Last Week's Games: Speculating on the merits of luck vs skill in tabletop games.

I found myself thinking about luck vs skill when it comes to hobby games, in the light of some of the things that have been happening in my house and in the wider gaming community. The argument is as old as games themselves but for those of you who might not know: In almost every game you play, there is an element of luck. Traditionally this is done through dice or cards, and lately certain games have mobile apps that can handle a lot of the random number generation those items provide. The games that are reliant on luck – Snakes and Ladders, for example – are usually easy enough to play, but they’re often less engaging in the long term (or even to the end of the game!) because the players never really feel like they’re in control of what’s going on. On the other hand, games that rely entirely on skill – Chess is probably the most obvious example – are potentially more engaging but as the player base is highly skilled, it also has a higher barrier for entry which makes the game hard to access in any enjoyable way. 

This came up in the news this week where I noticed that SteamForged games are bringing their support of their game Guild Ball to an end – a game that’s been going for six years that I meant 

Apparently these two are called
Ox and Shark. I never knew.

to try at some point but never got around to giving it a go. Since I never played the game, I’m going mainly on what they’ve said in their blog that covers it, but a lot of the problem was that Guild Ball relies almost entirely on the skill of their players to play the game. To echo the article, this created a situation where you would win your first game – the ones that the developers showed you how to play – and lose your next hundred, as you faced off against player after player who had been playing the game a lot longer than you, knew exactly what they were doing and what they needed to do to win. There was nothing in between; no lower class of players that would happily have a casual game you could just enjoy. You learned to play, and then you were in with the big boys who would show no mercy. A high barrier to… not necessarily entry, but to play on any level that might be engaging or fun, doesn’t create a sustainable business model, and sadly now it’s reached the point where the creators of Guild Ball are calling it a day on what was otherwise an excellent game. 

The most obvious basis for comparison is Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl – a game far more reliant on luck, but with a loyal fanbase, if not necessarily indefinite support. But I’ve never played the tabletop version of it either. 

Presumably some forest, or other. One that's Enchanted.

The game I’ve been playing is The Enchanted Forest with Jessie and Kirsty. This game relies almost entirely on luck and won Game of the Year in 1982, though from what I understand that wasn’t a great year for board games. As I said last week, it’s not a particularly well-designed game, we can’t really play it to the conclusion written into the rules as Jessie gets fed up with it before then once the initial novelty has worn off. But it’s easy for her to play, she’s even getting the hang of moving pieces on their movement squares, and understands what she needs to do to win – even if she hasn’t quite worked out that you’re not supposed to share that information with the rest of us. This game is nearly 40 years old and still being printed to this day, not many games can say that, and the ones that can is mainly due to the fact that their barrier for entry is far more broad than those games that rely on skill.

Last Week's Games: Shogun: Total War, Warhammer 40K, Get Bit, Zombie Dice

Let's see who's standing at the end of this battle!

My new game for this week is Shogun: Total War. The Total War series is one of the ones I’ve been meaning to have a go at for a long time, and while there are a lot of games out there for it now, I have an almost obsessive need to play games in sequence, so I’m playing Shogun first. I played through the tutorials, which was just as well since the interface is unlike any strategy game I’ve ever played. I also had a go through the campaign, but I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I’m supposed to be doing; building up an empire is obvious but I found that battles are not to be entered into lightly! I did, however, have the foresight to set the win conditions up to something other than total domination. I remember playing Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Galactic Conquest mode with my sister years ago, during which I discovered that the problem with potentially endless campaigns is just that – they take ages, and you’ll lose interest in it long before you reach the end. I set up the win to take a certain number of provinces, and to survive for 70 years. But I think I might go back and restart, with a better idea of what I’m supposed to be doing.

I wonder if my need to play video games in sequence hampers my enjoyment of them somewhat. Am I missing some great games because I haven’t played the first ones? Anyone who’s played the Witcher series would probably say that I am; The Witcher 3 looks to be the best game in the series but I haven’t bothered with it because I haven’t played the first two to completion – and I’m unlikely to find time to do so! It shouldn’t matter with Total War because they’re stand-alone campaigns; not sequential storylines, but lately I’ve become interested in finding the core mechanics of the game before jumping in to the arguably-better later versions. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of this; I’ve missed the better games in the series because I wouldn’t touch them until I’d beaten the first. So I’ll see what Shogun: Total War has to offer. It looks really interesting and I have enjoyed it so far, but I want a little more out of it.

I continued playing Eternal Crusade on my laptop, but was pleasantly surprised when on Sunday I managed to go in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and play the real thing! I got to play a game of Warhammer 40,000, using my Salamanders against Chaos Daemons. We played the Ancient Relic mission, which requires you to take and hold one objective for six victory points. I won because the objective way in my deployment zone. It was a good game but we had to it call early, and for my next one I’ll be using a substantially smaller army because I found myself looking at the rules for the new edition of the game far too often; it’s only my second game. Nonetheless, I like how the vast majority of the new rules are working out; especially how the templates have been removed so there is a point to Frag missiles now!



The front cover of the original X-Wing game.

Robots. Swimming away from a freaking shark.

I also had a game of Star Wars: X-Wing against the same guy, and managed to win with my tournament list consisting of 1^st-wave ships and characters. I was pleased that running the Trenchrunners worked, and I also learned not to fire Proton Torpedoes against a ship that has lots of shields and R2-D2, who recharges them!

I played some board games with Kirsty as well. The first was Get Bit, where you have to play cards to have plastic robots with detachable limbs swim away from a shark. There were the beginnings of a really good game in there but I wasn’t familiar enough with it to be able to explain it well enough for Kirsty to really know what she was doing! We also played Zombie Dice, which requires almost no skill other than pushing your luck. It is, ironically, brainless fun, which at the end of a long day is exactly what we needed! 
 

1/3/2014: X-Wing: A Massacre

Ado guys, it's been a while since I've played this...

I had a game of X-Wing today in Titan Games with Rich Bloomer and it was basically a massacre; I took three fighters to his five and was destroyed piecemeal. But as ever, I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.

My squadron was:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Biggs Darklighter	25	28	100
R2-F2	3
X-Wing: Wedge Antilles	29	33
R2 Astromech	1
Marksmanship	3
Y-Wing: Horton Salm	25	39
Proton Torpedoes (2)	8
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R5 Astromech	1

The idea behind the squadron was that Biggs and Wedge - both in X-Wings - would fly in close formation. Wedge would use his offensive capabilities of reducing the defender's agility to do some damage, and Biggs' effect that forces the enemy to fire at him rather than another fighter would keep the heat off Wedge. It kind of worked, but I mis-interpreted Biggs' effect. I thought that if the target was within range 1 of the shooter then the effect would kick in, but in fact the target had to be within range 1 of Biggs. I'll have to be a bit more careful if I'm going to run that tactic again!

The Y-Wing was to provide long-range support and hopefully score a couple of kills early on to keep the heat off the X-Wings. Sadly this didn't happen, though it was astonishing how difficult it was to kill; Rich spent around 3 or 4 turns with that being the only model left! The Ion cannon proved surprisingly effective as well, though perhaps this is because I misread the rules. I thought if one of my attacks hit then it cancelled out all other dice, so Rich wouldn't have had to roll his - but I've read the relevant section on the Fantasy Flight Forums and apparently he would still have been able to roll his dice, but I wouldn't have done more than 1 damage no matter how well I rolled. The effect of forcing the enemy to do nothing but fly slowly in one direction for a turn can take someone out of the fight for a turn though, and it ignores the normal rules for arc of fire so it is not to be taken lightly.

Also, did you see the mistake in the army list? Yes, I put the R2 unit with Wedge and the R5 unit with Horton; it should have been the other way around.

The R2 unit allows all movements of 1-2 speed as green manoeuvres. This would have been invaluable for the Y-Wing, because it has more than the usual number of red manoeuvers to give it stress tokens, and very few greens. The R2 unit would have been great for counteracting this.

The R5 unit on the other hand allows you to turn over a Critical Hit card at the end phase so that it only counts as a hit rather than a Critical. Honestly, I only took this one to fill out the points, but it proved useful in the end so it's worth hanging on to until I find something better.

So what happened in the battle?

I deployed my fighters in a 'step' formation; Wedge, Biggs and Horton. The first turn was basically spent moving towards each other on a diagonal slant across the board. I had hoped to take the flank of the TIE squadron, but instead I ended up flinging Wedge headfirst in to Darth Vader. He lasted two turns. Biggs was next to go; after flipping around to face the other way, he fired off a couple of shots only to be shot down by the entire squadron facing him. Horton lasted a little longer, as his craft was a little more hard-wearing, but he just didn't have the firepower to hold his own against 5 TIEs and went down after a few turns.

What would I do differently? Well, apart from the aforementioned changes to the army list, I would consider using the Ion cannon a lot more as it was surprisingly useful and did a good job of taking at least some of the enemy out of the fight. I've got another game coming up tomorrow so we'll see...