John Zeitler

Have to put the con swag discussion on hold for today, folks– I didn’t get much of a chance to play with any swag yesterday or today, due to real life concerns, but also due to the playtesting session I had to run. I’ve spoken a little bit about it, but I’m still not confident enough that I can start spilling all the beans just yet, aside from the fact that there is something really, really big I’m working on.

I know I said I was gonna stop posting stuff like that on the blog, but the difference is this time, I’m actually actively working on it.

Up late tonight, don’t know why. Anyway, just as a personal easing of the 50/2010 challenge, I’ve decided to allow fully-painted miniatures to stand in for completed games. For every completed unit or vehicle that I manage to have fully assembled, primed, painted, and detailed by the end of 2010, one game will be “credited” to the Clear list for the year. Right now my tally stands at one completed unit– the Space Marine exemplars I did up at the beginning of the year. Right now, based on what I have built out, I can exempt myself from ten more games with the Space Marines alone, and thirteen for the Imperial Guard (as bare-bones as it is, there’s a lot of models there). The Orks, however, are a special case. Their primary units have thirty models each, meaning that they’d have to count triple… except that would make them alone worth twenty-three games off the list. Instead I’ll just have the big units count double, bringing that down to a more manageable seventeen.

If I drop everything and just paint minis for the rest of the year, that gives me forty games “free”. Obviously I’m not going to do that, but having that as an option helps me to focus on that instead of fretting that I’m sacrificing another goal. At the very least, I still want to try to hit at least twenty games properly cleared this year.

Just getting out of my first play of the Imperial Guard army. I did remarkably well. Details will have to wait for a bit, probably tomorrow.

I lied, yesterday, when I said I’d have FF13 thoughts. Today was busy, and apparently I hadn’t quite beaten all of the whatever-pestilence-Grandfather-Nurgle-’blessed’-me-with, which means that in about an hour I’m going to take some NyQuil and time-travel to tomorrow morning. But I can talk a little bit about the game I played last night… a pretty basic 1400-point Space Marine on Space Marine battle. Nothing particularly interesting in and of itself; we played a scenario from the Battle Missions book (which I did wind up picking up last night, too– more on that in a bit). Of course, I lost, but I learned a lot more about the metagame and how other things work. I tried to analyze what I did wrong beyond “rolling poorly” and in the end I was pretty much able to identify my mistakes almost as soon as I made them. Didn’t help me all that much in the immediate, but I now have a far better understanding of what sorts of mechanics work in my favor and what don’t.

I then spent today, in between errands, putting together the last of the infantry for my highly-mechanized Imperial Guard army, which will play radically different from the Marines. At the very least my vehicles should last longer than the first turn.

Last night was the first time I’d played WH40K in a non-competitive setting. It sounds backwards to think that I went straight for a tournament as my first time (back in November); but that tournament was explicitly for new players, was at an opportunity when I wanted to get further into it, and I hadn’t had time to properly prepare a full army between then and last weekend’s tournament. Once I got through that, though, I realized that I didn’t have to go to such lengths to get a feel for the game; the Friday night groups at Legions are far more relaxed than I thought they’d be.

The end result is that I think I made a good impression on the other players (instead of “here’s some jackass who’ll drop by once with some half-assembled pile of crap, get frustrated, and then never come back again”, I hope I managed at least “here’s a guy who’s new to the hobby but is pretty committed to it, and he’s willing to learn”), and I have a new destination for Friday nights (usually). Oh, and I started seriously putting together the third army after realizing the value of vehicles (in my defense, my first exposure to them was an Ork Trukk which is not exactly known for reliability or even usability). Gonna be a while before that one’s ready (spent today putting together half of what I had bought previously) but it’s going to be a riot.

Catch you folks tomorrow, when maybe I’ll get back to FF13; that’s not a knock on the game, I just felt more motivated to do figure work today.

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

The concept of a Warhammer tournament is a little different from what’s usually thought of by the word. Unlike, say, a poker tournament or a basketball tournament, every participant in these events plays the full complement of games (usually three). Matches are made at each stage of the tournament, usually by rankings, so that everyone stays competitive at any point– a player who gets blown away in his first match could get decisive victories in the next two and come away with an overall win.

Furthermore, since each player has a distinctly different set of figures, and mission objectives change with each stage, there’s almost no predicting what you’ll face. For example, in my Round 2, I wound up taking the attacker’s role against a set of Chaos Space Marines… who were defending by not defending. My opponent chose to keep all of his forces in reserve, let me blunder in and wonder what happened– which also negated the orbital bombardment that I was entitled to at the beginning of the match, because there was nothing there to hit– and subsequently wiped the floor with me.

Overall, though, the $5 or so you pay as an entry fee is really more of a token gesture to the shop hosting the event. That five bucks guarantees you about six to eight hours of wargaming in a competitive and friendly environment. Some shops or clubs will even provide pizza or drinks. Really, it’s best not to go in thinking you’ll win, because unless you’ve got a decent amount of experience behind you, you probably won’t. Instead, focus on the game itself and enjoying the play, rather than obsessing over the results.

Oh, and incidentally: I learned the importance of vehicles. I’d been thinking they were just big targets, but they might just be worth having a couple around… which is why my Imperial Guard army is going to be fitted up with four tanks and four assault carriers.

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

I think we’ve established that my family is remarkably competitive. Today I wound up in two card games which could have been mistaken, at times, for a knock-down drag-out no-holds-barred beatdown.

And I loved every second of them. I wonder what that says about me, let alone my sister?

Today was, as can be inferred from yesterday’s post, a very gaming-centric day. The morning saw me finishing up work on the cooperative crime card game I’m developing, and the afternoon held the first playtesting session of the same. It was… educational.

Developing a game is very much an iterative process. Initially you start off with a set of rules, a set of goals, and the tools that the players can use to achieve those goals. In a competitive game, the primary opposition comes from other players, therefore resources should be plentiful but finite. However, cooperative games pit all the players against a preset scenario or challenge, and as such the resources there should be scarce but valuable. Americans have an ingrained sense of competitiveness when it comes to board and card games, and as a result for beginning players, the concept of cooperation (within the game framework) can be a little tricky to understand; however, once that slight paradigm shift is taken, coop games become frantic, tense affairs.

In the session today, three friends and I made a ton of adjustments to the rules that I’d laid out a few weeks prior and codified a bit more solidly last night. It turned out that, while I had made some surprisingly astute and balanced choices in designing certain parts of the game, I made other elements of the game far more restrictive, to the point where a game could be made unwinnable within the first two turns. While I was a little dismayed to note that I’d basically hamstrung the players, it was observed that “it’s easier to loosen up restrictions than it is to tighten them”. Rather than being limited to only one card per turn, for example, players can now play up to their full hand as long as they don’t play more than one card “colorlessly”. (That isn’t a word, I know, but for some reason the spell checker isn’t saying it’s not. Odd.)

In the end, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to refine the game mechanics. It turns out I may need to create a fourth deck for fewer players; I totally messed up the card balance in the “bad things” deck; and there are general tweaks and errata here and there that need to be resolved before we can playtest a “beta” version of the game. Fortunately, I have time to do just that.

Maybe not tomorrow, as I have a pretty busy day ahead of me, but we shall see.

Oh, the zombies? Yeah, you can guess what game I played tonight with only candlelight beside me and the headphones on.