Board Game Arena

I played an interesting game today in which I was the Hacker and my partner was the Peterman. After finding the stairs, I went up to floor 2 while my partner stayed to crack the floor 1 safe. On floor 2 I found the stairs quite early, but because the Hacker has a little more freedom of movement, I stayed on floor 2, found the safe, and uncovered the necessary tiles to crack it. After all, the Hacker is best at moving, and the Peterman is best at rolling.

I was shocked then to find myself immediately reprimanded by my Peterman teammate for pursuing my plan, and not proceeding to floor 3 at the soonest moment available. He complained that rolling the dice is not fun and elaborated that rolling the dice is not the game; exploring and uncovering tiles is. He then accosted me for depriving him the ability to play the "game", and told me that I and all other players who employ this strategy are selfish players.

What is going on here lately? Oh my goodness!

In a 2 players game, the game is weird. You got 3 floors for 2 players.
The usual strategy is for the player who stay floor 1 to crack floor 1 & 2.
And for the player who move up to peek at floor 2 and crack floor 3.
That gives around the same amout of actions for both players.
Moving upstairs early has the advantage too of trying to force walkway in floor 3 to goes down in floor 2 in a new area and have much more things discovered.
You got exceptions with strong supports, or with a floor 1 with lots of computer, or with a difficult floor 1 or 2...

.

Since I did stats in another post for 2 players games, I can back up that claim, in 100 games:
- 53 of them got a clear player which cracked floor 1, and have the other player which peeked at most floor 2&3 and which cracked floor 3
- 20 of them didn't reach the crack of floor 3 (or got both players cracking the floor 3 safe)
- 2 of them didn't peeked enough of floor 2
- all other games got either no clear player which did a specific action, or got players doing something different than this strategy.

So it's around two third of games where this is done. Note that I played all of those games and I like not persuing that plan if I find another good line to swap floors, and there is even a small advantage to swap floors.

.

If you start to crack floor 2 & 3, then your teammate will find themselves after half the game having nothing else to do, and just waste action and hide every turn. Which isn't fun. (I talked about support earlier, and trying to support you can be great with that plan, and communicating saying per example as the support that the other player could stay longer floor 2 or could crack floor 2 can be great).

If really your play is better (which I don't think it is, cracking safe is usually easy, but it depend of the map), I think you want to find a way to swap floor. The problem for hacker to goes from floor 1 to floor 3 is that he will end up in floor 2. If the guard move 4, then he will move 8 during the turn where both of you are in the same floor.

For what you reported, exploring and uncovering tiles isn't the only thing the game provide.
I think that player should maybe play hard mode. The bad plays can be seen more easily there.
Again, communication is king. When there is important decision about which player do which floor, I like to ask my teammate what we are doing.

I didn't got much problems around that part on my games.