So that went down as expected by pretty much anyone who was paying attention and knew anything about boxing and MMA. The differences in predictions mainly revolved around McGregor's cardio and when Mayweather would take advantage of it to finish him off, if he wanted to. McGregor started wearing out at round six or seven, Mayweather had a bet to win in under 9.5 rounds, and he won with less than thirty seconds to spare (1:07 or something of round ten).
The most interesting part of the whole thing might be that there aren't any rules about fighters betting on themselves, but Mayweather was stymied when trying to bet $400,000 on himself. Apparently, not only did the book say no, but when he sent a friend somewhere else to bet, they only took $87,000.
It was a good fight, though. I wonder if the people who paid for Mayweather/Pacquaio and this feel like they got their overall money's worth.
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Dave Reviews: An Old Game Made New And Better, If Better Just Means Shinier
Stop Thief!
Stop Thief! was originally released in 1979 as the first (citation needed) app-based board game. The app, in this case, was the ELECTRONIC CRIME SCANNER which hinted where the thief in play was and let you attempt arrests by punching in the numbered space on which you stood if you thought the thief was there.
It's Letters from Whitechapel with a computer Jack and investigators that have different abilities. Doesn't that sound cool?
Here's how it works: there's a square board with a large building in each corner. Each thief comes into play with an alarm going off and the app noting what building the alarm is coming from. That narrows down the possible starting locations to a handful--the red crime spaces at that location. Each player starts their turn by pressing the Get Clue button, which triggers the thief's next movement. Like Letters from Whitechapel, there are blank spaces between the numbered ones; thieves skip these, but players need to count them when they move. The thief goes one numbered space at a time, while players use one of six movement cards with varying distances on them. In addition to each character having a different set of distances, some of the shorter ones have unique abilities as well.
Once players think they're on the same numbered location as the thief, they attempt an arrest by inputting the number into the app. If correct, the player receives the reward. If wrong, the player pays $1,000 for bringing the cops out for no reason. Play continues until one person has the winning amount of money (varies by players in the game); a new thief comes out after each capture if no one has won the game.
Letters from Whitechapel is a fucking incredible game. Even though I like playing Jack and there's no way to take on that role here, seeing the similarity in the mechanics was immediately exciting. I wasn't expecting a genius computer opponent, either; for example, because all you have to go on is sound cues, and the thief is free until you make an arrest, a thief that was able to backtrack could just walk back and forth on the street. That would both make no sense and be incredibly frustrating to deal with. You need to run through several different thieves for someone to make enough to win, so relatively quick captures need to be possible, and a super-clever computer might work at cross-purposes with the fun aesthetic.
That being said, I was expecting a little more than this. A thief starts out in the Museum, sneaks onto the street, then goes back into the Museum to steal more stuff while the investigators are surrounding it. He gets caught, then the next one... goes right back into the Museum. I understand this is all done randomly, which was no doubt required for the big calculator-looking thing to work back in 1979, but we have gigs of memory and actual programming competence today. This bit of weirdness doesn't destroy the fun, but it is a bit odd.
The major issue here is thief movement rules. As a PI, you can move onto any numbered space if it's neutral, a crime space, or a door, but not a window. However, thieves do move through windows, which are numbered, thus they can end their turns on a window. If you're next, even if you have them nailed, you can't do anything. You have to wait for them to finish climbing through, run off into the building or down the street, and then try to catch up two or three or four turns later when you get to go again. That is the worst kind of randomness. Even if it sometimes serve the purpose of keeping a player who's running away with things from landing an arrest so someone else can get it, it's just as likely to keep someone who's behind from getting the arrest they need to catch up, which feels incredibly bad.
Worse yet, unlike Letters from Whitechapel, you can't block the thief's movement. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. The only way in which the game would be screwed up by this is if the thief is in a window and surrounded in such a way as to be unable to move, in which case the movement block isn't the problem, the window rule is. Now, in a worst case scenario, you can run up to a window where you know the thief is, stand next to it unable to make an arrest, then have the thief move right through you and run off before you get a chance to stop him.
A simple fix would be to keep the rule that thieves can move through windows while PIs can't, but don't make windows stopping points. Give the window break cue and follow with the appropriate movement sound cue. But you can't house rule any of this, because the app is central to the game and it only knows how to play this way. It's really unfortunate; compared to the original rules, a lot has been improved here, but when you're on the wrong end of this situation it's a 'I wanna choke people' level of frustration.
One final note: Pepper Gonzales is broken in a four-player game (maybe less, needs testing). She has two movement cards that let you take $1000 from other investigators. From a victory perspective, it is absolutely in your best interests to use those cards, reset your movement deck, and do it again. If you take that free $2,000 every three turns, combined with the fact the other players are looking for arrests just to make up the money you're stealing, odds are you can walk in circles and never try for an arrest unless you're sure you know where the thief is and he's in range. But that makes you a complete asshole and no one will have any fun. You should not have to decide between making the correct strategic play and keeping the game enjoyable for everyone.
The potential here was very high. It's still largely potential.
Score: Seven idiot thieves released due to pity for their incompetence out of twelve.
Stop Thief! was originally released in 1979 as the first (citation needed) app-based board game. The app, in this case, was the ELECTRONIC CRIME SCANNER which hinted where the thief in play was and let you attempt arrests by punching in the numbered space on which you stood if you thought the thief was there.
It's Letters from Whitechapel with a computer Jack and investigators that have different abilities. Doesn't that sound cool?
Here's how it works: there's a square board with a large building in each corner. Each thief comes into play with an alarm going off and the app noting what building the alarm is coming from. That narrows down the possible starting locations to a handful--the red crime spaces at that location. Each player starts their turn by pressing the Get Clue button, which triggers the thief's next movement. Like Letters from Whitechapel, there are blank spaces between the numbered ones; thieves skip these, but players need to count them when they move. The thief goes one numbered space at a time, while players use one of six movement cards with varying distances on them. In addition to each character having a different set of distances, some of the shorter ones have unique abilities as well.
Once players think they're on the same numbered location as the thief, they attempt an arrest by inputting the number into the app. If correct, the player receives the reward. If wrong, the player pays $1,000 for bringing the cops out for no reason. Play continues until one person has the winning amount of money (varies by players in the game); a new thief comes out after each capture if no one has won the game.
Letters from Whitechapel is a fucking incredible game. Even though I like playing Jack and there's no way to take on that role here, seeing the similarity in the mechanics was immediately exciting. I wasn't expecting a genius computer opponent, either; for example, because all you have to go on is sound cues, and the thief is free until you make an arrest, a thief that was able to backtrack could just walk back and forth on the street. That would both make no sense and be incredibly frustrating to deal with. You need to run through several different thieves for someone to make enough to win, so relatively quick captures need to be possible, and a super-clever computer might work at cross-purposes with the fun aesthetic.
That being said, I was expecting a little more than this. A thief starts out in the Museum, sneaks onto the street, then goes back into the Museum to steal more stuff while the investigators are surrounding it. He gets caught, then the next one... goes right back into the Museum. I understand this is all done randomly, which was no doubt required for the big calculator-looking thing to work back in 1979, but we have gigs of memory and actual programming competence today. This bit of weirdness doesn't destroy the fun, but it is a bit odd.
The major issue here is thief movement rules. As a PI, you can move onto any numbered space if it's neutral, a crime space, or a door, but not a window. However, thieves do move through windows, which are numbered, thus they can end their turns on a window. If you're next, even if you have them nailed, you can't do anything. You have to wait for them to finish climbing through, run off into the building or down the street, and then try to catch up two or three or four turns later when you get to go again. That is the worst kind of randomness. Even if it sometimes serve the purpose of keeping a player who's running away with things from landing an arrest so someone else can get it, it's just as likely to keep someone who's behind from getting the arrest they need to catch up, which feels incredibly bad.
Worse yet, unlike Letters from Whitechapel, you can't block the thief's movement. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. The only way in which the game would be screwed up by this is if the thief is in a window and surrounded in such a way as to be unable to move, in which case the movement block isn't the problem, the window rule is. Now, in a worst case scenario, you can run up to a window where you know the thief is, stand next to it unable to make an arrest, then have the thief move right through you and run off before you get a chance to stop him.
A simple fix would be to keep the rule that thieves can move through windows while PIs can't, but don't make windows stopping points. Give the window break cue and follow with the appropriate movement sound cue. But you can't house rule any of this, because the app is central to the game and it only knows how to play this way. It's really unfortunate; compared to the original rules, a lot has been improved here, but when you're on the wrong end of this situation it's a 'I wanna choke people' level of frustration.
One final note: Pepper Gonzales is broken in a four-player game (maybe less, needs testing). She has two movement cards that let you take $1000 from other investigators. From a victory perspective, it is absolutely in your best interests to use those cards, reset your movement deck, and do it again. If you take that free $2,000 every three turns, combined with the fact the other players are looking for arrests just to make up the money you're stealing, odds are you can walk in circles and never try for an arrest unless you're sure you know where the thief is and he's in range. But that makes you a complete asshole and no one will have any fun. You should not have to decide between making the correct strategic play and keeping the game enjoyable for everyone.
The potential here was very high. It's still largely potential.
Score: Seven idiot thieves released due to pity for their incompetence out of twelve.
Dave Reviews: A Game About The Safest Dungeon Ever
Delve
Four fantasy races (we'll call sellswords a race. And wraiths, too). One slowly expanding dungeon. A billion bags of gold that mostly aren't worth a damn thing. Treasure chests that sometimes feel worth the effort.
Welcome to Delve.
Delve is Carcassonne meets Above and Below and... anything where you fight people. Here's the Carcassonne part: a dungeon begins with one tile, and players begin their turns by adding a tile adjacent to any already on the board. If you put a tile down, you have the option of placing one of your five-member team on a piece of that space, be it a room or a corridor. Once a room or corridor is finished, the players with pieces on that room or corridor determine what happens next.
Above and Below analogy: if you're the only player with any team members on the area just completed, you don't automatically get the gold and treasure in the area. A quest card is drawn with a small story and two action options. This is nifty in that you always have to strategize around how many pieces you want in an area; two will beat the vast majority of quest challenges barring terrible rolls, but if you wait to get a second piece down, an opponent can very easily decide to jump in and challenge your ownership of that space.
Generic Fight Stuff analogy: if multiple players have pieces in a completed space, they roll dice appropriate to all of their characters present. Most swords takes all the treasure and half the gold. Next gets half of the remaining gold. If there are a third and fourth player present, they keep getting half of the remaining gold after each take. Apparently dungeon logic in Delve's world demands something be left behind after a fight. But if you have the highest number of coins on the dice, you get a free gold card (or treasure if you get 5+ coins). In this way it's possible to get treasure out of a room that has no treasure for the winner.
Each race (group, whatever) has a slightly different team composition; there are mages, leaders, brutes, and thieves, and each side has two of one of those classes (e.g. wraiths have two mages, one leader, one brute, one thief). Each class rolls the same dice regardless of their team. The teams also have special abilities they can use by spending XP; players receive three XP at the start of the game, with the potential to gain a bit more during the game (or occasionally lose some without spending it).
That's the game. Somehow the designers decided all this complexity warranted a rating of 14+. It wouldn't even be 14+ if there were tits. Eclipse is 14+. Battlestar Galactica is 14+. This can be played effectively by an eight-year-old.
Whatever, right? An age rating doesn't matter. I bring it up, though, because this is a game that very much feels like the designers might have thought there was more game here than is in fact the case. There's a bit of play with deciding what character to place on a given tile, but outside of the obvious placement of mages on rooms with magic pillars, you generally just want to pile strength on strength. Thieves are weaker fighters, but even using kobolds (with two thieves), you need multiple people in a room to have any chance at sneaking an extra treasure out. If you have two or more characters in a room and lose, even an extra treasure is less of a win than a slightly better than usual consolation prize. Losing most of your fights but getting an extra gold card every time is not going to win you the game.
Playing the dice odds doesn't do much for you unless you're the sellswords, who need to decide whether or not to spend an XP for a massive combat boost before rolling. Trying to figure out the chances you'll win a fight only really matters if you're about to finish a room, and trying to decide if you'll beat the quest if you're alone is almost impossible because of the variance in the challenges. You can play a completely reasonable game and just get shell-shocked by a battery of quests nastier than what your opponents get. On the other hand, you do have the option of avoiding quests by getting into fights, so it's not as though you must offer a sacrifice to the mechanic to have a chance.
Delve is not a bad game. The tile placement is very engaging, as long as you're comfortable with the placement rules and the fact you can break them through spending XP. If, by chance, a room explodes in size and you get a giant brawl going, that's pretty fun to watch, and it'll have about as much of an effect on the end result as a giant brawl in a giant, treasure-strewn room should. Learning that taking a room on your own is not free money is important, and adds another layer of 'what do I do here' to the proceedings.
Would play again? Yes. Would play a lot more? Not unless I find some hidden gems in the design that I missed before, and right now I can't imagine what that would be.
Score: Eight shiny but ultimately useless treasures out of eleven.
Four fantasy races (we'll call sellswords a race. And wraiths, too). One slowly expanding dungeon. A billion bags of gold that mostly aren't worth a damn thing. Treasure chests that sometimes feel worth the effort.
Welcome to Delve.
Delve is Carcassonne meets Above and Below and... anything where you fight people. Here's the Carcassonne part: a dungeon begins with one tile, and players begin their turns by adding a tile adjacent to any already on the board. If you put a tile down, you have the option of placing one of your five-member team on a piece of that space, be it a room or a corridor. Once a room or corridor is finished, the players with pieces on that room or corridor determine what happens next.
Above and Below analogy: if you're the only player with any team members on the area just completed, you don't automatically get the gold and treasure in the area. A quest card is drawn with a small story and two action options. This is nifty in that you always have to strategize around how many pieces you want in an area; two will beat the vast majority of quest challenges barring terrible rolls, but if you wait to get a second piece down, an opponent can very easily decide to jump in and challenge your ownership of that space.
Generic Fight Stuff analogy: if multiple players have pieces in a completed space, they roll dice appropriate to all of their characters present. Most swords takes all the treasure and half the gold. Next gets half of the remaining gold. If there are a third and fourth player present, they keep getting half of the remaining gold after each take. Apparently dungeon logic in Delve's world demands something be left behind after a fight. But if you have the highest number of coins on the dice, you get a free gold card (or treasure if you get 5+ coins). In this way it's possible to get treasure out of a room that has no treasure for the winner.
Each race (group, whatever) has a slightly different team composition; there are mages, leaders, brutes, and thieves, and each side has two of one of those classes (e.g. wraiths have two mages, one leader, one brute, one thief). Each class rolls the same dice regardless of their team. The teams also have special abilities they can use by spending XP; players receive three XP at the start of the game, with the potential to gain a bit more during the game (or occasionally lose some without spending it).
That's the game. Somehow the designers decided all this complexity warranted a rating of 14+. It wouldn't even be 14+ if there were tits. Eclipse is 14+. Battlestar Galactica is 14+. This can be played effectively by an eight-year-old.
Whatever, right? An age rating doesn't matter. I bring it up, though, because this is a game that very much feels like the designers might have thought there was more game here than is in fact the case. There's a bit of play with deciding what character to place on a given tile, but outside of the obvious placement of mages on rooms with magic pillars, you generally just want to pile strength on strength. Thieves are weaker fighters, but even using kobolds (with two thieves), you need multiple people in a room to have any chance at sneaking an extra treasure out. If you have two or more characters in a room and lose, even an extra treasure is less of a win than a slightly better than usual consolation prize. Losing most of your fights but getting an extra gold card every time is not going to win you the game.
Playing the dice odds doesn't do much for you unless you're the sellswords, who need to decide whether or not to spend an XP for a massive combat boost before rolling. Trying to figure out the chances you'll win a fight only really matters if you're about to finish a room, and trying to decide if you'll beat the quest if you're alone is almost impossible because of the variance in the challenges. You can play a completely reasonable game and just get shell-shocked by a battery of quests nastier than what your opponents get. On the other hand, you do have the option of avoiding quests by getting into fights, so it's not as though you must offer a sacrifice to the mechanic to have a chance.
Delve is not a bad game. The tile placement is very engaging, as long as you're comfortable with the placement rules and the fact you can break them through spending XP. If, by chance, a room explodes in size and you get a giant brawl going, that's pretty fun to watch, and it'll have about as much of an effect on the end result as a giant brawl in a giant, treasure-strewn room should. Learning that taking a room on your own is not free money is important, and adds another layer of 'what do I do here' to the proceedings.
Would play again? Yes. Would play a lot more? Not unless I find some hidden gems in the design that I missed before, and right now I can't imagine what that would be.
Score: Eight shiny but ultimately useless treasures out of eleven.
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Jon Goddamned Jones
PEDs. Again. Yeah.
What the fuck do you say about this guy now? Conor McGregor acts like the supreme asshole of the sport, but Jon Jones holds the actual title. There's no dick pill excuse on this one. If he did get another tainted dick pill, his suspension should be even longer on account of sheer idiocy.
Everything about this feels bad. I can't even be happy for Daniel Cormier having the title come back to him, because no matter the level of cheat, we saw him get busted up twice by Jones and, at his best, keep the fights even. I want to believe, deep in my soul, that an un-juiced Jones gets hammer fisted into next month by Cormier, but that only feels like it would be true if Jones had been juicing his entire career, even when he wasn't making the money to afford these suspensions (or maybe even the drugs).
Cormier deserves to hold the title, assuming this isn't some sort of borked test. He's the best light heavyweight in the world, by some margin, out of everyone who follows the rules. But it's also possible to recognize someone as a deserving champ while having it not quite seem like he's cleared every hurdle. It's not as though this is a singular problem for him, mind you; with regards to public perception, this idea is applied to other people as well. There's a difference between someone viewed as merely holding a belt (Michael Bisping), someone who might have deserving challengers but none who people think are on his or her level (Max Holloway), and someone who has completely cleared out a division (Demetrious Johnson).
But the whole point of the second Jones fight was for Cormier to prove, if he won, that he was truly the best and could beat all comers. Even knowing intellectually he was fighting a version of Jones that was not allowed in the Octagon, the sense is still there that Jones remains an uncleared hurdle. Justice in this sport would be never seeing Jones fight for a UFC title again. Even if he does, it wouldn't happen until Cormier is likely retired. Thus Cormier, unlike anyone else, will continue on without ever having a chance to implant himself as a champion in people's minds in the visceral way they need to see to really, truly believe it.
And that just fucking sucks.
What the fuck do you say about this guy now? Conor McGregor acts like the supreme asshole of the sport, but Jon Jones holds the actual title. There's no dick pill excuse on this one. If he did get another tainted dick pill, his suspension should be even longer on account of sheer idiocy.
Everything about this feels bad. I can't even be happy for Daniel Cormier having the title come back to him, because no matter the level of cheat, we saw him get busted up twice by Jones and, at his best, keep the fights even. I want to believe, deep in my soul, that an un-juiced Jones gets hammer fisted into next month by Cormier, but that only feels like it would be true if Jones had been juicing his entire career, even when he wasn't making the money to afford these suspensions (or maybe even the drugs).
Cormier deserves to hold the title, assuming this isn't some sort of borked test. He's the best light heavyweight in the world, by some margin, out of everyone who follows the rules. But it's also possible to recognize someone as a deserving champ while having it not quite seem like he's cleared every hurdle. It's not as though this is a singular problem for him, mind you; with regards to public perception, this idea is applied to other people as well. There's a difference between someone viewed as merely holding a belt (Michael Bisping), someone who might have deserving challengers but none who people think are on his or her level (Max Holloway), and someone who has completely cleared out a division (Demetrious Johnson).
But the whole point of the second Jones fight was for Cormier to prove, if he won, that he was truly the best and could beat all comers. Even knowing intellectually he was fighting a version of Jones that was not allowed in the Octagon, the sense is still there that Jones remains an uncleared hurdle. Justice in this sport would be never seeing Jones fight for a UFC title again. Even if he does, it wouldn't happen until Cormier is likely retired. Thus Cormier, unlike anyone else, will continue on without ever having a chance to implant himself as a champion in people's minds in the visceral way they need to see to really, truly believe it.
And that just fucking sucks.
Sunday, August 20, 2017
So What About This Defenders Show?
It's OK.
I wanted it to be better, which is a pretty dumb statement, because anybody who thinks a thing is only OK will want it to be better. I certainly expected it to be better. What I expected more than something better, though, was something longer.
Here's a reminder of the episodes coming in for the core characters:
I wanted it to be better, which is a pretty dumb statement, because anybody who thinks a thing is only OK will want it to be better. I certainly expected it to be better. What I expected more than something better, though, was something longer.
Here's a reminder of the episodes coming in for the core characters:
- Daredevil: 26 episodes (thirteen each season)
- Jessica Jones: 13 episodes
- Luke Cage: 13 episodes
- Iron Fist: 13 episodes
Getting the idea? They've had a method for doing these shows so far, and it's worked (except for Iron Fist, but there's no correct number of episodes that could make Iron Fist good), so the expectation was another thirteen. Maybe twelve. But eight? How do you properly approach a series with four main characters using less than two-thirds the total screen time than each of those characters had to themselves?
I don't know, and apparently the Marvel writers didn't either. It's not some bleak catastrophe of a show that will make you question the hours you spent watching, even if watching meant keeping it in the corner of your eye while you multi-tasked three different things on your second monitor. On the other hand, I thought Iron Fist was average rather than terrible, and this isn't even as good as Iron Fist, so maybe it is a giant dogpile.
If you saw the other four series and were expecting the characters to be similar, you'll be half-right and probably a quarter-pleased. Jessica Jones doesn't stop cutting down everyone and everything around her, and Danny Rand is the same self-indulgent little prick who doesn't know one-third the shit he thinks he does. But Daredevil won't shut the fuck up about Elektra, and Luke sets a fucking world record for rate of good guy cliches uttered in a single television series.
(Interlude where I speak to Luke Cage as if he's a real person: Luke. My man. You're a good dude. Maybe you're even a great dude. Everyone appreciates how willing you are to protect the people of Harlem and the city of New York. Everyone also knows by now how willing you are to protect them. Stop fucking telling us.)
It doesn't help that the story centers on Iron Fist (side note to Danny Rand: we also know you're the Immortal Iron Fist, stop telling us that too). The other three are all capable of personal crises far more interesting than his shit. It is understandable, though; he was the only character with an enemy that ranged beyond New York City. Putting a team of heroes together can very logically lead to using the biggest enemy currently in play. But that's why it needed more than eight episodes to finish the story properly. If this Defenders season had a story designed to spread back out into the single-character series and/or season two, that would be one thing--that thing being more than eight episodes--but it's not anywhere near enough to both give the characters any of the depth we expect from their individual series and carry the type of battle at hand here.
This has already been too many words for this show. It's OK. Meh.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Mayweather vs. McGregor: Prediction
Mayweather wins.
That was easy. The biggest question mark surrounding this fight is how so many people were convinced McGregor has enough of a chance to win that they were willing to put money on it.
It made some sense under the original odds; at +950 for McGregor and -2000 or worse for Mayweather, it was hardly worth betting on Floyd at all. The ROI at -2000 in a fight where the other guy has a puncher's chance is complete shit. So anyone who felt a burning need to put money down were only incentivized to bet on McGregor. What the hell, right? If I have fifty bucks I don't need and a miracle might turn it into $500, and I have the chance to say I believed in McGregor enough to put that money down if he does somehow win, it might be worth taking a flyer on it. Thus the movement of the betting line towards McGregor was inevitable.
The extent to which that's the case is a different story. One week before the fight, Mayweather's down to a -450 favorite, with McGregor at +325. A +950 line means approximately 10:1 odds; McGregor has to have at least a 10% chance of winning the fight to make the bet break-even. To give McGregor that much of a chance against the greatest boxer of the last two decades is a hell of a stretch at best, but those are the best odds you'll get, so jump on them when you can. Pretty quickly, however, only stupid money follows the semi-smart. At what point is a McGregor bet clearly a losing proposition, no matter your belief in his youth and the hope his striking power can translate to boxing? +700? +500? What argument can support McGregor having a legitimate one in five chance of beating Floyd goddamned Mayweather?
More over, when does Mayweather start becoming worth the money? Or when did he, since he clearly is at this point? Right now, you'd have to put down $450 to win $100. It's still mainly a bet for serious gamblers, the ones who place enough bets to withstand the variance of surprise outcomes; it's harder to justify risking $450 per $100 profit on a one-off. That doesn't change the fact that Mayweather, at these odds, is an incredibly good value.
Here's part of an overheard conversation about the fight: "If McGregor goes twelve rounds with Mayweather, that's going to prove MMA is for real. It'll be huge for the sport." That guy could end up being right, but if he is it won't have anything to do with McGregor proving something about his sport by going the distance. It will be McGregor and Dana White cranking the hype machine up to thirteen letting people know what an accomplishment it was to last twelve rounds with the greatest boxer of his generation.
On any logical level, though, that's absurd. Why shouldn't we expect McGregor to last twelve rounds? Have all the people predicting a Mayweather knockout because his skill level is so much higher forgotten his last knockout (apart from Victor 'Gimme A Hug' Ortiz) came against Ricky Hatton in 2007?
If anything, a Mayweather KO would logically prove how different boxing and MMA are. Conor McGregor is an extremely high-level combat sports athlete with fitness to match, facing a man whose greatness is predicated on defense and counter-punching, and who has never shown any qualms about taking zero chances in pursuit of a victory. People talk about what McGregor has to do to knockout Mayweather, which makes sense given that it's his only reasonable route to victory.
Floyd Mayweather doesn't fight for knockouts, he fights for victories. He's an all-time great fighting a well-honed athlete who brings, at best, a low-level professional's skill set in this sport. The most likely outcome, given the track records of the fighters, is that Mayweather scoots around the ring for twelve rounds and McGregor is lucky to land fifty punches of any type all fight. The fact most predictions seem to revolve around a KO for one man or the other defies all logic.
And that's why Conor McGregor is, by the betting line, considered more likely to beat Floyd Mayweather than Marcos fucking Maidana was in the second Mayweather/Maidana fight. People are just goddamned silly.
That was easy. The biggest question mark surrounding this fight is how so many people were convinced McGregor has enough of a chance to win that they were willing to put money on it.
It made some sense under the original odds; at +950 for McGregor and -2000 or worse for Mayweather, it was hardly worth betting on Floyd at all. The ROI at -2000 in a fight where the other guy has a puncher's chance is complete shit. So anyone who felt a burning need to put money down were only incentivized to bet on McGregor. What the hell, right? If I have fifty bucks I don't need and a miracle might turn it into $500, and I have the chance to say I believed in McGregor enough to put that money down if he does somehow win, it might be worth taking a flyer on it. Thus the movement of the betting line towards McGregor was inevitable.
The extent to which that's the case is a different story. One week before the fight, Mayweather's down to a -450 favorite, with McGregor at +325. A +950 line means approximately 10:1 odds; McGregor has to have at least a 10% chance of winning the fight to make the bet break-even. To give McGregor that much of a chance against the greatest boxer of the last two decades is a hell of a stretch at best, but those are the best odds you'll get, so jump on them when you can. Pretty quickly, however, only stupid money follows the semi-smart. At what point is a McGregor bet clearly a losing proposition, no matter your belief in his youth and the hope his striking power can translate to boxing? +700? +500? What argument can support McGregor having a legitimate one in five chance of beating Floyd goddamned Mayweather?
More over, when does Mayweather start becoming worth the money? Or when did he, since he clearly is at this point? Right now, you'd have to put down $450 to win $100. It's still mainly a bet for serious gamblers, the ones who place enough bets to withstand the variance of surprise outcomes; it's harder to justify risking $450 per $100 profit on a one-off. That doesn't change the fact that Mayweather, at these odds, is an incredibly good value.
Here's part of an overheard conversation about the fight: "If McGregor goes twelve rounds with Mayweather, that's going to prove MMA is for real. It'll be huge for the sport." That guy could end up being right, but if he is it won't have anything to do with McGregor proving something about his sport by going the distance. It will be McGregor and Dana White cranking the hype machine up to thirteen letting people know what an accomplishment it was to last twelve rounds with the greatest boxer of his generation.
On any logical level, though, that's absurd. Why shouldn't we expect McGregor to last twelve rounds? Have all the people predicting a Mayweather knockout because his skill level is so much higher forgotten his last knockout (apart from Victor 'Gimme A Hug' Ortiz) came against Ricky Hatton in 2007?
If anything, a Mayweather KO would logically prove how different boxing and MMA are. Conor McGregor is an extremely high-level combat sports athlete with fitness to match, facing a man whose greatness is predicated on defense and counter-punching, and who has never shown any qualms about taking zero chances in pursuit of a victory. People talk about what McGregor has to do to knockout Mayweather, which makes sense given that it's his only reasonable route to victory.
Floyd Mayweather doesn't fight for knockouts, he fights for victories. He's an all-time great fighting a well-honed athlete who brings, at best, a low-level professional's skill set in this sport. The most likely outcome, given the track records of the fighters, is that Mayweather scoots around the ring for twelve rounds and McGregor is lucky to land fifty punches of any type all fight. The fact most predictions seem to revolve around a KO for one man or the other defies all logic.
And that's why Conor McGregor is, by the betting line, considered more likely to beat Floyd Mayweather than Marcos fucking Maidana was in the second Mayweather/Maidana fight. People are just goddamned silly.
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Dave Reviews: A Game About Illness, Except You're The Illness And OK Look It's Not Pandemic
Pathogenesis
Outside of a board game store, when people talk about Pandemic, there sometimes comes a realization that you need to specify whether or not you're discussing the tabletop version revolving around the Scooby Gang of anti-infectious disease workers trying to save the world, or the internet version where you are the illness trying to literally end the world through your power, except those motherfuckers in Greenland always close off the port before you can get over there.
The upshot is, if you fear an imminent apocalypse, go to Greenland. No one's going to nuke it either.
The other upshot (can you have two? I say yea) is that now there's another 'that disease game' for the tabletop surface, which also starts with a 'P' and is not going to make this conversation a whole lot simpler, except the game's only ok (spoiler) and probably no one's going to know what it is in the first place.
Pathogenesis works with 1-4 players, and can be played either cooperatively or competitively, which should be a warning sign right there. In both modes, there's an ephemeral body with three systems for the players' diseases to attack--respiratory, gastrointestinal, and tissue--and the goal for all players is to kill the body by removing point counters from those systems. If that's not done before the immune system deck is drawn through twice, the body lives and all the players lose. The difference between cooperative and competitive is that in competitive, you only need to remove the counters from one system (two if playing 2v2 teams), while in cooperative you need to empty all three systems. Functionally, then, this determines whether or not you care if the other players have highly effective viruses attacking the body; you can leave good cards for other players in cooperative, for example, but you can't directly assist in making their diseases stronger (e.g. by handing them cards).
Other than that, this is a deckbuilding game in the vein of... all of them. Starting decks have ten cards, you draw five per hand, most of the cards help you buy better stuff, and so on. The differences are in how pathogens work. All pathogens have an attack and defense value; attack determines how many point counters are removed from the appropriate system of the body, whereas defense is used to protect the pathogens from attacks by the immune system. The base values of the pathogens aren't enough, though, especially when the second immune system deck gets shuffled in; fortunately, pathogens have nodes for additional abilities (these are the cards purchased from the gene pool), many of which have stat bonuses that help strengthen the pathogen. Therefore, you need enough attack on your pathogens to gather up point counters, but even more you need defense to limit the immune system's chances of wiping them out.
One thing that becomes apparent quickly is that it does very little good, and later on is in fact detrimental, to play weak pathogens without boosts. Once the immune deck comes into play, every pathogen is attacked, which means the immune deck loses cards faster if you have a bunch of pathogens in play. Furthermore, unless the pathogen has an ability that lets it attack before the immune system can react, the immune deck can kill your pathogen before it has any effect at all. At first your weaker pathogens are fine to play because you have to work through a small deck of starter cards in each system before the immune response comes into play, but you need to amp them up fairly quickly or else accept they're going to die and just focus on better, system-specific pathogens you purchase for your deck.
The best part about this game is its scientific validity. Everything works in a logical function and is based on the actual battle between diseases and bodies that our fragile mortal frames deal with constantly. Anyone who's taken high school biology (and didn't routinely skip class to make out behind the bleachers) should recognize how all of this works in at least a conceptual sense. It also mirrors the ramp-up of the immune system against particular diseases, in that the disease has a little bit of time to exist before being recognized as a threat.
But this is a game, and it needs to be best as a game. It's not.
The main issue is the randomness of the immune deck in a competitive game, especially with four players. Immune system responses vary from attaching new types of cells to pathogens that can combo off other immune cards on later turns to cards with a huge attack value almost no pathogen can survive. That's a cool concept, but if someone's 7/7 pathogen draws a combo cell and someone else's 7/7 draws an 8-damage immune card, the first person scores their seven points while the second doesn't, and seven points is over ten percent of the available points for any given system. That's a big advantage to take on one turn, and there's no guarantee the combo cell will blow up the first person's cell on the next turn while the second person's pathogen and its add-ons have to shuffle back through the deck.
There are different ways to set up the game to change game length and difficulty, which is all well and good in theory, but going from a quick game to a normal one only adds four cards to each immune deck, which means twelve more cards overall. Going through that deck twice, depending on how many pathogens people have out, might buy you two extra turns in a four-player game, but even then what you really need is for something to kill the opposing pathogen before that player's lead spirals too far out of control. Playing on hard just changes the odds of killing the body so that somebody wins, without affecting this basic problem of someone getting an unlucky draw and having a long climb back into contention.
'Alright, you picky fucking butthole,' I hear the voices say, 'it has competitive weaknesses. But it's a learning game, so what about cooperative?' And I acknowledge that it's probably cleanest in a cooperative setting. The immune deck runs out faster than you'd expect, so you have to work to ramp up your diseases quickly enough, while also planning with each other who should buy what cards in order to maximize the odds of success. This is also the mode where the other main difference between this and most deckbuilders--the ability to hold cards from turn to turn--comes into play, because waiting until you have a hand that lets you drop a monster pathogen all at once doesn't have many drawbacks in co-op. Because you want to set up pathogens that are likely to survive brute force attacks, the immune combos are also more likely to have an impact here.
However, the immunity randomness strikes again, because success in co-op requires building pathogens with the maximum chance of survival, ie. high defense. There really is no other way to succeed, which means you're taking the gene pool cards and deciding what variation on that defense theme to pursue as opposed to having genuinely different options for attacking the body.
And maybe that's the intent. Maybe that's the most scientifically valid way of showing how diseases attack the body, and the conditions under which they can succeed--the difference between cellulitis and MRSA as displayed through the abstraction of a card game. I really like the idea, and I'm glad this game was made. It just doesn't hold up fun-wise for as many playthroughs as most people are going to want out of their games.
Score: Eighteen dilated pupils out of thirty-four (one guy's all fucked up)
Outside of a board game store, when people talk about Pandemic, there sometimes comes a realization that you need to specify whether or not you're discussing the tabletop version revolving around the Scooby Gang of anti-infectious disease workers trying to save the world, or the internet version where you are the illness trying to literally end the world through your power, except those motherfuckers in Greenland always close off the port before you can get over there.
The upshot is, if you fear an imminent apocalypse, go to Greenland. No one's going to nuke it either.
The other upshot (can you have two? I say yea) is that now there's another 'that disease game' for the tabletop surface, which also starts with a 'P' and is not going to make this conversation a whole lot simpler, except the game's only ok (spoiler) and probably no one's going to know what it is in the first place.
Pathogenesis works with 1-4 players, and can be played either cooperatively or competitively, which should be a warning sign right there. In both modes, there's an ephemeral body with three systems for the players' diseases to attack--respiratory, gastrointestinal, and tissue--and the goal for all players is to kill the body by removing point counters from those systems. If that's not done before the immune system deck is drawn through twice, the body lives and all the players lose. The difference between cooperative and competitive is that in competitive, you only need to remove the counters from one system (two if playing 2v2 teams), while in cooperative you need to empty all three systems. Functionally, then, this determines whether or not you care if the other players have highly effective viruses attacking the body; you can leave good cards for other players in cooperative, for example, but you can't directly assist in making their diseases stronger (e.g. by handing them cards).
Other than that, this is a deckbuilding game in the vein of... all of them. Starting decks have ten cards, you draw five per hand, most of the cards help you buy better stuff, and so on. The differences are in how pathogens work. All pathogens have an attack and defense value; attack determines how many point counters are removed from the appropriate system of the body, whereas defense is used to protect the pathogens from attacks by the immune system. The base values of the pathogens aren't enough, though, especially when the second immune system deck gets shuffled in; fortunately, pathogens have nodes for additional abilities (these are the cards purchased from the gene pool), many of which have stat bonuses that help strengthen the pathogen. Therefore, you need enough attack on your pathogens to gather up point counters, but even more you need defense to limit the immune system's chances of wiping them out.
One thing that becomes apparent quickly is that it does very little good, and later on is in fact detrimental, to play weak pathogens without boosts. Once the immune deck comes into play, every pathogen is attacked, which means the immune deck loses cards faster if you have a bunch of pathogens in play. Furthermore, unless the pathogen has an ability that lets it attack before the immune system can react, the immune deck can kill your pathogen before it has any effect at all. At first your weaker pathogens are fine to play because you have to work through a small deck of starter cards in each system before the immune response comes into play, but you need to amp them up fairly quickly or else accept they're going to die and just focus on better, system-specific pathogens you purchase for your deck.
The best part about this game is its scientific validity. Everything works in a logical function and is based on the actual battle between diseases and bodies that our fragile mortal frames deal with constantly. Anyone who's taken high school biology (and didn't routinely skip class to make out behind the bleachers) should recognize how all of this works in at least a conceptual sense. It also mirrors the ramp-up of the immune system against particular diseases, in that the disease has a little bit of time to exist before being recognized as a threat.
But this is a game, and it needs to be best as a game. It's not.
The main issue is the randomness of the immune deck in a competitive game, especially with four players. Immune system responses vary from attaching new types of cells to pathogens that can combo off other immune cards on later turns to cards with a huge attack value almost no pathogen can survive. That's a cool concept, but if someone's 7/7 pathogen draws a combo cell and someone else's 7/7 draws an 8-damage immune card, the first person scores their seven points while the second doesn't, and seven points is over ten percent of the available points for any given system. That's a big advantage to take on one turn, and there's no guarantee the combo cell will blow up the first person's cell on the next turn while the second person's pathogen and its add-ons have to shuffle back through the deck.
There are different ways to set up the game to change game length and difficulty, which is all well and good in theory, but going from a quick game to a normal one only adds four cards to each immune deck, which means twelve more cards overall. Going through that deck twice, depending on how many pathogens people have out, might buy you two extra turns in a four-player game, but even then what you really need is for something to kill the opposing pathogen before that player's lead spirals too far out of control. Playing on hard just changes the odds of killing the body so that somebody wins, without affecting this basic problem of someone getting an unlucky draw and having a long climb back into contention.
'Alright, you picky fucking butthole,' I hear the voices say, 'it has competitive weaknesses. But it's a learning game, so what about cooperative?' And I acknowledge that it's probably cleanest in a cooperative setting. The immune deck runs out faster than you'd expect, so you have to work to ramp up your diseases quickly enough, while also planning with each other who should buy what cards in order to maximize the odds of success. This is also the mode where the other main difference between this and most deckbuilders--the ability to hold cards from turn to turn--comes into play, because waiting until you have a hand that lets you drop a monster pathogen all at once doesn't have many drawbacks in co-op. Because you want to set up pathogens that are likely to survive brute force attacks, the immune combos are also more likely to have an impact here.
However, the immunity randomness strikes again, because success in co-op requires building pathogens with the maximum chance of survival, ie. high defense. There really is no other way to succeed, which means you're taking the gene pool cards and deciding what variation on that defense theme to pursue as opposed to having genuinely different options for attacking the body.
And maybe that's the intent. Maybe that's the most scientifically valid way of showing how diseases attack the body, and the conditions under which they can succeed--the difference between cellulitis and MRSA as displayed through the abstraction of a card game. I really like the idea, and I'm glad this game was made. It just doesn't hold up fun-wise for as many playthroughs as most people are going to want out of their games.
Score: Eighteen dilated pupils out of thirty-four (one guy's all fucked up)
Friday, August 4, 2017
Dave Reviews: The Version Of Arkham Horror That Was Supposed To Be Shorter But Fucking Isn't
Eldritch Horror
No, it's not a new game. You think I'm trying to be competitive with Shut Up & Sit Down or something?
Anyway. CTHULHU BITCHES
Arkham Horror was the original version of this game, released in 2005, where you ran around Arkham to try and stop the invasion of the hentai gods before their squadrons of flying penis monsters took over the city, and from there the world. After a few expansions, some of which turned this reasonably good game into a pile of smoking dogshit (looking at you, Dunwich), a new version was built around the same gameplay concepts--run around, fight off the hordes of waggling dicks, and figure out how to stop the elder god from either spawning or just ending all life on the planet.
This one, Eldritch Horror, worked better from the start just by having your investigators travel all over the world, since it took a stretch of the imagination to think Cthulhu or Azathoth or whoever would dump all their forces into the one city where anyone knew about them and gave enough of a shit to fight back. It was also designed to have a more streamlined gameplay process; things happen that involve the alternate dimensions famous in the Cthulhu mythos, but you don't travel there and move according to special rules, nor do different characters move different distances, and everyone has two actions per turn to handle anything they want to do--movement, acquiring items, resting, etc. Also, your stats are your stats; the min-maxing every turn, while sometimes useful, is more number crunching than most people need. Five base stats (which can still go up or down, depending on what happens) is plenty.
When you look at the game, and get used to the turn flow, it seems like it should go much faster than Arkham, which was a major selling point of the game. There are only three turn phases instead of five, there's no monster pile on the side that keeps adding to your odds of being utterly annihilated... there's just less to keep track of in general. Your action options are limited and easy to grasp: move, get a ticket so you can move farther, use your influence to buy stuff, rest to regain health and sanity, or trade with another investigator. (Some cards or investigator abilities add more things you can spend actions on, but those are equally easy to understand.) They even have bank loans available so that if you totally flub your influence roll to buy assets, you can still take on debt to get something, assuming all the risk involved (read: mob hit squads). It's designed better on a core level than Arkham.
And yet... this is still a game where five competent gamers can take three hours to finish, which is not really an improvement. Nor are you getting a ton of turns in during that time, maybe seven or eight total. And five players is not excessive; it plays up to eight, which is not recommended. It's like being used to driving somewhere with your grandma, then getting to ride with your brother, which is a more exciting trip that fractures quantum mechanics and somehow ends up taking just as long. That's unfortunate, too, because Eldritch Horror probably benefits more from extra investigators in terms of your odds of winning than its predecessor.
If you've never played either of these games, Eldritch Horror is probably the one you'll like more. It's easier to learn and understand, with fewer marginally useful mechanics. There's more story written into the cards, and less of a requirement that you have investigators with the best possible stats for whatever they're trying to do. It is, in short, an improvement in the you would expect a new version of an older game to be. But you do need to expect this game to take a few hours until you're experienced enough to tear through the encounter and mythos phases.
Score: Thirteen detached tentacle suckers laying dead on a cobblestone road out of nineteen
No, it's not a new game. You think I'm trying to be competitive with Shut Up & Sit Down or something?
Anyway. CTHULHU BITCHES
Arkham Horror was the original version of this game, released in 2005, where you ran around Arkham to try and stop the invasion of the hentai gods before their squadrons of flying penis monsters took over the city, and from there the world. After a few expansions, some of which turned this reasonably good game into a pile of smoking dogshit (looking at you, Dunwich), a new version was built around the same gameplay concepts--run around, fight off the hordes of waggling dicks, and figure out how to stop the elder god from either spawning or just ending all life on the planet.
This one, Eldritch Horror, worked better from the start just by having your investigators travel all over the world, since it took a stretch of the imagination to think Cthulhu or Azathoth or whoever would dump all their forces into the one city where anyone knew about them and gave enough of a shit to fight back. It was also designed to have a more streamlined gameplay process; things happen that involve the alternate dimensions famous in the Cthulhu mythos, but you don't travel there and move according to special rules, nor do different characters move different distances, and everyone has two actions per turn to handle anything they want to do--movement, acquiring items, resting, etc. Also, your stats are your stats; the min-maxing every turn, while sometimes useful, is more number crunching than most people need. Five base stats (which can still go up or down, depending on what happens) is plenty.
When you look at the game, and get used to the turn flow, it seems like it should go much faster than Arkham, which was a major selling point of the game. There are only three turn phases instead of five, there's no monster pile on the side that keeps adding to your odds of being utterly annihilated... there's just less to keep track of in general. Your action options are limited and easy to grasp: move, get a ticket so you can move farther, use your influence to buy stuff, rest to regain health and sanity, or trade with another investigator. (Some cards or investigator abilities add more things you can spend actions on, but those are equally easy to understand.) They even have bank loans available so that if you totally flub your influence roll to buy assets, you can still take on debt to get something, assuming all the risk involved (read: mob hit squads). It's designed better on a core level than Arkham.
And yet... this is still a game where five competent gamers can take three hours to finish, which is not really an improvement. Nor are you getting a ton of turns in during that time, maybe seven or eight total. And five players is not excessive; it plays up to eight, which is not recommended. It's like being used to driving somewhere with your grandma, then getting to ride with your brother, which is a more exciting trip that fractures quantum mechanics and somehow ends up taking just as long. That's unfortunate, too, because Eldritch Horror probably benefits more from extra investigators in terms of your odds of winning than its predecessor.
If you've never played either of these games, Eldritch Horror is probably the one you'll like more. It's easier to learn and understand, with fewer marginally useful mechanics. There's more story written into the cards, and less of a requirement that you have investigators with the best possible stats for whatever they're trying to do. It is, in short, an improvement in the you would expect a new version of an older game to be. But you do need to expect this game to take a few hours until you're experienced enough to tear through the encounter and mythos phases.
Score: Thirteen detached tentacle suckers laying dead on a cobblestone road out of nineteen
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