I’m back on the wagon though, tentatively. I think I’m more constrained now, a little older, a little wiser. I mean you start with gamerscore chasing and the next thing you know you’re wiping bits of demo disc off your greasy shirt front with model-paint smeared fingers and picking polyhedral dice from your undershorts as the family you once loved retreats from you like an oncoming hurricane. If nothing else, you can’t maintain the pace very long.

Yet gaming is sort of my thing so while I occasionally have to reset the blitz, fall back into a 3-4 and give the opposing line a false sense of security, eventually I bring the house again.

The big change I made was that after the demise of $60 a Month, I made a bald-faced liar out of myself and stopped the program. It wasn’t just a fiscal adjustment, I simply couldn’t find enough to keep my mind engaged. Trying to spend a steady amoun on a hobby that ebbs and flows is interesting as an exercise but in practice it boils down to setting interesting things aside in favor of a new distraction whose merit is mere freshness.

So I dipped my toe by combing through my stack of shame and dragging out a few titles that had been lost in the trampling rush of The Next Thing and here’s what I found:

• Oblivion - I went back and started a fresh character with the sole purpose of finally completing the Thieves Guild quest which had glitched out on me in my previous effort. It is, I think, the best overall narrative in the game pulling slightly ahead of the Assassin’s Guild questline. I realized as I played why I love the whole world and the way Bethesda executes on the idea of the semi-sandbox RPG. I also realized that I would never go back and play through the expansion quest that I paid good money for because the spoils it may yeild are nothing to the agony of suffering through an entire quest I can’t bring myself to even want to explore.
• Eternal Sonata - After I finished with Oblivion (and I really had to put a strict cap on it: Finish Task X, quit the game), I was still in the mood for some role-playing style games so I tried on ES for a bit. It’s every bit as beautiful as I remember and I wasn’t far in so I started over. The combat is elegant but, like most Japanese-style RPGs, it’s not so elegant that I don’t find it eventually tiresome. Especially since these games, and ES in particular, tend to cluster repetitive enemy types within a single area you have to spend an amount of time in. I can handle a dozen or so similar fights but when you start stretching into the triple-digits with combat versus the same two foes that unfolds identically every time except it becomes slightly easier as your level ramps up, I go looking for a blankie and something soft to lay my head on.
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - This was one of the first DS games I picked up and I played it extensively without having played a Castlevania game since I think Castlevania III on the NES. It was new to me then and I did a lot of things wrong as a result. Since then I’ve played Symphony of the Night, Rondo of Blood and was just waiting to try this again with a bit more XP. It’s even better now.
• Fallout 3 - I rented this because having touched on Oblivion again I was feeling the shine return, but was unwilling to let Cyrodiil consume me yet again. Next best thing? Oblivion’s post-apocalyptic younger brother. Having played maybe twenty minutes of the original Fallout without a manual and no patience to devote to unraveling its mysteries (at the time) the long way. Thus I entered Fallout 3 with only my gamer’s preconceptions of the game as a dark comedy role-playing game often hailed by the community. I was instantly struck by how somber the game is. Oblivion can’t exactly be accused of having a great sense of humor, but that’s okay for a game that doesn’t purport to not take itself seriously. To be fair, neither does Fallout 3, but my expectations were somewhere else. It is, by all accounts, Sci-Fi Oblivion, so from that angle it’s exactly as delicious as I hoped it would be. I was a little disappointed that though I rented the PS3 variant it took no discerable advantage of the hard disk, still, I enjoyed almost every minute of my time with it. I made sure to avoid the main quest as much as possible and ended up having Nik pick up the full game for me on eBay so expect to hear more about this one.
• Geometry Wars 2 - In my absence I had lost all but one of my top spots from my Friends List so I tried to earn back the titles. I was… unsuccessful. It’s a game that requires practice I hadn’t put in, you see.

So there you have it… several weeks of gaming as I acclimate to a new job and a new schedule. These also don’t include the tabletop games (which have also been reduced of late) but I figure those will always be played more as time and participants allow rather than based on my own predilictions.

Actually, Einstein may have already talked about that. I’m not really a physicist, I’m just a gamer.

Ahem. Kongregate. Listen, Flash games are hardly new. Sites that feature a bunch of Flash games are established bedrocks of the online tapestry. And closed systems of imaginary rewards especially as relates to electronic games are also hardly unheard of. But Kongregate’s combination of a meta-game points system, user-submitted games and variety of titles makes it singularly compelling. Combine an accessible form of my favorite distraction, add an established addiction hook (see my year-long infatuation with XBLA Gamerscore points for reference) and add water. What sprouts, leafy and full, is a mind-gripping lock on my attention.

It would be one thing if the site contained just one or two games I liked. But the dangerous combination of tower defense titles, surprisingly rich old-school dungeon crawlers, strategic turn-based combat games, clever puzzle titles the likes of which you will never find on any PlayStation-branded device and the maliciously clever collectible card game tied closely to the already hostile points system and you have a place I can spend hours. And hours.

It’s not that Kongregate has no flaws, it certainly does. A plenteous selection of tower-defense variants and cookie-cutter platformers gives the site a certain redundancy and as cool as the collectible card game (Kongai) is in theory it’s implementation is by turns overwrought and too simplistic. But as something to do in lieu of make-myself-look-busy work and as a competitor with writing for my browser-time, it does it’s job well.

Too well.

Having never heard of Wushu before this, I read its description carefully and felt my imagination beginning to spin. I, too, feel that D&D 4th is primarily a tactical miniatures game although perhaps unlike Mr. Alexander I don’t really take it as some affront to the D&D brand. I happen to like tactical miniatures games and grafting a light narrative mechanic on top of them isn’t directly offensive to me. However, I also appreciate the story-heavy mechanics of the kinds of role-playing he and other 4th Edition detractors crave and reading about the far-afield Wushu principles was exciting.

I won’t get too deep into Wushu here because I haven’t tried it—though I would love to—but what it really did was start my wheels turning about a sort of non-diceless role-playing game that was focused centrally on something akin to Wushu’s Principle of Narrative Truth but without the on-paper awkwardness of what amounts to lightly gamed improvisational collaborative storytelling. In other words, Wushu sounds delightful, but it doesn’t sound a lot like a game to me, more like a creative exercise. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what I as a gamer really crave.

One thing I’ve always despised—and yes, that’s the appropriate term—about role-playing games is that the kinds of brightly imagined scenes and scenarios are often muted by the mechanics of failure, specifically when applied to low-level characters or early campaign episodes. First level characters, for example, frequently don’t have enough raw statistical ability to perform the kinds of extraordinary feats that are hallmarks of typical RPG genres. The basic trade-off between mechanical intrigue (can such-and-such be successful) and narrative strength (is this something a hero would really fail at) is one that falls in favor of the game more frequently than the tale. This is, to my understanding, the guiding principle behind the changes made for D&D 4th Edition: Make a grand game, even if the threads that weave the plot between and amid strategic battle sessions don’t exactly form an artful tapestry.

Wushu clearly tips to the other edge, and what I’m now fixated on is the idea that there can be a game that admires and respects the concept of Narrative Truth without fumbling mechanically with uninteresting game elements. It would take a lot of work to really flesh out the ideas, but the basic principles I think that would start the process would be basically giving character creation a set of loose characteristics: Instead of, for example, Acrobatics as a skill that needs to be checked in order to be used but is frequently found in disparate members of an adventuring party, it is part of a broader set of characteristics called something like “Agile Movement” which allows a player to declare, at any time, an action like leaping through an open window and executing a safe rolling landing. Players without Agile Movement would have to find a different way to get out of the room in a hurry.

The mechanical element of this would be the GM Challenge, in which a GM could declare that a player declaration exceeds the bounds of their assumed proficiency. At that point only is any kind of dice roll made for action. As an example, a character with Agile Movement 1 says they want to tiptoe up a bamboo shoot like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Agile Movement 1 covers things like basic tumbling, graceful leaping and other lithe motions but not superheroic and physics-bending actions like balancing on thin reeds which might be more like a Agile Movement 5 ability (these numbers are arbitrary lacking any playtesting or balancing). The challenge is then rolled to maintain Narrative Truth (let’s leave the dice rolling mechanics aside for the time being).

Assuming the player succeeds what ought to be a difficult dice test, they maintain Narrative Truth. Improbably, they actually do dance across a fragile bamboo shoot. On the other hand, if they fail, Narrative Truth is passed to the GM, who describes the result of the failed attempt. What you have here is a system where the childhood make-believe system of “I shoot you!” “Nuh-uh!” is actually worked into a game mechanic such that challenged actions are set in a construct to determine whose version of events is correct. As such, for the most part, players will move and interact with their environment unfettered by the GM. The GM exists only to describe things the players cannot intrinsically know: The environment for example. They also exist as the antagonists, the actor in the make-believe shouting “Nuh-uh!” whenever the player stretches credibility.

Due to this role, they are only likely to exercise a GM Challenge when the players overstep their control over the narrative in ways that are perhaps inconsistent with their character or—pivotally—when they attempt to influence something that is resisted. Obviously the GM Challenge to basic characteristic-defined Narratives should be rare assuming the player is operating within the shared vision of the world. However, there will be plenty of times when the player wishes to influence something beyond their PC and the GM must intervene to represent the opposing forces. A player with Firearms Training 2 might be reasonably proficient with common weapons such that when he says “I fire four shots in rapid succession, swinging my arm downward and spraying the bullets diagonally across the mercenary’s body” he is not rolling to see whether he can move his arm and pull the trigger in this fashion. However, he can’t dictate what the mercenary will do as a response, so the GM institutes an NPC Challenge to the action, declaring, “Sgt. Dekker catches the glint of candlelight off the barrel of the gun a moment before it swings to bear on his chest, and dives to the ground in an effort to avoid the bullets.” A test is made at that point to determine whose attempted action seizes Narrative Truth, and that participant (GM or player) then proceeds with the description of the outcome.

The fundamental element straddles the middle ground between Wushu’s concept of narrative as certainty and your standard RPG’s conceit that narrative is largely retroactive after the mechanical elements have been determined. The basic concern is a matter of timing: A GURPS player might indicate that she is attempting to thrust her sword into a foe’s abdomen; a Wushu player says definitively she impales the foe and the difference is that the GURPS player may not actually succeed in thrusting her sword or may in fact succeed and yet inflict no harm while the Wushu player most certainly executes the attack but the outcome is uncertain until the mechanics have been resolved. In my vision, the player may never assume the outcome or even declare a Narrative beyond their direct influence. At best the player may say, “I thrust my sword at waist level with all my strength.” They may strike the abdomen, they may strike a parrying arm, the result will depend on the responding action and the mechanical outcome.

Clearly there is a level here at which these principles could be applied to any standard role-playing game. The problem I would be addressing is mostly one of play style, but I think the construction of most role-playing rules is built such that combat is foremost in the rules as “defined scenarios” and everything else is, essentially, a metagamed skill check. Part of this is the specificity of the skills and abilities. Giving someone a 40% chance at Detecting Traps means they basically walk into a room and roll dice, saying, “I’m checking for traps.” The roll comes up successful and they ask the GM, “Did I find any traps?” Here is the alternative scenario I’m envisioning:

GM

“You stand in the doorway of a cramped room with stone floors and rickety wooden-paneled walls. A single unlit torch is barely visible on the far wall from the light of your gas lantern and in the furthest Eastern corner there is a sagging bookcase covered in assorted nick-knacks like partial bones, bits of parchment and copious dust and cobwebs. You have Narrative Control, Dave.”

Player

“I creep silently into the room and check for traps.”

GM

“There are no obvious traps in the room.”

Player

“Obvious traps? I’m looking for non-obvious traps. Hidden traps.”

GM

“Challenge. You have no way of knowing what might be hidden here.”

Player

“Okay fair enough. I peer carefully at the floor, looking for something unusual—”

GM

“Having never been in this room before, you can’t know what is usual.”

Player

“Good point. I’m checking the floor for something noticeably dissimilar from its surroundings; recessions, discoloration, carvings, that kind of thing. Also as I go, I’ll run my fingers lightly over the nearest walls looking for latches, triggers, mechanisms or signs of wear while being very cautious to avoid placing atypical pressure on anything.”

Should every trap-potential scenario be detailed this way? Most would probably argue it shouldn’t. But then again, wouldn’t “checking for traps” in each and every room the way it is done in most fantasy adventure scenarios be just as taxing and tedious? Narrative-wise, it makes more sense to detail the search for traps where they are most likely to occur rather than to slog through tedium for the sake of statistical protection.

And this is really the thing that has stimulated my mind: Role-playing games present a framework for compelling story but often abstract the elements that could go into such a story into game mechanics that thwart the tale. It’s easy to drift too far the other direction and create something that is barely a game and more of a setting. Somewhere in the middle lies roleplaying nirvana, and I’d love to find it.

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.

The List

It’s short this week because I think I suffered a bit from some post-con game fatigue and also I spent a lot of my potential gaming time doing more hobby-type things than actually playing. There are a couple of things coming up that may influence the List in coming weeks, although I can’t predict whether it will be an expanding or a contracting influence: First is the release of Viva Piñata 2 which Nik is interested in and the second is a schedule I’m working on to better track my daily activities. Currently I feel like I have more time for gaming than I actually spend gaming because I’m not sufficiently planning ahead, but it may be that when I work out the schedule I find I can’t spend as much time on it as I even do at this point.

• Blood Bowl - I entered my Elf team into the league, primarily due to a low league-night turnout and a lack of desire to play my Undead team against a familiar opponent when there are so many other teams in the league I’d still like to play against. I lost badly to Thom’s Orcs, though it could have been closer and a more satisfying loss if I’d understood a little better how to play Elves. It’s remarkable how different it is to play a high AG team opposed to a ST-based team; conditioned response-style plays like plugging up TZs with random linemen becomes a foolish move but it’s so second nature with tougher teams that I didn’t realize until close to the end of the first half how many of my players were ending up on their butts because they weren’t playing to their strengths. I anticipate that my second match with the Wildcats will be a bit better but I also speculate that it will be quite a few more games before I work out some of the base strategies to employ and become a legitimate threat.
• Pikomino - Nik and I played a round of this and I was again struck by how different this game is as a two-player affair compared to playing with three or more. The lack of steal opportunities I think makes the biggest difference; one thing I like about the game with more players is how insecure any lead is. It’s possible with two players to get enough of a lead to essentially secure the victory, something that just isn’t possible as you add more players.

Hobby Corner

I spent a large portion of Saturday engaged in the preliminary steps of getting a set of models finished: Priming, basecoats, sanding. I settled on a basecoat technique for my Van Saar Necromunda gang, basically a greyish blue color with a thin blue wash. It’s still not exactly what I envisioned in my head, but it’s pretty close and with these models I think the devil is going to be in the details, not the big sections of color.

I also sanded, assembled and primed my Elf reserves (two Catchers and two Linewomen) plus I glued some counter-weights into the existing Catchers’ bases since they were prone to tipping. I hope to get those basecoated this week sometime and ideally I’ll have them completed and based in two weeks. Why two weeks? Because I’m hoping that will be the amount of time I need to save up for my next purchase/project: I’m planning to buy a set of female humans from Shadowforge which I’ll use to round out my plastic humans from the boxed set into a complete co-ed Human team. I’m also eying the Heresy Ogre model from Impact! Miniatures as the Big Guy on that team and I think when all is said and done they’ll be pretty cool as a group.

My last partial project was a blister pack of Shadowrun Lone Star figs I had picked up a couple of years ago at GenCon in a flea market. I found them and thought I’d go ahead and get them sanded, assembled and primed while I had the primer out. Unfortunately I hadn’t looked close enough previously to note that the Ral Partha Shadowrun figs were probably more like 25mm scale than the GW-standard 28mm so they can’t be mixed. It’s not a problem per se, it just means I’d need some additional RP Shadowrun models to ever make real use of them and to the best of my knowledge, they aren’t being produced anymore. I guess I know what I’ll be looking for in my flea market scourings from now on.

Parting Shot

Having a bit of a chance to sit back and reflect on Pacificon, I think one thing I could have done better would have been to specifically plan the events and schedule around a realistic eating regimen. If I had one regret about the whole event it was that I wasted more time than I would have liked with between-schedule lag times that weren’t filled with pickup games and hasty meals that took more time than they should have considering they weren’t planned.

I’m already looking ahead to DunDraCon, so I’m thinking one thing that I’m interested in is making sure my GM’d games are set into better slots as well as (and part of this is based on my current schedule-everything mindset) ensuring there are set times for eating and bracketing those with either time to play random games or specific events I want to attend.

Another thing I’m thinking is that I lost a lot of time due to exhaustion based on some difficulty I had sleeping. Both nights at ConQuest I retired from the common areas fairly early but then lagged around the hotel room unable to sleep and then didn’t get enough rest so I didn’t get rolling the next day until about mid-morning. Some of the blame I can’t really pinpoint; I just had a hard time sleeping in that hotel room. But I think also my biggest motivator Saturday morning was a scheduled Pandemic game so I think scheduling games a bit earlier would be a good way to ensure I get the gaming in instead of assuming there will be time to play all the games I want.

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl - Despite the three-game marathon impending on Friday night I still attended League night Wednesday although I only helped Thom out by playing his Human team against his own Goblin team. Ironically I finally defeated Thom fair and square and it wasn’t even with my own team. In an effort to save my pride I played him first on Friday night with the new female Elf team against his Ogres and emerged once again victorious proving that at least some of the time I can actually conquer the Everest that is Thom in Blood Bowl. My next two games against a nice guy named Jeff’s High Elves and Aaron’s Dwarves weren’t so hot but I made costly early mistakes because we were trying a bit to rush through the games so we could make it to the flea market that started just six hours after the tournament began.
  My final impression after three games with the Elves is that they are a fun team to play especially because they offer so many chances for spectacular plays. With easy dodging, agility-based skills and high movement rates, they make for an enjoyable counter-point to my usual “hit anything that moves” style. Having to try to dance around the pitch was a trip, but not an unwelcome one.
• Zombie Fluxx - Nik found this for me and purchased it without consulting me. I’m glad she did, and it shows how well she knows me. I love zombies and Fluxx is a great game that I think gets overlooked a lot in our gaming group because it’s pretty arbitrary and we tend to gravitate toward themed games that offer a lot of strategic opportunity. I don’t know how strategic you can get with Fluxx, but the zombie theme certainly works well in this context and I had a lot of fun playing it with her. The minor Fluxx formula revisions add a much needed spice and the art is hands-down fantastic. A great pick-up.
• Pandemic - I already knew that Pandemic was a fun game but it wasn’t until Thom’s scheduled Pandemic blow-out that I really fell in love with it and began to understand why it has captured the gamer world’s attention so quickly. The co-operative nature of it is rare enough to make it feel unique and I already enjoyed that aspect of it, but playing with a group of people I met for the first time over the game made me realize it’s a great ice-breaker game since you’re forced to interact (contrast that to a game such as Magic: The Gathering where you may play against a stranger but never really engage them in any meaningful way). I also discovered how well balanced the game is to make it so that a group of competent players can manage the four-epidemic threshold handily but struggle with advancing the difficulty to five epidemics. We managed to win our three initial games though one came on the last possible turn and frankly we cheated by misunderstanding a rule about how city cards could be transferred from one player to another. But then we shuffled the participants a bit and won a five-epidemic game without cheating and it felt pretty good to do so. I hope Z-Man games gets the next printing shipped out soon, my only complaint about the game at all was how the buzz surrounding it focused primarily on how difficult it is to find and only secondarily how fun it is to play.
• Dados - Thom, Nik and I were compelled to test this beta version of a game when they offered us a free copy to play and provide feedback. It’s basically a bidding/trick-taking game with dice mechanics instead of cards. You get 36 dice and roll them four at a time placing each one onto one of 24 face-down tiles arranged in a grid. Once there are two players’ dice on a tile the tile can be claimed by any player in lieu of rolling on their turn provided their dice value is greater than any other players’. The catch is that the tiles are a gamble: Some provide heavy bonuses to the scored value (the base is the total value of the dice on the tile) others reduce the value or modify it in some other negative way. Then there are a few special tiles which are kept until later in the game and can be played to influence the game.
  Overall I thought it was a pretty fun game except it was billed as a light strategy game and I don’t think you can have a game with that many random elements be considered strategy. It’s more of a calculated risk game. It doesn’t diminish the game’s value, it’s just that I came in expecting one thing and found it to be something else. So I guess when the game is published we’ll all get free copies. Hey, if nothing else it should come with 144 six-sided dice, so you can’t go wrong there.
• Pikomino - While Thom and Carl played a quickie version of Legends of the Old West in the lobby, Nik and I tried out our new copy of Pikomino purchased in the dealer’s room. It’s something of a different game when played with two people because stealing is more difficult with fewer options on top stacks. We also scored significantly higher as a result of being more prone to stacking rather than being stolen from. It’s still a fun, casual game though and I’m glad we picked it up.
• Arkham Horror - So this was the game I had volunteered to run. It was a popular choice on the sign-up sheets, but I felt quickly that as a first-time game master I got in over my head. I hadn’t refreshed on the rules recently enough so I fumbled through game mastering it without playing and inadvertently ran an abbreviated session by running a Mythos phase between every single player’s turn. It did accelerate the game rather profoundly which was probably for the best since I had stupidly scheduled it right at dinner time on a busy day where we really needed a dinner break. The game started at 17:00 and ended about two and a half hours later and while the new-to-the-game players seemed to have a good time (they ended up winning by defeating the Ancient One in combat) I regret somewhat that they didn’t get a really good sense of how the game actually plays out.
  We also had to run a second game which I wasn’t involved in (but was managed by a devoted AH enthusiast so it let a few extra people play without really needing my attention) and there was some confusion trying to get another full copy of the game with the King in Yellow expansion. Aaron came through in the end but it was a little frustrating to have the second group getting antsy and testy with me because there wasn’t enough player space. I felt like I was being blamed for having so many people sign up, which was ridiculous but everyone ended up playing and having a good time anyway so it worked out in the end.
  After the first set of games I set it back up and we waited for Thom and Carl; they joined Nik, myself and another new acquaintance. We played correctly this time and the game lasted several hours which I think were enjoyed by all. We had several chances near the end to win but Thom ended up devoured three times in the course of the game and was really unlucky with his Other World Encounter card draws which directly lead to a confrontation with the Ancient One that… didn’t go as well as the previous game’s. Carl forged through the impossible odds till the bitter end anyway and I guess it serves as a small consolation that we were able to generate 35 successes out of a needed 60 to win.
• Power Grid - Sunday morning I got in on a full-fledged game of Power Grid. As I suspected I enjoyed it much more than the introductory seven-city teaser and found it to be a fascinating light simulation of economics as well as a grand strategy game. My biggest complaint is still in the decision to use paper money and one-dollar increments instead of something more manageable (like base $5 increments or money chits as in Arkham Horror). Not because I have some weird aversion to paper, but because in this context it isn’t exactly fast and easy to calculate or distribute the appropriate funds. Still, it’s a minor quibble and I very much enjoyed playing.
• Race For the Galaxy - This was my “big” convention purchase and while there wasn’t time to play it at the con, Nik agreed to join me in a game once we got home. Race is one of those games that’s frustrating to explain because it involves a lot of concepts that aren’t easily distilled into a single sentence and everything is kind of interconnected. When I’m teaching a game I prefer to start with base mechanics, build out to a general flow of the turn progression and then cover objectives. I usually let exception cases and special events wait until they show up mid-game and cover them then to avoid confusion. Every once in a while though you get to a game like Race where none of that works: There are no base mechanics, the mechanics are dependent on the turn progression. But it’s hard to teach turn progression because that is dependent on the phase selection mechanic. And even once you get to that point, every card in the game is practically an exception event; add to that the fact that the design of the game is great provided you already understand the game premise and just need an easy reference, but the myriad of icons and subtle distinguishing characteristics make it a poor self-teaching game so the first few hands of it feel like you’re playing a card game in a different language.
  Despite the challenge of teaching it, Nik won the game so I guess it went better than I thought it was going. I’m not sure that she’s dying to play it again, but hopefully my assurances that it makes more sense the more you play it were resonant and she’ll humor me with at least a few more rounds before we move back to something she’s more comfortable with.
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed - Despite all the board gaming, I did also sit down for a few minutes and play through the cursed Stage 9 boss. I don’t know why I had such a mental block against that guy; he was a re-tread from an earlier boss I defeated on my first try. But somehow I couldn’t pass him. I finally made it happen and then promptly got humbled by Stage 7. I like that the game retains its sense of challenge even though they’ve instituted a save system that prevents you from having to backtrack. The original game was conquerable but hard, this game feels the same way even if they’ve granted nods to the busy adult gamer who can’t sit for extended sessions to play a game in a single sitting.

Hobby Corner

I’m still in search of a suitable Ghoul model to round out my Undead roster and now that I’ve gotten enough Elves done to field a base team I’m starting to look to the future for my next projects. I need to save up some money so while I do that I have a Necromunda team to decide on a paint scheme for at long last, I have four reserve Elf models to finish and I need to get that final Ghoul for the Undead. But after that? Here’s what I’m considering:

1. Human Blood Bowl - I have 11 plastic human models: Two Throwers, two Catchers, two Blitzers and five or six Linemen. As hinted at last week I’m thinking of ordering the Shadowforge Female Human team to round out the roster with five more Line(wo)men and two each of additional Catchers, Blitzers and Throwers. Granted the Throwers would be extraneous since you can only have two on your roster, but the theme of the team would be co-ed Blood Bowl so I’d probably end up using one of the female Throwers anyway. I also saw that Impact! Miniatures has a great Heresy Deathball Ogre model that I’d like to pick up instead of using either Morg ‘n’ Thorg or a GW Ogre. I actually like the Heresy models so much I’d love to pick up enough for a full Ogre team, but they’re pricey models ($15 a pop) which would make a full regiment of six like $90. I do like the official GW Human models and the set comes with a full compliment of 16 which is vastly improved over the other official sets, but since I’m buying models to fill out a set I already own, I can’t justify the cost difference: Buying the Heresy Ogre and the Shadowforge females is the same collective price as the GW Human set sans Ogre. So yeah.
2. Dwarf Blood Bowl - Some Blood Bowl tournaments require official GW BB models. I have an official Orc team and an official Undead team but my Elves are obviously unofficial and if I add the Shadowforge and Heresy/Impact! models to my Human team that makes them unofficial as well. I’d like to have a third official team to choose from bringing my total to a nice round five, but in a testament to the sorry state of the Specialist line, the cheapest any team gets is $60 because you have to add boosters at a minimum. The teams that look most likely to work with as little additional expense (and that I’d be interested in owning or playing at this juncture) are Vampires, Dark Elves and Dwarves. I settled on Dwarves as my pick among those because I like the models the best and because I think it would give me a nice cross-section of the major fantasy races (Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Orcs, Undead/Other). My $60 would get me 10 Blockers, two Runners, two Troll Slayers and two Blitzers which is 16 players but I’d have to pony up another $35 to get the Deathroller should I choose to build in that direction. Still, it’s somewhat better than the Dark Elves which, for $60, gets you seven Linemen, two Witch Elves, four Blitzers and two Throwers which aren’t even part of the LRB5 team listings so they have to be used as either Runners or Assassins… I’m not sure what they expect you to do about the other option since no models technically exist for either. I guess that’s where you’re supposed to dip into the WFB line and pick up Assassin models for $10 a pop adding another $20 to the total. Sigh.
3. Pirates/Gunslingers - Aaron picked up the Warhammer Historicals rulebook for pirate skirmish battles and it got me all intrigued about painting some pirate squads. Foundry has some marvelous miniature sets for just such a game and while I’d have to see the rules before I decide which set to pick up, I think the prospect of this kind of game is even more intriguing than Legends of the Old West and I have to say I’ve been on the razor’s edge of buying a posse of gunslingers for a minimum of three years now. I have some ideas in store for how this might go down, but a gang of fun historical minis, a gang of Necromunda SciFi minis and plenty of Blood Bowl teams to choose from… well, that sounds like I’d be ready for fun no matter what.

Parting Shot

The one part of ConQuest I felt could have been better this year was a general sense of organization. They had to contend, I concede, with a strange hotel layout but I’d argue that other than the Hyatt where they hold KublaCon, few hotels are really meant to have this much related activity in one central location. Most conventions have less wandering around and seeing what’s happening than gaming cons and since few are big enough to sell out massive convention centers the way GenCon or PAX are, they have to make due.

But the situation wasn’t helped by having the dealer’s room offset from what seemed to be the con’s focal point: The board/war/miniatures game area. Also tucked over in that side hallway was the small open gaming area and the role-playing room which meant that a lot of the impromptu games had to be organized in high-traffic hallway areas or the common room off the main lobby. It’s not that the non-conventioneers were problematic but I think it’s difficult to run an effective RPG if you have to contend with gawkers and passerby. I think my experience is that ConQuest is generally more board- and wargame friendly while DunDraCon has a bigger RPG/LARP contingent and Kubla goes full force with the miniatures. All are always represented, but that seems to be the focus shift.

But aside from accommodation challenges, there was a sense that I don’t usually get from DunDraCon or KublaCon that the organizers… didn’t. There was a lot of times where I’d ask a volunteer where or what something was and they’d fix me with a blank stare before giving a vague wave and a cryptic reply. When I asked a staffer where my Arkham game was being held she said, “You kind of have to wander around and find it.” That’s not really my idea of great planning.

I also felt from a game master’s perspective that there wasn’t a lot of support provided to me. I asked someone what to do since there were more signups than my game allowed. The best response I got was a shoulder shrug and a “Try to work it out if you can. Do you have an extra copy of the game?” Listen: The game is $60 so no, I don’t have an extra copy. I was able to find one, but I had to do that on my own. No one came by to check on my game after the first five minutes and no one was around when it was over to collect my game master’s sheet. I was never made aware what the purpose of the sheets were anyway except someone said, “So we can keep track.” Of what, I never became privy.

It was really the little things that stuck out to me: The flea market was laid out in a tight circle with relatively narrow aisles between the outer tables and the inner. Con flea markets are almost always frustrating affairs, especially for mostly meek, smaller geeks like myself but this was so much so that I never seriously felt like I had a chance to make a purchase. I didn’t even attend the second night’s market. Even things like the signage with it’s arrow-adorned logo that contrasted with the intentional arrows meant to guide guests to registration and other key locations—a holdover from two years ago when I last attended ConQuest—showed lack of foresight and planning.

I rank the Con as one of my top gaming experiences overall, but I think there is definitely a lot of room for improvement.

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl - After four straight wins I was finally taken down a peg by the new member of the league whose Chaos Dwarves ground me to a tie. I went ahead and purchased a fourth Ghoul for the team, despite not having a model to represent him, just to have something to do with the extra cash I had lying around. Despite my rapid turnaround in fortune (this marks six straight matches without a loss after two opening defeats), I remain in second place. And I’ll say this: The first place team is Thom’s Orcs who:
  1. Have yet to be defeated.
  2. Have yet to be scored upon.
  3. Are +13 in Casualties.
  4. Have three games in hand on my team.
  5. Still manage to be five points ahead in the standings.

  At my current pace I’ll finish the season with 77 points. If Thom is completely shut out of his next six games, he’ll still only be eight points behind that.

• Power Grid - I think my favorite part of the game is the supply and demand mechanic for resource pricing. I do kind of wish they had chosen a more accommodating physical element besides paper money, but the fact that prices fluctuate as the game progresses and also in reaction to people’s purchasing decisions is genius. I’m definitely looking forward to playing this one again.
• Sorry! Sliders - We played some more of this with a four-player configuration and a long, three-section track. It’s still fun but like many manual dexterity games and games aimed at younger audiences it’s losing it’s magic rapidly. I probably have one more session left in me in the near future before I’d need a long break on it.
• Bionic Commando: Rearmed - My only real video gaming forays of late have been in XBLA territory and this is my single-player title du jour. I’m impressed continually with how well they managed to maintain the delicate balance between staying true to the sensibility and feel of the original while masking its very present flaws in ways that make this remake not just a new skin on an old game but actually fulfills the promise of what that aging title could have been. It’s impressive work.
• Ticket to Ride - My multiplayer gaming was also XBLA-based as I picked up the Europe expansion for the game and played a couple of rounds with Dr. Mac. I like how TTR has the kind of light strategy mechanics that really allow it to stand out in an online format: You don’t need to fully pay attention during other player’s turns as their play process is of no consequence, only the final result. I understand why Days of Wonder has taken to making each new variant (Marklin, Europe, etc) unique with its own feel and flow, but it does frustrate me a little that bits that work well in one edition won’t always even be included in later games making them less like revisions and more like new twists on the base game. I would like to see something that really tries to be the ultimate edition of the game incorporating the best mechanical elements from all the variant games. It would be nice if they used the online format (like XBLA) to allow you to customize the maps and game mechanics a little in an effort to see what people prefer.

Hobby Corner

I finished my Shadowforge female elf Blood Bowl team just in time for PacifiCon so I plan to use them in the tournament Thom is running Friday night. It will be interesting to see how that goes since I’m so used to playing bruiser-style teams and the elves are… not. As for the models themselves I think I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I used nothing but static grass for the bases and I think I would have made a few adjustments in how I handled the overall process along the way (I still have four extra models that won’t get used unless I enter them in a league at some point so I will yet have a chance to experiment with them) but overall the results are okay. I mostly just tried to do justice to the wonderful models themselves which are really well made. So kudos to Shadowforge; unfortunately the only other teams they have model sets for are Dark Elves (too close to regular elves to be my next team), Orcs (already have some orcs) and Humans. I’m now very tempted to buy a team of the humans to make a male/female team using the plastic models that came with the boxed set, but there are two reasons I might not want to do that. One is that it would give me an over abundance of models where some were drastically overshadowed by others. The other reason is that I actually like the GW human models (at least the metal ones) so I’m not sure double-dipping in the Shadowforge line would be as great if I weren’t specifically compensating for the repugnant “official” line.

All I want is a single model to round out my Undead Blood Bowl team. It’s not a tall order, nor an unreasonable one. However, my primary logical provider of this product, Games Workshop, is a sloppily run niche market company that can’t be bothered to cater to its customers and so I’m left with vitriol and empty hands.

At least I have a blog.

Look, I get it. Gaming has got to be a frustrating market for businesses that want to operate as legitimate enterprises and not labor-of-love charity organizations. Gamers are notoriously fickle, generally cheapstakes and loathe to part with their disposable income unless the purchase meets some ill-defined criteria whose formula cannot be deduced using modern mathematical principles. So yeah, game companies have a steep road to climb to financial success.

Big, important game companies like Palladium and TSR have struggled or failed because they attempt to either exert market muscle on a difficult to demograph clientele or they prostrate themselves on a core fanbase to keep them alive with guilt trips and puppy dog eyes. Small companies have risen meteorically based on fluke and fad, like Wizards of the Coast. Even sister industry video games have struggled to work within a customer base that is neither loyal and predictable nor malleable and excitable. Gamers tend to be skeptical, critical and yet habitual. So yeah, I understand to a degree why game companies might treat their customers with a bit of disdain.

What I don’t understand is a company acting like it’s allergic to certain types of paying customers. Games Workshop, publishers and rights-owners to several of my all-time favorite tabletop games, has squandered much of the good will it earned by associating itself with these products. I’ve already mentioned my general apathy toward their flagship products principally due to their hamfisted efforts to milk the few customers they can draw in dry. And now I’m losing the last ounces of respect I had for them because they can’t even manage the few games they’ve retained even a modicum of support for in a way that makes any sense.

This is strictly opinion, but I feel that GW’s Specialist Games line is their biggest asset. The squad-level games like Necromunda and Mordheim offer a brilliant intro to tabletop miniatures games without heavy investment and provide, due to their scale, a more manageable gameplay experience. The battallion- or fleet-level games of Warmaster, Battlefleet Gothic and Epic 40K provide a more robust strategic experience due to the wargame-style abstractions and the comparative simplicity of the hobby elements. Their more restrictive environment games, closer to traditional board games, like DungeonQuest and Space Hulk are some of their best overall products because they allow for a less fiddly experience that appeals to a wider audience while still giving ample opportunity in the hobbyist realm.

They even have stepped down the right path with their Living Rule Book concepts. If they don’t want to actively support these products with their company time and effort, that’s okay, as long as they allow the game to flourish naturally with a community-driven model. And in part they have with community-driving games like Blood Bowl (which is what this is really about). Yet in a time where Intellectual Property notions and theories are being challenged regularly with variations on the idea of idea ownership I can’t begin to fathom why GW thinks they have to tightly reign the product that they’ve essentially handed off to the community to run. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Basically Blood Bowl in the present tense is managed by the Blood Bowl Rules Committee, a group who works on revising the LRB. They are selected from the community and they democratically collate the results of playtests and rules discussions into something that works like actual rules modifications to improve the game as a whole. Which is great except that the community en masse is stifled by GW’s draconian demand for ultimate IP control. Like I said before, I get why GW ended up in this position what I don’t understand is why they don’t open their minds enough to see the value of trying something new.

Let’s take an example: The BBRC has voted unanimously to add three new teams to the next edition of the rules. Most of the teams are revised legacy teams from older, way outdated versions of the game. Most of them add great new dimensions to the existing game dynamic and yet there is a roadblock: GW won’t approve the addition of new teams without official models to support them and they won’t order new models to be created unless their market research can predict a minimum sales that Blood Bowl figures don’t meet. So there exists this set of limbo teams that everyone who plays the game and cares about it wants, but can’t be added because the rights holders have deemed it unprofitable.

I can’t explicitly fault GW’s reasoning here: Running a business is running a business and like I said, I can sympathize with their positions. But there seems to be a simple answer which will solve most if not all of the principal problems facing the game today: Develop a simple and extremely cheap if not free licensing system to allow alternative modelers to create and sell official Blood Bowl support products. Instead of making sites like Shadowforge and Impact! Miniatures circumvent the rules, give them an affordable way to step in and take the reigns. I’m no businessman but I can smell opportunity and there are companies that are already doing what GW doesn’t want (cannibalizing figure sales with unlicensed alternatives) so why not get a small cut of the action, earn some goodwill with the fans and perhaps give the game a chance to build an audience with a greater range of support than you yourself are willing to give?

As it stands you can’t order single models for any Blood Bowl team from Games Workshop and since the team designations in the licensed boxed sets are woefully outdated for two or more editions back (and arguably unsuitable even then) you have no option other than resort to alternative model providers, the secondary market or overpurchasing. They’ve completely gutted their support so that booster packs are disastrously rare and don’t even get me started on the miserable range of Star Player models that represent perhaps a quarter of the complete list. What this means is that the only way to create a full 16-player Blood Bowl team from official Games Workshop models is to either buy two boxed sets (leaving you with 22 players which in most cases still isn’t the correct combination of positionals as dictated by the team list and at best is eight models more than you’ll ever need) or hope that, again, a secondary site like BBFigs.com can fill in the blanks by reselling GW models.

Your IP is either something you stand behind or it’s a wasted opportunity: Right now GW is treating Blood Bowl and the whole Specialist line with indifference that I can only translate as a wasted opportunity. So what’s it going to be, Games Workshop? More customer ill will and more head scratching about why your company hemorrhages customers? Or out of the box thinking that can actually improve the profit margins that seem to be the only language you speak these days?

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.

The List

• Blood Bowl - I played through two more matches. Winning both, I’ve now put together three straight wins and a five-game set of zero defeats if you include the two earlier ties. But, listen, only one of those five games was against Thom. That’s not meant to take anything away from my other opponents, but in his 15 games to date he’s 10-1-4 so he’s clearly the most dominant coach. He’s also the player I personally have the most trouble with. However, I have been having more success in general because of lessons I’ve learned. I’m more comfortable with my Undead team now, I know how to avoid setting myself up for failure. Saturday’s game against Aaron’s Lizardmen was my most significant win thus far: I was playing an unknown team who may have had significant advantages in terms of speed and strength in some cases and I still came out on top 3-1. It easily could have been closer, but just breaking the two-TDs-per-game barrier was signficant to me.
• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 - The per-game-mode leaderboards are what are inspiring most of my dedication to the game at this point. The fact that someone else on my Friends List has a higher score on a couple modes drives me crazy and my obsessive pursuit of regaining the crown has me up late at night. Certain modes are clearly my strong suits while others have a maddening ability to mock me: Almost without fail every time I think, “Hey, this is shaping up to be a pretty good round,” I make a series of preventable mistakes and cost myself a lofty perch on top of the leaderboard. It’s possibly petty to care, but competition isn’t something I normally experience so when I do I guess it’s just for the best that it comes in arenas where there are virtually zero consequences.
• Etrian Odyssey II - I’ve slowed my progress some mostly due to fewer instances of downtime in the past week or so. I did finish a couple of non-story quests and earned some items I already had for my troubles.
• Sorry! Sliders - I spent some time at Thom’s house on Saturday night while my wife had a girl’s night at our place. Of course we played some Blood Bowl but after Aaron left we tried out his new dexterity game, Sorry! Sliders. Basically you take some customized Sorry! pieces that have ball bearings in their bases and you slide them along these cardboard tracks in a kind of curling/bocce variant. There are quite a few variations but my clear favorite was one that had a hole cut in the center just big enough to accept a single piece. A shallow ring around the cutout scored you your choice of either 4, 5 or 6 points. Points are awarded by moving mini Sorry! pieces along a vertical track toward a Home location but they have to enter Home by exact count.
  Since the center cutout was a Sorry! event that forced your highest scoring track piece back to the starting position but the ring around it was almost a guaranteed Home, it had a remarkable risk/reward dynamic that the other variants, despite being enjoyable, lacked. We played for about an hour and a half and while not the kind of game Thom and I usually gravitate toward, we had a lot of fun with it.

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.

The List

• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 - Most of my time with this game was spent with a purpose. That’s kind of unusual for a GeoWars game, but as I alluded to above, the game has a different feel to begin with. It’s always trying to give you a goal. First it was unlocking all the game modes. I don’t know if it’s merciful or disappointing that they’ve chosen to be generous with their progression speed; you can obtain access to the full game in under an hour. After that I was trying to bump the other guy on my Friend’s List who had the game from the top spot for each mode. I was 66% successful. Finally I was trying to get some achievements and I think I wrapped up most of the easier ones. Others, like Wax Off and Treaty will take a little more effort. I like the game, don’t let me distract from that fundamental truth. As far as a complete package, I think this sequel is more of a whole game than the original. But it’s also twice as expensive and nothing that it offers achieves that zen of familairity meets originality from the predecessor which means it may be a better game, but I hesitate to call it an improved experience just yet.
• Blood Bowl - I played a match against Dave on Wednesday. When last I played him, during the trial league we played through the end of June and first part of July, we drew a tie in Orc vs. Undead. Against the humans he trounced me soundly and left the team basically unplayable what with all the injuries and deaths. So I was apprehensive going into this match. Fortunately it seems that at least some of my recent strategy evaluations have improved my coaching skills somewhat; I was finally able to secure a full-fledged victory.
  Granted, I may have used a couple of my skills incorrectly (Piling On requires the skill user to be placed prone which I forgot to do), but I think that by and large I can’t point to anything I did wrong nor anything I did especially right, I just didn’t make dumb, exploitable mistakes for once. I guess it made all the difference. One thing I did notice is that I won the coin toss at the beginning of the game which allowed me to receive first. I almost botched my chance to take a first half lead but I managed to pull it out in Turn 8 with some sports-movie heroics; either way it seemed that controlling the ball for most of the opening drive was a great way to put Dave back on his heels.
• Etrian Odyssey II - I’m still slogging my way through the 2nd Strata; my two-party system was a bit of a bust since I end up wanting to keep certain characters on board at all times. I’m finding the Beast class to be superior in direct damage at an earlier stage than the Ronin which is kind of a bummer since I’ve had the Ronin as a key party member since the outset. But the Beast also fills in for the Troubadour in terms of FOE manipulation, if only the XP-boosting passive skill from the Troubadour had some sort of analog elsewhere. I’m finding the Alchemist to be a curious stumper. He has incredible potential but in most random encounters he’s largely useless because I don’t want to bother boosting his STR or giving him powerful melee weapons. Yet his elemental damage is occasionally necessary for certain resistant or high defensive enemies so I tend to only need him around on occasion. That seems like a poor excuse for using a precious spot on my 5-man adventuring team.

Hobby Corner

Spent more time working on the female elves over the weekend, getting a few coats of skin highlights and some base color on the larger areas of the uniforms. I’m struggling a little because my basic technique is to paint lighter colors first so I don’t have to multi-coat them over a dark basecoat. But when it gets down to putting the edges on the dark color, I have to be careful not to bleed over the skin tones. This means I need a fine paint brush and a steady hand. I burn through brushes like mad because as soon as they get a little used they no longer hold their tip as well and they become useless for what I’m trying to do. At $4 a pop that’s not very economical. I’ve already committed on these figs but I think I may go for a whole different approach on my next set of models. Not only is this method costly and furstrating, it’s excruciatingly slow as well. With less than three weeks to go before I want to have these done, I don’t need a plodding technique on top of my already crazy perfectionism.

Parting Shot

I received a disc containing a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft. In the mail, AOL-style. I appreciate that the game is so incredibly popular and Blizzard wants to do whatever they can to attract people who might not yet be hooked on playing the game to give it a shot. But I have to wonder if this sort of marketing is really effective. I’ve occasionally considered giving WoW a shot but I know that one of two outcomes are likely: I’d become obsessed with it and get myself into trouble for spending too much time with a game or I wouldn’t care for it and end up incurring monthly fees on a game I don’t play.

Given this overt attempt to appeal to a greater base however, I’m unlikely to ever try the game at all now. AOL disc spam used to make me insane, even if WoW is the best game ever and the thing I’ve needed to make my life complete, their co-oping of this onerous tactic has lowered their standing in my mind to the point where I can’t in good conscious even support a publisher who behaves this way. I can only assume they got my address because I subscribe to some game magazine or in some way identified myself as a gamer. That being the case, I can’t imagine a gamer being unaware of WoW to the point where they’d see a disc in the mail of all places and say, “What’s this? Maybe I should check it out.” If I’m a gamer and I haven’t already tried WoW I don’t think there’s any way a disc in hand is going to be the sudden burst of convenience that pushes me over the edge. The fact that Blzzard thinks otherwise is enough to convince me in the exact opposite direction.

Before we go further, let’s examine some statistics from the last twelve budget-conscious months:

• I acquired 95 games in the first year, for an average of just under eight games per month.
• I traded away 54 games over the course of the year, averaging four and a half trades per month.
• I earned $43.47 in money by recycling, earned $118.47 in gaming-related cash to add to the budget and used $40 worth of gift cards.
• My total budget, including $60 per month and the additional funds listed above, came to $921.94.
• I spent $876.70 on games in twelve months.
• My average monthly expenditures was $73.06. My average budget was $76.83.
• My total amount carried from one month to the next was $241.93, for an average of $20.16.
• The 12-month difference between available budget and amount spent was $45.24… in the black.

Overall I think the experiment was very, very successful. In the entire year I only overspent my budget one month by $2.91. My most active months were February and May where I acquired and lost a total of twenty games each and June was the quietest month where I only moved seven total games in or out. I didn’t feel over the course of the last year like I didn’t get a chance to play the games I wanted to play nor did I feel like I needed more money than I was able to pull together in almost every month.

So what lessons are there to learn from this ordeal?

Lesson #1: Learn to Trade

The biggest lesson I learned was that trading games is hugely important for the budget-conscious gamer. My trading system of choice is Goozex, but there are plenty of alternatives. Game Trading Zone, Trade Games Now and SwitchPlanet all claim to facilitate trades for video games, and BoardGameGeek offers a trading service for non-video games as well. I haven’t tried any of these services and I don’t know if they work with the same fair points system that Goozex does, but swapping out your existing games that you don’t really play anymore for something you’ve been dying to play is a hugely effective way to keep your library stocked with interesting titles without emptying your wallet dozens of times per year.

However, don’t overlook the moderate overhead costs of game trading. I didn’t monitor the shipping costs for a lot of the trades I made over the year, but for first class shipping to the continental U.S. with delivery confirmation (a must in shipping to strangers on the honor system), average postage is $1.50. When you tally that with my trades over the last year, that’s over $80 in postage fees alone. Plus some sites may charge a modest fee for each transaction; Goozex charges $1 per incoming trade. If half my acquisitions were from Goozex, that’s $45 there, too. I started counting those fees toward the end of the experiment, but a more realistic budget would have to account for those charges every time.

Lesson #2: Practice Patience

One thing I learned that was valuable over the last year was the virtue of patience. Occasionally a game will come along that you just don’t want to wait for. These tend to be highly anticipated games like Halo or Metal Gear Solid. But what I discovered was that by and large most of the games I raced out to break the budget over when they were initially released ended up being mild disappointments. That is to say, I’m glad I played most of them (Halo 3, Mass Effect, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune) but I don’t think any of the impatience I exhibited by paying full price was warranted. In the case of Mass Effect I probably wouldn’t have been discouraged from buying it on day one because of how well I liked Knights of the Old Republic, but my reaction to Halo 3 was nearly identical to Halo 2 so despite the cultural resonance of the moment, I could have easily waited a month or two until someone else got sick of it and popped it onto Goozex.

Likewise many games I anticipated getting on day one like God of War: Chains of Olympus or Overlord but ultimately waited for and got on the cheap (or nearly free) ended up being just as enjoyable later, perhaps more so because the games didn’t have to live up to a $60 price tag. The other benefit of waiting even a week after games launch is that you get a chance to evaluate community members’ opinions that align with your own. If you find yourself frequently agreeing with Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation or Tycho from Penny Arcade, wait until they get excited about something and then go pick up that game. Even a hyper-gamer friend who you have a lot in common with can be a great resource for determining which games are causing a stir (BioShock or Portal, for example) and which are dividing some gamers and might be better pushed back until the price drops (GTA IV or Metal Gear Solid 4 perhaps).

It’s also beneficial to wait and determine what games your friends are picking up, especially if you’re getting into an online game. I jumped the gun on both Call of Duty 4 and Burnout Paradise, assuming plenty of people on my Friends List would be joining my games soon enough. By the time my buddies were thinking about hopping on, I’d long since grown tired of playing solo or against random Live weirdos and never did get a great multiplayer experience out of them.

Lesson #3: Shop For Deals and Items You Want Together

It’s almost a corollary to the lesson above, but one of the things that you gain when you stop trying to stay ahead of the release cycle is the freedom to identify things you want and the price point you’re willing to pay for them. It prevents two problems of monthly budgets which are the psychological sense that you need to spend all your budget every time it comes around and the need to have everything you want regardless of whether you can afford it.

Since some months are going to be packed full of items you desire and others won’t have much that interests you at all, you’re generally better off not trying to wrangle three or four games into a single budget cycle and you’re just as well not filling empty months with random bargain shopping because it’s an “unbeatable deal.” Ideally you identify what you’re looking for and then look for it at the right price, whenever that may come. Call of Duty 4, many people’s Game of the Year for 2007, can now be found pretty consistently for $40 on Xbox 360 (some $20 off the day-one price) and I’ve seen it advertised on special for as low as $30. If you were on the fence about the game, you can do a lot worse for a half-price title.

Meanwhile, identifying what you’re after early and looking for the right deal can also yield great fruit through alternative options like game trading as described above or online auctions like eBay. Even private sellers on sites like Craigslist can offer some fantastic deals quite often. In many cases it makes more sense for people to sell their games online that way than try to get cash back for them from retail outlets who frequently pay far less than a private buyer would be willing. If you’re already exercising the patience, it should be trivial to do a bit of research to find a really good deal.

Lesson #4: Know When to Rent

Through the course of the last year I rented some of the games cataloged above. Unlike trading for games where you actually own whatever is in your house, you have to return rented games within a time period. For services like GameFly and Gameznflix, you can control how often you return the games, but you have to pay a recurring monthly fee. When I did Gameznflix at the beginning of the year, I calculated each game’s monthly fee by averaging out the subscription rate divided by the number of games I’d played that month from the service. Ultimately I felt it wasn’t a great deal. To make the math add up you have to play service-rented games almost exclusively and hope their turnaround time is quick enough to make everything cost effective.

The other option is renting from a regular brick and mortar store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. These stores typically charge more per game than mail-based services and have a strict time limit on how long you can keep the game. While it’s beneficial to have the freedom with a service to hang onto a game as long as you like, you do pay for the game as long as you hang onto it. But the lack of late charges, which can really add up, makes it seem like a better deal. Yet if you apply a specific strategy to renting games from stores, you can avoid the pitfalls of a recurring fee without killing yourself on late fees.

Your key strategy is game knowledge when it comes to rental games. By and large the formula is pretty simple: The typical time to completion for a given title is the basic factor you need to know. You then estimate your typical amount of play time for a given rental period (usually about a week) and divide the time to completion by the amount of time you have to play. That should indicate the number of rental periods it would take you to finish the game in question. You then multiply the number of rental periods by the rental fee and that equals the cost to you to play through the game in question. Usually I add an extra rental period just in case it takes me a bit longer than most people. If this cost to play the game is significantly less than both the cost to purchase the game and the value you could incur by purchasing it and trading it away, it’s a solid rental.

As an example, most people say it takes about eight hours to finish Heavenly Sword. If I can play about five hours per week and it costs $8 to rent a game for a week at my local shop, I can estimate it will take me two weeks to finish. Conservatively I’ll give myself three weeks so the price for me to rent the game and play through it is an estimated $24. The game is still selling for a minimum of $50 (used) and it didn’t get great reviews. Mostly this seems like a good candidate for rental. The difficulty is that sometimes it’s hard to find information about the length of games. Generally speaking action titles with no real multiplayer are pretty quick plays. Occasionally you can justify a longer game’s rental by assuming you’re doing an evaluation. Epic games that seem to be a bit divisive like Lost Odyssey might be worth a week’s rental to see if you really want to pony up full price, but budget-wise it’s usually better to try a free demo or simply wait for prices to drop.

The Bottom Line

So after a year of $60 gaming budgets I’m generally thrilled with how well it went. I do intend to continue minding the budget when it comes to games, I just won’t be chronicling it in a regular feature. The lessons above are lessons that I’m not just passing along, but lessons I actually learned through this process. I’m sure there is plenty more to learn about how to reduce a budget, how to manage it more effectively and how to even trim it down when necessary. But I think this has been a great experience and I hope you’ve found it enlightening or at least enjoyable.