hwango

I was disappointed that I didn't get a chance to play Dominion at the board game meetup thing, so I finally tried playing it on BSW.

The cards in your hand float and zoom in when you hover over them, in much the same way that suggested links show up at the bottom of videos on Youtube. It's every bit as annoying here and it is to me there. It just seems unnecessary, and it's not like there isn't enough space to display them all at full size. The way that it indicates that it's your turn isn't very obvious. I also didn't notice the "I don't want to buy anything" button right away, and couldn't figure out why it was still my turn at one point. And I accidentally bought a Garden instead of a Market once. That was...very upsetting. But I think with a little practice the interface will be just fine.

It was a three-player game, and we went for a completely random setup, which I've never actually done before. We got: chancellor, feast, throne room, gardens, thief, library, council room, laboratory, market, adventurer.

Someone bought a Thief early on, so I avoided buying silver or gold. My economy was based on Chancellors/Markets/Throne Rooms. To my amazement, it actually worked. Take that everyone who says the Chancellor is crap!

Each of us bought 4 of the Provinces, but I also bought a Garden, and a Duchy, and managed to win 33 to 29 to 27. The Garden was worth 3 at the end, so it didn't win me the game, but at least it didn't cost me the game either. Still, every time I drew it I shook my fist mentally at it for not being another Market.

One big plus for the BSW version is that, in spite of the interface issues, the fact that none of us had to actually shuffle cards sped things up to the point that the game only 20 minutes. So that was pretty cool.

I don't know what the hell it is lately playing Carcassonne on BSW, but I've been having a lot of games in which my opponent quits part way through. The latest time, about an hour ago, my opponent was a registered player with a 61% win ratio. I can see how he keeps it so high - he bugs out if things look bad. I had cut off one of his guys as a side-effect - that is, I played a tile for my own purposes that also happened to screw him. Soon after that, he played a tile for no purpose other than to screw over my guy, which is a perfectly valid strategy...I'll do it to the double-sized guy, the builder, multiple small guys, or just an enormous city. But, dude, it was a single guy on a single city tile. It was just petty. So I didn't feel at all guilty about playing a tile to screw over his 4-tile, 1 shield city with 2 of his guys and his builder in it. It was early in the game - he might even have gotten lucky and drawn the tile that would fit in the gap. Does he play around this problem and try to win anyway? No, instead he quits. Pathetic.

Now, I suppose it's possible that he legitimately lost his connection or something the instant after I played the tile that screwed him, and I apologize for defaming his character if that's the case...but I'm pretty sure he just gave up.