The League of Extraordinary Nobodies

No, I'm not insulting you. It's a song title. Look it up.

It's been so long since I've posted here that my shareholders are totally up in arms and random people on the street keep spitting on me as I pass them. I've never heard the words "pariah," "outcast" or "unclean" so much as I have in the last four months or so. I probably need some time to warm up before heading back into the deep end of the usual nonsense, so this post will be relatively brief. I won't spend time boring you with the details of why I haven't been keeping this place clean and evergreen (hint: videogames), so let's get down to it, boppers.

Over on his saucy Torn Signpost blog, Josh outed me for thinking of trying to start up a Chaos In the Old World league night. (Details of the league rules and how it plays out will follow here, if it actually comes together.) Why create and run a league, he asks, given that there's a potential downside of people playing against their own best interests in a given game in order to improve their overall standings within the league?

First, a word about how scoring in the game works, since it'll become important later. Players can win either by scoring the most dial advancements (a kind of experience point track, earned by fulfilling special conditions unique to each god) or by accumulating the most points (scored by placing mans to achieve area control). Victory conditions are checked at the end of each turn. If more than one player has achieved victory, dial advancements trump points, tieas on dial advancements are broken by points, and ties on points are broken by a three-round spitting contest or something. I don't remember what that last tiebreaker is because it never comes up in actual play - the point values have enough granularity that they're never that close, if they matter at all.

The winner of the league will be whomever has the most game wins, regardless of how they came by them, with ties being broken by total dial advancements and point accumulations per god. It sounds complicated, but it's really not. The takeaway here is that since game wins are more important than dial advancements or points, and since most gods aren't able to successfully win if they spend all their time messing with one specific other player, I don't foresee having to worry about the kind of "thrown game/eventual victory" scenario that Josh brought up as being detrimental to league play.

So why organize a league for CItOW?

1) Leagues are fun. Even without prize support, the narrative of underdog and reigning champion is one that has a lot of appeal to people, and the nervousness of having to defend your top doggery or struggle to rise through the ranks adds a bit more frisson to individual sessions. And that thrill can be...

2) Incentive to show up. My main motivation for running the league is to try to establish a weekly or bi-weekly night of playing Chaos, which is difficult to do if people aren't showing up with the expectation of playing the game. Not because people don't necessarily want to play it - in my experience, CItOW is second only to Battlestar Galactica for creating the most first-play converts - but because the game can only be played with four players, no more, no less. If the league never forms or collapses before being completed, I'm fine with that if we can still consistently get people together to play. I've played it hardly at all in recent months, and I'm more than happy to take on the duty of league organizer if that helps to rectify this glaring oversight.

3) Establishes a group of experienced players. As with most games that have any depth of tactics and strategy, CItOW tends to be a lot better if everyone playing it has at least a basic grasp of not only the rules but the ways that the game mechanics tend to create certain tendencies of play. When a given game isn't played very frequently, it's easy to forgot how all its parts interlock, and for a game as asymmetrical as CItOW this tendency gets aggravated quickly. You not only have to remember how your god plays, you've got to remember how the other three play as well, and there's really no viable substitute for regular play to accomplish that.

4) Excuse to say, "It's a league game, Smokey." This should be self-explanatory.

Friday Night Gaming Pre-Season

(Note: I've gotten bored with posting the creamy hot reportage that's made up the bulk of this blog so far. Since I'm not gaming as much as I was when I started State of Play, I've got less raw material to write about, but that comes bundled with more time to think about the games that I do play. As a result, I'm going to shift the focus of these posts to session-summary rather than -storytell, and focus more on strategy and musing about the games played.)

The New England Chowdah and Cahdboard Society hadn't met all summer long, since one of our inaugural members has a very busy schedule and has had all of his free time consumed by being half of the organizational committee of the brilliant Sub Rosa Drive-In. But I've been jonesing for some gaming, and the threat of my stealth/attack cyberdrones makes for a very convincing argument, so I convened an early meeting of the Society, minus our fifth associate. This was unfortunate in that it meant there was no point in playing Galactica, but it did mean that we had the correct number for playing Chaos In the Old World. So gangway for evil deification!

Game One: Blood Fever Sex Magik
Larry (Khorne) -> Richard (Nurgle) -> Kiarna (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

Khorne hit the ground running, and the other three of us didn't do enough running of our own to prevent him from getting double-ticks on his advancement dial during the first turn. That enabled the blood-god to continue to harass us everywhere we set up camp, though he took a long time to get to Tzeentch's northern stronghold and was delayed a turn further when the magic god teleported his expeditionary daemonmans back to the south. Nurgle wasn't able to hold Khorne off enough in Bretonnia and Slaanesh suffered just enough casualties in the southern three regions for Khorne to continue to double-tick. He managed to get two dial advancements every turn except for the last, giving him a win by turn five with the rest of us not particularly close to ending the game via victory point win. It certainly didn't hurt his chances that Khorne's dice were as bloodthirsty as he was, giving him at least one kill every time that he rolled dice during the game except twice, but I blame our failure to derail his progress on our own tactics rather than chalking it up entirely to bad luck.

Conclusions: Khorne needs to be stomped on early. But "stomped on," in a game in which fighting usually only helps him, doesn't have anything to do with combat. Instead, it seems to me that the other three gods need to dance around a bit on that crucial first turn, which should be easily accomplished since Khorne's daemonmans cost twice as much to summon as everyone elses' cultistmans. So everyone else should deploy next to the territory that they actually want to occupy, moving to the one that they want only after Khorne has dropped one of his three daemonmans into the region that they currently occupy. If possible, somebody should also play chicken with the initial cultistmans that Khorne normally starts his game with: by placing a cultist of your own in that territory, you either tempt Khorne into also dropping a daemonmns there (and thereby limiting himself to three starting territories, rather than four) or else you'll get to safely wreak your own havoc there. Since Khorne normally airdrops his first mans into populous country, Nurgle is probably the best bet to start staring down that first Khornemans, since Nurgle can just as profitably decamp to an adjacent populous region free of fighting or stay there and reap the rewards. Whether or not Tzeentch or Slaanesh would want to get in on that action will situationally depend on where the nobles and warpstones are, but they might want to try this if they decide early on to play for a victory point win.

With a little luck, this strategy will prevent Khorne from being able to roll any battle dice during the first turn, meaning that it'll be at least one more turn before his cultistmans gain the ability to attack and all hell breaks loose. This will make it nearly impossible for anyone to get more than one dial advancement on the first turn, but since I've only ever seen Khorne to get two on turn one anyway, this doesn't seem like much of a disincentive to anyone else.

For turns following the first, anti-Khorne tactics are going to be a bit more difficult to employ. Since Khorne will already have daemonmans camped out in three regions, those regions won't be safe for anyone else (barring a lucky Slaanesh draw of one of his Fields of Sextacy or Tzeentch zapping somebody away via Teleportation), and Khorne can easily expand from there if no one is crazy enough to come to him. Given that I haven't had a chance to harangue people into trying the first-turn strategy outlined above, I'm not really sure what the gameboard will look like if it's a success or what those of us who aren't trying to killkillkill should be doing to try to keep the skins of our mans intact. I've begun to wonder if Nurgle shouldn't throw some of his daemonmans into regions in which Khorne is attacking cultistmans, even if those cultistmans aren't necessarily Nurgle's. This seems counterintuitive - Nurgle doesn't want Khorne to win by dial advancements, but he also wants to spend his power points to further his own agenda of winning by victory points rather than helping Tzeentch or Slaanesh - but since the dial wins tend to happen more quickly than the VP wins, it might be worthwhile to slow Khorne just to ensure that the game goes on long enough for Nurgle to have a chance to scoop up those late-game VPs that he tends to start accumulating in the last few turns.

Games Two and Three: The Sheriff Isn't Checking His Email

Kiarna had to leave after we were done with our game of Chaos, and none of the rest of us had the mental fortitude to start a game of Fury of Dracula. It's supposed to be a good game for three players, but it's got a playing time of two to three hours and none of us have played it before, so it would of course end up running even longer. Richard had brought his copy of Bang, which is one of the old-school ones that has no English text on the cards, and the expansion Dodge City, which has rules for three players.

In three-player Bang, rather than having hidden roles, everyone knows who everyone else is. Each player is trying to kill one other player, and if he does so, he wins. If his target is killed in some other way (accidentally blows himself up with dynamite, or gets indiscriminately mowed down by a Gatling gun, &c.), the remaining two players duel it out. Distance isn't really an issue, though it can turn into one if somebody gets sassy and tries to ride off into the sunset before the final reel.

In our first game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite and I got thrown in jail in spite of being the deputy. Due to a mysterious* confluence of events, I was shot up really badly while trying to hide behind a barrel inside my cell, even though the jail itself was hidden away somewhere in the wilderness. Unsurprisingly, death.

During our second game, Richard blew himself up with dynamite again, but this time the explosion didn't prove to be fatal. I got thrown into jail again and then shot repeatedly until I died. Apparently, jail is a bad place to be when people are shooting at you.

Conclusions: Bang isn't much of a game with only three players. It's the hidden roles that make the game interesting, and without that it's mostly just a game of who draws the most beer and bangs, with a small side helping of who draws the character with the best special ability. The distance mechanic isn't really a crucial part of the normal game - it seems to be there to keep people mostly in their own corner rather than going cross-table all willy-nilly, rather than fulfilling some more elegant function - but even the loss of that made the proceedings less interesting. I'm not sure if there's some kind of house rule that could make things feel less predetermined, like maybe making a stack of six roles and keeping them secret somehow until characters get killed, but as the rules are written I think I'll keep looking for some other short three-player game. I've been hearing good things about Death Angel, and FFG is good enough to give away their rulebooks for free, so I'll probably have a gander at that.

*Okay, not so much of a mystery: I'm a doofus. Even though I'd made the exact same mistake last time we played, and then recorded it here, and then was told what the mistake was and looked it up, I still managed to make it again. Twice more. Maybe I'm just secretly illiterate.

We Conquer the World Three Times, and Then Get Bored

Game One: Nobody Likes Wagner
At my request, Dan dusted off his copy of Ideology, which I'd seen people playing but hadn't played myself. Apparently no one else had played it since that initial game I'd watched the second half of, so we made a few mistakes that we didn't pick up on until Chris happened to scan the rulebook after the game was over. If nothing else, that gives me an excuse to play the game again in the future, maybe this time playing the game that the designers intended us to play.

Ideology is a game in which each player attempts to sway the world to his particular, well, ideology, in a kind of ahistorical vacuum that seems to assume that WWII never ended but that the sociopolitical fallout from the end of WWII did happen. This lack of historical fidelity isn't any big deal, as Ideology is a mostly abstract game and isn't trying to model any particular conflict in detail. Each player begins play with a single nation under his control and attempts to gain sway over other countries that turn up randomly in a sort of poker pot in the middle of the table, as well as build up the countries which he controls. This ownership is established by using the military, cultural and economic influence which is generated by countries already under a player's control, creating a snowball effect whereby the players who control more countries gain more influence with which to gain control of other countries. The three types of influence can also be used to increase the value of nations already controlled, which also generates more influence on subsequent turns.

The three kinds of influence aren't inherently any different from each other, though all of the abilities which players can purchase create differentiators between them. Additionally, each ideology has a set of advantages and disadvantages thematically linked to the nature of their philosophies. Facism, for example, is very good at attacking other countries, but finds it very difficult to export its culture. Apparently, aesthetic appreciation of Sturm und Drang is difficult to force on people who didn't grow up with it. This combination of a simple base mechanic which becomes variably more complex during individual plays is an excellent way to create replayability, and Ideology feels like it can create enough distinct iterative sets of these complications to hold up to many plays.

There's another set of limitations on how influence can be used to interact with other players, a matrix of diplomatic stances which are tracked with regard to how each ideology is currently able to interact with each other ideology. Being at Peace, Neutral or at War with another player governs which types of influence you can use to mess with their control of both the countries they own and those they're still vying to take over. This is an interesting experiment in mechanically-induced negotiation that didn't bear any fruit for our group, but that might very well have been due to our inexperience rather than the weakness of the mechanic. As it played out, there seemed to be little reason for anyone to do anything other than simply go to war with everyone else. In games played by a people who have a better handle on the flow of the game, maybe a less hawkish group demeanor emerges.

I played bloody-minded Facism, Kirby polished his monocle and represented tea-sipping Imperialism, Dan prepared to exploit the underclasses as Capitalism and Chris followed in Dan's footsteps (but with fewer pairs of blue jeans) as Communism. At the beginning of the game, everyone mostly spent their influence improving their home countries, with only a few expeditionary feelers being sent out into the initially independent countries.

Chris took an early lead in Russia, building it up to its maximum capacity and also buying quite a few of the abilities granted by progressing up the game's tech tree. Similarly, I concentrated my efforts on improving Germany, but instead of buying tech I invested the rest of my influence in Italy, thinking that drawing extra influence cards would be more helpful than developing tech, most of which is either defensive or allows you to mitigate the extra costs involved in influencing nations which aren't near the ones you control.

My thinking was that getting the extra cards would be just as good as not having extra cards but not needing to spend as many, and that the extra draws would be advantageous in allowing me more flexibility in what I drew rather than locking me into a given type of influence like the tech trees do. In retrospect, that seems like such an obvious choice that I'm not sure why anyone would develop tech early, unless there's some subtle reason to do so that we missed in our headlong rush to misinterpret and sometimes ignore the rules as written.

There wasn't much interaction for the rest of the game, aside from a few feints and headgames that I won't go into in detail here, because we later learned that they weren't legal due to us misunderstanding the rule on how influence is placed on independent countries during the Foreign phase. Oops! Eventually, Dan and I were each at almost twelve points, the number needed to win the game. On the last turn of the game, we each went back and forth buying tech, which is the way that tiebreakers are determined in Ideology, but then Kirby successfully screwed me over by removing one of his influence cards from my controlled Italy, thereby preventing me from being able to maximize its point potential and keeping me at eleven points. That was a hilariously painful blunder on my part, as this was the third time during the game that someone had successfully outwitted me in the exact same manner. Who knew that fascists can't learn from their mistakes?

Kirby didn't mess up my plans out of mere spite, but rather as part of a grand plan concocted with Chris to prevent Dan and I from winning so that Kirby and Chris might be able to make comebacks from behind and snatch victory away from us. Alas, we all know how well the Imperialists and Communists honor their agreements with each other, and almost immediately after Kirby knocked me out of my winning position, he and Chris ran afoul of a massive communications error, the end result of which was that they were unable to free Cuba from the cruel yoke of capitalism. Dan won the day and Capitalism ruled us all; I'm waiting to see how that turns out, but my hopes aren't high.

Game Two: Khorne Has a Mid-Eternity Crisis
me (Khorne) -> Kirby (Nurgle) -> Chris (Tzeentch) -> Dan (Slaanesh)

Chaos In the Old World! It's totally my favorite game right now, so if I gush too much, somebody should remind me that if I love it so much then I should marry it already. In CItOW, four players take on the roles of the gods who govern the four most evil things possible in the Warhammer Fantasy world: hurting people, card tricks, sneezing on people and sexing people. Each of these gods is competing with the others to dominate the world, spreading their own gospels of Bad Stuff via their cultistmans and also summoning daemonmans to act as fighting units to kill other players' mans.

Each of the four gods has a very different set of powers and weaknesses, but somehow the playtesters managed to iron out the very real potential for power imbalances between those differing sets of abilities and create play experiences for each of the four gods which are quite asymmetrical but also well-balanced against each other. Each player also has two ways to win, either by gaining points for dominating and ruining the regions on the map or by advancing their experience track via a method particular to each god - Khorne, the blood god, advances his track by killing mans; Nurgle, the disease god, advances his track by spreading disease in highly populated areas, and so on. The end result is a game which is part area control, part political maneuvering and part resource management, with enough randomness thrown into the mix that no strategy can be entirely relied upon in the face of the changing environment. It's about the perfect storm of mechanics which I like in games, and has a great theme to boot, but unfortunately it's only playable with exactly four players, so I agitate to play it whenever a group I'm with has achieved that magic quorum. On this day I was successful in that crusade twice, which isn't uncommon if I can convince people to play it once, since CItOW doesn't take long to play and because people who play it once usually get hooked and want to play it more.

Khorne had been unimpressed with the amount of blood I'd shed in our previous game, to put it politely. (The actual expression of his displeasure was like something out of a Cannibal Corpse song, obviously unfit for reproduction in a polite venue such as this one.) Apparently the big guy saw some hidden promise in me, though, because he arranged to have me champion his cause by having the other three players choose the other gods available. Normally, Khorne plays to win by advancing his experience dial, because he's not particularly suited to winning via points. I'd been thinking about how to get him to win with that alternate victory condition, though, and since the chance came up I decided to take it.

The first Old World card we got was Dark Elf Corsairs, which was nothing but gravy for the newly open-minded Khorne. I promptly plopped down my greater daemonmans in the Empire and all my cultistmans in Kislev, allowing me to scare everyone away from the highest-scoring region on the board and also begin accruing victory points elsewhere. Unfortunately, the next card placed a hero token in the Empire, forcing the Bloodthrister to hop on a BloodGodCall Airways plane with one of his Bloodletter buddies, landing in Tilea where there were a few Tzeentch and Nurgle cultists hanging around. Those few mans quickly scampered away, and the Bloodletter chased after them, but the poor Bloodthirster spent the rest of the game vacationing in Tilea with nothing but his upgrade card to keep him company. Nobody even wrote, in spite of Khorne's insistence that it's a beautiful vacation area this time of year, what with the seaside being there and all. It's a sad tale, so let's turn our focus elsewhere before we get too choked up.

Nurgle was having a difficult time in the west, having his mans killed by the hero there and having his corrupting influence slowly stripped away by their graduation to witch huntery. The dark elves were still hanging around there too, somehow undetected by the Estalian witch-o-meters, making it even more difficult for the green guys to spread their love of the gout. On top of all that, since he kept piling mans in there, everyone else was doing the same in order to try to claim second place once the area was ruined, with the result that there was a lot more bloodshed than there probably should have been.

Everyone wasn't concentrating entirely on Estalia, of course. Tzeentch hunkered down with a nice pile of warpstone in the frigid north, scooping up the cheapie point areas there and accumulating steady dial advancements. Slaanesh hung around the eastern fringe of the board, putting sexy thoughts into the heads of the nobility and occasional witch hunter, hosting a rave when I got too ornery and tried to kill off some of his mans (but tactically! not wantonly) and generally messing with my plans to grab points for dominating some regions and then push east. For some reason we started thinking that The Border Princes was important, and a bunch of Tzeentch cultistmans piled in there accompanied by their Lord of Change, but just as quickly scurried away when the upgraded Keeper of Secrets offered to show them some websites that they decided they really didn't want to see. The two greater daemonmans had a couple of slapfights, as neither Tzeentch nor Slaanesh wanted to bother to pay the points to move them elsewhere, but neither of them had their hearts in it and they weren't able to hurt each other significantly.

At around the same time that Nurgle dropped the Great Uncle into the Empire, making this the first game in which I've ever seen all four greater daemonmans on the board at the same time, Tzeentch was about ready to end the epic Norse saga that he'd been working on and ruin the lives of the Vikings there. The rest of us wanted in on that action, of course, but it was down to whether or not Slaanesh or I would end up with second place. Tzeentch teleported away one of the cultists I needed to grab second place amidst the trolls, and then Slaanesh totally outwitted me by taking over one of the two cultists I'd placed with sleepytime perfume, thus giving him two cultists in Norsca to my one and the right number of corruption tokens to beat me by one.

As a result of his wiles, Slaanesh carried the day. The end scores were much tighter than I'd expected them to be, though. Tzeentch pulled ahead into second place, but only beat Khorne by a single point, and Nurgle managed to grab some points right at the end of the game as he always does, bringing him in last but not far behind me. I had a really fun time playing Khorne for victory points rather than going for a dial win, as it required a lot more strategic thinking than just, "There's something moving over there KILL IT." The payoff for that extra strategery was a much-enriched tactical game, as using Khorne's powerful offense to prune away threats to my attempts to gain VPs was unlike playing any of the other three gods for VPs, since they normally play so defensively when it comes to combat.

Game Three: Khorne Reads Some Sun Tzu
Chris (Khorne) -> Dan (Nurgle) -> Kirby (Tzeentch) -> me (Slaanesh)

The first Old World card drawn added two Nobles to the board, which Nurgle decided to stack on top of the two already present in the Empire and the Badlands. It's just like the nobility to not want to mix with the lower classes, but Nurgle's plan to screw me out of the chance to gain extra dial advancements backfired when Khorne decided to crash the party in the Empire in force. He moved all four of his cultistmans and a warriorman there and then played Field of Carnage, a one-point card which had no effect on the game except to grant him enough domination value for him to score seven points. Yikes. Nurgle set up shop in Estalia and Tzeentch poured cultists into Brettonia. I stupidly decided to eschew trying to get dial ticks at the moment and instead go for points, putting all my cultists into Kislev to dominate there and hopefully ruin it quickly to grab an early lead. Everyone dominated their chosen region and dumped a bunch of corruption tokens into it as well, leaving Khorne in the lead on points. As a result of our turtling, neither Khorne nor I received any dial advancements, and the other two gods each got one.

On the second turn, Khorne summoned his greater daemonmans to the Empire and played The Skull Throne there, planning on moving his cultists out to nearby regions in order to scoop up some second-place ruiner points. Tzeentch began to play a Changer of Ways on the region to cancel the Throne, but Khorne made it known in extremely explicit terms exactly what the consequences of such a card play would be. The words coming out of Chris's mouth were so foul that he was practically roleplaying. The clean version is that Tzeentch's stock would plummet for the remainder of the game, in a variety of unpleasant ways. Tzeentch was convinced by Khorne's vehemence and put the card back into his hand.

And apparently the awesome power of Khorne's threat blew out my mind. I'm not going to lie to you - I don't remember much of the rest of this game, and I foolishly waited quite a while to get this written up. It's a habit I really need to break! I'm getting my local group together tomorrow night to play, so afterward I'll break out the electrolysis machine and autohypnosis projector so as to not make this mistake again. The thing to take away is that Khorne did win on points this time, and fairly handily at that. It' was good to see that Ol' Killy is more versatile than I'd previously realized.

Game Four: I Still Don't Get It
I had just enough time for one more quick game before I had to get on the road, so Chris ran off to see if he could find his copy of Cthulhu500. Chris moved fairly recently and isn't as unpacked as he thought, so on that day Cthulhu would have to remain not dead but dreaming rather than climbing behind the wheel of an Unspeakable Olds. Our backup plan was to play Dominion, which I hadn't been a fan of when I'd played it in the past, but I decided to give the game one last shot to redeem itself.

In Dominion, everyone builds a deck. You start with a small deck containing cards that allow you to buy more cards to put into your deck, which are used to buy more cards to put into that deck, or which occasionally mess with other players' decks. Some of the cards that you buy are worth victory points, which are added up once three of the card types available for purchase run out. And...well, no, that's the whole game, actually.

Every time I've played Dominion, there really didn't feel like there was anything happening. Everyone plays their turn with no interaction with anyone else, aside from sometimes playing a card which affects the other players but which they can't interact with except to be hopelessly victimized by. People who like the game often tout its speed of play as a feather in its cap, but playing fast doesn't mean much if that play doesn't involve actually doing anything with the people around you.

The most disheartening example of this that I saw was that Kirby, whose set we played, who owns every expansion for it, and who likes the game enough to have played it in sanctioned tournaments, was playing a game of Civilization Lite on his iPad during the other players' turns. I don't blame him for doing so, since there wasn't anything happening during those turns that he ought to have had any interest in paying attention to, but it strikes me as a pretty harsh indictment of a game if nothing is lost in the play experience even when you spend 75% of it doing something else. I'm not sure why people like a game that's so uninvolving as much as they clearly like this one, but I'm aware that I'm in a small minority here, so I'll turn my gripe engine to its "cooldown" setting.

I don't feel like there's anything to write a report of, based on our session. Chris played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Then Dan played some cards, got some more cards, and then shuffled his deck. Repeat for Kirby and I, and then repeat for the table again. Sometimes people weren't able to do much of anything on their turns. Then the game was over and we counted points. That seemed to be all of it. Chris at least had a good time, playing a bunch of copies of a card called Wishing Well that opened up the option of a guessing minigame that he really liked playing, and the game finished quickly. That's too short a list of virtues for me to think that the game is worth my time, though, so I'm going to mark this as my Last Game of Dominion and never speak of it again (unless someone actually wants to hear my thoughts on it, which I recognize is entirely unlikely.)