Musings, Ramblings, and Things Left Unsaid

Packing List

2010-10-22T04:54:00.000-05:00

Next weekend, I embark on the first of two (?) lengthy research trips: About seven weeks along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to Natchez to Vicksburg to Little Rock (which is, granted, not on the River), and thence to St. Louis for the holidays. This is the longest research trip I've taken yet, by a couple of weeks, so packing is an interesting proposition.

Clothes, for instance, are trickier. Baton Rouge will get up into the 80s (30 C) while I'm there, but when I leave St. Louis it'll be in the 20s (-5 C), so I need a few different layers.

The other trick, of course, is staying sane while being alone on the road for almost two months. I'll be fairly busy, even when I'm not in the archives; I need to be categorizing all of what I find so I can get to it when I start writing. I also have a writing project I need to work on--on games on the Civil War--so that'll take up some time.

But there will be some time off. I'm casting an eye over the bookshelves and the game shelves, trying to figure out what to bring along. "Small" is the order of the day, of course, along with solo-able. I picked up Space Hulk: Death Angel on the recommendation of a great many people, and it's certainly a small enough package. Combat Commander is a natural; I'm also looking at Ancient Battles Deluxe, which is climbing up the ladder for me.

I may have discussed it before, but maybe not. It's one of my beloved "toy box" games, with the ability to depict a great many battles in one package. It's a redesign of the old 3W Ancients, which is the second game I bought in Austin (Europa Universalis being the first, of all things). The new one is more complex--although you can use the old rules if you want. But while it's more complex, it's still simple enough; it's no GBoH, that's for sure. It's not a dissertation on ancient and medieval warfare...but then GBoH isn't, either. (I got into a long Facebook argument about this with Richard H. Berg...) But it's fun, and it has a small footprint, and the time investment isn't great--and it provides a whiff of verisimilitude.

I'm trying to decide whether to bring a chess set along. I feel chess fever in my bones again, which is never a good sign. Speaking of reissues and revisions, a new edition of my favorite chess book ever reached my doorstep the other day: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's more than the usual game collection; it's a kind of autobiography written by a kind of idiosyncratic player, David Bronstein. He's famous for almost being World Champion in 1951; he drew the match (meaning he didn't take the crown) under suspicious circumstances, and there's a certain bitterness that tinges the book. But it's almost a kind of endearing bitterness; it's a sign of a real, tangible personality, which is often lacking from these kinds of books. Anyway, it's gotten me thinking about the Game of Kings again.

But on the other hand, there's the new Master Play, with fourteen go games deeply (and amateur-friendly) annotated by Yuan Zhou, who is making a nice authorial career out of this sort of thing. His books make me feel like I understand the game a little bit better after I read them. I don't think I actually play any better, but I might be appreciating well-played games better. In an attempt to actually improve, I've invested in Winning Go: Successful Moves from the Opening to the Endgame. Of which I cannot speak much at the moment...

Of course, what all this means is that I'll pack up all my games, and all my books, and forget my laptop...or the five (six?) chargers and cords I need...

Getting Educated: Football Edition

2010-10-08T19:23:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts as I slowly assemble my first "real" miniatures army...on which more soon. It's part of my program of finding small-footprint games to take along on my research trip.

Anyway, I'm a big sports guy. I'll watch darn near anything on TV or in person; it accounts for the vast majority of my TV time. My favorite three sports are baseball (obvious first place) and then hockey and college football (which flip-flop in my mind periodically). Baseball and hockey I know pretty well. I've played them, or games very like them, since I was nine. When I watch games on TV, I know what's happening and what all the terminology means.

Football's different. I never played, really, and while I watch football all day long on fall Saturdays I can only really relate to it aesthetically and tribally. I can't diagram plays, I don't know what a "veer" is, and really a lot of the intricacies of the game are beyond me.

TV doesn't help. There's a lot going on on a football field and there isn't much dead air to fill talking about them seriously. With baseball, there's a lot of time between pitches and at-bats to discuss what's happening, how strategy works, and so on. Sometimes they'll cut away from the action to describe some skill--what a "circle change" looks like; things like that. Football just doesn't have time.

(Neither does hockey, and more so, which is why it's hard to really get into unless you've played, I think. There's a lot going on that just looks like chaos to the uninitiated. Basketball is that way with me; I can only fully enjoy basketball if it's a team I care about (there are three of these) and I'm watching them in person. It's mostly tribal. Key fact: I never played a game of basketball in my life; just HORSE and other messing-around games.)

ANYway, I decided this season to educate myself about football. I'm kind of casting around. My first attempt (I declared myself one step above Football for Dummies) is Pat Kirwan's Take Your Eye off the Ball. It's endorsed by NFL.com, so you figure there's some sort of official Nihil Obstat/Imprimatur involved here. I certainly find it interesting reading; it goes through many of the steps of putting a team, game, and position player together, discussing the various skills involved and going through at least some X's and O's. I could probably stand some more hand-holding for particular plays and what they entail but I'm following along. Of course, the proof comes on the weekends, if I'm getting more out of the games than I was previously.

What's kind of interesting is his attitude towards the college game. The college game, in the NFL's eyes, exists to prepare players for the pros, and he goes into some detail about what the colleges do well and poorly--and wishes that they'd push more running backs out the door so their NFL careers can start a year earlier. I'm still a tiny bit of an idealist when it comes to college football, partly since I'm watching the student-athlete/instructor interaction at close range. The football players I've taught have been pretty good students, honestly--partly because we're lucky to have Joe Paterno who has built a strong organizational culture of taking class seriously. (This is honestly kind of rare, sadly.) So I like to pretend that college football can and should be about the "college" part, and can do so while preserving some pretty good football.

Of course, there's no reason for the NFL to give a damn, other than some sort of weird altruism.

I've begun having fun, though; it'll be good if I can intellectually connect with the third of my top three sports.

News and Views

2010-09-21T12:03:00.000-05:00

Greetings from my desk at Penn State. Sitting before me, and on top of the, um, upper top of the desk, are perched all but one of the commercially-published games on the whole Civil War to appear in English. (I also have one in French, and missing one in Japanese.) I'm working on ways to compare these things. Do I focus on particular design issues--how to integrate emancipation, the draft, etc--or the trend towards the "academic" in these things--having a patina of seriousness? I want to talk about everything, but I only have twenty pages...

At the California University of Pennsylvania--not to be confused with the Indiana University of Pennsylvania--there's a class on Military History being taught by Paul Crawford, a medievalist. It's of interest because of its attempt to integrate games in the syllabus. Games present kind of a problem for the professor, at least one of a largish class. (An eight-person seminar is no sweat; two teams and away you go.) The rules have to be easy enough for them to be grasped by a kind of cross-section of undergraduate humanity...who are not famous for reading things carefully for class. The big problem, though, is that they take up a lot of time. With all the hoo-hah associated with new gamers learning a new game, you have to figure on three hours for even a "short" game by our standards. That's two movies' worth, and every hour you spend on the game is an hour you can't lecture. I want to use games in my own teaching, so I'm following this class closely; I'm going to see if I can head out to see the class in action some day. My hunch is that "Military History" is too broad of a topic; it's just too much time spent on games (three of them--Commands and Colors: Ancients, Crusader Rex, and Conflict of Heroes 1). It seems like it'd work better with a class on the Civil War--you wouldn't lose as much context.

I mentioned that Paul Crawford is a medievalist. This is relevant, since a large percentage of professor-gamers are medievalists, I've found. The two most prominent professors are Warren Treadgold (noted Byzantinist) and Tom Madden (noted, and controversial, Crusades scholar)...both at St. Louis University. I suppose you might add me; I have more medievalist DNA than anything else. A student here is a medievalist gamer. There's enough people for a panel, honestly; I'm going to see if I can get the band together for next year's Society for Military History conference.

The collection has been creeping up towards the cap. I have room for three more games, then they need to get sold off to bring new ones in. I'm pretty sure I can keep to this regimen, since I recollect vividly how miserable it got to have 1200 of the things rather than a "mere" 300. The thing I'm torn about is how, if at all, to count the games I have just for this or that academic purpose. Of these two dozen games in front of me, I own one because I enjoy playing it. Another one is there because of cherished childhood associations. I might, I guess, keep one or two more? But probably not. The rest of these are getting sold as soon as I don't need them anymore...especially since some of these are among the worst games ever made. One or two I might have to just pillage and pitch, they're so unsellable (they're worth less than the cost of shipping). My hunch is to not count the ones I won't play, but I worry that that might become a crutch for full-scale cheating.

That, or I worry too much.

I should mention, too, that I'll have a new blogging outlet starting up sometime in October. Penn State's history department is starting a blog on Civil War matters; it's mostly just about relevant news stories...except for me, talking about games on the Civil War.

I'm not exactly sure how it's going to develop just yet, but I'm grasping any opportunity to bring gaming to the attention of academia. I think gaming deserves comparable (not equal, but proportionate) attention as movies, novels, or--the closest connection--reenacting receive, which is a good healthy bit of attention. I think I can pull this off, with some carefully-aimed academic darts. If I get what I want--scholarly attention to the hobby--I'm curious how gamers are going to react. As of now, the ones I've heard from are enthusiastic...but I can essentially guarantee that the coverage of the hobby is not going to be uniformly positive.

The big challenge for an academic studying games is that they have to be at least vaguely versed in how these games actually work. They'd have to play a few games themselves to understand how games get put together, what you can and can't do, and so on. This is by no means an insuperable difficulty, but it requires more "inside knowledge" than studying books or movies. Anyway, I'm vastly curious how this could all play out.

Civil War Games: Foreign Intervention

2010-07-31T13:01:00.000-05:00

So, the Confederacy felt that it's best shot at independence was--once it was obvious that it was getting into a big war--to get international recognition, and preferably some heavy-duty diplomatic intervention up to and including military aid, much like the colonist rebels got in the American War of Independence.

Both the USA and CSA expended considerable effort to achieve their desired outcomes. However, historians today generally believe that there was no way England and France (the only two powers that mattered) were going to throw their weight behind the Confederacy. Just none. There was too much else going on in Europe, they consumed too much USA wheat, they'd get the cotton just the same if the North won, etc etc etc.

Which leads to an interesting game problem: Assuming the historians are correct, should foreign intervention be possible in a good wargame on the Civil War?

I've always argued that it should. I've seen wargames as trying to recreate the mindset of the relevant historical actors (at least kind-of), and players should be induced to act based on the perceived reality of the time.

Yesterday I was showing my burgeoning collection of ACW games off to some non-gamer historian friends, and this was met with howls of derision. Intervention was impossible in reality, it should be impossible in the game, and if you make it possible in the game you're teaching falsehoods.

Nobody's studied this, and it'd be a pain in the butt for me to study it, but I have a feeling that there are serious disconnects between the way gamers approach history as it should exist in games, and how historians would approach it. It's reasonably well known that the two camps like different kinds of book; this takes it the other way.

Historians have long given helpful suggestions to movie makers--who have not read these suggestions--about how historical movies should be made. Civil War historians have recently taken to telling artists what to paint. Nobody (except me, a little) has told game designers how to design their games, likely because nobody cares.

Anyway, it'd be interesting to sit down with historians of the Civil War, describe the whole boardgame concept in a few sentences (I've gotten good at this), and see what they think of some of the major design challenges ACW game designers face--like foreign intervention. I'm too close; I'm too much of a gamer. (Even though I've played one ACW game once in the past eight years, and it was solitaire.) But I'm becoming curious about the gap between historians and games, just like in movies and art.

Thing I did not expect

2010-07-30T14:59:00.002-05:00

I had no idea that taking a blog private, and then going public again, would jack up RSS as much as it does. The feed may never work right again...

Oddities in Civil War Games, Part 1 of n

2010-07-29T09:13:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned earlier, I'm writing a book chapter/article on games covering the Civil War on the (grand) strategic level. One of the challenges is writing about games in such a way that they make sense to academic historians, most of whom haven't played "real" wargames in their lives. (Although some will have.) I also have to look at these games not as a gamer, but as an historian, and when you do that you look at different things. For instance, as an historian I don't care whether the games are fun, pretty, easily understood, balanced, or anything like that. I do care about the art on the cover, the name of the game, and what sorts of things the game covers--or not.

(It occurs to me that "balanced" needs an asterisk; I care about how likely it is that the North will win the war on the board, but not how likely it is that the Northern player will achieve the game's victory conditions.)

Anyway, I've been amassing a giant pile of Civil War games. Some of them have struck the historian bone in me one way or another. One example:

A House Divided: The Brothers [sic] War. At the beginning of the game, the single most powerful Union army is under the control of William Clarke Quantrill in Jefferson City, Missouri.

I mean, honestly. How does this happen? Quantrill had a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it career as a "Unionist" in Missouri, and at the height of his fame (as a Confederate) had a band of maybe five hundred men. There is just absolutely no way Quantrill commands the most powerful troops the Union has, and furthermore there is no way that said troops would be in Missouri and further-furthermore there's no way that the least-powerful single Union force on the map is the one McDowell has facing off against Beauregard and Johnson. I'm assured that the game is pretty decent but I'm going to have trouble convincing Actual Historians that this game was designed by grown-ups.

Interestingly, this is one of the huge pile of Research Material games that I might get to play. I'm curious how it works; it's designed as a 3-vs-3 team game, and has very simple rules. I'm just barely hopeful that I can con five people into playing this thing. One problem has been getting pieces. It doesn't come with counters or anything; you're supposed to use the pieces from the 1998 version of Risk. This version of Risk no longer exists in stores, and I had to pay $ to get pieces off eBay. Kind of annoying.

In other game-buying news

2010-07-24T19:06:00.000-05:00

I've actually been buying a lot more games than I detailed below. They are, however, not really for fun. Assuming all goes well, I'm going to be writing a chapter for a book to be released in two or so years from a major academic press. The book is a collection of the "most innovative research" done in popular culture studies over the past decade. Go me! Anyway, I thought that paper was dead and gone, so I got rid of most of the "research material" for it. However, now that I need to expand that paper into a full-blown chapter, I need to get it all back.

The chapter is on how the Civil War is "remembered" in popular culture by board games. I'm focusing on games that cover the entire war, since trying to grasp the whole wooly beast in one chapter is essentially impossible. The basic narrative is that, since 1961, the number of people playing these games has gone steadily down, from hundreds of thousands of copies sold in mainstream stores, to smash hits of 4-5000 sold worldwide today. However, the consumers have become more educated and have begun to demand more "seriousness" from their games. You can see this in little ways. We have no idea who designed Battle-Cry, but you now typically see the name of the designer on the front of the box, like an author. You have lengthy defenses of design choices, bibliographies, and sometimes footnotes. Many games nowadays try to incorporate not-strictly-military events into the games, with mixed results. And so on.

Anyway, to write this thing up "for real" I was going to need a fairly complete collection of wargames on the Civil War, since it's harder than you think to grasp what's going on with scanned rulebooks. I started out with three; Blue vs Gray, VG's Civil War, and Victory Point's (obnoxiously named) Lost Cause. I also need to have some of the bad games. This is easily the most unfortunate aspect of the whole project, but we academics bleed for our art.

I've been lucky to find most of them cheap. I have now close to a complete collection of the games that reached something like a wide audience, or at least a wide audience of the wargame crowd. I may play none of them; I am curious to play Battle-Cry, so I want to try that, but the enormous War Between the States? No thanks. The horrific Eagle Games' American Civil War? Gah! (It has most curious emancipation and foreign recognition rules, though, so it'll get ink in the chapter.)

Hopefully there'll be a math trade for wargames around the time I'm through with this thing.

And I'll never need to write about them again...

PS: What's the most "influential" game of all? Battle-Cry, of course. If you ask almost any Civil War historian who was ten when Battle-Cry was on the market what his first great impetus towards ACW studies was, dollars to doughnuts it was Battle-Cry. Even though the game, as a depiction of the actual or plausible war, is completely ludicrous. I mean, it bears no relationship to the war whatsoever. When I was ten, I got the VG Civil War game; didn't do much to move me towards ACW studies, and I've never met anyone ca. my age who was particularly inspired by it or any other boardgame. Just a curiosity.

A Napoleon in search of his Waterloo

2010-07-24T18:48:00.000-05:00

Hey!

So, under the new game-buying regime, I only buy games when I know they'll make it to the table, and fill niches that need filling, or replace games that are already there. I've been on a bit of a game-buying spree, by my "new" standards; I bought the latest set of airplanes for Wings of War (not a game in and of itself, and I love the stuff), completed my set of Dungeoneer (which all link up, so it's a quasi-game, and anyway I love Dungeoneer to death), got Settlers of America (a near-guaranteed "player")...and I wanted one of the new Napoleonics games that are coming out.

With wargames on battles, I like games that can do a lot of battles, rather than just one. "Toyboxes," I call them, where you can take out the parts and put them together every which way. The only games on a single battle I own are for my beloved Battles of the American Revolution series. (Just got Pensacola: Yes!) On the other hand, I own several toyboxes--Memoir 44, Commands and Colors: Ancients, Ancient Battles Deluxe, Hold the Line, Infernal Machines, Battle Cry, Trenchfoot, Cry Havoc...lots. As the ludic cognoscenti are aware, we are about to be awash in Napoleonic toyboxes. There are three currently out, and a fourth on the way. I don't have anything that does Napoleonic battles--I don't count Manoeuvre--and I do have an interest in them, so it seemed reasonable to make room on the shelf for one of them. ONE of them. None of this buy-all-four nonsense, even if I "swear" to trade off three. I know my weaknesses. So, it came time to check the market.

I was originally drawn to the "official" one, Commands and Colors: Napoleonics, coming to us from GMT. Here's the thing, though. Straight-up C&C does best for linear action, which is why (until Breakthrough) it shone brightest for Ancients (the height of linearity, as it were) and the beach assault scenarios for M44. There was no coherent way to do Gettysburg, although some insane person tried once, with eighteen boards or some nonsense like that. If you look at Napoleonic battles, they're pretty square, rather than rectangular. Lefts and rights are relative, if existing at all. It's not really built for C&C treatment, I don't think.

(You know what is? Musket-and-pike era combat. C&C: Thirty Years War? That'd be awesome, for me and the six other people who would get it.)

So I looked elsewhere. The prettiest game with the most grandiose name is The Battles of Napoleon: The Eagle and the Lion. (Sorry for not linking to these; it takes an extra thirty seconds each and TIME is MONEY when you're blogging for free.) It's also the biggest box, and the most expensive. $100 straight up, unless you buy it online like everyone else. Much like all its competitors, it focuses on the French against the English.

(Does this strike anyone else as a Marketing Fail? I mean, OK, we've all heard of Waterloo, but isn't someone out there interested in Borodino? Austerlitz? Can't somebody be different, and separate themselves from the pack?)

It is awful pretty. Here's the thing though. For your Ben Franklin (plus tax), you get a bunch of English, a bunch of French, and no Waterloo scenario. OK, sure, there are clashes within Waterloo, but not the actual near-run-thing itself. Also, poking around I found a PDF of the rules to download and discovered that at

forty-seven pages long

they exceed my current rules-length tolerances considerably. I decided that this was $100 safely spent elsewhere.

What helped Gio Games's Vive l'Empereur Deluxe is that it's the underdog, and I'm a sucker for that. But I'm also a sucker for games that don't use cheesy cardboard stand-up soldiers on plastic chips. I'm a connoisseur.

Which brings us to Worthington Games' entrant, Napoleon's War. This had a lot going for it. It seemed like it would bring us new scenarios and armies the fastest, for one thing, and would include the War of 1812. I don't see Nexus and FFG bothering with Bladensburg for Battles of Napoleon. It's also a system I trust for the period. I have Hold the Line and its predecessors, and I find that they work pretty smoothly, especially for asymmetric sides. Very few unbalanced scenarios, game-wise. The rules are fairly simple, I'm pretty familiar with them, so I say go for it.

And go for it I did.

I read the rules, they seem nifty, I set up Waterloo, and as I'm doing so the problems start to mount. These are small hexes, and packing five or six miniatures in there with a counter or two is a bit of a tight fit. But really, the problem is the overall size. Waterloo, when you stand back and look at it set up, is a small battle. And it shouldn't be small. It should be epic. It should have more than sixteen units a side, scrunched up in the middle of the map. It's a small physical space.

The beauty of C&C:Ancients and M44 is the almost operatic quality the games take on when you really get everything spread out, and you have elephants and archers and Panther tanks and cataphracted camels and Russian hordes and God knows what else going almost six feet wide, squaring off against each other in three dimensions and there's a real, serious tension before the first card is played, as the units' potential energy is straining, waiting to be released in a massive battle.

You don't really get that here.

And, for the first few games in the series, that's OK. I mean, the battles of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution just aren't very big battles. Germantown can be cozy. Waterloo needs to be big. Borodino needs to be big. Austerlitz needs to be big. Wavre can probably be a little smaller, along with most of the Spanish battles.

Let me be clear, too, that having played through this, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. These are good rules. It's a shame that the maps are one-offs; I'd prefer a blank map with tiles to strew over it. (But really I'd prefer bigger hexes; these things are just tiny.) I'm eagerly awaiting the next releases in the system...I just wish there was an Epic Napoleon's War to go along with the rest of it.

Edits a' comin'

2010-06-23T19:12:00.000-05:00

Today's discovery: More than eight people read this thing. "Train Games" below is going to see wider republication soon, so I'm going to go over it for style and making sure I actually believe everything I say, and that there aren't any straw men in sight (I may have glimpsed one or two). I'll be sure to mention that it's edited from original posting, of course.

Tomorrow sees the first day in the archives; I've been stuck in limbo the last three days, waiting for some approval to come through in the archives, so I've been watching soccer and working on an article I'm submitting. The soccer is currently going somewhat better (Team USA: Not the class of the tournament, but they do sure enjoy putting on exciting finishes). Both are more fun than doing pushups, which is also how I've been spending the time. Eventually, you run out of things to do, you know? I'm such a bad Civil War historian; I'm about four miles from a National battlefield park, Monocacy, but I haven't been. I went last time I was here; I doubt it changed, but when I voiced that to some of my fellows they looked at me like I'm insane: But it's a battlefield!

I'm a wargamer who thinks wargames are lame, an a Civil War historian who thinks the battles are boring. It's a living. I'm reminded of a story my MA advisor, Bill Piston, told about his Phd advisor, T. Lawrence Connelly. He taught at the University of South Carolina, in the middle of the state (Columbia) but fairly close to Charleston. Dr. Piston (then "Bill") discovered that Connelly had never--in decades of teaching in South Carolina--been to Ft. Sumter. Dr. Piston asked why not. "Because it's not required," said Dr. Connelly. That's been my mantra: Knowing all the corps commanders at Gettysburg, naming all the members of the Confederate Cabinet, going to all the battlefields: Not required. Optional, and sometimes enjoyable, but not required.

Nothing new under the sun

2010-06-23T10:29:00.000-05:00

My fellow wargamers might have more realistic notions of wargames-as-history than I thought (or than they used to, as I recall), based just on this thread on BGG, asking "which games are best at making you learn history" ("Making"!). Short answer: Not many, if any.

Train Games

2010-06-23T07:42:00.000-05:00

NOTE:　I have more Real Life going on than I expected this research trip, so I'm not sure how much I can grapple with this. Just some thoughts on gaming, although what I really want to do with this is go from this to meditating on how academic military history is, as it were, losing the war. Hopefully I'll be able to return to some of this soon. According to the Geek, I own eleven train games, and four or five expansions thereto (more than that, actually; I don't think I logged any of my extra maps for Steam). I had even more, obviously, before the sell-off; they've always been prominent features in my Euro collection. Some of them are light and fluffy--Transamerica, say--and others are meatier, like Steam (especially with Steam Barons grafted on). Some, like Union vs. Central, are so intense that most owners of the game only play it two or three times and declare themselves very pleased to do that.

What's interesting about them all is that most of them have no pretense at being, well, really educational about how the whole railroad business world actually operates. I mean, honestly; most of the aspects of actually running a railroad company are kind of boring, when what we really want to do is either build track or be wheeler-dealers in the finances. (Most games have these in some sort of combination; usually but not always being high in one area means being low in another.) But there's so much else about running a railroad that's never covered, or gets washed out--few games really get into government investment and control in any meaningful way, for example. (Some touch on it.) Then there's dealing with labor...other examples abound. No train game attempts to do everything, but usually chooses one or two aspects of the whole "train concept" to focus on, and spares the players the rest. In a game where the primary focus is on actually building a rail network, if the network roughly resembles a plausible reality it gets a decent score. Again, if the financial aspects pass a sniff test, they do OK as well (although I seem to recall a certain finance professor passing harsh judgement on a number of financial train games).

I don't recall too many arguments out there about whether a particular game is or is not a train game; usually if something has little trainies it's a train game. I think some of the dicier propositions are games like 2038 which look a lot like train games, but in fact contain no trains. I note that BGG calls 2038 a train game, which seems to have drawn no comment in the forums. (1830 BC: Not a train game.)

So they're not exactly educational, except for maybe learning geography (which I think is why my dad bought the family a copy of Empire Builder), the games have a nice range from light to heavy, and there's a reasonably robust community of "train gamers," many of whom play almost nothing else (heck, many play nothing but 18xx games).

It reminds me, frankly, of wargaming to a great degree--although there are much higher pretensions for wargames; wargames are Serious Business; so serious that many of the cognoscenti prefer "conflict (or historical) simulations."

I have yet to see a wargame that actually addresses warfare in a serious manner. Some of the CDGs come close; far closer than most traditional hex-and-counter games. If studying this crap has taught me anything, it's that warfare exists far beyond the battlefield, and in large wars can involve all of society. Wars can be affected by the combatants having differing concepts of manhood and courage--which can change over the course of a war. Dave Grossman studies the psychological costs of war; by manipulating these one way or another a clever (or foolish) commander can have a profound effect on the behavior not only of his men but the enemy and whatever civilians are underfoot. And then there are the civilians underfoot--my beat--who require more or less involvement from the occupying forces. In WWI, a major priority for the German army was to build a kind of military utopia in the occupied east, which sucked up serious resources. Why is it that an army would do that? No sane wargamer would do that; it's time and money and men that could be spent doing something useful like chasing the Russians around. But the German army did it all the same, and it's important to know that if you want to actually understand World War One.

We don't like wargames, in other words. We like combat games, where all this nonsense with Bob Hope and Lili Marlene and bond drives and on and on ("the boring parts," as my students put it) are safely ignored and/or abstracted out. OK, so the war as it was actually experienced is out-of-bounds; what are we left with?

We're left with combat, which at its purest form finds itself in battle games. In a battle game, how the generals got to be where they are and how the guns got to be where they are and how the soldiers write home to their parents and what they eat and all that other nonsense is gone. We have one line of men over there, another one over here, and let's fight.

And fight we do. We fight with considerably more than the generals at the time did, however. In essentially every game (Panzergruppe Guderian, I'm saluting you) the generals know how well their soldiers are going to fare under combat. My unit has a combat factor of "6," and yours has a defense factor of "4," I get to roll on the 3:2 table, where there is a 1/3 chance you'll have to retreat. Your historical counterpart knew none of that. Your historical counterpart probably also knew far less about the battlefield he's fighting on than you do; Lee was very misinformed about certain aspects of the geography around Gettysburg, which helped lead to the debacle on the third day. You, Wargamer-Lee, do not have that problem, and you can boss Longstreet around as you please.

And about that. Most games give you telepathic control over the men and subordinates under your command. Now, not always. In CDGs, you can't always move who you want, but if you can move him, he always follows your orders to the letter. Lincoln would have settled for that with McClellan. Truman would have settled for that with MacArthur. Lee would have settled for that with Longstreet. And so on. I don't think this is really contestable.

I have eleven train games. According to BGG, I have an even hundred wargames, and plenty of expansions. I consider the wargames I own to be kind of silly as simulations, no more or less trivial than train games are simulations of actually running a railroad. I just don't consider this a problem, since I don't really consider wargames and wargaming to be some kind of holy calling, where we're not playing a game we're running a simulation.

What the best wargames, and train games, are is evocative, something that gives a little thrill of part of the fun aspects of running an army or a railroad. For a second, we think we're there. We can suspend disbelief for at least part of a game and take on a bit of the spirit of combat and railroad administration. And they're competitive, and they're narrative. Consider, for a moment, this glowing comment on Crusader Rex (giving it a 9/10):

A really fun and enjoyable block wargame that captures the medieval theme very well. The 1.4 rules are an improvement, balancing the game nicely. This game always immerses me when I play it. I love it.

That's from Tom Madden, a prominent (if controversial) historian of the Crusades. It's balanced--more than what one can say of most wars--and immersive, which is the key here. It's not instructive, but it provides tension--and, if you will, enough madelines of history to evoke a sense that you're taking part in something historical. There's a difference between "capturing a theme" and "simulating history," and I think the former is what the best games do, and the latter is what we like to pretend they do.

I am a wargamer. I've owned probably north of a thousand wargames at one or another point in my life, and I doubt I've seen the last of them entering the collection. But as I've become a better military historian, at one point I became disillusioned with the whole wargame concept: These games are trivial simulations of what wars and combat are like! Who needs this stuff? But then I came to realize that simulation isn't the point, it's an impossible dream that propels some people on but the real matter at hand is to make you, mister wargame player, either Richard the Lionheart or Saladin. And given the constraints of the medium, real simulation probably isn't the way to go with that.

(Writing military history provides its own challenges, which I may get to later.)

Greetings from Maryland

2010-06-21T07:10:00.000-05:00

I've picked better places to live for a month. There isn't a desk, per se, and there's just the one table, which can't house both my computer and a game, which is a great shame. I suppose that just means more time spent on "work."

I've written a 2000 word dissertation on how terrible wargames are and why I love them so much. I'm trying to decide whether to complicate my life by posting it. We'll see how piqued I get as the week progresses.

Been watching a lot of the World Cup. My two favorite teams are USA (semi-obviously) and France. They're having somewhat different tournaments. I've been rooting for France in five straight World Cups now, but rarely has doing so been this huge of a pain in the butt. Also interesting is watching the furor in the United States over the whole World Cup project. This is the month where soccer is most popular in the US, drawing by far more coverage than for other events. The Champions League final was buried in pay-per-view in most areas, most Major League Soccer games are on weird channels, the fan base for particular EPL teams is fairly diffuse, etc. Many Americans are upset at how their countrymen only become soccer fans every four years; they somehow don't deserve to root for the US (or small countries, or whoever) since they're not huge fans in the other three years and eleven months. (Same with politics, honestly. All these Johnnie-come-latelies coming out of the woodwork every four years and pretending to like one presidential candidate or another--fie on them! If they can't be bothered to follow politics daily like a real politics junkie, they shouldn't get involved now. Wait, what?)

The most popular way for Americans to entertain themselves during the World Cup is to sit around and think of the best ways to Fix Soccer. Billions of people enjoy watching and playing soccer, so clearly something is desperately wrong with it. The primary ~~goal~~ object is usually to increase scoring, reduce draws, and avoid bad calls (this last being especially urgent in the US at the moment). Most of the ideas are cockamamie for one reason or another and I won't bother ticking them off.

There is, of course, a game link here. Western chess is also often considered "broken," with fears that the game is suffering from "draw death" with few actual wins, not much active play, etc. And every time there are plans to Fix Chess--offering cash bribes for wins, changing how you set up the pieces, reducing the time on the clocks, or whatever. And some of this actually happens, especially jiggling with the time controls. But the game soldiers on, being played by hundreds of millions (billions?) in tournaments, park benches, and homes across the world. And besides, every now and then the number of draws goes down and attacking chess returns when some new generation develops some new weapons and then all the worries are forgotten.

I'm also reminded of a period a few years ago when some gamers were worried that Eurogames had run out of gas, that the project was dead, and we'd have nothing but our old games to play. Then Caylus came out, inspiring a new kind of game, and Agricola came out, and a new explosion of good to great games hit the market and all this was forgotten.

I suspect the same will happen with soccer. Some teams will start opening up play, they'll be successful, and, like all successes, will be imitated. That's how it goes in every other sport, anyway, and I doubt the beautiful game is really all that different.

And now back to figuring out who, exactly, in the French camp I need to be cursing out. There are at least six plausible candidates, and I feel like I can only pick one target.

A Very Great Miscellany

2010-06-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

I've always had fun with these kinds of posts.

Baking seems poised to become my Number One hobby--which is odd, since gaming has held the title for twenty-two years (seizing the crown from model rocketry). I'm not sure what that'll do to my self-perception; it'll be interesting to see. I'm having fun, anyway. This week was exciting: I got two new bundt-style pans in the mail. I jacked up my original, plain-jane bundt pan when I made/burned a Kugelhopf a while back; looking to replace it, I decided to get a little snazzy. I discovered some neat pans from Kaiser that are super-heavy, nonstick (plusses/minuses), and, well, look pretty great, like "Domus" here. I like to make pound cakes (which are good for bundt pans), since they're really moist, dense, and keep a lot longer than spongier cakes. Since I'm the only one eating the things during the summer, that's all important.

I decided to get a copy of Karten Schach, Knizia's collection of chess variants, off the BGG marketplace. I like chess variants, like I just said earlier this week, I really like Knizia (when he's taking himself seriously, anyway), and I think I'll have an easier time getting rules-light two-player games to the table than anything else going forward, until/unless I move somewhere with a more active game community. And some of these variants look seriously clever. Still plenty of room on the shelves...

Speaking of, I looked at the shelves and figured that I could probably sell at least another 25 games and not die; not enough to be worth it, but worth keeping in mind.

Welcome, by the way, those of you who discovered this blog via the Chess Variants article. Between my post on Facebook and Russ's post on BGG, that article has brought in a serious number of hits; the first post since the reboot that has been more popular than my supposed picture of an FT-17 tank. I hope you enjoy your stay; we can probably call this a "game blog" for lack of anything better, although my guess is that no more than 40% of the posts are going to be game-related over the coming year.

On Sunday I head off to Washington DC for a month, working in the National Archives (which is powerfully, powerfully unpleasant if you're not nationally-known) and the Library of Congress (much better). This means I have to entertain myself. Sadly, my suite doesn't have a kitchenette so I can't make pound cakes for myself/the cleaning staff, so it's books-and-games time. Bookwise, I'm reading Yankee Warhorse, of course (of course), since I have to review it; I'm also bringing along Shadow and Claw, which is an odd book. I enjoy it, vastly enjoy it, and over the past eighteen months I've made it almost, almost all the way through Shadow of the Torturer (i.e., book one of four). Hopefully some enforced downtime will see me make real progress. Inspired by how much I liked The City and the City, I'll also bring along Perdido Street Station.

Gamewise is tougher. I know I have a table, but I don't know how big. I'll probably bring along Barbarossa Campaign in the hopes of having enough room. I want to write about this one in some depth for the blog; it touches on a lot of important points about wargames and what they're capable of (and incapable of). If there's not enough room, I'll probably go with another Victory Point game, Ancient Battles Deluxe, which is good clean fun in an hour or so. I might talk about that one, too, and about how as a simulation it is not obviously worse than Great Battles of History or other more highfalutin titles. (I'm reentering an "All Wargames are Crap" phase. They're fun crap, but crap. It usually passes in a few months.)

I also have an article to write. Can't forget that.

The next month will see either exceptionally heavy, or exceptionally light blogging. I don't think there's a middle ground. There's lots of downtime in the National Archives; if you get out of synch with the document-pullers, you can find yourself with nothing to do, nothing at all, for an hour and a half. You can't even leave. It's awesome. So there might be some blogging from within the hallowed bowels of America's junk drawer. And I've found that blogging sometimes inspires more Useful Work, so that might see some time. Or, I'll be such a research/reading/writing machine that I'll barely have time to eat, never mind blog, and I'll be a blur of high-functioning academia.

Expect lots of blogging.

Books with Pictures: Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants

2010-06-14T17:23:00.000-05:00

With most of my book notes--such as this one--the title goes to the Amazon page for it--behold: The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. In this case, however, it's not going to get you very far. The book is relatively difficult to get ahold of; in fact, I was haunting all the used book sites trying to track this thing down--it came out three years ago via a sub-tiny publisher that existed only to publish this book and no longer exists. Finally, I decided to check eBay, and discovered that Ancient Chess--one of my favorite eBay sellers--had a bunch of copies for thirty bucks including shipping.

So that was fun.

It came in the mail earlier today, and while I might have further thoughts later I thought I'd contribute a little bit now.

Pritchard (who died in 2005) was the foremost authority on regional, historic, fictional, proprietary, and all other forms of chess. It may well be that he knew more about chess variations than anybody has known anything about anything. He wrote a few books on the subject, and this is his magnum opus. It expands his 1995 Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, which is also very hard to find. The Classified Encyclopedia has 200 extra variants, bringing the total to north of 1600. It is organized into eight parts, and a total of 38 sections with varying numbers of sub-sections, each of which has between one and umpteen chess variants. Part three, for example, is devoted to variants with "boards of other kinds;" one section is on hexagonally-tiled boards, another with other planar boards, "cylindrical, toroidal, and spherical boards," boards in multiple dimensions...there are, incidentally, multiple six-dimensional versions of chess. My favorite game description in this section, though, is this:

Continuum Chess (Yes Laboratories, Suffolk, 1964). Board 9x9x15 and each piece occupies a point along a temporal axis 9 quanta long, giving 10,935 points of play. The rules are calculated to baffle, thus: "A red king on extra space positive or a white king on extra space negative lines shall be deemed the winner unless adjacent to minus chessman." For the resolute there is an advanced version of the game. There appears to be no evidence that either version has been played. (Booklet Continuum Chess, British Library X441/255)

You saw that right: That's a footnote, and there's one for every variant. In its way, it's as impressive as Continuum Chess.

I guess it's worth exploring why I like chess variants so much. One thing I like is that it's difficult to pin down what the platonic ideal of "chess" is; what is it that all these things are variants of? Some are subvariants; many add rules or pieces to Western (or International) Chess, but some are of the same generation as Western Chess. I like how all this can exist, and I'm fascinated that it does. No other game has as bushy a generational tree as chess, and I think it speaks to something important about its cultural and intellectual meaning over the years. I have a complete-enough-for-me collection of regional chess variants; I don't have many of the proprietary ones (I thought Tile Chess was hideous), although I'm scratching my chin about Knizia's box full of variant fun. Pritchard discusses Knizia's chess variants at some length--three pages--and they sound like pretty successful ways to turn chess into a Euro.

Pritchard missed a few. I'd have loved to read his description of Warmaster Chess 2000, which garnered an almost unfathomable 2.54 rating on the Geek. It also somehow earned an epic review, which I "thumbed" in appreciation. It makes you wonder how much else he missed, and what that means: This man was streets ahead of everyone else in his knowledge of his subject, and he still could never quite get everything.

This is vastly enjoyable reading. I like it in much the same way I liked reading Connection Games: Variations on a Theme, which it very much resembles in style. I like exploring the world of games. I like the math behind them, the history behind them, the culture behind them. Books like this open up a whole world of games that were heretofore unknown to me, which is hard for me not to appreciate. This is turning into one of those books--my favorite kind--where I can open it up at random and start reading.

Early reports, then, are very positive.

SdA Nominee: Campaign Manager 2008

2010-06-14T08:41:00.000-05:00

Campaign Manager is, I think, the game I played most in the 2009-10 period, with a total of [laughably low] plays. It took the fancy of one of my friends from the office, who, to his delight, kept drawing Obama as the candidate he was trying to guide to victory. Sadly for him, McCain (hi!) always won. I don't recall reading anything about undue brokenness to the game, so I'm forced to assume that I have an innate skill at Campaign Manager 2008.

I'm not sure it really feels like running a campaign, although it does a decent job of evoking the contest, assuming you read the flavor text on the cards. Without that, it's reasonably themeless. That's a big "without," though; we would get into our "roles" pretty thoroughly and that was a big part of the game's fun. If we treated it more reverently, as a chess-like test of wits, I doubt I'd have liked it very much.

I'm hoping that it's part of a series. There have been plenty of interesting campaigns in American history that could stand a game treatment. We've seen 1960 as a board game; 1860 would also be interesting (especially if you started in the year or two prior to the election, with a Republican player, a Secessionist player, and a national Democrat player). 1800 would be all kinds of wacky fun. I suppose that's what I like about Campaign Manager, in a way; it evokes an historical event without being, well, like a wargame--fairly complex rules, lots of pieces, lots of exceptions. It's not a simulation per se, especially since 2/3 of the events (all of which happened) don't occur in a given game, but it's still evocative, it still tells a story. That's part of what Tim and I were after; we each wanted to win, obviously, and we put serious thought into putting our decks together, but we wouldn't have bothered playing it more than once if it didn't have that storyline.

Another part of the fun--for me, anyway--came when Tim's fiancée would call. She'd always call around 10 or 10:30, after the game was over, and Tim would have to explain himself, detailing why, precisely, Obama lost this time.

For SdA purposes, Campaign Manager scores high for having been played an appreciable number of times, and especially for being a fairly simple but subtle and evocative gaming experience. Now that Tim's graduated, married, and employed I'm going to have to track down someone else to play it with...

Alfred Answers your Questions

2010-06-06T14:26:00.002-05:00

A recent search engine query that brought someone to these shores:

bipolar coming in handy for moving

I'm going to call you Dan, Dan from Minneapolis. Dan, I can't speak for everybody who's bipolar--which hasn't always stopped me from trying--but I can say that if you get your bipolar friend (who we'll call Steve) to help you move during a hypomanic state, he might be of more help than usual. (Which might not be saying much.) He likely won't need sleep, and possibly not as much food. He might even be one of the really gregarious manic types, and in a weak moment offer to help you move from the seventh floor of one building to the fourth floor of another for nothing.

Be sure to get that in writing, though, since Steve probably won't stay like that for very long. A big upswing, and before you know it your electronics are being chucked out the window to gory deaths seven floors down. A big downswing, and you're moving all by yourself for the rest of the day.

Overall, I'd say it's not worth it. If you're looking for moving help, I'd avoid bipolar folks at all costs.

(If the four of you in State College who are moving this summer read this, welcome! And I hope you take my advice to heart...)

What is a wargame?

2010-06-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

That title comes up as an I Want to have an Argument, Please starter on BGG from time to time. There was an argument once upon a time about whether Civilization is or is not a wargame. This was the closing argument from the winning side ("No"):

Definitely not a wargame, but an econ game with a conflict system. And even the conflict system isn't really a combat system; it is a means of determining whose culture survives in a given area.

If there's a better definition of ancient war, I haven't heard it...

(Slight exaggeration, but still.)

(Stupid wargames and their "battles;" the more I study war the more I'm interested in what happens behind-the-lines, from changing conceptions of manhood brought on by war to occupations to bond drives.)

Asymptotically Approaching the Ideal

2010-06-04T12:02:00.000-05:00

I only kept a very few "monster" wargames in the sell-off. Most of them are just too big, too time-consuming, and in most cases I have a game handy that does what the monster does in a smaller, more manageable package. One of the monsters I kept is Europa Universalis. A thread on BGG recently asked what game we would play if we had an entire week off, a picked set of gamers, and infinite space. I picked Europa Universalis--a mess, but a glorious one. There's been no game like it. 1492-1792 in yearly frickin' turns, that covers everything from conquering the New World to squabbling over the old one to developing new technologies to industrialization to the development of a merchant marine to the Reformation...it's an amazing achievement.

And I don't think anyone has the foggiest idea how to play.

It came out in 1993, so it's about seventeen years old. About the same age as the freshmen I teach history to. (Good God.) I bought it for $20, because the store in Austin (the one up north that sold train stuff, too) put the wrong sticker on it. Anyway, for the past seventeen years there has been a community of Europa Universalis players (such as myself) that has been trying to figure out the rules. We have not yet succeeded. Every day, there are a fair number of rules questions posted to the mailing list, from people who have played the game twenty times.

It doesn't help that there are various versions of the rules out there. There are the original French rules, the French rules with errata--and there are many iterations of the errata--French rules with expansion rules and clarifications, the second edition French rules...and then there are the English rules, which were officially done by the publisher but are often laughably bad (these are the rules that follow a "homogeneous rubric"). Any version of these rules is labyrinthine. One group of players has split off to forge a new set of rules so you can play a game with the old components but new(ish) rules. And now that set of rules has translation issues, since it was decided to do it all in English since that was a common language...even if it's a third language for many! And of course it has errata of its own, and clarificaitons...and for both sets of rules, there's a running argument about whether the exegetical work carried out online is "official" and also what "official" could possibly mean because the very concept of a Europa Universalis tournament is patently absurd.

So here's the thing. Is there something one can call "The Rules" to Europa Universalis? Is there some ideal ruleset that's worth approximating, or I daresay achieving? At some point during this game's early days the designer and developer presumably had some reasonably hard-and-fast idea of how you were supposed to go about playing the game. The designer and developer have shrunk back, however, and direct access to this kind of information is no longer with us. We have to deal with what we have, which is the rules, the components, occasional flashes of insight from the publisher (now sunk under the waves), and cold reason.

It's an interesting philosophical question. One group is questing after the One Perfect Set of Rules, which preexisted the published game, which any player can take and use, with or without a homogenous rubric. Another group (Hi!) has given up, and accepts that playing a game of Europa Universalis requires having a roll of ludic duct tape handy to kluge one misinterpretation after another.

We all like the game; none of us play it enormously often, because it's just not that kind of game. I'm toying with the idea of setting it up again for a great, silly solitaire experience. But I don't think two games have ever been played with the same set of rules, and I don't think it'll ever happen.

(More fun with philosophy: Are all these then playings of the same game? By what criteria can one say that a particular playing was "more incorrect" than another?)

Anyway, it's impressive to see a game with such a hardcore following, a group that one can say has faith in the game, that sees its greatness despite all its shortcomings. I can also see why it got turned into a computer game...with very different rules.

Found Item

2010-06-03T17:23:00.000-05:00

So, even after the sell-off, and renouncing a huge collection, there were a few games I knew I wanted to add to the shelves. I wanted Civilization; I didn't care about Avanced Civ or the other bells and whistles very much, but I liked the base game a great deal. I also wanted the classic 3W game Regatta, since there are some sailors among my friends and if I can guarantee a game will hit the table, I have a certain interest in it.

On my grand tour of Central PA game stores, I found a nice little out-of-the-way place that sold all kinds of hobby stuff--yarn, puzzles, a dizzying array of terrain for miniatures wargames, and a great many shelves of boardgames. Including some kind of elderly games...like Civilization and Regatta, and for then-current MSRP. Rather than, say, what they're worth now. The whole store was full of half new stuff, half old stuff. There wasn't much worth buying just to flip, so I didn't talk myself into buying anything beyond what was on my checklist but still: Good find.

SdA Nominee: Tobago

2010-06-03T16:35:00.000-05:00

I have a feeling I've written something before, way back in the archives, that either repeats most of what I'm about to say, or contradicts it. I see this as a potential problem as MR&TLU: Reloaded continues on its merry way, especially since I can't be bothered to go through and check. I'll fall back on the favorite politicians' dodge, which is that everything I say now that's different from what I said before is proof of a growing, evolving mind, and everything I say now that's the same as what I said before is proof of a sturdy, mature intellect and body of guiding principles. Either way, enjoy.

Tobago is an interesting game, which is why I'm discussing it. It's not an intense brain-burning experience, but it's not trivial either; you are rewarded for planning ahead, positioning yourself to take a variety of actions as necessary, and balance one kind of action over another. Many games are like this. What makes Tobago special? Why did I keep it when I got rid of the vast majority of my other games?

The big thing that Tobago has that many of its worthy competitors do not is tactility--kind of a fancy term for "nice bits." But really, that's part of something deeper, I think, and that's a realization that the actual physical interaction with a game is sometimes important to its enjoyment. Bamboleo, and other dexterity games, are obviously in their own little tactile nirvana, but there's many other examples. I'm big on tactility, myself. I'm not sure I always was, but that seems to increasingly be the case. Playing through a game of chess or go is just more fun on my nice sets than on my cheap ones. I can't imagine playing Zertz online and really enjoying myself; the "real" version has a strong physical preference, more so than most of the other Gipf games...which may well be part of the reason it appeals to me more than the others.

Bamboleo is on one end, wargames are on the other. Wargames often have beautiful maps, but there isn't anything to engage with in the third dimension. Block wargames are something of an exception, naturally. It's relevant that after I "blockified" Clash of Empires it became a favorite game, whereas before it was one August 1914 game among many. (Partly it's also because making it a block game makes it actually easier to play...one guy on the 'Geek said it actually made it the best block game out there...and he might just be right, depending on when I last played EastFront.)

I'll also remind the audience of how much I like Commands and Colors games...

So Tobago, with its ATVs and its giant stone heads and its trees and its pretty pieces of cardboard push one of my big blinking red buttons. And I don't think I'm alone; the giant stone heads are becoming things of legend and why one isn't a character in Board to Pieces is beyond me.

What I also like about Tobago is that it uses a mechanic from one of my favorite little games, Old Town. Old Town is the only game I know of that uses archival research as a thematic element (although Fleet 1715 might too; I never got to play that one). You're trying to figure out where, in this empty plot of land, the various buildings in this wild west town were located. You play cards, each of which narrows down the possibilities. The goal is to be the guy who definitively locates one or more of the buildings on his or her turn.

Tobago is similar, for locating the treasures. One card says it's within so many hexes of the water, another says it's next to a tree, and so on. Eventually it gets determined, and away we go to find it and split it up.

Now, here's the question. Is Tobago better than Old Town? Old Town is what I sometimes call a "simple" game, whereas Tobago is "complex." Old Town basically has one mechanic, and you crank it through time and again until the game's over. Tobago has several things going on; it's not just about locating the treasure, it's about the race to pick it up, getting the amulets the stone heads drop off, using said amulets appropriately, deciding what to do with the treasure cards, and on and on.

Neither of those is better than the other, obviously, but it's an interesting point of comparison. Simple games tend to be a little cleaner, but perhaps also a little dry. (You don't really get drawn into the theme of Hex.) A complex game might be able to, by means of its many mechanics, obfuscate the strategy sufficiently to keep everyone involved and "in" the game.

I found it easier to take Old Town seriously, probably because it is a simpler game. I also prefer the theme, to be honest, and that's not nothing. I don't need a great theme, but if it is a great theme, that's worth bonus points when calculating the game's Units of Quality. (And I can imagine malus points, as well.) In terms of presentation, Tobago wins big on 2D art and 3D tactility; Old Town just isn't that pretty. Now, I should note that Clicker's new game in the series looks pretty sweet, so they're on top of the problem.

I'm not sure I can give a straight answer about which of these games, both of which I like, I really think is "better." The Units of Quality metric is as opaque to me as to you, and it's my own metric. But I'll say this. For the game groups I can foresee getting to the table--mostly people who have only played maybe ten games in their lives north of Monopoly--Tobago is hitting the table. A group of more advanced gamers, it's Old Town. I think that in the rest of my life I'll play Tobago about five more times, and Old Town twice. I suppose that's a metric...

This is why nobody asks me

2010-06-01T07:57:00.000-05:00

According to BGG, I own 33 "games" from 2009-2010. There are a lot of asterisks there. Fifteen are expansions, and five are rework jobs on older games. That leaves (wait for it) thirteen actual games from the SdJ-eligible period. Of those thirteen, I've played precisely five. Which, almost miraculously, is the same number of nominations the SdJ has.

The nominees, then, for the 2010 Inaugural Spiel des Alfreds are:

Tobago,
Campaign Manager: 2008,
Phantom Leader,
Soviet Dawn,
and
The Barbarossa Campaign.

(Three solitaire wargames! Who could possibly have envisioned such a thing?)

Anyway, I figured I had two ways to go. The first was to write them all up at once into one 6,000 word monstrosity. The other way is to take one game at a time, in a series of ~~five 6,000 word monstrosities~~ five reasonably shortish articles.

It should be fun. All five are games I recommend, by the way, if you sense you might enjoy such a thing, which is always more enjoyable to write up than bad games. I'm not promising one a day, but I think we can be safely wrapped up in a week or so.

And, just like the SdJ, I have a "just missed the cut" list. These are the top five games I really want to play, but haven't for various reasons:

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare is probably my favorite miniatures system (despite its awful graphics), and I'd been waiting for an historical version for a while. In 2009, Battleground: Historical Warfare came out (on the Punic Wars)...and I haven't played it.

Adaptoid is a game I bought along with Nestorgames' reprint of Mole Hill (which I got signed by Reiner Knizia himself). It's a pretty sweet looking abstract, where you have to grow and shrink your "creatures" to battle the other guy. No clue if it's sweet playing or not; hopefully I'll find another abstracts fan around.

Last Train to Wensleydale struck me, when I opened the box, as a train game that has more to do with some of the real aspects of running a short line train company than any other game: bribing the government, hoping a big railroad buys your hideous little money sink, and buying rolling stock off the scrap heap of larger companies. DOWNSIDE: The board is hideous. I mean, it's really bad. I still have high hopes for this one.

Wars of the Roses fills a box better than any other game I own.

When Friedrich came out, I was struck by the elegance of the system, the beauty of the components, and never got it to the table. In 2009, it's prequel, Maria, came out, and I was struck by the elegance of the system, the beauty of its components, and never got it to the table. Can't wait for the third one!

And with that, we're off...

Place your bets now

2010-06-01T07:30:00.000-05:00

This year's Spiel des Jahres nominations are in. True to form, I've only played one of them--Roll through the Ages--and then solitaire. Identik I've never heard of. A la Carte I've heard of, but no more than that. Dixit surprises me here. I sold it during the Great Sell-Off; it's a game I very much wanted to get to the table, but I couldn't envision ever having a crowd that could handle it; it's just so surreal. It's a blend of thought and creativity I have trouble finding people for.

I share Erik Arneson's surprise that Tobago isn't on there. I wish it was on there, certainly, because that would mean I've actually played a SdJ nominee against other people. Furthermore, I thought it was an excellent game, for families or not. Remind me to get into why, later.

Of all these games, it seems like Fresco has the advantage of being extremely colorful and having a lot of hype behind it. Dixit may be a little outré, Roll through the Ages is monochrome, the other two are obviously too obscure to win (cough).

"Darkies in the Melon Patch"

2010-05-31T13:31:00.003-05:00

One of the most interesting BGG reviews I've read in some time.

UPDATES: The plot thickens on this one. The copies for sale on eBay now list it as a brand-new game. Thus, what was once a scam to trap the unwary African Americana collector is now...what, exactly? Chutes and Ladders for the Klan?

Greed is apparently pretty decent, at least

2010-05-30T20:47:00.001-05:00

Splotter's Greed, Inc. is one of the games I want to add to the collection, in large part due to its...ambiance. Brian Bankler gives examples.

I have two games left I'm trying to rid myself of, and they're reasonably valuable. (Battleground: Crossbows and Catapults and Affentennis.) Hopefully I can flip one of them for Greed in the valuable game math trade going on...

UPDATE: Or maybe it's not. I still think I'm willing to pay postage for it, from everything else I've read.

What, was I manic?

2010-05-29T19:45:00.000-05:00

According to the archives, I had 329 posts in 2004. That's almost one a day! How on earth did that happen? I had a job! Ah, six-years-ago me: Blogging dynamo.

My Top/Favorite Games

2010-05-29T19:35:00.001-05:00

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.

Bigger and Better?

2010-05-27T14:10:00.000-05:00

So, yesterday my copy of the latest toy for Memoir 44 came in the mail, the Breakthrough boards. These present an alternate "larger" format for M44. Whereas Overlord games (two boards meeting up the short way) were long and narrow, Breakthrough games are about the same width (ish) but far deeper, 13 x 17. The product comes with fifteen scenarios; more are appearing on the website. I set up the Prokhorovka scenario and went to solitairing it out.

If I have someone over to play M44, I will insist on playing a Breakthrough scenario. It feels almost operatic, with far more room to maneuver than with the shallow maps. It doesn't really work for multiplayer the way Overlord does, which is kind of a shame, although some people are trying to fit two Breakthrough maps together, which I hereby declare to be madness. Anyway, the experience feels much more like a miniatures game--with lots of maneuver, lots of units, a squareish field--than a game with miniatures.

Here's the thing, though. I can insist on playing it all I want because I love M44 and have two of everything that's worth having two of. The scenarios are designed for people like me. You usually need four or five expansions of one form or another to play any given Breakthrough scenario. If all you have is M44 and the box of Russians, you're out of luck. And sure, theoretically there could be fan-created scenarios that only use the base set and one or two common expansions, but nobody's doing that, since the people who are making the scenarios are freaks like me who want to play with all the toys in the toybox. This totally game-changing, revolutionary expansion is almost useless to the majority of M44 players, I strongly suspect.

Now, I understand why Days of Wonder wants to reward their customers like me than the (many) other customers who only have the base game, or the base game and an expansion or two. I suppose there's even the hope that Breakthrough would get some people off the fence and buy that one expansion they need for Pegasus Bridge.

It's just a shame, that's all. I don't know scenario design from a hole in the ground and have no real time to learn, so here's hoping that some of the die-hard designers will have pity on the unwashed...

Books with Pictures: Shopping in the Renaissance

2010-05-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

I like books. I have a very considerable number of them, and now that the games have been slashed the books have taken their place as the apartment's major decorative motif. The plurality of them are history books, and then mostly American history (for my sins). The trouble with American history books, at least the scholarly ones, is that they are almost unbearably drab. There seems to be a self-conscious desire to be seen as Scholarly within my part of the profession, a fear of seeming informal, unserious, or even idiosyncratic. Very few have color pictures, are on glossy paper, or frankly have much personality. Many are brilliant, many more are well-argued and coherent, but there's still a sense that we fear not being taken seriously if we let our hair down a little bit.

This is, historically, less of a problem for medieval and early modern (the Renaissance, kind of) studies. Many important, scholarly books by scholarly publishers in these fields border on the sumptuous. One of the most important books about the era, Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism is three volumes of luminous text and bright, shiny illustrations. Its like, in many different ways, does not exist in American studies.

A recent book that brought this to mind is Evelyn Welch's Shopping in the Renaissance.

I've mentioned before that I used to be a medieval economic historian. What I studied were how legal institutions affected economic institutions and vice-versa. This included things like the evolution of merchant organizations, laws concerning merchants and buyers, the role of the Church and state in amassing and distributing capital, and so on. This was reasonably hot stuff when I first started applying to grad school, but it's since cooled off substantially. Now, the big thing is the experience of mercantile activity, especially the experience of being a consumer. This has a lot to do with our present concerns about consumerism, consumer culture, and so on.

Welch's book is something of a monument in this new kind of economic history. It's rather more restricted than the title implies; it's a two hundred year span (1400-1600) and only in Italy (and hence mostly in central and northern Italy). It also heavily favors the larger urban centers, rather than smaller cities and towns (although they are not entirely neglected). The light is substantially better in these areas than in many others, of course, and thus leads to a richer view of what's going on. Still, I hope one day to read a similar book about the "beer zone" areas (Germany, England, Eastern Europe) as this provides for the "wine zone."

Welch deals with a great many topics, many of which extend rather beyond the purview of economic history, strictly speaking--markets as metaphors, the meaning of shopping, and so on--but have connections to institutional history. She also deals with sensory history--especially the sounds of the marketplace. The market could penetrate every aspect of one's life; I sometimes wonder if this is a little too "modern," but the evidence is good and the argument essentially persuasive.

I have to say that there's one chapter that might be of special interest to gamers: The chapter on auctions, lotteries, and other forms of capital transfer. Just how did auctions work in the renaissance? Did Medici get it right? A clever designer might find something useful in the half-chapter on the prevalence of pawnbroking (often leading to auctions) in renaissance Italy. You might also raise money by essentially raffling off one's things. Often it'd be the state who would be handling the auctions and raffles, even of private goods--if you couldn't pay the taxes, what you had would have to be sold. It was actually considered an act of charity.

What impresses me, as a budding professional in this field, is how deftly she uses a wide array of sources--especially integrating literature and fine art. In my line of work we typically stick close to diaries, letters, and other "low mimetic," un-self-conscious material. The idea/fantasy is that they're less likely to be biased. Sadly, there isn't much art about the occupation of the Mississippi River valley, but as my career progresses I hope to find something with as wide an array of source types, and this is certainly a book to look towards as a model.

This is a good book for anyone interested in consumer culture. It's too easy, and wrong, to draw a line from the goldsmiths of Venice to the wordsmiths of Madison Avenue, but it is useful to demonstrate that there have been consumer cultures before, that they've been qualitatively different from what we have now, and presumably from what we'll have in fifty years. It is written fluidly and well, which combined with its very high production values makes it a pleasure to read, presumably for the non-specialist as well (I may still be too close to a "specialist" to tell).

Very highly recommended. When I was halfway through, I said it's the best history book I'd read in years, and I stand by it at the end of the book.

A Sad Day

2010-05-23T08:14:00.002-05:00

Martin Gardner, 1914-2010. I have the very fondest memories of sitting in the basement, poring over Scientific Americans from the seventies, and always reading Mathematical Games. They're coming out with compilation volumes, which is as welcome as it is overdue. If nothing else, I have Gardner to thank for introducing me to cellular automata, one of my favorite mathematical hobbies. RIP.

A Welcome Sign

2010-05-23T04:16:00.003-05:00

That review for Neuland just got approved (as a link) for BGG. Some admin has a sense of humor...

It's the top link, "An objective and in-depth review for the gamer of discernment." I got .25 GeekGold for my trouble.

MR&TLU Reviews for You: Neuland

2010-05-22T09:45:00.003-05:00

NOTE: This is the first in a long--he hopes--line of reviews aimed at the discerning gamer without any playing partners around. This is kind of a "demo tape" for the delectation of publishers around the globe, who might be looking at aiming more of their marketing at this particular demographic. We hope you like it. --MANAGEMENT

Greetings! We here at MR&TLU certainly enjoy our games, and using the editorial "we" when discussing them in a formal capacity. Even if we don't play them quite as much as we used to, having a certain number of them around "just in case" has its certain appeal. This is common for many people in many situations. Anyway, today we're going to take a closer look at a game from 2004, only what I have is the 2008 English edition: Neuland. It had been sitting unpunched on my shelves for about two years now (reasonably enough) and it's time for a Closer Look. (I'm trying out various taglines here. Publishers, if you have a preferred one, let me know.)

First off, the Title. And hey: It's an Entdecker title! I like when a game comes out in an English edition, but preserves the German (or whatever) title as it is. This gets Z-Man +2 Bonus Points.

Moving on to Box Size. It's a standard 297x297x72mm box, which is appreciated. It sits nicely atop Ta Yü, Tobago, Vinci, and Ingenious without unsightly overlaps. This earns Z-Man an A. (Get it?)

Games also have weight, of course, and this one tips the scales at 1540g. In this reviewer's estimation, this weight is not excessive considering the amount of material in the box.

Opening the box, the first thing most gamers are struck by is the game's odor. Having been out of shrink for so long, most of the odor has dissipated. This does not deter us. What remains are faint, earthy tones; a kind of slight muskiness with an overlay of chemical dye. Overall, this rates as Faint.

Many gamers now move to punch the game parts out of the sprues. MR&TLU's Reviews Dept. has chosen, at random, a baseline time of ten minutes to completely detach the pieces from their cardboard prisons and either deposit them in the sorting tray provided by the game, or, failing that, into baggies. The time taken to de-sprue the game will be deducted from ten minutes, resulting in a positive or negative score. We desprued the game in 8:43.2, for a score of 1:16.8. We feel we could improve on this time with practice.

Like many games, Neuland comes equipped with a Rulebook. It is a small-format booklet, which makes the rules seem longer than they are. The rulebook is certainly colorful and appears to describe the operation of the game adequately. No major typos were discerned. As no problems with the rulebook were discovered, the rulebook scores zero points.

FINAL TALLY. Looking at the scores, we have:

+2 + A + 1540g + Faint + 1:16.8 + 0

Which, according to MR&TLU's proprietary formula, results in

46 Units of Quality (UQ)

46 UQ! Only time will tell if that's a large number or a small number, but I think we can all join together to praise Eggertspiele and Z-Man for bringing such a fine product, in a standard-size box, to our shelves. Thank you, publishers!

Hm

2010-05-22T08:09:00.001-05:00

A mere 1300 words about an OOP game that gets a 5.5 on the Geek. Still rusty.

North to the Pole

2010-05-22T07:16:00.002-05:00

The first actual game discussed under the new/old management here is to be Safe Return Doubtful, a 1996 production from the late, lamented Simulations Workshop. At one point or another I've owned all of Sim Workshop's games. I've sold most of them--I wasn't playing them, so out they went in the sell-off--but I kept this one, along with Ironman Football (which is supposedly being reprinted by somebody or other) and Rus, one of the more interesting (and rare) games in the Britannia family.

Simulations Workshop was one of the great Desktop Publishing (DTP) outfits. Their aesthetic tended heavily towards black-and-white, since that's the easiest thing to print off on cardstock on one's home printer, which is what I'm pretty sure happened. Some of their games--including Safe Return Doubtful--were also notable for having a lot of little cards to cut out. It led me to invest in a paper cutter, which has served me well lo these many years.

Safe Return Doubtful is a game, essentially a solitaire game although there's a very limited-interaction multiplayer system also available, on Arctic exploration, from about 1845 to Peary's expedition. You outfit your expedition, get on your ship, and see if you can make it to the pole and back without everybody dying. Your main job is to outfit your expedition. What equipment is available to you (in the form of cards) depends on when you're setting the game; early on, you can only pick food, tents, and sledges; as time moves on you can add dog teams, navigation equipment, spare parts, medicine, and so on--all of which prevent or mitigate the effects of various disasters and ill-tidings. All these other fun toys cost weight, though, so if you take a bunch of stuff along that means there's less room for food, which is the king of all equipment in this game.

Once you've outfitted your expedition, you have somewhat fewer choices to make. Your ship starts at 70 degrees latitude, and obviously you're trying to get to 90. You don't know what's ahead of you, and you find out by flipping over a cards from a huge "action" deck, which tells you what kind of weather you've encountered (and hence how far you move, either by ship, dogsled, or man-hauled sledge), if something horrible happens to you, and/or if you've encountered a new kind of terrain (which is determined by drawing from another deck). Every two turns, you have to eat, which will usually use up one of your food cards. If you're out of food cards, that's Bad. You can hunt when the weather is good, but otherwise you and your men may starve to death in the frozen wastes. In the winter, you can't move and you can't hunt; you just have to hope to survive.

The big decision to make when the expedition gets going is when to turn back. This is the part I always have trouble with. "Surely I'll be able to hunt successfully on the return journey," I say to myself as I push on for the pole with a dwindling amount of food remaining. "Nothing bad could possibly happen." Sometimes this actually works, in the sense that once I finally do chicken out I manage to at least get survivors back to the ship.

As I've kind of suggested, this isn't one of those games where you have a lot of choices. You make an expedition, decide how far you're going to go, and beyond that you're at the mercy of the action and terrain cards. This doesn't bother me so much. For one thing, the game takes about twenty minutes, and as a time-waster I have few intellectual demands on it. For another thing, it tells a pretty decent story, which is my real goal. There's a certain excitement, as it comes down to the wire: Can you return to 70 before everyone starves to death? (That's the usual question for my expeditions, rather than "Will he make the pole?")

I just flew through an early-period expedition: Just sledges and food. (I forewent tents. Tents are for pansies.) The crew were rated as good sledgers, which means they avoid falling into crevasses and get frostbite less often. (There are several crews available, each with a specialty.)

How far north you go depends largely on how lucky you get in the open ocean. The ice shelf begins anywhere between 73 and 83 latitude, somewhat randomly. (If your ship makes it to 83, it's automatically now ice shelf, and you have to disembark.) I got pretty lucky, and was deposited on land at 83 latitude, after a little over a year of shipborne travel. The journey was reasonably trouble-free; it was icebound for a while, found itself among icebergs but avoided major difficulties, and there was a scare of scurvy (that luckily didn't decimate the crew). Good weather overall.

Moving on foot through the arctic proved more problematic. We were stuck in deep snow and stopped by a wide river at one point, and in a year made it just 3 degrees. I turned us back with one food card remaining. That food ran out after just one more season, and we thus had to stop every other turn to hunt until we got back to the ship. If you hunt, you can't move. Still, the weather was mostly pretty good...but once back on the ship, the food there ran out (planning!) and now we had to stop the ship every other turn to hunt. The ship was also struck by almost an entire year's worth of bad weather, and the crew and its Intrepid Leader risked dying of starvation on more than one occasion. However, at the end of the summer of the fifth year of the expedition, the ships reached the fishing lanes once again, and sailed for home.

There's a lot of atmosphere in the game. Some of it, oddly, does not affect the game at all. You have to select an explorer, first of all, and you get a nice card with a black and white image of the great man. Which one you pick makes no difference at all; there are no special abilities or anything. Then you pick a ship. Each ship is rated for cargo capacity and nothing else, but they're all named, kind of pointlessly--from a purely ludic standpoint. But...who wants to just have a 22 cargo point ship when you can have the mighty Fram?

I like it. It gets decidedly mediocre ratings on the Geek, and I understand why. Again: Very few decisions. My standards for solo games are different than for multiplayer games, though; if I can get a good narrative out of it I declare victory, and SRD delivers a pretty good narrative, especially considering the time investment. I have meatier solo games--Peloponnesian War, [kind of aircraft] Leader, etc--but I have room for lighter fare.

I wish Sim Workshop would become a living entity again. Managing a DTP company used to be a harder thing to do; you really did need to print this stuff off on a laser printer and stuff them in ziploc bags and on and on. Now, though, you don't; Randy Moorehead (Sim Workshop's owner/etc) could put all this stuff on wargamedownloads.com and just wait for the money to roll in. I love all the little outfits that are putting out games on ungamed subjects, or with weird rules, or anything else that needs low overhead to really work. Putting the games together takes a little elbow grease, sure, but on the plus side you're paying very little money (speaking as someone who is willing to trade time for money, as I am paid very little). I will say that cutting out hundreds of cards for Safe Return Doubtful has paid off marvelously for me...even though, looking back over all the logs I've saved, I've never won...

Will Review for Games

2010-05-21T17:58:00.003-05:00

So, this summer I pass a major milestone in the life of a young history scholar: I have a book to review for an academic journal. The Arkansas Historical Quarterly is sending me a copy of Yankee Warhorse, a biography of the Union General Peter Osterhaus. The book looks promising enough (he says, reading the forward), although the fact that it's written by the great man's great-great-granddaughter gives one pause. Anyway, they want it by August 15.

This reminded me that, now that the blog's open for business again, it's time to start angling for some free games from publishers that I can ~~turn around and sell~~ review.

DEAR PUBLISHERS:

My name is Alfred, and I am the chief cook and bottle-washer for this little blog, Musings, Ramblings, and Things Left Unsaid. This used to be a kind of popular and well-known blog, but it's been laying fallow for a while and the game blogosphere seems to have passed it by. Most of the blog's hits now come from people using international versions of Google to look for pictures of FT-17 tanks in Swiss service in the 1920s.*

This presents you with a rare opportunity: Presenting your games to a tightly-focused, discriminating audience. This is no random bunch of yahoos like the Dice Tower gets. No sir, this is an audience of fiercely loyal readers, as well as people who just never bothered to remove it from their Bloglines subscriptions. This is also possibly why Spielbox still lists it as one of the eighty top websites for games, but you don't have to know that.

Also, this reviewer can present a unique view of your game: The view of a man who has nobody to play your game with. This allows more of the review to focus on things like odor, box size, quality of wood used for pieces, the presence or absence of typos in the rulebook, and so on. The reviewer is also competent to declare that a game "looks pretty good, assuming the auction mechanic works." This can work for you. If you have a terrible game to inflict on the gaming public, but it uses simultaneous-selection to determine where the meeples go, I will have no idea that it's broken. You will thus have a review handy that focuses on the finish on the cards, how easily the Select-O-Matics are put together, and the attractiveness of the young lady on the box cover. (Grrrrowl!) In this review, the game will be very, very good indeed.

In short, I and my readers present you with an underrepresented demographic, one which can only be reached by you sending me free toys. In the meantime, I will persist with my current plan for reviewing only games that are either out-of-print, unpopular, made in somebody's basement--or all three, as is the case with tomorrow's game. And nobody wants that, in today's cutthroat gaming economy.

Sincerely,

Your friend,

Who now has lots of space on his shelves,

Alfred

*This brings in a fair number of my hits, actually.

The Medicated Life

2010-05-19T17:24:00.003-05:00

(More non-game stuff. Expect a game replay/review by the end of the weekend. But this is going to be a somewhat more general blog in many ways.)

On any given day, I take between eight and twelve pills, spread out over four or more "feedings" from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I see individual therapists three times a week--all different days--and have group therapy once a week, usually on yet another day. This leaves me with one weekday off, plus the weekend.

I'm not complaining, bragging, or looking for sympathy, any more than I would be if I were to describe the clothes I wear, my hairstyle, or how often I brush my teeth. It's become part of life, and is to a large degree what gives it its rhythm. I'd miss not having it all, in some ways. Besides, I think we all know plenty of people who take more pills than I do, and many such people are even younger. It's just a statement of fact.

Bipolar has tried to ruin my life over various periods from age fifteen or so on, but it only got diagnosed about two years ago. Under its baleful influence I flunked my way through six semesters of college, lost friendships I valued, spent money I didn't have, attempted suicide twice and harmed myself in other ways dozens of times. I also made a lot of friends, got a lot of nice things with the money I spent, and at times had a terrifying quicksilver intellect that has been partially dulled under the weight of all the medication. My most unstable period at Texas was also the period I was most popular with women. None of them wanted to date me, obviously--they weren't insane, just me--but I was a fascinating figure to follow along behind. Nobody at the time knew this explicitly, but it seems to be the best explanation for the phenomena.

Keeping bipolar from wrecking my life any further has become a major life goal, and is what animates most (but not all) of the therapy and pharmacology I consume every week. I miss some of being bipolar. You can grade mania and depression on a scale of 1-10; if you could bottle Mania 2 and sell it you'd be a millionaire; it's better than any drug. You're incredibly smart, funny, you don't need to sleep, you can eat and not gain weight, it's amazing. The problem is you can't stay there; you either rocket up (and that's when you start shouting at people for no reason) or plummet down--and in my particular brand of bipolar, the downs are way, way down.

I mentioned earlier that in order to write about war, you had to have an idea what lay at its foundations. If you're bipolar, part of dealing with the disease (condition, etc) is deciding whether you prefer saying "I'm bipolar," "I have bipolar disorder," or "I have received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder." The differences between the three are fairly subtle, but I think they're graspable. I usually say that I'm bipolar, sometimes that I have bipolar. It's been part of me for so long, and we've fought each other for so long, that it seems to be a part of who I am whether I want it to be or not.

I'm pretty "out;" not everybody is. I have a shirt with (Li2CO3) on the front--Lithium Carbonate, one of my medications, the traditional one for bipolar. I have a few other lithium-related items--for a long time water with a high lithium content was considered healthy, so it was bottled and sold like the Aquafina of 1890 or even turned into beer. I have relevant bottles from both. Sometimes I call myself crazy; in Britain some bipolar folk are trying to reclaim "mad" for themselves--calling themselves madmen and madwomen. I can respect that. I try to have a sense of humor about it, under the theory that it's far too important to take seriously all the time. There aren't that many "out" bipolar folks in academia, I'm discovering, even among grad students. I know they exist, though; I'm a designated mentor for grad students coming to terms with bipolar. I know of one other bipolar academic in History; oddly enough, he's a Civil War historian as well (Mark Grimsley, of many excellent books). He and I met once, and discussed how we've been coping. We mostly discussed how there should be far more bipolar academics out there than we know about--something like 2-3% of the population is bipolar, after all. But, for whatever reason, we're holding the banner and nobody's marching behind us. I seem to be the second-most prominent bipolar historian.

[MAN I get a lot of hits for that one paragraph there, all from Columbus. Welcome, OSU folk! Sorry, that's about all I know about Dr. Grimsley, and I don't think any of it's secret knowledge.]

What's frustrating is not knowing whether the pills are doing any damn good, or if they're just giving me side effects. After all, my life with bipolar has consisted of long stretches of relative calm, then a long or short period of chaos, then back to quiet. And the quiet can last a week, or years...between major events, the last gap was seven years. So for the past two, the pills are either the only thing that's kept me out of the hospital, or doing nothing my body wasn't doing already. What's even more frustrating is this: When I was treated for simple depression and anxiety, the thought was that after a sufficient course of meds and talk therapy, I'll be cured, and won't need the therapy anymore. That's not an option now; I'll be taking medication and seeing therapists until I die. I will never be "better."

I'm fortunate to have a lot of support--excellent insurance (total out-of-pocket for all my therapy each week: $5), good friends, parents who, I gotta say, came late to understanding what was wrong but eventually came around. I only lost two friends in the last manic-depressive episode.

I also have a blog, to which I can post maudlin things like this. Why am I writing all this? I guess part of it is the narcissistic element of blogging. I blog because what I think and do is interesting to others, dammit, and you shall read it. And this is important to me now, even if it's in the background; four times a day I'm reminded that this isn't going away. I guess I also wrote this to get it out of my head, and to imagine putting into words comprehensible to other people what this all means. I talk about the disease's epiphenomena with my therapists, and I talk about other people's experiences when I speak with other bipolar folk, but I don't get into the foundational aspects that often. Partly that's OK. I'm not scared by it anymore, and I'm not even tired of it; like I said, it's part of the rhythm of life now. But it's good to put it out there.

I don't think bipolar's going to appear many times here. It's in the background, and I've learned to live around it. But if you're interested in the life of this blog's author, this is always around the corner. Hopefully from now on it'll stay there.

Shh!

2010-05-18T10:52:00.002-05:00

There's a lot I can't talk about here--which is a real shame, since it's where a lot of my best stories come from these days.

Back when I worked retail, there was a never-ending stream of Customer Stories (or, when I worked in another area, Supplier Stories) that I could issue forth on command. I could be pretty public with these--after all, there were countless customers and none of them knew my name, and my picture isn't on here. There's no way it could turn into an Issue.

Now, there's a problem. I have student/fellow grad student/department stories for days, and none of them will see the light of day here. I don't have very many students, or fellow grad students, and all of them know who I am and for all I know will Google me one sunny day and bam, instant crisis for Alfred, even if I change the names. This venue is way too public.

(So catch me alone sometime, and the stories will flow...)

Which means I have to make up new stories, many of them dealing with games and scholarship, that being What I Do and all. It's tough, though, knowing that I'm holding back from y'all...

This is my job

2010-05-17T17:17:00.002-05:00

I write about war. I almost said "I write about war for money," but that's not strictly true; I get paid to teach, or I get paid because I'm just the awesome person I am, but nobody's actually paying me to write about war and nobody will for several years yet.

One way or another, though, the part of my daily work that draws the most attention is writing about war. Specifically, my current project is about the American Civil War, or the sliver thereof that bordered the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis.

I've only been writing about war for a little while; we're finishing up Year Five. Before that, I wrote about medieval merchants and burghers...and nobody wanted to touch that, fascinating as they are. So war it is, and war it likely shall be for the rest of my life.

I think if you're going to write about war, you have to have some big, overarching meta-notion of what war fundamentally is. Not necessarily whether it's right or wrong--the ethics of a particular war or whatever--but what philosophically undergirds it, what makes war war, what guides this human activity through all of history.

For me, it's fairly simple. War, at the surface, can be many things at various levels at different times. It can be ugly, but sometimes beautiful; it has cowards and heroes, killers and lovers, good and evil. Brilliance and stupidity, and an ache of gray drab boredom spreading over the battlefield like fog. But what war really is, what animates everything else, is a sheer unrelenting ridiculousness.

There's so much random chance, so much that can make any plan go awry, to push a soldier over the edge from hero to coward, to make a "grand plan" look brilliant or stupid. And then, of course, there's the ridiculousness that lies near the root of so many wars that made them exist in the first place.

This makes writing on war take on a certain tone. Most of the "characters" in what I write are neither knights nor knaves but fools (innocent) and blunderers (not so innocent), of all ranks. What happens when these two whirling maelstroms of armies collide has less to do with trumpets and drums than with a million little accidents. There are historical actors, mind, and decisions matter (what to put in the maelstrom, which direction to kick it to, etc), but there is a considerable space for the irrational, and especially for the concatenation of little decisions that turn into something very large--and possibly horrible.

One of the famous, popular authors on war I most admire is Rick Atkinson, who is writing a trilogy on the US Army in Europe during WWII. The story is one of one great idea after another coming unglued, sometimes with grisly results, and then other plans coalescing from the pear-shaped plans that just died in the earlier chapter. The plane is perpetually being duct-taped together as it's in the air.

I almost got to meet Rick Atkinson, if only I'd known who he was. I was working in the Army's archives in Carlisle Barracks, PA and I notice that this one person in the library--this one very short person in the library--was getting a lot of attention. I go over to the sign-in sheet and try to deduce who he is. "Who's Rick Atkinson?" I ask myself. "Who's Rick Atkinson?" I email my advisor. "YOU GO OVER THERE AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF RIGHT NOW" comes the response...but by then he had gone; so sad. I'm not sure what I would have said. "My advisor told me to come over here and say 'hi,' but I've never heard of you and I don't have any of your books." That'd have gone over well. Good came out of it, though; I decided to explore his books..and they are excellent. The WWII books, his book on Petraeus and the 101st Airborne, the works. All good stuff, and heartily recommended.

Which reminds me that I should put up a reading list for military occupations...

Doing more with less

2010-05-17T06:05:00.004-05:00

It has been often remarked around the office, and my little neck of academia, that no Civil War scholar knows or cares less about the Civil War than I do. (This whole post will disappear before I hit the job market...) Now, I've read fairly widely in the war's academic literature, but there's a grain of truth to it. I can't name the corps commanders at Gettysburg--unlike my other ACW scholars-in-training--and I can't imagine getting to the point where I can. I mean, who cares, right? There are a zillion books on Gettysburg out there, and they all have orders of battle. And if I want to do something scholarly about Gettysburg--I'd have to be crazier than I already am, since there are all these people out there who have the background knowledge.

So, I stick to the byways of the war. The Trans-Mississippi's Camden Expedition, military occupations, etc. Places where I'm just about the only one studying the area, and nobody has much background knowledge. It's a clear field. It doesn't matter that I never read a serious book on the Civil War until my early twenties, and never considered making it my job until my late twenties. And I hope to move on to another war (Korea? Haiti?) after my PhD is in hand.

So, I can't do "normal" Civil War stuff.

In much the same way, I can't really do "normal" game stuff. I'm willing to bet that no "serious gamer" (which some people still consider me, oddly) plays games less often than I do. I've played--against other people--maybe three games this calendar year. I may play no f-t-f games at all this summer, and who knows what the fall will bring. My friends aren't too enthusiastic--and the three who were relatively most enthusiastic are moving away. I'm still oh-for-life on getting a girlfriend, so that's another avenue closed off. There actually is a little knot of serious grad student gamers in town, but the one person who can put me in touch with them (none are on BGG) has thus far declined to do so for reasons that are kind of mysterious but I'm informed are also perfectly normal under the particular circumstances. (EDITED to remove some frustration from one clause there.)

(And I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus of people bemoaning the demise of Amun-Re on SBW.)

So I don't see a lot of regular gaming happening. But, then, I've never gamed as much as many others do. There are people out there who have played games, fifty, seventy, a hundred times! I've played Mah Jongg and Zooloretto that much on my iPod, but that doesn't count. There aren't many games I've played ten times over the course of my life, never mind in the short period that Dominion's been out. And this goes back to my time in Austin, where I'd play games three or four nights a week...and there still wouldn't be that much time to play just one game over and over.

So I need to stay in the hobby. The megacollection idea went bad, real bad, and has been taken out back and shot. (I do have a few games coming in, but they've been seriously vetted and considered, and usually are games I've played, enjoyed, but not owned, like Fabrik der Träume.)

I basically have to make a virtue of necessity and somehow embrace the solo gamer concept, and make a point of connecting with the outside world about it--via this blog. On those rare occasions where I play against other people, that'll make an appearance, but it'll mostly be about wrenching enjoyment out of the hobby while playing alone.

It'll also have other content, mostly about research I'll be doing across the country this coming year. I'm still reading books, so if something comes up there worth mentioning, it'll be mentioned. (There's a good graphic novel out there about military occupations; I may give it a review.) But, mostly, this will become how I'm a Big Time Gamer again, despite playing six f-t-f games a year. We'll see how this works.

In other news--

2010-04-28T18:39:00.002-05:00

I've begun stripping games for chrome. There's a hard core of games remaining that aren't worth selling online, I can't find anyone to donate them to, and they're just not worth staying in the collection. Luckily, most of them have useful bits. I've reclaimed about fifty dice (most from just one game), umpteen little race cars, little wooden cubes, play money in many fanciful denominations, etc. It's kind of an interesting exercise. The biggest disappointment was not finding anyone to take Merchants of Amsterdam off my hands. Upside: I now have a Dutch Auction clock, which I can surely use for something down the line. If I ever design a game with all this stuff--fifty dice, a Dutch Auction clock, little plastic Civil War men, eight kinds of play money, and race cars--it'll be a sure hit.

Something that's made this process easier is that, since the beginning of the Fall semester, I've taken up a new hobby: Baking. It's odd how that came about. There wasn't one day when I woke up and decided that I wanted to become a great baker. No: I woke up one morning and decided that I already was a great baker. A subtle difference. One demonstrates one's baking abilities by, of course, baking. So bake I have, with a vengeance. I bake up one or two or three treats of some sort per week--so far this week I've made a batch of (plain ol' Toll House) cookies, and I have a cranberry-cherry pie in the oven, ready to come out in about eight minutes. Toll House cookies are kind of interesting; they're the first really modern cookie recipe, and nobody has ever really matched them for chocolate chip cookies. They're easy to make, and people like them, so I make them fairly often. However, I also like to test my limits. Cheesecake is fun for that--can I make one without any cracks at all?--as was this one fancy pound cake (an interesting concept) I made back in December, and a divine pair of Crack Pies--the hot new pie concept from Momofuku--that took four hours to make but tasted like happiness and warm summer days.

One thing I've learned from baking is that simpler is quite often better. I started baking with a cheapo stand mixer. All kinds of things whirred around--two beaters, the bowl--there were all kinds of lights and digital buttons and Lord knows what else. I eventually replaced it with--remember, I'm a great baker--an expensive Kitchenaid, which has no lights, everything analog, and the mixing is accomplished with one moving part. Easy. So hard to do, though, that nobody's figured out a way to do it better, or cheaper.

Another fun thing about baking, for me, is that since I started baking I've lost forty pounds. I eat very little of what I make. One slice of each pie, three or four cookies for every three or four dozen, one or two slices of cheesecake, never more than one a day. I bake to see how good of a baker I am, and to provide for other people...and, I must admit, to see the positive feedback on people's faces when they dig in. I am not a man immune to such things, try as I might.

I've also discovered that many people won't eat vegan desserts if they know that's what they are. I don't bake vegan terribly often, but sometimes I'm asked to whip something up on short notice--not enough time to bring butter and eggs to room temperature. A few modifications will make something that's almost as good (with apologies to some of my readership), but made with vegetable oil. I usually make a little label for whatever it is I've made, but I've learned to not label things as vegan, even in the midst of a pretty liberal environment like a humanities department. (Although the other chief baker in the department dabbles in veganism...)

I also never quite realized how "gendered" home baking is. I got a magazine with reader-submitted baking recipes, and precisely three of the 168 recipes were submitted by men (or at least people with male-normative first names). Three! Meanwhile, the world of commercial baking (and celebrity baking on TV) is dominated by men. At one point I entertained a fantasy that baking would make me more attractive to women, but it's becoming clear that this is precisely the wrong move.

But no matter. I'm having fun, and people eat what I make. That'll do.

Almost through

2010-04-27T17:11:00.002-05:00

I have about thirty games that still need homes. One is apparently valuable (who knew?), so I'm selling it through the Geek. The others...are not so valuable. The ones that are disintegrating (two or three) will probably see the knacker's wagon, but that leaves a couple dozen that aren't worth selling, so we've reached the giveaway phase. I'm taking them into the office, putting them on the breakroom table, and letting people graze. Hopefully one person will become a gamer out of it. I can dream...

It's interesting to see the range of reactions people have to this sell-off. The people who have known me the longest, online or IRL, have been congratulating me, asking why it took me so long, etc. The non-gamers who met me in State College aren't quite what to make of this sudden transformation, but it seems to be making me happy, so they're all for it. But random people? The ones who came to the sale, or have been commenting online? Complete mystery. Why on earth would someone want a much smaller collection all of a sudden? Shouldn't people want bigger ones? One guy came to the sale and bought about 400 games off me (!), and was pleased that this meant that he had doubled his collection since [whenever]. I gave him an "I was you, once" kind of look (which is odd, since he's a fair ways older than I am). But if his collection is still making him happy, more power to him.

And, really, it's not like I'm not calling a halt to buying new games. I liked Winsome's Wabash Cannonball and Age of Scheme, but I figured I'd sell them and buy Chicago Express and Samarkand instead. (Samarkand's had Scheme's teeth dulled, which is OK for my purposes, as I'm the hardest-core gamer in town that I know of.) When I was culling the herd, I stumbled on my Dungeoneer collection, which had gotten shoved to the back. "I loved that game," says me to me, "I should play that more often." To that end, I went to the store today and filled in some of the gaps in my collection. I've decided to let the total collection drift back up to about 300 discrete titles (again, not counting expansions), and then freeze it. That'll fill the shelves I have left. The new mindset is taking hold. I went into the game store (a quite large one, Six Feet Under in New Holland), looking to buy two specific Dungeoneer packs, found them, wandered around, and couldn't find a game that I really needed to add.

Rinse, repeat for the next sixty years...

Ahh, calm

2010-04-24T14:40:00.002-05:00

So, I just sold a huge wad of games. Not as many as I hoped, but far more than I feared. The money is welcome, but more than that I've enjoyed putting the games I'm keeping back on the shelf. A third the space!

I've changed a lot over the past fifteen months; I've lost a hundred pounds, for one thing, and that has kicked off a whole-life rethink the past year or so, resulting in other major life changes. I feel better about selling the games than I have about any other recent decision. I only own games I like to play, which is sort of a first for...years. Before, if someone had pointed to any random game on the shelf and said, "Can we play that?" I'd have probably said, "No, let's play Game X instead." Now I only have Game Xes.

The test is coming in a few hours, when the sale is officially over. I have five boxes full of magazine wargames, most of which are worth just about, or under, the $5 prices I put on them. I can't sell them individually, nobody wants to buy them as a lot, and...they're probably going to just be pitched/recycled (as appropriate). We'll see how liberating that feels.

Another fun moment: At the very beginning of the sale, I laid down the ground rules and asked if anyone had any questions. There was one: "Why are you doing this?" It was nice to have an answer they understood...

Sale of the century!

2010-04-17T08:01:00.002-05:00

...Or not.

I'm selling my games in a kind of interesting way: An enormous garage sale. For seven hours on the 24th, I'm going to be one of the biggest game stores in the country. People are coming in from hundreds of miles away to give me cash for my games; it's crazy, there might be dozens of people. When I concocted this scheme I thought there might be a dozen people, locals buying a game or five, but now I have people rolling in with about a grand in cash. Mostly eurogamers; I hope some wargamers come in to whittle that stack down.

In case you're curious, the game catalog is here.

Should be a crazy day.

That (incomplete) list is actually reasonably close to a thousand, even though it doesn't add up to it. Lots of those line items, especially in the wargame section, have more than one game. But at the end of this, I'll still have more than 250, probably; I wasn't counting expansions when I came up with that number (in my mind, they're not separate games, they just make the original game "bigger"), and some of these games aren't really in salable condition. I might end up throwing some away, and donating others, and schlepping others elsewhere. I should be able to get rid of a few hundred games, anyway, which the shelves, psyche, and pocketbook will appreciate.

What I really need to do is come up with some way to deal with the crowd. If I walk out of my apartment at 11 and find two dozen people there clamoring to get in, my apartment can't handle it. Does anyone in reader-land have any thoughts? One harebrained scheme I hatched was to have the initial crowd pull a number out of a hat, and bring people in in groups of six for fifteen minutes each. The fun part: I'd give some time beforehand to let people make deals for numbers. It's either brilliant or crazy...

New Mission Statement

2010-04-10T16:05:00.002-05:00

Hi there!

Just a few things. The short version of all of it is that I'm changing the way I relate to games.

I have about 1250 games right now, and I'm in negotations with a buyer for 1000 of them. It had kind of gotten to the point where having a huge collection was a goal in itself, which I finally realized was deranged. I made a list of games I like and play, or ones that I just got and want to play more, and it came to about 200. I figured I could toss on an extra fifty or so for sentimental value or whatever, but that still leaves 1000 games that are essentially dead weight. I hope I can get this deal worked out, since I'd like to get it taken care of by early summer. (If this guy doesn't work out, I'm not sure what Plan B is; I'd really-really-really prefer to sell them to someone within driving distance, rather than boxing it all up and shipping it...unless Troll and Toad feels like sending up a truck.)

I like to think that doing this will help me focus on what I want out of games, game playing, and game collecting. My game attention span is currently very short; having a tighter collection will, I hope, help focus it and help me really get into more of my games, rather than chasing down the Cult of the New all the time.

I'll say that I hope that this will give me more impetus for blogging. Some of the most fun I've had gaming is writing about it. I'll have all next year off from teaching responsibilities, and while the research I have to do will give me some long hours, I have a dream of blogging twice a week, say on Monday and Thursday. At the moment, I do talk about games...on my Facebook page. If you read this, and want to get some snapshots of my gaming activities, "friend" me. I approve basically any gamer. I'm also considering getting on Twitter for games; not sure if that's feasible or not.

But we'll see.

Part of my gaming self-identity is being a guy with a whole heck of a lot of games. Slimming down to a pedestrian (for serious gamers) 250-game collection will be new and different; I haven't been that low in years and years. But I think it'll be good for me.

SpielByWeb Update

2009-07-02T17:27:00.002-05:00

100%Blade! It's your turn!

I've spent the last two weeks in beautiful (?) Carlisle, PA, home to the US Army archives. I'm technically a semi-employee; I have a dress code, I come in at a certain time, leave at a certain time, and get a lunch break, the works. It's a three-week special internship, for which I am paid from a private grant. It's supposed to give me a running start to my dissertation, and it's certainly done that. For one thing, I realized that I'm really researching a navy story, not an army story...but there's still plenty here.

My favorite unit that comes up--often--in my study is the Mississippi Marine Brigade. This could easily be considered the worst unit in the Union army. They were stationed on a largish number of boats commanded by BGEN Alfred Ellet. The idea was that they would sail to a hotspot, put the boats close to shore, lower some gangways and send hordes of cavalry ashore to deal with the problem. In practice, the MMB were essentially vikings. The difference between "Rebel cavalry" and "probably innocent town" were a little fuzzy to the MMB. As was discipline. In one memorable incident, the marines (who should not be confused with the US Marine Corps of today) at a prearranged signal staged mutinies on board all the ships to ostensibly protest rations, but I can't help imagining that they just wanted to go pirate. In the end, nothing happened to them after order was restored. But they're an interesting approach to the problems of occupying a vast waterway.

So that's been my life. No gaming has been done, but I did get two games delivered here for...some...reason? Anyway, I now have the new Pegasus edition of Top Race, which completes the set for me. (I'm not going to try to get all the Top Race editions.) Probably my favorite racing game system; I'm eager to try this out. I also got a copy of Royal Palace, under the theory that I should own any game I can win. (If I stuck to this, and made it ONLY games I've won, I'd have a vastly smaller collection...)

What I do have here is my Combat Commander kit. Mr. Cranky has expressed a desire to try a wargame again, and this is the one that has been settled upon. It's one of my favorites, so why not? I'm putting together a scenario with relatively small numbers of units on a relatively terrain-free board, to minimize rule-age. I like that you can do this easily with CC; I know that it's part of a large series of games, but still. I love the rules, and I love the scenarios, but the simplicity of putting new, balanced scenarios together seals the game for me.

On the Road

2009-06-19T16:35:00.002-05:00

I'm about to head out for the Harrisburg, PA region--specifically, to work in the US Army's archives in Carlisle for three weeks. As is my wont, I also plan on squeezing in some gaming and game store visiting. One of the game stores, "That Game Place," has one of the most amazing logos I've ever seen: A wizard riding a tank firing a die. I mean, how do you top that? You might have a meeple riding the tank, sure, but a wizard's not bad. I would become a fan of any sport that had a team with that logo.

ALSO, AND UNRELATED: Anyone out there a Gathering fan? The band, I mean. I've been listening to their latest, The West Pole, which is the first (in many years) without their longtime frontwoman, Anneke van Giersbergen. Every review I've read tells me it's magical, but I'm not hearing it. I mean, it's not bad, and I don't want to compare it to the AvG period, but it's not grabbing me the way a really good, four-plus star album should. (And I really don't get the claims that the new singer, Silje Wergeland, will be able to handle songs like Rollercoaster and Shot to Pieces in live shows. Totally wrong voice for those songs, imho. And AvG would be wrong for the TWP songs. They're very different voices, and very different songs were written for them.) Just mildly venting...if there's some level of appreciation I'm missing, then do tell. I'm giving it two or three stars at the moment, aka "pretty good."

I have to get this off my chest

2009-06-17T10:29:00.002-05:00

Why does the packaging for Fruit by the Foot:

Emphasize "FOOT" over "Fruit"? I mean, presumably people are buying it for its fruitiness rather than its footiness. Foot, in general, is a poor thing to associate with food.

That is all...

I've lost my title-composing touch

2009-06-17T08:44:00.005-05:00

FIRST OFF: ~~Iain! Your turn in Amun-Re!~~ Taken care of. Many thanks!

SECOND OFF: I've been toying with the idea of buying Space Alert, the latest from Czech Games Edition. The reviews I've heard have been mixed; I'm mostly attracted by the fact that it's solo-able. The idea, if you're not familiar with it, is that the player[s] are cooperating to beat back waves of alien ships attacking their spacecraft. The attack lasts ten minutes, moderated by either a deck of cards or a track on a CD. I'd have bought it already if it had a slightly different theme: Taffy III at Leyte Gulf. (UPDATE: I'm wrong! What am I thinking of? There's some relevant clash between a destroyer and waves of Japanese planes.) I realize that significant chunks of the mechanics might have to change, but I still claim a historical theme might be interesting for the basic engine and idea. Of course, I like historical themes more than fantasy/SF ones (EXCEPTIONS: When they're faithful to books: Cthulhu, LotR, etc. I can't explain it.) I like Smallworld fine, but...Vinci has a map of Europe and classical-ish markers, so it wins for me.

I headed over to Jorge and Eva's place last night, after far too long of a layoff. We played a few games, but two stand out in my mind. The first is Royal Palace, which has interesting features you can read about in other places. What struck me about it is that, to my astonishment, I won. I thought I was doing OK, but not anywhere near Jorge, who I thought was at least ten points ahead of me at any given time. I ended up being wrong in my assessment by about twenty points. The funny thing is, everybody thought Jorge was safely winning, and thus helped me maximize my score. Oops! I think I would have been able to find a win on my own, although--once again--I didn't think I was looking for one.

We also ran out of money--which by happy accident is the top post on BGG for the game. I think I had the least money by the end, which I suppose could mean I used my money most efficiently? I guess?

The other game I thought I'd mention is my first play of Stone Age, which is currently ranked 31st on BGG, and has some extremely gaudy numbers and reviews and everything else. It is, of course, what I assonantly call a "place your dudes and get your cubes" game; BGG prefers "Worker Allocation," which is certainly shorter. I thought it was all right. GRANTED: I finished last. It's a good game, but it doesn't do enough things newer or better than my beloved Pillars of the Earth to really suck me in. Besides losing with a bullet, the game kind of dragged on; three-player would not seem to be its sweet spot, and I agreed with my hosts that four would be a better fit for the game. Definitely one to try again. UPDATE: It would appear, thanks to diligent questioning from Russ, that we were playing things wrong, which added a turn or three to the game. I'll certainly give it another try.

And finally: My "go book or chess book?" "contest" below was, indeed, from a go book: Kamakura from Slate and Shell. Vastly recommended! Nobody asks a 73 kyu player if it'll help their game, so I'll stick to the text part of the book. It's about, as those better versed in such things than I may already know, a ten-game match between two of the giants of mid-20th-century go: Kitani Minoru and Go Seigen. It took place in the Kamakura temple complex over a quite-long period. Much of the book deals with the events surrounding each game, from the physical surroundings to the verbal banter between the players (!). One learns a great deal about go culture ca. 1940. It is remarkable that in one of the biggest events in Japanese go during the period, players talked between moves, Kitani shaved his head in an effort to restore his balance--it's fun to imagine the Fischer-Spassky match going like this go match. Great reading--and, like many S&S efforts, the game diagrams have very few moves each, so it's very easy to follow. With any luck, diligent study should bring me up to about 69 kyu; whether it'll improve your game by four stones is another matter.

Fascinating Experiment

2009-06-12T16:13:00.003-05:00

Let's see. Anybody around? If so: I've set up an Amun-Re game on SpielByWeb called "Calling all cars," with the password isanybodythere. A five-player game, as the good Lord intended. (Or Dr. Knizia, anyway.) See you there!

Varia

2009-06-11T13:26:00.002-05:00

I keep forgetting I have this bully pulpit. So what have I been up to since April 25?

It was a long, long six weeks. I wrote two papers--and had to rewrite one of them. I also had to take my comprehensive exams. Each of these exams involved mastering a given reading list--of twenty to sixty books each, in my case--and then write out an answer in twenty-four hours on a particular subject that was given to me at 8 AM. Then, after four of these, I had to defend them in an oral examination.

But it's over--I passed them comfortably, and am now ABD! Life is easy; all I have to do is research and write a 350-page book. The research will be the most fun, of course; it'll likely be an immense road trip through the upper midwest and the south along the Mississippi. My topic: The military occupation and government of the areas along the banks of the Mississippi during the Civil War.

So don't write a book on that yourself, plz.

For the rest of the summer, I'm going to relax, and then do some work in the Army's archives, and then work on a lesson plan for my students: My first time as the "real" teacher. The subject is US History to 1877. Can't be too hard. Right?

...

What else have I got...

A little contest! Does the following come from a chess book, or a go book?

In the grounds of the great temple, tranquil in its antiquity, the clear voices of cicadas could be heard, whilst in the garden a black butterfly, big as a bat, danced soundlessly over the red amaryllis--the flower of September's autumnal equinox. The night before had seen a harvest moon. From the cloudless sky, a chill wind sucked down from the steep hillsides was enough to cause an involuntary tightening of the lapels.

If you get it right, you get ten points.

Le Havre is turning into a game that I respect highly, but have little intent to actually play--except maybe solo. I just don't comprehend it, and there's so much to comprehend that it seems like work. Do I really want to play it fifteen times, and then reflect on my inevitable defeats in order to become incrementally better the next time? Thinking...thinking...no. I'm too deep into the Cult of the New, for one thing. (My first human opponents, Mr. and Prof. Cranky, have played it umpteen times, and wiped the floor with me in our game. It was a harrowing experience.)

Not that my opinion can't change. I managed to eke out a victory in Age of Steam--one of my white whales--also chez Cranky. By my reckoning, that was my first not-last in my several playings. And now that I've learned that the 3rd Edition comes with a solitaire map, it becomes more attractive. (I'd sold off my AoS set a while back, when I decided I'd rather have $250 than the game.) And besides: I won! Woohoo! Nothing improves my opinion of a game quite like victory.

Yeah, I might pick it up this afternoon.

Game of Chicken

2009-04-25T16:03:00.002-05:00

(It's times like this I'm glad this blog isn't popular anymore.)

I have three shelves full of chess books, and a roughly equal number of go books. I consider myself a fan of both games, and routinely list go as one of my three "perfect 10" games. (The others being Combat Commander and Amun-Re. I go by categories.)

However, I virtually never play chess or go, even against the computer. I used to play go every week (or more) when I lived in Austin, but now...not so much. I love it, but I've lost the will to play it. Why?

I'm afraid of losing, basically; I don't want to look unintelligent. To paraphrase an old chestnut, I have chosen to keep my stones in their bowls and be thought a fool rather than play them and remove all doubt.

In some ways, this is partly because of the things that have led to me taking nine pills a day, racking up $1000 worth of mental health care a month (all paid by my insurance, thank heaven), and so on. It ties into why I have trouble writing; I might get caught out in an error; why risk it?

(Why yes I do have a paper due this week that I'd be better off writing rather than this, why do you ask?)

I suppose the real question is why this doesn't present a problem with other games. Part of it has to do with how chess and go are "touchstone of the intellect"-type games that have centuries of experience, literature, and thought invested in them. Millions have played, computers have been programmed to play them, hymns have been sung in their honor, there are professional players who play for millions. Amun-Re, on the other hand, has been around for six years, there are maybe 20,000 copies out there, and the great mass of humanity has never heard of it.

Also, it has to do with the playing culture. Most gaming "scenes" are not enormously competitive. (Exceptions, exceptions.) Mostly, though, games are social enough that the stigma attached to losing is not too great. On the other hand, I feel the cold stare of the millions of better go players than I am whenever I put a duck on the board. I've somehow spoiled the game.

Great chess players often speak about how winning just feels sort of like having driven home from the store without getting into an accident: Nothing special, but obviously better than the alternative. Losing, however, is vastly worse: Like an insult, or an injustice. For the insecure patzer, winning is like escaping, and losing is like having your worst fears about yourself confirmed.

(I'm not fishing for compliments here; just noting something odd about my game-playing preferences. I'll probably nuke this one in a few days.)

On the Bookshelf

2009-04-19T12:54:00.002-05:00

...or, at this moment, "on the windowsill." Anything flat is a shelf.

I have a new favorite series of books. Slate and Shell has come out with four books now in a "Master Play" line. Each of these slim volumes covers one (or, most recently two) famous go pro--Takemiya Masaki, Go Seigen, Lee Changho, Kato Masao and Seo Bong Soo. The commentaries are by Yuan Zhou, and the well-go-book-read will have guessed the format. Each pro is represented by just two games--gone through virtually move-by-move with comments.

The miraculous thing is that the annotations actually make sense to me. Partly this is because we take it a step at a time. In chess, there are several move-by-move books, but doing it like that makes it hard to see the overall trends. The usual thing is to take a chess game, let a bunch of moves rattle off, and then explain the last move...which is even less helpful. Nobody does it quite like Yuan Zhou, where (say) five moves are strung together and then we are shown how they work together.

I'm essentially never going to be a decent go player--which, for myself, I define as single-digit kyu. I hope, though, to learn to appreciate a good game when I play through it.

The New Toy

2009-04-08T19:43:00.002-05:00

So, a new game has reached my table: The Halls of Montezuma, the latest card-driven game from GMT. It's sort of a perfect storm for me; it's a great subject, in one of my favorite systems, from a favorite company. Sold!

(I actually gave up game-buying for Lent; lucky for me, I paid for it eons ago, so it counts.)

The game has one thing I don't like: The rulebook is problematic. It's like a mystery, where the secrets are not revealed until you get all the way through--at which point, if you've been keeping careful track, all becomes clear. All didn't become clear on a first pass; we're off for a second pass.

It does, however, provide something I like very much: Uncertainty.

First, the key mechanic to the game is manipulating Mexico's political will ("PW") to continue the fight. A great many things affect PW, like winning battles and whatnot. One of the ways is through the various PW cities. Most major cities have a PW marker showing what they're worth. The catch: At the start of the game, neither player knows what they are. Neither the US or Mexico really has a clue about what's going on in the hinterlands.

This also works with reinforcements. When you get reinforcements, you get A Leader and Some Troops. Who exactly that leader is, and what troops he is leading, is unknown to you. For the kind of warfare I study--and I imagine that of most wars--this is about right. You can scream bloody murder to GHQ about needing troops, but it's up to their infallible wisdom to choose which ones you get. (Or don't get.) This is far, far superior to the usual calendar of reinforcements--"Oh good, this turn I get Grant."

Finally, reinforcements. You can order forts and breastworks to be built, but how good they are is not up to you. However, you are allowed to know the final result, which is unknown to your opponent until he chooses to attack them. My question: Why should the builder know the defensive value? But 'tis a small point.

I have yet to see how it works in practice, but I'm intrigued thus far. Any game where I have eight randomizer cups working is a good one in my book.

The Lay of the Land

2009-03-28T12:12:00.003-05:00

This had been something of an exhausting week, so on the spur of the moment I cast around yesterday evening for some folks to play games with. I found precisely two--one of the results of doing things as snap decisions. Both were fellow Civil Warriors from the office, but I eschewed wargames for two more Euros to introduce them to.

I chose Ra and Taluva. We did Ra first. It's gratifying to see people get more comfortable with games, and thus with rules. The actual play of Ra is fairly straightforward, but there are a lot of things to keep track of, particularly with scoring. Talking everything out led to a lot of a-ha moments. The first epoch saw ridiculously few Ra tiles come out; there were several auctions called before we started seeing Ra tiles. As it happened, I had three suns left when the other two bowed out, so I got a pretty big haul. I ended up winning the game; the scores were something like 60-50-40.

On to Taluva. As always, choosing colors is fun. "Do you want to be the brown people, red people, yellow people, or white people?" None of us felt secure choosing the white pieces, so they were left in the bag. By the second turn pretty much everyone was comfortable with the rules.

This game was insanely close. I won, and Jonathan (to my left) would have won if I'd missed my chance. Looking at the game afterward, though, we discovered that Tim (to my right) missed a win on his turn...so yeah, it was close.

What came next cemented our status as dorks. We analyzed our created island for militarily important typology. The island was really two islands, connected at a pair of isthmuses (isthmi?). Clearly those two points were critical, as was the long saddleback ridge on the east island. The west island had one big mountain that dominated the whole works, with a sort of "lost valley" in the middle, a single hex surrounded by elevated terrain. We figured that the east island would likely have better soil.

We also concluded that Tim's Red Peoples had were a maritime people; with just a couple of exceptions they were all at Level One by the sea. Jonathan and I, on the other hand, had a more varied cultural topography.

What can I say? It's what we do. Tim told us about how when he and his fiancée go for walks, he periodically asks where she thinks the defensive lines should be from an attack out of [some trees/a road/a car dealership]. I've done something similar on my walks; if I walk from Road A uphill along Road B to my apartment, I often think about what an ordeal it would be to charge up to take the ridge my apartment is on; there are three military crests that can be stoutly defended, and it could take hours to get to the top. The other options, though, are up some sheer surfaces in the woods. It's quite a ridgeline. I figure this kind of planning will come in handy if some kind of "Red Dawn" situation breaks out in State College.

Morning!

2009-03-18T07:45:00.000-05:00

Yeah, that worked like a charm. This security guard got fired for sleeping on the job. Have to come up with some other trick...

Hold the Line

2009-03-18T03:14:00.002-05:00

I'm stuck on a sentence, so why not write a bit here...

I've been casting around for a game to have set up where I can pick up a turn here and there as events warrant. The most recent game I've cleared space for is Worthington's Hold the Line, a reimplementation of Clash for a Continent, which is one of my favorites.

I'm of two minds about the upgraded look. Between C4aC and HTL, Worthington has moved up a weight class in terms of graphical presentation. The counters are linen-finished, and the art on them is done by one of the "historical art print" artists, Gary Zaboly. I do like the new board and terrain hexes, even though I found the originals to be serviceable enough. The counters I'm more dubious about; I liked the old wood ones, and with them it was easier to put an infantry unit and a leader/artillery unit in the same hex. That said, from a purely graphic-art perspective they're quite nice.

I've set up the War of Independence scenario for Harlem Heights. I chose it because I didn't know too much about it, and it looked interesting on the board. Washington has cut off part of the English army--some of the best bits of it--and has to outflank it before the reinforcements arrive, which is soon.

When I get a chance to play it, I'll try to post some pictures. When that'll be...

This has been Working Well

2009-03-18T02:04:00.000-05:00

Only one nap! Check this space at 4 AM...

An Experiment

2009-03-17T20:24:00.003-05:00

My, it's been a little while.

If you look carefully, you might notice little shiny metal buttons set in the walls of, say, shopping malls, stadiums, or--where I first noticed them--large dormitories. They're for security guards, who have a special little...doohickey with them. When they reach one of the little buttons, they touch the doohickey to it, and that tells the central computer that the guard hit that checkpoint--i.e., that he was (probably) actually pacing the floor.

Tonight/this coming morning, this blog is going to serve a somewhat similar function for me. My writer's block and procrastination have been acting up something fierce, and that combined with the happy news that a conference paper that I thought was due next week is actually due last week...fun times. I need to write something on the order of ten pages, real soon now, and I can't trick myself into taking a "power nap" or anything of the sort.

I have to make one more trip for supplies, and then I'll post something every top-of-the-hour. It'll be game-related. The big supply I need I have plenty of: Coffee. My three ibriks, two moka pots, one steam espresso maker (but no drip coffee maker) will set me fine, with my two coffee grinders and God only knows how many different kinds of coffee. The real trick will be figuring out how to do this without sugar. Those who know me from back in the day might remember that Bit-o-Honey and orange juice is my brain food of choice.

I'm on a low-carb diet, though, so those two are out. I'm thinking gum; that's supposed to keep you thinking straight. Ish. We can hope. Anything to keep me rolling until about noon, at least...

(I'll brook no criticism of low-carb diets, at least as a lose-weight-fast technique (which was the doctor's orders; I was a special case). I've lost forty pounds since the second week of January.)

Manoeuvring

2009-03-11T08:56:00.002-05:00

I managed to contrive a way to play games two days in a row this week, which is something of a new experience. Even stranger, I played the same game each day.

Friday night, my friend Tim and I eschewed a departmental bowling night (Team building + Beer = Damn near Charles Bukowski) and met for some gaming and conversation. We were hoping for a third, but he failed to materialize. I pulled out a two-player I had tried to get onto the table for some time--GMT's Manouvre.

Many/most/all of you have likely heard of this game by now. It's played on a chessboard with terrain (towns, hills, forests, etc), and each player gets eight pieces representing one or another Napoleonic-era military unit. Each nation gets a different mix of units, and a different mix of cards with which one has those units attack, defend, bombard, get healed, go on forced marches, and on and on. There are also a few leaders in the deck, which give yet more combat bonuses and allow for coordinated attacks.

I took the Turks, Tim took the Prussians. The key to the game was a little clump of hills right in the middle of the board. I managed to plant my Janissaries (by far my best unit) up top, where they became almost unstoppable. Both Tim and I fought like demons, and I won a narrow attrition victory--piling a few cards up to make the attack almost unstoppable. We both agreed we liked the game very much, and would definitely try again.

On Saturday, I went over to Castle Cranky for a trio of games, another of which was Manoeuvre. I took the Austrians; Josh had the French. Each of the various nations has a particular "personality;" the French personality is "being awesome" and the Austrian personality is "being terrible." Still, Josh (weakened by, as he put it, bad card draws) failed to kill a single one of my troops, and I couldn't maintain any kind of bridgehead into his territory. (My Austrians also, naturally, failed to kill any of the French.) Josh won a controlling-the-field victory in style.

And then essentially declared he never wanted to play again. I think, among other things, this points up a major difference between a Eurogame mentality and a Wargame mentality. (Not that one cannot have both; I like to think I do.) The luck of the draw can be maddening to Eurogamers, who demand relatively little luck compared to wargamers, who are obliged to accept that life is not always fair in these games. Managing this gap is one of the key problems for Euro/Wargame crossovers. (The other, of course, being the appropriate level of detail.)

Luckily for Josh, there are other games to play as well. We actually began the day with Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, one of Winsome's Essen 2008 offerings. It involves railroads, and auctions where the money you spend goes towards capitalizing said railroads. It reminded me a great deal of Age of Scheme, but with a few twists. I did like the ending mechanism: There are six colors of cubes, one with about ten cubes, on up to thirty cubes. When a railroad starts, it takes the color of whatever has the most cubes left. Once each color has been used once, the game ends. It's an ending mechanism that really affects how the game plays out. It's good, but I have a lot of good games. I'll try it again, and see what I think.

Finally came Vikings. I bumbled through the game, not entirely certain what was going on, or what all the rules were. I bought stuff that it seemed like I could use, never having much money laying around, and generally wandered around, trying to figure out which of Josh and Jean--both experienced veterans of the game--would win. They had so many vikings! And were creating oodles of gold, lots of nobles for VPs...it was impressive to watch.

Needless to say I won, and by a decent margin. Is this really a game where you can win by making obvious moves? More likely, I think, is that Josh and Jean were too engrossed with their own battle to pay much attention to me. This has worked to my advantage before. My first gmae of Stephenson's Rocket pitted me against two wily veterans, and I clearly looked harmless the whole game. By the end of it, I had more money (VPs) than the bank had left, and more than the other two put together.

Of the three games, I thing I like Manoeuvre the best for the time being; Vikings has some interesting mechanics; I'd like to try again. GM&O didn't grab me, but I'm willing to try again. What's best, though, is that I've managed to play three games from my unplayed list. As a devotee of the Cult of the New, that's a real accomplishment!

Ancients: Remix

2009-03-01T13:49:00.003-06:00

By mid-May, I have to have written a conference paper, two journal-article-length papers, and have read (or have "read") some 250 books...so what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than playing a wargame?

I felt inspired to try another Victory Point Games title, so I brought out Ancient Battles Deluxe. It's a redesign of one of my favorite games, Ancients. Ancients was an attempt to make a fairly believable but very simple tactical game. It featured generic counters, generic maps, and a bajillion scenarios.

This one keeps the same look. The counters are Red Army vs Blue, the maps are just 18 x 12 hexes. The rules, however, are a notch or two up in complexity. That does not mean they are complex; it just takes a few goings-through before you internalize them, particularly the melee rules. There's a lot of adding, multiplying, and dividing going on here. However, by halfway through the battle, I was up and running nicely.

I chose Magnesia, mostly because it had elephants on both sides. The winner is the one with the most VPs. You get a VP for making the other army panic (losing a certain number of strength points), capturing the opposing camp, and one for having the most troops on the field at sunset. The Romans, in this scenario, have superior leadership (the Scipios) but fewer troops. They are given a 1 VP handicap.

I had Antiochus simply charge the Romans with his greater volume of soldiers, in the hopes of tying down the Romans and hopefully turning a flank or two. The Romans refused both flanks in time, but fought from a cramped position the whole game. The Seleucids took horrific casualties, but hoped to hang on until their phalanx caught up (it was left far behind in the initial charge)--and hoped to last just one turn longer than the Romans.

And, lo, they did. I eventually called it for the Seleucids; the Romans were on the verge of losing the last casualties before panic and rout set in--and weren't going to inflict it on the Seleucids simultaneously. The Romans missed a lot of die-roll breaks in the second half of the game, but their limited mobility told the tale.

I like the command and control system here. It's about as good as one can be that doesn't get completely bogged down. You have n leaders, and you allocate them to units each turn. They represent concerted efforts as much as anything. They can command multiple troops if they're part of a formation...and these formations tend to break apart as the battle progresses. Then, it becomes a matter of aiding local battles.

A worthy update and successor to the original model (which is still available here, for free). The homepage lists a third expansion coming out, covering (mostly) the first years of gunpowder in the west--which, naturally, I'm eagerly awaiting.

And now: Back to the reading.

Could be Simplified

2009-02-25T13:36:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-25T12:09:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-22T09:27:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-21T16:02:00.002-06:00

...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

2009-02-17T17:53:00.003-06:00

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

2009-02-15T20:19:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-13T08:51:00.001-06:00

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

2009-02-10T00:00:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-08T08:46:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-02-06T17:31:00.003-06:00

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?

2009-02-04T19:10:00.001-06:00

Seems like it. I should probably put something here.

I've Been Here Several Weeks Now...

2007-08-19T18:24:00.000-05:00

...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

2007-07-17T21:36:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-07-17T20:53:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-07-17T20:25:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-07-14T00:56:00.000-05:00

The wonderfully-named Action Park.

Controlling Command

2007-06-05T12:38:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-04T21:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-04T21:21:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-09T23:06:00.000-05:00

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

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.
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.)
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).
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.
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

2007-04-07T13:19:00.000-05:00

(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.

Things that are Harder than I Thought:

2007-03-30T15:40:00.000-05:00

Writing letters to graduate programs telling them I'm not going there. See, in previous years, it's been me getting rejection letters from them. Did they agonize over how to word their rejection letters? It's hard to imagine, but maybe. I'm not using a form, anyway.

That means I made a decision, of course:

See ya in the fall, Joe.

(He looks thrilled.)

Varia

2007-03-28T22:53:00.000-05:00

OK, so clearly I need to do more obsolescent-techblogging. In typewriter news, I think I've got it all figured out after a little more experimenting. My motto: If it hasn't broken yet, it won't just from me messing with it. The biggest problem with it was actually the seller's fault: He put the ribbon in upside-down, and to "compensate" he put the spools in upside down...which meant they didn't turn and I was just beating holes in the ribbon. Ten powerfully messy minutes spent unrolling and rolling a ribbon later, and we're in business. Types like a dream.

Brian's right that it encourages a healthier typing technique. You have to move everything more, it seems like, which means that the typing is overall less repetitive. Typing on a computer, your wrists are almost motionless, which means that there's more regular stress on the ligaments and whatnot.

(Yeah, I'm totally a doctor.)

In other news, earlier this evening I put what I think might be some of the finishing touches on my thesis. I'm circulating it to my committee tomorrow, and once I incorporate their suggestions (assuming they don't contradict each other) it should be basically good to go. Which means I need a new research project, to keep the juices going. I decided to test a theory of mine, which is that there's so much source material on the Civil War that it should be possible to write at least a short conference paper (15-20 pages) on virtually anything. To that end, I set up a little program in Excel to choose a random item for me from the 100-odd volume Official Records that came out after the war.

And thus it was that Alfred began to research the Battle of New Creek. I doubt you've heard of this unless you hail from a particular patch of unincorporated rural West Virginia. Short description: Some Confederate raiders in December 1864 came on the little hamlet of New Creek, protected by a fort, and tore up the railroad, chased off the garrison, and raised a little hell. Next day, they're gone. In particular, I'm looking at the reaction to the battle, from Grant and Sheridan, to the officials in Washington, and other civil authorities and the press. I have a feeling that there's a story here about scapegoating officers, the weakness of many garrison troops (many of the Union men at New Creek were 100-day state militia called up from Ohio just before), and how the Union came to see its security and situation after the reelection of Lincoln. And I think a small event, such as New Creek, can do well to illuminate many of these issues.

Of course, I've been working on this for about three hours now, so I could be wrong.

My point is this. When I visited the University of North Carolina this past weekend, another student (studying postwar German history) asked me, when she heard what I wanted to do, what there could possibly be left to study and write about the Civil War. Frankly, in almost any area of history the unknown is so much vaster than the known it's not even funny. Even if you look at just the knowable, it seems like there's a bottomless well out there. A lot of people, in any field, despair of finding something to study--but I think there's stuff to study everywhere, and if you can't think of something...study something at random.

I'll keep everyone posted about my New Creek project.

My other project recently has been choosing a PhD program. The finalists are Penn State and North Carolina. I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going, but I'm going to sleep on it one more night...

Great Leap Backwards

2007-03-27T12:41:00.000-05:00

In what may be part of a disturbing trend for someone who doesn't use a cell phone, I just took possession of a typewriter. A manual typewriter. From 1923. It's one of the earliest Remington portable typewriters. My main impetus to getting the thing is, of course, a game--De Profundis. I like the idea of people playing the game by writing letters to each other on vintage equipment, so when I found this one for cheap at a typewriter repair shop I picked it up. The dealer oiled it up, put on a new ribbon, and it's about as good as new. I'm sure I'll find some other use for it as well, such as perhaps a doorstop.

There are several interesting things about the typewriter. The first is that, once you sit down in front of it, you feel an overwhelming desire to move to the Florida Keys and write about boxers. The next thing you notice is that there's no "1" key. I'm not sure how to handle that. At first I thought that there was some kind of mistake, but I found other pictures of these typewriters...and no 1 key. And there's no typebar for it, either. How do you make a 1? A lowercase "l"? If so, how do you make an exclamation point? It's also a very attractive piece; it makes a nice objet d'art. The other thing about manual typewriters is that you have to learn to move your fingers differently. On a computer, or an electric typewriter, you can kind of let your fingers glide over the keys, taking mild taps of the required letters. Unless you're mad. On a manual typewriter, if you want the letters to show up you have to show some authori-tay.

My typewriter didn't come with an instruction manual, so you have to figure out how everything works essentially on your own. Manual typewriters are complicated instruments, I tell you what. All kinds of levers and wheels and settings and miscellaneous dealy-bobbers. There are a few internet resources, but not a whole lot. I did find a place that'll sell me a reproduction manual, though. I've got just about everything puzzled out; it's actually a fairly clever machine. You can do all kinds of stuff, as long as it doesn't involve the numeral 1 or exclamation points.

Alfred's Latest eBay Coup

2007-03-16T23:26:00.000-05:00

Some of the wargamers might appreciate this...

So, I've had Turning Point: Stalingrad for some years now. I went to get it off the shelf...and somewhere along the line I lost the board. God only knows how. I searched the other boxes assiduously, but no dice. (Or board.) I had all the pieces...the rules...but fat lot of good it'd do me.

I went on eBay, in the hopes that there would be "parts" copies out there. Again: No luck. And TP:S is one of those sought-after games, you know, so they weren't going cheap. I knew, though, that right now I had basically a box of random pieces that were useless, so I should keep an eye out for a full copy.

A week ago, I found a copy for sale. It didn't show a board in the picture. The seller didn't seem to really know what it was she was selling. Someone asked if there was a board--indeed, there was. (Good.) Someone else asked if all the pieces were there--and the seller refused to count them!

This is great news for me, since most of the buyers would be scared off. Since I'm looking for a parts copy, though, this is golden. I watch it, and pick it up for well under the market value for a known-to-be-full copy.

It came today. I open it up, and think "there are too many counters here." I count 'em up...and lo and behold, it came with the expansion kit, which sometimes sells for as much as the full game! If she had bothered to take the time to count the pieces, she'd have tripled the price she got...

And I'd have been left without a copy of a great game and an uncommon expansion.

Haven't Done THAT in a While

2007-03-06T14:47:00.000-06:00

The occasional all-nighter, I've decided, is good for the soul, even if you're in search of a half-decent second draft of a thesis instead of the infinite. I hadn't pulled one in...gosh, years. I stayed in the graduate office in the department; the offices have a different rhythm at night. One of the professors is a night owl himself; even he gave up at three, though. Two hours later, the first morning person came in. In the meantime: Me, and the cleaning crew.

For whatever reason, I had trouble sitting down and starting the editing process. Once I did, though, it went reasonably smoothly. One of those lessons I need to take to heart, I guess.

In other news: North Carolina took me. Any Chapel Hillians out there?

Go Me, Pt. II

2007-02-27T23:48:00.000-06:00

From the Penn State admissions server:

As of February 26, 2007, the Graduate School is pleased to grant you admission to graduate study at The Pennsylvania State University. A formal letter of admission is being sent to you in the mail.

I spent this past weekend touring the campus, visiting with current faculty and graduate students, and meandering around town. It gave an excellent impression--as, it would seem, did I. It's a magnificent program; it has a Civil War Era Center that is virtually a department within a department--twelve faculty, a huge number for ACW-era studies.

I've come a long way from when the departmental secretary at __________ asked me if my application was some kind of joke.

State College has two game stores, from what I can tell; oddly enough, they're across the street from each other, and have virtually the same (kind of thin) line of games for sale. I'm not sure how that works out. Introducing myself, I bought a game from one and a comic book (a Krazy Kat volume) from the other. Gotta establish connections, y'know.

The Codex is Mine!

2007-02-23T16:07:00.000-06:00

My copy of the Codex Seraphinianus arrived the other day, and I've had a chance to look it over. It's very much as strange and wonderful (if that's the word) as I recall it. It's a very attractive package; a nice sturdy cover, thick textured paper, the works. No slipcase, but hey.

It's worth noting that there are some additions included. The author gave a preface (in Seraphinian, of course) and eight new pages, along with some corrections to the original text--which is an interesting concept. Also included is a pamphlet in an envelope on the inside back cover called the "Decodex," which reprints several reviews and notices from when the book originally came out 25 years ago. Oddly, neither the book nor the Decodex includes Italo Calvino's preface to the second printing back in the eighties. I've always wanted to read that, but I haven't found a copy anywhere.

A fascinating piece of art, in all respects.

Goodbye Orange Blog

2007-02-23T10:25:00.000-06:00

...Hello, black blog.

As some of you may have noticed, the Haloscan comments dingamabobber has been acting up, refreshing and sending out the feed every few hours. It suggested that part of my problem was that I hadn't updated my template to the New Blogger Template format. I assumed that I had, since, you know, I had updated to the New Blogger, but apparently these are different processes. Who knew?

Anyway, so I updated my template style and went through the process to fix the comments feed and whatnot...and it hasn't really worked. So, until that gets fixed, if you want to comment on a post, you'll have to lean in really close to the monitor and shout.

UPDATE: OK, I think I managed to get it to work. I told Blogger to enable Blogger comments...which turned on Haloscan comments. I'm not sure how that happened.

So You Wanna be a Civil War Historian?

2007-02-22T16:49:00.000-06:00

In my young apprenticeship, I'm discovering that studying, researching, and writing on the Civil War is one of the truly great jobs, and I'm glad to have it. That said, it has its moments that tend to turn many people off.

I spent the better part of this afternoon trying to figure out how much cornmeal I could get out of a bushel of corn. Second, how many people would that feed, and for how long? Those have a lot of sub-questions, too. Are these "bushels" by volume or weight? (Gotta be volume; the new bushel-as-weight thing is recent. But does the weight correspond to a typical volume-bushel of corn?) When I read that the army had so many bushels of corn, can I assume that that means parched kernels, or could it possibly be ear corn? (I'm assuming kernels; that's gotta be the only reasonable way to ship and store the stuff. And it'd make a bushel, by weight or volume, completely unpredictable if it included cobs.) What books do I have that might answer such a question? (More than you'd think. If you wanna understand the south, or the Civil War, you gotta understand corn and hogs.) (And sweet potatoes.) Shoot; none of my books come out and tell me. What other books are out there? (I verily rejoiced when I found a 1916 manual of crop husbandry and utilizing at a nearby library.)

And you know what? I had fun doing all that. Academia is finding a field in which you are willing and able to become a complete dork. Fortunate those of us who find such a niche.

And, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to track down some parched corn I can put through my blender.

Fun With Google

2007-02-17T19:47:00.000-06:00

So, for some reason entirely unrelated to anything I've talked about recently I'm looking for a way to translate Grade 1 Braille into letters. I put "Braille" into Google and found, at the bottom of the page, a suggested list of "Searches Related to Braille." Let's take a look at them:

braille alphabet: Reasonable enough.
how to learn braille: Also fine.
louis braille: A natural.
braille battery: I don't know what this is, but sure.
braille translations: Kind of what I'm looking for, actually.
morse code: Both involve dots? I dunno.
sign language: Both adaptations for the disabled, I suppose.

...and finally:

who invaded spain in the 8th century

I'm curious how Google's algorithm found that one.

(The answer to that last query being, of course, the Moops.)

This Post Is About Something Completely Different

2007-02-14T20:21:00.000-06:00

Man, it's cold outside...

Further game content to come. Some other content to come in or around March 1.

One Reason the Stress Level is Down

2007-02-13T21:42:00.000-06:00

From OwlNet, Temple University's online information system:

View Graduate Application 02 Admission Decision: Decision: Congratulations! You have been admitted to the DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY program in HISTORY Decision Date: 02/13/07

That's the first decision to come down one way or another, of my eight schools. Maybe I'll end up at Temple, and maybe I won't--it is a good program, of course; I only applied to good programs I'd like to attend--but right at this moment I like Temple slightly more than Bill Cosby does. (If you don't get that, don't worry.)

Petals Around the Rose

2007-02-12T17:56:00.000-06:00

There's fun, there's great fun, and then there's the sublime feeling of introducing Petals Around the Rose to a game store full of people.

(If you haven't played that game before, and you go to that site, and you get frustrated...don't Google it. Trust me. It'll be worth it in the end, even if it takes you six weeks like Bill Gates.)

PXC

2007-02-12T16:17:00.000-06:00

As per Jeff's request...

About a week ago, Perplex City: Season One was solved. I had kinda lost touch with the ins and outs of Perplex City, so I didn't actually learn that until just recently. I'm curious to learn how it was all done. I found the backstory--which, presumably, was critical to unraveling the mystery--fascinating, but I came in absurdly late to actually get into it. I mostly focused on the puzzles, which I greatly enjoyed. I love the variety--trivia, logic, word searches, the works. And of all different difficulty levels!

Also impressive was the spontaneous community that arose around it, helping people solve the puzzles and commisserate over the metapuzzle.

On March 1, Season Two--with new puzzles and a new prize--starts up. I'm planning on getting in on the ground floor this time; I've got my name down for a box at the game store.

I Feel Like People Should Know This

2007-02-11T21:21:00.000-06:00

Cough! Cough cough cough...

Man...Dusty around here. My fault entirely, of course; between the classes I'm taking, the class I'm teaching (sort of), the thesis, and trying to get into another school for next year...it's been nuts, and the blog has absorbed most of the hits. Things are easing up, however, and the usual supply of drivel should begin again soon.

I just discovered something today, though, that might be of interest to those of you who--like me--are into Weird Stuff.

Codex Seraphinianus, the weirdest book ever, is back in print. It's been hard to find for a while; most copies on the used market go for $3-400...but from Italy, the new one is about $100 (before shipping). Sure, that's still an expensive book...but if you've never seen it, you're really missing out. It's just so powerfully strange, but there's still a deep order to it that has mostly defied attempts to understand it. The numbering system the book uses, however, has been figured out--it's a modified base-21 system. It is also guessed that the language--which is likely an invented one, with its own writing system--might be Semitic. Or not. Who knows?

If you're patient, the book is published by Rizzoli, but I don't know of any plans by their USA arm (aka "Random House") to publish a stateside edition (or, for that matter, any publisher doing any other edition); I imagine that there's gotta be some demand, though.

Alfred's Latest Treasure

2007-01-09T20:31:00.000-06:00

I'd heard that there was a copy of Beyond Balderdash at one of the local flea markets. I've been looking for a copy, so I made my way out there this morning. Wandering around, I found a few vaguely interesting games (Quiddler for $3), but no Beyond Balderdash. I was cursing my ill fortune, and making my way to the front when I decided--for who knows what reason--to poke my head in one last stall. I didn't see anything, but subconsciously I looked again, and saw a box of hats on the ground.

Oh my God, I said to myself, I thought they'd burned these.

Those of you who weren't in St. Louis, or closely following the NFL, in 1993 probably don't recognize what that is. That's a hat for the St. Louis Stallions--often called the "Purple Stallions" for the obvious reason--the ill-fated St. Louis pro football expansion team bid.

Back in 1993, the NFL decided to add two new NFL teams. The finalists were Baltimore, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Memphis, and St. Louis. Charlotte and St. Louis were the leading cities from the get-go; they were the largest TV markets without a team at the time. It seemed like it'd be impossible for St. Louis to not get the team; this was taken as a challenge.

The St. Louis bid became increasingly confused and chaotic. There were two competing groups, each claiming to be the "real" Stallions backers. Some of the money men turned out to not really, you know, have the actual money. Then the PR people decided that the team should be called the "Stallions" and have a purple-black-gold color scheme. This was a deadly combination, and the NFL eventually decided to give the expansion franchise to Jacksonville.

Still, a bunch of sweatshirts, memorabilia--and caps--were produced for the team, in the expectation that the Stallions would enter the NFL. Naturally, when Jacksonville's name was called, the merchandise was quickly pulled off the shelf. I assumed it was all either recycled, destroyed, or sent to relief agencies (the eventual fate of much of the "Ohio State 2007 BCS Champs" stuff); however, some still pops up. A sweatshirt, mini-helmet, and whatnot hits eBay from time to time--and a box of caps, $2 each, somehow found its way to a little flea market in Springfield, Missouri. They still have the Starter tags and everything.

As a memento of one of the most ridiculous episodes of St. Louis sports history, I think it's quite a bargain. I should go to a Rams game wearing it...

One for the Commonplace Book

2007-01-05T21:13:00.000-06:00

"As far as I can see, there are only two respectable reasons for reading a book written by someone else; one is that you are being paid to review it, and the other that you are continually meeting the author and it seems rude not to know about him."

--Evelyn Waugh, Labels

Merry Christmas! (Late Ed.)

2006-12-27T22:16:00.000-06:00

Here's hoping everyone's been having a good time lately, with all the holidays going around. (Pick any one.) I've been relaxing, getting ready for next semester's classes, editing the thesis, applying to schools...and using my favorite Christmas present:

A Turkish coffee grinder! Shipped straight from Turkey, along with a little bag of beans and two porcelain cup/saucer sets. They came from Herman and the other good folks of Turkish Gift Bazaar. The grinder's about seven inches tall; if you fill it with beans, it makes somewhat more coffee than I need for my double-ibrik. (I haven't quite precisely determined how many beans to put in.) You can change the fineness of the grind; I haven't messed with it too much. The settings seem to range from "ridiculously fine" to "virtually invisible."

Besides making great Turkish coffee grounds, a hand-grinder's great for building strength in your arms. It takes about four minutes to grind a full load of beans. You need every bit of mechanical advantage that handle gives you.

I confess I have no idea what the Arabic on the bowl of the grinder says. I'm planning on asking Dr. Ibrahim when I get back to school.

Besides the coffee that came with it, I've also been using Australian Fancy beans from Trader Joe's. A very bold, flavorful bean; I highly recommend it. It's a somewhat darker roast than traditional Turkish coffee uses, but still a fine brew.

I also like the cups. More holdable, and more stable, than my previous demitasse set.

The whole package comes highly recommended.

I also got a few more Civil War books for the library; drinking a fine Turkish coffee and reading a good book is one of the great sublime pleasures.

Transitioning

2006-12-20T11:07:00.000-06:00

Well, this past Friday was my last day at the library Ref Desk. I have a few weeks off, then begins a semester's worth of TA duties. Should be fun. I got some cake out of the end-of-the-road bit at the library, so that's always good.

I also just turned in the remains of my thesis draft. It's not a great draft. But, as they say, it's easier to fix something that's broken than something that's nonexistent. I feel like I've passed the top of the rollercoaster, but we'll see. Lots of stuff can happen yet.

The past week has been utterly frustrating. I had a bad case of writer's block/anxiety, which I thought I'd licked. I've discovered that the moment you think you've licked something is when it starts cominng back with a vengeance; you let your guard down and bam! you're back at square one. Time to start back on the write-every-day plan...that's the only way to go, I've learned.

I've also been discovering that American and World (or at least old world) history is written differently. I wasn't an Americanist until fairly recently, having been mostly into the classics and medieval history before that. Old-World history tends to be written in a more rhetorical, allusive, witty style (or at least it can be), while American history is more self-consciously "academic." This has been biting me writing the thesis, since I have to retrain myself. No dashes, no parenthetical statements, no dry wit or sarcasm...for a guy raised on Peter Green, this is a major blow. We shall see how this develops.

Anyway...one more day to recover, while it's raining, and then back to St. Louis for a few weeks of rest, relaxation...and editing, and reading, and writing. Great fun...hopefully I'll be able to get a few games in, too. I'll have Bamboleo along.

Battlelore, Pt. 2

2006-12-08T22:34:00.000-06:00

So, since my column, I've had a chance to work with Battlelore some more--solo, talking to people who have played, going in more depth with the rules. We'll call these "second impressions." This still shouldn't be considered a proper review; I'm actually curious what it's like to track my opinion of a game over a long period--from opening the box for the first time through the first several plays. I fully expect my opinions to continue to change.

Anyway, Jorge asked me this afternoon whether BL is any good, whether I'd recommend it, etc. I gotta say: If you have C&C experience, I can't really wholeheartedly recommend the game right now, with as few scenarios as it has. It has ten scenarios, but only one of those actually uses all the rules. I don't mind the programmed instruction format for the scenarios, but then there should have been a "real" scenario book, or some kind of scheme to generate your own. (coughpointscough)

That said, I like the rules more and more. There's plenty of good stuff; I like the "Lore" aspects and jiggling the War Council. That's great stuff. It's just that there isn't a lot to do right out of the box.

I'm also starting to think that the trays for the figurines are lamer than I originally thought. GOOD: There are lots of different figure molds. BAD: That means that finding the ones you need is multiple kinds of tedious when they're all jumbled up. I'm transferring everything to baggies. This is by no means the end of the world, but the shine has gone off the trays.

Interestingly, some of the guys at the store have been playing the Agincourt scenario multiple times, learning the game (not many have M44 experience, so starting at the beginning makes a lot of sense). The thing is, the French have been stomping the English every time. That...shouldn't happen.

I am confident that, over time, Battlelore will be a valued member of my C&C collection. It may well, one day, be my favorite. But that'll only happen when there are more scenarios, campaigns, and army/scenario building options. Until then, I think this is a great vehicle in search of more places to go.