Greetings, Hive Fans!
How do you get your friends and family to play Hive?
One problem is that new players lack the experience to play well, and if you continually beat them, they may lose interest and no longer want to play.
How do you overcome this?
Based on conversations on the Hive Discord channel, it seems that we have some options.
First, you can just keep beating them and hope they don't mind losing and keep playing. From my experience, this rarely works.
Second, you can play sub-optimal moves and let them have a chance to win. Or, at least they will last a little longer before you win. You may get away with this, but if your playing partner feels that you are ‘letting them win,’ they may get discouraged and quit.
A third option is to introduce some randomness into your play. The most likely way to do this would be to turn your pieces over and pick a piece. The piece picked must be the next piece spawned into the hive.
The situation with the Queen can be handled in different ways. If she starts face down, the player continues to draw pieces and place them without being able to move until the Queen is drawn and enters play. Alternatively, she can be left face up, and the player can place her as in a normal game. Or, one can randomly choose three bugs, place them face down, add the Queen, and shuffle them. Then she will be placed within the first four plies, as the game rules state, but there will be some randomness involved.
The fourth option seems to me to be the best! Use a game clock with different times for each player. For example, the new player could use 10+30 timing (10 minutes + 30 seconds per turn), and the experienced player could use 2+5 timing (2 minutes + 5 seconds per turn).
This keeps the game rules intact and provides some advantage to the new player, but it requires a game clock that allows different times for each player. As the new player learns and improves, the clock time difference can be adjusted.
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