Gaming: One of
the benefits of working at a game company for a significant number of years was
the pretty much ever-present availability of a lunchtime game. At TSR or WotC I
could almost always count on being able to set up a game on a “safe” table
somewhere in a little-used conference room or an out-of-the-way corner, and
rounding up half a dozen of my coworkers to knock down big games that might
require 10 or 20 hours of playtime one lunch-hour at a time. It’s a highly
civilized habit that would improve many workplaces, I suspect. Anyway, one of
our perennial favorites, a game we dusted off and played at least once a year
or so, was the old SPI “Empires of the Middle Ages.”
“Empires” is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the
mapboard was cleverly designed for its day and age (hexes were pretty much the
standard in the mid-80s). Second, it’s a game that’s about managing decline and
catastrophe. It’s very common for all the players to wind up in worse positions
at the end of the game than they held at the beginning, because they’re constantly
savaged by negative events such as Leader Dies Heirless, Epidemic, Outbreak of
Heresy, and obnoxious NPCs called magnates who appear at random and attack
everything around them. Finally, the basic resolution system is tilted toward stagnation;
the average ruler taking an average action has something close to a 50% failure
rate, so you spend many turns not getting anything done at all. With that
description, you might wonder why anybody plays “Empires of the Middle Ages” at
all. Well, there are a couple of reasons: The game is enough of an opponent
that you don’t feel compelled to constantly screw with the other players, so in
a way it’s an early peek at a cooperative us-against-the-AI game. Secondly,
there is a wonderful dose of schadenfreude to be savored in watching your
neighbor’s kingdoms fall into pieces, and plenty of gallows humor when you
learn, over and over again, that things can always get worse.
The resolution system of “Empires” is pretty interesting:
Your base effectiveness for any action is your leader’s personal stature, which
can be 1, 2, 3, 5, or 9. Your leader is rated for Combat, Administration, and
Diplomacy. You can take one of five basic actions each turn: Conquest, Pillage,
Rule, Fortify, or Diplomacy. Each of those different actions is based on one of
your leader stats. So if you want to conquer or pillage something, you’ll use
your leader’s Combat status, but if you want to try ruling or fortifying a
territory, you use Administration. You modify your active stat based on various
conditions like the overall social state rating of the province (is it a
wealthy little center of civilization, or a miserable forgotten backwater?) and
things like language, religion, and other situational modifiers. Then you flip
a Year Card and compare the result to your modified effectiveness. A typical
result on the card might read something like “C 3+, -1 SS 5-“ which would mean
you achieve a Conquest result if your effectiveness was 3 or better, and the
area you launched the attack from takes a -1 hit on its Social State if your
effectiveness was 5 or less. The card-based resolution system encodes a ton of
information in a pretty efficient little presentation.
Anyway, the big lesson I learned about playing “Empires of
the Middle Ages” over the years was simply this: Play to your strengths. If you
have a 5-1-2 in Combat, Administration, Diplomacy, you should NEVER bother with
taking actions that don’t use your combat stature, no matter how much you think
the game situation calls for administering or diplomacy. The success chances
are just miserable if you’re trying to do things with a value of 1 or 2 instead
of 5, so you ride your best score as long as you can. I think that lesson might
apply to a number of other board games—if you’re good at some particular type
of action, you should do that over and over again and take what the game gives
you.
One more note… the Decision Games version of “Empires” that
appeared in 2004 isn’t quite the same game. The mapboard is more appealing, but
it turns out that it’s easier to record province social state on a sliding
track (as in the original game) than to keep hunting for the right social state
chit over and over again. The new buildings introduced in their advanced rules
are generally not balanced well, and the scenarios award them to some positions
but not others with no VP handicap adjustment. Finally, the event deck is filled
with minor leaders that almost never match up with the player who draws one. Pick
up this version if you can’t find the original SPI game or if your SPI copy
wears out, and be prepared to do some significant marking up to improve the
play.
Politics/Current
Events: I like Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan for vice president. Ryan
is one of the most interesting politicians in the country for one simple
reason: The man had the guts to say what he thinks needs to be done, and put it
in writing. *Nobody* else has dared to provide a detailed plan of what they
would do with tax rates and entitlements to improve the fiscal footing of the
country—everyone else sticks to empty platitudes. You might think that Ryan is
gravely mistaken about which steps are necessary, but at least you know what
specific steps he’s proposing. Maybe, just maybe, we can actually have a
serious conversation about the “third rail” issues like Medicare and Social
Security in this election. Whether you think the Republicans are right or
wrong, it’s clear to me that NOTHING can happen, one way or the other, until
the conversation at least begins. Ryan’s budget is a place to start. Now I’d
like to see what the Democrats’ counter-plan looks like, so we can compare and
contrast. As voters, we should *insist* that the Democrats tell us what they
would do differently from Ryan instead of simply telling us that his plan is
wrong.
