Alfred Wallace: A Very Great Miscellany

I don’t really have any big ideas today.  I don’t even have any medium-sized ones.  The goal, then, is to pile up enough small ideas to make something halfway respectable.

(As Isaac Newton’s younger brother, Steve, put it: “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have piled up enough midgets to make a nice mound.")

It’s also getting late, and I can hear the Boss’s footsteps in the hallway.

With that out of the way…

So!  What are we all doing for National Games Week?  And am I the only one who thinks it’s gotten too commercial over the years?  It used to be a nice quiet holiday when the family would sit around the fire, sip hot chocolate, and listen to Grandpa tell the story about how Reiner Knizia, Alan Moon, Richard Borg, Sid Sackson, and Klaus Teuber came together and formed a giant robot to fight the monster Monoporiskludo in Tokyo Bay in order to Save Gaming.  Heck, back then it was just a single day--National Games Day--and now it’s a whole week.  A week! 

Well, fie on it, that’s what I say.  I say we reclaim National Games Week from the clutches of Madison Avenue and sappy movies on cable.  Let’s get back to our roots.  Let’s have game trees in our living rooms--Canadian Meeple, of course--and gather around them and sing National Game Week carols.  Head down to the store and get some cards; maybe bake some--

Hang on, phone call.

[pause]

OK!  Apparently I have National Games Week confused with something else.  NGW remains no more commercialized than Mother’s Day. 

More to the point, why is it Thanksgiving week?  If the idea is to help sell games, shouldn’t it be before Thanksgiving, in order to stretch the buying season?  (That’s not an original thought of mine; some game store folks of my acquaintance have brought it up as well.) The current time makes it hard for stores to do stuff, since they’re already (they hope) swamped with shoppers.  I suppose there’s something to be said for the date encouraging family gaming; that’s a reason I never think about, since I’m the only gamer in my family.  My parents never played games until I came along; they stopped playing games as soon as I demonstrated a willingness to play alone.  So far as I know, that holds for everyone else in the family tree as well.

I guess you could say I make up for the rest, at least in terms of collection size. 

What I did inherit from my family is a tendency to get really, really involved in my hobbies.  We don’t just do stuff or enjoy stuff; we become complete dorks about it.  That encourages large collections, books about stuff, and an ability and willingness to “talk shop” at the drop of a hat.  If I’m ever at a party with another gamer-coffee geek-Peanuts fanatic-Petrarch nut, the ensuing conversation will clear out rooms for fifty miles.  There is such a thing as knowing too much.

And, weirdly, I don’t talk Civil War stuff as often as one might think, given that studying that war is my avocation.  It’s not that I don’t find the war fascinating--I most certainly do--but if word gets out that one is a Civil War “person,” that tends to invite long, involved, detailed discussions about buttons.  I reserve such conversations for other things.

The Wallenstein game we started up a little while ago finished up.  I mention this because I won.  It was kind of an odd game; not a lot of fighting that I could detect.  I followed a strategy of not expanding very much; that’s my excuse.  I built up a little empire with lots of defenders; a region I knew I could control for basically the whole game, and build up.  For the umpteenth game I’ve seen, the Year One leader did not win the game.  This is a hard game to win with a target on your back; I think the thing to do is to focus on armies in Year One and just make sure you’re in hailing distance of first.  It was an extremely close game; the scores went 37-36-34-30-26.  Chegigo came in second (leading Year One); ozjesting was playing his first (?) game, and I think did well for himself.  It’s a tough one to pick up the first time through.  There have been several games where I was learning my way through my first game; playing by web like this enhances the feeling a lot of times.  (ozjesting himself pointed this out, I should add.) The pace is slower, you’re prohibited from making illegal moves, and so on.  I think PBW Wallenstein loses a little bit in the translation; I pick up the flow a little better in face-to-face games since I see every action, rather than coming in after umpteen battles and having to read through it all.

The game took a little over two weeks; that’s pretty good, I think, considering how many time zones we were crossing.  I find Wallenstein to be a pretty swift face-to-face game; many disagree, but I think games should typically clock in at about ninety minutes.  Fifteen minutes a season, three seasons a year, two years...that sounds about right to me.

I’ll start up another few games next week, probably.

© 2006 Alfred Wallace

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"The current time makes it hard for stores to do stuff, since they’re already (they hope) swamped with shoppers” I have a good friend who manages a game store and, after lengthy discussions about this, I can tell you that he agrees.  He said that he has little floor space for game playing at this time of year and is usually too busy selling to run an event of any kind. But, on the other hand, Thanksgiving week is pretty much a guarantee thats at some point you’ll be sitting around with your family having little to do but watch football so why not play a game? Posted by Mike Pennisi on Nov 3, 2006 at 07:22 AM | #

You must be confused.  Thanksgiving is held on the second Monday in October. The upcoming holiday is called Remembrance Day, and then it’s clear sailing ‘til Christmas… Glad to clear that up for ya, pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Nov 3, 2006 at 01:10 PM | #

So when was National Games Week (Canada), then?  Probably sometime in, like, June or some craziness. Posted by Alfred Wallace on Nov 3, 2006 at 01:12 PM | #

I think Wallenstein is onev of the best PBW games around as so many decisions are packed into just a few select moments in time.  This is evidenced by your game time of a week or two… That whole early leader losing is so common in many games… but its hard for an agressive player to remember to hang back sometimes… Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Nov 4, 2006 at 05:34 PM | #

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