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Path: utzoo!watmath!jagardner
From: jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner)
Newsgroups: net.games.board
Subject: Re: Opening Discussion
Message-ID: <16323@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Sep-85 11:56:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.16323
Posted: Tue Sep  3 11:56:36 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Sep-85 06:10:28 EDT
References: <394@brl-sem.ARPA> <47@ucdavis.UUCP>
Reply-To: jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner)
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
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[...]

Odds and Ends on topics that have come through here:

Diplomacy is the ultimate in "human interaction" games.  Strategy
is certainly important, but it doesn't mean doodly-squat if the other
players decide to gang up on you.  And you can be absolutely certain
that someone is going to gang up on someone in Diplomacy -- it's the
only way to get ahead.  You have to make an alliance with someone and
cross your fingers that you don't get stabbed in the back...or that
you will figure out when you're going to get stabbed and do some stabbing
of your own.  Diplomacy is a very frustrating game to play if you can't
find any allies.  Major disadvantage of Diplomacy: it is a _very_ long
game.  I'm told the gametesters never played a game to the end during
playtesting; they played until they got tired, then waved their hands
at who would likely come out on top.

Machiavelli is like Diplomacy in many ways.  My boss calls it "Diplomacy
with the rules fixed".  If you already know how Diplomacy works, you can
understand Machiavelli easily by thinking of supply centres as cities
inside provinces instead of provinces themselves.  It's not too hard to
take a province -- same principle as taking territory in Diplomacy -- but
taking the province doesn't give you the city.  You have to besiege the
city itself once you have the surrounding territory secured, and winning
the siege is quite tough.  The result is that you don't lose your home
base nearly as easily as in Diplomacy, and you stay in the game longer.
Add to this spying and assassination (which can be done even when you're
low on troops) and you have a game where you are much less at the mercy
of your fellow players.  Alliances are still going to make or break you,
but you aren't so helpless.

Civilization is a wonderful game...fairly long, like Diplomacy but you
always feel as if you're accomplishing something.  You can lose fairly
early in the game, unfortunately -- drop behind the pack and you'll
probably never catch up -- but you still have a powerful effect on the
game's outcome.

Nuclear War and Illuminati are also nice games.  I don't know why anyone
would call them "unusual", as games.  Their premises are a little odd,
of course, but they play very nicely.

A nice game that no one has mentioned yet is Empire Builder (known as
British Rails in England).  The rules are trivial and easy enough for
a ten year old to understand (if you want to play with your kids).  You
are constantly accomplishing something (a characteristic I really like
in games).  At the same time, it is an adult game and requires a fair
amount of strategy.  It's non-violent too, if that matters to anyone.
(And it DOES matter sometimes.  Even in these liberated times, wives and
girlfriends are often turned off by war-based games, but will happily
join a game of Empire Builder, Acquire, Scrabble, etc.)

Speaking of which, I don't know why Acquire hasn't achieved the classic
status of Monopoly and Risk.  It's a game that anyone can understand,
it's challenging and it's fun.  What more could you ask?

Someone called Supremacy the Risk of the 80's.  Maybe so, but the
group of people I play games with have developed several strategies
which really screw things up.  First of all, it's useless to play
with two people -- the first person simply borrows gross amounts of
money from the bank to do nuclear research, builds an appropriate
number of bombs, and nukes the opponent off the map.  If the first
player doesn't do this, the second will.  And if you agree not to
do this on the first turn, you'll do it on the second...or the third...
or sometime.  It's such a damned successful strategy, it's hard to
resist turn after turn, and you eventually give up avoiding the move.
House rules are definitely necessary to prevent it, and we have yet
to come up with an appropriate phrasing for such rules.

This strategy will not work when you have more than one player, but
in this case, there are a few other strategies that can be used
in a way that gives you a vast edge over the opposition.  Gross amounts
of money and resources can be acquired if you and the player to your
right or left agree on a systematic program of deflating and inflating
the market.  In this case, the pair of you can rapidly acquire enough
funds to nuke everyone else, or you force the other players to pair off
as well.  Nasty if you're playing with an odd number of people.  It also
leads to really spectacular arms inflation, with consequent Mexican
stand-offs.  Maybe we're missing something in the rules...

				Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo