Shannon Appelcline: Player Numbers

This game doesn’t support the right number of players, and I’ll tell you why ...

1. It’s not even multi-player solitaire, but just single-player solitaire. If I’m not going to have any human interactions anyway, I might as well sit down with a computer game. It’ll have better graphics in any case. Say, has any one converted this solitaire board game for computer play?

2. What are the chances that’s ever going to get played? Either the wife likes it, or I’m sunk, because trying to get a 2-player game to the table at a game night is like trying to get a Republican into office in Berkeley: not bloody likely.

3. OK, how about you’se and him’s fight, and I’ll just sit over here. No, don’t mind me at all. Just minding my own business. Oh, you’re both worn out and tired now, out of troops or out of money? Gee whiz, I guess I can’t help but win!

4. A perfect number, you say, just us and them? Sure, that might work in Germany, but couples playing serious games in the United States seems pretty rare to me. Sure, I can get it to the table sometimes, but more frequently the four-player games that I pack in my bag are wasted space and it’s only the 5-player games that ever hit the table.

5. So, this must be the perfect number, you say, since it supports a goodly number of people. Well, that’s only because we haven’t been talking about the chaos factor. Player interaction can be a little bad with three, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. By the time you get up to five players, you might as well not make plans at all, because someone else is going to ruin them. And, of course, this says nothing about seating arrangements. The average gaming table seems to support four, so with five someone has to sit at the end. Or, else, you have to squish people together--which leads into the problems that prevent there existing couples of game players in this country.

6. And if you think the chaos is bad with 5 people, it gets even worse with 6, and then you add that on to major downtimes. Sometimes you might as well go out and have a nice dinner while you’re waiting for your next turn. Because things are chaotic, turns get even slower, as people have to figure out their plans anew every turn. Besides that all, if there’s any type of geography, I’m not really in a game with half of these people anyway, so why bother seating us all together?

7+. Are you joking? Chaos and downtime multiply. Then, inevitably, the high-player number games start to introduce player elimination to the stew. Yes, I indeed was not a werewolf, and now I’ll just sit and watch the rest of you have fun for the next hour, at least for some definitions thereof.

So, perhaps I’ll just go read a book instead.

Around the Corner

There hasn’t been much time for writing these last few weeks, as perhaps this entry showed. My one recent review has been of a comic called Freedom Formula: Ghost of the Wasteland. I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks with something a bit more substantive.

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