Friday Night Shots – Mechanic Surprises

Welcome back to another Friday! The year is moving on, week by week, but I’m happy to have you spend at least a bit of your Friday night with me (or, more likely, your Saturday morning, but beggars can’t be choosers!).

Belly up to the bar (where did that phrase come from, anyway?) and I’ll get you a drink.

I have some Kool-Aid if you don’t want anything stronger.

Let me just turn down the music. I love me some Irish reels but when there’s nobody actually here to dance to them, they’re not as exciting.

And you can’t talk over them!

I know the title of this post may be a bit confusing. It sounds like I’m talking about games where the publisher hasn’t released any information about it so it’s all a surprise.

But no, that’s not what I meant.

Instead, I meant if you try a game that features a mechanic that you generally don’t like, and you not only enjoy it but you think maybe, just maybe, you might change your mind about it!

Tonight, for me, I’m talking about negotiation games.

So last week, my game group played a new game (or at least a new implementation of an older game) called Zoo Vadis by Reiner Knizia.

This is a pure negotiation game where players are animals vying for leadership in the zoo.

I’ll be talking about this more in next week’s “New to Me” games post, but it is essentially a negotiation game because you can only move forward toward the award area if you have the majority of votes in a section where your animal is.

You can offer to pay victory points or you can offer your special ability (which you can’t use, you can only offer it as a negotiation tactic) to get one or more other players to vote for you to move.

Moving will allow you to pick up victory point tokens in the path to the next area, so they are essentially voting to give you some points.

You’d better offer up some points of your own to make it worth their while!

Or maybe offer your ability which will let them do something cool in the future.

In addition to what you offer, for each vote they give you (the tigers above can give 3 votes to either of the other two players with pieces in that area), they get a victory point from the supply.

Thus, this is a pure negotiation game!

I tend to shy away from negotiation games, mainly because I’m not very good at assessing good value and making deals.

However, numerous people wanted to play this, it’s a new Knizia game, and I wanted to keep playing with the people who were playing this (it ended up being all six of us) in case we would be playing something else later, so I said that I would play it.

And I actually enjoyed it!

I still wasn’t very good at it, but I wasn’t horrible. I think I was middle of the pack (3rd out of 6).

It got me thinking afterwards.

Maybe I don’t hate negotiation games as much as I thought I did?

I mean, I don’t think I’m up for 12 hours of Here I Stand negotiating…but maybe some shorter games with the same mechanic?

Maybe I could actually get Versailles 1919 to the table at some point?

Hell, I bought the thing! But then I’ve been wary of the negotiation aspect of it.

I think Zoo Vadis was a 30 minute game, so that definitely helped it along.

Am I up for 2 hours of possible negotiation? Or 90 minutes?

If the topic is interesting, and I know (for me) the Versailles treaty is, then I could be.

I would like to get it played sometime soon, while the negotiating high is still in my brain.

Maybe at Bottoscon next week?

(I will be posting a retrospective of the 4-day con the week after, so stay tuned to find out!)

In checking out the Negotiation mechanic link on BGG, I’m actually a little surprised too.

I didn’t realize that Pax Pamir: 2nd Edition was the top game in that category, and I really enjoyed that game!

Maybe my plays haven’t been negotiation-heavy, I’m not sure.

I suppose there is some, mainly because you’re not controlling any real pieces. Instead, you are vying for influence over one of the three factions and thus possibly being able to control (or at least nudge) it to be where you want to be.

You are playing cards in front of you to try and earn this influence, but you could be negotiating things like where your spies are going to go, or maybe who you’re going to assassinate?

Either way, it’s #1 and I like it.

So maybe there’s something to this?

There’s also Bohnanza, the Uwe Rosenberg card game of bean collection, where you are trying to trade bean cards out of your hand before you are forced to plant them, which usually means uprooting a bean field that you may want to keep growing!

Each turn you have to plant the first one or two cards in your hand. If they don’t match the fields you already have out there, then you have to harvest the field to make room for them.

Of course, you can’t change the order of the cards in your hand, so if you want to avoid doing that, you have to trade!

I bounced hard off of this game in my only play of it, but that was back in 2012, right after I started playing games, and I may not have been ready for it (just like Dominant Species, which is not a negotiation game, but which is getting played again next week!)

I wouldn’t mind giving it a try again just to see.

The ultimate negotiation game, of course, is Cosmic Encounter (or maybe that’s just by reputation considering how much Tom Vasel can talk about it sometimes).

This is a game where you are an alien empire trying to expand to other players’ systems, establishing colonies on their planets. You have to attack, defend, negotiate, and maybe even bring in some allies in order to do this.

I’ve heard it’s a wild game, but that kind of negotiating didn’t really appeal to me.

But it might now!

Will this epiphany last? Does this mean I actually like negotiating games now?

I can’t say I “like” them necessarily, but at least for now, I may not avoid them like I have been doing.

Was this dislike due to a bad early experience? Like in Bohnanza (since that was one of the early games I played)?

Maybe, maybe not.

I wouldn’t mind playing a few more to see whether this newfound willingness to negotiate sticks around or not.

Or it might just be gas.

Anyway, do you have a game mechanism that you initially hated but found yourself kind of liking? Or at least willing to play games with it?

Which ones have you changed your opinion on over time?

Let me know in the comments.

And I’m still not up for 12 hours of Here I Stand.

This post brought to you by Smirnoff’s Wild Berry vodka, the number 179, and the letter “n” (for negotiate!)