Dale Yu: Competitive Balance – important for boardgaming - and a PUZZLE!

For those of you that follow the NFL (the National Football League of American Football), you’re probably now very familiar with the term “competitive balance”.  There has been a lot of discussion in the past two weeks surrounding the fact that some of the teams in the league have chosen to rest their starting players in attempt to prepare their teams for the season-ending playoffs – which happen to start this weekend.

First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with the issue – let me quickly summarize the events which have led to the firestorm of discussion.  The team which started all the buzz was the Indianapolis Colts.  At the time, they were 14-0 and on their way to only the third undefeated regular season in the entire history of the NFL.  They held a slim margin in the second half, winning by 15-10, against the New York Jets.  Though the result of the game was not yet certain, the coach of the Colts decided to take out most of the starting lineup.  The rationale for this was that the coach did not want to risk sustaining an injury to any of his best players.  By this point in the season, the Colts had already assured themselves of the #1 seed in the playoffs – therefore, whether they won or lost the game, there would be no change to their post-season positioning. 

The Colts ended up going on to lose the game, 29-15.  In fact, once the first team players were on the bench, the backups were actually fairly ineffective – the Colts did not even manage to gain a single first down with the backup players in the game!  Of course, they also did not sustain any injuries, and their best players will be well rested for the playoff games.  Additionally, the backup players were given the chance to gain experience playing – which given their poor performance – looks like they needed to do anyways!

I think that the media really focused on the Colts game because of all of the attention paid to their attempt at a perfect regular season record.  For many fans and pundits, it was unimaginable that the Colts could give up their chance at this record.  I watched the game on TV, and I was surprised to hear that many of the 67,222 fans in attendance ended up loudly booing their homestanding Colts despite the fact that they are in the midst of one of the best seasons and will have the best record in the AFC regardless of the results for the rest of the season.

This phenomenon was not limited to the Colts though.  In the final week of the season (this past Sunday), a number of teams including the Colts, Bengals, Saints, and Cardinals benched many regular starting players in attempt to either avoid injury or to give extra time to heal from previous injuries.  For most of these teams, their playoff status was already fixed, and there would have been no significant change on their own placement based on the results of the final game.

In contrast, some of the other playoff-bound teams played their starters – with mixed results.  The Green Bay Packers played all their starters, and though their coach freely admitted that they were risking an injury, he wanted the team to enter the playoffs on a positive note.  The Packers won their game 33-7, and they did not have any major injuries during the game – so their confidence should be at a high level as they enter the playoffs.  However, on the other hand, the New England Patriots have likely lost one of their team leaders, Wes Welker, to a season ending knee injury.  Admittedly, they were still playing to guarantee a higher playoff seed by winning their final game, but the prospect of heading into the playoffs with the higher seed but without one of their best players is probably not one they wanted to have at this point of the season.

For much of the past two weeks, officials from the NFL have been talking about examining the “competitive balance” of the league in the offseason to try to ensure that all of the teams are giving their full effort to win each and every game.  Why?  First and foremost for the NFL, they want to make sure that the games remain competitive so that the public will still attend the games in person or watch them on TV.  After all, they are in the business of providing people with entertainment.  But from the coach’s perspective – I can see many positive reasons for resting the starters.

But, what does this have to do with boardgaming?  Well – I think that this discussion brings up a number of interesting points to consider.  First, if there are no rules against doing something – is it wrong or unethical to do them?  This is a constant issue that comes up with gaming, and one that I flip flop on.  I am against gamers doing things that are against the spirit of the rules.  For example, in a game where memory seems to be an important element, I don’t like it when people demand that they be allowed to take notes because the rules don’t specifically prohibit such behavior.  Memory becomes a lot less fun when you are filling in your own grid of where the tiles are… However, if someone wants to make an unconventional move in a game – I am all for that, and will usually applaud the ingenuity.  For instance, whomever was the first guy to think of tearing up a Chaos Orb card (in M:TG) so that it could touch more of the opponent’s cards was truly a genius.  (Yes, I know that this play has since been errata’d as illegal).

Another issue that comes up is that there is an element of kingmaking with this sort of behavior.  The teams which had already secured playoff spots couldn’t change their own playoff standing.  However, they certainly did affect the other teams that made (or missed) the playoffs.  For example, the New York Jets won the last two games of the year and qualified for the playoffs – but they played the Colts and the Bengals – both of whom did not play their starting lineups for the whole game against the Jets. 

The question has arisen – is that fair to the other teams?  The teams that may have missed their chance to play in the postseason because the Colts and Bengals essentially rolled over and let the Jets win?** Is that fair?  To me, I don’t have a problem at all with this – the schedule has been set for months, and it was just good fortune that the Jets happened to face opponents that didn’t have as much incentive to play for the win.  The Bengals, it should be noted, did have the unique opportunity to possibly control who their playoff opponent would be – as they were playing in the final game of the season for the league, they could see what scenarios would unfold whether they won or lost.

This would be no different that what might happen in a boardgame tournament.  Let’s say you’re at the World Boardgaming Championships, and you’re in the midst of a Dominion tournament.  You’ve done well in the first two heats, and you already have enough points to move onto the semi-finals.  However, you still have a game to play in the prelims.  When you get there, you realize that you can possibly affect the overall results based on your play.  Wouldn’t it still be advantageous to you to try to play in a way that might let a more desirable opponent move on in the tournament – which would give you a better chance of winning?  I would think that this is an entirely acceptable behavior as the goal of playing the game is to win the overall tournament.  Though normally, I wouldn’t like to see someone play suboptimally in a single game, in the context of a tournament or a series of games, I can see perfectly acceptable reasons why this might happen.

In the case of the football, we’ll have to see how it pans out.  There will be a number of interesting rematches this weekend – in fact three of the four games in the first round will be repeat matchups from the final week of the regular season.  So, there may be a chance to see whether the strategy of resting players turns out to work or not.

**I am a Bengals fan, and I’ll have to admit that the Bengals didn’t exactly “roll over”.  They played their starters in the first half and were down 27-0 at halftime.  Of course, they didn’t leave the starters in to try to win the game in the second half – in order to prevent injury – but I think that Jets would have won the game last Sunday night regardless of which personnel the Bengals used!

Puzzle for the week – Well, I think that I’m going to start a (hopefully) regular part of my column where I offer you a game-related puzzle each week to keep you busy!  The past few puzzles which have been in the column were my own puzzles, but I simply won’t have time to give you a great puzzle each and every week.  So, I will open up the floor to guest puzzle masters to offer up their best brain teasers.  If you are interested in submitting a puzzle to be considered, please email it to me at BGNAdvisor@gmail.com.

This week’s puzzle comes all the way from sunny California… It is written by my good friend Mark Jackson, and it was taken (with his permission, of course!) from his gaming blog, http://akapastorguy.blogspot.com/.  I highly recommend checking it out as he is currently featuring his annual “Five-and-Dime” review!

Translation Party! Game Quiz

For translation back-and-forth fun, http://translationparty.com/ is strangely addictive.  You put in a phrase and it puts it back-and-forth into Google Translate to Japanese and back, until it “stabilizes.” Mark has put in the titles of 25 well-known games into the translationparty.com server… Can you figure out the names of these “translated” games?

1. Get
2. Bad touch
3. Hooks and crooks
4. Manic Channel
5. Chikinchachacha
6. Cause of the Universe
7. Drop: Dark Tour
8. Banihamu the needs of the Devil
9. Foreign
10. Town dying
11. Control: conspiracy
12. Erugurande
13. Social
14. Hyundai
15. Mutation: Castle Siege
16. The plot of the Queen
17. Gyarakushiresu
18. Role, through the Middle Ages
19. Snow Fairy
20. Warning capacity
21. Neolithic
22. Iron flow
23. The Night of Power
24. Crucible
25. Bet wisdom

*Here are some clues*:

- The answers are in alphabetical order.
- The really difficult one is NOT an obscure game.
- There is one game that is listed by the least common name out of
multiple editions… sorry.
- The number of words is not necessarily equivalent to the number of
words in the original game name.

Answers from last week’s puzzle

Well, the hidden puzzle got a few more answers in the extra week.  Essentially, if you read the first letter of each answer (in order), you’ll spell out the phrase “TRANSLATE NAME OF FINAL GAME G”.  OK, well you didn’t need to take the initial of the 25th answer, but instead use the whole name “Geschenkt”.  Which translated from German becomes: “Given”.

That was the answer I was looking for.  “No Thanks” would not actually be correct as that was the English title of the game, but not actually a translation of “Geschenkt”.

Anyways, thanks for playing along with that, and I’ll warn you now to always be on the lookout for a hidden puzzle (in the ones that I create at least!)

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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