Games

I love games.  The best are complicated.  I'm better than average at most but better at some than others.  I play Hearts well for example, but I couldn't win a night at poker to save my life (bluffs and counting cards are not my strong point).  My games involve tactics and some open-ended thought.  And I'm better at some in my later years than others.  I can't play chess worth a damn anymore.  But I play backgammon, cribbage and Risk pretty well.

And I've been playing a lot of Risk at Pogo.com these days in my spare time.  I learned the game at about 10, lost track of it in college as there was little time for such games with all that classwork.  Picked it back up a few years ago.

It's a fascinatng game with many ways to play.  The basic rules are that there is a world map with general nations defined.

 You need to take all the nations to win.  But there are complications.

You get armies in some nations to start.  You battle other players armies to take nations.  The dice decide the winners by repeated rolls for each army unit (and the dice are not generally good to me).  The more nations you have at the start of each turn, the more armies you get to spread around.  And if you control a whole continent (the different colors) at the start of a turn you get more (Asia gets 7, North America and Europe each get 5, Africa gets 3, South America and Australia each earn 2).

And then there are cards.  If you take any nation in a turn, you get a card.  The cards can be Cavalry, Infantry, or Artillery.  One of each or 3 or one gets you extra armies too.  So the gains are from number of nations, continents, or cards.  Deciding where to attack can become tricky.

And the cards change in value.  In one version of the game, a set of cards can increase.  They go from 4 armies and slowly increase to about 60 max (4-6-8-12-20, etc).  The nation count and continent values stay the same.  So the importance changes gradually from number of nations held, to continents held to the value of card sets.  And according to what you have, the values of each change. 

In another option of the game, the card sets are always worth only 8 armies  (8-8-8).  I don't like that game very much.  Its a game of super-cautious attrition.

So I said all this to explain THIS...  You gain player-points according to how many games you win.  You start at zero and the highest score I've seen is about 30 million.  I have 6.5 million.  Which is higher than average but no great shakes.

I lost almost 20 games in a row (meaning among 4 or 5 players I did not come in first even once.  So in frustration, I retreated to the game option of playing only "bots" (like playing the computer at chess).  I knew I was losing something at the strategy of the game.  I played the bots several games per night for a week. 

The Bots aren't pushovers.  They can calculate odds of winning any individual battle between nation armies better than I can.  But they can't (yet) think all that well strategically.  They can decide (for example) that they are likely to win a specific battle, but not hold a continent for that bonus of armies.

And here's what I didn't mention.  If you kill all the armies of a particular color, you gain all their cards.  Ans later in the version of the gain I like to play, that matters.  So I spent a week playing the bots to teach myself to focus of the continents and killing the colors (Bots). 

I lost the first couple games because I was still focused on the individual battles.  Then I learned to look at the long-term.  I gathered my armies not to hold nations but to kill off the Bots to get their cards.  Then I won every game.

If you've ever played pool, you learn that it isn't enough to sink the next ball, its where you are placed to sink the following one.

I rejoined the human player group 2 nights ago.  I won 5 games in a row outright against some 20 million point players.  They knew me and my history of losing lately.  They were NOT thrilled.

I don't expect the winning streak to last.  The other players will adjust.  They didn't get their many points by being stupid! 

But I'm sure gonna enjoy the winning while it lasts!  LOL!

Computer Games - Risk

This will only make much sense if you play strategic computer games...

I'm either getting better at playing Risk (against real people, not the computer robots) or I am lucky.  Tonight, when I signed in, Pogo.com was offerring 2,000 free tokens (good for something, I'm sure - I'll have to look into that) for winning 2 games in 2 weeks.  That may seem easy, but with many obsessed players with multi-millions of points, that's hard for us more ocassional players.

But I'm willing to put my mind (game sense) against almost anyone (seriously, after a million points, how much better can anyone get?)

I needed to win 2 games in 2 weeks.  I played 4 games tonight and won 2!  I was stunned.  Thrilled too, but stunned.  The lowest rated player (other than me)  had 3 times my points.  Some of them had so many points you couldn't even read them because of the allowed space for their names.

So I had a really good night playing Risk.  Everyone should have a good day or night at SOMETHING, once in a while.

I'm not sure what to do with these tokens I've won.  I think you just make your displayed profile fancier.  I already have my avatar dressed in camo and an animated orange/white cat (Marley) licking his paws at my feet.  What could be better than that?  That's my life.

Maybe I can add more cats (Ayla and Iza).  And some background.  I bet they don't offer gardens as backgrounds.

I play Trivial Pursuit there too.  Kill it.  As long as it is not "Actors & Actresses".  I don't watch movies.

Should I try try out for 'Jeopardy'?

The Risks of Risk

I joined an online game of Risk last night blind.  By which I mean you can investigate the conditions of the game and have someone jump in while you are doing that, or you can jump in blind yourself.  I went in blind.  The situation for my color was horrible!  

The only human player had half the board (and she outpointed me 3-1, 12million points to my paltry 4 million) and was attacking my poor few nations.  I was fortunate that she ran out of armies while I still had 2 nations.  It may seem bad that she surrounded me, but it DID mean I was isolated from the computer players for a turn.   And she SAID she would kill me on her next turn.

And she sure tried!  I got JUST enough to survive her next turn and slowly managed to control Africa and then South America.  She decided to try to take North America and the bots fought back stopping her plan.

I moved into NA and slipped from Alaska into Kamchatka (Asia) breaking her bonus for that continent.   I had JUST enough armies to stop her getting Kamchatcka back, but killing that last bot in Europe got me extra armies and I swept through Asia, pinning her in Australia.  She had no more armies that turn (takes 3 right cards to get more armies and she only had 2).   I took Australia.

I could tell she was really pissed.  You routinely tell the winner "good game" as you leave.  She didn't.

It doesn't get much better than that.  When you come from almost nothing, and win, that's special.