Games that end in 0

It's traditional this time of year for gaming bloggers and podcasters to publish their "Best Games of the Year" lists -- and I plan to give mine early in the new year. I'm waiting a few weeks until the official end of the year, however, in case I get a few more plays in during my vacation. (You never know how one more play might change my feelings towards a game.)

It's also an end-of-the-year tradition for many folks to give a retrospective list of the "Best Games From ... " fill-in-the-blank ... five, ten or twenty years ago. Looking over my collection of rated games, I realize that I really can't give a "Best of" list for any of these years, since I haven't played more than a few games from any of these years. So, I hereby give my list of ...

Favorite Games Published in a Year Ending in Zero
(other than 2010):

7. It's not a very good game, but it earns a sentimental mention because it's the first game I can remember playing: Hi-Ho! Cherrio was first published in 1960.

6. I gave Tyranno Ex (published in 1990) to my neice in the early '90s because she liked dinosaurs. She and I played one game, and I thought it was very interesting. It presents the general theme of evolutionary biology in a very abstract way. Although it was published by Avalon Hill, it used (what would today be described as) Euro mechanics. I was hoping that GMT's new game Dominant Species would be similar, but it's not.

5. Swashbuckler (published in 1980) was always a popular distraction for our group. Players control patrons brawling at a tavern. It was always a little too chaotic for my tastes, but you have to love a game where you can give an order to swing on a chandelier. It also has a number of sketches on its cover lifted from Errol Flynn movies.

4. I've only played it a couple of times, but War and Peace (published in 1980 by Avalon Hill) is the definitive strategic hex-and-counter wargame depicting the Napoleonic Wars. The GMT game The Napoleonic Wars is more fun, but War and Peace has the old-school feel to it.

3. I don't even have a copy of Vince Lombardi's (football) Game (published in 1970) anymore. Dennis received it as a Christmas present, and I remember watching him play using its solitaire rules. I played it dozens of times while Dennis was in the navy, and a number of high school friends (including Al, Rick, Steve, Doug, Paul S.) and I had a league using the game in 1982. Strat-o-Matic is a better game for statistical accuracy, but Vince Lombardi's Game was very elegantly designed. Pizza Box Football would probably come closest to capturing its feel.

2. I hated Battle Cry (published in 2000 by Avalon Hill) the first time I played it with Al. It was the first game in Richard Borg's Commands and Colors system. It wasn't until several years later, when Andrew and I played Memior '44, that I came to appreciate the system. I'm glad to see that Battle Cry is getting a makeover by Avalon Hill this year.

1. I remember seeing Avalon Hill's Civilization at the Smithsonian Museum of American History gift shop shortly after it was re-published by Avalon Hill. (It was originally published by Hartland Trefoil in 1980.) The description on the box got me hooked, and I got the game as a gift shortly after. The game's massive length-of-play keeps it from being pulled out too often, but it is a remarkable game. How remarkable is it? Sid Meier acknowledges that it helped to motivate the design for his historic computer game (which subsequently has inspired two board games -- one by Eagle Games and one by Fantasy Flight).

Not Bad in the Abstract

Patrick beat me at Hive this afternoon. He's getting very good at the game, and I'm surprised how much I like it, given that it's an abstract strategy game.

In game theory, an abstract strategy game is a game with no chance and perfect information. No chance eliminates any games with suffled cards or dice. Perfect information means that nothing is hidden -- both (all) players know where all of the pieces are. Examples of games with no chance but hidden information would be Battleship and Stratego. Chess, checkers and Go would be good examples of abstract strategy games -- having no chance and perfect information.

Why don't I like abstract strategy games? I think that the main reason is that I have a really bad memory, which seems to be a requirement for being a strong player. First, good players need to memorize standard openings and defenses. I probably could do this, but that wouldn't solve the mid-game problem. At some point in the middle of any abstract strategy game, players need to start analyzing potential moves. Anyone who's played chess knows the process: "If I move my knight here, he could move his queen there, in which case I could move my pawn forward. Or if he moves his bishop over there, I could counter with my bishop taking his knight." I suppose that I could "train" my brain to be better, but I'm generally lost after three levels of recursion, and can rarely remember which move I started the analysis with. The Wikipedia entry on Abstract Strategy Games suggests that chess has 10^123 possible board situations. Checkers is much easier, only having on the order of 10^31 possibilities. I am proud of the fact that at least I'm willing to admit that it's my mental shortcomings that sour me on these games, unlike many who want to write off the games themselves as being uninteresting. Since Hive only has 20 pieces (10 on each side), the mid game seems more managable to me. I still lose, but at least I don't have a headache at the end of the game.

A secondary reason is that most abstract strategy games lack a theme. (As a side note, Steve Krebs argues at BoardGameGeek that when gamers use the term "theme," what they really mean is "setting." I think he's right.) I enjoy learning something about a topic I'm interested in when I play a game. If I'm playing something from the Ticket to Ride series, I won't really learn anything about running a train network, but I do learn some geography from the mapboard. On the opposite end, I've learned a lot of history from the GMT card driven games, such as The Napoleonic Wars and Here I Stand. I remember that I wasn't through my very first turn playing Japan in a game of Axis and Allies (in 1985) when I understood the strategic importance of the Solomon Islands (and thus Guadalcanal). Checkers and Go have no pretense of a theme, and it would be a real stretch to argue that chess in any way teaches about military tactics. As it is, Hive has no real theme; that is players learn nothing about insects.

So, who is Hive good for? It's good if you want an abstract strategy game with fairly nice pieces, a short playing time and few enough pieces that someone with a bad memory can enjoy it.