![]() ![]() To illustrate that people aren’t inherently good at calculating even basic odds, let’s take the “ Monty Hall” problem. Trust me: I’ve been trying for the past five hours to come up with a spreadsheet to do it. It’s a risk, and one that is very difficult to calculate. If you’re after multiple combinations, you can really screw yourself over. Not only is the probability of success different now, you’ve got one fewer dice in the pool. I love the mechanic because it complicates things so much. But still, we owe our continued existence as a species to the first dudes who decided to chuck a pointy stick at a mammoth.Īt the same time, I think it’s easy to underestimate odds of success, especially when the “locked die” mechanic comes into play, whether that’s locking a successful die in or losing one when you don’t make a roll. Evolutionarily, you don’t make it out of the jungle without taking some chances if our ancestors really thought about it, they would have never tried to drop the first woolly mammoth. In fact, I think we’re wired to think that the odds are ever in our favor, even when they’re clearly not. I don’t think that we, as humans, are wired to think in terms of probability, and if we are, we really ought to be rewired. ![]() During the last game session I played, a few players had to explain to another player why, without any clue tokens or bonus dice, it was unlikely that he’d be able to complete an adventure requiring six specific die faces. If you have played it, you’ll know what it’s like to look at an adventure, think, “Three skulls and two scrolls? Yeah, no problem,” and then find, two rolls in, that it’s literally impossible for you to complete the adventure. If you haven’t tried it, the basic mechanic of Elder Sign is that you have to make certain rolls to complete certain adventures – and once you’ve rolled what you need, you have to set those dice aside for subsequent rolls on the adventure. In my most recent game, we were, as one always is in Elder Sign, struggling against the forces of ancient madness both in the story of the game and in its playing. I’ve been playing a lot of Elder Sign lately because (a) it’s a great game, and (b) it’s one of the few really good, relatively quick co-op games I know (having played Pandemic just about into the ground over the past two years). ![]()
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