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“Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.”
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843)
Perhaps Kierkegaard’s dim view on humanity owes something to long Scandinavian nights and coming from the land responsible for possibly the worst alcoholic beverage ever – Gammel Dansk, a concoction so vile even the Danes reserve it only for special events. Sometimes I suspect the Vikings were merely Real Ale fans in search of a good pint. Richard Fletcher in “Bloodfeud”, his superb book on Anglo-Saxon England, shrewdly observes that historians are prone to underestimate the effects of boredom on human history. Games designers often serve their audience poorly in this regard.
A good game requires all present to be involved and interested in the events unfolding on the table top. It is a poor game when one player sits slouched in a chair, or worse wanders off to the bar, whilst his opponent takes an age over the minutiae of moving his vast army. Yet so many games still employ an I go / you go turn sequence that almost guarantees boredom, albeit boredom evenly shared, for the players. I go / you go can work, and work well, with small numbers of units on each side, say when a player has no more than a dozen pieces/units to move, but element based games with near a hundred (or more) moving units per side is just too much. The PIP system used in the DBx games (and others) seems to allow large numbers of units and swift game play by limiting the number of units (even if “brigaded” together) to move each turn. My experience is that players using this system merely take an age deciding which of their blocks to move with their precious few PIPs and tedium sets in. Various card driven activation systems exist, including some rather excellent ones from the Too Fat Lardies stables, and these have great merit in severely limiting what one player can do in one “go”, thus keeping decision making to a minimum, and keeping all the players focused on the rapidly approaching next card turn. This system can lead to some units not actually doing much all game, and to units not reacting, as they might well do historically, to immediate threats or opportunities as their cards do not come up. Also, this system tends to favour those whose cards are drawn later, as the player whose cards are drawn first has to “waste” his cards moving within range whilst the late drawer can use all his cards for combat. This problem can be overcome by regularly reshuffling the spent cards into the draw deck, but this in turn can perpetuate the problem of certain units cards never appearing. For my money though, some form of random activation beats I go / you go for banishing boredom in big games. Fortunately I had no chance to be bored at the Conference of Wargames event I attended from the 3rd to the 5th of July at Knuston Hall, Northamptonshire. The event, organised by Wargame Developments but open to anyone, is an experimental gaming residential held in a stately home with beautiful grounds, excellent food and a bar! Unlike other wargames weekends players do not all participate in one epic battle. Instead delegates present their own innovative games each of which must conclude with a one to two hour time slot. From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon I played 12 full games, including assassinating Mussolini; refighting the battle of Solferino; commanding a Churchill tank in Normandy; attacking on the first day of the Somme; thrashing the Napoleonic Spanish; refighting Gettysburg; suppressing bolshie Africans; and bombing insurgent Afghans. The program included lectures on the history of wargaming, and games design and application. Full reports and rules for the games played are published through the following year in the Wargame Developments journal, The Nugget. In my absence, Wessex Games has not been idle. Steve has almost finished PDFing my ancient (in every sense) Mammoth hunting rules set, Tusk, for sale via Wargames Vault. Still published in paper format by Irregular Miniatures, these rules launched my rules writing “career” back in 1994. Revisting these rules after a long absence was a massive nostalgia hit for me. I was pleased to discover that they are still a good little set that does what it says on the cover, and I’m glad that they will now be available to a wider audience through the web. Craig, my editor for these monthly tales, tells me that you are interested in the progress of Astronef and would like to see pictures! Firstly you should know that I actually do all my playtesting with various bit of card cut from artists mounting board rather than wait until I’ve scratch built and painted up appropriate models. If I did that you’d never see a game out of me! Somehow I suspect photos of bits of card would not inspire, or illuminate. I will put together more details for the next Tale, but for now be satisfied with knowing that simple mechanisms are proving difficult to grasp in practice for some players. One of these mechanisms is that of planet-launched Interceptors, which have a speed which decreases when the interceptor turns. Interceptors start with very high speed which sees them zipping all over the board, but loose it fast, and have no means of regaining it, when they try to target attack runs on enemy vessels. Players have exhibited an amazing ability to totally misjudge their speed and either fly off the table with gusto or stall helpless amongst the enemy. Oh, by the way, we hope to get Aquanef out in the not too distant future… or recent alternative past, if you prefer. Matthew Hartley
July 2009 |
