Player Elimination VS Fighting For Third Place

NeonPeon wrote:

Shellhead wrote:
This is why I don't like how in Arkham Horror and Fury of Dracula you can be beaten in combat with something nasty, yet you wake up in the hospital. Blech.

The Injury/Madness cards from the AH Kingsport(?) expansion give you a way to address this issue, if it bothers you.

I can't believe we keep having this discussion and nobody ever brings up War on Terror. That game solves the issue brilliantly.

If you get eliminated from the game or decide you have no chance of winning, you go terrorist, which means you still get to play, but you're not going to be able to win the normal way. It's tougher for the terrorists to win, but if you manage to bring a few people down with yout, there's a decent chance it can happen. For this reason alone, I'll pull that game out before most other conquest-type games simply because I won't have anyone stuck in a hopeless situation, and I don't have someone off in the other room playing video games, which kinda' flies in the face of the whole it's-all-about-the-socializing thing doesn't it?

Hell, even Vinci and Small World offer a pretty nice alternative to PE. Getting your ass kicked? Just hit the reset button, the game will keep going on.

PE is fine I guess, and if it's a 2-hour game I really don't mind it. If someone's going to be in the other room playing Xbox, though, fuck PE. I want to play games with my friends, and the two minutes' worth of exhileration you get from crushing your enemies isn't worth having a friend away from the table for hours on end.

Bullwinkle wrote:

The Injury/Madness cards from the AH Kingsport(?) expansion give you a way to address this issue, if it bothers you.

I just read up on that (I've only played the base set) - I like it! I especially like that a double injury means you're devoured. The more devouring the better.

Don't you know? Player elimination is obsolete. Just like 8-Tracks, and MS-DOS, you can't buy it anymore. And even if you did it would be impossible to use, because nobody has the requisite electronic equipment. Euro games are like Blu-Ray and player elimination games are HD DVD. There is only one right way to design board games, and until you learn to accept that, you'll be slowing the relentless advance of progress for *everybody*.

I can't believe we keep having this discussion and nobody ever brings up War on Terror. That game solves the issue brilliantly.

It's brilliant indeed. And any time you feel squirrely, you can jump. Don't like how the last round went? Go terrorist. Tired of getting beat down for the whole game? Go terrorist. It's a great mechanic that keeps you in the game yet changes the winning conditions for everybody.

It's really a kind of "join the winning team" mechanic...yet, oddly, I've seen the game go down pretty much 50/50 between terrorist and empire victories.

It's really a kind of "join the winning team" mechanic

It's also a "don't piss everybody else off" mechanic. I gave up on a winning game once because there was another player, in second place, pulling the whole "let's git 'im" routine. Any time anyone did anything that wasn't fucking with me, he'd piss and moan about how they were just handing me the game, and it was starting to get on my nerves. So I went terrorist, now he was in first place, and I just let everyone turn on him. I didn't win, but his territories were hopelessly overrun with black cones within a few turns, so I considered it a moral victory. It forces you to really bring those smooth negotiating chops to the game, which is where most of the fun in those games lies anyway.

In the fabled game where I first identified a live Fun Murderer, we all decided to go terrorist at the end to make it where he was the only player who _didn't_ win.

NeonPeon wrote:

I just read up on that (I've only played the base set) - I like it! I especially like that a double injury means you're devoured. The more devouring the better.

Actually, it's a double identical injury that's an instant devouring. Multiple distinct injuries are carried by the character. So if you keep getting hurt, you start to be pretty badly hobbled. But, as always, you can play it how you like it.

MattLoter wrote:

It'd be totally stupid if a player got eliminated in Bohnanza

But totally hilarious too! We need some AT Eurogame variants.

Burn the bean fields!

Every second eurogame needs player elimination.

Not too rarely when playing a eurogame I enter a phase when I prefer fondling my balls over continuing the game.

Mr MOTO wrote:

MattLoter wrote:

It'd be totally stupid if a player got eliminated in Bohnanza

But totally hilarious too! We need some AT Eurogame variants.

Burn the bean fields!

Bank repossession, fire up the bulldozer!

MattLoter wrote:

Mr MOTO wrote:

MattLoter wrote:

It'd be totally stupid if a player got eliminated in Bohnanza

But totally hilarious too! We need some AT Eurogame variants.

Burn the bean fields!

Bank repossession, fire up the bulldozer!

Yes, if you fail to cash in any beans for a set number of turns the bank should take your farm away. That would certainly add some tension to the game.

And really that's what Player Elimination does best. It adds a level of tension so that not only are you trying to win, but also trying harder not to lose. You will fight for second place because anything else means you're out of the game.

I think player elimination depends greatly on the game you are playing. A conquest game should definitely have it. One of my knocks against Mare Nostrum is that you can't march your troops into an enemy capital but they can always build pieces there, so you can never really knock them out. At that point they are pretty ineffective and it's for them to climb out of the hole. In an economic game, maybe not so much as you are trying to make money and it doesn't matter if you make lots of money or little...although there should be provisions for buying out weaker players to take them out of the game.

My big thing with people ranting about player elimination is this...


The complaint is always, "People eliminated and have to wait and watch for several hours!"


But #1: People who don't like player elimination don't play games that last several hours

#2: No modern multi-hour game features player elimination as a common element. Sure, it's *feasible* to get eliminated in TI3, but it's not even remotely common.

But totally hilarious too! We need some AT Eurogame variants.

Have you played BOHNAPARTE? Your beanfields finance a war effort. You move troops around and fight. It's kind of cool.

One of my knocks against Mare Nostrum is that you can't march your troops into an enemy capital but they can always build pieces there,

I dunno, that kind of makes sense to me...loyalists/rebels trying to overthrow the new regime. Game-wise, it ultimately doesn't really give you any more of a chance of winning though.

The complaint is always, "People eliminated and have to wait and watch for several hours!"

Oh, that's just one of the anti-elimination arguments. Other good ones are:

"The eliminated player will have to spend the rest of the evening fetching chips and drinks for the other players" (my all-time favorite)
"The eliminated player will have to go home early _thus wasting their entire evening_" (this is true- THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION)
"Who wants to be eliminated from a 4 hour game in the first hour?" (note to those players- PLAY BETTER)