Othello. That is, the board game. Not the tragic downfall of a cross-race love by a right jealous dick fucking it all up.

Dammit RPS! You’ve ruined Othello for me now!

{the above uses sarcasm, I’m talking to you Angry Internet Man}

More on topic: I agree totally with your comment on tutorials, that they should show players what they should do rather than how they can do it.

An example of this is GalCiv II. The tutorials are helpful enough, but don’t really tell you what you should be doing when you play, so it’s a bit daunting. Fortunately the first few campaign missions were quite helpful as they allowed me to grasp the basics in a simplified environment.

(The campaign just gets silly later, IMO, with the nigh-invincible dread lords and your bloody annoying allies stealing all the colony worlds…)

GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire both suffer from the same end game problem too. In fact, most strategy games have this problem, if you become powerful enough it becomes pointless to continue, no one could oppose you in any way.

In Sins, however, it is common in multiplayer for losing players/teams to surrender to their enemies if it becomes obvious that they cannot win.

It can get a little long winded if you take on the “strategy” I once did when drunk, of placing one of my pieces in each end triangle, leading to a game no one could win.

That way the endgame can be a really fast paced and close thing – there’s nothing like ordering the opposite player to get out of your promised land so you can move in faster.

Oh God – please let the game NOT be Ludo.

We may not understand the fine parts of strategy and especially tactics, but we understand how to win the game.

Spot on. Very useful to know for writing help screens. Typically, screen #1 involves showing you the controls. Bad idea. Whenever I do help screens, I *always* have the “how to win” line on the first page. Even if the player ends up skipping through the rest of the help, they know how to win, and that’s all that matters.

So very true.