M57 wrote:

In my mind, these are design descriptors (categories) as much or more than they are difficulty ratings.

Warped and Wrinkled are kewl terms, but think of your general audience here, and more specifically visitors to the site.  Difficulty designations should be words like Easy, and ..umm  .. Difficult.

But think about what Oatworm said, the difficulty is not really the board, it's the players.  Take 5 10 year-olds and play a game of Risk with them and then have them play Kjeldor - they would do fine.  Throw Vataro in with them, and they wouldn't know what happened.

Edit: The purpose of dividing up the boards along these lines is more to serve as a warning label that you are not about to play a standard Risk game on a different looking board.

But think about what Oatworm said, the difficulty is not really the board, it's the players.  Take 5 10 year-olds and play a game of Risk with them and then have them play Kjeldor - they would do fine.  Throw Vataro in with them, and they wouldn't know what happened.

Using that criteria, all boards are easy ... and hard.  It just depends who you play.

I think you are blurring the lines between difficulty and sophistication, and to be fair, I may be confusing ease with simplicity.  But I'll stick to my guns for now.

Easy shouldn't mean easy to win. It should mean easy to understand. Take checkers.  A simple game to play. Yet, a world class player would crush me every time. Now if the rules of checkers are easy to understand, then the rules of chess are probably about medium.   It doesn't matter who you play.  Once you understand the rules and the mechanics of play, you can play the game. If you play Viswanathan Anand, you will get your head handed to you on a platter every time, ..but it wouldn't have stopped you from being able to play.

There are plenty of 3rd graders who can play checkers but can't play chess.  It has nothing to do with who they play against.

M57 wrote:

Easy shouldn't mean easy to win. It should mean easy to understand.

When I suggested the idea for classification of the board, this was the stratification I had intended.  It should not be hard to classify board on an easy, medium, hard scale (See Kjeld example in the other discussion). My real intention here was so that new players could see which maps played like the standard map and steer clear of the harder maps (Actually I wanted the site to steer new players away from hard boards).

However, there does seem to be a need for a pure strategy category as well since some of us are making 0 sided dice boards and I could also see a ridiculous category as well for maps where game-play is really hard to grasp and many a player will require playing many games before they have an idea of how to play (Certainly playing good players makes it harder and possibly easier to see how to play a map).

I do believe there is room for discussion on how many categories there should be, rough outlines for the difficultly rating/scheme, and who should do the rating (board designer/review team was my initial thought) if this is the route we go.  As was said above there will never be a perfect way to rate the boards difficulty, but I think asking players for their opinion should be minimal in the overall difficulty rating at best.

To see the initial conversation, go here:
  http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/716p6/Boots_an_Issue
post 104 is where the idea was introduced.

To weigh in, since I was part of this discussion in the other threads, I agree 100% with Alpha's point, "I wanted the site to steer new players away from hard boards". Board categories should help steer players toward games that meet their level of experience and expectation, in other words games that they'll actually have fun playing instead of games that they might join with, for example, Hugh, where they might just throw up their hands and say, f*** this s*** and walk away.

To my my mind, board categories should not so much give a rating of difficulty of winning a game on the board as an indication of how difficult it is to understand how to play that game. Hence why I proposed my basic-intermediate-advanced rubric:

Basic - Any board that resembles a variation of the classic continents-based geographic risk board. Includes some simple variations like fog, negative bonuses, overlapping bonuses, but not much else. Examples: War, GearStorm, Medieval Europe, Antastic, Lord of the Gears, SimCity.

Intermediate - Any board that plays in about the same way as the class risk board - e.g. secure a bonus, build outward, knock out weak players to take their cards, etc - but which is set up in a novel way (like Gauntlet), has a novel bonus system (like any hordes-based map), or uses extensive border modification, capitols, or other special features (like Titans, Castles, Ancient Isles of Kjeldor, Escalation). The key concept here is that intermediate boards are novel, but also basically intuitive.

Advanced - boards that aren't intuitive from a knowledge of basic risk. These include maps like Spy v. Spy, Duck Hunt, Plinko, Five, Risk-E-vaders or Star Gear.

I see no practical reason to expand the number of categories beyond three -- the breakdown just becomes more fine-grained than is useful, IMO.

Kjeld, I have no problems with your conceptual approach, but I wonder that we might want to avoid calling it a "difficulty" system, if only for the fact that we are taking as much time as we are articulating just what difficult means.  

Also, at least in my mind, one problem with your system is that it doesn't pass the Checkers test.  Checkers is not difficult to understand or play, yet it would fall into the Advanced game category, when really it belongs in a Different but Easy type of category.

Any adaptation of checkers to WarGear would not, I think, be easy at all, and would in fact take folks a while to wrap their heads around. Even if it was close, it wouldn't play exactly like checkers, and the task of figuring out what's the same and what's different would make it advanced, IMO (and that's not to mention that it is completely outside the Risk-based expectations of the standard newbie).

Ok, bad example, but you get the idea ..or perhaps you don't. Ok, What if I made a horse race. You race your horse around a one-way track. There are no choices to be made. You have to stay in your lane and forward movement is your only option. The game is completely luck driven. Roll dice, move forward (through the neutral armies in your way). Rinse and repeat. First player to the finish line wins. Maybe by getting a million armies and then taking out their oppponent's jockey (a capital).  This game could be pretty easily made using current WarGear features.

..Still Advanced?

This fight is dumb.

'Tis not a fight.  People are soliciting their ideas and others try and find weaknesses in them. I'll be the first to admit that my rubric doesn't cover all the bases.  I don't get the sense that anyone is angry or frustrated ..except perhaps you?

..and what is dumb about it? Do you have a turn-key solution? Or perhaps you think there is no need for something like this in the first place?

Since I like bacon, I'd like to speak in favor of a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" approach to assigning board "familiarity" (probably a better word than "difficulty" or "simplicity"), which closely mimics Kjeld's suggestion. One degree of separation would, of course, be Risk and Risk-like clones, with the "sixth degree" being zero-dice strategy games that play completely unlike Risk. Following this criteria, M57's horse race game would be a 6, not because it's necessarily harder or more challenging - it's just not Risk.

Make sense?

So your proposing a "like Risk - not like Risk" continuum.  I think that addresses one aspect of the problem. But I think people also want to get a sense of a game's ease of play.  On a scale of 1-6, Horse-Race may rate a 6 on the lR-nlR meter, but it's gotta be a 1 on the "Ease of Play" scale.

so a board is put into a 'continuum' category with a certain number of 'gears' associated with it. both have a suggested entry by the designer, and the review board must finalize it before passing into public play. you can then add thematic tags to each board in the future if that's the desire.

I think the "like Risk - not like Risk" continuum is what I was going for, but it does not address ease of play- for example Darts - not Risk, but fairly easy to play (and easy to lose btw). If you/we want to address both then we need separate systems.

I went to four categories over Kjeld's three to take into account the diceless games, but I do agree with Cram to a point also. All we really need to is steer new people away from the not-Risk/super-enhanced boards until they know what they are getting into when they play'em. Two categories would do it --> Standard/Non-Standard. Whether there are 2, 3, 4 or 10 categories beyond that is much less of a deal.

Oatworm wrote: The problem with your criteria is that boards like "Steal the Bacon" would rank much lower than they really should. Yeah, there's a capitol (+1), but the number of attack/fortify/view borders is ridiculously small, there's no border modifiers, no negative continents, no one-way borders, and I doubt there are custom card levels. So, it would end up with a +1 (slightly harder than Risk), which doesn't really describe it. Meanwhile, boards like Antastic would rank higher because it has significantly more borders than half the boards here, even though it's really not *that* hard of a board. 

I think this misunderstands the quantitative proposal and actually ends up being a good example of why it would work.

Bacon SHOULD rate as just slightly more difficult than Risk, because it's not a typical landgrab map, and there's one essential concept that you must grasp in order to "master" (not win) the board. Antastic would actually be the lowest 'sophistication' rating, ie. the same as Risk, because it IS the same as Risk (Risk on a different map). Despite the huge number of borders, there's nothing on the board that's not on Global Warfare, so the quantitative difficulty/sophistication rating system wouldn't detect anything worth bumping the Gear Quotient or whatever you want to call it.

I love that we're reproducing board games in the risk universe, but it's true that there is the potential for abuse when there are a finite number of scenarios when using 0/1 sided dice which could be exploited.

They're fun diversion games for sure, but in the case of checkers a computer program might be making all the moves for one player.

I would rather see a risk game incorporating checkers dynamics than a risk game emulating checkers for the above reason.

Andernut wrote: I would rather see a risk game incorporating checkers dynamics than a risk game emulating checkers for the above reason.

One of the things I think makes Five such a brilliant achievement - it's a fascinating classic-style streamlined strategy game produced within a Risk engine... that could NOT be played easily with pencil and paper or even a custom designed physical gameboard. It both transcends and relies upon the WG Risk engine.

asm wrote:

Oatworm wrote: The problem with your criteria is that boards like "Steal the Bacon" would rank much lower than they really should. Yeah, there's a capitol (+1), but the number of attack/fortify/view borders is ridiculously small, there's no border modifiers, no negative continents, no one-way borders, and I doubt there are custom card levels. So, it would end up with a +1 (slightly harder than Risk), which doesn't really describe it. Meanwhile, boards like Antastic would rank higher because it has significantly more borders than half the boards here, even though it's really not *that* hard of a board. 

I think this misunderstands the quantitative proposal and actually ends up being a good example of why it would work.

Bacon SHOULD rate as just slightly more difficult than Risk, because it's not a typical landgrab map, and there's one essential concept that you must grasp in order to "master" (not win) the board. Antastic would actually be the lowest 'sophistication' rating, ie. the same as Risk, because it IS the same as Risk (Risk on a different map). Despite the huge number of borders, there's nothing on the board that's not on Global Warfare, so the quantitative difficulty/sophistication rating system wouldn't detect anything worth bumping the Gear Quotient or whatever you want to call it.

What he said.

I meant a +1 per feature, not a +1 per actual border or actual capitol.  Antastic would be a 0.

The quantitative approach would work well in defining the Riskiness of a board, the Difficulty would be something else entirely.

Oooo.. Riskiness!

So I think we're considering two separate ratings here: Riskiness and Ease/Difficulty. I like this.

I don't know that I agree about using a straight quantitative feature assessment to determine Riskiness. I could see it being used as a guideline though.

How do people feel about player ratings vs. developer/review team ratings for Riskiness? ..Difficulty?

Since you asked:

Non-standard Gameplay Features: None, Some, Many.

Pretty much 11's system exactly. Feel free to just go back to his earlier post about adding +1 to some value for each type of non-standard feature you have and then putting them against some scale.

It gives people an elegant, quantitative/qualitative distinction they can use to make their own judgment on how "difficult" or "Risky" or "wrinkly" or "advanced" whatever the crazy *stuff* else you people have been chasing each other around in circles on for what feels like 100 pages worth of posts (but in reality is not yet even 2).