Tunnels of Doom

I love house rules. Obviously not all house rules are ideal, but the fact that games are analyzed closely enough and the nature of gamers trying to make their games suitable for their preferences is part of what makes gaming, especially tabletop gaming, so enjoyable.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of house rules gone awry; I recently heard tales of a Blood Bowl league that implemented a complex series of sportsmanship house rules that went so far as to penalize players for not apologizing if they caused a casualty. Another Blood Bowl league I know of actually changed the rules for how a team’s Treasury is counted in such a way as to make a non-game-impacting feature game-impacting.

But generally speaking House rules can be great for adjusting broken rules that haven’t yet been officially updated and for customizing games. I’m always interested in hearing some house rules people come up with for their games. One that we use is in Pandemic, we always play with our hands face-up. For 40K 4th Edition we used to handle difficult terrain checks with an average dice (2-5 on a D6) instead of selecting the highest from 2D6.

My experience is that there are two basic kinds of house rules: There are those that are developed in response to awkward game situations (like the difficult terrain check which was instituted after several games where entire units were rendered useless because of several turns with 2″ or less movement) and there are those that are developed from consideration of how to improve the game. Most of the latter are, like the sportsmanship rules from the Blood Bowl league that I heard about, complex sets of rules designed to accomplish a specific function. I personally think the sportsmanship rules are ridiculous and actually counter to the enjoyment of a game but the beauty of house rules is that they are by definition voluntary. If you don’t like a house rule, find a different house to play in or make your case to ditch them.

I’ve developed my own sets of house rules in the past, some more successful than others. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about Blood Bowl and, as with most consideration-based house rules, the concepts stem from issues I have with the existing rules. Indulge me as I think out loud about them.

1. MVP - The current MVP rules has a random player chosen from each team at the end of the game earning 5 Star Player Points for being selected the MVP. The problem is that this player is frequently unworthy of earning those points because they spent the game KO’d or (if you play using the LRB strictly) even dead. But I understand that if you gave 5 SPP to the legitimate MVP, which would probably be the player who earned the most SPP via other means, you’d end up with certain players advancing very quickly. Catchers, for example, would be particularly prone to rapid advancement due to their propensity for scoring.

   I have two proposals for this, both with their strengths and weaknesses.

   House Rule #1: Lower the MVP bonus to 2, make it a “real” MVP. Basically you take the player who earned the most SPP in the match and give them the MVP which would award an additional 2 points rather than the current 5. In the case of a tie you would break tie by order of SPP-awarding activity: TD, Cas, Cmp, Int. The benefit here is that it makes more sense, the downside is that it functionally boosts TDs to a 5-SPP action, especially on lower-scoring teams like Undead and Orcs.

   House Rule #2: Adjust eligibility restrictions. We already play with the house rule that the MVP can’t be dead or induced, but I’d say the restrictions could be better implemented. Eligibility rules would probably have to be extensively playtested but a good starting point (I think) would be to say a player is Eligible if they: Scored a TD, made a Cmp or Int or inflicted a Cas or they participated in every drive (ie they were not injured or left in reserves and did not miss a KO roll). The benefits of this are obviously that the chance that someone who was at least reasonably considered valuable are drastically increased without directly affecting the perceived or practical value of scoring actions while the downsides are that there could be instances where a team has no eligible players. I’d argue that a team that has no eligible players doesn’t deserve MVP, but I can also understand the counter-argument.

   As a corollary I’d suggest in either case that an additional rule be implemented to better help teams guide their development over long leagues: At the end of the game a coach may remove 1D3 players of their choice from eligibility. In addition, any number of Assistant Coaches will add +1 to the roll for a maximum of four players that could be removed from eligibility.

2. Touchback - There was a comment thread on NAF recently that discussed the way in which a ball bouncing due to lack of successful AG rolls to catch would result in a touchback. The scenario is that a ball scatters toward the midfield line on the initial scatter roll, where it ends up targeted at a player with a low AG on the line (for example). That player misses the catch roll and the ball scatters again, this time going over the midfield line and causing a touchback, where any player on the receiving team can have control of the ball without making a roll.

   Obviously from an abstraction perspective this is kind of tough to swallow. It would make more sense if a ball was considered in the air up until the moment when a player was permitted to attempt to gain control of it, at which point it was considered in play. This could certainly result in situations where a ball could start on the opposing half of the pitch from the receiving team, but practically speaking since the receiving team acts first, this is a minor setback at best.

   The biggest situation I can see this affecting is if a ball scatters out of bounds from a missed catch which, per the rules, would result in the ball being tossed back in by the crowd. But I think all this would do is prevent coaches from placing No Hands (or functionally equivalent) players in the wide zones because it is probably not reliable enough for the kicking team, even with the Kick skill, to plan on a throw-in on the kickoff; you’re still far more likely to end up with a touchback.

Feedback, as always, appreciated.

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The Marriott is a nice hotel. Not a super-swank hotel, but a nice one. I’m sure the non-convention guests at the hotel found the overall caliber of the environment a little less than they expected or hoped for what with herds of sweaty gamers waddling through the hallways and covering every available flat surface with assorted chits and dice and stacks of strangely decorated cards. For one such as myself, casting a gaze across the terrain and declaring myself among kindred, it was an experience matched by only a handful of previous conventions.

A huge part of my enjoyment was based on the pre-planning that went into the weekend. Unlike my previous convention schedules, I had determined weeks in advance that there were certain events I was certain to participate in. These both dictated the flow of the activities as well as ensured that some games would get played. In contrast, earlier events had been based on “gentleman’s agreements” in which we would lay fantastical stratagems woven into narrative tapestries which would be promptly unwoven by the twin calamities of attending wives who disfavor certain game genres and the Dealer’s Room whose treasures often foist urgent demands on our playing schedule.

Now we had framed particular activities into obligations and it made the difference in a marked manner. I confess that there could have been a better time designation: Both Thom’s Friday night Blood Bowl game and my own Saturday evening Arkham Horror session were set to start right at or before the dinner hour which made the attending wives unhappy. But that’s a mistake that is easily corrected next time. Likewise my own game could have been more artfully selected; I’ve played enough of Arkham Horror to know how it goes, but my month-prior refresher solitaire game was not enough to provide my aging brain the fuel it needed to run a game correctly. I suppose having an entire table of new players made the point relatively moot, but on the very unlikely chance that any of those players reads this: I’m sorry. Please don’t base your opinion of the game on my running of it. It actually takes much longer and is much more balanced when you play it right.

Next time I think I’ll be sure to play a game I understand thoroughly (such a feat is, I suspect, practically impossible with Arkham whose vengeful complexity is both part of its charm and its greatest weakness). As a rookie convention game master I’m delighted to have had the experience if only to get a chance to learn from my mistakes. Next time I’ll be running something more akin to Catan Card game or Werewolves.

My most pressing delight for the weekend was that I was able to play some games I’d really been looking forward to: Blood Bowl tournament, many rounds of Pandemic, Arkham Horror, Power Grid, Race For the Galaxy. I’m not sure this would have been possible without the pre-planning steps we took. And as a secondary thrill I was able to make some exciting purchases: I came away with a new copy of Werewolves (the old copy had been the victim of water damage on some critical cards at a Werewolves party) plus the New Moon expansion for it; Nik found a copy of Zombie Fluxx; I also picked up Race For the Galaxy and a bunch of new dice for various Blood Bowl purposes. As a secondary bonus whose delight cannot be properly expressed, I also returned home from the con to find my NAF Blood Bowl Block dice waiting for me in the mailbox. I was skeptical about the yellow-blue color scheme but they turned out really sharp and it will be great to have an extra, non-white pair so I can keep them separate from my opponents’.

It’s sometimes hard for me to enjoy the moments of my life as I experience them. I found several times during the weekend I could sense the fun I was having like a film enveloping the surface of my body. It was unfamiliar but sublime and I wanted it to last and last.

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Next week is Pacificon (that’s ConQuest SF for the pedantic), and most of this week’s activities were somehow related to early prep for the full weekend of gaming mayhem that lies ahead. I’m still in a video game doldrum; the only games I seem to have any enthusiasm for are XBLA games. I had an opportunity to spend a few hours with any of my longer-form games at one point during the weekend and I stood in front of my shelf of games, many of them begging to be played, and found none of them held much allure. I think I ultimately watched a few minutes of the Silent Hill 2 intro—this marks roughly the 42nd time I’ve sat through it—and turned it off because my one rechargeable 360 controller battery was dying. I wasn’t exactly weeping and gnashing teeth.

We did end up having Thom and his wife Kelly over later in the week for games. He walked us through the introductory mode of Power Grid, which I felt was more of a tease than anything. Basically the game involves a bidding match to buy the best Power Station card (which is wholly subjective) followed by a resource management phase followed by a Monopoly-like land grab. The mechanics are a little awkward to understand abstractly at first, but once they click they have a remarkable balance of simple elegance and thorough representation. Sort of the opposite of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know, I’m not good with the political jokes.

What was teasing about the intro game was that at the point in the regular progression where the game opens up and the true beauty of your early game establishment is revealed, the game is over. Imagine playing Ticket to Ride and after drawing your hand up to twenty-five cards, someone claimed their first 8-point Destination Ticket completion and announced the game was over. I understand the theory behind giving new players a taste, and I understood that our guests were probably tired (not to mention we will most likely be playing the game again at the con) but I’m the kind of gamer where if I get into the flow of a session, my strategy begins to form like a gathering storm. Leaving that mindset unfulfilled is like shaking up a can of coke and setting it gently on the counter. I survived, you know? But I’ve been replaying the short session in my head for days now, wondering how it would have gone if I’d had one last turn or…

It’s a path that leads to madness. Also scurvy, which is the lesser of the two evils. Regardless, I suspect I will be not be sated until Friday at the earliest. In the interim I would advise a wide berth. Twenty yards or so ought to suffice.

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Running out of new ways to talk about stale things is maybe not a challenge more creative or clever writers have to surmount. But I’m writing a weekly column about the games that I play and while I’m reasonably content sometimes to focus on a handful of games for a period of time, it makes coming up with interesting commentary that isn’t dreadfully repetitive tough.

So rather than re-tread Blood Bowl strategies or discuss my Etrian Odyssey II progress, I’ll talk about a game I don’t even fully own: Braid. It was one of those titles whose ill-conceived title stems from some artsy interpretation but lacks descriptive punch and yet is spoken of with a particular connotation that more or less creates a conceptual bookmark in my mind. If my brain were del.icio.us, it might be tagged with “check_out_maybe.” So I see the ads on XBLA this weekend while I’m playing some GeoWars 2 and the flag is raised in the back of my head and I decide to drag myself away from my obsession long enough to give it a whirl.

I knew only that it had “positive buzz” going in. The demo is fairly significant in available content, but the game itself is clearly designed to be an exploratory experience which is something that may work in an artistic sense but as something that is designed to inspire me to spend money I’m not sure it’s effective. I can say that as a post-modern throwback-slash-genre interpretation, it’s interesting. I can also say that as an overall package it’s demonstration content is uneven to the extent that your individual criteria are going to be the deciding factors on whether or not you pull the trigger on this game.

For example, there is a particular elegance to most of the game’s presentation. The smoothly shifting watercolor aesthetic of the backdrops and the quiet, introspectively lilting music is fresh and exciting. Meanwhile, the pixely-looking cartoon design of the game’s characters is cute, but contrasts sharply with the backdrop and while one or the other would be fine with me, the combination is unpleasant. Likewise the game’s referential sense of humor and youthful presentation doesn’t gel in any ready way with its knife’s edge of pretentiousness in the story elements. Even the gameplay with it’s elegantly designed puzzles but awkwardly integrated and purposefully sketchy tutorial/hint system feels painfully unbalanced.

A lot of online forums are lamenting the $15 price tag, which has itself fostered a backlash, one that may or may not have ulterior motives. Personally, I see it as just another in the game’s list of see-sawing pros and cons. Like I said, it becomes intensely personal. Either $15 for a platformer is repugnant and it wouldn’t matter if you were paying for the best platformer ever, you’d be morally opposed to the act, or you have no problem with it because you rationalize that $15 is still $45 cheaper than some alternatives. Either the art design is acceptable or the weirdly incongruous graphics are a deal-breaker. I don’t know how you can quantify something like this.

So listen, I didn’t buy it. I’m intrigued, for sure. I’m the kind of person who can overlook some strangeness in a game to find the chewy center that lies beneath. I’m playing Etrian Odyssey II, after all. And I’m putting hours and hours into it. But something about the nexus between the game’s odd choices and its price and its hyperbolic critical acclaim… I dunno, it wasn’t enough to push me over the line. Any time a game polarizes this way, I almost feel like I need to just stand aside. Maybe eventually it will be part of some XBLA Best Of promotion for $5 or something and I’ll catch up with it then. Meanwhile, I have something less controversial to play. Something I’m still more likely to enjoy.

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My 360Voice bot-blog has been griping at me for weeks as I’ve left the 360 unattended in favor of Etrian Odyssey and Blood Bowl pursuits. I was already thinking, “Maybe I should log on this weekend and just see if anything interesting is going on.” When I gathered a couple of new names from a forum I frequent to add to my Friends List, it was a done deal already so the announcement of Geometry Wars 2 being released can’t really be blamed in full.

What I can blame GeoWars2 for is my lack of sleep through the weekend and an onset of OCD-like symptoms that have me twitching and scheming to get a few more minutes in on various game modes like Pacifism and King.

Bizarre has done some interesting things with the Geometry Wars brand/franchise since the Retro Evolved game for XBLA became an early contender for best of show on the platform at launch. Some might persuasively argue that until the release of Oblivion and Dead Rising, it was the best next generation game period. I’m not saying I’m one of those people making that argument, I’m just saying they might have a case. Evolved was a sublime example of the kind of game console gamers wanted on their living room consoles. It was simple, harkening the old Atari 2600 era, but with a fresh feeling aesthetic and a rudimentray use of the Xbox Live platform features (the scoreboards I mean) that lent validity to the whole endeavour. The ribbon that tied the whole thing into a package suitable for delivery was the game’s in-session difficulty curve and obfuscated inner workings.

Obviously some of the “rules” of Retro Evolved are knowable: Multipliers occur at geometric sequence points starting at 25 with a ratio of 2, weapon changes occur every 10,000 points, extra lives are awarded at 75,000 point intervals and extra bombs at 100,000. But what is only surmized or perhaps supposed is the other less tangible elements: Some games it seems the waves that spawn from the board corners are heavily favored to one enemy type or another. Sometimes gravity wells (those hated foes that draw in other enemies until they nova into rapidly-moving clusters) appear within the first 10,000 points, other times they don’t appear until well past the first extra life. The explanations for these discrepancies are largely superstitious, but the fact that they are observable but not capable of being realistically charted makes them exciting, an element of randomness.

Add to that the fact that wepon changes cycle through only two options once you advance beyond the basic shot so you may stick with a favored cannon for minutes on end while other times you may find yourself flipping rapidly as probability allows and your score multiplier increases the milestone rate. Since some enemeies are subjectively easier to hit with one weapon or another, the game seems to intentionally introduce a certain arbitrary chaos into each session such that you want to keep trying “just one more time” to find that perfect storm of chance and performance that equates to a high score mark.

But since then the development team have opted for a more well-defined experience. I first heard about the “Geoms” concept when reading reviews of the Wii and DS exclusive Geometry Wars Galaxies, where each destroyed foe drops a temporary pickup that can be collected to various ends. In Retro Evolved 2, the Geoms are now the score multipliers and their ubiquity allows the scores to reach new stratospheres for good players, especially since the multipliers don’t reset with each life the way they did in the original Retro Evolved. Likewise, the sequel has five new game modes in addition to the basic Evolved game which are all enjoyable although a couple like King and Pacifism are clear favorites. But curiously those modes are those that are furthest removed from the predecessor’s gameplay: They drastically alter the rules of the game and, in Pacifism, almost create an entirely new mechanic.

I played Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on 76 different days. I don’t have any measurable or accurate statistic to indicate how many hours went into each daily session; some were lengthy stretches others were quick one-or-two game stints. But it is listed as my most-played Xbox 360 game ahead of Oblivion; while Oblivion may have it beat in hours (something like 200 total hours went into that epic) I wager that given the additional 24 days I fired up GeoWars, it’s probably in remarkably close contention especially when you think that a standard game of GeoWars takes under five minutes beginning to end. I don’t know that this sequel has what it takes to match that level of interest perhaps because they’ve made such efforts to clarify what a game of GeoWars is. I don’t mind their efforts, but perhaps I prefer to project my own perspectives into that abstracted space, and lacking some of that ability, it becomes just another game.

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A large portion of the week was spent on the road, as they say. I was unplugged in most of the usual senses: I didn’t even check my email from Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning. That may be the longest I’ve gone without digital communication since high school. I did intersperse a few Twitter text messages in there; it’s not like I traveled back in time. But being away from it all meant, among other things, that my typical games were not accessible nor were the people I engage to play them.

I did squeeze in a game of Blood Bowl last Monday night, at a pizza parlor no less. It was a hasty ordeal organized in a clandestine manner with comically ancient technologies (telegram) but necessary if I wanted to retain my streak of league games. I didn’t win, but I did manage to draw a tie. So far the (undead) Spoilers seem to be slow out of the gate and only their tenacity to fill the available roster spots late in the second half allows games to be close. I need to get better at not playing “down” since I frequently lose the coin toss and give up an early touchdown; the best I’ve been able to do is identify a need for fewer squishy players I’m afraid of losing on defensive drives. Specifically I need to stop loading the defensive line with Regeneration-less ghouls. We’ll see how this week’s game pans out armed with that insight.

The one thing I did have on my travels was my DS filled exclusively with Etrian Odyssey II. If you want to understand why I continue to marvel at how engaged I am with this game, you must comprehend that I expected to be this enraptured by hard-hitting next gen titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Mass Effect. What we’re comparing to, essentially, is a game that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Pentium (one) PC in 1996 that has transitional animation (that is, only the key frames) and consists almost exclusively of menus. I really have a hard time putting it down.

I reached the 2nd Strata over the weekend, playing on the plane and in the hotel room on mornings while I waited for my companions to wake from their sleep. The palate swap to autumn colors in this stage of the game was enough to force a tiny squeal of glee from deep in my chest. The unwitting passenger in the seat next to me was forced to glance at the screens and saw me almost slavering for the chance to unleash my mad cartography skillz on a new floor of the labyrinth. He immediately asked to be re-seated, and I barely noticed he was gone.

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The demise of E3 is regularly trumpeted as imminent, foregone or perhaps in some cases past tense. In any case some variant of it forges ahead roughly every 365 days so I presume that these discussions are moot. And while there appears to be a unanimity about the appropriate level of hype associated with the event, somewhere between rhetoric and action exists a sheet of ether made from what I call oppositium, whose sole purpose is to flip the outcome 180 degrees from the stated intent. So while journalists talk cool and lean back, nonchalantly saying “Oh, it’s just E3, no big,” what comes out of their mouths in a shrill, girlish squeal is “OhmygoshE3ohmygoshEEEeeeeThreeeeee!!”

No news that perforated my filter struck me as particularly noteworthy. There are going to be sequels to big franchise games, which I suppose qualifies as news similar to the way they throw the sunrise and sunset times and tide reports at the end of the weather forecast as though it were some kind of pertinent information. Also, I guess Xbox Live’s Dashboard is now designed by Apple and Nintendo? The revamp is… good? They spent the first couple of years excising the active user hostility from the first iteration, so this reset will be, um, new. And then there are the additional details about games we already anticipated which reinforce their imminent awesomeness. I don’t know, I felt a remarkable lack of interest in the press coverage considering the highlight of the show seemed to be a concert by The Who exclusively for media types which had, at best, a peripheral connection to Rock Band but unless Harmonix is prepared to send Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey over to my house to jam with me, this comes across as audience pandering; the ultimate schwag.

Meanwhile my actual gaming gets narrower in scope while the depth expands beyond the oceanic floor level, deep into the crevasses of near singular obsession. Whoever thought it was smart to put a lunatic OCD-targeted turn-based dungeon crawler on an easy-to-use hand held device that lists, among its key feature set, at-will clamshell hibernation mode—well, they didn’t take into consideration the impact it would have on my particular mind. Etrian Odyssey II goes with me everywhere. I steal moments between meal bites to search a wall for secret passages. I adjust inventories at red lights. In the time it has taken me to write this sentence, I’ve gained three experience levels.

EOII has a mechanic where enemies that are visible in the dungeon view (as glowing orbs; the graphical presentation of the 3D environment is more suggestive than representative), called FOEs, move through the dungeon in particular fashions. They may patrol a set course, or they may fly over areas you cannot pass. Or, in some cases, they may stand still or move very little but when you get within range they attempt to follow you and engage you in combat. FOEs are disastrously overpowered enemies. I accidentally read a spoiler that indicated there are at least 24 floors to the dungeon (probably more) and I’ve reached all of the fourth. However, my principal party members are hovering around level 17 and to date I’ve only been able to handle a singe FOE. Perhaps this indicates something about my choices in skill allotment as I advance, but I routinely handle the random encounter creatures at higher floors without even manual intervention (viva the L button Auto key) in less than a full turn. I suspect the FOEs are designed to be moving obstacles more than actual level-specific opposition.

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I mentioned last week that I was anticipating the arrival of my newest Goozex score, Etrian Odyssey II. I had been hankering for a dungeon crawler, something like a PC role-playing experience perhaps along the lines of Oblivion. Depth, you know? I don’t want to wander too far into a tangent already, but I keep trying these Japanese-style role-playing games and aside from the tactical ones, I find them insufferable. I guess I’m the one who changed and not the games (though my recent stint into FF VI suggests the games themselves are a bit different as well) and maybe it’s just that the “real-time battle systems” turn me off, perhaps explaining why the tactical variants aren’t as painful. But considering the fact that turn-based RPGs are outnumbered by real time variants something like 60 to 1, it strikes me as not surprising that I was feeling like it was a game type I wanted to re-connect with again.

Anyway, Etrian Odyssey II. I wish I knew where to start. The game itself has gotten pretty strong reviews, and yet it’s something that I suspect will fly far beneath most gamers’ radar. It works a lot like older PC dungeon crawlers. It’s turn-based, although the pace can be particularly brisk if you choose, so each step you take in the dungeon counts as a turn. Encounters are, for the most part, random although you do have a gauge that indicates the likelihood of an attack on the next turn. It’s not precise, but it does give a pretty good indicator of when to heal up if necessary. And there are a few enemies that are visible, usually boss-type creatures. These can occasionally be circumvented and usually avoided by judicious retreat. But a huge part of the game is the cartography, which is where most of the game’s DS functionality comes into play. Since it’s turn based you can avoid a Foe (the visible boss creatures) and mark your map to note its location for later. The mapping options are surprisingly robust all around, and enjoyable enough that they’ve somehow managed to make me go back to drawing maps by hand and I’m happy about it.

Aside from the turn-based aspect and mapping, there is also a clever class and advancement system: You earn experience for random encounters in keeping with the genre standards, but there is no accompanying financial reward. At least not directly and certainly not assuredly. Instead you get various trophies from certain critters you’ve vanquished, which can be sold for an almost universally paltry sum at the town shop. They then charge exorbitant prices for the goods you value. Meanwhile the experience points accumulate as you’d expect, and after a particular cache of them has been accumulated you level up. Except unlike most RPGs, the leveling process isn’t gifted, with automatic generosity in terms of extra HP, magic and attribute bonuses along with maybe some sort of tech tree. I mean, there is a tech tree unique to each class and you can choose how to progress within it, but you get either a skill or a single trait bonus. Each level.

Let me put it another way: In order for your Medic to earn the Revive skill, which brings a character back from 0 HP, you need no fewer than six level advancements which provide no additional bonuses to combat or defensive capabilities. It’s this kind of treatment of a player that gives the game its reputation for being punishing (check a few reviews to see what people think about it) but it feels so much to me like the older games that had little patience for sissy gamers who wanted to step into the game as a minor deity and exit the game as something analog to the champion of the universe.

There was a time when I spent a whole summer on a dungeon crawler, fighting and re-fighting my way through sections getting satisfaction from the minor victories. There is so much about those halcyon days that is captured in this game, and it is just what I wanted. The platform makes it compatible with my adult life, the anachronism makes it feel like something that maybe shouldn’t even exist in these times. I want to find the person responsible for this game and give them a hug. Of course I’d quickly end the embrace and clear my throat, offering a firm handshake instead. There are appearances to maintain, after all.

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Gamers will probably agree that there is no single perfect game. A few dedicated folks might pick chess or go or perhaps poker as the only game they care about, but gamers are sort of defined by their interest in the scope of games as a whole. Without that purview into games, the hobby loses some of its intrigue. What emerges, instead, is a contextually perfect game. This is the art of playing the right game at the right time, and it’s also about finding the ideal game for the individual gamer within a range of games that share mechanics or styles or themes.

I had a chance to play Ticket to Ride multiplayer on XBLA over the weekend with Doctor Mac. It was Saturday afternoon, my wife was sleeping off a headache and I was looking for something to pass the time. I had been playing a variety of demos and picking my way through GTA IV a little but I wasn’t really into it the way I had hoped I’d be. When Doctor Mac hopped online and asked if I was interested in playing something, I suggested TTR and before I knew it we had worked through seven games in a row. I’ve played the TTR board game many times, and I’ve owned most of the tabletop products at one time or another. I’ve also played a lot of the web-based PC version on Days of Wonder’s website, so this should have been just another TTR session. But for a lazy Saturday afternoon, with voice chat on my couch and a new player experiencing the game for the first time on the other end of the line, it was exactly what I was looking for in a game at that moment.

Perfection, I realized, also comes when elements of a game meet a particular gamer’s needs. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past few weeks talking about Blood Bowl and after last week’s matches I started thinking about why I’ve been so much more consistently intrigued by Blood Bowl than other Games Workshop titles. It’s not that I’m better at it than other games, I’m a consistently terrible BB player. And it isn’t that the game itself does any one thing so much better than other titles. What it comes down to is that it has the perfect confluence of complexity, strategy, mechanics and hobby elements to scratch my particular itch.

Take the other GW game that I’ve spent a lot of time with, Warhammer 40K. Thematically, I actually prefer 40K: As much as I enjoy a good fantasy setting, I gravitate toward Sci-Fi when given the choice. It’s why I’ve never been much interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Lord of the Rings. But 40K, once you move past the wonderfully rich setting, is in fact just a game. And as a game I find it to be somewhat clunky. Matches take too long and the rules are by turns too abstract and yet can be too methodical. From a hobby perspective the armies are too large and tedious to put together and paint. The barrier to entry is too high. It’s not a bad game, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent with both elements of the game (hobby and play). Yet when you compare 40K to Blood Bowl…

Blood Bowl, to me, is a more enjoyable game. It’s constraints in terms of playing field and available tactics add a level of elegance I don’t think a larger, more loosely constructed game like 40K can ever achieve. Most of the complaints I have with 40K can be addressed with skirmish-level games like Necromunda (which I also prefer to 40K) but at root Blood Bowl is a board game which I think reigns in some of the more tedious facets of tabletop miniatures gaming. There are no concessions for awkward line-of-sight rules or clumsy measurements to be made for movement. You have spaces on a board, and strictly defined character options that (mostly) avoid beardy customization. Yet there is a tremendous level of flexibility in Blood Bowl as you create your teams from a vast list and engage in the hobby aspect at exactly the level that fits my comfort zone. I find it overwhelming and dull to slop paint on dozens of 40K troops and then vehicles, special units and commanders. Yet I have just enough patience to crank my way through 15 or 16 Blood Bowl models.

The final element to gaming perfection is the mood-based context. There have been times when I’ll play a game I don’t really think is that great because it’s the right kind of game for my mood. A good example is Blacksite Area 51. I played the game several weeks ago (before trading it away) because I was in the mood for a military shooter. I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeanne D’Arc because while I actually like it, I don’t think it’s the best tactical turn-based RPG I’ve played, it’s what I have on hand and it fills that niche for me. The curse of the gamer of course is that occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to play something that either you don’t have or that you can’t reasonably play right then. This weekend I found myself really wanting to play an old-school style dungeon crawler. A few friends have been playing Etrian Odyssey II on DS, but I had to wait until I could find a trader on Goozex since I don’t have the cash on hand to go pick it up. Fortunately, gaming desires lead to determination; I manipulated my way to the top of the trade list for EO II and got matched by the end of the weekend. Next week I should have the game and a full report.

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Christmas 2006: I opened a gift from my wife, about the size of a book. Except, it rattled when shaken, and I was somewhat puzzled. To my delight, the package contained a box of miniatures, an Undead Blood Bowl team. Earlier that year, at a convention, I had stumbled across a sometimes difficult to find team booster pack for the Undead containing one each of the Undead types: A zombie, a skeleton, a wight, a ghoul and a mummy. The box contained three zombies, three skeletons and two each of the wights, ghouls and mummies which gave me a nice selection to start from. Before the end of the month I had them all primed and had begun painting.

I wanted to take my time with this team; before the Undead my only models were the Orcs and Humans that came with the boxed set and they were plastic. I had chosen the Orcs as my primary team and had managed to fill them out with a few extra models picked here and there from flea markets and bitz orders online. But they had been fairly hastily painted and I really wanted this team that I had specifically selected to look great. So I made slow early progress.

When we moved across town in the spring of 2007, our condo had a detached garage. At first I thought it was going to be great: I’d effectively have a dedicated area for painting and modeling. I even put a big gaming/work desk out there. The problem was, my focus shifted soon after we moved there. I worked a nasty grave shift for the first few months that left me with too little time with my wife to comfortably retreat to a man-cave when I wasn’t working or sleeping. By the time my schedule settled down I was absorbed in video games rather than tabletop games and the gaming area in the garage took on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind status.

In the last month, my focus shifted again. I started a Blood Bowl mini-league. A longer-form league is scheduled to start at the end of July, and it won’t accept unpainted teams. I was time to get serious about this team I had once been so excited about. So over the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time hunched over our dining room table, plastic cup of water in front of me, jazz playing on the stereo, applying coat after coat of paint to more than a dozen figurines. This weekend I finally finished the first 13 models (of 17 total) plus a grim reaper-looking guy from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles line that serves as my Assistant Coach and a Harpy that is acting as my team’s Cheerleader. The significance of the 13 is that it is enough models to field a complete league-ready team.

Overall, I’m happy with the results. A few of the models are significantly better looking than some, and a couple I might like to go back and take another shot at. But individually I think the quality is a step above the first team I finished, the Orcs. And it only took me a year and a half.

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