The Great Game Reorganisation Continues

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm doing a sort-of-major shake-up of the game collection. The point is that I have many more games than I play, and I only want to have a few more games than I play. It occurred to me that if I did get rid of some of the games that I did play and didn't like very much that would be a good thing, but my optimism maintains its stratospheric heights, and a lot of games are staying in case they get better with experience and I get an opponent who likes them, and all that sort of stuff.

The first obvious result has been the reorganisation of the games shelves. I now have one set of shelves for kids and party games, one set of shelves for word and abstract games, and one set of shelves for proper good games. Of course I love the word and abstract games as well, but it's harder to find opponents for them. I'll take photos one day, but if I do it this evening the light won't be good and the photos will be grainy.

I also revised my ratings on BGG. Mostly it was minor, but I did promote a whole lot of 9s to 10s.

Attika - my purchases of Attika, Taluva and Funny Friends last year really made me take notice of Marcel-Andre Casasola-Merkla as a designer. Attika is a very nice combination of (sort of) economic engine and connection game. It plays very nicely with 2 to 4 players.

Domaine - I previously had this at a 10, but I tired of it a little but now I'm hungry to play again. It's bordering on too aggressive for me, but I know that being attacked is a sign of weakness and the game is all about managing your weakness to hold together your domaines long enough to win the game. I much prefer the simple card purchase system over the Lowenherz auction, and I like the geometrical challenge of getting the limited number of fences into the right places.

Hare and Tortoise - It's a serious math nerd game and I'm a serious math nerd. Sometimes it's just frustrating as described in my session report, but I realise now that I should have been using a different strategy and it was my own fault for losing.

Rheinlander - This is now my only 10 I don't own, and I've never even won it - CyberKev has beaten me every time. I really can't grok the scoring system. But I love the way the duchies can expand and threaten each other and sometimes the card you desperately need really does show up. And it's all over in 45 minutes! My plan is for this to be my first purchase of the new year.

St Petersburg - Yes, it's a very strange game, but once you get past the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot stage it's brilliantly tactical. I love the art work, I love the theme, and I love economic engines. That Michael Tummelhofer sure is a smart guy.

Tigris and Euphrates - another sort-of aggressive game, but you just have to realise that the empires are not mine and yours, they are mine and ours. It's a sharing game! I love the connection / disconnection aspects, and the possibility of really great moves.

Tikal - A very thinky game, with connection aspects and the potential for great moves again. Hey, I'm seeing a theme here! It involves a lot of counting, but that's something that sort of comes naturally to me, and my plotting and planning keeps me engaged for the entire game.

Torres - Another game with connection aspects and the potential for great moves. I love the way someone tries to escape onto a really tall tower all by themselves, and maybe with the right action card and a cunning plan you can catch them and take their stuff. The components are stunning, and sometimes I just scatter them on my bed and roll around naked. Oh hang on, no, that's a different game.

I Just Want a Quiet Place to Sit and Eat My Lettuce

On Friday night at Critical Mass we played a game of Hare and Tortoise. I like this game a lot but it's hard to find an audience for it - some people, the kid included, find it too mathematical and won't play a second time. Luckily I managed to find 4 people who hadn't played before and the kid temporarily forgot how much he disliked it, and we were able to play with 6 players.

My first mistake was to randomly choose the player to my left to start the game. If I was first player I'd go straight away to the lettuce on space 54, but as last player that wasn't an option - the track in front of me was very crowded. There's also no way to get back to that lettuce - the first tortoise is in the space after it.

Of course by the time I got to the second lettuce it was crowded as well, and waiting to get onto it didn't work either as someone else was doing that. So I rushed off to the third lettuce, and someone beat me to that as well. So I tortoise-hopped back to the second lettuce... By that time everyone else was in the vicinity of the third lettuce, so I was able to peacefully eat two lettuces while the leaders approached the finish line. With all of the going backwards (not to mention eating lettuces in 6th place) I had a stack of carrots, so I rushed to the third lettuce to eat my third. However by then the game was lost - Aaron staggered over the line followed by Keith.

I was hopeful of third place, but I didn't have quite enough carrots to jump all the way to the end, and had to make an intermediate stop. The Evil Count von Walduck and Nigel finally decarroted themselves enough to finish. I charged over in 5th place.

It was a very frustrating game! I knew exactly what I wanted to do but couldn't get onto the right spaces. Waiting only made things worse. What could I have done better? Hmm... maybe I should have jugged the hare. I ignore the hare spaces because of the randomness, but for someone like me hanging around the back of the pack they're probably a useful way to get rid of lettuces. I didn't think of that until near the end of the game when someone mentioned that's what they'd done. Urgh... randomness.

Anyway, that was the 4th time I'd played this game and the first time I'd lost, and I guess I learned something.

Books

My beautiful Scrabblette is a book person who visits libraries more often than I cook dinner for her. In fact, a quiet weekend getaway for us will often involve driving to some nearby town and looking in all of the secondhand and new book stores. We have a lot of books in our house, even though most of hers are still overseas.

I like books about games. I particularly like how-to-play books, strategy guides and books that give me an insight into the mathematical underpinnings of games. Here are some that I've encountered recently:

Connection Games: Variations on a Theme by Cameron Browne - Scrabblette found this at a library and I liked it so much my copy is on its way from Amazon. It describes hundreds of games and the maths behind them.

Oxford History of Board Games by David Parlett - David Parlett is the designer of Hare and Tortoise, the first winner of the Spiel des Jahre, so the man has some credibility. Amazon can't sell me this book and Scrabblette's research indicates there is no copy in any library in Australia (the nearest is Singapore) and the cheapest copy she can find for sale is $300. I don't think I'll be getting it soon.

A Gamut of Games by Sid Sackson - I found a copy of this in a secondhand book store in Bundaberg when we visited baby sister. I found it not as exciting as the connection games book, but it's interesting.

The Complete Mancala Games Book: How to Play the World's Oldest Board Games by Larry Russ - Mancala is one of those games that I've been trying to ignore, but since niece flogged me (using the wrong rules!) I've had to pay some attention. After I read this book I will make niece cry.

100 Strategic Games for Pen and Paper by Walter Joris - I've also been trying to ignore pen and paper games, but Kropki is such a cool game I have to pay attention. We'll see what else is out there when Scrabblette brings it back.

Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations by R. C. Bell - Scrabblette borrowed this and its sequel from the library, and they're interesting reading about the history of board games, but most of the games are SO DULL. The Game of Goose. PLUGH. I don't know how many parcheesi variants the world needs, but it's fewer than already exist.

I also ordered a book about the game called Boxes, or Dots and Dashes. Why would such a dull game need a book, you ask? I asked that too. I'll report back.

Do You Like Games You Don't Understand?

I played Caylus for the first time today, and I was kind of meh. It's an interesting game, but there are too many things to think about and I'm not sure I'd ever do a good job with it. I like the building track, and if Caylus was simply an economic game trying to build the right sets of buildings so that my economy functions more efficiently than yours, I think I'd like that. I find that adding the castle and the royal favours makes Caylus so complicated I'll probably never do a good job with it. I can't grok the long-term consequences of my actions.

I think Princes of Florence is somewhat similar - there are just too many things going on. I'm all at sea when I play that, and consequently I don't enoy it so much. I suspect Goa and Louis XIV are a bit like that as well. Maybe just a bit too complicated. I like games that I can get my head around, even if it's only just, such as Tikal, Tigris and Euphrates, and Elfenland. They're the limit of complexity that I'm comfortable with and consequently a challenge to play. Easier games like San Juan, GIPF and Hare and Tortoise that I understand really well become old favourites that I can play to relax.

What I want to know is, do people often like games which confuse them? Are all the people who rate Caylus highly super-mega-smart? I have a Ph.D. and a genius IQ, but it confuses me. Are Caylus fans the absolute intellectual elite of the planet? If not, what's so good about a game that's confusingly hard? Do people like playing a game where they feel lost? Is there some different sort of intelligence that they have and I don't? I need feedback here, because it just doesn't make sense to me.

Games as Discrete Finite Systems

When I was at university I studied maths (that's what we call it in Australia) and computer science. I eventually realised the maths I loved was combinatorics. I don't know enough about it to tell you exactly what combinatorics is, but some things you might have heard that could be included are:

• Conway's game of Life
• Eight queens puzzle
• Game theory
• Magic squares
• Graphs, directed acycylic graphs, trees
• Rubik's cube
• Polyominoes
• Towers of Hanoi

Although I don't necessarily know very much about those particular topics, that's the vibe of the thing. If you understand that sort of maths, it may seem obvious to you that I like computers and I'll always choose an integer over a float. Furthermore, Douglas Hofstadter and Alexander Dewdney are my idols.

Why is this relevant? Because I think I like games that are based on this sort of maths. Games such as Trias, Domaine, and Rheinlander have a simple finite underlying model which the players manipulate to try to score the most points. In these games there is overt conflict, but you're only susceptible to conflict because you didn't manipulate the model to defend yourself properly - you chose different moves which left you vulnerable.

The GIPF Project, and many other abstract strategy games (Gobblet, Quoridor), are very simple finite systems (except TAMSK which has that annoying continuous time thing happening), so I can get my head around them and love to play.

Word games like Scrabble and Milleranagrams and Lexicon I think scratch some entirely different itch, but deduction games like Mystery of the Abbey, Coda, Code 777, Black Vienna, are all about optimally narrowing down a finite set of possibilities. Hare and Tortoise is blatantly mathematical, which makes it difficult to find opponents!

What about games that suck? CyberKev (who this blog is NOT about) swears that Cosmic Encounters is analytical, but I find it to be mostly political so I don't really get the fun bit. Mall of Horror is the same game with better components. Even Fish Eat Fish, although it looks like an abstract, turns out to be a political game.

Other games that suck are ones that aren't finite, where there aren't even discrete spaces for you to move on, like Warhammer 40K, De Bellis Antiquitatis, Mech Warrior, and so on. Maybe they're decent excuses to play with toys, but I don't find them very interesting as games. Even games with large maps like Heroscape don't work for me, because there are too many possibilities and I don't feel like I'm manipulating a system.

And party games! Don't get me started on party games! Oh hang on... it's my blog, I can say what I like. Taboo, Pictionary, Cranium, all absolutely suck. You can't even get people to agree on the rules so the games are decided by screaming matches between the drunken participants. They turn out to be political games where the politics isn't even part of the rules. By the way, I find playing word games without a dictionary to be a political game as well - if there's any chance of arguing about whether something's a word or not the game ceases to be a game and becomes an argument. You've gotta have the dictionary to make sure there are no arguments. Scattergories! VOMIT!

So I think this is the best characterisation of my favourite sort of games that I've been able to come up with so far. Others that suit me are Puerto Rico, Vinci, Tikal, Torres... with so many good games, there's no time to play bad ones.

Hare and Tortoise

So I was wandering through the con on Sunday and saw some people I didn't recognise setting up Hare and Tortoise. Because I didn't recognise them, I assumed they weren't really serious gamers, so I was a little intrigued that they were playing such a serious game. But of course, Hare and Tortoise doesn't look like a serious game. So I asked if I could join in, and volunteered to explain the rules. That was when I remembered I'd forgotten them, but I at least knew the spirit of them and we could go through the rule book pretty quickly.

For those who don't know, Hare and Tortoise looks like a roll and move game. It even has a six sided die, to trick you. But it is actually an almost purely analytical game, and that's the sort I like. It's a race, where you pay carrots to move forward. To move forward n spaces, you pay (n * (n+1) / 2) carrots. There are turtle spaces you can move backwards n spaces to get to, and you receive 10n carrots. There are position spaces labelled n, where if you are in nth position at the start of your turn, you receive 10n carrots. There are carrot spaces, where you can receive or lose 10 carrots. There are lettuce spaces where you can eat a lettuce - you are required to eat 3 lettuces throughout the game. Finally, there are hare spaces where you roll the die and have something good or bad happen to you, with the good more likely if you are behind many other players.

The hare spaces are the only random element (apart from the other players), and I personally despise them. However if other players want to waste their time taking a chance when they can get on with winning the game, that's their problem. I also never use the carrot spaces - 10 carrots sounds like a poor deal compared to 40 or more that you can get from a turtle space.

I started the game by spending carrots boldly and zooming to the front, where I stopped to snack on a lettuce. The weakness of leading from the front is that the positional spaces don't give you many carrots, so when I was getting low on carrots I slowed down and sat on a 2 space. The player who was easily able to pass me declined to do so, preventing me from receiving 20 carrots. I tried to do that a couple more times, and every time the other players chose not to let me get anything. No worries... now I know how to keep them behind me :-). I changed to trying to get carrots from tortoises, and that worked pretty well.

However the end game is where it's all at. There's a restriction that the first player to cross the finish line must have fewer than 10 carrots, so if you don't plan to eat all of your carrots, that will cost you. But you can figure out what you need to do. If you're 12 spaces from the end and you have 80 carrots, that's one move to win (costs you 78). If you only have 50 carrots, you need to make two moves of 6 costing you 21 each time. If you've got basically the right number of carrots near the end of the game, you can come up with a plan to finish neatly. My opponents did not do that. I did. I won by several moves.

OK, I admit it. Hare and Tortoise looks like a kids' game, but it is so much easier if you did 3 years of honours-level maths at university and have learned that way of thinking. I can do it, and I like this game a lot.