W. Eric Martin: The Game Sommelier & World of Warcraft

Human beings are social creatures, and whenever we get excited about something, we want to share that experience with others: Have you seen “Mad Men” yet? You have to check out this fantastic manga series called Death Note! You haven’t seen The Dark Knight?! (I did last week in my first IMAX experience. The short review: I felt like I was punched in the face and made to like it. Heath Ledger was haunting and magnificent.)

So given that I write tons of game news and reviews, in addition to playing the things a good portion of my non-working hours, it should be obvious that I end up talking about games every time I meet someone new. As I mentioned in a recent column, I even carry games in my coat or bag so as to have something to show those people who (unsurprisingly) haven’t heard of any of the hundreds of games that I own, play or rave about.

Matt Carlson, in a comment on that column, mentioned being a game sommelier, and although I’d never heard the term before, it made perfect sense. Just as a wine sommelier (a retronym, I know) endeavors to recommend wines that will blend tastefully with certain foods and social situations, I try to present games that will fit whatever situation I expect to encounter, as in the following cases when I am:

• Visiting my in-laws in New York – My mother-in-law loves playing Honeycomb Hotel and other logic puzzles on the computer. When I received the PC version of Ingenious ( BGN review) in 2007, I installed it on the computer at my in-laws’ house to test it out, and she quickly fell into playing that as well. As such, I’ve showed her Blokus, Qwirkle and Take it to the Limit, along with TransAmerica, Familienbande, and other light strategy games.

  

• Seeing my niece and nephew – When my wife Linda and I travel to NY, I bring games appropriate for the 4- to 8-year-old audience, most of which I received unrequested for review. These hopped-up younglings are eager to try anything I put in front of them. HABA’s Trotofant was a smash hit (although the tots subsequently smashed up the components, making the game hard to play), while other titles have been hit (Boochie – BGN review) or miss (Briarpatch titles).

  The most recent success story with them are the logic puzzles produced by ThinkFun (previously Binary Arts). I bought Railroad Rush Hour for the train-obsessed nephew as a holiday present when he was seven, thinking that the four-year-old niece could handle the ten bonus puzzles included for a junior audience – yet she blazed through those ten, then fifteen more, needing only a few pointers from her proud uncle along the way. I’ve since given them Top That and showed them Tip Over, which kept them busy for an hour in a bookstore. I’m now set for gift ideas for the foreseeable future!

• Attending a funeral – No, I don’t bust out a game on top of the casket. Even I have limits! But I did pack Tip Over for the reception after the funeral as I thought my niece and nephew would be bored there while surounded by adults. A nine-year-old cousin was also present, and he was soon enmeshed in the puzzle. His mom asked about the puzzles afterward, and I gave pointers on which ones might work best for him.

• Visiting any friends with young children – Two of our writer friends have young boys, so those kids get to be guinea pigs for games in need of review when Linda and I visit their homes. Linda goes off to talk about freelance writing with the adult, while I entertain the child and see how he responds to the game. (This column reminds me that I need to put those impressions in writing so that I can finally relieve myself of these games!)

  

• Entertaining the neighbors – My wife’s former boss, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter live a few blocks away from us, and I’ve slowly made games a regular part of our evenings whenever we get together. (We moved to Concord, NH after visiting them and liking the area.) The females are chatty, which distracts them from the game at times, so titles with few rules tend to work best. Bohnanza, Take it to the Limit and Say Anything ( BGN review) have been the biggest successes to date.

• Seeing my best friend – I’ve known Craig since 1978, and we’ve played many games over the years. He and his gaming friends and relatives are deep into Eurogames, so whenever I visit NY, I bring the latest hotness for him to try out. His group differs from mine in that they prefer to play games twice in a row to immediately test what they’ve learned from the first play. An ideal setting for someone who wants to review a game! (Craig works as an illustrator and you can see a self-portrait with fevered dreams on his website.)

• Going to the bookstore – Linda and I have a home office, but instead of being stuck in the house all the time, we often head to our second office in Borders bookstore, where we have access to food, drinks, reference material, potential magazine markets, and wi-fi. I always pack a game or three for the outing, with at least one that Linda likes and one that I need to review in case we want to stop working to play (which for me is still quasi-work). Occasionally I get to describe games to curious passers-by and hand out my card.

  

• Volunteering at spay/neuter clinics – Every month I attend a spay/neuter clinic about an hour from my house and rake cats. No, really! The clinic, an all-volunteer set-up in donated space at an SPCA in Massachusetts, spays or neuters 40-80 feral cats at each session. My primary job has been to use dowels and a giant metal pseudo-fork with a dozen long tines to rake the cats into a confined space so that someone can deliver anesthesia without the cat being able to move and bend the needle. This past clinic I was taught how to deliver the anesthesia myself, which thankfully turned out to be much easier than I imagined.

  All the people who work near me know about my passion, and when someone new joins us, I’m typically introduced with the line, “Eric has the coolest job in the world.” With that kind of set-up, I make sure to have games on hand, although they have to play fast (10-20 minutes), have few rules, and work with age ranges from teenager to senior. The July clinic saw Get Bit! and Have You Herd? hit the table, and I’ve also brought out Climb!, No Thanks!, and a few games that have no punctuation marks in the title.

• Going anywhere and doing anything – This category covers all other situations, and while I try not to devote too much coat or bag space to games – a resolution that frequently fails as I decide to pack just one more – I will have a couple of titles on hand in case I want to read the rules for something new, or play something with Linda, or demonstrate a game to others. Zirkus Flohcati, Geschenkt and Familienbande are standard pocket games as I can demonstrate them quickly and listeners get the gist of the game almost immediately.

The challenge of being a good game sommelier isn’t limited to pushing games on people who don’t know anything about them. I also try to find the right games for those in my game group, steering away from a speed game if player A is at the table, avoiding anything with a long decision tree when player B is around, pushing for a trick-taking game when player C visits, and so on.

With that background in mind, when a copy of World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game arrived on my doorstep, I knew the two people who would be most interested in playing and emailed them to arrange a game time. While one of them turned out to be swamped with summer work outdoors, the other practically jumped through the computer screen in response to my invitation. (I’ve since played a second game with someone visiting from the West Coast and have a third game scheduled for this week.) Since I plan to write a full review later, I’ll keep the coverage short for now. Here goes:

I have zero experience with World of Warcraft, either on the computer or with the giant board game from Fantasy Flight, so I approached World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game as a total newb. The game has you playing one of four characters, each of which is personalized through a special power and a deck of ability cards. To win, you need to collect eight valor points, which come from completing quests or defeating encounters preprinted on the oversized gameboard. Defeating some of those preprinted encounters also allows you to boost your character’s stats (life points or attack, defense and damage values).

Most turns consist of movement, an action based on a gameboard element (draw cards, heal damage, teleport, etc.), and an encounter with some critter. Combat consists of a single die roll, and everything other than another player is destroyed from only a single point of damage. (This doesn’t mean you’ll kill something every time you fight – only that the fights are short.) Defeat a creature, and you flip the creature card over to see what item – armor, a weapon, magic items, food, etc. – you’ve claimed as a reward.

As the game progresses, you’ll bulk up attack and defense values and start taking on more powerful opponents, working your way through certain parts of the board to complete the all-valuable quests, which range from killing certain types of creatures and visiting certain locations to causing damage to opponents or being damaged yourself! Both games with two players were largely non-interactive for roughly the first hour before one of us was able to take advantage of certain ability cards and items to inflict a bit of pain on the other player. (In one game, for example, my Curse ability cards were worthless for a long time as one of my opponent’s quests was to be defeated by another player.) Death isn’t permanent, but the dead do lose items and board position – and given the quests you’re trying to fulfill, offing an opponent may be required to make progress.

In addition to a lack of WoW experience, I can’t recall playing a giant fantasy game of any type previously. Typically I like to hold all the parts of a game in my head and picture how they operate and interact. I want to have a strategy and a reasonable idea of what I need to do to accomplish it.

All of that went out the window for World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game. The quests do nudge you in certain directions, and additional experience with the encounter card decks – which come in four levels of forty cards each – would help you refine those initial plans, but largely you’re rolling with the punches and adjusting the game plan on the fly over and over again. You can draw new quests to replace current ones if you’re not making progress, so you’re never stuck without options. To the contrary, your turns are often overflowing with options, from the multiple possibilities of resources to the hand of ability cards you could play to the plethora of items you could use, each of which has teeny text and icons that all have meaning. There’s a hundred moving parts, and rather than trying to optimize my moves, I just did things, saw what happened and adjusted future plans from there. (My approach to the 32-page rulebook was somewhat similar as in both games we discovered play errors or unanswered questions in the middle of the session and just adjusted as best we could.)

I did say I’d keep this coverage short, right? Let me stop for now with a note that I’m having fun with the game, but at this point it’s hard to imagine getting better at developing a strategy or even handling some of the minor game elements. With so many details, it’s easy to lose track of everything and World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game comes down to being more about living the experience of each game and its particular situations rather than improving from one game to the next. We’ll see how that assessment holds up based on additional plays in the weeks ahead…

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