by lindyhopper
dyepbr wrote:
My wife and I are 5 games in. I'm really enjoying it so far. I'd say average game is 25 minutes (counting setup, and playing the base game), which actually feels a lot shorter since you become engrossed in the gameplay.
For me, it's not that I want game "time" longer, it's the fact that I feel our engines are just taking off, and then the game ends. I feel like I want to see where the game would go with 2 or 3 more turns. However, I can't figure a way for this to happen and still keep the game tight and interesting.
All of our 2 player games have been decided in 6 points or less, with most being within a few points, and 1 ended in a tie with the ship # tie breaker.
In our 2 player games, we end the game with anywhere from 7-11 ships each. If we say that we average 9 ships towards the last turn, that depletes 18 fish per round. To increase the fish total to last at least a few rounds more, I'd imagine that we would have to add 45 more fish for a total of 95 fish for a 2-player game (accounting for more ships being launched these rounds as well).
How many more licenses to add, I don't know. I haven't tried to extend gameplay yet, but I would guess the point difference would be much higher, with a swing towards fish strategy and crazy high bids as others have mentioned.
I very much enjoy the game, and my desire for a deeper run with my engine only has me wanting to play the game again. I do hope someone can experiment and find the right balance for a slightly longer variant. I'd love to try it.
For me, it's not that I want game "time" longer, it's the fact that I feel our engines are just taking off, and then the game ends. I feel like I want to see where the game would go with 2 or 3 more turns. However, I can't figure a way for this to happen and still keep the game tight and interesting.
All of our 2 player games have been decided in 6 points or less, with most being within a few points, and 1 ended in a tie with the ship # tie breaker.
In our 2 player games, we end the game with anywhere from 7-11 ships each. If we say that we average 9 ships towards the last turn, that depletes 18 fish per round. To increase the fish total to last at least a few rounds more, I'd imagine that we would have to add 45 more fish for a total of 95 fish for a 2-player game (accounting for more ships being launched these rounds as well).
How many more licenses to add, I don't know. I haven't tried to extend gameplay yet, but I would guess the point difference would be much higher, with a swing towards fish strategy and crazy high bids as others have mentioned.
I very much enjoy the game, and my desire for a deeper run with my engine only has me wanting to play the game again. I do hope someone can experiment and find the right balance for a slightly longer variant. I'd love to try it.
A word of caution.
In many engine building or optimization games, that feeling of "I just need one or two more turns to let my engine run and it will be perfect!" is part and parcel to the tightness and balance of the game.
Often, running the game longer than this point will either just make the margin of victory wider (overwinning) or worse, it unbalances the points-generation-per-turn strategies from the build-once-for-big-payoff strategies.
Think of the difference in Race for the Galaxy or Puerto Rico in the loose VP vs. the points-from-buildings -- tweaking the end-game conditions in these games by having a larger pool of loose vp's without also tweaking the # of buildings required to win, can wreck the balance between the two strategies.
Some games also have a propensity to snowball into insanity, given a longer playtime. The clearest poster-child for this sort of game is Glory to Rome, the engines can be so effective that if you somehow manage not to win once you get a particular engine going, the game turns become comical, a lot of work and/or totally broken.
The balance point in Fleet could well be tweaked for a longer game, but you'd want to do it with care to preserve a nice balance between the different routes to victory. Otherwise you might be taking away from the game, by making it longer than it should be.