Starting at some point late last year and proceeding until, well, now, I've been on a severe board game purchsing binge. I always like to have something to focus my spending on, and so I have acquired, among much, much else, Fury of Dracula, Mansions of Madness (plus Season of the Witch), and, naturally, Arkham (plus all expansions). With the advent of Elder Sign, my pockets shall be well and truly empty. But I remain insatiable. And thus have I begun looking into Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game.

That previous paragraph was just a lead-up to the main topic here, which is the CoC LCG FAQ. I've begun reading it just this morning and...wow. Not only is it extremely extensive, what is particularly striking to me is the definitions. Things like "entering play," "playing," "paying," and even "then" are given clear definitions and explanations.

When the fabled FAQ finally enters our reality and its unknowable glory reduces us to gibbering madmen, I would like to see this sort of thing in it. Imagine concepts like "location," area," "item," "enter," and "then" being given clear definitions. One can hope....

Incidentally, do people recommend the Coc LCG for when my wallet finally recovers?

Walk said:

I'd recommend CoC LCG when you've got the money for it. You should try the CoC LCG boards and ask around.

And yes, it would be nice if they released a new, and clearer, FAQ for Arkham Horror.

Walk said:

The major problem here is that the terms area/location etc have already been used interchangably. The list of dinitions would then have to be accompanied by an exhaustive list of errata.

I still maintain that the FAQ is just a Rumour card:

Place 1 new speculation on this card at the end of every mythos phase (starting 12 turns before this card entered play).

Pass: You can't

Fail: You already have..

As a general note, the job done by FFG for supporting their LCG is impressive. The FAQ for the CoC LCG are very well structured and updated constantly, which is a huge effort, especially if you consider that the game keeps on growing linearly (every month with a release) and that the complexity grows exponentially (every new card could have interactions with all the others) (Avec, check my maths if I'm wrong!). Which makes me always more frustrated concerning the AH FAQ, that should be an issue a lot easier to solve.

The LCG per se is absolutely worth the money invested, especially because actually you don't need to buy every single dam(n) expansion in order to have fun. Asylum packs add a lot of variety, but just the core game, with seven factions you can build decks from, it's enough for giving you months of fun. I'm playing three of the FFG LCG (four when Star Wars will be out), but the CoC one is my fave. It's designed for two players (even AGoT could be played in two, but I've always found it more interesting when played in four) and has a great deal of cards and situations and combos to be investigated (LotR is also great, but I never liked the "too thin" decks you have just playing the base game)

Anyway, I noticed you have this game in your collection. Satisfacted?

Julia said:

Yes, a similarly-sized releases at a regular time interval is linear. But the possible combination thing isn't mathematically exponential. The number of possible card interactions is a factorial:

n! / k!(n-k!)

"n" is the total number of cards in existence and k is taken to be the number of cards we're looking at at a given time. For simplicity's sake, 2 will work.

Thus the above reduces to:

n! / 2!(n-2!) = n!/4(n-2)!

or:

n * n-1 * n-2 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1 / n-2 * n-3 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1

Canceling out terms leaves us with:

n(n-1) or n^2 - n

which is polynomial . Though in common parlance, "exponential" is similar in meaning since both imply growth at a growing rate or decay at a decaying rate (although it's interesting to note that exponentials always grow faster than polynomials).

Aha! thanks Tibs! now to rewrite time!

Julia: (note: the reason I always give people's usernames followed by a colon is because I still haven't figured out how to quote someone within a box as I see so often) I am absolutely satisfacted! This is almost certainly the best L/T/CCG I've played. Partly, it's because of how easy it is to get into and the format of the asylum packs, but there's just something very appealing about the art and the way the cards are set up. There's also somethng inordinately exciting about finding out about new cards (I feverishly peruse the news for new spotlights and announcements, as well as the spoiler lists on Board Game Geek). I'm a Cthulhu/Yog-Sothoth player and loving it. My only regret is finding people to play with; I used to play a lot with my brother's friend, who used my Core Set's Hastur and Shub-Niggurath cards. At first, he flattened me, but I got several asylum packs and rebuilt my deck; now I beat him often enough that he doesn't want to play anymore.

Whoops, I made a mistake. (1/2!) reduces to 1/2, not 1/4. But I pulled it out anyway because it doesn't affect the behavior of the curve. In fact, the polynomial relationship represents "opportunity for problematic combinations" which is in arbitrary units anyway.

To be more precise, we could define the total number of "confusing" combinations of cards by summing over all k (k = 2 to n) and multiplying by P(k), which is the probability that an assortment of k cards is "confusing." Though n can increase without bound, I'm sure that any player of a CCG can recognize that there's an effective upper-limit to the number of cards (k) that can be involved in a "breaking" combo. That is, there may not be any ill combinations at all above, say, 6 cards, as long we don't count an ill combination as two of the cards that are broken together and four that benefit from it.

Summing over all probabilities:

Sum from k = 2 to k = n of P(k) * [n! / k!(n-k)!]

will still exhibit a polynomial behavior dominated by n^2 as n increases, given that there is an effective "upper limit" to the number of cards that can be made into a confusing combination.

Tibs: thanks for the polynomial thing. I couldn't have said it better ::laughter:: Anyway, the polynomial has a ^2 in it, so at least it's not a first grade polynomial :-P (anyway, thank you. I'll give it a more approfondite read later... I never ever had understand anything of combinations and similar stuff, I'm glad to have an example on something practical)

Walk: I'm very happy you enjoy the game ::smiling:: I personally don't like that much the Yog deck (too many spells to meet my taste), playing often a Hastur or Hastur / Shub deck. Sometimes I'm tempted to play Cthulhu. And yeah, same for me, not many people to play, and not much time for it anyway. Sigh.

The thing I love about the combination is that it's not that hard to win by exhausting your opponent's deck. Even if you get your best characters and you're still not running the show storywise, all you need to is stall and wear your opponent down. The only time I won against the aforementioned brother's friend before I got any packs, I exhausted his deck with Blackmoor Estate when I had no won stories and he was this close to winning his third.

Walk said:

Sounds like you had a great time ;-)

Walk said:

Have you tried clicking the "quote" botton instead of the "reply" one?

Julia said:

Let's see.... Wow, that worked. Thank you.