Idle Thumbs 210: Pro Fish Smart Fish

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 210:

Pro Fish Smart Fish

Pro Fish Smart Fish, Dice and Card Fish / Diablo III and StarCraft II, Twilight Struggle and Defcon too / A week of draws and decks and rolls, of seats too hot and wars too cold / That's this week's podcast at a glance, its half-rhymes masked with assonance.

Games Discussed: Diablo III, StarCraft II, Twilight Struggle, Defcon

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[sclpls]

Glad to hear how much Sean enjoyed Twilight Struggle! The tug-of-war scoring system in the game is common to many war games in general, and there are a bunch of card driven war games that do an equally excellent job of inspiring the players to reflect on the historical drama of the events in spite/because of the abstraction of the game system. So if Sean's descriptions sounded interesting I would encourage people to look over the rest of the GMT Games catalog and see if they find anything that sounds interesting. My personal favorite is Andean Abyss which is a 4 player game that revolves around asymmetrical conflict in Colombia in the early 90s between the government, left and right wing guerrilla forces, and the drug cartels.

[Badfinger]

Oh my goodness the ending to this episode.

 

And Spaff, I'm calling you out. You totally Clarkson'd the end of the podcast. I heard it!

[Codicier]

How do we get a podcast which mentions robot fish and not the immortal classic James Pond Robocod

[Turgid]

The best image of Spaff:

 

 

I'd love a picture of that robot fish if it can be found.

[SecretAsianMan]

The Jr Mints have shipped so hopefully they'll arrive by next week's cast.  Everything else should already be there.  One clarification on the Kit Kats: they're not normal Kit Kats, it's a variety pack of Japanese ones

 

 

The idea of a robot fish leading the organic fish to revolt against the humans is basically the plot of an episode of Futurama where Bender thinks he's a penguin.

[tegan]

I'd love a picture of that robot fish if it can be found.

 

 

 

 

I'm super proud about having inadvertently been responsible for the name of the episode this week!

[Bjorn]

Geraldric Cube - A magic box into which unwanted items can be placed, but the only thing you ever get back is a Geraldo. 

[Mangela Lansbury]

Geraldric Cube - A magic box into which unwanted items can be placed, but the only thing you ever get back is a Geraldo.

Finally, the box from Hellraiser has some competition in the worst torture in cube form arena.

[Ben X]

I'm super proud about having inadvertently been responsible for the name of the episode this week!

Congrats! I noticed Chris pronounced your name to rhyme with Vegan, though, not Megan. Could this be the biggest mispronunciation scandal since Toe-blixgate?

[Ben X]

Also, I am proud of tweeting the Thumbs to remind them to put this thread up!

[Coods]

Yessss Twilight struggle really is the best. You guys touched on coups and VP scoring system as really evocative mechanics, and I think this is true with so much of the other design choices. I'm not familiar with a lot of other strategy board games of this intensity, so some of this stuff might be convention, but damn I think it's super cool and makes me want to play more board games.

 

Mainly my favorite thing about Twilight Struggle's card playing mechanic is that it evokes the uniquely unbalanced nature of something like the Cold War. Each card is either U.S. favorable, U.S.S.R. favorable, or neutral. At the start of any era, each player draws a random handful of them. Theoretically, the U.S. player could draw 8 U.S.S.R. cards and then essentially have to deal with the consequences in order to use the influence points. To me, it echoes the real foreign policy of containment, or limiting the spread of communism during the war. Since you have to make moves regardless of the cards you get, sometimes you'll use the influence points of a card simply to cancel out that cards effect. The important and brilliant thing is that you as a player get to "contain" the effects of these cards as best you can, since you have agency over when and how they are played. The incredible thing is that when you DO get terrible turns, the way you handle threats can drastically mitigate the negative effects.

 

As a specific example, if you are U.S., there is a USSR card worth 4 points (really good) that causes all U.S. played cards to decrease in value for the rest of the turn. This seems pretty terrible for the U.S., but if you happen to draw this card, you can choose to save it for the last round in the turn, so you get to use the 4 points without any negative repercussions because the turn is already over. Small workarounds like these are what make the strategy of this game super interesting. 

 

There are also a lot of clever ways in which real events are synthesized into card abilities. For example, the Cuban missile crisis in real life was resolved by compromise, where the USSR would essentially take nukes out of Cuba as long as the U.S. took nukes out of Turkey (and also to not attack Cuba). The Cuban missile crisis card in Twilight Struggle can be removed if the U.S. player chooses to take some influence points out of Turkey.

 

There is no real life parallel to nullifying an event and chucking it towards the space race, though. I think it was a respectable try at capturing the essence of the cultural relevance of the space race and its relevance in the cold war. It won't win you the game, but it helps.

[Spaff]

Oh my goodness the ending to this episode.

 

And Spaff, I'm calling you out. You totally Clarkson'd the end of the podcast. I heard it!

 

I don't remember being a crazy racist and punching anyone in the face, even though i wanted to obviously.

[SuperBiasedMan]

It was funny to hear the Thumbs talk about how $100 feels like so much to take out to them still, since that's how I feel about €50 and I usually just take out 20's. That's probably mostly due to me being over half a decade less grown up and not living in San Francisco though.

Congrats! I noticed Chris pronounced your name to rhyme with Vegan, though, not Megan. Could this be the biggest mispronunciation scandal since Toe-blixgate?

Wait, what? Those are both wrong? :S

[richardco]

Whoa!  A boardgame that I've actually played!  I only played Twilight Struggle once but it was a lot of fun.  I was Russia and I lost.  Felt like I didn't have a great grasp on "the china card" and its importance.  The best part of Twilight Struggle is that there's an event card in which the US player has to poke the Russian player in the chest (and maybe say a stern phrase? I can't recall.).

Might have to give Defcon a try as well.  Sounds like a lot of fun.

Terrifying robot news.

[tegan]

Wait, what? Those are both wrong? :S

 

Tegan rhymes with vegan.

[BigJKO]

Congrats! I noticed Chris pronounced your name to rhyme with Vegan, though, not Megan. Could this be the biggest mispronunciation scandal since Toe-blixgate?

Wait, what! Is toe-blix not the correct pronounciation of toblix?! I feel like I don't know him anymore!

[Polish Hill]

And Spaff, I'm calling you out. You totally Clarkson'd the end of the podcast. I heard it!

 

Next week's podcast he'll open with a loud "Tonight"

[unimural]

Great to have Sean back on the pod!

 

The discussion on Defcon and Twilight Struggle reminded me of ICBM, a short (thumbs-friendly length) nuclear launch code operator simulator. Or a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander to be exact. I'd say it's worth your time if you enjoyed sims by MicroProse when such things were still made.

 

http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197/

 

It is truly strange that nukes are such a piece of fiction to me, even though they are very real and rather terrifying.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Ending on bombshells predates Clarkson, doesn't it?

[clyde]

Great to have Sean back on the pod!

The discussion on Defcon and Twilight Struggle reminded me of ICBM, a short (thumbs-friendly length) nuclear launch code operator simulator. Or a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander to be exact. I'd say it's worth your time if you enjoyed sims by MicroProse when such things were still made.

http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197/

It is truly strange that nukes are such a piece of fiction to me, even though they are very real and rather terrifying.

The conversation between Michael Davis and GamerBats in the comments was an enjoyable read.

I haven't played it yet, but I hope the developer put in a 1 in 10million chance that the operator gets the call.

[tegan]

Twilight Struggle is my My Little Pony/Mad Max crossover OC.

[Badfinger]

I don't remember being a crazy racist and punching anyone in the face, even though i wanted to obviously.

 

Oh, obviously. Don't we all? I didn't mean to suggest you went full Clarkson. You never want to go full Clarkson.

Ending on bombshells predates Clarkson, doesn't it?

 

Does it? I honestly have no idea. That's the only place I ever heard it.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I know that it was on the Day Today and Alan Partridge used it too.

[tberton]

One thing that nobody's mentioned about Twilight Struggle is how brilliant it's scoring mechanic is, both in terms of gameplay and how it evokes the Cold War. You mentioned the Tug-of-War scoreboard, but not how points are actually scored. Essentially, the board is split into 6 regions (Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia) and each region has a card associated with it that, when played, will score points based on how many territories a player controls in that region. Only the Europe, Asia and Middle East cards are in the deck at the beginning of the game - the other three get added later. This means that you have a rough idea of when certain regions will get scored but can't be exactly certain.

 

This creates an effect where you are trying to guess what scoring cards your opponent has based off of how they play. If the USSR is targeting Europe really heavily, and I don't have the Europe scoring card, then I can be pretty sure that they've got it and I'd better do something about Europe before they score a boatload of points. So I, as the US, start to care about Europe. This means that regions on the board are only important insofar as your opponent seems to care about them. That maps really nicely onto all the political power plays of the Cold War, where one power would try to gain control of a country only because the other wanted it.