The entire idea for this post is stolen, stolen from a far more original blogger than I, Yehuda Berlinger. If you like it, thank him; if you hate it, blame me.
I like fewer games than Yehuda does, so I'll try to bloviate more to fill up the space.
THE TEN RING:
See, I do my 10s differently from other people, as I've explained about ten times to anyone who's reading this, but just in case: I have one "10" wargame, one "10" Euro, and one "10" abstract.
WARGAME: Combat Commander. This is a game that has a lot of limitations. A lot. You can't have particularly large scenarios, most of the maps are typical rather than historical, there isn't much richness to the nationalities beyond the Big Four, there's only infantry (and artillery), and much else besides. Yet I love it, love it with a stupid love I reserve only for the flawed beauties in this world. I've mentioned its flaws; its beauty is that it takes its very limited mission--small-unit infantry actions in WW2--and executes it amazingly well. It is wonderful cinema; most games are full of friction (units appear, booby-traps are triggered, all the hidden dangers of combat, and all beyond the reach of the players), and accomplishing anything requires constantly reassessing your position and what is possible. This is not a game for someone who wants complete control of the battlefield; as the commander, what your men do and what happens on the battlefield is something you can influence, but never truly master. I love that stuff. Dealing with all this keeps you ever-engaged with the game; turns move quickly and are usually interactive and there is no downtime. It's one of the great storytellers of the hobby.
EURO: Amun-Re. My top-player according to the Geek, with 23. Most of those were on Spielbyweb, of course; I'm sure I've played a few other games more but 23 is about right; AR is somewhere near the top of my play list. It also has a major limitation, at least for me: I pretty much need to be playing with a full complement of five players to really enjoy myself. Thus: I really, really enjoy myself when I'm playing a five-player game. This is one of the few Euros where I've spent significant time thinking about what kinds of strategy to employ--that is, when I'm not playing. (There are, of course, many games where I don't think about that sort of thing during the game. I lose a lot of games; it makes me very popular.) It's also one of the very few games where I marveled at how well balanced it is, and how much that balance can change from game to game. That balance between strategies is one of Knizia's trademarks, and I think this is where he gets it best.
ABSTRACT: Go. I will never, ever, ever be any damn good at this game. I also play it bitterly rarely, despite countless opportunities online. Here's the problem: It embarrasses me to play it as poorly as I do. I feel like it deserves better. I'll stink at a Euro, no problem; but if I shame myself at go, that feels like a much more profound failure. (This is actually a fairly major hang-up of mine; I don't dance, cook dinner for other people, play tennis, etc because I'm bad at them, and I don't want people to see just how bad I am because I love those activities so much in theory.) This may be a 10 out of respect and fear. Now, I do enjoy reading about go; I have three shelves' worth of books on the subject--how to become better (growing dusty), game collections (my favorite), etc. I think I feel smarter just being associated with it; or, if not smarter, a better gamer that I'm connected with something so--dare I say--important to the world of games, of which I consider myself a minor part. At least that's my justification.
(Yehuda's top-scorer is Bridge, which gets a 2 from me. Oh my sweet Lord I'm terrible at trick-taking games. My various game partners over the years can attest to this.)
NINES:
Yehuda listed Dvonn and Tzaar as his two favorite Gipf games; clearly this is only because he neglected to mention Zertz. I've played this game a kabillion times, mostly against my friend Jeff from UT. We had a long series of games, and who knows what the final tally was. (That, and I think there may be some disagreement as to what it is.) This is another game I've thought a lot about. Also, part of the 9 comes from how this is a game where I had one of my gaming epiphanies, where suddenly the game made sense. If a game can generate that feeling in me, it moves into the higher echelons of my gaming consciousness. One of the very few games I've ever been very good at.
(I dimly remember playing Dvonn and I've never played Tzaar. I don't think.)
Looking at my list, I see I quite like Knizia games. He appears frequently; his second appearance is for Samurai. Something nice about this game is how it can be enjoyable both as a lightish strategy game (with the rules out of the box) and as a serious-business brain-burner--with open information and choosing from all the tiles at once. I've enjoyed it both ways, anyway; the last time I got it to the table was in its declawed version and everybody declared it excellent. I honestly can't think of a group where, if they suggested playing it, I would say no, or a group where I wouldn't pull this down for. It's really flexible, and it scales magnificently for 2-4. Great game.
More Knizia! Through the Desert is a fine game, as most people admit, and it's a game where I played it often enough that I cultivated a skill to become better: A system for keeping track of people's oasis scores. They're hidden, normally, see, and by knowing everybody's relative score I had a big advantage. The first time I employed it, I suddenly and unaccountably doubted myself. Everyone was going after one particular player, who I knew had the fewest points, but...the other two seem to know what they're doing...so I went along with the crowd, which let somebody else win. Well done, Alfred. I'm not sure there's anything too highfalutin I can drag out for Through the Desert; I just enjoy playing it. (Boring.)
One more: Taj Mahal, of course. This was a 10 before Amun-Re knocked it out. In Austin, I was the heavyweight champion of this game for a while; once I lapped most of the field. Another game I spent a lot of time thinking about; I almost felt like Brian Bankler (even though I had no conscious idea of his existence at the time). At last report I'd lost my touch and I stink now. I'd love to play it again, but I have no idea at all how I'd get it to the table; it's so far above the gaming level of any of my friends these days.
In a more serious vein, there's Beyond Balderdash, my highest-rated party game. This is a good game for historians, I've found, especially for the date category (naturally enough). Often this devolves (or evolves?) into a "who can make the funniest definition" contest, which is fine. As long as people approach the game with a spirit of fun rather than of competition, it's all good. I don't even keep score, most of the time. (Apples to Apples: Same thing. Play till we get sick of it. If I recall correctly this leads to short games in the Ford household.) I kept trying to get this to the table last year when all my friends were around, but never got the chance. So yeah, now I'm having trouble with Beyond Balderdash and Taj Mahal. Good times.
Memoir 44 I have as an 8; the Breakthrough expansion gets a 9. Also getting a 9 is Commands and Colors: Ancients. Looking at it right now, I'm not sure it's a 9; it's more complicated than the others in the series, for one thing (so many kinds of infantry!). That said, more than any other game in this whole list it looks good--it looks amazing. Ancient, linear combat is made for the C&C system (remember, it took Breakthrough for M44 to reach its potential), and with the full color blocks for GMT (which I think is a far superior system to plastic minis, despite the enormous time outlay to assemble them) make this one of the stunners on the game table, especially in Epic mode (aka "Overlord"). In one of the great services to the hobby, some soul converted the DBA army lists into C&C armies, which means its transition to a miniatures system is almost complete. If ancient battles had a lot of terrain, adding another layer of (mildish) complexity to the system, the game might be tiresome; as it is, it's quite a gaming experience. I have every expansion, and haven't regretted it yet. (That said, is it my second-favorite ancients system? It may be. Stay tuned!)
Also, do we like that paragraph? Six parentheticals! I've got my stylistic fastball working tonight!
I didn't like Caylus very much. I didn't really care for Stone Age. I see no particular reason to get any more invested in the "worker placement" games than I already am. I do have one such game, Pillars of the Earth, however, and I'll play the ink off it. I think it's partly theme. The whole Caylus theme didn't seem to make any sense. Why are we building stuff along this road? And why can't we go backwards? Pillars is more coherent, and it seems to actually be things related, somehow, to the whole building-a-cathedral project. And the game still works; it is an extremely rare game that has a strong theme and and strong game engine, and this one seems to fit the bill pretty nicely. Now, I have a lot of Knizia up there so I'm not immune to pasted-on themes, but I still give this one marks for getting everything right. I played this game a lot when I lived in Springfield. When I got here, I bought the expansion so I could play it with my buddies, but that never worked out and they've moved away...grumble. Also fun: I was the one who taught this to the crowd in Springfield, but for whatever reason I got whole swaths of the rules wrong, and it took about five games to get the kinks all ironed out. Interestingly, we thought the game was also fun with the various errors; I chose to take that as a good sign, of the game's resilience, rather than of some sort of ludic looseness.
I considered having a 10 for dexterity games, since I have a fair number of and affinity for them, but I've resisted thus far; should I give in the obvious candidate is Bamboleo. I have never seen a game generate so much joy as this game. I got this one in Springfield, too. I set it up in the store, and we played a simple little game of Bamboleo-Jenga: Everybody takes a piece until the thing topples over, and that person loses. By the third or fourth time we set it up--me in a duel with Carl, one of the managers--there was a crowd of at least a dozen gathered around, cheering and hollering and oohing and aahing as the board teetered and tottered. The crowd erupted when it would finally fall. Honestly, I lied. The most visually impressive game on this list is this, one of the great monuments to the laws of physics ever to see light as a game. The ways this game contorts itself look impossible; you think the board is being held onto that cork ball by pixies or something. This is a game where the rules, the strategy, the everything gets lost in the wonder of the thing; you don't play this game because you appreciate the subtle strategies of piece-removal, you play because you want to see just how long a yellow piece of wood, with many red and black pieces of wood on top of it, can stay at a 35 degree angle. I like it enough to give it a nine.
Up Front was my 10 wargame before Combat Commander came along. They have a lot in common, especially uncertainty; CC has more than Up Front, and it's still manageable, so I give it the edge. Up Front is a lot grittier, game-wise; the units are man-to-man, and each man behaves differently under fire. That's pretty cool. Also cool is that neither side really knows what the terrain is like. That drives a lot of people crazy but it seems right to me; most meeting engagements were on fundamentally unknown terrain (as one person told me, "Do you know what terrain's on the other side of my house?"), beyond the bare essentials ("mostly rolling hills, with some gullies and maybe some woods"). (Two in one sentence!) The game kind of breaks when you add the tanks, which is likely what inspired Chad Jensen to ignore them when he designed Combat Commander. But again, there is no better game for meeting engagements between two squads of infantry than Up Front, and that's not nothing. Honestly, with the dominance of Combat Commander in my gaming life this is probably not a 9 anymore but an 8, but sentimental attachment is keeping it up at the moment.
I kept three Civil War games in the sell-off, all at the whole-war level. One is the old Victory Games "Civil War," which gets high marks for having the Far West theater and for being my first "real" wargame, another is Victory Point's "Lost Cause," which looks interesting despite its abhorrent title--which contradicts the point of the game, anyway--and is one of their line of "tower defense" solitaire games (i.e., where you're trying to keep the enemy armies away from your Base (in this case, Richmond) as long as possible). (Nested!) Haven't played it yet; I was supposed to look it over for historical accuracy but my playtest copy never reached me. Anyway, the third game gets a nine: Blue vs. Gray. I did an annotated after-action report on this game back when the blog was drawing more than six visitors a day, and I think everybody here remembers it, so I won't go into too many details. This game gets things right that no other game really gets right. Going to my favorite wargaming hobbyhorse: Uncertainty. Neither player knows when a decent general or a good batch of reinforcements are coming, which leads to some interesting decisions: Do you go dancing with what you got, or do you wait just one more turn, giving the other guy another chance to reinforce himself? In most games, you know precisely what it takes to get troops, and you have a pretty good idea, as Lincoln, when Grant is coming and how to get him over to the Army of the Potomac. You don't know any of that in this game, which is what makes it great. Some games can end in the first few turns, if Grant/Sherman/Lee arrive a bit early, and while that has some ludic issues (most of which can be fixed with house rules), is it such bad history?
After all, we sometimes get into a trap of assuming that what did happen is the most likely result. And, often, that's just not true; there's nothing guaranteed that the Union would break at Bull Run--what if they were the ones that held and the Confederates broke and ran? What then? That battle was a 50/50 or 60/40 proposition, after all; that "game" could have been over in the snap of your fingers. Anyway, something roughly approximating what really happened is also possible, and Evan Jones (the designer) went to pains to storyboard the entire actual war using his game, down to the die rolls if I recall correctly.
I kind of wish it had the Trans-Mississippi, but that would have added a number of more cards for, I have to admit, a modest improvement to the game itself. As it is, I say it's the best game out there on the Civil War at the strategic level, both as a game and as history.
So that's what I got. I have some 8.5s, but I think we've seen enough. I'll note that my highest-rated "regular" card game is Canasta (although I vastly prefer it with the special Caliente decks, so I don't have to remember what the cards do). It beat cribbage by half a point; that is the game I've played more than any other, as it came out almost every night for a game or three against my dad when I was a kid. Maybe I should rate it higher.
My ratings don't change particularly often; I don't put enormous stock into them, so I only look at the top-rated ones, especially to make sure the 10s accurately represent the top of their particular categories. Sometimes I think the identity of the top 10s reflects something in my gaming "personality," and I did feel like something had changed when I dropped Up Front and Taj Mahal. (And my goodness, what would it mean if I dumped go for Zertz or Sittuyin or something?) Defending them like this has been an interesting experience. I considered looking at my bottom-ranked games, but for most of them I forget why they were terrible (I know Jeff and I tried to play Ritter öhne Furcht und Tadel when it came out, and it didn't work, but I can't remember why, but there it sits with a 1).
So Kudos to Yehuda for inspiring this; it was good for the brain on a quiet Saturday. And if it was bad for you...well, I'll have 3000 words written on some other random thing soon enough, that perhaps you might like.
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