GMT's Combat Commander: Europe presents a handsome package. Nice cards, clean counters, good play aids, readable rules (though the rules aren't great for reference), and I really like the big hexes. After reading the rules a couple times I expected the worst of two worlds -- the tedium of ASL with the randomness of Up Front. What I got was something else. The game played more smoothly than I expected, and the learning curve was pretty gentle for a game with so many moving parts. Part of this is down to decades of playing the games upon which Combat Commander is based, but the example of play is also very good in this regard. We were quickly up and running, playing the game rather than fighting the rules, and by the end of our second scenario the rulebook checks were down to a tolerable minimum.
I liked the way leadership was handled, and the activation rules were good in the way of the best card-driven games, in that you are rarely able to do exactly what you want to do exactly when you wish to do it. The movement and terrain rules made sense. The objective system and the promised replayability of the scenarios were both attractive.
So far, so good. But while the game played smoothly, I can't say I enjoyed it very much.
I found the combat mechanisms tedious -- a lot of adding, card-flipping, and comparing of results. Something is definitely screwy in the Combat Commander combat system. Should modifiers for moving targets, spray fire, assault fire, point-blank fire, and ambush really be resident on action cards instead of being driven by terrain or unit behaviors and capabilities? Seems to me that something like spray fire isn't a resource that I carefully husband to play at the right time, but that's how this game plays it. Likewise it seems I shouldn't be able to guarantee that I'll have an ambush in close combat just because I have the proper card in my hand. Cards to activate units to fire, a card for attack value, a card for defense value, various cards to modify results up or down, and the possibility of diversions to resolve unrelated events ... this system needed more development, to eliminate the precious ideas and scrub out the grit. Was it really so critical to eliminate dice from the game? This makes it better because ... why, really? Different, yes, but better?
I never thought I'd say that I liked the ASL routing system, but I don't see how this is an improvement ... I play cards to make the bad guys run to cover? Really? I guess I can play rout cards on myself to get my brokies out of the open, but this seems like a book keeping process, rather than something I should spend a precious order to accomplish. And isn't the point of a rout that the troops are acting outside my control in the first place? If so, why is it linked to an "order?"
I didn't care for the way support weapons were handled, particularly for the way they are broken, fixed or eliminated on a "global" basis. I had two Russian MMGs go down because I pulled doubles as part of the same fire group (a reasonable penalty for risking sustained fire, but it felt odd that they both automatically went down at the same time). Then they both broke on cue a moment later during a sniper check. Well, thanks for that, I guess, but the illusion of random failure was sure disrupted by having both MMGs blow up at precisely the same instant.
The frequent interruptions to play out snipers or other events were distracting and didn't feel like battlefield chaos so much as "one damn thing after another." Worse yet, the fits and starts imposed by the system disrupt the kind of narrative that so richly informs games like Up Front or ASL. The randomness of the system, overall, is such that it is practically impossible to execute tactics. Certainly you are guided by tactical principles, but when you do coordinate a rush on an occupied farmhouse, you feel more like you've experienced a good run of cards than anything else. I certainly don't feel like I've been able to apply my superior knowledge of tactics or the game -- I just caught a break in the hand that was dealt me.
You have to knock out the champ to win, and Combat Commander fails to land a knock-out blow on either ASL or Up Front. I would play it again, but long-term I simply don't like Combat Commander enough to muscle either of those games off the table when I'm looking for a tactical WWII fix.
And all the spinning in the world by the publisher and the design team isn't going to make me miss vehicles any less ... I understand that the game focuses on infantry actions (and all-infantry actions are usually my favorite ASL scenarios), but to assert that tanks aren't included because they're outside the scope of the game is kind of disingenuous. Am I really to believe that infantry and armor interactions at ranges of less than 450 meters or so are genuinely unimportant or impossible to simulate? I don't buy it.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Virtue of Oblivion
I value games for a lot of reasons. They are engines for social interaction. I enjoy the way good game mechanics fit together. Some games provide aesthetic satisfaction just from the way they look, or the materials they use. I appreciate games for the competition they make possible, and for the narratives they sometimes create.
But the best thing about a game, at least about a good game, is that they can completely dominate my attention. When I am deeply involved in a game, I lose track of time, I forget about problems at work, and the only thing that matters is the game and the people in it. If there is narrative and theme, then the game can become a kind of virtual experience, a transport with friends and opponents to a different time and place. But even if there isn't a theme, there is a kind of welcome oblivion that comes from being lost in a game.
For me, games provide some of the virtues of meditation. They are a shortcut to an alpha state, a way of being entirely "in the moment." I don't think games provide any deep insight on my own condition or subconscious, but I do find it refreshing to concentrate without distraction on the concrete and comprehensible universe of a game. It is a dive into a pool of total focus, and the well being that results can last for hours or days in the more fractured and uncertain world of every day life. I do know that just a little bit of gaming can dramatically improve my mood. And I know that if I go too long without playing a game that I can get depressed.
I can achieve similar total concentration by more extreme means ... I can ride a roller coaster, or get roaring drunk. What is remarkable about getting to this place of oblivion through games is that it happens so quickly, and without having to resort to extremes. It really is a shortcut to some better place. I don't want to be in that place all the time -- games may be an escape, but that doesn't mean I am eager to escape life. But it is nice to be able to punch my ticket for that land of oblivion for such a marginal cost. And it is nice to be able to take that journey with special people who might want to come along.
I think this is at the root of why I find gaming at conventions to (usually) be an unrewarding experience. I game to escape, sometimes alone but better with good friends; the mechanics of a game are less important to me, except inasmuch as they support the theme (which improves the quality of the escape). Games with strangers are almost always about mechanics, or competition ... things of secondary importance to me. A convention game is good for test driving something new, or, rarely, for meeting new folks, but it will rarely provide for the kind of transport a good game with familiar opponents can provide.
Something I can't quite figure is why I don't get a similar buzz from role playing games. On the surface, RPGs would seem to be even more purpose-built to transport a group of friends to another time and place. I think it has to do with control ... or the lack of the same, inasmuch as RPGs can, at best, be a shared journey, but more often are a kind of directed make-believe, a sort of experience of imaginative compromise where the bubble must not be broken or else the entire game experience will collapse. I also find that RPGs require more effort just to keep them going. As open-ended systems, RPGs are more fragile. Often players must serve the game, or forfeit their own desires in the interest of preserving the game itself. With a boardgame, the possibilities are more limited, but you can bang up against the walls of the thing with little fear of shattering the experience, and the solid structure at the center of a boardgame will carry you through to the end with the kind of certainty than a system administered by gamemaster fiat cannot hope to match.
And videogames take me to a place of oblivion, too, but I find it less rewarding, as it is so infrequently a shared experience. My favorite videogame experiences have all been co-op, or head-to-head, or a few rare moments on Xbox live. If it's just me against the machine ... well, I have gotten lost in a good racing game, which has some of those same moments of total concentration, but it is a different kingdom than that strange place I get to through boardgames.
But the best thing about a game, at least about a good game, is that they can completely dominate my attention. When I am deeply involved in a game, I lose track of time, I forget about problems at work, and the only thing that matters is the game and the people in it. If there is narrative and theme, then the game can become a kind of virtual experience, a transport with friends and opponents to a different time and place. But even if there isn't a theme, there is a kind of welcome oblivion that comes from being lost in a game.
For me, games provide some of the virtues of meditation. They are a shortcut to an alpha state, a way of being entirely "in the moment." I don't think games provide any deep insight on my own condition or subconscious, but I do find it refreshing to concentrate without distraction on the concrete and comprehensible universe of a game. It is a dive into a pool of total focus, and the well being that results can last for hours or days in the more fractured and uncertain world of every day life. I do know that just a little bit of gaming can dramatically improve my mood. And I know that if I go too long without playing a game that I can get depressed.
I can achieve similar total concentration by more extreme means ... I can ride a roller coaster, or get roaring drunk. What is remarkable about getting to this place of oblivion through games is that it happens so quickly, and without having to resort to extremes. It really is a shortcut to some better place. I don't want to be in that place all the time -- games may be an escape, but that doesn't mean I am eager to escape life. But it is nice to be able to punch my ticket for that land of oblivion for such a marginal cost. And it is nice to be able to take that journey with special people who might want to come along.
I think this is at the root of why I find gaming at conventions to (usually) be an unrewarding experience. I game to escape, sometimes alone but better with good friends; the mechanics of a game are less important to me, except inasmuch as they support the theme (which improves the quality of the escape). Games with strangers are almost always about mechanics, or competition ... things of secondary importance to me. A convention game is good for test driving something new, or, rarely, for meeting new folks, but it will rarely provide for the kind of transport a good game with familiar opponents can provide.
Something I can't quite figure is why I don't get a similar buzz from role playing games. On the surface, RPGs would seem to be even more purpose-built to transport a group of friends to another time and place. I think it has to do with control ... or the lack of the same, inasmuch as RPGs can, at best, be a shared journey, but more often are a kind of directed make-believe, a sort of experience of imaginative compromise where the bubble must not be broken or else the entire game experience will collapse. I also find that RPGs require more effort just to keep them going. As open-ended systems, RPGs are more fragile. Often players must serve the game, or forfeit their own desires in the interest of preserving the game itself. With a boardgame, the possibilities are more limited, but you can bang up against the walls of the thing with little fear of shattering the experience, and the solid structure at the center of a boardgame will carry you through to the end with the kind of certainty than a system administered by gamemaster fiat cannot hope to match.
And videogames take me to a place of oblivion, too, but I find it less rewarding, as it is so infrequently a shared experience. My favorite videogame experiences have all been co-op, or head-to-head, or a few rare moments on Xbox live. If it's just me against the machine ... well, I have gotten lost in a good racing game, which has some of those same moments of total concentration, but it is a different kingdom than that strange place I get to through boardgames.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Image Snob Meets Interface Snob
For no real good reason I have reversed my stand on being a television Luddite and purchased a 42" Panasonic plasma screen television. Whoo-hoo. Even better is that I bought the thing by remote control while sick on my couch, as my lovely wife Rita and my good buddy the Ulm went out and picked the thing up for me (and I greatly benefitted from Ulm's encyclopedic knowledge of all things HD, too).
So it is here, and set up, and it looks great for DVDs and select HD television broadcasts. It's shocking how fast I've turned into an image snob, refusing to watch anything in standard definition unless there's no other alternative. I mean, I was able to hold my nose to watch a broadcast on Fox Sports tonight, but that's only because it was a Dodger game and because I bought the MLB Extra Innings package to get around the damn Padres television blockade (and because I really, really missed listening to Vin Scully).
So far, so good.
Problem is that I had to give up my TiVO box in exchange for Time Warner's HD-compatable DVR, which runs something called "Moxie." I know that TiVO has a HD box, but it runs something like eight hundred bucks, and even as a TiVO true believer and significant stockholder I just can't go down that much for a DVR.
Please, TiVO, get an affordable HD DVR on the market, and soon ... this Moxie box is OK (and I even like some things a little better, like how your broadcast continues to play in a reduced window when you're noodling around with recording plans), but Time Warner's DVR is really crippled by poor search features and the total lack of wish lists and viewing suggestions. The quick categorization of programs by type (movies, sports, etc.) is good, and I like the visual display of station logos, but the box is next to useless in hunting up new things to watch. If you already know where to find an existing show, you're in decent shape, but if you want to set the box to find, say, "Young Frankenstein" the next time it airs, you are S.O.L. Which means that this tech requires I go back to doing what I most hated about TV viewing -- channel surfing to find out what is on.
I still have two TiVO boxes in the house, but they are on my non-HD sets. I am faced with the ridiculous prospect of using my TiVOs in the other room for search and then manually subscribing to whatever I find on the Moxie box. Pretty stupid.
Fantasy scenario: Apple buys TiVO, my stock pays off handsomely, TiVO functionality is rolled into Apple TV (which is upgraded to include HD), and then I can throw money at Apple and throw everything else in the trash.
Until then, the war for my living room continues.
So it is here, and set up, and it looks great for DVDs and select HD television broadcasts. It's shocking how fast I've turned into an image snob, refusing to watch anything in standard definition unless there's no other alternative. I mean, I was able to hold my nose to watch a broadcast on Fox Sports tonight, but that's only because it was a Dodger game and because I bought the MLB Extra Innings package to get around the damn Padres television blockade (and because I really, really missed listening to Vin Scully).
So far, so good.
Problem is that I had to give up my TiVO box in exchange for Time Warner's HD-compatable DVR, which runs something called "Moxie." I know that TiVO has a HD box, but it runs something like eight hundred bucks, and even as a TiVO true believer and significant stockholder I just can't go down that much for a DVR.
Please, TiVO, get an affordable HD DVR on the market, and soon ... this Moxie box is OK (and I even like some things a little better, like how your broadcast continues to play in a reduced window when you're noodling around with recording plans), but Time Warner's DVR is really crippled by poor search features and the total lack of wish lists and viewing suggestions. The quick categorization of programs by type (movies, sports, etc.) is good, and I like the visual display of station logos, but the box is next to useless in hunting up new things to watch. If you already know where to find an existing show, you're in decent shape, but if you want to set the box to find, say, "Young Frankenstein" the next time it airs, you are S.O.L. Which means that this tech requires I go back to doing what I most hated about TV viewing -- channel surfing to find out what is on.
I still have two TiVO boxes in the house, but they are on my non-HD sets. I am faced with the ridiculous prospect of using my TiVOs in the other room for search and then manually subscribing to whatever I find on the Moxie box. Pretty stupid.
Fantasy scenario: Apple buys TiVO, my stock pays off handsomely, TiVO functionality is rolled into Apple TV (which is upgraded to include HD), and then I can throw money at Apple and throw everything else in the trash.
Until then, the war for my living room continues.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Sports Gaming
I have a love/hate relationship with sports games, lately swinging back toward the "love" side of the equation, but only after taking literal decades off away from them to recover from significant burnout and possibly a nervous breakdown. I'm semi-serious about that. I did most of my sports gaming in my twenties, when a fanatical love of sports, a mania for games, a need to triumph at something, and a desire to break down game systems combined in me to form a pretty potent brew. Those weren't my best days, to be sure, but man, did I do a lot of sports gaming.
My first exposure was with Strat-O-Matic ... it must have been their excellent football game, played face-to-face when I lived in Phoenix back in 1980-81. That's when I would have bonded (finally) with the Raiders, although I remember being kind of torn over who to root for in that snowy playoff game between Oakland and Cleveland. I had conceived a love of the Browns because of their "Cardiac Kids" offense, as well as a natural love of the underdog; fortunately I sided with the Raiders that day and never looked back. That might have been the last time the Browns were decent, come to think of it.
Anyway, I loved Strat football. I loved how the defense worked, where you would stunt players into zones in addition to making your play call, and the offense had just enough detail to make playcalling meaningful. The games were the right length and they generated great stats. I can't remember if the little league we had going ever reached a conclusion, but I did bring the game back with me from Phoenix, keeping up with the new card sets, playing several games with Rita back in the day (she used to kill me by deliberately running Joe Montana around the end), and later running some straight-teams leagues and even an abortive draft league when I was managing the Last Grenadier game shop in Northridge later in the decade. For all that I was competitive in the game I don't remember details of the leagues, but I do remember to this day losing a game in overtime when my guy fielded a punt on his own two yard line, and then returned it for minus-three yards ...
We also had a couple baseball leagues back then, an all-star league run by John Cummings (whom I would dearly like to find again after all these years), and a draft league where we picked teams off the pile and built the best squad we could. My team was the Pacific City Americans, composed of the Tigers, Bluejays, Indians, and some other American League team that I can't recall. I really loved that team -- it introduced this Dodgers fan to American League baseball, and at a very good time, as the core of my Americans would be composed of a Tigers team that would win a championship in 1984, and a Bluejays team that came very close a couple times in that decade (and when they eventually broke through and Joe Carter hit that homerun to win the title, I felt like I had been there since the beginning with the unknown Jays ... I mean, after all these years, names like Jesse Barfield, Rance Mullinex, and Dane Iorg are still conjured unbidden -- that game, and that team, made an impression on me).
Where Strat started to get toxic was when we migrated to play-by-mail formats. I'd dabbled a bit with Strat's basketball title in a play-by-mail league (and would later join Gary Graber's wonderful SBA, where my New England Musketeers would win a couple titles over the course of a six or seven year run). To expand our baseball league we shifted to a play-by-mail format, and the emphasis changed a bit from playing individual games to running seasons and competing for titles. The details are blurry, but I must have played hundreds of games of baseball in several leagues, eventually moving onto my Apple (in a semi-manual fashion that was pretty cool, as it used physical cards from the Strat set while automating stat keeping, dice rolling, and chart lookups). Over time, the leagues became more competitive, more complicated, and steadily less fun, as deadlines would sometimes require that I grind through games when I'd rather be doing something else. The more games I played, the less they seemed to matter. That I was usually the commissioner and had to bust balls to get other guys to turn their results in on time didn't help.
I did win a couple championships with my baseball teams, after an appropriate bit of heatbreak, and I do remember literally tossing my cards in the air when my beloved Americans finally got over the hump and beat Vic Kalustian's team in our draft league. I took a lot of pride in those games, framing my winning team cards and hanging them on the walls ...
But the game that broke my heart and nearly gave me a nervous breakdown was Strat-O-Matic Hockey. Growing up in L.A., hockey might as well have been played on the moon, but in my early twenties I conceived a liking for the game, and Strat taught me a lot about the NHL and its teams (and I would later go on to play hockey as an adult, cementing a love for the sport that lasts to this day, only helped by the fact that hockey is just about the only sport my kids are interested in watching with me). But the Strat hockey game really wasn't deserving of the devotion I gave to it. It was clearly the worst of Strat's games, lacking the interactivity of the football game, the pace of the baseball game, or the very good statistical appraisal of their basketball game. It was pretty much just a card-flipping stats generator, and unlike the baseball and basketball games (which translated very well to draft leagues), the hockey game was dependent on team performance for things like offense and defense ratings, and proved a very brittle design when you created "all-star" teams in a draft league. We had several draft leagues way back when, and all of them were sloppy and broken to some degree, and it seemed like all of them were sloppy at my expense.
I remember we played a 40-game season, I think in a six-team league. Tom Keefer had Jari Kurri on his Philadelphia Pliers team, and Kurri scored fully half of his season's goals against my hapless Hot Tubs. It drove me nuts -- Jari just couldn't miss when he played my guys, seemingly every shot was a "goalie rating," and my goalies couldn't stop the guy if they'd walled up the goal mouth with bricks and mortar. There's a real slot-machine quality to Strat-O-Matic hockey, where you always seem to come up just short of success, thanks to the relatively scarce scoring opportunities driven by split results. You continually think you missed by just THAT much, and when it happens again and again from season to season, in multiple leagues, and with several teams, well, you start to feel snake-bit.
It got to be so bad that I became a genuine crank for the game, starting several teams and leagues, and dropping out of the same when my blood pressure started to boil. Each new team was going to correct the problems of the past, but the Hot Tubs, the Silver Seven, and the Otters were all the same -- losers, whether I stacked up on defense or went for snipers or whatever. No matter what I did I just couldn't break the back of that game, and after one agonizing single-goal loss too many (where I frisbeed my clipboard across the room so hard it stuck into a wall), I decided it just wasn't worth it, and pretty much walked away from sports games entirely.
Until a couple years ago.
I found myself thinking about sports games again, but this time entirely as a solitaire experience. I wanted to avoid the competition and deadlines of a draft league at all costs ... I really liked the idea of leagues or replay tounaments that I could completely control without having to rely on anyone else (or disappoint anyone else). I was also looking for a game that would play out with some color and some narrative. It was no longer important that a game play in twenty minutes. I could take an hour with a game if I wanted ... there were no deadlines ... everything would be by hand, and the play would be the thing.
So I bought into Replay Baseball, and found I quite liked it. It was slower and a little more awkward than Strat, but I really liked the way fielding was handled, and I also liked how the pitcher and batter cards were involved in every play (instead of the 50/50 split of Strat). The game was novel, and colorful, and I threw myself into a 1970s Diamond Decades replay tournament that saw the 1970 Baltimore Orioles go 14-0 against the American League side of the field. I found myself deeply in love with the game, planning to buy deadball era teams or Negro League teams going forward, but then after playing into the second round of the National League side of the replay I suddenly stopped dead, and but for a single game played last year I don't think I've touched the game in two years now.
What went wrong? Nothing, really. I went into crunch on Darkwatch and just didn't have time for the game, plus the real life baseball season ended and the replay seemed to lose urgency. And it was ... great! Because no one was depending on me, and in my mind that replay is still active. I'll get back to it sometime, maybe this coming baseball season. And if it is fun I'll keep playing, and if it isn't I'll put it back on the shelf until it is. Through this game I had rediscovered my love for sports gaming.
So when I decided to start following the Anaheim Ducks earlier this year (our only local team after the ECHL San Diego Gulls folded their tent), I decided to buy back into Strat Hockey to learn more about the league, which I hadn't followed in several years. I didn't expect much of the game, knowing it was the worst in Strat's line-up, but I did want a painless way to look at the players and see their general strengths and weaknesses. I set up an overly-ambitious single elimination tournament involving every team in the box, and played the game for the first time in twenty years ...
,,, and found that I liked it, a lot. Without an emotional stake in the outcome of the game, I could better appreciate it's narrative qualities. It was still a little thin on detail but a reasonable picture of an NHL contest emerged from the game, and it didn't hurt that the games I was playing were tight affairs, low-scoring, with a couple big upsets (the most notable being a truly awful St. Louis team somehow beating #3 seed Dallas in a 1-0 shootout ... these being the 2005/6 cards, by the way). Playing with historical teams allowed the system to function in ways our crazy draft leagues never permitted, and now instead of being driven by wild swings of fortune in games ruled by breakaways and takeaways, the games were grinding, close-run matches where 2/1 defensemen banging it in from the point could determine the outcome of the match.
So in my first burst of enthusiasm I got the game on the table four times in October and November of 2006, but then it just ... stopped, and that was OK, but it did nag at me a bit because I had a sense my team set was going stale. But the Ducks hit a hard patch and I was traveling a lot over the holidays so I just didn't get back to the game.
Until tonight. After a break of three months I finally got my replay going again. And it is probably doomed, this was only the fifth game out of fourteen scheduled for the first round alone, but it was a great game, with my Ducks moving to the second round by smothering a very dangerous Florida team, 2-0. The Ducks forecheck helped them outshoot the Panthers 33-17, and the game was fun for all the things that don't show up in the stats ... for the Anaheim checking line playing out of their minds and totally shutting down the Florida scoring line, for Selanne scoring on a breakaway on the last card of the first period (where the Ducks had outworked the Panthers for twenty minutes, but nearly had nothing to show for it), to Giguere having one of those signature games where he doesn't seem to be doing anything spectacular and suddenly you realize he's working a shutout.
In short, it felt just like an NHL game, a remarkable accomplishment for such a simple game design. I know I'm bringing a lot into this game by putting narrative on top of the game system, but that's OK, it adds to the fun. And the only purpose of a solo project like this is to while away some time, enjoying the system, watching the story evolve, and maybe learn something about the teams in the process (and I've learned a bit, I can certainly see how the Ducks took a major step by adding Chris Pronger to their blue line this year).
So the game has satisfied and I have become a Ducks fan (something that would have been unthinkable when I was following the Gretzky-era Kings during their Stanley Cup run). The Ducks have been a rewarding team to follow. They got off to an amazing start, and when they were both healthy, watching Pronger and Scott Niedermeyer wire the puck back and forth at the blue line on the the powerplay was genuniely a sight to see. The Ducks have been inconsistent lately and it is going to be a tough time in the playoffs but I'm committed now and enjoying both the league and this game a great deal.
And if it suddenly goes on the shelf I won't feel like I'm letting anyone down ... and my replay league won't be dead until I say it is. Which means it will probably go on forever.
And after all this blabbering about sports games I realize I didn't write a single word about the F1 auto race gaming I did way back when ... talk about a genuine obsession. Wow.
My first exposure was with Strat-O-Matic ... it must have been their excellent football game, played face-to-face when I lived in Phoenix back in 1980-81. That's when I would have bonded (finally) with the Raiders, although I remember being kind of torn over who to root for in that snowy playoff game between Oakland and Cleveland. I had conceived a love of the Browns because of their "Cardiac Kids" offense, as well as a natural love of the underdog; fortunately I sided with the Raiders that day and never looked back. That might have been the last time the Browns were decent, come to think of it.
Anyway, I loved Strat football. I loved how the defense worked, where you would stunt players into zones in addition to making your play call, and the offense had just enough detail to make playcalling meaningful. The games were the right length and they generated great stats. I can't remember if the little league we had going ever reached a conclusion, but I did bring the game back with me from Phoenix, keeping up with the new card sets, playing several games with Rita back in the day (she used to kill me by deliberately running Joe Montana around the end), and later running some straight-teams leagues and even an abortive draft league when I was managing the Last Grenadier game shop in Northridge later in the decade. For all that I was competitive in the game I don't remember details of the leagues, but I do remember to this day losing a game in overtime when my guy fielded a punt on his own two yard line, and then returned it for minus-three yards ...
We also had a couple baseball leagues back then, an all-star league run by John Cummings (whom I would dearly like to find again after all these years), and a draft league where we picked teams off the pile and built the best squad we could. My team was the Pacific City Americans, composed of the Tigers, Bluejays, Indians, and some other American League team that I can't recall. I really loved that team -- it introduced this Dodgers fan to American League baseball, and at a very good time, as the core of my Americans would be composed of a Tigers team that would win a championship in 1984, and a Bluejays team that came very close a couple times in that decade (and when they eventually broke through and Joe Carter hit that homerun to win the title, I felt like I had been there since the beginning with the unknown Jays ... I mean, after all these years, names like Jesse Barfield, Rance Mullinex, and Dane Iorg are still conjured unbidden -- that game, and that team, made an impression on me).
Where Strat started to get toxic was when we migrated to play-by-mail formats. I'd dabbled a bit with Strat's basketball title in a play-by-mail league (and would later join Gary Graber's wonderful SBA, where my New England Musketeers would win a couple titles over the course of a six or seven year run). To expand our baseball league we shifted to a play-by-mail format, and the emphasis changed a bit from playing individual games to running seasons and competing for titles. The details are blurry, but I must have played hundreds of games of baseball in several leagues, eventually moving onto my Apple (in a semi-manual fashion that was pretty cool, as it used physical cards from the Strat set while automating stat keeping, dice rolling, and chart lookups). Over time, the leagues became more competitive, more complicated, and steadily less fun, as deadlines would sometimes require that I grind through games when I'd rather be doing something else. The more games I played, the less they seemed to matter. That I was usually the commissioner and had to bust balls to get other guys to turn their results in on time didn't help.
I did win a couple championships with my baseball teams, after an appropriate bit of heatbreak, and I do remember literally tossing my cards in the air when my beloved Americans finally got over the hump and beat Vic Kalustian's team in our draft league. I took a lot of pride in those games, framing my winning team cards and hanging them on the walls ...
But the game that broke my heart and nearly gave me a nervous breakdown was Strat-O-Matic Hockey. Growing up in L.A., hockey might as well have been played on the moon, but in my early twenties I conceived a liking for the game, and Strat taught me a lot about the NHL and its teams (and I would later go on to play hockey as an adult, cementing a love for the sport that lasts to this day, only helped by the fact that hockey is just about the only sport my kids are interested in watching with me). But the Strat hockey game really wasn't deserving of the devotion I gave to it. It was clearly the worst of Strat's games, lacking the interactivity of the football game, the pace of the baseball game, or the very good statistical appraisal of their basketball game. It was pretty much just a card-flipping stats generator, and unlike the baseball and basketball games (which translated very well to draft leagues), the hockey game was dependent on team performance for things like offense and defense ratings, and proved a very brittle design when you created "all-star" teams in a draft league. We had several draft leagues way back when, and all of them were sloppy and broken to some degree, and it seemed like all of them were sloppy at my expense.
I remember we played a 40-game season, I think in a six-team league. Tom Keefer had Jari Kurri on his Philadelphia Pliers team, and Kurri scored fully half of his season's goals against my hapless Hot Tubs. It drove me nuts -- Jari just couldn't miss when he played my guys, seemingly every shot was a "goalie rating," and my goalies couldn't stop the guy if they'd walled up the goal mouth with bricks and mortar. There's a real slot-machine quality to Strat-O-Matic hockey, where you always seem to come up just short of success, thanks to the relatively scarce scoring opportunities driven by split results. You continually think you missed by just THAT much, and when it happens again and again from season to season, in multiple leagues, and with several teams, well, you start to feel snake-bit.
It got to be so bad that I became a genuine crank for the game, starting several teams and leagues, and dropping out of the same when my blood pressure started to boil. Each new team was going to correct the problems of the past, but the Hot Tubs, the Silver Seven, and the Otters were all the same -- losers, whether I stacked up on defense or went for snipers or whatever. No matter what I did I just couldn't break the back of that game, and after one agonizing single-goal loss too many (where I frisbeed my clipboard across the room so hard it stuck into a wall), I decided it just wasn't worth it, and pretty much walked away from sports games entirely.
Until a couple years ago.
I found myself thinking about sports games again, but this time entirely as a solitaire experience. I wanted to avoid the competition and deadlines of a draft league at all costs ... I really liked the idea of leagues or replay tounaments that I could completely control without having to rely on anyone else (or disappoint anyone else). I was also looking for a game that would play out with some color and some narrative. It was no longer important that a game play in twenty minutes. I could take an hour with a game if I wanted ... there were no deadlines ... everything would be by hand, and the play would be the thing.
So I bought into Replay Baseball, and found I quite liked it. It was slower and a little more awkward than Strat, but I really liked the way fielding was handled, and I also liked how the pitcher and batter cards were involved in every play (instead of the 50/50 split of Strat). The game was novel, and colorful, and I threw myself into a 1970s Diamond Decades replay tournament that saw the 1970 Baltimore Orioles go 14-0 against the American League side of the field. I found myself deeply in love with the game, planning to buy deadball era teams or Negro League teams going forward, but then after playing into the second round of the National League side of the replay I suddenly stopped dead, and but for a single game played last year I don't think I've touched the game in two years now.
What went wrong? Nothing, really. I went into crunch on Darkwatch and just didn't have time for the game, plus the real life baseball season ended and the replay seemed to lose urgency. And it was ... great! Because no one was depending on me, and in my mind that replay is still active. I'll get back to it sometime, maybe this coming baseball season. And if it is fun I'll keep playing, and if it isn't I'll put it back on the shelf until it is. Through this game I had rediscovered my love for sports gaming.
So when I decided to start following the Anaheim Ducks earlier this year (our only local team after the ECHL San Diego Gulls folded their tent), I decided to buy back into Strat Hockey to learn more about the league, which I hadn't followed in several years. I didn't expect much of the game, knowing it was the worst in Strat's line-up, but I did want a painless way to look at the players and see their general strengths and weaknesses. I set up an overly-ambitious single elimination tournament involving every team in the box, and played the game for the first time in twenty years ...
,,, and found that I liked it, a lot. Without an emotional stake in the outcome of the game, I could better appreciate it's narrative qualities. It was still a little thin on detail but a reasonable picture of an NHL contest emerged from the game, and it didn't hurt that the games I was playing were tight affairs, low-scoring, with a couple big upsets (the most notable being a truly awful St. Louis team somehow beating #3 seed Dallas in a 1-0 shootout ... these being the 2005/6 cards, by the way). Playing with historical teams allowed the system to function in ways our crazy draft leagues never permitted, and now instead of being driven by wild swings of fortune in games ruled by breakaways and takeaways, the games were grinding, close-run matches where 2/1 defensemen banging it in from the point could determine the outcome of the match.
So in my first burst of enthusiasm I got the game on the table four times in October and November of 2006, but then it just ... stopped, and that was OK, but it did nag at me a bit because I had a sense my team set was going stale. But the Ducks hit a hard patch and I was traveling a lot over the holidays so I just didn't get back to the game.
Until tonight. After a break of three months I finally got my replay going again. And it is probably doomed, this was only the fifth game out of fourteen scheduled for the first round alone, but it was a great game, with my Ducks moving to the second round by smothering a very dangerous Florida team, 2-0. The Ducks forecheck helped them outshoot the Panthers 33-17, and the game was fun for all the things that don't show up in the stats ... for the Anaheim checking line playing out of their minds and totally shutting down the Florida scoring line, for Selanne scoring on a breakaway on the last card of the first period (where the Ducks had outworked the Panthers for twenty minutes, but nearly had nothing to show for it), to Giguere having one of those signature games where he doesn't seem to be doing anything spectacular and suddenly you realize he's working a shutout.
In short, it felt just like an NHL game, a remarkable accomplishment for such a simple game design. I know I'm bringing a lot into this game by putting narrative on top of the game system, but that's OK, it adds to the fun. And the only purpose of a solo project like this is to while away some time, enjoying the system, watching the story evolve, and maybe learn something about the teams in the process (and I've learned a bit, I can certainly see how the Ducks took a major step by adding Chris Pronger to their blue line this year).
So the game has satisfied and I have become a Ducks fan (something that would have been unthinkable when I was following the Gretzky-era Kings during their Stanley Cup run). The Ducks have been a rewarding team to follow. They got off to an amazing start, and when they were both healthy, watching Pronger and Scott Niedermeyer wire the puck back and forth at the blue line on the the powerplay was genuniely a sight to see. The Ducks have been inconsistent lately and it is going to be a tough time in the playoffs but I'm committed now and enjoying both the league and this game a great deal.
And if it suddenly goes on the shelf I won't feel like I'm letting anyone down ... and my replay league won't be dead until I say it is. Which means it will probably go on forever.
And after all this blabbering about sports games I realize I didn't write a single word about the F1 auto race gaming I did way back when ... talk about a genuine obsession. Wow.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Back to Battlelore
Finally got Battlelore back on the table after an initial outburst of play over the holidays. I played my first "lore" scenarios and sampled the creature rules.
Lore and the spell cards integrated into the game more easily than I expected. It quickly became second nature to add a lore decision at the end of the turn, when drawing cards. The "Wizards & Lore" scenario didn't provide too many difficult decision points, though -- it was usually obvious whether you should draw two lore or mess around with the cards. The spells themselves added a bit to the game, from the dicey (fireball and creeping doom) to the useful (the cards adding battle dice for a single activation), to cards too weak (or too subtle?) to be played. I did find the counter-spell useful, and the teleport cards were game-turners, given that they can be used to break up a powerful, supported position just before your guys pile into the line.
What I most enjoyed about the lore cards was the possibilities for new combos. Combining a foot onslaught or a mounted charge with a teleport card that whisks away a critical supporting unit is very sweet. Giving an onslaught a little extra umph with a dice-boosting card is a good combo, too. I am anxious to play with the war council rules to experience a wider range of lore cards.
The creature rules were ... OK. Basically the elephant rules from Commands & Colors: Ancients, with a bit of chrome.
This was also the first time I played the game with my crazy magnetic basing scheme in place. At the risk of repetitive stress injury, I fitted the bases of all my Battlelore troops with self-adhesive business card magnets, then built movement stands for infantry and cavalry out of self-adhesive "paper steel" and matte board. I sprayed half of the bases white, and left the other half natural black. Now I can push my units around without having the figures get jumbled up (or fall over, because of those heavy flags), and enough of the white/black base shows through to help identify unit possession. It's a definite improvement over the stock components, but I wish the magnets were a little more powerful, and the bases possibly wider, as the bases are still a little fiddly to handle. The base colors do somewhat improve the "which guys are mine?" problem, which I found a pretty serious drawback in the game out-of-the-box.
I liked the game well enough, but for some reason I'm finding Battlelore a little less than the sum-of-its-parts. I played a couple scenarios of Commands & Colors: Ancients the same weekend, and found it a more satisfying game. I think it comes down to the flexibility of the light troops class in Ancients versus their counterparts in Battlelore ... it is still a pain in the ass to determine the difference between lights, auxillia, bows, and slings in CCA, but the subtle differences in battlefield roles for those units do add quite a bit to the game. I guess I like running spear men up to pepper the enemy line before the clash of shields more than I like parking bowmen in forests to plink away at the bad guys from a distance.
I also think the CCA scenarios have a bit more to offer than those in Battlelore. Notwithstanding the whole wonky Hundred Years War With Giant Spiders Thing, the Battlelore scenarios seems a little bloodless, a little "samey." Certainly they are leaning heavily on player input via the war council system to spice them up. Some of the CCA scenarios generate blowouts but it is the assymetrical situations that are most interesting -- cavalry versus foot armies, phalanxes versus lights, elephants versus anything. In Battlelore, the opposing armies just seem too similar (and the goblins and dwarves not dissimilar enough); there is a generic feeling to the troops and setups in Battlelore that feels a little uninspiring. I don't find myself especially eager to play the remaining scenarios for their own sake -- I'm interested in them for the new rules they will introduce, but not for the situations, whereas I do want to play those Greek scenarios from the CCA expansion, and remain intrigued by the promise of legion vs. barbarian scenarios in the second expansion.
The just-announced scenario generation supplement for Battlelore does have promise, though. Maybe this just needs to be a campaign game.
Lore and the spell cards integrated into the game more easily than I expected. It quickly became second nature to add a lore decision at the end of the turn, when drawing cards. The "Wizards & Lore" scenario didn't provide too many difficult decision points, though -- it was usually obvious whether you should draw two lore or mess around with the cards. The spells themselves added a bit to the game, from the dicey (fireball and creeping doom) to the useful (the cards adding battle dice for a single activation), to cards too weak (or too subtle?) to be played. I did find the counter-spell useful, and the teleport cards were game-turners, given that they can be used to break up a powerful, supported position just before your guys pile into the line.
What I most enjoyed about the lore cards was the possibilities for new combos. Combining a foot onslaught or a mounted charge with a teleport card that whisks away a critical supporting unit is very sweet. Giving an onslaught a little extra umph with a dice-boosting card is a good combo, too. I am anxious to play with the war council rules to experience a wider range of lore cards.
The creature rules were ... OK. Basically the elephant rules from Commands & Colors: Ancients, with a bit of chrome.
This was also the first time I played the game with my crazy magnetic basing scheme in place. At the risk of repetitive stress injury, I fitted the bases of all my Battlelore troops with self-adhesive business card magnets, then built movement stands for infantry and cavalry out of self-adhesive "paper steel" and matte board. I sprayed half of the bases white, and left the other half natural black. Now I can push my units around without having the figures get jumbled up (or fall over, because of those heavy flags), and enough of the white/black base shows through to help identify unit possession. It's a definite improvement over the stock components, but I wish the magnets were a little more powerful, and the bases possibly wider, as the bases are still a little fiddly to handle. The base colors do somewhat improve the "which guys are mine?" problem, which I found a pretty serious drawback in the game out-of-the-box.
I liked the game well enough, but for some reason I'm finding Battlelore a little less than the sum-of-its-parts. I played a couple scenarios of Commands & Colors: Ancients the same weekend, and found it a more satisfying game. I think it comes down to the flexibility of the light troops class in Ancients versus their counterparts in Battlelore ... it is still a pain in the ass to determine the difference between lights, auxillia, bows, and slings in CCA, but the subtle differences in battlefield roles for those units do add quite a bit to the game. I guess I like running spear men up to pepper the enemy line before the clash of shields more than I like parking bowmen in forests to plink away at the bad guys from a distance.
I also think the CCA scenarios have a bit more to offer than those in Battlelore. Notwithstanding the whole wonky Hundred Years War With Giant Spiders Thing, the Battlelore scenarios seems a little bloodless, a little "samey." Certainly they are leaning heavily on player input via the war council system to spice them up. Some of the CCA scenarios generate blowouts but it is the assymetrical situations that are most interesting -- cavalry versus foot armies, phalanxes versus lights, elephants versus anything. In Battlelore, the opposing armies just seem too similar (and the goblins and dwarves not dissimilar enough); there is a generic feeling to the troops and setups in Battlelore that feels a little uninspiring. I don't find myself especially eager to play the remaining scenarios for their own sake -- I'm interested in them for the new rules they will introduce, but not for the situations, whereas I do want to play those Greek scenarios from the CCA expansion, and remain intrigued by the promise of legion vs. barbarian scenarios in the second expansion.
The just-announced scenario generation supplement for Battlelore does have promise, though. Maybe this just needs to be a campaign game.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
2006 Gaming Year in Review (Part 2)
It is with some small satisfaction that I manage to conclude my gaming year in review before more than a month of 2007 slips away ...
GAMES WITH THE KIDS
Star Wars Miniatures got on the table six times, all with Miles, and mostly clustered around our summer trip to Arizona, where the heat kept us inside during the day. I’ve long wanted to have a game I could share with Miles, and the prospect of a collectable game is also attractive in this regard, as it would give us a reason to go to game shops together. This isn’t a bad little game, and Miles likes it well enough, but it’s attritional and heavily dependent on die rolls, and with our limited stock of figures usually comes down to the last two guys trading shots at each other from middle distance. Plus, Miles always wants to stomp me with the AT-ST, which is pretty clearly out of scale with the rest of the game. I acquired a whack of commons in a geekgold trade on BGG late last year, and I bought the Rebel Storm missions book, so sometime this year I’ll set up some scenario play with Miles. But the lad hasn’t asked for the game in a long time; he’d still much rather play video games.
Battleship and Penguin Pile-Up were played three times each, both with Jack. Jack is easily discouraged when learning a game, which means it’s best to play games I can throw his way the first few times, making Battleship an ideal candidate (“Why, yes, Jack, you did hit my battleship again!”). It’s a strange thing with Jack as he’s not a sore loser – once he understands a game, he can win or lose and it’s all the same to him – but if he’s trying to learn and things don’t go his way, he can be poisonously hard on himself. I also had some luck playing Pecking Order with Jack, initially because Jack liked the bird theme, but later because he came to genuinely enjoy the game, grasping the strategies of the tie-breaker, the vision roof, and the bird-eating jaguar. Battleball got a few outings (and I bought a second set to create casualty figures), as did Miles’ favorite Monsters Menace America. And there were desultory one-and-done games like Mission Command: Sea, Jumping Monkeys, that kind of things.
Overall, it was a slightly disappointing year for gaming with the kids. Poor Miles’ brain continues to roll around and around like a marble in a tube. It’s genuinely hard to play games with him as he has a hard time internalizing procedures and staying on track … I have to be his aide-de-camp for every move in addition to playing the game myself, and while I enjoy spending time with Miles over a gameboard, we get to a happier place in a more direct line by playing Guitar Hero II on the Playstation. Jack, however, is growing into a little gamer, and I have hope that I will play even more with him in the year ahead. I just have to bring him along slowly and keep gaming times special, rather than stressful.
ON THE RISE
There were a number of games that I played two or three times in 2006 that I hope will see more table time in 2007. Chief among them was Up Front, which I have played since 1983 … probably pushing a hundred games of this, lifetime, and I added four more in 2006, significant mostly because they were all with an enthusiastic new player at work. We have a quasi-regular Thursday lunch game going and it is my ambition to play through all the scenarios this year. I remain amazed that this game exists at all, it is such a singular design, really a bolt out of nowhere that really hits the sweet spot between game value, narrative, and even a bit of simulation. And I have no idea how the game could have even been conceived, let alone designed, in an era before computers. It’s like the wargame equivalent of ancient astronauts, something that visited us in the dim past and left inexplicable remains.
I also went back to Strat-o-Matic Hockey for the first time in about twenty years. I used to be in several PBM league of this, and the game stressed me out. I could never achieve success with my draft teams, and the nature of a low-scoring game like this is that you always seem on the verge of success, which only leads to greater frustration when you miss three or four quality shots in a row, and then a long blast from the enemy point finds the back of your own net.
I got back into this one because hockey is about the only spectator sport that Miles finds interesting. When the San Diego Gulls folded last year, I bit the bullet and decided to start following the Anaheim Ducks. There was a time when cheering for the “Disney Ducks” would have been unthinkable, but I want to share the game with my son and they’re just an hour up the highway. The prospect was made more palatable by the Ducks proving to have a very good team this year, and I’ve never had a really strong allegiance to any one time (my infatuation with the Canucks was cleansed by the lockout a few years ago).
Anyway, getting back into the NHL as something to share with my boy made me realize that I didn’t know a lot about the league as it is right now, so I bought back into SOM primarily as a means of familiarizing myself with the players. I had an outburst of four games of SOM early in the season (as the beginning of an overly-ambitious replay project that will probably never be completed), and found the game was better than I remembered. With stock teams many of the wilder swings of fortune are erased, and it generates a good narrative. Plus I no longer have the passionate interest in the outcome that turned my PBM games into such a blood pressure cooker. I’d like to get back to this one, at least play a few more games before the Stanley Cup Playoffs come around.
Ingenious was a real surprise for me – I recorded three playings last year, but really my playings were in the dozens. They were just all on-line against robot opponents, rather than “real” games against real folks. I meant to throw this into my big Boulder Games order late last year but forgot (getting the truly awful Marvel Super Heroes instead). I entertain the idea of playing this with Rita and both boys. It’s breezy, colorful, satisfying in a “build a puzzle” kind of way, and has the hidden depths you’d expect of a Knizia. I overlooked it upon release because I generally don’t care for abstracts but I definitely want to get a copy of this. I think it will also serve nicely in the “Ticket to Ride” rotation of games Ulm and I play with our wives.
LIKELY NEVER AGAIN
Ancients got to the table four times, and spawned some remarkably dry session reports for BGG, but it’s been replaced by the vastly superior Commands and Colors: Ancients, and been traded away.
I played a few games of Street Soccer but the ship has sailed on this one – where once I loved it, now it just drives me crazy. I concede that better players can ride out the dice better than I, but too much of the game comes down to rolling a six when you need it. Plenty of theme, though, and hell, I played it a hundred times online so it has to go down as a hall of famer for me, even if I can’t bear to play it anymore.
Eurorails recorded three plays and I don’t even own it – these represented dozens of plays of a computer version of the game, which proved an excellent solo pickup and deliver game. It also verged on OCD for me and I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.
The Vallco Professional Drag Racing game was a weird little indulgence, a Strat-o-Matic style drag racing game from the 1970s that I bought from the author. Part of this was a burst of enthusiasm after going to the drag races with Miles earlier in the year, part of it was a desire to see how such a subject might be gamed (and I continue to tinker with a drag racing game of my own), but mostly it was a distraction while my father was dying. Throwing those dice and sliding plastic cars down the dragstrip required no real thinking or decision making but it did give me an illusion of control, and a way to escape. And it was fun enough that I might go back there again when the replay sports bug bites. Besides, Bob Glidden is damn fast in Pro Stock and I’d like to see if he can win a season championship.
Played Wallenstein three times, and traded it, realizing that I liked it less each time, and the window was closing on its value as trade bait (scored a copy of La Citta for it, which I have yet to play). Complex inputs resulting in chaotic outputs is a pretty rotten play pattern, really. Played End of the Triumverate exactly twice before trading it – it ranks as one of the disappointments of the year, as it just didn’t have as much theme as I was hoping. Jumped through all sorts of hoops to get a copy of Industria and it proved an absolute dog – I traded it off before the glue had dried on my custom components. I can offer no real answer for why I played games like Decathlon or Jutland: Duel of Dreadnoughts, and I played True Colors (twice!) only because there was a gun to my head. Some other games I sampled but won’t miss include Mall of Horror, Three Dragon Ante, Age of Mythology, and Hippodrome (a rare bad game from Gary Graber’s Panzerschrek magazine).
MIDDLE OF THE LINEUP GAMES
There were some decent games that got trotted out a time or two that may or may not return to the table … things like the very decent Battle Line (Knizia), Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball (I have no defense for why I like it), Acquire (all on the computer), the Conan Collectible Card Game (just a bit too long for what it is), Antike (so damn close to being good, but I can’t find a way to beat the marble grinding strategy), Age of Steam (the game liked by the most people that never seems to get played, Power Grid stole a lot of its time this year), Hammer of the Scots (still good after four or five plays), and Titan: The Arena, which I like a bit more than I used to (the Cyclops still goes down like a dog, though). I was pleased to get in a couple co-op games like Lord of the Rings and Shadows Over Camelot (my Arthur fetish is alive and well, I might even play Pendragon again this year). I tried Focus on Warren’s suggestion (he was very kind to give me a copy) but it hasn’t gelled yet. I had the usual experience with filler like Can’t Stop and Kung Fu Fighting. Battle Cry came out a time or two, and maybe I’ll try that again with the kids. I even have an eager opponent in the wings for Star Warriors, but I strangely can’t work up much enthusiasm for playing the game after going mad painting a bunch of miniatures for it. Sometimes this hobby doesn’t bear close examination.
ONE MORE TIME
There were some grail games that got played just once last year, and that I hope I can play again. Freidrich and Europe Engulfed were both very good (and unfortunately very long). Bonaparte at Marengo was short but not nearly the game I hoped it would be … have to play it at least one more time before letting go of it, though. Dune got trotted out at MANCON and didn’t live up to my memories, but it probably deserves another chance without all the drunks.
Ra can’t get any traction, and neither can Samurai, which is strange because I used to like those games a lot. Ditto for Through the Desert (do these Kniza came age poorly, or have I just moved into a different space in my gaming tastes?) Modern Art deserves to have been played more than once. Same with Mississippi Queen. Silverton might be a hit with the guys but I think I need to enlarge the board, and I think it’s always going to be stuck behind something like Age of Steam. Slapshot came out and it was still a hoot, want to do that one again. I still like Union Pacific but Ticket to Ride really is about half the same fun for a quarter of the effort. World in War was promising as an Axis and Allies replacement but it’s time may have passed before I ever knew the game existed – I really needed this one twenty years ago.
ONE AND DONE
Doom: the Boardgame really is a dog, but I painted my pieces so I am stuck with it (plus the kids like to play with the figures). Dungeon Twister was a real disappointment, at least for Tiege and I, but I could be talked into trying it again if I was matched with someone who really wanted to get deeply into the thing. El Grande got it’s semi-annual outing, and no, I still don’t much like it. Oltremare was awkard. Titan will get maybe one more play before it goes to eBay.
AND SO … there it is, a year in games, and a pretty good year, with regular gaming at work, on weekends, and at a couple private min-cons that evoked the glory of GeekEnds past. There’s been good momentum going into the new year, with thirty games played in January, and a couple new titles are getting a lot of play (Runebound, Return of the Heroes, and Factory Fun). I’m enjoying Twilight Struggle, and while Battlelore hasn’t taken off like I expected, I think it may yet be heard from this year. I have some new-to-me games that I want to explore (La Citta, Mare Nostrum), and I’m getting more comfortable with VASSAL so wargaming is more possible than has been the case in a long while. I might even try role playing again this year.
If I can spot any broad trends, I seem to be leaning toward “experience” games with less emphasis on the tight, mechanically pure Euros I’ve enjoyed in the past. I seem more interested in games as social engines and less as competitive experiences. There’s been a good mix of old and new recently. I have a chance for some more local face-to-face wargaming that I need to take advantage of. I do still want to pare the collection down to games that get played, or have a remote chance of being played. Just trying to keep the ball rolling …
GAMES WITH THE KIDS
Star Wars Miniatures got on the table six times, all with Miles, and mostly clustered around our summer trip to Arizona, where the heat kept us inside during the day. I’ve long wanted to have a game I could share with Miles, and the prospect of a collectable game is also attractive in this regard, as it would give us a reason to go to game shops together. This isn’t a bad little game, and Miles likes it well enough, but it’s attritional and heavily dependent on die rolls, and with our limited stock of figures usually comes down to the last two guys trading shots at each other from middle distance. Plus, Miles always wants to stomp me with the AT-ST, which is pretty clearly out of scale with the rest of the game. I acquired a whack of commons in a geekgold trade on BGG late last year, and I bought the Rebel Storm missions book, so sometime this year I’ll set up some scenario play with Miles. But the lad hasn’t asked for the game in a long time; he’d still much rather play video games.
Battleship and Penguin Pile-Up were played three times each, both with Jack. Jack is easily discouraged when learning a game, which means it’s best to play games I can throw his way the first few times, making Battleship an ideal candidate (“Why, yes, Jack, you did hit my battleship again!”). It’s a strange thing with Jack as he’s not a sore loser – once he understands a game, he can win or lose and it’s all the same to him – but if he’s trying to learn and things don’t go his way, he can be poisonously hard on himself. I also had some luck playing Pecking Order with Jack, initially because Jack liked the bird theme, but later because he came to genuinely enjoy the game, grasping the strategies of the tie-breaker, the vision roof, and the bird-eating jaguar. Battleball got a few outings (and I bought a second set to create casualty figures), as did Miles’ favorite Monsters Menace America. And there were desultory one-and-done games like Mission Command: Sea, Jumping Monkeys, that kind of things.
Overall, it was a slightly disappointing year for gaming with the kids. Poor Miles’ brain continues to roll around and around like a marble in a tube. It’s genuinely hard to play games with him as he has a hard time internalizing procedures and staying on track … I have to be his aide-de-camp for every move in addition to playing the game myself, and while I enjoy spending time with Miles over a gameboard, we get to a happier place in a more direct line by playing Guitar Hero II on the Playstation. Jack, however, is growing into a little gamer, and I have hope that I will play even more with him in the year ahead. I just have to bring him along slowly and keep gaming times special, rather than stressful.
ON THE RISE
There were a number of games that I played two or three times in 2006 that I hope will see more table time in 2007. Chief among them was Up Front, which I have played since 1983 … probably pushing a hundred games of this, lifetime, and I added four more in 2006, significant mostly because they were all with an enthusiastic new player at work. We have a quasi-regular Thursday lunch game going and it is my ambition to play through all the scenarios this year. I remain amazed that this game exists at all, it is such a singular design, really a bolt out of nowhere that really hits the sweet spot between game value, narrative, and even a bit of simulation. And I have no idea how the game could have even been conceived, let alone designed, in an era before computers. It’s like the wargame equivalent of ancient astronauts, something that visited us in the dim past and left inexplicable remains.
I also went back to Strat-o-Matic Hockey for the first time in about twenty years. I used to be in several PBM league of this, and the game stressed me out. I could never achieve success with my draft teams, and the nature of a low-scoring game like this is that you always seem on the verge of success, which only leads to greater frustration when you miss three or four quality shots in a row, and then a long blast from the enemy point finds the back of your own net.
I got back into this one because hockey is about the only spectator sport that Miles finds interesting. When the San Diego Gulls folded last year, I bit the bullet and decided to start following the Anaheim Ducks. There was a time when cheering for the “Disney Ducks” would have been unthinkable, but I want to share the game with my son and they’re just an hour up the highway. The prospect was made more palatable by the Ducks proving to have a very good team this year, and I’ve never had a really strong allegiance to any one time (my infatuation with the Canucks was cleansed by the lockout a few years ago).
Anyway, getting back into the NHL as something to share with my boy made me realize that I didn’t know a lot about the league as it is right now, so I bought back into SOM primarily as a means of familiarizing myself with the players. I had an outburst of four games of SOM early in the season (as the beginning of an overly-ambitious replay project that will probably never be completed), and found the game was better than I remembered. With stock teams many of the wilder swings of fortune are erased, and it generates a good narrative. Plus I no longer have the passionate interest in the outcome that turned my PBM games into such a blood pressure cooker. I’d like to get back to this one, at least play a few more games before the Stanley Cup Playoffs come around.
Ingenious was a real surprise for me – I recorded three playings last year, but really my playings were in the dozens. They were just all on-line against robot opponents, rather than “real” games against real folks. I meant to throw this into my big Boulder Games order late last year but forgot (getting the truly awful Marvel Super Heroes instead). I entertain the idea of playing this with Rita and both boys. It’s breezy, colorful, satisfying in a “build a puzzle” kind of way, and has the hidden depths you’d expect of a Knizia. I overlooked it upon release because I generally don’t care for abstracts but I definitely want to get a copy of this. I think it will also serve nicely in the “Ticket to Ride” rotation of games Ulm and I play with our wives.
LIKELY NEVER AGAIN
Ancients got to the table four times, and spawned some remarkably dry session reports for BGG, but it’s been replaced by the vastly superior Commands and Colors: Ancients, and been traded away.
I played a few games of Street Soccer but the ship has sailed on this one – where once I loved it, now it just drives me crazy. I concede that better players can ride out the dice better than I, but too much of the game comes down to rolling a six when you need it. Plenty of theme, though, and hell, I played it a hundred times online so it has to go down as a hall of famer for me, even if I can’t bear to play it anymore.
Eurorails recorded three plays and I don’t even own it – these represented dozens of plays of a computer version of the game, which proved an excellent solo pickup and deliver game. It also verged on OCD for me and I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.
The Vallco Professional Drag Racing game was a weird little indulgence, a Strat-o-Matic style drag racing game from the 1970s that I bought from the author. Part of this was a burst of enthusiasm after going to the drag races with Miles earlier in the year, part of it was a desire to see how such a subject might be gamed (and I continue to tinker with a drag racing game of my own), but mostly it was a distraction while my father was dying. Throwing those dice and sliding plastic cars down the dragstrip required no real thinking or decision making but it did give me an illusion of control, and a way to escape. And it was fun enough that I might go back there again when the replay sports bug bites. Besides, Bob Glidden is damn fast in Pro Stock and I’d like to see if he can win a season championship.
Played Wallenstein three times, and traded it, realizing that I liked it less each time, and the window was closing on its value as trade bait (scored a copy of La Citta for it, which I have yet to play). Complex inputs resulting in chaotic outputs is a pretty rotten play pattern, really. Played End of the Triumverate exactly twice before trading it – it ranks as one of the disappointments of the year, as it just didn’t have as much theme as I was hoping. Jumped through all sorts of hoops to get a copy of Industria and it proved an absolute dog – I traded it off before the glue had dried on my custom components. I can offer no real answer for why I played games like Decathlon or Jutland: Duel of Dreadnoughts, and I played True Colors (twice!) only because there was a gun to my head. Some other games I sampled but won’t miss include Mall of Horror, Three Dragon Ante, Age of Mythology, and Hippodrome (a rare bad game from Gary Graber’s Panzerschrek magazine).
MIDDLE OF THE LINEUP GAMES
There were some decent games that got trotted out a time or two that may or may not return to the table … things like the very decent Battle Line (Knizia), Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball (I have no defense for why I like it), Acquire (all on the computer), the Conan Collectible Card Game (just a bit too long for what it is), Antike (so damn close to being good, but I can’t find a way to beat the marble grinding strategy), Age of Steam (the game liked by the most people that never seems to get played, Power Grid stole a lot of its time this year), Hammer of the Scots (still good after four or five plays), and Titan: The Arena, which I like a bit more than I used to (the Cyclops still goes down like a dog, though). I was pleased to get in a couple co-op games like Lord of the Rings and Shadows Over Camelot (my Arthur fetish is alive and well, I might even play Pendragon again this year). I tried Focus on Warren’s suggestion (he was very kind to give me a copy) but it hasn’t gelled yet. I had the usual experience with filler like Can’t Stop and Kung Fu Fighting. Battle Cry came out a time or two, and maybe I’ll try that again with the kids. I even have an eager opponent in the wings for Star Warriors, but I strangely can’t work up much enthusiasm for playing the game after going mad painting a bunch of miniatures for it. Sometimes this hobby doesn’t bear close examination.
ONE MORE TIME
There were some grail games that got played just once last year, and that I hope I can play again. Freidrich and Europe Engulfed were both very good (and unfortunately very long). Bonaparte at Marengo was short but not nearly the game I hoped it would be … have to play it at least one more time before letting go of it, though. Dune got trotted out at MANCON and didn’t live up to my memories, but it probably deserves another chance without all the drunks.
Ra can’t get any traction, and neither can Samurai, which is strange because I used to like those games a lot. Ditto for Through the Desert (do these Kniza came age poorly, or have I just moved into a different space in my gaming tastes?) Modern Art deserves to have been played more than once. Same with Mississippi Queen. Silverton might be a hit with the guys but I think I need to enlarge the board, and I think it’s always going to be stuck behind something like Age of Steam. Slapshot came out and it was still a hoot, want to do that one again. I still like Union Pacific but Ticket to Ride really is about half the same fun for a quarter of the effort. World in War was promising as an Axis and Allies replacement but it’s time may have passed before I ever knew the game existed – I really needed this one twenty years ago.
ONE AND DONE
Doom: the Boardgame really is a dog, but I painted my pieces so I am stuck with it (plus the kids like to play with the figures). Dungeon Twister was a real disappointment, at least for Tiege and I, but I could be talked into trying it again if I was matched with someone who really wanted to get deeply into the thing. El Grande got it’s semi-annual outing, and no, I still don’t much like it. Oltremare was awkard. Titan will get maybe one more play before it goes to eBay.
AND SO … there it is, a year in games, and a pretty good year, with regular gaming at work, on weekends, and at a couple private min-cons that evoked the glory of GeekEnds past. There’s been good momentum going into the new year, with thirty games played in January, and a couple new titles are getting a lot of play (Runebound, Return of the Heroes, and Factory Fun). I’m enjoying Twilight Struggle, and while Battlelore hasn’t taken off like I expected, I think it may yet be heard from this year. I have some new-to-me games that I want to explore (La Citta, Mare Nostrum), and I’m getting more comfortable with VASSAL so wargaming is more possible than has been the case in a long while. I might even try role playing again this year.
If I can spot any broad trends, I seem to be leaning toward “experience” games with less emphasis on the tight, mechanically pure Euros I’ve enjoyed in the past. I seem more interested in games as social engines and less as competitive experiences. There’s been a good mix of old and new recently. I have a chance for some more local face-to-face wargaming that I need to take advantage of. I do still want to pare the collection down to games that get played, or have a remote chance of being played. Just trying to keep the ball rolling …
Monday, January 1, 2007
2006 Gaming Year in Review (Part 1)
I’ve always been a compulsive list-keeper, but this is the first time I’ve logged my games played on Boardgamegeek. Overall, I found the logging to be a positive experience – it didn’t take a lot of effort, I didn’t get bogged down in trying to keep track of game results, and I had something to look back on whenever I started to get the irrational feeling that “I don’t get to play enough games.” I mean … I logged 265 games played in 2006. What more do I want?
I also enjoy some of the special features that BGG has attached to the game logging system. Looking at games played over the last thirty days is especially illuminating … I view this display as the “product” of my game-playing hobby. All the thinking about games; the buying of them and the reading of rules and preparation of components; the on-line search for details and opinions; the discussions about games good or bad … all of the stuff matters to me only inasmuch as it results in games getting played, and the “last thirty days” function gives me a snapshot of how I’m doing. I also like watching the sidebar update on this blog each time I play a new game, and I like watching the rise of select games on the overall list of plays for the year. It’s amusing to me to see that June was my best month for games played (39 … MANCON makes it’s presence felt), while September was the pits (only 7 games that month, and five of them on a single day, not sure what went wrong in September).
And the system lets me look back over the year as a whole and analyze my game playing habits as a whole, and project a little bit about what might happen in the year ahead. Rather than go through each game on a times-played basis, I’ve broken the games into several categories. This first post will concentrate on my “Top Games of the Year” and (mostly) my “Solid Peformers.”
TOP GAMES OF THE YEAR: Commands & Colors Ancients (21), Memoir ’44 (11), Battlelore (8)
I already wrote extensively about these games in my “Assimilated” post last month, so I won’t say more about them here aside from noting that I expect Battlelore to be my most-played game of 2007.
SOLID PERFORMERS: Tigris & Euphrates (9), Liar’s Dice (8), Power Grid (8), Tikal (8), Lost Cities (6), Conquest of the Fallen Lands (5), Das Motorsportspiel (5), Pizza Box Football (5), Ticket to Ride (5), Wings of War (5)
I came into this year rating Tigris & Euphrates as “9” (a rate rating for me on BGG); I end the year rating it “8.5” as the bloom has begun to fade, just a bit, after playing this one for a decade. It is still a deep and challenging game but I find I like it a little less, I think maybe my tastes are starting to swing back away from elegant mechanics and more toward “experience” games or games with better-integrated themes. The nine times I played T&E this year were entirely play-by-email games on BGG, and eight of them were part of a two-player tournament (where I think I finished 4-4). I’m not sure I’ll play this nearly so much in the year ahead, but it would be nice to get it on the table for a couple face-to-face games.
Liar’s Dice is a game that I can take or leave, but it always comes out when we’re in a group and drunk, so it will be here again next year. Lost Cities and Ticket to Ride are in a similar category for their ease-of-play and I’m sure they will return to the list.
Power Grid was the star of my face-to-face gaming this year … the Ulm really took a shine to it, and I liked it well enough to get swept up in his enthusiasm and keep bringing it out for play. I was surprised by the degree to which the variant maps kept the game fresh. Overall I would rather play Age of Steam but Power Grid is a solid game that I like well enough, and when a game has momentum you go with it. It will be here on this list again in 2007.
Tikal is a game I continue to like … I’m surprised to see I played it eight times, I think those must have all been on line as SpielByWeb rolled out their web-based version earlier this year. It makes for quite a good play-by-web game as the analysis-by-paralysis downtime goes away, but it also becomes an even more competitive game when played in this fashion, and I think I like Tikal best played face-to-face with friends. The components are just too nice to leave in the box. I resolve to play this one live in 2007.
Conquest of the Fallen Lands is a new game that I really like a lot, but I may have burned it out with the local group. We’ve detected a significant turn-order advantage in this one (which I’ve written about on BGG), and the game may be poisoned insofar as the guys are concerned … but I can’t help but think we’re one tweak away from getting this game dialed in, so I plan to lay low until the Spring sometime and bring it out again.
Das Motorsportspiel sat unplayed on my shelf for years after being acquired in a trade, but then saw a crazy flurry of play in the middle of the year. I think it is an “experience” game for autoracing, not something you’ll play a lot but worth playing as an event every once in awhile. I don’t see it as having enough legs to sustain league play, which is really the only place you can go with it. It will probably stay on the shelf until the next time Warren Spector visits (he’s a race game nut and he’s eyed this game a couple times).
Pizza Box Football was a game that I wanted to like more than I did. I put a lot of time into trying this one, playing face-to-face, and solo with full stats from the Pro cards expansion. I think the only way I’ll really enjoy this one is with a group of football fans that want to play the basic game, and I don’t see a critical mass developing on that front, unless we start another Madden lunchtime league at work, when this game might sneak onto the table while guys are waiting their turn on the Xbox.
Wings of War is a very clever game, and it has a wargame theme (which bumps it up in my estimation). I’ve put some time and materials into pimping out my set, and I’m gratified to see that it got on the table as often as it did this year. It does feel like an underplayed game that I haven’t experienced enough, but it will be hard to get this game on the table versus Battlelore in the year ahead. I also can’t shake the feeling that the scenarios aren’t quite enough, and that some kind of campaign system is necessary (but at the same time I know I don’t have enough guys interested in this one to play it that extensively). If the 3D models and movement stands come out this year, this game might see a burst of activity.
I also enjoy some of the special features that BGG has attached to the game logging system. Looking at games played over the last thirty days is especially illuminating … I view this display as the “product” of my game-playing hobby. All the thinking about games; the buying of them and the reading of rules and preparation of components; the on-line search for details and opinions; the discussions about games good or bad … all of the stuff matters to me only inasmuch as it results in games getting played, and the “last thirty days” function gives me a snapshot of how I’m doing. I also like watching the sidebar update on this blog each time I play a new game, and I like watching the rise of select games on the overall list of plays for the year. It’s amusing to me to see that June was my best month for games played (39 … MANCON makes it’s presence felt), while September was the pits (only 7 games that month, and five of them on a single day, not sure what went wrong in September).
And the system lets me look back over the year as a whole and analyze my game playing habits as a whole, and project a little bit about what might happen in the year ahead. Rather than go through each game on a times-played basis, I’ve broken the games into several categories. This first post will concentrate on my “Top Games of the Year” and (mostly) my “Solid Peformers.”
TOP GAMES OF THE YEAR: Commands & Colors Ancients (21), Memoir ’44 (11), Battlelore (8)
I already wrote extensively about these games in my “Assimilated” post last month, so I won’t say more about them here aside from noting that I expect Battlelore to be my most-played game of 2007.
SOLID PERFORMERS: Tigris & Euphrates (9), Liar’s Dice (8), Power Grid (8), Tikal (8), Lost Cities (6), Conquest of the Fallen Lands (5), Das Motorsportspiel (5), Pizza Box Football (5), Ticket to Ride (5), Wings of War (5)
I came into this year rating Tigris & Euphrates as “9” (a rate rating for me on BGG); I end the year rating it “8.5” as the bloom has begun to fade, just a bit, after playing this one for a decade. It is still a deep and challenging game but I find I like it a little less, I think maybe my tastes are starting to swing back away from elegant mechanics and more toward “experience” games or games with better-integrated themes. The nine times I played T&E this year were entirely play-by-email games on BGG, and eight of them were part of a two-player tournament (where I think I finished 4-4). I’m not sure I’ll play this nearly so much in the year ahead, but it would be nice to get it on the table for a couple face-to-face games.
Liar’s Dice is a game that I can take or leave, but it always comes out when we’re in a group and drunk, so it will be here again next year. Lost Cities and Ticket to Ride are in a similar category for their ease-of-play and I’m sure they will return to the list.
Power Grid was the star of my face-to-face gaming this year … the Ulm really took a shine to it, and I liked it well enough to get swept up in his enthusiasm and keep bringing it out for play. I was surprised by the degree to which the variant maps kept the game fresh. Overall I would rather play Age of Steam but Power Grid is a solid game that I like well enough, and when a game has momentum you go with it. It will be here on this list again in 2007.
Tikal is a game I continue to like … I’m surprised to see I played it eight times, I think those must have all been on line as SpielByWeb rolled out their web-based version earlier this year. It makes for quite a good play-by-web game as the analysis-by-paralysis downtime goes away, but it also becomes an even more competitive game when played in this fashion, and I think I like Tikal best played face-to-face with friends. The components are just too nice to leave in the box. I resolve to play this one live in 2007.
Conquest of the Fallen Lands is a new game that I really like a lot, but I may have burned it out with the local group. We’ve detected a significant turn-order advantage in this one (which I’ve written about on BGG), and the game may be poisoned insofar as the guys are concerned … but I can’t help but think we’re one tweak away from getting this game dialed in, so I plan to lay low until the Spring sometime and bring it out again.
Das Motorsportspiel sat unplayed on my shelf for years after being acquired in a trade, but then saw a crazy flurry of play in the middle of the year. I think it is an “experience” game for autoracing, not something you’ll play a lot but worth playing as an event every once in awhile. I don’t see it as having enough legs to sustain league play, which is really the only place you can go with it. It will probably stay on the shelf until the next time Warren Spector visits (he’s a race game nut and he’s eyed this game a couple times).
Pizza Box Football was a game that I wanted to like more than I did. I put a lot of time into trying this one, playing face-to-face, and solo with full stats from the Pro cards expansion. I think the only way I’ll really enjoy this one is with a group of football fans that want to play the basic game, and I don’t see a critical mass developing on that front, unless we start another Madden lunchtime league at work, when this game might sneak onto the table while guys are waiting their turn on the Xbox.
Wings of War is a very clever game, and it has a wargame theme (which bumps it up in my estimation). I’ve put some time and materials into pimping out my set, and I’m gratified to see that it got on the table as often as it did this year. It does feel like an underplayed game that I haven’t experienced enough, but it will be hard to get this game on the table versus Battlelore in the year ahead. I also can’t shake the feeling that the scenarios aren’t quite enough, and that some kind of campaign system is necessary (but at the same time I know I don’t have enough guys interested in this one to play it that extensively). If the 3D models and movement stands come out this year, this game might see a burst of activity.
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