Gaming Weekend: Perfection Edition
Gamers will probably agree that there is no single perfect game. A few dedicated folks might pick chess or go or perhaps poker as the only game they care about, but gamers are sort of defined by their interest in the scope of games as a whole. Without that purview into games, the hobby loses some of its intrigue. What emerges, instead, is a contextually perfect game. This is the art of playing the right game at the right time, and it’s also about finding the ideal game for the individual gamer within a range of games that share mechanics or styles or themes.
I had a chance to play Ticket to Ride multiplayer on XBLA over the weekend with Doctor Mac. It was Saturday afternoon, my wife was sleeping off a headache and I was looking for something to pass the time. I had been playing a variety of demos and picking my way through GTA IV a little but I wasn’t really into it the way I had hoped I’d be. When Doctor Mac hopped online and asked if I was interested in playing something, I suggested TTR and before I knew it we had worked through seven games in a row. I’ve played the TTR board game many times, and I’ve owned most of the tabletop products at one time or another. I’ve also played a lot of the web-based PC version on Days of Wonder’s website, so this should have been just another TTR session. But for a lazy Saturday afternoon, with voice chat on my couch and a new player experiencing the game for the first time on the other end of the line, it was exactly what I was looking for in a game at that moment.
Perfection, I realized, also comes when elements of a game meet a particular gamer’s needs. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past few weeks talking about Blood Bowl and after last week’s matches I started thinking about why I’ve been so much more consistently intrigued by Blood Bowl than other Games Workshop titles. It’s not that I’m better at it than other games, I’m a consistently terrible BB player. And it isn’t that the game itself does any one thing so much better than other titles. What it comes down to is that it has the perfect confluence of complexity, strategy, mechanics and hobby elements to scratch my particular itch.
Take the other GW game that I’ve spent a lot of time with, Warhammer 40K. Thematically, I actually prefer 40K: As much as I enjoy a good fantasy setting, I gravitate toward Sci-Fi when given the choice. It’s why I’ve never been much interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Lord of the Rings. But 40K, once you move past the wonderfully rich setting, is in fact just a game. And as a game I find it to be somewhat clunky. Matches take too long and the rules are by turns too abstract and yet can be too methodical. From a hobby perspective the armies are too large and tedious to put together and paint. The barrier to entry is too high. It’s not a bad game, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent with both elements of the game (hobby and play). Yet when you compare 40K to Blood Bowl…
Blood Bowl, to me, is a more enjoyable game. It’s constraints in terms of playing field and available tactics add a level of elegance I don’t think a larger, more loosely constructed game like 40K can ever achieve. Most of the complaints I have with 40K can be addressed with skirmish-level games like Necromunda (which I also prefer to 40K) but at root Blood Bowl is a board game which I think reigns in some of the more tedious facets of tabletop miniatures gaming. There are no concessions for awkward line-of-sight rules or clumsy measurements to be made for movement. You have spaces on a board, and strictly defined character options that (mostly) avoid beardy customization. Yet there is a tremendous level of flexibility in Blood Bowl as you create your teams from a vast list and engage in the hobby aspect at exactly the level that fits my comfort zone. I find it overwhelming and dull to slop paint on dozens of 40K troops and then vehicles, special units and commanders. Yet I have just enough patience to crank my way through 15 or 16 Blood Bowl models.
The final element to gaming perfection is the mood-based context. There have been times when I’ll play a game I don’t really think is that great because it’s the right kind of game for my mood. A good example is Blacksite Area 51. I played the game several weeks ago (before trading it away) because I was in the mood for a military shooter. I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeanne D’Arc because while I actually like it, I don’t think it’s the best tactical turn-based RPG I’ve played, it’s what I have on hand and it fills that niche for me. The curse of the gamer of course is that occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to play something that either you don’t have or that you can’t reasonably play right then. This weekend I found myself really wanting to play an old-school style dungeon crawler. A few friends have been playing Etrian Odyssey II on DS, but I had to wait until I could find a trader on Goozex since I don’t have the cash on hand to go pick it up. Fortunately, gaming desires lead to determination; I manipulated my way to the top of the trade list for EO II and got matched by the end of the weekend. Next week I should have the game and a full report.
The List
- Blood Bowl – This week’s match was facing my Orc team (the Pestilence Bay Pickaxes, a 49ers-themed Orc team built from a foundation of included plastic minis from the boxed set into a fairly robust line-up) against a team coached by a fairly new player to the game; this was his second match. He’s playing with a borrowed set of Dark Elves called the Tampa Terminators and I knew the match was going to be tough when he got a fortuitous roll on the kickoff table that allowed him a first-turn score, despite the fact that I was receiving.
Strategically I didn’t make a ton of mistakes (a rarity in itself), although as usual I missed a lot of critical rolls. Generally speaking if there ever comes a point in a match where I have to make a roll in order for my game plan to continue, I will fail that roll nine out of ten times. The Pickaxes also suffer because the roster I set up for the tournament includes a lot of players but only a single re-roll. In the future I’ll need to adjust the lineup to sacrifice some reserves in favor of more second chances.
The one big mistake I made was a planning error that put my ball carrier within striking distance of the goal line but without a sufficient protective pocket (usually called the Cage in Blood Bowl). Since I usually fail any rolls I absolutely have to make, it follows that my opponents almost always hit their key rolls and of course my ball carrier went down and prevented me from tying the game 2-2. Ultimately it ended up being 3-1, with the final score coming on the last play of the game so I held him to a one point lead most of the game. Quite a feat considering there were no casualties (on my end, I did manage to double-skull a hit with a Black Orc Blocker that sent him to the Dead & Injured box). Still, it’s mere consolation to say that I achieved anything at all in a two point defeat. - Grand Theft Auto IV – I find myself playing this game in a manner that I didn’t expect. I’ve been wholly absorbed by previous GTA games, but this one seems to hold me at arms length. There have been lots of discussions about the storytelling in this game, and I think that the further I go into it the more forgiving I am of its tale and the presentation, but whether it’s because I don’t get to control the story the way I’d like or because the linear story being told doesn’t engage me, I find it easy to resist. I do get enough enjoyment from it to pop it in now and again, but if this is the extent of what I wanted for so impatiently, color me disappointed.
- Ticket to Ride – Other than the fact that the game was exactly what I wanted to play at a particular point in the weekend, I don’t have much to complain about. It looks as though they have at least left themselves hooks to add additional maps (Europe, Marklin/Germany, Sweden) and the achievements list is pretty solid. The best part of the game is the wonderful point tally at the end, where a train chugs forward counting up your score alongside your opponents. It then jumps and drops back based on your destination tickets performance.
My only complaints are that the tutorial seemed to be a bit rushed. I went through it to see how good of a job it did, and while I confess that I’m very familiar with the rules so it’s hard to accurately judge, I felt it skipped over some facets that are kind of important strategically like the fact that your uncompleted routes actively count against you and the face-up cards being wiped when three Locos are turned over. Those are often the stickiest points when I’ve taught the game to others and their bare mention in the tutorial felt like an oversight. Also I hate the default zoom angle on the map. There are three zoom stages and the furthest back one is too far away to make out the colors (red, orange and pink all look remarkably similar from that distance) and the close one is too awkward to get a sense of your planning (a problem shared by my other favorite Euro-board/XBLA crossover, Carcassonne). The middle one is tolerable, but still, I liked the map on the Days of Wonder online version. What was wrong with that? - Professor Layton and the Curious Village – I’m utterly entranced by this game, in spite of myself and in spite of the game as well. Typically I dislike feeling dumb, and this game is adept at lowering one’s self-esteem, but there is something utterly compelling about the constant barrage of puzzles that aren’t difficult per se (it took me quite some time to realize that they are probably not ever going to expect me to understand advanced algebra) but perfectly challenging. Even the goofy storyline and the odd persistent puzzles like the painting scraps, contraption assembly and room decorations are intriguing enough to keep me playing. I do find that I have to frequently set the game aside and stew on a puzzle for a bit before I can finish it, but the DS is the ideal platform for this title and I love the way the entire experience comes together so well.
What trips me up a bit is that I’m not sure who I would recommend this game to. It’s probably a bit too frustrating for younger gamers; people with short attention spans or linear thinkers are likely to find it too plodding and unforgiving and hard core gamers will almost certainly find the whimsical setting and European sensibility to be off-putting. Even people who would enjoy the types of puzzles presented in the game are perhaps going to come away from it thinking it has some cool elements but it also has a lot of game-y features like area exploration and dialogue-based NPC interaction. So the people this game appeals to is a super narrow niche of mid-level gamers who are old enough to appreciate a childish aesthetic and patient enough to tolerate some light role-playing mechanics. I wish I could say more people fall into that category, but I’m looking around and I see maybe eight other people raising their hands.
Demo Watch
I spent a bit of time playing some queued up XBLA demos. Most were barely worth mentioning, like Aces of the Galaxy, but I did enjoy Warlords, particularly the enhanced version (possibly the first enhanced Atari classic I’ve really thought added something to the original game). I also thought that Commando 3 was kind of fun, although I’ve basically had my lifetime’s fill of twin-stick shooters so there was no danger of a purchase there.
Hobby Update
I’m trying a new occasional segment this week where I talk briefly about any progress I made in the painting/modeling arena. I spent a few hours early in the weekend putting some finishing touches on the some remaining Undead Blood Bowl figures. I had four position players left and one Harpy cheerleader who was basically just primed with no paint. By the end of the weekend I had nearly every drop of paint I planned to put on the position players finished and had their bases about halfway finished. I probably only have another 30-45 minutes left before those are completely done, and that includes drying time. I don’t anticipate any problem having the entire lot ready to go when the official league starts up in a week.
Meanwhile, I too a slightly different approach to the second cheerleader than I had with the first, going with a Goblin Green base coat and drybrushing Rotted Flesh over the top. It was looking fantastic (I thought) so I added a few light Scorpion Green highlights and just as I was finishing up I pulled out the Dark Angels Green to start on her loincloth. There was a ring of dried, goopy paint on the pot so I pulled it out with a toothpick and set it on the plate I was using as a palette. Immediately I dropped the figure onto the ring and got dark green paint all over the back of the Harpy’s wing. Now it’s probably not so bad that I can’t start over on just that part, but a setback like that is kind of crushing when you were feeling good about the progress to that point.
In between various coats and highlights I continued work on my sample Van Saar Necromunda figure. I started with a basecoat of Steel Grey, which has a heavy blue tint to it, and then used a blue wash to fill in the recesses. On top of that I drybrushed Ghost White, a bluish white color that I thought would look great. Unfortunately, it didn’t come out as cool as I hoped and now I’m not sure what would be an improvement. Between the Van Saar and the Harpy, I decided to call it quits for the weekend, but now I realize that means that first thing out of the gate next week I’ll have a lot of clean-up and re-dos to take care of.
Parting Shot
Since my pre-season Blood Bowl league winds down this week, I’ve found myself looking ahead to the regular season. And that means re-evaluating my rosters based on my performance during this tournament and deciding which team or teams I’ll be entering. I’ve already decided to avoid over-extending myself so I’m only putting one team into the league to start with. And I’m basically convinced that the Undead are the way to go. For one thing, they’re my newest team so they’re the ones I’m most excited about. But above that, they also look better from a construction and painting standpoint and I have a more flexible selection of models to build my roster.
However, the roster I put together for the pre-season needs some work. I initially included three skeletons, three zombies, three ghouls, two wights and two mummies. Everything about that is just fine except I realize after a few games that maxing the wights and mummies is the way to go, but ghouls somehow become the pivotal point in the team since they have Dodge and the highest movement allowance of any position player. Now I only own three ghoul models, but it might almost be worth it for me to consider trying to find a fourth and max out that category as well. As the key to scoring with the team, they also happen to be the only players on the team without Regeneration meaning they might as well have huge targets painted on their backs.
So the key is deciding who I want protecting them: Skeletons, or zombies. It’s almost a direct trade-off: Armor for Movement. Skeletons move a little faster with MV 5, but only have AV 7 while zombies have one less move and one more armor. But then again, the zombies also cost 10,000 gold more per player. My pre-season roster included three skeletons and three zombies. My two main options are to replace all zombies with skeletons (saving 30,000 gp) and waiting to buy Fan Factor, Assistant Coaches and Cheerleaders until later in the league, in favor of buying a third re-roll. It’s not a bad scheme except it’s assuming I won’t be spending my winnings replacing dead players (which is more likely with the lower armor values on the basic linemen). Never mind that I don’t have six skeleton models at the moment.
My other option, the one I’ll probably try, is merely replacing one zombie with a skeleton so I have four and two. My thought process is that the zombies may be staying alive more frequently but they aren’t helping me score since the ghoul has to actively slow its advance to let them keep pace. Meanwhile I’ll be relying on Regeneration to keep my players coming back match after match regardless, and I can get off to a head start with some nice-to-have stuff. I realize that buying extra re-rolls once the league begins is the more difficult task (each one costs twice the usual amount after the start of the league) but I think I might be better served by simply cutting one of the two reserve zombies if it came to that. I still have some time to stew on it, but decision time is fast approaching and I’m feeling the panic of inexperience closing in.