Mage Wars > Domination

Domination as start point for beginners?

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Sailor Vulcan:
Why can't you just run two 1v1 demos at the same time? Place some sort of divider between each half of the full Arena and walk the players through each round at the same time. If this seems confusing you can think of it as a single four player free for all game with an invincible triple wall cutting the board in half and the game ends when half of the players have been eliminated. :P


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Kitarja:
Thanks for your answers :) hmm thought it would be a cool idea to start off with a team game, especially because you don't know all the spells. In a team game you can chat with your mate, ask him what he thinks about specific cards etc, so I thought that could help get over the burden of learning the cards and in addition I really like the idea of the domination mode.

I thought about the Apprentice mode, but I really dislike it. The few times I played it, it just wasn't great. But I might think about using apprentice with the team rules or maybe give it another go, have to think more about it ;) but I would definitely perfer to start with full Arena mages and think my friends can handle it, we're used to long games, where people take their time for their turn, so flipping through the book and thinking about all the options won't be a problem I think.

Is there a specific reason you all think that a team game is not a great start? I have only played domination once so far, but that was lots of fun and it might end up being my preferred way to play the game, be it free for all or teams. Being able to play well with more than 2 players at once is a big bonus in my opinion. Sure two separate games are possible, but I think less fun than one big game ;)

Zuberi:
My main concern isn't with the team game or the domination format. It's with throwing them in the deep end with a full spellbook. It's not just a matter of it being a long game. In fact, Domination rules will keep it from going too long. It's that the vast majority of the time they WON'T BE PLAYING. They'll be scratching their head figuring out what's going on and what they should do. It doesn't matter if they can handle the length and complexity of the game. The cards aren't that hard to figure out. But no matter how smart your friends are, it takes time to digest what you've put in front of them.

Studying isn't very fun for most people. It's even less fun when you've put them in a sink or swim scenario with stakes such as victory or defeat. Especially when other people are depending on them on a team. And that's mostly what they'll be doing. Studying and trying to figure things out.

Apprentice mode is great not because it's a great game variant. It's not. But it's great because it lets you PLAY while you LEARN by cutting down on how much you need to digest. You have very few cards to worry about and learn. None of them do very complex things, relatively speaking. You don't have enough room to maneuver in and worry too much about positional tactics. And the life is so low that the game will end relatively quickly. So, yes it kind of sucks to play. The mages aren't super balanced and it doesn't allow for too much strategy. But it's great to TEACH.

But you know your friends better than us. If they like puzzling over a book and don't mind the down time, then I don't really have any other reason to worry about throwing the full game at them.

Kitarja:
Thanks again for that long reply :) Got your point now, my main problem with the apprentice mode is, even though it's nice for teaching, each time I played that variant I couldn't really enjoy the game, because it quickly felt unbalanced and that just took the fun away for me. And playing a game that is not fun, well is not fun. But that might just be me, as I generally don't like stripped down versions of complex games.

Guess I will give them the choice, if they want to have an introductory game or want to start with the full game. I'm pretty sure 1 or 2 of them don't mind puzzling over their books and studying everything there is in one go, but I'm not sure if that's true for all.

Let's say we play one or two rounds of Apprentice mode to get a feeling for the game and then play a game of Domination afterwards or the next time we meet. Can we play with the starting books of the mages or should I slightly adjust the books for Domination? I took some notes from iNano's post on Multiplayer Domination, but didn't have time so far to take a deeper look into his domination spell books and I'm not sure those would be good for beginners.

Zuberi:
I think going into Domination after one or two introductory games would be awesome. The starter books will work fine, and will simply be adding onto what they've been using in Apprentice mode, which is handy. These books aren't great for Domination, or for Arena for that matter, being very generalized, but they will definitely suffice. If you wanted to throw custom books at them after the Apprentice games though, I think that's fine too. Potentially even better.

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