Patience

For many young players and young people, discerning when to act and when to wait is one of the hardest lessons of strategy.  For example, the novice player is so eager to attack and claim victory, he plunges into his "routing" foe only to realize--too late--that he has fallen into the patient opponent's trap.  

In life, I am doing my best to be patient and while I search for my next career-continuing job.  I would say career-beginning, but I have been working towards this job for years now.  My days are consumed by searching, applying, networking, and waiting.  I have compared my hunt to fishing--putting hooks in the water and waiting for any bites.  

The catch with patience in life as in games is the possibility and probability of payoff.  To further the fishing metaphor, no amount of hooks and patience will catch a fish on dry land or an empty pond.  Unlike a metaphor, with obvious illustrations to carry the message, life and many games have imperfect information.

Like the "fog of war" in many games, many of life's opportunities and follies are shrouded by a fog of the unknown until burned away by the light of expended effort.  As we choose and try new efforts, we fail, succeed, and avoid follies and successes.

Of late, I have begun to wonder if my efforts at finding work are ever going to be successful.  I am beginning to feel that while I am not fishing on dry land, perhaps I am in a drying pool.  Hopefully one that is merely suffering from a prolonged drought.  Times these reveal the underlying requirement of patience--faith.  The strategy of patience requires faith that the chosen course is the right one.  Whether that faith is faith in yourself, God, or something else, you need enough to make it to what you believe the payoff will be.  I just hope there will be more than dust on my hooks soon.

End Turn.

Mulligans

We have all made mistakes in our lives.  It is part of how we learn.  The same is true of games.  Novice gamers are just as prone to mistakes as novice "live-rs."  I could easily make some joke about college freshmen having inexperienced livers too.  The point is this: in games as in life, players must learn how to cope with and learn from mistakes.  Players often permit mulligans in games, especially in casual ones.  Life sometimes offers a mulligan, but we tend to call it forgiveness instead.

End Turn.

Played Any Good Games Lately?

Last week, some friends "came over" to play a game with my wife and I.  Since we moved two plus states and several hundred miles away from the bulk of our friends, we've had to get creative to "get together" with those we left behind.  We decided to embrace technology and join the rest of the civilized world with Skype--only we went one step further.  For those who are unfamiliar with the game, Settlers of Catan is a fantastic import from Germany, and can only be described as... Settlers.  The point of the game is to expand and construct settlements, cities and various monuments for "victory points."  The way you do so is to collect, trade and expend resources generated by the tiles your settlements touch.  Which tiles generate resources turns on the roll of the dice.  Statistically, the numbers closest to seven will produce the most resources throughout the game, but anyone who has ever played Settlers will agree with Mark Twain that there are lies, damned lies, and ghost towns on sixes and eights.

Anyway, the point was this: we set up a Skype account and played Settlers with our friends with mirrored boards.  It is actually a rather brilliant idea borne first of necessity.  We have our dear friend, Father Adam to thank for it, really.

Way back in the ice ages of the winter of 2009, Father Adam was stuck in West Virginia, while we were in Washington, DC.  As you may have read on papyrus, there was an unusual snow storm that blew through the area, paralyzing the world.  Independently, both houses decided to take in all they could of this magical white fluff of pure wonderment to three little-at-heart southerners.  Three hours of snowbound fun was about enough, sending each house scurrying back indoors to find warmth and happiness.  Then the next several days came and went.  The Alabaster Abomination, the pale and patient guerrilla General Winter, revealed its icy insidious intent.  The trap sprung, the pure driven banks revealed their oily, gritty, corrupted cores, eroding our wonderment with disillusion.  As unwanted by society as the beggars they displaced, the huge piles of filthy snow persisted and imposed their wretched, gnarled, withering, and yet indestructible masses upon us.  Imploring the bundled, hurried, and repulsed pedestrians to remember them for what they once were, the banks of snow continued to wear away at our cheeriness, even as they were in turn trodden down by haggard commuters and immutably cheery children.  It was cold, it was miserable, and nothing was open.  It was a similar scene in West Virginia, and Father Adam needed a break from his hermit's winter-hovel.  We both searched for what games would play well over a camera; games prohibiting duplicate secret information--like the killer, weapon, and location in Clue--were out.  Settlers, as it turns out, is quite good for that purpose, requiring only minor house rules. 

Playing Settlers over Skype requires good communication to get the pieces properly set.  Thankfully, it is pretty easy to guide in your fellow players using only words.  Most of the time, a simple three hex/tile description is enough.  Calling out that you are building a settlement on 8-5-10 tells your opponent on the other side to look for the junction of the three tiles bearing those numbers.  Roads go along the shared sides instead of the vertexes and must be built off of one of the player's existing roads or settlements/cities, so calling out the two tiles and a supplemental tile of the direction the road is going towards will resolve nearly all confusion as to where the player is going.  Trades are easily managed by substituting the bank's reserves for the player's hand on the other side of the camera.  Finally, the development cards require a house rule.  Since the odds of two independently shuffled decks having the exact same order of cards is near zero, the simplest solution is to have one deck control, and prohibit hidden cards.

All of that was a long way to go to say this, but my wife and I played Settlers with another couple with which we're friends.  Kate, my wife, won with a sweet yellow brick road strategy (bricks, lumber, a huge wheat connection and the wheat trading port), and I realized something that I wanted to post about here.  As anyone who has ever moved away has realized, we have it pretty sweet when we are still in school.  Friends are in ample supply, and everyone has far more time to spend together than they ever will in the working world.  We go from seeing multiple friends in a day to multiple days to see a friend.  It is great to live in a time when we can turn back the clock and bridge the distance with friends this easily.  Make sure to realize that and ask your friends if they've played any good games lately.

End Turn.

Lucky Numbers

As a strategist, I swing back and forth on game mechanics that rely on dice rolls.  Certainly, luck plays a role in strategy.  Sometimes the name of the game is to increase your odds (or make your opponent think your odds are higher than they really are) and hope for the best.  I have heard and read that skill and luck are opposites.  Some even go as far as to say that to increase the amount of one decreases the other in game mechanics.  In extremes, there is validity to this belief, but there is also some skill involved in increasing your luck. 

I, personally, do not like games that require only luck--especially those which take longer than five minutes.  As a strategist, I hold on to the delusion that I have some skill.  Skill which I like to exercise when I play a game.  On the other end, however, I find myself mixed on games that require pure skill.  Chess, for instance, is not one of my favored games (I know, I have the chess background for the blog currently--I'm working on it) because against a skilled opponent, a single mistake can render a player's chances for recovery, much less victory, to near zero.  I have been on both sides of that equation.  I saw an early blunder by a novice player, and knew his fate was sealed unless I chose to throw the game.  I like to have fun and have close, fair, and fun games.  Effortlessly slaughtering a human opponent is not fun, and it is not fair.  I've also been on the other side of the table.  I could tell when I was doomed, and the game lost interest for the both of us.

A different game of pure skill that I find myself loving is Diplomacy.  There are no dice involved, and the only "luck" is in whether or not your French opponent buys your bluff about refraining from entering the English Channel.  To me that is more of a mind game--the purest form of strategy.

"So what about those classics, like Risk or Axis and Allies?"  One of my college buddies put it best.  "Pete, you have demon hands!  HOW? How can you have such luck!?"  I don't like Risk or Axis and Allies because while there is a decent amount of strategy involved in improving your odds, the games put too much emphasis on luck.  Watch 25 armies go down to 5 armies from India to Siam, and pretty soon you'll tire of beginner's luck.  Contrast this to a more complex game like Warhammer and you'll see that luck (in the form of dice) still has a role.  Luck cannot be discounted, but luck will not save you from a well executed flanking attack.

End Turn.

Your Opponent's Shoes

Previously on <the show you're watching>, <the narrator recaps the entire episode in 30 seconds, cutting out all of the irrelevant, time-filling crap; side stories that you wish you'd been getting a glass of water in the kitchen for; and generally making you realize you wasted an hour of your life last week to get what everyone else just got during this 30 second blurb at the beginning of the conclusion episode>.

So my dad went on to explain, (once you know the rules and how the pieces move and interact) the way to defeat your opponent is understand what he or she is going to do.  As he explained it, the way to out maneuver your opponent is to put yourself in his or her shoes and figure out what his or her best move is going to be.  Once you know what their best move is, think about what your pieces can do to make that move ineffective, disadvantageous, or down-right stupid.  Start planning ahead, and you will be along way toward making your opponent mystified to the point that victory is all but assured.

Of course, this is the mere beginning of a strategy.  There is a world of ground to cover in each of the steps.  First you have to figure out what your opponent is doing.  What you may think is the best move may not be what your opponent thinks is the best move.  Your opponent may be doing exactly what you are doing, resulting in a mind game like the iocaine powder scene in The Princess Bride. 

Secondly, there are also situations, much like the iocaine scene, where you don't have all of the information and are about to fight the wrong battle to your misfortune.  You must also have the wits and/or experience to figure out how to counter your prediction of your opponent's move.

Finally, sometimes, there is no amount of strategy that will guarantee victory.  Sometimes you're playing a numbers game and hoping for luck to be on your side.  Sometimes, you cannot or do not win.  That is where the real lesson of gaming comes into play--being a better winner or loser than other competitors.

Speaking as one who struggles with sore losing (you never truly overcome the disappointment and frustration of defeat when you want to win), I know that accepting defeat with grace can sometimes be very hard to do.  Just as hard to deal with are those who cannot win with dignity.  Neither a sore loser, nor a sore winner, will have the wealth of opponents and opportunities to learn from them as players who show respect.  If you truly want to become a master of strategy, you must learn that not all games are over when they end.  If you really love to play, teach your foes why they lost, and seek to learn from those who best you.

Until next time,

End Turn.

Opening Moves

We all start somewhere.  I remember loving all games and strategy to back before I even began school.  I have my father to thank for that because he too shares my love of strategy games.  My first real memory of learning how to formulate a strategy came from the old hexadecimal ocean warfare game, "Dreadnaught."  My dad and I were playing one of countless historical scenarios he knew by heart--he is a fantastic history buff--and he was swabbing the deck of some steel-hulled behemoth with me.  Flabbergasted by his near magical ability to destroy my superior units, I asked how in the world he was able to do that.  What followed next could only be described as a moment of pure genius.

I know he was clean-shaven, but in my mind, somehow my father instantly sprouted a two foot Fu Man Chu mustache and became a wizened 200 year old strategy kung-fu master.  With an obligatory "Ah so, Grasshopper," he proceeded to teach me the forward pass of strategy gaming...

To be continued...