Oops, We Missed Something #1

I've decided to record any instances of games we played incorrectly without realizing it until far too late to correct it. Game-changing rules that weren't discovered until someone asked an unrelated question, and while perusing the rules for an answer we noticed something else; times when no one had any concerns with the game until someone played a card that permitted them to perform an action in a way that we had already all been doing consistently; anything else we come across.

In this inaugural entry: Villagers and Walk the Plank.

Villagers

Villagers is a set-collection game where the goal is to generate money, and money = points. But the cards you're collecting are residents of your village that you're drafting from a central display, called the Road. Some characters require you to pay 2 coins in order to add them to your village, and that money sometimes gets paid to another villager, possibly owned by another player. There are two scoring phases, and in the first one, you gain money equal to the printed value on any of your villagers, plus money equal to any coins currently on any of your villagers. In the second scoring phase, at the end of the game, you gain printed money values, and you remove any coins on your villagers and add them to your score pile. However, some end-game cards give you extra coins per the coins on your villagers, so you want to accumulate a lot of them over the course of the game.

What Did We Do?

During the first scoring phase, we removed all the coins from our villagers. And there were a lot in some cases. That meant we unknowingly spent two thirds of the game short-changing ourselves for end-game scoring by not having the first half-dozen coins on one or two villagers. It probably wasn't a huge difference, but it was wrong nonetheless.

But Also...

the Road is made up of 6 cards, and there are 6 piles above the Road, and the setup would have you place one pile above each of the 6 cards. The draw piles are the timer, they have the scoring phase cards in them. But each pile only has a certain number of cards, and the rest are in the Reserve deck off to one side. When the Road is emptied, if anyone still has to take a turn before the game ends, they'll draw from the Reserve. When you draft from the Road, you immediately replace from the left-most remaining deck of cards. At the end of the draft phase, you'll remove any cards that have a coin on them from a previous round, add coins to any remaining cards, and refill empty market spaces from the Reserve. This way, each villager is only available for two rounds, and eventually become more appealing with the additional coin.

And we...

replaced drafted cards in the Road from the left-most pile of cards, as normal, but at the end of the draft phase, we removed any cards with coins, refilled empty spaces from the left-most pile of cards, and added coins to every card. If you're following along, that means every round after the first, every card had a coin on it, we never drew from the Reserve deck, and we burned through the game's timer way faster than we should have. And this game is dependent on getting cards out of the Reserve. Many villagers have prerequisite villagers, and if those are in the Reserve pile, then most of the villagers on the Road are worthless.

I didn't mean for the Villagers errors to run so long, but this next one is pretty simple:

Walk the Plank

This action-programming game is about controlling a group of 3 like-coloured pirates forced to walk a plank with up to 4 other groups of pirates, shoving each other toward the end of the plank, shortening the plank, extending the plank for safety, running back to the ship, and trying to be the last pirates to avoid ultimately being eaten by the Kraken. The game ends when either a) only one colour of pirate is left, or b) only two or fewer pirates remain, regardless of colour.

Can You Guess How We Played it?

I was taught this game before I ever read the rules, by someone who had played it at least a few times before. We thought the only way the game ends is when only one player still has pirates still alive. I've probably played it a dozen times like that, probably far more, because the game is so short you'll play it two or three times in a row before you put it away. It just made sense, how else could you win a game of pirates being eaten by a Kraken than by being the only pirates not eaten?

A couple days ago, while someone was planning their turn, I happened to glance down at the rulebook, and I read the flavour text aloud. It says the captain is annoyed with our collective incompetence, and wants to whittle us down to only two pirates. This is technically contradicted by the end game scenario where only one player has living pirates and there are 3 of them, but the important part is that this game can easily turn into a stalemate when there are only two pirates left, of different colours. And it frequently does. I played this game 5 times over this past weekend, and I bet 4 of them ended with a long stalemate of two pirates jockeying back and forth while the other players watched and laughed.

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That's it for now, but come back later for more game-changing rules goofs, as we continue to play games so infrequently that we forget how they worked from the last time.