After watching my Oakland Raiders stumble through an historically inept season, I again have to do two things. First, I have to pick a proxy team to cheer for in the playoffs (Colts? Bears?). Second, I get to offer my simple prescription for turning this team around:
1) Use their draft pick to trade down and stockpile additional picks or guys who can play right now.
2) Draft defensive players ... the problems with the offense won't be solved by throwing rookies at it, and you never want to reinforce failure.
3) Fire Art and every coach associated with special teams or the offensive side of the ball.
4) Promote defensive coordinator Ryan to head coach ... this will show the team that success is rewarded, and that grit is recognized. It will also be the first step toward applying the Raiders' successful defensive mindset to the team as a whole.
5) Look outside the organization for an offensive coordinator.
6) Look to improve the offense through free agency and trades to find guys who can help this team today.
With a successful defense and a floundering offense the temptation will be to select offensive players in the draft ... but I really think the Raiders should reinforce their very good defense with an eye toward making it a dominant unit that can carry the offense for the next couple seasons. Then, develop an offense that can eat the clock and score more often than not on a short field. It's basically the same formula that got the Bears into the driver's seat in the NFC ... and what the Raiders are doing now sure isn't working.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Assimilated
I won’t be doing my end-of-year game report for several days, but the story of the year is already clear – I have been assimilated by (Richard) Borg. His Commands & Colors games (Battle Cry, Memoir ’44, Battlelore, and especially Commands & Colors: Ancients) were my most-played game by a comfortable margin.
It was Commands & Colors: Ancients (CCA) that really won me over to this system. My previous experience with Battle Cry (BC) and Memoir ’44 (M44) had been mixed. I enjoyed both games for their components and ease-of-play, but my inner grognard couldn’t unreservedly embrace either system. The BC unit interactions (particularly the use of infantry) felt too inauthentic to me, and while M44 was a step-up, the absence of overt overwatch (defensive) fire made the game too chaotic and flighty to feel like WWII company-level command (not that this deficiency prevented me from buying all the M44 expansions anyway).
I resisted CCA. It was yet another iteration of a system that had under whelmed me in the past; it didn’t have cool little figures (employing wooden blocks instead); and the subject (Rome vs. Carthage) was only mildly intriguing. BUT … I did like some of the core things the system was trying to do, and I’d previously read that CCA was the Ur-Game for this system, from which all the other games in this system were derived, so my antenna was up. When favorable word came in from trusted wargame net sources (particularly Charles Vassey), I decided I wanted this game.
After several weeks of hunting around, I scared up a copy in trade with a private owner on Boardgamegeek. After a tedious block-stickering session I got it on the table with Matt Tieger about a week before the first MANCON (an event I’ll have to write about someday). Tiege had taken a shine to Battle Cry and had become my primary lunch game opponent, so I had high hopes he’d take a shine to CCA.
But he didn’t. Tiege didn’t care for the multiple (and subtly different) unit classes; he thought the blocks were inferior to figures; he thought the battle-back mechanic made an already-dicey game too luck-dependant; and he didn’t think the additional rules load versus Battle Cry added enough to the game. But I loved it. For the first time, I felt like the mechanics of this system weren’t fighting the theme. And as someone who had tried to get into ancients through other game systems (primarily GMT’s Great Battles of History series, and the DBA/DBM miniatures rules), I had a better idea than Tiege of what the game was trying to simulate under-the-hood.
And here is where I found the game especially brilliant. BC and M44 had entirely too much “boom and zoom” for my taste – individual units vaulting across the battlefield, easily crossing the killing ground of open terrain, and blowing their targets away at point-blank range with little fear of reprisal. The line command, support, leadership, and battle back mechanics of CCA forced me for the first time in this series to really keep an eye on unit cohesion, and to pick my targets with an eye toward hitting my opponent in the flanks.
I also really appreciated the “grit” that turned off Tiege from the game. After a couple scenarios, the seemingly useless “light” troop class became my favorite. I valued them for their speed and flexibility … I liked how they could soften up distant units with missile fire, how they could sometimes move rapidly enough to cut off enemy retreats (a vital tactic in CCA), I liked their ability to act as skirmishers to screen my main battle line (while evading the attacks of heavier troops), and I liked how they could be empowered by special command cards like “Move-Fight-Move” and “Darken the Skies” to execute game changing maneuvers under the right circumstances. It did take me a couple games to become comfortable with the difference between light infantry and auxiliaries (and in this area I agree with Tiege that the fine slicing of unit abilities presents an obstacle to beginning players), but this was the kind of learning curve I was willing to endure because the game was proving to be so rewarding.
But how was I mounting this curve without a ready opponent? Here’s where the other seismic shift in my gaming came in – I committed to learning VASSAL to play CCA virtually, and on-line. VASSAL is a Java-based program allowing users to play wargames live over the net (or alternately play-by-email style, with alternating turns recorded in log files). The program is a free labor of love originally designed to enable play of Advanced Squad Leader. It was just coming on-line when I was laboriously playing ASL by hand over email in the early 1990s, but without broadband and without the technical chops to get the program downloaded and properly installed, I never learned how to use the system.
Flash-forward a decade and change and VASSAL has evolved into a considerably easier-to-install (and use) system that supports not just ASL, but dozens of games. The modules look virtually identical to their corresponding games, so it really is like playing a boardgame on your computer. CCA seemed about the right complexity for a game to learn the VASSAL interface, and I loved the game enough that I was genuinely despairing that it was failing to get traction as a face-to-face game. And I finally had broadband so the system promised to run at an acceptable speed.
So after a couple false starts getting the game installed, I hooked up with Don Clarke over the yahoogroups list supporting CCA for a learning game. It was the 4th of July, and my family was out at the neighborhood park having a fine time in the sun, but I was inside hunched over the computer having a revelatory wargame experience. Don was gracious both in explaining the protocols off the VASSAL interface and the finer points of CCA (many of the subtle interactions involving retreats and leaders had eluded me). The game took a bit longer than I expected it was it was a terrific experience, and I came out of it hooked not just on CCA but also very intrigued with VASSAL as a means of playing my vast an neglected library of wargames.
After that I dove into CCA pretty deep, playing a dozen on-line games, and getting the rules down pat. The more I got into the system, the more rewarding I found it to be … the common complaints that the game was too driven by the luck of the dice or cards were things I found could (usually) be managed by careful play, while the history present in the game inspired me to read in the subject and reconsider “Ancients” as a wargame genre. By Fall I’d started to burn out on the game just a little, but I still joined an on-line tournament through yahoogroups, where I got my hide tanned but (most importantly) met a very compatible opponent in Ed Wehrenberg. I’d even started to get a little traction with the game with other local face-to-face opponents …
… but by that time Days of Wonder had announced Battlelore, and I sensed CCA might be riding into the sunset. And that was all right. At twenty plays CCA had more than given me my money’s worth, and I wasn’t looking forward to trying to scare up the expansion sets on the trade market. With Battlelore, I could have my cake an eat it too … the medieval engine of Battlelore promised to include many of the things I appreciated about CCA, while proving more accessible thanks to it’s fantasy theme and buckets of little toy soldiers.
So I eased out of the larger on-line CCA community and didn’t sweat trying to play the game with face-to-face opponents, and figured to get into Battlelore when it came out at the end of the year. But then a funny thing happened … my on-line buddy Ed W. suggested that we play Memoir-44 on VASSAL. With my interest in Borg’s system reinvigorated by CCA, and with M44 being a game that I’d invested in and always regretted having not played more, I was happy to give it a shot.
And I found that I enjoyed M44 a lot more for having experienced CCA. It’s still not a great WWII game for me, but now that I more fully appreciated the mechanics of the Borg system as a whole, I could see how the terrain effects in M44 were at least trying to depict WWII combined arms. I also found that the scenarios in the Russian expansion were a bit more flavorful than those in the base game (something I suspected after a single play of the Stalingrad scenario face-to-face several months earlier). I liked the game enough to break down and order the Pacific expansion, and I played several games face-to-face at the second MANCON and with my nephew during my Christmas Colorado Springs visit. I still like this game a bit less than CCA but I enjoy WWII more than Ancients, and I look forward to playing several more games on-line next year.
I might even go back to Battle Cry. I played BC twice this past year with Tiege, both times with some house rules we cribbed up to make things feel more like the Civil War (to me, at least), but I wouldn’t mind playing it by-the-book again, now that I better appreciate the subtleties of this system. Maybe I’ll try to get this one going with my boys.
And so the end of the year arrived and with it came Battlelore. I’d pre-ordered two copies from Days of Wonder (one for me, and one as a Christmas gift for my nephew Scott), and of course they showed up during the busiest time of the year, when I was trying to wrap things up at work, get Christmas shopping done, and get my family out of town for our holiday trip to Colorado Springs. I barely had time to open the box and flip through the rules. I joked that my copy came with pre-painted figures … because Tiege had ordered his own copy, and was painting his figures, and it was unlikely I would find time to play the game before Tiege finished his painting project. With two or three other guys in the local group also purchasing copies of the game the prospects were positive for getting plenty of face-to-face play of Battlelore … but it didn’t look like that would happen before the New Year.
But Battlelore (BL) has proven to be a hit with Scott here in Colorado Springs, and I have unexpectedly managed half-dozen games with him. I’d planted seeds with Scott a couple years ago by giving him a copy of M44, and it turns out he and his friends were enthusiastic players of that game, so he hit the ground running with BL, genuinely enjoying the game and not seeming to mind (so much) that it took him away from World of Warcraft.
Battlelore appears to be the real deal. I think it will be a solid hit with the guys back home, although I think the components will need some pimping (the scheme of generic troop figures distinguished by banner shape and color wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped). The game is similar enough to CCA that I quickly picked it up, but different enough in critical areas that it feels fresh again (maybe I’ll write about the differences between the systems another time). I don’t think I’ll play this one on-line, as I’d like to keep it fresh for face-to-face play. I’m interested to see where Days of Wonder’s ambitious expansion plans lead with this title – there’s already been some small backlash that the GMT expansion for CCA just added new blocks that largely reproduced what was available in the base game. Because of the novelty of the figures, DoW might be able to get away with the same thing for Battlelore, but I hope they really take advantage of the fantasy theme to add truly different creatures, terrain, and magical effects, while also finding an opportunity to reintroduce CCA concepts absent from BL (primarily the leader effects, and evasion).
So count me a raving fan of Borg’s games now, well and truly assimilated, thanks to the very intriguing design of CCA, and the positive experience that game drove through VASSAL. It really is amazing how many times Mr. Borg’s games hit the table for me in 2006 (virtually or otherwise). Beyond the Commands & Colors system we even played Liar’s Dice a half-dozen times, so the guy has me coming and going. In the year ahead I hope to play M44 frequently on-line, maybe participate in another CCA tournament, get my Battlelore guys painted and based and play that game a bit, maybe play Battle Cry with the kids, keep an eye out for the development of the Battlelore expansions, and cross my fingers that Commands & Colors Napoleonics will be announced.
And maybe I’ll finally try ASL over VASSAL, too.
It was Commands & Colors: Ancients (CCA) that really won me over to this system. My previous experience with Battle Cry (BC) and Memoir ’44 (M44) had been mixed. I enjoyed both games for their components and ease-of-play, but my inner grognard couldn’t unreservedly embrace either system. The BC unit interactions (particularly the use of infantry) felt too inauthentic to me, and while M44 was a step-up, the absence of overt overwatch (defensive) fire made the game too chaotic and flighty to feel like WWII company-level command (not that this deficiency prevented me from buying all the M44 expansions anyway).
I resisted CCA. It was yet another iteration of a system that had under whelmed me in the past; it didn’t have cool little figures (employing wooden blocks instead); and the subject (Rome vs. Carthage) was only mildly intriguing. BUT … I did like some of the core things the system was trying to do, and I’d previously read that CCA was the Ur-Game for this system, from which all the other games in this system were derived, so my antenna was up. When favorable word came in from trusted wargame net sources (particularly Charles Vassey), I decided I wanted this game.
After several weeks of hunting around, I scared up a copy in trade with a private owner on Boardgamegeek. After a tedious block-stickering session I got it on the table with Matt Tieger about a week before the first MANCON (an event I’ll have to write about someday). Tiege had taken a shine to Battle Cry and had become my primary lunch game opponent, so I had high hopes he’d take a shine to CCA.
But he didn’t. Tiege didn’t care for the multiple (and subtly different) unit classes; he thought the blocks were inferior to figures; he thought the battle-back mechanic made an already-dicey game too luck-dependant; and he didn’t think the additional rules load versus Battle Cry added enough to the game. But I loved it. For the first time, I felt like the mechanics of this system weren’t fighting the theme. And as someone who had tried to get into ancients through other game systems (primarily GMT’s Great Battles of History series, and the DBA/DBM miniatures rules), I had a better idea than Tiege of what the game was trying to simulate under-the-hood.
And here is where I found the game especially brilliant. BC and M44 had entirely too much “boom and zoom” for my taste – individual units vaulting across the battlefield, easily crossing the killing ground of open terrain, and blowing their targets away at point-blank range with little fear of reprisal. The line command, support, leadership, and battle back mechanics of CCA forced me for the first time in this series to really keep an eye on unit cohesion, and to pick my targets with an eye toward hitting my opponent in the flanks.
I also really appreciated the “grit” that turned off Tiege from the game. After a couple scenarios, the seemingly useless “light” troop class became my favorite. I valued them for their speed and flexibility … I liked how they could soften up distant units with missile fire, how they could sometimes move rapidly enough to cut off enemy retreats (a vital tactic in CCA), I liked their ability to act as skirmishers to screen my main battle line (while evading the attacks of heavier troops), and I liked how they could be empowered by special command cards like “Move-Fight-Move” and “Darken the Skies” to execute game changing maneuvers under the right circumstances. It did take me a couple games to become comfortable with the difference between light infantry and auxiliaries (and in this area I agree with Tiege that the fine slicing of unit abilities presents an obstacle to beginning players), but this was the kind of learning curve I was willing to endure because the game was proving to be so rewarding.
But how was I mounting this curve without a ready opponent? Here’s where the other seismic shift in my gaming came in – I committed to learning VASSAL to play CCA virtually, and on-line. VASSAL is a Java-based program allowing users to play wargames live over the net (or alternately play-by-email style, with alternating turns recorded in log files). The program is a free labor of love originally designed to enable play of Advanced Squad Leader. It was just coming on-line when I was laboriously playing ASL by hand over email in the early 1990s, but without broadband and without the technical chops to get the program downloaded and properly installed, I never learned how to use the system.
Flash-forward a decade and change and VASSAL has evolved into a considerably easier-to-install (and use) system that supports not just ASL, but dozens of games. The modules look virtually identical to their corresponding games, so it really is like playing a boardgame on your computer. CCA seemed about the right complexity for a game to learn the VASSAL interface, and I loved the game enough that I was genuinely despairing that it was failing to get traction as a face-to-face game. And I finally had broadband so the system promised to run at an acceptable speed.
So after a couple false starts getting the game installed, I hooked up with Don Clarke over the yahoogroups list supporting CCA for a learning game. It was the 4th of July, and my family was out at the neighborhood park having a fine time in the sun, but I was inside hunched over the computer having a revelatory wargame experience. Don was gracious both in explaining the protocols off the VASSAL interface and the finer points of CCA (many of the subtle interactions involving retreats and leaders had eluded me). The game took a bit longer than I expected it was it was a terrific experience, and I came out of it hooked not just on CCA but also very intrigued with VASSAL as a means of playing my vast an neglected library of wargames.
After that I dove into CCA pretty deep, playing a dozen on-line games, and getting the rules down pat. The more I got into the system, the more rewarding I found it to be … the common complaints that the game was too driven by the luck of the dice or cards were things I found could (usually) be managed by careful play, while the history present in the game inspired me to read in the subject and reconsider “Ancients” as a wargame genre. By Fall I’d started to burn out on the game just a little, but I still joined an on-line tournament through yahoogroups, where I got my hide tanned but (most importantly) met a very compatible opponent in Ed Wehrenberg. I’d even started to get a little traction with the game with other local face-to-face opponents …
… but by that time Days of Wonder had announced Battlelore, and I sensed CCA might be riding into the sunset. And that was all right. At twenty plays CCA had more than given me my money’s worth, and I wasn’t looking forward to trying to scare up the expansion sets on the trade market. With Battlelore, I could have my cake an eat it too … the medieval engine of Battlelore promised to include many of the things I appreciated about CCA, while proving more accessible thanks to it’s fantasy theme and buckets of little toy soldiers.
So I eased out of the larger on-line CCA community and didn’t sweat trying to play the game with face-to-face opponents, and figured to get into Battlelore when it came out at the end of the year. But then a funny thing happened … my on-line buddy Ed W. suggested that we play Memoir-44 on VASSAL. With my interest in Borg’s system reinvigorated by CCA, and with M44 being a game that I’d invested in and always regretted having not played more, I was happy to give it a shot.
And I found that I enjoyed M44 a lot more for having experienced CCA. It’s still not a great WWII game for me, but now that I more fully appreciated the mechanics of the Borg system as a whole, I could see how the terrain effects in M44 were at least trying to depict WWII combined arms. I also found that the scenarios in the Russian expansion were a bit more flavorful than those in the base game (something I suspected after a single play of the Stalingrad scenario face-to-face several months earlier). I liked the game enough to break down and order the Pacific expansion, and I played several games face-to-face at the second MANCON and with my nephew during my Christmas Colorado Springs visit. I still like this game a bit less than CCA but I enjoy WWII more than Ancients, and I look forward to playing several more games on-line next year.
I might even go back to Battle Cry. I played BC twice this past year with Tiege, both times with some house rules we cribbed up to make things feel more like the Civil War (to me, at least), but I wouldn’t mind playing it by-the-book again, now that I better appreciate the subtleties of this system. Maybe I’ll try to get this one going with my boys.
And so the end of the year arrived and with it came Battlelore. I’d pre-ordered two copies from Days of Wonder (one for me, and one as a Christmas gift for my nephew Scott), and of course they showed up during the busiest time of the year, when I was trying to wrap things up at work, get Christmas shopping done, and get my family out of town for our holiday trip to Colorado Springs. I barely had time to open the box and flip through the rules. I joked that my copy came with pre-painted figures … because Tiege had ordered his own copy, and was painting his figures, and it was unlikely I would find time to play the game before Tiege finished his painting project. With two or three other guys in the local group also purchasing copies of the game the prospects were positive for getting plenty of face-to-face play of Battlelore … but it didn’t look like that would happen before the New Year.
But Battlelore (BL) has proven to be a hit with Scott here in Colorado Springs, and I have unexpectedly managed half-dozen games with him. I’d planted seeds with Scott a couple years ago by giving him a copy of M44, and it turns out he and his friends were enthusiastic players of that game, so he hit the ground running with BL, genuinely enjoying the game and not seeming to mind (so much) that it took him away from World of Warcraft.
Battlelore appears to be the real deal. I think it will be a solid hit with the guys back home, although I think the components will need some pimping (the scheme of generic troop figures distinguished by banner shape and color wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped). The game is similar enough to CCA that I quickly picked it up, but different enough in critical areas that it feels fresh again (maybe I’ll write about the differences between the systems another time). I don’t think I’ll play this one on-line, as I’d like to keep it fresh for face-to-face play. I’m interested to see where Days of Wonder’s ambitious expansion plans lead with this title – there’s already been some small backlash that the GMT expansion for CCA just added new blocks that largely reproduced what was available in the base game. Because of the novelty of the figures, DoW might be able to get away with the same thing for Battlelore, but I hope they really take advantage of the fantasy theme to add truly different creatures, terrain, and magical effects, while also finding an opportunity to reintroduce CCA concepts absent from BL (primarily the leader effects, and evasion).
So count me a raving fan of Borg’s games now, well and truly assimilated, thanks to the very intriguing design of CCA, and the positive experience that game drove through VASSAL. It really is amazing how many times Mr. Borg’s games hit the table for me in 2006 (virtually or otherwise). Beyond the Commands & Colors system we even played Liar’s Dice a half-dozen times, so the guy has me coming and going. In the year ahead I hope to play M44 frequently on-line, maybe participate in another CCA tournament, get my Battlelore guys painted and based and play that game a bit, maybe play Battle Cry with the kids, keep an eye out for the development of the Battlelore expansions, and cross my fingers that Commands & Colors Napoleonics will be announced.
And maybe I’ll finally try ASL over VASSAL, too.
Monday, December 25, 2006
Christmas In The War Room
I could probably name Christmas Eve activities all day before hitting on what I actually ended up doing on Christmas Eve -- answering phones at NORAD. Our Christmas trip to Colorado Springs has been on the books for weeks, and I knew we were going to Peterson AFB to do something related to the annual "Santa Tracking" they do at NORAD, but what I didn't know was that I was expected to do the tracking. Well, at least to man a bank of phones and email terminals in front of the updating "radar display" tracing Santa's drunken progress across the skies. Not quite the Doctor Strangelove war-room, but I'll take it (although it would have been cooler if we'd been inside Cheyane Mountain, and even cooler if Kim Il Jong used that opportunity to go hot, and we got sealed inside the mountain to ride out World War 3 with a bunch of Air Force kids and half the animated mascots in the Western United States who were on hand to high-five everyone and pose for photos).
Maybe that wouldn't have been so cool. But it would have been a singular post-apocalypse story.
NORAD has been doing this Santa tracking thing since 1955 ... kids can call in, and (now) log onto a website to watch Santa's "progress" on the map. They can also send email -- NORAD gets hundreds of thousands of emails each season, they told me -- and mostly what I did was answer email. But I only got about twenty messages in my two-hour shift, while the phones to the left and right of me were ringing off the hook (probably eighty-plus calls each in two hours). Because of the volume of contacts, NORAD puts out a call for volunteers ... most of the folks that were there with me were Air Force or their families. I'm not sure how I wound up there except that my hosts here in Colorado Springs are plugged into the vast Military Industrial Complex, being ex-Marine and ex-Navy officers.
Anyway, it was unexpected, and actually really nice, a kind of sudden left hook that put me in the Christmas spirit whether I wanted it or not. NORAD has a FAQ that you can reference when composing your replies, but pretty soon you get down the basics ... you offer an update about where Santa is right then on the "big board" ("He's over Iran, but because of the UN Sanctions he can't land!"), then you tell the kid when Santa will be in their part of the world, which is always between 9:00 PM and Midnight local time. The FAQ has all kinds of stuff in it about the technical specs of the sleigh if someone wants to ask a real zinger, but for the most part you just wing it. The highlight questions for me were how Santa takes a piss (and if NORAD can track the emissions), and a plaintive call from a New Jersey kid visiting relatives in Italy wanting to know if Santa would bring his gifts to Italy or to Jersey.
I manfully resisted the impulse to mix in a few nasty answers ("Santa is skipping your town this year," "Santa hates you," "We just shot down that fat fuck, sorry,"), but even with my good behavior I may have inherited some bad Christmas karma for my evil thoughts. It seems like both my boys are tumbling to Santa's ficticious nature this year -- I'm holding the line with evasive answers, and pointing to the vast authority of NORAD as proof this is anything but a hoax, but in their hearts my boys know Santa is a fraud (and my seven-year-old is even more matter-of-factly convinced of this than his allegedly more savvy nine-year-old brother). At this point my best hope is to duck-and-weave on the truth until mid-year, so at least this Christmas isn't tainted by tears of betrayal ... but I expect the whole thing will come unraveled in the Spring when the implausability of the Easter Bunny becomes just too great to ignore.
(Thanks to the Christmas viewers of this post from 2006 ... if you want to checkout my current blog, please mouse over to Longbox Graveyard!)
Maybe that wouldn't have been so cool. But it would have been a singular post-apocalypse story.
NORAD has been doing this Santa tracking thing since 1955 ... kids can call in, and (now) log onto a website to watch Santa's "progress" on the map. They can also send email -- NORAD gets hundreds of thousands of emails each season, they told me -- and mostly what I did was answer email. But I only got about twenty messages in my two-hour shift, while the phones to the left and right of me were ringing off the hook (probably eighty-plus calls each in two hours). Because of the volume of contacts, NORAD puts out a call for volunteers ... most of the folks that were there with me were Air Force or their families. I'm not sure how I wound up there except that my hosts here in Colorado Springs are plugged into the vast Military Industrial Complex, being ex-Marine and ex-Navy officers.
Anyway, it was unexpected, and actually really nice, a kind of sudden left hook that put me in the Christmas spirit whether I wanted it or not. NORAD has a FAQ that you can reference when composing your replies, but pretty soon you get down the basics ... you offer an update about where Santa is right then on the "big board" ("He's over Iran, but because of the UN Sanctions he can't land!"), then you tell the kid when Santa will be in their part of the world, which is always between 9:00 PM and Midnight local time. The FAQ has all kinds of stuff in it about the technical specs of the sleigh if someone wants to ask a real zinger, but for the most part you just wing it. The highlight questions for me were how Santa takes a piss (and if NORAD can track the emissions), and a plaintive call from a New Jersey kid visiting relatives in Italy wanting to know if Santa would bring his gifts to Italy or to Jersey.
I manfully resisted the impulse to mix in a few nasty answers ("Santa is skipping your town this year," "Santa hates you," "We just shot down that fat fuck, sorry,"), but even with my good behavior I may have inherited some bad Christmas karma for my evil thoughts. It seems like both my boys are tumbling to Santa's ficticious nature this year -- I'm holding the line with evasive answers, and pointing to the vast authority of NORAD as proof this is anything but a hoax, but in their hearts my boys know Santa is a fraud (and my seven-year-old is even more matter-of-factly convinced of this than his allegedly more savvy nine-year-old brother). At this point my best hope is to duck-and-weave on the truth until mid-year, so at least this Christmas isn't tainted by tears of betrayal ... but I expect the whole thing will come unraveled in the Spring when the implausability of the Easter Bunny becomes just too great to ignore.
(Thanks to the Christmas viewers of this post from 2006 ... if you want to checkout my current blog, please mouse over to Longbox Graveyard!)
Saturday, December 23, 2006
What Matters?
What matters (in games, at least)?
THEME MATTERS: By theme I don't mean the subject so much as the integration of the theme with the game mechanics. While I will always be more attracted to a game with panzers than (say) plantations, I'll pick a plantation game with a tightly-integrated theme over a generic panzer-pusher every time. I want the things I'm doing in a game to map to whatever the theme is trying to represent. This doesn't require simulation -- Power Grid and Commands & Colors: Ancients both succeed in integrating theme and mechanics for me, because the mechanics make me feel like I'm building a power network or keeping my troops in line, even if the games themselves bear only a secondary relationship to their subjects.
SPEED MATTERS: I will happily play a game that takes all day so long as they mechanisms and means of resolution are swift. I love games like Up Front for their speed of play (among other things) ... I don't care for games that require a lot of pondering, or for games that have a long tail of uninteresting process attached to every action. This is also one of the reasons while I'll find myself barking at players taking too long to make their move. Slowing down a game almost always takes the joy out of it for me. If I'm going to play a game that benefits from pondering (an optimization game like Tikal, or most wargames), then I prefer to play-by-email, where downtime doesn't intrude of my fun.
INTERACTIVITY MATTERS: I like to be consistently engaged in a game. Interactive sequences of play are valued over a game where I can walk away from the table for twenty minutes or more while my opponent takes his turn. I want to interact with the other players as much or more as with the game itself -- this is why I like auction games, or games with plenty of conflict.
COMPONENTS MATTER: Raised on American wargames and first-generation role-playing games, I quickly developed an immunity to production design. It didn't matter if the game was mimeographed, in a ziplock bag, with single-color counters on think, uncut pasteboard ... it was the PLAY that counted. My position was knocked on its ass when I played my first Euros ... there was simply no way I could ignore the value added to the game by the superior components of the best European boardgames. I found my tolerance for American wargames declining when effortlessly punching out the counters of a Euro; I found I really did prefer mounted maps (as I had back in the Avalon Hill days); I came to expect that cards could be part of any game without running the retail price through the roof (Up Front, I'm looking at YOU).
PRICE DOESN'T MATTER: At least, it doesn't matter much. And by this I mean I don't mind paying more for quality. And I also mean that I won't cut a game slack if it is free or inexpensive. This is why I've never been a fan of Cheapass Games ... the games might be inexpensive, but my time is not, and the opportunity cost of playing a poor game over a better one can't be offset by a lower retail cost of a game.
DEVELOPMENT MATTERS: I don't want to be a beta tester. I design games for a living ... when I sit down to play a boardgame, I don't want to discover significant holes in the rules, game-breaking strategies, or substantially imbalanced starting positions right out of the box. If I can spot these things in my first few plays, I expect the designer to have spotted them, too, and to have eliminated them from their design. I certainly can tinker with houserules to address game problems, but I don't want to.
THE PLAYERS MATTER: And the players matter most of all. This was driven home to me at GenCon Indy in 2005 ... everywhere I looked there were games to play, but for the most part I found I was evaluating the games strictly in terms of how they'd go over with the guys back home. Games are engines for social interaction, and if you aren't playing with funny, engaging, challenging, and fun people ... then, well, what's the point?
THEME MATTERS: By theme I don't mean the subject so much as the integration of the theme with the game mechanics. While I will always be more attracted to a game with panzers than (say) plantations, I'll pick a plantation game with a tightly-integrated theme over a generic panzer-pusher every time. I want the things I'm doing in a game to map to whatever the theme is trying to represent. This doesn't require simulation -- Power Grid and Commands & Colors: Ancients both succeed in integrating theme and mechanics for me, because the mechanics make me feel like I'm building a power network or keeping my troops in line, even if the games themselves bear only a secondary relationship to their subjects.
SPEED MATTERS: I will happily play a game that takes all day so long as they mechanisms and means of resolution are swift. I love games like Up Front for their speed of play (among other things) ... I don't care for games that require a lot of pondering, or for games that have a long tail of uninteresting process attached to every action. This is also one of the reasons while I'll find myself barking at players taking too long to make their move. Slowing down a game almost always takes the joy out of it for me. If I'm going to play a game that benefits from pondering (an optimization game like Tikal, or most wargames), then I prefer to play-by-email, where downtime doesn't intrude of my fun.
INTERACTIVITY MATTERS: I like to be consistently engaged in a game. Interactive sequences of play are valued over a game where I can walk away from the table for twenty minutes or more while my opponent takes his turn. I want to interact with the other players as much or more as with the game itself -- this is why I like auction games, or games with plenty of conflict.
COMPONENTS MATTER: Raised on American wargames and first-generation role-playing games, I quickly developed an immunity to production design. It didn't matter if the game was mimeographed, in a ziplock bag, with single-color counters on think, uncut pasteboard ... it was the PLAY that counted. My position was knocked on its ass when I played my first Euros ... there was simply no way I could ignore the value added to the game by the superior components of the best European boardgames. I found my tolerance for American wargames declining when effortlessly punching out the counters of a Euro; I found I really did prefer mounted maps (as I had back in the Avalon Hill days); I came to expect that cards could be part of any game without running the retail price through the roof (Up Front, I'm looking at YOU).
PRICE DOESN'T MATTER: At least, it doesn't matter much. And by this I mean I don't mind paying more for quality. And I also mean that I won't cut a game slack if it is free or inexpensive. This is why I've never been a fan of Cheapass Games ... the games might be inexpensive, but my time is not, and the opportunity cost of playing a poor game over a better one can't be offset by a lower retail cost of a game.
DEVELOPMENT MATTERS: I don't want to be a beta tester. I design games for a living ... when I sit down to play a boardgame, I don't want to discover significant holes in the rules, game-breaking strategies, or substantially imbalanced starting positions right out of the box. If I can spot these things in my first few plays, I expect the designer to have spotted them, too, and to have eliminated them from their design. I certainly can tinker with houserules to address game problems, but I don't want to.
THE PLAYERS MATTER: And the players matter most of all. This was driven home to me at GenCon Indy in 2005 ... everywhere I looked there were games to play, but for the most part I found I was evaluating the games strictly in terms of how they'd go over with the guys back home. Games are engines for social interaction, and if you aren't playing with funny, engaging, challenging, and fun people ... then, well, what's the point?
First Post
During difficult times recently I said that I wasn't looking for things to improve so much as I was hoping for a gap in the abuse. Which makes my life sound much worse than it is. I have no serious problems, and in fact things are going so well that I have the technology and the time to set up a blog to post thoughts about games and other stuff. So the name of this blog, like the blog itself, is a falsehood.
But, it's here.
But, it's here.
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