{"id":75,"date":"2020-10-18T18:13:09","date_gmt":"2020-10-18T15:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/?p=75"},"modified":"2024-01-17T15:37:11","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T13:37:11","slug":"everybody-was-tie-breaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/everybody-was-tie-breaking\/","title":{"rendered":"Everybody was tie-breaking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In games with simultaneous actions, it is often necessary to determine what happens first and to whom. I&#8217;ve got a bit of a personal case study in the subject known as &#8220;Staking the Throne&#8221;. The core of the design&#8212;simultaneous blind bidding and set collection&#8212;has persisted, but pretty much everything else has shifted back and forth during the years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>&#8220;v0.1 Profiteers (2015)&#8221; was the very first version of the game: The players were allowed to choose when to win a tie or whether to save that possibility for later. The ties were common, so this slowed down the gameplay considerably.<\/li><li>&#8220;v1.0\/v2.0 Roar for the Throne (2015)&#8221; had basically the same thing for ties, but players were forced to cash in their possibilities.<\/li><li>&#8220;v3.0 <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/boardgamegeek.com\/boardgame\/205888\/symboletto\" target=\"_blank\">Symboletto<\/a> (2016)&#8221; is the only published version of the game&#8230; well&#8230; if you count a small print run of 70 copies as &#8220;published&#8221;. The tie-breaking was streamlined a bit, but effectively this was still the same (i.e., check who won, update the order afterward). The bigger changes were in other mechanics, which reduced the number of ties quite a bit.<\/li><li>&#8220;v4.0\/v5.0 Bets and Bids (2018)&#8221; had no changes with respect to tie-breaking.<\/li><li>&#8220;v6.0\/v7.0 Staking the Throne (2020)&#8221; had ties broken by unique value (eliminating the need to update the tie-breaker).<\/li><li>&#8220;v8.0 Staking the Throne&#8221; has no tie-breaking! This was enabled by having differents tracks for points as well as for sets, so now rewards could be given to all players involved.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The journey has been rather long, starting from a clunky solution to an issue, which in the end turned out not to even exist. This actually reminds me of a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=q445Pf75amw\" target=\"_blank\">Ravensburger game design video<\/a> I watched recently, in which one piece of advice was to &#8220;Instead of adding stuff to cope with something, fix the underlying issue.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Getting back to the topic: In my humble opinion, there should not be tie-breaking during gameplay, as it breaks the game flow, complicates rules, and could be unfair. For instance, tossing a coin gets the job done, but that would not have anything to do with the game. And sometimes you need to break and shake things around until they fall into positions, which allow you to get through neatly. So join with me: No more ties! No more ties! No more ties!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In games with simultaneous actions, it is often necessary to determine what happens first and to whom. I&#8217;ve got a bit of a personal case study in the subject known as &#8220;Staking the Throne&#8221;. The core of the design&#8212;simultaneous blind bidding and set collection&#8212;has persisted, but pretty much everything else has shifted back and forth [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-staking_the_throne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bogasta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}