Could be Simplified

I like Mahjongg a great deal, to the point where I have not only a "standard" Chinese set, but also Mhing...and a very snazzy Riichi (or "Reach") set.

I haven't gotten a chance to play Riichi yet--gosh darn there are a lot of ways to score points--but I have read the rules, and I thought I'd share one of the "setup" rules--setting the winds. The following is taken from the wonderful The Great Mahjong Book: History, Lore, and Play by Jelte Rep.

The allocation of seats around the table happens quickly [emphasis ed.]. The four Wind tiles, an odd tile, and an even one are mixed and placed in a row. The oldest player (or the host) throws two dice. The six tiles are turned faceup and the odd and the even tiles are moved to the closest side.

If the oldest player throws an odd number, then he gets the wind that is on the odd side temporarily . . . The other players are allocated the other temporary Winds: the player who sits to the right of the oldest (counterclockwise) gets the second Wind (East); the player who sits right of him gets the third Wind (South); and the fourth player gets the remaining wind (north).

If the oldest player throws an even number, then he becomes North and the other players respectively become South, East, and West.

Now temporary East decides who will become [real] East by throwing the dice. If he throws six, for instance, then he counts counterclockwise, starting with himself, and temporary South becomes East.

This sort of thing is precisely why we just drew the winds out of a bag back when I played regularly.

The Sheep and the Goats

I decided, for reasons of space and finances, to cull the collection a bit. I eventually marked 140 (including expansions) for sale, and sent the list off to a used game dealer. I know I'd get more if I sold them individually, but my time is not entirely valueless.

Some bad games are in the seven piles in my apartment, as are some very good ones. Aaaand then there are the mediocre ones. I used a few criteria to judge whether a game stayed or went away.

If I really liked the game, it obviously stayed. Also obvious: Selling off the games I hate. There weren't many of the latter. The real challenges were the ones I'd never played, or played a few times and thought "eh."

If I thought I'd never play it, and had it basically as an objet d'art, it went. See: This Hallowed Ground, the extremely huge and fairly complex game on a battle (Chickamauga) that doesn't excite me. But it's really huge! I can say to my buddies "Behold my huge game! This gives me many advantages in male dominance rituals!" It's gone.

A lot of games that other people like, but I think are...good, but a bit much, are on the pile. Most notably, Race for the Galaxy. I like it OK, but it doesn't do much for me. Why I bought the expansion, then, I'm not sure. They're both on the pile.

(I guess with Race, it pushes all the buttons that San Juan does, but with added bells and whistles that distract me, and reduce the number of players I can play it with. I can teach anyone San Juan, but Race comes with fairly intense charts and whatnot. No thanks. Go and Chess are my limit for reading strategy guides.)

Games that I think are good...but I have a lot of good games. When the heck was I going to play Antiquity? Nobody's ever asked, and I've never suggested it. Why would I, when I have a great many great games that I'd rather play/explain to people. Masons is...fine, I suppose. But why not a quick game of Thurn und Taxis?

Games I own for "academic purposes." At one point I decided that it was important that I own every single darned game on the Civil War. So I could write an article, I guess? My dirty little ACW secret is that I find vast stretches of the military side of the war totally uninteresting; WWI, WWII, and Ancients are my military history bag. (Bags?) This knocked out a number of games, most notably War Between the States. It's huge, I disagree fundamentally with its assumptions, and there are no fewer than seven ACW grand strategy games I'd rather play, because I actually like them. Plus it might get me some $. Easy call.

A less easy call: PitchCar. It's a good game. I like dexterity games, and racing games. There were two things working against it. First, it's not my favorite dex game--or my favorite racing game! (It is, however, my favorite combination of the two...) Second, and more important: I suck at it. If it's a game I congenitally suck at, it's gone.

Duplicates, and near-duplicates. I'm not sure why I have two copies of Lancashire Railways; soon enough I'll have one. Then there are the two games I call "Meet the New Boss; Worse than the Old Boss:" Domaine and Entdecker: New Horizons. Well, "worse" may be a stretch, but I can't see much improvement and Löwenherz and Entdecker 1.0 were formative gaming experiences...so I'll keep those versions.

A few things saved games that might otherwise go.

Small games tended to survive. First, they might not get noticed. I have basically no idea what's in my three shelves of "small games." Also, and this is really its own category...

Worthless games live in a sort of liminal state. Anybody up for some mediocre S&Ts from the early nineties without magazines? Anybody? They're worth about $3 on the open market, which means I might get $1 if I'm lucky. I could probably get $1 of value out of it. That said: I still put Tripoley on the pile, so I was willing to stretch this rule. I didn't think I'd get $1 out of it, I didn't want to donate it, and it pains me to throw games away...

I can't wait to see the eyes of the UPS Store people when I drive up with these. They know me as the "game guy," but nothing's prepared them for this.

Game Night

I managed to piece a game night together involving five of my fellow history grad students plus (coming in late) Josh, AKA Mr. Cranky. We played in an empty classroom, my apartment being, um, otherwise occupied by extreme messiness. It actually worked out well; it may become our gaming venue of choice. Centrally-located (I'm on the edge of town), spacious...the only downside is that I have to take the games along, which requires some advance planning. But no matter.

The night began with dinner. I think we may have walked into an episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares; it's always a good sign when the waiter says that, quote, "Everything is going wrong tonight." And it seemed to have been. The tea machine was busted (bad news for a Chinese restaurant), service was spotty, some of the food was a little dodgy, but we seem to have emerged essentially unscathed.

Upon our return, waiting for Josh, we busted out Transamerica. This was unquestionably the hit of the evening, and perhaps the most intense and passionate game of Transamerica ever played. They quickly intuited the first rule of Transamerica: Your cards are awful, and you need to express it boldly."

"This one isn't a real city!"
"I don't think this is in the United States.
"It is mathematically impossible to connect these cities."

Some of the other rules were less easily intuited. Being a group of relatively novice gamers, some were faster learners than others--it took fifteen minutes to explain the rules of TA, but we did get going eventually.

And good Lord almighty did we get going. The game clearly hit some sort of pleasure center in the brain, as what resulted was over an hour of shouting, gesticulating, trash-talking (!), crying aloud, swearing--all at high-volume. We played about four rounds, six-player, all told (in, again, an hour or so), and never actually finished a game.

Josh arrived in the midst of this ("I shudder to think of how you guys would react to Transeuropa"), and when we finished that round we broke into two groups. Josh introduced three folks to the world of competitive zoo operation (Zooloretto, of course) while I guided two gamers through Metropolys.

Metropolys was a big hit as well. It was good to see them appreciate a somewhat brainier game, and they got their heads around the weird auction system quickly. One guy didn't grasp part of the final scoring...but it wouldn't have mattered in the end. I won by seven points, 40-33-18.

Zooloretto was a quieter experience than TA, which seemed to make it go down a little less well, but I can't really speak to that.

I have to admit that I was a little taken aback by just how intense Transamerica was. Part of me always hopes that the meatier fare will do better than the appetizers and desserts, but then again it's my job--as the gaming host--to ensure that my guests have fun, rather than that they become educated in the ways of Higher Gaming. Enthusiasm seemed to run high for another game night--and they liked the looks of Union Pacific...p'raps they're climbing the ladder after all.

Civilians in the Path of Wargames

...or, if you will, "Playing the 'Rape of Belgium' Card."

About forty years ago, virtually all books on military history were set on the battlefield, which was neatly scrubbed and prepped before battle. Soldiers were important primarily as carriers of equipment, whose status could be determined neatly by "morale clocks" above each regiment. (He says, exaggerating for effect.) Since John Keegan's Face of Battle, change has come--and, indeed, has accelerated. War is now seen as a very large societal event, with much of the focus now on the individual soldier's experience, and how war affected civilians--those on the home front, and those in the path of war.

Wargames are still generally focused on the theater of battle (or war...), but in the last fifteen years or so, there has been a change similar in kind--if not in degree--as that which has taken place in military history scholarship. I'd like to spend a few blog posts--probably interspersed with other kinds of post--discussing how civilians have appeared in wargames. Sometimes they're represented in cardboard counters just like everyone else; sometimes they're more abstract.

This little project began as a seminar paper I wrote last semester; turning it into something larger (and scholarly) is on indefinite hold, so why not put it here? With any luck at all, it'll provoke at least one thought somewhere. And for an academic, that's a runaway success.

Impossible, but Necessary

So, I've begun toying with the idea of turning the Soviet Dawn/Israeli Independence system into an American Civil War game. Instead of one point of convergence, though, I'm thinking three: One for Virginia, one for the West, one for the Trans-Mississippi. Once the CSA loses Virginia and one of the others, it's out of the game. There'd also be a track for the political viability of the CSA, which would represent a combination of internal dissent and foreign recognition.

I ran that by one of the folks in the office, who objected--as there was essentially no way that England or France would ever recognize the Confederacy, because [of numerous reasons extraneous to this post]. I agreed that there was no way it could happen in real life--but it had to be in the game, as it is in most Civil War games.

See, both the USA and CSA thought it was a serious possibility, one which they spent considerable energy either discouraging or encouraging. If a game designer is to create the illusion of history, he or she must find some way for the players to fritter away energy and resources on sidling up to European heads of government. The result: Making it possible for the CSA to get material help from Europe.

There's another possibility, of course: Simply not having European recognition enter the game at all--or making it so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. Battle Cry of Freedom (the "forgotten" Civil War game) has the various events all happen--Mason and Slidell, the Trent Affair, the works--and they affect the sides in military terms (which seems kind of odd to me).

I prefer my option, obviously. It has kindred rules in other games. Ted Raicer wanted players of Paths of Glory to be historically paranoid about supply issues, so he made the rules draconian: Any out-of-supply unit is immediately destroyed. He granted (as I recall) that this wasn't what would have automatically happened in 14-18, but he wanted the players to be supremely supply-conscious.

It's not really something we can do in history books, at least the nonfiction variety. Tension is harder to create, but of course not impossible. The secret, like a good mystery novel, is to keep the reader from mentally skipping to the end of the book. When I read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, I would occasionally find myself in real anticipation to find out what would come next--although I naturally already knew. Sadly, few academics write nearly as well as Shirer. (Hell, few nonacademics write nearly as well as Shirer.)

In my neck of the woods, the best I've found has been William Shea and Earl Hess's Pea Ridge, which receives my very warmest recommendation. Watch the chaos of the Pea Ridge campaign as it unfolds! I described it once as the blind leading the blind, fighting the blind. And it was one of the major battles of the war...

Get that Garbage Out of Here

Got back from Virginia today. On the way back, I stopped at Monocacy National Battlefield. It's relatively new--it opened in 1991. It's quite nice; excellent exhibits, and restored to near-1864 condition, including working cornfields.

They're most notable, however, for their trash cans: They have none. I wanted to dispose of some water bottles, and searched in vain. I took them with me into the visitor's center.

"Can I throw these away somewhere?"
"We ask that you not."
"What?"
"We're a 'Trash Free Zone.' If you create trash, you have to take it with you out of the park."
(pause)
"Do you seriously expect that to work?"

They did, apparently. She did relent, and offered to take the bottles off my hands privately.

I will say that I didn't see mountains of garbage laying around, but (a) the policy was quite new, and (b) it was still the off-season. We'll see how this goes in July.

A Night on the Town

So, I wandered over to the game store—the great Game Parlor of Woodbridge VA—and waited for the gamers who were scheduled to arrive at 6:30. I had with me my brand-new copy of Metropolys, which I had bought at GP the day before. When the gamers came, it was clear that they were going to play Axis and Allies—the new, gargantuan edition—instead of my kind of game, so I left them to it. Ah well.

This meant one thing: Gaming in my motel room. Quieter, anyway. I chose Soviet Dawn for the evening's entertainment.

It's a solo game, where you're the Bolsheviks seeking to establish the new Soviet state. You do this by protecting Moscow against six approaching armies, and by improving your geopolitical image until the world has to accept your legitimacy. If you can hold off the hordes until the end of the game, that's a military victory. If you win international legitimacy, that's a political victory.

Cards drive gameplay. Each card has several parts. It says which of the threatening armies advance, what special events come into play, and how many things you can do on your turn. There are three kinds of action. You can launch an offensive against one of the opposing armies—a mere roll-to-hit. You can roll to improve your international prestige—another die roll; this gets harder as you advance up the track. Finally, you can call Trotsky in and attempt a reorganization of the Red Army, which will provide one or another advantage—temporary or permanent.

Lots of the flavor of the war makes it into the game. You have to eliminate the Tsar before the Eastern armies reach Yekaterinburg. You can fortify Petrograd; you can get armored trains, you can choose whether to accept the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk or keep on fighting...and on and on. There's a lot of flavor bolted onto a simple framework. (The cards also have copious flavor text, which I always appreciate.)

There are as many turns (potentially) as there are cards in the game. Both of my games last night ended early.

The first one, I signed Brest-Litovsk the first card, which shut down the Baltic front for the time being, but activated the Allies, who proceeded to march down from Murmansk. I tried to beat them back, but every card moved them forward and my die rolls were hopeless, and they reached the last square before Moscow. Meanwhile, I attempted to get myself moving up the political track, but with a signal lack of success. I was eventually forced by a card to roll for Political Dissent. This is an interesting feature, whereby you can either lose a space, go nowhere, or turn the dissent around and actually move up the track. I rolled to move down, which in my case meant that my regime had lost all legitimacy inside and outside Russia, and I was put down in a bloody counterrevolution, which was aided by the Allied forces. I lasted six cards, or somewhat less than five minutes.

Let's try that again, shall we?

The next one, I decided, on a whim, to have Trotsky work his magic reorganizing the army. You need a six to do this, and lo! a six was rolled. Appropriately, I got the armored train, which aids in offensives. I would repeat this trick about six more times during the game (sometimes with positive modifiers), and I scored on no fewer than four rolls. It was magical. In an attempt to help balance the scale from the last game, I also got some big winners on the Political track. I kept all the advancing armies at arm's length for most of the game—thank you, Trotsky—and in the end I got a bounce from a Dissent roll and won widespread international recognition. A glorious victory, at the highest level of achievement!

And y'know, that seems about right to me. Why should we assume that the historical outline was the most likely? A few lucky breaks in 19170-1918, and the Bolsheviks go down in history as some overgrown Decembrists. And if Trotsky and other experts had been in charge of the army from Day One...the whole thing might have been wrapped up like a bow in three years or so, like my second game. An effective military could have given the state some vital diplomatic breathing room.

In other words, it all seemed like a logical narrative. And it was a narrative. I prize good storytelling in all wargames, especially solitaire ones, and this delivers in spades. I was cheering on my forces, grieving their defeats, and I have every intention to pull this game out many, many more times. I also look forward to trying their Israeli War of Independence game, even if (or perhaps because) it has less chrome. This is a magnificent solitaire game. It doesn't look like a “real” wargame, with just a few counters, a map that is essentially six marker tracks, and cards with more flavor text than in-game information. And maybe it's not a real wargame, but it is an extremely good Something.

Packin' Up

I head out the door tomorrow (today?) for Quantico, VA, headquarters of the US Marine Corps and home to their archives, where I hope/plan to do research for the next few days. (I'm researching a paper on aspects of the occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934.) The most important question for any trip, if you're me, is "What games do I bring?"

I've given the matter no little thought; far more thought than I've given to what clothes I'm going to wear. I've settled on two, both solitaire wargames.

The first is Dan Verssen's "Field Commander: Rommel," which covers three of his campaigns (France 1940, Africa 1942, France 1944). The major problem: You're Rommel. It smacks of "clean Wehrmactitude," but most Rommelabilia does that for me. That said: The word on the street is exceedingly positive, and I have yet to play a Verssen solo game I dislike (I have the next game in the series, on Alexander the Great, on the way).

The next is Victory Point's "Soviet Dawn." It's actually not quite Soviet Dawn, actually; It's Soviet Da[shah-ee]. Yes, it's our old friend from many games set in Russia: Faux Cyrillic. It annoys me so, and it's all over the place in Soviet Dawn. The map is rife with it. But again: Lots of love for this game, and it's on a topic I like a great deal.

I'll be sure to post updates. And possibly with pictures! I'm also getting in some "real" gaming, as I've found a game night nearby.

Oo! And also a chess set. I've entered on one of my biennial Chess Frenzies, which typically results in the loss of very many dollars and the gain of very few ELO points. I've at least had the sense this time to get all my books from the library. Will this be the year Alfred plays a clocked game against a face-to-face opponent?

...

No, probably not. Although the local-to-Quantico game store does have a chess night.

I Hope you Like these Comments

I gave it my level best to change my comments from Haloscan back to Blogger, but with a signal lack of success. Halsoscan wasn't very helpful (shocking!), Blogger said even less (actually shocking!), and the ideas in the forums didn't work. End result: We get these comments until a Plan C emerges.

So!

So it's been a year and a half or so. What's been up?

After an almost blissfully smooth two years at Missouri State, life at Penn State has been a bit rocky. My old nemesis, writer's block, returned in full force, for one thing. I think it's partly because I dropped my feather--this very blog. It got me out of the habit of writing every day, or at least fairly regularly. Which, to be honest, is the main reason I've decided to start again. It'll probably take a while to hit my stride again, and there are no promises that it'll be the same as it was.

I also suffered a major mental breakdown in April, which I mentioned on BGG a while back. I've been diagnosed as bipolar, which explains many of the issues I've had in my life over the years, particularly the extreme instability of my undergraduate days. It's been hard putting life back together after this latest episode, as it's not as though school has stopped and waited for me. I'm catching up, though, but I'm leaving other things (such as BGG trade offers...) behind more than I'd like. Again, I hope blogging gives me some sort of structure as I live on the seven-pills-a-day plan. (Fewer than many; I count my blessings. And they do help a great deal.)

But enough of that noise. What about the games?

I'm lucky to have an excellent gaming partner here in State College in Mr. Cranky, aka Josh Adelson. State College is home to two of the larger game collections in the country, and I think we're about it for regular gamers. It's an odd situation. At any rate, we've discovered some great, good, and (sadly) bad games in these two years, and I hope we get to discover more in the next four years or so.

I'm also trying to get the office into gaming. It's met with some scattered success. Memoir 44 Overlord was a huge hit. I'm fascinated by the reports that the amateur military historians on BGG find it historically unacceptable while we professionals (well, apprentices) eat it up! We've also played Settlers, Carcassonne: New World (too fiddly), Nat. Geo. Expedition (big hit), Bamboleo (big hit), Ingenious (medium hit)...maybe it's working out better than I'd thought. Next up--to celebrate my becoming a doctoral candidate, whenever that is--is a miniatures game of Shiloh. We're doing Volley and Bayonet.

Next week should have interesting posts. I'm hitting the road to northern Virginia, on a research junket. I'll be visiting some battlefields (for fun), and I think I'll be able to hit at least one game night, at the Game Parlor--one of my favorite stores. I'm actually going to Quantico, where the US Marine Corps has its archives. I'm researching the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the 'teens and twenties. Once they kick me out, though, I have the whole evening to myself...

Is This Thing On?

Seems like it. I should probably put something here.