Category Archives: Games!

Space Junk Miner Wilco

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/video-watch-60-years-space-junk-accumulate-1-minute

They called her ‘Wilco’. They’d been calling her that since she was selected to be part of ‘Satellite Control’. “‘Space Junk Control’ more like” she had said under her breath during the induction ceremony, but not out loud, as this was the only way most people could get to space.

You see, all non-essential spaceflight had been cancelled since a number of high profile fatal collisions with space debris in the 2020s. There were the few essential robot missions to Moon Base Alpha, to provide them the equipment they couldn’t manufacture themselves yet, the constant replacement of GPS sats (now dual-purposed to carry data), and the occasional deep space probe that made its way through the space priority committee, but no more pleasure craft, only ‘Satellite Control’.

‘Satellite Control.’ Even the name was pompous. The mission was equally so, to think that they could actually clear LEO, MEO, and GEO of space debris, when they hadn’t even been able to clear LEO after years of trying. Of course, the constant rain of new debris from GPS-debris collisions, and the rain of debris from MEO didn’t help.

‘Wilco’ walked over to her ship, that she would call home for the next two weeks. The next two lonely weeks. The ship was basically a giant shielded cone, with a tiny cockpit living module at the point. From the ground, even with the best of adaptive optics, ground sensors could still only reliably detect debris of about half a centimeter or larger. The billions of smaller pieces of debris would skeletonize an unshielded ship like piranhas.

Strapping in, flight checklist. Fuel check. Computer check. Sensors check. Engines check.

“Wilco reporting. Ready for launch sequence.”
“Roger that, Wilco.”

(She hated that, even though she had always enjoyed the exploits of the space ‘sanitation engineer’ Roger Wilco from the Space Quest games, her nicknamesake.)

“Thrusters online.”
“Docking clamps disengaged.”
“Disengaging at 0.5 meters per second.”
“Okay, you are now clear of the station. Nose to the wind.”
“Nose to the wind.”

‘Nose to the wind’ was now the traditional call sign and benediction for the ‘Wilcos’. It had to do with how they flew their ‘collection’ ships. The massive cone was pointed in the direction of travel, collecting the space debris and not incidentally protecting the pilot. There was also a magnetic cone which extended the size of the cone, allowing the ‘nose ships’ to collect more of the ‘heavy dust’, the dark tiny shards of metal which did the most undetected damage. The ‘wind’ was similar to that of riding a bicycle down a hill on Earth. You would be going so fast that it seemed that everything was streaming towards you, on Earth a benign pushing force, up here a deadly rain of metal shards.

She settled in and started navigating towards her first target. A cloud of debris from a commsat which had been on its way to its graveyard orbit when it was hit by unexpected booster debris.

It was going to be a long day, but for now she was free, and IN SPACE! It was beautiful and quiet. All the many stars that humans would go to one day, as soon as they cleaned up the orbits around their own world. Thinking about it, maybe Earth wouldn’t be considered a planet until it (they) had cleaned the orbit again. The cloud was approaching. Arguments about Pluto and Eris for later. Time for work.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest#Roger_Wilco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet (3rd part of definition)

The article that inspired me:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/video-watch-60-years-space-junk-accumulate-1-minute

“Humans are messy, and not just here on Earth. Now, you can see all the junk we’ve launched into space for yourself with a data-driven animation created for the United Kingdom’s Royal Institution by Stuart Grey, an astronomer at University College London. It all begins in 1957 when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, a 58.5-centimeter-wide ball emitting radio pulses. A piece of the rocket that took it into orbit was the very first piece of space junk. The United States launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, the next year. Almost every mission into space has created new debris, either from the launch vehicles, objects falling off satellites, or unintended collisions. By the time the USSR launched the first human into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, there were 200 objects floating around up there. By 1980 we had landed a man on the moon and left nearly 5000 objects in orbit. And because of deep space exploration, not all of them are tiny. Entire rocket engines are lurking around up there. The number of objects remained stable at about 9000 until suddenly, in 2007, a Chinese ballistic missile test exploded and added 2000 chunks of metal to the mix. In 2009, a couple of big satellites collided and added yet another 2000. You get the picture. We now stand at about 20,000 known pieces of space debris bigger than an apple—that is, an apple capable of ripping through a steel wall at 17,000 miles per hour—and there’s bound to be more. Space is becoming a very cluttered place, making it all the more dangerous to send humans up there to our orbit and beyond. (Video credit: Stuart Grey)”

Why Would Alduin Save the Dragonborn?

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

So, some of you may have heard of a little computer game called ‘Skyrim‘.

In the game, you play the part of a ‘Dragonborn’ character, whose special ability is being able to learn ‘shouts*’ by consuming dragon souls.

The game starts (although the player doesn’t know if yet) with the ancient dragon king ‘Alduin**’ arrives after being thrown forward in time by thousands of years. Alduin then*** flies to where the player is about to be executed, and attacks the town, freeing the player.

You learn later that Alduin’s goal is to resurrect dragons (who were all or mostly all killed before recorded history), and conquer the world**** again.

So, why, as Alduin’s first act would he save the life of the one person who can thwart his dragon resurrection**** plans? There are two main theories:

1) Alduin reappears after being thrown forward in time, perhaps confused, and attacks the nearest human target, perhaps the nearest human military target.

The nearby towns:
– Ivarstead (small town) is 5+4 (6.4 units as the dragon flies) away SE
– Helgen (fortified town) is 8+9 units (12 units as the dragon flies) away SW
– Riverwood (medium town) is 8 units away W
– Whiterun (major city) is 7+9 units (11.4 units as the dragon flies) away NW, but is where a dragon was trapped before, and is heavily fortified.

From this it’s a stretch to see Helgen as the obvious target, as it’s the furthest of the nearby settlements. Perhaps Alduin enjoyed flying over mountains, or was flying in the opposite direction from High Hrothgar (where humans taught each other shouts, also heavily fortified). Perhaps the people who threw Alduin forward in time were from Helgen, many thousands of years ago, and he was following them back.

2) The other person saved by Alduin’s attack is ‘Ulfric Stormcloak’ (another human who can ‘shout’), whose capture was about to end a civil war. His escape after being saved by Alduin reignites the civil war, distracting humans, and not coincidentally providing Alduin with many more souls to eat in Sovngard. Sovngard being the afterlife for honoured warriors, where Alduin resides so as to be impossible to kill on the mortal plane.

This theory feels like it makes a lot more sense. Alduin having been defeated by humans once, and needing time for his dragon resurrection campaign needs something to distract the humans. How he would have figured out that freeing Ulfric would help this is unknown. He could also feel that Ulfric could ‘shout’, and seek him out as a source of power, to defeat him, or to release him to cause chaos. I feel Alduin’s arrogance would only let him respect (and only barely) a human who could ‘shout’.

Other ideas:

3) Alduin senses the dragonborn (the player) (either because they feel like a dragon, or like a powerful human), and attacks to try to kill them*****. Ironically, this ends up saving them. Why Alduin didn’t finish the job is beyond me. Perhaps the player escaping into the keep and going underground caused Alduin to lose them, and he went off in search for other prey or dragons to resurrect. Perhaps because the player had not yet come into their power, or did not shout back at Alduin, they were nothing but prey, or beneath his notice.

4) The Elder Scroll****** or whomever empowered it to be used to throw Alduin forward in time brought him forward to the exact time and made sure he was in such a mental state that he would through his own actions save the very person (the player) who would cause his downfall. It was suggested that the time/dragon-god Akatosh was displeased with Alduin’s arrogance, so they could have been responsible.

5) Other ideas? Let me know what you think in the comments!

*’Shouts’ are an innate ability of dragons, for whom ‘shouting is as natural as talking’. ‘Shouts’ are special words of power which do the standard type of dragon things you would expect, like breathing fire or ice, or various other spell-like abilities. It is also mentioned in-game that a dragon argument involves them ‘shouting’ at each other, leading to very blurred lines between dragon arguments and combats.

**Alduin was the first dragon, created by the dragon-god of time Akatosh. Alduin’s original purpose was to be the ‘World-Eater’, to devour the world at the end of time, but Alduin decided to try to conquer the world and become a god. The humans rebelled (with some dragon help), and eventually used an ‘elder scroll’ to throw Alduin forward in time.

***It is unclear if anything else happens between these events.

****Dragons were originally the creation of the dragon god Akatosh. They are normally immortal, and can be resurrected by Alduin (and perhaps others). Consuming their souls prevents this resurrection.

*****Dragons ‘shout’ to argue with each other, so Alduin could have sensed someone like a dragon (dragonborn), and ‘shouted’ at them just to try to speak with them. This is not canon at all, but could make for a much more poignant story, if the whole story was all over an inability to communicate.

******’Elder Scrolls’ are fate-linked artifacts which have amazing and special powers, but these powers seem to be linked to the threads of some larger story woven by the gods or perhaps something even more powerful and ancient.

Touch Typing

It’s the little things that you notice. I was writing something, and just happened to notice that I was looking off into the distance while I was typing. It was one of those choices I made when I was very young. I was in High School, our school didn’t have a typing class, and I decided I needed to learn how. I don’t even remember why. It might have been my mom’s stories about learning, with those typewriters with no letters on the keys, when she was growing up.

Anyways, I remember taking one course, one of those summer enrichment things, up at Northern Secondary. I seem to recall I also took magic, stained glass, and board games, but those might have been different years. (Come to think of it, it might even have been before high school…) Interestingly, I remember this being my choice, perhaps an odd choice for a 12 year old. I don’t even remember why I thought it would be useful, but I remember acutely that I knew it would be. Perhaps similar to my choice to pursue chemical engineering over computers, as I knew that no matter what I did, I would be using computers.

I remember taking that one course, and it being fun…They had these cool puzzles where they gave you a sequence of commands to type, making simple versions of what I could only find online as ‘typewriter art’: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1250&bih=694&q=typewriter+art

(Kind of early ASCII art, I wonder how much crossed over…)

In searching for the above, I found:

http://www.rapidtyping.com/online-typing-games/isogram-puzzle.html

It’s Mastermind, but with words! 😀

Which apparently has also been published:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind

In a couple of different forms:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1029413/word-mastermind
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1151419/word-mastermind

Anyways, I took these classes, but I don’t remember really using my typing until we had an email group in undergrad called the ‘Mailstrom’, often hitting 3 digits of messages per day, where quick wit (and quicker typing) was key.

I suspect there was also some training from playing computer games, but that would really only train a few keys (mostly ctrl and alt, from that era), and the mental mapping probably wouldn’t be from the hand motion to the letter.

And right now, I’m touch typing this, and it seems so normal/natural. Such a weird skill. Happy typing! 😀

Class Divisions

There are many computer games out there which have or purport to give the player the fighter/mage/thief* experience. The canonical examples for me are ‘Quest for Glory’ (Sierra) and ‘Keef the Thief’, probably because they were the first ones I played in the genre.

Most of these games will have different skills you can use to overcome the various obstacles the games throw your way. I’m interested in looking at these skills, and seeing how much each of the games actually lets you play a fighter, mage, or thief, and also how much each of the skills falls under one or more of these categories. But for this, well need some definitions…

The mage/non-mage division is probably the easiest to define, good canonical examples are ‘Ars Magica’ and the ‘Might and Magic’ series, where there are various types of magic users various types of non-magic users.

Mages:
– Basically, a mage is someone who can do things that are outside of what a human could do at a medieval tech. level**.
– They also have some sort of internal power reserve which they use to perform these feats, a power reserve which recharges over time or when they rest. This power reserve is sometimes the same as ‘stamina’ (GURPS), ans sometimes not (D&D, TES, etc…)

‘Fighters’ and ‘Thieves’ have skills that one could conceivably acquire as a very well-trained human. The main difference is in the techniques used to solve problems.

Fighters:
– Tend to use very straight-forward methods to solve problems, often involving combat.
– Fighters will tend to have more combat skills and options than others

Thieves:
– Thieves tend to use more stealth, trying to find an adversary’s weak points, and using more non-combat skills, many of which have less than legal uses.
– Thieves will tend to have a wider variety of skills than others

There are also various skills which any ‘adventurer’ would require to get by in a fantasy world. Depending on the particular game and its game balance, these skills may fall under any one of the ‘classes’ above.

*I’m stepping somewhat away from the D&D Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Thief paradigm, but may revisit this in the future. There are a large number of games which merge all magic users into one, and that’s what I want to explore. Also, the idea of a separate class of ‘healers’ is an interesting concept/conceit, and it may be interesting to see how this is reflective of a society where people damage themselves all the time, and rely on one member of the group to heal them, rather than doing things in a more sustainable/mindful manner…

**’Tech. levels’ were first codified (that I saw) by GURPS: http://gurps.wikia.com/wiki/Tech_Level. Most fantasy-type games feel like between 2 and 3 on this scale. Game balance wrt different ‘magic spells’ and their resepective tech. levels is a whole different interesting topic.

Personal Character Classes

Around the internet, you will find many quizzes which purport to tell you which archetypical ‘character class’ you most belong to. As you would expect, many of these quizzes are clickbait, and even if they weren’t, it’s relatively unlikely that the authors would have taken the time to poll some ‘gold standard*’ group of people to a statistically significant degree.

I’ve been (very slowly) taking a different tack. The plan was to write a story written from the perspective of a character falling into each each of each of the archetypes, to see which one(s) spoke to me the most**,***.

The first installment, ‘Druid’ currently has two parts available here:

Druid

Barriers

*It does seem somewhat absurd to have a ‘gold standard’ of correctness for which fictional archetype one best fits into, but what can you do?

**The best analogy for this for me comes from the struggles of the protagonists in the Modesitt books ‘The Magic of Recluce’ and ‘The Magic Engineer’, where they say things out loud and see how their internal mental map/conscience twinges to see how true they are. Another analogy is presented by Paul Graham here: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html where he talks about ‘essays’ being trying out ideas in written form to see how well they work.

***Note that this does not get into issues of differences between what you feel as a person vs. what type of character you would play in a game.

Buck Rodgers: Countdown to a Better Ship

So, when I was growing up, I played all of the gold box games. One of the ones I don’t remember if I finished or not was Buck Rodgers: Countdown to Doomsday. One of the things that rankled was that you couldn’t upgrade or otherwise modify your ship. Also, in the course of the game, depending on how you play, you could destroy or capture dozens of enemy ships, many more powerful than yours. But you couldn’t fly one of them instead…

I did a couple of modifications which allowed you to have higher ship hitpoints (your ship has hitpoints in 6 areas: ‘Hull’,’Sens’,’Ctrl’,’Life’,’Fuel’,’Engn’), and more ship weapons. At the time, I wasn’t able to determine the hex location for the ‘current’ hitpoints, so I could only modify the maximum. This seemed reasonably game-balancing for me, as your party would salvage parts, then have to repair them themselves. (The one irritating part here was that when you went back to base for free repairs or fuel, they would ‘repair’ the current status back to the original values, so you had to fight space combats and repair it all the way back again.)

Now, with my recent success understanding and modifying the Pool of Radiance series (and probably more diligence now that I’m older), I’m going to try these games again, and see how it’s different with a snazzier ship (and different with the passing of time).

Analysis: Ascension CotG Constructs vs. Heroes

Often a difficult decision: Do you purchase the construct, which you may or may not be able to use multiple times, or do you purchase the more powerful hero, which you will be able to user every time?

How often you will be able to use a construct depends mainly on the other players in the game. In a four-player game, with identical players, you would expect your opponents to defeat the construct-destroying monsters three times as often as in a two-player game.

This article will concern itself with the two-player game.

Assuming a 20-round game, with each player purchasing one card per hand (and defeating the relevant monsters which appear).

There are two monsters in CotG which can destroy your opponent’s constructs:
Corrosive Widow (4 power, each opponent destroys one construct) [4 copies]
Sea Tyrant (5 power, each opponent destroys all constructs but one) [3 copies]

So of the 100 cards in the deck, 7 of them allow you to destroy some (or all) of your opponents constructs.

In a 20-round 2-player game, with 20 purchases per player (15 center row + 5 Mystic/Heavy Infantry), 30/72*28 = 11-12 monsters will appear, or about 3 construct-destroying monsters.

So you would acquire your construct, spend between 2 and 4 rounds waiting to play it, then every 7 rounds, you may be forced to destroy it. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume 3 rounds of waiting, followed by 4 rounds until it is destroyed, meaning a construct (if purchased before the last 7 rounds of the game) will be played once and used 3 times more.

Now, some comparisons:
The All-seeing Eye (6 runes/2 honour construct, draw one card per turn)
Ascetic of the Lidless Eye (5 runes/2 honour, draw two cards)

I’m comparing the All-seeing Eye to Ascetic of the Lidless Eye because they have the same effect of +1 card overall.

Interestingly, if you get to use a construct 4 times, the construct is about 4 times as powerful, for only one more rune in cost (although that is 5->6 runes, which is difficult to do, especially in early game). Our playtesting agrees with this assessment. We actually removed this construct from our games because it was far too unbalancing if purchased and played early (our games tend to be ‘friendlier’, with less deliberate defeating of monsters to destroy the other player’s constructs, and two-player, which would exacerbate these effects).

(Commenting on the rune:honour ratio of individual cards is for a later post.)

Comparison 2, +power constructs:
Militia (0 runes (assumed)/0 honour, add one power)
Shadow Star (3 runes/2 honour construct, add one power)
Yggdrasil Staff (4 runes/2 honour construct, add one power, can trade 4 runes for 3 honour)
Void Thirster (5 runes/3 honour construct, add one power, +1 honour for defeating a monster once/turn)

Demon Slayer (4 runes/2 honour, add three power)
Muramasa (7 runes/4 honour construct, add three power)

So, it looks like it’s plus 3 runes here to make the +1 power permanent (along with the requisite honour). (Similar to the difference on cost between Apprentice and Mystic and Landtalker.) In this case, 4×1 power is much less powerful (hah!) than 1×4 power, and these cards have never felt too overpowered to me. Perhaps Muramasa, but it’s rarely out until the endgame, and there are a lot of other quite powerful 7 rune cards.

Comparison 3, +rune construct:
Apprentice (0 runes (assumed)/0 honour, add one rune)
Snapdragon (5 runes/2 honour, add one rune, +1 honour for playing a lifebound hero once/turn)

The Snapdragon looks like it’s supposed to be the rune equivalent to the Void Thirster, but even during design of the first set, the designers noticed that runes are more powerful than power (hah again!); looking at the cost of Mystics and Heavy Infantry will show you this, amongst others.

I’ve found that Snapdragon, if you can keep it in play, is a less-subtle-than-you-think help, especially early game. I can understand why you wouldn’t have the 3- and 4- rune equivalents, as they would tend to crowd out other strategies (and be even that much easier to purchase in the first couple of turns).

A final note of comparison. Using the math from above (and previous analyses), we can assume that each rune and power produced by a construct or hero produces 1/2 of an honour point.

Looking at it again, under the following conditions:

No card banishing:
5,5 ->12 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, or 12 total)
5,5,2 ->14 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, or 14 total)
3,5,5,1 ->17 (3 completed turns, one carried over, ends with +3 cards, or 17 total)
4,5,5,3 ->20
2,5,5,5,3 ->24
2,5,5,5,5,2 ->29
3 (20 rounds)

Your construct would come out about 1.5 times, for 4 rounds each, and your hero would come out about 3 times, so your construct would be seen about twice as often.

Militia gives you 3 power, for 1.5 honour
Construct gives your 6 power, for 3 honour, at a cost of +3

Demon Slayer gives you 9 power, for 4.5 honour
Muramasa gives you 18 power, for 9 honour, at a cost of +3

Apprentice gives you 3 runes, for 1.5 honour
Snapdragon gives you 6 runes, for 3 honour, at a cost of +5

This feels slightly wrong, that the +1 power constructs don’t give you honour quite that often, so they’re probably pretty closely balanced with Snapdragon. Muramasa does actually feel 3 times as effective as the other constructs, so that’s fine. But all of this is based on so many assumptions, it should only be a guideline for whether you should purchase that construct at this stage in the game.

Analysis: Ascension One & Two rune cards

In our last segment in this series, we talked about the overall rune/power balance in Ascension: CotG: http://nayrb.org/~blog/2015/08/03/analysis-ascension-runes-vs-power/

In this segment, we’ll go into a bit more depth on the 1- and 2-rune cards in the set.

The cards are:

0 runes:
Apprentice* (add 1 rune, 0 honour) [factionless]
Militia* (add 1 power, 0 honour) [factionless]

1 rune:
Arha Initiate (draw one card, 1 honour) [Enlightened]
Lifeblood Initiate (add 1 rune and one honour, 1 honour) [Lifebound]
Mechana Initiate (add 1 rune OR 1 power, 1 honour) [Mechana]
Void Initiate (add 1 rune and may banish one card in hand or discard, 1 honour) [Void]

Starting with the 1-rune cards, reading http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/7794/when-to-buy-cards-costing-1-rune-in-ascension, it says many things I’ve felt for a long time. The four cards here are not very balanced. I would even use stronger language, and say that the void initiate, if acquired early, can decide the game. I generally find that if I have two ‘banishing’ cards acquired early, I can winnow my deck down the just the essentials. This quickly becomes overpowering.

From a math perspective, one could assume the following (with no card drawing cards, assuming purchasing 1 card per hand):

No card banishing:
5,5 ->12 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, or 12 total)
5,5,2 ->14 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, or 14 total)
3,5,5,1 ->17 (3 completed turns, one carried over, ends with +3 cards, or 17 total)
4,5,5,3 ->20
2,5,5,5,3 ->24
2,5,5,5,5,2 ->29
3 (20 rounds)

With one card banisher in first two turns:
5,5 ->12 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, or 12 total)
5,5,2 -> 13 (2 completed turns ends with +2 cards, banish 1 card, for 13 total)
2,5,5,1 -> 15
4,5,5,1 -> 17
4,5,5,3 -> 19
1,5,5,5,4 -> 22
1,5,5 (20 rounds)

With two card banishers in first two turns:
5,5 ->12
5,5,2 ->12
2,5,5 ->13
5,5,3 ->13
2,5,5,1 ->14
4,5,5 ->16 (all Apprentices and Militia are banished now)
5,5,5,1 ->19
4,5 (20 rounds)

(Note that this may somewhat overstate the power of banishment cards, as we’re assuming perfect banishment, and being able to purchase two banishment cards in your first two turns. This has happened to me a number of times, though, so it’s not out of line as an assumption to make the math easier.)

So, with no banishment, you can get through your deck 6 times in 20 rounds. With one banishing card, you can get through it 6.5 times, which can be significant, as the later turns are much enriched in powerful cards, many of which can get you multiple honour points each. This strategy truly shines when you use two banishing cards, however. Note that your deck barely grows in size for the first half of the game. This allows you to go through your deck 7.5 times, being able to use your most powerful cards an extra time *each* more than even the one banishing card player.

With this in mind, barring further math, I’ll make the assumption that a banishing card is worth 1 extra rune for each turn you would have used the card it banished. (This assumes that you replace an apprentice with a mystic, which will probably overstate the banishment power in the early game, but understate it in the later game.)

This means that the Void Initiate gains you 1 + (5+4+3+2+1+0)runes/6** = 1 + 2.5 = 3.5 runes!
Assuming that you can always gain 1 honour (in cards) per two runes, this works out to 1 honour + 1.75 per play!
Working this in to the equations for the other 1-rune cards:

Void Initiate: 1 honour + 1.75 honour per play
Lifeblood Initiate: 1 honour + 1.5 honour per play***
Arha Initiate: 1 honour and -1 card
Mechana Initiate: 1 honour + 0.75 honour per play****

Now, on to the 2-rune cards.

2 runes:
Temple Librarian (discard one card and draw two cards, 1 honour) [Enlightened]
Seer of the Forked Path (draw one card and may banish a card in center row, one honour) [Enlightened]
Spike Vixen (draw one card and gain one power, 1 honour) [Void]

The two Enlightened cards here, in true ‘Blue’ fashion, are starting to show the control aspects of their faction. The Temple Librarian allows you to cycle your deck faster, and the Seer of the Forked path alternately allows you to swap out cards in the center row you don’t want for maybe one that you do, or even perhaps more useful, to get rid of a monster that your opponent will attack you with next turn!

I’ll cover these cards in more depth when I cover drawing cards in more general.

For now, remember that deck winnowing is powerful. My favourite corollary to this is from the board game ‘Age of Renaissance’: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26/age-renaissance, which forces you to keep unplayable cards in your hand as an ‘unplayable misery burden’, which I think aptly describes low value cards in many deckbuilding games.

*I’m including Apprentice and Militia here for comparison for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is the correspondence with ‘Copper’ in Dominion. The second is that colourless cards in Magic: The Gathering are typically (slightly) less powerful than other cards at the same converted mana cost. Apprentice and Militia are listed as ‘0 runes’ because ‘Copper’ also costs 0, and it makes sense intuitively, but they might have slightly different actual ‘costs’, depending on how the math works out in later posts, when we work out how useful cards are, and give them fractional worth/benefit values.

**Yeah, I know. It’s not exact, and it doesn’t take into account the two-Void Initiate case.

***The high apparent value of this card under these assumptions suggests to me that the benefits of banishment are even higher than +1 rune each time a card that has been banished would have been played. Might be partially because +1 rune earlier is more important, as are runes >4-5 per turn…

****Assuming the flexibility is worth 0.5 runes per turn. In actuality, I’ve found that this card is seldom used, never mind used for its flexibility.

Analysis: Ascension Runes vs. Power

So, as you’re playing Ascension, you have a number of choices to make. One of the more important ones is how you balance your purchase of cards which give you runes vs. cards which give you power. (Myself, I enjoy the slower build and feeling of game mastery by playing a 120-point* game, so I tend to err on the side of runes.)

On first blush, it would seem that power would be the better (and simpler) strategy. You can purchase heavy infantry for two runes which will give you two power every time you draw them, vs. having to spend three runes for a Mystic which will give you a (seemingly) similar two runes.

There are more complex issues to get into, such as how each card you purchase affects your average draw and the histogram of your draws, but for now, we’ll focus on the list of cards in the first set, ‘Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer’.

Some people have very kindly made a list of all of the cards in this set, including the manufacturer: http://ascensiongame.com/game/card-database/, and some people on boardgamegeek.com: https://videogamegeek.com/thread/673668/how-many-each-card

We’re going to start with some basic statistics about the cards in the deck:

There are a total of 100 cards, 18 in each of four ‘colours’, and 28 ‘monsters’.

Looking at the monsters first, there are:
– 10 monsters costing 3 power
– 8 monsters costing 4 power
– 6 monsters costing 5 power
– 3 monsters costing 6 power
– 1 monster costing 7 power

A simple test for the maximum effort you should put into cards which give you power is what is the maximum number of honour points you would expect to gain from that? You can always trade two power for one honour (cultist), but given that that is the default, you shouldn’t expect it to be the optimal move very often.

Assuming you go through the entire deck, and your opponent kills no monsters:
– 10 monsters costing 3 power give 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2 honour, for a total of 13 honour
– 8 monsters costing 4 power give 3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4 honour, for a total of 28 honour
– 6 monsters costing 5 power give 3,3,3,5,5,5 honour, for a total of 24 honour
– 1 monster at 6, 1 monster at 7, for 3 and 4 honour, respectively, for a total of 7

So, that’s a total of 72 honour from center-row monsters, plus however many from cultists.

So that seems reasonable, 72 honour to compete with between you and your opponent. However, at the same time, you have to compete with the center row cards which cost runes:
– 12 cards costing 1 rune each
– 8 cards costing 2 runes each
– 13 cards costing 3 runes each
– 17 cards costing 4 runes each
– 11 cards costing 5 runes each
– 6 cards costing 6 runes each
– 4 cards costing 7 runes each
– 1 card costing 8 runes

And give you honour:
– 30 cards which give you 1 honour
– 20 cards which give you 2 honour
– 12 cards which give you 3 honour
– 4 cards which give you 4 honour
– 6 cards which give you 5,5,6,6,7,8 honour (all mechana constructs)

for a total of: 30+40+36+16+37 = 159 honour possible from purchasing center row cards.

So, including cultists (and a few other cards), you would expect to get twice as many honour points from rune-requiring cards as power-requiring cards.

This suggests to a first-order approximation, that you may be able to ignore power-requiring cards, but you very likely cannot ignore the rune-requiring cards.

Next time, we’ll discuss 1-rune and 2-rune cards!

*120 honour aquirable honour points at the start of the game. The standard game has 30 points per player, so for the two-player games I usually play, that would be 60 honour points. The game doesn’t end up twice as long, as the number of honour points you acquire per turn is closer to exponential than linear**.

**Don’t quote me on this, I have not mathed it out, yet.

Analysis: Ascension (and Dominion) Basics

Ascension is officially* my favourite modern** deck-building game (the genre started by Dominion).

The game was designed by a guy who had been a U.S. Magic: The Gathering champion, to try to capture more replayability by harnessing a quasi-drafting style of play.

http://ascensiongame.com/files/2015/05/Ascension-article.pdf

This article is not about that. It is about the play balance of cards, and how you may be able to use math to help predict what works and what doesn’t.

It was in an article about Magic: The Gathering that I first heard about this, about ‘boons’ http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Boons, where the original designers came up with the idea of trading one mana (and a card) for three of something. Unfortunately, the 3 of somethings ended up being quite unbalanced, with respect to each other, so they ended up restricting or stopping the print run of most of them.

They had some more success with their ‘1 mana per attack/defense’ rule for creatures, with an ostensible balance with Fireball/Disintegrate, where you had to spend one mana per damage dealt.

Anyways, back to Ascension. You may recall from Dominion, the Fibonacci series for costs of Copper/Silver/Gold/Platinum:

Copper: cost 0 for 1 purchasing power
Silver: cost 3 for 2 purchasing power
Gold: cost 6 for 3 purchasing power
Platinum: cost 9 for 5 purchasing power

This works because in a normal length game, as your deck gets larger, you get about as much total purchasing power from each copper as you would from Gold:

Start of game: EEECCCCCCC -> (3.5/hand)
Turn 1,2 buy silver: EEECCCCCCCSS -> (4.58/hand)
Turn 3,4 buy silver: EEECCCCCCCSSSS -> (5.36/hand)
Turn 5,6,7 buy silver,gold,gold: EEECCCCCCCSSSSSGG -> (6.76/hand)
Turn 8,9,10 buy gold,gold: EEECCCCCCCSSSSSGGGG (7.25/hand)
Turn 11,12,13 buy gold,province,province: EEEPPCCCCCCCSSSSSGGGGG (6.95/hand)
Turn 14,15,16,17 buy duchy,duchy,province,province, ending the game (assuming 2 or 3 players).

Each copper is used ~6 times, silvers are used 5+5+4+4+3 = 21/5 = 4.2 times, making them worth ~8.4 each. Gold is used 3+3+2+2+1/5 = 11/5 = 2.2 times, making them worth ~6.6 each.

So, this shows:
1) The coins are approximately balanced
2) Early game silvers help more than other coins, assuming the game is as short as possible.

So, really back to Ascension now. Apprentices are the clear analogue to Copper, Mystics the clear analogue to Silver. I’m guessing they considered having an analogue to Gold either overpowering or boring, hence the fact that Landtalker only appears once in the deck in the standard set. (The higher cost and rune production cards in Ascension are quite interesting in that they get non-linear after a cost of 6 (perhaps to accommodate the 7 and 8 ‘automatically get or defeat something’ cards).)

That’s it for now!

*And unofficially…
**Magic: The Gathering is currently considered ‘old-school’, and also is a ‘collectible trading card game’.