Bones to pick with Planet Baen

So, at the recommendation of Slagdar the Ineffable, I'm trying out planet Baen. Yeah, pros and cons. And naturally I'm gonna be talking more about the cons than the other way around.

So, I'm actually not that dismayed by the game's progress quest like nature. It's all about making your numbers go up, but there are ways to fiddle that, and make the numbers go up faster. I like seeing numbers go up, and I like seeing it happen even faster, so that part of the game doesn't really bother me much. And there are constraints on design.

It's an open ended game on the internet. You want your players to play for as long as possible. Given that the cost to play is "free" the budget for making this game isn't through the roof. There's only so much you can do to keep them playing; games like World of Warcraft are constantly writing the next patch, the new dungeon so there's more stuff to keep their current player base going. If you're bribing your players to play you don't have the same money for software development.

So they try other ways to keep the players from getting bored; they limit the time players can play; after a certain amount of interacting with the game you have to wait until a period of time has passed until you can play again. It works; As I'm writing this I'm waiting for the daily rollover at Kingdom of Loathing. So, in Planet Baen you get a series of decisions that take perhaps 20 minutes a day. (Or would, if I wasn't also the type to obsessively check this stuff) and then you're done. Works.

I have my problems with the specifics of the decisions being made.

When they designed the game, they wanted some sort of a politics simulator. From that linked story there was some sort of arguing about politics that went down, and they're right, a lot of science fiction uses the laboratories of the stars to demonstrate the consequences of politics. Or at least to argue their points. To take a classic example, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land expresses his ideas about sex, religion and human nature, and his Starship Troopers discusses his ideas of foreign policy. (To wit; there are always going to be wars, so it's best to always be prepared to fight and win them).

This is a dangerous road to go down. To begin with, politics simulators never really work. Whatever you actually think about politics bleeds through in the assumptions you program in. If you think that free markets are heartless and cruel, your game is inevitably going to reflect that and penalize players for going down that path. In principle you can compensate for that by knowing your biases and reflecting that in your equations, but that doesn't work. Because then your simulator will give you results that you know aren't right, because such and such a variable was left out.

Whatever conclusions you get, they always won't be correct because you've left variables out. The only system complicated enough to accurately simulate something as messy as politics is reality itself. Anything less is an approximation, and you can't really say how close it gets. This is my problem with simulations in general (err... not Sim City, but people simulating the climate or stock market to make real world predictions.) So when I play the game, I choose to join the Hayek league because the free market is inherently the moral choice, and if it doesn't earn me in game stats as quickly as the others I get annoyed at the game.

There's another problem with making these things. Even if you could make the simulation accurate, that wouldn't make a good game. Real life isn't balanced. If you take a stat in reality and you try to min max it (money, for example) hey, maybe you end up like Bill Gates. Or maybe you lose out and go broke. So how does someone who went broke catch up with someone who's a multi-billionaire? They don't. In a game, it's always more fun when the outcome is still in doubt, so we put in catch up mechanics to prevent people from taking a commanding lead early on and just winning. If the free market is really as superior to command economies as history tends to show, then it makes for a lousy game mechanic. You either choose correctly and win or you don't and you lose. So when you put that into your game simulation you cannot make it accurate and still have a game worth playing.

And finally, when you mix your politics with your business, you offend people and you lose customers. See that bit above there where I said that the free market is inherently the moral choice? Goodbye, half our potential customers. We both know that you'd never translate into actual customers unless you got jobs. Hippies.

There are other problems with the game; the design is somewhat clunky, and they make some incorrect choices, like making me read white text on a yellow-green background. And some of their mechanics choices are counterintuitive, and furthermore penalize successively for not intuiting them correctly. While I like the idea of using a game as a next generation advertising tool to sell science fiction books, I think they'll need to put some more work into their game.

On the other hand, free books!

On Gamification

So I'm looking at the trusty calendar of blog posts around here, and it seems it's been about five months since I personally have written anything. To be fair, I've had something to write about for a couple months now, not including the Axis and Allies Global contests where the Axis actually won. You'd think that would be something that should have come up, especially since I was the one who pulled it (actually it was twice) off, but I'm lazy. And as it turns out, the topic I am going to write about isn't the one that's getting written about. Suckers!

...no, you shut up.

Arbitrage

I've been playing Fallout 3 again recently. It's still a good game. One of the aspects of the game has gotten me thinking though. Quite apart from the quest lines and the normal course of bartering you can turn in certain items you find scavenging the ruins of DC for a reward. Let's take an example:

Sugar Bombs have a listed value of 5 caps, which means that the various eateries in the capital wasteland will sell them to you for six to eight caps, depending on how many points you've put into barter. Murphy, a ghoul in Meresti Station, will buy Sugar Bombs from you at 15 caps per (more if you talk him into it). So quite apart from scavenging, whenever I'm at a bar trying to parlay a battered suit of Raider Badlands Armor into a stimpack or two I pick up any Sugar Bombs they have on hand.

There are a number of other turn-ins. The Brotherhood of Steel will give you 100 caps per pre-war book (nominal value of 1). Walter at the water processing plant in Megaton will give you 10 caps per piece of scrap metal (nominal value of 1) and Winthrop in Underworld will trade chems direct; 5 pieces of scrap metal for 1 Stimpack, Rad X or Radaway. There are more, but those should suffice for the current discussion.

Back to the Sugar Bombs for a moment. If they're generated at one point (let's assume that a different scavenger brought them in and sold them off). You can make a profit just by knowing where you can buy them and where you can sell them. Arbitrage.

Given how much time I spend in game keeping an eye on things I can buy one place and sell another, couldn't you get rid of all that stuff with Super Mutants and raiders and so forth and just make a game about buying stuff one place and selling it another? Oh, right, that's what the Escape Velocity series was all about. And come to think of it, EVE Online. Except they tend to junk it up with random spaceship battles.

Let me clarify for a moment; I love gunning down super mutants and blowing up spaceships and such. It's just that I can name a dozen games where you have spaceships trying to blow each other up; Escape Velocity is the only one I can think of with that sort of trading.

So why is that? Well, that sort of thing gets boring after a while. Supposing you find a good route. You land, fill up your hold, take off, fly three star systems over, land, sell everything off. Buy something else, take off, fly back to the first system, sell everything off. Repeat. You get to see numbers go up, but that's not much of a reward for a mechanical task. You also get to upgrade your ship, which is a case of "I can make the numbers go up faster", unless you're also branching into space combat. That gives you a whole range of potentially interesting upgrades, which makes the Escape Velocity games work.

Its' still the trading system that makes them unique though. And I don't want to make a game that's just a copy. So we modify the trading. In particular, we automate. Instead of physically transporting the goods from one system to another, you hire someone else to do it. You establish a trade route, which then gives you a certain profit each time your captain completes it, and then you move on trying to find another.

At this point we've got a puzzle. Or at least the wherewithal to build a puzzle. Once you find the best trade routes it's essentially solved. You can increase the life of the game and also make it
closer to life if you change the efficacy of the routes over time. Winthrop in underworld might finally get enough scrap metal, and offer a lower bounty. Murphy has a pretty small operation, and might only be able to process a certain number of Sugar Bombs. If we make the value of certain runs time dependant, you have to keep an eye on them and redirect your caravans when they stop being profitable. It's still a puzzle, but a trickier one.

From here we could make this into a full on game. We'd need a way for several players to interact, or a way to keep it interesting for a single player. (At this point it pretty much has to be a video game; it's entirely too time consuming to do all these calculations with a physical game.) We'd also need to strip out the references to Fallout or Escape Velocity; it's all right borrowing mechanics, but taking from someone's creative side might engender a law suit. In any case, we've got plenty of games being designed right now, so I feel comfortable leaving this idea to simmer where it is.

RISK Legacies and Diablo III

Playing more RISK Legacy. Got my name on the board. Friggen Finally. The game is continuing to update, and now there's a faction of mutants on the board. Figures that we'd end up nuking each other before we managed to put the world capital on the board. I'm still 1/7 amongst four of us, so I'm still doing worse than average. Grr. Barbarossa is up to three signatures now.

Also? Playing Diablo III. Having a great time playing it, it's a wonderful game etc, etc. Don't intend to elaborate on it much, except for this bit of inspiration. Naturally it gets me thinking about... math. Yeah, who didn't see that coming? Allow me to elaborate.

Diablo III has numerous monsters that spawn other monsters. As long as you stand around like an idiot that portal device will keep summoning imps, or that doom bat nest will keep popping out doom bats. Pretty cool and all, except there's a part of me that wants to just stand around, waiting for them to spawn enemies for me, and then just kill those enemies. The sweet EXP without having to go running about and all. It's a case of cross incentives because pretty obviously what the game wants you to be doing is running about and all, killing other, more varied things.

How do they solve this? Generally by making the enemies spawn at a slow enough rate that it's quicker just to blow up the nest and go searching. (And that's not terribly slow, given the nature of the Diablo games). In Diablo II at least (I haven't checked this in Diablo III yet; having too much fun killing things) when a Fallen Shaman would resurrect a Fallen, the already killed monster would grant you no more experience.

How would I solve this? Math. There are ways to sum up infinite series of numbers that (so long as they're smaller htan one) gives you an actual number when you're done. Image!It's a geometric series, and I think you can get how it works by looking at that picture. So this is how I'd set up my monster generator. The generator itself is worth a certain amount of EXP. The first monster (or wave of monsters) would be worth 1/2 that amount, the second 1/4th and the third 1/8th and so on. Then, when you finally get sick of the diminishing returns and blow up the monster generator, you find that it's worth the sum rest of the square. So the experience gains for that monster and it's spawn are fixed at a given number no matter how long you have waiting, and thus you're pushed to kill the thing quicker and be on your way.

There's a problem with this setup; if you bury the mechanics in combat text (by the by, do I need to mention this is a strictly video game setup? Board game players would get bored entirely too quickly having to do all that dividing.) Anyways, what was I saying? Oh yeah, if you bury the mechanics where only careful parsing and some Science! will dig it out, your players generally won't, and might end up getting frustrated. "I stood there like, all day and still only got a measly 2000 exp!" It goes against that interface design stuff I was talking about.

All of life is Interface Design

I'm going to repeat that, it's important.

All of life is Interface Design.

Ok, what's interface design? In broad terms, when you try to get someone to understand how to do something, you're doing interface design. Everytime you're managing the way that someone interacts with a system, that's interface design. It's a pretty broad category, which allows me to make sweeping statements like the two up above.

How do you tell good interface design from bad? How easy is your interface to use? Ideally you want people to not even notice the interface is there. In this sense, a banana has better design than a pineapple.

Let's bring this down into the specifics. Supposing you've got a new game to play. If you've never played it before, and if you've got nobody there to teach you, what do you do? You read the rules. It's always an odious task, and oftentimes they don't seem to go out of their way to make it easier.

About two weeks ago I was helping some people learn to play the game Killer Bunnies It's a decent game, so far as I can tell. You have a certain amount of resources, you're trying to deprive your opponents of their resources, and it's complicated by the fact that you need to plan out your actions two turns in advance. I really can't give you any idea of the nuances of the game, I didn't pick up on them because I spent the entire game trying to figure out how to play cards. That's not where you want your player to be.

The game comes with a "your first game" booklet. Ok, that's good. I've been considering writing that sort of thing up for our games. It goes through some basic setup, and tells us that there are five kinds of cards; Run, Special, Very Special, Kaballa Dollas, and Play Immediately. Then it instructs you to deal with the latter two types of cards. Then it helpfully goes into how to play a bunny, which is an important type of resource in the game. It gets you through the first turn, the first round and then... nothing.

Hey wait a minute, how do I play "special" and "very special" cards? How do I play weapons? I've got a lot of weapons in my hand, and I've got no idea how to get them into the playing field. I get how you play bunnies, but most of my cards aren't bunnies, and I don't know what to do with them. From that point the game, whcih was ostensibly started, lurched from confusion to confusion until I had read enough of the second rules booklet (with helpful things like instructions for playing special cards), that finally I had an idea of what I was doing. By then the game was pretty much over. Briefly, this is the paragraph they should have put into the rules:

"Most of the time you'll play cards by sending them through the run. The run, in case you've forgotten, is that set of two cards in front of you. Cards that are the type "Run" (which include bunnies, weapons and some other stuff) can only be played by sending them through the run. You set them down in the "replace" part of the turn (Remember the basic order; flip, slide, draw, replace.), and then wait to slide and eventually flip them on subsequent turns. Special cards can also be played through the run with two important exceptions. First, instead of flipping over the top card of the run you can play a special card from your hand. Or, if you already sent it through the run and flipped it, but do not wish to use it right away, you can set it aside and "store" it for now. On your future turns you can play that card without having to forgo your flip. Very special cards are much the same as special cards, but you can play them on anyone's turn, and you don't have to forgo any flips to do it."

Or something of that nature. If that was for one of my games I'd spend quite a bit more time wrangling over exact phrasing and such, but you get the general idea. If they had that explanation in the rules the game would have been quite a bit less frustrating.

Still, that rulebook wasn't the worst I've seen. You want truly horrendous? Power Grid. Given a group of several intelligent, experienced gamers, we had to read through that rulebook at least three times before we knew what was going on, and even so we spent the majority of the first two games putting things on hold to make sure we're doing things right. It's a very fun game, with all sorts of interesting strategy decisions, but getting there was pretty agonizing.

Does any game do it very well? I don't know. I'm inclined to give some credit to Magic the Gathering, because I know they spent some time and money researching the best way to teach people how to play the game. (Fun fact: the card Giant Octopus got reprinted in 7th, 8th and 9th edition because it made for a really great picture in the "how to play" comic books. Apparently the octopus trying to eat your opponent makes it easy to remember you're attacking them, not their creatures.) Even so, I learned Magic the only really good way to learn a game I've yet found.

I got someone who knows how to play the game to show me.

Further updates on RISK updates

Ok, ok, one month is better than three, right?

When last I showed my face around this blog we were talking about RISK Legacy. The promise of the game is that each time you play the game changes irrevocably in new and exciting ways. It's interesting territory, stuff that I haven't really seen games doing before. So I'd been waiting to play the game for a couple months before we finally got a chance to.

Dramatis Personae:
Havoc Jack, playing myself
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon

The game comes with five factions, so maybe if we had been able to rustle up a fifth conspirator that'd've been better, but you go to war with the generals you have. Or something. We divided factions between ourselves.

Each faction starts with a special power. Which you have to choose from two. Then you physically peel the sticker off of the card it comes on and place it onto the faction's card. So, for example, Die Mechaniker (which, for those of you who don't "spreckinze Deutsch" is German for "The Mechaniker"), they get to treat the space with their headquarters as fortified. That is, they get a bonus on their dice rolls when defending home. Oh yeah, you get a headquarters when you start the game, to place on a space of your choice. I went with Russia, recently upgraded from being Ukraine on previous boards. The board itself starts the same as standard RISK. It doesn't stay that way for long.

In the game we each also got scar cards, at first they're just two types; a space gets declared "fortified" by putting a bunker scar on it; that gives all defenders +1 on their higher die roll. Or you can have a space with an Ammo Shortage on it, which gives it a -1 to it's defense instead. In the first game, due to a border war I was having with Barbarossa Brazil got the fortification and North Africa the Ammo Shortage. Each player gets one scar per game to place on the board (provided there are enough scar cards left) and each territory can have only one scar. They remain on the board permanently, affecting future games.

To cut to the chase, Napoleon took this one down. He owned Australia. He got to sign the board (They provide 15 lines for signiatures), and he founded a major city (Erik's Land) in Greenland, because he he heh, those suckers are gonna be soo cold. I founded the city of Scandiland in Scandinavia, Barbarossa founded Jaynestown down in Argentina, and I can't quite recall which town Zerg_Rush founded. Possibly the Prussian Consulate in Siam, but maybe that happened in a later game. There are other options for changing the board at the end, (in a later game, which Zerg_Rush won, he renamed North America to "Twelvepakistan". Or you can choose to upgrade a territory card; upgraded cards count as multiple when trading in cards for armies.)

Anyways, with the first game over there are some changes. Cities on a territory mean that the territory is worth 2 or 3 for purposes of counting for armies at the start of your turn. So if I held Scandiland it'd be worth two and Erik's land worth three. And Napoleon gets a missile instead of a red star. The stars act as victory points; if you control four you win the game. You start with one if you haven't signed the board yet (that is, if you haven't won a previous game), and controlling someone else's headquarters counts as one, and you can get them in other ways. By giving Napoleon the missile (which can be used once a game to change one die roll into a six) you make it harder for him to win in the next game.

So we played the next game. Barbarossa took this one down, (holding S. America), and put up a major city in Russia, named Syktyvkr. (This is a running joke from our playing of Russian Rails, basically that any word with eight consonants in a row doesn't deserve to be pronounced correctly. I'm looking at you Kyrgyzstan. So we tend to pronounce it something like "Skeer-ki-veer-ki-verk-i-gard." Or something longer.) And the game evolved more.

In the box they have some cards blocked off in containers with tantalizing instructions. "Don't open until all the minor cities have been placed." "Don't open until a faction has been eliminated." "Don't open until the world capital has been founded." (How do you open the world capital? It must be in one of those containers.) And my personal favorite. "Don't open. Ever."

After the fourth game we were able to open three of them. In the fifth game we had one faction with another special power (having gained one from being eliminated) and a couple new scar types. Due to repeated provocations by Napoleon, who somehow tends to end up down there, Barbarossa scarred West Australia with a toxic waste dump that removes one army from that space every time he takes a turn. Essentially it means that holding the continent is only worth one extra army, a change I think we can all get behind.

So after five games what does the world look like? It's surprisingly more populous; there are cities all over Southeast Asia, various scars all up and down South America, a continent renamed, and five signatures on the board.
Napoleon
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon
Zerg_Rush

Yeah, I'm still irked by that.

So what about the game from a design perspective?

Interesting.

So, I really like the idea of future games proceeding from the way the first one changes. Or, more generally, games that take more into account than the movement of pawns on the board. Richard Garfield's quest to make a game larger than the box it comes in is what gave birth to Magic.

Speaking of Magic, you've got to be careful treading in these grounds. You know how they did a parody set called Unglued? Well, you know what the two least popular cards from that set were? Blacker Lotus and Chaos Confetti. You know what those two cards have in common? Yeah, they both refer to Alpha cards*, but really what I'm saying is they both require you to tear them up to play it. People don't like getting rid of perfectly good stuff. I know I was unhappy to toss away the cards with one sticker still on them, one special ability never to be played. We even went so far as to look up the price of multiple copies of this game in case we wanted to play through it again. Beyond my price range.

Another concern with the game is, once we're past 15 plays, will we be able to continue to play the game? Probably, but if it's still changing at that point it'll only change for the worse. One of the options you have if you win the game is you can tear up a territory card. Literally tear it up. No word as to whether you need to sprinkle it over your opponent's permanents... anyway. You can make them better if you lose a game, so taking that option if you win (instead of renaming a continent, founding a major city, or raising or lowering the army bonus of a given continent) helps you control an out of control territory card. But if you play the game an infinite number of times (in this case, infinity is probably close to 40) you'll run out of territory cards.

Using stickers to modify your cards is probably the best way to handle that, but it does make them harder to shuffle.

How do we manage a play group? Taking the life of the game as fifteen games, it looks like we're going to keep on with the same four players throughout. Most games we invite people over to play, let them play, let them see how things are going, etc. In this one? I sort of want to keep the same group together, because it feels like the 15 games are really all part of one larger one.

Anything else? I think the changes could be a bit more radical. That is, I don't think they're doing enough to change the game. Or maybe I've got enough lingering resentment for how RISK worked beforehand that I could use more change. Still, it'd be nice to see "Nuclear Wasteland: Remove Great Britain from the board." You could print a "cover this up with a sticker" sticker large enough while still fitting it on those cards.

Even so, I'm still pretty happy with the game. Odds are I'll steal some of it's ideas in the future.

If we go 15 games without opening it, I'm cracking the "don't open. ever" pack.

*Hanging Asterisk. I don't see a good place around the web to link to for the chaos confetti legend, so this is a reminder for me to write it up someday.

Killing Zombies for Fun and Profit

Time for an update on the Zombie Game. If you'll recall, last time we discussed it the game was undergoing some serious rules revision. After a couple playtests, it's clear that there need to be some even more serious revisions before we get anywhere with it. Quick recaps: the first game featured a surprise attack by the United States on the Arab League. I know, shocking, right? The game went poorly, due in large part to the fact that we didn't have a decent board at that point. So, a couple weeks later, we tried again. Inspired by the previous surprise attack, I, as the Arab League, launched a surprise attack on Russia, for the same reasoning as previous: their lands were wide open. The counterattacks were not unexpected, but the nuking was. The zombies won soon after that.

So, in the third game, we decided to see what would happen if all sides went after zombies exclusively. Short answer: they'd win, but it takes too long for it to happen. After about seven or eight hours of playtime we eradicated most major concentrations of zombies with several sets of minor outbreaks on the board.

Instead of doing the full recap here, I'm just going to outline some positives and negatives I happened to notice.

Positives:
1. Killing zombies is still really fun.
2. The special abilities the nations have are also a lot of fun.
3. This game is going to be the only time I ever get to say "man, suicide bombers are totally awesome."
4. Making fun of the UN never goes out of style.
5. Rolling 30+ dice at once and still needing to roll more? Also good.

Negatives:
1. Hard to kill zombies fast enough.
2. In a regular game, the zombies are probably going to win.
3. Lack of rulebook meant that half the time we weren't sure how to rule on something.
4. After a while, rolling more than 30 dice can get kind of annoying.
5. Right now, the only way to wipe out all the zombies is with nukes. I'm not opposed to this, but I dislike it being the only option.
6. The event cards are, in general, too uniformly negative, which in a zombie world, might be to be expected. Even so, I think it needs a change.

I think that's about all I've got right now, I might discuss specific changes later now that I've got these going on.

RISK and its updates

Let's talk about RISK. You've played RISK, right? Everybody has. You take your armies and you conquer the world, only someone backstabs you and it all ends in tears. I've even talked about it once or twice on the blog here.* I've played a lot of RISK, probably running the gamut of potential game states. I've played innumerable games, including the time I brought it winter camping with the boy scouts. I've made alliances and nonagression pacts, been backstabbed, broken up other people's alliances, had bitter arguments over the rules and the terms of agreements. I kicked the board over once when I got eliminated on the first turn. I've played once on a double world with two boards, and I even organized my own RISK tournament. (Napoleon won. Oh, don't bother sending in for their tournament information; it's useless. The only thing I learned from it was that the proper spelling of RISK is in all caps.)

Given my longstanding connection to the game, it might come as a surprise when I tell you that the game sucks. Ok, not that much of a surprise, it's not like i didn't foreshadow it by telling you I'd be surprising you. But back to the point. Judging by the standards of today and the other war games you can find on the market, it's a wonder that anyone plays the game at all. Quick rundown of the problems with it:

-Australia. Friggen Australia. You get someone set up there and it becomes prohibitively expensive to go in and root them out. Meanwhile they're getting extra armies every turn.
-The cards. In the long term, it doesn't matter what else you do, the cards is all that matters.
-Diplomacy. I gotta say, I learned a lot of things about negotiations from this game. Trouble is, a lot of those lessons came via harsh penalties; you table talk because if you don't you're screwed. You don't form alliances because if you do, they screw you. You don't break a promise because that's a great way to lose friends. In a permanent sense.
-Only one kind of unit. Makes the strategies pretty straightforward.

That'll do, for now. The point is, while RISK was innovative and exciting when it was introduced what, seventy years ago? Game technology has moved on since then. You've got dozens and dozens of more modern war and strategy games that are a lot more interesting to play. There's a reason why we never seem to stop talking about Axis and Allies here. So why do we still play RISK?

Because everybody plays RISK. Everybody's got at least a passing familiarity with the game. So if you're forced to socialize with those long lost cousins, and they're having trouble coming to grips with the fact that you don't go to the bars for a good time, instead you stay up all night pretending to be a wizard or some such, well, it's something that they'll play. And it does have some merits. I griped about only one kind of unit above; inasmuch as that bothers me as an advanced gamer, the simple rules structure that that entails makes it a lot easier to play with just about anybody. The fact that at least one of them has probably played RISK before is also huge; it's always harder to get your foot in the door with an unknown anything; it's why I've played so many Axis and Allies franchise games, it's why comic book movies are the thing this decade, and it's why when I go to the grocery store and want pickles, I pick up Vlasic ones. Not because I know anything about pickles, but because I've seen their adds before and the comforting warmth of already knowing the brand name is enough to steer me in their direction. I hate advertising so much.

That brand name recognition is huge in terms of marketing the game. RISK is never going to leave the Walmart shelves because of that. Supposing your nephew is turning eight. You don't know a thing the kid, so what do you get him? Maybe you want to get him a game. If you know absolutely nothing about board games you wander into the toy aisle and look at the familiar names, and get him one at random. You pick one you recognize, maybe you dimly remember playing twenty, thirty years ago. What did you pick up? Monopoly. Or Clue. Or RISK. Maybe Yahtzee. Scrabble is for a more mature audience. You know- when they're old enough to snigger endlessly about spelling out dirty words. But back to the point; these games generate huge amounts of revenue for the companies that publish them.

So we've got a cycle going on; kid plays RISK, kid grows up, kid buys RISK for his kids. And while the player base is large enough that you can get steady revenue from this cycle, well, wouldn't it be better if you could turn these kids into true gamers, people who will shell out again and again for your games? To that end, Parker brothers, or Hasbro, or whomever, anyways, they've been publishing variants on RISK to patch up some of the rules, and to hopefully convert their occasional customers into more steady sales.

The first one of these that I ever played was called RISK 2210. "OK, so, you're in the future, right? You fight with giant robot armies. And you get generals with special powers and stuff. Oh, and you can conquer the moon."

Conquering the moon is one of my longstanding goals.

Later I got to play RISK Godstorm. In this one you're in the ancient world, and you summon gods. Which interact much like the generals. Come to think of it, it's suspiciously similar to RISK 2210. Anyways, in this one when your armies die, they get sent to the underworld, where you get to fight it out. When they die there? Then they're really dead.

I gotta admit, being able to sink Atlantis is pretty cool.

While these games are all right, they haven't exactly revitalized my interest in the brand. Sure, I'll play them, but they aren't exactly as exciting as I'd like.

Now, now a new one comes along. RISK Legacy. This one promises that the game will change, irrevocably, depending on how it's played. Interesting. I wonder how they'll do that. Or at least I wondered. I'm five games in now, and some interesting things have gone down. But I've spent too much time yammering about RISK in general, so I'll talk about that. Next post. Which won't take three months, I swear.

*For the people who are bored enough to click and are still curious, I haven't gotten much further with my Markov Chains. I've done some fiddling with simulations rather than actual solutions, which has met with limited success. Unfortunately, I don't trust computer simulations almost at all.

Hey Kids! What time is it?

Time for more Axis and Allies blogging!

Yes, we do go to this particular well quite often, thank you very much for asking. But today is gonna be different, because this time, we played Axis and Allies Revised!

I expect at this point, some people are asking, "What's so different about Axis and Allies Revised, as opposed to Global 1940?" If this is the case, you probably haven't played both of them, and I'm glad to offer my services as one of the players, assuming you have a free weekend or two, and a large surface area on which to put the 1940 board.

The major differences, other than board size, include fewer rules and abilities for Revised, a later starting date (1942), with Panzer divisions poised to parade victoriously through Red Square, Japan more or less ascendant in the Pacific, and fewer nations. 1940, in a historically accurate but otherwise misguided move, also includes France, however in most iterations of that version Germany at the least takes Paris on the first turn, dooming them to well-deserved irrelevance.

For the first time in a long time, we managed five players, but since I'm too lazy to give a nom de blog to any of them, I'll be referring to them as the countries played. Havoc Jack commanded the Imperial Japanese forces, and in a stunning departure from normal roles, I was in charge of the American armed forces.

Having made that long prelude to the actual meat of this post, I find again that I should've taken notes if I wanted to do a proper blog about it, and probably have done it in two posts, if only to boost my count. At any rate, starting from the end, the Allies were victorious due to having mostly locked down Germany; the Japanese forces were nearly poised to backstab Russia however their forward bases (one of which was provided by me, necessarily or not) could not have produced enough to cause too much devastation before Germany went under.

Some other items of note from the game:

After Germany successfully invaded Egypt, the UK attempted to take it back, and failed miserably. This temporarily led to them losing both India and much of Africa, however they were able to offset it somewhat by taking Norway and by the US launching an early invasion of Africa.

Japan did well on its early assaults, however as tends to happen they lost most of their ground forces. Had they more land units to take and hold territory they may well have wreaked more havoc then what they did manage.

In a spectacular bout of bad rolling in one round, Germany, rolling for 10 tanks attacking at 3 or less, managed a single hit. While they did win the battle in the end, due to at best average defense from Russia, it's still worthy of a mention.

The US didn't get nearly as much action as they could have, I probably could have just gone straight for Europe and had better results, especially vis-a-vis Japan's poor showing in terms of infantry.

Germany did a fairly effective job of protecting its air force up until near the end, when it was found that owning Denmark does NOT protect the Baltic sea from being invaded. Which it shouldn't really, given that here Denmark is grouped into Western Europe. When this was discovered, the Allies could have gone for the quick victory and taken Germany, which at this point was covered by only a single fighter, however we allowed a redeployment. Instead an attack was launched at most of the German air force, which happened to be unprotected by infantry, and actually succeeded in taking the territory.

Anything else? Oh, right: I don't like playing as the U.S., especially in this version. They hardly ever get any of the epic die rolling you can expect from the Eastern Front.

Also, when in doubt, buy infantry. I saw two examples of what happens when you don't, an example of why you need to do so, and, full disclosure, one minor counter-example. (To be fair, I wasn't expecting Germany to launch a more or less all-out air assault on the Royal Navy, but that's because I wouldn't do it.) WARNING: That link is to TVTropes. Go through at your own risk.

Design blogging: The Zombie Game

All right! We're back in action in 2012! Okay, enough of that, tonight we're going to be live-blogging our design meeting on one of our games, currently titled "The Zombie Game". Whatever merits we may have as game designers, coming up with good titles is not one of them. The idea for this game came about after watching the movie "Zombieland", and a discussion about why military forces always seem to be unprepared for zombies.

The premise of the game is such: zombies have overrun China, and the other powers of the world are attempting to end the threat before it becomes uncontainable. Why China? Mainly the large population to be zombified and government censorship to prevent the news from getting out. The playable nations are the U.S., India, Russia, and the Arab League, a loose and probably unfeasible coalition of Muslim nations. We originally included the European Union but discarded it as they don't have much viable territory on our game map, plus their military response would be pretty anemic anyway. (Havoc Jack adds there's some doubt it will exist by the time the game is published.)

Gameplay is similar to the Axis and Allies model, with specialized rules for the expansion of zombies and event cards which do things like add random zombie outbreaks around the world.

With the basic explanations out of the way, let's talk about the changes that are being made after our few initial rounds of playtesting, with random excerpts whenever.

First things first: we got rid of the U.N., or at least the game version. As its purpose was more or less similar to the actual U.N. (i.e. condemn Israel and the U.S. and give diplomatic cover to random dictators) it was an unnecessary mechanic and the only reason we could find for keeping it in was to continue to make fun of them. Since we don't need the game to do that it went.

We also removed the oil purchase mechanic we borrowed from the game Powergrid, which mirrors a basic supply and demand function, raising the price as barrels are purchased from the market. While it is admittedly an awesome mechanic, it adds unnecessary complication to the game. With any luck we can get it back in the game later on.

...insert distraction by Youtube here.

Okay, back. Decided to test out various battle scenes. After about 50 test battles against five zombies, it was determined that three tanks are the minimum necessary to have a decent chance of winning a battle. Two infantry and two tanks both only managed to win one battle out of 10, three infantry managed two of 10, and the three tanks won nine of 10.

Last but not least we worked up some notes for national abilities, although these mostly haven't changed much. Still happy with the Arab League having martyrs, although it could be likely to get us in trouble with someone. Being able to take out zombies without fear of losing troops to make more zombies is quite useful, IMO.

Q: How is Italy like the Chicago Bears?

A: They both still suck.

In an attempt to generate some new content, we're gonna reuse some old content. Recently we had another go-round on the old Axis & Allies Global battlefield, so it's time for a few quick ruminations on what went down.

1) In an astoundingly bad play by Havoc Jack commanding UK Europe, the UK was left nearly undefended and overran by an amphibious Nazi invasion. The next turn Germany invaded Russia. After feinting towards Leningrad and handily defeating a Red Army counterattack, the Wehrmacht swung south into the richer lands of the Ukraine, headed towards Stalingrad.

2) After negotiating a five-turn ceasefire with Russia, Japan launched an all-out assault on the US on the first turn. After successfully taking both Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as a daring sweep into Alaska, the Japanese offensive bogged down while battling UK Pacific. This was entirely due to a foolish decision on my part to allow UK Pacific to collect the African IPCs of UK Europe, although I was swayed by a Churchill quote, that wily old bastard.

3) While the American counterattack was defeated, the Axis were not able to build up quickly enough to overcome the American income, and thanks to a slightly problematic purchase for Japan that didn't protect the home island enough the US was able to take Japan for a split. (After about the second round we had to break for the day and picked it up on a second day at which we engaged the UK Pacific collecting African IPC rule.)

4) Italy still sucks. During the first round, the Italian fleet had as good a chance as it would ever have to overcome the British fleet, and failed to roll a four in three consecutive rounds. The remaining fleet and air force were unable to drive the British remnants out, and later a newly built Italian fleet failed miserably at defending itself, as well as the Italian army being hammered by an extremely lucky British defense. Given the final outcome of the game, I can't say that it was Italy's fault this time, but had they done better it might have drawn more US interest and/or allowed them to put auxiliary pressure on Russia.

Rocking the Innistrad Prerelease

Before I get into anything else, a quick correction. In my last article I reported that it took Doyt three months at 8 hours a day to achieve the Insane. Actually, it only took him three months at five hours a day. Plan your achievements accordingly.

This previous weekend Fountain of Youth games held a prerelease for Innistrad, the latest Magic the Gathering set. Like many good things, this story starts with waffles.

At the Friday Night Magic before, I made an agreement with one of the locals to make waffles. At the prerelease. At 10:00 am, when the doors open. So I bring the wafflemaker, I get there at 10:00 and he's nowhere to be seen. At 10:40 I'm sick of waiting, and I haven't had breakfast yet, so I make a run to the local grocery store and pick up what's necessary. As usual, I forget some important components, so I'm mixing with a plastic fork and I have to send another guy out to find me some syrup. Luckily the gas station down the road had some.

At noon the other guy shows up. With 32 double stackers from Burger King. Turns out it's free waffle free burger day at the game store. Which is awesome.

This is critical to the gaming narrative because providing waffles to the populace at large seems to have given me a karmic boost that I rode the rest of the day. In my sealed pool I pulled a new Garruk, and plenty of red and green stuff to play along side him. I ended up with a super aggressive deck and I handily dealt with most opponents. My favorite play of the day:

Turn three I drop a Kruin Outlaw. He doesn't have a play. On my upkeep he transforms into a 3/3 evasive double striker. I play an Inquisitor's flail, equip and swing in four twelve. I won that game the next turn.

I went 3-0, at which point I was able to intentionally draw with the other players into the top eight. Now, I can go either way on that sort of shenanigan. On the one hand it seems cheap for me to guarantee my way into the top eight draft without any risk. On the other hand, well, drafting is pretty awesome. A free draft is even better, and if you can get into the prize support (Fountain of Youth has a very vertical prize structure; only the top 4 got prizes), the prize support makes things better. After drawing with my opponents I did play out the matches "just to see", and I would have ended the day at 4-1, which would have gotten me into the top eight anyway, so my conscience is assuaged. Maybe I'll go into more detail on this subject later.

In the top eight, I wanted to draft red. My brother tells me that red is going to be one of the more powerful colors in the format, and I tend to believe him. However the consensus around the store is that red is a weak color in the format. So I intended to force red, prove my brother right and take all of them down. Based on the packs and the cards available I went blue black tribal zombies. It turned out much worse than I expected. The blue zombies are good, but they require you to lose creatures from your graveyard. The black removal is ok, but it also wanted me to lose creatures from my graveyard. And I had a couple powerful raise dead effects, but that resource was pretty darn low by the time I got around to those. Best card in the deck was, unsurprisingly, Evil Twin. Which, incidentally, is my favorite card in the set. At one point I copied a 5/5 regenerator, and was having to block something else every turn and try to shoot the regenerator, holding them both off. I won one round and lost the next, leaving me in 3rd or 4th overall, and with 4 packs of prize support. Huzzah!

The other high point in the day (and a day that has both waffles and a prerelease ranks pretty darn high already) there was a wizards representative at our store. Mark Gottleib, of the Innistrad development team (and much other experience at WOTC) had other business in town, so he showed up to gunsling at the prerelease. For reasons which I can't fathom his table wasn't incredibly busy all day, so I got to hang around, take on his sealed deck (I won, like I said, my deck was good), and so forth. I got him to sign my Living Wish. You see, Mr. Gottleib was rules manager when the M10 rules changes were enacted. One of the changes took "removed from game" and replaced it with "exile". Since the wishes got cards that were outside of the game, they could no longer retrieve cards that were exiled. Instead you get stuff out of your sideboard or collection. As Mr. Gottleib physically wrote on my card "Exiled cards aren't really out of the game". Though I have some lingering resentments over the M10 rules changes (and not very many; really they did an amazing job with that set in general), I was glad for an opportunity to meet one of the developers.

On Sunday I came back, but made no waffles. My sealed pool pushed me into Jund colors (Red Green and Black), with three shimmering grottos to fix mana. I got a first round bye, and then proceeded to go 1-3 the rest of the tournament. Sad.

Not that many people showed up on Sunday, so the store had extra product, so they were able to schedule an impromptu prerelease draft. Cost more than usual, with some prize support, but most interestingly it's a chance to draft the new set. Once again, I tried forcing red. This time I ended up in red green, very aggressive werewolf deck. I didn't draft any of the enablers (moonmist, for example), but I did have a solid wall of creatures to keep dropping. I narrowly won out the first match against another werewolf deck. I narrowly lost the second match against a mono black deck. It came down in game three to him having the second Bump in the Night to burn me out the turn before I would have killed him. Round three I lost against a guy who had the Sturmgeist I couldn't deal with. I probably would have had him anyhow if I could have dealt with his Crab Fortress

Net outlay $80 on games, for a total of 22 packs. I beat the Wal-Mart $4.00 a pack price, but only just. While I enjoyed myself immensely, I'm frustrated that I haven't yet mastered the format. Looking forward to more drafts.

The Joys of Meaningless Rewards

Today we talk about filling bars. The meaningless rewards that games give you to make you keep playing the game. I'm even going to go one step further than that. Your standard fantasy RPG, you get experience points until you level up, and when you level up you gain new abilities and get more powerful and all that. That's your traditional leveling structure. The thing about that is that it actually lets you play the game more efficiently. I'm going one step less useful. The Cheevos.

World of Warcraft rolled out achievements late in the Burning Crusade expansion. When you get your first honorable (read PvP) kill, you get an achievement. Then for 25, and 100, and 500, and 1000, I forget all the increments but it goes up to at least 100,000. So if you keep playing the game you move up the achievement scale. The further up you get, the more achievement points you have, and you can compare these things to the other players. You look at that link? That's Zerg_Rush's primary WoW character, clocking in at 8165 achievement points. You know what those points do for him? Nothing. They might earn him the respect of other players, but they might also earn their pity. If you check his Feats of Strength (pretty long list, actually) he's got "Insane in the Membrane" (and, I hasten to add, the hard version from before that also required Shen'dralar rep before they removed it from the game), which took him approximately eight hours a day for three months to manage. Impressive yeah, but it doesn't let him kill things any faster.

That's not to say that WoW is the only one that does achievements. Far from it. Pretty much everybody is dipping their toes into the field as "gamification" becomes the new marketing buzzword. Three minutes into that presentation and you learn that looking at three lolcats gets you a badge, and that the icanhascheezburger group awards achievements now. Frightening stuff.

This tends to make me unhappy, because I've got two conflicting desires on this front. On the one hand, I like completing things; I like getting trophies or badges or whatnot, and if I know that there's one for doing X task, then you'd better believe I'm going to be doing X task. 5000 damage from a single Hadouken? I'm on it. But I really don't like getting caught in these things with everybody. Lolcats? I'll stay away. Even in games I enjoy playing (Half Life 2 springs to mind) the achievements make me want to go back and make sure I checked every nook and cranny for the solution, but I don't always want that pressure. I've got time constraints like everybody else, and not every game is worth a second or third or nth playthrough.

This was mostly brought to mind by Magic's new rating system. I'm a level 31 Invoker! Have yet to see how that has any real world consequence at all. Even so, I'll probably check back from time to time to see when I hit level 31

I can't deny the motivational effects. If you've got a game worth playing I usually end up trying to max out the cheevos. As careful as I am to avoid this sort of thing I can exploit it myself if I find a good enough reason. Enter Mindhack. In the game of life I apparently made Will my dump stat (and Charisma, and Strength... you know what? let's move on.) To fortify a low score, I'm trying one of these reward systems. I wrote a calculator program with a simple experience and level system, and I award myself experience for doing things that ought to be done. Yesterday, I hit level two. And I was happy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to award myself 100 exp for completing a blogpost.

Replays and Replayability

(No, this isn't going to be a what-if featuring Jane Austen playing D&D. -ed) (Hey, that's not a bad idea! -B) (No! -ed) (C'mon! -B) (Dammit, I said no! -ed)

Warning: This post will contain links to game wikis. If you are worried about spoilers, I suggest not following those links through.

So yeah, this issue's been bugging me for a while, and if I can't get a suitable discussion out of it, I can at least get some content in here. First of all, what makes a game re-playable? Using some of our standard examples, in Kingdom of Loathing, once you beat the final boss, you are given the option to ascend and start at level 1, keeping one or more skills from your previous run, and doing the new run in a variety of different ways. In Fallout: New Vegas, and the other Fallout games to varying extents, you can play through using different skills and/or make different choices, leading to other endings. Another option used in New Vegas is that of achievements, giving you some sort of boost to your fragile ego by giving you awards for things that you either might normally not do, or for doing a lot of the things you would usually do. If you have a couple spare hours, you might ask Zerg_Rush how he got the title "The Insane" for one of his WoW characters. I'm sure you've run across these tactics to squeeze more playtime from other games, I'm just using the examples I've run most recently. Some, of course, are more effective than others.

The more philosophical question is what actually causes one to replay a game? Havoc Jack just spent at least one post talking about how he's restarted Diablo II, but I can't normally seem to muster up that much desire to replay a lot of games, especially after I just finished it, whereas I've seen him finish a Starcraft I campaign and immediately start replaying the same campaign. Every once in a while, I will go back into the vaults and work up some game I haven't played in a while, but for the most part I don't replay games that much. Starcraft II was pretty awesome, but after playing it once I haven't really gone back to it at all, except for running a few missions trying to get achievements. I haven't actually finished Fallout: New Vegas yet, but I don't really plan on playing through again once all the DLC comes out and I actually do finish the game. I ran though Fallout 3 twice, although that was primarily because I got DLC for that and decided it would be simpler to play through again. On the other hand I play KoL all the time, and am constantly ascending. Perhaps it's just that easier accessibility to a wiki and easier character optimization makes me want to play it more, although according to Steam I have played New Vegas for 62 hours, so I guess that's a decent amount of time spent on it. And of course, I did end up reading a lot of the wiki, and sometimes I find that reduces my desire to actually play the game.

I'm not sure why this single-play tendency only applies to video games, though. I've played any number of board games any number of times, I've watched many movies as much as I could stand, and nearly all the books on my bookshelf have been read dozens of times.

Insofar as no one else can answer the question for me, perhaps if anyone actually reads this blog instead of it being a vanity project for us they can attempt to answer the question for themselves.

Diablo II and the Penny Box

My local game store buys Magic collections fairly often. They have a special table in the back where they sort the cards. The good ones go into the case in front, they've got a shelf of binders, and most importantly they've got a penny box.

A given magic block has about 550 cards in it, 1/3rd of which are commons. Commons show up in a booster pack at a ratio of 11 commons to 3 uncommons to one rare or mythic rare. So let's say that the shop has about 3000 cards from Alara block sitting in the back there. Assuming an even distribution they'll get about 12 of each common. Now, they don't need twelve of every single common. they hold on to about ten, but excess cards are dumped into the penny box.


Enter the cheap magic player. I love this game, I love building decks, and of course I don't have the cash to acquire all the cards I want. Or most. Or even many. And honestly, cards like Gravedigger are perfectly fine, if they aren't going to make the tournament decks anytime soon. You can still build a good, fun casual decks. And I do. And thanks to that penny box I've got 47 copies of Terramorphic expanse, waiting for decks. I've spent about $20 buying penny cards.

A couple weekends ago, a friend of mine proposed a LAN party. We'd all bring our computers over and play Diablo II in a networked game until the wee hours of the morning. Ok, it's a good idea, Diablo II still remains one of the best games of all time. I spent significant portions of high school playing the game when I should have been studying, but I got over the game, and in times past I couldn't really work up enough interest to get past halfway through Act I.

I bet you know how this is going to turn out, right?

My necromancer is level 81 now, and doing Magic Find runs in Hell. (Hell is the highest difficulty level. One thing Diablo II did right, they got the style down.) In the game one of the many randomized modifiers you can find on items is "% better chance to find magic items". So you can get items which give you a better shot at getting even better items. It's a cycle, and it's rewarding, and pretty soon you find you can't stop. I got my Blade of Ali Baba and my Goldwrap, but I'm still waiting on my Chance Guards and War Travellers.

The real interesting point about this is the feeling; I can slay my way through the legions of hell with relative boredom, but the minute that Unique Grim Shield drops the adrenalin rushes and I get that cold gambler's thrill while I take my portal in to confirm that it is indeed a Lidless Wall.

I get a remarkably similar feeling when I'm looking through the penny box. Sure, those terramorphics are nice, but every so often I find a card that the store owner undervalued; last time I dug through that box I got a playset of Life and Death, which the internet values at about a quarter, but it's still a much better reanimation spell than they've printed since, well, since about Life and Death. In later times they prefer to print better creatures and worse ways to cheat them into play. I've also found other good stuff in that box, a Zuran Orb and a pair of Animate Dead for example.

And then I think about my brother, Zerg_Rush. He spent more time magic finding in the old days of Diablo II than anyone, and even though he doesn't play much Magic anymore he'd still like you to know he pulled a foil Elspeth Tirell out of the booster packs from Wal-mart.

I usually don't go for casino games; I see the rate of return and decide that I have better games to waste my money on. But apparently the motivation still works on me.

The Best deck in Modern

Ok, maybe it's not the best deck, but it's certainly the most awesome. From the pro tour this weekend:

To start with, the deck plays like your usual midrange deck; it grinds out incremental card advantage by trading up creatures with it's Birthing Pods. Start with a Wall of Roots, Take it's mana and sacrifice it with the pod to get a Kitchen Finks. Next turn, sacrifice the Finks to get a Murderous Redcap. For the investment of a wall and four mana (three if you don't count the one the wall produced) you get: 4 life, a 2/1 creature, a 2/2 creature and two damage to direct to any source you'd like. Next turn you can sacrifice the redcap to get a Reveillark or something. You're getting a lot of value for your cards. So even if the deck didn't engage in any other shenanigans you'd have a shot at taking your opponent down.

But does it engage in other shenanigans? It does. Oh yes it does. Take a look at Melira. Then read the fine print on Persist. Persist checks if the creature has a -1/-1 counter on it. If it doesn't, then when the creature dies it comes back, and persist puts one on. But if Melira is in play, then your creature can't have the counter put on it. So it comes back, but without the counter. So if it dies again, then persist will bring it back. Again. And again. So if you set up a Viscera Seer, for example, then you can keep sacrificing the creature and bringing it back over and over and over. To recap: Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite life. Melira + Finks + Viscera Seer = Infinite direct damage. And if you've got the Finks combo, the Seer's scry ability even lets you find the Redcap.

So, in addition to the already solid midrange deck, you've got an infinite combo that doesn't even require bad cards to pull off. (Viscera seer is questionable on it's own, and Melira sans combo pieces really is only good against the combo poison decks that showed up, but finks and redcap are fine creatures even without support). Granted also that you've got effective tutoring methods (two different ways to search creatures into play) you can stuff your deck with all sorts of random creatures as answers to particular problems. It also gives you space to tune your deck for particular metagames. I can see how this deck went 8-2 in the highest level Magic tournament out there. (I presume Mr. Jaklovsky also had something to do with it).

Still, if I were to build the deck, (and you can darn well bet I will, soon as I get my hands on some more birthing pods) I think it'd be a little more... silly. To wit, there's another combo that you could easily shoehorn into the deck, but which Mr. Jaklovsky delclined so to do. Probably this was a deliberate choice tuning, which makes the deck more efficient, and therefore more likely to kill. But I'm too happy with the notion of the combo to dismiss it entirely. It uses Viscera Seer and Reveillark, which are in the deck already, to set up a stable loop with Saffi Eriksdotter.

Have Saffi, Reveillark and Seer in play. Sacrifice Saffi with her own ability, targeting Reveillark. Sacrifice lark to the Seer. Bring back two creatures with lark, one of which is Saffi and the other is up to you. Saffi's ability resolves, and brinks lark back from the graveyard to play. You're back where you started, but now you've got another creature in play. What that other creature is gives you a wealth of options.

Acidic Slime lets you destroy all their noncreature permanents.
Eternal Witness lets you return your graveyard to your hand
Tidehollow Sculler lets you force them to discard their hand (there's a trick to making sure the cards stay removed from game; it involves stacking the triggers properly and sacrificing Sculler again quickly. I'm not going to explain it here)
Wall of Roots lets you generate infinite green mana
And, of course, Murderous redcap can kill them and all their creatures in play.

Those are just the options that are already in the deck. Some more options:

Mulldrifter lets you draw out your deck
Elvish Pioneer lets you play all the basic lands you draw that way.
Nevermaker allows you to put all your opponent's permanents on top of their library
Merrow Witsniper lets you mill them all into their graveyard
Offalsnout lets you remove their graveyard from the game
Riftsweeper (along with Mulldrifter) gets you back anything that has been exiled
Siege-Gang Commander gives you an army of goblins
Essence Warden gets you infinite life

If you're keeping track, that allows us to draw all the cards in our deck, get back anything in the graveyard or that's been removed from the game, play out all our basic lands, play out anything in our deck that requires green mana, make infinite goblin tokes, kill anything your opponent has in play, or stack it on the top of his deck, mill his deck away, rip his hand, and exile everything in the graveyard. Leaving you with everything you could possibly have in play, a hand stocked with whatever you like, infinite life and mana, and leaving him with no permanents, no deck, no graveyard and only a couple land in his hand.

Furthermore, if you consider the Eternal Witness options, you can get back and replay any spell any number of times. For example, a Desperate Ritual played again and again gives you infinite red mana as well. Theoretically this lets you do even more things (rip those last lands from his hand, play out the nonbasic lands stuck in your hand, or possibly steal all his stuff) but I'm going to leave working out the details as an exercise for the student.

Or you could be boring, return a Murderous Redcap and just kill him. But if you do it that way, you'll never understand why Blofeld keeps investing in sharks and piranha traps.

Women.

Women. I tell you. See this? This annoys me.

Basically, the girl sets up an online dating account, and goes out on a date with Jon Finkel. She finds out he's a gamer. He played and plays Magic, the Gathering. And she decides "I'm never talking to this guy again."

Ok, I understand that being a nerd means you don't get the girls. And as a shlub who's main magic achievement is occasionally taking down a Friday Night Magic tournament, well, it isn't the thing I talk up when I'm trying to impress someone. Still, there's less stigma now than before, since pretty much everybody's a gamer now. At least amongst the younger crowd.

The thing that really annoys me about this whole bit is the impossibility in her mind of mitigating circumstances. Aside from the basics, he's not just good at the game, he's the best. Over the course of his career, competing against some of the smartest and most dedicated people in the world he's earned $291,865. And I'm pretty sure that number is low; the profile in question doesn't mention his surprising return from retirement to out and out win Pro Tour Kuala Lumpur. This guy lived the dream. But apparently having touched the cards is enough to make him undateable.

"Look, I understand you're Wayne Gretzky, it's just that I don't go for hockey players."
"Oh, you're THAT Angela Merkel? Well, I'm not very political, and seeing as you're the prime minister of Germany..."

MMO Arbitrage

So today I'm going to talk about an idea I had back in the day, possibly even while still in high school. As the title says, it's MMO arbitrage. I'll assume here that anyone reading this blog knows what an MMO (or MMORPG if you want the full acronym) is, but arbitrage may not be, so if you're too lazy to click that link, it's the process of making profits by trading something (usually currencies) at different rates. How does this work? Let's say I can buy euros with dollars at a 1:1 ratio in Lisbon. I can then sell the euros for $2 in Prague, then return to Lisbon and purchase twice as many euros, and repeat the cycle. The really good arbitrage is going to go through three or four currencies along the way and won't make near as much money per unit. (Ideally you'd also cash out with dollars and head to the States to spend them up, or find another arbitrage cycle to play with)

Anyway, how does this relate to games you may ask? Again, I'm assuming you did, because that's the question that's about to get answered. My plan was to create a stable of characters in several different MMOs, each of which had a certain amount of ingame cash. (The amount? Large) This would allow players who'd accumulated a large amount of cash in one game to trade it for cash in another game, so they could enjoy the wealth they had accumulated. Of course, most people could see several problems with this, such as:

1. Wouldn't it take a lot of time to accumulate that much wealth on that many games? Yes, it would. Unless of course I were able to recruit already rich players or buy them off. I suppose buying resources would be reasonable, given that most businesses expect to start off with a certain amount of investment.

2. How would you determine the cash value of the ingame currencies? The only one I can give a good accounting for is Kingdom of Loathing. As has been previously discussed, the game's currency is Meat, and there's no subscription fee. You can however donate $10 and receive a Mr. Accessory, which in addition to being pretty useful its own dang self can be traded in for monthly Items which do even more nifty things, and more importantly be sold to other players, making for a decent currency conversion. Currently they're selling for 8 million meat, making the conversion roughly 800,000 meat/dollar. So there's one.

3. How would you make money? Besides taking a commission on trading currency from one game to another, there would presumably be personal arbitrage trading and other deals going on the side, assuming the time and wherewithal to do so.

4. What would cause people to trust you? If my word of honor isn't enough, I shall demand satisfaction! Really, though, there's not much of a way, although I'm not familiar enough with PayPal to be sure that there's not a way to enforce a deal if it goes south.

5. How would you know what games to work with to actually get profits? Again, I've no real idea. My guess would be it would require one character in pretty much all MMOs that had a decent fanbase.

6. What about games that don't allow reselling of currency or items via third-party vendors? What about them? This is probably the biggest hurdle, but not the one that actually stopped me. (It was laziness more than anything) If I thought I could actually make a decent profit off this thing, I'd be willing to see if I could work around this. Unfortunately, I think it's just a decent idea. Still worth blathering about though.

Modelling Axis and Allies

I've been trying to mathematically model an arbitrary Axis and Allies battle for a while now. Not having managed to do that, I went one lower, and taught my calculator to simulate the battles. I'm going to post the code.

Program: AXIS

{0,0,0,0,0}->AT2
{0,0,0,0,0,0}->DE2
0->WIN

Just setting up a couple variables here. Rather than individual units we list attacking units that fire at 1, 2, and so forth. The list also includes attack at zero for the first hit on battleships, for example. The Defense list has six entries, for the possibility of jet fighters defending at 5

Input "Attackers at zero:",A
Input "...at one:",B
Input "...at two:",C
Input "...at three:",DD
Input "and at four",E
{A,B,C,DD,E}->ATTACK
{A,B,C,DD,E}->AT1
Input "Defenders at zero:",A
Input "...at one:",B
Input "...at two:",C
Input "...at three:",DD
Input "...at four",E
Input "...and at five",F
{A,B,C,DD,E,F}->DEFENSE
{A,B,C,DD,E,F}->DE1

So, seeing as I"m doing this on my calculator, there are... interface issues. Basically I've got to express the question as a series of queries. The ABC variables can be ignored. "D" was used for something else important that I didn't want to mess with.

Input "Number of simulations",A
For(N,1,A)
ALLIES

"ALLIES" Is the command to run the eponymous program. After this is a bunch of stuff tallying results of a particular run of the battle.

[snip]
End

The specifics of tallying are moved to afterwards, where they'll make a bit more narrative sense. Moving on to the subroutine:

Program: ALLIES

0->HIT
0->DHIT

Clearing up some variables. From here there are going to be a number of nested loops, it's going to get complicated.

While (sum ATTACK)*(sum DEFENSE)>0

Recall from above that the sum of either list is the number of units on that side left on the battlefield. When one of them zeroes out the program ends.

For (M,2,5)

...makes sure what follows goes down each attack value of attacking units

For (O,0,ATTACK(M))

And this one does the operation for each individual attacking unit

If randInt(1,6)=HIT

Rolls one six sided die per unit, adding up the total number of hits.

End
End

Ends both for loops. We're still inside a while loop, and the for loop from the previous program. If you're keeping track, this is the attacker doing one round of attacking.

For(M,2,6)
For(O,0,DEFENSE(M))
If randInt(1,6)=DHIT
End
End

A mirror image of the attacker's code, with the usual exception for jet fighters. Note that casualties haven't been removed yet, so all defensive units in the casualty zone get their parting shot. Naturally, this means the model is invalid for submarines with first strike.

For (M,1,5)
If ATTACK(M))>DHIT
Then ATTACK(M)-DHIT->ATTACK(M)
0->DHIT
Else DHIT-ATTACK(M)->DHIT
0->ATTACK(M)
End
End

A more complicated equation, I'm separating it out a bit to make it more readable. Parse the logic if you like, basically it removes casualties while ensuring it never goes to negative numbers. The first End is for the If statement, the second for the For loop.
The defense has an identical loop, only with the variables DEFENSE for ATTACK and HIT for DHIT. Oh, and the For loop goes up to six.

End

And that's the finish of that While loop at the start of this program. If after a particular round of combat one or both armies is eliminated, the while loop triggers and we go back to the main program, to finish out that For loop.

If sum ATTACK>0 Then WIN+1->WIN

If there are still attackers at the end of the battle, the sum of the ATTACK list will be greater than zero; indicating the attacker took the country.

(Back to AXIS)
ATTACK+AT2->AT2
DEFENSE+DE2->DE2
AT1->ATTACK
DE1->DEFENSE

If any units survived on the invading side, they'll be expressed as integers in the ATTACK list. AT2 gives you a running sum of all the units that survive in each simulation. Same with DE2. The other two lines reset the lists to your original inputs before you go back for another jog through the loop. (Remember, this is all in the context of a For loop from above.)

Once the loop stops, once the simulation is run, we can tally up the results:

Disp (Win/A),(AT2/A),(DE2/A)
Stop
Hammertime

The first number you get is the percentage of the simulations where the attackers took the country. The second list gives you how many units the attacking army can expect to survive, and the third list is the expected survivors on the defense. Stop stops the program, so it never actually gets to the necessary sequel, which is a comment on the code. Or a comment on my taste in jokes.

And one general, vital question: Do I trust the results? In a word, no. I'm always suspicious of computer models in any situation, and I'm not convinced my logic is satisfactory in this case in particular. And even if my logic holds up this is still based on rolling a large number of dice; while you won't get too far away from the law of averages it's still an inexact predictor.

Yeah, ok, so we can't necessarily trust the results; what sort of results does the program give? Bad ones. By setting up a battle that can have only one outcome (attackers at zero, defenders not) I find the modeled results don't match up to reality. So it looks like I'm going to have to save this post, do some debugging and come back. Grr.

After saving this post, doing some debugging, and finally coming back, I don't have a solution. My logic is fine, as far as I can read it, so I'm not sure where the errors are creeping in. Even so, I'm lacking in content, so I'll post this now and maybe give you an update if I ever figure out where I'm going wrong.

Assemble one Economy

Now that we have our solar system more or less laid out, let's continue looking into the economy. Broadly speaking, the economy exists to transform time into spaceships with which to blast the enemy. Consequently, in broad strokes let's try and figure out what goes into spaceships.

There are only a few really vital characteristics to a warship. From my previous post, the interesting ones are:


How hard it hits
How many hits it can take
How accurately it fires
How fast it can move
How much it can carry

The question here is, how do you achieve those characteristics, and what materials do you need so to do?

How hard it hits:
Nuclear weapons. Your standard atom bomb has a hollow sphere of plutonium in the middle, surrounded by a soccer ball array of high explosives, which have some complicated electronic triggering mechanism. Then you stick it in a steel shell so it doesn't fall apart, and a rocket engine on the back to get it where you want it to go. (the bomb detonates by blowing the high explosives to crush the plutonium into a very small nugget, which then hits critical mass. It's bombarded by neutrons, and all hell breaks loose.)
So, in a materials checklist we have: Plutonium, High Explosives, Advanced Electronics, Steel, and a Rocket Engine.

What's in a rocket engine? Let's skip down to

How fast it can move

I'm thinking of these ships moving due to advanced fusion motors. What makes them advanced? My say so. Also, if you install a Langston Field into a heat engine you can get some interesting properties. If you stop over once again at the incontestably useful Project Rho, you learn that one of the main factors that affects the feasibility of engines is not letting your engine melt due to waste heat. If we run our fusion reactions inside an inverted Langston field, the energy from the reaction is absorbed and emitted only inwards; we can sustain all kinds of scary high energy reactions without damaging our ship or crew. Just leave a hole open in the back so that you can go rocketing along. (I haven't run the numbers proper just yet, but I expect I'll work off of this type of engine)

Anyways, an engine includes Fuel, Reaction Mass and a Langston Field generator. Since I mentioned the ability for spaceships to generate their own hydrogen supplies (again with that field. You see why I try to keep my miracle devices to a minimum?), I think we'll qualify both fuel and reaction mass as Hydrogen, allowing us to move on to

How many hits it can take

Which is entirely dependent on the properties of a Langston Field generator. So I guess I've got to 'fess up to what's actually in these things. You ready?

Exotic Materials.

No, I don't have any idea how one of those things ought to work either. Moving along;

How accurately it fires

Since we're pretty much entirely talking about missiles, we're asking what a missile needs to connect with it's target. It needs to find a potential target, identify as friend or foe, measure relative positions, velocities and accelerations and modify it's own vectors to collide with said target. It also needs something to tell it precisely when to detonate.

All that I'm going to sum up in my previous category of Advanced Electronics. Convenient. One last warship category:

How much it can carry

Seeing as cargo space is mostly empty volume, we can ignore this category. Or, in a move that saves me some rewriting on this post, we can talk about what the ship needs to carry some of it's more vital components; people.

People require some basic things to live. Food, water, air, access to the internet. At least those first three. In the context of our discussion, our spaceships have to be able to carry a basic livable habitat for the people. In resource terms, I'm going to shoehorn all of that into Organics; I'm looking to build game pieces not actual starships. Note though, that a troop transport ship will require a whole lot more life support than an ore freighter.

There are also considerations involving the ship itself; you need a steel framework to hold the various pieces together (you could go with titanium or some such, but with the Langston field providing the defense, you really only need enough structure to hold the thing together. Steel is still cheapest.) You need some vast, complicated bridge with a huge glass window and oddly shaped chairs and large computer banks with blinking lights on them. There are other features that are useful for maintenance, Medbays, Machine shops, the sergeant's illicit still, that sort of stuff. But broadly speaking, they fall under the same resource categories. To sum up:
Organics, Steel, Advanced Electronics

Let's list out those resource types for all the categories:
Plutonium
High Explosives
Advanced Electronics
Steel
Hydrogen
Exotic Materials
Organics

Seven types of resource. Can we pare that list down at all? Sure. For starters, let's just pretend the High Explosives don't exist. (Side note: this is not a winning legal defense.) Furthermore, Plutonium is only a component on the bomb side of things. If we upgrade to H-bombs, we still need a plutonium detonation to trigger the hydrogen explosion. I suppose I could just say "Future!" and hand wave that away. I think I'd rather shoehorn it into the Exotics category. One more; Hydrogen, while it's useful to remember it's there, can be safely ignored. That brings us down to four categories:

Electronics
Metals
Organics
Exotics

I'm going to add in one more category:

Labor

Or possibly Money. I'm less certain about this one than the others. While I don't want to get into all the details of financing (buy war bonds!) I want to provide a resource that can be expended to ease tension between other resource amounts. So, if you don't have enough Electronics one week you can expend a certain amount of Metals and Labor to turn it into Electronics. Or if you need more steel, you can expend labor to boost it up wholesale from Earth's gravity well. (Remember, the cheapest way to get steel in space is to start with steel that's already up there; thus the asteroid mining and so forth. You can stick some on a Saturn V rocket and send it up to the orbital factories, but that'll cost you.)

It also allows us to gather resources from locations that wouldn't have them normally, or produce the wrong type. There's a small settlement on Mars; not large enough to pull things out of the gravity well. So what good is it? It produces Labor.

As with most things at this stage of the game, these resources aren't set in stone. Except for the metals, which are probably an ore in some obscure asteroid right now. Next time I get back to this topic We'll go over a map of the solar system and discuss what gets produced where, and how much.