Looking Past the Game of Life

So you played board games as a kid. You wonder why most of the games you see at Walmart are either the same old games you've been playing all your life or new gimicky ones that couldn't possibly be worth wasting time playing, much less actually purchasing. Maybe it's because the best games have already been developed and there just aren't any good ideas left. False. There are hundreds of new boardgames that have been released in the last couple of decades that blow away the so called classic games that crowd Walmart shelves around the world. In a way I'm a little bitter about this. Many times I've seen articles written by those who loved boardgames in their formative years but have no idea of the wealth of great games now on the market. I just want to scream: "Try Settlers of Catan, IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!" Just because you're old now (and I am!) doesn't mean you can't play boardgames! If you're like me you may just find you love boardgames even more now than you did then. Problem is, these incredible new games don't just come to you--they're not quite as mainstream as the monopoly and risk games of years past--to find them you need to look a little beyond the Walmart shelves. Now this isn't to say most of these games are obscure, quite the contrary: many are unqualified successes, hovering just below the surface of the mainstream.

It saddens me that so many people who really do love games at heart never do discover this new world of boardgames. However, it is also undeniably rewarding to be part of the minority that has access to these gems. It feels good to be special, but sometimes you still wish everyone else could be special too! Don't you want to be special? I thought so. Now, by the way I'm rattling on here you'd think that I'm an expert on the subject. By no means is this true. I have merely begun my exploration of this new world. Due to a lack of gaming group to play with in this area I still have yet to try many new games. Here are three I have played and why you need to give them a shot:


1. Settlers of Catan
Released in 1995, this undeniable classic really set the ball rolling in the modern game industry. Settlers wasn't the first game of this modern era (I don't even know when you'd say the 'modern era' began!), but it was the first to really make a big splash. There are hundreds of reviews on this game on the internet, especially at www.boardgamegeek.com/ so by all means look around and read up on it. Here are some of the reasons I love the game:

The 'board' consists of many cardboard hexagons that represent different terrain types on an unpopulated island. Each game starts by randomly constructing the island, resulting in a unique distribution of terrain hexes for each play. This ensures that players will need to be flexible and adapt to different opening conditions each game. Also, it makes for a unique experience every time the game is played. Prime real estate is an important limiting factor in the game as players vie for the best positions on the board that will produce the best resources, which in turn allow them to build settlements and populate the island. Almost every move you make effectively limits what each other player can do. It is also important to maximize the benefit of the resources you acquire by managing your hand through smart building and timely exchanges with other players. A great strategy game that has plenty of luck as well to keep even novice players in the hunt. One last thing: Settlers isn't just a game, it's a franchise. A host of games have been released under the Catan umbrella, the two most notable (Seafarers of Catan, Cities & Knights of Catan) both expand the base game by adding extra terrain and rules.


2. Carcassonne
Carcassonne is a tile laying game depicting the countryside around the southern French city of the same name. The basic mechanic of the game is very similar to that of dominoes: each tile is played alongside at least one tile already on the table. Each side that touches another tile must match terrain features along the adjacent side(s). For instance to place a new tile next to a side that depicts a city, the new tile must have a city side as well. As you play tiles and construct cities, roads, cloisters, and fields, you place your pieces (followers) on tiles, then score points for completed features when you have more followers than the other players. The components are beautiful and there is lots of strategy to consider as you play. Carcassonne is easy to learn and definitely worth a try.

3. Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is probably the best game amoungst these three, and that's saying a lot. Players act as plantation owners in Puerto Rico during colonial times. During game play, players produce five types of commodities, construct buildings, manage resources, & ship goods back to the old world. Instead of having a set order for each action in the game, Puerto Rico uses a mechanism that allows each player to choose a 'role' or particular action. Each player then performs that action, with the choosing player getting a bonus. Thus much of the game is determining which roles will be the most advantageous to you at any given time. Puerto Rico involves almost no luck, so those looking for a deep strategy game should love this one. PR is rated the number one boardgame on boardgamegeek, and is generally considered the best or one of the best boardgames of all time. Play it and find out why!

So, children, here's the moral of our story today: go out and find some new games! Do some research online and pick a game you'd like to try. Find a friend who has it, ask about demoing a copy at a local game store, or just get out there and buy a copy! Boardgames are better than ever, so you owe it to yourself to revisit the long lost friendship that is boardgaming... One final note: You may ask "So what do you think of The Game of Life?" No comment.

What I Love (and Hate) About the Board Game Experience

By no means am I an expert in the field, but I do love board games. Is this reason enough for you to listen to my ramblings on the subject? Absolutely, it is! Board games are a great way to spend quality time with family and friends. The good ones are fairly simple to learn, force players to us their brains to excel, have immense replay value for a reasonable purchase price, and, best of all, serve as a means for friends to interact and converse rather than as a distraction from those activities that movies or video games often are. Don't get me wrong--I enjoy video games, especially classic ones, but there's just something engaging about playing a great board game. Well designed board games with quality components provide me great pleasure, in both a visual and tactile sense. Shuffling cards, moving pieces, placement of tiles, rolling of dice, and then the sight of the game unfolding one move at a time before you, to me, is a rewarding experience indeed. This is not even touching one of the most engaging aspects of the pastime: the competition!


Everything I know about board games I learned from my uncles

Of course, the best thing about board games is when your uncle gets that glint in his eye that says "Nathan is exactly 7 spaces from Park Place and 9 from Boardwalk, sounds like it's time to mortgage my utilities to finally build those hotels I've been planning!" Yes, I was schooled in board games early in life by my uncles up at my grandparent's farm in Vermont. Sure, it is only a game, but what good is a game if you don't try your best to win? Sure, this might come across as cutthroat, especially if you yell "HA! Take that!" at that moment you crush your hapless opponent, but some things in life just can't be helped.


Dude, it's just a game!

I take board games very seriously. I also believe that the point is to have fun. Some people may think that these two stances are contradictory, but that is certainly not true. Being serious about a game simply means that I respect the rules and the systems that have been put into place by the game designer(s). I very rarely use house rules since I feel that the game as published is nearly the best possible version in almost all cases. Certainly house rules can spice up a tired game in some instances, but in general they sabotage a designer's well thought out plan and ultimately make a game less fun to play. For instance, take the house rule in monopoly used by almost everyone who plays the game: Placing extra money from taxes and fines into the middle of the board which is then awarded to a player who lands on free parking. This adds playing time onto an already long game, and increases the amount of luck involved in an already heavily luck dependant one. So when someone says "let's put money on free parking, that'll be more fun!" what that ends up meaning in reality is that the winner will much more likely be determined by luck and the game will probably last an additional hour, all of which leads to a less interesting and more agonizing session.


Boardgame S&M anyone?

Of course, if you prefer your board games to be boring and agonizing, enjoy pounding your forehead against the table out of frustration, and love subjecting your friends to the same, go right ahead and throw that money into free parking! I mean, that is the way the game is played, right? Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't always feel this way. I too have spent many years playing house rules, especially in monopoly, because it always seemed like a good idea as a kid. Ah, my years as a misguided youth! [I'm a misguided adult now, thank you very much!] We're grown-ups now, it truly is time to take on something that actually rewards good play instead of the whim of the dice.


A code beyond the rules

Taking games seriously, to me, also means playing in a way that is consistent with the point and spirit of the game. I believe each player should play to win to the best of his ability. If all players do that I feel that overall you will have the best possible game, spirited and fun for all. I especially hate what I would call intentional kingmaking, where one player has decided (s)he has little to no chance of winning and therefore gives an undue advantage to another player and thereby throws off the natural course of the game. For instance, in monopoly it is perfectly legal to give some or all of your property to another player for free. If you decide you will not be able to win, you could give a monopoly and all of your cash to another player so that a third player, who is the current leader, can't send you into bankruptcy and take all of your property on a subsequent turn. In such a case the hard work and smart moves that the 3rd player has made to get to such a strong position is wiped out simply because you decide to throw the game. Nothing to me is as disappointing or infuriating as a move such as this. Although not against the rules, such play undermines the spirit of the game and makes it feel pointless and the results arbitrary.

I leave you with two points that really dredge up the worst of board game players:

1. Cheating--If you don't care about the process of the game and the challenge of winning honestly, but only about the results, how about not subjecting your friends to your psychopathic tendencies? Simply set up the game on your own, declare yourself the wiener and move on.
   
2. Complaining incessantly or blaming the dice/other players/poor circumstances for your own inability to play well. If you seem to lose a lot but would be really awesome at the game if it wasn't for bad dice rolls and your obnoxious friends always ganging up on you and making your game sessions miserable, see my suggestion for cheaters above. If you can't peacefully play with others, just go play with yourself!
   

Thank you for reading, and good day.

So, I'll admit it, I have a gambling problem.

Well, it's probably not quite what you'd think but it is a problem nonetheless. I'm not (yet) a compulsive gambler since I don't spend an inordinate amount of time or money on the pastime. In fact over the almost four years since I've been living close to a casino I've only been there three times. The unsettling fact about my recent gambling forays is that I just can't seem to win. Now some quite rational folks might interrupt me here to offer a reminder that this is, in fact, the point. (At least from the perspective of the casino, that is!) Well, for better or worse I'll have none of that. I'll add, as a brief side note, that my most recent gambling session resulted in a loss of a mere $50. Good news, right? Considering the last time I went I somehow managed to drop $250 at the tables, there's really no other way to look at this more recent trip than as a major victory! Okay, now to return to reality.

Once you go Blackjack you never go back

To me gambling is almost always either blackjack or poker. I'll play poker against human opponents, but when I'm playing against the house I prefer blackjack. Now, this game has a reputation of being the only casino game that can actually be beaten. Fortunately for the casino the vast majority of blackjack players seem to interpret this rep as meaning blackjack 'can be beaten by any idiot with a lot of cash who's willing to bet big.' Now you might want to stop me here to ask if these players actually call themselves idiots in their own thoughts like that. Of course they don't but really, a few thoughts in the hands of such people can be very dangerous indeed. So I think we're all better off if I just do the thinking for them.

Back to my point: what this reputation really means is that under certain player friendly rules a player who has the ability to count cards, a proper sized bankroll, mastery of the game's basic strategy, and the discipline to walk away from the table when ahead is theoretically able to beat the game long term. As you may be able to guess, the percentage of blackjack players that fall into this second category is a fraction of a percent, and they certainly win much less money than the first category of players generously donates to the casino.

It pays to be Progressive

Now, as a blackjack player I fall somewhere between these two extremes. I subscribe to a hypothesis presented by Walter Thomason in his book Twenty-first Century Blackjack. Thomason argues that card counting isn't necessary to win consistently at blackjack. He champions a system based on positive progressive betting paired with proper execution of game fundamentals. Positive Progressive betting is simply raising your bet after every winning hand along a predetermined progression. For example, I may follow a 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 betting progression. My first bet would be $10, I would increase it to $15 following a win, and continue to move along the scale until I topped out at $30 or I lost a hand. After any losing hand I would return to my initial $10 bet. Now most mathematicians who have studied the game of blackjack have discarded (no pun intended, really!) this system without much consideration because since each hand is completely independent of the previous one there is no reason for you to believe that the hand following a winner would have any greater chance of being a winner than if it had followed a losing hand. Despite this, Thomason demonstrates such a system's effectiveness through thousands of hands of simulated play.

Streaking for Fun & Profit

Thomason's best explanation for why this system seems to work is that blackjack is a game of streaks. Many times during a playing session a player will experience several (or more) consecutive wins or losses. During such streaks, the positive progressive player will tend to have much more money on the table during winning streaks and much less money on the table during losing streaks. Unfortunately for me during my last trip to the casino, I had more losing streaks than winning streaks. Using this system in such a case can still be beneficial since it minimizes the amount of money lost during such rough sessions. Of course, it's little consolation that I could have lost a lot more!

Perhaps next time I'll be a little more fortunate and end up with some of the casino's money instead of it ending up with mine. Of course, at this point my wife is simply convinced that I'm just plain unlucky and should quit now while I'm only a little in the hole. My philosophy is this: I've been lucky so far in life in lots of ways. Somehow I ended up with a great wife, two healthy kids, and a job I don't hate. Also, I'm still alive. Even more amazing, the Red Sox finally won the world series in 2004. If that isn't being fortunate I don't know what is. From where I'm sitting it feels like only a matter of time until some of that good mojo rubs off on my gambling sessions and sends me home a winner. Finally.

Welcome To My Blog!

And So It Begins...

I start writing here with lots of unresolved questions about this new venture. Will I actually ever post anything here? Do I really have anything at all to say, much less anything interesting? Will people visit my blog even if by complete accident I say something interesting or relevant or funny? Can a blog survive without having any theme or direction? Who am I anyway? And most importantly (and I think Douglas Adams would agree): When is lunch?

I guess my primary objective in starting a blog is to have a chance to write a bit and hopefully along the way find a primary objective for my blog. I suppose I'll probably write a little about my family, a little about food &/or wine, lots about gambling, board games, classic video games, and the Boston Red Sox, maybe a thing or two about my friends (if I ever get any), some commentary on politics (if I ever learn anything about it), share my musical interests, and generally babble on incessantly until someone tells me that I really should just shut up and spare the world the aggravation of reading such inane drivel. If I really get on a roll I might even grace you with a 'that's what she said' line or even practice the time honored tradition of sexual innuendo. It is probably to the benefit of any hapless soul that happens upon this blog that I never get on a roll. Now where was I? Ah, yes, wandering aimlessly.

If you are familiar with the novels by Douglas Adams or the films by Monty Python you may suspect from my writing style and sense of humor that I am obsessed with both. Of course if you are such a person you would also be stunned at how I could be influenced by such sources and yet not be the slightest bit funny. This is a conundrum even I cannot answer.

Anyway, my name is Nathaniel and I have a blog. Please give me your feedback or simply shout profanities in my general direction. I can take it. In fact, it would probably make me feel pretty special to know that somebody hates me.