fun & games

Lately I’ve been playing four games.

Chess.com

When I was a kid, I was really into chess for a while, but the difficulty was finding people with which to play. Not many kids my age were interested in chess, and I almost always lost playing against adults. When computer chess came along, for a while I had one of those chess computers with the LEDs that light up to show you where to move the pieces, but I almost always lost to that, too. Eventually, tablets and the Internet arrived, but I never really enjoyed playing chess on a screen. There’s just something about a wooden board with well-carved, attractive chess pieces that a screen can’t match.

However, I recently realized that you can combine the screen and the wooden board. I discovered Chess.com, which allows for human vs. human games. However, more interestingly to me, it also allows for matches against various bots of increasing skill levels. I’ve been playing against the bots, arranging the pieces on my wooden board, and I’ve slowly been working my way up the skill level of the bots. I suspect that I’ll max out my ability somewhere on the lower third of Intermediate.

Of course, people sometimes focus on flashy tactics and moves in chess, especially with opening sequences. But a more prosaic approach is the best – arrange your pawns carefully, advance whenever possible to choke off your opponent’s field of movement, and try to force exchanges where you lose one of your pieces but claim one of your opponent’s more powerful pieces. Lose a knight to take a bishop, lose a bishop to take a rook, lose a rook to take a queen, and so forth. Though chess is also a game about mistakes – whoever makes the biggest mistake first generally loses.

Magic The Gathering: Arena

In a way, Magic The Gathering is a far more realistic game than chess.

I realize that sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Chess is basically a stylized medieval battle between foot soldiers and horsemen. There are no elements of random chance in the game whatsoever. A skilled player will nearly always beat a player of lesser skill, and in a match between two equivalent players, whoever makes a mistake first will probably lose.

But real life isn’t like that at all. Random chance often overrides all other considerations. It’s even in the Bible: “The race is not always to the swift, not the battle to the strong, but time and chance overtake them all.” We’ve all seen situations where a smarter, better-prepared opponent (in whatever field) was defeated by a less-skilled adversary due to luck, mischance, or simpler blundering.

Our brains find it hard to accept that the world works that way, but it does. This is why violence and the use of force are dangerously seductive because they offer a (seemingly) foolproof solution to a problem. Yet it overlooks the fact that your opponent will fight back, your opponent might be smarter than you are, there will likely be unforeseen consequences that you can’t possibly predict and that could be worse than your original problem, and sometimes luck is simply not on your side. (Of course, there are situations where force is indeed the appropriate answer, but having the moral high ground is no protection against blunders or bad luck.)  Magic The Gathering manages to capture that chaos in game form.

Wow, that got philosophical for a card game about dueling Space Wizards, didn’t it?

Anyway, the deck shuffling in Magic The Gathering adds that significant element of random chance we see in real life. Like, a Magic player could have all manner of intricate strategies prepared in his or her deck, only for it all to fall apart because of the random deck shuffling. I did play Magic for a while in the 90s and the early 2000s, but lack of time and lack of funds (those cards get expensive) meant I eventually forgot about it.

However, I recently came across Magic The Gathering: Arena, which is free-to-play with a LOT of microtransactions added in. But! Recall that in 2022 I beat ELDER SCROLLS: BLADES, another free-to-play game with many microtransactions, without paying a single penny for any of those microtransactions. For the casual Magic player, Arena is pretty good – you can pop in, play a match (one of the advantages of Magic is that the games are often over very quickly), and then you’re done. The app also automatically calculates all the various intricacies of the rules, which in Magic can get really complex.

The app itself is pleasingly frictionless, albeit with occasion connection issues. But since I discovered it in January, I’ve probably played more Magic The Gathering than I did in the 1990s and the 2000s combined. It essentially automates the most annoying part of playing Magic The Gathering – finding other players, and then dealing with those other players.

I imagine hardcore players can make use of all the tournaments and rounds and so forth, but the app is pretty good if you just want to play a quick match against a bot or some random person also using the app.

Arcane Quest

I mentioned before that I read Jon Peterson’s GAME WIZARDS last year, which describes the legal battles around the early years of Dungeons & Dragons. (D&D’s entire history seems to revolve around dice, lawsuits, and bad business decisions, up to and including recent events.) But during the early years of D&D, other companies tried to get into the fantasy wargaming space. One of them was Milton Bradley, which came out with HEROQUEST. I’d never heard of the game before, but it sounded like a lot of fun. But I don’t have the time (and the table space) to devote to an intricate long-running board game.

But! It’s a long established principle in US law, dating back to the 19th century, that you can’t copyright game rules, only the creative expression of the rules. This, for example, is why Zynga was able to make Words With Friends (which is basically Scrabble Lite) without getting sued into oblivion by Hasbro, which owns the copyright to Scrabble. (In fact, Zynga and Hasbro played ball, and Hasbro released a board game version of Words With Friends a while back.)

So someone made a video game called Arcane Quest that basically follows the rules of HEROQUEST with some modifications and changes. It’s free with ads on the iPad, and I really quite enjoyed it – I suspect it closely recreated the experience of what actually playing a board game of HEROQUEST would have been like.

Scrabble

I am very bad at Scrabble. That’s all I have to say on that topic.

-JM