St. Louis Maroon Knights FC -- Week 2

This is a continuation of the football season started in the previous post.

Fresh off of our 2-1 victory in Kiev, the Maroon Knights headed back home to prepare for week two. The team looked good on the pitch, but the front office discussion was glum. The signing of Park Lee had drained the bank account, and since there would be no income from the away match, we had to start by laying off the team's assistant manager.

Equally important, the medical staff reported that Welsh midfielder Cecil Bowen's knee was hurt in the first match. Since the team only has five middies on the roster (and no one from the youth squad seems ready to make the leap), manager Angus Collins couldn't play the 4-5-1 formation in the second match versus Bucharest. Instead, striker Jory Cornish got the call, and the team went with a 4-4-2 formation.

A total of 13,500 fans showed up for the home match against Bucharest. Cornish had two solid chances in the first half, but couldn't convert. Instead Bucharest went up 1-0 in the 42nd minute and then made it 2-0 in the 63rd. Guyaese wingback Samuel Buxton sliced the deficit in half with a tally in the 68th minute, but Bucharest responded two minutes later with another goal, making it 3-1. Park Lee made it a one goal game in the 81st minute, but the Maroon Knights couldn't notch the equalizer. The game ended 3-2.

The inury to the 32-year-old Bowen might have been the difference, as it forced the Knights to play out of their prefered formation. And, while Bowen appears ready to come back for next week's game against Istanbul, the medical staff reports that American midfielder Owen Jessup is llikely to be out of action. Collins will need to decide whether to stick with Cornish as a striker or to play someone out of position.

After two weeks, the league table is as follows:

Club	W	D	L	GS	GC	Pts
Bordeux	2	0	0	9	3	6
Paris	1	0	1	6	4	3
St. Louis	1	0	1	4	4	3
Kiev	1	0	1	3	3	3
Bucharest	1	0	1	5	7	3
Athens	0	2	0	3	3	2
Marseille	0	1	1	2	5	1
Istanbul	0	1	1	3	6	1

St. Louis Maroon Knights, FC

One of the amazing things about BoardGameGeek is the number of self-published board games available. It's not surprising (to me) that many serious boardgamers are wanna-be boardgame designers. It's the same as every teenager with a guitar wanting to be a rock star, every English major wanting to write the next great novel and every movie nut believing he's a director.

BoardGameGeek makes it fairly easy for amatuer designers to post their game materials and solicit feedback. I've tried out a few of them. For the most part, these games are fairly rough, but, I suppose you get what you pay for. (One exception that I discovered last year was the very-fun Delve: The Dice Game.)

A couple of weeks ago, Luke Morris (Geek handle Hamster of Fury) emailed those of us who requested it a preliminary version of his game Footy Manager. The game allows one or more players to manage the front office of a soccer (football) club. Unlike other soccer games, such as APBA Soccer or All Time Championship Soccer (another self-published game), the game doesn't focus on the play-by-play of the matches. Players spend about half their time managing the team's roster and about half playing the games. The player's team starts as the lowest-ranked team in the fourth division of a fictional soccer league. Working with a paltry amount of money (and a roster of fictional players), the player tries to win enough games to work his way into promotion. The games themselves are OK, but the real fun is the "role playing" aspect of following your fictional players through their season/careers. It reminds me of following my fictional bomber crew in the 1981 Avalon Hill game B-17: Queen of the Skies or my fictional squad in the 1983 Victory Games game Ambush.

I started a game a couple of weeks ago, but Luke made some (much-needed) changes to the injury charts (and a few other tweaks). So I started anew this afternoon. Here is a short summary of the first few weeks for the St. Louis Maroon Knights FC. (Note that Luke uses British pounds as the game's currency, but I'm using $s instead.)

The marketing deparment was able to land a $2 million sponsorship deal with Barclay's, which gave me enough seed capital to expand our stadium's capacity to 18,000. It's a long way from a Premier League stadium, as only 5,000 of the capacity is seated -- the rest is standing room.

I also hired some staff. Having learned my lesson the first time through, I hired a full medical staff to help with injuries and a youth team coach to help feed new players into the roster for next season. (This is a lot cheaper than trying to buy players off of the transfer list.) I also hired assistant managers and coaches to help with training. This left me with only $1.6 million in the bank.

Speaking of the transfer list, most of the players were far too expensive. Henrik Jacobson, a 32-year-old keeper was available for $5 million from second-divsion club Turin, and first-division club Lyon wanted $3 million for Swiss wingback Thomas Hurlimann. Then I saw that 27-year-old Korean striker Park Lee was available from third-division club Bremen for $1.5 million. Lee was much better than my top strikers, so I drained the bank account to sign him -- putting my 30-year-old striker Jimmy Swales on the transfer list cheap. (I was able to move him to fellow fourth-division club Paris for $75,000.) That left $175,000 in the bank as I headed to Kiev for the first match.

Kiev is ranked 4th (of 8) in the fourth division, so the manager decided to play a 4-5-1 formation and hope for a tie. Attacking middie Johnny Shanks put the Knights up 1-0 in the 68th minute, and Park Lee made it 2-0 in the 81st minute. Kiev scored one in injury time to make it 2-1, but it was too little too late.

The first home match will be next week against Bucharest. In the meantime, I'll need to check the injury report to see who's unavailable. Hopefully a big crowd will show up, because we need the money.

Excited about APBA Soccer

As regular readers know, I've been trying to locate an enjoyable soccer game for over a year. The boys and I had a good time last summer with The World Cup Card Game, but it's not really a simulation as much as a card game.

I played around last winter with several versions of my own soccer game. While the game was able to reproduce reasonable stats, it just wasn't fun.

Finally, last month I took All-Time Championship Soccer with me to Jamaica. The gameplay wasn't that enjoyable, and (at least for the few games I played) the results didn't strike me as all that realistic.

I'm hopeful, now that APBA may come to the rescue with its new soccer game. I've been an APBA fan since I bought their baseball game in 1981. The session report that I've read makes it sound fairly interesting. It might have a few things in common (understandably) with APBA Hockey. I bought APBA Hockey in 1994, and thought it was a slight improvement over Strat-O-Matic Hockey. My biggest complaint with both hockey games is their weak handling of line changes. Luckily, that's not an issue with soccer, so I'm hoepful that the game will be enjoyable.

I've officially told Dennis that I'd like APBA Hockey from the family for my birthday next month. In the meantime, I located the cards for the Irish National Team online. Looking at them with anticipation reminds me of the days I spent reading the brochure for APBA Baseball again and again in 1981 while waiting for it to arrive.

Gaming in Jamaica

Jamaica was beautiful, as usual. I spent most of my time enjoying the scenery and working on a paper for an economics conference. But I did get a little gaming in.

The first game is a self-published effort called All Time Championship Soccer. It's a download-for-free and print-it-yourself package. The game comes with a roster for 32 nations representing the nation's best World Cup showing. I played three games and shelved it, as the goal scoring seemed excessive. So, my search for a good soccer game continues. I still need to try The World Cup Game, and I now see that APBA has a soccer game available.

Gillian and I split two games of EcoFluxx. I still like the game, but I think Gillian still doesn't quite see the point (which is a common reaction to the Fluxx games).

The best gaming of the week was three games of Early American Chrononauts. I had a feeling that Gillian's dad, Ollie, would enjoy it, since he likes history and science fiction and has a good sense of humor. Gillian beat me in the first game while Ollie watched. In the second game, I managed to draw consecutive "Get there first" cards, and I stole two artifacts from Ollie to win the game. Ollie won the third game by snagging his three required artifacts. It was the first time I had played the game with three players, and it reminded me how much fun the game is.

Finally, I played dozens of games of cribbage on my iPhone in the airport. I think the AI is fairly weak, since I won about 80% of the games.

Extra Credit Settlers

A couple of years ago, BoardGameGeek user Joe Wasserman created a geeklist summarizing the games he uses in his high school class to teach economics. I posted some suggestions at the time, but it got me thinking about how I could bring boardgaming into my economics classroom. Unfortunately (at least in terms of my thinking), I've spent most of the last year and a half teaching quantitative courses.

This semeseter, however, I'm teaching Principles of Microeconomics. So, I turned my thoughts from Joe's geeklist into an extra credit assignment. Students wanting the extra points can play two (or more) games of Settlers of Catan and then answer one of four essay questions. The student can buy Settlers or he or she can borrow my copy. Here are the questions:

1. There rarely is enough of any resource (let alone every resource) in a game of Settlers of Catan. What big microeconomic idea does this describe? Since there isn't enough grain for you to build everything you want, buying a development card means not using the grain to build a city or trading it away for something else. What big microeconomic idea does this describe? Describe one situation during the game when you had to make a choice of how to use a resource card. What were your options for using the card? What were the advantages and disadvantages for each option? How did you decide?

2. Describe one trade that you remember making during one of the games. What card(s) did you trade away, and what card(s) did you receive in return? Explain how you eventually used the cards you received and why you preferred this to the cards you traded away. What big microeconomic idea is described by the fact that the trade made both you and the other player better off. Suppose that a "referee" cancelled your trade because it was "unfair." Would this make you better off or worse off? Would it have made your trading partner better off or worse off?

3. Even though there aren't "prices" in the game, were all of the resource cards equally "valuable." Select one of the games you remember well. Which resource was the most valuable in this game? Which resource was the least valuable? How can you tell that a resource is valuable (or not) even though there aren't any prices in the game? What factors (either particular things that happened in your game or general factors built into the game's rules) caused the valuable resource to be valuable and the non-valuable resource to be non-valuable?

4. How many times (in total) did the robber strike during your games? Of those, how many times did you control the robber (i.e., it was you who rolled the '7')? How did you go about deciding where to put the robber? What factors did you consider in making a decision? (Note that some of these may be strategic, and others may be personal.) How did your decision-making change as the game progressed?

So far one student has borrowed the game, and another has reserved it for spring break. We'll see how the answers turn out.

Good Gaming Magazine

This weekend I discovered Win -- an online magazine (German, but with an English version avaiable) devoted to gaming. The normal subscription price is six euro per year (about $8), but for the next few weeks, you can download the pdf files of the six previous issues for free. I already printed out these issues for airport reading on my trip next month.

Choose your own review: Space Hulk Death Angel: The Card Game

I used to enjoy Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I thought the format would make for an interesting review ....

You are in the midst of a quest to a strange new land! (OK, let's say you're at the dry cleaners.) As you leave the merchant stall with your new magic rune (three business shirts, light starch), you look across the parking lot and notice a game store that you've never heard of before. You feel drawn to it -- you're sure you hear a voice telling you to visit. What do you do?

a. Walk into the store. (Go to #1.)
b. Leave and go home. (Go to #2.)

1. You walk into the store and are greeted by a kindly man. He introduces himself as Manager -- he's the Subaltern of Merchants. He is organizing his wares, and you notice a game you've never seen, called Space Hulk Death Angel: The Card Game. Noticing your interest, Manager asks if you are familiar with cooperative games. How do you answer?

a. "What's a cooperative game?" (Go to #7.)
b. "I hate cooperative games; why bother to play with people if there is no winner?" (Go to #3.)
c. "It depends upon whether there's a traitor mechanic. Without a traitor mechanic, it always seems as though one person runs the show." (Go to #4.)
d. "I enjoy cooperative games -- even without a traitor mechanic." (Go to #5.)

2. You mount your steed (get into your car) and drive home. You can't help but wonder what the voice meant, but now you'll never know. (Seriously? What kind of adventurer are you? The end.)

3. Manager answers, "You were wise to speak with me first, my friend. This game will not serve your purposes. You may want to visit a friend of mine named 'BoardGameGeek' in the land known as Internet to find other options." You are disappointed to hear this, but you feel as though you have made the correct decision. (Go to #9.)

4. Manager answers, "You were wise to speak with me first, my friend. This game will not serve your purposes." If you don't already own them, you may want to consider Battlestar Galactica, Shadows Over Camelot or Saboteur." You may want to visit a friend of mine named 'BoardGameGeek' in the land known as Internet to find other options." You are disappointed to hear this, but you feel as though you have made the correct decision. (Go to #9.)

5. Manager answers, "You may find it worthwhile to buy this game, but maybe not. Death Angel's theme involves playing out a futuristic gun battle between space marines and aliens known as Genestealers. How does that sound?" How do you answer?
a. "That sounds really cool!" (Go to #6.)
b. "That doesn't sound like something my group would enjoy." (Go to #8.)

6. Manger answers, "Very good, my friend. Death Angel is largely a card game with a few markers and one die. There is no board -- not even a player mat. There are no fancy figurines. How does that sound?" How do you answer?
a. "That's OK with me -- it makes the game more portable and keeps the price lower." (Go to #10.)
b. "That doesn't sound like something my group would enjoy. My group really likes a nice board and some components." (Go to #11.)
c. "Did you say a die? Hold on there; my group doesn't go for rolling dice." (Go to #12.)

7. Manager answers, "A cooperative game is one where the players work as a group to defeat 'the game.' The group either wins or loses as one team. Does that sound like something you and your companions would enjoy?" How do you answer?
a. "That sounds cool." (Go to #5.)
b. "That doesn't sound like something my group would enjoy." (Go to #3.)

8. Manager answers "You were wise to speak with me first, my friend. This game will not serve your purposes. If you don't already own them, you may want to consider Pandemic, Shadows Over Camelot or Saboteur." You may also want to visit a friend of mine named 'BoardGameGeek' in the land known as Internet to find other options." (Go to #9.)

9. You leave Manager's merchant stall. You feel good about the decision you made. As you mount your steed (start your car), you look up to see that the stall has disappeared -- it now appears to be a seller of poor-quality armor (a Radio Shack). You stare in disbelief, but then hear Manager's voice. "Do not fear young adventurer. I will return again when I am needed." You ride away, vowing to return to the wise merchant in the future. (The end.)

10. Manager answers "It sounds as though you and your companions would enjoy Death Angel. Furthermore, Death Angel is enjoyable solitaire if necessary. Please meet me at the front of my merchant stall if you would like to complete your purchase." (Go to #9.)

11. Manager answers "You were wise to speak with me first, my friend. This game will not serve your purposes. If you don't already own it, you may want to consider Shadows Over Camelot." You may also want to visit a friend of mine named 'BoardGameGeek' in the land known as Internet to find other options." (Go to #9.)

12. Manager answers "You were wise to speak with me first, my friend. This game will not serve your purposes. If you don't already own it, you may want to consider Pandemic." You may also want to visit a friend of mine named 'BoardGameGeek' in the land known as Internet to find other options." (Go to #9.)