Games Mech-Somethings

So, periodically you have word wars in gaming.

The most obvious candidates are defining things: What is a wargame, Euro, AT, abstract, area-impulse game, dice game, and on and on and on ad nauseam.  And then more nauseam.

But then you have people who periodically reflect on the argot of our hobby.  Our hobby is pretty big, by the way; in case you're wondering, nobody who studies "games" or "ludism" or academic things like that considers "boardgaming" to be entirely unto itself; it's a segment of "gaming," which involves a very great many things indeed.  Most customarily, it includes the entire GeekDo (remember GeekDo?) universe of boardgames, video games, and RPGs.  Sometimes not RPGs.  We're usually spared being lumped in with scratch-off lottery tickets and tic-tac-toe playing chickens, but not always.  (Such as in math books.)

Anyway, the point is it's a big hobby we're in, even if we only participate in some of it.  I mean personally, all I have are board games, video games, and RPGs, so...right.

 So there are two terms that seem to draw the most attention.  In both cases, there is an overwhelmingly common first alternative, and a second alternative that is considered by snobs cognoscenti to be superior.

The first troublesome term is "theme."  I can't find it now, but Nate Straight had a post a while back pointing out that "theme" is already a term in games, for something else--common motifs players encounter in a given game.  Obviously, English-language books being what they are, it's most commonly a chess term.  So we have this chess term, and this other boardgame term that is competing with it, which is at best clumsy.

Meanwhile, there's a perfectly good word one could use instead of an argot term: "setting."  In virtually all cases you can just remove "theme" and put in "setting" and it would at least be grammatical.  Some of the clichés of our little language, like "dripping with theme," would have to be shot and then replaced with new clichés, such as "strongly evokes its setting."  (I stole that from something I said on BGG, John Fogerty-style.)  But everyone would understand what was meant perfectly well.  It has the added advantage of being appropriate for Euros, AT, and wargames, whereas "theme" only really felt right for Euros, at least to me.

"Theme" is a term, that we use for "setting."  We should just use an ordinary word, like "setting."  We do not need a term.

I've been trying to say "setting" whenever possible, or some other appropriate word.  I doubt I've succeeded, considering how entrenched "theme" is, but I try.

Second term: "mechanic."

It's not a terrific term, I have to admit.  It's part of our argot, though, so we pretty much all sort of know what it means.  Some of us think "mechanic" is a pointless thing to have in the first place, but there we have it; we think "worker placement" is such a "mechanic," and thus as a "mechanic" it is labeled.

It is objected that a "mechanic" is a person, a person who works on (say) a "mechanism."  Why not a replacement term, "mechanism"?

This is a little different from theme/[anything else].  "Mechanic" can't possibly cause any confusion, although someone new to games (or new to being weird about games) might be curious about how the word is used, but I think that would be the case with "mechanism" as well.  In any event, there's no game term "mechanic" that this is competing with.  So there isn't the urgency; we just think it's an ugly word.

Viz:
Theme: Not an obvious word
Setting:  An obvious word

Mechanic: Not an obvious word
Mechanism: Not much more obvious

Instead of replacing a term with a simple word, we're trying to replace a term with a different term.

The other problem is that "mechanic" is in very general use.  It didn't used to be; back in the seventies, everyone said "mechanism."  But not now--mechanic took off since the mid-nineties.  Ngram?  Ngram.

Furthermore, the population that's saying mechanic is, beyond BGG users, that larger community of game scholars I mentioned earlier.  The people who study games and gamers in a big way seem to like mechanic.  It's what Wikipedia has.  It's what Gamification has.  It's what Game Studies uses.  It's what every book I own on the subject uses.

I think we're at the point where we just have to take our language where it is on this one; the overwhelming pattern of usage today is to say "mechanic."  I don't know why, but "Mechanism" isn't as good to this generation.  And this could change--if you ever find yourself in the position to seriously shift the language, go ahead and start saying "mechanism."

But that's hard, man.  Rob Neyer is one of the most prominent writers on baseball in America.  (awkward transition)  There is also a very important if controversial statistic (or statistical philosophy) called Wins Above Replacement.  Abbreviation: WAR.  So everybody says WAR instead of Wins Above Replacement.  But not Rob Neyer, who dislikes associating something like "war" with baseball, so he says Wins+ instead.  Nobody cares.  Not anybody.  Nobody else does it, and he has way more clout in writing-about-baseball than the "mechanism" forces have in games.

Or you could get lucky, and get a "Meeple" thing going.  But that's easier with new words.

Again: This is a problem with turning one term into another.  It's up against technical usage.  If I decide to call the meter a "snee" and say that someone is 1.6 snees tall, I'm not going to get anywhere.  I have to say meter, or else I'm not communicating.  I suppose I could try to convert my fellow human beings to all say "snee," but...how likely is that?  Mechanic/mechanism isn't that drastic, but it's the same principle.  We have a term; it is a term for an invented concept (unlike theme); the vast majority of people use that term in place of an available alternative.

Not that I really like "mechanic" very much.  But if I had to change it--hm, that's turning into a big thought.  This might be another post.

More looking ahead

Life changes tend to lead to game changes.  I had a few games growing up, and few friends and no gamer friends.  Then I went to Texas, and Boom! all of a sudden I have a much more full social life, filled with gamers (in everything I did), and so the game collection started to balloon.  Lots of gamers through my "interregnum" back in St. Louis, and finally in Springfield (more gamers!) the collection went over 1000, which was a perverse goal.  Come Penn State, and gamers mostly dried up.  The game collection kept growing, though.  That changed as part of a chain of events--losing weight being the key event.  I eventually sold about 70% of the collection.

It's been creeping up since, but nothing too crazy.  But I was thinking about it, what with the new slate of life changes, and it's time to shape the collection again.

So--thinking positively!--I'll be moving next summer to some new horizon.  It will probably be library school, hopefully either U. Texas, U. Illinois, or Simmons College in Boston.  All three are pretty decent gamer populations.  All three have nontrivial gaming communities.  Particularly Texas.  I'm not sure I can keep that from being a tiebreaker for Texas.  Anyway, historically my games have sorted into three piles:

1.  Multiplayer games, for game day/night
2.  Two-player games, for...um...appropriate scenarios
3.  Wargames, which I play solitaire

Historically, for 1 and 2 I like having a lot of variety.  I'm a mechanics guy, and I like to see them in action.  There's such a thing as much too much variety, and I've been there, but I like having a lot of games here.  I'm being a little bit of a cheater and including multi-player wargamers under 1, since that's been how I've played most of them historically.  (Which just occurred to me.  "I never play wargames against other people," except for Successors, all the Britannia games...)  I mean, I have played them solitaire, but I think I'd prefer to play Empires in Arms with a group.

3 is tricky.  I like having a lot of wargames, partly because of the reasons above and partly because I'm a greedy materialistic bastard.  The thing is, even though I have nothing to do all gaming day but play wargames around here, and lots of variety to choose from, over the past five years I've played precisely 13 different wargames.  (Dubiously counting "Various games in the Battles of the American Revolution Series" as one game.  They all seem like one mega-game to me.)  I have scores more that I haven't played, or else--and this is really crazy--I set them up and then not play them and then pack them up again.

I don't think I'd be happy to be stuck with those thirteen for the next five years.  But I certainly don't need all the ones I have.  When I think about how many I want to keep, I have this vague feeling like "two dozen" but I think it will more depend on space than a simple census count.  I have fifteen shelf-units I can dedicate to games, plus whatever's left over from the books--say, the equivalent of three more shelf-units.

It's hard to just throw a number at that.  I mean, Memoir 44 and Commands and Colors: Ancients aren't going anywhere, I play them so often, but they take up more space than any of my other games.  (Coming close: Runebound.)  Then I have a container filling with ziploc games--what do I do with those?  Honestly, selling them would net almost nothing, and they take almost no space individually...they may be the last to go just because of that.  Since the idea is saving space.

But OK, excepting the three big tubs we're back to fifteen units.  It seems like...five units is reasonable.  Four?

There's no rush.  I'm here in State College for another year, and I think I have enough cash flow coming in from...three sources? four? that I won't need to sell a bunch of old wargames to some dealer for $200 to put food on the table.  <--- always="" br="" didn="" fortunate="" it="" like="" look="" t="" that="">

But there's going to be an exodus.  I've already boxed up about 500 pounds of books to enrich the bookstore another grad school washout opened.  It won't be 500 pounds of wargames--that's hard, what with paper maps--but it'll be a fair bit.

Crazy Times

So, things have started to calm down.  About the middle of August, I will officially withdraw from the program.  A lot of people--professors, parents, psychologists, pfriends--have asked if I'm disappointed; I am, but...that's all gone now.  I don't get any benefit from disappointment, so I'm trying to not feel it.  I'm doing pretty well.

That, and I like the horizon.  I think by this time next year, I'll either have a job offer from a community college, or a good seat in...library school!  That's exciting.  Do I go to Syracuse and hang out with Scott Nicholson?  Probably not; they don't really teach what I want to learn, which is special collections/rare books--something that uses my history knowledge but also has a technical aspect.

But between now and then...troubled times.  I have no paycheck, and I'm not allowed to get one until my current gig with the school is up.  Grad studenting isn't a good way to build up savings.  I am hopeful that I'll get a teaching gig with the department, and supplement that with heading back to the bookstore.  There's a program, COBRA, which should preserve my insurance for a year, or whenever the exchanges start up.

And I may need to swallow hard and see if I can get help from my parents.  Which sucks, at 35.

No matter what, though, I'll have more mental and actual free time than I've had in years.  I may go to BGG.con!  That'd be fun; my first real con that I participated in.  (Well, I went to the first Geekway to the West, which was about a dozen guys occupying Jay Little's house.  Not quite the same thing.)  I could probably swing that.

But this blog was born in an atmosphere of working at a bookstore, doing some education on the side.  Those were some peak gaming years.  It could be that again--or peak reading years, or at any rate peak interacting with others years.

In other news...

The apartment is getting lighter.  I've boxed up several hundred books--22 boxes--for a friend who left the program to start a bookstore; she's lived off the largesse of some of us ever since.  ("Lived off of" is a bit much.  But one day I drove by and doubled her history section.)  It represents 70% of my Civil War, US History, Military History, and Occupations sections.  Everything I won't need and won't read.

I'd like to make the game shelves shrink, too, but that's tougher.  I picked off about thirty wargames I won't play any time soon, and I could probably do a few more.  But my non-wargames are in a pretty good place; there are only a few I can part with without taking one of my appendages along with it.  But I guess that's why it's tough.  I don't need to part with them except for the money, and the money will not be a deal-maker amount of money, I can't believe, unless I (gah) sell all of them one at a time.  Which is an exhausting thought.

Anyway, I'm certainly not buying games.  Open to trades, but not buying any.  Well...I'd buy one.  Fire and Axe: A Viking Saga.  But that's it.  I have plenty of games for my needs for a while.  Actually, based on what I just said, more than enough.  I'm not cancelling my preorders, since that could at least theoretically inconvenience other people.  But if I don't get some of that income I talked about...

I need to structure my day, and games and books and blogging sounds like a fine way to do it.  One of the themes for game-blogging is following the progress of some of the games I'm on the fence about keeping.  Why did I get the game in the first place?  Why do I want to sell it?  Have I played it?  Of course I haven't played it; why not play it?

And so on.  There are a lot of games I have where I look at the shelf and think, "Why did I get that?"  It's more of a problem with wargames.  I'm looking at Pax Baltica right now; I have no particular interest in the Wars of Charles XII, but there the game is, since I heard it was good.  That's the disease talking.  But who knows--maybe I'll really like it?  Let's play it and see.  Another game like that is Next War: Korea.  Ahem.  Part of me thinks playing it now would be bad taste; part of me thinks it's perfect timing.  I'll see if I can resolve that.

But I think coming up first will be something far less controversial--the Arab-Israeli conflict.  6 Days of War is a game I've been wanting to play since the moment I heard of its existence.  It's about the (wait) Six Days' War, or the '67 War, or whatever you prefer; Six Days' War is roughly standard so we'll go with that, especially since it parallels the game title.  Anyway, games on that particular war often aren't that gripping, since the Arab countries mostly got clobbered for six days.  What makes this game interesting is that it sets the game in the midst of the wider geopolitical struggle within the UN, between the US and USSR, etc.  The diplomacy takes place as most of the turn, and affects what goes on on the ground: How quickly reserves are called up, whether certain units can come on the map, etc.  It's a very great idea, for modern wars that take place within a certain diplomatic climate as well as a particular battlefield.

Plus, if I play this game, nobody on BGG has posted a thing about it.  I could be the first review!  Or session report, at least.  I've written three session reports, one for Snakes and Ladders and two for a silly PNP offering that has been since forgotten.  Charles Vasey, a wargamer whose taste I hold in high esteem (although there are ways we differ), calls it "Interesting."  One word.  When you're the master, you only need one word.  (Compare to the length of this post.)

Anyway, that's where we are.  In a lot of ways, I'm not in great shape.  But a decade ago a favorite word of historians was "agency," which kind of meant that even in a terrible situation, someone was able to affect their surroundings and, to some degree, thrive in them.  That's the goal.  In the fall semester, I start applying to things like mad.  I'm also going to seriously look at HTML and XML and databases, since those will be part of my life soon enough, if I go to library school.

(The problem with agency is that it was applied to people like me, people like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, slaves, people who like cornflakes, and...it started to seem like it wasn't as useful a word as we thought.)

So, what brought me to this situation, anyway?  Well...

And so here we are

Like I posted a little while ago, it's been a long hard time the past...months, really.  The result of all of that--many things, all of which I collapsed into a sentence--is that I'm withdrawing from PSU's history program.  This is not the end of the world; four years ago I might have thought it was the end of the world, but not now.  I'm not exactly sure what my next move is, but my eventual goal is to get hired by a Community College to teach history, or else get into a good library science program and thence a job in a library.  (Duh.)

I can still keep doing scholarship; it'd be hard to publish a book academically but journals are pretty fair to talented non-PhDs, for the most part.  I'll probably get a couple of articles out of my dissertation, an article or two out of other stuff I've done, but it's been decided that my best use to the world, as a scholar, would be to open up the world of toy and game studies.  There isn't as much to keep track of, in terms of other research.  Most community colleges operate on nine-month calendars, so there would be chances to get out and do research (if I've saved my pennies over the life of the contract, that is).

At any rate, I have five more months of pay coming to me, a period of subsidized "productive leisure," as I think St. Augustine put it.  Hopefully one of my job leads will come through.

In the meantime, I have some peak gaming time coming up.  I feel like busting out a monster game for old time's sake.

Out of Order

We like categorizing things, as a species.  Every culture does it a little different, as shown by, most prominently, its language--grammatical gender is the most obvious example, dividing nouns semi-arbitrarily into masculine, feminine, neuter, and (rarely) other categories.  Most Indo-European natural languages do this except, oddly, English.  While it can be taken far too far, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at least suggests that the way we think and the way we speak feed back in on each other.

These categories generally do not have any objective objective meaning; they exist, in theory, to help us navigate the world.  Nothing is intrinsically a "boat;" "boat" is a word that English speakers have found useful to describe a certain set of objects in our world.  Other people, with other languages, might divide the world of vehicles, or seaborne craft, differently to put our "boats" in different categories.

"Alfred, where are you going with this."

I'm intrigued by boardgame categories.  I'm not as intrigued as most wargamers, who have been arguing what a wargame is like mad recently.  But in general, I'm interested in how people think about games, which involves how they are categorized.

Part of this is that how I categorize games changes, unconsciously, fairly often and from situation to situation.

To my non-gaming friends, whose interest in the world of games is nonzero but not vast, they like the idea of "Euros" and "Wargames," so I stick with that.  I say that my collection is about half and half.  Of course, that involves calling a lot of games "Euros" that I probably wouldn't in other contexts.

One of those is Boardgamegeek, which offers a number of categories to slot your games into.  These categories are extremely confusing.  You have subdomain, which is eight categories.  You also have "categories"--eighty-four of them.  Then there's the fact that many people don't know what these terms mean, and confusion of what "category" means, which is probably part of the reason there is an Abstract Strategy subdomain and category.

So my games are all slotted into various subdomains and categories, usually into more than one of each.  This is basically for Boardgamegeek purposes.

As a working matter, I perceive my collection as having wargames, abstracts, Euros, and...other games.  I don't perceive myself as a "Thematic" gamer--no plastic spiders here--so I don't like the idea that I have such games.  But I have all these games that don't fit my mental slots--Clash of Cultures, Age of Renaissance, History of the World, Kremlin, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective...

The alert reader will note that except for Clash of Cultures, all those games came out before these categories we use existed, or anyway a market where German games were little-known.  What's a "Euro" in 1985?

Sapir-Whorf in action, right here.  We want categories for these games, but those categories meant nothing to the games' creators or initial audience.  I forget what kind of game I thought these games were.  I first played them in Austin, but I wasn't a "Eurogamer" yet, in my mind.  But now we're the audience, and we have the categories, so we need to match them up.  So they tend to get sent randomly to the Wargame, Strategy, and Thematic subdomains.

(And then there's Top Race, which I consider a Euro, and Daytona 500, which I don't, even though they're the same basic game by the same designer, only the latter was released in the 1980s by Milton Bradley.)

But there are categories I like, and are valuable to me--and not the regular lot at BGG--because I like the games a lot and most BGGers don't consider them important enough to give their own categories.  Dexterity games is prominent here.  I don't have as many dex games as I used to, but I still have five, I follow the dex game situation pretty closely, and I'm at least interested in every new one that comes out, even if I don't have my wallet at the ready.

I category I ponder sometimes as a potential subdomain would be "card games," but considering how much trouble we have defining the subdomains and categories we have now, it seems like a sure road to chaos.  The hardass wargamers would gang up to put Twilight Struggle and Paths of Glory into "Card Games," and it seems (to me) like there's an important difference even between Res Publica and Spades, even though they both have cards.  (Granted that half the Res Publica ones never get shuffled into a real deck.)  But that's how I'd divide them.

But when I talk about these categories I use, once again they're ones I devised for my own purposes.  It's a useful way to think about my collection, even if there are a few strays I can't answer for.

The trouble comes when one tries to really reify these categories in our minds into something objective one can hold everyone else to.  Abstract gamers are the furthest along, as the most dedicated abstract gamers have 98% agreed (some have wiggle room in a practical sense) that an abstract game is a two-player game of no luck and no hidden information.  It helps that this is awfully close to a strictly-defined mathematical term.  Still, there are a lot of people who think four-player Blokus, Can't Stop, and Backgammon are abstract games.  (Such as the editors of Spielbox.)

I mentioned the wargame arguments.  I'm pretty sure no single wargamer has a definition of wargame they use that includes only things they consider wargames and excludes only things they do not consider wargamers, when you get right down to it.  I have a very broad notion of wargame, and I still get itchy when I realize that it means I have to think Wallenstein is a wargame.  (I mean, it kind of is?  And kind of is not.)  This does not stop wargamers from believing very strongly in the correctness of their definition.  And caring, a lot, about whether something is a wargame or not.

But then there are wargames, and miniatures wargames.  I divide them.  Does anybody else?

Anyway, you see category arguments all the time on the Geek.  "What is Ameritrash?" "What is a Euro?"  They come up a fair bit.  "Is this game a strategy game, a wargame, or a thematic game?"  I'm trying to decide what to do.  A couple of months ago another hoary old BGG Speak question came up, "Do solitaire plays of a game count as a play?"  I was first on the scene with "If you think you're playing a game, then you are."  Others chimed in.

The conclusion was that categories were made for games, not games for categories.

(ducks)

Clarity

I'm taking a break from putting together a rowing machine.  It has been a grotesque pain in the ass.  It's nothing but Euroglyphs and arrows.  In the front of the manual, there is a diagram showing the various sizes of various fasteners and washers and whatnot, along with the quantity.  There's a picture of a hex bolt, and it says "M-12 x 40."  Problem: The box does not come with any M-12s, never mind forty, for the very good reason that the thing doesn't use M-12 bolts.  It's just a picture of what various sized pieces of hardware look like, and I'm guessing it's a picture this company uses in everything.  So, yeah: Takin' a break, before I go back to attaching this hydraulic piston.

There has been an occasionally-bumped discussion in the Abstract Games subdomain forum about what makes for a good abstract game.  Something called "Clarity" came up reasonably often, but was never quite defined.  Someone then started a new thread devoted to the topic in particular.  I considered posting to it, but I don't really have the abstract gamer mindset, I don't think, and I was thinking about the concept rather beyond abstract games anyway.

My working definition is more or less along the lines in the thread I linked to.  I don't really think of games as having clarity, although some games might be more prone to having clear positions.  A clear position is one where an ordinary player, with (say) a low to moderate amount of experience, can look at the board and formulate a plan.  It might not be a great plan, but he or she is not moving at semi-random.  The player can perceive something to do.  I recall a psychological study in the Soviet era of chess decision making, where the better the player is, the fewer moves they looked at.  The game became more clear with experience.  (<--shocking br="" result="">

Of course, this partly depends on the gamer.  As I've said before, I have trouble with chess games, which is bad considering I collect them.  I'm not sure what to do with the starting position, and I almost never catch the various tactical tricks unless I'm warned that they're there.  Games where the board starts empty and I fill it--tile laying games of all kinds, dare I include go--I feel far more comfortable with.

Go, of course, presents the player with a very great many choices for most of the game--which is partly what gives it its depth.  While I can only discern the exactly right path if it is either very obvious or I am very lucky, I can usually work down to some reasonable choices.  Most games, as you get friendlier and friendlier, have fewer choices.  If you're playing Dominion, you have as many choices as there are cards in your hand.

I've found auction games to be very difficult to teach, since it is often...unclear how much to bid.  I introduced some new people to Medici, and it was a disaster; I won going away, since I had all the experience.  I tried to give advice, but you can only hold onto the bicycle seat so much.  Two other Knizia games work rather better--Amun-Re, where the amount you bid is fixed, and growing very quickly, and especially Ra, where the amount of your bid is so circumscribed.  There are many opportunities for poor bidding in both games, but there is less of a sense of "What do I do now?"

Clarity in wargames is an interesting concept.  There are a few possible axes to place wargames on, and one is density: How many pieces are on the map.  Paths of Glory has a very low density, and the pieces have very limited movement.  Fire in the East, a gigantic hex-and-counter game on the Eastern Front, has a very high density, and the pieces have a lot of liberties.

My instinct is telling me that a less dense game with more restricted movement should be more clear than a game with a billion counters.  And that may be, but there's one complication: In Paths of Glory, each individual move is more important than each individual move in Fire in the East.

I'm not sure how complicating that is.  This would be a good study for some psychology grad student who wants to do interesting work and be utterly unemployable.

Grounded

I'm culling the herd.  Too many games.  I'd like to part with something like three or four shelves' worth.  Most of this is coming out of wargames, which I'd like to have an easier time choosing between.  I'm flirting with the danger of becoming Patrick Carroll, nursing a game collection I mostly hate.

This is kind of a toughie, since I got rid of the obvious ones ("I own this?") the last time.  Now I'm actually putting good games on the sale pile.  Some of the games have odd requirements, like 1812; it's best with five players, and that's just not happening for wargames any time soon.  Games that are really, really not solitarable are on the pile. I can solo almost anything, but some are beyond my powers.  Strike of the Eagle, with hidden orders, is one.  Another is the Down in Flames series.

This is a series of WWII games designed by Dan Verssen to model both operational air warfare (getting to an objective and bombing it) and dogfighting, which is a rare feat.  Everything's handled by cards, either aircraft cards or maneuvering cards.  Dogfights are basically matching games, a more complex version of what Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage or We the People have.  You play a maneuver, which can be counted by a particular countermaneuver.  If you "win" a maneuvering battle, that gives your plane an advantageous position from whence to shoot.

Traditional air combat grognards were horrified.  There's no precision, any plane can make any maneuver (although some have a larger deck than others), and so on.

That said, there's something it does the other games don't.  Other games take forever.  Each tern represents five seconds, but it takes minutes to plan and carry out.  The speed and instinctive flying of a real dogfight are entirely absent.  They are...less absent in Down in Flames.  It's a much faster-paced game.

And it's entirely impossible to solitaire.  And if I had another player to play against, I'd go for a non-wargame first, and then I'd go for a different wargame.  So out it goes.

But it was kind of painful; I had a self-image of myself as a Down in Flames player.  (This sounds like something Patrick Carroll would do, if he liked random card games!)

That said, I'd really like an air combat game (I'm doing it again!).  Air combat was kind of my entry into the hobby; my first real wargame was Flight Leader, and I played who knows how many games of Blue Max against my father.  I do have a vast aerodrome of Wings of War/Glory stuff, both the original cards and the current miniatures.  And there are plenty of WWII miniatures, but they don't do operational campaigns very well, and it takes an immense amount of room.

Maybe if Patrick Carroll ends up liking Mustangs, I should look into that...

Two Quick Things

First, I hope the name Soren Narnia (username sorennarnia) means something to everyone here.  He's one of the great poets of BGG; he doesn't make significant posts every day but when he does, it's kind of an event--even if often not many people are watching.  I bring this up, because yesterday he uncorked what might be--and what I currently believe actually is--the finest thing on BGG, this session report for A World at War, GMT's version of Advanced Third Reich/Empire of the Rising Sun.  The report has no pictures.  It has no maps.  It has very few now-I-moved-here-and-he-moved-there passages.  It's, in many ways, not about the game at all (his wrap-up that actually gives his impression of the game, while very eloquent, almost seems out of place).  It's about life, love, friendship, and how lots of unexpected things can lead to playing a monstrously complex wargame--far, far from his comfort zone.

Be warned, though: It's about 70-75 double-spaced pages long.  But it's worth it.  You don't really need to know very much about wargames.

It's sitting at 34 thumbs right now, because who wants to read a stupid session report for a big wargame, but it's a classic.  I got out of A3R a long time ago, but I felt a twinge.

Then take a look at his geeklists.  Or at least the top four.

*****

A thread in the wargames area came up a few days ago, about whether gamers would prefer games to come in ziploc bags rather than boxes--assuming some sort of discount.  The usual desultory discussion followed, and it seemed like you have your people who really like boxes, and the people who really like saving a few bucks, and some wishy-washy ones.  I suppose in theory almost everyone has some sort of acceptable discount; I might be willing to go for a 10% discount, but a more box-friendly sort might need 40%.  But we all have our price.

Anyway, it got me thinking about converting some of my wargames to ziploc status.  It would save a lot of space, essentially, and space is the limiting factor on the collection right now.  The trick is that if I were to sell a converted game, I'd have to give that discount I just talked about!  It would thus have to be a game I have a lot of faith in as a long-term keeper.

The question: What kind of faith do I have for any of this?  I have no idea where I'm living next; will I have space for a full-sized collection, or a collection of my top 50% wargames and not the rest, or will I have to go down to a dozen games like I talked about months ago?

I've already decided that I'm keeping Command and Colors: Ancients; I trashed the boxes and put everything in a big plastic tub.  Selling that might be something of a challenge.  All my Memoir 44 material is sorted into new containers, which has sometimes helped; finding a terrain tile is like rooting through my box of Lego(s) when I was a kid.  Combat Commander: Resistance! has been broken down, the box forgotten, and and the stuff packed in the Europe and Mediterranean boxes.

If I were to do this, the first to be boxed would be all my Battles of the American Revolution games, all of which I like...and the boxes of which I don't like.  I don't know what it is, I'm not as big a Roger McGowan fan as a lot of people are.  Along the same lines, I could bag Blue vs Gray, serenely confident that I'll like it for a long time yet, and that the cover has problems:

Like, what's that line across McClellan's face?  What's that big Navy revolver doing there?  I do like how it tries to call the cult classic a regular classic on the top.  Anyway, I don't see myself disposing of it unless I really do have to go down to a dozen games; this is one of the last wargames I'd sell.

Now, I should say right now that while I don't like McGowan boxes in general, I quite like some in particular.  (And that I've never not bought a game because of the box.  I bought AH's Nazi boxes, I can buy anything.)  I think almost everyone thinks this is his best box:

Bagging Paths of Glory would be hard, for two reasons.  First, I like the box.  Second, I have a lot of stuff for Paths of Glory, too much to fit into the box in the first place.  So I'm not sure I'm going to find a better storage solution than what I already have.  It's probably my sixth-to-tenth favorite wargame, one I'd be loth to sell, but it stays the way it is.

And there are a lot of games like that--very full boxes.  So, we're looking at games I'd try very hard to keep, have sub-excellent box art, and have a lot of air in the box--that ziplocing (?) the game would actually reduce space.

And looking at my shelves, that's maybe ten games.

So this was a good thought experiment!  Have to do this more often.

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I would never ziploc a significant boxed Euro.  I think it's really more of a taboo than a serious stance.  And usually bagging would be impractical--boards, etc.  Few games squish into an 8.5x11" bag.  But some do: Card games, like St. Petersburg and San Juan.  But...I just can't see it.