@captsternn: YES. This, despite all of my constant complaints about how it can often create unfair scenarios, is ultimately what I love about the game and why I feel that it is an improvement on a series that I already enjoyed. I find that I can’t really go back and play the old AB games much, either – there’s clearly a static solution intended for most of the levels that, once you’ve figured it out, makes them not terribly enjoyable to play again. Sometimes I experience the joy of coming up with a different solution than what seems to have been intended, but I feel like I have to exercise that sort of ingenuity much more in AB2.
A lot of games have finite puzzles to solve because there was finite time to develop a set of levels. Once you figure this out, the solution doesn’t change, and it’s basically up to mind memory and muscle memory to complete a level. In the old days, that was just a limitation of the medium for the most part, but I feel like a cleverly designed game will change up those expected solutions to keep players thinking. At least, I appreciate the aspects of a game that will challenge my brain even when I think it’s familiar. I appreciate the extra effort taken on the part of the developers to create a wide possible variety of scenarios while at least playtesting those scenarios enough to make sure they’re reasonably challenging. It can really change the replay value of a game and thus the bang for your buck you get out of buying it (at least, back when it was acceptable to charge a one-time fee for a game upfront – that seems to be taboo nowadays because people expect their apps to be “free”.)
The other games I play most frequently on my phone are Plants Vs. Zombies and Ticket to Ride (I play the latter in “meatspace” a lot, too). Both have fairly basic strategies that evolve over time as you get into new worlds/expansions of the game, but in any individual round of the game, you might implement your strategies differently even if the map/level layout/enemies are always more or less the same. In Plants Vs. Zombies, trial and error has let me to a subset of weapons I’m most comfortable with that will usually fend off the advancing hordes well enough, but the appearance of certain enemies or high numbers of them might cause me to deviate from my usual strategy, plus it’s fun to experiment and challenge myself. In Ticket to Ride, the better maps have a wide enough variety of destinations and possible routes to connect them that pretty much every hand you can be dealt requires you to adapt your strategy in some way you might not have been anticipating.
That’s just the sort of game I like, because if it’s up to sheer memorization of a sequence of moves, I’ll get bored and/or frustrated with having to keep doing the same thing reflexively every time and not being challenged to “think outside the box” in some way.
Even with old-school board games, if there’s one optimal strategy where you can pretty much always win if you never deviate from it, I’ll get bored as soon as I figure it out or someone else spoils it for me. I had quite the appreciation for chess in my younger days because it was one of those “easy to learn the basic moves, but takes a lifetime to really master it” sorts of situations.
