June 5 2002 RussCon Report

News Game Results Meta Party Game Results Evening's Soundtrack Ratings Links 21 of us played 17 games. RussCon Mailing List Subscription Info RussCon Report Archives Previous Report Next Report RussCon Info Russ Zone Check out my webcomics. Comicollage: daily ongoing comic jam with 7 artists and no planning ahead! There's a russ strip every Tuesday. I make exquisite corpses at deepmachines.

Game Results

Buried Treasure is a little Sid Sackson gem that's short and fun, and we should play it more.

Recent newcomer Deborah proved her mettle at Carcassonne. The new tiles certainly do add more play variety. There was a large city forming, which Dan got 2 dudes into separate parts of, and a new tile was drawn (which I think of as the Reverse Claw) which separate the 2 parts, thank goodness. Dan's cut-off part had a cathedral in it, heh. The scores tend to be higher and the game lasts longer, simply because there are more tiles now.

JP lost the last game of Drakon and used a controversial negotiating gambit, reminiscent of some recent threads on rec.games.board... It led to a long discussion of gaming group etiquette and assumptions and how we tend to take things for granted about playing style. Multiplayer games, unlike 2-player games, raise all sorts of interesting issues with regard to negotiation, alliances, etc...

In this Drakon game we reached a point where Steve could make a move which would gain him his 4th gold, and guarantee that on his following turn he would get his 5th (game-winning) gold no matter what JP, Sea Biscuit, or I did. So naturally he started to make this move, but JP suggested he do an alternate move instead which would seemingly gain him the same result, but do so by costing me a gold, hence increasing JP's rank to tie for 3rd with me instead of coming in dead last. However, this alternate choice had the potential that we 3 could conspire to keep him from getting his 5th gold on his following turn, so Steve saw no reason to prefer this option. Then JP said that he'd agree not to make a move that would prevent Steve winning on his following turn if Steve would do this alternate proposal, and that furthermore, if Steve stuck with his original plan (which guaranteed his 5th gold on his following turn), JP would play a tile that would let Sea Biscuit win before Steve got his next turn. After several minutes of arguing and negotiating all around, Steve did his original choice of actions, whereupon JP played a gold tile next to Sea Biscuit, so Sea Biscuit of course moved onto it and gained his 5th gold, winning the game.

JP said he felt he had no choice but to follow through on his threat, so that in future games people would know they were serious. The rest of us felt somehow uncomfortable with the whole thing. Steve said he felt he had to do his original action so that JP would know that in future games Steve resents that sort of "bullying ultimatum". We all agreed (I think) that if Steve had simply done his move without JP having proposed the alternate move, then it would have been wrong of JP to gratuitously kingmake and let Sea Biscuit win before Steve got his following turn (since in doing his kingmaking, JP did not alter the fact that he was coming in dead last). So it's an interesting nonobvious question of whether it was appropriate for JP to kingmake given that he had explicitly threatened to do so.

We discussed that the RussCon group has an unspoken ethos that you shouldn't kingmake unless it improves your own position, so in some sense JP violated that for the sake of metagaming (i.e. playing less than optimally in the current game in an attempt to do better in future games by altering how people will interact with him). My personal preference is to avoid such metagaming; I think each game should be played indendently of past or future games ideally, though in practice that is never truly attainable. For instance, imagine that Alf & Bert make a deal, and later in the game it comes time for Bert to honor the deal, but circumstances have unpredicatably changed so that if Bert honors the deal, Alf will immediately win. Some players say Bert should honor the deal, but to me that is based in metagaming of "I want people to trust me in future games". I argue that Bert should break the deal if honoring it is going to give Alf a guaranteed victory. I believe there's an implied ethic that we are all trying to play our current game well and to win it if possible; simply handing someone else victory violates that, and can be frustrating to the other players, just as frustrating as an external-to-the-game alliance (e.g. the stereotype of a boyfriend who always helps his nongamer girlfriend in games because he wants nookie later).

Related issues discussed were to what extent table talk and deal-making should be permitted in games. Most of us seem to like it and agree on the level which we like, but JP's unorthodox proposal stretched the limits in an interesting way. Ironically earlier in the evening, Dan had debated with me, Deborah, and MarkH about the appropriateness of kibitzing in Carcassonne (which is actually explicitly allowed and encouraged by the rules of Carcassonne). Most games don't explicitly state whether table talk is encouraged, allowed, discouraged, or forbidden and every gaming group seems to evolve its own group consensus.

Other interesting unspoken assumptions are whether it's ever reasonable to throw the game to someone else. Our group seems to permit it, if you feel you cannot win: throwing the game to someone else if it maximizes your rank (e.g. you get 2nd place) feels ok to us normally. Yet I know some groups would be horrified at that.

What if you are in last place and have no hope of improving your rank? That's a painful position: is it ok to throw the game just to end your misery? That's seems to be a grayer area! I think most of us feel that it would be a little vulgar to arbitrarily hand victory to one player out of the blue just to end the game, i.e. it's frustrating to other players for one of them to basically win by arbitrary fiat. But it might be more reasonable to avoid stopping someone from winning if you were in that situation.

Evening's Soundtrack

Pirate Jenny, Never-Sea Land
Nina Simone, Jazz Masters 17
Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera
Marianne Faithfull, The Seven Deadly Sins
The Young Gods, play Kurt Weill

Pirate Jenny! The first CD is an obscure band named Pirate Jenny, and the rest all have a version of the song "Pirate Jenny" from Threepenny Opera. Longtime friends may recall the special significance that song has for me. One day the Black Freighter will sail again...

Ratings

Rank ratings:
 1.0000 Deborah (2 games played)   
 0.7000 Daniel (3)
 0.6154 JonathanC (4)
 0.5714 JP (4)
 0.5455 Allen (4)
 0.2500 Matt (3)
 0.2000 Marty (2)
 0.1538 RussW (5)
 0.1000 RussD (3)
 0.0000 Clay (2)
-0.1250 Dan (3)
-0.1429 MarkH (3)
-0.1429 Steve (4)
-0.1429 Whendy (3)
-0.4000 MarkY (2)
-0.4167 Tim (4)
-0.4545 Clayton (3)
-0.5000 Dudley (5)
-0.5000 Sarah (3)
-0.5455 William (4)
-0.8000 JeffF (2)

New Win ratings:
 1.0000 Deborah (2)
 0.7143 JP (4)
 0.6364 Allen (4)
 0.5000 Daniel (3)
 0.3077 JonathanC (4)
 0.1429 MarkH (3)
 0.1250 Matt (3)
 0.0769 RussW (5)
 0.0000 RussD (3)
-0.2000 Marty (2)
-0.2000 MarkY (2)
-0.2143 Dudley (5)
-0.2727 Clayton (3)
-0.2727 William (4)
-0.2857 Steve (4)
-0.3000 Sarah (3)
-0.3333 Clay (2)
-0.3333 Tim (4)
-0.3750 Dan (3)
-0.4286 Whendy (3)
-0.6000 JeffF (2)

Deborah is the Devil! JP is Vice-Devil. Daniel is Vice-Vice-Devil. Then Sea Biscuit, then Allen.

Links

Recent PVP strips spoof alternative comics and then have have pirate vs ninja action

Daryl Cagle collects themed sets of editorial cartoons.

Shiny mud balls

where do they keep the captain's log?
on the poop deck!

Russ