Zombie Realpolitik In the Wild West

Well, not all at once, unlike what the title suggests.

We had five people show up to our Monday night session, which is normally V:TES plus the occasional other game. Since we'd had our tournament the day before, it didn't seem like anybody really wanted to play more V:TES right then and there. Josh had suggested earlier that we try to scrape together a game of Bang!, which I was totally into, since I've got a copy of the game but hadn't yet ever played it. Everyone else seemed congenial, so we slapped cowboy hats on our heads, bellied up to the bar for a shot or six of rotgut, and prepared to squint at each other malevolently.

Game One - If I'm a Cylon, Does It Take An Action to Reveal?
At the beginning of a game of Bang!, every player is assigned a secret role, which defines his victory condition. The Sheriff, who reveals his role as soon as he gets it, is trying to kill everyone who isn't a Deputy. The Deputies win if the Sheriff does. The Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff. The Renegade wants to kill everyone except the Sheriff, and then kill the Sheriff. As you can see from that synopsis, only the Renegade's victory conditions are in any way complicated. This will become important later.

In theory, this game could involve a fair amount of bluffing and negotiation, given that nobody knows for sure what the other players are trying to accomplish. In practice, at least during this game, almost everyone opted for a "shoot first and interrogate the corpse" methodology instead. I suspect that this is usually the way the game plays, since the vast majority of the cards are either kill-you or save-me cards. Having little or no technology available to try to suss out other players' roles without violence means that about the only way to try to figure out who's who is to throw a couple of bullets at people and see how they react. That's good design, given that Bang! is meant to be a quick play. Forcing players to start shooting as a means of gathering information keeps play from stagnating into he-said/she-said politicking, which is definitely not how the West was won.

Ben was our Sheriff, and started out by building up his position with a long-barreled gun, an iron plate under his shirt, and a horse. Josh screwed up early on, telling Ben that he had no intention of stealing Ben's gun, a comment which arrived apropos of nothing and immediately aroused Ben's suspicions. I managed to make an even bigger mistake right after that. When I had gotten my role card, I'd glanced at it and immediately forgotten what it said - I was tired and Josh was going over the rules of the game at the time, so what I'd looked at fell right out of my head. I looked at my card again, to see what in tarnation I was supposed to be doing, making a joke about revealing myself as a cylon as I did so. Ben assumed that the only reason I'd have to look at my card a second time was because I was the Renegade and hadn't fully understood the victory conditions for that role, as all the others are so simple. Since I was actually an Outlaw, I didn't put up much of an argument against that logic.

Ben took potshots at Josh and Max to see what they'd do. Josh shot at Matt, and Max went after Josh with gusto. Max must be the Deputy, then, right? Ben threw Matt into jail, which was the one mechanic in the game that I found really annoying. (While in jail, you don't get to play at all, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to get out of jail - whether or not you're released is purely random.) I played some cards to build up my position and didn't act aggressively toward anyone.

Max kept plugging away at Josh, who got gunned down in short order, revealing that he was the Renegade. That gave Ben pause, since he was now unsure of my role, but he quickly decided to throw me into jail just to be on the safe side. Several turns passed in which Ben and Max didn't do anything while Matt and I rotted in jail, which I knew meant that Max must be the other Outlaw. If he'd been the Deputy, he would've been shooting at Matt and I. Ben didn't twig to that, though, given the smart trust investment Max had made with Ben earlier, by following Ben's orders and blasting Josh when he was told to.

Matt and I freed ourselves from jail at about the same time, and Matt decided that the thing to do was to light a stick of dynamite, which passes around the table and randomly blows up one player. Unfortunately, he got tossed back into the clink right afterward, and sat there staring at the dynamite in his hand before it blew him to pieces. That revealed that he was the Deputy, so all pretenses were put aside and Max and I laid into Ben with everything we had. That turned out to be rather a lot of flying lead, and though Ben managed to dodge bullets like he'd taken the red pill for a couple of turns, we soon laid out the Sheriff before he managed to put either of us down. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," indeed.

Game Two - Backdoored by Squidbillies
Max had just bought the Game of Thrones boardgame, so we set it up and prepared to battle it out for control of Westeros. I was the white guys in the north, Ben was the green guys in the south, Josh was the yellow guys in the mid-east, Matt was the red guys in the mid-west, and Max was the black squidbilly guys squished between my territory, Matt's and Josh's.

AGoT is an area-control game with a few mechanical hiccups meant to evoke the atmosphere of the books on which the game is based. Those design choices are quite effective at getting the feel of the novels across, but unfortunately what makes for compelling fiction doesn't necessarily correlate to what makes for compelling gaming.

The setting is faux-medieval England, but unlike most fantasy settings, it hews closer to alt-history than it does to Tolkienesque flights of fancy (at least in the first few books, which are what the game models). This means that there's no magic to speak of, no great heroes who can destroy entire armies, and no horses or boats that can travel with the speed of the wind. In short, this is the kind of setting where just getting to the battlefield is a logistical slog, and the battles themselves are rarely decisive, as armies tend to be routed and regroup rather than being utterly destroyed where they stand.

To reflect this, AGoT uses the strangest set of mans mechanics I've seen in an area-control game. Everyone starts with a very small number of mans, such that there are neutral territories between every players' individual starting territories. In and of itself, that's not so strange, but it's determined completely at random when players get new mans, meaning that there's no safe way to expand your holdings beyond a territory or two from where you start, and no way to safely defend the territories you're leaving behind. The game mitigates this a bit by making your mans quite a bit more doughty than the mans in most area control games; most battles result in retreats rather than a loss of mans, so as long as you've kept a clear path of retreat behind your advance, you're unlikely to have your overall force strength reduced.

I have no problem with games possessed of a high degree of randomness, as long as that randomness suits the theme of the game. I really like Yetisburg and Mall of Horror, and both of those are as dependent on luck as they are on strategy (or maybe even moreso). The AGoT setting is certainly one in which I can get behind the randomness of when your mans muster, but it baffles me as to why there isn't a Monies For Mans mechanic in the game. That would have perfect thematic resonance, as mercenaries play a hugely important role in the novels, and would also help to alleviate the turtling/iceberging tendency that we saw in our game, and which I imagine happens in most plays of this game. Such a mechanic would incentivize players to try to take Monies territories, and would force tough decisions between conquering Monies territories (which could be used to buy more mans, but which might also be needed for other uses) and Mans Factory territories (which give you more mans for free, but are unreliable).

Our game started slowly. We got a lot of cards that let us bid monies for big cardboard pieces: a sword, a bird and a chair. I managed to get myself fairly well-positioned along each of those power tracks, simply because I bid as much as everyone else and was the furthest distance from Josh, who had the chair (which let him break all the ties that came up) and knew that I was the least threatening to him, and so let me be the highest amongst the tied players. None of these things seemed to really have much effect on the game at that point, but there wasn't anything else going on, so everyone moved to occupy Make Monies territories and then spent those monies on these auctions, with the end result that no one really did much of anything and mostly maintained their starting positions on the power tracks.

Ben and I secured some uncontested territories in our respective ends of the island, and Josh overreached himself a bit and lost some mans in battles with both Ben and Matt. Max pushed south to mess with Ben on the high seas, leaving me alone to start greedily eyeing his Mans Factory territories which weren't too far from my southern border. I hadn't really been paying much attention to the way that the ocean spaces worked, since I only had one boat and couldn't see much use for it. The few times I tried to push my boat south, Josh stepped up and defended his sea lanes, but he didn't really seem to be able to leverage that ocean power to any useful end, so I kind of wrote off the oceans as anything worth worrying about.

There were a few more inconclusive skirmishes in the middle of the board, with the other four players pushing each other around a bit, but with nothing conclusive happening there. We finally got our first More Mans command from the game, and I prepared to head south to unseat Max from some of his lightly defended northern territories. My push was a success and he was forced to fall back. Since I didn't have enough mans to leave a reasonable defensive force behind me, though, he was able to use his command of the sea lanes to backdoor his way into my northern territories. Drunken squidbillies piled into my ancestral home and pushed my mans stationed there southward to join my other forces, which would have been a tragic tale of woe if not for the fact that I couldn't work up the will to care. Though I'd been ousted in the north, the new territories I'd conquered in the south compensated for the lost lands exactly, so it didn't make any difference.

Josh had been getting his face pounded in by Ben during all this, and Ben had managed to acquire five Mans Factory spaces. Due to geographical restrictions, none of the rest of us could stop him, even if we teamed up. The game was almost over anyway, and we had about an hour left before the store closed, so we decided to call the game with Ben the winner. It wasn't a particularly satisifying play experience for me. Ben won by turtling, Max and Matt and I iceberged around the board, and Josh got his teeth kicked in because he was the only one really trying to conquer more territory. An area control game which discourages you from trying to control more areas than you start with is a pretty flawed premise, and there's definitely a lesson to be learned here about trying to0 hard to capture flavor at the expense of dynamic gameplay.

Game Three - Zombies Want Sexy Clothes
Mall of Horror isn't like other zombie games. In other zombie games, you move your mans from space to space, look for weapons to kill zombies, and try to keep yourself alive long enough to complete some kind of objective. In Mall of Horror, you move from space to space and look for weapons to kill zombies with, and you definitely want to keep your characters alive, but the objective here is to make sure that other peoples' characters get eaten before yours do. The game doesn't end until almost all of the characters have been eaten, so your objective is to look as helpful as possible while being as spiteful as possible.

It's a French game, complete with hilariously mistranslated manual, whose central mechanic is hidden voting. That voting mechanic is location-based, meaning that only players who have their characters in an appropriate location get to cast votes to resolve what's happening in that location. So, players who have characters in the security office get to vote on who among them will be security chief for the round, characters in a location that's being attacked by zombies vote to see who gets pushed to the front of the crowd and eaten by the living dead, and characters who are in the parking lot vote to see who gets to search the supply truck for useful equipment. Players who have more than one character in a location get more votes there, but since you can only move one character per turn, it's also easy to lose one of those characters if that location gets overwhelmed with zombies, which creates a nice decision-making tension between spreading yourself too thin and putting all your eggs in one fragile basket.

By the time we got around to playing MoH, my brain was pretty fried, and I honestly don't have real firm grasp on the chronology of this particular zombie holocaust. Chalk it up to the overwhelming horror of this "uncomfortable situation" (a phrase straight from the rulebook). I'm quite sure that the following events occurred, in more or less this order: Max had two of his three guys eaten in one turn, throwing him into a highly defensive posture; the Cachou "Sexy Clothes" store was closed as a result of there being too many zombies waiting there for someone to buy lingerie; Matt very quietly managed to keep all three of his characters alive long after the rest of us were reduced to one or two guys.

The game ended with the kind of climactic lightning round that characterizes the best endgames of MoH, in which the security office was too overwhelmed with zombies for anyone to venture there to check the security monitors to see where the next incoming wave of zombies would be appearing, several of the locations were closed entirely and the rest all had zombies waiting outside for fresh meats, and everyone had run out of equipment cards and so had nothing to rely on except luck and persuasion. Additionally, everyone other than Matt was down to one character, which meant that the rest of us would need to team up in order to keep him from winning.

Matt was able to outfox us all, though, putting both of his remaining characters into the same location. Since the zombies in a given location only eat one character, even if he lost the vote and was chosen to be eaten, he would've been able to choose his higher-point character and thus win. It was a great, out-of-the-box play on Matt's part. In the end, though, it didn't matter, since Max got caught in the parking lot and ripped limb from limb, ending the game.

Afterwards, we discussed the highly random nature of the game, and a few of the people who've played it multiple times expressed some dissatisfaction with that. I've since come up with few houserules that I think will add some more strategery to the game (one of which is to make everyones' dead characters come back as zombies, which is so genre-appropriate that it seems like it should've been a bigger part of the game in the first place), so we'll give those a shot next time we play this one.