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Domenico Licheri
Italy
London
United Kingdom
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For the People: A Case Study in Two Campaigns is an unusual set of two Session Reports.
The first six chapters have been published in the "Files" section:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/53506/for-the-people-a...
I will post a message on this thread as an alert of publication, so if you subscribe to this thread you will be notified that a new chapter is out.
The first chapter is reproduced below.
Thanks to all for your interest and I hope you like this!
Domenico
Chapter 1
Introduction
For The People: A Case Study in Two-Campaigns
Why a “For the People” Case Study?
The game is deservedly very popular. Being one of the first Card Driven Games and the first on the topic it represents a significant evolution in the American Civil War games category.
The most innovative and best appreciated aspect of the game is perhaps the portraying of the war as a contest of wills: praise has rightly been heaped on this aspect from all sides. Not only is the idea quite new but it is also most finely balanced and it has withstood the test of time: other games have imitated this concept but rarely with the same level of success.
As could be expected, For the People has sparked animated discussions that have over time polarised into two parties that for the sake of simplicity I will name the “gamers” and the “game-historians”.
The “gamers” more or less unreservedly and often very passionately love For the People, while the “game-historians” have had more of a love-hate relationship with it and have over time formalised criticism of a number of the game’s features, with the Card Driven engine, the Combat Results Table, the rules on Leader Casualties and the Naval Rules coming up for critical comment more often than other aspects.
The occasional wrath of the game-historians has been offset by the persistent delight of the gamers as even the aspects that are most criticised seem to work very well in terms of the resulting game dynamics and play balance.
The Ghost of Braxton Bragg
The authoritative view that “History is about what has happened and not what could have happened” is a tenet of historical research.
An accomplished game may contribute to the understanding of history’s main events and of the behaviours and decisions of the main characters by helping us to appreciate some aspects that influenced why some events happened and others did not as well as why some decisions were taken while others were not.
Such understanding is usually more difficult to convey with the same argumentative strength and clarity through other tools of historic research.
The fact that events that did not happen historically may happen in the game is therefore useful to understand the “strategic” dilemmas facing the historical “players” and to help us infer some of the reasoning and motives for their decisions.
The reverse side of the coin is that the strength of this “contribution to the historical understanding” will inevitably be diminished if in a specific play session the game evolves into a situation and direction that significantly differs from the historical events.
Unless a game is completely confined within the straitjacket of a pure simulation that simply re-enacts history the game-historian will always risk finding (reasonable?) issue with it for allowing something “so non-historical” to happen. This is true of all games that simulate historical settings, but it seems to be exceptionally more so for American Civil War games.
The difficult predicament of the Game designer creating an American Civil War game has been vividly expressed Richard Berg in his quote celebre: "The American Civil War is an extremely difficult topic on which to design a "game". A simulation? Easy; a game? a major challenge. […] there are an awful lot of people who know an awful lot about the ACW, and an awful lot of those often awful people are often quite "secure", shall we say, in their knowledge. And may the Ghost of Braxton Bragg reside in your briefs if you don't get it exactly the way they securely envision it to have happened.”
Prevalent consensus has it that in some measure the challenge in designing games on the American Civil War is a by-product of the fact that many of the decisions and strategies adopted by the Union early in the war were significantly sub-optimal.
This has a severe impact on game design: if the historical conduct of the Union was sub-optimal then it will be relatively easy for the Union player, with the benefit of hindsight, to adopt “better than historical” strategies and decisions. This element alone, if not “corrected”, will often lead game play down a path that gamer-historians will be more likely to class as non-historical (and may lead some to say the game is “unrealistic” or “flawed”).
Different game designs have devised a variety of devices to address the challenge, in essence all being different sorts of straightjackets allowing different degrees of variation and frequency to the “possible outcomes”.
There also seems to be a consensus on the fact that throughout the war soldiers on both sides generally fought with equal gallantry, and it is common in ACW games to see comparatively little emphasis on the proficiency or morale of the infantry soldier (whereas this is usually a key factor in Napoleonic Wargames) while a pivotal role is assigned to the leaders, and here always the Confederacy has the edge.
Another useful tool to “bring back” games toward their historical path is to provide different “scenarios”: no matter which of the many ACW games one may choose to play from the start of the war it will inevitably be unlikely that the situation at the beginning of 1864 may be close to the historic events.
The game design comes to the rescue by proposing a “1864 scenario” so players can explore and try their hand at the specific set of decisions for that situation. Arguably this could be taken as far as to provide a “historical situation scenario” for all points in the game, effectively showing a “historical re-enactment game-play”.
In this respect Mark Herman (the Designer of For the People) has worked extremely hard to create a game that is both very enjoyable while also being as veracious a simulation as possible from a historical point of view.
Beyond the clever game design itself Mark has created a good number of scenarios (official and un-official) and even included an example of play in the rulebook to reproduce the historical events of 1861 (unsurprisingly this example of play states that the moves described may not be optimal).
Mark also took significant pains to conduct “due diligence” on the historical adherence and “realism” of the battle mechanisms (mainly on the Combat results table and on the rules governing leader casualties), having these and their results checked by eminent Mathematicians, Statisticians and History experts.
The use of Strategy Cards in For the People lends the game a rich historical flavour while creating a captivating “fog of war” effect.
This feature ensures that virtually no game of For the People is like another; a very good thing for a game’s longevity, but the apparent randomness of the draws seems to have fuelled an overstated perception about the frequency of cases in which a “freak” card draw will cause the game to significantly “deviate” from the historical course of events.
Rules Distillation
Players and aficionados have been playing, exploring, studying, discussing and tweaking the game for many years. This lively activity has sustained a significant refinement in the rules and has resulted in the current and final standard set that is widely used by the For the People community.
The fact that the discussion of alternative and house rules endures after many years is proof of the interest that the game continues to generate, while at the same time the crystallization of the rules into an official set allows players across the globe to participate in tournaments and games via web, e-mail or face to face at conventions ensuring they are fully familiar with the mechanics without having to haggle on which variation will be in use and without having adapt their play to specific “surprise” rules in the middle of a game.
In addition, this crystallization crucially has allowed the community to “agree” on a sort of authoritative referee role for Mark, who has graciously complied and continues to help the community by responding timely to queries and frequently intervening in forums and discussions.
This would have been impossible if a proliferation of inevitably incoherent additions had been allowed to endlessly continue to be introduced and withdrawn, and this sort of uncertain environment would have adversely impacted the players ability to find opponents willing to play a specific set (particularly in tournament or ladder-style play) and would have damaged the game overall.
The final set of rules is a robust clockwork of rare precision: its straightforward and polished mechanics, refined and perfected over the years allow the players to quickly master the technical workings of play so as to be able to concentrate on the rewardingly complex strategic decisions facing them as they are convincingly placed in the boots of Lincoln and Davis.
How complex to analyse is For the People (in a “scientific” sense)?
Most players would say that playing and observing play are the ways to find out more about the game and would underwrite the statement that For the People “…does not support card counting and perfect moves…”.
They are most likely to be right: in fact while straightforward and elegant in its mechanics For the People is near impossibly complex to analyse in a scientific sense.
Many would accept this statement as fact without further discussion, but I will indulge in some quantification to reinforce the point.
The games of Tic-Tac-Toe, Draughts and Chess have been the subject of much scientific research.
We know from boring theorems that a “perfect strategy” (i.e. an optimal way to play) exists for each of the players in all these games.
Tic-Tac-Toe has very little longevity because players quickly develop a strategy that ensures they can’t lose, and the game is not much fun after that.
An average gamer making a decent effort would probably crack the secrets of not losing in Tic-Tac-Toe in half an hour or less, even without applying a rigorous analytical process.
It may be a surprise to know that there are over 255 thousand possible different play sequences in Tic-Tac-Toe so that it would take 3 days to play them one per second, and all of these must be considered to provide a scientific proof that the “cannot lose” strategy a gamer will find in a half hour is indeed “perfect” in a scientific sense.
Draughts is in a different league of complexity and the number of possible play sequences is enormous. It was big news and a great scientific achievement when a “perfect strategy” for was found for Draughts in recent years.
Chess is yet more complex and the subject of much study.
At the start of a Chess game the white player has “only” 20 possible moves available, and the black player can respond with one of “only” 20 possible moves, so that there are “only” 400 possible different positions after one move by each player. The number of variations literally explodes after this point.
Masters of the game would know by heart the main variations for the opening stages, and effective strategies have been developed in the form of computer programs that achieve super-human results, but it will probably still be a very long time before a “perfect strategy” in a scientific sense is found.
In For the People players do not have access to complete information about the state of the game as players of Tic-Tac-Toe, Draughts or Chess would (because they do not know what cards their opponent holds).
I seem to recollect (but I am not positive of this) that this simple fact is enough to cast doubt over whether a “perfect” strategy even exists at all for players in For the People.
In a practical sense rigorous analysis can yield results only if applied to much smaller “Sub-games” (i.e. to a very limited game situation) but definitely not for the game as a whole.
An example will help appreciate this: we mentioned that the use of Strategy Cards ensures that virtually no game of For the People is like another.
Let us consider a “Sub-game” variant of For the People that is played with the respective hands face-up (clearly a very different game) and in a scenario that only lasts for the Spring 1861 turn (i.e. 4 card plays for each player).
For this limited game a perfect strategy is guaranteed to exist for each player. Would this perfect strategy be hard to find?
Let’s see: at the start of the game there are 130 cards in the deck. To simplify and reduce the complex calculations let’s take into account that some of these cards are present in the deck in duplicate or near-duplicate copies. If I understand the cards well enough then there are 98 “really different” cards: 78 are unique cards (which exist in single copy in the deck) and 20 are “types” of non-unique cards that exist in multiple copies in the deck and that may show up multiple times in a hand, for a total of 52 non-unique cards.
Let us consider the opening 4 Card hands of both players in this sub-game and for the sake of simplicity let’s restrict the game to those hands which do not include duplicates of a card (i.e. if a player draws the same card twice, for example two copies of the “Elite Units” card, then the whole hand for both players is cancelled and Cards are dealt out again).
To a rough count there should be over 11 trillion different combinations of hands that the players may be holding at the start of such a “simplified” game.
If it took 1 second to play each hand and each time the players would magically draw a combination hand that had never been dealt before it still would take over 349 thousand years to play all combinations in this simple sub game.
And this A) excludes hands where any card is duplicated; B) does not take into account that a card can be used in different ways to move different forces of different sizes with different Generals to different locations, or place PC markers, create Armies or forts in different spaces, etc.; C) it only covers the first turn where players only draw eight cards, four each, while for example at turn four and later they’ll be drawing fourteen cards each turn, with theoretical numbers of combinations rarely seen even in the mapping DNA sequences.
I am sure the idea is clear, and at this point we may well accept that rigorous analysis can not practically be applied to the For the People game as a whole.
It can, however, be usefully applied to specific and limited game situations, and in our Case Study we will often utilise analytical tools with worthy results.
How much do we know about For the People and how to play it well?
Over ten years of individual and collective “exploration” of the game (through play, observation of play, discussion and analysis) have resulted in the accumulation of a significant capital of “knowledge”. While some of this capital is generously and widely shared and disseminated, a vast portion of it is locked-away in the minds of the players.
As a result of this accumulation of knowledge many players believe that much of what there is to know about the game is already known; this belief transpires from statements such as “…opening strategies for the Union have been catalogued…”.
This view is supported by observation of the persistent consistency of the top ranked players’ winning records: the best ones by far exceed what would be statistically likely to happen in a situation where skills are reasonably similar.
The argument is that in For the People, much like in Chess, the main openings have been catalogued and the main strong strategies have been identified (and if a perfect strategy is not even proven to exist and would anyway be practically impossible to find then this surely is satisfactory). Occasionally some new concept may be “discovered”, but it is an accepted assumption that the frequency of such discoveries will tend to diminish as the acquired knowledge increases. The downside of this view is that it does not encourage further exploration, and that any new concept runs the risk of being met with more than the fair share of scepticism.
Many other players hold the alternative view that much remains to be discovered.
Supporters of this view observe that the large knowledge base that has been developed over the years has not diminished the fun of playing For the People. Since we tire quickly of things we have fully understood they argue the widespread players’ perception that the game continues to remain as uncharted, fresh and engaging as the first time they played it is proof that most players find its exploration still thrilling and continue to learn new things (even if only subjectively new) every time.
This view takes heart from the fact that it is practically impossible to fully survey even a small sub-game, let alone the game as a whole.
Not only they rejoice in that For the People is the worthy and rewarding object of their exploration, but they also trust that this fact is unlikely to change for many years to come.
A Journey of Exploration…
This Case Study in Two-Campaigns is a limited exploration of the game through observation and analysis of play.
Play by e-mail is a format that superbly suits For the People since it gives players the time that is needed to appropriately ponder their decisions, as should be with a Strategic simulation game.
The two Campaign games that we will observe were recently played by e-mail in the “serious” context of a ladder tournament by reasonably competent players of broadly similar rank (at the time these games were played our players all ranked in the top half of the table).
The players did not know each other and had never played against their opponents before; the only information available on their opponents prior to the games was their respective ladder rank. Communication during the games was courteous but generally limited to moves with only occasional brief comments on play or luck.
The aim of this work is to illustrate the situations that occurred and the decisions that the players took, alongside some of the strategies and alternatives that were available to them, aiming at forming an assessment on those strategies, decisions and alternatives in the perhaps ambitious hope of gaining some better understanding of the game and how to play it well, and to make a small contribution to the accumulation of knowledge about For the People.
With access to the full records for these Campaign games we could assume the point of view of a spectator that can see the cards each player is holding.
Providing a balanced assessment of the strategies, available alternatives and decisions for each player would be quite difficult from such a point of view, since we would have to “selectively” forget part of the information in order to be able to see the game with the player’s eyes. Incidentally this is the reason why realistic solitaire play is so difficult in card driven games: it is difficult to make decisions that resemble the ones a “normal” player would make if we know that our opponent is holding “3 Cigars”.
To avoid these difficulties we will observe the game from the “point of view” of one of the players, and in order to provide a more complete survey of the game we will observe one Campaign with “Confederate” eyes and one with “Union” eyes.
In the course of our analysis we will make informed assumptions on the aims and reasoning of the “point of view” players leveraging information obtained through post game conversations. These assumptions should be taken with some care as the players’ views and recollections of the game may be biased and may rely on knowledge of developments they did not have at a specific point in time (similarly to the plenty of examples of biased memoirs of historical leaders and generals after a war).
The two Campaign Games
The individual events that, in their succession, make the story of the two Campaign games are observed from the point of view of one of the players (the Confederate in the first game and the Union in the second game).
Some of the events in the succession are the direct result of the player’s decisions: we will analyse the decisions with reference to the information available at the point in the game when the decision was taken. For some of these decisions we will venture to consider whether the decision was a good one, however, in the game like in life not all good decisions produce good results, and great victories may result from mistakes.
An example will help: buying a $1 ticket for a single prize $1 million lottery where the odds of winning are 1 in 10 million is a poor decision. If that decision is repeated over and over again the player will sooner or later lose all of his money. This is an assessment of the decision.
However, as we move on with the one game we are observing we may see that the player who bought the ticket has won the lottery: from this second point of view later in the game, and drawing on the knowledge of subsequent events, we can say that the ultimate effect of that “bad” decision was to make the player a millionaire. This is an assessment of the consequences of the decision.
This is extremely unfair, but in the world we have diligent people going bust without ever having bought a lottery ticket and we have reckless gamblers who are (perhaps temporarily) millionaires.
We know that a player that takes good decisions is more likely in the long run to have good games, but also that in a specific game we may see a player lose while taking good decisions.
Some of the other events in the succession may in some way have been influenced by the players without being in their control: these events are the result of the decisions of their opponent. While we will assess the decisions of the opposing player and also assess their consequences, it will be difficult or impossible to assess to what extent these were influenced by the point of view player (also keeping in mind that there was very little communication between the players).
Finally, other events in the succession were not influenced by the players: the Card draws and die rolls. This is the domain of “Luck”.
We will be assessing probabilities of various possible developments, as these are crucial to assess decisions.
As the succession of events in the Campaign game evolves we will consider various statistics and assess the impact of “luck” on specific situations as well as on each player’s “attitudes” and on the game overall.
These Campaign games are presented as they were and are “normal” in every sense. As you read through you are likely to find complex strategic situations and a “normal” number of “extraordinary” and “unexpected” developments that with “normal” frequency seem to occur at critical junctures and to have a disproportionate impact on the game. Then on reflection the overall impact of “luck” will at most times still seem to be “normal” and “neutral”.
Rules of Engagement
This work attempts to closely observe For the People play. I hope that you will find reading it both informative and fun.
The analysis in this work will be heavily influenced and limited by my views, opinions, reasoning and misconceptions.
I enjoy playing games and have been doing it (even if not nearly as often as I would like) for a long time. I have some numerical skills and some experience in game analysis, a dust-covered legacy of my 1993 cum laude in Game Theory.
I will freely quote figures and probabilities without usually providing a calculation, but if you have a query as to how a specific figure was derived please send me a message and I will do my best to respond timely.
I am not a mathematician or statistician, and given the nature of the topic and the complexity of some of the calculations I am keenly aware of the inevitable multitude of errors, mistakes, wrong assumptions, flawed assessments and misinterpretations that will be scattered across this work.
I hope that among these you will also find some valuable insights.
It is not the aim of this work to discover or formalise something new about For the People in an absolute sense: members of the For the People community have been playing and observing play for over ten years, so it is unlikely you will find in this work something everybody else has missed.
Your feedback, alternative views and corrections are welcome, and will be graciously received and published with thanks as appropriate in the knowledge that these improvements will further the extent to which this work can achieve its aim of being both informative and fun.
Conventions
The following conventions will be in use:
• 1OC, 2OC or 3OCs will indicate a generic Strategy Card with an Operations value of 1, 2 or 3 respectively.
• Armies will be referred to with their acronyms; so that AoNV will stand for Army of Northern Virginia, AoP will stand for Army of the Potomac, and so on.
• 1 SP will refer to 1 Strength Point, and this notation will be also used when referring to the numeric strength of an Army or Corps. Groups of Strength Points may occasionally be referred to as “units” or “forces”; this latter term often indicating that a General is also present with the Strength Points.
• Other common abbreviations will be occasionally used, for example LOC for “Line of Communication”, OOS for “Out of Supply” and similar others.
Plan of the Work
This Case Study will be made up of this introduction, a general overview of the game at the start of a Campaign game and then by the detailed accounts of a Confederate Campaign and of a Union Campaign game.
These detailed accounts will be published in chapters, each covering roughly one turn.
Specific chapters will be devoted to a summary and assessment of each year’s events, including a statistical appendix. The statistics are very detailed and I trust most players will find these most interesting.
The case study will be first published as a set of files on Boardgamegeek: I will place a new post to alert that a new chapter has been published, so if you subscribe to the For the People – A two Campaign Case Study” thread in the “Sessions” section of the Boardgamegeek For the People Forum you will be notified every time a new chapter is out.
Please e-mail me if you would like to have a printable version of this work.
As I write this introduction I have just completed the general overview and the chapters relating to the year 1861 of the first Confederate Campaign game.
Writing a chapter is hard work, and even if I enjoy writing these I cannot commit to a firm schedule.
I am thankful for everyone’s interest and for your kind patience as this work progresses.
Domenico
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Patrick Kairns
Canada
Longueuil
Quebec
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Fantastic work Domenico. I have just downloaded the files and I am looking forward to reading your fine oeuvre! May I ask you, what would you suggest would be the best way to print the MHT files? I've opened them in MS Word 7 and in Internet Explorer 8, but there is no way that what I see in the "print previews" will be as nice as the way you have laid the presentation out. The only reasonably viewable format is if I flip to Landscape, but even then not the best. I really would like to be able to print these. I dislike reading from a screen for too long. If you prefer that the files not be printed, I understand as it is YOUR work and YOUR property.
Thanks for the great effort and your time.....
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Mark Herman
United States
Unspecified
Unspecified
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I am quite impressed with the depth of thought and the time it took to write this first chapter. I am off right now to download the rest and read on. I would like to suggest that if you are interested the piece that you wrote would make a fascinating c3i article. If you are interested please let me know and I can set it up.
Thank you for taking the time to share your well reasoned and thoughtful remarks on my design.
Mark
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Domenico Licheri
Italy
London
United Kingdom
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Dear all,
Please be advised that "printer friendly" pdf versions of the first six chapters are now available in the files section:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/53506/for-the-people-a...
Regards,
Domenico
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Patrick Kairns
Canada
Longueuil
Quebec
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Bravo! Thank you again!
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gianfranco cianchetti
Italy
Bonate Sotto
BG
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Well, I think that actually it would be a good idea to include Domenico study in the game box.
Congratulations Dome.
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Yannick Poirier
Canada
Calgary
Alberta
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This is an amazing report. Thank you. :)
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