They’ve just released 0.15 (up to 0.15.2 for some bugfixes). I’m sitting here waiting impatiently for it to download. Nuclear power, rebalanced combat, a ‘marathon’ mode (critical items take a lot more materials to build), and prebuilt settings for various styles of play….

It is a sign of good sportsmanship on my part that I didn’t skip gaming to download it yesterday (when it released), but that’s only because I’d promised that I’d teach High Frontier.

Update — It’s slower going (7 types of science instead of 4 — and purple science is no longer “stuff you get for free by killing natives”). I’ve got a horrible spaghetti maze because I haven’t been looking ahead. I should probably punt, but my goal is to use this base as a starting point for a big base, so its ok. But I do like many things:

• Flamethrowers are still good, but much more expensive. Bullets have been buffed, because they were terrible.
• Infinite science (even if some of it seems to be a bad deal, like mining productivity).
• Lots of quality of life fixes (showing oil patches underground, etc).

I need to get logistics bots for this factory. It’s not pretty. Gotta find a new copper patch, too. Have basically run out.

Epistemic status : high confidence in the meta level slightly lower in the toy level and low in the object level
Secret information in this context means information known to one player (or party) that is NOT known by the other player (or party).

Large amount of economic behavior such as signaling can be thought of as secret information. In this context the secret information can be thought of as a skill such as ability to do math. The owner of the secret information (often known as the agent) uses this information and try’s to show the principle that they posses the quality, through costly signals. (if the signal were not costly everybody would do it therefore it would cease to be a good signal).

Secret information in board games

Board games use secret information all the time,it’s a great way for the game designer to introduce randomness while not sacrificing agency of the players. Take for example the game poker. Texas hold’em gives players 2 hole cards, these hole cards are hidden from the other players. The fact that you know that they DON’t know what your hole cards are has profound impact on gameplay. a player can see themselves as the guy who 3bet rather than as the guy with pocket aces. The secret information in this case is what I refer to as randomly assigned information. With this sort of information, the player can inform their decision to maximise the information asymetry present, and also try to deduce the information that the other players have. This deduction as one may notice from that video is about narrowing the possibility space to determine what isn’t possible. in a game like chess the possibility space of what has happened in the past is already determined. So such deduction about what previously happened is unecessary. The difference is that in a game like poker, the web of gameplay has impact on what the current game state actually is. For example, there is a big difference between starting 100BB deep, and 3 betting for 6 BB (making a total of 12BB in pot) and then betting half pot on a J46 rainbow and getting called, compared to calling a 4x raise and then potting on a J46 Rainbow and getting called, even though at the end there is the same amount of money in the pot and the same cards have shown up. The web of previous actions is connected to the web of actions after.

Utilizing Secret information (in board games)

When a player is dealt secret information that secret information should dictate their play. When playing magic a common play is to bluff attack with a 2/2 into a 4/4 with the assumption that you have Giant Growth in hand, if you do have giant growth then your opponent suffers greatly, but if you get your bluff attack called they will eat your 2/2 with no compensation. So how can a player get their 2/2’s blocked when they have giant growth but not get them blocked when they don’t? Well they can’t, but a player can employ universe assesment (blogpost to be made later) you attack in the situation where if your attack get’s blocked you were going to lose the game anyway, or you had little chance. And you non-bluff attack in the situation where you have giant growth. Notably one does NOT bluff attack in the situation where the game is slightly favorable but they will fall behind if their bluff get’s called, because in that situation the bluff value is low. Notably they aren’t “soul reading” their opponent, you are looking at the current gamestate and determining “does the value in bluffing outweigh the downsides of when bluffs get called? The answer can often be “no” but is also frequently “yes”.

It is also of note that if you are on the reciving end of a bluff attack, one should consider the state of their hand. examples of such reasoning follow

“my hand sucks, I won’t beat him if he has giant growth anyway, but if he doesn’t have giant growth then the edge I gain from blocking the bluff attack is large especially if his hand is garbage as well, then I actually may steal a win from a game that actually is even”

“my hand and deck are awesome in this spot, I can’t lose unless I make a bad block in this spot if I don’t block I lose nothing, but if I do block I could lose the game”

“My hand is ok, if his hand is the type of hand that would bluff attack, then either his hand is attrocious (and wouldn’t win anyway, he’s just making this attack to cover the spots when he has giant growth) or his hand is medium but he has a bad lategame and needs to push through a good amount of extra damage. his hand could be a giant growth hand with a useless land and a 2 drop, which I do beat if I cast my next spell but I don’t beat if I block, if he has a good hand and a giant growth I lose no matter what, so may as well ignore that possibility…”

The last example while complicated should illustrate how complex the decision making can get when you introduce uncertainty and secret information. Players use their own secret information to make the decision and base their decisions on the information they have rather as well as elimination of possible universes from the opponents possibility space.

Using secret information in real life.

In real life we can use secret information in a number of ways, we can take the same principle from board games that our actions reveal information about the information we have. Signaling in economics is when a person makes a decision that reveals information about the type of person they are. You can use signaling to show for example if you are a person with high IQ, by going to App academy or college straight out of high school.

We can also do the reverse, take signals given to us from other’s sets of information about them and use those signals to guide our behavior. The secret information of somebody’s skill as an engineer is important information to obtain. One could hunt for engineers by offering high compensation to those who are willing to take a 1 month trial run where an employer determines the employee’s productivity. Those productive engineers would be delighted to take such an opportunity, but lower quality ones would certainly consider such trial runs to not turn out well. As such only engineers above a certain caliber would even bother showing up.

In situations where competition is zero sum (or nearly so) one can use the lines of reasoning in the magic the gathering examples, go over what the other side Doesn’t have given their previous actions, and go over what you don’t have given your previous actions. Iteration over this process may help leading to understanding what is and isn’t going to happen.

Thank’s for reading my first blog post, I hope this post was useful to you, comment on my blog about what I could do better. Seriously just comment any comment at all no matter what it talks about would be extremely useful to me for future posting.

(Update — Fixed some typos, fleshed out thoughts, added links. Also, I don’t wish to imply that Mombasa or Jump Drive are bad. I like both. I use them because I played them during the same week).

During my time at the Gathering, I played 31 games. Eclipse, Colonists and 3 plays of High Frontier took roughly 21 hours. The remaining 26 games took about 20 hours.

I spent my first two games of High Frontier doing terribly. I earned 1VP apart from Heroism (aka “The Challenger Explosion card” aka “Pity Points”).

Suppose winning just involved earning VPs at a fixed rate (ignoring opponents). It takes about 40 VP to win High Frontier, so I would ‘win’ after four hundred hours of gameplay.

Let’s flip that around. Wins/hour. For those first two games I earned 0.0025 WPH.

Among the other games I played were Mombasa and Jump Drive. For Mombasa I earned about .7 WPH, since I generated enough VP to win in my game, which was about 1.5 hours. A nice rate. My Jump Drive rate was 4 WPH for the Gathering, slightly higher than my typical 3 wins per hour. But I taught the game twice.

So, for 10 hours of High Frontier (roughly 1/4 of my gaming time) I was arguably the least effective game-player in all of the gathering. I’d have to go to ten gatherings to eke out a single win. (I have some true anti-skill in that game. But I did eventually get a bit better). Apparently I did OK in my only game with second edition (although it left me cold), but we did the fast start, so I may have randomly gotten a good setup.

Of course Wins Per Hour is a somewhat ludicrous idea. Isn’t it? It seems obvious, but winning isn’t the problem. And we routinely praise games for being “tight” or “fast” or having a high decision density.

I was already pondering the similarities between High Frontier (the current hotness) and Factorio (the current hotness is not necessarily a singular). I mean, they both have Rockets, but there were other similarities. I’d been thinking about it (vaguely) even before Jeroen asked me to pitch Factorio to him over breakfast. One of the random thoughts I blurted out was its old school scoring. (It was a long pitch. In my defense, I had previously warned him that if he asked about Factorio he should set aside a day for my answer).

Anyway, old school scoring. Launching one rocket (aka “Winning”) gives you a score of …. one. Its like how the original pinball machines had scores like 1-2-3 for each bumper, but now you get a million points for simply launching the ball. But after you get on the scoreboard in Factorio, you can keep going.

Factorio is optimization, but you are free to decide what to optimize:

1) Speed (the speedrun: how fast can you win?)

2) Throughput (how many rockets per unit time can you get? This can be subdivided to a final sprint, ignoring the setup time, or over the lifetime of your game).

3) Size (How small a factory can you get a rocket out of. This is currently a challenge on Reddit. Yes, these rockets would take roughly one year of real time to be built, but they are ludicrously small factories).

There are others. People play without using robots (or just logistic robots, or just personal robots), or without lasers, or trains. Some play peaceful, some play Deathworld. Factorio has a victory condition, but people often ignore it. You can keep playing after you win. It’s a sandbox. You make what you want. I’m watching “The Belt Diva” on youtube, and its like watching Bob Ross. Happy little conveyer belts. She wants to build a mega base. I have no idea if she’ll launch a rocket. Does it matter?

Mombasa is not a sandbox. Neither is Jump Drive. You could argue that High Frontier isn’t a sandbox either, it has VP and end game conditions, but the standard criticism again Eklund’s games is: “Great simulations with arbitrary endgame/VPs attached.” (The latest edition of High Frontier’s scoring seems reasonable and at about the right time).

Ignore the victory conditions for High Frontier and just play with the system and it would still work. (Also true of American Mega Fauna, or other games like Seven Ages. You could just tell people to play in the best interest of their species/nation and not the actual victory conditions).

You could add self imposed conditions on your game. Only use solar sails, or “try to get out to Neptune with only basic cards,” or “Make the Kessel Run in 7 parsecs.” For any Eklund game, you could take a reasonable goal (“Expand your species,” “Become President of Mexico,” “Kessel Run”) and if you achieved it, who cared what the VPs said?

High Frontier feels like a sandbox (much like all Sierra Madre games).

Can you do that with a Euro? I suppose you could just say “I’m trying to maximize my red cubes and not VP” But that seems silly. The goal is to maximize VP.

Objectively, there’s no difference. You lose, the other players win. You may throw the game by being silly. But in a sandbox game it feels acceptable.

You might not even mess up the other players. (If you didn’t mention you had mentally altered your victory conditions, they might not even notice, assuming you chose something ‘reasonable’) We’ve already quietly accepted the premise that in a sandbox game the VPs are somewhat not the point when we criticize the poor victory conditions in otherwise good games.

We wouldn’t play a Euro similarly broken. Wouldn’t make sense.

I once knew someone who built a Magic deck with 58 islands, 1 mountain and 1 fireball. (Several of my readers should remember him). The point was to build a deck that could theoretically win (if you drew the mountain, the fireball, and then managed to play 20 lands). He’d pull this deck and lose and lose to people who often did not notice that their opponent never did anything except play islands. He was truly Andy Kaufman, CCG player.

Or perhaps Stanley Milgram.

When I’m losing a game like High Frontier (or Combat Commander, or Seven Ages, or Here I Stand), I may flounder and grasp for a way out of my situation, but I feel perfectly happy just exploring the system even though the time invested is well out of proportion to what I’d normally give to a game.

I’ve dismissed countless games after one play (or less), games I’ve won included. Games I won especially. Those tend to fail the test of time (unless everyone was new).  A game where I can beat experienced players probably isn’t that deep, or has too much luck.

Whereas games I lost repeatedly include Titan, 18xx, Magic Realm (counting dying as a loss), Chess, Go, Bridge.

Clearly, I’m not optimizing my wins per hour. Knizia has that quote….

When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning

Pretty Zen, but I get (and approve) the idea. Those guys who crushed that sub-sub-Mendoza line Magic deck and chortled and kept playing it again and again to rack up wins? Not great gamers.

But is the goal really to win? Usually, yes. When I played American Megafauna with non-existent or terribly wrong Victory Conditions, I don’t recall having less fun. In High Frontier I started out trying to win. Mainly I was trying to do something constructive. A Winning-adjacent goal.

Some play games to explore systems, but that requires a system worth exploring. Which is not to say that Mombasa or Jump Drive’s design is not deep. Just (relatively) transparent. You can argue about the best path to winning, but that path is well defined. With Combat Commander or Magic Realm or High Frontier, you aren’t sure what’s going to happen, and sometimes the joy is just in unlocking the secret or even seeing that rocket take flight. In fact, defining the direction of the path is surprisingly hard … the player that did best may be the one that lost, according to the rules. It’s like that old Supreme Court definition of pornography. You know who won when you played it. Who cares what the rules said?

Its like watching your factory grow, then deciding what you want to optimize next.