Topics

1

Happy Meeple community / Support for those who suffer

« on: 27/02/22, 06:18pm »

Behind the horrible situation in Ukraine, it is democracy and freedom that is under attack.

We would like to express our support and solidarity for the Ukrainian people who suffer from the atrocious attack on their country. Ukrainian people are needlessly dying right now. It is feared that the situation may escalate further in the coming days, the fierce resistance of Ukraine possibly leading the Russian dictator to even more atrocities (which unfortunately he has proven many times to be capable of).

We sincerely hope that the situation will be resolved as soon as possible.

We would also like to express our support for the Russian people who suffer from an odious government. They cannot demonstrate against war (they are put in jail by police). They cannot know the truth (Facebook and Twitter are now closed in Russia and lying state media are not even permitted to use the word war). They cannot vote for opposition parties as these are harassed (and their leader poisoned). The money generated by the economy is stolen by a few. The Russian people already suffer now and will soon suffer more heavily from the war (thousands of young Russian soldiers already died sent as cannon fodder and economic sanctions will hurt the poorest the most with the currency, the Ruble soon worth very little).

At Happy Meeple, we value respect between citizens of the world more than anything else.

We sincerely hope that the free world will prevail over a few mad men.

2

Tips, polls, updates / Statistics and high scores

« on: 07/02/22, 08:16pm »

The following text has just been published in the "List of updates" thread. I am copying it below to open a new thread on the specific subject.

Please feel free to comment and help us improve on it!


2022/02/07 Statistics and high scores

You can now see a list of statistics and high scores for all games.

- average scores (per player position and rating range)
- average win rates (per player position and rating range)
- high scores
- high losing scores
- low winning scores
- top rated matches
- latest top rated matches

For all tables, when a minimum rating is indicated, it means that both players must have this minimum rating for a match to be considered. So, for example, in the averages table, the row >1500 takes into account all games where both players had over 1500 at the start of the game.

Matches with the weakest bots have been excluded everywhere except in the averages table.

Some earlier matches (from 2012-2013-2014) were excluded because we did not record either scores or ratings.

You can have direct access to screenshots of the match as well as replays, provided they were recorded. Screenshots and replays were available from march 2018.

See here the stats and high scores for Cartographers: https://www.happymeeple.com/en/board-games/cartographers/stats-high-scores/

I am sure this will answer many questions. Have fun with all this good data!

3

Happy Meeple community / Incredible Zatu offers (Cyber Monday)

« on: 29/11/21, 05:59pm »

I have just checked our partner's offers for Cyber Monday. I am not sure how they can offer these prices, but there are some incredible deals out there, like:
Wingspan at £34.49,
Terraforming Mars at £38.49,
or Great Western Trail at £26.99.

Cyber Monday

4

Happy Meeple community / Happy Meeple name stolen

« on: 19/10/21, 11:57am »

Hello all,

We would like to inform you of the following sad news.

A board game publishing company in Belgium has been launched. Its name is "Happy Meeple games".

We would first like to state that this company has nothing to do with us.

This makes us very angry. We can't understand how someone can think that it is fine to use a variation of our name for a board game publishing company.

We reached out to them and are now in touch with their lawyer. For the moment, they deny any wrongdoing. Their main line of defence is that offline game publishing and online game publishing are not the same domain.

We argue that we have the same partners (publishers) and the same customers. It is therefore the same domain.

As I said, we are very angry. 

Any advice welcome.

5

Happy Meeple community / Chat appropriate behaviour

« on: 17/02/21, 01:51pm »

Hello all,

I have just banned a player from chatting for a month. He was extremely aggressive (with a slow player), then insulting.

We cannot tolerate this kind of behaviour and his account will be closed if he does the same again.

Please rest assured that we will keep Happy Meeple a happy place, a friendly community.

Please do not make us waste our time on this kind of things. We have more important things to do, like improving the platform or adding new games.

6

HexRoller / HexRoller (German & Spanish)

« on: 21/01/21, 05:15pm »

HexRoller tutorials and helps are now available in German and Spanish.

Apologies for the delay. The main developer has been stuck abroad (due to the Covid 19 situation in the UK) without access to the code. Our brilliant translators had done their job much earlier.

7

Happy Meeple community / About resignation

« on: 20/01/21, 11:48am »

Hi all,

There has been a long and heated discussion in the inn chat about whether it is fine to resign a game. Lots of interesting points have been made. Some of them will be made again below, but I'll try to bring my own two cents too and present the official Happy Meeple stance on the matter.

The resign button is a feature offered by the platform. It had been requested by our players.
However, certain players don't like that the opponent resigns when it is clear that they have no change of winning.

As was noted in the discussion, resigning when it is clear that we have no chance of winning is commonly done in Chess, Draughts, Go. There is no point continuing a game when there is no more tension in it. Resigning, rather than being considered negatively, is appreciated and good behaviour. In those games, making the game drag pointlessly is considered wrong and being scorned upon. If you are a queen and a rook behind in Chess, conceding is the only right thing to do (unless it is a kids' competition where the level is really low and anything can still happen). There is even a scene in the popular Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" about exactly that. The teacher explains to the young player that she should resign after losing her queen early in the game.

In other situations however, resigning is not even permissible. No football team would leave the pitch 10 minutes before the end because they are 6-0 behind. That would just be unthinkable.

So, you see, the acceptability of resignation depends very much on the context.

For board games, there is no clear rules and one must expect players to find their own middleground. No single clear rules can be drawn for all to follow. First and foremost because we are all different and we have different priorities and tastes.

For many of us, finishing a game is natural and should be expected. Not doing so is for sore losers.
For others, finishing a game early when one could play another more exciting one immediately is a much better approach.

But not only does it depend on the players, it always varies with the kind of game that is being played. Is it a long one that is really worth shortening? Or is it a 3 minute game where final score matters (for personal records for example).

It also varies with the players' skill. Usually top players will care less about finishing the game and be happy to pocket the rating points that come with the win.

And of course, here, there is the food concept where shortened game means less play time.

I spoke about tension above. In abstract games, resigning early makes sense because what is remaining of the game is just dull and not fun for anyone. In board games however, there may be plenty of tension left even when one player is far behind. First, it is usually interesting to discover the final score and see if it matches our expectations or compares with other games (if not for world records, personal bests). Then, there are often hidden cards to look at. Even if you are sure of losing, the opponent might not be so certain. By resigning early in some games, you may be depriving your opponent of the tension that only the end game generates. Finally, the last moves are also in many games the moment when your strategy falls into place and big powerful combinations made (I am thinking of engine-building games where your power is getting very big near the end). Resigning early in engine-building games prevents the opponent from actually doing what he worked for during the whole game. There is a lot of satisfaction in executing a big combination as a result of a gradually-built strategy.

My conclusion is some kind of best practice. Considering that resigning acceptability varies so much with the context and the players, I think it would be good to follow these guidelines:

- in doubt ask the opponent if he minds a resignation
- or at least say a word explaining why you are resigning (it may have nothing to do with the game itself, we all have life outside of the platform)
- take into account the kind of games you are playing and the kind of players (level) you are playing with. Are you depriving him of some fun/satisfaction/sense of achievement? Is there some tension/excitement left in the game for them?

In any case, please don't feel offended if the opponent does not behave as you expect them to do. Not everyone has the same view on this matter. We do have to agree to disagree I am afraid 

8

HexRoller / HexRoller minor bug

« on: 22/12/20, 11:26am »

There a minor bug in HexRoller right now.

If you select the "Place a 3rd group" bonus in a round and then undo it and finish the round with only 2 numbers as usual, the bonus is active at the beginning of the next round (it should only be after you have placed 2 numbers). If you "use" it at that moment, the game seems to continue normally but you only place 2 numbers, not 3. And your bonus seems to be considered used anyway.

So if the bonus is active too early as a result of the bug, make sure that you don't click on it before placing 2 numbers.

9

HexRoller / HexRoller feedback

« on: 21/12/20, 12:32pm »

Please use this thread to give feedback on HexRoller!

To react to the first things I was able to read about the game, we have to agree that some challenges require not only the correct strategy but also a bit (or sometimes a lot) of luck. That is the nature of the game. Some rolls are better than others and you will be more or less lucky each time. We have played all challenges ourselves, recorded all scores and seeded them accordingly. We can assure you that most of them can be done in a couple of tries. Getting 3 stars is of course significantly trickier, but even then, we believe that it is quite feasible to get them in most challenges without the need to try 100 times.

The challenges are designed so as to force you to look at the game differently each time. You should be learning new skills in each of them. If you still struggle with a challenge, I suggest trying the training or online mode and play a good number of games. You'll get experience and probably learn important skills for the challenges.

The question has been raised as to why the game is not 2-player rather than solo. It was a tough choice and personally, I was more rooting for the 2-player variant until I was convinced otherwise. It was a tough call. Given the randomness of the game, being able to compare scores with another player who got the same rolls makes perfect sense. But if you play the online version (for rating), the randomness will even out over a good number of games. So it is not so much of a problem. Your task remains to score as much as you can with what rolls you are given each time.

I want finally to tell you about the rating system. It works here exactly as for Raging Bulls. After each online game (and training too actually, but these games don't count), a performance is computed, translating your score into a rating-comparable number (=performance). If your performance on an individual game is higher than your current rating, your rating increases. You should have no problem increasing your rating in the first 20-30 games as the start rating (1400) is quite low.

Because there are 2 sheets, the performance is computed differently for each of them. Here are the formulas:
Grid 8: Perf=Score*40-500
Grid 7: Perf=Score*40-800
I write this from memory so this may be inaccurate, but in any case, for the same score, you will get 300 more for grid 7 as it is much easier to score with this one. The publisher told us 10 more points were scores on average on grid 7. Our own records showed 7. So we settled for a 7.5 advantage. Before leaving for the holiday, I looked at actual stats and the gap was only 2.5 points. It is still early to say though as the number of games was still quite low (about 65). In any case, we will adjust the gap according to the actual stats as soon as we get the change to access our machines again (unfortunately our remote access is now failing which means we can't update anything now).

Finally the figure that is displayed in the ranking page next to the rating of each player is the equivalent score computed from your rating, meaning the score you need to get to keep your rating stable. Another good way to look at it is to consider that this is your average score (which is basically correct if you have played a lot of games). I have just corrected it so that it takes into account the 2 sheets. The formula for computing is is now correctly this one:
Rating = equivalent score*40-650 (650 is the average of 500 and 800 as you many notice)

I hope this answers some of your questions. Please let us know how you are doing with the game!

10

HexRoller / Beta-testing HexRoller

« on: 04/12/20, 04:37pm »

Hello,

The time has come to beta-test HexRoller.

Please get in touch if you want to know how to do that! To do so, please use our contact form (little pen above the green dice or here)

If you have already done it for another game, the procedure is the same. You need to select "Tutorial + Challenges" and make sure you are in English language (otherwise, you'll get plenty warning messages as translations are not done yet).

Many thanks for your help!

11

Tips, polls, updates / Bug. Replay with the same opponent

« on: 08/11/20, 10:23pm »

It seems that using the "Replay with the same opponent" button leads to disconnection.

Did you notice this? Does it happen all the time?

12

World, castle, market... / Maximum number of houses

« on: 16/10/20, 06:27pm »

Some asked about many houses one could get.

As of now, the maximum number of houses is 42 which you will get for your 171th meeple.

Have a good journey towards it! 

13

Tips, polls, updates / Restrict tables by rating

« on: 14/10/20, 02:53pm »

Hello,

We'd like to know your opinion.

When opening a new table, we'd like to offer the option to restrict the table to a rating range.
For example, you would restrict the table to players between 1500 and 1800.

There are a few ways to that, for example, for someone with a rating of 1600:
- with limitations:
A1) choose a "symmetrical" range around your rating, for example, between 1500 and 1700, or between 1400 and 1800.
A2) choose a range of your choice around your rating, for example between 1500 And 2000,
A3) choose a min rating only for example, above 1600
A4) choose a max rating only for example, below 1600
- without limitations
A5) you can restrict the table as you wish, for example ask for players below 1100 and 1300 only, or below 1600 or above 1900.

So in essence, can the option give complete freedom or is best to allow only reasonable ranges?

Thanks for your input.



NB: Bear in mind that the feature may have consequences on the Daily Quest.
NB2: The question of playing against specific bots comes into the picture. It is probably not desirable that players always pick the same bot to play online. Probably the feature would not apply to bots.

14

Cartographers / Updates on Cartographers

« on: 09/10/20, 03:34pm »

We have made a few changes to Cartographers. The most important ones are:

- the scores of all players are now shown at all times in the right column
- below the 4 edicts, you can now tick 2 options for faster animations

A few more improvements are coming.

15

Cartographers / Cartographers feedback

« on: 06/10/20, 05:10pm »

Hello all,

Cartographers has just been released. The game won lots of awards (including being nominated for the Spiel des Jahres this year). It is truly fantastic.

Please give us feedback! We are obviously particularly interested in bugs you may find, or any question that you may have regarding the game.

Thanks for your ongoing cooperation! Have fun!

Nicolas.

PS: please note that this game has no AI as such. The bots in training mode play always in the same nonsensical manner. They are nevertheless useless to learn the various edicts. The 12 bots that you can play in training mode each come with a different set of edict cards. Each edict cards can be found 3 times.
But of course, as always, Verboten is harder to beat than Lobotomo.

PS2: unlike all our other games, there is no way to play Cartographers online against a bot. You will need to find a human opponent. We recommend using the "link access" feature to invite friends that are not yet playing on the platform. By following the link you send them, they will jump into your table immediately with a guest account. Speedy and efficient.