#27daysofgames Day 10 – Weirdest game I own – Dungeon Twister

 

Weird is a subjective concept, because you can go from the game that plays the strangest, to the weirdest idea of how a game is played, and then all the different permutations between those.  For me, the game that comes in first for the weirdest concept is the one where both players aren’t actively playing against each other, but neither are they co-operating, and the playing field is something that can be changed by either of them throughout the game.

Welcome to Dungeon Twister...

The idea of the game is very simple, both of the players take the part of a group of adventurers trying to get out of a dungeon created by an Archmage that had a fetish for building massively mechanically complex dungeons.

Why did they create these MMC dungeons when they’re an all powerful mage?

Who knows...?

Who cares...?

In the game, both players take four out of eight adventurers and try and get them from one side to the other, where they will escape from the dungeon. 

Wait a minute, if they can escape from the other side, what’s to stop the group that starts on that side from using the same escape route and saving the whole trip across the board?

Nah, we won’t ask that question...

The truth is, the idea behind two groups trying to escape off the side of a board that their enemies are coming in from is ridiculous, which leads us to the game itself, which, cheerfully enough, is brilliant.  There’s no element of chance in this game, no dice, no change in the options available to both sides and no difference to both sides.  Both players can choose the exact same options for their side and the only way you win is by being better than the other player.

No other variables...

The interesting point of the game is that while the tiles are put in place at the beginning of the game, the tiles can be rotated by putting a character on the gear tile and using an action to rotate the tile around, which can lead to any other pieces on that section being inconvenienced or locked out completely of the place they were trying to get to, leading to them having to go back and turn the room again or try a different route out of the maze following their previous exit having been dried up.  In theory, it’s a neat twist to the game that can be used to complicate matters for the opponent.  In practise, it can make what should be a 45 minute game into a two hour game as you both vie for control of the board.  The individual characters have different abilities, including walking through walls, being able to turn a board section other than the one you’re on, stealing objects from other characters, and avoiding combat entirely, and the choice of the characters you make directly affects the strategy you have to use to get through the maze.

The other thing is the combat matrix used, the cards that are given to the players don’t recycle, so when you’ve used all the high combat cards, it’s down to the characters with the high combat scores to resolve the fights and everyone else needs to stay out of the way, when the jump cards are used up, you don’t get any more, and in fact the only thing that does recycle are the action cards for the number of things the character can do every turn, so that if you use the high action cards in the first few turns, you have to slow down later in the game before you can speed up again, so even that aspect of the game is tactically controlled.

And that might be the problem, there is no aspect of this game that has a random aspect to it, so there’s no way to base a loss on anything other than the other person being better than you at playing the game, and for some reason, a lot of people weren’t happy with that.  Easier to lose when you can blame it on a bad roll, a random break, someone elses cards came up right when you ended up landlocked, but not on being a worse player...

As a game to play, it’s brilliant, frustrating and exhilarating in equal measure, but definitely weird...

#27daysofgames Day 9 – Favourite premise or concept in a game: Machine of Death

There are a number of interesting ideas in games today, and often the most interesting and long lived games are the ones about subjects that would seem dull or lacking in playability.  Farming and resource gathering, curing diseases and building railroads, in real life, all of them time consuming jobs that take years to do successfully, none of them subjects that would have been seen to be an interesting game years ago, and yet when you look at Settlers, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride, you have to wonder if it’s the premise or the mechanics of the game that makes it good.

For me, it has to be a combination of the above, but the reason I pick a game up in the first place is because the premise has my attention.

And when it comes to premises that got my attention, it’s Machine of Death all the way...

Machine of death as a premise indicates that there’s a machine out there that predicts how a person will die, not when or where, but how.  The difference is that it uses terminology that can be a misleading, the example of this is that one person gets told that it will be Old Age that kills them, and as they leave the machine centre, an old person asleep at the wheel of their bus goes over them and that’s it, they’re killed by old age...

This is a game in which the players take on the role of a group of Assassins trying to make sure that the Machine’s prediction comes true.  Players are given a target to kill, then the cause of death, and then the tools to cause the murder to happen and the complications in the case.  It’s then down to the players as a whole to come up with how all those things come together to solve the assassination.  What I like most about this is the almost completely freeform nature of the game, as seen in the cards here, when you draw Current as a cause, it could be that of a river, an electricity circuit, or something that’s up to date. 

The key thing about the whole game is that you judge your rate of success on the game between yourselves, so it’s possible to say that all the plans you draw are very likely to work, and that makes the next stage infinitely easier to win when it comes to the endgame, but then what’s the point of the game if you always choose to make it easier, it’s like playing a two player game with only one player and then running around the room cheering when you win. 

So when it comes to the endgame, you get a single minute on the egg timer to go through all the plans that you’ve figured out, and if you pass them all, the target is done, but if at any point you miss the roll, you have to make another plan in that same minute to come up with another way to finish the job.  If you do make all the rolls, you get a bonus in the form of equipment or circumstance that can be used on the next job.

When you’ve finished the series of four hits, you check the results, four dead and the team wins, even one survives and you lose.  As I said, it’s easy for the team to make the game very easy, but if you play it as it’s intended, it’s excellent.

And as far as premises go, for me it can’t be beat. 

#27daysofgames Day 8 – Favourite Pieces in a game: Star Wars Starship Battles

It has to be said that if certain games had arrived from Kickstarter when they should have done, then my response would most likely have been different to what it is today.  Mainly because those pieces were from Cthulhu wars, and they look like being the most singularly awesome pieces that have ever graced a game.

But Cthulhu wars has not arrived yet, and so I have to look at my present favourite pieces in a game, and those belong to the Star Wars Starship Battles Game...

I’ve always liked larger pieces in a game, I like the tactile element when you pick the piece up, the weight of it in my hand, reminds me that the decision I’m taking on what to do with it shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

Overthinking things?

Maybe, but it’s what I feel...

I’ve always liked things that are sturdy, does my head in when I think I’m going to pick something up and bits of it are going to fall off in my hand, ruins the whole feel of the game for  me, and that’s why I always liked these pieces.  They’re not the most well constructed, they’re certainly not in proportion to each other, and the game itself has rules that are on a par with Battlefleet Gothic for getting it wrong, but there’s something about being able to pick up a Super Star Destroyer and move it around the table. 

When X wing came along a short while ago, I found myself using both the X wing and the Tie fighter in the battles set to play larger games before I went on to buy the relevant models from the X wing range, and I find myself thinking hard about what you could do with all the other models that are out there.  On the one hand, if you were going up against a super star destroyer, it’d have to be the size of my garden to be accurate in size compared to the regular X wing pieces in the set, but when you consider that the top speed of most of the snub fighters is in kilometres per second, it’s entirely appropriate to have things racing around something as if it wasn’t this mammoth hulk sitting in space.

But I digress...

While I didn’t play much of the game, the pieces have been sitting on the side since I opened the box, and they’re the only game pieces that occupy such a position, because I still like looking at them even if I don’t play.  For me, pieces that generate such interest are both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because you just want to play with them, even if the rules aren’t the equal of the pieces.  A curse because if they weren’t so shiny in the first place, you might not have bought the game in the first place.

I have to say that I’m hoping I won’t feel the same about Cthulhu Wars when it finally arrives...

Dragonmeet: A New Beginning, Organisers Debrief...

 

So, at the end of every convention, I like to take a look at what worked well, what didn’t, and what can be done to improve it for the next year.  When we’re in a Year One scenario, we haven’t had any chance to do any of that, and therein lies part of the problem, you don’t know what’s going to be a problem and what’s going to run fine, and there’s nothing you can do about it till the day.

Didn’t post anything yesterday because in truth, we were up past midnight making sure everything went alright and following a five hour run back from London, I’ve finally got time to sit down and reflect on what was right, what was wrong, and what we’re going to do to improve it.

What went right...?

Interest in the new convention was beyond all expectations, total number of people over the course of the day was over 1600, full details will be emerging when we crunch all the numbers, but as you can see from the images, even in the quiet spots

Things weren’t that quiet...

The trade hall had been booked out for a while and the combination of veterans like Lords of War, All Rolled Up, and Cubicle 7 were bolstered by new faces like Graham Walmsley, Iron Crown enterprises, and Ogliarchy to make an excellent combination for all those coming in to the show. 

Demonstration games were extremely popular, with the gaming room having a massive variety of things available for people to look at, the room didn’t get quiet till well past 9 at night, and it’ll be something we’re looking to build on in the years to come.  Many remarked that there were a lot more people looking for miniatures and miniature play than had been seen in the previous years, which again, is something that we’re going to be building on in the coming years.

What went wrong...?

Volunteers...

I know it’s impossible to predict which people are going to turn up on the day and which aren’t, but when you start with a reasonable number of volunteers including a number of veterans, and before you’ve even got to the start of the event, the number is less than half of what it had been due to drop outs and cancellations, you know things are going to get bad.  Those of us who were left did what we could, but when you’re dealing with double the numbers with half the staff, I would have thought that those watching us running from point to point would have been wondering what had gone wrong, and rightly so.  We got through most of the major crises, but when you need three people just for the bring and buy and two more for front desk, those individuals who are left are going to be running everywhere.

If the venue had not changed, then a lot of the problems may well have been significantly lessened, because at the previous venue, everyone already knew where everything was, where to find a particular trader, where the games were, where the toilets were, where the signups were, and so on.  At  a new venue, everything’s got to be told to everyone again, and that brings me to my second point.

Signage...

Next year, far more signs, and a number of volunteers to be present in the upstairs areas to direct people to where they want to be going, rather than us not having the manpower which required that we give people directions and then hope they got there.

And on the subject of rooms, my biggest bugbear...

Games...

I’m a perfectionist, I like things to run smoothly and I like it when everyone knows where they are and everyone knows what they’re doing, this is how I run it at Expo, and at Expo, I’ve had several years to get it to run in such a way.  But then at Expo, we’ve also got the volunteer core to have people shown the right way and maps in place to let them see where they need to be going. 

The Main games rooms, those containing the Organised play (D&D and Pathfinder) and the clubs (Indies, Phoenix, RP Haven) worked well, because we didn’t have to move people in and out of them, those rooms worked because we could direct people there and have the clubs deal with the people we were sending them (With thanks to Rachael Hodson, Gary Harper, Martin Tideswell, Colin Foster, Pete Griffiths, Rob Silk, and Jens Loesel for all their immense efforts through the day).  The problem occurred with the open gaming area and the upstairs gaming area.  A lot of people say that there was a general state of disorganisation in these area, not helped by the lack of any staff presence there to resolve it.

I have to agree, a lot of the problems in those areas would have been solved by having a member of staff present to deal with the problem as it arose, rather than me finding out about it twenty minutes after it had gone off, but we didn’t have the volunteers available to leave there and Chris and I were too busy dealing with matters on the ground floor to be able to get up and check things.  When some GMs and players decided they wanted to move their tables around or push tables together to make a bigger table for them to play on, we found out about it too late (After the games had started), leading to further issues, all of which could have been resolved by one volunteer present to stop it before it started, but it’s a lesson learned, and that brings me to...

What we’re going to do to improve it...?

I’m big enough to get my hand in the air and say when we got something wrong, and while there wasn’t much that we did get wrong, we were massively hamstrung by those who offered help who didn’t turn up, a lesson that has been hard learned by this man after years of having people I could count on.

Those who did turn up worked like heroes, not stopping for a break and not asking to be let off duty, they just kept on working, and their efforts will not be forgotten in the years to come as we go from strength to strength.

Next year, I’m bringing with me a team dedicated to the purpose of keeping the rooms off the ground floor running, that team will have been briefed on the situation and circumstance of what happened last year and will be able to communicate problems immediately. Most importantly, I’ll know that I can count on them and we won’t be left firefighting as we were this year.

Signage will be placed at every point we can put it, the same team that’s keeping it going through the day will be coming down the night before to make sure we’ve been able to put everything together.

GM’s will be assigned tables and spaces, those who didn’t show up this year without a good reason won’t be coming back next year, and most importantly, the entire system will be run by me.  We didn’t have the automation in place this year to get the website working with all the other things that were done, those of you who’ve been to Expo know how tight that ship runs, and that’s how this will be next year.

But for all that went wrong, almost all the people that we spoke to had a good time, and those that had niggles or gripes were often things that were out of our control (Yes, I know, the bar ran out of bitter half way through the day...) or things that we’ve now got a resolve on for the year to come.

Overall, I’m quietly cheerful about how things went, the Bring and Buy was an unqualified success with more than 500 things going through it in the course of the day, and the Auction, ran by the ever superb Brian Nisbet made more than £1500 for charity.  Lots of people came by the desk and thanked us for our efforts and what we did to make the day good, and I think there’s a lot of goodwill in what did built this year that will entice people back next year.

And next year it’ll be better...

#27daysofgames Day 7 – Most Intellectual game I’ve ever played – Go

There’s a theory that games don’t need to have millions of rules to be complicated, and that the simplest games can often have the greatest amount of strategy to them.  In many games, this isn’t the case, and a lack of options on playing can result in a game that’s far easier to predict and as a result, far easier to win...

Not in the case of Go...

Go was invented some two and a half thousand years ago and features the simple premise of each player taking turns to place a stone at an intersecting point on the board with the idea of controlling more of the board and removing the opponents stones by placing their own.  A stone is removed by occupying all the linear points (called liberties) around it, if you find yourself able to surround a larger number of stones at every point, you can remove all of them at the same time by occupying the final liberty in the formation.

Sounds simple?

It really isn’t...

There are a variety of other rules that make up the playing of the game, such as not being able to make a move that returns the game to an earlier position (and in this manner, preventing tit for tat stone taking or at least slowing it down), but the basic concept of the game is to place a stone upon the board, one at a time, till both sides rest.

How is this intellectual?  It’s the simplest set of rules in the world...

And therein lies the Intellectual nature of it, The first move in Go can be any one of 19 rows and 19 columns, giving you 361 different options, by comparison, the first move of chess can only be one of Ten (six of the rear pieces locked in place by the pawns), the second move in go can be on any of remaining squares, giving you a total number of permutations of 129960 in the first two moves alone, in comparison to 100 for Chess.  By the third move, the number of possible moves that could have been made rises to 46655640.

You can see where this is going...

And the thing is that while you can teach a computer how to play Chess, so you can teach it to play Go, but when you’re teaching a computer to play Chess, there’s a very strict attack protocol to each piece, as there are in most games, there’s rules on what it can do and where it can go, and in return, what the opponent can do in retaliation, which gives the game a pattern than can be looked at and analysed.  Go has no such protocol, any piece, anywhere, at any time, and a move that was done a hundred stones ago will still have bearing on the strategy that is unfolding now, which is something that a computer does not account for.  It is the reason that computers have been unable to progress into the higher levels (Dan Grades) of professional Go players, whereas Chess programs have been challenging at very high levels for a long time.

I only have a few friends that play Go, and it’s always an excellent time when we actually get to play, although it’s frequent that the board has to be brought out from the last time that we were playing so that we can continue playing the game that we didn’t get to finish the previous time.

But that time is well spent, because you can pick up the game without refreshing your knowledge of what went on before and you can continue without pause, even though you haven’t played for months.

And any game that takes the most powerful computer in the world four hours to consider it’s next move, where a human will place within a quarter of that time, is surely testament to the power of the human mind, and that’s why I consider this to be the most intellectual game in the world today, because computational power and rules will never win over a truly intelligent strategy, and while AI’s remain very much in the A and very little in the I category, this is the proof that something that has a truly versatile mind will always triumph over something calculating the odds...

And with Skynet getting ever close, I take heart that a machine has yet to beat a human at at least one of our games...

#27daysofgames Day 6 – Game I’m never likely to play again – Battlefleet Gothic

It wasn’t rare years ago to pick up a game that you liked the look of, take a glance at it, play it the once, and then decide you weren’t going to play it again.  The problem with a lot of games that you see at conventions is that they’re being demonstrated by people who know all the problems with them and know when to avoid certain parts of them to make the game run smoother...

And therefore make you buy them...

So it was for me when I first encountered Battlefleet Gothic, I mean, seriously, what’s not to like, huge great honking starships running around without the need for hexes, more firepower than a dozen titan legions on even the smallest ships, and all the different races of the universe out there to shoot at each other.

What could possibly go wrong...?

Well, one or two things...

Battlefleet Gothic got the essence of what it covers very well, it’s not a game that’s designed to simulate small combat, it’s a game to show the sort of fights that go on between mile long capital ships, and while that’s covered well, there’s one problem with capital ship combat...

It’s dull...

It’s not the bobbing and weaving individual dogfights like those seen in the first star wars films, it’s the cumbersome moving of massive ships to throw enormous amounts of firepower at each other, which requires a completely different mindset to the one that I’ve got when it comes to space combat.  For me the sitting of big ships at either end of the board and throwing huge numbers of dice at each other is dull, there weren’t many special move or attack options on the ships, it was whoever got the angle on the enemy first for the most dice.

I know there’s some out there that would say that that’s no different to a number of games out there, but when you’ve got limited options on moving and tactics, the battle tends to go to the swift, and then there were the expansions, which fell into the inevitable GW quandary of making everything bigger and badder after the initial game.  The other problem was that to have an enjoyable game, you had to field a good sized fleet or it was over before you ever really got started on the game, because once a ship started to lose systems like propulsion or weapons, it became a line of sight obstacle and very little else, so if you only had the one ship, you suddenly had a very expensive target and nothing else.

And that’s where most of the people I played with had the problem, the game we’d seen at the store was one where they’d been using a lot of the smaller, faster ships, and it presented the game as a far faster playing game of moving, firing, moving again and keeping the action going rather than turning slightly and lighting up the sky with megatons of firepower...

This is not to say it’s a bad game, it’s just one that didn’t fit with our particular game style and so while a few games were had, we didn’t really get what we wanted out of it and so, like many things I’ve been looking at recently, it needed to be dusted off before I took photos...

Still, be interesting to see how it works out against the new Star Wars Armada game that’s coming out...

Dragonmeet Countdown

So, spent most of the day travelling down to London, and while it’s not normally a journey that takes the whole day, had to drop into Sheffield to get Pete, and then down to Leicester to get Graham.  It’s as well both of them are excellent company, because the journey down was a long one, as any journey that goes through London when there’s a possibility of Traffic in it will be.

Cheerfully though, Good company, shorter journey, so six hours didn’t seem like quite so very long at all, which is an excellent thing.  Arrived to find that the staff in the Ibis are phenomenally more helpful than the staff at other hotels I’ve had to do conventions at, and that every request is met with “No Problem”, “I’ve got it”, or “I don’t know, but I’ll go find out right now” which they promptly do...

So here’s the hall, devoid of most traders

Here’s the RPG rooms before we set them up

Quiet...?

I like to savour these moments before the Storm...

So tomorrow, just as it was with Kensington Town Hall all those years ago, new place, new start, and we’ll see what comes of it by the end of tomorrow, there’ll be a convention report in all this somewhere, but at this point in time, I’m just trying to make sure that it all goes off right in the first place.

Check in with me tomorrow and I’ll let you know how we’ve done...

#27daysofgames Day 5 – The Game that exemplifies why I play games

Difficult one this one, because when you’ve been playing games as long as I have, you’ve played a lot of games, and to find one that stands out as the exemplar of why you play games, not just a game that you like playing or that you find interesting, but the example of why you play games, well, there’s only one game it could be...

Ludo...

Wait a moment I hear you say, how can that be...?

Well, it’s fairly simple to be honest, Ludo is the game that exemplifies why I play games, because it’s not really a game, it’s several people rolling dice, with pure luck being the only reason you ever “win” at it.  It’s the reason why I play real games, not what the world at large believes to be a game, and at the same time, it’s the reason that most people don’t ever start with games in the first place, because they see “games” like this, where their own skills and intelligence, their own ability to make good judgement and plan ahead, can have no effect whatsoever on the game that they’re playing, and they presume that all games are the same...

And they never go near another one...

So yes, this is the game that exemplifies why I play games, because when I look at a new game and the rules for it, the first question I ask is “Is it Ludo...?”  Is it a game that has no way to influence the victory, no way to do things that will alter the course of the game, and no way to win other than random chance...?

If so, I put it back down again and think nothing more of it...

For me, Ludo and games like it form the biggest obstacle to getting new people into games and having them see that they’re not just for children who don’t know any better.  In Germany and countries where the games culture stretches back years, the problem is far less of a problem than it is here in England, because their older generations don’t think that the only games that existed from twenty years ago were things like Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, and the like, where random chance was the only decider in victory.  In England, the generation above me has a few people who know what real games are, but for the most part, they only know of the random chance brigade, and it’s them that taught the next generation that games were silly things, and that generation will teach their kids, and so on, and son on...

Of course, there’s those that rebel against the status quo, and as more and more people are introduced to the idea that games aren’t just throw dice and hope, so games like these will steadily fade and I hope that one day they will be little more than a footnote in the history of games, with everyone just looking back with a puzzled expression on how anyone thought they could be fun.

And we’re not there yet...

But we’re getting there...

#27daysofgames - Day 4 - Most recent game Purchase - Ancient Terrible things

I had a short want list when I went to Essen, and I didn’t know enough about the convention to abandon the booth at the first chance on Thursday and run around collecting things, so when I finally got off there, I went to see what I could find and found that most of it was already gone.

However, I was lucky that some of my want list wasn’t in the mainstream of things for everyone to pick up, and so it was that I managed to get a copy of Ancient Terrible Things.

I did a review for it earlier in the year, which can be found at http://millionwordman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/game-review-ancient-terrible-things.html so I won’t go into the game itself, but more for the fact that I’d seen the game when it was first offered on Kickstarter and couldn’t really justify picking it up at the time, and since that point, I’d not seen much about it, only that it was eventually going to be available at Essen.  What got my interest about this game was that there was a nice premise (being that you’re all playing members of a doomed expedition up a river of darkness to find forbidden knowledge), backed up by reasonable game mechanics and excellent production values.

I know, I’m a sucker for shiny looking things...

But having a good game behind the shiny is always a massive win...

There’s an expansion due out for it shortly that I’ll be picking up, and they’re adapting the dice system (which is really well thought out) to a few more games that they’re bringing out in the new year.  It’s rare I’m interested in a game enough to look for it in advance, but if Pleasant games are going to be bringing out things of this calibre, I’ll be looking for them more often...

#27daysofgames Day 3 - The first game I bought with my own money - Legions of Steel

Being a single parent for a good number of years puts a bit of a lock (to say the least) on the amount of money you have to spend on games, and for good reason, after all, the money should be going on the little tiny, and so it was for me...

However, occasionally stores close down, and when they do, they sometimes have sales to get rid of all the rest of their stock and you can find yourself getting a whole lot of product for not very much money.

So it was when Electronics Boutique decided that tabletop and RPG’s weren’t the way forwards and decided to liquidate their entire stock.  It was close to my birthday and the lady I was dating and I were both fond of games in general, so we took a visit to the store and there she got me SLA Industries (which took up a lot more of my time over the years than what I bought), and I bought the big box set of Legions of Steel...

Mainly because I thought I could use the tiles to expand on space hulk without having to get another copy of it...

Legions of Steel was a good attempt at creating a game that would rival the concept of Space Hulk without implicitly stating that it was a copy of it, because although Games workshop were far less lawsuit happy than they are now, they’d still have a go if they thought they could get away with it.  So, for a fiver, I got the box set, which had all these tiles

All these figures

And then all I had to do was find someone to play it with...

This proved more difficult...

The problem wasn’t that the game was badly done, it had good production values, tiles were good and the general level of detail was more than fine to get a good game going.  The problem was that it didn’t grab peoples imagination in the same way that things like Space Hulk (borne of Rogue Trader, which my circle of friend loved) did, and it didn’t have the same level of product support that those games did, which was a problem in and of itself, because once you’d played the basic game a few times, you ran out of options to play, and when you figured the mechanics of the game out, there were very easy ways for anyone playing the droids to just overrun all the marines without any serious effort.

So I believe that in total, I’ve played it maybe four times, and at least one of those was a theoretical run through to see if there was any way in which a line of marines could reasonably stop the spiky death fiend (which we’re assured was a mark 1 version, really don’t want to meet the mark 2 or 3), which ended in a lot of dead marines really quickly.

However, the game mechanics themselves are effectively those of Space Hulk (down to renaming Command points as Leadership points), but the weapon mechanics are different (worse) and that’s probably why...

a)      It never really caught on as much as it could have done.

b)      No one from GW sued them

So my copy needed to be dusted off before I could take photos of it, but it was fun for a short while, and given that all gamers are reasonably resourceful, when you look at it, plenty of tiles for larger space hulk boards, and I didn’t have to buy necrons for quite some time... 

#27daysofgames - Day 2 - The first game I ever taught someone - Magic the Gathering

Following on from the first game I played, which was a very long time ago, it took me some time before I figured that other people might have been interested in playing games, and more importantly that they may want to learn to play other games, and as a result, I was reasonably late into teaching other people the games I was playing.

For the purposes of this, I don’t include the games that I learned with people, because that’s not me teaching them as a person who knows the game, it’s me figuring things out with them, which is not the same thing.

So the first time I taught someone how to play a game was back in ’94, when I only had three decks of cards, and the resupply hadn’t quite made it as far as England.  I’d picked up the first decks from an Electronics Boutique (Remember those England?) that had two left, and a single booster pack, after reading the Dragon magazine article pointing out what had happened and the magic “Phenomenon” rapidly spreading.  Three months later I got another deck and figured that maybe someday there would be some more cards over here...

How little we knew...

But the game that day was between two decks, singularly unplanned, both five colours, (Although one of them with a single plains and four white cards) very little of anything else in them, and while I knew how to play the game, there weren’t enough cards out there to build focussed decks, and Land wasn’t available by the bucket for free like it is now.  It was hard enough getting enough land together to play a deck properly without having to think about trying to get enough to play a two or even (impossible!) one colour deck.

Didn’t take long to teach my friend how to play the game, indeed the very appeal of the game is that it doesn’t take much to teach people (or at least it didn’t then...), and winning by reducing them to zero life points wasn’t a difficult concept to get across at all. 

They won the first game, and we swapped decks and I won the second, so we put all three decks in the middle and picked random decks and played again, and by the end of the evening, we didn’t care who’d won the most games, it was just a good afternoon playing a new game.

I still have the deck I played with that day, when the new cards started coming out, it seemed a bit of a shame to break up the deck that I’d started this with, and over the next ten years or so, I tried out for the british championships at the NEC in ’95 (Before the concept of a Pro Tour had been thought of), I played hundreds of people from all the different places of the world, and I made many new friends that all had a love of trying out new combinations.

But the world changed, people figured out that there was money to be had in this, things went from playing a game with people and having fun to seeing how fast you could wipe out your opponent (Turn one without them having a go seems to be the record on this) and with it came a new set of players that were only interested in getting the win, not interested in playing just for the fun of it.

My breaking point came when a nine year old decided that my cards were marked and called the umpire to adjudicate, which caused twenty minutes of waiting while they checked every single card and decided there was nothing wrong with them, and said nine year old then starting to cry when his accusations were found to be unproven and he’d have to actually play me.

I chose to exit stage right before committing twaticide...

So I haven’t really played much magic in the last few years, and some of that’s down to the life I’m leading and spending more time organising things than playing them.  The other part of it is that as soon as the game became massively competitive, it lost something, because the games where you had to play four colours because you didn’t have the land to play less, and the games where you could spend an hour mashing away at each other trying to find the chink in the armour are long gone.  I rarely watch a game that lasts more than five or ten minutes these days, and I understand that I’m a relic of a time gone by when people just played the game because it was fun.

But I like having fun, that’s the reason I play games, and so we still have occasional games with three of us playing in a circle, and sometimes a one on one, but we don’t stray much out of the circles we started in, and we don’t play that often anymore.

But I’ve still got all the cards!

So if anyone does want a game out there, isn’t going to quote me on the fact that I can’t have certain cards in my deck (I don’t even know if Type 2 exists anymore, but I’ve got no Moxes, No Lotus, none of that stuff, but a lot of its Ice Age and Legends), and just wants to play a game, look me up, I still love the game...

I’m just not competitive enough for the new world...

Tabletop Game a Day, Day 1 - First Game I ever played - Yahtzee...

 

I started playing games young, there wasn’t much on TV (and to be fair, you had to have a TV in the first place to watch it, which we didn’t), and when you lived in Yorkshire, you didn’t have to be told life was Grim Up North (tm), you knew it.  But I had a few things I was grateful for, a few people that brightened my life immensely.

One of these was my Nan...

My Nan was one of those fierce ladies, she was one of those ladies who wouldn’t put up with things that were wrong, she liked a beer in the evening (and sometimes one at dinnertime), she cooked meals that consisted of meat and potatoes, with occasionally non essential (that’d be everything that’s not a potato) vegetables and gravy that you could stick a knife in, and she believed in doing what she wanted to do, rather than waiting for someone to tell her she could do things.

One of these things was playing games.

Nan liked a game or two, and it was her that introduced me and my brother to the game of Yahtzee.  For those who’ve (somehow) never seen it, it’s a game that involves the rolling of five dice to try and get certain combinations to score the most points.

It’s not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination...

What it is, is a game that takes no time at all to learn and can be played by almost people of any age, and the best thing of it is that every game is completely different, you get good games and you get bad, and it’s what you do with the dice that makes the game interesting.   The set that we learned on was the basic 1978 version, that came with one set of dice, one bowl in which to throw them, and bits on the bowl to rest the dice when you wanted to keep them.

So after your first roll, it might look like this

After your second, this

And so on.

The game had an element of chance in it, but if you played smart and didn’t scrub out the possibilities that you could make when you had to rub something off the score sheet, then you stood a good chance of making the right scores to win the game.  There wasn’t a problem with this game as it stood, the problem was that the people making it kept on seeing silly things to do with it to try and sell more copies of a game that didn’t need to be changed or improved.

Bigger score sheets for example...

And then take Yahtzee Hold Em Poker (please) for example...

Shiny...

Very shiny

But I can hear my Nan talking back across the years, clear as if she were standing next to me, she’d take one look at this and say “But it’s Poker, why don’t we just use cards...?”

I have to agree, so I’ll be back here with the basic set having fun rolling dice.

Paul Walker Memorial Cruise - Sheffield

I’ve got a few interests in life, one of them that not everyone knows about is fast cars, and to be honest, my first introduction to that was the film The Fast and the Furious.  One of the stars of that franchise was Paul Walker, and in an accident that no one could have even considered, he lost his life on this day last year.

It’s not often that a celebrity passing away actually has anything more than fleeting interest to me, because I don’t know them personally, and for the most part, they live their lives in a different world to me.

Paul Walker was different.

Paul Walker was one of those celebrities who stayed away from the parties, and spent his wealth on trying to make the world a better place for other people, so when he died in a freak accident last year, it hit home, here was a man who did everything he could for others, here was a man who had more good to do in the world, and this was what struck me about his death, that the world had lost one of the good guys.

With this in mind, I went to the Memorial Cruise held in Sheffield this evening, where a number of other people with the same interest in fast cars came along to pay their respects and remember the man who brought the whole scene to the attention of many people who until that point had been tuning up their cars in their own garages and not thinking there were others like them.  There’s a cruise most months, where ten, sometimes twelve people turn up and show their cars, and it’s not Hollywood, the women there aren’t in hot pants and the idea of everyone standing there wearing muscle tops is clean out the window.

This is Sheffield, not San Francisco...

But this was different, as you can see from the images, hundreds, if not thousands of people turned up for this, no violence, no racing, just a whole bunch of people who like fast cars.  Even the Po-lice turned up, which given the character Paul played in the films, was entirely appropriate, but it was an excellent evening, there was a minutes silence for the man that none of us ever knew, but who brought us together in ways none of us could have imagined all that time ago.

So tonight my thoughts are for Paul Walker, a good man gone too soon, and I hope that they do quarter miles in the sky(line), because if there is a Valhalla for those who like cars, he deserved to find it...

27 days of games...

Back in August, Dave Chapman (http://autocratik.blogspot.co.uk/) posted a set of questions about roleplaying games, designed to get people talking more about RPG’s in general and also to get some ideas of what people think when it comes to games. I thought it would be a good thing to do the same thing, but not just about RPG’s, about games in general, and so having spoken to Dave briefly (the list idea was his in the first place, so the credit goes to him), I thought to ask a similar set of questions regarding board and war games in general, but this time to put a little explanation behind each one of the headings as I know that some of the august entries were a little open to interpretation.  I’m going to be doing this list in December on a day by day basis, and I’ve left the list shorter than having one every day, because there are a few days when I expect that people will be doing things other than writing about board and war (and for that matter, RPG) games.

So, the list is as follows

1 – The first game you ever played, literally that, no matter what it may have been, the game that started you out in the world of games.

2 – The first boardgame you ever taught someone else to play

3 – The first game you ever bought with your own money

4 – The most recent game you bought

5 – The game that most exemplifies why you play games

6 – The game in your collection that you’re never likely to play (which is not to say that you haven’t played it before, just that you’re never likely to play it again, and why...)

7 – The most Intellectual game that you’ve ever played, and the reasons why you consider it to be an intellectual game.

8 – Your favourite counters/pieces in a game, and again, why you like them so much

9 – Your favourite premise/concept in a game, little bit more tricky this one, because the question is not whether it’s your favourite game or the best game, but the game you like the idea of the most.

10 – The Weirdest game you own, and why...

11 – An old game that you still play all the time, and for old, I mean from the first half of your gaming life, which I know for some people means last month, but still...

12 – Most memorable game played, which is often less about the game being played and more about the events that took place while you were playing the game, so let us know why it was so memorable.

13 – Best Spur of the moment Convention Purchase – Because we’re all vulnerable to shiny things, and conventions are often the place where the shiny is too much for us to resist.  Sometimes when we get the shiny home, it’s not so shiny anymore, sometimes it is, this question is for the impulse buy that turned out to be gold.

14 – Favourite Convention Game – Either the favourite game you’ve played at a convention, or the game you most enjoy playing at conventions, and why.

15 – Game you wish you owned – But just don’t, Damnit....

16 – Funniest game you’ve ever played – Similar to 12, but more with the humour

17 – Favourite game mechanics – Because if there’s one thing that makes games different, it’s the mechanics we use to play them, here the question is which game mechanic do you like most and why?

18 – Favourite Licensed game – So anything that’s been given a licence from something outside the games world, who do you think has done the best job and why?

19 – Best second hand game purchase – For all those times you went to a yard sale or a car boot sale and came away with something that brightened your whole day, tell us about it.

20 – Coolest looking game – From the designers edition of OGRE to the immense multi boards of Cthulhu wars, some games just look cool, even if they’re not the best in the world to play, here the question is what’s the best eye candy?

21 – Most complicated game – Not to be confused with Intellectual, we’re talking about the games that are so complex you need the rulesbook to get through them, what’s the game that you’ve most needed to refer to the rulebook on?

22 – Favourite game no one else wants to play – Because while you think it’s brilliant, for some reason you’re the only one that does...

23 – Game you’d like to see an improved version of – It doesn’t even have to be out of print at the moment, just let us know which game you want to see a new version of, and why...

24 – Rarest Game owned – Whatever it may be

25 – Favourite game of all time – And why...

26 – What game I got for Christmas this year – Well we need a way to work off all the turkey on boxing day...

27 – What game I would use to introduce someone to gaming – And why

My first post is in a few days...

Spoiler Alert...

It’s Yahtzee...