I've Been Here Several Weeks Now...

...and it finally feels like home:

Sorry about the blur there; I'm on the Backup Camera at the moment. Sharp-eyed readers (Tom) might note a considerable number of lousy games there...

My neighbors, right on the other side of that wall, had taken to playing techno music extremely loud. It was like living next door to an Abercrombie & Fitch store. (If you don't know what that is, consider yourself among the blessèd.) Entreaties to turn it down--or at least reduce the bass--went unheeded.

Then, I started putting together my shelves. It's the work of a few minutes each, and the only tool you need is a mallet. I waited until they started playing music again, and then went to work, assuming that I wouldn't disturb them if they had something to drown it out. After a couple hundred mallet blows, my shelves were up and the music had stopped. I learned later that it sounded like I was pounding directly onto the wall, and had finally been driven to a nearly homicidal rage by Cascada turned up to 13.

As the music has not yet returned, I have not disabused them of this notion.

On the table is Forged in Fire, one of my purchases during my WBC expedition. The designer and publisher rated it highly; and if you can't trust the word of the game's designer and publisher, whose word can you trust? It's not a perfect game, but the Peninsula Campaign presents certain design problems which may be insoluble in a playable boardgame. It's fun, though. I'll have more on it soon. Now that I'm all moved in, the months-long insanity of thesis-graduation-moving has ended...

Alfred vs. The Vast Romanian Conspiracy

Another thing I've discovered recently has been Travian, a real-time game that has started with Settlers and gone a very, very long ways away. Such as there's a bunch more warfare. Anyway, you start with a tiny little village and build it up into--you hope--a mighty empire. There's also trade, warfare, diplomacy, raiding, culture, and pillage.

I've been doing reasonably OK. I have a respectable little hamlet, as these things go. The trouble is that you're given a random starting location, and mine is in the thick of a large web of very large, well-established, and heavily-armed alliances--all of whom are populated by Romanians. New players (Hi!) are typically seen by longtime players (i.e., the Romanians) as an overflowing supply of natural resources. Such as the time I was recently overrun by a huge army (131 units to my 7), who thereupon carted off half of my accumulated supply of grain, iron, bricks, and lumber. Now, I can rebuild that army, of course. The Romanian solution: Send 100+ units into my territory on a reasonably regular basis.

In the final analysis, I think success at Travian (and similar games) depends largely on having a very high caffeine-to-life ratio. I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep up with this...although one of my fellow grad students at MSU knows Romanian...maybe I'll have her give me some messages to try to convince them that I, too, am Romanian and wish to join the Borg. That, or at least have her give me some Romanian swear words so I can hurl imprecations at them as I go down in flames.

A Foray into RPGs?

I recently stumbled across a combination miniatures ruleset-roleplaying game called "Science vs Pluck." Each of the players represents an officer in the British colonial army in the Soudan in the late 19th century, with the Umpire/GM playing the Mahdi, the forces of nature, other (rival?) officers, Cruel Fate, etc. As in life, the player-officers have numerous concerns. They have to plan the campaigns--including the logistical difficulties, manage their men on the march, lead them in battle, perform heroically, write up after-action reports deflecting blame elsewhere--and carefully grooming their reputation, both in the army and back in England. To that end, there are rules for promotion--and a possibility for a player to represent a war correspondent rather than an officer.

It's currently in its third edition, and is available here; a previous edition of the game is now "freeware" and can be had here. As of now, I only have the freeware version.

Now, the goal is to rope some folks into playing the thing...

What am I On About?

Whoof. It's been a long month-plus. I'm taking a little break from box-packing--I have to be mover-ready by the morning of the 26th, and I have a couple of hobbies that take up a little bit of space.

My first few weeks of State College--I went up to take possession of my apartment, get my academics straightened away, etc--went peacefully. I met some of my future classmates, who seem like good folks.

A couple of us went out to the batting cages, which I hadn't done in too long. We figured that, when you think about it, there really isn't that much difference between us, and a major-league ballplayer. I mean, our genes have to be 99.99-plus-percent the same, right? Thus armed with confidence, and quarters, we got a bat and headed for the cages. The 40 mph cage was broken. The 50 mph cage was inhabited by a little kid, maybe six or seven, who was making contact with some authority. Refusing to be upstaged, we chose the 60 mph cage. We didn't do so hot. Eventually the kid came out of his cage and started giving us some tips, which we maybe didn't take with all the grace it deserved. We've decided that there were several problems. First, the pitching machine was just wonky. The pitches were like sliders. Second, the balls had to have been a little lopsided. Who knows how the kid managed to connect five times as often as we could.

The biggest problem, though, was certainly our bat. We're on the prowl for better bats, ones that will allow our formidable natural skills to shine forth. As befitting my status as a mid-19th century US historian, I'm going with this bad boy.

One disappointment with State College is the game and book store situation. There's one (1) used-book store, and two game stores...across an alley from each other. And they're both kind of thin; games are a sideline for both. The game club seems to have gone home for the summer, and neither store seemed to have any idea if there was another group. Furthermore, both stores close at about 8 PM, which is distressingly early. (Gamers, in my experience, are rarely morning people. Unless you count 3 AM.)

In between my other tasks, I've decided to add to my language collection by picking up some Biblical Hebrew. It's an interesting challenge, since all my other languages are Indo-European, and have a decent number of cognates between each other. The impact of Old Norse on Biblical Hebrew is very slight.

One thing that's helped is iTunes U. Ever been there? There's a lot of admissions-office BS, but mixed among it is some free-for-download courses in various topics. Concordia Seminary, in my fair hometown of St. Louis, has its Elementary Hebrew and Elementary Greek courses up. They're not perfect, but more than worth the price (again, free).

Right now I'm trying to get a feel for the syntax and morphology, so I can be comfortable with the sentences. Vocab is less of a worry; there are dictionaries for that. Learning a language (for reading purposes), it's far more important to know which words in a sentence are nouns and verbs and adjectives, and what their roles are, than what the precise translation is--at least when starting out. (For conversational purposes, that's probably reversed.)

I'm also brushing up my Old French; one of the books assigned to me this coming semester is La Chanson de Roland, and the copy I have sitting around is in OF. Luckily, if you have Modern French and Latin, OF isn't so hard, especially if you learn the rules for pronouncing words.

As for games...

Coolest. Amusement Park. Ever.

The wonderfully-named Action Park.

Controlling Command

As of late, I've become more and more interested in how wargames depict command control--how the player, nominally representing some kind of supreme commander, gets his subordinates to do things.

In many games, the commander is an omnipresent, omniscient puppet master. He has complete knowledge of the battlefield, and is in continuous, instantaneous contact with his subordinates, who live only to carry out their commander's will. Maybe combat rolls don't work out, but hey. They moved when you told them to move, and fired when you told them to fire. And you always knew where they were, in relation to all other units, friendly and enemy, on earth.

Increasingly many games change this up in one form or another. A great many games have at least limited fog-of-war; the other guy's units are facing away from you in block games, for example. Many games have variable reinforcements now, so that's out of the player's control and knowledge. With the "card revolution," games restrict the kinds of orders you can give your units, a way to represent friction outside a player's control. Some clever games make you write orders and send them by courier to units, which carry them out n turns after you write them, depending on how far away you are. Assuming the orders don't get lost.

A toughie, though, has been the independent-minded subordinate. Many games restrict when you can give an order, or what kind of orders you can give, but at the end of the day your loyal (if laggardly) brigadier will salute and march his men over that hill. Back in Real Life, this was often not the case.

Monday afternoon, I was hanging out at Metagames (No! Yes! It's true!) and I got to watch the Battle of Bussaco reenacted using the free miniatures ruleset Fast Play Grande Armée. This handled giving orders in a very clever way, I thought.

At the beginning of every turn, the overall commander rolls a number of d6 based on his quality rating. Let's say he's an average general, and rolls 2d6, getting a score of 8. He then gets eight "order dice," which can be used for many things during the turn, such as giving (or, rather, amplifying) orders. Every "pulse" of a turn (there is a variable number of pulses; if you're familiar with the Area-Impulse games like Breakout: Normandy, it's a similar concept), every subordinate commander rolls two dice, plus any dice that the overall commander chooses to add from his stash at the beginning of the turn. The overall commander chooses any two of the rolled dice, adds them together, and compares them to a chart; let's assume that the subordinate unit is near the enemy:

≤ 3: Withdraw
4-6: Hold
7-9: Active
10+: Attack!

"Active" means that the subordinate actually comes under the control of the player. "Withdraw" means that he quails from the enemy; "Hold" means they do nothing, and "Attack!" means that--by golly--they move towards the nearest enemy, regardless of whether that's a good idea. Furthermore, one's subordinates have personalities. Marshall Ney, for example, gets +2, while Bernadotte gets -2.

It's a simple and clever way to get players to say, along with their historical counterparts, "Oh God, why is he doing that?"

It's possible to avoid this kind of disconnect if one's scale is appropriate--on which more in a little bit...In the meantime, I have to give some careful consideration to investing in some Napoleonics.

Books, Books, Books

I have a few "real tasks" to get done this summer. I have to move--as mentioned earlier--and I have some academic stuff as well. I have to turn my thesis into an article or two, I have to get advised for the Fall semester, do a little meet-and-greet at Penn State, that sort of thing. Still, this is a period when I can do a fair bit of "pleasure reading." I can read any old thing I want! Naturally, I chose history books. I'm one of those guys who takes "work" with him on vacation, I guess you could say.

I decided to take Gibbon off the shelf. I picked up an unabridged set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire some time ago, but never got around to starting it. It had mocked me for too long.

There are better books, with newer research and techniques, on late antiquity. When an historian (or, for some of my expat readership, "a historian") reads Gibbon, he or she reads him not to learn about Rome, but Gibbon. Sometimes annoying people call this "interrogating the text." As I read Gibbon, I ask myself: What does Gibbon think about gender roles? (When he describes a nation as "masculine" or "effeminate," what does he mean?) What does he think constitutes nationhood? What are his categories? What does he think a "republic" is? (He considers the Emperor to be the head of the Roman Republic; does this add to our understanding of late 18th Century concepts of "republicanism"?) What is "virtue" in a ruler, according to Gibbon? What is he trying to tell his own generation about power, virtue, judicious behavior?

Many people know that Gibbon rips into Christianity in Decline and Fall; Christianity (upsetting the (supposed) universal, unifying nature of polytheism, etc) and the Germans are his prime suspects for the decline of the Empire. The thing is, great chunks of his own evidence don't support that. Most of the book describes a whole raft of institutional weaknesses within the Empire itself, that no emperor was really able to solve and few seemed to even recognize. A question, then: Why did Gibbon not emphasize those? It's more than just the Enlightenment talking--Gibbon's attitude towards religion qua religion is interesting in and of itself; he's not opposed to it per se.

Getting deeper and deeper into the glorious historiographical and literary thicket that is Gibbon, I started looking for some background reading on Gibbon's style and rhetoric. I settled on Peter Gay's Style in History. This book studies four of the titans of 18th and 19th century history: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt. Gay doesn't just discuss their literary style--although it's certainly present--but also their working style. What kinds of sources did they prefer? Furthermore, what does all this tell us about culture, about ideas? It's a fascinating, short book--only occasionally marred by excursions into psychoanalysis...

I've found that historiography is a subject that many students hate taking and many professors hate teaching. I eat it breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What is this thing that we do, and how do we do it? I love it.

Poking around for Gibbon stuff, I found a recommendation for another book--Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. It seemed to have a fairly small [English-speaking] following, but the following it had was quite devoted. I'd never heard of this book, but any history book described in the glowing terms Rebellion has garnered deserved my attention, I figured.

Holy moly. This is one of the best books of anything I've ever read, never mind one of the best military histories. Boiled down, it's about a brutal campaign by the early Brazilian Republic against an isolated religious community in 1896-7. It's about way the heck more than that, though. It begins with a long discourse on the geography of the region, the Brazilian desert backlands. One gets the feeling that da Cunha was a civil engineer or a geologist; a bit of biographical checking proves one correct. It's tempting to skip over it, but one should persevere. For one thing, there are some fascinating glimpses into 1890s ideas about climate and whatnot. For another thing, his point is that geography is extremely important to history--and much of his history won't make any sense unless you have a good idea about the ground. One also, reading this section, gets the feeling that the desert also symbolizes other things, in Brazil and the world--and one would be correct.

Da Cunha then sets the human drama. He begins very broadly, and narrows down to this community in the desert. Da Cunha is a liberal of his time, which did not make him immune to believing the dominant racial theories of his day, sadly. At any rate, the structure of this section is excellent; it's a masterpiece of making a relatively small event very relevant and significant.

The story of the rebellion, and the succession of brutal military campaigns to put it down, is harrowing. The rebels started with a city of 5200 or so buildings and 30,000 or so people...and, by the end, were left with no houses and maybe 300 captives alive. They fought virtually to the last bullet. The brutality is almost, but not quite, numbing. Here's an extended excerpt. This is the very end of the third expedition; the rebels have, after being pushed right to the brink, fought back like demons and have killed most of the Army and sent the rest running into the hills.

This was the end. Captain Salomão now had about him barely half-a-dozen loyal men; the enemy closed in upon him and he fell, cut to pieces with the blows of a scythe, beside the cannon which he had never abandoned. The catastrophe was now complete.

Not long after this, as he was galloping along the ravine to "Angico," Colonel Tamarindo was knocked from his horse by a bullet. He was still alive when the army engineer, Alfredo do Nascimento, reached his side. Lying beside the road, the old commander whispered his last order in his comrade's ear: "Get Cunha Mattos."

That order was a difficult one to carry out.

The jagunços [rebels] took the four Krupps back to the settlement, their front-line fighters now equipped with formidable Mannlichers and Comblains in place of the ancient, slow-loading muskets. As for the uniforms, belts, military bonnets, anything that had touched the bodies of the cursed soldiery, they would have defiled the epidermis of these consecrated warriors, and so the latter disposed of them in a manner that was both cruel and gruesome.

...

Having concluded their search of the roads and trails, and having gathered up and brought in all the weapons and munitions of war that they found, the jagunços then collected all the corpses that were lying here and there, decapitated them, and burned the bodies; after which they lined the heads up along both sides of the highway, at regular intervals, with the faces turned toward the road. Above these, from the tallest shrubbery, they suspended the remains of the uniforms and equipment, the trousers and multicolored dolmans, the saddles, belts, red-striped kepis, the capes, blankets, canteens, and knapsacks.

The barren, withered caatinga now blossomed forth with an extravagant-colored flora: the bright red of officers' stripes, the pale blue of dolmans, set off by the brilliant gleam of shoulder straps and swaying stirrups.

There is one painful detail which must be added to complete this cruel picture: at one side of the road, impaled on a dried ancigo bough, loomed the body of Colonel Tamarindo.

Fans of Mario Vargas Llosa may have read his novelization of the event, The War of the End of the World. I haven't read that yet, but it is certainly my intent to do so...

Three books, three hearty recommendations. Not a bad record...

Hully Gee, It's June

Yikes--it's been...it's been a lot longer since I posted than I thought. Many thanks to Yehuda for reminding me...

So, what have I been up to?

I've graduated, for one thing. In about two weeks, I take possession (if that's the word) of my State College apartment in Pennsylvania. It's advertised as being a very safe neighborhood; I imagine that that's due to the local security system, as discussed in a recent newspaper article:

Patton Township police report that a black bear has been seen over the last several days near the Woodledge Circle area of Toftrees.

They are urging individuals not to engage the bear or feed it.

So that'll be fun. I'm in what looks on the maps like a valley, with hills and woods (aka "bear country") right outside my back door. Will report back later.

Besides that, I've spent a lot of time trying to think of something other than moving. I mean, boxing up my books and games...man, I don't want to think about it. Didn't I just do that?

So, instead of putting the books and games in boxes, I've been reading the books and playing the games. I'll have more on the books, at least, in just a little bit...

Gathering of One, Day Three

Thesis writing's a game, isn't it? Sure it is. It has:

1. A Victory Condition. Get the thing finished, and you get to graduate. Looked at another way: Don't finish it, and you can't graduate.
2. Rules. And a great many rules there are. There are actually several rulebooks, used by various competing organizations. I'm playing by the "Turabian" rulebook, with additions from the "Graduate College Style Guide" rulebook, plus of course a wide variety of house rules developed by my committee, some adopted seemingly on the fly. Not that that's actually true! I'm sure everything's all very rational. (You can't be too careful.)
3. Various Phases. I'm currently in the endgame phase of a much larger game, which began with setting up (determining a topic), the early phases (secondary research), the middle game (archival research), the, um, late-middle game (writing the stupid thing), and now editing. Soon comes the final scoring (see no. 1, above).
4. Pieces. Not necessarily required for a game, but there are pieces nonetheless. It'd probably be classified as a pencil-and-paper game, although it's typically done on the computer nowadays, for the most part.
5. Turns. I make a move, and submit it to the referees (the committee). They then resolve my moves and return the result to me. I then make a move based on that. Repeat ad nauseam.

I'd put the playing time for this game at approximately two years. There's an advanced version of the game, as well, which I'll be getting into in a few months. That one can last much longer. In fact, some people never finish! They just leave it set up for years and years, almost but not quite forgetting about it entirely.

So, yeah, that's been my gaming activity.

Wait--not quite. There's also a "reverse prize table." I've determined that it's easier to move money halfway across the continent than it is to move games I don't play. To that end, I'm going over the shelves, looking for more dead weight. This week: My Great Battles of History collection. All kinds of games and modules and whatnot, all for sale on Boardgamegeek. They're not bad games, but I have other gaming priorities.

Gathering of One, Day 2

(For Day 1, go here.)

Day Two of the 2007 Gathering of One found me back at MetaGames. My usual favorite Friday gaming activity consists of hanging out and slinging the bull. I did that, of course, but also got in a couple of games of 24/7, the latest from Sunriver, which Metagames carries through some kind of arrangement with Funagain. (It involves some six-degrees of game retail separation; it's complicated.) I'd previously played 24/7 with three others; I was curious how it'd do as a two-player.

I played Carl, the manager, twice and won both times. It's a fun game, especially when I win, but it seems like a game where seating order is paramount; it's very, very easy to tee up a big score for the other guy.

If you're not familiar with the game, there are forty tiles, numbered 1-10 (four of each; three, chosen randomly, start the game out of play). One random tile starts in the middle. You have a hand of tiles in front of you. On your turn, you take a tile from your hand and place it on the board diagonally or orthogonally adjacent to any other tile. The idea is to make consecutive runs of the same tile, or tiles in sequential order, or rows that sum to 24 or 7. (Essentially.) There are lots of ways to do that, though; for most of the game it's hard to play "safety shots," to use a pool term. There are many games that I sometimes call "nim-like" where the idea is to "pass" in effective or creative ways, until the other guy is forced into zugzwang and has to give you good stuff. These games can be pretty good, but they're fragile and depend on people being knowledgeable about the board situation, and at least a way to minimize the luck of the draw. (Which is why the One True Way to play Knizia's Samurai is by drawing your tiles face-up.)

In 24/7, you're looking for tactical opportunities, rather than long-term planning, since it's so easy to screw up other players' plans. And you can be shafted by the tiles, as well. It seems like there should be some kind of way to eliminate much of the luck of the draw. Say by giving everyone an identical "starting hand," from which they choose their first six, and choose a replacement every turn? I'll have to try that.

What I like about the game: It's fast, it's easy, and encourages good table talk. It leads to good times at the table, even if the game mechanics aren't quite All That. It's not one I'd pull off the table all the time, but as a light game, it's pretty good.