Hate Prestige

[MRD90]

I like this game. The base game is fun, and the expansion adds many new cards that I think are interesting (spending goods for military power, combining hand during Explore, nice things like that). I like most of what this game has to offer.

Except Prestige. I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE Prestige. If someone lucks into some early prestige generation that can't be challenged for a couple turns it feels like they can runaway with the game. Doesn't matter which side of this I'm on, it feels terrible. Just last game my opponent got an early settle of the "Produce: +1 Prestige if most Uplift" (Ravaged Uplift World) if I'm remembering the effect properly. I was setting up a Rebel military strategy and couldn't put down as any Uplifts. End score was like 64 - 26. I can have fun even losing in most games, but getting steamrolled like that is just demoralizing, especially when it feels like I don't know what I can do about it. And most Arena/Tournament rules use the expansion, not just base game.

I'll readily admit I'm far from a good player even at base game, but it feels like non-Prestige mechanics have much more counterplay against them. You can set up leeches against a Produce/Consume strategy. Seems much harder to defend against Prestige generation.

One flaw I can definitely identify in my play is underutilization of the special search and Prestige action bonus card. Could that be what I'm missing to combat this? Or do I need to be digging through the deck with Explores more? IDK what to do. I want to like this game as much as I can, but Prestige is really dragging it down right now.

[ColShaw]

Prestige definitely changes the rhythm of the game and the power level of the cards. It's definitely true that the main strength of prestige comes in the first 3 turns or so, which is why cheap prestige-generators are at a premium in Brink of War (Ravaged Uplift, like you said; Gene Breeders; and Security Council are probably the 3 best cards to see in your starting draw in most cases). When I see my opponent drop Gene Breeders and Produce turn 1, my heart always sinks and I figure my chances of winning are probably 25% at best.

That said, it's not a guaranteed win. If you can tie up the prestige for the first couple of turns (Imperium Invasion Fleet can be a VERY nasty surprise and can net 3 prestige in a single turn by Settling a non-military world), it largely negates the effects of prestige engines on the game.

You're absolutely right that you can't leech off opponent prestige. You can, however, use your knowledge of their cards to predict their actions. Very often, Ravaged Uplift and Gene Breeders lock into a trade/produce strategy that many players will just blindly continue. If you can set up a Consume strategy (for instance, Consumer Markets and then drop a couple of blue worlds) you can gain more points than they are getting from the same actions.

I think you ended up in a very unfortunate matchup there, as straight military against prestige engine is likely to lose in most cases. But that's the nature of the game; sometimes we all end up hard-countered by what the opponent draws. Essentially everyone loses at least 25% of their games, no matter how skilled they are (myself included).

I would definitely recommend using the special Search option, especially at the beginning of the game. Against Ravaged Uplift I will often search for a green X just to shut down their prestige generation. But it has many, many other uses. The most common times I use it are with Uplift Mercs to search for a green X, with Rebel Freedom Fighters to search for either +1 Mil devs (praying for Rebel Troops) or Military windfall, or looking for a 6 dev for middle/endgame. It's a hugely valuable tool, though it does need luck to work.

[krinndnz]

After jamming a bunch of games in Season 20, yeah, Prestige is bad. There are many BOW cards that are good, but the Prestige mechanic adds too much variability, especially when combined with earlier cards that were already prone to causing non-competitive games (Galactic Developers). Basically I'm coming around to the view that RVI and TGS are much better, especially for a competitive setting, than the base game and BOW. The base game isn't quite complete, about half the keywords/themes need more support. BOW blows out the competitive balance badly because of how distorting Prestige is, which amplifies the problems caused by the pronounced start world tiers. If someone's start is Galactic Developers and they get a Prestige point on turn 1 while you're stuck with Separatist Colony or Ancient Race, the game is already over. Mechanics that result in more non-competitive games and more garbage time are bad mechanics. Prestige is a bad mechanic.

[FrankJones]

I've never played with Prestige. Is this from the Brink of War expansion?

I prefer the simpler game - I do not like goals or takeovers. Perhaps I might warm up to them once I become more familiar with the interface here. It is difficult for me to play such a fast-paced game here, with a new (to me) interface after 1000+ plays on the steam version.

I think I recall reading the Prestige rules and not being all that interested. Is this a setting that can be disabled (like takeovers or goals), or is it automatically included when playing with the expansion?

[krinndnz]

I've never played with Prestige. Is this from the Brink of War expansion? […] I think I recall reading the Prestige rules and not being all that interested. Is this a setting that can be disabled (like takeovers or goals), or is it automatically included when playing with the expansion?

Yes, the Prestige mechanic is from Brink of War. It is — by RAW — part of the expansion, such that if you're playing with BOW, you're playing with Prestige turned on.

[spotcard]

I had a similar reaction when Brink of War came out. I stopped playing the game for years. When I got on BGA, I tried it again and came to like it with prestige. You might try it again sometime, and you can certainly have scores as lopsided as the one you reported, or worse, without prestige.

[krinndnz]

Prestige is a bad mechanic.

We have another season with BOW turned on and yup, Prestige is still bad. Way, way, way too many games that are effectively over on turn 1 or 2 because one player gets an early Prestige point and snowballs that into an impossible-to-beat advantage. A card that particularly offends me this time is Pan-Galactic Security Council, which is a repeatable source of Prestige that any start world can play on turn 1 and also is a pretty hard counter to takeovers, one of the few non-Prestige ways to actually interact with the other player. Similar with Pan-Galactic Mediator — trivially easy to play on turn 1 and once in a while just completely runs away with the game.

Prestige might be okay in casual games or multiplayer games, but for 1-on-1 ladder matches, it's pure downside to the competitive environment. Prestige skews the game away from skill and towards luck, and RFTG's RNG-heavy design means that that's particularly bad. Adapting to the raw material of your own draws is the core challenge of the game — a poker-like dynamic of risk evaluation and deliberate taking of chances. Prestige blows that out by adding a factor of "once in a while there is no real game because one player randomly got handed a massive advantage." Nobody would play poker professionally if in 30% of games one player just got a bonus ace in addition to their other resources, but that's basically what Prestige is like. If you know Magic, it's like a Standard environment warped by Oko or Omnath — something so good that choosing it is basically mandatory and if your opponent isn't doing the same thing they just lose (apart from rare & unusual cases where something goes horribly wrong with your draw).

I do not understand why people have repeatedly voted in BOW for the competitive format. It is unsuitable for competitive play because of Prestige. Prestige is a bad mechanic. It was a mistake on Lehmann & company's part to add it to the game. It makes the game worse.

[Rygon1]

I wrote a whole post on how I'm in a losing streak, but the browser losr it. I feel like every other game I'm losing because someone gets a prestige engine going and it always wins.

https://boardgamearena.com/gamereview?table=818947354

Like this game. I'm up 17 to 10 at the end of round 3, with +8 military, and a full 10 cards in my hand. That's a solid setup for a military strategy. But they start getting prestige and 6 cost developments, and I make some questionable decisions when I don't get cards that look good. And then I lose 48 to 34 after 7 rounds. It's just frustrating.

[FrankJones]

I've never played with Prestige but it sounds uninteresting.

Is this a problem specific to prestige? I've had any number of games in which I "seem" to be ahead, only you have my opponent play one or more broken cards and get what seems to me to be a cheap win.

Isn't that the nature of the game, in a game in which there is no communal card pool and all drawn cards are random face-down cards? I mean, any game in which all drawn cards are random, is going to have high variance. Sometimes you draw a bunch of garbage and your opponent draws one or more of the annoying easy-win cards, and sometime vice versa.

[Disclaimer: I seem to be a mediocre player at this game, stuck fluctuating between 300 and 350 Elo, so take my comments with a grain of salt.]

[krinndnz]

Is this a problem specific to prestige? […] Isn't that the nature of the game, in a game in which there is no communal card pool and all drawn cards are random face-down cards?

Yes, the problem is specific to prestige. The core of RFTG is managing randomness and taking calculated risks, like in poker. You start with a bit of solid information — start worlds, opening hand, goals, opponent's start world — and then make the best decisions you can. Ideally you take the game actions that are most likely to work out well, but even those actions sometimes will fail to work out well. This much is completely fine.

There are two closely linked problems with prestige. One problem is that prestige widens the range of how well or poorly a turn can go, and the other problem is that prestige is self-reinforcing because of the card draw and the extra points — which means that it reduces the effect of good decisions. This is why it's a heinous problem in one-on-one competitive laddering and annoying but forgivable in multiplayer and/or casual games. Consider a favorable start: one player gets a couple of prestige tokens that draw them 2 cards and gain them 3 VP in the first three turns. In a competitive game, that's routinely enough to decide the game, and that's nowhere near a maximally favorable start.

The problem is worsened further by the way that some start worlds are crap. Consider a game where you start on Ancient Race and have to throw Explore to get some options, while I start on Galactic Developers into Investment Credits and Pan-Galactic Affluence. There is no reasonable chance of you winning that game. Same thing if you start on Epsilon Eridani and I start on Rebel Freedom Fighters into military development and a cheap Rebel world. In both cases, the prestige will give me some points and at least one extra card and I'll be developing my tableau and gameplan, while you will be not just struggling to catch up, but will also be likely to throw more Explores that will put me further ahead, and because having the prestige lead gets me a point every turn even if I don't get more prestige, you are not just stalling, but falling further behind every turn. You must either get lucky by having an early prestige card yourself, must advance your gameplan without prestige, or must defer advancing your plan in order to dig for a prestige engine. All of these options are bad! In TGS+RVI, let's say you have New Sparta into Settle + Trade and Alien Robot Sentry. That's a very strong start, you gain a big resource windfall, but those cards have to be something useful, you have to keep playing the game to convert them into an advantage, you have to make decisions about how to use them and the decisions can be good or bad. You don't put your opponent in the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose position that a prestige start does.

The objection is not that prestige is powerful, the objection is that the way it is powerful makes the game more random and causes more garbage time. Games like the ones I described are effectively over on turn 1 or 2, which is very bad for the competitive environment because it reduces the impact of skill (by introducing an advantage of sufficient magnitude that skill alone can't reliably overcome it) and also bad for the play experience because the concede button doesn't work until a game is 50% complete, so you'll be sitting there and playing cards knowing that you basically can't win, which is a miserable experience — garbage time. This is why cards like Pan-Galactic Security Council are particularly egregious: it's good in any tableau, you can play it on turn 1, and it's a prestige engine unto itself (and it grants near-immunity to takeovers, as though the rest wasn't enough!).

If you play poker, prestige is like one player at the table getting an extra hole card. If you play Magic: the Gathering, prestige is like one player getting to scry the top couple cards of their deck during mulligans. If you play chess, prestige is like White starting with an extra pawn. Except with prestige, most games are ordinary but some fraction of them — you don't and can't know which ones until you're actually playing! — give one player this advantage. In all of these games, when the game is being played competitively at a high level, you would expect the given advantage to be something a skilled player could very, very reliably ride to victory. Such a random element is grotesquely destructive to the competitive environment — cultivating skill is already hard enough without some percentage of games including a massive anti-skill element. RFTG is at its best when the randomness of the deck gives players traction to make skillful decisions, and in earlier expansions, the number of games actually decided by the randomness rather than the skill was acceptable. That number can't be zero when you have a game like this that is about skillfully navigating randomness. But with BOW, prestige gratuitously increases the number of games decided by randomness, and it does this by reducing the number of games decided by skill.

Prestige is a bad mechanic. It makes the game worse.