Blog Post for 3/22

Today I learned more about the relationship between elements of luck and elements of strategy while playing Smallworld. Smallworld, while not an entirely skill-based game, seemed to have far fewer elements of luck than many of the previous games we had played. There were only really two points where elements of chance came into play. The first was in the selection of races/powers available to be picked by the players. While the races/powers were incredibly important in the game, the elements of luck were minimized by the fact that rather than players each drawing their races/powers, a sort of pot (shared among all the players in the game) of five sets of races/powers were drawn, and then each player had to strategically choose the race they wanted, meaning that race/power selection had substantial skill elements to it. The second instance of luck was in the dice rolls necessary to take territories if you had less than the amount of troops required to take them. However, I only used the dice rolls 3 or 4 times, and it seemed entirely possible to go through the entire game without rolling the dice once. As well, each dice roll only determined your ability to take one territory in that specific turn. While this was certainly important, there was no point in our game where the result of a dice roll lead to anything nearing game-changing. I honestly liked the level of luck present in small world as opposed to some of the other games we had been playing. While the small amount of luck worked enough to make the game more exciting and more unpredictable, as well as adding replay value, the large amount of strategy meant that players lost or won based on competence, rather than luck, which, I think, is how a competitive game should feel.