SU&SD did a delightful review of Bohnanza this month: The Beans Game.
I’ve been wanting to check it out. It sounds like you have a lovely group. Whereabouts are yall located? x)
Your game here seems marvelous. I particularly love the idea that the players aren’t balanced, so you can’t compare scores. This makes game design vastly easier and allows more creativity in tinkering with abilities, etc.
Right? Most multiplayer games just aren’t able to discuss power asymmetries, they get boring when they do, which is absurd, games often have these characters like, I don’t know, Bowser, who are supposed to be abnormally strong and intimidating, and then they have to remove that characteristic from the character.
I think you’d sell some to the rationalist community if you could get it even decently manufactured.
Yeah, interest among EAs is really high. I think there’s a lot we can learn from this kind of game, but I’m always reluctant to focus on the audience at home. The audience who’s most aware that they need a thing are often the audience who mostly already has it, I really want to reach the kind of audiences who don’t know that cooperative bargaining theory exists, they’re really suffering out there.
Good points. Then I think you want to market to / pursued parents. They want their children to be good at resisting bad deals, but wise in how they exercise their power over others.
I think for adults there’s also a huge pitch for this being a new type of game: cooperative and competitive at the same time. Play it your way. (And learn how that works out).
You might actually want to make it a tiny bit more competitive to entice people who think cooperative games are dull. It would be easy to put the points on the same scale by looking at average scores of different roles over just a few sessions. There still wouldn’t be one winner, but it would make it more of a challenge to improve your own play and play better than others. Challenge is motivating.
SU&SD did a delightful review of Bohnanza this month: The Beans Game.
I’ve been wanting to check it out. It sounds like you have a lovely group. Whereabouts are yall located? x)
Right? Most multiplayer games just aren’t able to discuss power asymmetries, they get boring when they do, which is absurd, games often have these characters like, I don’t know, Bowser, who are supposed to be abnormally strong and intimidating, and then they have to remove that characteristic from the character.
Yeah, interest among EAs is really high. I think there’s a lot we can learn from this kind of game, but I’m always reluctant to focus on the audience at home. The audience who’s most aware that they need a thing are often the audience who mostly already has it, I really want to reach the kind of audiences who don’t know that cooperative bargaining theory exists, they’re really suffering out there.
Good points. Then I think you want to market to / pursued parents. They want their children to be good at resisting bad deals, but wise in how they exercise their power over others.
I think for adults there’s also a huge pitch for this being a new type of game: cooperative and competitive at the same time. Play it your way. (And learn how that works out).
You might actually want to make it a tiny bit more competitive to entice people who think cooperative games are dull. It would be easy to put the points on the same scale by looking at average scores of different roles over just a few sessions. There still wouldn’t be one winner, but it would make it more of a challenge to improve your own play and play better than others. Challenge is motivating.