A few months ago, I was playing Boggle nearly every day with Alyx. Work and other circumstances have brought the frequency down, but we still play. It’s a good two-person game and you can fill up any amount of time you happen to have; we usually played a best-of-three series. All trash talk aside, she probably won a little more than half of our matches, although I think it’s been closer to even recently.

I find more words in most boards, and I tend to get a good start in the first 90-120 seconds (the round is 3 minutes), but I tend to find more short words and lose steam in the final minute. Alyx usually misses quite a few of mine, but is much likelier to find the big words that are worth 2, 3 or 5 points.

We play with the house rule that words that are formed just by adding an S to an existing word are illegal, both for nouns and verbs. We’re decent players, and this keeps the easy boards (with a good mix of common consonants and vowels) that happen to have an S from determining who writes fastest, since if these words were legal, you’d never have to stop. Adding –ES is fine as is –D or –ED or any other trivial-ish suffix. I suspect this rule slightly favors me, because I would typically gain only 1 point by adding a new word with an S, while Alyx could fairly often pick up an extra 3 or 5.

We also like to play with other people when they are around. Inexperienced people favor Alyx, because they’re more likely to find my short words than her long ones; experienced people don’t have a predictable influence, except that they will predictably be the scapegoat for the loser.

Like Scrabble, Boggle isn’t really about having a big vocabulary. In my experience, Scrabble is about strategic positioning, making the best of the letters you happen to get, and if you happen to be in a multiplayer game, sitting to the right of the weakest (or most reckless) player.

Instead of being about positioning and hooking onto existing words, Boggle is about quickly picking out familiar patterns from the jumble of letters, and recognizing that some patterns tend to imply the presence of others. For instance, if you have TOOL you definitely have TOO, LOO, and LOOT and you should look for other nearby words that like LOON, TOON, TOOT, POOL, etc. ATE is worth EAT and TEA as long as the letters are arranged in a triangle instead of a line. That’s my strategy, anyway. Alyx seems to find a lot of her good, long words by stemming off consonant blends like STR-, SCR, THR, and so on. With luck, she’ll share some of the rest of her secrets in a comment.

Procrastination is killing me…

I have a great article trying to get out of my head, about the importance of theme to a game. Problem is, I want to give this article the thought it deserves. Given that it’ll probably weigh in at about 600 words (unless I end up making it a 2-parter), this means I’ll want to spend about 2 hours getting it right. And since I just remembered at 11:15 that I need to get tonight’s article out… I’ll try to remember to go to the coffee shop and spend some quality time there writing tomorrow.

(And if I start letting the deadlines slip for articles, I’ll end up mothballing the entire blog in a month. I’ve gotta pretend I have discipline or I just fall apart.)

So tonight, you take what you get. I was discussing RPG systems on the ride home today. I was bemoaning the other drivers’ lack of skill (“Where the hell did you spend your skill ranks, anyway? Profession: Masturbator?”) but this got me thinking of a weakness of RPG systems: the unfortunate ease of failing easy tasks.

Driving to work every day is a task for which no sane GM is going to require a roll. But let’s say I want to make it to work in 30 minutes (the usual time is 45). This is going to take some talent, because I’ll have to go 85 on the interstate, do some creative interpretations of yellow lights on city streets, and some artful weaving on both. In this system, sure, the GM is justified in making me roll.

Now, I’m 25 and have never killed a goblin, so let’s say that in d20, I’m a 1^st-level Expert with a maxed Drive skill, for 4 ranks, and have a 15 Dexterity, for another +2 modifier. Even though there’s a roll involved, this is still a pretty easy task, so the GM sets the DC at 10. Seems reasonable enough? The trouble is, even with my +6 modifier, I still have a 15% chance of failure. It’s not a safe drive, but geez, I can do better than that…

At this point, I was going to launch into a tirade about how White Wolf’s new World of Darkness system is a lot better. Then I did the math… oops. Giving myself a 3 Dexterity and 2 Drive, I have a 17% chance of failure. White Wolf makes it just as hard to do easy things, unless I whine to the GM for a bonus modifier for special equipment like my lucky driving sunglasses. (You laugh, but the book suggests—in earnest—bonuses to Resolve rolls for a WWJD keychain.)

The moral of the story is that in every system, failing easy tasks is… well, too easy. To resolve this, I suppose that you’d want to think of “failure” not in terms of “your skill broke down” (and I crashed the car) but instead “you didn’t get what you wanted” (I couldn’t manage to shave the time I wanted off the drive, so I ended up late anyway.)

Not wind, nor rain, nor cute girls can keep me from posting…

Two days ago I didn’t have the misfortune of playing Run For Your Life, Candyman! This is only because I had the misfortune of playing it earlier, so by last Friday, I knew better.

For those who haven’t played it, Candyman is a parody of Candyland and is played in essentially the same way. You draw a card from the deck and move to the next marker on the board with that candy piece on it. In Candyman, you play a gingerbread man running through a hostile candy terrain, with areas like Bad Juju and the Lady I. Scream. You have a sheet that tracks the health of each part of your gingerbread body (four limbs, torso, head). When you pass another player on the board, you’re allowed to make an attack on them, flipping a card from the deck and marking off a square from the appropriate body part. There are very few consequences for losing any of your limbs, except that you’re eliminated from the game if your entire body is destroyed.

Sounds like a classic JRTC game, right? Well, there’s a problem. Like Candyland, Candyman features certain cards that move you straight to designated squares on the board—and there are plenty that will take you backwards. Unlike Candyland, there’s also a mechanic that on the “Candy Cage Match” squares, you get to drag another player back to wherever you are and make a bunch of attacks against each other. In practice, everyone does this to whoever’s closest to the finish line. This can make the game last… pretty much forever. And evidently some people are amused enough by the parody that they forget the fun of the parody ends way before the rest of the game does. I got through a fair-length Catan game, starting after the Candyman players started and finishing before they did. The one time I played, I was praying for the sweet release of gingerbread death so I would have a polite excuse to stop playing. (My wish was granted about 75 minutes into the game, by the way.)

What keeps Candyman from being a decent JRTC game is this tendency to take way too long. It’s also too expensive: $30 for nothing more than cheap cardboard and a couple of plastic figure bases. Because it takes zero concentration, I can see it being an OK beer-and-pretzels game, emphasis on the beer, or play it as a drinking game:

• Whenever you get hit by an attack, take a sip.
• Whenever you would get hit by an attack, but the attack misses because you don’t have that limb any more, take two sips.
• When you actually lose each limb, finish the drink.
• When you feel like you don’t want to play any more, drink until going on seems like a reasonable idea.

Finish with two large glasses of water and two ibuprofen tablets before you go to bed.

Happy (belated) birthday to Alatar.

A couple of days ago I linked to Mafia. For those who haven’t tried it, I recommend it. About 8 or 9 people (or more) is a good number; 7 is probably close to the minimum. Why? Well, the entire game really comes down to the one special position in the game that’s really not optional: the Cop (Detective/Sage/whatever), the player who can determine during the night whether a given player is Mafia or not.

Without this role, the good guys are in the dark completely. The game’s essentially a crapshoot to determine whether the townsfolk can get lucky and lynch both Mafia before the Mafia executes them; and with the Mafia voting down their own executions, of course, the odds aren’t good. With the Cop, there is someone innocent who has useful knowledge who can subtly guide the discussion. Sure, he can’t be too obvious (or the Mafia will kill him) but the Mafia can’t be too obvious either (or the Townsfolk will lynch them.) The 8 or 9 people mark usually gives the Cop two pieces of information to work with (since two people are killed per day/night cycle), while with 7 or fewer he’s likely to have only one.

In a pinch, also, the Cop can reveal himself and name names. He’s virtually certain to be either lynched or murdered, of course, but if the Townsfolk still have a majority, they can mop up the Mafia.

When choosing what roles to include, consider the following variant and why it ruins the game. Instead of just “Townsfolk”, players get specific roles, “Townsfolk 1” up to “Townsfolk 8” or whatever. There is no cop—it’s not even necessary. All of the townsfolk just list off their numbers to each other. The Mafia can try to lie, but the Townsfolk still have each Mafia member narrowed down to two people (and many of their own number eliminated from suspicion.)

Some people work around this by creating a list of possible roles before the game; players know who might exist, but nobody can enumerate the people. In theory this works fine; in practice, the players need to accept that the moderator might come up with a grossly unbalanced set of roles.

The last time I played we tried Masons, a group of 2 or 3 Townsfolk who mutually know each other’s innocence. With 3 people, this is grossly overpowered; they form an nearly-invincible voting bloc and enjoy the benefit of being able to reveal their own innocence without the Mafia really being able to interfere. Even with only two people, the extra knowledge is a big advantage for the Townsfolk, probably worth at least a Mafia member.

And now, I’m off to play Oblivion. In case you hadn’t heard, it’s excellent and highly recommended. I won’t go so far as to say it’s bug-free, but it’s at least stable, which makes it way better than any previous Bethesda game.

As promised, I picked up Oblivion yesterday. It’s calling to me now; I can hear it. As a result, there is no full-length article today. Nothing would get even remotely the thought it deserves.

It also occurs to me: I never mentioned before that Crackpot Theory has been renamed Cabal. It seems so clear now.

I had no idea what I was going to write about today until Nathan pointed me to this comic.

(Further links are to http://www.pagat.com, an excellent reference for classic card games (anything played with an ordinary 52-card deck).

Repackaging classic games isn’t a new idea, of course. In the realm of children’s/family games, Uno is just Crazy Eights with special rules given to the face cards (and a couple extra wild cards, to be fair.) Skip-Bo is essentially the same as Spite and Malice. Phase 10 doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do with an ordinary deck and some variant Rummy rules, andif you go to the card games rack in a toy store or K-mart, you can find any number of repackagings of Old Maid, Go Fish, and other children’s games. The Great Dalmuti is essentially the same game as President/Asshole, although the deck is a little different.

One of my favorite games of this type is Wizard, a commercial repackaging of Oh Hell. It has a couple of additional features I really like. One is extra wild cards, which can be played out of suit and help you feel more in control of the flow of the hand. The other is an improved scoring system which rewards you for taking tricks (since it’s generally easier to try to lose tricks than to win them) and also rewards you for getting as close as possible to your bid, rather than going crazy and trying to screw everyone else as soon as you know you won’t make it.

It’s not limited to card games—Looney Labs’ game Are You A Werewolf? is just a set of rules for the classic parlor game more commonly known as Mafia, along with a nicely illustrated set of role cards. And this very blog has spawned Cabal, which is just a simplification of Clue.

I don’t want to seem dismissive of these games, because both the originals and repackaged versions can be fun to play (especially Wizard!). In fact, the addition of a theme can be very useful for introducing a game to new players. The importance of a theme to a game will be the topic of a later article…

By the way, the long-awaited PC game Oblivion is released tomorrow. If the articles Tuesday and Thursday are perfunctory, you’ll know why…

Tuesday’s article sparked a couple of discussions. One quick, one longer.

First, king-and-rook vs. lone king is an easy drill. Kids learn it in half an hour. My opponent on that fateful day knew it himself and knew I knew it cold. This was not an example of “maybe I could learn something by watching the rest of this game,” which is an acceptable reason to keep going.

[EDIT: I’m going to leave this the way it was written for context, but Fuleng posted a better description of Go resignation etiquitte himself in the comments.]

Next, reader-and-sometimes-commenter Fuleng plays Go at amateur shodan level, or close to it. (My sense is that this is something like a USCF rating of 1800-2000 or so.) Evidently the etiquette in that game is very different from Chess. First, unlike Chess, Go has a margin of victory. At the end of a Go game, you add up and compare the territory controlled by each player. Many American players, evidently, like to play each game to the end, to try for the best score even if it means a loss.

However, in Go culture there is a sense that the stronger player is doing the weaker player a favor by playing against him. (Some might say deigning.) Given this mindset, and the fact that the weaker player also starts with handicap stones on the board, strong players often expect a resignation as soon as the position is decided. These players are insulted and offended when the weaker player fights on. And not without reason: They correctly claim that playing through an unbalanced game is nothing like playing a real game. Conservative play isn’t that difficult in Go, and the player who’s already given up for lost has no reason to play well and see how a game develops from there.

A note of cultural and game comparison: Chess offers more opportunities than Go for risky play to pay off. So a 400-point upset is nothing unheard of, while a 4k upset in a no-handicap game is rare. Unless the margin of strength is larger than this, stronger players seem fairly willing to play weaker ones. Also, a blitz game of Chess (game in 5 minutes per side, often done in less), takes less time than a blitz game of Go (game in 5-15 minutes per side, but it probably takes the whole time).

Although I’ve forgotten the opponent’s face and name, I remember vividly a game of Chess I played a few years ago. After a hard-fought early and midgame, I managed to gain the upper hand and reduced his forces to a bare king against my king, rook, and a couple of pawns.

(For the non-chessplayers: king-and-rook vs. king is a trivial checkmate that’s one of the first things every new player learns.)

After taking his last pawn, I waited for the resignation. It didn’t come. To clarify, the best he could hope for was a draw—a stalemate which would require a blunder of cosmic proportions on my part. I interpreted his refusal to resign as an insult, a statement that I was such a poor player that I could even screw up a trivial endgame. I was enraged. I ended up not playing through the standard king-and-rook endgame, but queening remaining my pawns one at a time; once they were finished, I rolled them over to deliver the mate. I walked away mad (no handshake and “good game,” which is very unusual for me) and never played him again. I wish I had tipped my own king over.

Nobody expects you to resign when you still have a chance to win or draw, of course, or even if you’re unsure. But resigning at an appropriate time is a gesture of respect to someone who’s just beaten you, and likewise, withholding the resignation is a gesture of contempt.

When is an appropriate time to resign? My rule of thumb is: as soon as I’m sure that I’m going to lose. When you see the mating net descend upon your king; when the pawn that was your last promotion hope is blocked or captured; when you lose the bishop that was keeping the remnants of your pawn structure together. (If the mate catches you by surprise and there are only one or two moves left to go, it’s fine to go through the motions and allow your opponent to deliver the mate, though.) The stronger your opponent, the subtler the lost position might be.

Another appropriate time to resign, for some people, is if, in a tournament game, you make a big blunder early on that costs you a piece without any compensation. Your opponent is almost certain to win this game; by resigning, you give both of you a chance to rest and come back refreshed for the next one. However, in this case, nobody will be mad at you if you decide to fight it out. Fighting bad odds in a complicated position is very different from fighting impossible odds in a trivial one.

Another random point of chess etiquette: Saying “check” when you deliver check can also be interpreted as an insult; in this case, a statement that you think your opponent is so oblivious to the situation on the board that he might be unaware that you just delivered check to his king. There are enough people, especially older players, that say “check” out of habit that most people won’t get mad, but when in doubt, don’t say anything.

I was recently introduced to a game called Jungle Jam. If you’ve ever played Egyptian Rat-Screw (ERS), you’ll be familiar with the concept; this game makes some very nice refinements, though, which make the game playable even without dangerous levels of caffeine in the bloodstream. Here are the differences and why I think they make the game better:

• Instead of slapping the cards, there’s a “totem” you grab, which is just a piece of wood in an easy-to-grab shape. Since you can grab this and pull it away, it hurts a lot less than having many people try to slap a stack of cards. It’s also shaped to make it difficult for more than one person to grab it cleanly, so there’s less chance of an inconclusive grab (it still happens, though).
• Instead of a communal card pile, everyone lays their cards in a stack in front of them. When a match is revealed, only the two players who are involved in the may grab for the totem. This is good for two reasons. First, it prevents one player from dominating the entire game. Slower players will be matched against each other sometimes, and nobody feels like they’re losing all the time. Second, since only two people are usually grabbing for the totem, the chaos/injury potential is reduced.
• The cards are designed so that the shapes of many of the cards are deceptively similar, so it’s easy to mis-grab. (Two bones crossed under a third bone, vs. over; identically-shaped masks with a vertical mouth grill vs. a horizontal one; etc.) This is maddening at first, but adds an equalizing element to the game later on because everyone has to hesitate before grabbing at full speed. It also adds a feeling of accomplishment as you learn to distinguish the subtle differences.
• Instead of trying to gather all the cards, the object is to be the first player to get rid of all your cards. This makes the game much faster and keeps everyone playing until the end, instead of watching the last people show down for ten or fifteen minutes.

If you don’t want an intensive test of both your visual acuity and reflexes, Jungle Jam isn’t the game for you. If you like twitchy games, though, this is the most elegant and fun one that I’ve played.

(By the way, like the Forehead Game, this game is good and manageable with four or five people but gets real chaotic real fast as you get up past six.)

To tie why the Deck of Many Things back into board games, consider the following variant rule for Chess:

Once per game, instead of making a move, you can roll a die. On a 1-3, you have to remove one of your rooks from the board. On a 4-6, you get to replace a knight or bishop. (Your opponent gets to choose what square in your back row the piece appears in, so you won’t be able to use this for immediate tactical advantage. You can’t use the ability if you have no rooks to sacrifice)

Is this fair? Well, in a sense, yes, because it’s available to both players, and you stand to lose more material than you gain. But the game would be no fun, because the randomness introduced by the new rule would dominate the game. Consider equally matched players. The game would progress until one player gained an advantage that looked decisive. At that point, the losing player would exercise the special option. If the roll turned out badly, no big deal; the game was going to turn out badly anyway. If the roll succeeds, the tables are suddenly turned (adding a knight is usually more than enough to turn a decisive loss into a decisive victory) and the other player is suddenly forced to use the option. If the other player also succeeds, the effects of the special rule are meaningless. If the other player happens to fail, the game is finished.

So, the final net effect of this optional rule is to add a flat 25% chance that the losing player wins the game instead. Like the Deck, it’s sudden and immediate; if you win, you don’t feel like you deserved it. It’s a little different in that you don’t have to be desperate to draw from the Deck, although that would certainly be the best use of it when considering risk vs. reward.