ConsimWorld Expo, Part 3 of 3
Getting into the right frame of mind for
EastFront or Here I Stand
Playing EuroFront II (and EastFront) at
MonsterCon this year really drove something home to me, and this is the tension
between "competitive" and "experience"
games.
For me personally, one reason to
play a game like EuroFront or Europe Engulfed is to experience the entire war.
Each phase has its distinct flavors: the desperate early years for the Allies,
the titanic mid-war clash of arms on the Eastern Front, the cat-and-mouse games
in the desert, the logistics of the big amphibious assaults, and the Soviet
late-war steamroller. If I play a strategic WWII game, I sort of want to
experience all these different phases. Even if I just play EastFront, the whole
war goes through a lot of different flavors (as I mentioned in my last piece),
and I'd like to experience them
all.
However, in a game of skill, we
expect skillful play to matter, preferably a lot, and we would be disappointed
if a brilliantly-executed Barbarossa didn't convey a decisive advantage, or if
mistakes in '42 didn't come back to haunt us. Between equally-skilled opponents,
a tightly-contested game may well go right to the end, but it is far more likely
that our own quality of play will derail the gaming experience at some point:
the skillfulness of the game has made it more likely that we won't be able to
"experience" the flavor of the entire historical
war.
Compare EastFront or Europe
Engulfed to Here I Stand, which is a game that leans heavily towards the
experience rather than skill end. In Here I Stand, skillful play is unlikely to
pull you ahead because the other players will just beat you back. The system
provides opportunities to thread the needle and come out temporarily ahead, but
it also provides more than ample opportunity for the luck of the draw and the
dice to dominate skill. And so everyone just goes along, hoping to make
incremental improvements in their position, experiencing the flavor the game has
to offer. A masterful Hapsburg player is not going to derail the experience of
the game for everyone else by doing something so unseemly as quickly winning
through his masterful play.
Like many
of these hypothetical gaming trade-offs, calling it a trade-off is slightly
deceptive. One can of course improve simulation value by removing rules and also
improving playability, as games like Grant Takes Command and Breakout: Normandy
demonstrate. And likewise, there are games that, it seems to me, manage to both
provide a competitive environment while still giving you an excellent experience
game: Paths of Glory, Barbarossa to Berlin, Hannibal, Republic of Rome,
Middle-Earth: The Wizards – maybe that's why some of the card-driven games
are so highly-coveted.
Regardless, the
take-away message for me here was simply to recognize EastFront and EuroFront as
the skillful games they are. It seems like such an obvious thing, but so many
big or more complicated wargames these days are non-competitive, either because
balance was considered secondary to historicity, or because they are
definitively experience games, or because playtesting was inadequate, or because
they're so long that very few people can ever really become skillful with them.
EastFront, though, is not like these games. So when tackling larger games in the
Front system (i.e., trying to play more than 12 months), it's so easy to be
sitting at the end of Summer '42 and having a desire to experience '43, but in
reality, once you get behind the 8-ball in this game, it's overwhelmingly likely
that you're done. I think the smartest thing is to take it 6 months at a time.
Check the victory points; if it's close enough to continue (and the ranges in
EastFront are usually reasonably generous), press on, otherwise, call it a game.
It would be nice if a lot more of these bigger games had checkpoints that you
could look up after 4 hours of play time or so and do a sanity check to see if
the game has decisively swung one way or the other.
Posted: Sunday - July 16, 2006 at 09:49 AM