|
Welcome to the List! To be honest, Caveman/Mastodon balance has been a big problem
all along. During playtesting the results came out to something like
80-20% in favor of the Cavemen. If I recall correctly (and it has been a
couple years), in the couple games where the Mastodons won, a reasonable
configuration was to have a couple Mastodons in a row with one end against the
edge of the board. e.g. B1 and B2. That seemed to strike a
reasonable balance between protecting exposed flanks and still maintain some
mobility. If you want to take on the task, you could try tweaking the
rules to see if there is a way to balance the power of the two sides. One
possibility would be to reduce the number of Cavemen. Another one would
be to somehow increase the power and/or mobility of the Mastodons. I’m
not _positive_ there is a way to balance things. Let me know if
you come up with anything that looks promising. If you have a Treehouse set and a Volcano board (and you’re
not yet completely turned off to Ryan McGuire games) might I suggest Ice Dao?
http://ryanker.com/IcehouseGames/IceDao/IceDao.html The game requires two smalls in addition to the medium and large
for each player. You could easily play “warm” versus “cool”
colors. i.e. Red Large, Yellow Medium, Red Small, Yellow Small against a
similar Blue/Green force. Ryan From:
icehouse-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:icehouse-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Doctroid Hi, new member here. I bought a Treehouse set recently and last weekend was
trying out some games with my son. One was Ryan McGuire's "Ice Age". My question is, how can the Mastodon player possibly win? I've tried several strategies for placing pieces, but found
nothing that works. Every time, the Caveman player can take out a mastodon on
nearly all the first few moves -- three mastodons down, and game over, by about
the fourth move. If real life cavemen and mastodons were like this, mastodons
would have gone extinct long ago. Oh, wait. Better to place in herds or not? In herds you need more
cavemen to take out a mastodon, but four cavemen can threaten two or more
mastodons at once whereas two separated mastodons need six cavemen to threaten
them. Better to place on the edges or not? It gives the cavemen
fewer options to surround them, but the mastodons then have limited retreat
possibilities. Maybe there's something I'm misunderstanding about the rules? I guess seeing an example game would help. |