Puerto Rico and Ice Towers

[avram]

When I got to last night’s Games Club, most people were already playing something, so I just chatted. At one point I was moved to figure out the theoretical maximum number of points a victor could win in Puerto Rico.


Assumptions: Five-player game, which means 122 points worth of victory chips. In order to get the maximum number of virtual victory points (the kind you get when the chips run out in the middle of people getting victory points), I’m assuming the last round starts with only 1 point left in supply, and the winner ships enough of four goods to fill all three real ships (capacities: 8 + 7 + 6 = 21) plus the Wharf (capacity: 11). That’s a total of 154 points.

To accomplish this, our winner will need to have the Wharf, plus three production buildings (the fourth good can be corn). For maximal victory point values, assume the Coffee Roaster, Tobacco Storage, and either of the large indigo or sugar buildings. That’s another 11 victory points, bringing us to 165.

The rest of his town should be filled with large bonus buildings, four of them:
Customs House: base 4 points, + bonus of 1 per 4 VP chips of 38 = 42
Residence: base 4 points + bonus of 7 for having 12 plantations = 11
Guild Hall: base 4 points + bonus of 2 for each of the three large production buildings = 10
Fortress: This is the tough one. The bonus is 1 per 3 colonists. If the winner had the full 100 colonists you start with in a five-player game, that’s a 33-point bonus (plus 4 for the building, total 37). But it’s impossible for any one player to get all of the colonists. And figuring out the maximum one player could theoretically get is non-trivial.


I did eventually get to play two games of Puerto Rico, one with five players and one with four. In the first I made the stupidest Puerto Rico mistake ever: I picked up the wrong large bonus building when I bought one, and didn’t notice for a couple turns. This cost me three points, and almost the game. I wound up tying with another player for first on victory points, and winning on the goods-plus-money tie-breaker. This was a game where I got a good money pump set up early (I got coffee going early, then got an Office, and a Large Market, and then a Factory with four goods going), but didn’t have much victory point chip flow (only producing one of each good for most of the game).

I taught a bunch of people how to play Ice Towers, and we played four games, adding players each time till we had seven for the last. By that time all the newbies had discovered stodgemeyering (or whatever the Icehouse slang is for holding back your pieces till other players have committed; Google isn’t finding it for me), so the last game was excruciating.

On the way home I turned 38.

Comments

[mneme]

Cool PR calculations. Looks almost correct, except that you forgot the Captain's bonus (of +1). Additionally, you spent four slots on the Guild Hall and Residence, but if you replace the Residence with two smaller buildings... a Harbor would be worth 8 points (3 + 4 shipments, plus 1 from the Custom's House), with another large production building making the total 12 for those two spots (or you could replace the Guild Hall with the Harbor and another three cost building -- a factory or University) . So it sounds like the maximum points is less than 266.

Stodgemeyering is correct; this is one reason I try to train new players by example -- not playing too fast, and -certainly- playing all larges I can before dropping mediums, and mediums before smalls (except when I see a good opprotunity to grab a huge number of points with a small early, of course)...but also playing to reduce opposing plays and -not- waiting for everyne else to be out of smalls before playing my own, if you please -- against good players, if one player has all his or her small pieces grounded by the time everyone else has played theirs, they are -not- necessarily at any kind of advantage -- what matters more is what towers you have and what resources you have for keeping them -- grouping more than playing early/late.

I do think that Ice Towers could use a "shot clock" -- say the game ends a minute after the last move, frex.

Re:

[avram]

Or a simple time limit. Better would be a clock that gives warning beeps at intervals — say, ten minutes, then a one-minute warning beep (which inspires a burst of activity), then the one that ends the game. Or, if you’re coding the thing on a computer, the final ending beep is randomized to come somewhen within a twenty-second window centered at sixty seconds past the warning, just to fuck with people counting down in their heads.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

By the way... Happy birthday!

[mneme]

WTF is with LJ automatically adding "re: blank" in the fscking subject line?

Anyways...I don't like using a time limit for this, largely because unlike Icehouse, Ice Towers doesn't lend itself to one -- the game -does- inexorably work its way toward a conclusion, but a random time limit can leave the game in an unstable state and end up with a random winner and players playing the timer.
Much better, IMO, is to simply end the game after no activity has happened for a specific amount of time, for this game, at least. But both are worth testing, I think.