One Assassin or Two? Amanda Vacharat has an opinion

Yes, my introduction was complete when I asked Amanda, “Should I take one assassin, or two?” . . . and she paused, thoughtfully, and then . . . answered! with a relatively informed, relatively interested opinion.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the process through which one selects what type of soldiers will constitute your army in the Games Workshop game Warhammer (yes, I am still embarrassed to write the word).

Think of it like chess—both Warhammer and chess are designed, on some level, to simulate a battle between two armies (both also consist of miniature, model soldiers). One difference, though, is that in warhammer, unlike in chess, you can choose your army. Imagine if in chess you could choose to have four bishops, instead of two bishops and two knights? Or imagine if you can choose to swap all of your pawns, and instead have two queens?

That is how Warhammer works, on some level. When I was asking Amanda about whether or not I should take one assassin or two (think of “assassin” like “rook” or “knight”), I was asking about which models I should include in my army, as opposed to others.

Hopefully, that makes sense, without adding boring explanations. The point is: Amanda was able to converse freely and fluently about the nitty-gritty of (my favorite) Games Workshop game.

And with that, I conclude my portion of the teaching challenge. Next up: Amanda teaches me acting exercises . . . which I think just isolate the most embarrassing, uncomfortable, fear-inducing parts of acting . . . and then make you do those parts over and over. Or something like that.

Anyway, I am ready. Kind of.

-Dorian

Winning, Losing, Playing Well, and “Playing the Odds”: What to be Emotionally Invested in When You Play Games of Chance ( . . . like Dreadfleet!)

For our third lesson in how-to-play-Games-Workshop-games, I decided to zoom out a little.  Start from the very, very beginning.  We had a little lesson on playing poker.

Why poker, when I was trying to teach Amanda about Games Workshop games?  Well, here is (in my words) what happened the last time we played Dreadfleet: everything was going fine, Amanda was winning, until . . . she draw a single, unlucky card.  And then she was not winning anymore.

And then she totally checked out, refused to roll dice, tried to take a nap, and was generally in a bad mood.

Now, one thing I frequently talk to Amanda about, relating to the differences in our childhood, is the fact that I played team sports and Amanda did not.  When I say I played team sports, I mean I really played team sports.  (I am not  exaggerating when I say: I am one of the ten most competitive people I know).  BUT, I played team sports.

And, as everyone who ever plays team sports knows, sometimes you play really well  . . . and your team loses.  Sometimes you play really badly, and your team wins.  Winning or losing is one thing (contingent on other players on your team) and how you play is another. 

A person like me, for example, might play a game of soccer, and my team might have won, but I still might have been angry at myself for playing badly.  Or visa versa: I play a game of pickup basketball, play AWESOMELY , but still, it’s pickup basketball (who knows who’s going to be on your team?) and my team loses.  I would be very happy if you met me after that game, despite losing.

Basically (going back to that game of Dreadfleet), it seemed like Amanda lacked this separation, between winning or losing on the one hand, and your individual performance on the other.  She drew a card, and she translated it to herself (emotionally) as: “I did something wrong, I sucked, I am a bad person, etc.”

Poker, or games based on probability (like all Games Workshop games, which are based on dice or cards) have a slightly different separation than team sports.  In poker, you might do everything right, and still lose—not because your teammate did something wrong, but because  . . . .you were unlucky!

It’s that simple.  With poker, you play hand after hand after hand.  It’s a game of iterations.  All you can do is “play the odds”—and that’s what a good poker player is (emotionally) focused on: getting the odds right, making the right play.  If the cards fall the way he wants, then great.  If not, that’s part of the game.  You’re going to play hundreds more hands.  And you did all you can do.

Now Amanda, a person who has played many card games in her life, didn’t—I don’t think—have any idea just how much calculation of odds a really good poker player does, in his head, all the time. We  went through some hands, and calculated some odds: Say you have two high cards in your hand after the flop (this is hold’em).  What are the odds that you will get a pair?  And then, based on that probability, what should your next move be?

Basically, I wanted to open up another zone, a world of strategy and odds, that you can then interact with emotionally.  That is different than just being emotionally invested in what card happens to fall.

And I said at the end is that if you make a bad move in poker (i.e., you don’t “play the odds” right) but you still win—just from luck—what a veteran poker play would do is, not praise you, but come up to you and say, “You are a f—ing idiot.  If you play that way again, you are going to lose.  Don’t ever do that again.”

. . . and finally . . . going back to Amanda, and that last game of Dreadfleet, Amanda did everything right as a strategist.  She “played the odds” right.  But she was unlucky.  She drew a card (and the odds of drawing that card seem to be about 1/50) and she lost.

There wasn’t anything she should have done differently.  She should have been proud of getting to that point.  A veteran player, I think, would have came up to her, after losing that way, and just said, “Good job,” shrugged, and then asked rhetorically, “What are you going to do?”

What are you going to do?

Play again, probably.  If you are at all a competitive person.

Dorian Teaches Amanda Lesson 2

I don’t like losing.

It seems to me that there are already enough opportunities to lose—choosing a job, choosing a date, applying to schools/jobs, sending out writing, picking a movie for the night…why, then, oh WHY would you willingly, happily, excitedly put yourself in an EXTRA situation of potential loss?

I.E. Why would you ever play a board game??

We were challenged to teach each other something the other new nothing about. Dorian is teaching me Warhammer/Games Workshop. Dorian’s first lesson in Games Workshop was successful—we constructed some little boats, and we played a very basic version of the game. And I did like it, as he said. But he neglected to mention the post important aspect of that evening…namely, that I won.

The second lesson didn’t go so well—Dorian decided the next step would be to play a slightly more complicated version of the same game. A logical move. Unfortunately, half-way through it was apparent that I couldn’t win.

“Half-way through?” you may say. “If it was apparent that you couldn’t win, why was there another half of the game?” Maybe you won’t say that. But that is what I said, and kept saying during the hour in which I tried to stop choosing my own cards/rolling my own dice/moving my own ships, and resorted to (maturely) “napping” in-between turns as a way to dull the pain of my slow-yet-inevitable demise.

For someone who already hates losing (who won’t play tennis or even Mario Kart for points) it was basically an evening of torture. I just this minute read on Wikipedia that in chess, it is considered bad etiquette to keep playing after checkmate!

But Dorian says you have to “play out the story,” and apparently my next lesson is to be on character backgrounds, and how this game is not about winning, but creating a world….I’m excited to see how this works…

~Amanda

Dorian Begins to Teach Amanda Something . . . Not Just Any “Board Game”

“Board games.  I mean, board games?  Are we talking about  . . . board games?  I mean, board games are alright, but—board games?  I’ve played a lot of board games.  I just don’t like board games.”

Yes, Amanda, talking about board games, sounded a lot like Allen Iverson,  talking about practice.  There was quite the negativity in her every pronouncing of the words “board games”.

And yes, most board games can be a little monotonous, as you wait for other people to complete their turn before taking yours.  And yes, board games often have a certain ceiling of just how fun they can be: very few times do you hear of a board game being “wildly, unbelievable amazing” or “mind-blowing” or “the most memorable experience of 2007”.

I, challenged as a I was to teach Amanda something that I knew well (and that had been important to my life somehow) was not trying to teach her just any board game.  I was trying to teach her a Games Workshop game, based in a full-blown fantasy world of its creation.

Games Workshop makes sci-fi and fantasy miniature war games.  These games are not designed to be played for an hour or so on a Thursday evening, but rather are designed to be an entire hobby–one that can (and does for those who are devoted to it) take hours and hours over the course of years.

You collect, model, and paint each miniature–in extreme, amazing detail.  Then you create names, background, and stories for your miniatures, that fit in with the fantasy worlds created by the people at Games Workshop.  Then you create (model) the scenery for an encounter between two players’ miniatures and make up a scenario (a fictional situation) in which these two armies of miniatures might meet.  And THEN you play the game–which is elaborate (if I may be so bold as to make an understatement) and designed to represent such a meeting between strange, magical, (miniature) fantastical armies.

Some people come into the Games Workshop hobby from the painting end, attracted by the idea of painting miniatures.  Others come in because the strategic element appeals to them.  Others, from encountering the world of its fiction (there are countless novels based on the Games Workshop games, some of them best-sellers, many of them available in your average Barnes and Noble).  But all of them (and this is my point) would say of their hobby, “Ain’t’ no game of Parcheesi.”

And so, though Amanda has had some negative experiences with board games–and even some board games of a fantasy/sci-fi bent–I had a great deal of hope that she might get into it, after she let the negativity seep out of her “board games”.

We played Dreadfleet, a game based on naval warfare–tiny, miniature ships.  I think (you might have to check again with her on this) that Amanda had a good time.  And (more than that) she is excited to paint the little ships.  My hope is that her enjoyment with that aspect of the hobby will tie in, at least a little bit, with her later playing of the actual games.

…and Amanda Will Teach Dorian the Delights of Acting Games

A little while ago, we completed the challenge of “writing and performing a 10-minute play in iambic pentameter.”

Well, we didn’t write much about it then, but before the performance, we had some rehearsals. And as part of the rehearsals, we played some acting games, or rather—I rushed around giving too-brief, super-excited directions, and Dorian got quieter and quieter.

That’s when I realized the huge gap in our acting knowledge –I didn’t think about the games as being potentially intimidating, or overwhelming…though when I stopped prancing around long enough to think about it, I remembered coming home from my first three acting classes in tears.

So, because we were challenged to “teach, as well as possible within a week, one thing that I know that the other knows nothing about”, I have decided to teach Dorian acting games—not just because acting (and the games involved) have played kind of a major role in my life thus far (understatement) but also because the point of the games is to increase focus and precision of movement, and to decrease self-consciousness (the bad kind)—blah blah blah, which overall is supposed to build self-confidence…which is good for everyone!

Also they are fun.

So I’m busy developing a delicious curriculum involving pulling imaginary things from imaginary bags, and dancing, and pretending to be water, and masks, and….oh boy!

…Dorian is not as excited as he should be.

Dorian Will Teach Amanda the Epic Game of Fantasy Battles

I must teach Amanda something.  Something that she does not know very well, and that does not suck.

I’m not going to lie, but my first thought was—Ludwig Wittgenstein!

His Philosophical Investigations, I do think is great, and it is difficult to read (difficulty being a theme of this blog) and yet . . .

And yet, I didn’t want to teach her Wittgenstein’s philosophy, or how to read Wittgenstein, or anything like that.  I wanted to teach her something fun, something we could do together, something from the primal and biographical depths of my childhood, something that she had absolutely never before experienced . . .

I want to teach her . . . and even now, I can barely manage to write the word (it’s too ridiculous). . .

WARHAMMER, the game of fantasy battles.

Yes, it is a pseudo-board game involving the painting of miniature fantasy creatures that fight epic (yet miniature) battles against each other.

Imagine if you took Risk, and set it in Middle Earth (where the Lord of the Rings is set), and made it four times more complex (and twenty-five times more dorky).  That is what WARHAMMER, the game of fantasy battles, is like.

And yes, it is actually kind of fun.  Amanda’s not that warlike, but she is kind of dorky and very imaginative (and a little competitive) so there is some small hope that she will enjoy WARHAMMER, the game of fantasy battles.

But it’s a small hope.  I do think it will be something very different for her, and cool exploration of what was for central to my experience of free time during middle school.

We will battle Lizardmen (Amanda) against Skaven rats (Dorian)