Matt Carlson:  The Gamers Determine the Reality

Once again I find that some of my more interesting gaming reflections come from my weekly high school gaming group.  This week a student brought in one of his favorite games, Pirateer.  While it isn’t quite my cup of tea, they played it all afternoon long and seemed to have more fun than anyone else in the club.

Privateer reminds me of a classic 70s or 80s sort of semi-abstract bookshelf game.  Each player has three round ship tokens which can move on the boardgame grid.  On one’s turn, you roll 2-4 dice (depending on the number of players and game type chosen) which are then used to move your ships.  Ships can only move in a straight line, but can turn a corner when using a new die.  Thus, rolling a 3 and a 2 would allow a player to move two ships three and two spaces respectively or move one ship like a knight in chess.  A ship could even move in a direct line all five spaces or three one way then back two for a total movement of one.  Landing on an opponent’s ship removes their ship from the game.  The overall goal is to move one of your ships to the middle of the board, steal the golden coin on the central island, and return it to your home base without being captured.

It is a very simple game, and if your opponent moves too close to you, their capture is nearly guaranteed unless you roll particularly poorly.  While the dice add a lot of randomness to the game, the number of rolls over time should cancel out some of the fickleness of fate.  In the grand scale of things, this would normally be an acceptable gaming situation for me.  However, due to the dangers of being captured, it was nearly always in my best interest to hang back and try not to get too close, waiting for someone else to make a dash in for the gold and hope that I could capture them before they get back out again.  Any game that forces me into a delay mode loses several stars in my book.  While I enjoyed my single play of the game, I had no desire to go through such a random walk again and begged off further plays by starting up a game of Cartegena.

I filled up four total player slots and we leapt into a game.  While I often go first to “show the way” in Cartegena I decided to let the other players go first this time.  A strange thing occurred, everyone played nearly all their cards and proceeded to push a single pirate as far forward on the track as they could.  There was next to no skipping of places since very few pirates were on the board.  Eventually, the board began to fill up a bit more, but there was not nearly the amount of large-scale movement I’ve come to expect in Cartegena.  The game seemed to move at a slow place since progress was so slow.  To make matters worse, one of the players has severe analysis paralysis (I’m not sure if rules get too deep for him quickly or he just has a hard time deciding on things).  The end result was a slow moving, rather boring, game of Cartegena.  One of the students even commented on how the game seemed to be a long game.  (I take that as a very bad sign when new gamers offer up such a critique.)

Meanwhile, the Pirateer players are having a grand old time, laughing and enjoying themselves.  I KNEW I was playing the better game, but why wasn’t I having more fun?

At first I tried to convince myself that I should give Pirateer more credit.  I think I was a bit harsh on the game.  There are many different rules variations in the short rulebook, and the students were even mixing and matching several of them at a time.  Each game was fairly short (about 10-15 minutes once the game was down to only 4 players), and the sheer variety of game rule variants kept all the players from getting bored with the same game over and over again.  Thus, in the right crowd (chaos tolerant, combative) Pirateer is a pretty decent game.

Was Cartagena the bad game?  I couldn’t admit that as I have had many a good game of Cartagena, and find is a particularly nice game to teach to gaming neophytes.  So what was the problem?  Could it be me?  Clearly, it had to be the players.  If I was really unhappy with the way Cartegena was being played, perhaps I was playing with the wrong crowd (or worse, maybe I was the wrong crowd!).  The more I thought about the situation the more I realized that who a game is played with is about as important as the game itself.  I like a good thinking game, but I’ve happily played many a round of No Thanks! with non-gaming friends and relatives and round after round of Cash ‘n Guns with various youth groups.  Both are a bit chaotic (Cash ‘n Guns more so), but I enjoy them due to the fun interaction that comes out when the game is played.

Even deeper strategy games show similar signs of enjoyment closely linked to who is playing the game.  I enjoy In the Shadow of the Emperor immensely, but can’t imagine enjoying the game if my fellow gamers wouldn’t also find the humor in bumping off an older noble with the dubious doctor or the fast auctioning off of one’s daughter to try to get as much as possible out of the deal.

As I enjoy a good cooperative game, I proceeded to apply this principle of players making the game to that genre.  In a recent (and my first) play of the cooperative game Pandemic, I had a great time.  One reason was the players.  None of us had played it before and we had a great time trying to sort out what kinds of moves might be useful and how we could best try to strengthen our position.  While it is very difficult to arrange, it would sure be nice to always play cooperative games of this type with gamers of the same level of experience.  As we all learn about the game at roughly the same rate, we would be less prone of having any individual player micromanaging the rest to create a group/solitaire game.

I’m not about to kick anyone out of any of my gaming groups for sub-par enjoyment of gaming with them.  However, I do vow to make sure that I am always striving to preserve everyone else’s enjoyment of a game while I play.  OK, that’s not quite true… if I’m going for the win I might need to ruffle a few feathers here or there, but otherwise I vow to be a good game player.

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A final note of interest to those few who follow my other writing around the net.  My regular gig at www.GamerDad.com is no more, as that site has merged with www.GamingWithChildren.com.  I will continue to write approximately biweekly reviews and views at the new site, so nothing has really changed other than a new look to the page and a new site name.  I still plan to try to keep an eye on the best of all genres but give games suitable for family play a slightly higher priority.  I’m starting out with some revamped material from my earliest postings over at GamerDad.  First up was an introduction to modern boardgames, which was followed by my take on several boardgame awards and the games that received them.  I’ll begin to add in more current reviews and views as things progress, and will be also archiving my older reviews over at the BoardgameGeek for posterity.

For those just interested in my postings can head directly to the Unlpugged index to find the newest posts.  Those demanding a handy newsfeed can get one through feedburner here.

© 2008 Matt J. Carlson

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Comments:

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Yeah, Pirateer’s not too bad, except the wrap-around board edge bugs me a bit. It doesn’t get a lot of love from long-timers Eurogamers (longer than me, anyway) because I understand that the designer was perhaps not as diplomatic as he might have been.... Posted by Jeffrey D Myers on Apr 19, 2008 at 08:27 AM | #

Yeah… “not as diplomatic” is a, well, diplomatic way to describe his behavior. Posted by Mark "Fluff Daddy" Jackson on Apr 19, 2008 at 10:21 AM | #

like me, you might only dislike pirateer due to the old flamewars about it on rec.games.board… (Remember when that was the only source for information?) Dale Posted by Dale Yu on Apr 19, 2008 at 11:29 AM | #

I read some Rec.Games.board at times, but mostly cruised them for auctions of games to buy… I’m unaware of any sordid past for Pirateer, but think it wouldn’t be a favorite of current Eurogamers due to the high luck/dice factor. I have to give it props, though for being a fine “filler” in that it does give players some choices, plays quite quickly, and has many rule variations to keep the variety factor high. Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Apr 19, 2008 at 07:36 PM | #

Personally, Pirateer is on the list of games I have no intention of ever trying precisely because of the old flamewars on rec.games.board. The designer did plenty to drive potential customers away from his designs. The closest thing we have had to it in recent years was the CardChess dustup a few years back on BoardGamGeek. I am so happy that we have moved beyond rgb being the only source for information! I do have to admit that I miss some of the news sources that came later (Ken Tidwell’s Game Cabinet, in particular, really did wonders for the early advancement of designer games outside of Germany) Posted by David Reed on Apr 19, 2008 at 11:15 PM | #

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