Five Steps to a Better Game

While it is generally considered that games made back in the 80's are on average harder than those made today, there are still plenty of crazy hard games being produced. While some of these, such as Metal Slug 7 and Contra 4, are continuations of earlier series new IP's such as Super Meat Boy, Battle Kid, and Legend of Grimrock all provide new settings in which to put your gaming skills to the test. What follows are five simple steps to get better at these difficult games, with techniques that can also be applied to most games.

Step one: No Cheating
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. One of the best known cheats of all time and unfortunately a very easy way to prevent yourself from getting better at the game. Having 30 lives per continue means that you can progress through the game by attrition only. When playing Contra 4 I don't even let myself use a continue, while this is more extreme than the no cheating rule needs to be, the point is that my progress in the game is due purely to getting better with the controls.

Step Two: Use Training/Challenge Stages
Quite often these extra challenges and levels ask you to do something much harder than what is required in the main game. The advanced skills you develop will not only help you excel in the sections of the game you are already familiar with, but also mean that you will be better prepared for new more difficult levels later on.

Step Three: Demand Perfection
This is something I learnt from my sister. Her and I played Rainbow Islands a lot as children and if she lost a single life before reaching world three she would slam on the reset button and start again. I also adopted this system, later changing it to not losing a life before world four, and both of us eventually managed to finish the game.

Step Four: Learn From Others
Guides, tips, tricks and advice in general can greatly help improve your game. I mentioned above that both my sister and I finished Rainbow Islands, but what I didn't mention is that while she merely finished it, I got the harder to achieve good ending. I was only able to do this because of one key game mechanic that I read about in a gaming magazine.

Step Five: Find a Rival
As a child my rival was my sister, as an adult my girlfriend. By pushing each other and throwing down the gauntlet to say try and beat that score both people become much better at the games involved. I was once shaken awake at 3am to be informed that my high score in Sin and Punishment: Star Successor had been beaten, naturally I dragged myself out of bed and played until I was once again number one (this score also put me in the number three spot for the regional online leader board).

So there you have it, five simple steps to playing a better game. Now what are you waiting for? Go win some games!

Keeping it on the Level

First let me apologise for not having updated in quite some time, it turns out that moving to a new country takes up a lot of your time and resources. That being said, I will probably be cutting back to only one update a week for the next wee while.


I quite often talk about how to maximise your chances of winning a game through various strategies. Another way is to minimise thoughts and actions that can cause you to lose. More specifically, DON'T GO ON TILT! Having been watching peoples recordings of themselves playing Magic Online I'm amazed at how easily some players will fly into either a rage-filled mindset, or else just become totally nihilistic. What also surprises me is how petty some of these things are. For example, your opponent taking an excessive amount of time to pass priority. Yes it's annoying but in online magic it just runs down their clock giving you another win condition, and maybe before you start raging you could politely mention that you would appreciate them playing faster.It is quite possible that they are new to the game and aren't aware of the keyboard short-cuts that they can use to help speed up the game.

What I find most concerning is that if someone were to behave like this in a game of paper magic the judge wouldn't even bother to penalise the player playing slowly because they would be too busy removing the other player from the tournament.

Losing is a skill, if you know that you're not good at it then please try and improve. Play some casual games with friends with silly prizes, like jelly-beans or a lucky dip for the winner. Personally if I lose to someone then I like to get in behind them and support them for the rest of the tournament, this is partially so I can claim that I only lost to the best but also because it means that I'm going to be able to remain calm and happy during the rest of my games.

So please don't go on tilt, it just makes you more likely to lose and also makes it less fun for those around you.

Barrier to Entry

After my earlier failed video attempt I got into a discussion about how much it costs to play Magic Online. To create an account you need to part with US$9.99, which gets you an account, one M12 booster, 2 Magic Online tickets, 5 Avatars, 1 Planeswalker 2012 Deck Pack (cards that can only be used in the Planeswalker format), and 300 additional cards, after this it is up to you how much you want to spend buying new cards and playing in tournaments. However, it is worth noting that is cost nothing to play casual games.

With this in mind I have put together two casual decks that each cost less than two tickets. The first is an aggressive tribal deck featuring allies, and the second is a combo deck with creatures that have the unearth ability. Once again I had some trouble making the videos, of the seven games I attempted to record with the Allies deck (all of which I won) only one of them actually worked. The Unearth deck actually recorded but in all three games I had to revert to plan B of actually playing creatures, rather than being able to combo off. However, I did manage a turn four win in a test game I played when I was first putting the deck together.

I'm still not 100% happy with the videos, I become far to quite when thinking so have resorted to using some of kurtjmac's patented snarky yellow text to try and stop things getting too boring, but this provides a starting point for future videos to improve on. If you are having trouble reading the cards then you need to increase the video resolution.

Thanks for Letting Me Win

A while ago I wrote about needing to have a plan for victory. How, by identifying a way to salvage a bad situation you can win against the odds. Quite often these plan involve having your opponent make a wrong choice.

When presented with a decision, your opponent will always try and take the route that should be best for them. However, people make mistakes and quite often they don't have all the information needed to make the correct decision. Last week I was playing Magic Online and was up against a much better deck. I knew how I could still win but first I needed to draw the correct card and then I needed my opponent to block in a specific way. There was a video but the quality got severely reduced when I uploaded it so I'll have to redo it. But trust me it illustrates how by giving your opponent the opportunity to make a wrong decision you can come out on top.

The Trouble With Friends

In a competitive two player game your objective is simple, win! As such, quite often your choices are easy to make, you simply pursue the path that should give the best return. However, as soon as the number of players increases your choices can become less clear. Casual alliances and the potential for treason can encourage you to make 'sub-optimal' plays in order to avoid attracting too much attention.

In the game Junta each player is given a role in the corrupt administration. Each position has different abilities and command of certain military units. At the start of each turn the President will distribute the budget as face down bank notes (face down so as to hide the denomination), each player then gets to vote to pass or reject the budget. While there are ways to put a budget through at gunpoint most presidents decide to be as fair as possible in order to try and stave off a coup d'etat.

Junta is designed around social interactions and as such the need to compromise is obvious, but this same requirement will often show up in games where it was never intended. Playing multiplayer Magic: the Gathering is often an exercise in not looking too threatening for fear of having every other player try to eliminate you. It has gotten to the point where players have started to tap all their lands at the end of their turn to show that they have nothing else to do and don't represent a threat during an opponents turn. I find this to be irritating and refuse to do it, because it means that if I later don't tap out I'm advertising a card I want to play at instant speed. The annoying part is that often I get attacked early on simply because I have untapped lands.

Cooperative games, such as Arkham Horror or Pandemic, can suffer from a different problem. Since everyone is working together they will often discuss strategy and tactics, which is fine until a more experienced player starts effectively taking everyone else's moves for them. The thing to remember is that, generally speaking, multiplayer games are designed to be a social affair with everyone having fun, not an exercise in ruthlessly winning, and should be played in such a way so as to maximise enjoyment.

Winning the Wrong Way

About a week ago a new deck called Monogreen Tron started making waves in the 'Modern' format of Magic: The Gathering. What is interesting about this deck is that at first glance it looks to be playing the wrong number of lands. Earlier decks based around the Tron strategy (playing the Urza's lands to generate large amounts of mana) had run around 25 lands, while this deck was only playing 18. The deck works because it has 12 cards that can find a land, 8 cards that can draw a new card for only one mana, and 4 cards that can generate mana. In reality it only has 10 cards with which it can actually win the game and the rest of the deck is devoted to getting the correct lands in play.

This made me thing back to when I first started playing. I had quite a bit of success early on playing 'Limited' format decks with the 'wrong number of lands'. I built my decks with 16 creatures, 16 lands, and 8 other spells. It wasn't until later that I learnt that 17-18 lands is considered the correct number because having the extra land or two helps to make the deck more consistent. By running fewer lands your deck is more likely to have mana problems, but in the event that it doesn't you have one more threat that your opponent so actually have a more powerful deck. Actually some players suggest that if you have an unfavourable match up (the concept of the metagame was described in an earlier post) then you should remove a land to increase the threat density of your deck, and vice versa.

Another misconception that some early players have is that it's okay to keep a hand with 6 or 7 lands in it. Their logic being that the chance of drawing another is low so they'll be fine. In reality you need to consider what actually happens if you do draw another land? The short of it is your opponent gets a free turn. Also you have no control over the order that your non-land cards arrive in, which can often mean that you do nothing besides play lands for the first four turns even though you are drawing non-land cards. This results in your opponent developing their board position and applying pressure while you do nothing.

In truth, the correct answer to how many lands you should play and what hands you should mulligan come down to what's in your deck. A deck that doesn't need large amounts of mana can easily cope with fewer lands. However, when building a deck there is no point in cutting a land to make room for a low impact card, every card you play needs to help you win in some way. Finally there is a deck called 38 Lands which will quite happily keep a six land hand, just as long as they are the right six lands.

Some Grand Lessons

The game map

Several years ago I helped to co-write a Grand Strategy game (imagine a 30-40 player game of Risk). We had written a couple of LARPs in the past and played in several Grand Strategies so we thought it would be quite easy to do this. How wrong we were.

Best Laid Plans
We decided to do a space exploration, combat, and mining game, and right from the start we had several ideas for how to fix problems we had seen in earlier games. The first was speeding up game play, it was not uncommon for some games to end with only three complete game turns being finished because combat and issuing orders took too long. To this end we computerised the combat and game map, which also meant that we could do more 'realistic' stats on the game units with descriptions rather than hard numbers, of course the computer software had numbers for the units but we didn't see why the players had to know these details.

Other features we included were zones, so a player could be on Earth with access to the stock exchange, markets, and government; in space, where they could see the game map, plan in private and issue orders to their fleet; or in transit between the two where they could interact with the somewhat corrupt government intelligence agents. So what went wrong?

Player Like Numbers
Because we had not given numerical stats and a detailed description of how the space combat was worked out*, players were unwilling to commit to a fight and as a result there were no battles the entire game. This was also due to a lack of incentives as players could only destroy other teams mining instillations and couldn't capture them, which made them think that they would be spending resources on damaging another players production capability which they could instead spend on improving their own resource production. The lack of information relating to combat only furthered this problem as players weren't sure what percentage of their fleet would survive the attack, the reality was that more often than not only a few ships on each side would be destroyed and the losing side would retreat before the casualties got too high.

Players Will Exploit Any Loop Hole
As I mentioned there was a stock exchange on earth. This stock exchange had a random element and a player driven element and was designed so that the random element should dominate. The problems started when one team decided to sink all their game cash into just one resource, and noticed that its price rose slightly, they then sold it back and noticed the price dipped slightly. So they went and found the team with the second largest amount of money and they both invested in the single resource, which caused its price to spike, they then sold and the price plummeted, so they then spent the rest of the game playing the stock market. It turns out that their was a level at which the player driven element would dominate, which hadn't shown up during play testing because no one had invested so heavily in just a single resource.

Friend Computer is not Your Friend
The first thing that happened on the night was the discovery that the wall separating the Earth zone and the Space zone was made of some magic material which resulted in the Wi-Fi not working so the head GM who was located on Earth couldn't update the map, which was located in Space. So some furniture was rearranged, ethernet cables were fetched, and the problem was resolved. The next problem came right at the very end, I previously said that there was no combat which isn't entirely true, on the very last turn the Earth fleet engaged a player fleet and as a result the software crashed. During play testing we had run numerous battle simulations, tweaked numbers so that the results agreed with what we expected and we had even run a small combat only version of the game, all without incident. But, on the night the one and only combat crashed, and crashed hard. The head GM (who also happened to have written the code) had to manually work out what orders had and had not been processed before being able to give the final end game positions, as the combat result wouldn't affect the final standing it was ignored.

Players Find a Way to Have Fun
You might think that with all these problems the players would be bored and disappointed, but they still told us that they had had a good time. One team had found fun in a bottle of Vodka (this tends to happen no matter how engaging and well written the game is, as it is run as a social event) while another team had fun by being as devious as possible. The corrupt intelligence agents would sell you information relating to what other teams were up to, show you their orders, or even sell you ships at sub-market prices. One team realised that if they bought information from the agents then there was nothing stopping them from selling this on, better yet why even bother actually buying the information in the first place, the great thing about secrets is that they are secret so no one knows if they are true or not. It was quite a shock when a player came up to me with an envelope of game currency and asked for a full report on Project Pegasus (no such project existed), still I took the cash and told them that I would go and prepare the report. After a quick GM meeting we gave them a report and suddenly a player invented rumour was official, much to the amusement of the team that had started it.

Conclusion
From being involved with this game I learnt a lot about how players think and what they want in a game, and despite the technology issues on the night I still like the idea of automating the game map, and have since done so for a LARP without incident. I just think that in future I will be sure to include numbers for unit stats and a description of how combat works, along with some incentives for fighting.

*Combat was worked worked out with the capital ships launching their fighter and bombers. The fighters would attack the bombers and enemy fighters, then any undamaged bombers would attack the capital ships. Finally the capital ships would fire on each other. Then a moral check was taken, if this was passed another round of combat occurred, otherwise one of the two sides would retreat.

Time for a Change?

Last night I watched Raymond Keene, the second British Chess player to be awarded the title of Grandmaster, play twenty games of chess at once. In each game he was the white player, which as I mentioned previously should give him a very slight advantage. Unfortunately I missed the start of his games so I don't know what his initial move was, but I do know what mine would have been. The King's pawn would have moved forward two squares to e4. I begin almost all my games of chess with this move, the reason for this is simple, when I was taught how to play I was told that this is a good strong starting move. From my personal experience this seems to be true, but I have never actually sat down and given it any due thought, rather I have just accepted the validity of this statement and gone from there.

This make me wonder what would I do if the layout of the board was different, say for example the knights and bishops were swapped over, moving the piece forward does nothing to the possible move set of the knight so would this still be the best move? Maybe it's time we played chess differently, how about instead of placing the pieces in the standard positions we randomise the placement of the non-pawn pieces? Not only would this force us to think about our pieces and what kind of game could develop but it would also remove the symmetry associated with the standard layout. It would now be possible for a player to have both bishops on the same coloured squares and if their opponent notices then they could exploit this.

Part of what appeals to me about trying this type of game is that it wouldn't be fair and even, players would be forced to make the best of a bad situation, and try their best to capitalise on any advantage they see. It would add the excitement of slowly clawing back a game that you looked destined to lose right from the start. I enjoy these kinds of challenges, which is part of the reason I don't just lose interest and give up when a game isn't going my way. I was playing a game of Carcassonne against opponents who have a poor track record against me, when they decided that they should all gang up against me. So every time the option to remove a meeple from the board arose mine was removed. Rather than get annoyed I found it hilarious good fun as I was made to work for every point and took a minor victory in still being able to get over 50 points, although this was still last place by a long way.

I guess my point is that the fun of a game comes not from the winning or losing but rather the path taken to get there. Which is why I have no problems playing unfair but intellectually stimulating games.

Please Think of the Children

I've recently started teaching KS3 maths (pupils aged 11 - 14) and I must say I'm not a fan of the way probability is taught. For example one practice question is "Alice flips a coin 100 times. How many times would you expect her to get a head?" with the possible answers being 50, 25, or 100. My objection to this is that without the words 'on average' in the question I have no expectation for the result of her trial. The problem can be illustrated without even doing much maths because in order for exactly 50 heads and 50 tails the after the second to last flip their must either be 49 heads or 49 tails and the probability that the next coin flip brings us up to exactly 50 is a half. Doing the maths we find that there is only a 7.96% chance that Alice will actually record 50 heads.

Another question "John and Julie are both strong badminton players. Is it more probable that Julie will beat John in four games out of seven or five games out of nine?" First we must assume that by saying both are strong players that there is a 50:50 chance each will win. When I first saw this question my gut reaction was to say 5 out of 9 because it is closer to the 50:50 average. However, when we do the maths we find that Julie will win 4 out of 7 games 27.3% of the time and 5 out of 9 games only 24.6% of the time.

The question I had the biggest dislike for was "Helen and Christine play noughts and crosses 20 times. Helen wins 12 of the games. Estimate the probability that Christine will win the next game." My objection is not that the sample size isn't large enough to make the estimate from, but rather that they chose the game noughts and crosses, which as I have explained in an earlier entry should always result in a draw, and I would hope that after 20 games the players would have worked this out, so my estimate for winning the next game is 0. This assuming that the dataset is large enough shows up again in the following question "2 netball teams played 10 games. Team A won 2, B won 5 and 3 were draws. If they played 20 games, how many might A win?" With the options being 2, 4, or 10. Ignoring the fact that draws in netball are very rare, and also the lack of information about the victory margins, it is possible for all three of those options to occur, team A might win 2, or 4, or 10 of the next 20 games but answer that gets you the tick is 4 because if they won 2 out of 10 they might win 4 out of 20.

I realise that this post has been a bit different to usual but teaching this maths course has helped me to gain a better understanding of why some people struggle so much with playing risk/reward style games. So please think of the children and teach maths better, otherwise they won't grow up to be world class game players!

Schrodinger's Card

In 1935 Erwin Schrodinger devised a thought experiment whereby a cat was placed in a box with a vial of poison, a hammer, a radioactive source, and a Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter detects radioactive decay it lowers the hammer, breaking the vial and killing the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics treats the cat as being in both an alive and dead state, until such time as the box is opened and the fate of the cat is discovered. But what does this have to do with games?

Quite often when playing a game there will be some hidden information, a face down or as yet undelt card, some undefined counters, or even the result of the next dice roll. When we make our decisions we need to consider what these still to be determined events could be and the risk/reward in each case. For example, playing The Settlers of Catan I have nine cards in hand on my turn and have to make the choice between using some of these cards or keeping them to use later, the risk being that if I choose the latter a seven will be rolled and I'll lose half of them. How should I make my decision? Well I need to consider the probability of a seven being rolled and also the probability that if it isn't I will be able to make better use of my cards next turn.

Let us now switch games to cribbage. At the start of each hand a player must decide which two cards to place in the crib before the starter card is revealed. Because the starter is used at the end of the hand for scoring consideration to how our kept cards can combine with the starter is important. Since sixteen of the cards have a value of ten and only four a value of nine, keeping a five is more beneficial than keeping a six (having cards that add to fifteen scores two points). It is also worthwhile, as explained in my How to get Lucky post, to consider the chance of keeping a hand that is not currently high scoring but with the right starter card becomes high scoring. Some people find this kind of thinking difficult, as the obviously the top card is already determined, and also your opponent has six cards in their hand so none of these six card can be on top! However, probability doesn't understand that and we must treat the cards like Schrodinger's cat, being all cards at once until such time as they are observed, except for one small problem.

Our opponent is not random, but rather is making decisions all the time and based on these decisions we can get a hint about what cards are where. In 2008 a Nature article detailed scientists 'peeking' at the cat without causing it to become either alive or dead. When our opponent plays their first card we immediately gain some information and get a 'peek' at the cards in their hand, for example if our opponent leads a ten I would assume that they have a five, I don't know for certain so the card is still undefined but I get a hint. The reason is that, as I explained earlier, the starter card is most likely worth ten, also the most common card value in your hand is a ten which means that keeping fives is very common, meaning the chance of someone having a five as one of their four kept cards is closer to 2/5 than 2/7, so by leading a ten I assume that they have a five to play (scoring two points for doubles) in the event that I play my five.

This type of thinking also applies to poker, when a player folds rather than bids we gain information about what they don't have in their hand, and the probability that those cards will appear in the community cards increases, of cause poker also gives us the option of lying which is where knowing your opponents play styles and 'tells' comes in handy. I once used knowledge of my opponents play styles and 'peeking' to great effect in a game of 500. Due to time constraints it was the final hand, I had dealt and the player to my left opened the bidding at the eight level which my partner then matched, the player to my right then made a bid at the nine level. I still hadn't looked at my cards but I had played with these people a lot and knew they were not the types to overvalue a hand even if it was the final had of the day, so still without looking at my cars I bid open Misere, after some complaining about bidding blind and me wasting their time the bid was accepted and made, winning my partner and I the game. Afterwards I pointed out that because of the way they had bid I knew my hand had nothing in it and that was why I was comfortable making such a large bid without having seen it. Despite this explanation I still got a reputation for being a maverick, crazy player who despite making stupid bids would end up winning.

Perfectly Unbalanced

During the development of every competitive multiplayer game there comes a time where the game's balance needs to be assessed. That is, what is the probability of winning provided by the different strategies/choices available to the player and are there any moves that will simply guarantee a win? I mentioned recently how chess slightly favours the white player when both players make few mistakes, while other games such as checkers will always result in a draw when played perfectly. Tic-tac-toe also always results in a draw when played correctly, however with so few moves available to the player the correct play is always obvious, making the game rather pointless. The game Anti-Monopoly claims that is has been perfectly balanced by a computer to ensure that being a monopolist or a competitor poses no disadvantage, all I know was that after six hours of playing we were nowhere near having either side win and 1/3 of the player had fallen asleep.

So how do you ensure that a game is fun, fair, and doesn't just result in endless draws. One way is to introduce a luck element, this way two people who play equally well will still obtain a result, and ideally the luck element will be small enough so that a better player will usually defeat a weaker one. You could introduce certain counter move/strategies to your game, plays that would usually be weak except in certain situations. Or you could just not worry about it and  let the players sort it out through metagaming.

Metagaming is the use of outside of game knowledge to increase your chances of winning. One simple example is that in a game involving temporary alliances player X always lies, after playing a few times people realise this and no one will ally with them, negatively affecting their chance to win. However the type of metagame I want to discuss involves game where players must decide on a strategy or move at the start of the game and stick with it. The simplest example of this type of game is rock-paper-scissors where you must decide on what hand gesture you will make and then you are stuck with the consequences, this example seems trivial as if picked randomly against a truly random opponent each choice has an equal chance of winning. But image if I told you that 60% of people choose scissors as their first move, using this extra knowledge you can greatly in crease your chance of winning by playing rock. However, what happens when you are paired against another player who also knows about this, should you switch to paper to defeat their rock? Or what if the information becomes so well known that rock starts to become the dominant starting move, suddenly the choice is much less obvious as the metagame has changed.

In games which are less balanced than rock-paper-scissors, such as a CCG or video fighting game your ability to do well in a tournament often depends on the deck/character choice made relative to the average deck/character choice. Image four different deck types A, B, C, and D. A defeats B 70% of the time, C 55% of the time, and D only 35% of the time; B defeats C 55% of the time and D 60% of the time; and C defeats D 70% of the time. The question is what deck should you play in the up coming tournament? Deck A seems to be the strongest as it has a favourable matchup against all decks except for D, which by contrast is only good against A. What your choice comes down to is what deck do you think most people will be playing, if most people own or want to play A then you should play D even though this is it's only good mathup. If however the metagame has got to the point where everyone is playing either A or D, then maybe C is the best choice as it isn't far off being even against A and usually defeats D. These choices mean that the unbalance between the individual decks is resolved by players making choices based on their analysis of the metagame.

Even with metagaming problems do still arise, the character Meta Knight was recently banned from competitive Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournaments because he has no bad matchup, meaning that even using metagaming the best decision is to simply play as Meta Knight. However, this also shows that as long is there is an active governing body with the power to take such actions mistakes such as this can be rectified.

No One to Blame But Yourself

A couple of days ago I did something I haven't done in a long time, I played a game of chess (three to be precise). Chess is an interesting game in that there is absolutely no luck involved, both players always have all information about the game state and what moves are possible available at all times;so when you lose it is entirely your fault.

I lost both of the first two games due to a mixture of not having played for a while and also when I did last play it was against novice opponents, which meant I had gotten use to the types of moves and mistakes that these players make and as such made poor and/or risky moves expecting them to work anyway. When it came to the third game I had finally come to the realisation that I couldn't just walk it in and would actually need to pay attention and think. I'm pleased to say that doing so got me a win and also made me think about a couple of things.

The first was how you can get into the habit of playing your opponent rather than the game. I often see this in Magic the Gathering (yes another Magic story), were new players despair at being paired against top ranked played, and then the way they play comes to reflect a feeling of inevitability about the game. Sometimes a lack of experience works in a player's favour as they don't notice when their opponent is representing a threat, make an attack a more experienced player wouldn't, and end up winning as the stronger player was bluffing.

The second thing I was thinking about was whether being black or white was an advantage, as each time one of us won we were playing black. In general, the consensus is the opposite of what we observed with white being considered to have a slight advantage (usually somewhere in the vicinity of a 52-56% win rate), but this only applies to high level players who make few mistakes. This issue of a player going first or second being advantageous is found in many games. In Go black, which has the first move, is given a points penalty to balance out the advantage of playing first. While in Magic the starting player is penalised by having to skip their first draw step. Even in games of pure chance there can be an advantage to going first, for example in Snakes and Ladders if each player rolls identical numbers throughout the game (while this is unlikely the average of their die rolls will be similar) the player that went first will win.

Ultimately what I really learnt from playing chess again was that without regular practice, against players of a similar or slightly higher ability than you, your skills become rusty and your play level decreases.

You Sir, Play Like a Child!

Earlier this year I was visiting a friend, who had recently started playing the Call of Cthulhu living card game (a living card game is similar to a collectable card game in that there are expansions and you create your own decks but when you buy an expansion pack you get all the cards instead of a random subset). I hadn’t played the game before but am always up for playing something new, so when they offered to teach it to me I accepted. A quick summary of the rules/purpose of the game is that players place cards under their ‘domains’, which are later drained to put other cards into play, the more powerful a card the larger the domain that needs to be drained to play it; the played cards are then used to both complete stories and prevent your opponent from completing stories, with the first player to win three stories winning the game.

After we had played a few games I felt like I had a good enough grasp of the rules, timings, and card interactions to ask a few of the questions that had been nagging me. The first was why are our two decks not the same size? I had noticed this straight away and as a semi-serious Magic the Gathering player the idea of a deck being larger than the minimum size without a very good reason was irksome. The answer I was given was that when deck building my friend liked to pull out any cards that looked good or fun and put them in the deck and refine later based on deck performance. This also answered my next question, which was going to be why are there so many big monsters in the decks, so rather than asking that I instead asked if I could make a deck? I was then given a box of cards and told to go for it.

Having no real idea of what was the best strategy for this game I decided to build the deck based on three simple ideas. First removal is good, that is cards that get rid of your opponent’s creatures. No card in the deck should require a ‘domain’ with more than three cards under it to play, my friend’s decks contained cards that required domains with six cards under them to play, the logic being that I could stop putting cards under the domains after only a few turns and also lets me play my threats early. The final idea was that ‘card advantage is king’, card advantage is the concept that if one card can produce or remove two or more cards then this helps you win as you have more cards/resources to call upon than your opponent. I should also mention that my deck was the minimum size. So we played a few more games of my new deck against the old decks and each time the result was a solid victory to my deck.

After this second round of playing I rather uncharitably informed my friend that he ‘plays like a child’, by which I meant that he focused too much on the big monsters and not enough on fast efficient cards. His retort to this was that my deck wasn’t fun and completely failed to capture the flavour of game, how could I play Call of Cthulhu and not included even one Great Old One in my deck? In Magic the terms ‘Timmy, Johnny, and Spike’ are used to describe the three main types of players. Timmy likes to win with big creatures, Johnny likes to win in funny ways, and Spike just likes to win. I guess I’m a Spike while my friend is a Timmy.

We then went online to look at the decks used in tournaments and noticed that almost all of them only played cards that required a domain of three of fewer. No wanting to give in to this ‘unfun way of playing’, my friend made a new deck which I’m pleased to say was both competitive and played the Outer God, Shub-Niggurath to win, although it was snuck into play by a card requiring a domain of only three.