![]() Or just decent cake, if your grandparents are the baking kind. Sit in on old-people’s bingo night for the chance of an inheritance. Buy the scratch card and hand over your loonies (that’s a Canadian term, look it up) for the dream of millions. Spin the wheel, fail to win the giant box of stale chocolates. We can recognize a lottery when we see it. Which (since you now have enough background to understand it) brings me to the other part of the title, the “Difference Between a Game and a Lottery.” Some of those games have been interesting enough to garner me positive interest from publishers (haven’t sold any yet, but then, for the past eight years, I’ve been putting my time into writing rather than game design.) I’m not a newb. I’ve been playing games for over forty years, and I’ve been deigning games, on and off, for over twenty. I don’t claim to be the greatest Star Realms player, but I do have an understanding of how the working parts of the game fit together. No, he’s playing on a single heuristic: is the card expensive?īy now, I’ve cut back his advantage to exchanging a single scout for an explorer – he’s still got 10 cards in his deck, and now, I can occasionally win. Since I’ve got the Frontiers and Colony Wars expansions, there are too many cards for him to memorize them all (although he is trying). He still has no idea what he’s doing, only that expensive cards are good. This allows me to play as good as I can, and him to win consistently. So I started decreasing his advantage (he’s got no idea how to prepare the starting decks, and relies upon me to do it, which gives me plenty of opportunity to fine-tune the algorithm for maximum fun and pleasure for us both.) With a faster starting deck, that was enough for him to crush me every single time. Buy the most expensive card you can afford.I’ll get back to that.Īfter a few games, my son stopped asking me what to do. I stopped doing that after the game where he beat me with 116 life to zero. He’s got the advantage of being faster (having a smaller deck to cycle through, and a head start on his purchasing engine with the explorer that yields double the amount of trade than the regular scouts.) In his first games, he also got additional heath, 70, instead of the standard 50 life (or authority, if you want to go all in on the Star Realms terminology.) Playing Star Realms with my son, I don’t have to. Even when I knew that my wife wouldn’t play games that she didn’t win an overwhelming amount of time, I couldn’t throw the game. I want my son to keep winning, but I don’t want to throw any games. Some cards, he recognizes by their image, and the recognition is followed by an enthusiastic exclamation: “this is the ship that copies other ships,” or “this is the good one that blew you up.” As long as he keeps winning, he wants to keep playing. He can’t read, yet he’s quite comfortable in knowing what “Draw a card,” “Destroy target base,” or even “Target opponent must discard a card” means. Remember that, it’s important.Īs my son kept beating me, he started learning to recognize patterns of words. Cards in Star Realms have a cost that you need to pay, using other cards, to acquire them. From that moment on, my 5-year-old was a Star Realms fiend. I had to help him read the cards, and explain the concept of damage, trade, and life to him, but he beat me handily. I removed some crap cards (three scouts and a viper for you Star Realm aficionados) from his starting deck, and gave him a decent card (an explorer). When he first became interested in playing Star Realms, I gave him a lot of advantages. He’s got a very limited idea of what Star Realms is, other than the pictures being cool, some numbers dealing damage to me, and other numbers giving life to him, and that both numbers help him win. Put them together, and you get someone who plays Star Realms according to set rules. Star Realms, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a expandable, tabletop, deck-building, engine-building, science fiction card game with open drafting and a take-that mechanism.Īnd for all of you for which the previous sentence made absolutely no sense: Star Realms is a card game where you buy star ships and bases, then use those to buy better star ships and better bases, and use them to damage and destroy your opponent.Īn Automata is an algorithm, a way of performing actions for an opponent when you want to play a multiplayer tabletop game on your own. ![]() ![]() Before we begin, you need a bit of background on what a Star Realms Automata is. ![]()
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