Dissertation Procrastination

What do I do when I'm not in a graveyard? Lately, I've been playing a lot of board games with Pete and my Am Civ friends. One of our recent favorites is Pandemic, a cooperative game in which players race to eradicate four deadly diseases. On each turn, you turn over cards to find out how the diseases have spread, then you rush all over the map trying to prevent outbreaks and contain the epidemics long enough to find a cure.

Each player in the games has a role that gives him/her special powers:

• Dispatcher: moves pawns around
• Operations Expert: builds research stations
• Scientist: can cure disease at a 1-card discount
• Medic: cures more people
• Researcher: can exchange cards with others
  

It rained today, so Pete and I stayed in and played a few rounds. I always forget what my role is and don't use it to the best advantage (especially if I'm the Dispatcher, which is of limited usefulness in a 2-player game). Part of the problem is that the pawns are not very evocative of the role they signify. To remedy this, I made my own little meeples:

Grumble

I just bought a Trivial Pursuit app for my iPhone. It is generally very good — a little easier than regular Trivial Pursuit (it's multiple choice), but still good.

I'm a little confused about EA Games' understanding of the "history" category, though. One of the "history" questions was "To whom is Ellen DeGeneres married?"

But that's not why I'm grumbling. I'm grumbling because one of the answers was WRONG!

Question: In which war were the most Medals of Honor awarded?
A: World War II
B: World War I
C: The Civil War

It said that the answer was WWII, but, in fact, way more Medals of Honor were awarded during the Civil War. Fewer than 500 Medals of Honor were awarded during World War II, while over 1,500 were awarded during the Civil War. I don't know whether that figure even includes the 864 Medals awarded to the 27th Maine (all but 300 erroneously) or other rescinded Medals.


I'd rather be right than win.



Update: I've played a bit more of this game and found the other categories equally dubious. The "geography" category includes questions such as "Where does Peter go in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'" and "Where are the villains in 'Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull' from?" It's pathetic. There's already an "entertainment" category — why must it spill over into everything else?

1960: The Making of a Mildly Amusing Board Game

It's been another raucous night of debauchery here in Cambridge —Pete and I spent the evening playing 1960: The Making of the President. My initial reaction: meh.

In this 2-player game, the opponents vie for electoral votes by deploying event cards based on real factors in the 1960 presidential campaign. For example, the Nixon player might play the "Norman Vincent Peale" card to counteract Kennedy's support among Catholics, while the Kennedy player might play the "Nixon's Knee" card to slow down Nixon's campaigning. Players can also gain support by buying advertising, winning endorsements, and spending "campaign points" to position themselves on the major issues (Defense, Economy, Civil Rights). There's even a mini-game to simulate the debates.

Unfortunately, this was a game that added up to less than the sum of its parts. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the event cards and learning tidbits of information about the campaigns, but that was really the best part. The other parts seemed unbalanced — advertising was a pain to buy and ended up netting the buyer very little, positioning on the issues was similarly irrelevant, and the wide swings in support in key states at the end of the game were neither plausible nor particularly interesting. It was very difficult to keep track of the electoral vote count and I spent much of the game wondering if this simulation wouldn't have been better as a video/computer game rather than a board game with 1,000 tiny cubes.

None of those aspects of the game are necessarily fatal flaws, but in the end, it just was not very much fun. I felt no sense of accomplishment or suspense, and the individual maneuvers, while engaging in the sense that they took brainpower, never left me emotionally invested in the outcome.

Sometimes that happens the first time I play a game — I don't know what I'm doing, so I have no strategy, and just end up going through the motions. Usually, though, by the end, I'm excited and want to try again. This game left me indifferent. I'd be willing to play it again, as it will almost certainly be better the second time, but I'm not sure it will become a favorite like Agricola or Nexus Ops. Other people seem to like 1960, so maybe it's just not my cup of tea.

It's easy to joke about it — what? a board game about the 1960 election is not thrilling? shocking! — but I don't necessarily think a game about an election is boring by definition. I, for one, would welcome a Jefferson/Adams boardgame with a mechanic of fearmongering and vicious personal attacks.

Agricola!

The beginning of the semester always stresses me out, so I like to do craft projects that allow me to work off some creative energy in a non-academic context. Sometimes I knit, sometimes I produce subversive cross-stitch patterns, etc.

This semester, I have decided to make little clay pieces for Agricola, a new board game that Pete bought for us. The game has lots of boring little wooden pieces, but some people over on Board Game Geek have decided to customize their sets with clay replacement pieces. I thought I'd try my hand at it. Here are my results:

The Green Team (Team Ireland):
Pete is usually green when we play games, so I made a red-headed team for him. The father figurine is just a hair over 2" tall (with hat).

The Red Team (Team Italy):
I am almost always red, so I gave the mama for Team Italy a book. I wouldn't be very useful on a farm. The little discs under the figurines' feet are the original "people" tokens from the game.

The Blue Team (Team Sweden):
No one in our house plays blue and, in retrospect, I should have done this team first so I could work on my technique. After completing Green and Red, I was getting ambitious — hence the quilt and young Olaf's freckles.

The Purple Team (Team France):
I don't know what Papa Purple is so surprised about. I didn't run out of clay — I meant to make him bald.

The Naked Team (Team Nudist/Utopian Co-op):
Ok, this one takes some explaining. Normally, game designers will make the fifth team a primary or secondary color (yellow, orange) or a neutral (white, brown, black). The Agricola designers decided instead to just slap a sealant on the natural wood and call it a day. In honor of their choice, I made little natural people who work their nudist, co-op farm in peace and harmony with nature. Another take on this theme here.

The Guest:
In the game, you can get an extra worker called The Guest. The token for this character shows him (inexplicably) holding a cat. I have named him Luigi.

The game also includes many tiny animals (sheep, pigs, cattle) and crops (grain, vegetables), along with fish, bread, and plates of food.

Sheep:

Pigs:

Cattle:

Grain and Vegetables:

Fish:

Food:

Here is a complete Agricola setup (2 players) near the end of the game (Pepsi can for scale). This game ended in a 49-49 tie:

I was inspired by many of the photos submitted to Board Game Geek. My favorites were these abstract, Holy-Land-ish creations and this brilliant take on the Blue Team.

Little-Known Facts

Most people don't know that General Philippe Régis de Trobriand was a yeti. These people have not yet played Yetisburg.

In other news, Titanic Games has produced one of the only modern Gettysburg-related products that is not under the thumb of the Shaara-Turner complex. The six Confederate generals included are standard fare (Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hill, Ewell, Stuart), but the Union generals are not the standard Killer Angels characters: Meade, Hancock, Reynolds, Meredith (of the Iron Brigade), Wadsworth (commanded 1st Division, 1st Corps, comprising Cutler's Brigade and the Iron Brigade), and Col. de Trobriand (brigade commander in 1st Division, Third Corps). Nary a Chamberlain nor Buford in sight.

Either the game designers are in love with the First Corps, they picked the names randomly, or they are weary of the whole Killer Angels bit. Regardless, I was surprised.

I think William Barksdale would have made a good yeti.

Yetisburg

Pete and I play a lot of board/card games in the evenings when I'm not up to my eyeballs in work. When I'm done with my current crop of essays (soon, I hope!), I'm looking forward to purchasing this one:

The sequel features zombies and is called "Dismembering the Alamo."