Ack, sorry, real life has intruded and it may be hard to keep this up for the next week or so -- but I am quite interested in accepting submissions -- either positions that came up in a game that you found particularly interesting, or particular aspects of the game about which you have something to say, or about which you'd like to see if I have anything to say.
I notice, by the way, that Max has never played the Space Girlz buttons on buttonmen.com [except for the one game I am currently playing]. I think these could actually be potentially interesting games. For example: Max vs. Maya [which is the game currently going on] -- how do you think Maya should set her plasma die? and what about Max's Swing die? You can see the choices we are currently trying at the link above..
I still think Max is much stronger than his statistics give him credit for being (though I might not go so far as to call him "strong" in an absolute sense -- but way better than 30%). There are certainly specific buttons he can't possibly beat, and there are some buttons to which he can't possibly lose, but for most of the middle, he could do better than people think if he's played correctly -- but it's subtle!
[Not so subtle part] In almost every game, Max will sweep the other button's dice off the field, the real question is how much poison he can make it eat before it goes -- so the object of the game is to set the swings properly so the amount of poison is achievable, then, make moves to force a sufficient amount of poison to be eaten.
In some sense, this is no different than any other matchup -- Buttonmen is always about knowing your victory conditions, and making moves most likely to push the game towards those conditions -- but with Max, that tends to mean finding ways to force your opponent to take at least one large poison die -- and that seems very different than the usual buttonmen plan:
if you take his small dice first and his big dice roll LARGE, they'll have too much choice and can take your smallest poison before they die -- but if you take his big dice first, his small dice may roll too low and get to pass alltogether!
Almost always, you want to have at least one of your larger dice roll lower than at least one of your small dice. With so many big poison, there's a good chance at least one of them will roll moderately low; then it's a matter of forcing its capture.
But this is all pretty vague, illustrative game positions would help -- and I don't have time to construct them right now, maybe I should set up a lot of challenges with Max to try to generate a few.
3 comments:
I'm not convinced that setting Max's swing dice lower than 20 is ever a good idea. For one thing, you never want to go first, because that's one less die your opponent has to eat. For another, if your goal is to set up situations that force your opponent to eat one of your big dice, having small dice around generally works against you, by giving your opponent the option to eat your smaller dice instead... While having more big dice increases your odds that some of them will show low.
This is a fairly naive analysis; I'd be curious to hear other ideas. I'm also happy to try out some matchups if you'd like -- pick someone, challenge me to a game and a reverse, I'll put Max's swing dice high, and you can put 'em wherever you want, and we can see if there's actually some advantage in going lower than 20...
There are potentially 2 problems with that reasoning
(1) the main issue is that with too many large dice it becomes much harder to force your opponent to capture 4 or 5 dice -- even if they go first, they may be able to pass a turn or two towards the end of the game.
(2) by increasing the poison, you change the threshold of victory -- maybe to an awkward value. For an example, if your opponent's dice total, say, 38 sides; if your X-poison are set to 20 sides, then, to win, you must get your opponent to capture at least 85 sides of poison; whereas with your X-set to, say, 11 sides, you must get your opponent to capture your opponent must capture at least 73 sides of poison in order to win.
how attainable are these goals? 85+ sides out of {12,12,20,20,20,20,30,30}
requires [A] with 5 captured dice, if two of them are the 12s, you need 61 more from three dice,
at least one must be a 30!
[B] if you somehow are able to protect one of the two 12s,
yet force him to capture five dice in total, you'll win
[C] if he only takes 4 dice (say you went first, or he is able to pass on a turn late in the round], you are sunk unless he somehow didn't take
any 12s (it's not impossible -- but is it likely?); but if he captures one or two 12s,
he'll need to capture BOTH 30 sided dice!
on the other hand, if you need for him to capture 73+ sides out of {11,11,12,12,20,20,30,30}
[A] if he does take all four of the 11s/12s, you will need the fifth die to be a 30.
[B] if you are able to protect even one of those four dice, yet still force him to capture
five dice, you'll win. This is easier than case [B] in the previous example, since
by the last few turns of the game, he won't have as many dice and you have a better
chance of getting one of these dice above him.
[C] if he only takes 4 dice, you'll need to protect two of the 11s/12s, but any combination
of two of the 20s/30s, with two of the 11s/12s will do.
Ted: Good points -- I hadn't worked out the math, and had been assuming that allowing the opponent eat two [p4] dice (with X=4) was essentially worthless compared to the value of forcing the opponent to eat one additional [p20]. And that's probably true in all but a few cases; but of course there's a big middle ground, and that middle ground may be better than either.
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