Salmagundi

No theme, just some observations and thoughts.

CCG

Played V:TES in Pleasanton recently.  One game, about four hours, 20 minutes.  At the four mark, I was winning, even though my grandprey in the five-player had self-ousted right after rescuing one of my prey’s vampires (they were all in torpor).  It was an interesting game.  At times, some players didn’t have much to do, but everyone was highly involved some of the time.

It took me a few tries, but I nuked Jost with Anathema + Archon rush.  I was amused by my deck as I brought out Greger, gave him Potence, got blocked bleeding, so Disguised out a Deer Rifle!  If not for the Deer Rifle, I would have been toast as my predator had Basilia, who got both the Blade of Enoch and a Weighted Walking Stick, and my prey was Celerity/Protean aggpoke.  When my prey did get Desert Eagles, my guys started exploding.  I did end up using a couple of the Grenades I Concealed out as well as tried to punch a few times for five with Torn Signpost + Undead Strength.  Speaking of too many weapons, my grandpredator was playing a Pier 13, Ghoul Retainer deck.  Of my four Sabbat Threats, three were blocked and the other did a mighty one pool damage.

RPG

I am constantly amazed by groups that have had various campaigns that don’t make a concerted effort for party PC design.  I don’t mean the sort of “force you to storytell” mechanics of a game like FATE but just making sure that the party will have a reason to adventure together.  Nor do I mean mechanically fitting in a party, since GMs can adjust to party strengths and weaknesses.  Wargames, like D&D, might require that you have party balance to play “normal” adventures, but most RPGs handle unbalanced parties.  I mean in character reasons that my character would adventure with other characters I don’t like or have no respect for.  Same issue when introducing a new character to an existing party.

I’ve already designed a new character for one of my campaigns because I have yet to see how my current character would work with one of the other players.  Yes, I mean player, not PC.  His PC is an extension of his interests, like my character is the extension of mine.  The two PCs are polar opposites.  As I have an extremely collaborative personality and prioritize the plot and the party over individual goals/interests, it makes sense for me to create a better fit.  This was actually something I worried about as soon as I saw the other players’ concepts.  Now, I haven’t decided to switch characters yet as the campaign hasn’t progressed that far, but unless I see some real change in the party dynamic, I should pull the trigger soon.

I have frequently praised L5R.  I have noticed something, however, that is a weakness of the roll and keep system.  I quite enjoy the openended rolls possible when faced with a static target number.  I kind of ignore that the Raise system doesn’t work like it’s presented.  I have decided that I’m not much of a fan of contested/opposed rolls, however.  The random “I rolled 50 on 3k2″ is cool when it, 1., is better than rolling 25 and, 2., isn’t rolled against another PC to determine who wins something.  I’m not even that thrilled when a NPC rolls some crazy number to beat a superior dice pool of a PC, but it’s especially unpleasant when two PCs are contending (in a contest, say) and the inferior competitor so often defeats the superior.

Boardgames

Was a busy weekend.

I’m fairly bored with most of Scepter of Zavandor at this point.  The parts I’m not bored with are the endgame manipulation of VPs and certain subtleties of play.  Not that these mean much when I play a better game than the people I typically play this with.  While others pointlessly pick up Crystal Balls, I get Crystals of Protection and far outproduce.  I’m the only one who ever seems to get the Tomcat Sentinel and convert my gems into Opals.  I’m happy to believe that there are better players than I, but I don’t need to be clever in how I buy Sentinels, be clever in when to buy inactive gems, or need to figure out how to ever get any use out of Crystal Ball.

I could report on our Seafarers of Catan game, which nobody seemed to enjoy, and our Dominion games, but I don’t like either game.  I at least like Scepter, even if I’ve grown tired of it.  It’s normal for me to tire of boardgames since they are so limited, so no big deal.  I still consider Puerto Rico the best Euroboardgame I’ve played and I grew tired of that years ago.  I did comment to someone in the group that I should look around for a new boardgame.

Miscellaneous Articles

A variety of thoughts have come to mind recently.  One was even based off of comparing the NFL vs. MLB to one CCG vs. another.  But, then, I realized that there were too many sources.  I thought I’d just list some articles I’ve read recently and what sort of thoughts they inspired.

The Play’s the Thing

Ah, daily Magic articles.  The best are Mark Rosewater’s Monday ones.  The “nice, relaxing” reads are Friday’s Tom LaPille’s (a V:TES player, btw).  My third favorite are Mike Flores’s as, while possibly hard to see by my opponents in games, I am more of a Spike than anything else.  I should just have a permanent link somewhere – Timmy, Johnny, and Spike.

Two things that came to mind.  One is obviously that playtesting requires PLAYtestING.  People pontificate endlessly about (in CCGs) cards, decks, strategies without actually knowing what is true.  This is theoretically important should V:TES actually see new cards.  Though, if the cards aren’t going to be manufactured as real cards but simply be electronic, hardly matters as they become easy to change after being provided to the playerbase.

Of more interest is Tom’s comment about how playing a CCG is not the primary activity with it.  Maybe having a professional make this remark will help people understand this.  Why is it important?  Because it goes back to investment of thought, which I’ve harped on before when talking about how investment of dollar, dollar bills is not really the significant cost to enjoying CCGs.  I don’t understand people who enjoy playing CCGs but don’t spend time thinking about them.  Might as well play a boardgame, and I think it’s just that – I differentiate the experience between boardgames and CCGs precisely because the former doesn’t necessitate the thought investment of the latter.

Sure, I think about boardgames.  I think the Game of Thrones boardgame is an awful game, even with errata, but because it was so limited, it was interesting to consider optimal moves, basically it was chess to me.  I read boardgamegeek.com sometimes and like the analytical forum posts.  But, I mostly don’t care – I don’t care what’s good, I don’t care what’s bad, I don’t care to know how to win.  In comparison, even with CCGs I don’t play, I’m interested in what’s good, what’s bad, and how to win (even if I don’t make use of the knowledge).

Getting back to thinking about CCGs.  As Tom says, designing cards that create interesting choices is more fun.  If I had to say what the greatest failing of V:TES has been since White Wolf brought it out of torpor, it would be the lack of interesting choices.  Not as much with individual cards but with the metagame of what the best strategies are.

Dominate’s failing isn’t that it’s awesome, it’s that it squeezes out a lot of interesting choices because it’s so much more effective.  In comparison, something like Una doesn’t do that.  Combat ends has always been a problematic mechanic because it forced combat into much narrower paths as too many rush strategies just lose to combat ends.  Looking around today, I’d say Crows/Bats has taken over from combat ends as a tactic that makes other tactics so ineffective as to be frequently ignored.  If V:TES weren’t a game of small effects and weren’t multiplayer, it would never have survived developing as it did.  Relative to other CCGs, the metagame of superior deck archetypes for V:TES has just been amazingly stale.

I do go back and forth.  Sometimes, I feel the “I might be playing different cards, but I’m not doing anything novel” problem that others feel with V:TES.  Sometimes, I’m of the view “And?  It’s not the cards that really matter, it’s how interesting deck interactions occur regardless as to what the decks are made of.”

RPG.net

I’ve been reading more and more columns, reviews, and forum posts on RPG.net.  Some of it is fascinating.

Lloyd Brown’s Business of Gaming Retail column is my favorite.  I realized quite a few years ago that the gamer dream of having a game store wasn’t a very enthralling dream.  Unless you don’t care about losing money, you have to run a business like a business, which takes a lot of the joy out, nevermind that you aren’t going to be playing while you are running, though I suppose you could just be an owner who has others run the store.  Nothing about his articles makes me want to change my view, if anything, it’s somewhat more discouraging, but it is fascinating.  It does give hope to those who feel the desire more strongly that staying in business is plausible.

I read the Naked Steel column, of course, though it doesn’t get me that juiced for upcoming L5R products.  There’s finally going to be new tattoos, but I see a lot written about kihos, which are meaningless to me.  And, overall, I still feel like 4th Edition is too mechanical, too low power, too dry.  It’s funny because some of the things that bother me – the focus on weird schools – is precisely intended to not be dry and to show off the variety and depth of the world but only bores me because I wouldn’t want to play such a character.  Sure, it was absurd that 3rd Edition gave every clan dueling techniques, but so many techs at least seemed cool, which is probably more about the powering down of 4e (and increased focus on tactical movement) than anything else.

The animal column is … well, I preferred the article way back when in Dragon about how real world animals are badass or, at least, annoying as hell.  Not that I’ve read more than a couple of the articles.  I find it less interesting for gaming and more interesting for science!  That hot climates encourage larger surface areas is not something I recall reading about elsewhere, for instance.

This interview with Reiner Knizia is a recent read.  I actually find that cooperative boardgames are fundamentally flawed, so I focused on what he had to say about replay value.  In the forums, commenting on an earlier article in the column, someone said that cooperative boardgames owe a nod to RPGs.  Perhaps, but I find that they are completely different when it comes to the fundamental flaw of cooperative boardgames.  Cooperative boardgames are only penalized by having multiple players.  Perfect cooperation is superior to achievement than lesser cooperation, so you are always better having one player do everything.  What about traitor games (Shadows Over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica, etc.)?  I don’t find that they work or are enjoyable.  Having one person singled out to oppose the others randomly does not interest me.  Shadows Over Camelot is so hard by itself that a traitor should cause losses almost all of the time, which is neither interesting for the larger group or for the traitor.  Speaking of difficulty, I also see that the games must be exceedingly difficult in board mechanics (i.e. putting the traitor element to the side) to have any replay value.  While difficulty is hardly a major turnoff to gamers.  What the difficulty encourages is people playing more efficiently, moving towards the “why don’t you just play everyone’s position since that’s more effective?” problem.

Meanwhile, yes, with RPGs, having the best tactician tell everyone how to handle combat is going to make the party more effective, at least, at combat.  I don’t know if this element is one reason I’m not as excited by combat as others or not.  What I do know is that good RPG sessions have personal decisions that matter.  I like to get along with NPCs or obliterate them.  I like exploring, whether actually wandering around some place or reading through the castle’s library.  Cooperative boardgames lack the personal element as do all boardgames.

I’m a huge fan of HeroQuest (the old boardgame), but I clearly see that it has the cooperative boardgame problem that each adventure should be optimized.  You don’t even need one player as the game is sufficiently limited that all decisions can be figured out easily enough.  And, this is where I see the most value in cooperative boardgames – as solo gaming experiences.  Play against the board mechanics and see how well you do.  That might have been something I’d be more into before I got to know a lot of other gamers.  Nowadays, I can’t imagine the Pool of Radiance grinding that I used to do.  Probably why I don’t play videogames anymore.

Since new articles don’t come out that fast, I’m catching up on archived columns.  This post is long enough, maybe I’ll come back to some old articles in another post.  Or, people can just read articles themselves and let me know what they think are interesting articles.

How Many Wonders?

I didn’t realize until after the weekend that my weekend (don’t normally include Fridays but an exception here) went:  Friday, RPG; Saturday, CCG; Sunday, boardgames.

We only played two different boardgames Sunday – Scepter of Zavandor, 7 Wonders.

Scepter was a waste for me as I got Kobold and played my default strategy of maximizing early income with Opal #3 and Sapphires.  I got such a jump on the other players that my endgame production was over 100 and I won by around 17 VPs; I even had so much money to burn that I picked up the Spellbook in the late game and upgraded all my Opals to Emeralds.  Kobold suits this style of play just too easily.  While I’m not obsessed with getting the correct Druid strategy, I still want to try strategy variations.  I don’t know how many are left outside of Druid, though.  I finally played dust dude in a previous session and it was easy to do what I wanted even if it felt different.

The far more interesting thing was playing games of 7 Wonders.  I had played once, at DunDraCon for those who didn’t know.  It was seven players and I won, so I was prepared to retire my 7 Wonders career as supreme victor, having no strong feeling toward the game to where I felt a compulsion to ever play it again.  After Sunday, however, it’s going to be a staple.

I still don’t feel that strongly about it.  I actually find the cards rather lacking in variety.  But, there’s nothing wrong with it, and there’s tons of analysis that can be done.  I read through a number of boardgamegeek.com strategy threads, though too many of the games people play are three-player.

A side note:  At one point, someone compared it to Race for the Galaxy.  The primary reason for doing so was that one of my friends hates Race and likes 7 Wonders.  He tried to argue that they weren’t at all alike, but after various people pointed out analogous mechanics, the rest of us pretty much agreed that they are very similar.  Now, Race is one of my favorite “boardgames” because I like the variety of cards even if my strategies tend to be repetitive.  The reason why he hates it is that he feels like he gets screwed by random opening hands all of the time, whereas I never feel screwed in the game, just playing what I can.  Though, the people I play with explore way too much which allows me to get cards to get out of bad hands.

Anyway, back to 7 Wonders.  I’m not really into these games to the level where I’d memorize what Wonder produces what to go with what cards require what.  We aren’t talking about CCGs here where there’s enough ability to bring one’s own personality into the game that thinking hard about a game has a payoff.  I do realize that there’s a huge jump in play skill by memorizing all of the possibilities and that the game is very different when played by players who know how to play the game optimally.  Just as Scepter is a different game when players play optimally, or anything else.  It’s just that there’s little value to achieving expertise in a boardgame when your opponents aren’t interested in doing so.

So, I lost in my second game.  And, lost badly in another game.  Finally, around game four or five, I started doing better.  I think it’s because of the shift in military.  In the early games, the players on either side of me went hard on military, so I abandoned it.  When they started getting bored with that, I picked up military.  The most “we don’t really know what we are doing yet” game was when I had 56 VPs and 50 were from Science.  That game had a three-way tie (all of the games were four-player).

What do I think of the game?

I’d say the card pool is rather dull.  Yes, there are advantages to this, as it enables people to dissect the game to figure out optimal plays, but, then, I’m not really into that.  I’m a romantic chess player, not a mechanic.  On the other hand, there are 14 different possibilities of Wonder boards and a great deal more possibilities of interactions between them based on who plays what, who is next to you (or anywhere if you want to get superadvanced), and how many players there are.  So, there’s a lot of room for trying to understand different positions.

It’s fast.  It’s harmless – by which I mean that it doesn’t lend itself to griefing other players or being in positions of annoyance even when you know you are going to lose.  Drafting is interesting and I’m sure going to be a big mechanic in “boardgames” for a while.  There might be some paralysis by analysis, but it isn’t even as bad as say the endgame of Scepter where you are trying to optimize.

I don’t have a rating system for “boardgames”, so maybe I should come up with one.  The tricky part is that a game might be really good, but I might have no interest in playing it, like Puerto Rico, because of how limited boardgames are in comparison to CCGs.  So, do I rate how much I want to play a game or how good I think the game is or both?  Do I use a “most things are average” system of rating or a balanced system?

Let’s say I use a 1-5 system with 3 being average, 1 being suck, and 5 being beyond good.  From a quality perspective 7 Wonders is 4 or 5.  From a want to play perspective, 4.  I’d much rather play it than play a lot of other things.  I think I’d pretty quickly rather play it than play more Phoenicia or Stone Age or Glen More, which are all games I’d rather play at the moment, once I get a game or two more of these in.  Since it is so similar to Race, it’s not much of a surprise that it beats out a lot of other games (like Scepter).  On the other hand, it’s hard to rate anything a want to play 5, since I’d rather play RPGs or CCGs.

Off Kilter

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration – so sayeth someone who stole a bunch of inventions.

I could, of course, do my first June post by stealing some idea.  The inspiration hasn’t been great enough to justify the, admittedly modest, perspiration.  Why?  KublaCon came and went.  Normally, write about my con experiences.  Then, other things came and went that kept my mind unfocused.

I didn’t get inspired by KublaCon because it was mediocre.  It wasn’t terrible in any way and some of the annoyances didn’t have to do with gaming, like having my favorite Chinese restaurant have stupid hours on the weekend.  There was nothing particularly excellent.  Sure, there were a lot more V:TES players around than usual, but that also contributed to a lot of messy organization because people can’t be forced to be ready to play on time.  I must remember to never pretend that a convention tournament is ever going to be a tournament and just have whoever is there start a game and keep having games generate as players become available.

It would have been amusing to have my main character in HoR3 get killed on my birthday.  I did like Fire and Water.  The main gimmick is interesting but also not one I’d like to see employed much.  The reward gimmick based off of it is less bothersome and kind of cool, if, typically, unfair.

Rank the Mods (1-10 FQ, fun quotient):

SoB00 New Beginnings – (7)  Cute spin.

SoB01  Undefended Border – (4)  Stuff going on that went over my head, too early.

SoB02  Bonds of Fate – (3)  Not much going on, IME.

SoB03  Standing Against the Waves – (3)  What’s the story?

SoB04  Personal Sacrifice – (7)  Could use more development, PC defining.

SoB05  Poisoned Gift – (1)  Cool ideas, terrible plot, ridiculous rewards.

SoB06  Walk Through the Mountains – (8)  I was much more into this than SoB03.

SoB07  Delicate Negotiations – (9)  Biased cuz my PC was perfect for it?  Felt shafted on rewards.

SoB08  WC: Kyuden Hida – (6)  Would have done more with my other PC.

SoB09  Fire and Water – (7)  Could have done Fire and felt screwed in the end.

Okay, so that’s from a FQ perspective and that’s only factoring in the actual play, not the aftermath that is rewards.  Factoring in a more objective measure of quality of mod, trying to take personal experiences out of it, the rankings of the mods in my mind are more like:

1.  SoB07 – Lots to do, aka depth, personal achievements matter and don’t screw over others.
2.  SoB06 – Things to do before plot, resolution interesting.
3.  SoB08 – Decent number of things going on without being bogged down.
4.  SoB00 – Better intro than Topaz Championship (fewer die rolls), decent narrative.
5.  SoB09 – Linear, which a number of mods have a problem with, but flavorful.
6.  SoB04 – Heavy on the exposition, light on things to do.
7.  SoB01 – Too much wandering about without a sense of what to do.
8.  SoB03 – Maybe there’s more to the story, felt like excuses for combat.
9.  SoB02 – Missing a scene or better connectivity between scenes.
10. SoB05 – Waste of some interesting mechanics.  Is there more than one way to proceed?

In general, the earlier mods suffer from lack of depth either in story or in choices.  Later mods feel fuller, more coherent.  Undefended Border would probably be given more credit if it came later, when it made more sense to introduce “new” things.  Alternatively, if there was follow up to it, to where what happens mattered more.  I really want the sequel(s) to Personal Sacrifice since its reward/punishment mechanic clearly needs a follow up.

It’s good to see some different faces for our Sunday V:TES sessions.  My new Pander deck is the sort of hilarious, “here’s a bunch of cards in five disciplines” deck that is so much more interesting to play than focused decks.  I so need more of these.  Maybe I build a counterpoint deck that is the other five common disciplines.  What I just said might not make any sense.  The Pander deck is an Aus/Obf/Pot/Pre/Tha deck.  Not intentionally, just because it’s what the crypt encouraged.  If I build a deck specifically of Ani/Cel/Dom/For/Pro, I have a challenge and a wacky deck … um, except Stanislava is the only vampire that natively has all of those disciplines, with Forestal in support.  That doesn’t sound wacky or hugely challenging.  Maybe I just don’t run either one.  I could take out the “crutch”, but that leads to boring Gangrel/! crypts.  Taking out Protean is funny for Cardano and Kostantin.  Taking out Animalism has some interesting choices.

As for Off Kilter, only thing I got that would be different is vote, in particular Patsy deck to try to wreck annoying titled decks, except those are the decks that can stop your votes.

Bonus boardgaming section:

I’ve gone to some boardgame days recently.  I played a couple of games of Phoenicia (and watched one before playing which helped immensely).  I liked it.  Not great but something I’d do again for a few more times.  Quick, light, auctions weren’t painful.  It was a day of nothing but auction games for me, though, with a six-player of Scepter of Zavandor.  First six-player game I can recall, though I think I’ve played five once or twice.  Fortunately, only one new player, so things weren’t crazy long.  My strategy of focusing on production with sapphires and buying up production artifacts worked well … for someone else.  I came in third or fourth in what was a reasonably close game.  With players who know how to value artifacts better, the game is much harder to dominate.  Anyway, a reasonable day.

Yesterday, played Alea Iacta Est for the second? time.  We totally didn’t remember how it was supposed to work so we played a practice round first.  I finally remembered what it was like and went through the same feelings as the first time – it seems like sets end too quickly but it makes sense when you play the game out.  Frustrating in some ways because I find the dice mechanic neat and the game is much more tactical than strategic in how you use dice.  Me being a strategist and not so much a tactician.  Another game I’d want to play again, though I’m more interested in how to use the dice mechanic for something cooler.

Then, played Glen More for the first time.  I’m not a big fan of Carcassonne.  It’s okay if uninspiring out of the base game and I’m not too familiar with the expansions.  I hate Caylus.  Didn’t used to.  But, it’s mechanics are not ones to endear me to repeated play.  Glen More has elements of both.  Yet, I’d easily play it again, maybe a few more times.  I like the flavor, for one thing.  That I haven’t figured out the winning strategy is another plus.  I had the most whiskey, the most chieftains, the castle that rewards for villages to counteract my massive territory, and came squarely in last.  I knew a big territory was bad, but I didn’t realize that what VPs I got from my advantages wouldn’t pay off at all.  My theory is that brown tiles are where it’s at and the game is about cashing them as much as possible.  I only had one in my 17 tile empire and I didn’t even max it out.  I find the “bigger territory = less VPs” mechanic highly amusing and innovative.  Do I think it will hold up after about 5 or so plays?  Probably not.  Even with the randomness of tile sequences, the game seems simple enough to solve in terms of optimal strategies.  I’m not a huge fan of games that require spatial planning, since I overthink things, but this has few enough tiles that I don’t see a big paralysis by analysis problem.  Kind of a lighter way to go then Caylus, with more style.

Betwixt

I have this sense that something in the last week should be remembered better, so I’m just reviewing the last week’s worth of gaming.

Last Saturday played Winter Court: Kyuden Hida, SoB08 of HoR3.  It went quite a while.  Even if we would have played faster, the mod seemed to have more depth than most of the HoR3 mods.  As with every Winter Court mod I’ve seen for HoR, I believe there are too many characters and, especially, too many characters that don’t matter.  I realize that a living campaign needs to have diversity to cater to a large group of players, but it’s really hard on the GM whether the NPCs have interesting stories or not.  I think I’m getting more and more feel for my main character, who has played about half as much as my alt.  I rebuilt the character specifically for the mod since the character didn’t need to be finalized until after the mod, when I had played it three times.  I did a really good job of predicting what was important, I just couldn’t pull the trigger on taking an obscure skill that would have been useful, which would have been amusing even if the die rolls would have suggested that it wouldn’t have mattered.

Sunday, we expected four for V:TES.  I don’t really need to explain events, as Brandon http://brandonsantacruz.blogspot.com/2011/05/update-and-game-re-cap.html has already done so.  I do need to do something about breaking down some of my lamer decks.  The 3e-only deck is fine if I didn’t also make it a 4cl deck.  The Stray Bullets deck is just not something for me to give other people until I identify whether it’s viable or not.  Games like Wings of War are always funny with me since I’m so bad spatially that I don’t really know where plotted movement takes me.  The Greatest Fall deck had an interesting crypt, since only my favorite vampire mechanically in the game was the one I least wanted to bring out from my uncontrolled region, but the library was fairly dull.  I should probably make some changes on my Jyhad-only 4cl Toreador tap vote deck, but I guess it’s matchup dependent no matter what, where I badly want my prey to have titled vampires.

It was late enough in the day that I didn’t feel up to posting many of these comments on May Day.

Not knowing whether one of the regulars was playing my HoR2 campaign Tuesday, I prepared to run one mod and had another printed as a backup plan.  Went with the backup plan, which nobody seemed happy about.  It’s an uninspired mod that was okay for me when I played it resultswise but not all that interesting.  That lack of inspiration coupled with how I think my group is just really bad at investigation made it drag and nothing all that interesting happened except an ending that I’m sure is fairly rare.

Only Andy out of my players will probably read this – I don’t understand why following up on leads and asking the right questions is such a challenge.  I’m perfectly fine avoiding investigative mods/situations (to the extent it’s possible in a campaign where investigation is the primary activity) if the party isn’t interested, but the party is so close so often on doing what it’s expected to do (and probably wants to do) and then goes and does something else that doesn’t end up being terribly productive … and never comes back to a far more productive line.

Thursday, I blew off class to do boardgames with the old South Bay group.  First up was Scepter of Zavandor, a variation on Outpost.  I like the game.  It has some of the problems that Outpost, which I hate playing because it’s so limited and unforgiving, has.  It probably lacks the variety that I perceive it has for me at this stage.  So, it’s not great by any stretch of the imagination.  But, there are enough roles that I haven’t played a lot of different strategies (subtle as the differences may be), so my fascination with strategic variety is stimulated.  Well, whatever.  It’s good to not be bored with a game.  Speaking of bored with a game, we played Settlers because it was easy.  It was a blowout, as many of our Settlers games are, as I couldn’t care less what actually happens in Settlers games anymore.  I spent the entire game working on largest army and never got to three soldiers – that’s not a comment on the quality of the game or my competitive effort – it’s just a note that relates to how I find the game completely unsatisfying, whether competitively or not.

Yesterday, I finally made an appearance with Jeff’s RPG group.  We played All Flesh Must Be Eaten.  It went well, especially from a narrative standpoint.  My rancher character got to use First Aid a lot when the vet kept getting the crap beaten out of him by zombies, .50 caliber machine gun fire, and whatnot.  I never took any damage.  After all, the driver is probably never going to get hit by machine gun fire going through the engine block, right?  On the flip side, I could never find a gun, so the only damage I did was a two-fisted blow to the back of a head of a zombie … for 1 point of damage.  Go Strength of 1.  Go Strength of 1!  The two jocks kept leaving us behind, since their Ferrari and motorcycle lacked the problems our stolen vehicles had.  The trucker never ended up driving a truck, but he did get to shoot some zombies … Perhaps we could organize our resources better – M-16 to the rancher who has Guns: Rifles and a low Strength, truck to the trucker, vet tends others rather than getting tended to, etc.

Next week, with the group, is likely to be RuneQuest, where I get to hack and slash.  Been a while.

So, the takeaways from all this are what?  HoR is HoR – it isn’t likely to be perfectly suited to a particular group of players.  I’m still working on how to better suit my players.  I think the Shadowlands mods, the more I reread them, are more what the campaign should be like as they are less likely to drag.  I need to be building more interesting (to play) decks for V:TES and not lend out decks that only “work” when I play them.  Maybe I need to find another boardgame to be a staple of play so that I don’t get stuck playing ones I really have no desire to ever play again.  Unfortunately, most of the few I own fall into the category of not being ones I actually want to play.

Finally, the RPG book I ordered on April 13th has finally shipped.  Not that I’m doing a good job of delving into material I buy, but I really should do more to support the industry, so putting in an occasional order for something, even if it takes a month to ship, makes sense.

Legends

So, for the first time in quite some time, I played V:TES.  We have had issues regaining the local group through the holiday season and this year.  Having found a pleasant store to play at, Legends in Cupertino, we decided to look at reinstating the every other week schedule at the store and find something else to do if we didn’t have a good number for V:TES.

We didn’t have a good number today, but we still played a couple of three-player games.  I was amused, especially by the first game.

Game 1:
Andy (Samedi + Enticement) -> Ian (Ahrimanes) -> Brandon (Group 1/2 Toreador & friends)

I had a great crypt draw with Darlene Killian (heretofore known as Kill-Ian), Effie, Gentha, Muricia.  Going second, my first thought was to bring out Gentha, but I had High Top in hand and thought it would be hilarious to have Kill-Ian recruit an ally.  Brandon brings out Isabel de Leon behind me and I pass on High Top for a turn as I expect that IdL can intercept me, reducing the value if maybe not the amusement.  Brandon calls Toreador Justicar with IdL, letting me know that it isn’t a weenie Auspex deck, and I get High Top which is not great for Andy and just bad for Brandon.

Brandon sees a lack of voting, so discards Dread Gaze.  Andy bleeds/Entices me to where I’m not poolriffic as I’ve brought out Muricia and Effie.  I get an Underbridge Stray (Sprinkles), Path of Harmony, New Moon Sigil on Effie, Visionquest, but never get around to playing Blessing of the Beast.  I start choking on masters, so I Direct Intervention Ogwon playing a Lost in Crowds while Sprinkles is blocking.  Sprinkles blocks.  I discard another DI.  Brandon is calling Con Ags for 2 to Andy and 1 to himself due to my sad pool situation.  I put out The Hungry Coyote while at 6 pool, Muricia Vulture’s Buffets for 3 blood, 1 pool off of a deceased Sprinkles.  Andy gets ousted because he didn’t oust me nor play enough Off Kilters nor have enough defense against 0 stealth bleeds.

High Top keeps going after IdL, taking her down.  Tatiana Romanov follows.  IdL comes back, calls a KRC I don’t block, I play Dread Gaze to fail it and Brandon scoops.  So, New Moon Sigil, Visionquest, and the final nail in the coffin of Dread Gaze carry me to overwhelming victory.

Game 2:
Brandon (Hannibal & clan) -> Ian (Thin Step) -> Andy (BH Assamites)

Stuff that happened that meant nothing to my game:  Lost in Translation Reza’s Guarded Rubrics bleed with Parnassus back to Brandon; put The Black Throne in play while at 4 pool; put Alamut in play and gained 0 counters; got ousted by Neonate Breach with zero combat cards (ignoring Swallowed by the Night) in my ash heap.

As for the other two, they kept bleeding at stealth, though the !Malks did a pretty good job of blocking the Assamites bleeding with nothing happening in combat, while the Assamites occasionally Ministryed enough intercept to block something.  The closest any minion got to torpor was Hannibal pressing against Nails to reduce him to 0 blood.  Andy didn’t put a lot of pressure on Brandon in the endgame, so Brandon eventually killed him with Reins of Power.

We went to the food court and got gourmet burritos.  The Thai burrito actually was fine.  It had an interesting taste, it wasn’t absurdly heavy like burritos of similar/smaller size tend to be, and the low quality steak was palatable.

We returned to the store to play Talisman.  I was the only one who had played before and largely kept any of my derision for the game hidden until after we played.  Playing only with the base set and playing with only three players was an incredibly different experience – people actually progressed rather than just screw each other over for 6 hours.  I was amazed at how many adventure cards were positive since I’m so used to people loading them with their personal cards or expansion cards.  As we were several hours into the game and all in pretty good shape but not feeling the awesomeness of trying to kill the others off, we decided to use the sudden death rules of whoever gets to the Crown of Command first.  Brandon got hit with a Random to take away massive amounts of built up Strength and Andy got hit with Cursed by a Hag followed by the unwise move of visiting the Witch, who toaded him.  I made it up to the top level, rolled an 18 in the Crypt (1 in 216 chance, for the win!) to get sent back to the City but had the immensely useful Poltergeist around to enable me to move efficiently back.  I eventually got past the Crypt and the rest was easy.  Prophetess is so broken.

I’m just amazed at how popular Talisman is, but then, I don’t get any of the “let’s randomly screw ourselves and the other players for hours on end” games like Wiz-War or the less obviously so games like Munchkin, Chez Geek, Grave Robbers From Outerspace, etc.  Not that the concept is any way new, as many old kid’s games are structured around the idea of randomness mixed with crippling opponents.  Perhaps, that’s why people continue to play such games – it’s an ingrained concept.  Perhaps, it’s part of the reason I despise such games – been there, done that, want some actual strategy and meaningful interaction in a game.  Of course, there’s always the fact that some people enjoy being mean in games.  Compare any of these sorts of game with a good game like Kill Dr. Lucky, which prima facie seems very similar but is either a reasonably strategic/tactical game with small numbers of players or a non-painful, psychological game with large numbers.

Legends has a decent variety of gaming stuff and, apparently, plans on bringing in more.  I read an indie RPG book on sword and sorcery that was almost tempting enough to buy and realized that the Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG mainbook would be hugely appropriate to my SK campaign where things are at.  It was just a pleasant environment and the rest of the mall was better than it had been in the recent past.  We still need to try to build the local playerbase again for V:TES and figure out what we enjoy as backup games, but I look forward to getting on a regular, every other week, schedule of heading over there.

As for backup games, my more inspired ideas were for HeroQuest (the boardgame) and Dragon Dice.  Other prominent ideas included short RPG sessions and Euroboardgames.

DunDraCon 2011

Surprisingly easy to get to the con given all of the rain Friday.

Friday

Get in early enough to do something by 7PM, consider trying to do the L5R LARP that was happening at 8PM, but the organization left something to be desired and I lost interest while waiting.  Saw someone I didn’t expect to see (moved) and talked for a while and we settled into some three/four-player Dominion.

Ah, Dominion.  I was reminded, as I am pretty much every time I play, why I’m not fond of the game.  That we used random card draw with at least the base set and Prosperity seemed odd to me given how often cards just don’t work together to provide interesting or effective strategies, theoretically exacerbating the problem of there only being limited strategies to a game.  But, upon further thought, I’m not sure that’s quite the case.  I just think the game is fundamentally flawed by having a narrow, i.e. 1 or 2, optimal strategies within any given game.  While this may appeal to people with an interest in efficiency, my interest in efficiency isn’t in the doing but in the knowing.  In fact, the doing of clear effectiveness bores the hell out of me.  Maybe somebody would like to argue that the value in the game is that it’s quickly over and you can move on to the next one.  Hmm, that would be the argument people use for why Magic is better than other (more fun) CCGs.  Still doesn’t work – there’s no point in playing a game that’s usually unfun when there are plenty of others that are.

We, then, played seven-player 7 Wonders.  It was okay.  I think it has, at least with so many players, a problematic mechanic with regards to player interaction.  It’s not quite that there’s none across table, just that you have to really know what’s what to impact the game over yonder.  We so didn’t have that what’s what knowledge.  Being cognizant of how to draft games in a general sense and picking up games quickly (while often losing interest quickly), I can now lord over lesser beings with my undefeated 7 Wonders record.  I didn’t have too much trouble completing the Great Pyramids and got a last epoch boost in military to crush my neighbors for an eleven point boost, giving me the only 50+ point score.  Would I play it again?  I’d only say probably not just to keep my silly record intact, it’s actually … okay … inoffensive.  I just can’t say I’d care one way or the other.

Find out I didn’t get into a Saturday morning game, begin to think this DDC will be as awful as the last two were.

Saturday

Ah, not just a gamer anymore, an old gamer.  While gaming has decreased (at local cons), sleeping has increased.  No morning game = little morning left after getting out of bed.  Leisurely lunch over at the shopping center, continue creating characters for my Sunday night game, unable to get a V:TES game together, finally my 4PM game arrives.

Marvel Universe using BASH system.  Have about 50 Marvel supers to choose from (no cosmic powered or villains).  I can’t think of anything specific at first.  Yes, I have favorites expressed in my former buying habits, but I was trying to think of something different.  Not particularly wanting to go the mutant route and thinking more in the Avengers vein, I finally thought of Vision … One of the themes of the con for me was being chill.  When the GM read off names, I was almost tempted by Moon Knight, though I found out later that it was the crazy MK, so I was fine with not having to think that hard.

So, Vision, The Hulk, Captain America, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Shadow Cat & Lockheed, and Spiderman team up to defend part of New York from a giant Hydra robot.  As expected, Vision and Lockheed team up for the kill and The Hulk throws it out of harm’s way.  Other stuff happens, but really, does any of the minor characters’ exploits really matter?  Uatu shows up to speak aloud in our presence of the danger of Kang going 70 million years into the past to find a cosmic cube and to randomly create a portal to Doctor Doom’s castle where a timeship may or may not be.  Once there, The Hulk starts drawing fire, Shadowcat goes to find the defense system controls, Vision also runs some “shoot me ineffectually” forward positioning, Doombots show up, and eventually the timeship is secured.  With Spiderman at the controls, dinosaur time.  Wolverine squares off with t-rex, stampede comes through, Hulk smashes stampede, stampede smashes injured t-rex, we resume mission.  Hulk leaps on Kang’s ship, Nightcrawler bamfs us in, Shadowcat, Lockheed, Vision phase.  As expected, Lockheed and Vision bombard Kang’s forcefield with hotness, which eventually drops to the three-bladed Nightcrawler.  Shadowcat claims the cosmic cube.

To the future … with Kang!?!  We try to find his honey and he stops messing with our centuries.  Uatu gives him coordinates, he leaves, and the world changes.  We not so smart.  Uatu is not himself, nor Thanos, nor a bunch of other supervillains that may come to mind, but Apocalypse.  Nightcrawler bamfs a speeding semi into Apocalypse, mutants unconsciousify Apocalypse momentarily, but he recovers to full strength, so The Hulk jumps him and gets casually flung aside, leaving Captain America to go all steroid freak on Apocalypse and make him not so living.  Dr. Strange is found to restore our reality.

On the one hand, having a bunch of superhero nerds note nerdy things is interesting, on the other, it gets distracting.  The game was basically a series of combats.  In and of itself, that’s reasonable for a superhero game, but things dragged.  The Doom castle stuff was especially slow as none of the weapons had any effect on The Hulk or me.

Oh well, it was the first scheduled RPG I got into at DDC in three years.

Sunday

Old people sleep.  Nice leisurely lunch at the shopping center, followed by reading the adventure I was running, followed by, wait for it, a pick-up game of V:TES!  Once upon a time, you could play all con, all night.  One DDC, we had a 17-player game, while the finals were going on.  These days, it takes incredible effort just to get people who don’t play anymore to fill out a four-player table for a single game over a four-day convention.  No one got ousted.

My game was full but in a weird place.  It turned out to be a pretty good room for us.  I had two extra players (8 total), so the extra space was nice.  What was I running?  The intro mod to HoR3, New Beginnings.  I had two players deeply into it playing twin Bayushi brothers.  They did an amazing job acting out the scene of Akodo meeting Ikoma.  Things went longer than I wanted and I was losing coherency six hours in, but I didn’t feel as badly as I usually do after running a RPG afterwards.

Monday

I slept through my alarm.  That happens, on average, about once a year.  I woke up a bit after 7AM (going to bed around 2AM, not falling asleep much in between – bah, only old people need sleep).  Got ready to go down to confirm that I was in an 8AM game.  Checked the sheets.  Didn’t see my name.  Checked the program, had an interesting realization.  Checked the sheets again.  Found my name, for my 10AM game.  I had a crummy parking spot anyway and Monday was not going to see a full parking lot and I don’t really like any of the food around the hotel, so I drove over to another shopping center and got a sandwich at Nob Hill.  Drove back, packed, took my stuff to the car, waited in the game room until other people arrived. Yup, the usual things you do before your game begins on the last day of a four-day con.

L5R – but not HoR.  This con was ridiculous for L5R when you consider how D&D and Call of Cthulhu prevalent it typically is.  The LARP, a L5R related game at the same time as the LARP, my game, this game.  Though, this game was billed as having Call of Cthulhu elements, so there you go.

I decided to play the Miya character.  I think we were all rank 2.  We had a Shiba bushi, Isawa Earth shugenja, Soshi shugenja, and Kakita bushi.  We were on our way to a matchmaking event.  In my case, I was the official herald for the event with a personal interest in improving the prospects of my three daughters.  I got the assistance of one of the matchmakers as things were progressing adequately until the Shiba started in about “terrible slaughter”.  An agent of the Lying Darkness was shapeshifting and we confronted it, had a nice dinner, then confronted it and its fellow Lord Moon Lobby in a cave.  Did we survive?  Don’t know.  In the end, four of us were trying to scramble away from a shadow beast coming through a gate while the Soshi shugenja cast a spell to send a message for help.  So, whether Hiromi, Kasumi, and Miwa gained husbands or lost a father is a page left unwritten.

… 2011

So, following up from the look back at 2010, might as well throw out some thoughts on 2011.

Predictions

I don’t foresee major changes.  Boring?  Sure.  I’m sure something inconvenient will happen, like computer issues or a shake up in what sort of gaming I end up doing or having convention plans not work out quite right for Gen Con or, if I’m feeling frisky, Origins.

I don’t foresee picking up any major new game.  … boring.

Need to predict something.

V:TES will see a continued emphasis on storyline play, meaning something this year.  No new set in 2011.  A continued problem with coherent conversation on the game.  The lack of material compensation should see fewer out of country participants in the NAC, so it’s likely a NorAmer will win.  Columbus group should do well, even ignoring that it’s in their backyard, but we might see another Canadian coup.

L5R 4e will put out broken schools/paths.  One CCG that isn’t Magic, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh! will hold people’s attention briefly.  Self published RPGs will continue to take marketshare from established companies and the e-ification of RPGs will grow to the levels that they should have already.  Boardgames (and non-collectible card games) will continue to be where the hobby gaming money is.  The expandability concept built into many recent games will continue towards becoming the standard, just as Hollywood loves its franchises.  On average, EuroGame complexity will rise (falling when the boardgame bubble bursts next year).  Online gaming, of course, has an impact on tabletop, but I think most of the damage has already been done.

Concerns

I am concerned with the smooth sailing of HoR.  Even if I don’t have any troubles getting mods in and the campaign doesn’t have a major problem in 2011, I imagine that an increase in players will put stress on how things are currently done.  Also in the realm of HoR, my plan to run mods at local cons may not work to get more players or even work so well as one-shots.

While my planning for major cons is superb, I can’t control everything in ways that are rather important, so there’s always the concern of keeping the cost of Gen Con under control.

I don’t know that Origins or Gen Con will fare all that well, which might not be a big deal this year but may be a problem for next.  Both appear to be struggling mightily, possibly due to online gaming’s hold on the mainstream.  I expect ConQuest will have its last year near my house, possibly its last year.

Hopes

I hope that the local cons are better experiences than in recent years.  But, I might as well keep expectations low so that I’ll be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed.

I hope that V:TES’s management doesn’t try too hard and end up making some decision that reduces the fun of playing the game.  I hope that some site replaces the newsgroup and much of the fragmented discussion on various forums as a central place for discussion of the game.  I hope that players stick with the game and don’t try to come up with house rules.

I hope to find some new product that is inspiring.  Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on a two-player CCG being that product.

I hope to find the magic mix of time and money to make it to more interesting events.  And, for those that I do attend, I hope that they work out a bit better than the last couple of years.

Hope to correct any of my mistaken theories on how games, the industry, or whatever works.

Plans

My intention is to continue to try to find a mechanism for generating decks that amuse me to play and to eschew reactionary concepts.  I might have to break down and play some of my tournament concepts in casual play, though, if I manage to get to Origins, that won’t be necessary.

My intention is to tighten up my RPG schedule, as I hope to be busy enough with other things that I need to manage things more wisely.  Hopefully, Conan will be more consistent.  Hopefully, I’ll figure out what to do, if anything, with Solomon Kane.

My intention is to get some of my fictions done that I’ve intended for ages.  I can hope to get some non-gaming writing done, but that’s asking a lot.

Look to finish off one of my blog series and expand on the Card of the Weak series.

Look to put away all of these loose piles of cards, even if it only lasts briefly.  Will need to switch to bigger boxes, though, as I can’t even fit Serpentis in its box.

Try to be even more chill on public forums and avoid using this podium to unfairly criticize.

Is 2011 the year to consolidate lessons of the past and move forward more wisely?  Or, will it be surprising?  Or, will it be much the same?

End of Time

So, I don’t speak much of boardgames even though I do play them on occasion.  I went to a get together Saturday where I failed to complete a single game.

Vinci

We started a game of Vinci, four players. I think I had played it before a long time ago and had a vague idea what it was about. For such a simple game mechanically, we had a lot of questions. We called the game when the other group was done playing something (11 people total for the event) both to mix people up and because one of my friends just didn’t find it interesting, feeling that it had too little going on.

Actually, I just think the game is too subtle for his interest with the game mostly being about planning what to do when you go into decline. That combat never hurts the attacker actually is pleasantly different from the wargames and warboardgames I’ve played where attacks often go horrendously for attackers to where the player is discouraged even if the position isn’t untenable.

I would have been fine playing more, especially with how my second game went. I’m fairly sure I have a strong interest in seeing games to completion, even if only to better understand endgames.

Through The Ages

Today, I looked at its boardgamegeek.com ranking – #4. I’m somewhat surprised, though I think people on BGG suffer from short term memory far too often as newer games get ranked way higher than they should be.

The reason I’m surprised is that I think it’s an awful game. Now, one 5.5 hour learning game called 1.5 hours or so before it would have ended if played out is hardly a depth of experience. I’m sure the game is far more interesting to people who know what the cards do. I’ve read some of the forum threads on it to see if there was something major I was missing. Neither that nor our postmortem on the game leads me to think that it’s a desirable game to play for people of my ilk or for my usual boardgaming crowd.

Why awful? Let’s start with things that others complain about that don’t bother me or bother me trivially.

1. Duration, length of turns – I can be mightily drained by long games and there’s a fundamental problem with games where you can be disenfranchised early that last longer than a couple of hours, but I wasn’t bothered by people (four players, one who knew how to play, one who had some familiarity) taking 5+ minutes since we were learning. For one thing, the game is incredibly nonintuitive in core mechanics.

2. Atrocious rulebook – I don’t really learn games from rulebooks. While it would be nice to be able to find answers to questions, especially for a game with this many parts, I assume people will figure things out with the help of online resources eventually.

Moving on to what does bother me:

1. Complexity, nonintuitiveness – I’m not, in general, a fan of complexity in boardgames. As a CCGer, I can hardly argue against complexity per se. But, CCGs are inherently inelegant and prone to high levels of complexity followed by increasing complexity as more mechanics and cards get added. Boardgames can afford to be more elegant. Actually, the complexity in TTA is not that high, it’s that it’s nonintuitive. How population becomes workers becomes things, by itself, is fine. How resources move back and forth to supply, by itself, is fine. Together, they are awkward (nevermind “happy”), something that we newbs had a hard time managing quickly several hours into the game. Of course, there are many other things going on. That some cards can be played right away and some not, that some actions take one type of action versus another, that there are a number of tracks with actual VPs being disengaged from a lot of what else is going on, that certain cards go away at certain times, etc. are the sort of features I’m talking about. While not unintuitive, the number of cards that you need to know adds dramatically to the complexity for people new to the game. I had absolutely no idea that Napoleon + Air Force + big Tactics card was an important thing to be concerned by. Of course, I didn’t learn that military strength variance gets absurd until late in the game.

2. Variance – Talking both about card strength variance and military strength variance. I have a tendency to ignore military strength in any game where building it is an option (rather than being the primary element of the game, or whatever). Early in the game, military strengths were similar and I knew I was behind in production (due to newb mistakes), so I didn’t bother. Then, others got so far ahead, I continued to not bother. While an apparent problem with the game is that it encourages picking on the weak rather than dragging down leaders, that’s a different issue; we called the game when one person could generate 81 military to someone else’s 68 … when I had zero. Then, there are the key leaders – my two leaders did pretty much nothing for me (Julius Caesar pacifist strategy is not effective, just saying), the openended military cards, the late game VP scores (which I only heard about rather than actually saw, with what I heard sounding a lot like Age of Empires III’s endgame cards which I think contribute a lot to that game being obnoxious).

3. Military – Apparently, the game has a prey on the weak incentive, which is insipid for obvious reasons. Taking variance into account, there was talk of capping the openended military beatdowns, but I actually thought the real problem was how much military strength could vary to where I never played a defense card because they wouldn’t have done anything.

4. Uniqueness – Now, it’s very possible that the game has a lot more variety in how your civilization develops than in similar games, and it could just be that the game is more abstracted in how your civ is represented, but one thing I find kind of dull about all games like this is how you don’t tend to end up with really goofy creations. Yes, I jumped from bronze to coal, with no iron, and Caesar had the Hanging Gardens built, where the Kremlin was built next door centuries later, but I still felt like I had to pursue the same core strategies as everyone else – maximize stone, maximize food, maximize light bulbs (science), get harps (culture – VPs), build a respectable army. As I understand it, there are known strategies that focus; one is Napoleon’s Air Force, another is superscience, another harptastic, Cook’s territories, Michelangelo’s happy, etc. There are certainly plenty of cards to do different combinations. I just felt like I needed to grow a very specific way, much like how Outpost, The Scepter of Zavandor, et al require that you not screw up your engine.

I don’t hate the game. There are some interesting concepts. I very much like the idea of building a civilization, though I find that the boardgames that do it are often much less interesting than the concept and often the end results are wildly unbalanced games. I just don’t really see the point of TTA. The amount of effort required to learn it followed by the effort of playing it does not seem to be justified given how unenthralling the actual play is and with how lopsided I would expect results to be.

Is it fair to pan a game based on a single experience? I’m not actually trying to pan it, even if calling it awful is pretty much doing so. It’s not really the game, but that the game is so newb unfriendly that there are better things to do. But, then, I could see someone saying the same about virtually any CCG, with V:TES being one of the worst offenders. So, to each their own – I was running through a list of boardgames and there are plenty I wouldn’t want to play again.

It was still enjoyable to try the game out, and it’s always interesting to try out games that I won’t know I’ll hate until after I’ve played them.

MagnetX

For all of those last minute Christmas shoppers (I finished yesterday), here’s a possibility for a family game.

MagnetX is a game of placing magnets on a board.  The stones have varying magnetic fields and no two sets are alike.  Variations on the game are entirely possible, but the basic idea is to place more and more magnets on the board without having them touch or leave the board.

Additional information is available from:

• http://www.psyxgames.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagnetX
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/PsyX-Games/174643518387?v=wall

I was introduced to the game by the designers, whom I play V:TES and RPGs with.  They have also held tournaments at local conventions.

I see the nature of the game being two-fold.  Part of the game is strategy.  The Wiki article does a pretty good job of explaining some of this.  There’s a lot that can be learned about the different properties of different shaped pieces.  The other part is physical somewhat along the lines of Operation or Jenga where body (finger/hand) control helps immensely as you can start to feel the pull of the magnetic fields, can also see the other magnets start moving/spinning as you get closer to them.

While it helps to have some basis for your plan, some people just have a better feel for the game. 

For someone like me used to German style boardgames of resource management which often only appeal to gamer families, MagnetX is a game that should be just as accessible to kids as adults or is it adults as kids?