Gaming Weekend: A Journey’s End Edition
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.
The List
- Blood Bowl – I played two matches this week. On our league night I played Dave again, this time pitting my Undead against his Orcs. I had a much better match than last week’s epic failure with the humans, but I was still only able to pull a draw, 1-1. Part of the problem was that he went on a hot streak early in the second half and he ended up knocking out or killing a huge portion of my team. Thank goodness for Regeneration (the Undead specialty) because without it I would have been hurting for Week 3. But in the war of attrition he managed to pummel me until I had only four players left on the pitch as the end of the half drew near and was able to more or less walk to the end zone.
The second match was an early Week 3 battle with the victoryless Undead versus the equally hard luck Elf team played by Thom, the Trojans. It took me a while to warm up to handling the lightning-quick Elves as he jumped to an early 2-0 lead. But eventually I settled down and scored on the last turn of the first half. I thought I was going to have a chance to tie it up but as my cage marched down the field through the second half I got within striking distance of the goal line and had a tough decision to make. I set up a modified cage the best I could considering Thom’s excellent defensive positioning but I had to either place my ball carrier out on the front line of the cage (which formed more of a horseshoe pattern) and give him the opportunity to score or I could hold him back to a more secure position but force myself to risk a bunch of hairy agility rolls so I could pass it into the end zone. I went with the more offensive option and it didn’t pan out. Thom made his block roll and knocked the ball free for a late game score leaving me down 3-1. Both matches were hugely enjoyable and I’m now more convinced than ever that this will be my primary team of choice in the main league coming up. But I have an interesting game planned for next week’s meet-up where I’ll get a chance to try out the Orcs with the goblins and the troll for the first time so I’m interested to see how that goes. - Rock Band – Ever the party starter, we played a bit of this over the weekend with some friends who hadn’t tried it before and then Nik and I spent some time playing just for fun. I did manage to finally get the Flawless Groove achievement for 100% on Expert Bass using only upstrokes. I did it on Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid” after a few attempts where I got 99%. Those are very frustrating. At this point I’m pretty comfortable with Expert when I’m playing bass but I still think the World Tour mode needs to take relative difficulty into consideration since Nik isn’t quite ready for the Hard difficulty yet on guitar and so we’re stuck in our progress. I feel my Expert bass level should balance her Medium guitar into an average of Hard. After all, if they’re trying to simulate an actual band, plenty of real bands have members who get carried along on the talent of their mates. But I completely understand Nik’s unwillingness to move up a notch; I have plenty of fun with drums on Medium but there is nothing but frustration on the other side of the step up and if I’m not enjoying myself, what’s the point?
- Lost Cities – Nik and I played a few rounds of this waiting for some friends to arrive on Saturday. My typical strategy of playing the lowest card in my hand and using expedition cards whenever I have a card in that color above 7 and half the deck remains failed me as I consistently fell into deep losses because I had expedition cards out and nothing more than an eight and maybe a three to stack on it. Losing 18 points on a single stack is not a great way to ensure victory in that game.
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village – I finally gave up on an optional puzzle that was stumping me (Puzzle 016 Triangles and Ink) and I think I’m ultimately feeling like it should be done faster than it really can be. But at least the game doesn’t grind to a halt if you get stumped; mostly you can skip a puzzle and move on. I do continue to get annoyed by puzzles that are more difficult than they have to be because the interface isn’t clear enough. One particular one involving matchsticks would have been solved straight away if it had been more obvious how to rotate the matchsticks. It’s easy enough to discern moving them around the screen, but carefully touching the head and dragging to one side is something I missed for a long, frustrating ten minutes. Especially since I knew the answer going in, I thought it was just a variation in which you couldn’t rotate the stick. Great game, stymied by some of its own design I’m afraid.
Parting Shot
The Blood Bowl league I’m running has undergone some fairly intense changes since I first envisioned it. Originally it was intended to mimic the weekly match-up vibe from NFL games: Each upcoming match would have its own particular gravity associated with it based on the teams’ relative standings and the race for the conference or division title. But when fewer teams than I expected signed up and even fewer coaches expressed interest I had to scale it back. It then quickly became obvious that scheduling human players was significantly more difficult than scheduling the games themselves. I tried a number of things to make it work but in the end the problem came down to trying to shoehorn a level of abstraction that had already been excised by the official (playtested) rules back onto a game.
For someone who loves fiddling with game mechanics and trying out house rules I think the one lesson I’ve learned (in general, but also driven home by this recent effort) is that flexibility is the key. Sometimes the official game rules exist for a reason and in the case of Blood Bowl, now in its fifth rules update, many of the challenges I’m facing have already been addressed. Rules tinkerers probably have to see this in action to be convinced but one thing I’m not shy about is changing course in the middle. I dropped the initial static schedule after the first week and now that two weeks have passed I’m finding even the conference system to be fundamentally flawed because two teams played that should not have.
As league commissioner I could have ruled the match void but I never want to see players waste their games. I’ve also shortened the league. It was originally intended to be a pre-season for six weeks leading up to the regular league. The idea was that there were a couple of players who were new to the game and I wanted people to have a chance to try out some roster configurations before we dove into a full on league. But six weeks is starting to feel long for something that will ultimately be undone; all player progression resets at the end of the pre-season. So I dropped it to four weeks with each team playing any other team that hasn’t played four games. I’ve left the simulation rules in place so we don’t get stuck waiting for matches to get played that will never happen and I think in the end the goals of the league will be met regardless of how well the experimental stuff worked.
For example I’ve already learned that I’d rather have more zombies than skeletons and I need all the ghouls I can get into the roster. This is the kind of thing I want to know now and not halfway through a three-month league. I can’t say I’m not a little disappointed that my ideas weren’t more effective, but I’ve learned some things about the game and I’ve achieved my primary objectives. And that’s the definition of success.