Nearly Two Decades Gaming... My Experience With Magic: the Gathering.

Been a while, huh? I promised myself that I wouldn't write any articles here that I couldn't be sure would provide a unique or valuable perspective. There are lots of places to read about games, comics and geeky films/novels/TV online, that I pledged that I'd write when my opinion was relevant to folks who don't already know me well. That also came with "no promising blog updates if none are forthcoming." I've got a few ideas now, so in the coming weeks and months I'll be doing some writing, with no guarantees as to update frequency. What I've been up to since I last wrote is a return to a few geeky hobbies that I used to be into years ago, but not since until recently. I'll be writing a few articles on these subjects, but both topics (Collectible Card Games, especially Magic: the Gathering, and Miniatures wargaming, especially Warhammer) are too large for a single article. Gotta start somewhere, so Magic's up first.

I prefer not to think about how much I've spent on this game, but I can't say
I didn't get a good value for my money.

The year was 1993, and I was at my third Gen Con (which would be my last one with my father and younger brother, as I started college that fall,) mostly there to play D&D. I registered for various events and seminars, but everywhere I went in the Milwaukee Convention Center, the scene was the same. Everywhere there were people sitting at tables where there was no event scheduled, or even on the floors playing a game I'd never seen before. It was some sort of card game, but each player had their own deck. Magic didn't need word of mouth in those first few days, people were too busy playing it on any flat surface they could find with anyone who had a deck to bother evangelizing. I headed to the hall and picked up a starter deck and a booster pack of Magic cards, what we'd now call "Alpha Edition." I didn't actually play Magic at Gen Con, there wasn't time to figure out the game and attend my scheduled events, but I looked over the curious cards and read the rules.

College was a great time to be a gamer, at least for me. I quickly found a gaming group and was playing D&D and Shadowrun as often as I could (which was a little too often to keep up my studies, especially once I moved into a dorm room.) When one of the guys in the group got a job at a game store in early 1994, he brought Magic to campus with him. Some of us had a few cards, had maybe tried it, but with Revised Edition and The Dark, it blew up big that spring. Through the rest of that first year and the summer that followed, we played a LOT of Magic. Some of us quit in frustration at the release of Fallen Empires (a set so bad that nearly 20 years later you can still buy unopened display boxes of packs for well under retail,) but we all got back in for Fourth Edition in the Spring of 1995.

If only I'd kept this, I could now buy a used car.

I attended a few tournaments, as I was playing one of the early dominant competitive decks, a red/green deck based around a card combination that could end the game on Turn One with a lucky draw. My "Channel Fireball" deck won its share of games, but when key cards in it were banned, I found myself unable to stay current with purchasing the cards to build a new competitive deck. I tried a few other tournament concepts that didn't do very well, but it was pretty much back to "kitchen table" magic for the next few years. Once the college friends started to get married, move on to jobs and such, playing magic at all seemed expensive and not really worth it except on the rare occasions that we all got together and felt like bringing out the old cards again. Money got tight, I sold off the expensive cards from my old tournament deck, and that was it.

Except it wasn't. When I got into games retail, I stayed away from Magic Cards at first. I remembered how expensive they could be. A friend I met at the store got me into buying pre-constructed decks as they released for a "buy this once and then put it away" kind of playing, and I did that for a year or two, maybe buying a booster pack when curious. A customer helped me trade for enough cards to make a semi-competitive tournament deck which I played and did okay with for a bit, until the mighty banhammer hit a key card in that deck, too. Back to the kitchen table. I kept the tournament deck together to dust off and smack people around with on occasion, but I bought fewer and fewer cards, with no real desire to have more.

My favorite setting in the M:tG Universe, it returning when it did seems like fate.

In the year immediately before the Hobby Shop I managed closed its doors for good, I briefly got back into Magic when I discovered booster drafting. We'd get together, draft a few packs and build decks and play a few rounds of swiss for a prize pool of about a pack per player split between the top 2. These small drafts were in the original Ravnica Block, and I loved the characters, the setting and the two-color guilds, I even read the novels. The 3^rd set in the block came out, and we just never managed to get together for that last booster draft. I kept the packs, unopened, and put them away for years. I was pretty sure I was done, and for over six years, I was right.

Four months ago, two things happened. A friend (from that original group at college) posted to Facebook about playing Magic with his wife and daughters. Around the same time, my wife met a group of Magic players at the college where she's returned to finish her degree. We started talking about the game, dug out my old collection from the 4-5 different boxes and closets it had been scattered to... and just like that, I was back. I learned about the current tournament formats, got my friends into EDH (also known as commander) and started working on a tournament deck, learning what parts of my collection still held value. Magic is regarded as a rich man's (or woman's) game, but I've done okay on relatively little money, and I'm a tournament player again. The specifics of that journey are best left to a second article.

After 20 years, Magic proves to be one of those games for me... I never really quit, I just go into periods of remission.

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Disney acquires LucasFilm, new Star Wars Films Starting in 2015.

I may not write as often as I used to, but considering my interests and areas of expertise, now and again a story comes up that absolutely cannot be allowed to pass without comment. This is one such story. The media giant The Walt Disney Company has been snapping up or producing geek-friendly properties for a while, with a recent buyout of Marvel Comics, their publishing of the Percy Jackson teen olympian series through Hyperion and a general increase in science fiction and fantasy on network programming (They own half of A&E and all of ABC Television.) Today, they dropped a bomb on geekdom. They bought out LucasFilm and ILM for just over $4 Billion USD and are getting straight to work on cranking out new Star Wars movies.

"I've got a bad feeling about this" jokes will be EVERYWHERE in a day or two.

Reactions have been immediate and scattered. We're not prepared for this. The automatic knee-jerk reaction to a huge media conglomerate buying a beloved property and making something new out of it is supposed to be fear and disgust, but this is Star Wars. More importantly, this is Star Wars without George Lucas at the helm, which is something geeks have been praying for in the "never gonna happen but wouldn't it be nice if..." category.  Every geek is going to have to face something that we may secretly dread. We're going to have to judge new Star Wars films based on their own merits, and confront the possibility that we might not just be able to blame George Lucas if the franchise moves on past being something we can enjoy, and we just plain... hate the new stuff, trapped in our dreamy memories of the originals. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Lucas will be kept on as creative consultant, but the new films will have LucasFilms' Kathleen Kennedy (I'm calling it now, this is a name that in a few years will be thoroughly idolized or vilified, spat like a curse in geek circles) at the helm. They are in active development for a new trilogy, with Episode VII to release in 2015, and beyond that, Disney plans to continue making a new Star Wars movie every 2-3 years until people stop paying to see them.  They know there is money to be made whether the hardcore Star Wars fans approve or not, and so long as that is true, there will always be a new Star Wars. Maybe, just maybe... that's a GOOD thing.

Hey, even if it turns out bad... an Evil Empire ruining the franchise is TOTALLY Star Wars,
so... there's that.

Hear me out. I am tentatively excited about this announcement.  Maybe the new films will be great, maybe they'll be crap. We know that without George Lucas running the show, even if they are crap, they'll be crap for different reasons, not because one guy decided that his creation wasn't bigger than him after all, and it'd be his way or not at all. Even if the new films are bad, there's an opportunity there for new Expanded Universe fiction, new video games, all sorts of properties that traditionally make the most money by being satisfying to US. Those properties are way more likely to be developed and put in the hands of someone capable of doing them right if there's a new film coming up to tie them into. No matter what they say today, geeks are going to go see every one of these films, and more science fiction is pop culture means one thing for sure...

There is gonna be sexy cosplay in 5 years of characters that don't even exist yet. Nice.

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XCOM: ...and Now. (2012 Firaxis.)

I meant for this follow-up article to follow within a few days of my profile on the 1994 original. However, when I got the new XCOM on launch, I realized something. There would be dozens of articles within days of launch written by foks who had put a handful of hours into the game and written to hit a deadline. I knew after a few minutes playing that I was going to be into XCOM for some time to come, and the best way to talk about it would be from someone who had sunk enough hours into the game to consider themselves a veteran. In the last two weeks, I've sunk nearly 85 hours into this game, making it the second-longest played game on my Steam account, beating out Borderlands which I played weekly with friends for months, sometimes staying up all night. Early this morning, I finished the game in the manner it is intended to be played: Classic Difficulty, Ironman mode. I now feel qualified to talk about it.

XCOM has the guts to do something new.
 Instead of eventually beating the game being a matter of persistence, you can sink dozens
 of hours into a game of XCOM, and lose. Planet is taken by the aliens, Game Over.

So many of the reviews I read and listened to did the same thing. Spent a few sentences talking about what a good game XCOM is, and then the rest of the review talking about flaws, many of which were just design decisions they didn't personally understand. Make no mistake, there are a few bugs here, and they frustrate, especially in a game with permadeath and a mode which does not allow you to reload saves when something unfortunate happens. However, even in its current state, XCOM is a triumph. Turn-based strategy is a genre that is mostly found in niche titles or older games, with the notable exception of the Civilization series. XCOM has the potential to change all that, with a big-budget, slickly produced title that modernizes the gameplay and provides modern polish.

The game is, like the original title, about running a global organization to combat an alien invasion against a foe that outnumbers, outguns, and strikes without warning anywhere in the world. They start with weaponry that can kill a human or destroy a building, while the best soldiers in the world with our finest technology can only kill one of their weakest number with concentrated fire, assuming they don't panic before doing so. What provides hope is the strategic and tactical command of the leader of XCOM (you) and the researchers and engineers who take bits of alien technology and study and replicate it in order to develop new weapons, armor, ships and techniques for turning a bunch of scared rookies into a force capable of striking fear into alien hearts. Turn by bloody turn, difficult choices are made, and the tide slowly turns from barely surviving to kicking the aliens the hell off our planet.

You can customize everything about a soldier except their assigned class, Country of Origin, and gender. I named this squad after characters played by myself, my wife and friends in tabletop RPGs over the years.

In the strategic layer, you need to manage limited resources to build up the base, get satellites covering most of the globe, research and develop the tech for the soldiers on the ground, build and arm craft to shoot down UFOs and manage global panic to keep your funding in place. The game is played through the tactical missions, but won or lost based on the strategic layer. The missions are usually "find and kill all the aliens," but sometimes there will be a VIP to escort or locate and protect, bombs to defuse or civilians to protect. The pace of the game is careful and deliberate, with risky play resulting in failed missions, wasted resources and dead soldiers who need to be replaced with raw recruits. The best and worst turns of the game are when you make a minor mistake, exposing a new group of aliens to your squad's position, and your soldiers are at risk, even if they have advanced equipment and abilities.

Every soldier is assigned a class on promotion from being raw recruits, and as they participate in missions and kill aliens, they level up, gaining more powerul abilities. You can customize the soldiers, they gain nicknames automatically, and it hurts to lose a leveled-up soldier knowing it was your fault. That's going to happen. I lost surprisingly few soldiers in my successful Classic Ironman game, but two of them were Colonels (the highest rank) with dozens of kills each, and they died in the same mission on two subsequent turns. Each soldier can move twice, move and fire, or just fire their weapon without moving. Certain special class abilities or weapons require you to stay still, and others end your turn as though you had fired a weapon. You make hard choices. Save India, Canada, or Russia? Reload now, not knowing if you should instead get that soldier ready to fire on an alien you can't see? Try to outflank the enemy and risk alerting more to your position, or take a risky 35% shot and feel maybe like you wasted a precious action?

The result of poor planning, squad panic, rushing forward too quickly, or just plain bad luck.

Having played a bit with the multiplayer (point-based, competitive mixed squads of humans and aliens on static maps) and beaten the game on Normal and Classic Ironman, albeit with two wins out of thirty games attempted, I don't think XCOM is quite done with me yet. I might not take on Impossible difficulty with any degree of seriousness, but Firaxis is committed to long-term support, especially with a game that has done so well. Reviews have been nearly universally rave, and DLC is planned, with the first post-release content announced yesterday. A subplot focusing on China with custom maps and new missions will be the focus of "Slingshot," with a Chinese gangster available as a hero character, and the possibility of early access to a powerful endgame weapon as the reward. With more DLC planned, and the inevitable expansions and sequels, I feel bad. So much death is coming. Aliens, poor squaddies, and a whole lot more of my free time.

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XCOM: Then... (1994 Microprose)

Tonight at just before midnight, one of my most anticipated games of the year is releasing. That's a bold statement in a fall that is so packed with amazing game releases for PC and consoles that even someone without a job or school commitments can't possibly make the time to play everything. When XCOM: Enemy Unknown arrives, I expect that my time with the other fall releases, as well as the games I still have from the Summer Sale that didn't get the time they deserve will come to an abrupt halt. I've spent a week watching videos and reading reviews. I'll give a full review of the 2012 XCOM once I've emerged from a likely weeklong bender playing it. To understand why I am so hyped for this game, you have to look at the game it is a remake of, 1994's X-Com: UFO Defense (known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe.)

The Global Geoscope view is, along with base-building and the tactical combat, 1/3 of the X-Com experience.

Most games from almost 20 years ago don't hold up very well. Even if you can get past the dated graphics of years gone by, when you take off the rose-tinted glasses, gameplay has come a long way. The original X-Com is still compelling, still brutally difficult, and still fun if you can actually manage the downright hostile user interface. I've made my love of turn based strategy well known, between Jagged Alliance and Civilization I've spent countless hours planning, plotting and fighting battles one turn or action point at a time. Xcom is a game that I realize even now I've never gotten very good at. In the year 1999, Aliens invade and the Earth pools its money to fund a global organization to combat the threat. The situation is near-hopeless, but you are the last hope for humanity.

I can say that with many hours into the game, I've never won. I am still challenged even on beginner difficulty in a game that has veteran players modding it to further increase the challenge. X-Com does not tailor itself to the player, from the beginning, the aliens are playing to win, independent of your skill or decisions. Globally, you have to manage bases, respond to threats and learn where the aliens are and what they want. You fight on the ground with normal human troops each with unique names and statistics over landed UFOs or crashed ones you've shot down. Capturing alien technology for research, figuring out where alien bases are, even capturing live specimens for study are goals from day one, and even surviving the aliens is a challenge.

Inside an enemy spaceship, the squad from an Escapist Magazine forum's Let's Play
faces a dreaded Chryssalid. Zombification imminent.

Your soldiers get better with time, but against alien weaponry they die. Even once armor has been researched and produced, and you have energy weapons at your disposal, in a single turn a soldier can be killed, and death is permanent. Every battlefield is procedurally generated, all terrain (aside from UFO walls is destroyable, and if you have the action points, you can issue a wide variety of orders to the troops. Grenades, rocket launchers, and stun batons supplement conventional weaponry, and tanks can be loaded into transports to assist your troops. If a psionic alien can be captured alive while it is mind controlling your troops to drop grenades into the middle of the squad, psychic powers can be researched, and psi-soldiers trained.

The new game has big shoes to fill. Along with Sid Meier's Civilization, X-Com was one of the titles that made Microprose huge in the 1990s. Luckily, Sid Meier's own studio, Firaxis Games has taken up the challenge, and I look forward tonight to seeing Sectoids mind-control my hapless squaddies while Cyberdisks move in for the kill and Chryssalids happily turn civilians into zombies to panic and terrorize the citizens of a likely doomed Earth. Should be a lot of fun.

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Quick One. Taking on Writer's Block.

It has been two months since my last post. This bugs me way more than it does anyone still reading or checking for updates. I've got a ton of decent reasons and bad excuses, but the biggest factor is that I've been struggling with completing articles in my usual format. I have 3-4 posts 75% done that I just hit a wall on. The one and a half page with 3-4 images and 5-9 link articles were draining me, and I came to a point of total creative burnout. Had trouble writing anything, designing anything, etc... if it wasn't for weight training and a TON of awesome video game releases, I'd have been just pretty much sitting here staring at a computer screen and occasionally sleeping. However, there are new games, fantasy novels, TV shows and other geeky things that I think I need to write again.  Maybe to bust that creative block, what I need to do is play with the format a little bit, try some shorter, punchy articles. See if people like the shorter format and if the pressure to write hundreds of words several times a week doesn't get to me.

For a preview of what I'll be talking about first, in a 2-part series, I refer you to the following image.

Not Enough Time Units Remaining!

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Quick Article: Doc Designs a Boardgame. (Part 1)

Quick one today, as I'm struggling lately to not just write about video games all the time, since that is what much of my leisure time of late has been devoted to. (That, and getting a few books deeper into Vlad Taltos, which I already wrote about here.)  Since it seems that most of the (non-pornographic) content on the internet is dudes and ladies writing about video games, I try not to make this site "game review/discussion of the week or however often I'm updating now."  There is, however, one thing I've got going on that is about geeky stuff, what I'm doing at the moment that is directly related to being out of work, and that neither I or 1000 other sites are writing about at the moment.  I'm finishing design and development of a boardgame.

Before I started this blog, sometimes there were quiet moments between crises at my previous work when no students needed assistance, no paperwork had to be done or organized. In these rare times, I didn't want to risk disrupting a quiet and productive class by doing much of anything that would invite comment, which could really be anything when working with Behavior Disorder/Emotionally Disturbed teenagers.  With a clipboard full of paper and a bunch of ideas in my brain, I'd sometimes casually sketch out game design ideas.  One of these, a thematic (sometimes called "Ameritrash") style game about players controlling squads of mercenaries, each distinct characters with skills, personalities and the ability to level up along the way, started taking shape.  The obvious thematic influences for the game included popular strategy/rpg PC titles like the Jagged Alliance series and X-Com, as well as films like The Expendables, Delta Force and Predator.

I've bought each of the games in this series more than once, and I know
that my experience playing them will be reflected in the design.

Despite how close the game came (on paper) to being done, I never finished it. The expense and difficulty in getting a board game published made this not much but an interesting intellectual exercise.  Then, in the last year or so, something changed.  I'm talking about Kickstarter.  The crowdsourcing website for funding self-publishing of creative projects has changed the game for someone in my position, literally. I already knew an amazing artist/graphic designer, and my wife has been involved in editing gaming products for years now... this could actually happen. I dusted off my notes, started moving them from paper to computer, and cleaned up the design here and there as I transcribed.

What I have now is a little more than half-finished game design, with mechanics somewhere between a competitive questing game like Runebound, and a cooperative story-driven undertaking like Arkham Horror, all set in the wrapper of modern paramilitary action movie. I think that no one's quite combined this theme with these sorts of design ideas in quite this way before, and I'm really making the game that I, personally, have always wanted to play.  Each game should play out differently, with different combinations of the characters on each squad, with different equipment, fighting against a Warlord with different abilities and statistics.  Vehicles, resource capture and management, roleplaying style events and special cards playing out a story for each game, a story where deadly men and women use their varied talents and skills in the pursuit of cash.

Imagine between 2 and 5 players controlling squads of guys like this, setting explosives,
firing machine guns and throwing grenades in a "Questing" style board game. If that isn't exciting to you, we
enjoy very different things.

I hope to occasionally do a developer journal in these pages, as we move from "design" through "mockup and playtesting" to "prototyping and launching the Kickstarter to get this thing made."  I read somewhere that people only do things for two main motivations, out of love, and out of fear.  When answering the question of "What's Next?" for me, I know the last time I went back to work at my old job, it was out of fear. Afraid of what would happen if I didn't take the offer, afraid of the bills, afraid of running out of unemployment, afraid of feeling useless and worthless by turning down a job I knew I could do.  If this project makes my next career "game designer," I know it will be a labor of love. Please comment with opinions on this one, it is a subject dear to me.

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Surviving the Steam Summer Sale

Way back when I started this blog, one of my first articles with any significant content was talking about how great Steam is for unemployed gamers. You don't have much money, but man, have you got some free time. Even looking for a job as hard as you can, there's still more time for gaming than the average working person has, and sales, especially of the deep price cut variety, can help with the "not a whole lot of disposable income" end of the equation. As a veteran now of Steam Sales, I can share my learned strategies and talk a little about my purchases this sale week, and how they revisit both the Piracy and the DRM issues.

I've never been so excited about online shopping before. Twice a year, this is actually a legit event.
 I sometimes spend more time shopping for games during this than I do playing them.

Steam Sale Strategy Guide:.


1. Be patient.  Whatever the game you want is, it is probably on sale starting the first day of the sale. However, that first-day price might not be the lowest it'll go for the duration of the sale. In general, until the sale is over, you should wait until whatever you want is a featured item, whether that means the Daily Deal or, this Summer, the Flash Deal.  The Daily/Flash deal price is the lowest it'll go during the sale, and if it is never a featured item, you can still buy it at the normal sale price on the last day of the sale. Patience is rewarded.

2. Participate in the activities when you can. Whether you are completing achievements for tickets or presents, working on a Badge, or voting on the next Community Choice Sale, in general, there is some level of reward for the customer in being a part of the event. It is a simple deal, Valve wants you to be tempted as often as possible by looking at the store, so you are rewarded for doing so. Effective on all counts.

3. Watch for DRM, and decide if the deal is worth the hassle. Even though Steam itself is effectively an anti-piracy scheme, some publishers just won't let their own measures go.  SecuROM, Games for Windows Live, both... personally, if the game is good enough and the price is low enough, I'll deal with it, but be aware before you buy.

4. Check Package Deals and Individual Game Prices. Always. Sometimes, even when a game is on Daily Deal, buying it as part of a package saves money, or for a small amount more gets more games or DLC (Downloadable Content) by the publisher. Conversely, sometimes the package is featured, and you only want one item from it, but while the package is on special, each item within it is also cheaper.

My haul from this year was pretty good. I bought a lot in the first few days, as almost everything I really wanted on Steam was a featured item very early in the sale. I bought the Arkham City complete pack (Arkham Asylum GOTY, Arkham City + all DLC and Gotham City Impostors,) The digital deluxe editions of both the Witcher 1 and 2, Back to the Future by Telltale Games, and Crusader Kings 2. With this, I got  a little bit of everything I enjoy in terms of genre, and picked up games I'd rented or even pirated in the past with additional content.  Not only did Steam get me to virtually stop pirating games, but even the little piracy I've done in the last few years, I've evened the accounts at least in my own conscience by purchasing the titles in question.

I started playing this when I got it, and 10 hours vanished. Politics, assassinations,
birth and death and succession and war... and there is a Game of Thrones total conversion mod.

What is interesting to me is that all the intrusive DRM didn't stop me from getting a pirated copy of a game within a few days of launch.  A reasonably priced service from a company I like quite a bit got me to eventually buy those same titles, and endure the copy-protection hassles as a legit customer. That seems backwards. It tells me something that developers should take to heart, though.  Price motivates ethical behavior in a way that even the world's best DRM cannot, and treating your customers well means that the loyalty you've built up in that relationship will even make some of the most shameless pirates into good customers.  Don't punish the honest with expensive and ineffective means to fight piracy, translate the lack of licensing fees for that garbage into a lower price-point and build a rapport with your customer, and they'll stop pirating on their own.

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