BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Charon’s on the Styx, not the Lethe, fml

I have to give a special thanks to Josh not just for his generous patronage, but for pinging @blognomic-idle and giving me a challenge I couldn’t refuse.

I was away from my computer when dust to dust passed so I couldn’t CoV in time.

In hindsight we should’ve all just flown to the campfire like Zack did instead of driving!

Look at that, Gandalf was full of crap about the eagles after all.

I added a little fun fact to the wiki commentary section. https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=The_Ninth_Dynasty_of_Brendan#Commentary

Not sure about the legality of creating a post in an interregnum, but I can use a comment too, so… Would someone unidle me?

I would but I’m not an admin.

Unidling you, SuperStar. Quorum would remain at 7, but I’m also unidling Chiiika, so it’s 8 now.

Anyway, I liked most of this dynasty, although the end was a cluster.

That felt like an unusual dynasty for having the three (or four?) lead players focused on the same scam: when the Kiosk victory route was unplugged there was some caginess among the most vocal players about how to proceed, which seems to have been enough to make the Driving game feel stagnant, and for players to agree to abandon it. I think if we’d had some other backup victory mechanisms in place at that point, it wouldn’t have happened.

The Coin endgame started off interesting for putting decisions out in the open, and moving factors like “theme should matter” and “new players should get a chance” out to the individual rather than trying to craft a single victory-split proposal that everyone could get behind.

But it was disappointing when Zack - leading on coins - instantly agreed to pool with Clucky and TyGuy6, with literally only a couple of minutes discussion, and no attempt to solicit better counter-offers from other players. (Although if that was part of an older, standing agreement between the three to pool their resources the moment that doing so would reach victory, fair enough.)

I agree that it is disappointing that the end meta-game immediately devolved into a tepid pool, but that at least feels consistent with what a significant number of players wanted - the drive to have any kind of merit-based endgame seems to have been limited to a very small number of players.

I honestly do also feel a little slighted that I offered Zack my Coins in good faith of a merit-based outcome and then immediately got shafted on a victory-split dice-roll - given the extent to which I underwrote Zack, if it was going that way I should have at least had a share.

But the endgame was a bit of an experiment, and in my view it failed, so at least that’s good to know for next time. #

The rest of the dynasty was interesting in a way that never fully cohered, I think. I wish the souvenier-gathering gameplay had been a bit better developed; it felt like we were getting closer, at the end, but by that point we’d had several weeks of people chipping away at trying to get the dynasty abruptly ended, so it felt awkward to push to continue.

One of the great small pleasures of the dynasty was Brendan’s location names, which raised several genuine laughs. Thanks for that, Brendan!

When I saw the stars aligning for Josh and Kevan to pull a heist on the Roadside Attractions, I knew they’d win if I didn’t do anything. And I’d put myself *just* beyond those Attractions! I went for a second best option, to thwart their plans, and pulled together the (only) two people who could also exploit the scam in time: Clucky and Tech.

The two of them were very fun to plot with. We were just pulling out of the station, ready for a close fight, and wondering to ourselves how on earth we’d beat them if they had already seen all the little details we were chatting about, when Josh and Kevan threw in the towel! The scam was patched.

So I guess Josh’s next hope was to set up for a pooling victory, because, (despite his alleged interest in a merit-based outcome,) that’s exactly what https://blognomic.com/archive/staunton_lick looked like it’s going to produce:

“At any time, a Tripper may give any positive amount of their Coins to another Tripper.

When one Tripper has more than half of the Coins that are in the game, that Tripper has achieved Victory.”

But the Josh-Clucky rivalry made it hard for the key players to get backing, I guess, and I was content to accept a coin flip that I could be a part of. I didn’t take Clucky’s first offer, but once it looked like he and Zack were surely going to make a deal with somebody, 1/6 equity was looking a lot better than what most others were getting.

The road trip mechanics were great, and we could probably have done more with them, but it’s also always nice to have a fresh start! Good luck in the next “trip”!

FWIW I was def hoping for a merit auction not a pooling auction! Naïve I know.

I’d say it was pooling and merit: Zack earned some Coins through merit, and gambled on the mantle to get the rest he needed, if he felt that TyGuy and Clucky weren’t willing to give any Coins on merit.

It did seem unwise that Zack agreed the pool roll in two minutes in the middle of the night, rather than soliciting offers from other players: I’d certainly have been willing to outbid Clucky or TyGuy on mantle share, if my alternative was “0% chance of winning”. But that’s easy to say from an armchair several days later, when delaying could have cost Zack the game if a counter-pool of four players moved against him. Definitely a lesson in how to do that kind of endgame in future.

And yes, good naming work from Brendan, we definitely made the right call of not going down the name-it-yourself-even-if-you-don’t-want-to route this time.

...a lesson in how to propose that kind of endgame in future, I mean. It probably should have been something more like “if a player has held more than half the coins for 24 hours”.

Thanks for the kind words on the stop names—I felt very much like I was indulging my own sense of humor there, so I’m glad it wasn’t too idiosyncratic to be enjoyable.

@Kevan To be fair, it was not the middle of the night for me. Gotta love time zones.

@Zack I think the corollary for that is: timezones exist, so you should consider not acting immediately, as there may be a better opportunity when the next batch of people wake up