Wrath of Ra
We have gotten through two solid sessions of playing Ra, enough to constructively talk about the game but not enough to satiate our desire to play it. Ra is a fairly simple, easy-to-learn game that can be very engrossing after a single time playing it.
We want to discuss these games and answer key questions that will help inform what about the game is special / interesting / fun and how those elements can be mapped to
possible game mechanics in the digital game realm. Our list of questions thus far are:
- What are the main game mechanics?
- What makes this game fun / interesting? (Oh, so easy to answer)
- How would this work as a computer game?
- ….what other questions should be asked?
Mechanics
The main mechanics of Ra are very simple. Players can:
- draw a tile to be places on the board
- start an auction (either voluntarily or involuntarily)
- spend a God tile to hand pick a tile on the board
- decide which tiles to discard when getting a catastrophe tile
- table talk to goad other players into decisions
Points are determined by which tiles a player has at the end of three rounds as well as the final suns (i.e. auctioning money) in their hand.
Why is this fun / interesting?
There is a great analysis I’d like to excerpt from here that was on Board Game Geeks
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/171104 :
Why is this so popular? Is dragging bits out of a bag any less random than rolling dice every turn? Yet the latter can easily generate complaints while this one doesn’t seem to. I can identify several key attributes which I think establish the attraction:
1) Everyone is involved with every turn. This keeps attention focused. Every tile drawn provides new information to be assimilated.
2) There are multiple paths to collecting points. This makes for multiple decisions. Each of the tile categories offers different possibilities for players to compete, or choose not compete, against the others for limited resources. Even within a single category, two different scoring rules may coexist. The same tile, therefore, may have different meanings to other players. Plus the different lifetimes for tiles, lasting either a single round or forever, make for long-term and short-term choices.
3) There are multiple ways for events to take place. This makes for multiple sources of tension. There are two ways to end a round; three ways to initiate a bidding competition. The progress toward most of the triggering conditions is visible, but generally you still won’t know precisely WHEN the condition will be fulfilled. Capturing tiles has an alternate pathway, too. While mainly done by winning the competition, it has a backdoor through the special “exchange” power of one of the tile categories which can be used to obtain a single tile directly.
4) It’s so fast. It’s amazing how many things there are to calculate simultaneously, yet how little agonizing is done for each offering. I suppose there are two factors that may explain this: a) there are so many dimensions to assess that it’s just too overwhelming to try and therefor a certain amount of gut-feel choices take place instead; and b) the conditional status of several of the scoring categories means that there is no definitive score in mid-round, only an indefinite probability or possible score.
5) It’s simple. Maybe it takes a special effort to explain it in an organized manner (some “teaching” threads exist in the GENERAL section of this forum), but it doesn’t take that much to understand it provided you do get an organized explainer. You can readily follow it after a single play.
6) It’s tantalizing. Which has the meaning, “to tease and torture by presenting something desirable but continually keeping it out of read.” Winning is desirable. And despite the known randomness, this game can generate the feeling that you might improve on your chances if you just keep playing and learning.
Aside from the poignant list above, it seems like a key unifying feature of the game is that the values and probabilities (of tiles and suns) as each round as well as the game gets closer to an end. If a round is one Ra away from ending, players are faced with spending that precious 12 sun on what earlier in the round would have been bought with possibly a 4 or 5.
The fact that there isn’t a clear mapping, as pointed out above, from early or mid-game state to player success, that makes it all the more interesting when trying to make decisions as a player. A large part of the experience is trying to figure out how much an auction is worth to me versus forcing another player to spend more than they would want to. All the players are on a journey of trying to mentally summarize how well everyone is doing, how well everyone is LIKELY to do given the game history to this point, and what to do at this moment (do I start an auction? what should I bid right now?). The factors for deciding if / what to bid are:
- what tiles you and everyone else have
- absolute value
- relative value
- proximity of the tiles in a given hand
- what round it is
- how many Ras are out
- how full the auction row is
- how many of each kind of tile have been drawn
- what bids came before you
- how many suns each player has left
- everyone’s projected score
As mentioned above, there is a ton to compute. Far more probabilities than in a game of poker, where there are general tables to be memorized.
Mapping to Computer Games
One of the interesting points that came up was that the main experience in gameplay - auctioning of currency for non-replenishing resources with the value of both the currency and the resources changing over time - has no obvious parallel in the game world. Basic auctioning mechanisms occur in MMO’s for example, but they are more of the traditional type rather than the kind seen in Ra.
Considering the mechanism in Ra could lead to some interesting interactions in existing games. For example, Counterstrike allows you to purchase weaponry and armor before each battle. One could imagine a Ra-style auctioning mechanism that blends battle success (e.g. if you kill someone, you swap your lowest sun with their second-highest) with between-battle auctioning. Now, that would probably slow down the transition between games, which is a negative point in practice, but interesting to consider otherwise.