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A Clash of Cultures

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23 Jan 2010 21:10 #270691 by The Expanding Man
by The Expanding Man    
January 23,...

I've just returned from a session with a Boardgaming club I belong to.  It is a well organised and supported club, has a good library of boardgames, and pleasant members with developed social skills.  All types of games are played, but the focus seems to be Euros.  Members on the whole tend to be tertiary educated and middle class.

Anyway, I was involved in a 5 player game of Powergrid - a game I do enjoy but no more than, say, 3 times a year.  The guy with the real passion for the game, and who insisted on taking the lead on introducing the rules to first time players, was way in front.  He had played well all game, probably a result of his greater experience and understanding of the game mechanics.  On the other hand, he may well have been a lot smarter than the rest of us!!

He was a perfectly pleasant opponent, but there was just something about his slightly smarmy, optimised play attitude that I found mildy irritating.

We came to what was going to be the final turn, and he was all set to win convincingly.  If I could drag another turn into the game, I had an outside chance of a victory.  I noted my position - I had first dibbs on the resource market.  I spent all my cash on hoarding the resources he would need to fully power his 15 cities, ensuring his victory.

The guy got mighty pissed, accusing my of unethical play.  I listen to criticism, and this got me thinking.  From my point of view, what I did was within the rules, gave me the only chance of a victory, and exploited the only weakness in his game play - not adequately diversifying the resources he needed to purchase on the market in order to counter my play.

But, in reality, my chance of victory was extremely marginal to the point of being mathematically possible but almost certainly out of reach.  There was no way I could add extra cities to my grid becasue my money was all spent on resources I didn't need.  I knew this before I made the move.  What I did, in effect, was more of a spoiler play.  In the end the nice guy won the game, who was attending his first ever club meeting,  and had never played Powergrid before.

I've been thinking a lot about that game.  Am I supposed to acknowledge a person's skill as being the overall best interpreter of the game mechanics and manipulator of finite resources?  After all, this game is a difficult intellectual exercise.  Or am I permitted to stray outside the recognised optimal moves to give myself the only, but extremely marginal, shot at victory, when the almost inevitable outcome will be that a less optimal player (not me) wins the game?

For us fans of the AT genre of games, the answer is obvious.  But what what about those few heavy euro games that have a small window of opportunity for spoiler moves?

And is there a difference in accepted play styles between groups of close friends who regularly game together, and relative strangers at club meets like this?

In the end, it wasn't such a big deal with this guy.  He was a mature enough person to understand my motives, and that it was, in my twisted logic, the optimum "euro" move for me to make.

I resolved whatever tension remained by immediately suggesting a round of Cosmic Encounter, a game where the gloves are definately off, and he had all the opportunity in the world to extract his revenge.  Which he did, winning that game convincingly.

No prizes for guessing which of the two games generated the most passion and enjoyment that session.

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