Oh dear, I seem to have provoked an Alison rant. Hopefully it was clear that my comments were intended as suggestions and not as complaints.... I'll recklessly assume that that's the case, and proceed with the discussion:
> > It just seems that Everybody Gets 1 is overpowered under X=X+1. In a
> > game of any size, you get to draw ten or twelve or more cards...
>
> But as I write this, I see your meaning (which would be clear from vocal
> inflection which is difficult to convey in email): that "in a game of any
> SIGNIFICANT (understood to mean LARGE) size" EvGets(2) has you drawing a
> huge number of cards.
Apologies for the imprecision. The number of times I've gotten myself into trouble this way, you'd think I'd've learned by now which turns of phrase I shouldn't use in text-based communication.... :)
> > ...it's rare that you've got more than three or four cards (besides
> > the D&D itself) without having *any* you'd rather keep.
>
> I disagree: In fact, I wouldn't consider it worth my while to play
> Disc&Draw _unless_ I had a large hand size (or a REALLY crappy hand)
>
> In games I've played, we routinely see people throwing away large hands
> because they want a fresh batch, or they want 10 Cards In Hand specifically
> (of course) (meanwhile they're tossing a bunch of crappy hand limits they
> wouldn't want to be forced to play anyhow.) You think this happens
> infrequently, but I would say it's quite common. I often angle for a large
> hand size. I'll deliberately not play keepers to remain Poor if the Poor
> Bonus is in effect (especially with an Inflated Poor Bonus!)
Ah, so we apparently use that card rather differently. I generally don't play it while I've got a Goal that includes one of my Keepers, or a strong Action card, or a New Rule that could shake things up a bit, or...you get the idea. Unless my current hand's entirely useless, I'd sooner stick with it than take my chances--and the more cards I have, the less likely it is that they're all useless at the moment. So I don't often play D&D from a large hand (though there's always the rare case when I've got seven irrelevant Goals or something), and I haven't noticed other players doing that very much either. And since I also generally try to increase my hand size when possible, the result is that I don't find a lot of opportunities to play D&D--hence my attempt to juice it up a bit. If you use the card quite differently, then yes, that might tend to negate my argument.... :)
(Unrelated note about playing for large hand size: We got EcoFluxx recently, and in just our second game, we discovered a rather amusing quirk: The first play of the game was Composting--and the next five plays were all Jackpot! before somebody had a better idea.)
> > ...so you just play Disc&Draw on the theory that one of your 20 new cards
> > will have to be 10 Cards in Hand; but that doesn't come up too often.
>
> It doesn't? I'd gamble on it any day. And the effect of Inflation on hand
> size is totally disproportionate to it's effects on 10 Cards In Hand. You
> can MULTIPLY your hand by two, while the winning condition has only been
> elevated by an ADDITION of one. That just doesn't seem right to me.
That was the whole point--to make D&D a more playable card, since currently it tends to hang around in my hand for a long time waiting for all the good cards to go away. If I could double my hand size by playing it, I wouldn't be so disinclined to use it. Four random cards don't often seem a better option than the four cards I'm looking at, but *eight* random cards certainly do. Again, though, it appears that you use D&D in such a way that it doesn't have this problem to begin with.
> We all think we're in the majority, don't we? I'm talking like my way is
> the only way, and you're talking like your way is...
Eh well. I *am* in the majority, among the folks I play Fluxx with, and you can probably say the same.... It might be interesting to ask which style of playing D&D is strategically optimal, but I'm not sure how one would go about answering that--we'd need some metric of Fluxx card utility, so that we could judge how often a hand of random cards would be more useful than the hand of nonrandom cards that you've hung on to until this point in the game. And it probably depends upon the play habits of the others in the game, too.
> > (On the other hand, if you never play above a three- or four-player game,
> > it's probably not an issue; but most Fluxx players probably do....)
>
> This "on the other hand" of yours sums our differences in a nutshell. Most
> of the games I play are three or four players. I probably only play above
> a four player game at a convention, or when teaching newbies. And the box
> says up to six players. We'd break it into multiple groups if it got much
> bigger. We find it to be just too freakin' long between turns. Fluxx with
> a larger group CAN (not always, but CAN) be a disappointing bore for the
> new player ("I only got one turn in that whole half-hour game!") and we try
> to avoid that new player disappointment.
>
> What all this points out to me is that people (and social circles)
> have different styles of play, and what seems overpowered to one group is
> nothing to another, and vice-versa. It's like some people love to play
> severe hand limits, even when they screw themselves as well, just to mess
> with everyone else. Some people like to go for chaos even above going for
> potential winning strategies. I don't do that (I try, when possible, to
> play to win) but many delight in this aspect of Fluxx.
Another interesting point. Judging by our behavior, we seem to think that more players are always better (as long as the deck is sufficiently crammed with Blanxx and cards from multiple editions that running out of cards isn't a problem). After all, Fluxx is the sort of game that's fun to watch while you're waiting for your turn; it's not like you're just sitting there while the other guy thinks for five minutes. And the longer it takes for your next turn to come up, the more fun you're probably having watching whatever crazy events are causing the game to take so long--we once had a single person play 23 cards in a turn without winning, and we once had a player not get a turn for ages because, three times in succession, the players next to him managed to reverse the turn order just before he would've got to go.
(Events of the latter type, though less extreme, happen often in our games; it's somehow become an established norm that one should attempt to use Reverse Order, or the cancellation of it, against whichever player it's been used against most frequently that day.... We always play to win when possible; but when there's no clear winning play, we often play for maximum humor value--which is not *quite* the same thing as chaos, but sometimes comes close.)
> The glory of Fluxx is that it's so flexible (Fluxxible?) that it can
> accommodate all these styles of play, and keep us all pretty happy. (or
> more than pretty happy, eh?)
Amen to that. The LLabs tag line always seems to be "Thanks for playing our games!", but it's you who should get the thanks; we wouldn't be playing Fluxx and its kindred so much if they weren't so splendid. (And now you've got me in the mood to go round up a game, but it's late evening on a Sunday and the department is deserted. Sigh....)
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