How To Play Point Salad

I’m not going to go through all of it. Basically it’s an open drafting game. You either take two vegetables or one scoring card. If you take vegetables that is going to cause the scoring cards to change. If you want more thoughts on it and my full review, albeit from a while ago, you can find that here. The player with the most points from their vegetables based off of their scoring cards wins the game.

Simplicity of the Game

Point Salad is not a complex game. For that reason, I think that it helps how the app can work and how quickly you can pick it up and play. I did have the advantage of already knowing the game, but it is an easy game to sit down and learn. Though, the app doesn’t do Point Salad any favors in learning the game.

But the basic mechanisms of the game work really well. It’s a sit down and get playing game that the system can play against you. It doesn’t require too much complex development to where the AI feels like it’s good because it knows more. That means that the AI is not too easy for the game, but also that it feels like playing real people. Sometimes other people just get luckier on their draws.

Learning Point Salad

This is an area, though, where the app is lacking. Most games that I download offer one of two things. Either they integrate the rulebook into the app, or they give you a walk through. Now, as someone who knows most of these games, the integrated rulebook is fine. But I admit it isn’t as nice as a walk through or tutorial level to learn how to play.

Point Salad gives you a link to a PDF download. So, you leave the app. That to me is just weird. What is so hard about taking your rules, again pretty simple rules, and just creating a page in the app that looks like your PDF? I don’t want to leave the app. I close my apps that are open a lot, so what if after I read the PDF, I close and your app? Not a big deal, but not nice. And it doesn’t integrate into being a ruleset that I could look up during the game.

Final Thoughts

I like the app and I think that Point Salad works well as an app. However, I know the game so that gives me an unfair advantage when learning the game in the app. Mainly, Point Salad is such a simple game that I don’t really have to learn it. I already know it, and I don’t even need a refresher on it.

For people getting into the game, I do think that it’s a fairly big negative to not have the rules integrated into the app. So I can’t give it as high marks. And with the AI, I said that it feels like a person. I stand by that, the intelligence level and skill level feel real. The downside, again, is that they feel like someone who knows the game. That means if it’s your first time or first handful of times, it might thump you. Especially if the app is your introduction to drafting games.

Overall, though, I think as people learn it, it is a good game. I haven’t played around with the online mode. I rarely do because it takes a fast game and makes it slower. And I didn’t mention this, but on the app it is very fast, another good feature. I might play online or pass and play eventually, but right now solo against the AI works well.

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Ascension is one that I started playing a while ago, but just recently came back to it. Ascension is a pretty straight forward deck building game where you are trying to get the best engine going of buying power and fighting power to get the most honor points. You get honor points by killing monsters during the game, but also then from the cards that you purchase. The game is straight forward and has a nice rotating market that can be frustrating if you don’t get what you want or the market just becomes monsters and you’re just about buying things. On your turn you play out five cards and basically do what they tell you, that is generally adding up attack and purchase power and then using them, but some cards will have special abilities like additional card draw, or they’ll be constructs, cards that go into play permanently and give you some bonus that way. You can find my whole review here.

So let’s talk about the app and how well it works on a phone. Now I’m just doing phone only as I don’t have a tablet that I use for these. The app implementation on the phone is actually really good. The game plays extremely quickly, much quicker than in person. Or at least playing solo on the app does. Pass and play with someone in person does as well, but you can also play it online against other people. The interface is very good and the tutorial gets you up and running fast in the game and the game takes care of some of the extra work for you. Of course you don’t have to shuffle, but negative monster affects, those can run automatically, and it keeps track of your purchase and attack power for you each turn so you don’t have to mentally track that and reminds you if you have any left.

Let’s talk a bit about the AI. I tend to think that it’s just okay. On hard I win most of the time, so a lot of the time when playing it I am more interested in trying out a new strategy to see how that works or to see what score level I can get to. On easy, the AI basically goes all in attack every time, which means that the game goes fast but you don’t really have anyone competing with you for the good cards or combos. I think with adding in some of the expansions, which are additional purchases it could keep the game more fresh and interesting, but I do think the game can get a bit repetitive over time playing against the computer, no matter the level of AI. Now, playing against people online, that’s going to obviously be more engaging in terms of strategy, but obviously takes a considerable amount more time.

Some of the bells and whistles in the game are nice though. You might want to know what constructs your opponents have, you can look at that. You might want to see what you have in your discard you can look at that. But the information isn’t dominating the screen, those are all things that you can look at versus stuff that clutters it up. And you can expand all the cards, so even though I’m playing on a small phone screen, if I need to read what a card says, which I don’t now but did before, I can just hold it down and it’ll pop up for me so I can see it large enough to read.

Overall, the game feels very intuitive in what you are doing. The game play is very fast as you go, so I can probably now get through a game in 10 minutes playing solo against four AI opponents. But, the game does lose some replayability over time against the AI just because their strategy isn’t always the most unique. I don’t think it’s a bad AI and I don’t win every time, more due to luck of the draw than great AI play. But it’s still a fun time to sit down and play fast, and I could easily buy some expansions to make it more diverse in my game play if I really wanted. This is a good app implementation, and if you really wanted you can play it online with friends or as a pass and play as well, which will give you a good representation of the real game. Definitely an app that I’d recommend.

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There are some games out there that are high contact games. Everyone is using the same cards, pieces, pool of resources, and things are just getting touched quite often. A couple of examples of this would be 7 Wonders or Sushi Go Party! where you are passing hands of cards for a draft. Classic games like Monopoly or Clue where you are passing dice and money or cards around, or Scrabble where you are drawing tiles out of the same bag, all of these are going to have more cross contamination potential. Now, we don’t know the precise likelihood of transmitting this disease that way, you’re definitely at more risk just sitting around the table and being in proximity. But if you’ve taken precautions, people are wearing masks, these wouldn’t be your ideal game options.

Instead lets look at games that have limited amounts of contact or potentially no contact.

The first genre of game that makes a lot of sense is roll and write games. Now, not all roll and write games work in this situation. Yahtzee has communal dice that are shared. However, Yahtzee has standard six sided dice, so, if you’re like me, you have plenty of six sided dice lying around for dice for everyone. But more so the roll and write games that are using a communal pool for placing. So games like Welcome To…, Criss Cross, and Second Chance, one person is rolling the dice or flipping the cards that everyone is using for a given round of the game. All you’ll end up with as points of contact as the player sheets and possibly writing utensils. However, I’ve laminated mine, so it’d be easy to wipe those off and the dry erase markers as people are taking them. Even if you haven’t laminated them, a pencil and a piece of paper as single points of contact isn’t bad for a game.

I’d also say that some party games work. Now, some, Catch Phrase or the likes where you are passing something around in a circle won’t work well. But there are others that have a similar roll and write amount of contact. I think that there are ways you can make something like Wits & Wagers work, where instead of having everyone sort and people grabbing random dry erase boards back, you put your own guess in the right spot, numerically and then take it back at the end of the round. Scattergories is another one that would work as you are coming up with answers. If your game is set-up well with the sheets and category lists already in the folder, there would be limited to no contact if you let a single person roll.

Finally, there are some other games that just don’t have much interaction in the game. A few that pop into my head are games like Dice Throne where each character has it’s specific deck, specific cards, and specific player board. So there is no reason to touch the other person’s cards. Skulk Hollow actually has some of that with the two asymmetric sides. While they react and interact with each other, that is only as a game play mechanic, not something that is physically done. Even something like Photosynthesis, which has a shared board, but you only are ever dealing with your own trees on that board. If you have one person who moves the sun around, and you lay out the point chips so that only one person is touching them, it’d be quite easy to have little to no interaction.

Now, the simplest way would be to play the games digitally. As I said, the proximity to people is going to be the bigger thing than the interaction of the game components for your likelihood to catch a disease. Even when there isn’t something like Covid-19 going around, it’s very often that “con-crud” will happen as big gaming conventions where a group of people get sick from being there. And that’s not because of interactions with games or anything, it’s about being around the people. But, if you are concerned about the physical interaction with the components of the game, there are certainly options out there that you can try when playing.

I think the final and best piece of advice I can give for getting games back to your table and starting up gaming after illness is going around, whether it’s the seasonal flu or something like Covid-19, if you’re worried about exposure but you still want to game in person, limit the amount of people you see. Don’t go to the game night at the local FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store), or don’t have your normal fifteen people over, instead, invite a couple or a couple of people to game with and do that a few times with the same people, then you’ve limited your points of contact to the possible infection. That, more than finding those multiplayer low component interaction games is going to make a difference, but those low interaction games won’t hurt either. And then just clean surfaces once people have left, there’s not going to be any ways to completely eliminate risk, but you can be smart about limiting it.

What ideas do you have to starting up your board game night around when people have been sick? Are there any games that don’t require component interaction that you’d play?

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Now, I’m not the only one talking about this, D&D Beyond has put up several articles on it, but I got the chance to run a quick session of Dungeons and Dragons on Saturday night for some friends and my wife via Google Hangouts, so I wanted to talk about that and what else you can use as well.

Let me start off by saying that as long as people have access to a way to roll dice, playing Dungeons and Dragons across a distance is easy. You need a webcam, someone with access to another device to go on D&D Beyond, and even with the free stuff there and the limited character creation, you have enough to run an enjoyable game for a little while without it becoming boring or stale. However, that’ll limit you a little bit, so I’d strongly suggest someone grabbing the books either digitally through D&D Beyond, or pick up a physical copy of the core three books, Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide.

The only real physical thing that is nice to have is for players to have dice, but again that isn’t even needed. On Google Hangouts, they have commands that roll dice for you so you can do that in the chat section. And other virtual tabletops, like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20.net will also give you the ability to roll dice as well. Personally, I like rolling physical dice, but those are something that can be gotten easily from your friendly local game store that is hopefully doing curbside pick-up of orders or delivery now, as well, of course as places like Amazon or if you want fancier dice, Easy Roller Dice. You might just have to wait longer for those, even though, I think Amazon should consider dice to be essential items that get priority shipping.

Then you can really just dive into playing. Make up your own world, do theater of the mind, and just let the game and imaginations run wild. Now, I will say that if you are starting out, I’d recommend that people roll up characters for the first time in the limited options on D&D Beyond. Or that the person who is running the game does that for everyone simply so that you don’t have to start by going through the process of creating characters over the internet. But if you have a group of more experienced players, you probably have more of them who have the player handbook or can find online resources to build out the character that they want on their own or during a session zero where you talk through a story idea.

Let’s talk a little bit about theater of the mind, depending on what you’re playing on, you’re going to need to determine the level of theater of the mind. If you’re not familiar with that term, it basically means that your combat and encounters are all done in your head, when you describe it, people picture what you are saying in their head, and they can’t look down at a grid or anything to figure out how close their characters are to the bad guys or anything like that. With some of them Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, you won’t have to play that way, if you don’t want to, but it’ll add in more prep and planning to your game. The advantage of theater of the mind is if a combat happens, it can just happen because you don’t need to prep a map, put characters and monsters where they are supposed to be. I personally prefer theater of the mind and find it easier and easier for online because it requires considerably less work. However, in a major boss battle, it can be fun to set the mood for the combat with a map as well.

What are some pitfalls when playing online? Obviously internet connectivity is a must and it might be possible that you’ll run into situations where someone freezes or lags. So someone might be trying to say something and it gets lost because of that, also it’s harder for people to talk over each other and for everyone to hear everything. So, this is something I picked up with podcasting, try and not talk over each other, in particular, if you see someone is starting to say something at the same time you are, pause and let them go first and then jump in fast so that you can say what you want, but so that you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes. The more people in more different locations the more likely you’re going to run into this issue.

There’s also going to be a learning curve for players who are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons because it plays differently than it does at the table. I feel like playing online requires a little bit more buy in and a little bit more go with the flow of what is being presented. Going back to Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, you can set-up a map for an encounter, but you aren’t able to pivot as quickly as you might if you were playing all at the same location and you could draw it out or set it up on the fly for whatever encounter your players get into. This is going to be something that trips up players who are familiar with playing that style, versus new players who might be jumping into it for the first time or so.

With those two negatives for it, or not really negatives, but potential pitfalls to watch out for, I will say that compared to board games, Dungeons and Dragons is way easier to do over physical distancing and if you’ve been in a situation where you don’t have people around to play with, this is a chance to try digital and find people around your area and all around the world who would want to play some Dungeons and Dragons with you.

Have you played D&D online? Are there any tips or tricks that you recommend for people starting up playing digitally?

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