Familiar Moments in Games

Obviously board games are great - the things themselves, that is. Amazing art, the beautiful simplicity of a great mechanic, an elegant scoring system, a stunningly-sculpted miniature, the texture of a card or piece…. and man, that new game smell. But of course games are really about people. The friends and enemies you play with, and the times you have. We could start off our blog with a game diary about how Beastly Bust-Up came together - how we built the rules, how we found the fun and how we made - and keep making - mistakes. I’m sure that would be great for one or two of our best friends and Ben’s mum and our paid hangers on, but instead we thought it might be more interesting to focus a bit more on people, particularly the stories and moments that make up an evening pushing bits of cardboard and plastic around. So here’s a series on moments - on being in the lead, and being realising you’re out of the race, on messing about, and on planning ahead - and a few more.

On careful plotting vs messing about

People who we spoke to about this most fundamental of board game debates had ferociously varying beliefs. Some looked deep inside themselves and found that messing about can help to soothe their more egocentric tendencies. Others came out as fundamentalists, glued to the idea that messing about is a game-by-game decision and not an inherent right of all players. If the game allows it, you may caper.

By and large, these different camps are divided along lines of competitiveness. Surprising, no? Those who want to win don’t like loose cannons rolling around. It disrupts their plans. Even if you’re not leading or you’re out of contention, shouldn’t you be making the eventual winner earn their props? If there’s one thing that competitive players can’t stand, it’s someone falling behind and deciding that they can get more fun out of things by trolling through to the end. To win a game – and this is mostly taken on trust from people who do it regularly – you’ve got to have your own plan in place but at the same time you need a fair idea of what everyone else is after. As soon as they cut loose and swing away from the shared objective, you’re out on a limb.

Naturally, not everyone is as monocular as to forge on with their own clown show at the expense of the competitive tension. After all, nobody wants to be "that kid who doesn’t understand the rules of football and thinks it’s funny to run onto the pitch and pick the ball up". But some of us like a game to be just a game – not a fight! If we’re all here to eat crisps and roll dice then why not muck around and give people something to laugh at? Isn’t it funny to throw a spanner in the works when someone’s been sweating for hours? Okay maybe that would be rough if the shoe were on the other foot. But what about if they nobbled you earlier in the game? Well… okay. Now we’re into some lovely tit-for-tat stuff.

Are you taking your go or not?
Bring me some more bloody Cheetos and I'll think about it.

Emerging nemeses

Those rivalries, emerging over the course of a game, can be just as fulfilling as a final victory. Hands up who hasn’t coasted to an unexpected win while the other side of the table descended into petty revenge missions and increasingly self-righteous indignation. In our gaming circles at least, those fulminating squabbles live on far longer than the brief glow of getting the most points. But that’s something for another post.

So what are those brainboxes doing while the other half of us are monopolising the sheep cards or flicking our counters into each other’s drinks? They’re planning apparently! Yeah, working out what to do before they do it. You know what else? They’re doing it during your turn as well. The audacity of it. It’s a strange quirk of playing these kinds of games that the planning time afforded by the duration of other players’ turns doesn’t translate into a delight from those players when someone more ponderous takes 15 minutes to have their go.

Surely that’s money in the bank for the planners and plotters? Doesn’t it buy them even more time to polish and hone their scheme and revel in the anticipation of enacting it?

No, because once that one optimal course of action has been discovered and worked towards, the ultimate dread is that someone else will trample all over it.

Just let me make it to my next turn...

That’s a dreadful, heart-flattening experience when it happens at the hands of another multi-brained rival. But at least you’re dying by the sword. You’d have got them if they hadn’t got you, and at least they had to work for it – either by sweating for turn after turn just like you did or by gathering their neurons into one giant precognitive squelch to spot what you were about to do. Fine, you win some you lose some.

I was going to go there, mummy...

But if some clod-footed clown just wanders across your idea move or plonks their unwitting meeple on your crucial spot? It makes no sense! They don’t even need the extra wossname that they get from that space! They’re… they’re just doing it on a whim! Unbearable. But wait, what if they worked out what you needed to do and decided to confound you just for the giggles? That’s paranoid talk, surely, but they do seem to be laughing quite a lot. Probably shouldn’t have stolen all of those sheep from them in the second turn.

Playing the players

One of the fascinating things that casual, muckabout, or even just rubbish, players might not realise about their braincrunching counterparts is that sometimes the difference can come down to who’s playing against the other players and who’s playing against the game. It sounds so obvious to say, but this might be one of the fundamental differences between players.

It’s not necessarily about who’s trying harder or who’s taking it seriously. Some people like to interact first and foremost with their fellow players – sparring, spoiling, even allying – and others get more enjoyment from the challenge of tackling the game itself. The latter group love to find out what’s going on, to anticipate how the game will pan out, and to calculate that elusive ‘ideal move’ each turn. The process of unlocking a new game’s secrets is just as enjoyable for some as the thrill of beating someone to fourth place.

Surely the real pinnacle is managing to do both at once. It can be stressful to cling on for five other people’s turns until you can advance your plan unmolested, and it’s never brilliant to get trounced every time because you don’t have a long attention span, but every now and then the renegade player will find that perfect combination by luck or judgement, and once in a while the competitive player will realise that they path to victory lies in juicing everyone else in the most counter-intuitive way. Best hope the two don’t happen in the same sitting, though.

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Follow the Matador on Twitter @FatMatadorGames

Beastly Bust-Up launches this Autumn on Kickstarter

On looking forward to it… and reading the rules

Meeting up

We spoke to a lot of people in the course of our highly scientific research for this series of posts - our core gaming group, our wider circle, the miniature guys, the casuals, the pretending-to-be-casuals, our collective reluctant and faintly embarrassed partners, and even the new guys who we wouldn’t play Chaos in the Old World with…. yet. As you can imagine, we got wide and varying answers on most of the subjects, but this question on how you feel before a game night kept coming back the same. Everyone is excited, and everyone is looking forward to it.

Is every board game night first and foremost a social event? A comfortable evening in the company of people you already know you like a lot? Something you look forward to like a couple of beers with good friends? Our circle think so - but then our groups all play in someone’s house, or on holiday together, or occasionally a pub. We don’t really encounter ‘strangers’ - unless they are introduced by a friend. The focus is on the people, not the game. You’re as likely to look forward to catching up with people as you are to counting out the cards.

The feeling’s different when you’re were heading to a hobby shop because you really wanted to play something specific, and didn’t mind who it was against. Those kinds of games can come with anticipation that borders on apprehension – the pre-match nerves of a game with something on the line. You might be off to a tournament , spiced up by the added danger of playing with strangers.

There’s anticipation in our more homely, social gaming too, but it’s more the thrill of playing something new, discovering a new interaction, testing a new deck, or getting one over on David at last. As (relatively) mature people with (comparatively) serious jobs and family lives, our group is longer on money that it is on time. That leads to an oversupply of new games to play, new cardboard to punch out, new cards to shuffle,  new plastic to examine, and new rules to learn…

Breaking out a new one

Everyone wants to to have fun in the games evening, and for everyone else to feel the same, but with new games come new opportunities to steal a march on your friends. With the level playing field of the new game comes the chance to figure out the meta-game first, or work out that new trick before anyone else spots it. The perennial underdog can snatch a couple of early victories, or the experienced players can take pleasure in racing to find a game’s rhythm. While everyone else is saving up to buy a cow, you could be working out what to do with the magic beans!

But! Before you can get all nervous energy and brain-gymnastics, it’s time to navigate the choppy waters of the rulebook. It’s this polite but often fraught period that starts to mark out the power gamers from the rules lawyers, the slowcoaches and those who say they don’t care about winning but secretly really do.

I am looking on page 236...

You can watch them round the table. The rules lawyer is easiest to spot, going through the rulebook line by line; the subtler sub-species will plough on through when they know they don’t have the group’s full attention, storing up opportunities to pounce on some obscure and unheard clause later in the piece. The really cunning ones look the rules up in secret before coming, or sneak a look when other people are labouring through their turns! The lawyers don’t just want to maintain propriety - they want to win. The lawyers’ stiffest opposition comes from the impatient, who suspect them of being slowcoaches, and can’t understand why we can’t just get started and learn the rules as we go along. In an evening which we might squeeze four hours of gaming in if we are really lucky, if the coffee’s good and the snacks are sugary, the lawyers are usually outnumbered.

Get on with it

If it’s your game that’s on the table, then chances are you’re donning the lawyer’s robes yourself this time. That’s a tough role because pretty much everyone we asked expressed some degree of impatience with the whole process. So you’re up against the clock. Here’s a selection of snippets from what people fessed up to when we asked them:

• “I wish I was better, but I soon lose interest and want to crack on…”
• “I'll try and absorb the basics but…”
• "I do try and pay attention but…
• “I try to pay as much attention as possible, but…”
• “I do pay attention, but I want the explanation over with as soon as possible.”
• “I can’t listen to instructions.  I want to, but my brain won’t let me.” 

Most people like to get things going and learn as they go along, making mistakes, being reminded, seeing what other people do. Everyone dreads the moment that begins with ‘Ah, actually guys apparently we’ve been…’ and ends with ‘…okay okay okay, we’ll start doing it like that next turn’. As a rules lawyer, or the poor fool who ends up in that role, there’s nothing more simultaneously frustrating or secretly vindicating than the cry of ‘Aww, you never told me that!’ when you know that you definitely did. That’s one of the wonderful things about playing socially – we’re all bound to be nice to each other and laugh off that first glitchy, confused, unfolding playthrough. Some rules can lurk for months before being discovered.

So let’s get on with it, give it a go. We can cook up plans as we go along, tell the same jokes, lay the same traps and get caught in them ourselves. We’ve only got a few hours, until next time at least.