Matt Carlson: A Hello, a Lack of Dimes, and an Election

I believe I’m the last of the Gone Gaming writers to make my way onto the regular ranks of Boardgame News.  Searching through the back-issues of Gone Gaming you can see that I joined their ranks a bit later on as well, having written about 24 articles over the past 18 months.  Some have already kindly been moved onto BGN by the lovely Eric Martin. (Gotta start buttering up the editor asap…) You could read through all those posts to get to know my gaming style and preferences, or I can simply tell you that I am a high school science teacher who loves almost any game (some more than others, of course) and see myself as somewhat of a gaming evangelist. 

I’m often happy to play a slightly lighter-weight game if it will be a better fit for a less experienced gaming crowd.  My primary vice in gaming is that I’m a sucker for a good theme.  If I can get into a role while I play the game, it will be a more enjoyable experience.  More information, for those inquisitive few, can be found in my BGN bio.

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With introductions out of the way, it’s time to head on into the meat of my post.  This is also the time of year when five and dime lists pop up around the net so I toyed with the idea of adding mine to the mix.  However, I decided it would be a better fit (for my gaming proselytization) to post that list on my regular column over at the family gaming site, GamerDad.com.  If you’re a big fan of five and dimes, you can head over to check it out.

That leaves me with a column to fill here, and the news this week in the U.S. has been full of election coverage.  What better time to take out my new copy of 1960: The Making of the President from Z-Man Games.  While I’ve been able to get in only a single full-length game, I was impressed with what I saw.  The game has plenty of theme to draw me in, and the mechanisms were well-balanced, providing a fine evening’s enjoyment of tough decision after tough decision.

Election Rules

To bring everyone up to speed, 1960 is a two-player game in which players take turns using cards to try to gain majority control of each of the fifty states during the 1960 election between Nixon and Kennedy.  States are worth their electoral votes in the final election, so whichever player is able to garner a majority of the electoral votes across the nation wins the game.  (In my only comment about the components, I must admit I love how the cardboard tokens used to represent the states’ values display each state’s official seal.  They’re a bit hard to read on that side, but look very nice.) As is typical in a card-driven boardgame in this style, players take turns playing cards which have point values.  A card’s points can be spent on one of several actions.  In this case, players can use points to add cubes (1) to the board to gain influence in states, (2) to media spaces in one of the five regions (which can make gaining influence in that area easier), or (3) to one or more major issues within the campaign: defense, civil rights, and the economy. (Controlling issues grants a player the benefit of some resources in between rounds.)

A hallmark of this style of game are the events which are listed on the front of each card.  In addition to providing a fun thematic (and, at times, educational) backdrop to the game, players must choose to use a card for its event or for its action point value.  As one might expect, more powerful events tend to appear on cards worth more action points, so players are often deciding to either forgo a powerful event or give up the opportunity to spend a nice pile of action points.  This balance between events and action cards is the heart of the game, and is just one of the many well-balanced features I like about the game.

The game plays over nine rounds.  Players play five cards in each of the first five rounds and set aside a sixth card.  On the sixth round, a debate occurs using the cards that each player set aside.  In the seventh and eighth round, players still play five cards but now set aside two.  The final round is simply a resolution of the election.  A bit of election preparation is performed, the set aside cards attempt to mildly influence a few states, then all the votes are tallied to declare a victor.

A Balanced Election?

In my short column, I don’t intend to review the entire game, but I do want to point out the many, many checks and balances I found within the game design that I appreciate.  While I haven’t played enough to know whether either of the two sides in the game (Nixon or Kennedy) has an advantage, many little decisions and points of balance are built into the game that keep every decision interesting.  Most of this balance that I noticed is built right into the cards.  Gamers who avoid randomness may have concerns about drawing a poor hand of cards in a given turn.  However, there are several balancing mechanisms to even out the score, so a player must always attempt to take advantage of the situation provided by the hand he or she is dealt. 

The first such mechanism I have already mentioned: Better events tend to have better action point values (typically 4 points instead of 2 or 3).  You can use the action points to accomplish several goals, but you then miss out on using the powerful event.  Worse yet, if the event is favorable to your opponent, they can spend a momentum resource to cause it to occur after you have used the card’s action points.  If the event is deemed bad enough, a player can spend two momentum resource chips to prevent the activation of the event on their played card.

This is all fine and dandy, but what if a player gets an entire hand of 2’s with little or no more powerful 4’s?  This is balanced out by the candidates’ resting abilities.  When actions require a check for success, such as determining player initiative on each turn, colored cubes are removed from a cloth bag.  A successful check involves removing colors matching one’s party (red or blue).  At the start of the game the bag is full of equal numbers of red and blue cubes.  When players play a card worth 2 action points, they gain two rest cubes—symbolizing the time that their candidate has spent resting up during the campaign—while playing a 4 action point card garners no rest cubes.  At the end of each round, all rest cubes saved up are placed in the bag.  Thus, players who are dealt more 2 cards will have significantly more cubes in the bag and be far more likely to be able to choose the turn order and will tend to be more successful in any success checks.  I appreciate this balancing mechanism since card-driven games without it can often favor the player who just happens to draw the more powerful cards.

A secondary balance mechanism comes into play during the two special turns: the round 6 debates and the final (round 9) election.  During the first five turns, players must play five of their six cards and save one for the debate rounds, which means players will have five cards for use during the debates.  Every card has both an issue icon (defense, civil rights, or economy) and a party icon (sometimes both party icons).  During the debate, players take turns placing cards on each of the three debate issues; cards matching a specific party are played on that player’s side of the debate board and contribute the card’s action points towards that party.  The main goal during the debate is to have more action points on each issue to win it.  Winning an issue in the debate rewards a player with free control cubes to be placed anywhere on the game board.  Since the more powerful event cards have higher action point costs, saving better cards for the debates is a nice strategy.  A different strategy is to save powerful cards for the debate that benefit one’s opponent so that they cannot be activated during the normal round.  This avoids the nasty event (since players are forced to play every other card they’re dealt), but also gives your opponent a much better position during the debate.  Once the debate is over, there is still one more balance mechanism in play on the cards.  In the final two card-playing rounds, players play five cards and save two.  Those four cards are then used in the election round for last-minute campaigning.  Each set-aside card has the name of a state in the corner.  During the election round, players draw three cubes out of the bag for each state shown on their four cards.  Cubes that match their party color are then added to that state’s total, giving a little bonus to players who played fewer powerful cards and thus have more cubes in the bag.  Of course, more powerful cards tend to be the cards showing the name of more valuable states.  So, you could set aside that card for New York and hope for a couple more control markers in the last round, but you’d be giving up a powerful 4 action point card to do so.  Set aside your lowly 2 cards for the election round, and you’ll swing the vote only in states worth just a few electoral votes.

It is this constant check and balance of the cards, cubes, and mechanisms that gave me the greatest joy as I played the game.  If I held far too many weaker cards I consoled myself with my massive majority in the cube bag.  When I had many powerful cards in a round, I longed for the good old days when I had more rest cubes accumulating and didn’t have to worry about my opponent activating nasty events.  All this is wrapped up in a game with a solid grounding in theme, and I’m sure I’ll be playing it for some time to come.  Who knows, I might even get the social studies teacher down the hall to take me on in a game…

© 2008 Matt J. Carlson

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Comments:

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The balancing mechanisms of which you speak only work if they are actually balanced - that is to say, if the 4CP are roughly equivalent to the power of the event, or if a rest cube is really worth about a CP. But that is manifestly not the case ... most events are expressed in terms of cubes you get to place, and many of those events clearly allow you to place more cubes more flexibly than you could if you simply played the card for CPs. So in many, many cases, the events are clearly and demonstrably better than the CPs. So drawing better cards is better. But you know what, that’s OK. In fact, the game wouldn’t make any sense if that wasn’t the case. Given that most event effects are just adding or subtracting cubes (i.e., almost always stuff you can do just by spending CP), if the CP were roughly equivalent to the event, where would the decisions be? What would be the point? As it is, you have to balance the desire to just win the high-point-value states with the desire to be in a position to capitalize on the powerful events in the deck, events that punch far above their CP weight. You have to know that as Nixon, say, if you play in the Northeast you are running the risk of tangling with some powerful Kennedy events. That’s where the game is; the game is not in deciding between events and CPs, those choices are usually pretty straightforward. And that’s where you need to look for balance, in the forest of the entire card deck, not in the individual cards. Also in this sort of game, it is expected and desirable to have cards that are weaker than others. Every card game ever designed has an element of having to minimize the damage when you have a weak hand, and capitalize on a strong hand, whether it’s Bridge or Hannibal Rome vs. Carthage. This is actually my big fear about 1960. In Hannibal, say, if you get a lousy deal but, at the end of the turn, you’ve been able to limit the damage, you’ve done well and can look forward to turning it around next turn. In 1960, there is a much larger knock-on effect, if you have a weak hand and lose ground the effects have a far greater drag on your future prospects - same problem Twilight Struggle had. When you’re just counting up points of influence, and just using cards to add to or subtract from that influence in the great majority of cases, the effects are not very nuanced. Anyway, 1960 is still a clever game, but “balanced” is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about it. Posted by Chris Farrell on Jan 14, 2008 at 12:58 PM | #

I’ll reiterate that my thoughts were off of one play-through so I don’t have the experience necessary to talk about play balance of the game, just play balance of the _mechanisms_. I cede pretty much all your points except for the following (which are more minor quibbles).  For example an event on a 4CP card frequently moves more than 4 cubes around on the board.  However, using the 4CP would let you move EXACTLY whichever cubes you want.  The event cubes are often restricted.  I found events to be too weak more often than too powerful.  (ie. a 3CP card event may move around about 3 cubes.) Note that events have the one advantage that they can often ignore penalties for changing cubes where your opponent has “carried” a state and you don’t have a media presence. I didn’t mention Twilight Struggle (I like the game and didn’t want to naysay it), but felt that 1960 was at least a step up from its mechanism due to the “rest cubes” giving a low-CP hand draw at least some little token of things back to even things out.  (And I’d disagree that 1960 has more of a problem with making up lost ground than Twilight Struggle - with the possible caveat that TS has more turns in it if I recall.) My other mechanism-balancing comments (other than CP vs event) should still be valid.  Whether you have really good cards or really poor cards you still have to balance out whether to spend them during your turn or save them for debates or (less importantly) the election draws. Now, if you happen to draw a hand of all high-CP cards with great events for your side only (not your opponent’s so he/she can’t activate them) AND they all show your symbol so you can save any of them for the Debate phase.  Then, YES you will have a nice advantage over your opponent.  But at this point you are really going to have to chalk it up to freaky luck (like rolling lots of 2’s in Settlers).  I just don’t see all those things aligning frequently in regular play. Still, I’m glad you made the point that my discussion did nothing to talk about play balance of the game itself.  As my intro sentence to the 1960 segment says, I’m only discussing the balance within the mechanisms.  I found it very pleasing to see how making a decision one way (play a card now) meant I had to give up other nice effects later (save it for later in the debates or election). Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Jan 14, 2008 at 05:47 PM | #

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