Ludology Epsiode 68 - Game, Set, Match

Welcome to Ludology, a podcast about the why of gaming, with your hosts, Ryan Sturm, and Jeff Engelstein. Ludology, episode 68. Game set, match. Yes, we are talking indeed about one of those three things. Can you actually, two of those, now all three of those things. Hello everyone, my name is Ryan Sturm, and welcome to Ludology, your source for intellectual analytical gaming conversation, and I'm here with the brilliant, as always, Jeffrey Engelstein. Well, that's a lot to build up too, but yes, I thought the title was very clever, Ryan. I'm little disappointed that you didn't react to it more, but yeah, we are going to be talking about the idea of matching things to form sets in games. Oh, match and set. I just got it. I just, I didn't get the set and the match part. Anyways, continue, so they understand. Yes, so we want to talk about the idea of set collection in games, and this is used across a wide variety of game types. Some games are just about the set collection in some games. It's kind of a subset of the mechanics and sort of a sideline of what you're trying to do or a means to another end. So we wanted to take the next hour or so and dive deeply into that and explore some of the different games that do that and the different ways that it's implemented and what works and what doesn't. And so I thought we could start this with a little intellectual exercise for you. Yes, you sitting there in your car or mowing the lawn. You're probably not mowing the lawn because it's November, but maybe I don't know if you're further south. But a lot intellectual exercise for you to think about games with a set collection element. So to be clear, these are games where a part of the game is collecting cards with matching something or tiles with matching something in order to do X or score points. And usually the bigger the sets, the more points you get, something along those lines. So I'd like you, sir, or Madame, to think about games that have this and what are some of the games that use that you really like and why does it work? And are there games that you, it has it in and you don't like it? Have you thought about this, Jeff? Yes, I have. All right. Have you thought about it? Yes, I'm talking to you. I'm breaking the fourth wall, Jeff. Do you like what I'm doing there? Yeah, this is really kind of advanced radio. So no recording for this yet. Well, I feel right that you have a particular least favorite game. So I thought from reviewing the show notes, there appears to be a little bit of, a little bit of an issue that you have with one set collection game and it's after. So I figured we would start with that and kind of let you get that off your chest and maybe we can start the conversation by talking about that and why it doesn't work. I have a game that is just one of my least favorite games of all time. It's a horrible, terrible, awful excuse for a game and set collection is the major element. Dear listener, can you think of which game I'm referring to? That game is indeed phase 10. Bump, bump, bump. Yes, if you have sat through the two to three to four hours, it takes to play this horrific pile of garbage. You know what I'm talking about. Basically, I've never played phase 10, so why don't you give us a little bit of a review. Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness, Jeff. You have been spared this. There's a pile of cards, it's basically four sets of number cards, one to twelve. And the game consists of drawing a card and discarding a card. The goal is to achieve the first phase, which I think for the first one, it's like three of a kind of a number. And the first person to do that lays it down and then they say, "Yay!" And then you deal out a new hand and you do it again. And if you finish the first set, then you move on to the second set, which is more difficult. And the game continues in this way until someone gets to the tenth set, which is the most difficult. So each hand takes an ever longer period of time and, you know, you're playing the four or five players, so you got to play like 50 hands of this mindless piece of garbage. I would like to, in fact, quote a review that summarizes my feelings of this. It is by BGG user Gilder, Richard DePippo, I would like to give you full credit, as I think he succinctly points out the value of this game. He says, "There's a bit, and I do mean a bit more to this game, but it's not worth mentioning. If you want to collect sets of cards, play ticket to ride. Want a card game? Play Rummy." Heck, play war. At least it will be over quicker. This game is quite simply awful. It is the yardstick by which I will measure my dislike of all other bad games. Well, it wasn't as bad as Phase 10, I will say, with relief. If your friends insist on playing this, say you are allergic to the ink in the cards. Fake a stomach virus. Heck, eat some expired food from their refrigerator, eat it, and get a real stomach virus. That way you will have an iron-clad excuse. And if they want to play this game in the future, you can just shut her and say, "Can we play something else?" just thinking about that game makes me want to vomit. Oh, wait, that's not done. I will say that some people have said that this game could be better if it shortened. Perhaps by allowing players to complete the phases out of order, but trust me, this game is not worth fixing. So he didn't like it. I don't know. I think at the end there, he kind of hit on the crux of the problem, and I think one thing that we'll see that is a commonality in some of these set collection games that really work. One of the terrible things about this Phase 10 game is that you have a set goal to get X, three of a kind, or a run of five or six cards. And there's no other option. There's no multiple uses of the cards or anything. So basically, it's just totally mindless. You pick up a card if it helps you, keep it if it doesn't help you discard a card that doesn't help you, continue Rinse Wash Repeat for three, three and a half hours until someone wins. Right. And I think that that's a good point and brings us to kind of the granddaddy of this category of games, which is Rummy, Jim Rummy, and all of the various Rummy variants. And then those, for those of you that haven't played Rummy, you're trying to, in the card game, you're trying to collect either sets of three or four or runs of cards. And the thing that makes it a much more interesting game than it would otherwise be is the fact that you've got both the sets and the runs, means that each card is in multiple possible sets. It's not, you know, a card is in only one set. And so if you start collecting sixes, you're just collecting sixes. That's all you have options of other things that you can do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I actually really like it. And you're with, I guess, and, you know, my childhood, a big craze was this game on those chunky white plastic tiles, like, you know, like those white plastic tiles with the cool little red and yellow guys, with the happy and sad face on them, you know what I'm talking about? Is that Rummy Cup or Rummy? I think it actually won the spiel-to-yar one year, obviously. It was just Rummy on tiles, but I actually really like playing this game. I have nostalgic feelings about it and I feel this way about this game, the same way I feel about solitaire, like, there's, in solitaire, there's something there and I just, like, clearly miss it. And this game I often, like, miss the obvious play, I think. And I actually really like standard Rummy or Rummy Cube, but I think that's a good example sort of the hallmark of, you know, where a lot of these games come from and you'll see a lot of more modern games take that basic idea of, all right, you're trying to get two different sets and, you know, trying to decide when to go for one and when to go for the other. So I think it's a good idea to just kind of pour through some of these games that use set collection as a major mechanic and see how they do it in an interesting way. Yes. And, of course, you know, of the Rummy-style games, another one which is extremely old is Majang, which also uses the tiles and you're trying to collect, you know, different sets to play and there's different, a lot of different types of sets that you can get. And I think Majang actually has, I'm not as familiar with it as it probably should be, but there's a lot of different patterns of things that you can get. So it's kind of, you know, built on the regular Rummy idea of just getting, you know, through triples or quadruples or runs and has that all of the different kinds of crazy ways that you can play the tiles. You're talking about the card that when you play it, you can wish for another card, right? I don't know. This is Majang, the Chinese tile game. Yes. That's the game. I pull it up on one of the free games. It comes with your computer and you bring it up and you have no idea what you're doing. You just got the tiles. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm unfamiliar with that one. Should be more familiar with it. Yes. But that's in the same vein. And, you know, again, that goes back, I believe, to like the 1800s or perhaps even earlier. So same kind of idea of sort of intersecting sets. Another game, older game that I thought of was Yatsi. Do you consider Yatsi a set collection game? I guess in a certain sense, you could categorize it as a set collection game. I mean, you're certainly trying to get three user fours or fives, but it's over very quickly in terms of, you know, each turn you're resetting and you're doing that, you know, you start your dice all over again, but yeah, I think that's that is a type of set collection. And when you roll the dice, you have to figure out which of the patterns you are trying to go for and trying to collect. So you're trying to get dice that meet that. So I would definitely give that one to you. And there we see how it's better than phase 10, like all of the games we will be mentioning here in the future. You after you roll the dice, and you know, Yatsi isn't that fantastic of a game, but it's miles better than the phase 10, because when you roll the dice, you can decide which of the sets am I going to try to get. You're not shoehorn. Imagine if you played Yatsi and you had to do the things in order, how much fun that would be Jeff. That's that's that's a good analogy. But again, Yatsi, I mean, the one of the interesting things about Yatsi is it does tend to not that it's supposed to be super deep, but but you can kind of see that echo in Yatsi and that I always find that it tends to break down when you get towards the end of the game. You know, your last two or three things, it's like, okay, you know, I need, you know, I need four fours or I need a, you know, a large straight. And that's all you can, all you can really get. I think you're pointing out a major flaw in the game. The game is actually somewhat interesting in the beginning as you have so many options, you know, and you always have that, you know, do I go for the fours or do I go for the run and becomes less interesting as the game goes on? And usually once it hits that point, you still have another hour to play. Right. So from, well, it's not that, it's not that bad. But, but yeah, from a narrative arc standpoint, I think Yatsi actually starts out in the most interesting way. Although, I guess, in a sense, it gets a little more interesting in the middle when you have to decide when you want to use your chance slot. That's that's really the biggest decision. Once you've kind of used that, then you're a little bit, you know, kind of locked into to what you've got. And then it just kind of gets gives you fewer and fewer options as you get towards the end. So it just does kind of end a little bit with a fizzle than with a dramatic conclusion, like we like to see. Yeah. So I think we could start to look at maybe some of some of the modern games that have taken on this set collection mechanic. I think one of the ones I'm really impressed with is just because maybe nobody's really thought of it before was the game Colorado, where players are building groups from which the other players to choose from. And just the simplicity of the game. All you're going to, you're either going to select a group on your turn or you're going to draw a card and build a group that another player can choose from. And it probably won't come back around to you. And so you are building these sets, but you're also kind of building the groups from which the other players have to choose. And that's simplicity, which of course eventually went on to Zooloreto and Aquareto because you got to have this game have cute pandas and stuff and put it in a big box. But I think the simplicity of Colorado is pretty awesome. Right. And this is a good point to, I think, to talk about, you know, kind of the core deficiency of a set collection game, which is something that designers need to try to get around. And, you know, some more successfully than others. And that is the idea that, you know, there's a certain number of sets that are out there possibly to collect. You know, you're collecting, like if we, which we'll talk about a little later, like in civilization, you're going to be collecting ore or you're collecting grain or you're collecting wine, cloth, whatever it is. But if person A and person B are both trying to collect the same thing, then they are immediately at a disadvantage relative to the other players. I mean, you want to be, for the most part in these games, the only player that's trying to collect a particular thing. And you see that in Rami, if you're, and another player are both trying to collect sixes, neither of you are going to have success. In a two-player game, it's not as big a deal if you get into multiplayer games, then it starts to become an issue. And different games deal with this in different ways. And Colorado, its particular brilliance is, you know, if you were just that, for those of you that aren't familiar with the original Colorado, the scoring in that is that I believe it's your top three colors. There's a whole bunch of different colors. You get points for the most that you took in three colors. And it's a triangular scoring system. So one card is worth one, then three, then six, then fifteen, and twenty-one, and so on. And you subtract, though, the other cards. So if you get five different colors, your top three colors will score positive and your bottom two colors will score negative points. And that's, so basically you want to only get the good stuff. You only want to get the stuff that you're collecting. So the way that it's kind of gotten around in Colorado is you play on your turn, you have two choices, you can play a card to one of, I guess, three groupings that are out on the table. Or you can take every single card in a grouping. So you can't pick and choose what you want. You can only, you have to take every single card. And so you have to make the judgment, okay, I'm collecting blue, but I'm also going to have to get some of these reds, which I don't want. Or you can kind of poison the well for the other players. If you don't want to take one of the other groups, you can poison it for a player so that they won't want to take. If you know they're collecting reds, you could throw in some other colors. Or you could try to build up a group for yourself and hope that the other players don't jump in and start throwing garbage in it that you don't want. So that's, that's kind of the way that that Colorado gets around it by giving a very, very simple decision choice. You would basically have two choices on your turn. You know, you lay a card into a group or you pick up one of the groups, but it gives it a lot more complexity by forcing you to take things that you don't want. By understanding if another player is collecting something, even if you're not collecting that, there's something that you can do to interfere with that player. Yeah, if you are not familiar with Colorado and you're interested in games, you need to buy it. It's eight bucks. It's a great example of how to do set, set collection well. I like it better than the Theme Big Box $30 versions. Anyways, you don't need all the extra fluff. I think it's just a brilliant game. Yeah, so keep in mind this idea of, you know, if everybody's, you know, if you've got two people that are both trying to get read or whatever the sets happen to be, how does the game deal with that? How does the designer kind of deal with that? And let's, you know, kind of use that as a lens to look at the next one on our list here, which is Ticket to Ride, which was mentioned in the review of Phase 10 earlier. Ticket to Ride has a definite set collection aspect to it. I mean, that's what you need to do to lay tracks as you've got to collect sets of certain colors. Yeah, that's what makes Ticket to Ride work is you're competing for these various locations on the board. And if someone beats you to a spot that you want, then you just don't get that spot and you have to go around. If we wanted to crapify, and I'm going to use that as a, as a verb, crapify, Ticket to Ride, we could easily do that by having three routes between each city. And that way, everybody could go wherever, basically, they wanted to. And it would also lose everything that makes Ticket to Ride fun, at least to me. Right. So in this case, the, the set collection aspects, because, you know, if you're, you know, the danger in a game, if it was just about, you know, collecting, I'm collecting the black cards and, and, you know, Ryan's collecting the red cards or whatever it is, is that you're, there's a reason to collect a certain color. So in Ticket to Ride, you may absolutely need brown to make the connection that you need to make. So if somebody else is, is also, you know, trying to get brown, then you've got a choice to make of whether you think that, you know, you want to kind of put that on hold while they're collecting brown so that you don't sort of dilute your turns and maybe take one, but, you know, wait, wait till there's more browns available, or if you want to just, you know, go for it and just scoop up every, every brown and wild card that you can get. So that's, that's one thing that, that works very well in Ticket to Ride, is that there's a meaning behind the sets. It's not just that, whereas in Colorado, a set of four is always worth the same. It's set of four is worth 10 points. In Ticket to Ride, a set of four reds to me, maybe worth something very different than a set of four reds to another player. And also there's, there's the collection, you're not continually collecting the same sets. So if somebody's collecting brown and you really want to collect brown, you're not hosed for the entire game. At some point, they're going to get the browns that they need. They're going to build their root or the, you know, the cards are going to get discarded and come back and cycle through again. So you'll have another opportunity. Maybe maybe they've, you know, the only negative is if they're taking the route, but, you know, most likely they'll, they'll be someplace else. So, so there's a couple of different factors working there that mitigate kind of the inherent weakness in a set collection mechanism. Yeah, the other thing that makes that work, Ticket to Ride work, is giving the, the players the, the destinations at the beginning. So that tells them right up front, you need to collect, you know, sets to connect from here to here. Obviously, there's not just one way to do that. And that's part of what makes Ticket to Ride work is that there's, there's many different choices. And if someone blocks you out one way, then you can adapt your strategy with the cards in your hand. And having that starting position is a very important part of Ticket to Ride. I would like to, um, to sort of contrast, Ticket to Ride with a game that I think wants to be Ticket to Ride. And then it's turning taxes, Yes. Are you familiar? Turn in Texas. Yes. This game actually was, it's I've played it, but yes, it won the Spiel de Jardin. It won the Spiel, won the Spiel de Jardin. It's a very average Spiel de Jardin winner, in my opinion. If you compare it to ticket to ride, there's no comparison. I think that the reason is a couple of those things that we just pointed out. You basically can do whatever routes show up. You just basically take whichever routes appear. Turn in Texas, the way it works, is you're collecting cards to make sets. It's very, very rummy-ee in that there's different regions on the board and that you're going to play stations in. The main mechanic is that you can either play as many of one color or you can play one of as many colors as you have. There you go. It's got that rummy element, but there's also bonuses on the board. If you get all the red cities, you get a point. If you're the first person to get a play, a chain, a longest chain, you know, you get points. But it's missing, missing, missing, missing that tension that I love from ticket to ride that because I think as many people can be in a city as you want or it's two or three, there's not really, you're not really that concerned. The only thing that's different is like you might get a one point penalty because someone got there before you, someone got all the gray before you did. They got seven and you got six. Whoop a ding dong. It's just, it's missing. It's missing all of the excitement that makes ticket to ride work. Yeah, it's been a while since I've played that game. It is my go-to game of not very exciting themes though when I'm looking for an example. Or not very exciting games. The game of German mail route construction. German, the German postal service. Yeah, one hit my, when I, when I did my last calling, that one was in the, the list. Okay, another one that we've got on our list here is a, kind of a set collection tied in with the drafting game and that is fairy tale. So what are, what are your thoughts on, on fairy tale in the way that that works? One of the things that fairy tale does that I think is sort of interesting that we see in some other of these modern set collection games is we see some sort of thematic connections. In, in fairy tale, you want to get like certain suits of cards because they, they work together nicely. You could even say like, like magic has some of, some of this because if you get like lots of goblins, they all sort of feed off each other. Of course, there's slivers. Those of you who really know about magic they gathering will know about this thing called slivers and the more slivers, you get they all help each other out. But fairy tale did this in, in sort of a minor way because if you have, you know, the elves, they all kind of feed each off of each other and give each other points. I would even say one that you might not think of as a set collection game is race for the galaxy because in race for the galaxy you start, you start wanting to get various sets of things because they all feed off each other. If you start going for say the, the brown resources, then you want to get certain ones that, that feed off each other. If you want to go military, you want to start collecting all the military stuff as it all sort of feeds off of each other. And I think we see that in a lot of games. We get sort of loosely thematically bound set collection because once you start getting a certain type of the doors, you want to get all of the doors because they all sort of play off of each other. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And that's, you know, again, that's that's kind of an ad hoc, you know, set collection where you can, the game kind of gently nudges you in a particular direction to try to achieve the best efficiencies. But, you know, you don't have to go that route or there, there's some other options there. I think race for the galaxy is an interesting one in that. Yeah, you're, you're trying to set up those synergies and there are certainly certain combinations that the experience player and I'm not nearly as experienced as, you know, I know some people that are, you know, fanatics with race for the galaxy and have analyzed it much deeper than I have. So I apologize if I'm not getting all the niceties of it. But, you know, there's certainly some combinations that if you get, you know, certain victory point planets or certain types of things, you know, if you're trying to do conversions to get victory points, you know, versus, you know, conquering military planets or whatever it is that there's the strategy that you choose itself kind of lends itself to a specific type of card that you want to get and becomes a de facto set collection type of game. And you know that this person's going to be trying to grab these types of cards. Mm hmm. Yeah. And one of the things that this makes me think of is a problem in set collection games. And that is, and something that I've actually been looking at and training in the Mediterranean. And that is the danger of making the sets become too powerful. You know, this can happen in a couple of different ways. If I want to reward players for constructing a larger set or getting more of a certain thing. However, if you do that too much, and this happened in training the Mediterranean with the values I gave, if you're rewarding them like exponentially so high, then you're going to devalue everything else in the game. You're going to take away all other decisions because once I start getting, let's say I start getting grain, if the next grain gives me six victory points, I don't care about anything else. All I want to do is get grain. And you've got to walk that fine line, you know, the same thing with the dwarves, you know, the dwarves feeding off of each other. You want to kind of nudge and say, oh, if you get this little dwarf, then, you know, he gets plus one in underwater basket weaving or whatever it is, but you don't want it to be like plus three victory points for every dwarf you get. Otherwise, suddenly, you've created this snowball that's removed all of the decisions from your game. Right. And I, there's a couple of other examples of that. I think that's, that's a very cogent observation. I just recently played because I was at SN and I was in the stronghold booth giving, giving demos of Die Stool is I also had an opportunity to play and demo a bunch of times the new Scott Nicholson game going, going gone, which is, I played that. Is that the one where you're putting stuff in the cups and stuff? Yes. Yep. Yep. And I had a really good time with it. I will definitely be, be picking that one up when it comes out over here in the States, which should be shortly. But, you know, one of the things about that game and I can kind of see what's got to do a little bit is that in that game, you can, it's, you're trying to collect sets and he's got the two different intersecting sets. So there's like a car, there's like a British car and a French car and, you know, in a British comic book and a French comic book. And you can either collect, say comic books or you can collect French stuff. So you can kind of mix and match make sets. So that's a perfect example of what we've been talking about of having one card serving two different roles, which helps mix things up in the game because if I'm collecting cars and no one else is, you know, anybody else that starts collecting cars is going to be foolish because it's going to be hard, you know, we'll be competing for them. But it's because of the intersecting nature. You get rid of that. But when you turn in your sets, the value of a set, you know, one card is, I don't remember the exact fact, but I think one, I actually do know, one card is worth two points, two cards is worth six. So it goes up by four. The next cards were 12. So it goes up by six. Then the next card adds another eighth. The next card adds another 10. Okay. So it starts getting super valuable. So like a set of four or five is worth like 30. It's a, it's a really big number. And there's seven of each card. So if you can get all seven, it's worth a lot of points. But the value of each incremental card actually starts going down once you reach a certain level. So up to like, I think it's you, you basically add two points for the first card, four points for the second, six points for the third and you add all these numbers together. So two, four, six, eight, ten. And then it starts going down eight and then six and then four. So when you get to those really high values, those cards are not worth as much to, to, to the player that's got a really big set. So actually, even though, you know, we're as in a game like civilization or even in trading and Mediterranean, going from six card set to a seven card set is always better than going from a three card set to a four card set. It's not the case in going, going gone, going going gone. There's a, there's a best number in there. And if you collect more than that, then there can be situations where going from a four card set to a five card set is better than going from six cards to seven cards. So he kind of built that in there, which I think is, is interesting. I think is interesting to, to see what he did, you know, to try to counteract that effect of otherwise, you know, you'd reach a point where you basically would take all your cubes, you know, there's be like almost no bid for you that would be too low to go from six to seven. You might so just dump all your, all your cubes in there and nobody else is going to want to spend as much as they, as they would need to to make it, you know, worth blocking him. That is very funny that you mentioned that because I came to the exact same conclusion in trading and Mediterranean. And that's exactly what I'm looking at doing for, for our game is, is hitting a certain point because we were getting to that problem when someone was getting green, you know, I get four, I want five, now I need six, now I need seven, I don't care what's on the bottom. There's just too many points there. That exactly, you know, you've got that steep incline and then you've got a taper off point. So now, if I get a fifth, if I get a fifth green card, I can, you know, maybe trade one of those grain away that that magic number for the basic goods is four. I could still maybe trade [BLANK_AUDIO] those grain away because I know that the bottom part is bad for me. I'm not like locked into that at so many points. And I think that's really going to improve the game and offer up a lot more decision-making. Yeah. I wholeheartedly support that idea and I will also back you up when you say that you came up with the idea before Scott Nicholson did. Yes. It's funny, I actually played that game with Scott, it must have been a year or two ago. So that game's been in development for quite a while but I'm glad it's being released now. Yes. Excellent. Yeah, it's fun. And I don't know when you played it if you had that kind of tapering off at the top level. But yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, I didn't even make that connection but it's funny that you mentioned that now because I came to the exact same conclusion that Scott did. Right. And it's weird because it's not, you know, it's subtle because it's not obvious when you just look at the cards. I mean, when you just look at the, there's a little table that says, you know, if you have two cards, it's worth this, if you three cards, it's worth this. And the number keeps going up. I'm not saying that a seven card set is less valuable than a four card set or a five card set. So when you just look at the chart, it keeps going up. But if you look at the differences between each step, the amount that you gain by adding that next card is a little bit, it starts coming down. So unless you're really paying attention and, you know, it's interesting because this is kind of a casual family game. So I don't know how many players of this thing would actually analyze it to that extent. But you know, I'm completely insane. So when I see a table like that, that's that's the first thing that I look at. I think it does have that way of preventing that. And I think that's, I think that's a great thing to adopt for trading in the Mediterranean because you're right. I mean, it reaches a certain point where, you know, you're, yeah. Yeah, you know, to get that one, you may get another, to get that next green card, you may get another arrow. But there's no extra building or victory point or anything that's going to compensate for what you're giving up by getting rid of a green card or not getting that, that next one. Yeah. And the change I'm looking at it's, it's really pretty dramatic. I was going from, it was, if I can remember off the top of my head, I think it was 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21. So if you've got seven, now you're trading in for 21 victory points, which to a game that's 100 victory points is a massive amount to going to 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8. And so that, that magic number is definitely four, which just feels right and, and I think works pretty well. Again, I was a little concerned about, you know, is the casual player going to notice that, hey, four is kind of the magic number that, you know, I can kind of stop trading for grain at this point, but I think, as you say, I think, train, mentor, train is geared towards more of a gameery game. So they're going to catch on to that. Right. Now, in terms of values for set collection, there's, there's a lot of different ways that it's done, you know, one of the, the original classic civilization did it by the, the square of the number of cards. So basically, the value, you multiply them by the number, but the value goes up as 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36. So the value goes up super duper fast and actually, I wonder, I want to ask you, do you think it's too much? I get crazy amount to the point where basically, I feel like whoever, I mean, you've got the map thing going on, but I really feel whoever wins the trading phase sort of wins the game typically because that, that exponential is such a strong, strong curve. I, I think it's a little bit too high and I, I think it does, you know, you reach points where you absolutely just cannot trade somebody that next value. You know, if you, if you give somebody that next card, you, you can't possibly get enough back in exchange to make it worthwhile to you, but because it's a multiplayer game, then you get into that game, well, am I going to be the guy that's going to, you know, not get my next cloth because I don't want to give Bob his eighth green card. So yeah, I think it's, I, I think it's a problem in the game that it's, it does really, really dominate in them, the math, the mathematical purity of it is really nice. I mean, I, I admire the, the fact that, um, that was Mr. Tresher, right, that he, uh, you know, that he stuck with that and see you know, exactly, you know, if you can figure out the math in your head, you don't have to look at the little chart, but still it's, it's, it's kind of crazy. Um, the other way, I find myself in that game, I find myself in that game like trying to like persuade someone like, no, you can't give him his seventh salt. That's insane. You can't do it. And they're like, well, why are you, why are you involved in this? This is not your trade. I'm like, you can't give him the seventh salt, uh, just because I feel sometimes people don't, don't make that connection of how much, you know, that next card is and sometimes that, that's an issue in the game. Right. And another one that's very popular, which is what Colorado uses is the triangular number, um, or the bowling pin numbers as I like to think about them, which is one and then one plus two, one plus two plus three, one plus two plus three plus four. So in that case, also every single card is worth an extra, you know, it's, it's, it's much more valuable to, uh, to, to that person than, than other people, uh, if you've got a lot of them, I know that, um, thieves, uh, has, has cards like that where you collect and they go up in a triangular sequence, it's, it's very, very commonly used. Yeah. And it's a thing that's not as, as frightening as the exponential, right, but it's still, it still grows. Now one thing that I always thought was interesting was, um, in ticket to ride, the value of one train is one, two is two, three is four, four is seven, five is ten and six is fifteen. So again, it's one, two, three, four, seven, ten, fifteen. Now a pure triangular sequence is one, two, three, six, ten, fifteen, twenty one. So this one's a lot flatter. Some of the triangular numbers kick in there, but it's, it's sort of flatter than triangular. It's not true triangular. And actually send an email off to Alan Moon, um, to ask him where those numbers came from. Did he, uh, do some math was, was it like to, you know, a three halves power or some crazy, some crazy function to determine those values, uh, because I thought they were kind of curious numbers. Um, and he said that it was just strictly from light testing. He played with a lot of different numbers until he got to numbers and felt right. And, um, and, and that's how we ended up with those. Uh, so he kind of started with the triangular numbers and it was just became collecting the big sets and playing them just, just was worth too much. So he had to, so he just scaled it back until it was, till felt right. I know one of the early thoughts was that, oh, if you just, if you just get all the sixes, don't worry about your tickets, just get all the sixes. You will win. And no, you won't. And I think maybe if you put in that straight triangular, what is six 21? Is that six 21? Yeah. 21 is 15. Maybe you could pull that off and I would, I would hate that if it was a viable, a really good strategy to get all the sixes. I mean, you want to reward somebody for getting longer routes, um, cause it's, you know, it does take more time to collect those bigger sets and, you know, add some other interesting dynamics. But yeah, I mean, the game is about connecting the cities. That's which, that's what you want the players focus to be on. You don't want it to be on just, you know, grab the biggest tracks and that's a viable route. Now, it can be useful later in the game, it gives you another thing to do, like if you don't want to draw, one of the nice things about is if you don't want to draw another ticket card, if you complete your tickets and you don't want to risk doing it, it gives you something to do, you can just try to grab big routes, um, so it does give, give the players another option, but maybe not a, not a totally winning option all by itself. And it's also a good way to be a total jerk. Haha. Yes. Well, maybe. Let's dive into the good doctor, Reiner Knitziah. He loves set collection. He has dreams about set collection. I'm pretty sure. Yes. I think so. One of his oldest games with, well, I don't know about oldest, but certainly one of his most popular games of set collection would be, would be lost cities, um, and that's got a number of interesting twists on set collection, uh, and, and the biggest is that when you start a new set that it is initially negative. Yes. Yeah. I, I think lost cities is another game that I would, I would describe as brilliant, um, and I didn't really think of it as set collection when Knit popped up when I was doing some research for the show, but when you, you think about it, he took set collection to a different level in that you're, you're getting runs of numerical order, but you're very strictly limited to, you know, how many cards you can have at a time. And so there is the tension in there, you know, you start with eight random cards and you're going to build that hand, but you can only hold cards for a certain amount of time. And you also, if you start a set, you start negative and, you know, just the simplicity of the structure of the game and how it builds that sense of tension, especially in the interplay between the two people, it gets to that, uh, Yinn and Yang that you were speaking about. If I start, if I start blue, can you also start blue or if I'm not doing blue, can I discard blue cards so that you don't take them, uh, it's just a marvelous game. Yeah. Um, and again, you can see how he kind of tackled the, uh, you know, the whole, those, those just from aspects of collection set collection that we talked about that can be problematic in that, you know, starting a new set is not always, you know, you're kind of committing yourself to a minimum set collection or else it hurts you. So I think that's a real powerful mechanic to, uh, you know, kind of force the players to think about it and, and feel like it's, it's a risky play. Otherwise, you know, It's always easy to just, you know, would just be the lay down another card and say it's what I'm going to do. So it's kind of like the Colorado idea, although this predates Colorado that, you know, if you have a lot of little stuff, you want to concentrate, you don't want to spread yourself thin. And then the other aspect of constraining the order in which you can play the cards that you have to play them in ascending numerical order. Yeah. And then the, the team made up a whole bunch of spin-offs for this game. And most of them are really, really good, I think. I mean, there's, there's battle, or Shulton Toten, I guess, it started as. And then it became battle line, I think it's more common here in the US, whereas instead of, you know, combinations, you're building sets of three cards. But also like, Celtus, and then I even played Celtus the card game and was kind of rolling my eyes, you know, thinking that this is the, this is the card game version of the board game of the card game. But that game was fantastic. I love that game, and you can't get it here really easily anymore. But even just like little twists on those basic ideas that lost cities brought, you know, you can go backwards and forwards and, and adding another element to go for. And they're just all very nice, simple games. Right. And I, I wouldn't, it's interesting, I, I'd never, and I'm still not sure I grieved that that battle line in Shulton Toten are kind of related to lost cities. I, I see them as kind of different elements of their own. I mean, for those of you that aren't familiar with with Shulton Toten was the earlier game about setting up giant boulders along the Scottish border, I believe. Great theme. Yes. And battle line, I think is about how it's going to be great. But basically, there's a series of nine cards, I think, in the middle that you're fighting over and, or boulders, in the case of Shulton Toten. And you're playing up to three cards behind each one, and you're trying to form, in essence, like poker hands, it could be three sixes or it could be a four, five, six, on the same color. And there's certain combinations and ranks. So every turn you have to play a card behind one of those boulders. And then if you have a, if, when both players have three, then you claim that, that card. You claim that column. And you can also do it with, if the other guy doesn't have three, if you can prove that there's no way he could beat what you've got there. And, and you're trying to either claim five out of the nine total or interestingly get three in a row, if there's three directly next to each other, then the other guy could have many more than you. And you'll still win the game. So there's a lot of different interesting elements there. And yeah, that's, that's sort of set collection in a way. I guess you are, you are, in essence, building sets behind each one of those. But, you know, there's, there's a lot of different aspects there because you're basically putting your sets head to head against the opponent. And again, you know the cards that he's trying to draw because you're drawing from the same deck so you can see all the cards are, are right there in terms of what's, what's possible in which cards are still outstanding. Yeah. And I'll try those, those are both excellent games. Battle line, I think is from GMT and it throws in a couple of extra special effect cards, which may or may not add to the game, depending on your attitude. But, otherwise they're, they're, they're basically the same core game. The special effect cards in the box. And yeah, the Scottish Boulder fighting could be nine, nine jars of pickles. You're competing over it. It doesn't matter. It's, yes, it's just a math game, but it's an awesome math game. I mean, there's just so much tension in that game fighting for, you know, do I go for this one or do I fight him over here for this one? And then there's like an adjacent sea issue also in the game. Yes. I don't, I think I agree with you. There's not purely set collection, but you can definitely see how it derived from that. That hand management in lost cities. Right. Now, another one of, of Knitsy game that you put on the list here that I, I like a lot more than many other people is modern art. Mm-hmm. It's, it's primarily an auction game in a sense. I mean, that's, that's the way that you collect the cards as you have to auction them off. But in essence, it's the, the valuation of the cards is kind of determined in a, in a set collecting sort of a way. It's interesting and it's kind of, you know, a sly dig at the art scene in that the number of painting sold directly determines the value of that artist, the more, the more paintings that are sold of a particular artist than those paintings are more valuable inherently. So you have to, so in that case, when you're collecting sets, you've got the auction aspect of it, of trying to value not what they are currently valued at, but what you think they're going to be valued at by the end of the round based on the paintings that you have in your hand that you could potentially put up for auction and by what you see, you know, the, the values that paintings had from previous rounds. And you have to point that out because that is, that is one of four times that Reiner Knitsy has actually made a thematic mechanical connection. So no, it's almost totally abstract, but that time it's like, wow, that is cool. The more people buy the art, the more the artist's worth, that's, that's actually thematic. Wow, impressive. Just because normally it's, it's just the math game. I mean, like, like that Lord of the Rings is, is probably the least thematic Lord of the Rings game ever made. But I, I love that as well. And I want to focus on that one element that you talked about when you allow players to create these, the batches with which there are to choose from. In Modern Art, you get to select what card is being auctioned off. And that may determine the value at the end of the round. That's done very well in several other games, Medici, a great love of mine, where players are, are building a set where they decide whether it's one, two or three tiles. And the Colorado example, that's, that's happening. That's happening there as well when players are, are building those batches. Also, another parallel aspect to that is when players are deciding how much different colors of goods or the different types of goods are worth. In Modern Art, that's by playing more cards, you're increasing the value. I think another interesting example of another game that I love is Reef Encounter. Players are trying to collect these tiles and different sets are going to be worth varying amounts. But players have to use their resources in order to make certain colors worth more than others, which is an awesome aspect of that game. Right. And that's again, you know, one of the core problems facing the designer of a set collection game is what are the sets of value that, and, you know, this is definitely another approach that gives you an opportunity to give another challenge to the players, which is that the players, by the players, can manipulate the values of the sets and what you thought was going to be a real good thing to collect, all of a sudden is crap. It's been crappified. Is that crap? Crappified, yes. Crappified. So, yeah, that's, that's another way to do that. But you know, it's, you gotta do something. I mean, as a designer, you can't just have set collection. There's got to be something else that goes around it. I mean, if you just, as a thought experiment, I mean, maybe the basic set collection game that I can think of is, you know, you deal three cards face up and, you know, say it's just numbers from, you know, one to ten or whatever it is, and there's four copies of each number or just a regular deck of cards. And, you know, on your turn, you pick one of the ones in the middle and, you know, at the end of the game, a set with one card is worth one point and a set with four cards is worth ten points, and that's, that's the game. And obviously, that's, that's a broken game. You know, that set collection on its own does not fully support a game. There's, there's gotta be some twist on it, whether it's Colorado that, that throws crap in there that you've also got to take kind of a poison pill thing or whether it's law cities where there's a negative value, whether it's a ticket to ride where you're, the set collection is a means to an end of connecting these other, you know, these other locations in the map, which you, if you don't collect them, you, you don't only give up points, but you score negative points, that there's gotta be something else going on that's, that gives you that twist. And, you know, to talk about trading and Mediterranean, again, the twist that, that we added to it was this idea that there's a secondary effect on the card, so that, you know, yes, you're increasing the points that you get from getting that next grain card, but it may also hurt you in some other way and you have to kind of compensate for, you know, you got to take that into consideration when you're making your choice of, it's, the value of the set is not just the set, but also the other, you know, almost semi-random things that are part of the set. Yeah, and when you talked about, you know, poisoning the different sets, I thought of a Riner Knitsy as other game poison, which also has been re-themed as Baker's dozen, have you seen this? It actually comes in like a little donut box. I haven't seen everything, but the original one, refresh my memory about it. I think that's when you're throwing cards into the pot and you're trying not to make it go over 12, so that one. Right, yep, that's why it's called Baker's dozen, because if you make it, I think maybe it's over 13, but people can put moldy donuts in there and you don't want donuts, unless you get the most of vanilla chocolate or strawberry, then those don't count against you. So it has that push pull, you don't want to get anything, unless you want to try to shoot the moon and go for one of the three types, but also people are throwing moldy donuts in there and moldy donuts are always doubly bad, and that is a clever little set collection game. But I want to talk about one designer who's very good at making other stuff go on in a set collection game. And that is my friend, Dirk Ken has designed two designs, which I think really display how to do this well. And those designs would be Alhambra and Atlantic Star, which is now better known as Show Manager. Alhambra has got a lot more going on. And you want to get, there are six different kinds of buildings, and you want to get the most of two or three different colors of buildings. But when you get a building, you have to create a little palace like Carcasson style, and the building tiles have walls on them. So when you get the buildings, yes, you want to get blue and purple buildings, but you want to get special ones that sort of fit nicely into your low village. And then there's this really cool aspect of how you buy them. There's actually four different colors of money, and at the end of your turn, you're going to pick up a couple money cards, but they're four different colors. And each building is placed sort of randomly on one of the four different colors of money. So when you take money, you have to make this interesting decision about what color of money to get to get the high one, or do you try to get a variety of colors in your hands? I love Alhambra, I think it's great. Yeah, and it's interesting because it's kind of like a dual set collection mechanic, you're kind of collecting sets of money of different types first, and then you're using that to collect different sets of these, these other tiles. And, you know, the methods that are used in Alhambra to get around the issues with set collection is one that there's this, in a sense, the scoring of the, the towns, if I recall correctly, the different colors, it's more of an area majority than a, than a true set collection, if it's, it just gives points to the person who's got the most of a certain color, a fixed amount of points, right? Most and second most, I think, right, right. So that kind of caps the maximum value of what, you know, that that incremental getting yet another pink tile is not going to be exponentially big for you. And also that got the funky exact change. Oh yes. So if you, if you get into the exact change lane, and you use your easy pass to pay exactly what, how much something costs, then you get to grab a second tile or maybe even a third tile if you can do exact change again. So that, that as a whole other twist that may force you, may, may end up pushing you into getting tiles that you might not otherwise bother to pick up just because you can, you can get these and it'll, it'll expand the size and give you some other options. So there's a lot of interesting little things at work in there. Yeah, I forgot about both those things about both those reasons why I like those games, you know, that exact change mechanic is awesome. And the capping, we, we're getting this recurring theme of you really can't just make sets continually more awesome. Otherwise, it might destroy your game. And that was an interesting way of how he handled that that really once, once I'm dominating blue, I need to like look for other avenues for points because if I just get, you know, every blue tile in the game, that's not going to score me a lot of points. Right. And that's that kind of starts string into area majority, which I'm guessing we will probably come back to at some future episode. Maybe some, some nearby future episode one last game, I don't know if it's the last game, but I did tease out Atlantic star, which is another very clever game, which is now that is not one that I have played. Can you go into maybe some of the sure. Yeah, you're, you're basically, you're buying cards to collect sets and you want to collect in the original. I think it's the root actually was, I think it was show manager first, and then it was, which was collecting movie stars to make a movie, and then they re-themed it to collecting boats to go on cruises, and then they decided, that was a cruddy theme. Let's go back to actors to make make movies. That's more interesting. And so that's the, the latest edition, but you're getting the edition that I played first was the getting boats one. So you need to get boats and your boats can go on maybe two or three of the different cruises. So they have different options for making a set, but you need to get a set of four or five of the Pacific Ocean cruise or the Atlantic cruise, and these boats can have different values. You have a strict hand limit, and so you're buying cards, you're also going to run out of money. And eventually at some point you're going to say, all right, I'm going to play a Pacific cruise line, and you play out those cards, and you add up the value of that. When you do that, you also get to choose how valuable the Pacific Ocean cruises are. You may wish to make that the most valuable cruise in the game, or you can choose to make it the least valuable cruise in the game. And later on, you record that score, and if someone beats you, then they get first place on that if they don't, then they go below you, but you're choosing how valuable that is in the game if you're the first person to do that. The other thing that's really neat about that game is you can take away points of cruises you've already scored to finance yourself to get more money. So there's a lot of really clever things going on there. There's choosing the value of how valuable the different categories are, as well as that tension of not having enough money and trying to strip points away from yourself to continue yourself in the game. So it's a very neat one. I recommend you play either version Jeff and listeners. OK, I will definitely try to check that one out. Now, another whole kind of category of games. And at first, I didn't think about this as a set collection game, but I think it definitely is in terms of the way it adds to your score and it affects the game is certain types of stock games specifically like the 18 XX games. And in 1830, you're trying to collect sets of stocks and the amount that you know, no, you're not. No, I don't believe you know, well, I think you're going to just sell me on this, sell me on this. Well, the value of a set, I mean, that you know, you get points based on the value of each share of stock. So you're trying to collect sets. So larger sets are potentially going to give you more money. You're getting dividends. You're getting the appreciation of value of the stock. And also, if you are the largest holder in the stock, then you get control of the railroad. So in essence, it's, you know, maybe it's more of an area majority, but I think that the the interplay of the stock market and is this person going to be able to collect more of this specific stock than I am. I think is a is an important aspect of it. I think a choir would kind of fall into this category as well. You know, you're trying to draw stocks and grab them. And you know, the more you have, the more valuable your holding is. I think by the strictest definition, I think maybe, but if you're talking about what's going on in the game, I don't think it's a major aspect of the game. Either you're trying to like get control of it, or you're going to get like one of them. So you get a low bonus money every time people runs. But I don't know. I say I say 18X X is not set collection. How about this one then? Scrabble is a set collection game. Yeah. Okay. I suppose there. But here's the prize. Certain patterns or certain patterns, combinations of tiles that you can play in certain combinations of tiles that you can't play. All right. So imagine a set collection game where only half the people at the table know the sets that you're supposed to create. That is gravel. Well, I think that's true. And I think that's that's to a certain extent as a detriment to in the difference between people that know what the hell they're doing when they play Scrabble and people like me. Just sit there and try to, you know, come up with things. So I can almost make pumpkin. Pumpkin would be worth a lot of points. Yes, it was. Okay, well, those are just. I guess it up throwing out there for you is Katana set collection game. No, I don't see that that's really set. I mean, that's really resource collection. You're trying to collect resources and certain combinations to do things. I think that's different. That's a different thing. Yeah, that was kind of my feeling. It did come up. But I just don't think so. The other sets like the biggest army is a set collection, but that's such a minor aspect of it. I don't even I don't even count that. One of the things we see a lot, especially in recent euros, I'll say a felt is kind of guilty of this or likes to do this is they'll put in set collection is like a little mini game. Someone else, someone else I might know I think is guilty of this. They just kind of throw in this little mini game of set collection into a game and you know they have like four or five of these mini games. I don't know who else did that. I can't think of it right off the top. I must be thinking of a Antoine Bowser and wonders. There you go. There you go. Antoine. But that seems to come up. You know, I need I need a little another mechanic wonders. You've got the little science thing. So when you collect the sciences, that's a little almost like a set collection mini game. I mean, you get points on that by either collecting again the same symbol lots of times or groups of different symbols. So it's, you know, that's that's and none of the other elements work like that the victory point cards or the military cards or whatever there. I guess you could kind of stretch and say like the military is sort of a set collection in that you're just trying to get that resource to bash your neighbors. And none of them have the purity of the science cards. So that's, it just seems like there's there's a little twist on the mechanic for you. of the different types of things that you can try to do in seven wonders, whether it's a set collection or whether it's the special buildings that just give you victory points or whatever. Yeah. A couple other games that have that, Trajon and Castles of Burgundy, Stone Age has those cards you need to get like one of all the different ones, Age of Empires, that's how the economy works. Colosseum, I wanted to point out, I thought that was interesting. No other game has like a set of 17 that you want to collect, that that wouldn't work, but it actually works pretty well, surprisingly, because I think because there's so much overlap between the different sets that it allows the players and flexibility. Yeah, I think the flexibility in that game is really what makes it that you can shoot for this, but it's not like it's all or nothing, like I either get this set of 17 or I'm dead. Right. You can always go back and use them for something else. Or there's the important aspect of you can even perform it missing one or two at a point penalty, but you can almost get there and still it makes it work that way. Yeah, I think that's an excellent example. All right. Well, any other games you want to talk about or should we wrap this set up? No, I think that we can bring this one to a close. Just to kind of summarize, I think I kind of gave my summary a little bit earlier, but basically, I don't see set collection as a mechanic pure set collection with, say, increasing value sets that stands on its own. I mean, that was like the hypothetical game that I gave where you're just picking a card and doing it because either you've got one type of thing for each person to collect and then there's no interaction if you've got six players and six possible things you can collect, or you've got maybe five things you can collect in six players, which would be the worst case because they've got two players trying to collect the same thing and then those players are pretty much out of it. The issue is with the exponential growth. So there's a lot of pitfalls in set collection that you've got to be careful of, but there's a lot of different ways that you can get around that and I think we've gone over a lot of some excellent examples from other designers and different games and the way that they approach those. So that's what are kind of your thoughts on that? Yeah. My takeaways was initially in thinking about it, thinking about what makes good set collection games work. It's that they're combined with something else to make the set collection interesting. As you said, it doesn't work on its own as well. I think that point is something I didn't think about initially, but I think that's really been hammered home to me by this discussion is that in almost all the set collection games, you have to set some sort of plateau somewhere, much like these episodes of ludology, some, an hour long episode is good, but that does not mean an hour and a half episode thus makes it better. So you're saying that I should skip my plans to develop Phase 11? Phase 11, why would you do that when you can make Phase 21? Okay, well thank you everybody for joining us and we again, we will be opening up a thread on the guild to discuss this. We're very interested to hear about your take on set collecting games and some of your favorites, either positive or negative examples. So please come out to the board game geek guild and check us out. Thanks so much for listening, I really enjoyed this one and you will hear us in another few weeks. Goodbye everybody. Thanks for listening, ludology is made possible by the support and donations of listeners like you. We encourage you to visit us at ludology.net to get involved in a continuing discussion of today's topic. ludology is part of the diced tower network, the premier board game media network featuring the how to play podcast and the flagship podcast the diced tower. For more information on these shows and much more, please visit www.thedicedower.com. Until next time, keep thinking, keep learning and keep playing. [BLANK_AUDIO]