Wits and Wagers at work

Today we had a pot luck luncheon at work, a sort of celebration of the end of the fiscal year - or at least, just an excuse to blow off some steam on a Friday.  My team lead asked for game ideas, and I volunteered to be the game host for the event.  With a group of twenty generally smart but not avid game-playing people, my immediate thought was to run Wits and Wagers (designer Dominic Crapuchettes, publisher North Star Games).

W&W is a terrific party game for a large group.  In our case, we had twenty people, who divided themselves into five teams of four.  (The rules suggest seven smaller teams, but our game worked out fine with five.) The great thing about the game is that you don't have to know trivia; you just need to recognize the right answer when you see it.  We had a pretty good age range in our group, so questions about the Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly actually got some nods of recognition.

The premise of the game is that there are seven rounds.  In each round, a trivia question is asked whose answer is a number (such as a year, a measurement, or an amount of money).  For example, one question asked, "In what year were women first admitted to the United States service academies?"  Each team writes down an answer.  The answers are arranged from least to greatest on a betting mat.  Teams bet poker chips on the answer they believe is closest without going over.  The payout depends on how much of an outlier the right answer is.  If the median answer among the guesses turned out to be correct, then it pays 2:1.  If the smallest of all five guesses is correct, then it pays 4:1.

I should mention that one of the guiding principles of North Star Games is that they try to design games so that everybody is playing all the time.  There are no turn-based mechanics in W&W, and there should be very little down-time for anyone in the course of a game.  Everybody is working on an answer at the same time, and everybody is deciding what to bet on and how much at the same time.  That principle seemed to play out well in our session, and I didn't have to use the egg timer to keep things moving.

Usually when I play this game, people bet aggressively, and I have a problem with running out of poker chips when people win big.  That wasn't the case in this game at all.  Teams bet very conservatively (or very poorly), so there was never a team that bet a giant stack of chips and won a payout of an even bigger stack of chips. In fact, three of the five teams lost everything they had on the last question.  ("In what year was the novel Frankenstein first published?")  The winning team won with 59 points in poker chips - a remarkably low winning score in my experience.

But of course the real pay-off was how much fun everybody had playing this game.  I got a lot of positive feedback from co-workers who had a great time and really enjoyed themselves.  And of course that's what it's all about.

I should add that my team lead was very gracious to announce, before the game started, that I had a new game of my own published, and then showed everybody her copy of Trains Planes and Automobiles.  Needless to say I was surprised and very appreciative of her support.  I got a few questions about TPA afterward as well, which was really nice.

Frontispiece, Frankenstein,
1831 edition

Oh, and in case you were wondering:  Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was first published in 1818.  She wrote it while in Geneva one summer with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron, who had proposed that they each try a hand at writing a supernatural tale.  As for the service academies, the four major academies (West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, and Coast Guard) first admitted women in 1976.  As a member of the Naval Academy class of 1982, I was quite aware of this transition period.  What few people realize is that the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy admitted women in 1974, two years before the other academies.

A new dimension to Qwirkle

I was amused to see that Mensa-select game Qwirkle (designer Susan McKinley Ross, publisher MindWare) had won this year's Spiel des Jahres, the German annual award for best new game of the year.  Amused because my family (and many Americans, I expect) have been playing Qwirkle for quite some time.  But I guess if it's new in Germany, it's new, and that makes it eligible for the SdJ award.  Of course, Qwirkle is a brilliant game - easy to learn, fun to play, while aesthetically pleasing at the same time.  So the award is well-deserved, if a little overdue.

So the other day, I happened to have some rare time on my hands and wandered into Game Parlor Chantilly, my favorite local game store.  I really didn't expect to buy anything but had my eyes open - and spotted Qwirkle Cubes, a game by the same designer and publisher that I'd heard of but never thought to look for.  I snatched it up, secured my purchase, and whisked it home to try it out.

Kathy and I played it last night, and tonight our ten-year-old joined us for a game.  Qwirkle Cubes adds a nice Yahtzee-like dice rolling element in which tiles are replaced with dice, and the pattern you seek to obtain from your roll depends on the board configuration at the time.  Also important is that in Qwirkle Cubes, your "hand" of cubes is visible to your opponents (and vice versa), so that the risk of leaving an opening for an opponent to accomplish a high-scoring qwirkle is easier to evaluate.

The scoring in Qwirkle reminds me of basketball from the standpoint that the final scores are very high and usually close.  Tonight was no exception:  I won with 125 points, followed by Kathy with 122 and our son scoring a respectable 116 in his first game.

I can see Qwirkle Cubes quickly becoming a family favorite, perhaps even retiring the original SdJ-winning Qwirkle to the shelf for a while.

Trenes Aviones y Automoviles: Will TPA expand south to Latin America?

I've been very excited by the early positive response to the release of Trains Planes and Automobiles.  Most recently, my brother in Buenos Aires is trying to get a copy smuggled in a suitcase with one of the in-laws.  And the idea got me thinking:  Is it too early to work on an expansion?

The idea to expand TPA to other continents came up in conversation with Worthington/BlueSquare even before we had the deal nailed down.  We were both excited by the possibility, and I think our initial thought was that Europe would be the next venue for TPA if the North American version took off.  But for some reason, the exotic Caribbean islands and Amazon jungles have really got my creative juices flowing again, and I'm starting to lay out what the map would look like for a Latin American follow-on.

I'll tell you, though, I'm learning some serious geography in the process.  If I keep to the current map size and scale, there's no way I'll fit all of South America on a single map.  I'm thinking I'll actually do two new maps - Central America (which would also include the northern third of South America) and southern South America (which would include the major cities of Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires).  The interesting thing will be how the geography of South America affects game play.  I have to believe that large swaths of the Brazilian rainforest as well as the Andes Mountains are impassible, which makes air travel that much more important.  But there are few heavily inhabited islands south of Panama, so theoretically everyplace should be accessible by car ... true?

Anyway, it's just great to be excited about game design again.

Congress of Gamers on Sat 8 Oct

Okay, everybody, I can't help but plug my favorite little game convention, Congress of Gamers.  This event is a nice opportunity for those in the D.C. and Maryland area to have an inexpensive, friendly one-day boardgaming experience.  Hope to see you there.

Here's convention director Kaarin E.'s email:

Congress of Gamers 2011 is coming soon--from 9am to midnight on Saturday, Oct. 8, in the same location as last year:

Rockville Senior Center

1150 Carnation Dr.

Rockville, MD 20850-2043. 

Go to http://www.congressofgamers.org/register.php to register and pay online. If you would like a t-shirt, get your order in this week. A few shirts will be available at the con, but they will be limited in number and size.


We'll have many great events, including the EuroCaucus, CoG Racing Series, General Services Administration (RoboRally), Embassy from China, Transportation Department (a demonstration and game of Trains, Planes, and Automobiles), Education Department (demonstration of Dystopian Wars), De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) Tutorial, the 7th Annual Washington DC-area DBA Open Tournament, and more! Take a look at the schedule at http://www.congressofgamers.org/schedule.php. We'll also have lots of open gaming, and Games Club of Maryland (GCOM) will bring a library of games that everyone can use.


The math trade will start soon. Watch the website and Boardgame Geek Convention Forum for details. 


If you are planning to sell things at the Bring and Buy, you can download item sheets at http://www.congressofgamers.org/commerce.php.

Our Game Table will be joining us as a vendor with great games and accessories. 


We look forward to seeing you this year!


Kaarin Engelmann
Convention Director, Congress of Gamers

Trading styles in Settlers of Catan

Seth Brown posted a nice essay about trading strategies in Settlers of Catan on About.com.  His strategies are very much in line with my own, and his article makes a nice summary of considerations for resource trades.

Resource cards in Settlers of Catan.
(c) Mayfair Games.  Used by
permission.  All rights reserved

His post got me thinking about some different styles of trading I've seen when playing among friends or in tournaments.  For my part, perhaps the most basic approach to a trade is to ask for what you need and offer what you don't.  It seems almost trivial, really - I need wood, I've got an extra wheat, so I offer one wheat for one wood.  In a friendly game, that's about as much thought as it takes.  I've even seen people approach Settlers as a co-op game, although they don't explicitly think of it that way.  They don't mind being helpful, and they enjoy building until at some point someone says, "oh, look, I've got ten points, I guess I win.  That was fun!"

A friend of mine has a son, on the other hand, who has a killer instinct for the barter economy of Catan.  His sense for which resources are going to be in demand is uncanny, and he invariably knows when to press a hard bargain on a trade that anyone else would have accepted on the first offer.  Because he is such an effective trader, he typically wins, and the people around the table look at him and ask, "how do you do that?"

I played in one tournament at PrezCon against a fellow who was a shrewd trader.  I specifically remember one interchange where another player said, "I need brick."  Shrewd Trader said, "what can you offer me?"  Brick Guy said, "Do you want a sheep or a wheat?"  Shrewd Trader immediately answered, "Both."  Neither of the other two of us had brick to trade, and Brick Guy had essentially admitted (if not in so many words) that he needed neither the sheep nor the wheat and therefore could spare both.  So Shrewd Trader held out and got the best deal.  Needless to say, Shrewd Trader advanced to the quarterfinal.

But playing hardball can backfire.  In another tournament, one guy at my table said that in his gaming group, nobody would trade straight up, one card for one card.  The active player, the one whose turn it was and therefore who would be able to build, had to offer at least two-for-one just to get people to consider a trade.  He said trading was not at all common in his group, and he was astounded at how freely the other three of us at the table would trade among ourselves.  He ended up in last place at that game.

So perhaps the lesson here is that a barter economy is still an economy.  A market equalizes when supply balances demand, so if one player is a hold-out and demands, say, three wheat for a brick, anybody else who has a brick can make a better deal than that, and the "price" of brick goes down.

Different people have different ideas about when a boycott is appropriate.  One practice I've seen is a hard-and-fast policy never to trade with anyone who has eight or nine points.  I try to be more flexible than that, but not by much.  I'll trade with someone who has eight points if I'm confident that I'm not enabling a big move (based on the number of cards my opponent has and whether a two-point turn is within striking distance) and if it gives me a sure point - and even then, I'll give it very careful consideration.  Others never trade with the leader, regardless of how early in the game it is.  A few even refuse to trade with anyone who has more points than they do, which can really shut the market down if everybody takes that position.

Sometimes it's very tricky to balance the need for a trade with the potential edge it gives an opponent.  In yet another tournament game, I had six points, behind a very good player who had the lead with seven.  He made me a respectable trade offer, and after some hesitation, I accepted, over the objections of the other two people at the table.  As I handed him the card, I said, "I have a feeling I'm making a deal with the seven-point devil."  He gave a little half-smile, and sure enough, he stayed just out of reach of the rest of us until he won the game.

The infamous Monopoly card.
(c) Mayfair Games.  Used by
permission.  All rights reserved.

Making an offer generally requires that you have to reveal something about what you have, but that can be risky when someone could have a "Monopoly" card.  Some people like to be cagey about the way they pose deals, like, "if you had brick to trade, what would you want for it?"  I've described before the "Monopoly give-back," in which you freely trade a lot of one resource away for everything you need, then play the "monopoly" card to get it all back.  As non-confrontational as Euro games are intended to be, there are opportunities to take an opponent down at the knees.

So trading style sometimes comes down to a function of strategy, but it is also an artifact of the personality of the players.  Since boardgames are at heart a social activity, and since trading is inherently interactive, it makes sense that trading styles will vary according to the individuals playing the game.  That quality of sensitivity to the individual playing style is, I think, part of the appeal of Settlers of Catan.

Trains Planes and Automobiles available online!

The September 15 newsletter of Worthington Games announces the debut of their new family/Euro game label, BlueSquare Board Games.  And the first game in the BlueSquare lineup is Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, designed by yours truly!  And I love the retro postcard art by Sean Cooke.

As news correspondents in mid-twentieth-century North America, players race from one news story location to another to complete exclusive assignments and scoop each other to the next big story.  Players travel by air, rail, and highway to locations around the continent and the Caribbean.  The first player to complete seven assignments wins the game.   

This game is fun for parties of adults, kids, and families and was a huge hit with players at the World Boardgaming Championships.  Trains Planes and Automobiles retails for $40.00 and comes with pawns, cards, mounted board, and rules.  It is available to order from http://bluesquareboardgames.com.   

Trains Planes and Automobiles will make a great Christmas gift for the whole family!

I'm very excited about this announcement.  Other forthcoming BlueSquare games are

• BrainDrain - cross words with your family and friends to score the most letters (available for pre-order)
• Mazedom - create an ever-changing maze puzzle to entangle your opponents (coming soon)
• Antarchy (I love the title of this one) - lead the ant colony in search of culinary delights that will satisfy the queen's ravenous appetite (coming soon)

Saturday evening, my good friend Jeff W. invited us over for a dinner party and insisted that I bring TPA for a spin.  The six of us - all grown-ups (according to our drivers' licenses) - had a great time, and as always, I was surprised to see how close the game turned out to be in the end.  I feel that it strikes just the right combination of luck, thoughtful play, and lead balancing mechanics that keep the game fun, even when stranded at the airport in Bermuda in bad weather ... or in Thunder Bay, Canada, with a broken-down rental car.  Everybody was in it to the end, and I love games like that.

I hope more people do, too.

Gaming in a hospital room - what works, what doesn't

I missed my customary Monday blog post because I was in the hospital with a family member.  (The details aren't important, and he's home and fully recovered now.)  He was well enough yesterday to ask to play a game.  We had brought a few games with us for the visit, and the hospital also had a recreation room with a few titles that we could borrow.  We discovered a few things about gaming in the context of a hospital room that we'll remember for next time.

What worked:  Pass the Pigs (designer David Moffatt [or Moffitt] of the original title Pig Mania, now available as Pass the Pigs from publisher Winning Moves) is great for cheering up a hospital patient for a number of reasons.  It is terrifically portable.  It requires very little space on which to play and no set-up to speak of.  It requires little mental and physical effort to take one's turn.  It's good for a laugh.  The game can be interrupted easily without consequence.  It finishes quickly.  It lends itself easily to a re-match if "the pigs are against you" in the first round.

We also brought Uno, which, if we'd played it, I think might have worked almost as well.  There's a little more difficulty in sitting up in bed and holding a hand of cards, depending on the circumstances (like an IV or an awkward bed configuration).  But again, Uno doesn't require a lot of thought or effort, it's good for a laugh, and it interrupts easily.

What didn't work:  The game we borrowed from the hospital game room was Clue: Secrets and Spies (Hasbro).  We actually got this for Christmas last year and played it once as a family, to a decidedly lukewarm reception.  I had wanted to re-visit this title in the hope that perhaps it would gain some appeal with fresh eyes.

Unfortunately, we didn't really get the chance to properly evaluate Clue:S&S as a game.  The hospital room didn't have a proper game table, so we used the over-bed table (normally used for meals in bed).  The game board overlapped the edges of the table, so it was easily knocked.  Game set-up was a little "fiddly" for the context of a hospital room.  In this case, we were particularly hamstrung by the borrowed copy of the game that we had available.  Three significant game pieces were missing.  Two could be replaced with coins representing the missing pieces, but one - a black light for revealing secret text on cards - was indispensible.  The accommodations necessary to play this game under the given circumstances were too great, and we abandoned the effort.

I should make note of one other consideration for playing games in a hospital room.  Hospital-acquired infection is an ever-present risk, mitigated by simple but important hygienic precautions.  It is wise to ensure that hands are sanitized before handling game pieces.  Normally I don't think about who's been handling the pigs, cards, or dice in the game I'm playing, but medical professionals take a number of precautions to minimize the spread of germs in a place where sick people naturally congregate.  (I was particularly mindful of this issue with the borrowed game from the recreation room.)  The hospital had a hand sanitizer mounted outside the door to every room, and antimicrobial soap was available at every sink.  We found ourselves paying a little extra attention to keeping each other healthy and to keeping our own games uncontaminated so that we wouldn't bring home an extra souvenir from the hospital.

How many dice are too many?

My good friend Grant G. hosted six of us for a Firestorm Armada battle on Labor Day weekend.  This was our first time at this science fiction space battle miniatures game for most of us.  As a fan of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, I could really get into this "space naval combat" genre.  Many tactics of the sea still hold true in space - concentrating firepower on one part of the enemy's formation while trying keep the opponent spread out and disconnected.  Other tactics have to change because of the different weapons' firing arcs:  Ships that are strongest when firing straight ahead but can't easily start up from a complete stop require a different deployment from those that are strongest firing broadsides in a line of battle.

One aspect of the game that got a lot of commentary was the dice rolling.  In combat, each ship has a certain number of six-sided attack dice (depending on range and firing arc).  Generally speaking, rolls of 4 or 5 score a  hit, while rolls of 6 each score two hits and add an extra attack die to roll.  So there is considerable potential for multiple extra rolls to score many hits even from a modestly-armed ship if the attacker's luck is good.

But what a few of us found a little unnerving and perhaps cumbersome was the sheer number of dice to roll and re-roll.  It was not uncommon for my Directorate battleship to attack with 17 dice all rolled at once.  Then I would have to sift through the results and set aside the fours and fives, count the sixes, then roll extra dice for each of the sixes.  If the extra dice also included sixes, too, then there would be more dice to roll on top of those.  Sometimes I might score in excess of 20 hits.  But the combat results might only translate into one or two points of damage to the target.  So it was hard to appreciate why so much dice-rolling was necessary for such unspectacular results.

I think some people like rolling huge handfuls of dice in their miniatures games.  As a mathematician, I can appreciate the probability distribution function that results from so many dice combinations.  But as a game player, I tend to prefer a roll-once-and-resolve combat system.

One of my favorite combat systems in a miniatures game appears in De Bellis Antiquitatis and others in the DBx series.  In those games, for each attack, the attacker and defender each roll one six-sided die.  Troop types, adjacent formations, and terrain can add or subtract modifiers to the die rolls.  The modified defender's roll is subtracted from the modified attacker's roll to determine a combat result for that attack.  The system is so elegant and the modifiers so easy to remember that with practice, it is seldom necessary ever to look up anything in a table.  "My spear attack your cavalry."  Roll, roll.  "Okay, three plus four is seven to your five plus  three is eight, I lose, my spear recoils."

There is such a thing as a Combat Results Table (CRT) that is too drastically sensitive to a single die roll.  Avalon Hill games had a tendency to have CRTs that were much more sensitive to the die roll outcome than to the size of the attacking force.  Efforts to alleviate this problem that were published in The General were themselves cumbersome, such as Steve List's "Resolving Fractional Combat Odds" in Volume 16 Number 5 ("Design Analysis").

If the shoe fits...

Something of a combat standard that has emerged is the 20-sided die, or d20.  We often play WarZone, which uses a single d20 for each attack.  A probability distribution over 20 possible die outcomes provides sufficient granularity that small tactical factors have a noticeable but not overwhelming impact on combat, yet the die is easy to handle and the combat quick to resolve.

So the question that came to mind as I reflected on our Firestorm Armada experience was, what would a d20 CRT look like that reflected the Firestorm Armada combat outcome distribution but didn't require so many d6 rolls and re-rolls?  Well, I did a little spreadsheet-cruching to find out, and here's what it looks like:

Hits resulting from one roll of a d20 for any given Attack Dice (AD) rating

d20	AD=1	AD=2	AD=3	AD=4	AD=5
1	0	0	0	0	0
2	0	0	0	1	1
3	0	0	1	1	1
4	0	0	1	1	2
5	0	0	1	1	2
6	0	1	1	2	2
7	0	1	1	2	3
8	0	1	2	2	3
9	0	1	2	2	3
10	0	1	2	3	3
11	1	1	2	3	4
12	1	1	2	3	4
13	1	2	3	4	4
14	1	2	3	4	5
15	1	2	3	4	5
16	1	2	4	5	6
17	1	3	4	5	6
18	2	3	5	6	7
19	3	4	5	7	8
20	4	6	7	8	10
Average	0.8	1.6	2.5	3.2	4.0

Okay, so there's nothing intuitive about this CRT - nothing here you could memorize in the way of an algorithm and say, "I have three attack dice, I roll an 11, so that means I get two hits."  Maybe I need to go back to the drawing board on this idea.

Or maybe I just need to get used to rolling big handfuls of six-sided dice.