Gaming Weekend: Odd Calm Edition
I guess I figured there would be more gaming last week. I had some time off work, I had ample enthusiasm and somehow I ended up doing gaming related activities more than playing games. I recall now that this happens when you’re focused on tabletop gaming. A lot of time is spent building campaigns, painting, modeling, planning, organizing, preparing, reading, testing and generally doing everything besides actually playing so that the limited time available to play the games goes as smoothly as possible.
It’s certainly not un-enjoyable. I particularly enjoy the artistic satisfaction that comes from painting and modeling miniatures. And there is a certain part of my brain that finds the continual battle for proper organization to be unexpectedly soothing when you consider how much of a slob I am under other conditions. For example I spent a good portion of yesterday morning printing out various summaries for Blood Bowl rules and creating portable dugout templates and arranging them neatly in a binder with the LRB and copies of my team rosters. Would I ever happily spend that much time organizing my financial statements? Highly unlikely.
Speaking of Blood Bowl, I did get one match in against Thom, as an inaugural match for my brief time-based league, TRMBBL. Thom is starting a year-long league in August using the standard rules and I wanted to get in a short pre-season to give people a chance to fiddle with their rosters and get their teams up and painted before the real league began. Thus was born TRMBBL and the first match was Thom’s Cleaveland Browns versus my half-painted Deadmonton Dirtnaps. Both teams are bruisers (the Browns are Orcs, the Dirtnaps are Undead) so we expected a long slugfest. And we got one. Of course I rolled garbage all day long (viva the mighty 3 on 2D6) so I barely got any advancement at all other than the random MVP at the end.
I also didn’t execute very well. The final score was 1-0 in favor of the Browns, but I imagine I could have stopped the initial drive that resulted in the score if I’d been a bit more defensive minded. Granted I’d never played with the Undead before so I was sort of learning as I went, but getting into a position where a Skeleton has to dodge and push it twice on a Blitz just to attempt a two-die defender chooses block on the ball carrier who can score at will if any of those tough rolls goes south is poor planning. Very poor.
Still, it was good times and surrendering a couple of Fan Factor for pitting an unfinished team against a completely finished one was sufficient motivation to get some more paint on my guys. I even stopped at a game store after the match and picked up some white primer so I could finish priming my Necromunda gang and get my sweet Undead cheerleaders and assistant coach worked on. So despite the apparent dearth of game playing, I did a good amount of general gaming. I only wish desire and effort had some sort of positive effect on dice rolls.
The List
- Blood Bowl – In my history as a Blood Bowl coach, my record is terrible. I don’t have hard numbers but I suspect my record is something like 2-43-5. Primarily this is because I play Thom more than anyone else. The few matches I’ve played at cons against other people I wasn’t already friends with have typically resulted in more losses or at best ties (I’ve mostly played Orcs, what do you want from me?) and the couple of wins I’ve managed have typically been great flukes or, in one case, directly attributed to the fact that I was playing the one guy who rolls even worse than I do. At first I thought it was just because Thom wins most games he plays. He’s like that, but the good news is he’s a gracious winner so it doesn’t make anyone want to not play games against him. But then I realized that I actually do win games against Thom—maybe not as often as I do against some other people, but it happens. But when it comes to Blood Bowl I realized that he’s been playing this game longer than almost any other game. This is like his game. It certainly doesn’t mean I’m better than I might seem to be; the nuances of Blood Bowl strategy are still frequently lost on me (I can barely figure out the correct number of Block Dice to use half the time) but it does give me some hope that I’m actually improving underneath all those losses and it’s just hard to tell because my frequent opponent is odds-on favorite to win the Blood Bowl itself in our league come next Spring.
- Catan – Even my video game playing has begun to orient itself into a tabletop style. I found myself lacking a willing opponent in much of my game-playing moods so I settled on some offline Catan, working toward the elusive achievement where you finish 10 games with the Largest Army card. My strategy in Settlers of Catan isn’t usually focused on Development Cards so it’s a bit of a reach for me to burn so many rock and wheat resources on cards. Plus I find it annoyingly ironic that when I do buy the cards in “serious” games of Catan I often hope for something like a Victory Point card or Road Building and end up with the stupid Soldiers. When I’m only really looking for Soldiers (and in some cases actively hoping not to get VPs since that would prematurely end the game) I get more of the other kind of card than I ever would normally.
- Carcassone – I played a round of this on the Xbox with Nik. I still like The Castle better but it’s hard to beat the no-mess, no-brainer scoring of the XBLA version. I have to admit though, I was poking through the options before the game started (to see if it supported the Live Vision camera) and I found the customized scoring options. I can’t imagine why in the world anyone would want to do some of these. Zero points for a two-tile city? Is that really enjoyable?
- Tetris DS – I picked this up from Goozex (natch) and while it’s, you know, Tetris, I find the ever-spin option that has been present since the late 90s in every Tetris variant I pick up to be a) stupidly not toggle-able and b) so contrary to the spirit of the game I wonder why people haven’t put up a bigger fuss about it. I can understand at least the concept behind the ghosting effect which shows where your piece will land and usually that feature is capable of being turned off. But it seems to me the bigger mechanic of the game isn’t correctly lining up the drops, but committing to the ones you make. That’s why in what I still consider the definitive version of the game, the Game Boy one in B/W, the hard part about Level 9 isn’t getting the block rotated the way you want, it’s getting it where it needs to be in time. Committing to the spot, as it were. If you want to make it easy, ghost the location. If you want to make it boring, let them spin it forever and make up your mind long after the piece has hit the stack.
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village – I’m officially terrible at this game. I do find it occasionally frustrating to fail a puzzle because the description is vague or intentionally misleading which is happening with more frequency as I progress, but it’s still compelling in a way I didn’t expect and the animation, voice acting and art design remains charming even hours later. I can’t yet say if this game is worthy of a purchase or not, but I can say it’s worth trying out.
Parting Shot
I went ahead and ordered the Player’s Handbook for D&D 4th Edition from Amazon. After my visit to the game store revealed that the $21 price tag on Amazon was almost $15 off cover price, I figured I would be silly to avoid it just because I had no game scheduled. The curious part is that the RPG book I really want is Call of Cthulu. After playing Arkham Horror last week and Dark Corners of the Earth I was struck while sitting in traffic by an idea for a CoC adventure. Yet I went with D&D, a game I freely admit to thinking is fairly low on my overall hierarchy of role-playing systems and settings.
Here’s why: When you’re a budget-conscious gamer, you have to occasionally be honest with yourself. Really honest, to the point of admitting sometimes unpleasant truths. In this case the truth is I have a poor track record in starting games. I’ve gotten halfway through the writing process on so many adventures I can’t even begin to catalog them all. And it has financial ramifications as well, because if I keep buying more sourcebooks I’ll never use and game books I can’t get anyone else interested in, it ultimately becomes a waste of money. It’s why I haven’t purchased more than a few miniatures at a time in over two years: I have so many unfinished models and half-completed painting projects, if I keep buying them they’ll just keep stacking up. I saw a Lizardman Blood Bowl team at the game store this week and though I really wanted a new team that was more speed and agility heavy than my other strength-based teams, I put it back because picking it up would further delay the work I have pending on my Warmaster army. And my Necromunda gang. And my Battlefleet Gothic fleet. And my Gorkkamorka models. And my Chaos Space Marines. And my historical Napoleonic army. And so on.
So in the end it came down to having a Player’s Handbook on the likely chance that someone will want me to get in on a 4th edition game sometime in the near future (and getting a good deal on it in the process) or spending more money on a pipe dream.
Occasionally, pragmatism chalks up a win.