J C Lawrence

(clearclaw)

Blog

Geek of the Week #131.

Unless a game is flagged as a Must-Have on my wishlist, I am almost certainly not interested in a game trade by mail. My tradelist is used as a way of tracking games I intend to lose at local trades and auctions, not as a means of attracting trade offers from others.

Some of the groups I play with:

-- BAP
-- Endgame Oakland
-- Los Altos Gamesday
-- SB-Boardgamers
-- SVB

Game preferences:

-- Relatively strong zero-sum patterns. While I have no interest in Take-That! games, advancement explicitly at the cost of the other player's positions is appreciated. Screwage should be clearly but not dominantly expressed, and must be matched and balanced by personal player self-interest. Arbitrary hosage is uninteresting. Carving on and foiling other player's plans and positions while advancing my own is desirable. On the other side, if I can't positively and negatively affect another player's game fortunes, why am I wasting my time with this pansy activity? There must be struggle, and it is good if at least a portion of that struggle is zero-sum. I am generally not interested in efficiency-race games.

-- Small random effects. This is often thought of as a requirement for perfect control. That's false. I simply find random events/effects uninteresting and even mildly depressing (why am I bothering?). I'm interested in the other players as the source of prediction challenges, not the game. I find no tension or interest or anything but mildly distasteful disinterest in rolling dice or pulling cards to see what whatever comes up. I'd rather go do something actually interesting and have the game tell me what happened later.

-- No hidden trackable information. If it is trackable with pencil and paper then almost without exception I'll play it open. Making such hidden trackable information open doesn't change the logical definition of the game. Example cases include an open Castillo in El Grande, open hands in Settlers of Catan (I know about the thief not being trackable), open money in Container (and most other games), Tigris & Euphrates with open cubes, Acquire with open shares etc. The realisation that I could potentially make a better decision if only I'd tracked (whatever) is an excellent means of persuading me to either not to play that game again, or to only play it with open information in future.

-- Emergent strong player incentive structures. The ability to control, direct and even dictate other player's interests, as well as to have my own interests similarly declared by other players is wonderful. Frequently this manifests as either explicit negotiation or implicit negotiation via board play (moves that make offers to other players). Quite possibly the one pattern I enjoy more than any other in gaming is to setup another player so that their primary in-game interest is to help me win (or to be setup that way myself). In short, Set it up so that the best way to improve your game position is to help me win.

-- Networks and graphs. They are simply fine and enjoyable things. Topologies, especially inferred or implicit topologies, are a wonderful thing.

-- Counter-intuitive. Games which work against the player's own intuitions and presumed natural proclivities are especially liked.

-- Ambiguity. Games without ambiguous decisions are uninteresting. I specifically look for games that allow players to manipulate how, why and to what extent other player's decisions are ambiguous (or not).

-- Unfriendliness. Simply, my favourite games seem to specialise in making their player's game lives difficult. They have absurdly high penalties for failure, they disproportionately abuse early errors and they appear capricious and even arbitrary (despite being perfect information games) until the secret dances and languages are learned. Ideally merely playing the game could be catharsis for deistic sin.

-- No combinatorics or economic snowballs or efficiency race games. I'm simply not interested in presumably clever combinations of special powers, features or abilities and I reserve an especial dislike for economic system/economic snowball/grow-like-a-fungus games. Not my thing, don't expect me to play them, do expect me to sit out if that's the only thing on offer as that's what I expect you to do in the same situation of a game you dislike.

-- Blood only. I do not play party games and will generally only play family or gateway games under protest. My preference is to simply avoid those games and somewhat even the people who play them, and when that's not possible, to sit out until something worth playing hits the table.

-- Game first. When at a game group I'm there to game, not socialise. Socialising is fine and I enjoy it, but that's not what I'm there for -- let's play! The gaming comes first and second. The socialising and shared experience maybe comes fourth. I'd rather play a game I love with people I dislike than a game I dislike with people I like. If your friends/game group won't play the games you like, get a more amenable game group or friends.

-- Poker chips. I always use poker chips for the money in games, no matter what components the original game did or didn't come with. Monopoly money and little coins are simply not worth the hassle. If you don't have poker chips, play something else.

-- Right/Left binding bad, variable turn order good. Player left of the newbie wins is a death knell, as is leaving it up to the player to the right of the leader to stop the leader. No thanks. 'Nuff said.

-- All games are abstract. Theme is just a source of convenient nouns and verbs for explaining a game. Once in play all games are abstract. Narrative is emergent and occurs in the player's heads; it does not require the game to explicitly support it.

-- Tabula rasa. The only thing that should enter the game is the players and their knowledge. The only things that may leave the game are the results. Every game begins and ends on a perfectly blank slate. Emotions, history, relationships, outside considerations, metagames, social contexts, cultural considerations and all the rest of that claptrap and the people who wish to carry it with them have no place in the games I play.

-- Play the game. The only things that are allowable in the game are the bits of the game itself and the players with their knowledge and skills. Unless explicitly cleared before-hand the only acceptable goal of a player in a game is winning or some suitable approximation of that if winning is no longer possible (ranking, absolute score, percentage of winner's score, etc). All other considerations are not part of the game. Once in a game players are merely resources to be exploited in the pursuit of victory just like any other game resource. Adding external considerations like friendship to a game is unacceptable metagaming. Out of the game more social considerations may hold but that has no relevance inside the game.

-- Negotiation. Negotiation is only acceptable in games if the rules explicitly allow it or negotiation has been explicitly cleared and accepted by the players before the game starts. With rare exception if a game doesn't explicitly allow negotiation in the rules I will not allow negotiation when playing it.

-- Exponential rating. My game ratings are according to an exponential scale (Okay, a small mantissa). Yes, I consider a game with a rating of 5 to be exponentially better than a game with a rating of 4, likewise for the difference between a rating of 9 and 8. I do not rate any games a 10 but two player Blokus probably comes closer to that target than any other game.

-- Start player. I almost exclusively play the remainder game to pick start players. Number the players in rotation starting with 0. Have each player stick out some number of fingers on a count of three. Add up the fingers and get the modulo of the total number of fingers by the number of players (remainder after division). The player with that number is the start player. The requirements that drive use of the remainder game are:

a) Efficient
b) Deterministic results
c) Actually random
d) Short constant execution time
e) Works with any number of players in any situation
f) Works with any game in any situation
g) Is clearly auditable by all concerned