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How are numerical chess rankings calculated for different ranking systems?
I know there are several different ranking systems for chess, but how do they work in general? How exactly do they approximate your skill and how you will fare against other players? How can I figure out my own rating? Does the jump between 2000 and 2100 require a lot more practice/improvement than the jump between 1000 and 1100?
I know I phrased the question to be generic to all systems, but feel free to go into the specifics of any one rating system if it helps answer the question. :D

Does the jump between 2000 and 2100 require a lot more practice/improvement than the jump between 1000 and 1100? - From experience:  yes.  To go from 1000 to 1100, I could teach you about pins/forks, and tell you to do half-an-hour of practice problems a day for a week or two, and that would likely be all you need.  To go from 2000 to 2100, however, would require a lot of work in the areas you are weakest (probably studying a lot of endgames and grandmaster-games).

I suppose that's true of most things, though:  going from bad to average is a lot easier than going from 99th-percentile to 99.9th-percentile.

In general, the idea is to give an approximation of relative strength among players, based on their history in rated competition in that type of chess (normal, blitz, correspondence). The greater the difference, the higher the probability that the higher-rated player will win.
Ratings are modified based on the difference in rating between the players and the expected result. Ratings generally go up for a win and down for a loss; the rating change is bigger if the difference in ratings as bigger. There is typically a damping factor that reduces or removes the penalty for losing to a much higher-rated player.
There are typically different rules for players with established ratings and players who haven't yet played enough games to establish a rating. Provisional ratings fluctuate more and have less predictive value for future results.
In general, yes, once you have established a rating, it is harder to increase your rating by 100 points from 2000 than it is to increase it by 100 points from 100. That does depend on your skill level: if you have a knack for chess, you may never have a rating in the low 1000s.
Below are summaries for most of the major ratings I have been able to identify; apologies to those who use a different rating system.
Elo system
The formula for calculating your Elo rating is this:

new rating = old rating + K×(W-We), where K=10, W=actual score, and We=expected score

In tournament play, the difference in ratings between you and each of your opponents is calculated first. From this, an expected score against each opponent is derived from a table. The sum of those expected scores is compared to your actual score, and thus your new score is calculated.
ECF system

As of 2009, a player's grade is calculated by taking the opponent's grade and adding 50 points for a win, subtracting 50 points for a loss, and taking the opponent's grade as it stands for a draw. For grading purposes it is assumed that the opponent's grade is never more than 40 points above or below one's own. An ECF grade can be approximated to an Elo rating by multiplying by 8 and adding 600*.

For a further explanation, per the ECF website:

In the interval between the end of a grading period and publication of the new grades, the "current" grade for calculation purposes is the new, as yet unpublished, grade.
The Grade is calculated by dividing the total number of points scored by the number of games played. If there are at least 30 games in the current period, then the Grade is based on these games alone. If there are not, results are brought forward from the previous periods as required (see 'Category' above). In no case does calculation go back more than 36 months.
Results are brought forward in two different ways, depending whether the Grade is Rapid or Standard. With Rapidplay, any games brought forward from a previous period will be the most recent games in that period. This is possible because the dates of Rapid games are (almost) always known. With Standardplay, unfortunately, this is not the case. So, instead, the required number of (notional) games is brought forward at the average score for the period.

For ungraded players, a grade is estimated this way:

A Rapid Grade, where available, will be used in default of a Standard Grade; and vice versa. If the player has no Grade at all, a starting grade is calculated as follows.
Stage 1 is to calculate a 'grade' for each ungraded player on his games against graded opponents. The 40-point rule is not used. If all his opponents are graded, it stops there and the result will be used as his starting grade.
Stage 2 brings in games between the ungraded players. Once again the 40-point rule is not used. The players are 'graded' on all their games, using as starting grades the figures obtained from Stage 1.
The resulting 'grades' will not be very accurate. So they are fed in again as new starting grades, and Stage 2 is repeated. This continues, with increasing accuracy each time, until the figures (more or less) stop changing. The starting grades can then be considered accurate.
These starting grades are then used in the grading proper.

Glicko system
The Glicko system is an improvement on the Elo system, introducing a concept called Ratings Deviation.
The rating system itself is beyond the ability of this site to display; without the add-in that Math.SE has, the formulas would be nearly impossible to follow.

The RD measures the accuracy of a player's rating. For example, a player with a rating of 1500 and an RD of 50 has a real strength between 1400 and 1600 with 95% confidence. Twice the RD is added and subtracted from their rating to calculate this range. After a game, the amount the rating changes depends on the RD: the change is smaller when the player's RD is low (since their rating is already considered accurate), and also when their opponent's RD is high (since the opponent's true rating is not well known, so little information is being gained). The RD itself decreases after playing a game, but it will increase slowly over time of inactivity.

USCF Correspondence
The USCF used a linear approximation of the Elo method for calculating correspondence chess methods ... this is how it works now.
Established players
To calculate a new rating after a game, use the following formula:

Rn = Ro + .04(ED) +/- 16
This means that a new rating (Rn) is determined by taking the old rating (Ro), adding or subtracting 4 percent of the difference in ratings between opponents (.04(ED)), and adding or subtracting 16 points.
Rating differences that exceed 350 points are figured as 350 points.
For players rated 2100-2399, the formula Rn = Ro + .03(ED) +/- 12 is used.
For players rated 2400 and above, the formula Rn = Ro + .02(ED) +/- 8 is used.

Provisional players
During your first 25 games as a correspondence chess player, your rating is calculated as the average of your game results.
Each game result is as follows:

400 points plus the opponent's rating for a win, unless the opponent's rating is more than 400 points less than yours.
The opponent's rating minus 400 points for a loss, unless the opponent's rating is more than 400 points greater than yours.
The opponent's rating for a draw, regardless of the difference in rating.
Your current rating in all other cases.

For your first result, because you do not yet have a rating, the 400-point differences do not apply: you get the opponent's rating for a draw, +400 for a win, -400 for a loss. If your opponent also doesn't have a rating, then it's 1700 for the winner and 1300 for the loser, or 1500 for both if you draw.
There is also a provision for forfeits under certain circumstances, like the death of an opponent. (Yes, this is a drawback to correspondence chess ... sometimes you suddenly don't have an opponent any more.)
EDIT : The ELO system is not that simple : here is the FIDE handbook that regulates the rating system : http://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=172&view=article.
For those who don't want to read it, here goes (for already rated players) :

For each game played against a rated player, calculate the rating difference D
A difference in rating of more than 400 points shall be counted for rating purposes as though it were a difference of 400 points.

Use a table to find the player's score probability PD
dR = score - PD (score is 0, 0.5, 1 for each game)
The rating change is : the sum of each dR multiplied by K

K is the development coefficient, defined as follows :

K = 40 for a player new to the rating list until he has completed events with at least 30 games
K = 20 as long as a player's rating remains under 2400.
K = 10 once a player's published rating has reached 2400 and remains at that level subsequently, even if the rating drops below 2400.
K = 40 for all players until their 18th birthday, as long as their rating remains under 2300.
The Rating Change is rounded to the nearest whole number. 0.5 is rounded up ( whether the change is positive or negative).

Hope it is useful for everyone that wondered.


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When should I add life gain cards to my deck in MTG?
One common mistake in MTG is to overvalue life-gain cards (at least in 2 player games) because they don't do anything to actually help you WIN the game, and only make you lose slower. This makes them seem like the kind of card that's good in any deck, but not great in any either.
But are there any decks where cards whose primary purpose is life gain really shine? In what type of decks are they significantly better or worse than other types of cards? What combos or strategies upgrade them from average cards to truly great ones? How can I tell if I should add some life gain cards to my deck?

Have you ever seen any of the decks that were popular a few years ago circa Coldsnap, that centred around the Martyr of Sands/Proclamation of Rebirth engine?  If you're going to gain a lot of life, then a combo that can realistically get you 10-20 life every turn is what you need to be looking at.  A lot of decks - any deck that wants to win by beating down with creatures and burn spells - have no defence against such a strategy.  (Of course, not all decks are like this.  You'll need to have a different route to victory against other combo decks.)
Here's a sample budget Martyr list that I found on the official Wizards site, in an article from 2009:

4 Adarkar Wastes, 7 Island, 10 Plains
4 Martyr of Sands, 3 Ranger of Eos
4 Muddle the Mixture, 2 Proclamation of Rebirth, 4 Thopter Foundry, 4
  Sword of the Meek, 4 Thirst for Knowledge, 4 Condemn, 1 Journey to
  Nowhere, 1 Ghostly Prison, 4 Path to Exile, 4 Fieldmist Borderpost

Lifegain is a good strategy to consider in any environment where fast red decks are dominant - and this is not actually that uncommon, given that fast red decks tend to be a cheaper option in Magic terms.  If rival decks are happy to spend a card and one red mana to aim a Lightning Bolt at your dome, you will be very happy with anything that efficiently gains life against them, as this efficiently undercuts their strategy and makes it very difficult for them to win.  Just be sure that your lifegain kicks in pretty quickly, as left to their own devices many red decks can easily deal you 20 points of damage by turn 4...

+1 for that last paragraph. Cards like Wurmcoil Engine and Timely Reinforcements gain a lot of their strength from being able to both clog up the board and get you out of a deck's "reach" (ability to finish you with direct damage bypassing creatures).

I built a beat-down deck that had quadratic growth of damage output with no upper bound.

But are there any decks where cards whose primary purpose is life gain really shine? In what type of decks are they significantly better or worse than other types of cards? What combos or strategies upgrade them from average cards to truly great ones? How can I tell if I should add some life gain cards to my deck?

Respectively: no; they're always worse; none, and anyway they were terrible cards to begin with; you shouldn't. ;-)
Seriously though, assuming you're talking about constructed, cards whose only purpose is to gain life contribute nothing useful to any deck that aims to be anything more than purely casual. Think about the possible win conditions you could be playing against:

Creature beatdown: if you gain some life, the creatures will take it right back, and then you're in exactly the same situation you were before - in other words, your life gain spell effectively makes you skip your turn
Poison counters: life doesn't matter
Mill: again, life doesn't matter
Combo: life doesn't matter because when a combo deck goes off, it can usually deal a huge amount of damage in one turn, so no matter how much life you have, you're still toast

Basically, life gain spells use up resources (mana, cards) that could be devoted to other spells which would help your game situation more.
The only place you could argue that life gain cards might fit in is when you can exchange that extra life for some more important resource. The original example was Necropotence: each life you gain becomes a card you can draw, so Stream of Life acts like Braingeyser (which is ridiculously powerful, FYI). More recently, you have Felidar Sovereign as Shane mentioned, which means that gaining life brings you closer to winning in the same way that dealing damage to your opponent does. In that case, Stream of Life acts like Red Sun's Zenith (although it only works on players, which kind of holds it back because being able to target a creature is the main appeal of direct damage).
Even in decks that make use of life in this way, though, pure life gain spells aren't usually the best choice, because there are other, better spells that gain you life as a side effect of doing something else. In the Necro deck, it was Drain Life, which dealt damage to any creature or player (great deal) and gained you life as a side effect. In combination with Necropotence, it acted like Red Sun's Zenith and Braingeyser in the same card, which explains why Necro was arguably the most dominant deck in Magic history. In a Felidar Sovereign deck, you would have lifelink creatures, which would again gain you life as a side effect of dealing damage.
There is one case that I know of in which a pure life-gain effect (of sorts) achieved some success, and that would be Soul Sisters, the deck centered around Soul Warden and, in a later incarnation, Suture Priest. Even so, the only reason the deck worked was that it included a bunch of other cards that got pretty decent bonuses off gains in life, like Serra Ascendant and Ajani's Pridemate. So the life gain was just a roundabout way to pump up the creatures. The later version of the deck did use the combination of Leonin Relic-Warder and Phyrexian Metamorph which could gain an arbitrarily large amount of life, but even that was only a stalling measure, and only worthwhile because the cards involved had other practical uses.

Life gain for life gain's sake is generally bad. People don't play Angel's Mercy because it doesn't solve the problem of redundant damage sources (i.e. creatures).
However, life gain with other affects as other answers have given, are much better because the other affect can stabilize the board for the control player by either dealing with a problem creature (Lightning Helix), provide a big blocker (Loxodon Hierarch or Thragtusk) or draws a lot of cards (Sphinx's Revelation). These cards allow you to affect the board state while putting you out of the range of an aggressive deck's damage potential for the next few turns while you stabilize your position and get back into the game (as the control player).

Well, there are some white cards such as the Felidar Sovereign that let you win the game if you have a certain amount of life so life gain cards would be useful in a deck that uses that card.

That's rather presupposing that Felidar Sovereign can be the centrepiece of a good deck.  To the best of my knowledge it never saw Constructed play; my assumption would be that a competitive Felidar Sovereign deck wasn't really ever a viable possibility.  Fun for casual and/or multiplayer, naturally...

Apart from answers in which life gain is demanded by the metagame, or when cards synergize / trigger on life gain...
Life gain can tactically combine with control strategies.  For instance, Ivory Tower and Wrath of God form a tactical combo.  If you hold Wrath of God for a long time and allow your opponent to accumulate a lot of creatures, then the upside is that the Wrath of God will destroy many creatures and yield perhaps 6-for-1 card advantage; but in the process of waiting for the opponent to play out all of these creatures, you will have to withstand many attack steps and may take dozens of damage.  Not to mention that the opponent has minimal incentive to overextend that many creatures.  On the other hand, if you cast Wrath of God very early, when the opponent's board development is small, then the opponent won't get many opportunities to attack you and you won't take much damage.  The downside to blowing your Wrath of God early on in the opponent's board development is that you won't kill many creatures, and the Wrath of God may only achieve 2-for-1 card advantage.  How can you achieve the best of both worlds?  If you had an Ivory Tower in play, then the opponent wouldn't be able to achieve a net reduction in your life total unless they put several creatures onto the battlefield, not merely 1 or 2.  Ivory Tower's life gain also allows you to hold onto Wrath of God for longer and get more card advantage out of it without dying to damage in the meantime.  So recursive life gain combos with board sweepers.  There also exist successful Turbo-Fog strategies, and in some respects, life gain is similar to Fog-type cards.  On turn 2, a card like Heroes' Reunion might even yield a better net result than Fog.  Also, any sort of recursive life gain card (i.e. if it were powerful and it had buyback) can allow you to essentially ignore most threats on the board without having to truly control it.  Gaining life faster than threats can deal damage is very similar to having Moat in play and having effectively blanked the threats.  Doing so also gives you the luxury of saving your control spells for only the threats that are truly dangerous.
Another reason you may want to play life gain is if a specific card has raw efficiency.  For instance, suppose one card dealt 3 damage for 2 mana; and suppose another card dealt 2 damage and gained 6 life for 2 mana.  Which one would be a better choice to play?  In more aggressive strategies, 3 damage might be better, since it better aligns with your game plan.  Even in an aggressive deck, that life gain can buy you more turns, which equates to extra draw steps, which means drawing and casting more burn spells before you die, which ultimately advances your aggressive strategy -- hence Lightning Helix may be better than Flame Rift and/or Boros Charm if you are Boros Aggro.  In more controlling strategies, 2 damage + 6 life might be better, in part because it is probably better value, and partly because staying alive is among control's strategic objectives.  In combo, which often is only concerned with short-term survival, 2 damage + 6 life may be even more the best choice, since life gain only aids with temporary survival anyway.  Basically, my point is that if a sorcery gains N life for 1 mana, there is a number N that is so high that the card would be too efficient to pass up on.
Magic decks tend to start the game with the same starting life total and the same number of cards.  If there were factors that affected this, it could reward life gain.  For instance, the scarcely-played Vanguard format modifies your starting life total and starting number of cards in hand.  It is also possible that there could be a format where you frequently damage yourself with your own cards, like Underground River, Gitaxian Probe, Skeletal Scrying, and Dark Confidant.  If your deck has obscenely efficient forms of card drawing and inflicts lots of self-damage, then life gain cards could be justified.  Ideally, the life gain would be stapled to another substantial effect, like Pharika's Cure, Corrupt, or Lone Missionary (acknowledging that this question was primarily about naked life gain).  However, when you play a self-damaging deck with life gain cards, then there would be some inconsistency between the games where you do draw life gain vs when you don't -- they would play out very differently, since some games you would be drowning in card advantage while near death, and other games you would have a healthy life total but fewer cards.

A better example for Boros Aggro: Boros Charm is just better Flame Rift with Modern's manabase.

For an example of a deck constructed with life gain cards as a strategy (but not the primary win condition,) check out the Ajani vs. Nicol Bolas Duel Decks.
Cards like Searing Meditation, Ageless Entity and Ajani's Pridemate turn those little life gain abilities into a big beatdown.

If you can add a card which has a different primary purpose and adds life as a side effect, that's a good opportunity.

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Tweaking the difficulty in Arkham Horror?
Most cooperative games have methods of altering the difficulty listed in the rulebook, but Arkham Horror doesn't (although it does mention that Cthulu tends to be harder than the other ancient ones).

What are some good ways to tweak the difficulty?
How does each one alter the game difficulty and strategy?
Are there any methods of changing difficult in the expansions that you don't need to have the entire expansion to use?

There's a lot of obvious things, like drawing more mythos cards, taking away character abilities, having more monsters come out of gates etc. But I'm afraid to just start tinkering away. Which methods tend to work best?

A couple of these I'm pulling straight from Richard Launius' House Rules (My favorite of which is Rule #12)
If you want an easier time of it:
Drawing a Mythos card every other turn is the way I've done it. It allows the players to wander around Arkham and have encounters they normally wouldn't take the time out to have.
You can also make traveling through gates (for those standing on them) during the encounter phase optional rather than mandatory.
Monsters standing on a location that contains a gate when that gate is closed are drawn through it, in addition to all those that would normally do so due to their dimensional symbol.
To make the game harder:
Have Investigators randomly dealt out to players or randomly dealt two and pick, etc.. My group usually hates playing spellcasters, and with good reason! They weren't particularly impressive before the later expansions and the spells use precious Sanity. This forces players to pick people they wouldn't normally play as and prevents games from being filled with powerful characters.
Place gates face down on the board. This makes it more of a surprise when you find yourself plummeting into R'yleh after jumping into an unguarded gate, or fighting through a horde to end up in the Dreamlands. It also makes it harder to come out of a gate that you didn't enter through (as they are facedown, you don't know if there is another exit on the board). When I do this, I usually allow the exiting Investigator to look at one facedown gate, and if it wasn't the one they were looking for, they get LiTaS and the gate stays facedown.
The Heralds and Guardians that made their debut in later expansions (King in Yellow and beyond) also help make the game harder (or easier with Guardians). Hastur paired with the King In Yellow Herald have made games so painful my group refuses to play with either one of them anymore.
Personally, I've never found it necessary to take away a character ability. None of them are that broken. Some are close, but there's always a drawback to them.
Additionally, (though I've never used them myself) there are difficulty modifying cards in the Black Goat of the Woods expansion. Two of them make the game easier, two of the harder. I think they do things like 'everybody starts blessed/cursed, more/less mythos per turn', etc.

I have always liked the injury/madness cards from the Durnvich horror expansion. In my mind the make an defeat a bit less painful. I prefer getting an injury most of the time to lose half my items.
An other way to make the game a bit easier would be to let each investigator take an extra item, unique item, spell or skill in during the setup.
On the other hand placing an extra portal and monster on the map during setup would give you a harder, more hectic and possible shorter game.
The number of investigators are also a way to adjust the difficulty. If you're only two playing for instance consider playing two investigators each to make the game easier.
If you are four investigators adding a fifth or maybe only use the rules as if there was five players would ramp up the difficulty. With five investigators for instance you should add two monsters per opened portal.

In terms of rule tweaks (as opposed to expansions), Richard Launius' house rules (pdf) are as close to canonical as it gets (he designed the game). They're linked in the accepted answer, but there's a lot more, so I think it's worth having a summary here. The document is organized by rule type; to help make it easier to find rules to tweak the difficulty how you want:

Much harder: rule 9 (no victory for sealed gates), rule 10 (with >4 players, two gates per mythos with >=6 doom tokens), rule 11 (modified Great Old One combat)
Harder: rule 1 (two monsters on first gate), rule 2 (semi-random investigators), rule 3 (gate locations unknown), rule 5 (lose spell/skill on insanity), rule 7 (lose sanity for harming another investigator)
Easier: rule 4 (choose to travel through gate), rule 8 (one free evade)
Much easier: rule 6 (monster guards sucked through closing gates)

Rule 1b (two monsters per gate with >4 players) makes it harder, but was already added by the Dunwich rule revisions. Rule 12 (game master draws two mythos cards and chooses one) can make the game either easier or harder.

To make the game slightly easier, deal either the double of cards or one extra than the investigator needs and pick the one(s) that the most thematically appropriate to the character and discard the rest.  This makes trading items in the first few turns almost redundant thus allowing to focus on monsters and/or gates.

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TTR: Destination ticket value changes in the America 1910 expansion
The BGG summary for the expansion mentions this:

a complete replacement deck of the 141 cards from the original game deck: 30 Destination Tickets (4 cards have a reduced value from Ticket to Ride)

What were these reductions and why were they necessary?

Which tickets were changed?
The following destination tickets received a decrease in value:  (Source: this post by Days of Wonder Forums user "Baron Von Schmidt original")

Sault St. Marie to Oklahoma City: now 8 points
Los Angeles to Miami: now 19 points
Los Angeles to New York: now 20 points
Seattle to New York: now 20 points

Tickets Probably Over-valued
It appears that the minimum number of trains required to complete a destination ticket was the starting point for assigning each ticket a point value. The claim is made  (in this post by Days of Wonder Forums user "Caboose")  that Alan Moon (the game's designer) said the ticket values were not supposed to be the shortest route between two cities. Lacking the context that this may have been said in, I believe the intent was to put to rest worries that some ticket values were mistakes or misprints, rather than to deny all connection between tickets' values and their minimum lengths.  (This post by Caboose from several years earlier shows (s)he had previously believed the issue was due to a misprint.)
Additionally, if the changes were to "fix" the tickets to match their minimum lengths, they didn't fix all of them. It's been pointed out  (in this post by Days of Wonder Forums user "DiscJet")  that the Los Angeles to Chicago ticket and the 1910 expansion's Las Vegas to Miami ticket are each worth more than their shortest length.
I conclude that Mr. Moon decided the four changed routes were somewhat over-valued, at least for the 1910 rules (if not in general).
Attribution Note: I got the idea to look through the Days of Wonder Forums from aramis' answer. I don't have access to my copy of Ticket to Ride and the 1910 expansion at the moment, so I can't verify the route lengths or values myself.

Point values were probably corrections as they probably intended the point values to be based on the shortest path.
For example the Seattle - New York ticket was 22 in the original game and is now 20 is the America 1910 expansion.  You can get from Seattle to New York with 20 trains.

Days of Wonder stated in their forums that the 1910 changes were to reflect the shortest route valuations. (I can't find the post right now.)
Likewise, all other tickets adhere to that basic rule.


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What is the correct opening move in mancala when you go first in a 6 hole per side board?
Obviously the first thing you want to do is get the bonus turn. But I'm confused after that. You don't want to do your 4th hole from the left because that would allow your opponent to get 2 bonus moves. I also imagine you wouldn't want to do either of your 2 on the far left because you could use those for captures or maybe extra moves later. I'm assuming you would probably choose the 5th hole from the left as your last hole is much harder to capture and better to use for around the board captures.
Is my logic anywhere near correct? What is the preferred opening in Mancala to maximize your chance of winning?

This site suggests third-from-the-left (your 4) followed by far-right (your 1).

This opening has the following strengths:

It empties bin F* early in the game, allowing Mi to play a single pebble from F into her mancala each time a single pebble lands there.
It empties bin F at a time when at least two of the pebbles from F (those landing in J and I) will likely eventually come back around the board to Mi’s side.  Furthermore, if Yo makes the defensive G play, all five of the pebbles from G are ultimately likely to wind back up on Mi’s side.  For example, after playing G, Yo has six pebbles in H.  If she plays H on a subsequent turn, the sixth pebble in H will land in A, back on Mi’s side.
It allows Mi to play from A, B, C, and F without repopulating Yo’s side of the board.  It therefore sets Mi up for an effective “starving” strategy.
Because of the large number of pebbles in each of Yo’s bins, it is unlikely that Yo will be able to counter with a stalling or starving strategy herself.
Most importantly, it puts Yo in a defensive position at her very first move of the game.  Yo has an immediate glaring vulnerability to being raided in bin G, and must therefore seriously contemplate the defensive G or HG responses.  Either of these responses, however, leaves her in the weakened board position of having each of her remaining bins populated with enough pebbles to play around to Mi’s side, thus reinforcing a starving strategy by Mi.

They go into a considerable amount of detail explaining subsequent moves, analysis, and their conclusions: I would definitely recommend reading the entire page to understand it better.
*Note: this page labels your far-left bin A and continues counter-clockwise, so your far-right bin is F, your opponent's far-right bin is G, and your opponent's far-left bin is L. Yo is the opponent with the mancala on the left; Mi is the player with the mancala on the right.


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Why is there a bonus for holding honors in bridge? Isn't having 4-5 of the highest trumps privileges enough?
After I read about honors in bridge, I quickly started wondering why they were added to the scoring system. Its obviously a privilege to be holding the cards required, so I can see why the scoring might want to reward that. But isn't holding the honors and having the power of playing them enough? Why was it necessary to add an additional bonus just for having them?
It feels like the rule is just adding luck to game that was designed to be about skill, in the sense of getting points for just getting the right cards, and not having to know anything about the strategy of how to play them. If you do hold the honors, you're almost definitely going to get more points because they allow you to take more tricks, which are the whole basis of how to get points anyway. Being automatically given points for receiving good cards that will help you win points during the actual game-play seems kind of paradoxical, almost like getting an extra $5000 every time you have a great idea that will let you make a lot more than that if you are able to develop it skillfully.

Does the rule do any more than just give you points for what you should be able to use to get points anyway?
When does it actually influence your decisions in the game?
How would bridge be different if it didn't have this rule?

(I'm a very novice bridge player, and I'm sure that my reasoning is incorrect, but I've been unable to prove these assumptions wrong on my own, and thought you guys would be able to help a noob like me understand. :)
Honours                 Points
All 4 aces in NT        150
5 top trumps (AKQJT)    150
4 out of 5 top trumps   100

Upvoted because I never really understood the point of honors either: it just felt like insult upon injury when the opponents crushed me with their amazing cards, and then claimed an honors bonus on top of that!

The rule of honors applies to any side. So if you are defending hearts holding AKQJ of hearts, you get the requisite number of points.
It really does not matter that there is a bonus for this. In the long run, the luck factor will even out: as the points go above the line.
As to why this is there: Most of initial bridge (i.e. auction bridge) terms and rules (like rubber is two games etc) and initial scoring were derived from Whist.
Giving points for honors is no different. Doing a bit of research turns up this book on Whist: The Bridgewater treatise on Whist which details out when the honor sequences can be used to add points to your score.
In fact, I suppose some of the auction bridge rule makers felt like you did and made a rule for adding points for chicane: when you have a void in the trump suit. This seems to have been dropped from the current contract rubber bridge scoring though.
As to that making a difference, here is a story from the autobiography of Howard Schenken(Education of a Bridge Player).
Howard Schenken was playing auction bridge (note: weird scoring) and held a hand with four Aces and a Queen, when he heard his RHO bid 1NT. Without thinking, he bid 2NT and was doubled. He went down 2. So he lost 200 and gained 100 (for the honors) for a net loss of 100. He later realized that if he had just passed, he would give 10 for 1NT (remember auction bridge scoring) but gained 100 for honors for a net gain of 90!
I also remember there was a hand (possibly in Zia's autobiography Bridge My Way) where he was given a hand (as a wager) and asked "Play or Defend". After going through all the possibilities, Zia decided to defend, getting the contract down 1. At which point the puzzle giver claimed money from Zia, because declarer has hundred honors!
In contract rubber bridge, since the honor points go above the line, they ideally should not (drastically) change the way the game is played. Though, there will definitely be a difference, I suppose.
For instance, holding xxx,AKQJT, Kxx, xx  you could potentially gamble a 3H bid over opponents 2S, get doubled, going down 1 but yet come out ahead as compared to letting them play 2S, because of the honor points.

Upvote for pointing out that honors can be scored by defense as well.

I know honors can be scored by defense as well, but how often does the side with 4-5 honors actually lose? If defense has 4 of the top trumps, they have substantially improved odds of defeating the contract, so it still seems like its just more points for the winner. I don't have enough experience to know how often the side with honors loses, can someone shed some light on that? :D thanks for the answer!

@Crazy: It will be hard to quantify that. But the point is, that is irrelevant, as the luck will even out. Given that the bonus is tiny and scored above the line, it should not matter that much.

Okay, so the affect of the rule is that it encourages you to bid a suit that you have honors in, even if you might loose points by not fulfilling the contract as you're sure to get the honors bonus. The last part really confirmed my suspicions, thanks! :D

I disagree with the sense that luck will even out. In the long run, yes, but that doesn't really make much of a difference on the time-frame of a single round of Bridge. How many times per round do you see Honours? I would hazard not likely more than once. Which means that whoever gets the honours gets a large boost purely based on luck, which isn't likely to be matched.

Realistically, they do just add a swing-y element of luck to a game. Just because over thousands of nights of playing Bridge that it will probably equalize doesn't mean it isn't adding a perhaps silly degree of randomness.

@SimonRose: It will even out, solely because it adds to the top of the line. Think of it as a side bet, made every time a rubber is played.

Sure, but why pretend that it serves any purpose than swinging things based mostly on luck? On the time scales that most people play it just serves to reward one partnership entirely unrelated to their skill, which is for what most people laud the game of Bridge.

@SimonRose: Perhaps you need to play more rubber bridge :-). btw, your arguments can also be applied to someone getting 15+ points or whatever. In rubber bridge luck plays a factor. You cannot deny that. That is why I prefer duplicate.

Very simply put, your reasoning is basically right, and you are not alone thinking like this.
Does the rule still exist?
American Contract Bridge League pages confirm my own personal experience that rubber bridge players often, I'd say always, choose to ignore the rule today (and why):

As there is no skill in scoring for honors,
  players often agree to play without the honor bonuses.

In duplicate bridge, which is the nearly exclusive form of bridge seen in tournaments and clubs, this scoring rule is non-existent.  Note also that in duplicate bridge, scoring rules purely based on hands dealt as opposed to player actions, would have no effect on the ultimate outcome.  They would just cancel out.
Where did the rule come from?
The game you know as (contract) bridge is based on older forms of bridge, and those on a group of card games known as whist.  Notice especially the 17th century variant of whist aptly called Ruff and Honours.  As you can see from the references, the spirit of this rule is several times older than that of contract bridge, a 20th century invention with marked emphasis on gradual elimination of chance from the rules.
The process of removal of the honours scoring rule was also gradual, and the range of situations where the bonus can be awarded has been considerably reduced between auction bridge and your version of contract bridge rules.
How the game is affected if you do use the rule?
Strictly speaking, honors scoring is not purely based on hands dealt and a modest degree of skill is probably still necessary to cash in the extra points.  While you do NOT need to be the declarer to obtain this bonus, you always need to control the suit of the contract.  The rule could therefore bring about some bidding challenges, for example when all the honours in a suit occur in one hand, and when that hand is otherwise fairly weak and misfit to the partner's hand.

Its not entirely true that they would cancel out in duplicate.  They only cancel out if trump ends up being the same.  A different bidding sequence could lead to not scoring the honors.

@bwarner - You and I are basically saying that the honours scoring rule is not purely based on hands dealt.

In games like bridge and mahjong, there are what I call "simple" wins (barely meeting the requirements) and "compound" wins (meeting the requirements with something extra to spare). The extra honors pretty much fall in the "compound" wins category, because cards in sequence are worth more than they are individually. That is, AKQJ is really worth MORE than ten honor points.
Paradoxically, it could alter the game by encouraging someone with AKQJ (or T) to bid game with an otherwise weak hand. That is, s/he wouldn't have bid game without the 100 or 150 honors.
USUALLY, that's not the case, however. Most of the time, I don't think it really alters the game. But it does represent an extra bonus for "getting lucky."


text:
What's the difference between Puerto Rico and San Juan?
I've heard people describe San Juan as Puerto Rico's little brother. What's actually the difference?

How is the game-play changed?
Is it any easier to teach new people?
Is it worth buying if I already have Puerto Rico?

... a wise-acre would've said that San Juan is the capital of Puerto Rico ;)

Game Play Differences
While the games are thematically the same, and San Juan was designed as the "card game version" of Puerto Rico, the gameplay is actually quite different.
Role Selection

In Puerto Rico your choice of role has many implications. You need to consider how the role will affect your success, how it will affect the other players, and every bit as importantly, how your success and that of others will be affected if another player chooses it. You're commonly making a choice that, for example, hurts you the least, or hurts the leader the most, etc.
In San Juan role selection has minimal affect on others. You do want to choose the role that's best for you, but that's about as far as it goes.

Strategic Play

Puerto Rico strongly calls for selecting an overall strategy near the beginning of the game and sticking to it, very broadly the "shipping strategy" or the "building strategy." There are clever things you can do within each strategy, tactical stuff that requires good decisions every turn, but if you don't decide on a strategy early or switch strategies mid-game you're very likely to lose.
San Juan is much more tactical, with very little in the way of strategic play. There are a few cards that call for trying to push the overall game in a certain direction, especially the game-end bonus cards, and some cards complement each other better than others, but it still hard to call it real strategy.

Newbie Forgiveness

Puerto Rico isn't kind to new players, but worse, new players can easily throw the game to a certain player without realizing they're doing it. Sitting to the left of the newbie is an easy way to dramatically increase your odds of winning; seen from the other players' perspective it means the newbie can give you the game.
San Juan isn't a game you're likely to win the first or second time you play if the others are experienced, but you're not going to "give" the game to anyone due to sub-optimal play, and you'll likely score within 20% of the winner no matter how poorly you play.

Seating Order

Seating order doesn't just affect the possibility of a new player giving the game away in Puerto Rico, it also has a strong affect on how easy it will be to achieve your goals. If after a few rounds you decide that your game strategy is to grow and ship as much tobacco as possible, if the player to your right starts growing tobacco you're screwed. The same holds true for the shipping/building strategy lines in general: if the person to your right is using the same broad strategy as you, you're going to have a much tougher time.
Due to San Juan's general lack of interactivity, you're much less likely to be affected by seating order. I've yet to hear a compelling case for it mattering.

Teaching the Game
San Juan is definitely easier to teach to new players, though I wouldn't say massively so. However, it is much easier to teach how to play well than is Puerto Rico, and so is more forgiving.
Is It Worth Buying?
I absolutely consider it to be worth buying. If it's like any game, it's really most like Race for the Galaxy (see below for inside scoop), but a much lighter version. It's much faster to play than Puerto Rico, and is actually quite fun with just two players, something that can't really be said of Puerto Rico. The two games are so dissimilar in play style and feel, you'll never mistake one for the other in any way, even if you played them back-to-back.

Just a short bit of gossip about San Juan and Race for the Galaxy: the story goes that when Alea Games saw the (comparatively) great success of Puerto Rico, they started hinting around that they were interested in a card game version. One submission was a game very much like Race for the Galaxy, though many years earlier. The Race-like game wasn't selected as the winner, but the eventual game, San Juan, turned out to have incredible similarities, including the cards-as-resources, cards-as-money, and cards-for-their-face-function game concepts. Whether any ideas were copied or not, in the end Race needed a fair bit of redesign to make it less like what San Juan turned out to be.

I'd be very interested if you have anything else to say about Race For The Galaxy in relation to both of them. :D http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/2702/race-for-the-galaxy-vs-san-juan-and-puerto-rico

One is played with cards (SJ) and one is played on a board (PR).  San Juan is certainly easier to teach and far faster to play (not to mention setup).  It's a quick fun game.  It's still rich in strategy in the way that Puerto Rico is, but, it lacks some of the complexity, depth, and nail-biting-ness that I've found in a good Puerto Rico game.  Oh, for a list of discussion threads on BGG that have gone over this, see here.

Ah http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/1319726 may prove particularly helpful.

Grrr - set up is two words, not one :)

The only thing these games have in common is the artwork, theme, publisher and role selection mechanic.
Alhough with similar themes (building your infrastructure and producing and selling goods),
most of the game mechanics are completely different.
Basically:

Puerto Rico is a boardgame with lots of bits, more rules, takes longer to play (~90 min). Basically a good representative of Alea game series intended more for the gamers and people appreciating a deeper game.
San Juan is a somewhat light cardgame. It takes less time to play (~45min) and is very similar to a "dumbed down" Race for the Galaxy, but much easier to teach to new people, so it is a good game not only for gamers but also for non-gamers and casual gamers.

So answers to your questions:

Game play is completely different
It is significantly easier to teach new people
It is definitely worth buying even if you have Puerto Rico. (It will be a nice travel size game, which takes less time). Keep in mind, if you have Race for the Galaxy, then I would say - no need to buy this also.

P.S. They are both really good games, just really different.

San Juan takes a couple of the concepts from Puerto Rico: building assets that then provide points and resources or some other benefit, and per-turn role-picking, and implements them in a card game with similar imagery and item names to Puerto Rico. Aside from the 5 role tokens, San Juan is 100% cards.
The closest I've come to playing Puerto Rico was about three turns on BSW, but it is definitely a much more complex game than San Juan. In addition to building structures, you have to manage placement of workers on them. If I understand correctly, produced resources can't be turned immediately into new buildings or workers, but must be shipped off first, shipping be another mechanic not found in San Juan. I'm guessing there are more differences, but as I said I haven't played a full game of Puerto Rico yet.
To boil it down, San Juan is a simple card game, and Puerto Rico is a (very?) complex board game.

I usually reserve the 'very complex' rating for stuff like arkham horror, axis and allies, and diplomacy, but Puerto Rico is definitely far from easy. :D

Having played AA once (long ago) and PR a few turns, I'd put them on the same level of difficulty, but I'm no expert.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
If the Witch steals the power of the warlord and tries to destroy a player's district, are they protected if they have the bishop?

Player A has the witch and bewitches the Warlord.
Player A chooses to destroy player B's district.
Player B has the Bishop. Can he reveal it to protect himself?
If player B can do this and reveal the bishop, can player C rob the bishop with the thief?

is thesunneversets' correct?  If so, it would be helpful to mark his answer as accepted.  You seem to have a large number of answered questions that aren't accepted.

No
The Witch doesn't get to destroy a district when she is revealed - she skips her turn after taking an action, and only gets to play when (if!) the Warlord is revealed.  By that time, player B has already been revealed to be the Bishop, and is immune to the bewitched Warlord's power.

Ug, I've been playing differently and I forgot this was the actual rule. Thanks. :)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
How does the Merlin's company expansion change Shadows over Camelot?

What does it contain?
How does each component affect the base game?
What improvements/advantages will it offer me?

Merlin's company comes with a few different things:

8 new knights
more black, white, and loyalty cards
a new travel deck

The 8 new knights can add some variety as you learn to use their powers. MC lets you play with 8, and if you really want to you can probably play with 9 or 10 without any major issues. The loyalty cards allow for as many as 3 traitors, although this substantially affects the difficulty level.
The new black and white cards are the real core of the expansion. There are plenty of new special blacks and whites, as well as enough standards to balance things out. The new threats and powers added by these cards are what really makes the game more interesting and fun.
The travel deck is basically just a cool way to make the game harder. Every time you move to a new quest you have to draw a travel card, most of which do bad things, although sometimes they will bring Merlin to your side and let you draw more white cards while on a quest. This adds a fair bit of tension and difficulty and makes the knights think very carefully about when to move around the more treacherous roads around Camelot.
Overall the expansion adds more variety, letting you add more players, choose different knights, play with 2 traitors, and use the travel deck to tweak the difficulty level. I'd highly recommend it if you play SOC a lot as it makes the game a lot more interesting. :D


text:
How does the Ticket To Ride:1910 expansion change the original game?

What does the expansion contain?
What are the different ways to play with it?
How is each different from playing without the expansion?
Is there anything else I should know about the expansion before buying?

1910
The primary mechanical change is an alternate set of tickets, and there is also an additional bonus score condition.
The tickets work exactly the same way as normal, but it's a different set. They may also be combined into a single large ticket deck.
The standard bonus condition is longest route; the new one is most completed tickets. Both have the same value, and are often not the same person.
Since I've only played 1910 online, I can't speak to the card size issue.
Europe 1912, the comparable expansion for Ticket to Ride: Europe, likewise has replacement tickets and the most routes bonus, but instead of adding full size cards, instead adds a "depot" mechanism, which results in the trains deck being depleted sooner and more cards being out of play. While the tickets are not cross-compatible, the depots are. Since TTRE also has separate long route cards, 1912 also adds 6 more, to a total of 12.

I'll let someone else explain the expansion options, I just want to list the most important change.
Normal Size Cards

+1'd, they make such a difference.  It's a bit of a crime that they weren't standard to the core set...


text:
How long does it take to play Arkham Horror?
BoardGameGeek says 4 hours, I've heard a lot of people say 5 hours, but some of my friends say they've played it several time in less than 2.

How does the game time vary with different numbers of people?
How does the game time vary with player experience? What's the difference in the length of time between a group's first game and their games as they gain more familiarity with the rules and strategy?
Should I not buy the game if I doubt my group will be able to have 4 hour straight sessions very often? Is it possible to shorten the game length if need be, or break it up into shorter sessions?

Right now the length of time required and the complexity level are the biggest factors affecting whether I buy this game, and I wanted to get some second opinions. :D

FWIW, I've played twice, and each time it took two sessions to complete. The first sessions were around 4-5 hours, and the 2nd sessions were around 2-3 hours.

In case you didn't know, the game rules also have random character pulls so that can affect the game length.  This really could be added to any answer below and I don't feel worthy of an answer along but can add one if people want.

I've only played once (there were four of us) and it took about 4 hours. I would agree with thesunneversets that you'll likely have a much better experience if you slowly bring in new players. In this game, I was the only n00b and one of the guys had played a ton of times.
This is important because Arkham is a pretty complicated game. Combat with monsters, which happens quite a lot, requires remembering what four different symbols mean, as well as the order of rolls. If I didn't have someone there to basically tell me what I needed to roll and why, we would have spent lots of time figuring things out.
There are also lots of little details, like remembering what the color codes on the monsters mean (they may be aquatic, or flyers, or move in a certain way). All that encoded in a colored border.
So I had a lot of fun but I'd say play on setting aside a good chunk of time, especially if your group is all learning together. I also suspect that game length is a strong function of experience. I could see it moving the total time by an hour or two.
Lastly, I would recommend breaking the game up into multiple sessions. There are lots of tokens and counters and cards. You'd either have to devote a room to holding the board between games or take a picture of the board. Otherwise, there'd be no way to remember where the portals were, which ones were closed, what the players stats were at, what items everyone had, the count on the doom track, etc. It's too much to break down between games.

Well I can tell you my personal experience - I bought it because I knew lots of friends and acquaintances in my past were fairly obsessive about it, and organized an 8-player game one evening with a bunch of beginners.  Four or five hours later, we were maybe halfway through the game?  One or two of the group had gotten pretty into their characters and quests, but some of the others had completely given up, it was just too much.  Admittedly this was a very "casual" set of players, not dedicated boardgamers, but it's a cautionary tale.
I'd say you wouldn't want to break this out except amongst people who are pretty serious about boardgames, and preferably people who have done some roleplaying - Call of Cthulhu would be ideal, obviously, but in general terms I really would class this as a roleplayer's boardgame.  It definitely seems advisable to learn the rules with a smaller group than 8!  I expect that games will speed up as everyone becomes familiar with the mechanics and strategies, but I'd still expect to be talking 3+ hours.
I don't see the point of breaking it up into multiple sessions really - part of the fun of the Lovecraftian universe is slogging onwards to the end of your quest despite encroaching exhaustion and madness!  If you're looking for a light, fun game that you can whip out at short notice and then play for a couple of rounds before putting away again, Arkham Horror would seem to me like a really odd choice!

I don't consider our group a casual gaming group at all, but after our fourth game last night, we all come to the consensus that we're done with the game.  It's a shame, because I personally have tried so hard to get into it, since everyone else in the world seems to love it, but we always end up frustrated and bored.  The rules seem overly clunky and arbitrary for the sake of being clunky and arbitrary, and while I think these reference sheets I found would have definitely helped early on, the damage has been done.

@LittleBobby: I'd stand by what I said about it being a boardgame for roleplayers.  The rules are complex by boardgames standards, but positively streamlined compared to the amount of information you need to keep in your head to run an RPG!

@LittleBobbyTables: Updated link for reference sheets: http://www.headlesshollow.com/freebies_games.html#ark

With a fair degree of precision, you can control the length.  Of course there are always going to be outliers, but on average you can dial it in pretty good.
There are a lot of components in Arkham Horror.  The better a system you have for organizing them the better.  If you have things ready to go, the game can begin pretty quickly (within 10 minutes).  If you show up with all the components scattered throughout the box, it could easily take 30 minutes before everything is set up.  This gets much worse as you continue to add expansions.
Here is my setup:

To a certain extent, adding expansions will slow down your game.  In addition to having more ground to cover, there are several different mechanics that get added that have to be accounted for.  Particularly with the large expansions (rifts with Kingsport, Deep Ones Rising track with Innsmouth).
We're pretty experienced with the game.  With all the expansions we do 1-2 games/night in a five hour block.  The average night would be one game followed by a shorter filler game (Dominion or Chez Geek).
If you have a decently prepped set without any expansion I would expect you can easily finish within 4 hours as long as at least one person is familiar with the game.
For the fastest game:
Pre-game do these steps:

Preselect all characters, get everything they need in a separate plastic bag including specific and random items
Shuffle the decks
Pick a Great Old One without complications (Azathoth will even prevent the final combat)

When the game begins:

Set up the board
Assign someone to drop clue tokens on the unstable locations
Hand out the characters
Figure out the starting player and draw a Mythos card.

Arkham Horror is one of the more difficult games to predict a length on, since it can accept up to 8 players and the way in which it is played makes such a big difference.  I've played with groups who approached the game as a min-max problem (basically how they approach Pandemic) and we were able to rip through a game in a couple hours, without too much trouble.  I've also played in a game with 6 players that tipped over into five hour territory and was probably about halfway done.  One thing that makes a huge difference is how much people are playing up to the theme.  If everybody is reading their events out and listening to what is happening to each other, it's going to be a very long game indeed.  If people are parallelizing actions and taking care of stuff on their own, it can move along smartly.  Add in variability for expansions and I can say that I'd expect a game of AH to last anywhere from two to twelve hours, depending on expansion choices, gamers and mood.

I, too, have played multiple times and each time I got different results. One time we played for about 2 hours, while another time we played for well over 7 hours. It just depends on who you're playing the game with and how experienced they are at that game.

The Arkham Horror Statistics project has compiled data from over 15,000 player-submitted games, including the amount of time it took. As of this writing, the project has calculated that a game of Arkham Horror (not including setup) takes:
96 minutes, plus 18 minutes per player
More accurately, the game takes 96 min ± 8 min, plus 18 ± 2 min per player.  Thus the game is expected to take the following amount of time:
  #  |  Min  |  Max  |       Range
-----------------------------------------
  1  |  104  |  124  |  1h 44m - 2h 04m
  2  |  120  |  144  |  2h 00m - 2h 24m
  3  |  136  |  164  |  2h 16m - 2h 44m
  4  |  152  |  184  |  2h 32m - 3h 04m
  5  |  168  |  204  |  2h 48m - 3h 24m
  6  |  184  |  224  |  3h 04m - 3h 44m
  7  |  200  |  244  |  3h 20m - 4h 04m
  8  |  216  |  264  |  3h 36m - 4h 24m

It's likely that these numbers are weighted towards those who are already familiar with how to play the game, since hardcore fans are more likely to find this statistics project. If you have players who don't know the rules well (or you don't have anybody at the table who knows the rules well, the game will certainly take longer.
Anecdotally, I'll say throw in 30 minutes if one or two players don't know the rules, 60 minutes if most players don't know the rules, and 90 minutes if nobody has ever read the rulebook before playing. Add 30 minutes if somebody at the table knows most rules, but requires frequent lookups in the rulebook.
And again, these numbers do not include setup. If you are punching out pieces of cardboard or shuffling every deck, the game will certainly appear to take much longer.

I'm not sure how well this question can be answered for this game. There are a lot of variables: number of players, player speed, expansions used, whether the Ancient One awakens or not, etc. I've played the game a few times. One time we finished in about two hours. Another time it took 10 hours! That was a 7-player game where the Ancient One awoke (I forget which one it was, but the battle took forever!). So there is a huge amount of variability with this game.
I guess I'd say 2 and 10 hours are the extremes, but you're likely to be somewhere in the middle.


text:
Would using 2 progressions of evil and 2 heroic actions per turn destroy the balance of Shadows Over Camelot?
After reading so much about how Battlestar Galactica was a better game than Shadows Over Camelot, I became determined to help it and see if I could help it at all in the contest. One of the issues was how easy it is for your turn to become very boring, like when you do nothing but play a grail or other card. This requires very little strategy, discussion, or decision, and it seems like the game could be speeded up a little without any huge disadvantages.
Since the game is based on the balance of good vs. evil actions, why not just do 2 evil actions and 2 heroic actions per turn? This could be a small disadvantage as more bad things will happen before your next turn, but is it fairly balanced out by the double good actions? Most other cooperative games give you multiple actions, and as it gives you more choices, it makes the decision of what to do during your turn all the more interesting.
Would this hurt the balance of the game? Is there anything I can do to counteract its effect or reduce turns where very little thinking is required?

This would make the game much easier.  The ability to focus effort on quests is how the knights win.  Travel time relative to card draws would go down.
Quick example, 5 player game, you have fought cards 1-5, so you go to the Picts quest.  It starts as your turn:

Progression of Evil / You move to quest
PE / You play 1
8 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 2
PE / You play 3
8 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 4
PE / You play 5 -- Quest Completes

Total PEs possibly ending your quest in a loss: 22
In the original rules, it looks like this:

Progression of Evil / You move to quest
4 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 1
4 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 2
4 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 3
4 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 4
4 other PEs from other players
PE / You play 5 -- Quest Completes

Total PEs possibly ending your quest in a loss: 26
So, by focusing the effort, you've saving 4 progressions of evils (the other player's turns) on your quest.

How so? How will the extra progressions of evil not cancel out the heroic actions?

Quick example:  5 player game, you're going to fight the pics, you have a straight by yourself: -- adding to answer...

After several trial games, I've found it does make the game slightly easier (Mr. Tibrewala's answer has a good explanation). However, I also find it makes the game a LOT more interesting.

You have more choices each turn. Since you pick one thing and then another, you have more analysis to do. Do I draw a black card and see what it is before deciding what to do for my other action? Do I move here and play a card, or draw cards and fight a catapult? Possible things you could do on your turn increase rapidly, making decisions more interesting.
It feels like you actually DO something on your turn. One problem I've heard other players talk about in SOC is how it can drag a little. You really can't do much in one action. Admittedly you are planning to do something else your next turn, but for me moving to a quest doesn't feel like I'm really helping much. If can move there and play a card without even having to burn a life, I feel like I'm actually useful. It also reduces the number of neutral turns that are totally. I drew a despair and played a grail....Wow that was useless... For me it turned the game from "my turn, let's have some really tiny decision that doesn't do much or require any thinking" to "YEAH! MY TURN! I can kick butt now!"
It makes the game quicker without really subtracting anything. Since the turn's are more interesting, it feels quicker, and you can usually shave 15 minutes off the game while playing this way without sacrificing anything (IMHO you're actually making the game cooler AND shorter).

Since it's really easy to tweak the difficulty to counteract the effect, I always play this way now. Everything just becomes more interesting, and if you add the Squire's Challenge from the base or the Travel Deck from Merlin's Company you'll have about even difficulty anyway. :D
Would love to hear any other opinion's or comments!


text:
Citadels: Wishing Well card 'every other purple district' clarfication
In the Citadels: Dark City expansion the Wishing Well purple district card reads as follows:

At the end of the game, you score one point for every other purple district in your city

The italicization is actually printed on the card.
Does the means "every purple district that is not this card" or "every second purple district"? If you had this and 3 other purple districts at the end of the game, would you have 3 extra points or 2?
I'm leaning toward the first one, because it seems more balanced and the second would suggest a bit more clarification.

Feel really stupid but asked anyway. Does anyone think this questions is valuable enough to leave up?

I was 99% sure that that must mean "every purple district that is not this card", as you suspect.  But how to prove that for sure?  My first thought in such matters is to look at foreign versions of the cards.  Rules text that is ambiguous in English is sometimes much clearer when read in other languages.
I haven't (yet) found a scan of a foreign version of Wishing Well... but this French page, (which contains a comment by Bruno Faidutti the game designer himself, so it must be fairly respectable!) seems to suggest that the text of Fontaine aux Souhaits is along the lines of "autres batiments violets" counting for +1; and I think you'd be hard pressed to translate that as "every second purple building".
(link: http://www.auteursdejeux.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=707)
I'm going to keep looking for card scans I guess, but I'm pretty sure we're en route to the right answer here.  (What language was Citadels first published in, does anyone know?)

Awesome justification! Citadels does seem to have a lot of rule ambiguities, and being published in English as an afterthought would help explain that. :)

Earliest Luding cite is the French version (1999)

I have always played it this way.

You have -this- purple district card (wishing well) and you have -other- purple district cards. Count them up minus the wishing well and that is the number of points.


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Why do you get an extra point for each fenced stable in Agricola?
Most of the scoring rules in Agricola makes sense because they reward you for doing well in various categories (like crops and animals). However, I haven't been able to figure out why the rules reward fenced stables with a bonus point. When combined with the fact unfenced stables can can only hold one animal, this seems like to make unfenced stables unnecessarily weak. Why did the game creators choose to add an extra point for fenced stables?

Unfenced stables give you a point by removing an unused farmyard space at the end of the game.
Since you get -1 point for each unused farmyard space, and stables count as a used farmyard space, they are also 'rewarded' with one point. In order to keep the balance, the rules ensure that you effectively get one point for each stable no matter where it is placed. This allows stable placement to be determined solely by your desired animal capacity instead of points for the stables themselves.
Alternatively, the game creators could have removed both of these benefits and given stables no points, but that would have made stables far too weak in the game.


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When should I choose to redesign my Alhambra?
My family and I have played several games of Alhambra now, and while we're still relative beginners, we've noticed that we rarely if ever choose to redesign our Alhambras (move tiles to or from our boards). In fact, I think its happened less than 5 times in our past 5 games. Is this normal? The only time we really redesign is after we've bought a tile we couldn't use to deprive someone else of it and have nothing better to do with our turn. Otherwise, its just way too expensive in terms of lost opportunities to take money or buy tiles.
When should a player choose to redesign their Alhambra?

As far as I'm concerned, your intuitions through play are correct.  Redesigning your Alhambra is an action of last resort, rather than an action a player is likely to take multiple times per game.  Quite often I don't redesign my Alhambra at all during the course of a game.  If you can construct a reasonably expansive Alhambra where it is easy to add new tiles no matter what their configuration of walls, you may well not need to resort to a redesign at any point in the game.
On the other hand, just because a strategy is not that universally great, doesn't mean you shouldn't use it if circumstances dictate that it is the right one.  I find that, in the early game, going all-out for walls tends to be beneficial, and if you do this you may end up in a situation where there are tiles you want to buy but can't currently place.  In such cases, it makes sense to grab those tiles for your reserve and use a redesign action at some point in the second or third round to make your Alhambra easier to expand.  Likewise, it would often seem foolish to pass up on a tile that you can buy for exact money, just because you can't place it.  You can offset the action you lose by placing the tile in your reserve with the action you've gained by buying for exact.
Generally taking a good money card, or combination of money cards, will be the correct play, before or after buying a tile for exact price.  On the other hand, I usually find that at least once per game you will be confronted with a mediocre selection of money (let's say 5 5 4 4, in unappealing colours).  Such occasions give you a prime opportunity for a redesign of your Alhambra, and dump the inferior money picks on your opponents instead of yourself.  Would you really rather pick up a poor money card, and open up much better picks for your neighbour?  Sometimes picking up the money that is available is an actively unappealing option, and this gives you a prime chance to perform a useful Alhambra redesign action instead.
In short, most of the time an Alhambra redesign is not the optimum play, but there will usually be at least one occasion during a game where there isn't much else you need to do with your turn, making it not a bad play at all.  The player who remains flexible and gives himself the opportunity to change  their strategy via a well-timed Alhambra redesign will win more games, on average, than the player who fixates on a one-track strategy that can be stymied by a bad run of luck. (Case in point: I played against someone who ended the game with about 9 tiles in their reserve the other week. If they'd been imaginative enough to do an Alhambra redesign to open up their board at some point, instead of waiting for the tiles to arrive that would fit into their wall arrangement... they'd definitely have done a lot better in that game.)


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Pros and Cons of running a deck with no 1-mana spells?
Sometimes I've noticed myself building decks that have no spells that cost 0 or 1 mana, and instead have extra spells that cost 2 mana to make sure I don't get crushed in the early game. 1-drops only really shine on turn 1 or when you squeeze them in on later turns, so switching them all out for 2-drops seems like it could potentially be advantageous. Am I making a big mistake by doing this?
I understand that this is highly situational in terms of deck-type and the cards in question. I would think an Aggro deck would want to run 1-drops just to get swinging by turn 2, even if they could've waited and got a more powerful creature later on. There are also some 1-mana spells that are good enough to be competitive with 2-drops anyway. But in general, what are the costs and benefits of running a deck with all the 1-mana cards shifted up to more powerful 2-mana cards?
(I primarily play limited formats, but I don't think constructed vs. limited would matter much in the context of this question)

I think it's a too broad question. Depending on format and deck strategy there are lots of answers to this question.

When I'm playing standard, the game is typically decided in the first 5 or 6 turns. Consider how devistating a Titan was, and the number of extremely powerful 6 drops compared to extremely powerful 5 drops. Now in the current set, development actively tried to extend the game further out, but still in many cases the game is set in stone (barring a true bomb, of course) by turn 6. If you don't have a solid 1 drop in a standard game, you aren't so doomed that you scoop right away, but you are at a significant disadvantage because you lost the ability to play on one of the 5 game defining turns.
When I'm playing draft, assuming the opponent doesn't get mana screwed, mana flooded, color screwed, or some other 'lame' win, I expect the game to really not be decided until turn 8 or 9. And due to the sporadic nature of bombs in your draft decks, can completely turn around at any time. So missing out on a first turn creature and falling a little behind isn't a big deal. It's still not good to start at a disadvantage, but you're much more likely to come back from this in draft than in standard.
Now in something like Commander, when you have 40 life, a 1 mana creature doesn't do much at all. In fact, I only have 4 one mana spells at all (which, drawing 7 cards out of 100, means I have a about a 1/3 chance of getting one - not very high) in my main Commander deck, and none of them are creatures. They are all highly utility too: Sol Ring, which i consider more like a land than a spell, Shrieking Affliction, which isn't much of a turn 1 spell, but does a lot of damage over the course of the game, Virulent Swipe just because death touch is very important to the deck, and Quest for the Gravelord to profit from people fighting eachother. So really, only one of those cards is intended to be played on turn 1, and is still viable at any time in the game. (5/5s are always welcome!)
So, it's important to know what the tempo of the game is. I have control decks that don't mind not having a 1-drop. Multiplayer doesn't normally need one. It's all about knowing your deck, the tempo, and even your opponents. Like so many things... playtest, playtest, playtest!!

Note that the 6-drop Titans aren't really turn-6 cards in the formats where they were played competitively They're turn-4 cards in a ramp deck. Or turn-7 cards in a control deck (because "Six mana is way more than five... maybe two mana more.").

Great point on the speed of the format; zero and one drops are even more important in Vintage where games are often decided by turn 4.

In Limited, you may well want to avoid 0 and 1 drops.  The advantage of 1 drops is that they're quite marginal cards... which can come out on turn 1, and generate quite a lot of early pressure if they do.  (I'm obviously talking about "true" 1 drops, and not things like Giant Growth which you never play on turn 1.)
In an aggro Constructed deck, your game plan is to generate as much pressure as quickly as possible, and 2-power one drops will very likely be a big part of this plan.  In Limited, though, unless things have gone very well for you, or you're drafting Zendikar, you probably aren't planning to swarm and kill your opponent inside the first five turns.  As such, having cards in your deck which are good on turn 1 but pretty much dead draws after turn 5 doesn't seem like maximising your win chances.
Don't get me wrong, you should always try to gauge the speed of the format you're playing in, and make sure your deck allows you to make plenty of relevant plays before your opponent  creates so much tempo advantage for himself that it will be difficult for you to make a comeback.  It's just that, outside of Constructed, it's not usually the case that missing a turn 1 play will make that difference.  So you will probably be better off concentrating on card power instead of card velocity (to coin a phrase).  Just remember that filling your deck chock full of powerful 7-drops isn't likely to work out for you either, at the other end of the scale!

Agressive Rakdos and Gruul-style decks in RTR are also happy to play all the two-power one-drops they can get their hands on; Rakdos Cackler is excellent and Dryad Militant quite viable in that kind of deck, and I've even seen (as Steve Sadin points out) some excellent white aggro decks using Trained Caracal/Judge's Familiar and Ethereal Armor.  It's not every draft format where a true aggro style is viable, but Wizards has apparently been making it more and more of an option the last few years.

Actually, constructed vs. limited does make a major difference here, simply in the quality of the one-drops that are likely to be available.  As a for-instance, a card like Deathrite Shaman is going to be nearly as fine in a well-built draft deck as he will be in a constructed deck, but you can't exactly say 'today I think I'll draft a Golgari deck and open Deathrite Shaman'!  (Besides, you would clearly say '...and open Pack Rat' instead...)
For limited, it's not only just fine to have a deck without any one-drops, I would say it's more common than not.  The problem is that most one-drops are just too quickly outclassed and can't get enough damage through in time to be worth the burden of top-decking them in the midgame when you need something that can actually punch through.  There are certainly exceptions (an aggressive Rakdos deck would benefit from a multiplicity of Rakdos Cacklers, for instance) and many decks can be enhanced by the 'right' one-drop — but I wouldn't consider a lack of one-drops a detriment for any but the most agressive of limited decks.

Cheap spells often give you a small benefit for the cost of a card. Expensive spells often gives you a bigger benefit and still only costing you a card. This means that you get more out of each card with more expensive spells.
So, why don't you only play the expensive spells to maximize your output from your cards? Well, obviously, if you only play 8-drops you're going to end up losing a lot of games. Sure, Incinerate is a stronger card than Shock but it can't kill a Raging Goblin until you have 2 mana. Can you afford to take that extra hit?
It's really that simple, expensive cards give you a greater effect but later on (or maybe not at all). What suits you best is all about what your game plan is and what you're up against.
I think you should have a look at so called 'cantrips'. They are cheap spells with a small positive effect and also draws you a card. So if you don't want to play anything that costs you a card at turn 1 a cantrip is perfect. Examples: Brainstorm, Ponder, Sleight of Hand, Peek, Gitaxian Probe.

One drops are nearly useless in multiplayer, since they represent an even smaller fraction of the damage that you need to do over the course of a game. A 2/1 for one mana can deal one tenth the necessary damage to win a duel, but with 4+ opponents it is only dealing one fortyith that damage.
If the card doesn't provide mana (Birds of Paradise), make everyone sacrifice a creature (Innocent Blood), tutor (Vampiric Tutor), or draw lots of cards (Land Tax) then it probably isn't worth playing. There are of course exceptions, cards that do scale well (Soul Warden) in multiplayer, but in general most cards below 4 CMC don't do much in multiplayer, creatures especially. You are almost always going to be able to out class your opponents decks if you play with zero 1-drops, so that when the mid/late game hits you are drawing higher quality spells.

This can vary between formats, but in some general way, it goes like this.
For constructed:
If you are playing an aggro deck, you will need 1 drops. Usually a lot of them, mostly because your main plan is to win in turn 4 (or 5 if things go wrong), so your 1 drops will be relevant half of the match (turns 1 and 2 because you will prefer to have 3 creatures 2 turn instead 1 creature, so they would need 3 1-mana responses to kill them or a sweeper). Furthermore, it is possible you never draw your 4rd land, so your 1-mana will be relevant the whole match by enabling you to play 2 spells by turn.
If you are playing control, you mostly will not play 1 drops. Maybe some shock or equivalent to kill early creatures, of course, some cards are good enough for control decks but remember your main plan is to win via card advantage (i.e. you have 5 cards in your hand with 2 permanents in battle and they have nothing).
If you play combo, well, every combo deck is different, so it depends of the parts of the combo. Anyway, you probably will want some 1-mana draw/cycling cards so you can find the parts faster.
For limited:
You probably should not go aggro because you will cant get enough good 1-drops, except in rare cases. Combo is an even rarer option. Limited is more about bombs because the synergy of a decks is low (i.e. you are drafting a goblin deck but you could not get 4 of each goblin lord), so individual power will make the difference. As a regular rule, I don't play 1 mana spells unless they can be scaled (by pumping, in example) or they are really good in a long game (like Land Tax). Of course, if you are playing good and many bombs, you could take some 1-mana draw/cycling cards to, you know, draw them more often.


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Can I use Act of Aggression to steal their attacking creature and block with it?
My opponent declares two creatures as attackers. I want to play Act of Aggression to gain control of one of their creatures and so I can have it block their other creature. Is this possible? Is so, during what step do I need to play my Act of Aggression? If I played it during my declare blockers step, would the creature that I now controlled still be attacking me?

Yes, that's fine.  You would play the spell during the declare attackers step, after attackers are declared, but before proceeding to the declare blockers step.  Then you are free to declare it as a blocker.  If you wait for your declare blockers step, it's too late to block with the creature.
The ordering is:

Declare Attackers Starts:
Turn Based Action - Attackers are declared
Players get Priority <- Cast Spell Now!
Declare Blockers Starts:
Turn Based Action - Blockers are declared
Players get Priority <- Too late
to use as blocker if cast now!

Any time a creature changes controllers, it is automatically removed from combat, so it will no longer be considered attacking you (or attacking/blocking at all if it previously was).


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Can I tap a creature with summoning sickness to pay "tap an untapped creature you control" costs?
I have a Chosen of Markov on the battlefield and I played a vampire earlier this turn. Can I tap both to transform Chosen of Markov even though I just played the vampire?
Extra Example: I play Battle Screech to put two 1/1 white bird tokens into play. Can I now tap a both of them and another creature I control to pay Battle Screech's flashback cost of tapping three white creatures?
Obviously these creatures couldn't use any tap abilities until my next turn, but since the tapping is coming from a different source, I figured the situation might be different.

Yes, you can. Relevant rule:

302.6. A creature’s activated ability with the tap symbol or the untap symbol in its activation cost can’t be activated unless the creature has been under its controller’s control continuously since his or her most recent turn began. A creature can’t attack unless it has been under its controller’s control continuously since his or her most recent turn began. This rule is informally called the “summoning sickness” rule.

This is the tap symbol:

The only limit that summoning sickness imposes is about the tap symbol . "Tap an untapped Vampire you control" is not the tap symbol.
It has nothing to do with being from another source. Heritage Druid could tap herself the turn she comes out.

Added a little for completeness.

bear in mind that some older cards might not use the tap symbol or they might use a different tap symbol

@Sam I am, What's printed on the card is of no importance. It's what's in Gatherer that matters, and Gatherer only uses the new symbol, even for old cards.


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Is a spell with split mana in its cost a multicolored spell?
Say I play a Noggle Bandit (or any card with split mana in its cost). Does its color depend on what mana I use to play it, or is it always both red and blue? It seems a little weird that this card would return Aurora Eidolon from my graveyard to my hand AND be able to block red creatures with intimidate if I only paid blue mana for it, but I highly doubt that it would 'remember' the mana-color used to play it. Likewise, Reaper King would always be 5 colors no matter how I pay its cost, right?

A card's color is all colors contained in its mana cost, be it regular mana symbols and/or hybrid and/or Phyrexian mana, plus the color of its color indicator, if any:

202.2d An object with one or more hybrid mana symbols and/or Phyrexian mana symbols in its mana cost is all of the colors of those mana symbols, in addition to any other colors the object might be. (Most cards with hybrid mana symbols in their mana costs are printed in a two-tone frame. See rule 107.4e.)

Also, it's not at all unusual that a card has a color that is different to what you pay to cast it. There are numerous cases where those two properties are unrelated.
Examples include:

Creatures that have no mana costs at all or cost zero mana
Creatures that have their colored mana costs reduced to zero
Creatures that are brought into play without paying its mana costs through other means
Creatures that have alternative costs that do not include mana at all
and so on.

In other words, Yes.

@cdeszaq I prefer a "Yes, because..." though. It is what makes a correct answer a good answer.

I agree with you completely, and was just filling in the missing affirmative :)

You can say that Ghostfire is the exception that proves the rule. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?size=small&type=card&name=Ghostfire&options=

@AndSoYouCode It's not an exception per se. An ability or property of a specific card can override any rule in the rule book.

@Hackworth Yeah, you're right. My point was that since they feel the need to write it explicit then it's an exception to the regular case.