My apologies. I clean spaced on co-op games - and figured Pandemic
would be a bit on the nose in these times of SARS II: Electric Boogaloo.
....and Plague, Inc. (where your objective is to crush the world with your virus vs. the defending scientists/countries) is even more sketchy right now... feels a bit too close to home....
I feel I must disagree with the Learned & Honourable member on his
characterisation of space competition in Eurogames as "modest", as well
as indirect silly buggers "not (being) a major focus".
In terms of game design, it is in a majority of Euros. I did say not all Euros nor all Americans hewed to the generalization with equal rigour.
This may be due to my boardgaming groups being adults, good mates, and
thus absolute _bastards_ to each other in-game.
It also takes a fair bit of intelligence and/or gaming experience to recognize some opportunities to really control a game. And many very bright folk are fairly competitive.
Mechanisms that I've seen, have used myself, or have been on the
receiving end of, to screw with other players in Power Grid include but
are certainly not limited to:
1 - Manipulating player ranking.
Player ranking is 'manipulated' by the collective actions of all the players. No one player can (most of the time) dictate that.
Because player order originates from a collective series of actions, I don't think I'd call this a direct attack either because it everyone has a hand in building the player order.
2 - Manipulating fuel market - especially to leave the poor sod out
front with ONE less fuel than they need to power at some critical
juncture. "Well played, you rat bastard" commonly accompanies this.
I see a lot of gaming of the market and some of them cause some minor havoc (as you say). The place it *really* kills is in the last round with doubled values if someone can run the market in a resource you need.
However, a lot of it just drives up the price for everyone so isn't always that advantageous.
There are also usually things you can do in your power plant choices (diversity), in your buying strategy (shopping ahead in some potential crunches), and in how you attrit other people's ability to do that by forcing auctions they need to win higher so that they don't have a whack of money to engage in shenanigans.
I'm going to call this 'indirect' though, because you don't directly attack the other player.
3 - Manipulating other players to screw with a targeted player. I often
cop this one a lot from my sister, as I am (rightly or wrongly)
perceived as one of the strongest PG players in the group.
Psychological warfare is beyond the purview of the game and is not embodied in the rules, so you can't really say the game allows this. That's like arguing threatening to beat the crap out of a sibling to get them not to make a play is somehow a part of the game...
Judge throws this one out on the basis of 'beyond the scope of the game'. Acknowledge that this kind of gamesmanship happens if you have a really chippy gaming group (most have at least one or two who do this, but there are those that won't).
4 - Bluff participation in auctions. This can backfire horrendously, or
(especially in the 10th anniversary edition) pay off handsomely (such as
me getting a decent mid-game powerplant for 1 elektro because I bluffed
everyone else into buying other, expensive, plants at somewhere above
list price, which cost them at least one city build at the same time I
could afford an extra one, relative to no-one buying a plant at all). I
cannot repeat the language my sister used when she realised what I had
pulled off.
Some of this is luck though. If you drive up an auction and get someone to buy a lemon and what flips out and shows in the market is great and you are the only bidder, you get a deal. If you are hoping for the great thing and nothing good comes out, you can be positively screwed for at least a few turns and that can blow your chance of winning (sometimes with a crap market, nobody buys plants for a while and those with better plants make out like bandits).
This is again, not a direct attack against others (you are not removing resources, you are not causing them to miss a turn, you are not playing a card that otherwise changes their victory conditions, etc).
For this to work, you need to a) be lucky, b) to have a sucker that doesn't see your plan and leave you paying a lot for a plant you don't want, and c) for anybody to rise to your bait.
It is, at best, an attempt at an indirect harm, but it is like throwing a grenade through a window... if it goes in, you're good. If it doesn't, you get to find out what it feels like.
In the group I play with, at least 3 of the gamers will know the exact amount everyone has in their hidden stash, will know the likely strategies those other players will need to follow, and will know exactly how much (to the Elektro) how much they can bid and (due to long relations) will know very closely how far they can push one of these bluffs. And they'll have a plan b already in place in case they get stuck with a lemon. It's one thing to play with players with an information horizon that contains the current turn, some vague ideas from prior turns of who did what, and not much look ahead vs. playing with those who could tell you the colour the wiring in your power plant is and who made the lubricants... and who have the entire set of your corporate books at hand to review along with the discussions of your CEO, CFO and COO about future acquisitions...
5 - Non-bluff participation in auctions. I've found paying what you
need to, earlier in the game, for a decent mid or late-game plant gives
you _time_ to upgrade your powerplants later on when you _want_ to (say
to grab a good plant opportunistically, like I did in 4), not when
circumstances _force_ you to.
Except even then, if that stops you making certain geographic moves (depending on map) because you bought the end game plant, you can lose access to some areas for anything less than prohibitive costs and that becomes an issue.
There are many cadences you can use in power grid (some people save up and then burst out at a timed point) but there are costs and benefits to each (and how well you pull it off is everything - one missed step and your cadence is blown and the advantage you would like to have is wasted). You can make gains by getting first into a city, by buying cities that lead others to be trapped or have to pay through the nose to escape, by getting an efficient plant in a game where there is a stagnant phase due to crappy plant market for several turns, or getting decent deals through luck and auction success to get great end game plants for good prices, and of course, by getting resource purchases cheaply (be the only one in a resource with efficient plants... the double gain!).
Again though, this is you doing what you need to do to build YOUR engine, not something that is a direct attack on someone else.
6 - Build connected cities towards a minimum spanning tree to get into
each region in play.
That matters more in smaller player counts than it does with six players. You can sometimes get into only 3 regions and complete.
That said, there is an efficiency to being first into cities. There is a longer view though that you don't want to let getting two or three cities first lead to being trapped with a brutal way out. You have to look at both aspects when making decisions.
Here again, doing your own thing. That's not a direct attack.
7 - Induce a morale collapse in one or more player(s).
Perhaps a direct attack, but again ruled out because not within the scope of the game rules.
At least one of the metaheuristics underlying the above should be
obvious - pointing out which one(s) I leave to the Learned & Honourable
members as an exercise.
Alex
Many euros have little interaction with other players other than some tile buys for instance. And that has some impact on others, but it can be very slight. They are more about engine building and optimizing for your own purposes. Some, like PG, allow a lot of indirect stuff, but even then the mechanics to do that often involve a cooperative sucker or the participation of 3rd parties to make and in most of the cases, it can backfire on you.
Contrast that with many direct-attack games of the American school (reminds me of Austrian vs. Keynesian schools of economics...) where if you did not engage in direct attacks, the games may well be unwinnable and where a significant amount of time is devoted to figuring out how to put together good attacks vs. working on your own engine (which is Euro school).
I've seen people that could turn a game of 'snap' or 'crazy eights' into urban warfare... but that's well outside the rules of the game. We humans can turn bottle caps or left thumbs into lethal weapons....
Our group built an online implementation of PG and probably played well over 100 games with it. Then they build online pandemic and played over 1000 games. They actually have statistical data the game developers may never have crunched (until the online version was done - we were waaaay ahead on that). Love both of those games.
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