Game Openings

Just thought I'd post here that I started a few more BGN games on SBW, and it'd be nice to get them started PDQ. IYKWIM. One, the Wallenstein game--Scarlet Knight Fever III--still needs two people to simultaneously develop Germany and burn it to the ground. Password: bgn.

Alfred's First Tournament

So, I'd never been in a tournament before. I have two "streaks" in me--sometimes I'm very competitive, but only when I try to avoid conflict and hypercompetitiveness. If someone's going to freak out over losing, gosh darn it, I want that person to be me.

Still, I was intrigued reading about this new CCG--sorry, TCG--on the block, and wanted to give it a try. No, not World of Warcraft, but The Spoils. The Spoils is set in a kind of steampunk Victorain world, with various factions (Bankers--represented by literal fat cats; Mad Scientists; Arcane Cultists; etc) vying for control of the world. The art is pretty neat; the game has a sense of humor to it--sometimes wry, sometimes juvenile, but I like to see this often overwrought genre taking itself a wee bit less seriously.

So, I was interested, and I learned earlier that there'd be a tournament on Saturday night--first prize, a special The Spoils iPod. I figured I'd give it a shot.

So, 7 PM came around, and the store called everyone to the front desk who wanted to play in the tournament. There I am, standing tall. 7:15, and Carl the manager starts going around trying to drum up some interest. Eventually he finds four of us ready to go, and I see my chances at the iPod dwindle away.

It's a sealed-deck tournament. The four of us go to the table and look over our cards. Two of us had never played before in our lives--me, and a guy named Jeffrey. (I think.) Another guy had played once or twice in the "Beta" release from a few weeks ago. The fourth, a kid (15 y/o?) named John, had apparently played a couple dozen times and hadn't signed up right on the dot since he was stuck somewhere studying his spoiler sheets.

The three of us older (gah!) folk sit around, sorting our cards and talking about our favorite defunct CCGs. (Me: Mythos and NetRunner. Jeffrey was a Lot5R and Hecatomb man. I forget what the third guy liked.) John, meanwhile, is studying his starter and two boosters with the intensity of a nuclear physicist in the lab.

Going through my cards, I felt a little overwhelmed trying to figure out what to play. I thought the mad scientists--or, more properly, the Gearsmiths--looked promising. I should interject here with

ALFRED'S PRO TIP FOR "THE SPOILS" TCG SEALED-DECK CONSTRUCTION 1. When opening your sealed starter and boosters, the first thing you should do (of course) is separate out your factions. Then you take the Gearsmith faction, hold it in your right hand (or left, if you are left-handed), and toss it gaily over your shoulder.

I did not take this advice. Neither did Jeffrey. I'll ruin a little suspense and say that we finished fourth and third, respectively. It was generally conceded that I came in fourth because I had the most Gearsmith cards; Jeffrey came in third because he had the second-most. The other two played for the iPod because they had no Gearsmiths, and thus were fairly competitive with each other. Now, they're not totally useless cards, I hasten to add. They're just slow. These games rewarded fast decks that brought out lots of creatures that prick you to death. The Gearsmiths let you build a very efficient infrastructure over time that brings in the Huge Bombs...if you survive that long. You can probably construct a deck that brings the Gearsmiths to the fore, but in a random draw I don't think that's very likely.

After the first game, I started to wonder if I picked the wrong factions to work with. By the end of the second game, I knew I did. In fact, I'm pretty sure--looking back on it--that if I had played with the cards I considered but discarded, not only would I have had a vastly better deck, but I might have actually had the best deck for this particular tournament. I left some great stuff in the box.

There was a round-robin--three games--and then a bracket for the finals. I lost my previous three games, mostly horribly. In one game I was wiped out without dealing a single frickin' point of life hits to the other guy. It was just nasty. Meanwhile, John, the kid, is rolling. He is one with the cards. Not a single move is wasted. He deals out catastrophic hits to us with a calm, but intense heat. It's kind of disturbing. Jeffrey managed to eke out a draw against him--the clock ran out. I, of course, as the fourth seed in the bracket faced John in the first elimination round.

And, gosh darn it, I darn near pulled off the amazing victory. At the very end, just before I got wiped out, I looked down in my hand and discovered that I'd let a powerful card moulder in my hand for who knows how many turns that would have destroyed most of his creatures. And, within minutes, he played a combo that eliminated me.

So I went oh-for-four.

I imagine I'll have a few hits in the next few weeks looking for The Spoils tips and info. To the inevetable complaint that I'm an oh-for n00b offering "pro tips," I can only agree that I have no place doing so. If you won a sealed deck tournament with an all-Gearsmiths deck, I salute you. Just keep on tryin' that. Did I make horrible mistakes? Clearly. I doubt I did anything really "right" the whole night. Frankly, if you're looking for real advice on how to play The Spoils, I can only encourage you to look elsewhere.

So did I like the game? I sure did. The aesthetics are nice, of course, and that always helps. (The best part? The backs of the cards. I'm not kidding. It's a magnificent design--totally abstract, like "real" playing cards, but has a nice kind of Victorian gothic look to it. I'd buy a poker deck with these backs.) I call Mythos and Netrunner "storytelling" CCGs, and M:TG a "fighting" game; I generally prefer the former, but for whatever reason this "fighting" game kind of drew me in. I bought enough cards to make a semi-plausible constructed deck for casual-plus play; that's about all the investment I'll probably make, although I might enter another sealed deck tournament if the entry fee is low enough (and the prizes spiffy enough).

I had fun, despite being slaughtered. That's a sign of a quality game, in my book.

So What do I Know, Anyway

I brought Hollywood Blockbuster to the game store tonight, mostly showing it to the employees and bystanders coming by. As a little experiment, I decided to not voice my opinion on the art, puns, etc. Everyone was really excited by the game, loved the fake names for the actors and (especially) movies--so I think that while changing the look of the game may have met the disdain of the longtime Traumfabrik players, Uberplay will still manage to do very nicely with the product they have.

Dusting Off the Keyboard

Hey there!

My copy of Hollywood Blockbuster--via Tanga--just arrived. A few quick notes on that:

The packagaing from Tanga was not up to snuff, says this longtime book- and game-packer. It came in an enormous box, with a wafer-thin layer of packing material on the bottom, on which rested the game, which was allowed to bounce around all over the place. No damage, thank heaven, but still...

I don't mind the art, I don't mind the contemporary actors and directors and movies; I mind the names, which are lame puns ("Demi Less," "Spikely," etc). I know that there are applicable laws that precluded the use of real movies, but I'd still rather have the tiles with real names on them. There's nothing stopping me from making my own paste-ups, I suppose--other than the thesis and lack of GIMP skillz. I'm surprised there aren't more homebrew variants, actually. Think of all the possible themes! You could even do an animation one, adopting the Roger Rabbit notion that the characters are actors.

I'm still glad to have a copy of one of my favorite games, though.

I also recently picked up...an RPG! Well, it's kind of an RPG. It's De Profundis, the wide-open-format Lovecraft-themed game/experience. Basically, each player plays an "investigator" discovering the horrors in the world around them. Players send letters to each other, describing their findings, and play off each other. That's basically the entire rules, right there. The beauty of the rulebook is its meditation on how to enter what one might call horror-reality; seeing the world as superreal, filled with conspiracies and dark secrets. (Just who is that guy in the car next to you? What's his story? He seems to be...very focused on the road. He must have...something...he's going to. What can it be?) It's often said, such as in Michel Houellebecq's essay HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, that Lovecraft's skill--and that of other successful horror writers--is to writ stories that reject reality and (regular) life; Lovecraft's narrators are the ones who have moved from "the world" (sanity) to a shadow, horror world (insanity); this involves a new kind of perception as much as anything else. De Profundis encourages and teaches a way to change perception first, in order to perceive (the uninitiated might say "imagine") the horror-world around us.

Certainly a neat product; worth tracking down a copy if you're interested in Lovecraft or the frontiers of gaming.

(The thesis, in case you were wondering, is trucking along. I presented the a chunk of it in my research seminar last night; I was declared by one fellow-student a "Yankee propagandist," which is a major milestone in the development of a Civil War historian. The next step is to be called a "Neoconfederate Lost-Causer.")