Alfred Wallace: I’m Ready for Some Football

Ahhh: My favorite time of year is just beginning—College football season!  I’ve been waiting for this one since the Rose Bowl ended—and, as a Texas Longhorns fan, it’s been a good wait.  Last year was most satisfying, and this year…sadly, I can’t tell you that I expect a repeat.  I have other teams to root on, too; the Mizzou Tigers—my “firstâ€? football team, that I grew up rooting for—and the Missouri State Bears, a Division I-AA team that, in all likelihood, is going to be ground into a fine powder by Oklahoma State tomorrow.  Ah well…

The point of all this—and I’d better get to it fast; I can sense Rick loading his dart gun—is that a lot of what I like about college football is what I like in board games.

Before every football season, there are always stories about whether professional or college football is better.  NFL football is played at a higher level—the players are bigger, stronger, faster, and more experienced.  I certainly grant this, but the reason college football draws me in is variety—there are vastly more teams, and they generally have to do more with less, leading to a multiplicity of playing styles, far more than in the NFL.  You build a strategy with what you have, and the games pit these two strategies against each other.

Board games are similar in that in some games, the players have basically one strategy to maximize—who can be the most efficient, who has the best timing.  These are “NFLâ€? games.  The one that springs to mind is St. Petersburg.  The basic strategy is pretty well scripted; the trick is knowing when to move from one kind of card to another.  Alhambra works in a similar way; it’s about buying points efficiently.  Deduction and perception games also basically test one skill; either you’re good at Ricochet Robot or you’re not.

Other games, though, offer many potential paths to victory.  A lot of Reiner Knizia’s games are like this—there are many ways to score points, and there’s a kind of race between them.  Taj Mahal is a favorite example.  Do you go for elephants?  Or chains of palaces?  How important are the special cards for you?  The game is about how different strategies interact, and who can make their strategy work best within the framework of the particular game.

Games where you build your forces—be it a deck of Blue Moon cards, or an army in Warmachine or Axis and Allies: Minis—of course, offer a particularly fine outlet for this sort of game.  With a certain points budget, you’re going to have to deal with an “armyâ€? with particular strengths and weaknesses, and there can be several different kinds of successful armies—and unsuccessful ones.  Of course, once you have an army, you still have to direct it effectively.

One of the reasons I like chess and go is that there are (at least in halfway decent games) similar clashes of philosophy, particularly in the openings.  In chess, do you stake out the center, contest it, or approach it from the side?  In go, do you create a framework that will give you secure territory—but weak in the center, or do you play for influence, hoping that whatever gets taken from you is paid back later?

Not all games fit into these categories—at least not well—and in and of itself allowing and rewarding multiple valid strategies doesn’t make for a perfect game—but it’s usually a good sign.

It’s been a slow few weeks for gaming.  School started up, I had the World’s Most Minor Surgery Ever (don’t ask), I had a conference paper to write and polish up (it’s still not “good,â€? but it’s no longer “badâ€? and in any event it was finally “dueâ€? so away it went)…busy times, and nobody was able to get a game night together.  So it goes. 

Instead of gaming, I’ve been spending my time puzzling.  I won a subscription to GAMES Magazine in a contest a while back, so those puzzles are on the table.  It’s been a while since I’ve done cryptic crosswords, so I’m disappointingly slow yet.  I’ve also recently discovered BBC Mind Games, a little pricey in the States but generally good value.  They claim to cover board games, but from what I’ve seen they make GAMES look like Spielbox.  That could change, though.

The big passion, of course, has been Perplex City, the huge metapuzzle that’s been going on for a few years now—but I, curse the luck, have only just discovered it.  The prize—two hundred grand—is better than a subscription to GAMES (sorry, guys—I love the magazine, but still), I’ll say that.  It’s collectible, kind of—there are cards, they come in random packs, there’s rarity involved—but the kicker is, you don’t actually need any of the cards (probably) to actually win the prize.  You don’t need to spend a dime—assuming you don’t have to travel to where the Cube/McGuffin/prize is located.  The fun of PXC (as it is abbreviated) is in discovering the extent of the puzzle and exploring the virtual world the puzzles, large and small, create.

Puzzling is kind of a solitaire game, I suppose—or a cooperative one, in PXC’s case—but there’s no “winning,â€? per se, at least for me.  I feel a sense of accomplishment when I win a “realâ€? game against opponents, but for puzzles it’s not the same.  I just say “Well, that’s doneâ€? and move on to the next one.  Puzzling is definitely about the journey, not the destination.

(It can be the same way doing historical research—going to archives, reading background material, doing the creative and logical work to create a narrative—that’s fun.  Opening up the ol’ word processor and banging out umpteen pages on it…that’s not fun.  The fun is done, and now it’s time to work.)

Anyway, I hope everyone else is enjoying themselves, be it with puzzles, games, or watching football.  Along those lines, I note the Premiership is starting up, and my boy Theirry Henry has been doing not-so-well…

Have a great weekend!

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