Letterbox, by Ron Hale-Evans
>


Great job Ron! I haven't yet played the game but from a read of the
rules it sounds like a lot of fun. My impression is that the game is
sort of a cross between a party game and a good designer board game,
combining aspects of both; social interaction and humor combined
with thought-out moves and strategic planning.

I particulary admire the scoring system, the cleverest aspect of
which, in my opinion,is the awarding of 1 point for each other
player who finds your own letter box. At a glance it seemed to me at
first that players should be striving to find other player's boxes
while keeping their own well hidden to keep the scores of other
players low, so initially I felt that players should <lose> a point
for each other player who finds their box. In fact at first Steve
and I wondered if there was a misprint in the rules. We were
discussing how it seemed to us that the game would be way too
sensitive to the relative difficulty of the initial clues, to such
an extent that the game might even be effectively broken (at this
time we were assuming that players were actually supposed to lose a
point when another player found their box). However shortly
thereafter it became clear why players receive <positive> points
when other players find their boxes; it's because this neatly
precludes a clue sensitivity problem. Very nice!

We did find ourselves a bit confused by the tie breaking rules
description. It's not clear how ties can be broken by awarding the
win to the player who has visited the most letterboxes, since the
game always ends the moment one player (in a 4-player game) finds 3
letterboxes. I believe this is the same as just saying that in the
case of a points tie, the player who ended the game wins and that
would make sense, but if that's true, then why is there the need for
another level of tie-breaking beyond that? I suspect I may know what
the rules intention is but I don't think it's completely clear as
written. Question: does the word "winner" in the first sentence of
that section mean <exactly> the same thing as the word "winner" in
the second sentence?

On another subject, I'll be interested to hear what you think of
Tapestry when you play it.

-Mike