I generally like to expose myself to new & unusual games at conventions; things that I can't play at home for whatever reason. This usually means I end up with a widely eclectic variety of games. I've had VERY good luck with Cthulhu LARPs, so when running across the description for this one, I knew I wanted to play.

This is the third in a series of session reports about my games at Origins 2011.

Saturday 12p-8pm LARP - National Security Decision Making Game

Dynamic scenarios covering the modern world stage. Every game is different! You can make those choices that can reshape the world as we know it. Experience economic, military, and political competition with a simulation based on those used by the US military. We always have room for more players!

I generally like to expose myself to new & unusual games at conventions; things that I can't play at home for whatever reason. This usually means I end up with a widely eclectic variety of games. Everything about NSDM is an enigma to me. The game, the players, the organizers; I just can't rationalize it and bring it in to my gamer worldview. It's different, quite a bit different, than every other game I have ever played, convention or otherwise. And it's wonderful

I generally like to expose myself to new & unusual games at conventions; things that I can't play at home for whatever reason. This usually means I end up with a widely eclectic variety of games. Sometimes, you want something you KNOW is good. This is one of those times. Enter: PST Productions

Friday 8p-11p, $18, PST Productions, LARP Event 2097, Cthulhu Live

The year is 1889. Tonight, join us at the gala unveiling of Professor Earl Waxflatter's latest and greatest foray into the world of Mysterium powered super science. Gather with some of the best and brightest minds along with some of the most daring adventurers the world has ever seen. Your host for the festivities will be the chairman of the prestigious Adventurer's Society and famed Airship pilot, Captain Nicodemus Parlance. Refreshments and cocktails will be served at this once in a lifetime event. Join PST Productions for their long awaited Cthulhu Live Steampunk event. After many requests we are bringing you an evening of Mythos and Steam with a world that is only limited by your imagination. Costumes are STRONGLY encouraged. Please contact PST Productions for advanced character assignments so you can costume and ask any questions.

Conventions.  The smells of body odor, fried food, the sounds of box farts, cards shuffling, and heated discussions about who was hotter, Princess Leia or Amidala.  People complaining that 7XL was the largest t-shirt available (yes I witnessed that) and all the geek ego stroking you can imagine.  You wanna hear about my character?  My deck?  My greatest 18XX triumph?  Fat women in tight leather asking if M'lord would like to demo their new CCG, stormtroopers waiting in line behind Klingons to take a piss.  More Mountain Dew Code Red sold in one day than is sold the other 364 days of the year.   For some, this would be a scary sight or something to make a documentary about.  For me, it was a chance to play a whole lot of games in one day and hopefully see a bunch of new stuff.

      Sometimes people just hate.

      Three quarters of the way through I was being booed by the spectators on both sides of the obstacle course.  This wasn’t “disappointed” booing, this was “angry” booing.  This was “hate” booing.  There was one guy of the 300 or so watching was rooting for me to open an even bigger lead, but he was wisely keeping his mouth shut.

      This was awhile back.  I was younger and healthier back then, 20 pounds lighter and still relatively quick.  I was way ahead of the seven-year-old kid I was competing against, and I wasn’t slowing down.  I was all-in, running as hard as I could and positively crushing a fifty pound bean-pole midget who needed help (and about 20 seconds) getting over a six foot wall, the first obstacle in the course.  I had put one foot in the middle of it and bounced over, giving me one hell of a lead before I had exhaled a second time.  One adult threw his half-full coffee cup at me but I ducked it.  I kicked in the after-burners, leaving little Billy Bean Pole to kick and scratch and claw his way over an obstacle nearly twice his height.  Spending a moment to look back would have slowed me down, so I didn’t.

      People ask me about gaming with kids all the time.  It’s not just because I play a lot of games.  It’s as much about appearance as anything.  I’m a middle-aged white guy that wears ties a lot, so people think I’m smart.  I also have four kids and a hundred or so games, so everyone assumes I know what I’m talking about for that particular subject.  That may not be the case; you can decide for yourself.  But playing games with children, particularly the subject of winning and losing comes up a lot for me.  Parents ask my opinion, and I answer honestly.

      Play hard.  Play to win.  

      That doesn’t often please the parent that asked.  They're looking for some nuance, some secret method to make meek children brave and brash children mild.  But short of playing against someone aged four or less I play to win, and I don’t hide it.  Oh sure, I may pick a game that limits my ability to excel (Zombie Dice instead of aMAZEing Labyrinth, that kind of thing) but short of a teaching game where I’ll specifically make a bad play to demonstrate a concept, I’m going for the win heart and soul, and I let the child know that.  I'm going to set an example.

      Now before you start getting up in me for being some sort of obsessive-compulsive win-at-all-costs kind of guy, you need to know that’s just not the case.  Witnesses here can testify to my good spirits at WBC in spite of truly horrible play at Struggle of Empires.  I don’t have to win.  But I try to win, and I expect no less from my opponents.  And this is part of my approach when I sit down to play with kids.  I promise them that I’m going to give them good competition, and that I expect nothing less in return.  Play hard.

      It’s hard to plead your case at a dead run, and likely no one on the sidelines understood why I’d unapologetically blow away a seven year old kid.  It's ungentlemanly especially since this was a Cub Scout event where us adults are expected to be trustworthy and honorable and all that.  In fact it was worse than that, it was my obstacle course.  I had designed and managed it the day before when the kids had gone through it to earn an award.  But that was why I was running it in the first place -- the only adult to compete.  The Dads had goaded me into running the last race of the weekend and had intentionally picked three-foot-tall-wiener-boy to run against me.  It was a set up.  I couldn’t win.  If I won I lost, and if I lost . . . well I lost big.  The whole point was to make me look like a stooge and I was ok with that.  I have a gift for it.  But in their attempt to stick me the Dads had unwittingly put the kid in a tough position too.  If I mooked my way through the course and intentionally fell on my ass he wouldn’t be in a position to claim anything, certainly not victory in a fair race.  And if I beat him . . . he just lost.

      I cleared the ten-foot long 4x4 with a single step in the middle, kept moving full throttle.  The Dads in the crowd were having to find creative ways to express displeasure, language hindered by the young audience.  The kids were less reserved, saying truly cruel things.  One was particularly hurtful.

      After responding with that “play hard” part I usually explain to parents that kids are smarter than we parents think.  Some are really smart, and it’s not uncommon for really smart kids, game-playing kids, to see through you when you don’t play your best.  When they catch the whiff of you throwing a game, it’s over.  You've lost their faith.  They disengage.  That kid wants to test their mettle against a real opponent and when they see you pull a punch they get pissed.  They give up caring and for good reason -- what satisfaction (and more importantly what lesson) does that kind of child take from a compromised victory?

      So when I think a kid is up to it, I’m more honest and less nice.  I play hard.  When I play with my boys I advise them of their chances for victory given the game on the table and my extra years of experience.  It’s not uncommon for me to say “I can teach you to play that, but I have two-dozen plays in and that’s going to make a big difference.”  In short, I set their expectations appropriately.  Then I let things play out as they will.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ll handicap a game whenever it’s practical but that will be part of the conversation as well.  That only comes via mutual agreement before the first move.  (That choice-of-game thing I mentioned above is a big factor in this, and I make it a point to steer towards games where handicapping is readily available.  Memoir '44 is an excellent example of this, where something as simple as the chosen scenario can make a big difference in the session with a disadvantaged player.)

      I’ve been playing Chess against my twelve-year-old for five years now and he hasn’t fared well.  Each game has given me the opportunity to coach and to explain concepts, and in spite of loss after loss he’s learned, gotten better, and become comfortable with keeping his head in a game where he faces near certain failure.  Chess is a hard game to handicap, though its perfect information puts coaching front and center.  My boy has never expected to win, because I’ve told him that it will be a very steep hill to climb.  But climb it he has and as you should well expect he eventually did win.  A few months back he capitalized on my over-aggressive play style and cornered my queen deep on his side of the board, forcing me to surrender her in exchange for a mere rook.  I fell onto the defensive and never recovered.  He rolled me up on one side of the board and soon after the game was over.  His first win against me at Chess was complete, and here’s the thing -- he was absolutely positive that he had earned every bit of the victory, because Dad doesn't give out freebies.  This win was his, all of it, and he damn near fell down the stairs from the rush in spite of trying to look all cool about it.

      So I needed to set expectations appropriately with that seven-year-old kid before we ran the obstacle course.  I didn't want to throw it.  The Dads volunteering to help were well-aware that I had designed the majority of the course and that it would be a big finish for the weekend if the guy that made the course made the final run against a scrawny little kid.  I was up for it.  But I also wasn’t stupid.  I did what I always do before stepping into competition – I prepped.  I stood at the starting line and considered each piece of the course, running the course in my head before doing it for real.  It’s what I do.  I had pulled my buddy Paul aside (my fellow Camp Master for the weekend, the guy that introduced me to wargaming, and to role-playing, and to Ameritrash-style games and incidentally the guy that I quoted at the beginning of my first article here of FortressAt.com three years back – “running will only postpone your traitorous death”) and explained to him the obvious problem.  He agreed to run interference for me and moved the people farther back from my side of the course.  Then I pulled the boy I was to compete against aside, got down on one knee and told him how things were going to play out.

      “Alright, here’s where we stand.  I’m bigger, faster, and stronger than you.  That’s how it goes and we can't change that.  Short of me breaking a leg in the muddy part I’m going to be faster than you for virtually this entire course.  Make sense?” The boy nodded and I pointed him in the direction of the finish.  “Look over there at the last piece of equipment before the finish line.” 

      The course ran like a horseshoe so the end of the course was relatively close to the beginning, though a patch of trees hid things a bit.  The last obstacle before the finish line was a pair of corrugate pipes, 30 feet long and maybe 30 inches high.  The Highway department and loaned me them for the weekend.

      “That’s the one place on this course where being bigger, faster, and stronger is going to be a disadvantage. I’m guessing it's going to take me thirty seconds to get through my pipe.  You’re going to bend at the waist and go through yours on your hands and feet, almost at full speed.  I want you to understand something before we start: I’m going to run hard, I’m going to go full throttle, I'm running to win.  But that pipe is going to be the end of me.  You have a real chance to win here.  Do you understand that?”

      He nodded his head.

      “But only if you stay in this.  When that whistle blows, I’m going to take off and I’m going to get way ahead of you.  Don’t get discouraged; don’t give up; keep going as hard as you can.  You have a shot at this, fair and square.  You with me?” 

      He nodded again, this time with a smile.  He was in the game.

      “It’s all going to come down to that pipe, so I’m not going to hold back.  If you win this, it’s yours.  You own every bit of it.  No matter how far ahead I am, don’t you give up.  You run hard until you cross the line.”

      We gave each other a smile, shook hands and took our positions.  There was one last look from him, sizing up his opponent.  Then whistle blew, and the race was on.

                        S.

I'm consigning games through a "local" game shop and had $60 in store credit so far, so I'm filling gaps in my Wings of War/Glory collection. That may be a surprise for some of you -- I have over 40 planes currently so there isn't a lot of point to purchasing any more. The most I’ve ever played with is 25. But I like to have pairs of each model so that anyone picking a particular plane to play can have a wingman, a dogfight concept since Boelcke established the fundamental rules of air combat early in World War I. The store where I'm generating the credit doesn't carry GMT, which has the heavy-hitters on my wish list at the moment, so planes it is, a guilty pleasure of mine. It could be drugs or women, so no one is complaining.

In the second of my series of wargames we're going to look, appropriately enough, at the second barrier that's stopped me from looking into to these sorts of games. The first, as we discussed in last weeks column is the high value many of these games place on simulation. This time we're going to be looking at player numbers and the serious lack of good, playable multi-player historical games.

See as I've said many times before, I thrive on multi-player games. This is partly a practical consideration - I usually find myself in a situation where there are more than two people at the table wanting to play. But there's more to it than that of course. I enjoy the social aspects of gaming, and as far as that's concerned the more the merrier. I also continue to enjoy the diplomatic aspects of multi-player games in spite of all the people who tell me that I ought to be getting bored of it because it makes all games the same. It's this fondness for table talk that puts me off one obvious solution, a team game. Team games have to be extremely well designed to stop them falling into a situation of either one player bossing the others about or of a general team-malaise developing where players become so focused on their individual objectives that they find a team victory unsatisfying. But there are amazingly few multi-player historical games to be found, and once you've put on my previous caveats about team play and agonizingly complex simulations (if it's hard enough learning the rules yourself, try teaching it to other players) it narrows the field even further. Why are there so few?

Board games have been a big part of my life for the last four or five years, and having reached a sort of a crossroads in the hobby, I wanted to put down “how far” I’ve come in gaming and describe what gaming means to me. I’m in no way prolific as an F:AT member, so I’m not sure how much interest this will hold for others; on the other hand I’ve always been curious about how people have gotten into the hobby, especially users of this site. It seems to me here that a lot of posters at F:AT have a history in gaming that goes back further than the German and euro game explosion of the ‘90s (before the existence also of BGG). Theirs is a different experience from mine, and I’d be curious to hear more stories about it.

A typical dull British morning: grey skies to dampen the soul but not quite cold or wet or windy enough to even be interesting. Yet, coffee in hand, I feel a misplaced sense of exhilaration. Curving away into the thin fog below me are two sets of parallel rails. I know exactly where they go, back to my childhood home. A small seaside town I've been back to countless times. Still, the low whine of an approaching train heralds a small pleasure. A day of movement without effort to enjoy, to think, to write.

When I sat down to write this, it was going to be an awards piece. Something to celebrate the very best games I've played this year. It was all planned out: I had a series of categories, a winner in each and an overall game of the year. A pleasant exercise in rewarding excellence to cap off an excellent year of releases.

In recent years, there seems to have been a surge in board game events in the UK, where people come together for a day or two to play games with old friends and new. I'm thinking of events like AireCon, Manorcon or Tabletop Scotland, but there are many more. These events are different to expos, like the UK Games Expo, which do have open play or tournaments, but whose main focus is on exhibitors showing off their products. What I want to talk about here are more like festivals, where the focus is on playing, and exhibitors, seminars and other activities are secondary - and I want to look at AireCon in particular.

If you're anything like me--and based on the forums, I know that some of you definitely are--you deal with pleasing different audiences on a regular basis.  In my case, it's not just pleasing different gaming audiences, but also pleasing different sets of readers.

Since I'm not one for being constrained creatively, I'd like to talk a bit about meeting the needs of different gamers (and readers), what's going on with my reviews going forward, and get some feedback on things that are useful to our readers.

Vaping beats hell out of smoking, but there's a downside - battery life. I have three batteries and two chargers, and every now and then, I still find myself jonesing with no way to get a fix. So last night, I left the house at 11:45 and drove to the corner gas station to pick up a pack of Winstons. I don't care, really - if I smoke a pack every two weeks, I think I'm still doing pretty well.

This isn't a story about smoking. It's a story about sad little men. Because the guy working at the Shell station at midnight was a dumpy, balding old man in a dirty polo shirt who spends most of his night trying to get outside so he can smoke the incredibly cheap cigarettes that he sticks in the crack in the windowsill every time someone stops by to fill up the tank.

As I was standing there paying for my pack of poison, I had a depressing thought. Maybe I'm just maudlin because I'm approaching a birthday, with two kids in high school and a mortgage that gets paid late more often than it's on time on a house that needs lots of repairs I can't afford. But whatever the case, I found myself wondering if this poor bastard asking me if I want debit or credit ever saw this for himself. When he was a young man and the world was his oyster, did he ever think, 'you know, I just hope one day I can work at a gas station in the middle of the night, and have nobody on the planet who finds me attractive.' Did he have aspirations at all? What happens to a man to make him a pathetic overnight gas station attendant?

That probably should have made me glad to have escaped his fate (so far), but it didn't. Instead I was saddened that this man, a guy who may have once been an ass-kicking tough guy with a way with the ladies, was now a hopeless washout. Maybe he spent his whole life a pathetic loser, but that's actually more depressing, because instead of being in the twilight of his life, he's spent his entire life in the gloom of mediocrity. I don't know, but when my mood starts to darken, it develops its own gravitational pull, and sucks all the light out of the corners of my mind.

It seems that when you're thinking dark thoughts in the middle of the night, they tend to snowball. It took the smallest of leaps for me to begin to ask the same questions about myself. I'm about 30 pounds overweight, I have a bald spot on the back of my head like a monk's tonsure, and it's been a long time since a girl made a pass at me. I'm a middle-aged man working in a cubicle in an ugly office full of ugly people. My boss is a spineless weasel, and his boss is the kind of bitch that makes people plot her demise. I sit here in my ergonomic chair at my company-approved computer, smiling while I'm insulted and attempting to ignore it when people sell me down the river.

This isn't what I saw for myself. I was going to be take the world by the ballsack and squeeze until I was rich. I was going to have a trophy wife and a hot mistress, an Italian sports car and a huge house. My maid was going to do the laundry, and my chef was going to cook my meals. My secretary was going to be blowing me under the desk while my staff diverted all my incoming calls. In other words, I was going to do a hell of a lot better.

But life is a bastard, and I made mistakes. I don't regret most of them, because I never would have learned the stuff I know now, but it would have been sweet to be in that Ferrari right now, scoring blow for my tasty hooker girlfriend while she was at her topless photoshoot. On the other hand, in the light of day, with a few hours of sleep behind me, things look a lot better.

I have two great kids and a wife I adore. I have a decent home and enough extra income to buy lots of the stuff I want. I may not be rich, powerful or famous, but I'm also not living in a single-wide in Kentucky, all strung out on crystal meth and trying to dodge my child support payments (no offense if you are a hillbilly meth addict). I haven't done everything I thought I would do, but I've done a lot of things I didn't think I would. For every day that I think how badly I've done for myself, I have five where I wonder how I got so lucky. I'm not always a positive guy, no matter how I try, but in a world with a lot of crap, I've managed to avoid getting too much of it on me.

So what the hell does this have to do with games? Nothing, really, but I did have a point that gets awfully close to being about games. Because at midnight, when that poor schmuck manning the register at the all-night convenience store was going outside for his fifteenth smoke since his shift started, I was playing a game (you know, after I got back home). I feel nothing but bad for the overnight gas man, but after a lot of thought, I'm incredibly happy with my life, and I'm really glad I'm not him. I have the chance to play all the games I want, which is great, because I want to play a lot of games. If my hobby were rock-climbing, stamp-collecting or basket-weaving, my life would give me the opportunity to explore those things, and that's not something everyone can say.

So my life isn't perfect. So it's not as good as I hoped it would be. It's still pretty damned good, and even if it gets to me every now and then, I have a lot to be happy about, and a lot that makes me proud of my accomplishments.

And maybe one day I can buy a Ferrari and spend all my money on French whores. Then my life will be complete.

Mattis a staff writer for Fortress: Ameritrash and the author of theDrake's Flames blog, where you can read more of his crassly opinionated reviews.

Click here for more board game articles by Matt.

A few years back I was standing at the World Boardgaming Championships looking at the games table in the open gaming room when somebody behind me said, "does anybody want to try out a new game?" The offer wasn't to play the newest title from an established publisher, this was an offer to play-test a game still in development and the guy asking was its designer. I'm not the biggest fan of playing half-baked games with strangers so my initial reaction was to stay quiet until other people claimed all the spots and then go back to what I was doing. But a quick look around me indicated there were exactly two of us within earshot, so I was pretty much on the hook to answer one way or the other. The man making the request had an honest face, so I decided to go for it. Five minutes later I was in the war room, sitting down to a map of the Middle East with several piles of chits and cards on the table beside it. This was a Dudes-on-a-Map game, one that worked political, economic and military aspects into a single unified play. World War I? North Africa Campaign? No to both. This was set in the age of the Caliphates, when struggles for power happened in grand palaces as much as on front lines, and this prototype game before me worked that into the mix. I grabbed (and held onto) the Caliph card early in the game but it wasn’t enough. Despite controlling much of the game flow from this powerful position I came in third of three players, victorious in the back rooms but defeated in the field. I wanted to play again, and still do. Though still in development, this was a good game about a time and place most gamers know nothing about.

I have often heard that board game reviews should talk about the price of games. If a review tries to help people make a buying decision, then that makes perfect sense. After all, the best game in the world may still just be too expensive and a game that's free may still not be worth it. Of course, there are many steps in between. So how much a game costs is clearly something people consider. Yet, I never mention the price of a game in any of my reviews and I don't plan on doing so in the future. Let me explain...

The scene: Me with a foam orange gun pointed at my mouth. "People are always asking me if I know Malloc"

Malloc: "Three minutes. This is it Trashfest 2008 ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?"

Me: "i.. ann.. iinn.. fff.. nnyin..."

Me: "With a Cash n' Gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels"

Me: "I can't think of anything. For a second I totally forgot about Malloc and Trashfest and I wonder how clean that gun is."

After reading Mad Dog's article about eye-patches I was inspired to come up with another obvious category. Throwing back a nod to Ancient of Mumu with the calendar concept.... or a top 1.  My criteria used to winnow it down to a dozen was... movie or TV but no anime/cartoon/comic... only humans. It's not so much about the character as it is about the body part... has to be cool and preferably it has uses beyond what nature intended. Many of the characters in this article have gone on to become memes and have been mocked, copied, or otherwise been paid homage in other movies. Sci-Fi is liberally applied as I wanted to keep the title consistent with the original.

I have always hoped that our community would work together to help each other through tough times, and it seems that my hopes have been answered. I don't think I need to describe the recent, global events, but when many of us had to stay at home and our social bonds were put under pressure, a lot of people did what they could to bring people together again and create a fresh sense of community.

Cynthia Celeste Miller, game designer, role playing game author and President of Spectrum Games will be joining us today to answer your questions about her new game, Urban Manhunt, as well as any other questions you might have regarding her work.