Thursday, September 07, 2006
Never Again
Vinci with the teleport rule, that is. (Shivers up spine.)
Apparently some ne'er-do-well rules lawyer noted that the rules of Vinci did not prevent a player from picking all his units off the board and re-entering from a different side.
This variant was used as an official rule at the World Boardgaming Championships recently. A friend of mine played in the Vinci tourney at WBC and thought the variant was interesting enough to try.
He was wrong.
Basically the variant adds too much time and chaos to an otherwise well balanced multi-player game. The teleport rule allows everybody to gang up on the leader with pinpoint attacks, while earning very few points themselves. Vinci already has serious "king maker" problems out of the box and needs house rules to fix the end game, and the teleport rule exacerbates that problem.
Apparently some ne'er-do-well rules lawyer noted that the rules of Vinci did not prevent a player from picking all his units off the board and re-entering from a different side.
This variant was used as an official rule at the World Boardgaming Championships recently. A friend of mine played in the Vinci tourney at WBC and thought the variant was interesting enough to try.
He was wrong.
Basically the variant adds too much time and chaos to an otherwise well balanced multi-player game. The teleport rule allows everybody to gang up on the leader with pinpoint attacks, while earning very few points themselves. Vinci already has serious "king maker" problems out of the box and needs house rules to fix the end game, and the teleport rule exacerbates that problem.
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It's not a variant. it's the official rule. The variant would be not using it.
It made for a very exciting game.
It made for a very exciting game.
Apparently, there is some speculation that designer included this rule in the prototype.
The rules do not explicitly exclude it. There are some comments on various boardgame sites discussing the pros and cons of the variant. The rules for civilization expansion would seem to exclude such a move, and it is clearly against the general theme of the game.
If it is an official rule I will have to drop my rating by at least 5 points. For now I will just assume it is some lame-brain variant.
The source for the rule is the errata/rules clarification handout that was distributed at WBC.
Perhaps Lance can post some of the relevant sections on his blog. If not I will try to remember to borrow the handout the next time I see him and post it here.
The rules do not explicitly exclude it. There are some comments on various boardgame sites discussing the pros and cons of the variant. The rules for civilization expansion would seem to exclude such a move, and it is clearly against the general theme of the game.
If it is an official rule I will have to drop my rating by at least 5 points. For now I will just assume it is some lame-brain variant.
The source for the rule is the errata/rules clarification handout that was distributed at WBC.
Perhaps Lance can post some of the relevant sections on his blog. If not I will try to remember to borrow the handout the next time I see him and post it here.
The handout was only copying clarifications from online FAQs and Boardgame geek. They invented nothing new, they were just trying to make sure everyone had the same errata and clarifications.
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