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[PATV] Thursday, July 18, 2013 - Shut Up & Sit Down Season 2, Ep. 11: Quarantine
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[PATV] Thursday, July 18, 2013 - Shut Up & Sit Down Season 2, Ep. 11: Quarantine
In this episode Paul and Quinns review the board game Quarantine.
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Also, I'm now entirely unsatisfied with my first edition copy of Pandemic. Those new cubes look delicious!
Quarantine, I am disappoint. I was looking forward to learning about a game that could finally stand tall next to Pandemic as another fantastic disease-based game, and then as a boardgame representation of the excellent Theme Hospital, but you had to go and ruin it in the end with those weird counter-intuitive win conditions.
If I were to buy/play this, I would probably just push for us to ignore that particular win condition, or change the wording of it so that the completed nurse's stations are worth more points, since that at least would be more in line with the theme the game's trying to project. But even though the price isn't that unreasonable ($30 new) that's still a fundamental flaw, and I'm not interested in having to remember to fix *their* mistake every time I play.
Ah well. More money goes into the Terra Mystica fund, I guess...
To Seek,
To Learn,
To Do.
-QFG2
If the speed of light is faster then the speed of sound, is that why people always appear bright until they speak? o_O
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
"Curing patients is more valuable at the end of the game than expanding your hospital"
The hospital is a tool to move patients as they are your victory points. Purchasing hospital tiles costs you victory points so if you don't move more patients through your hospital with those tiles its at best an even exchange of points.
Again I appreciate your review and I think I will be picking up this game.
The eating of Pandemic tokens really caught me off guard, though.
Bingo, I've just read through the rules and you get 1 point per special room, 1 point per nurses station, 1 point per 2-cured patients in your supply. This is a classic game of balancing investing in the capabilities to do something vs actually having an end result to show for it by the end of the game. The first tie breaker is even based on the person with smallest hospital winning.
If you wanted to turn it into a game about building the best hospital rather than a game of net costs basis curing the most patients then I'd imagine you'd need to house rule it to harshly penalise players for having queuing patients at the end of the game.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
A game about building should reward building, as Agricola does to wonderful effect. A liquid asset, like remaining money, should be a tie breaker not a source of VP. Un-invested funds should be a liability - encouraging greater interest in the core mechanics, rather than less, as the end approaches.
If I get this game I may house-rule the victory conditions (after actually reading them carefully). Are remaining queued patients at the end of the game worth negative VP by default?
Food is not a source of victory its upkeep - Curing patients is Victory points and the goal.
Yes Quarantine also gives victory points for your hospital but really your just changing your existing VP into a different form with the potential to generate more VP.
If you over pay for a hospital tile it might hurt you. If pay for a hospital tile without using its benefit your not gaining. If you send all your patients to a different hospital your giving away your potential VP.
The patients as currency mechanic is brilliantly simple and the "easy to learn difficult to master" aspect of maximizing your hospital is great, but the game is ultimately held back by poor endgame score balancing. It could be great, but the patient/currency VP value needs to be nerfed in some way. Make every cured patient at the end of game worth 1/2 VP, but each patient still sick is -1VP. Make patients just plain less valuable as VP. Something, because the poorly weighted win conditions just drag down the game.
I know this might be asking a lot of the guys, but I'd love to see Paul and Quinns do another series where they dig into what makes a good game bad and what can be done to fix it. Sort of like how Extra Credits goes into game principals and mechanics to teach about video game design.
By tying victory to money you introduce a tension to the game that would otherwise be missing, you could buy that extra room which would make your hospital work better, but will it pay itself back? How much should you make a contract cost to price other players out of it being useful for them?
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
This isn't actually the case at all, is it?
Since your treated patients ARE your currency, Quinns could easily have treated 5 more patients overall, but spent 17 more on rooms.
Yes, I meant unspent treated patients. The point is that, say Quinn had 10 money-patients at the end of the game then Rob will have had to have had 22. Twenty-two money-people is not an easy to miss little thing that is insignificant. It's basically a whole tree. Sitting there. Right in front of everyone.
Quinn massively over invested in his hospital, Paul didn't invest enough, Rob, apparently more by chance that skill, managed to balance special rooms with unspent money-patients. There's clearly going to be a tempo to the game that they missed. There's a build-up period followed by a treatment period. Quinn got stuck in the build-up mentality
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Was it dissonance between theme and gameplay that did them in? Misleading text in the manual's introduction? Was it just super late and they were a little drunk and everyone was a little tired after hauling Quinns to the E.R. at 3am and every time someone tried to get a look at the manual, Paul made awkward sexually charge eye contact? We need to know these things!
Certainly they flubbed the review, but it's possible for counter-intuitive rules or misleading presentation of the rules to be a factor. Remember Jazz? They were clearly having way more fun with the core mechanic than the win condition! Maybe that happened again here, and it ruined their play session, and they didn't even stop and think about why until the episode was in the can.
I want to know if they played more than once.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
It was the first thing he mentioned: patients are currency, currency is patients. If the goal is to be the most profitable hospital in the end, you can't spend all your currency on expansion; you have to balance expansion with profit. If you've got a grand sprawling hospital that's all well and good, but you can't expect it to last if you're barely making ends meet, whereas a smaller hospital that very effectively and consistently treats patients with that as its whole focus makes a tidy profit, money that would then (in the real world) go to equally important but easily overlooked qualities in a hospital.
Nursing staff is a big one, for instance; if you've got a huge hospital with all these nursing stations to staff but are running on a threadbare budget (because you spent everything building all those stations), expect your nurses to be pretty stretched and stressed out by the workload compared to the smaller hospital that can afford to really staff up in full rather than rely on just getting by with the employees they can afford.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but just at a glance, I think it's a pretty clever mechanic. Sadly I have zero people around here with which to play boardgames or I'd be tempted to try this out myself.