Game ends in a draw?

This just happened to me, with me being down 5-4 and both of our remaining guys (warrior for me, priest for my opponent) on a victory square. Not fun, neither of us had any motivation to leave their square. Too hard to get from one victory square to the other, not worth moving, not a fun map.

 

An offer draw option seems like a good idea to me. You could add a "drawn" column to the multiplayer leaderboard and have it leave both players' ratings unaltered. Personally I wouldn't give either player any reward for it (other than the many minutes of your life that you've not wasted!) but I guess I wouldn't object to a barrel or two of Pickled Herring for each player. I can see conditions like no damage dealt for x rounds or no movement for x rounds being unreliable for various reasons unless implemented carefully but if someone refuses an offered draw when they're clearly making no attempt to win the game then I think you could justifiably report them for unsporting behaviour.

 

Problem with that logic comes when taking any action is detrimental to your chances of winning a game.

 

Well I was starting from the assumption that it is possible to get into a position where neither player can win, due to a combination of map, decks, characters left, etc. In that case it seems sensible for both players to agree that the game should end in a draw so that they can move on to trying to win their next game, without them having suffered a loss which would impact their MP rating.

 

It's a general issue with the map design. I discussed this when we were talking about different possible victory square orientations. With the squares split up it is very easy to get into a situation where the first person to move loses. The difficult terrain exacerbates this because, even if you draw another move card (or save one up) you can't get into melee range, attack, and then get back to the victory square to make sure you don't lose the game. In order to not lose in this situation you need a complex set of cards:

• 2 move cards and ranged attack(s)
• 2 move cards and be able to kill your opponent
• 1 move card and be able to kill your opponent at range

Now that's for standard, normal deck expectations. Certainly there are other situations such as:

• Be a non-Dwarf and have a movement altering effect (hover, flight, teleport), and be able to kill your opponent
• Be a non-Dwarf and have a movement altering effect (hover, flight, teleport), and have 2 move cards
• Have a Scamper and be able to kill your opponent
• etc...

Now, I'm not suggesting that these combinations of cards are difficult to get, but it removes the skill from the game as you sit there and wait to see who can draw the right combinations of cards and the only one who needs to draw them is the one with the least amount of time left. The other player can just wait and stack blocks etc.

 

I think it's important that we keep the variety of having some maps with separated victory squares, because separated victory squares lead to some interesting tactics and builds which are not viable with clustered victory squares. I think it would be a real shame if we gave up on all of that variety just because of the possibility of an occasional draw.

As I mentioned earlier, the three-pass rule for draws would still be a bit problematic, because it requires that players don't deliberately stall the game by making trivial moves. After giving this a bit more thought, I reckon the rule should be something like this:
If no damage is received by any character and no victory points are claimed for 10 consecutive rounds, then the game is a draw.

I don't think the specific number of rounds is very important, and 10 rounds is a quite a lot. I just think it's important the number of rounds be long enough that people don't feel pressured to do attack something just to avoid a draw. If the two players are both just standing on their victory square doing nothing, then 10 rounds could be pretty fast anyway; and I think it's good to give players a chance to draw their best cards - in case they're just waiting for some special cards to break the deadlock. (10 rounds still isn't enough to cycle through the entire deck though. It would give 20 of the 32 cards.)

In any case, if no one is taking damage and no one is gaining victory points then presumably the game is not progressing towards an endpoint. Most matches take less then 10 rounds in their entirety, so I'd only expect a rule like this to influence the game in the kinds of deadlock cases that this thread is talking about.