It's time again for the sort-of-annual Fortress: Ameritrash Essen Preview!  Get ready, because you won't want to miss out on the excitement this year!

My feeble dithering over my old copy of Space Hulk versus the brand new, shiny copy of third edition Space Hulk have become legendary. However, all is not lost. Out of this stinking mire of qubbling and indecision there can at least be salvaged something worthwhile: an article on getting the very most out of your copy of Space Hulk. As if twelve missions and a variety of Terminator suit payloads wasn't enough.

Welcome back to another edition of the Snack Attack.  This is my own little, dark, corner of the Fort where I get to discuss something that I think everyone can relate to: food!  Well, I hope you can relate to it.  Otherwise you’re either A) Dead or B) Possibly a baby that still eats flavored goop from a jar.  In either case you’re probably not one of our readers.

Whenever an old game from 30-40 years ago gets reprinted, there will always be a chorus of people who just don’t get it. Maybe their tastes just don’t jive with those of the 1980s, or maybe they just get tired of hearing people gush that their favorite game is back in print. Either way, the complaints will eventually migrate from griping about luck and game length, to complaining about the game’s fans. What moron would like a game like this? Why did we wait so long to get this game back in print? Why are people so excited? They are clearly blinded by (cue dramatic sting) NOSTALGIA. And sometimes, it cuts the other way. If a reprint contains a couple dramatic changes, fans of the old game will complain about the new changes. Fans of the new version will again say that the old guard is complaining just because of nostalgia. Call the former “Talisman Syndrome” and the latter “DungeonQuest Syndrome.”

My reading material at the moment is Daniel Dennett’s book on evolution – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. It’s a fantastic book dealing with both the philosophical and scientific aspects of Darwinism and ought to be mandatory reading for anyone obtuse enough to doubt the very real fact of evolution, or to try and substitute some form of creationsim. But enough politics; in a footnote in the book I found, oddly enough, a very interesting gaming reference.

The author claims (with what veracity I do not know) that a popular tactic of the famous US chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer was to deliberately make moves with no clear purpose in order to confuse and bamboozle his opponent. His hope was that by doing this, the other player would take much longer than normal in making his move whilst he puzzled over the meaning of Fischer’s’ play. This would eventually tell on the chess clock, either forcing rushed moves later in the game or even potentially run them out of time completely. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that for those of us who play chess at a less rarefied level, pulling off a stunt like this has the potential to yield rewards without having to rely on the artificial limitation of the clock.

What struck me about this particular piece of unorthodox genius is that there are a wide range of modern games in which this particular tactic wouldn’t work. Interestingly enough there is also an ancient game where it would have little or no application either – Go. Since many, many moves in a Go game have no obvious and apparent purpose anyway – I have been told that a good Go player should “feel” his moves as much as he thinks about them – trying to confuse an opponent with a random play is just wasting a stone.

On further reflection it occurred to me that allowing for the deliberate confusion tactics in the mechanics might actually be a worthwhile marker of what I would consider a game worth playing. I call this formulation “Fischer’s Law of Game Quality”. It can be crudely summarised thus – “Good games are those which allow a player to gain an advantage through making suboptimal moves by confusing his opponent(s)”. So what does it actually mean if a game doesn’t meet the rather rough specification of Fischer’s Law?

Firstly it means that the game has little, if any, social interaction associated with the game itself. Any game which has social elements combined with hidden information has set up bluffing as a viable strategy, and as long as bluffing is a viable strategy then the game obviously comes under auspices of Fischer’s Law. After all, what was Fischer attempting to pull off in his games if not a gigantic bluff?

Secondly it means that the game has to have limited player interaction. The definition of player interaction itself is pretty vague but for my purposes it usually means that a game has to have pieces on a board which manoeuvre and can contest control of board space with pieces from another player. The manoeuvre bit is important – Chess would qualify but Go would not – because without it it’s possible to be placing things on a board that don’t interact with those of your opponents. The vague definition of “control” is also important because it widens the definition beyond just direct confrontation combat games to include other mechanics such as area control and area majority. 

Thirdly it means that the game cannot be one in which making optimal moves at every turn is important for play balance. If that deliberately provocative move is obviously deliberately provocative or if, in a multiplayer scenario, it hands a clear advantage to another player down the line then you’re just going to end up losing and looking like an idiot. There are various ways for a game not to end up breaking this knock-on prediction of the law. One of them, clearly, is for the game to have enough random elements in it to make your sub-par move look like a gamble or an honest mistake instead of the clever sucker-punch it really is. Another is for the game to have a complex enough decision tree to make the analysis of whether it was really a poor move rather difficult and this of course is where chess falls in to line.

As I write this it’s suddenly occurred to me that what I’ve done is simply taken the three things I’ve previously identified as the markers which can differentiate a good Euro from a poor Euro and turned them on their head, identifying them from the other direction. However, Fischer’s law still serves a wider purpose. Firstly it encapsulates those principles much more neatly since from a one-line statement you can deduce the marginally more complex thoughts I had on the subject. Second it allows me to cast my net wider and identify bad Ameritrash games. The reason for this is that the law has a fourth aspect which I’ve yet to touch on – games with excessive random factors will fall foul of it because too much chaos means lack of meaningful strategy. And without a meaningful strategy it’s not possible to make a deliberately non-strategic move for the express purpose of confusing everyone else at the table. And of course, as I’ve long lamented, over-reliance on random factors is the biggest bane of the genre that we love.

There are also very important exceptions to Fischer’s Law. Dexterity games ought to be exempt, as should party games and games based almost entirely on gambling. We should recognise this because these sorts of games are often awesomely entertaining! The other exception is to recognise that there are certain games which can fail to meet the demands of Fischer’s Law and still be excellent games – Puerto Rico is a great example which escapes by virtue of it having made the branches of its fairly simple decision tree fiendishly difficult to pick and choose between (and that’s the unique virtue of the game if you ask me). But there’s always an exception that proves the rule.

At this point I probably ought to point out that I’ve taken a vague notion that occurred to me while reading a complicated book late at night after too much wine and spun it out to a quite ridiculous degree. There are obvious problems with it not covered by my exceptions above, such as the fact that it in no way relates to the way in which the inclusion of an appropriate level of randomness can vastly improve an otherwise dull game. So have I wasted blog space? I hope not. I think that even if the idea is fundamentally fairly unsound it’s kicked up a few issues worth mulling over.

So. Chess, anyone?

Apologies for lack of new material this week. Family & I have all been ill. But I'm glad I had the chance to dig this out: it was one of the better things I wrote on the old blog and I hadn't tagged it properly so it languished in obscurity for a while.

Every game store I’ve ever been to has stacks and stacks of all of the different variations of Steve Jackson’s Munchkin. It’s a perennial seller, one that has spawned countless expansions and legions of fans. And at first glance it looks like a fun game, with amusing rules and funny graphics. And look at all those cards! It’s full of items like “The Boots of Running Really Fast,” which is indeed kinda funny. But for my own part, kinda funny doesn’t really cut it. In fact, by the end of my one and only game of Munchkin, I was irritated at the game’s snarky attempts to make me giggle at all of its in-jokes. It was enough to put me off of playing the game again. Maybe you love Munchkin, and if that’s the case I salute you. I’m glad that you, the hypothetical fan, have found hours of enjoyment and humor from this game. But the jokes wore thin for me, and it made me realize how difficult it can be for a game to actually be funny.

Sorry there's no new material this week: I've been caught out being really busy at work and at home and there's been no time. Plus I'm told today is a holiday in the US so you lot should all have better things to do. However I had a look over at our old blogger site to find some of my old material for a F:AT looks back column. This piece is about social interaction in games where it's not specifically encouraged by the rules, a topic that I don't think I've ever revisited and which remains relevant today, so it'll be interesting to see what ideas people have on the subject today compared with 2007.

I played Railroad Tycoon for the first time this weekend, a game I'd snapped up when poor old Eagle Games (the only other committed publisher of AT games besides FFG) went bust. Game went down pretty well with my friends, and although I'm lukewarm about the theme and the board is annoying on multiple levels I'd give it a cautious thumbs up.

One of the game mechanics is an auction to see who goes first each round - highest bidder pays the money and gets the honours, then it follows clockwise. So the person sitting to the left of the high bidder basically gets a free advantage. At some point during the game we played I was one of two players left in the auction, and after my opponents had made a bid increase I voiced my concern that it was really worth my while upping the bid again, just by way of table chat, you understand. The player on my left, who was out of the auction, then offered to give me $1000 if I'd increase my bid by the same amount. He'd be going last if the other player still bidding won so it was totally worth his while to effectively bid a small sum for the chance to go second. This caused uproar round the table with some players condoning the action, others condemning it. In the end, to silence the fuss I increased my bid, won the auction and took the $1000 and gave it to the player who'd remained silent during the argument!

The point of this lengthy introduction is to illustrate a source of fairly fierce argument amongst gamers of all stripes which is the legitimacy of allowing negotiation and social interaction in games which do not specifically set it down as part of the rules. There are a number of games which are built around the concept of negotiation but there are equally a number of games (Puerto Rico is a good example) which say nothing about negotiation in the rules but which would be easily and completely ruined if two players started conspiring together. The largest class of games is a third, to which Railroad Tycoon belongs, which fall into a grey area between the two in which negotiation is not discussed in the rules but it's impact upon the game is less clear.

I kind of have a silly thing about rules - I regard them as being fairly sacrosanct to the point where I'm unwilling to add house rules or variants even to improve games that are obviously begging for changes. After all the rules are the rules - without them you don't actually have a game at all. Plus I think it's kind of fun to enforce silly rules, like demanding to be called the Lord of Catan after winning a game ofSettlers. So I'm totally siding with the legions of fans who ask that designers actually make a point of saying in the rules whether or not negotiation and/or resource exchange (which often accompanies it) are allowed as part of the game. At the moment the unwritten consensus seems to be that unless it's specifically listed as an aspect of the game then it's not allowed which I think is a great shame. A number of games I'm fairly fond of (Citadels for example) say nothing about it in the rules but would be spoilt for me if they excluded plotting and conniving from the game experience.

I think this state of affairs has arisen because a lot of Euro fans really don't like the chaos and unpredictability that trade and negotiation can inject into otherwise pure and balanced game designs. Indeed I've seen people complain that after a while all games which include this play element eventually turn into the same meta-game where negotiating and trading over favours and alliances effectivelybecomes the game, relegating other mechanics to the background and rendering all plays strikingly similar. When I first heard this point of view I thought it interesting and quite possibly accurate, although I personally don't seem to tire of the meta-game because it offers huge variety even within the strictures of being a similar experience every time - far more so than the limited play options that seem to arise from game designs that follow their fundamental maths too closely. But on inspection I'm not entirely sure that the argument holds up.

Consider. In the first instance we have the sort of negotiation offered in multiplayer conflict and empire building games which I suspect is the genre most people have in mind when they make this complaint. Games likeDiplomacy andA Game of Thrones are completely built around this aspect of the play whereas others like crusty oldRisk (much improved in its latest outing) don't strictly forbid it and a lot can be added to the play experience by allowing it. These games are basically about effective lying - you need to persuade other players that you're either not a threat or are offering a very serious threat in order to get them to behave in a way that suits your purposes regardless of whether you actually plan to attack them or not. Play enough of these games and they will, eventually, turn into the same meta-game already described.

But wait - there's lots of other games which encourage different types of negotiation. Games likeTraders of Genoa and to a lesser extent Settlers, described above, encourage players to negotiate around trade. This is entirely different - here you're not lying to try and build alliances or protect weak fronts but instead your negotiating over value and there's no need to lie - the drive to negotiate comes from either hidden information or a simulation of market conditions. Other games, such asTitan allow some limited negotiation based on circumstance and assessment of the relative players' skills. Games with co-operative elements likeFury of Draculaencourage positive negotiation within small groups or indeed amongst all the players if they're playing against the game system itself. I'm sure I could expand this list if I tried, but frankly I'm getting bored, so let's move on.

A long, long time ago over onBoardGameGeek there was a brief trend for making geeklists based around online personality tests. I'm dubious about these sorts of tests but I'll admit that as long as you're painting with very broad strokes they can offer some sort of insight and interesting information. It seemed at the time that most of the respondents to these lists came out as being categorised in varying degrees of introversion - maybe not surprising for a self-labelled "geek" site. But not me - I kept coming out as an extrovert. There's been a lot of discussion about the demographics of the Ameritrash fan movement - age, occupation, martial status and so on - but I'd like to suggest that the introvert/extrovert division is another guide for whether people are likely to prefer Euro over AT games. A lot of AT games encourage a loud and boisterous game experience and negotiation of some kind or other is a cornerstone of that kind of gameplay.

So that brings us back to Railroad Tycoon, based on the classic out-and-out Euro designAge of Steam. It is in fact a Eurogame much beloved by the AT crowd not an AT game itself. So was the player to my left right or wrong to offer me the $1000? On the right side we might offer that here's a solution to the oft-quoted problem of RRT taking the AoS mechanic of allowing turn order to proceed in order of bid value amongst all players and turning it into a winner-takes all scenario that hands a bid advantage to the player of the left of the winner for no cost. On the wrong side we've got the suggestion that AoS was playtested with the rule that a player who passes is out of the auction, making passing a more difficult decision and that by offering a bribe, a player can circumvent this stricture and unbalance the game. Who was right? Answers on a postcard please to... the comments button.

Sorry you've got another F:AT looks back this week, but I've just come home from holiday and prior to that a minor family crisis and I've not had time to get something together. I've also got  big voluntary programming project coming up which will eat into my writing time so you may see a few more of these in the coming weeks. Sorry. But some of the old blog material is reasonably good. I picked this one because I've been asked to post a few more session reports, and although this isn't one of the cool narrative ones I post occasionally, it does showcase my favourite game, and it does offer some interesting insights into gaming.

I know I don't really use my blog space for what blog space is usually used for - rather than telling everyone about the games I've been playing and spewing forth amusing anecdotes from my game evenings I tend to prefer to get on my high horse and preach at everyone. I make no apologies for this - I thoroughly enjoy doing it, and if I sometimes come across like a lecturing professor then so what? But today I'm going to something different - I'm going to do the usual blog thing and tell you about a game I played.

And then I'm going to preach at you.

The game in question was Twilight Struggle, one of my absolute favourite games. It was played over the fantastic free facilities over at WarGameRoom. I, a moderately experienced player was playing the USSR against a considerably more experienced US player.

One of the reasons I wanted to flag up this particular session for public consumption is that is showcased everything that's brilliant about Twilight Struggle. Every hand was loaded with tense, agonising decisions about best plays and risk management. There was luck in the game that helped it swing one way and the other to groans and cheers from the players involved. It's possible that luck, in the end, decided the game and although I don't think it did, the bottom line is that TS is just so much fun to play that really, who gives a damn if it does?

The opening few rounds went pretty smoothly, with no great changes in either direction. Europe and the Middle East were balanced but I'd managed to get into a strong position in Asia, having gathered North Korea, Pakistan and India and when Asia scoring came out I took a small lead. I also absolutely raced up the space race track leaving my opponent standing in the dust.

Things started to get a bit wobbly for me in the mid-game. I made a textbook mistake in Europe, being suckered into participating in a race to get control of France and then being hit by the dreaded "Truman Doctrine". However, my opponents' play of "De-Stalinisation" gave me the chance to grab battlegrounds in South America and Africa - since I already had Cuba thanks to "Fidel" I was in a strong position in those countries. Having gained control of these important areas I made a decision to use the points from "Decolonisation" to usurp the US in SE Asia, gathering Thailand, Indonesia and Laos for my troubles. However I then got hit with "Voice of America" or whatever it is that cleared out my influence in Africa and South America, which put me in a real bind having only Asia and Central America to score from.

The real disaster came in turn seven. I had a hand full of scoring cards and I got hit with Pope John Paul, Ussuri River Skirmish and the China card all in one turn - I lost Poland, North Korea and Pakistan and there was nothing I could do about it. I spent the next two turns desperately fire fighting - the scores were pretty much equal and I managed to claw my way back into parity in South America and gain a slim domination of Africa. So now I had Africa and Central America ranged against Europe and Asia for my opponent - the big scores at the end of the game were his.

However, in turn nine I also managed to loose control of East Germany (I don't now recall how this happened) and I thought my number was up as my opposite number had complete control of Europe. My last few cards on turn nine were to hit the enemy with "Quagmire" which basically made him miss one turn and then in sequence cram in "Soviet Governments" to make him loose control of West Germany and "Willy Brandt" ( the first time I've ever played that card as an event) to give me a foothold.

Then the game crashed.

So we hooked up again in the WarGameRoom chat facility and I basically offered him the game but he talked me into playing out the last round. My headline was the dreaded "Red Scare" which reduced the points he could pour into Germany this turn. The first few cards we were just battling for control of West Germany. Then my opponent played "tear down this wall" to give him a free realignment attempt at West Germany. Muscles were tensed, breaths were held and... it backfired spectacularly as he actually lost influence, giving me control of the country. He'd burned all his best cards and I used my last few cards to minimise US scoring opportunities in other regions and make sure he couldn't get his military ops for the turn. I thought I'd lost it.

When the final scores came in, I winged it by a measly two points, and rejoiced.

So, a great game. But it occurred to me afterwards that there were a few lessons that I ought to take away from the game.

First and foremost, never give up. Watching people in games whose world has collapsed around then get all sulky and throw in the towel has to be one of the most pathetic sights in the world. I've long since learned not to sulk when it happens to me, but to appreciate the fine play of my opponents and enjoy my spectacular demise for the fine gaming spectacle it often is - but I still frequently resort to giving up when it happens, as illustrated by the game above. But I played the last round and snatched victory from the iron jaws of defeat thanks to a combination of luck and poor play by my opponents. Keep going to the bitter end - you never know what might happen.

The second lesson is that this is a fantastic illustration of why random mechanics and thematic games have the ability to create more exciting and memorable gaming moments than more tightly scripted games. A level-headed analysis of the situation would run something like "we played a game for two hours, and a last minute dice roll was a significant factor in determining the final winner". But that's to miss so much - I only pulled out the last minute win because I'd played well enough over the preceding rounds to stay in touch, and in the end, random win or not, we'd both had a fantastic time and come away with a great gaming anecdote to bore our friends with.

And the third lesson is probably the most important lesson in gaming - however viciously, desperately, achingly you want and play for that all-important win what matters at the end of the day is that you had a laugh doing it. A big part of how I learned not to sulk when the players gang up on me or the dice go against me is to remember that my gaming experience is just part of a wider narrative, so if you're going to go down, don't go quietly no matter how pointless your situation is. It might just be that you swing the game in one direction or the other, even if it's not toward you, and it might just be that you pull off the mother of all spectacular collapses or even comebacks that everyone will be talking about for months to come.

That's right, guys and gals...another year has gone by, and it's time to let YOU the readers weigh in on this year's favorites.  This was an incredibly loaded year for great games.  How will your faves stack up this year?  It's time for you to VOTE!

Thinking back, though, over the history of F:AT since its blog days, there seem to be few discussions about gaming with kids (besides the great articles and posts by Uba). F:ATties discuss gaming when they were kids, but I see few posts about gaming with kids or about their kids gaming. I’ve often wondered about this gap in F:AT’s forums. Is it because no one wants to replicate BGG posts about trying to get their 4 year old to play Caylus (KingPut, can you help us out on that one) ? Or is it that the F:AT demographic is skewed towards those without children or with kids too young? I really don’t know the answer to this and would be interested in hearing feedback.

One of my strongest influences in board gaming came from noted French designer Bruno Faidutti. Aside from his many designs over the past 15 years, at one point he maintained one of best board gaming sites on the internet, his Ideal Game Library. This was a valuable resource to me as a new gamer, because it showed me two very important things: that gaming had a rich and eclectic history, and that I did not need to like every popular game. Of course, Bruno is best known for his games, which are numerous and varied. I’ve gone all over the places on his games. Mission Red Planet is an underrated game that synthesizes bluff and area control to great effect. A couple, like Red November and Mystery of the Abbey, are compelling misses for me. At least one or two others, like Letters of Marque, didn’t work for me at all. But his contribution to gaming can be best summed up in what I call his Triple Play, a run of three little games he released between 2000 and 2001. These games, Dragon’s Gold, Castle, and Citadels, are three designs that continually impress me with their simplicity and their terrific interaction. They’re all pretty different from each other mechanically, and my mental grouping of them is mostly arbitrary. But they have always felt of a piece to me, and I think they’re exactly what light games should be.

I recently asked for some suggestions for board game topics I could write about. Phil Gross answered my plea and suggested I write about the best game to play with your in-laws. I loved the idea, but I wanted to open it up a bit wider and talk about games that are great for all the family, young and old, blood relatives and in-laws alike.

Chapter 1:
We were somewhere around Bucharest when the Romanian liquor began to take hold. I remember an aftertaste of gasoline and saying something like "He's either in Varna or Dublin . . ." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around me and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" My brother was pouring beer down his throat. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered. "Never mind," I said. "It's Dracula's turn."

I’ve done the full circuit in terms of hobby gaming. In addition to all the usual suspects, I’ve also dipped my toes into LARP and, at one point, spent some time involved with living history and battle re-enactment. If you think you’ve seen more oddballs than you can stomach at gaming nights across the country, they’re nothing compared with some of the nutters that living history attracts. Not to mention the prospect of camping with them, medieval style and no mod cons, for a weekend or longer.

But one thing I did totally get out of re-enactment was learning how to fight with melee weapons, properly. None of the rubber LARP rubbish where you furiously try and rain short blows down on a fake orc with a wobbly sword as many times as you can before he gets a shield up, but serious, physical combat with realistic heavy steel weapons (blunt, of course) and no-holds barred effort, resulting in blows that’ll send chunks flying out of your wooden shield while you cower behind it. It teaches you an awful lot about how people actually would have fought with these sorts of weapons. And it’s nothing like you imagine it to be.

For starters it’s utterly exhausting. Even with a relatively light weapon and no armour you can only keep it up for perhaps ten minutes, and that’s if you’re physically fit. Add a suit of chain mail and a decent sized sword and you can halve that, or less. The scenes you’re used to seeing of combat in films and books are ridiculously prolonged, and the protagonists rarely seem out of breath: in reality one of the combatants would have died of exertion long before being skewered on a blade. And for another thing the only time melee fighting looks anything like it does in the movies is when all the people fighting have swords. Swords are neat things that can stab and slice, chop and parry, swing and feint. Most other weapons have only one mode of operation: axes chop, spears stab and maces swipe. That’s all they do. They do them very effectively, and they’re just as good for killing people as a sword is, just a lot less interesting to watch.

Another thing that came as a shock was the discovery that this stuff is in no way choreographed. Whenever I'd watched displays in the past I had always assumed the fight scenes were pre-rehearsed to a large extent as I couldn't imagine there would be any other safe way to do it. The answer is that you're taught to fight safely: first of all with a blunt dagger, a weapon too small to do serious damage (unless you poke someone in the eye, which I almost did when I was learning). Blows aimed at the head are not allowed, and you're taught to "pull" the blow - to watch if it's about to hit flesh and to take all the force out of it in the moment before it connects. It's not that hard once you've practised it for a while, although mistakes are still common. Bumps and bruises are par for the course, and the occasional more serious injury does happen. I once caught a blow across the fingers so hard that the compression split the skin on one finger from top to bottom. And when that had healed, I went out and got some chain-mail gloves, and carried on. 

But the most surprising thing I learned about it is how much of hand-to-hand fighting is about distance. Yes, strength, speed, skill, stamina and all the things that gaming has taught you are important about fighting play a vital part, but whenever the fight involves protagonists with weapons of different sizes, the actual form of the battle is totally dictated by length and reach. It’s obvious when you think about it. Imagine a man with a sword fighting a man with a spear. As the two square off, to start with the swordsman simply has no chance at all to land a blow on the spearman. His weapon is too short: as they close, the spear point will be placed between them, and the spear wielder will do his very best to make sure it stays that way. As long as the distance between them remains the length of a spear shaft, the sword blade physically cannot reach the spearman to harm him. However, if the swordsman can find a way past the point, suddenly the roles are reversed: the spearman cannot harm the sword-weilder because the sharp end of his weapon is somewhere past his opponents’ back. He’s now totally at the mercy of the sword unless he can find a way to retreat and re-impose that advantage of distance.

Distance can be psychological as well as physical, and it’s no less effective. As a gamer, you might be a bit worried about facing down someone with a two-handed axe because it has a big damage dice, but that’s nothing compared with the worry you feel when you’re faced with the prospect of getting to grips with a six-foot beaded lunatic swinging a ten-pound axe that’s bigger than you are for all he’s worth. And that’s even when you’re armed with the knowledge that the axe is blunt, it’s all for show and he’s not really trying to kill you. Even then, it’s a tough ask to make your legs move in the right direction. In theory, it’s easy to kill someone with a war axe: it’s an unwieldy, cumbersome weapon and the time you have between blows when he’s vulnerable are easily enough for a skilled warrior to dart in a drive a wedge of steel through his middle, but psychologically, forcing yourself to get that close to something that terrifying is a whole different ball game.

So whenever two fighters with weapons of different lengths meet, distance totally dictates the battle. And what determines the winner nearly all of the time is whether the fighter with the shorter weapon can find a way to close the distance before the longer weapon wounds him. It’s worst for people with really short weapons such as daggers and hand axes fighting against weapons that are longer, but still one-handed like a sword: even if they make it past the point, the defender still has a shield to protect themselves with whilst they back off.

Speaking of which, another point that’s often done down in games is the essentially of shields. A shield is the ultimate blocking device - you maneuver it to where you need it to be, and a well-sized shield is light enough to be mobile whilst large enough to require a minimum of skill to block with effectively. Although enormous shields can be useful too: I once met a re-enactor who made his own gigantic shields to cower under and he was terribly difficult to beat, as he would just stand behind his shield and wait for an opening in your defences before striking. Games make nowhere near enough of shields: the paltry +1 to armour class they gave you in D&D was so idiotic that it looked stupid even before I knew from practical experience just how stupid it was.

The point of this lengthy rant is not simply one of interest at the fact that melee combat turned out to work rather differently to the way I’d always imagined from fiction and from games, but to illustrate how totally and utterly wrong most games that attempt to describe such violence get it. And when I say “most” I may well mean “all”: I, personally, have never come across a game system that comes close. Even games that have involved, convoluted, non-random, narrative systems such as that presented by Magic Realm fall woefully short of the mark.

Do we care? Especially given that we’ve devoted a fair number of column inches lately to discussing how it’s not actually particularly important (or even possible) for games to provide even a vague approximation of reality. Not really. The knowledge that everything is wrong rarely intrudes into my enjoyment of the occasional game of tactical sword-age warfare. Rather I’m more thinking about it as a fertile area of possibly unexplored design space. After all, if someone can write an interesting and engaging game about the split-second intricacies of gunfighting such as Gunslinger, why not one along the same lines involving melee combat? Why not throw in a healthy dose of fantasy as well? I doubt there are many people here who would disagree that a Gunslinger like game would be instantly improved by the additions of orcs and dragons.