Alfred Wallace: Impromptu Rules Variants

One of my favorite recent releases, as reported previously, has been Pillars of the Earth.  It’s been a big hit locally, being played very often at Metagames and elsewhere around town.  I was the “early adopter,” as usual, getting the game and teaching it to the first table.  It propagated out from there.  Everybody’s had a blast.

The trouble is: I got some reasonably big rules wrong when I taught the game.

First off, the first player gets to put a Master Builder back in the bag once a turn.  Missed that.  Also, I completely blew the Marketplace rules.  I was giving each player only one shot to buy/sell something, instead of wrapping around.  That was kind of huge.

This kind of mistake is, I gather, a common phenomenon.  It’s galling because I have a history of playing big ol’ complicated wargames.  I mean, I understand the Up Front rules—from the actual rulebook, mind you—so how can I miss a major rule in a game that doesn’t have that many?

(Or, I shudder to think, am I getting half the rules wrong in Up Front?  See, this is why I play solitaire.)

It’s heartening, though, that everyone likes Pillars of the Earth despite the rules snafus.  I’m also grateful that I’m still allowed to teach games…

Another week, another new release hits the table: Colosseum.  Mercifully, Carl taught the game to Allan, Kip, and me so I think major rules confusion was avoided.  I only have one game under my belt, so I don’t want to make a magisterial pronouncement here, but I have reservations about the game nevertheless.  (FULL DISCLOSURE:  I got creamed.  Bad.)

The game is only five turns long, which means there’s no time to waste.  Everything has to go as efficiently as possible.  You have to plan a route to the big, monster-VP-generating shows early on.  I worry that, as we get more experienced, games might have a sameness to them—if there’ll be just one True Path developing.  By the same token, I worry that this is the kind of game where newbies will get rat-stomped by experienced players. 

That said, I’m going to keep playing.  It’s pretty, for one thing, and the theme (putting on shows in ancient Rome) is intriguing.  It’s got bidding and trading, also plusses.  The other good reviews out there keep me hopeful—but if the table would rather play Taluva, Pillars, or Age of Empires III…well, who am I to object?

I’ve started getting more involved in miniatures lately.  The visual aspect of minis gaming is vastly appealing, and adds greatly to many games.  (Disbelievers are encouraged to try Wings of War with, and without, the minis.) Beyond that, I like the fluid nature of them compared to board wargames, oftentimes.

The trouble with miniatures, of course, is the expense—both in money (lead ain’t cheap) and in time, for painting.  There are options, however, for the miniatures gamer on a budget—such as the graduate student who has a thousand-strongboardgame collection to support.

The first is Battleground: Fantasy Warfare.  Here, the miniatures are replaced by cards, each of which depicts the unit of troops.  2D is less great than 3D, of course, but you don’t have to paint them, and you don’t have to spend nearly as much money.  Thirty bucks gets you a starter pack for two factions.  In fact, you can pay even less than that now.  For five bucks, you can get a scenario booklet that has “cards” to cut out for one of the included scenarios, and you can print the rules out online.  Or, you can be me, and be a completist—I have everything under the brand so far, including the spiffy new terrain pack.

The terrain pack is useful for many wargames, and I think it’ll have a broad appeal in the hobby.  You get two laminated sheets to cut up, that gives you fences, streams, roads, cliffs, fences, trees, hills, the works.  One tricky bit: One of the sheets says “CUT THIS SIDE ONLY.” I’m not exactly sure how one cuts just one side of a piece of paper, but there you have it.

My one complaint about Battleground—and it’s minor; as I said, I have everything they’ve put out—is the computer-generated art.  It dwells uncomfortably in the uncanny valley, if you ask me.  Since the cards use top-down views, though, when they’re on the table, it’s usually not that big of a deal.

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare provides a lot of gaming for the buck, and if you’re curious how miniatures wargaming works, it’s a great way to start out.  Each faction has its own personality, and I find them to be quite well-balanced.

Another option for the budget-minded miniaturist is the vastly fun little product, Wood Wars, which has existed in a couple of incarnations by now.  I have the latest, in the tube.  The miniatures are all little wooden pawns; what exactly they are depends on little ID discs you put next to each unit.  It’s based on HG Wells’s “Little Wars,” and true to its source there’s projectile-based combat: To shoot your archers, you put a marble in a tube and aim it at the target.  What it knocks down is killed.  When we play at the store, it’s the archery that is the real grabber.  It’s a serious game, however.  Melee combat is luck-free, for instance, and there’s some real thought required for assembling and moving one’s forces.

There’s one aspect of many miniatures game rules that drives boardgamers up the wall: The deliberate vagueness of the rules.  Often, miniatures rules will invite the players to add other rules, subtract rules, change rules, ignore rules—all at whim.  If you want a strict set of all-encompassing rules, miniatures games may not be for you.  They’re kind of like roleplaying; the designers hope that the players can dream up situations that the designers didn’t, and want the players to assume the flexibility to adapt.  Around a game of Wood Wars, a rules lawyer would be out of place and unwelcome indeed.

In other words, they’re great for the kind of player who gets rules wrong!

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A reminder: We need one more player for Amun-Re at Spielbyweb.  Name of the game: “School’s Out for Summer,” the password is bgn.  I’m pretty sure the rules are all correct over there.

© 2007 Alfred Wallace

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Comments:

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I haven’t played Colosseum all that much, Alfred, but I’d be surprised if there’s a single path to victory.  They just provided too many ways to attract spectators.  So you can go for the biggest events, cram in multiple Season’s Tickets, try for a wire-to-wire win (lots of Podiums) or lay back in the weeds (lots of picks from the leader), go for a bunch of different events or only a few, get lots of Star Performers, and so on.  In my last game, we all chose different strategies (most of them dictated by the game position) and the scores were very close.  So I’m hoping this concern will prove groundless. As for experienced players stomping newbies, that may be unusual for a DoW game, but I’d say that’s more a good thing than a bad one (it shows the game has some depth).  Still, I didn’t think the strategies in Colosseum were that opaque.  It probably has no more than a half to one game learning curve. Posted by Larry Levy on Jun 1, 2007 at 12:43 PM | #

Thanks for the link to the Uncanny Valley, Alfred! Fascinating topic, and one you can see in action in Pixar movies when the filmmakers try to depict real people. They never look right, although do look right enough to be disturbing. The worst was the squawling baby in Pixar’s Tin Toy from the mid-1990s. Gruesome… Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jun 1, 2007 at 08:41 PM | #

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