Borel Game Session Notes

When I made my review post on Borel, I hadn't played the game; I acquired it from a thrift store of sorts as it was a relative steal for a designer board game. It took a while before I managed to have a session at it, but I managed to have one with my relatives and it turned out to be a bit more fun than expected.

First session notes:

A finite number of games is a must; the bank runs out of physical money fast.

Somehow the 100/500/2500 denominations worked amid the money having to move in blocks of 100/300/800/1500.

As the players treated the game as a sort of gambling game the timer felt like an afterthought during betting rounds.

The experiments in the cards might have been easier to explain if everyone involved could understand English. Being precise with an experiment's language is a must as ambiguities may affect how a result is interpreted. The experiment descriptions are rigid enough that there is no room for ambiguity but they must still be explained clearly.

Some experiments finish early if the answer is incontrovertible, e.g. A dice roll hits a threshold sum value. There is no provision that the experiment has to be done in full before a result is declared, then again treating this game with too much rigor kills it.

Reruns were done a bit differently due to improper rule reading. Reruns were usually done by those who lost their bets.

It's a mild surprise that a game whose premise is intuition of probabilities — and testing them — can be fun with the right means of doing so, which inevitably involves what amounts to gambling. The variety of experiments does leave one wanting, though this is more of a limitation of equipment; one can only do so much with some of them, and dice rolls are fun.

For later sessions it would be interesting to look more into the rationale of players' betting patterns, what makes one choose a bet, whether their bet is affected by their current score. The free bet rarely found use even with its no-loss nature, though it's of no surprise that one would prefer a big win than not losing.

With this being a rough assessment, more thoughts will come in a later piece after more games.