Kris Hall: Loserville

The first game I played in 2008 was Manhattan.  I introduced the game to my wife and a non-gamer couple that we know.  I was happy to see that they all liked the game.  By the way, I lost.

The second game I played in the new year was Brass.  I taught the game to Ted Cheathham and Dave Gilligan, and these gentlemen are very much veteran gamers.  I lost that game, too.  In fact, even though every game of Brass I have played has been with people who have never played the game before, I have lost each time.

When I consider a lot of my favorite games, I realize that I have never won any of them.  Age of Empires III, Reef Encounter, Struggle of Empires, Manhattan, Perikles, Union Pacific, High Society—never a victory have I seen.  I seem to have a room reserved for me in the Loserville Hotel.

You’re probably thinking, he’s just a lousy gamer.  But I don’t think that is it.  Or at least, not entirely it.  Yes, I’ve made my share of bone-headed plays.  In each of the games of Brass I have played, I can remember specific mistakes and miscalculations that damaged my final score.  And sometimes my style of play works against me.  When playing Age of Empires III, I have a tendency to accumulate lots of merchant ships, building tiles, and piles of cash.  Other players often see me as the biggest threat and react accordingly, while Charlie Davis quietly marches to victory with his discovery-and-colonization strategy.

I can remember having my share of victories (if not in the games mentioned above), and on rare occasions I can dominate the games of a given Appalachian Gamer evening.  But on the whole the Appalachian Gamers are a pretty well-matched bunch.  No dummies, and no geniuses.  Yes, certain players seem to dominate certain games.  If you are going to play Age of Empires III against Charlie Davis, be prepared to lose.  And James Lilly has won every game of Reef Encounter that I have seen him play.  Ted Cheatham may not be invincible at El Grande, but it is his favorite game and it shows.

So why do I lose so often at games that I love?  Games that I actually study?

One reason may be that my personal preferences cause me to over-value some of the options that the game systems provide.  Age of Empires and Struggle of Empires both have special ability tiles that I gobble up like potato chips.  I just love getting extra powers that other players don’t have.  While these tiles may have their place in a winning strategy, over-valuing them causes me to neglect other important aspects of the games, and this impacts my final score.

Ego and spite can hinder my judgment as well.  In Union Pacific, being the second-place stockholder in three companies may net you more cash than being the first-place stockholder in just one.  But if a player challenges my dominance in my favorite railroad company, I may wage a battle for control that wins me the company but costs me the game.

Avoiding inconvenient but worthwhile strategies may be another weakness of mine.  In Brass, it takes a lot of effort to construct one of the high-scoring shipyards.  You need the right cards, you need a lot of cash, you need access to both coal and iron, and you need to eliminate those annoying zero-level shipyard tiles.  So far I have just found it easier to get a lot of ports and cotton mills on the board, but this is a strategy I am in the process of the revising.  So far, the majority of high-scoring players in my games of Brass have built one or more shipyards.  And I like to think of myself as smart enough to learn from my mistakes.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to get out of Loserville regarding one or more of these games. 

Of course, that might make it harder to get people to play them with me.  Right now, my sales pitch is: “We can play this game.  It’s one of my favorites—and you’ll probably win.”

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