2373: Sheriff of Nottingham

0373_001

My brother bought me a board game for my birthday known as Sheriff of Nottingham, and it hit the table for the second time this evening. I was particularly keen to see my friends Tim and James compete against each other in it, because they’re both very good at arguing (they’re both lawyers) and both often get rather competitive — and Sheriff of Nottingham is a game very much designed for argumentative, competitive players.

The mechanics are pretty simple. By the end of the game, it’s your aim to score as many points as possible through a combination of the cash you have on hand and the value of the goods you managed to successfully bring to market. To achieve this, you play through five phases several times.

First up, you look at your hand of six cards, ditch up to five of them and draw replacements from either or both of the two face-up discard piles (which have a small initial stock on them) and the central blind draw pile.

Once you’ve done this, you put up to five cards in your “merchant bag”, a lovely little prop with a pop fastener, just big enough to hide the cards you choose.

Next up, each player declares to the Sheriff player (which rotates each turn) what they’re supposedly bringing to market in their bag. You can (and often probably should) lie about this, because contraband items are worth significantly more points, and there are also big end-game bonuses available for whoever has the most of each of the four “legal” goods, so it pays not to telegraph your intentions to your opponents too early.

Then comes the Sheriff’s time to play, since he hasn’t participated in the previous phases. At this point, he has the choice of whether to inspect each player’s bag or let them through. If he inspects the bag and discovers its contents are not what the player said they were, the offending goods get seized and discarded, and the guilty player must pay the Sheriff a fine. If, however, the inspects the bag and discovers the player was telling the truth, the Sheriff must pay the innocent player compensation for the value of all the legitimate goods in the bag. In order to determine the best course of action, the interaction at this point is completely freeform: the Sheriff can threaten players (within reason!) while players may offer the Sheriff bribes of money, goods or even favours to let them pass without incident.

Once all the merchant players have been inspected or let through, they lay down the cards they were able to keep — legitimate goods face-up, contraband face-down — and the Sheriff role passes to the next player. This then continues until everyone has been the Sheriff twice, at which point the winner is the person with the highest total points, which consist of the points on the cards they have on the table, plus the number of gold coins they have, plus bonuses for having the most or second most of each of the four legitimate types of goods. (There are no bonuses for having the most contraband, but some contraband counts as multiple legitimate goods when calculating these bonuses.)

It’s a really interesting game. It’s simple and quite quick to play, but the interaction element makes it rather fascinating — though at the same time also rather dependent on having a group who are capable of negotiating and dealing with one another rather than just not really knowing quite what to offer or threaten with.

It’s essentially a game about lying — either getting away with lying, or making other people believe that you’re lying when you’re actually telling the truth. After two games, I think we’re still learning the intricacies of appropriate strategies, but it’s been a lot of fun so far, and an eminently good fit for our gaming group as a whole.

2315: RPGs are Weird

0315_001

In case you hadn’t noticed, my favourite genre of game is the RPG or role-playing game. Which is kind of a weird type of game, when you think about it, particularly from a modern perspective.

Computer RPGs (hereafter “CRPGs”) have their roots in tabletop roleplaying systems like Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk — indeed, the Dungeons and Dragons inspiration is very obvious even in Japanese titles like the original Final Fantasy, and we’ve also had a swathe of outright Dungeons and Dragons titles for various platforms over the years. Where CRPGs and tabletop systems diverge, however, is in their main purpose.

Tabletop role-playing is about different things according to who you speak to, but there are two broad things it allows its participants to engage in: firstly, it allows them to play-act a fantasy of some description, be it ruling the night as a vampire in modern-day New York, exploring the Planes and fighting otherworldly horrors or battling the Empire alongside Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. This is, for many people, the biggest attraction of tabletop role-playing: the chance to be someone else for a little while, and enjoy the experience with other people. Tabletop role-playing rules tend to be deliberately a little fuzzy around the edges, allowing for some bending here and there in the name of making a more entertaining experience for the participants; indeed, some of the most successful, effective systems have some of the most straightforward rules.

When those rules come into play, though, that’s the other big strength of tabletop role-playing: they allow for all manner of things to happen. If you really want to boil it down, they’re a means of using mathematics to create an abstract depiction of some sort of action, whether it’s something that is possible to depict literally (attempting to use diplomacy to prevent a war) or something that is pure fantasy (infusing yourself with the power of the Gods to leap 50 feet into the air and stab a demon in the left nostril with your holy sword). But for most groups, these rules are in service to the main attraction: the roleplaying; the communal storytelling; the shared fantasies.

CRPGs, meanwhile, focus almost exclusively on this latter aspect: the use of mathematics to abstractly represent things happening. It’s pretty rare to find a CRPG that affords you complete freedom to do what you want, and where they do exist, these experiences often feel a bit “empty” thanks to the lack of true human interaction — plus perhaps the awareness that the “freedom” you’re enjoying is just an illusion: all it really is is the game designer having thought of more things that you might do than some other people would have.

Because truly freeform role-playing doesn’t really work when you don’t have other humans in the equation, we get a focus on mechanics and rules, with perhaps a story of some description overlaid on the top as justification for the rules and mechanics you’re following. But it’s still a little strange, as I say — particularly through modern eyes.

Why? Because we’re at a stage where we don’t need to abstractly represent things as much as we used to. In the early days of video games, the abstract, mathematical mechanics of CRPGs were in part a response to technological limitations: they allowed for the representation of things that it simply wasn’t possible to render believably on the screen. Now, though, graphics hardware has come along to such a degree that there’s not much we can’t depict completely visually, given a talented art and animation team to bring these things to life. Not only that, but with the advent of motion control and virtual reality, we can even put ourselves among these things: these strange and fantastical locales; these weird and wonderful creatures. And we can interact with them physically.

So why, then, do we still have turn-based role-playing games that are deliberately and heavily abstract and unrealistic in their depiction of anything from battle to relationships?

Well, for a number of reasons, the first being that not every development company has infinite resources to be able to produce a game that depicts your every action literally on the screen. But there’s also the matter that engaging in abstract mechanics and learning how a game’s systems work is part of the fun. You can learn how to take full advantage of a real-time system, sure, but that takes practice and, frankly, not everyone has the physical dexterity to be able to do that. A mathematical-based system like a CRPG, though; that’s accessible to pretty much anyone, though of course it does favour those with a bit more of a mind for numbers over those with twitch reflexes.

And then on top of all that, there’s the fact that even though it is possible to depict a lot of things visually in games nowadays, there are still certain things that it’s hard to represent in anything other than an abstract manner. Take the combat in something like Dungeon Travelers 2, for example: the concept of this game is that you’re playing the role of a non-participant in combat, issuing orders for what up to five people should be doing, the results of which then unfold in front of you through a combination of visual effects, numbers popping up and text messages. By keeping to a simple representation of what would be an altogether chaotic affair if depicted literally — five people attacking up to five monsters — Dungeon Travelers 2 and its ilk allow the player to engage in enjoyably tactical, strategic gameplay that would be highly impractical to show in real-time.

The other thing that appeals to me personally about games like this is that they stoke the fires of the imagination. I know that Dungeon Travelers 2 doesn’t depict things literally — there’s very little animation in the game, even outside of combat — but I also know that it is keeping visual representations to a relative minimum in order to let my mind do the work. It provides just enough — the overall theme of the dungeon I’m exploring; music to support that; the voices and visual appearances of the girls in my party; the appearances and behaviours of the monsters we fight — to get my imagination fired up and fill in the blanks for myself. When Monica fires a Spiral Arrow and hits for 3,000 damage, I don’t think “ooh, 3,000 damage!” — I think “Wow, that was an amazing shot.” And I like that.

The bigger-name, bigger-budget CRPGs are starting to move more and more away from this sort of abstract depiction of what is happening — look at BioWare’s games, for example, or Square Enix’s approach to Final Fantasy XV (although in that case, it’s a peculiar middle ground between a truly literal depiction and abstracted mechanics) — but I’m pretty sure there will always be a place for imagination-stoking, presentation-minimal CRPGs for people like me. At least I hope so!

2308: An Open Letter to @wilw About Games as a Lifeline, “Male Tears” and Inexplicable Blocks

Hi Wil,

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Apparently I’ve done something to offend you in the past, though, because you have me blocked on Twitter. I don’t know why and I don’t know when this happened because as far as I know, we’ve had no direct interaction on any occasion ever, but I will apologise for whatever it was anyway. I will also express my sincere disappointment that someone I used to look up to as a bastion of what modern nerd culture should aspire to feels somehow threatened or upset with something I’ve done in the past — threatened or upset enough to simply cut me off from the prospect of ever interacting with him.

I was an avid viewer of many of the Geek and Sundry videos when it first launched — particularly Tabletop, which introduced my friends and I to a number of board games that are still in our regular rotation. Tabletop was an excellent show that gave a good flavour of how the various games played — even if there were occasional bits of fuzzing over the rules in the name of keeping things snappy! — as well as providing a great opportunity for some of the most entertaining, fun people in geek culture to come together and have a good time. A good time that was infectious — so enjoyable was the atmosphere on Tabletop that it felt like the audience was right there with you all, sitting around the game table, rooting for your favourite player to win and commiserating with you when you inevitably came lost. (As the resident person in our tabletop gaming group who perpetually comes last in pretty much everything, I could relate to your position quite a bit.)

On a more serious note, nerd culture in general is something that I’ve talked a lot in the past about giving me a lifeline when I needed it. In the case of video games, they’ve provided a constant and much-needed centre of stability in a life that has often been chaotic and beyond my control and understanding; in the case of tabletop gaming, they provide one of the few means of face-to-face social interaction in which I feel completely comfortable, whether it’s with close friends or, as it was for me this Friday evening just gone, complete strangers. I think it’s the fact that interactions over a tabletop game are, for the most part, clearly structured: it’s why I gravitate towards games with clear rules, turn structures and player roles as well as those with strong themes that include flavour text I can read out dramatically to our group. Conversely, those games that require a certain degree of negotiation or freeform interaction are those I feel less comfortable with, since I’m sometimes not quite sure what I’m “supposed” to say.

But all that’s by the by; it’s just a bit of context of who I am. Needless to say, games of both the video and tabletop variety are extremely important to me; as you said in your keynote speech at PAX East in 2010, “some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter.” I agree entirely, and when I took a risk, flying from the UK to Boston, MA for that PAX East — my first time attending such an event, and only, I think, the second time I’d taken a solo trans-Atlantic flight — I found somewhere that I really felt like I belonged. My life was, at that point, a bit of a mess: my marriage was falling apart — my wife at the time would go on to leave me shortly after I returned from Boston — and I didn’t have a reliable source of income. Games gave me a sense of being grounded; somewhere to retreat to when I couldn’t face the terror that everyday life at the time confronted me with. Games gave me common ground with which I could interact with other people; games gave me something to talk about, something that I could call “mine”.

That time in my life was turbulent. I’ve had ups and downs since then, and as I type this I’m very much in a “down”. Over the years since 2010, I’ve come to recognise the importance of acknowledging one’s emotions, the causes of these emotions and the ways to deal with them. I’m not afraid to cry as I once was back in high school; as someone who sometimes has difficulty expressing exactly what he wants to say verbally, there are times when bursting into tears says more than words ever can; there are others when the act of opening those floodgates allows the repressed emotions to be released in a more controlled manner once you’ve calmed down a bit, letting you communicate what’s really bothering you after the storm has subsided. Crying is important. Crying matters.

Which is why this image you posted on Twitter bothers me so much:

For anyone reading this letter who doesn’t already know, the expression “male tears” is usually used by the more toxic side of online activism as a means of demonising men — usually straight, white men — when they wish to express themselves. It’s largely brought out during arguments between the more militant side of feminism and those — usually, but not exclusively, men — who are tired of all the sociopolitically charged fighting that takes place every day on the Internet, particularly those who fight back somewhat aggressively with foul language, threats and exhortations for people to kill themselves. The “joke”, such as it is, is that all this unpleasantness just bounces off the noble “progressive” types — referred to disparagingly by their critics as “Social Justice Warriors” or “SJWs” for short, an epithet which these people flip-flop between absolutely hating and trying desperately to reclaim in the same way black culture has largely reappropriated “nigga” for itself — and is just interpreted as straight, white men crying about something not going their way for once; the fact that “male tears” is written on a mug allows the “progressive” activist the opportunity to drink from it, suggesting that they relish the opportunity to feed on the tears of their enemies.

Pretty unpleasant however you look at it, and while the original intention may not have been to reinforce traditional ideals of what these same people call “toxic masculinity” — stereotypes such as “big boys don’t cry” and “be a man for once” — I can’t help but look at it that way. Speaking as a (straight, white) man who does cry, isn’t ashamed of the fact that he cries and, in fact, has cried quite a bit over the last few months due to his own life situation and the suffering of the person he loves most dearly in the world: to see the idea of “male tears” used so gleefully and indiscriminately as a means of oneupmanship, of proving one’s “progressiveness” feels grossly distasteful and insensitive. To have it proudly promoted by someone I once looked up to as almost an idol; someone I thought I could aspire to follow in the footsteps of; someone who proved that a person with my interests could find success and a place for themselves in the world? That just feels like a stab in the back, with a few good twists for good measure.

I don’t deserve to feel like that, and I’m pretty certain I’m not the only person who feels this way. Some may express their disappointment and upset with this more eloquently or more aggressively than others, but however they choose to register their discontent and however much or little I agree with their methods of expressing it, I understand it completely. As someone who, now 35 years of age, was often ostracised and ridiculed for his interests and hobbies in his youth, was subsequently delighted when geek culture started to become fashionable over the course of the last decade and most recently has noted with a growing sense of discomfort that the things he finds most relatable, most important to him are those that are getting relentlessly torn down in the name of being “progressive”? It hurts. A lot.

I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t hurt anyone. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the things I enjoy with friends who also enjoy those things, and likewise to leave those who are interested in different things to do what they enjoy. I don’t care about this perpetually raging culture war that has all but destroyed meaningful online discourse around video games in particular over the last five or six years, and put a serious strain on a number of friendships. I don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach to inclusivity and diversity, which is what many “progressive” types seem to argue for; I instead subscribe to a “many sizes fit many” ethos, which makes for a more vibrant, interesting and cross-pollinating culture in the long-term. And yet somehow, at some point, I’ve been branded with a scarlet letter, thrown in the pit with all the other social rejects. I’ve also been called a paedophile, a pervert, a misogynist and plenty of other things besides. My crime? I like Japanese video games with pretty girls in, and frequently argue against the misrepresentation of these games as soft porn in the mainstream press by those who won’t take the time to engage with them.

Frankly, the whole situation makes me want to cry, but now I feel I shouldn’t, because it will just, apparently, give you some sort of satisfaction. And that, to be honest, seems like the very inverse of your own credo, your own Wheaton’s Law, of “Don’t be a dick!”

You almost certainly won’t read this, Wil, because having blocked me on Twitter I’m not sure there’s any way you’ll see it outside of someone you haven’t blocked directly sharing it with you, and I don’t see that happening. But I wanted to post it anyway; even if you don’t read it, hopefully it will bring some sense of comfort to those who feel the same way I do about all this; put some feelings into words; provide a sense of solidarity.

As you argued in your speech, this feeling of solidarity, of belonging, is extremely important. We should all strive to help each other feel like we belong doing the things we love with the people we love in the places we love. With photos like the one posted above, you deliberately block off people from feeling like they can engage with this part of culture they adore, and people they might well otherwise get on with. And whether or not you believe that “male tears” only applies to men who don’t know how to behave themselves politely and appropriately, know that it can — and will, and has — been interpreted in a way that just comes across as exclusive, combative and gatekeeping: the exact opposite of what you yourself argue we should aim for.

This whole situation needs to stop, as soon as possible. I hate it. Everyone else I know hates it. Can’t we all just get around a gaming table and settle this the old-fashioned way: with dice, cards and chits — maybe even some fancy miniatures?

Thank you for your time, and thanks for reading, whether you’re Wil Wheaton (unlikely) or some random passer-by who just wanted to see what I had to say.

Love & Peace
Pete

2294: Partners in Space Empires

Finally got the chance to try out the physical version of Star Realms today, and it turns out to be an excellent game that appeared to go down well with all four people who were playing it.

I was particularly interested to try out the physical version of Star Realms because it provides the opportunity to play in ways other than the head-to-head two-player default style that the computer and mobile versions offer. You need more than one deck to do so (one deck per 1-2 players) but since the game is not expensive in the first place, getting enough cards to play with up to 6 people is still eminently affordable, and probably cheaper than many other, bigger-scale games.

We played in two different ways: firstly as a “free-for-all” game in which anyone around the table could attack anyone else on their turn, including splitting their combat scores between multiple opponents if they saw fit. The climactic moment of this particular game came when my friend James scored a massive 34 points of damage on my friend Tom, taking him down to just 7 Authority remaining. Conveniently, the hand I had drawn for my next turn — I was after James — had exactly 7 damage worth of combat power in it, so Tom was swiftly dispatched, to our great satisfaction; Tom generally beats both James and me in most games, so it’s always a genuine delight to utterly destroy him.

Following that, we tried a team game in which two two-player teams face off against one another, each team starting with a single Authority pool of 75 instead of the usual 50. In the team game, both players on the team play simultaneously and have their own “in-play” area, hand, draw deck and discard pile, but can pool the Trade and Combat resources they accumulate by playing cards. This means that the game’s “ally” abilities (which tend to trigger when multiple cards of the same colour are on the table) can only happen within an individual team member’s in-play area, but players can pool their resources in order to more easily acquire expensive cards or deal significant amounts of damage to their opponents.

I particularly enjoyed the team game; the dynamic was very different to the free-for-all multiplayer and two-player head-to-head variants, and the cooperative aspect worked well. In many cooperative or team-based games, “alpha player” syndrome rears its head, with one player tending to dominate discussions to such a degree that teammates go along with whatever they say without any real input. In Star Realms, however, the fact that each player is building their own deck — and teammates are mutually agreeing on how to proceed — allows for them to feel like they’re taking independent actions, but also to feel as if they’re contributing to the overall effort. Discussion and collaboration is essential to success — and can lead to some spectacular combos of cards hitting the table — but at no point did I feel like one player was dominating the table talk, nor did I feel like the game was especially unbalanced when played in this way. In fact, there are many aspects of the game that actually feel more balanced when played in a team game — certain abilities appear much stronger and more useful than they do in the free-for-all or head-to-head game, and specialising your deck with particular colour cards becomes even more important than it already is.

Star Realms was a resounding success, then, which I’m pleased about. It’s a simple, quick and easy to set up game that has a nice blend of theme and mechanics. I’m looking forward to playing it some more in the near future.

2282: What Kind of Gamer are You?

0282_001

An email thread between me and my friends earlier extended to well over a hundred messages, and only part of it consisted of us casting aspersions on each other’s sexuality or threatening to cave each other’s heads in with Ikea shelving. No; the most interesting part of it was the part where we decided to discuss what games we’d find mutually pleasing to play on our vaguely regular Tuesday night board gaming sessions.

The struggle we have, you see, is that our group is split kind of down the middle. Two of our number — Tom and Sam — very much enjoy strategic, competitive games that they can train to be good at and quite reliably destroy the rest of us at given any opportunity they have. Their favourite game is Agricola, a game which I respect enormously from a mechanical perspective, but absolutely positively cannot get my head around from a strategic perspective. I can make the most perfect farm in the world and still lose due to not having enough points on cards or bonus points or whatever, and it’s enormously frustrating.

Tom and Sam, meanwhile, have played a bunch of the game both in its tabletop and mobile app formats, and consequently know it rather well — what strategies work, what combinations of cards go well together, and a sensible sequence of actions to take. The rest of us, on the other hand, do not have this knowledge and tend to struggle our way through the game, usually fairly secure in the knowledge that we won’t be victorious.

My friend Tim and I are essentially the “opposite” to this. We enjoy cooperative games in which the entire group plays against the game itself — or perhaps plays against a single adversary player, as in games such as Descent and Advanced Heroquest. For the most part, we have nothing against competitive games, enjoying plenty in our own right, but our preference tends to be for cooperative, heavily thematic games that encourage a touch of role-playing. If we do play a competitive game, we enjoy those that have an element of randomness to them, such as deckbuilders or those where dice rolls are a central mechanic — games such as Thunderstone, Carcassonne and Catan are among our favourite competitive games.

The wild card in our group is James, who has garnered something of a reputation among our little ensemble as being “the backstabber” — largely due to his enthusiasm for the game City of Horror, in which attaining victory is mostly dependent on being as much of an asshole to the other players as possible while maintaining a facade of apparent cooperativeness in the early stages.

As our email discussion proceeded, James explained his approach in a bit more detail. For him, it’s less about outright backstabbing and more about pushing the boundaries of the game’s rules to see what is possible. For example, in our last game of Agricola, he decided to see if the game — which, for the most part, has little direct interaction between players save only one person being able to take each action space at a time — could be played in an outright adversarial manner. Deliberately taking aim at both Sam and Tom — whom, you’ll recall, are considerably better at the game than the rest of us — James decided to sacrifice any and all of his own scoring potential in the name of trying to make life as difficult as possible for Sam and Tom, hoping that either Tim or I would win. It was an entertaining exercise, for sure, though I still didn’t win.

These gaming archetypes conform to how we tend to play video games, too. Tim and I tend to favour either narrative-heavy single-player experiences or cooperative affairs such as Warhammer End Times: Vermintide, whereas Sam and Tom are big players of hefty, competitive games like Civilization V. James is somewhere in a middle, a little less keen (or able?) to break the boundaries of the rules in video games, though he noted specifically that the thing he enjoyed most about Grand Theft Auto Online, which we’re all playing semi-regularly at the moment, is being able to show up to each session dressed in an increasingly outlandish, freakish outfit to make us all laugh. Once again, making his own fun. (James, never quite able to shake off that “backstabber” reputation, is also the player most likely to shoot you in the face with a shotgun if you enter the same square mile of map that he occupies.)

Finding games that we all enjoy can be quite challenging at times, but it does happen sometimes. The aforementioned Grand Theft Auto Online is suiting our needs for video game multiplayer fun at present, for example, while this evening we ran two simultaneous learning games of Android: Netrunner for those among us who are less experienced to pick up the rules ahead of a planned “boys’ weekend” of gaming at the end of the month, during which we’re hoping to play a few games of Netrunner.

We left our email thread with the promise of coming up with a short(ish)list of games that we’d all be happy and excited about playing come a Tuesday evening, rather than our attempted “rota” system that we’re currently using. We haven’t quite perfected our list yet, but I’m confident we can find a selection that we’d all be happy to sit down for a game of.

Assuming James doesn’t break the game, of course.

2096: Sod Off, McIntosh

I have, to date, resisted taking the bait of the one and only Jonathan McIntosh, the complete tool who is responsible for the majority of the garbage that Anita Sarkeesian spouts on a regular basis, but witnessing his whining today that tabletop gaming is heavily steeped in colonial themes and mechanics, and that this leads to it being an overwhelmingly white hobby — this somehow being a bad thing, even if it were true (which I somehow doubt, since he failed to show any actual data to back up his assertion) — just proved to be a little too much for me. First he attacks video games; now, it seems, he’s starting on other forms of entertainment, too.

I honestly pity him a little bit. I don’t really understand what could have possibly happened in his life to make him such a malodorous thundercunt, but it can’t be a particularly pleasant life looking at the world through such an utterly joyless lens. Video games and tabletop games — not to mention all the other forms of entertainment media he’s doubtless had a pop at — are designed to bring joy to people, and in the latter case in particular, they’re designed to bring people closer together to share an experience in a face-to-face, social environment.

I’m not denying that there are plenty of games — particularly of European origin — that have colonial themes. But the reason for this is not anything to do with living out white supremacy fantasies or anything like that; it just so happens that the very concept of building up a civilisation or colonising an unexplored land makes for compelling, competitive gameplay.

And McIntosh’s assertion that the heavy use of colonial themes leads to it being a white hobby is absurd, anyhow; tabletop gaming is one of the most inclusive hobbies in the world. Thanks to its heavy reliance on abstract rather than literal representations, you can imagine whatever you like unfolding on the board in front of you. Who’s to say that the colonists in The Settlers of Catan are white, since you never see them? The meeples of Carcassonne have neither gender nor race. Agricola features a completely egalitarian society where both men and women do their part for the greater good as much as each other. Terra Mystica’s “human” characters are of a variety of ethnic origins. (Sorry, they’re “People of Colour”; God, I fucking hate that obnoxious phrase.)

Not only that, but his assertion that there are a “staggering number” of board games that focus on colonialism is likewise absurd. Looking over at my game shelf, it’s clear that this is just plain bollocks. Just on the top part of my shelf, I have a game based around King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; one about medieval monks solving a murder; another about 1920s high society solving a murder on a train; another about Egyptians building a palace for Cleopatra; another about Middle Eastern-inspired nomads attempting to take control of a desert region and the genies that live there; one about driving cars very fast; one about the whole world coming together to fend off an alien invasion; and a dungeon crawler whose main character is a dark-skinned elf.

So fuck the fuck off, Jonathan McIntosh. Your views are utterly poisonous to the sanity of people who just want to enjoy their hobbies. If these things bother you so much, then perhaps you should find something more enjoyable to do with your time. Go and help starving children in Africa or something if you really want to make the world a better place. But no; that would involve getting off your pasty white arse and actually doing something rather than indulging in constant armchair slacktivism on the Internet, wouldn’t it? And we couldn’t possibly have that; far better to keep scripting nonsense for that pet hoop-eared cretin of yours to keep regurgitating just as everyone is starting to forget about you and enjoy the things they love again.

Get some joy in your life. And allow those of us who already have some joy in our life to enjoy it in peace, you absolute bellend.

I thank you.

2074: Karate Fight

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the fun, silly and provocative card game Tentacle Bento, which I picked up a copy of at PAX a while back. It occurs to me that I’ve also played its companion game Karate Fight, but haven’t written about that at all, so that’s what I’ll discuss today.

Tentacle Bento is a reasonably sedate game with a strong degree of randomness to it, but it’s fun for the silly situations it creates. It’s somewhat akin to Rummy in that it involves collecting various combinations of cards in order to score, though the special events and characters add some chaos to the mix that can flip the outcome on its head if you’re not prepared. Karate Fight, meanwhile, is a game determined almost entirely by randomness; there’s no real strategy involved, and instead, appropriately enough for the theme, it’s a game of fast reactions, observation and responding to situations.

In Karate Fight, the entire deck is dealt out to all the players, who hold it in their hand face down. One at a time, they lay down and flip the top card from their deck in the middle of the table, and a number of rules then come into play.

If the card laid was an “attack” card, the next player has a number of draws indicated on the attack card to draw another attack or counter card, otherwise the attacker wins that hand and collects all the cards laid in the middle.

If a “Strike” card is laid, that triggers a “Hit” and everyone around the table has to slam their hand onto the pile in the middle, with whoever was first (i.e. on the bottom of the inevitable pile-up) taking the entire pile. A “Hit” is also caused by certain combinations of cards being laid down — all the attack cards being used in this particular hand, for example, regardless of other cards that have come in between, or the same defense card being used several times in a row.

A “Counter” card counts as an attack card and also reverses the direction of play. And a “Janken” card requires everyone to play rock-paper-scissors (in Japanese, naturally), with the winner taking the pile in the middle. Once someone gets all the cards, they win. The whole thing lasts about 15-20 minutes or so, even with stubborn players who seem to be doing nothing but passing cards back and forth between themselves.

Our game group is used to more sedate games in which you can take your time over your moves, but this seemed to go down pretty well when we tried it — perhaps because it was a break from the norm, and perhaps because its highly energetic, somewhat physical nature is inherently amusing. From my perspective, I certainly enjoyed its paciness — “thinky” games are somewhat prone to analysis paralysis, particularly with our group, and so this was an enjoyable change from what we usually play. It’s not something I’d consider bringing out as the “main game” for a session by any means — there’s a lot of luck and randomness involved, though it will ultimately come down to who has the best reactions, memory and observational skills — but it’s a fun warm-up, quick to play and a good means of getting people alert and aware. I also imagine it would be quite fun after a drink or two.

Also its boobylicious, panty-flashing artwork is clearly channelling Senran Kagura something rotten, which is no bad thing, unless you write for Vice.

1878: Would You Like Dinner, A Bath or Me?

Spent a bit of time reading through the rulebook for Maid: The Role-Playing Game today. It’s an interesting one in that the actual core rules for the game only take up about 20 or so pages of a 200+ page book, so it’s pretty straightforward to play; the remainder of the rulebook consists of “replays” (apparently a common inclusion in Japanese role-playing game books, essentially taking the form of a transcribed game session — a good means of getting a feel for how everything works) along with scenarios and optional rules to make the game more interesting than it already is… which is very interesting indeed.

What’s most intriguing about Maid is that it offers the potential for a wide variety of experiences. Most role-playing games can boast this owing to the fact that they’re essentially improvisatory theatre with a bit of dice-rolling involved, but in many cases they’re tied to a specific style of play. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, is geared very much towards Western-style fantasy (and, in the case of 4th Edition in particular, a very combat-heavy experience), while Vampire: The Masquerade is designed for modern-day intrigue and role-playing, with combat being somewhat more incidental. Maid, meanwhile, is flexible enough to cater to pretty much any setting you can think of, and to involve scenarios that range from the mundane to the ridiculous. It is indeed possible to play Maid as a straight-up simulation of being a maid for the master of a household, but I get the impression it’s a lot more fun when you start throwing in some of the more ridiculous elements.

Even this is flexible, though; you can put in some lightweight nonsense purely through the character creation process, which provides the opportunity to create everything from demure gothic Lolitas to hammer-wielding robot women with sexual perversions that would make the Internet blush. You can jack up the ridiculousness by including some of the optional rules — such as the “Seduction” rules, which allow maids to gain “Favour” points from sources other than the master of the house through… umm… various means — and truly take things to the max by including the rules for random events. The game explicitly warns you that using random events is very likely to throw anything vaguely pre-scripted completely off the rails, and indeed it’s even possible to run a complete game purely through random events if you see fit.

Chaos appears to be a central part of Maid, and it’s often player-led. The aforementioned random events can be triggered by players when they spend the “Favour” points they’ve earned throughout the course of the game, meaning that the players can wilfully cause chaos for the poor GM almost at will. It’s part of the character and theme of the game — it’s supposed to be inspired by wacky, slapstick anime comedy, and indeed maid-type characters in this sort of show are often somewhat chaotic in nature, with strange things happening around them. (In the optional rules, the chaos of the maids is sharply contrasted with the orderly nature of the Butler character, who isn’t allowed to trigger random events and is often penalised for certain things that maids might be rewarded for — like taking advantage of the Seduction rules.)

I’m really interested to give it a go at some point. Question is, will I be able to find players open-minded enough to explore it with me, or will it be a case of some Skype-based sessions with my Final Fantasy XIV/PAX friends, whom I know all appreciate it for what it is…?

1875: Ohayou, Goshujin-Sama

Third day of PAX East today, but the main thing I want to talk about tonight is what we’ve been collectively doing for the past couple of hours: creating characters in Maid: The Role-Playing Game, an anime-inspired tabletop roleplaying game that I hadn’t even heard of this weekend.

Maid is a peculiar and hilarious game, heavily based on random generation. Of course, you can pick and choose the characteristics you want to customise things a bit more, but the true joy of character creation in Maid comes from rolling dice and seeing what on Earth happens.

For example, the character I rolled was a boyish lolita (who actually is a guy) with an overactive imagination who was born into a hereditary line of maids and who binge eats when she has a “stress explosion”. Another character rolled by one of our number was a super-cool blind ninja maid who wields a raygun (called Ray Charles… work it out) and who is actually a traitorous infiltrator of the master’s household. There’s a huge combination of characteristics, which make for some hilariously complex and deeply flawed characters.

We’ve spent about two hours creating characters and haven’t actually tried playing the game at all yet, but it’s been an absolute blast. From what I understand, it can be played in three different ways: purely based on randomly generated events, as a more structured “adventure” or in a competitive manner where all the maid players are attempting to win as much “favour” from the master as possible.

I’ve ordered my own copy of the game, since when I went to try and pick it up today at PAX it had sold out — apparently it’s been a popular product for the past few years ever since it first came to light. Fortunately, I found that Amazon had a copy for a pretty cheap price, so I’m looking forward to perusing it at my leisure when I get home. And perhaps — hopefully — convincing some of my more open-minded friends to give it a try at some point!

It’s a fine example of the creativity that you’ll come across if you head a little bit off the beaten track — not just in video games, but also in tabletop games and other media, too. It’s a gloriously chaotic game that doesn’t take itself anywhere near as seriously as some of the more established tabletop role-playing games — not that that’s anything negative in itself, but sometimes you don’t want the hardcore “weight” of a Dungeons and Dragons and just want to play something a little… ridiculous. And Maid certainly appears to cater to that.

Can’t wait to give it a proper try.

1795: Thoughts on Roll20 and Other Board Game Apps

Longstanding Internet friend Matt Mason sent me this link earlier. For those too lazy to click, it’s an article about an app called Roll20 that is, so far as I can make out, designed for two main things: to facilitate online “remote play” of tabletop role-playing games between players who are scattered around the globe, and to support the “local” experience of those playing together in the same room by making the housekeeping and paperwork required for playing and running a tabletop role-playing game electronic.

It’s a good idea, and indeed many role-playing groups already use various electronic solutions to support their sessions, whether it’s simply firing up iTunes or equivalent to provide a musical backing to a dramatic encounter, or having an indexed, searchable copy of the rules on hand to save leafing through weighty tomes in the midst of what is supposed to be frantic combat.

The Kill Screen article is a little confused, so far as I can make out; it goes on to mention what it calls “Boardgamegeek-type board games” (with the implicit definition that these are things somewhat more complicated than entry-level fare like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan) and suggests that an app such as Roll20 would provide an adequate solution to what a “pain” many modern boardgames are.

I can’t argue that there are certain games out there which are a bit of a pain at times. Stuff like Arkham Horror and Descent have so many cards, chits and tokens that it’s 1) difficult to keep the box organised and 2) rather time-consuming to set up and put these games away. Arguably, though, the setup and pack-away time is part of the experience: there’s the tactility of punching out all those tokens in the first place, and the satisfaction of laying them out in pleasing arrangements on the table during play — there are plenty of people out there who “pose” their game boards to make good photographs. There’s also something inherently satisfying about picking up and playing with physical items: slamming down a card in front of an opponent when you pull off a satisfying move; shuffling through a treasure deck to get your reward from a tough encounter; hoping that the deck of event cards will be kind to you this time around.

I also have mixed feelings about electronic versions of board games. It’s cool to be able to play many titles online with far-off friends, but the experience just isn’t the same, particularly when playing asynchronously. A single game of Ascension or Carcassonne can take weeks if you let it — and it’s very easy to let these things slide, even when they’re right there in your pocket on your phone — and it just ends up feeling more like work than fun, particularly if you have a number of games on the go at once. These days, if I’m going to play a board game, I want to do it face-to-face.

That doesn’t mean that apps like Roll20 don’t have a place, however. In fact, we’re already starting to see some interesting examples of technology being used to support — not replace — game components, the most notable of which is the upcoming board game adaptation of classic PC strategy game XCOM, which effectively casts an app in the role of the antagonist “player” or “game master”, deals with all the heavy lifting with regard to tracking things and provides suitably randomised elements for which no-one can complain that the decks of cards haven’t been shuffled well enough.

There’s scope for plenty of other types of things, too; the aforementioned Arkham Horror and Descent would both benefit enormously from phone or tablet character sheet apps, allowing players to keep track of their health, fatigue, equipped items, treasure and all manner of other things without having to gradually take over their corner of the table with cards, chits and all manner of other gubbins. Games like Mage Knight would benefit from their randomised elements being automated and made truly (or as near-as-dammit) random.

I’d never want to give up the physical element of board games altogether. But I think we’re starting to move into an interesting new era where traditional physical components and digital elements will come together to produce truly interesting experiences. I’m excited to give them a try.