Category Archives for: Board Games

The Fenris Experience

26 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Scythe is a stupendous game of the economic type that has a few other features mixed in. I see it as somewhat of a hybrid, but there are players that consider it a pure euro game.

I have owned “The Rise of Fenris” expansion since it came out, and it is only now that I was able to play it. Having played Scythe exclusively solo with multiple Automa factions on the board, I was interested in playing “Fenris” with others, but I could never make that happen, and I finally decided to do it as a five-player game with me and four Automas.

What an Automa is needs to be explained for those that don’t know. This is nothing more than a small deck of cards that act as the brain for one of the factions in a game. With an Automa, you could play against it in a solo game, and it would be similar to playing a real person. The cards each have an order of actions the Automa faction takes in its turn. Since the cards are shuffled, the solo player never knows what is coming next. And yet, the Automa actions are not just random choices. It makes mostly logical decisions that escalate as the game moves on.

Without spoiling the surprises in the expansion, I am going to talk about my thoughts about it. “The Rise of Fenris” is a campaign-based expansion. It has the players go through a number of scenarios that follow a single long story. Players are to play this story over numerous games. I guess you could compare it to a TV show with a set number of episodes, and “Fenris” follows the buildup and surprises of such stories.

To guide players through the story, each scenario becomes a modified version of base game Scythe. Some of the attractions players expect from a campaign expansion are these modifications in their beloved games. The other attractions are the surprises that come along the way. Although “Fenris” is not a legacy game (the type that goes through a similar campaign but that permanently alters the game components), the surprises are the added feature in such a game that you can never get back. So, though you can reset the game and play the campaign as new more than once, it will not be the same experience as the first. A second play would mechanically be slightly different in that you are not supposed to read the outcomes of each scenario until the corresponding episode bout is over, thereby offering surprises in some of the rewards — and these would no longer be a surprise with multiple attempts.

I had been excited about this one for a long time, and I am delighted that I finally played through it, but in the end, regular Scythe is the ultimate experience. The Fenris campaign was a novelty that I enjoyed mostly, but these new scenarios did not make the actual game more enjoyable. Though a couple were interesting, the scenarios put limitations on those game features that I normally loved.

I didn’t enjoy the overall story. Honestly, it felt like bad TV, and it made me think that such stories are best left alone in board games. I have heard of Pandemic Legacy: Seasons 1’s stellar story, “as if you were watching a proper TV show,” and it makes me wonder if such an experience can even be emulated in board games. I am guessing that the surprises and the buildup can never be the same.

In the backstory at the beginning of the campaign book, there seems to be a conscientious attempt to explain why in the original game, huge mechs are fighting alongside saber-wielding cavalry men and archers. It felt so forced, that it almost destroyed the magic of Scythe’s theme. We don’t want to question what might be wrong with the logic of certain themes and the mechanics that back them up in a favorite game. As players, we want the ideas behind the game to slide harmoniously into place. All I need is a few hints, and my imagination can run wild. When I play games that makes sense, I am the one that provides my own connections as to why they make sense. So that man with a composite bow riding toward a mech can very well bring it down with one arrow if the game allows it.

After playing certain scenarios, I felt that each game was cut short. It had to do with new goals that gave a match the possibility of being shorter. This might have happened to me because I was playing with multiple Automas. “The Rise of Fenris” campaign book does explain that playing with more than one Automa could have balance issues, and I think one of them was the high possibility that later games would actually be shorter because the Automas could reach the goals faster. And there was one game that actually almost stalled with the four Automas infesting the board with pieces and not being able to go forward. I found myself gaming this unlikely feature, trying to take advantage of it to win the game.

So, my observations should be taken with more than one grain of salt. The campaign experience would certainly be different if I were sharing it with friends. A story that does not necessarily appeal to me would be a lot funner if I were sharing my expectations with other Scythe lovers. And I know the mechanics introduced in these game situations would have played out better with others. There was also the burden I had of remembering accumulating rules, and this would have been easier if there were more pairs of eyes chaperoning the added details.

With it finished, I might return to “Fenris” to play the more curious scenarios, but I feel that base game Scythe is the perfect iteration of the game — which is as it should be, I think. “The Rise of Fenris” is an experience, but the original Scythe is almost a way of life. You can keep playing it and finding new aspects you hadn’t played with before, even if you just play it solo like I do.

Leave a comment | Categories: Board Games, Review | Tags: Board Games, Review, Scythe

Down to the Judges (first published in Northwest Indiana Literary Journal)

06 December 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I tell people I was there, watching the fight. The massive screen was blaring through the windows, past the cheers inside. It was a triple event. I was at a birthday party that happened to be on Mexican Independence Day, and that night was the high-profile bout on pay-per-view. My neighbor had just installed the pool, and he was living it up this birthday, granting this pool party for all his close associates and loved ones. I was meeting more of his family members than I had met at the last party, and we danced to mariachis celebrating his birthday and the birth of Mexico as a modern nation. It was really overwhelming, and I was there.

Then it was time for the rematch! I stayed in the pool area with a couple of others while everybody else went inside for the main event. I could see them through the sliding glass door screaming at the set. My neighbor’s son and I were having a deep conversation about life and his time in Mexico. He was talking about his long journey, when his father was filling out the paperwork to bring him to the US. We were talking about life and the rules you had to follow in life and how oftentimes the very laws that are crucial to our lives come down to paid professionals that either know your case or don’t. Holy shit! this was sobering me up even with all the hollering in the background.

So, I was technically in the patio, and I did not see a single jab or bodyblow. I could see the video colors of the screen flashing through the silhouettes of the spectators, and about everybody there swore I watched the rematch, as they were coming out once the fight was over, hooting and lauding the unexpected results. It went the full twelve rounds. It had gone down to the judges and their scores. Everybody swore they were going to give it to Triple G, like they did it last time when again they went through twelve rounds and no knockout, but it didn’t happen that way. Canelo, the Mexican boxer, had covered Triple G with bodyblows, and the judges reacted. A welcome result for Mexican Independence!

They were explaining it to me as they were filtering back into the pool area. Canelo was a counterblow fighter. He waited for you to come to him and then reacted to you. Triple G was an attacker. That is how he won over the judges when they went to twelve rounds last time. This time, Canelo stunned the audience with a reverse in his strategy, and this is the part I found fascinating! He was on the attack. Triple G, as it was described to me, looked confused. Canelo got more punches in, including a battery of body blows. The judges had no other recourse but to recognize who was on top in the fight.

Why find such things fascinating when I don’t even like boxing? It wasn’t just about psyching the other guy out. It was about coming up with a winning strategy and being one step in front of the other guy. Imagine if Triple G resorted to a different strategy. Canelo’s plan would have gone out the window. But what if he was sure Triple G would do the same thing again because it was something that worked last time, and why fix a good thing? That might have been what cemented the change of strategy for Canelo. He would have had to not only think about doing it differently, but I imagine his training would have to reflect this too, and the real psych out would be the one of him trying to psych himself out, trying to become a different fighter, going through different routines.

Maybe Triple G wasn’t thinking at all; he just went with whatever was natural to him, uncompromising attacks. What if that was all he knew? I do believe the real winning move would be in deciding what kind of fighter Triple G was going to be in this second match. Canelo would have had to recognize on what level Triple G was playing and if Triple G was also switching his strategy according to what Canelo might be thinking of doing.

I am thinking of a little kid’s game of having the other kid guess which hand has the marble. After going through one round, if the one holding the marble were trying to be clever by keeping it in the same hand, the savvy kid would know it. If the kid chose a different hand thinking that the other kid expected him to be clever and keep the marble in the same hand, the kid that would know that about his opponent would guess correctly. The point was that you had to guess at what level the kid was playing.

Then again, it could have been nothing more than something as simple as Canelo using Triple G’s strategy because that was what worked in the first bout. It could also be that there aren’t that many strategies to choose from in boxing. There is the type of fighter that plays defensive, the type that favors coming in low or high, and the one that likes to keep his distance or clench to deliver the little kidney jabs. How many other possibilities are there? When you put accomplished fighters in the ring, they are going to bring their ultimate strategy, and maybe there is no choice in the matter because you have to pick the thing you’re best at, and everyone will know it, even the people like me that don’t know boxing, who are informed by the propaganda machine for such an event that educates the audience so that they have something in which to sink their teeth. I am sure it is something like that.

As we were getting back in the swimming pool, I was picking up the talk and able to describe what I saw of the fight. I didn’t even know what the two boxers looked like, and I was absorbing the excitement and letting the alcohol do much of the talking for me. I was so excited, who would have questioned me?

On Monday, they were asking me if I saw the fight when I was picking up my cup of coffee to start the day, and I was not lying when I said it was amazing, spouting off the mechanics behind the results as if I had known both men’s careers since before the first match. I was keeping my conversation rather long, giving a full summary, almost overcompensating for missing every little thing about it.

But I was there. I have no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw nothing. It is like calling a witness to the stand who was present during an incident but who was actually at an angle that would have given the witness no information whatsoever, and yet they call him anyway, and he states his observations, and they take them seriously. Or it is like the witness that was not there at all? They have a name for such people that know not a thing about the incident but deliver probable causes to an event. They are called expert witnesses.

Leave a comment | Categories: Ancedote, Board Games, Essay, Memoir, ReyA' | Tags: anecdote, essay, literature, memoir

Hammer & Mauling

29 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When my own life was the most important thing to me, I used to be an extremist. If I was hot, I’d crank up the AC as far as it could go, and the same went the other way. I didn’t have a middle ground because the middle ground was like no man’s land. It held nothing of interest for me.

When I played a game, it was about building up forces. Yes, I allowed the opponent to position himself in the best place without hindrance, while I was allowing loss of ground purely for the interest of hammering him hard in the end. Actually, it was the end that was so important to me. It had to involve the strike of a hammer.

That is why I never won anything. I was not good at Chess, and when I was introduced to a new game, I would find a way to work it so that I would sacrifice initiative and the gaining of ground to build that heavy army to come forward and devastate right at the end, just like in the movies.

If a game did not allow the opportunity to build up your forces, then it was not my type of game, and I would probably not play it for long. In practical matters outside the realms of gaming, this made me somebody who was constantly burning or freezing.

I would slowly freeze in my room and never even notice that I needed to put on a sweater or to turn on the heater. Maybe I was off in other worlds. I never noticed noises either. If we were playing paintball war games out in the Everglades, noises were what you had to go on because they were what spelled out who was near you when you were hiding in the bushes ready to ambush your friends. That meant I was good at tuning out the shit from neighbors too, although I was such a light sleeper, a noise of any kind always bothered me, nonetheless.

In Chess, my friend had an easy time with me, toying with me because of my obvious propensities. As we were setting up the board on our first game, I told him I liked knights best of all, and he then started the game by annihilating my knights. I thought he was just being a jerk, but later he confessed that he had been reading a book on Chess psychology. It brought up the new Chess of the day, where you use the opponent’s attitudes and whims against them. If somebody said they liked their horses, and you took them out in the beginning moves of the game, you were not just sending a message by capturing them, you were also making the opponent upset, playing this person, making him desperately look for a move for revenge. Another good reason to remove the knights was that if that person were telling the truth and they were good at using the knights, it was best to remove them early. And as every Chess player knows, knights are most useful in the beginning, anyway.

At the time, all of this was shooting over my head. I wasn’t good enough to know how to use horses well enough, anyway. I just knew my friend was annoying. I did want to get revenge, and this kind of attitude always got me into worse trouble.

Later, I was living on the other side of the country, and when I came back for Christmas, I played my friend, and he was shocked. In our first game in almost a year, I was putting him in a corner, and he wanted to know how I got better.

I didn’t study the game, and I didn’t practice. But I was a different player. I went through experiences in this other city, and I became a different person. My behavioral clock had been retuned, and I was making decisions in different ways. That was how I was adding it all up.

On a Chess board, I was playing in a way where every piece and pawn was susceptible to sacrifice if it got me closer to the opponent’s king. I was now playing with the speed of developing your forces and with the understanding that the pieces themselves were not important; rather, what was important was their proximity to the other king.

We played three times during my visit. I beat him twice and had him in the ropes in the third game when he was finally understanding what it was I was doing. We didn’t finish that last game, but I have to admit he was about to turn it around.

I was going through life now moving with the moment. If I lost my horses in a Chess game, that only meant I didn’t lose something else, and it might give the opponent the false sense that they had done something valuable, pinning them to a strategy that might not have worked. I was going with the flow, and I now knew that speed was important. If I needed to sacrifice some pieces to get that much closer to the throat of my opponent, I was going to relieve myself of those pieces.

The one thing I was not doing correctly was being judicious with my sacrifices because sacrifices that did not share mutual destruction with opponent pieces were going to weigh heavily on the player who was two or three pieces behind toward the end of the game. If I got my opponent quickly, it might work, but if the game dragged, I would likely lose. It was the idea of hitting someone with everything you had, fast. I was starting to notice that it was not a winning strategy in the long run. Once my friend knew what I was doing, he could hold back and wait until I was weak enough to overwhelm. I thought I had hit the perfect strategy and was proved wrong, and when I looked at it hard enough, it was nothing but a different version of the old hammer I used to rely on, except this speedy attack was more like mauling.

Eventually, I did get to study Chess a little. I read books about certain tactics. I was never a real Chess player because you have to study the openings, and I never did. Openings didn’t interest me. But I was reading books about Chess psychology and began to understand my friend. He was still a better Chess player than I was, but I could now give him a run for his money.

With time, I can’t say I ever got significantly better. I was still using a modified version of my maul. If my old hammer were the slow move to the explosion at the end, the maul was the fuse already lit at the start with the idea that we were not going to ever reach the end. Both approaches were still about climax. That quirk was still inside me. I would still crank up the heater in response to my being cold.

When I think about this, I must have been doing it because I waited until the last moment of being cold — until it finally dawned on me I was cold — to rip it open and reverse the tide of frost. For me, it was only natural to go to extremes, and I think it was because I liked to experience the sudden changes. If you wash your car after six months of it collecting dust, it was satisfying to wipe off the grime and witness dramatic changes in surface gloss, beholding the filthy water run down the driveway.

I got into a couple of other games. It was funny, but with me, it was always about war games. I would play a skirmish-style game, and again, I would go into the extremes of mauling the other war band with sudden death, if not getting mauled myself.

When I got into board games of all types, I slowly started understanding the parameters of certain games. Now that I was exposing myself to a vast variety of these new board games, I discovered that there were all types of games out there. As I slowly became a better overall player in different types of games, I was starting to wean out the old bad habits. I now started to understand that games were about balance and timing, as well as playing your opponent against self (the psychological factor). If you were hoarding your forces until they were ready, you were not playing with timing or balance, and your opponent can see the slow-moving punch coming at them with enough time to do something about it.

Enlightenment comes in bits and pieces. It is no exaggeration when I say that games have changed the way I go about a problem and how I make decisions in life and in my work. They also honed my ability to focus, to go about the next few steps in any process, whether it be in games, art, or writing. When enlightenment finally arrives, you quickly gather that you had it wrong all along. Because now you know better.

I haven’t played Chess in a long time, what with all these games that are more fascinating right now. These days, it’s getting colder, and I noticed that I apply the force that is needed in my car’s heater almost like a chemist who needs the right amount, and if I need to adjust, I do so with the slightest change as if getting that exact number to make the interior of my cabin perfect. So instead of the extremist that allowed his fingernails to go opalescent, I am someone fascinated with precision.

An extremist takes his argument to its logical conclusion, much to the chagrin of anybody going against the argument. This was the seed of feuds that progressed outside of game environments and thermometers. I used to have a logically sound argument to defend any point, no matter how inconsequential. And nowadays, in order to retain precision in a discussion where both sides do not agree, let’s say, I profess to not really know very much about anything — not in any significant way. My viewpoint is still lurking in the background, and I now defend it with just the right amount of detail and force, coupled with the right timing to deliver the best argument. In the interest of not losing when it really matters, I keep myself and my tendencies out of it, playing the opponent and not myself. It makes life simpler, and it keeps me sharp.

Leave a comment | Categories: Board Games, Essay, ReyA' | Tags: Board Games, essay