Spiel des Jahres prize—German board gaming's highest honor. Winning some obscure German award may not sound impressive,
Obscure? Gosh, we are elitist, aren't we?
First time I've heard reference to "German-style", rather than Eurogames, as well. Ouch, out of a four page article, it feels like there's the equivalent of an entire page explaining the mechanics ("The robber appears on a 7, the likeliest outcome of two dice as any craps player can tell you").
And, after all the Monopoly bashing, they finally mention the important fact that... nobody plays it right! (I saw this explanation on Boardgame Geek): Putting fines in the middle, and getting them back from Free Parking keeps money in the game, which makes it longer to play. If you use that unofficial variant, don't complain about the game length. And worse, it redistributes it randomly, which means an almost bankrupt player can be given an undeserved stay of execution.
I'm surprised that they're programming the AI for Settlers from a spreadsheet though. I'd have thought a self-teaching neural net was far easier to set up, and then the results could be extracted (if not understood!) to the final game. (See Tony Mitton's devilish Puerto Rico in Excel model.)
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Date: 2009-04-08 10:46 am (UTC)Obscure? Gosh, we are elitist, aren't we?
First time I've heard reference to "German-style", rather than Eurogames, as well. Ouch, out of a four page article, it feels like there's the equivalent of an entire page explaining the mechanics ("The robber appears on a 7, the likeliest outcome of two dice as any craps player can tell you").
And, after all the Monopoly bashing, they finally mention the important fact that... nobody plays it right! (I saw this explanation on Boardgame Geek):
Putting fines in the middle, and getting them back from Free Parking keeps money in the game, which makes it longer to play. If you use that unofficial variant, don't complain about the game length. And worse, it redistributes it randomly, which means an almost bankrupt player can be given an undeserved stay of execution.
I'm surprised that they're programming the AI for Settlers from a spreadsheet though. I'd have thought a self-teaching neural net was far easier to set up, and then the results could be extracted (if not understood!) to the final game. (See Tony Mitton's devilish Puerto Rico in Excel model.)