My Blog About Games.

Of all the rotten luck...

2010-06-15T19:59:00.001-07:00

Even thought my wife and I just played Race for the Galaxy, we were so impressed by the first couple of games that we had to try it again. The game is really interesting, and even just a couple of plays show that there are some deeper strategies to attempt, so we decided to try the "two-player advanced" set up.

Normally in Race for the Galaxy, each player chooses only one phase cards per turn, and each of the selected phases is played with those players who chose it getting a special bonus or benefit during that phase. In the two player advanced game, each player chooses 2 phase cards per turn. This changes the dynamic of the game quite a bit. Now, not only can you potentially have 4 different phases occur during a single round, you can also potentially have the ability to develop or settle twice. My thought after playing the "basic" game (one phase card per player) was that this would make the game go faster and require a bit more planning. My thought after playing the advanced game is that I was right.

The first game pitted my Alpha Centauri against her Old Earth. I lucked into getting a few good rare element and military worlds in my opening hand, but that was where my luck began and ended. I did some development of my tableau while my wife started slowly, and eventually I had some really good military power out. So I started to explore (+5) for military worlds and developments, to see what I could come up with. Meanwhile, my wife began to settle a number of production worlds. Turn after turn, I sought out well-defended and valuable worlds, but despite drawing 8 or more cards per turn, I was unable to find anything at all. Nothing that would help me score points based on a military of 6 came up. Even after exhausting the deck and reshuffling. And while my horrible luck stymied my attempts to get points, my wife developed a Diversified Economy and started to beat me on points and card advantage. Perhaps I relied too much on a strategy that wasn't working, but her goal of a produce/consume engine was clear early on, and by the time it was clear that mine wasn't working, I was already so far behind on VP chips it was all the hope I had left that something would eventually happen. Needless to say, I was trounced.

We played again. This time I got Epsilon Eridani to begin, and my wife had Earth's Lost Colony. I expected that this would mean another produce/consume engine. I was wrong. I began with a strategy of playing a ton of developments, as my opening hand had Public Works and Investment Credits. I figured that I could use the advantages of those cards to get more cheap developments, and eventually find cards like Galactic Federation and other expensive developments. I was hoping I could outpace my wife's ability to score points and end the game quickly. It didn't quite work that way. Unfortunately for me, while I was completely unable to get a military strategy to score any big points in the previous game, she lucked into a few early military powers which allowed her to settle, settle, and settle a little more without spending her cards. Outpacing her was impossible. And the points she commanded from both military worlds and producing/consuming x2 once again toasted my feeble tableau.

I was a bit frustrated with the whole thing. The random draw was against me in the first game, preventing me from getting any really valuable military worlds until it was too late. And it was against me once again in the second game, delivering into my wife's lap the military worlds that I couldn't find with a map and GPS coordinates in the first game.

It was frustrating, but I know it sometimes happens. That's just how games with random cards are. Just before we played Race for the Galaxy, we played Dominion a couple of times and I basically destroyed her. Sometimes, fortune swings the other way. Regardless, I didn't "not enjoy" the games. I was just a bit frustrated that they didn't quite go how I had planned. Better luck next time, I'm hoping.

No need for San Juan anymore...?

2010-06-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

I picked up Race for the Galaxy earlier this week after selling off a few older video games that I haven't touched in years. I've been looking at RftG for a while, and I nearly bought it several times in the past year, but a number of things made it a difficult choice. First, I already own San Juan (a very similar game in a lot of respects), but my wife doesn't enjoy the game. She has a hard time putting it into words, but I think I've gotten it pinned down. More on that later.

When I cracked open the box, I was initially concerned by the round and card summary. It makes the game seem pretty intense. Once I had read through the rules and scanned through the cards, I realized how useful the thing actually is; it's got almost every rule you need to play the game right there. This is one of the few games I've played where I didn't have to go back to the rule booklet during the first play. I know there are some people who don't like to use this as a teaching tool, but I found it to be a great help... you just need to make sure that the information is explained in small bites and there is space to digest each bite. Trying to grasp it all at once is like trying to swallow a sandwich whole.

My wife was less than enthused to try the game out. As I mentioned, she doesn't like San Juan, and some of the threads on Board Game Geek have a lot of discussion about how difficult the iconography is to follow. I assured her that it wasn't that complex, but the game seemed to have a lot more options during play compared to San Juan. Today she said we should give it a try.

I explained the rules, first with the basic concept of the phases and how they are chosen (which made a lot of sense, coming from a background of San Juan and Puerto Rico). I introduced the different types of cards as they came up (i.e. explained Developments during the Develop phase), and then quickly went over the icons from the card summary. She's a pretty solid gamer and she didn't have any trouble with the rules. I suspect that some people might, but I'm a teacher born (and by trade!), so I think I can work it out.

In the first game, we started with the preset Start Worlds and hands, just trying to get an idea of how the game flowed. I was Alpha Centauri, so I started off with focus on Rare Elements worlds and developments, while my wife did some seemingly random diversification. The phase selection went pretty easily, and eventually some lucky draws landed a bunch of 6 cost Alien worlds in her hand and a solid production/consume set up that let her play them. I had bumbled along with a weak Military tableau, hoping New Galactic Order (which adds points equal to your military rating at the end of the game) would carry me. Unfortunately for me, it didn't. Alien technology, planets, and the Alien Tech Institute put her 10 points ahead.

However, we decided to try a second game, without the preset cards and worlds, and see how well we had grasped the basic strategies. This time, things with much smoother for me. We both diversified our production/consumption engines, hers a bit more efficient due to a Black Market Trading World (trade goods for cards even if you don't call Consume: Trade). But as the game went on, I was able to get out the Tourist World (that eats 2 goods for 3 VP) and the Diversified Economy development (that eats various goods for 1 point per variety). One or two turns using Consume VPx2 got rid of all of the VP chips and ended the game in my favor.

We both found the game to be fantastic. Much more enjoyable than San Juan (an inevitable comparison), a variety of strategies and tactics, an interesting theme that doesn't seem pasted on, and quick set-up/tear-down. In a post-game discussion, my wife and I pinpointed why she enjoyed RftG but not San Juan: In SJ, you can score points by building, that's it. In RftG, you can settle, develop, take over with military and produce and sell goods. The variety makes the game so much more enjoyable and deep. I'm not trying simply to bad-mouth San Juan, but rather to make a comparison with a similar game.

As a side note, we also decided that Puerto Rico may have been replaced in our collection. We enjoy PR, but the set-up time and complexity of the rules mean that it always takes forever to get started, play, and clean up. A different number of colonists, ships, money and points for each number of players? Ack. RftG has some key similarities in play, but is much faster. It may seem like a strange "Game A replaced Game B in my collection," but that's what we came away with. We'll play PR, and we'll enjoy it, but don't feel the need to own it anymore. It's going to be someone else's problem to carry around, set up, and explain.

Overall, Race for the Galaxy was great fun, fast enough to get a few games in without getting fatigued, and we're already looking to play again (and maybe try out some of these nice looking expansions). Next time, we'll give it a go with the "advanced" 2-player, which looks to make the game a bit faster and more intriguing, and hopefully get a chance to play with 3 or 4 players in the near future.

Buying, selling, planting, harvesting and trading vegetables!

2010-06-01T21:26:00.000-07:00

"At the Gates of Loyang" went from being a game I had never heard of to bought and on the table in the span of about eight days. This almost never happens.

My wife and I went to the local game store just over a week ago and saw this large Agricola-like box, and took a look. I'm rarely attracted to a game due to the box, but as it was another game in Uwe Rosenberg's "harvest trilogy" we thought it was worth looking into more. Well, my wife did. I wasn't terribly interested. She took a look on BGG about it, read a couple of reviews, and pointed some of them out to me. It looked to be a pretty good two player game, so it went on the wish list... and then I got an email from the local store with a coupon for 25% off one item. With the price of Loyang what it is, we decided that would be the game to get.

So, I punched out the few punchable bits, sorted things out into bags, and tonight we sat down to give it a try. I had taken a look at both the rule booklet in the box and the "narrative" rule booklet from the files section here, and thought I had a pretty good basic idea of how the game worked. To be honest, I did. But there are enough little fiddly rules to keep track of, and the two rule booklets describe each thing in different ways. So as we began to play, I was almost instantly frustrated by how vague these things could be. In particular, the special rules for two players during the "distribution round" and the wording of the rules for the harvest phase required referencing both documents at once. I'm not normally so confounded.

Anyway, we basically got things figured out (although there were some snafus with scoring and field acquisition). The basic flow of the game is pretty quick: First you harvest and gain a new field, then you distribute cards, then you take turns taking your actions and gaining your points. I've seen some people complain about the "multi-player" solitaire aspects of the action phase, but that's part of the fun. Each round, you get to draft cards from the deck, looking for a combination of customers, trading stalls, and helpers that will score you coins. So it becomes a puzzle of sorts to see how you can maximize those pieces, with some control in the form of the "Two-pack" (extra cards) and the ability to randomly add additional cards into the Courtyard to draft from (pushing your luck, in a way).

My wife started off strong, having a couple of turns where her fields spawned exactly the right vegetables to work with her traders to provide both regular and casual customers with their orders. It sucked for me. In one early hand, I drew nothing but regular customers, meaning I had to take one... but I had nothing to provide them with because it was too early in the game. This may have been a blessing in disguise, though, because I was able to then focus my resources on the customer I went with and build up my economy.

The game was quite close, as I expected it would be from reading reviews. The way points are scored means that it's easy to get the first one in each round, but increasingly difficult to get additional points. I lucked into getting the plowman a couple of times which helped to reload some fields, which ended up allowing me to have just the resources I needed to be unbeatable in the final round. This was visibly upsetting to my wife, who basically had to give up. She just didn't have enough vegetables coming from her fields, even with trading stalls, and she had taken an early loan to get her engine started, and it came back to bite her in the end.

Overall, it was a fun game (although, obviously the most fun was in the middle once we had learned the rules, but not gotten to the "foregone conclusion" part of the last two rounds). It's not as cutesy as Agricola, but it's not as ponderous as Le Havre. So I'm glad we made the purchase. And we'll definitely be trying it again... I forgot that private fields that empty are removed from the game, and only remembered as I was writing this report. Oops. That would definitely have made a difference in the game-play. We'll get it right next time!

Pathfinder: It's like D&D 3rd edition!

2010-05-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

I first played D&D in college with the university "Gamers' Association" at UGA. I had played other RPGs before that, but it never really occurred to me to try D&D for whatever reason. A friend of mine was running a game so I joined up, made a mechanically awful character concept (multi-class Druid/Ranger) and sort of enjoyed it. The basic mechanics of the game were pretty straightforward, and while there are definitely complexities to delve into, on the surface it wasn't too bad. The more I got to know the game, the more I found to dislike about it, though.

I never really got to know it well, but I always had this niggling feeling like maybe I should give it another try. So when D&D 4th edition was announced, I kept a close watch on the previews and such to see if it was going to interest me. It turns out that the designers were turning the focus from the broad array of options in 3rd (and previous) editions to mostly combat encounter-centered mechanics. At first, I thought "Well, that's not a great move." But as I discovered more about the changes and how they were implementing the concepts, I began to think the move was a good idea.

See, I'm not a "one system for everything" kind of person. I like using a variety of games with different focuses and strengths to play a variety of games in settings/genres that utilize those focuses and strengths best. So, where I have games that can be used for generic fantasy adventuring, very few (if any) were oriented towards the tactical positioning and encounter-level resource management. D&D 4th edition looked to be very strongly designed for a particular goal, and now that I've played it for a couple of years, I can say that it is well suited for that goal. But I'll reiterate that it's not suited for every goal. It just did what I wanted D&D to do better than 3rd edition did: give me a lot of tactical and strategic options, a variety of character builds without newbie character creation traps, and keep each encounter as a more or less self-contained mini-game.

Of course, this isn't the be all end all of fantasy adventuring games. Sometimes you want to roam the countryside killing whatever you find, but sometimes you want to have the fantasy equivalent of the A-Team, or maybe a game about a series of murders at a sorcerer's college, or a game about a guild of mercenaries who rise through the ranks of political power and eventually control large swathes of the country or continent. Some of the stuff that 4e cut out of the "D&D experience" was rightly missed.

One company, Paizo, took advantage of the desire to keep playing this kind of D&D in an in-print, currently published format. Even better, they could use the rules for D&D 3rd edition, because they are a part of an open license. The idea was that they could take the rules that everyone already knows and loves, refine them, improve them, and then keep the people who love that broader kind of D&D happy. The result of this was the Pathfinder RPG. And tonight, we gave it a try.

Well, it felt like D&D 3rd edition, with some minor tweaks. Combat was faster than 4e, but it also lacked the options and variety of 4e... but we were only at level one, so it was really hard to see if the speed or lack of variety was endemic to the entire system or if it was just the low level. I wasn't a big fan. We kind of meandered through a dungeon, killed skeletons and ghosts as we found them, and then continued meandering. In 4e, this would be interesting because of the combat system of powers and tactical positioning. In Pathfinder, it wasn't very exciting. Perhaps we might have had more fun outside of a dungeon. Who knows?

I had read a lot about the game before we sat down to play tonight. While some people compliment the improvements made (e.g. fighters have more variety in what they can do, clerics have more flexibility, mages have more at-will magic), there are a lot of people who think that some changes weren't enough and some where too much. One constant refrain from people who want to "fix" 3rd edition D&D is that there is too much of a power gap between magic users and non-magic users. Based on my experiences tonight, I'd say that Pathfinder doesn't do much to address that issue. Yes, non-magic users don't run out of powers and can keep trucking even when a wizard is out of spells or a cleric is out of healing, but in practice, when the magic users run out of "per day" spells everyone rests until they have recovered. So this significant strength of non-magic users is overshadowed...

Anyway, I didn't find it to be much fun. Maybe a higher level would fix that (although I suspect it would exacerbate the magic/non-magic disparity), and maybe knowing the specific fiddly rules would help (although the articles and discussions I've read online don't suggest that it would). I'm just going to chalk it up to "not really my thing." It just felt like D&D 3e with somebody's house rules. So, if you like 3e, you'll probably like Pathfinder. If not, probably not.

Card Counting and Set Collection in Ancient Greece

2010-04-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here's my quick review of Battle Line, from BoardGameGeek.com:

For a long time, Susie and I have been interested in a game called Battle Line. It's two-player, which is something we're always on the look out for. It's also based around set-collecting and push-your-luck mechanics. We tried it a few times back when we were in Japan using a Sticheln deck, but it felt dry and the lack of any special moves in the form of Tactics cards left it without much in the way of unexpected plays.

Recently, on a trip to Indianapolis, we stopped by the Game Preserve to take a look at their new location (which, by the way, is much larger and has more room to play). We spotted a copy on the shelf and decided that after three (or more?) years of wanting it, we ought to just give in and pick it up. We got around to playing it today.

The theme of a Greco-Persian war isn't extremely strong, but it is present. You have a line of "flags" which you can take, either three in a row ("breakthrough") or any five ("envelopment"), in order to defeat your opponent's armies and win the game. You send out your forces by way of individual cards (like cavalry, hoplites and javelineers) which combine to create three-card battle formations (such as wedge/straight flush, phalanx/three of a kind and skirmish line/straight). So, the intellectual dryness of just playing with Sticheln cards was overcome by the pseudo-authentic artwork and tying of play concepts to warfare nomenclature.

The game play is pretty straight-forward. Each turn you play a single card, either a troop or tactic. Troops are all numbered 1 through 10, representing the general strength of the troop, and colored one of six colors, representing those troops that... I don't know... have the best working relationship? Tactics cards alter the play environment or your opponents cards, but you can never play more than one more than the other player. After you play your card, you draw a new one (your choice, troop or tactic) and it becomes your opponent's turn. Gradually, this allows you to build up formations on your side of a flag, and when you can prove your formation to be stronger than your opponent's, you get that flag. This last bit is a key part of the game. Even if your opponent has played some cards to their side of the flag, if you can show by pointing out other cards in play that their formation cannot be stronger than yours, you can win right then.

As I mentioned, tactics cards really help with the Greco-Persian war theme. You have cards like Alexander/Darius as leaders who can serve any role in any formation (i.e. wild cards), Fog which prevents formations (only highest total matters), or Traitor which pulls one of your opponent's cards to your side. There are only 10 of them, but they inject some much needed flavor and options. I'm a sucker for games that involve periodic rule-breaker options, so I needed these to make the game work for me. Susie, on the other hand, was frustrated by a couple of plays I made with them, effectively making three or four of her turns worthless with a couple of timely blocks.

The game really revolves around knowing when to go for particular sets from your hand, when to draw tactics cards, when and where to play them, and how to keep your opponent in the dark so they can't claim flags even if [i]you[/i] know you can't win. You have to be very conscious of what cards are still available in the deck, what cards have been played, and what tactics cards might be able to help you out of a tight spot. But all of that really mixes well together to make a nice little card game with some tactical brain-burning and a fun theme.

In our recent game, I was able to eke out a win by getting the right mix of tactics and holding my wife's [i]ridiculously[/i] powerful formations at bay long enough to get the cards I needed. The game seems to always be pretty tense, especially towards the end when each person has nearly the flags they need to win but no one can get the last cards they need. I'm interested in keeping this one out for when we are looking for a two-player game longer than Court of the Medici or Hive but not quite as expansive as 1960.

The only thing bad I have to say about it really is that it takes up more room than you might expect. There are 9 possible flags and you need them to stretch across the table in a single line, plus have room at the ends for the decks and on both sides for the troop formations. It's not too big, by any means, but for a game that consists only of wooden "flag" pawns and a deck of cards, it gets kind of spread out.

Small World: Taking Over Fantasy Nonameland!

2010-03-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to my session report at Boardgame Geek:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/510188/first-play-and-initial-impressions

Here's the text of my session report at Boardgame Geek:

With my birthday coming up, and a bit of extra cash to spend, my wife and I agreed that Small World was a suitable "early birthday present." She isn't too hot on the idea of games that revolve around taking over maps with little armies (and she hates Risk), but I was hoping that the fantasy theme and apparently simple game play would help her get into it.

Initially, I was planning on playing a 4- or 5-player game, to see the rules and interactions at the largest scale, but that fell through... so the first game was just my wife and I.

With the game board and bits set up, albeit a bit messily due to unforeseen storage problems (I have the Cursed! and Dames of... expansions), I explained the rules and we got off to a fairly quick start. My impressions of the simplicity of the rules from reading through some threads here on BGG were correct: the game at its core is very simple, and thus easy to teach. Which is good, because I'm willing to bet the cutesy theme and art will have people asking for this one to be brought to the table. The inclusion of a huge rules and race/power reference sheet is also really great for helping people understand what is going on.

Onto the game! I (having a "Darwin's ear point" according to my wife) began by selecting the Hill Gypsies and heading out for whatever hilly regions I could reach. My wife then went for Fortified Skeletons, hoping to spread out to get some good use from the "recruiting" power of the Skellies and then dig in with the Forts. That seemed to work pretty well, as my gypsies just ran off the board every chance they got which left her with lots of open room to take the natives down. It was kind of strange; even with very little room to maneuver, the game started off without much direct conflict.

I was the first to decline my race, and went for Dragon Master Kobolds, hoping the sheer numbers and the dragon token would help me get through my wife's fortress-strewn lands. My approach went well, helping grab a lot of land and the required number of Kobolds helping me to defend them. My wife eventually declined her skeletons and grabbed the Pillaging Trolls. A rules misunderstanding somewhere around the midgame lead to her wiping out some of her in-decline skeletons. She misunderstood when I explained how they would still provide her with victory coins, and so she ended up being a little behind on her point total.

After a little bit of back and forth, I declined again, taking another very numerous race, the Swamp Ratmen. I don't know what happened to put these into a good position, but I think I was behind on points and the sheer number of Ratmen plus the bonus points for swamps made them seem attractive. My wife plowed through my declined Kobolds, building up huge defensive armies with access to the fortresses and the Troll Warrens. I tried to stay away with my Ratmen, just spreading out as much as possible, and then the final turn came around. I was ahead by only about 5 coins, so with the points lost to confusion and miscalculation, we were basically tied.

You may notice that I don't talk much about the Reinforcement die. Well, we kept forgetting it. For the majority of the game, we just overlooked it, and even when we did remember, it was forgotten shortly thereafter. So, I'm hoping that the next game we make better use of it and explore the options that it provides. We also had trouble remembering to move the Turn Marker, so there may have been 1 or 2 extra turns... Other than that, I think we got most of the rules right and nothing was too difficult to remember.

The game was a lot of fun, even with the frustration and confusion of learning new rules. My wife said afterward that she enjoyed it more than she thought she would, and as I suspected the theme was a big help. I really want to play it again, not only to get the rules right, but to explore some more of the 500+ combinations of races and powers... also, a bigger group would be nice. A 2-player game necessitates bashing into each other all the time since causing your only opponent to not gain points is effectively the same as gaining the points yourself, but with more people the strategies are going to be a lot different (and involve a bit of negotiation, I suspect). Overall, it's a light area-control game that ought to be fun for a long time. I'm glad we chose it.

RPGs I want to play: Zombie Cinema

2009-08-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

Last year I went to Gen Con and saw a lot of really great stuff... more than I could possibly afford, and certainly more than I could possibly play. I picked up a number of games, and made a note to check out a few of the things that were new on various forums. It's really easy to get caught up in the spirit of the convention and just buy everything that interests you, but I try really hard to find out lots of information before I buy games.

One of the things that caught my eye at that Gen Con was a little video box labeled "Zombie Cinema." I couldn't tell much about it except that it came with all of the pieces needed to play, including cards, dice, a board, and tokens to move around on that board. Also, it was about zombie movies.

As a side note, there are a lot of games about zombies. And most of them are completely terrible. I don't think I've played a zombie game that wasn't a boring snooze-fest with crappy mechanics that also managed to miss what makes zombie movies (like the original Night of the Living Dead) so engaging. There is a wall of our local game store that is almost entirely covered in crappy zombie games, and there are companies whose specialty is zombie games... and the only one that seems even passably playable was All Flesh Must Be Eaten (an RPG from Eden Studios), and even that was relatively standard RPG fare that would have worked with basically any system.

The point being zombie games, 9 times out of 10 will suck. So I was wary of something called Zombie Cinema, but drawn to it because of the source. It was on display in the Indie Press Revolution game booth, and written by Eero Tuovinen. I've enjoyed basically everything that I've picked up from IPR, and Eero has always struck me as a very insightful member of message boards like Story-games.com. I decided to put some research into it and see what people were saying about it.

Praise was everywhere, and it was strong praise. The game was apparently designed with Night of the Living Dead forefront in the author's mind, and when played it perfectly replicated both the gradual threat level increase from the zombies, as well as the inter-party conflict (and yes, stupidity) of the groups in the best of zombie movies. I took a while in deciding for sure, but when Gen Con rolled around this year, I decided to pick it up.

The game impressed me. The pieces it comes with are sturdy and the board is well made for an indie product. The cards and rules are on sturdy stock, and overall it's got a great presentation. But that's not the best part. The best part is the rules, the way the game runs.

Now, obviously, I haven't had a chance to run or play Zombie Cinema, but it's got me hooked in. Making characters consists only of putting together some flavorful cards (some personality, some occupations, some secrets or goals). Play is about getting in conflicts with the other characters and hoping you can get ahead of them on the track... or sacrificing your own safety to help others get ahead, because there is a zombie creeping up that track at all times. And it wants to eat you.

The board/track is one of the coolest things in the game, what really enforces zombie movie flavor, because it breaks up the progression of a zombie outbreak through "The zombies are just seen in news reports" to "Everyone is going to die" to keep everyone's minds on just what the zombies are capable of.

Really, what draws me to this game are the things that drew me to another few games this year (namely Misery Bubblegum and Serial Homicide Unit): simple character creation, simple and fast play, and simple but flavorful enforcement of the genre. Also, cute packaging. I'm interested in playing Zombie Cinema because I think it could really break the "zombie games are crap" streak that I've hit upon, and it's a nice light set of rules that ought to help create some real drama in a fairly short amount of time.

I'm not exactly sure how that would be fun...

2009-07-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

Today, I was told something ridiculous by someone I don't know:

"You can have fun eating poop."

Really?

My first instinct was to react poorly. It's clearly insulting, illogical (besides the basis of the argument being "poop eating is fun"), and it's an incredible overreaction to the discussion at hand. How someone's preference for a particular class in a role-playing game has anything to do with "eating poop" is beyond my reasoning faculties, but for some reason, that connection was made. No, the person didn't need to make that connection, he didn't have to equate poop-eating with playing a druid, but he did anyway. And the internet is surely better for it.

But I didn't react poorly, I just chose to not continue having the conversation there. I'm not a better person for it, I just can't see the point in having a discussion about something where someone else equates what you are doing with consuming feces.

There are a number of thoughts that this exchange put into my head, though. The first is that, no, playing a druid in D&D is not like eating poop... so, those of you who are interested in the druid class in D&D, please continue to enjoy it. The druid is an interesting combination of ranged and melee control, and just because there are some folks out there who can't grasp the utility of being able to seamlessly shift between the two modes, doesn't mean the class is terrible. The druid may not be as good at ranged control as a wizard, or as good at melee as a rogue, but they are vastly superior to a wizard at melee, and vastly superior to a rogue at ranged control. It may be that the druid is a good support class, but it's not chewing on dookie.

The second thought I had is that these potential problems that people have with classes, like the Paladin, Warlock, or Druid are significant, in that there are arguments to be made and potential problems to look out for, but they aren't NEARLY as significant as the problems you run into in older versions of D&D. Or even other non-D&D games. Now, I enjoy 4th edition a lot, but I wouldn't call myself a "fanboy." I just think it's a solidly made game. And when you have people talking about how 2 points of damage in the difference between a Warlock's curse and a Ranger's quarry is TOTALLY GAME BREAKING I find myself at a loss for words. Do you guys not remember the really ridiculous imbalance between fighters and wizards in 3rd edition? Or how the cleric could basically function as a single-character party and overpower just about anything with the right build?

I'm a pretty mechanics focused person when it comes to RPGs, and I'm not terrible at math and I trust math as an abstract concept that can say a lot about how the different aspects of a system combine. So I'm not saying that the math is wrong, or that you should just play these classes for the "role-playing." Sometimes there are problems that need to be re-worked. But I haven't seen one yet that is so absolutely terrible that it's unplayable or doesn't function in a fight (or the rest of the game). And a lot of times the pure math arguments fail to take into account things like non-damaging effects, movement and mobility, benefits to other characters, and long term (i.e. two or three rounds) set up for a pay-off. Math is hugely important, but if it's not accounting for everything, then it's going to be off.

I'm done with the conversation on RPGnet about the druid and won't be going back to it. But I felt like I needed to let some steam off about how people have been behaving with regarding the game, and having the preference for a class likened to sitting down to a meal of doodoo was just the latest thing to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Dominating Dominions

2009-07-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

When I went into the hospital to have my gall bladder out earlier this year, Susie ran out while I was under and instead of buying me "get well" flowers, she bought us a copy of Dominion. She had taken a look at my Boardgame Geek wishlist, and narrowed her purchase down to Cold War: CIA vs KGB (which I wrote about previously...) and Dominion, but the latter won out because the manager of the store offered a kind discount knowing I was in the hospital.

Anyway, Dominion is a really great game. It's a card game, in which the ostensive theme is the ownership, development and expansion of a fantasy dominion (hence the name). Much like collectible card games, you have a deck that you draw cards from which you can play for points, resources, or special effects, but unlike collectible card games, it's not collectible. The game comes with a bunch of cards and it's all you need to play.

The thing that makes Dominion really special is that unlike basically every other card game, it's not really about playing the cards as much as it is about building your deck. Short term strategy has little place here. See, you start off with a very small deck, and you have to use the resources you draw to bulk the deck up, expanding the money and actions available while making sure to put some points in when you can afford it. But since the points cards don't do anything (they just take up space in your deck), you can't just buy those. You have to strike a balance.

On top of that, the action cards that are available to buy in a given game are randomly determined. Only 10 of the 18 available are used. So the game mostly consists of prepping a strategy for what cards you will buy once you see what is available, how you will use them, and then adapting your plays as the cards you've bought come into your hand. It's a little hard to explain in the abstract, but it's a lot of fun. And it's fast: a single game can take as little as 20 minutes.

So, Susie bought me this game, and eventually we got around to playing it. Then we introduced our "non-gamer" friends Beth and Jake to it, and we could hardly get them to stop. The combination of fast play and variable actions in each game meant that we would end up playing 4 or 5 games at a time... it got to be a bit too much, really. But we kept having them over and playing anyway.

Then we found out that there was an expansion in the works, and we all got excited. It wasn't going to be available for a while, but it was going to add a lot of twists to the core concept.

This past week, Susie and I went to the store in the hopes that the manager had picked some copies of the expansion (Dominion: Intrigue!) up at Origins. It turns out that she had bought Intrigue, but only one, and it was for a friend. But she offered to sell us the copy anyway. And thus, we found ourselves in possession of Intrigue weeks before we thought we would have it. And, having played a few times, I'll say that it has definitely made a good game even better. The cards aren't more powerful overall, but they add a lot more options and strategies, and change old options and strategies. It's really fantastic.

Superheroes, by way of Mouse Guard

2009-06-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

I and a few of the other folks in my RPG group on Tuesday nights have been trying to set up a once a month or so gaming night where we get together and play something besides the normal Tuesday night game. This will theoretically maintain momentum in whatever we are playing on Tuesdays, give us the opportunity to try out some unusual things, and get some folks playing who otherwise can't normally make it to a Tuesday night game. I think it's a great idea.

The first one of these was last night, and I offered to run a superhero game that I've had cooking for a while. It's roughly based on Mouse Guard, with influences from a bunch of other games in minor ways. I wanted a system that was relatively traditional at the core, with very simple character creation that allowed for real mechanical distinction between powers, and a conflict system that involved strategy without needing a map. So, I put some stuff together.

Anyone who is familiar with Mouse Guard would understand most of how it works already; basically, conflicts work like in Mouse Guard, but instead of weapons, you buy powers for your character that contribue different modifiers to the various actions you can take. So, a Green Arrow-type bowman would have a "Bow" power that adds dice to Attack actions, or Spiderman's webs would be good for Maneuvers, but bad for attacks. Powers can also add to non-combat stat rolls, if the contribution makes sense... Super-strength adds successes to an Attack action in combat, but also to Stamina rolls for picking up heavy buildings. I find it to be just concrete enough that it makes sense, but it's limited and abstract enough that it encompasses all kinds of powers without being as complex as a traditional superhero game.

Anyway, we made characters (which, as always took a lot more time than it should have)... I even brought pre-made characters, but everyone was WAY into making their own guy, so I went with it. Art was a bare-handed brawler with regeneration powers, Matt was a gravity controller, and Russ was Heisenberg, master of velocity and position, but never both at once!

The heroes were sent to stop the evil sorcerer Sacrilege from stealing something from a museum, so we hade a couple of stat rolls and a fight against his henchdemons Imp and Helliana. The fight was the meat of the session, and it went alright, but Russ became convinced that the best way to win a fight is to script Attack-Attack-Attack every time; the other options were interesting, but they don't actually help very much (and scripting Defend opens you up for a massive failure if your opponent scripts Feint). The heroes knocked the villains' disposition down to 1, but then the villains managed to Feint the heroes down to 0. So, we ended the session with the cliff hanger of what sort of death trap they would be put in by Sacrilege.

It went really well, and I think the players had fun. The only real issue was a discussion we had over the efficacy of an attack-attack-attack script. I'm not convinced that it's going to win every time; against itself, the script fails as much as it wins, and against a solid combination of maneuvers, attacks, and defends, I'd bet it fails a lot more. Regardless, I don't know for sure.

But more importantly, there was something I forgot to emphasize. When you reduce your opponents to 0 disposition, you win the conflict. But if you have lost any disposition yourself, your opponent gets a little of what they wanted. In a fight like we had, where the goals were "They knock you out" or "You knock them out," partial victory or failure wasn't a big deal, and attack-attack-attack looks really nice, because all you need to do is win. But in a conflict where more is at stake, you can't just scrape by. You have to win big.

Imagine a villain who wants to destroy City Hall, with all of the people in it. The players' goal is "Take out Evil Explosive Guy," but Evil Explosive Guy's goal is "Destroy the building and everyone in it." So, after a few exchanges of "attack-attack-attack" from the players, we get down to 0 disposition for the bad guy, while the heroes eked out with 2 disposition. They have to offer a major compromise: a lot of the people in and around City Hall are injured or dead, and large portions of the building are destroyed... So, yeah, technically the heroes won. But they did so at the expense of all of those lives.

This attack issue was something that I really struggled with while I was piecing together the system, and I think I did a good job. The limits in place for how to design characters are simple but firm, and the combat options give you flexibility which you should use, or compromises will kick your ass.

Overall, it was a fun game, and I want to try it again. I'm pretty sure everyone else was cool with it, too.

The Coldest War of All Wars that are Cold

2009-06-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Susie and I bought a game called Cold War: CIA vs KGB. It's a two-player game, and we've heard a lot of good things, and we decided to try it. One player takes the role of, well, the CIA, and the other takes the KGB. Each turn, you send out a spy and try to influence a variety of countries and events using the people and organizations in those countries, trying to make them lean one way or another in the Cold War.

It's an interesting game because there is a strong element of bluffing and double-bluffing. The spy you send out could be sent to kill your opponent's spy, or cause your opponent to think he's winning when he's not, or score a bunch of secret, unexpected points. And you have to constantly guess which spy your opponent has played, and then guess as to whether they know you know, to determine if you need to play a different spy. It's ends up with a "going against a Sicilian when death is on the line" feel.

The main mechanic for influencing countries is a quite a lot like blackjack. The players alternate drawing group cards on their turns, trying to get the total as close to the "stability" rating of the country without going over. In other words, if you screw around too much in a country, you are going to cause all kinds of problems in the citizenry. Cards also have special powers that let you do things like swap groups with your opponent, or see what cards are coming up. Overall, this allows for some really interesting options, but after several plays, it remains highly unpredictable.

That unpredictability is a real disappointment; Susie and I are always on the lookout for really great two player games that are quick but deep. Cold War feels deeper than it is at first, but it's really a light filler game. It's a great filler game, but the combination of guessing about your opponent's spy having a pretty significant effect on play, and the core of the game being a press your luck mechanic, it's too unpredictable to be a huge success.

That said, we have enjoyed it. It's fun, and the back and forth of sending out spies and influencing nations is cool. The only real issue is a set of cards in the country cards called "events" that more or less come down to "both players draw a card and the player with the highest card gets special power X." The rest of the game has high randomness, but this was just too much. Randomly getting the "retrieve a disavowed/dead spy" power is HUGE, and we wanted a little more influence over the result. So we changed it from a card limit of 1 to a card limit of 2 (called population 1 and 2, respectively), and it made the cards much more interesting. And it's not an issue anymore.

What I want from an RPG, more than anything else.

2009-06-01T20:31:00.001-07:00

Here's the experience that I want:

I find a game, by reading about it online or coming across it in a store. Something about it catches my eye, so I find out a little bit more. And the game just grabs me. The setting is interesting, the mechanics are engaging, and the combination of the two is fantastic. So I buy it, learn how to play, get a good grasp of the setting and how to best utilize it, and then pitch it to my group.

When my group hears the pitch, they express genuine interest, not just polite neutrality hoping I won't bring it up again. I put together some rules summaries or design a character sheet, and when I bring it all in to the first session, everyone is excited about the game. The group commits to learning the rules and setting, even if they make mistakes or start off slow. My enthusiasm heightens theirs and theirs heightens mine. And the game is a blast, even with minor distractions that are inevitable.

The actual game lasts a long time (at least three months), everyone can basically make it to the once a week session, and the momentum of the game pulls us along. There is character development both physical and emotional, and the story arc for each of the characters intertwines easily with the general storyline, because everyone worked together creating their characters for the premise of the game.

And when we finally come to the end of the game, everyone remembers it for a while afterward, keeping a great deal of interest in the setting and/or system, and wanting to play again with a different GM or set of characters.

So, I guess that's probably why games like Exalted and D&D, even with their flaws, have worked so well for me. Everyone gets super-enthused for whatever reason, everyone gives at least some commitment to not only learning the game but consistently showing up for sessions, and the buy-in from the GM and players carries the game through inevitable slumps.

I know it can be done, because I've done it. I just wish it would happen more often.

"Using" Dogs in the Vineyard for Star Trek

2009-05-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

My RPG group got together today for our game. The current D&D GM still was out, so we continued the Star Trek game.

After last week's game, I really had a strong feeling about free-form and this group. A few of my previous posts are my thoughts that came out of that. And after tonight's game, my opinion hasn't changed. Or if it has changed, it's strengthened.

The story of the game isn't terribly important, and was mostly cliche. After tracking down the kidnappers to a remote location, they used their superior technology and tactics to take down the kidnappers (phasers set to stun, of course) and rescue the kidnapped leader of the Warrior clan. One of the kidnappers was the terminally stupid son of the Civilian clan; he didn't seem nearly smart enough to put together the plan to kidnap and hold the Warrior clas leader, nor to manage negotiations, so the crew suspected a secret leader. While the engineer and science officers tried to track him down through the splinter group's makeshift communicators, the captain and security officer went to let the Civilian leader know what happened. He was furious, and refused to help any sort of investigation until he got his son and the other splinter soldiers back. The captain wanted to speak with his daughter, the sister of the "lead" kidnapper, but she was gone. In the mean time, the engineer had tracked down a signal and decided to leap into action without letting anyone know. He transported in, surprised someone, and managed to successfully stun him with some tricky transporter usage.

It turns out that the man was a war profiteer who had fooled the Civilian leader's son into kidnapping the Warrior leader, and the son wasn't smart enough to see through the plan. The profiteer was attempting to respark the wars and continue making money. The crew uncovered the plot, and managed to get the groups working together again. And the daughter of the Civilian leader, in love with one of the Warrior higher ups, was married at the end of the story. A metaphor of sorts, I suppose.

The first conflict (attacking the kidnappers) didn't go well. I mean mechanically, because it went fine for the PCs in the fiction. The players didn't seem to like the way it worked, abstract in the wrong places and too concrete in others. Plus, it was an utter blowout -- the kidnappers never had a chance. So, from then on, I went free form. The players said what they wanted, and how they were trying to get it, and I weighed their abilities, relationships, and methods against the trickery and plans of their opponents to determine what happened. It was fairly easy, to be honest, and the game went great. There were a lot of distractions and jokes, but we eventually got up to a good pace. The only other conflict I played out was the engineer versus the profiteer fight, and even that wasn't necessary. The engineer player's clever use of his transporter experimentation basically closed the deal, and was cool enough that it would have done the same in a free form environment.

So, I consider this an unintentional experiment with the group and free form play. With all of the different systems we've played and tried to run games in, for the most part the group flows really well with a specific type of free form that isn't very complicated. Tonight, the nominal system didn't work for them, and drifting back to a free form system did. And in a post-game discussion, it became more and more apparent to me that the previous games the group has played, before I arrived, relied a great deal on free form play. I'm completely convinced that an explicitly free form game would work for most of the group, and I would love to try one out and see what happens.

BSG: Mastering Skills and Musical Admiralships

2009-05-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

I posted an actual play report of our Sunday Battlestar Galactica games to Board Game Geek.

Click here for the link.

Battlestar Galactica: The Flamethrower!

2009-05-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, I purchased the Battlestar Galactica board game. It's based on the recent television series about a rag-tag fleet of space ships, all that's left of humanity after a surprise attack by "cylons," and their search for a new place to call home. And the twist is that cylons are a formerly robotic race that the humans created, who then (predictably) rebelled. After a lengthy exile, they returned, this time with the ability to appear human, and executed a plan that nearly destroyed their creators.

The first season of the show, and the game that is based upon it, follows the flagship of the fleet (the titular Battlestar Galactica) as it deals with the hardships of space, attacks from pursuing cylons, and worst of all, the cylon saboteurs in their midsts that they can't root out because they appear human in almost every way.

That last point is what makes this game stand out, for me. As the game begins, each of the players is secretly given a loyalty card that tells them if they are a cylon are not. The humans win if they can get the fleet all the way to Kobol, a legendary planet, a new home. The cylons win if the humans fail.

So, while trying to avoid revealing themselves, the cylon players try to wreak as much havoc as possible. There are all kinds of ways to do this. As problems come up on the Galactica and the rest of the fleet, the players have to work together, playing cards from their hands, but any player can secretly add cards that don't help, or possibly make things worse. Sometimes a player is forced to choose between two terrible options; a human will try to pick the one that harms the fleet the least, but there is no guarantee that they aren't a cylon choosing the one that they think the harm the fleet the most. Many of the character abilities work in secret, giving a player a great way to help everyone, or a great way to hurt everyone with no one the wiser. Almost every decision in the game could be interpreted as a human or cylon decision...

And half way to Kobol, things are made even worse: The cylons have placed a number of "sleeper agents" throughout the fleet. There are people who are working for the cylons and don't even know it! At the halfway point of the journey, they suddenly realize who they are and what they need to do. Each player is dealt a second loyalty card, and this one can change a "non-cylon" into a "cylon," along with that player's win condition, without warning.

So, there is a lot of paranoia. You can't trust anyone, and even if you had a chance to look at their cards and know for sure (and there are a few ways to do this), they still can't trust you. The entire game runs on this. Yes, there are mechanics for dealing with problems, making FTL jumps, flying fighters around in space, making political powerplays, and seeking out a new home, but all of it is surrounding the simple core of the game: The players can't trust one another. And from what I've seen in actual play reports, there are a lot of accusations thrown around.

It sounds like a whole lot of fun. And it looks like we'll probably be playing it this coming Sunday, so I'll make sure to give a rundown of how it went.

Free-form!

2009-05-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned that my current RPG group my deal very well with a relatively free-form system. I thought I'd expand a little bit on what I meant by that.

Free-form is a tricky thing in a lot of role-players' minds. People who are used to stuff like D&D, or even lighter fare like World of Darkness hear the phrase "free-form" and think that it means no rules, no structure, no way to define your character and thus differentiate him or any number of other things. Well, to be honest, this stuff isn't necessarily accurate. Sure, you could potentially just have a game in which whatever people say goes, but then you get into a tricky situation.

When we play RPGs, all of the people at the table are imagining stuff. But unusually, we are all trying to imagine the same stuff. So when one person says something happens, and another person says that it doesn't, there is an obvious problem: if we are trying to keep the imagined stuff consistent, only one of them can be right, and we basically come to an impasse if we can't figure out who to go with.

So, you have to have a way of figuring this out. In most traditional games, a GM is set up as sort of a final authority on this, such that when he says something happens, that's the way it is. The other players sometimes have a chance to roll dice or narrate other stuff, but the GM acts as sort of a gatekeeper to the imagined stuff. You might say "My guy stabs the orc," but until the GM approves, it doesn't happen. Or, more traditionally, you would say "My guy tries to stab the orc," and then roll dice as a sort of neutral way of determining if it happens, if your guy stabbing the orc actually becomes a part of the shared fiction.

There are all kinds of ways to determine where the authority for deciding what happens falls. Does the GM decide? How is he restricted? Do the players decide? How are they restricted? Do we appeal to some sort of non-player force, such as rules, or "realism," or "story"? As an aside, that's not all that rules are for, by far, but it's certainly something important to realize they do; a big part of the system we use to play a game is figuring out how we decide what becomes a part of the imaginary stuff.

So, most RPGs that are called "free-form" have that. Online play-by-post games have rules like "you can't contradict what happened in the previous posts" or "don't be an asshole" or "you can't kill other player's characters without their permission." The rules tell us what is ok, what we allow through the gate. Face-to-face games tend to have a stronger, but sometimes unnecessary, reliance on stats and dice rolls and weighty mechanical doodads. But here again, the rules are telling us what's ok. When we agree to use a certain set of rules, we are agreeing to abide by a particular way of letting things into our shared imagination.

Sorry if this is starting to ramble or sound redundant... it's late. I'll get to the real point here.

If we all agree to some combination of "GM as final authority," "Authentic feel of the source material," and maybe a minor little mechanic that allows the players to represent the strengths and weaknesses of their guy (for example), then we don't need much else. And from my experience with the group I'm in, it would probably work fairly well. I'll be thinking about this, because I really feel like it would be enlightening to try.

Using Dogs in the Vineyard for Star Trek

2009-05-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

The new Star Trek movie came out a couple of weeks ago, and seeing as how there are a number of big Star Trek nerds in my normal Tuesday night gaming group, I proposed that we take a break from out long-running D&D game to play a Star Trek game of sorts. As I don't have an actual licensed game to run, I instead went through the trouble of doing a slight conversion of Dogs in the Vineyard. Both ST and DitV are about small, empowered groups sent out to protect and manage distant colonies, and deal with the people and problems of those areas. More or less. So I figured it would probably be a good match.

Last week, several of us got together and we made characters. This was a mistake; with the excitement over the new movie, the general level of Star Trek nerdiness, and no one but me having any real understanding of the game, it took us nearly two and a half hours to make characters. And, if you are unaware of Dogs in the Vineyard and how it works, this is insane. Creating a character consists of distributing some dice and making up some stuff about your guy. It should take no more than 30 minutes, and that's at the far end. I should have just pre-made some iconic characters (the captain, the security officer, the doctor, the engineer) and had the players pick from those.

Regardless, we got back together this week (with the number of players severely depleted) and actually tried to get playing, rather than just talk about Star Trek. And while there was a lot of side-tracking and joking, we did manage to play a bit.

The characters were sent to act as a "neutral" third party in negotiating peace between two warrings factions, offering the ability to join the Federation as a carrot. The two factions had been in a brutal war for decades, and they finally had leaders who were willing to create an accord, if wary of the other side. The crew showed them around the ship and presented their options should they join the Federation. And then one of the leaders disappeared, apparently kidnapped by their opposition. The remaining leader accused everyone of conspiracy to make his side look bad, but he was calmed enough to allow the crew to investigate the disappearance and figure out what happened.

It mostly went well, with regards to the fiction, but the mechanics were left almost entirely unused. In part, this was because of how the group normally approaches problems, realistically, carefully, and trying to avoid any real conflict if it can be avoided. Another issue was that I just wasn't pushing very hard. I sort of let the fiction move along as the players did, and there wasn't much opportunity for any real meaty conflicts. Yet.

It made me look back at my experiences with this group and the individual playstyles that I have seen. For the most part, I feel like the group would be perfectly happy with a mostly free form game, especially when it comes to a genre as well-known and and entirely "grokked" as Star Trek. There just isn't much need for any sort of tactical conflict mechanic, or really any sort of obtrusive mechanic at all. The fictional material is all shared through a mutual enthusiasm for the fiction itself. This in itself is kind of funny, because I also feel that they would balk at a game that didn't have some sort of initiative/attack/damage mechanics in it... they don't need it, but they wouldn't want to get rid of it either.

It's interesting to see the different ways that the players look at mechanics, and the different ways they use them (or don't). I feel like maybe we should try a relatively free form system and see what happens...

RPGs I want to play: Mortal Coil

2009-05-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

While I was in Japan, a lot of really cool games came out. I read a lot of actual play reports on RPGnet and Story Games, and tried to figure out which of those were worth buying for someone who only really had one regular player (Susie, my wife). Sometimes, though, even if a game didn't seem particularly suited to one-on-one play, there was something about it that was so awesome I just had to see what it was about.

Mortal Coil was one of those games. It's an RPG about magic and fantasy (mostly in modern times) that uses resource management and blind bidding in place of dice, a really effective and fun resolution system, but that's not really the thing that drew me to it. I read a post describing a game in which one of the player characters was Yahweh. And apparently, the game was put together in such a way that this actually worked, even with far less powerful (e.g. humans) running around as PCs. This, I thought, is something that I have to see.

There are a number of really great innovations in Mortal Coil, and a number of more familiar mechanics used in new ways. The primary innovation, the thing that makes this game stand out more than anything else, is the way magic works.

Let me preface what comes next by explaining that I'm a big fan of modern fantasy. One of my first RPGs was Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and to this day I'm still interested in the World of Darkness. I enjoy the Dresden Files books that I've been able to read, and moreso Last Call (by Tim Powers) and The Devil You Know (by Mike Carey), all of which feature protagonists, antagonists and side characters who exist in the modern day, but have access to magic and powers that come from the occult. Of the genres I would prefer to read or play, modern day fantasy is near the top ofthe list.

Coming back to Mortal Coil, as a game that featured that genre as a primary influence on its design, I figured that the magic system was going to be interesting, and I was not wrong. The effects of magic, which includes spells, supernatural powers, godlike abilities, and all manner of inhuman features, is made up as the game is played. When you want to define one of the spells of powers of a character, you permanently spend one of your magic tokens, and the spell or power can have whatever effect you describe. However, the opponent (GMs for players and players for GMs) determine the Price, the fictional and/or mechanical effect that must be paid in order for the power to take effect.

So, if you want your wizard to have a spell that can unlock doors, the GM can say that you must destroy a key. If the GM wants his werewolves that are attacking to have massive claws that rend spirit armor, you can say that doing so causes them mental agony or terror. It sounds like it could devolve into "Yes, but this price makes the power worthless," but that's where the theme document comes in.

See, before the game begins, before characters are made or any action in the story happens, the players and GM work together to create a setting/genre document that defines the sorts of stories you will play, the sorts of magic that exists, and the general feel for how everything will work. Everything is negotiated and agreed upon, so that everyone is on the same page about the game. And thus, people have a unified vision, and something they can point to when they feel like that vision is being pushed upon.

Altogether, this makes the magic system extremely flexible, covering a wide range of effects and power levels, without being overpowering for one side. It's a whole load of fun in play; we used it for a superhero game where one of the players was a speedster, and he said that he had never played a game before that actually allowed a speedster to actually behave like a true comic book character could.

The last thing I'll ay about it is that it has a really great system for Passions, the things people care about, how they can effect the actions of those around you, and how those around you can affect them with their actions. It's a really solid social conflict system with some really cool effects.

So, this is something I want to play. You get fantastic buy-in from the players due to the theme document, which also sets up the big overarching conflict of the game, complete with badguys. You get a system that can fit PCs with vastly disparate power levels, and not fall apart from it. You get a magic system that is molded as play happens, and spurs player creativity and competitiveness. You get a cool conflict resolution mechanic that uses no dice, but is still quite unpredictable, and incorporates a fantastic way to deal with social conflicts as easily as physical ones.

My most favorite game

2009-05-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

My favorite game, bar none, is Tichu.

Tichu is four-player card game played in partnerships of two. This is the first thing that really drew me to it; I like competitive games, but I really like the opportunity to play with my wife rather than against her. That's not to say that we are never on opposing teams when we play Tichu, but with this game we really have an opportunity to take advantage of our experience with each other and our ability to read each other's actions.

Tichu is a climbing game. This means that one player puts down a set of cards, and then each player in turn must either player a set of the same type but with a higher value or pass. Generally, the point of these games is to get rid of all of your cards first, so it's tricky to balance being able to play with being able to lead. This mechanic is used in a number of popular games. The first place I saw it was in a game called President, also known as Asshole or Scum. It's also featured in the modern "classic" The Great Dalmuti, which is a much simpler game, but it works well for large groups and parties.

For a long time, one of my favorite card games was a game called Gang of Four which I even brought to Japan with me because I enjoyed it so much. Something about the "climbing" mechanic just suits me. But as I played it more and more, I grew tired with the sloppy scoring mechanic and the game came to bore me. And that's around the time I discovered Tichu. Before I had even bought a copy, I read everything I could find about it. I devoured articles about strategy and tactics, I read in-depth play reports and calculated how I would play the hands dealt... it was a very nerdy period.

When I got it, and finally managed to pin down precisely two other people to play, I truly fell in love. It almost seems silly; the Tichu deck is a standard deck of bridge/poker cards with 4 special cards to add some unusual flavor. But the combination of how those cards are used, of how the cards can be combined and recombined as play progresses, of the trading and manipulating of hands before play, and of the big gamble Tichu call just make the game perfect.

That last point is a big one; if you call Tichu before your first card is played, and then go out first, your team gets 100 points, more than the entire hand would be worth otherwise. I love this kind of gambling mechanic. I love it in the form of the doubling cube in Backgammon. I love it in the form of escalating bids in poker. And here, it adds that extra bit of tension and anxiety that can make any hand a real nail-biter.

Every time I play Tichu, I have fun. Sometimes there are rough patches, where luck and skill don't match up and things go terribly wrong. But that's really part of the fun. I encourage anyone who likes traditional card games to track Tichu down and give it a shot. There is almost nothing I would rather play.

RPGs I want to play: Dirty Secrets

2009-05-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

My wife Susie and I managed to make it to Gen Con in Indianapolis last year, and we had a really enjoyable experience. We played a number of games and bought quite a few more; so many more, in fact, that we haven't had a chance to play a majority of them, and it's almost time for Gen Con to roll around again.

One of the most enjoyable games that we played was Dirty Secrets, with the author Seth Ben-Ezra. It's a game about a noir-style investigator, set "in your home town," with several interesting mechanics, including a reversal of the normal RPG set-up: instead of there being several players and a single GM, Dirty Secrets has one player (the investigator) and several GMs who rotate duties. It also features a fun Liars' Dice based conflict mechanic, no-prep game set-up, and a true mystery for everyone to "solve" through play.

This last bit is really intriguing. There is no prepared solution to the mystery of who has performed the crimes of the set-up and why. The game has you use these little charts and a mechanism based on how conflicts resolve to pinpoint which of the NPCs in the game are the true criminals. It's quite impressive, because it inevitably works out. Sometimes the criminal was someone suspicious, sometimes it takes everyone by surprise (mistaken identities and complicated but accidental self-murder!), but it always makes sense in the story that everyone created.

The reason I want to play this is simple: I love the noir detective stories that I have encountered and their descendants. They are fun, the characters are engaging, and they are inevitably brutal, but in a cool way. The Maltese Falcon is a true classic. The Dresden Files are engrossing, and it's not simply because of the sorcery and modern fantasy. Veronica Mars (particularly the first season) is one of our favorite shows. All of these could be recreated in a way, but more importantly, the game is put together to push you and your group to create your own stories, and it helps the entire time. It's a great tool for creating collaborative noir fiction, and it can and will still allow for great surprises.

I haven't managed to get it to the table for a number of reasons. The primary one being that the group I play in is pretty conservative and prefers to play in extremely long games. The lack of any traditional attribute/skill/advantage structure and the fact that the game is not truly "mission" oriented would certainly throw most of them for a loop, and the intricate rules for how different situations interact make it hard to teach easily. It is also structured so that even a lengthy story would take only four or five sessions but my group likes to play stuff that takes months to get to a climactic point.

But I'm working on them.

Games, games, games...

2009-05-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

I love playing games. I'm always looking for an opportunity to play a good game, and I'm always looking for good games to play. And when I say "game," I'm not just talking about the familiar Monopoly, Risk, Poker or Bridge. I'm talking about a much wider variety: card games, using regular 52 card decks or those with their own customized decks; board games, from traditional family games to avant garde "European"-style diversions; and role-playing games, like D&D, sure, but branching out so far to things that to some would barely be recognizable as a "game" in any way.

There is just something about them that compels me to play. Perhaps it's the social aspect, getting together with friends and enjoying their company. But it's not just that... there is an aspect of developing tactics and strategy, an aspect of exploring new approaches to a game, of pitting my wits and intuition against the other players. There is an aspect of immersion, of getting drawn into the system and the interaction between the bits and pieces therein. There is an aspect of story, even, a natural build-up, rising action, climaxes, and denouements that carry with them an emotional charge. And of course, I should not forget the diversion of games; the distraction from real world stress and problems, the fun of just playing. There is so much that I enjoy, it's hard for me to break away from playing games as a hobby even for a short while.

That's not to say that all games are good or fun, or to say that it's easy to understand why one game is great fun and another is a waste of time to even try. Games are complex creatures. And certainly, that's part of what this blog is about. What is it that is fun? What is it that makes a particular game click?

But before I'm accused of navel-gazing, I'm not planning on getting lost in a bunch of theoretical hoohah. I want to talk about the games I actually play, about the games that I want to play, how I get them to the table, why I want to play them, how I teach and explain them... all kinds of stuff that may not be important to anyone else, but is a real part of my life. I think this blog will be a way for me to get this information worked out for myself. If anyone else gets a benefit, that's a bonus, but I really just need to talk about things and see what I can make of my own thoughts as they are put to the keyboard.