Alfred Wallace: Spam and Tricks

First off, I’d like to give a brief note to all those people out there I’ve been spamming the past couple of days.  Please don’t hate me!  Or, anyway, please don’t hate me more than you already did on, say, Wednesday.  It also serves as a warning for others…

So, I got an invite a couple of days ago from a gamer, blogger, and all-around stand-up guy inviting me to visit and/or join a Facebook/Myspace-type site called…Quetchup.  I can tell that some of you are nodding, chuckling, or out-and-out laughing at that very name.  NOTE TO SELF: Before doing anything like that, run a quick little Google search on the subject.

Anyway, the thing starts mining my email account for addresses, and sends out an invitation to everyone I’ve sent an email to, or received one from.  Whee!  Including, say, various academic personages I’ve been in touch with.  And a certain percentage of them joined, which meant that I started getting emails back inviting me to join, again.  It is, in all likelihood, the most obnoxious viral marketing tool of all time.

So—like a great many of the people in that Google search—I’d like to take a moment to apologize to all the people I’ve spammed in the last couple of days, especially the people who trusted an invitation from a fellow gamer, blogger and (I hope!) all-around stand-up guy (cough me cough). 

In happier news…

Josh recently had Nick and I over for a few games.  One of the ones we played (joined by Jean) was Karl-Heinz Schmiel’s trick-taking game Was Sticht?. 

I don’t play too many trick-taking games, for the very good reason that I’m horrible at them.  I mean, most of the “advice” offered in the Board 2 Pieces series the last few weeks seems perfectly reasonable to me.  I can look at a hand in, say, Bridge and as long as it has more than one suit in it, I can usually talk my way into any possible bid.  I just don’t know what the heck I’m doing.

Frankly, I was expecting the same from Was Sticht?, but I played anyway, convinced that any Karl-Heinz Schmiel game is worth trying at least once. 

For those not familiar with the game, it’s quite a bit different from the “purer” trick-taking games.  (Basics: Nine cards of four suits, numbered 1-9.  No suit ranks.) First of all, there are the task chips.  Every player selects five, each of which provides a certain goal, and the victory points you get for doing it.  They’re things like “Take the Fewest Tricks,” “Take no Blue cards” (one of the suits), and so on.  Every hand, the players secretly select one to aim for; the game ends when someone has “made” their last chip, and most VP wins.

Second of all, you select your own cards each hand.  The cards are laid out in a 4 x 9 grid.  Each column represents a trick.  For each such trick, the players go around and select one card, and then the dealer says who wins.  The tricky bit (sorry) is that only the dealer starts out knowing what the trump number and suit are; the goal is to figure out which they are, and select one’s cards according to which goal they’re going after.  For instance, in our game I was left with two goals that required taking very few tricks, so I aimed for low cards.  After everyone’s constructed their hands, the trumps are revealed, and then the hand gets played out “for real.”

There’s enough non-trick-taking in the game for me to survive—and, indeed, to thrive, as I pulled out the victory.  It rewards a lot of different skills, and a deficiency in one can in some ways be made up elsewhere.  Also, I found it easier to construct a hand based on my perceived needs than to perceive possibilities in a given hand.  Not exactly sure why that is…

So, I can say with confidence, now, that there is at least one trick-taking game I enjoy.  The trick, now, is to convince people who want to play Tichu, Bridge, spades, etc etc etc to play Was Sticht? with me instead…

© 2007 Alfred Wallace

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Comments:

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Yeah...thanks for the invite, Alfred.  I was all set to join until it asked for a region and the US wasn’t included.  I could have had the same fate.  <sigh> Close one! Please give Mr. Cranky a hug for me.  No, really.  Josh doesn’t bite.  He’s just a big teddy bear, despite the internet persona that most readers are familiar with. Posted by Valerie Putman on Sep 7, 2007 at 10:22 AM | #

I even got an invite in one of the second-round thingys that was instigated.  (Valerie, The US was too a region...) I had no interest in asking others to join so I think I managed to prevent further spreading… Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Sep 7, 2007 at 01:51 PM | #

Heh.  I got one from Chris Brooks.  Thanks to this article I knew to delete and slowly back away from the computer… pk Posted by Patrick Korner on Sep 7, 2007 at 05:54 PM | #

I received this message from several gamers I know, but since I already don’t use LinkedIn (despite having numerous connections), I decided to pass on this one. Marketing pushes like this one are what scare folks like my parents off the Internet. I can’t believe the Quetchup folks thought a program like this was a good idea! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Sep 9, 2007 at 01:59 AM | #

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