This is what my gaming life is like, and so of course I consider it the norm….: You’ve got your little gaming group, gang, or clan. You own a collection of games, collectively. Some are group favorites and get played a lot. Some are lesser lights but get pulled out on special occasions. Maybe it depends on who exactly is present on gaming night. New games arrive from time to time, get learned, played, and assigned their role in the cast of games, to be slowly re-evaluated over time.

In its very nature it’s insular, and on a local level, it’s a bit of a monoculture. We like it that way. It’s a social experience, but you have to have boundaries, limits on the size of the social group, for the experience to be valued. Strategies are learned or discovered after a number of plays on a certain games. The few (or one) best way(s) to win a certain game become understood, acknowledged, are often the subject of lengthy post-game conversations. Analysis happens. We boil down the practical evidence to arrive at an intuitive sense of how to play. This game calls for aggression. That one is about patience. Here, we need to be adaptive. There, it’s about playing against the environment, not the other players. And so on. Before very long, we’re not just playing the game itself, but we’re also carrying along our sophisticated assembly of experiences and preconceptions of the game, as individuals, and as a group.

Then one day, a gamer friend from a different social circle sits in on a session. Or a gaming friend or relative comes in from out of town and joins your group for awhile. Or you go and play a game you know and love with a different group of people at a gaming convention. And suddenly, it’s a whole ‘nuther game. The new guy uses a strategy you’ve never seen work before. Or – more often than we’d ever like to admit – shows how we’d been misreading the rules on some certain point for all these years. Sometimes he brings a suggested house rule you’d never heard of, one that transforms a marginal game into a great one. Sometimes it’s something as mundane as a new idea for handling some part of the game’s book-keeping that suddenly makes playing it a lot more fun. Sometime he brings and teaches a new game. And when we’re really lucky, he (or she) brings a new way of understanding a game’s mechanics that we never quite got a handle on, something that lets us see an old game in a new light. This is especially true if there’s a game that his “home group” plays so much that he’s actually been compelled to do “research” on the game to stay competitive. Now, he’s in a position to share those lessons with a new class.

Such a person is a Strategy Vector. His particular contagion is gaming knowledge, and these random little jumps from group to group is how practical gaming knowledge is often spread in the real world. The Internet is a fine resource and all that, but the real action still happens in our social groups.

A spare observation: games with a bidding mechanics, in particular, seem to go spectacularly haywire when cultures collide. “You bid what for Barcelona?!”

Random and I have a gaming friend who moved away some 2+ years ago, and now he’s visiting for a couple weeks. We’re going to play a bunch of old and new games and learn and whole lot and have a blast. It’s all going to culminate on the weekend of October 6–8 as we descend on the quaint little city of Schenectady, NY, for the quaint little gaming con, Council of Five Nations XXIX. Every member of the d21 team has attended ‘Council at one time or another – I think all seven of us might have been there last year, in fact. This year I think it’ll only be three of us, plus our collection of friends from across the region. In years past there have been times where we more or less ignored the slate of events (um, the ones we weren’t running), and just binged out for a couple days of free-wheeling open gaming, fueled by all the sugar and caffeine that could be supplied by the Price Chopper across the street. With MetalJim transplanted too far south to make it this year, I think I’m counting on Rhelik to show up with new games to teach and sell. M’Jim always brought a select crop of new games to teach and share – he’ll be missed. (KarasDjun and Mystagogue have in the past provided some memorable and madcap single-session D&D adventures…)

Here’s a couple games our group is swinging on lately, where to be honest, we could use a bit of a Strategy Vector to show up and set things right.

Alhambra. We’ve now played this one three or four times, and the charm of it is becoming more apparent. I think I could add this one to my collection and get good mileage out of family and other very casual gamers. But it seems like the reserve board is a complete waste of time, or at the very least, a tool you use under very special (or desperate) circumstances. Right now for us it seems that when you use your reserve board for any reason, the clear message you are sending is “I’ve really screwed this one up, and oh yes, I’m probably losing”. If I was teaching the game to beginners or non-gamers, I might completely omit it.

Are we brain-dead? I’m waiting for that mysterious stranger to cruise into town and show us just how wrong we are. On a similar but lesser note, there’s the whole issue about just how important or not it is to buy tiles with exact change, so as to not give up additional actions. It seems vitally important to us now. Is that groupthink? Could we be wrong?

Lastly, I’ll mention that it’s no longer seeming like a ludicrous notion to me to spend some time just studying all of the tiles. Alhambra plays to the point of tile exhaustion, so while the order is random, they all do matter, each and every game. I’m pretty sure there’s a huge edge to be gained by learning the exact wall and cost characteristics of each tile. Sometimes I’m tempted to buy the “right” tile for wall or other positional concerns, but it’s really not in a set that does me much good. How powerful would it be to know with more certainly what other tiles are left to come out? I can totally imagine playing this over XBox Live Arcade next year, using a physical set of Alhambra tiles as a tracking system for the remaining stock.

Trias. Third play on this one. There may be something we fundamentally don’t “get” about this game, or perhaps it’s just not a very good game. I’d sure like to figure out which it is! Kind of like Shogun but worse, it’s so very hard to decide what constitutes a “good move” when the bulk of the scoring is deferred to the end of the game, and when by its very design the board position is so transient. Is it better to break the land masses apart first, and then breed up on the big ones? Or it is more important to get coverage across the land as much as possible first, and then try to reposition as things break up? Assuming you knew the answer to that, what are good ways to drift tiles effectively? Is it even worth chasing the little points from birthing new continents prior to the endgame? With the moves as foggy and arbitrary as they seem right now, we can’t even begin to get into the question of when to play the drift card you have in your hand, versus taking a random draw.

Again, if I were teaching this game I might just do away with the random-draw rule, and maybe even the pre-endgame scoring. I just see them as needless complications. Oh, sure, my opinion might change after another dozen plays, but I doubt that’ll happen because the game just doesn’t seem to have the legs to make that kind of exploration worthwhile. Nope, I need an expert, stat.

In conclusion – be mindful of the role you yourself can play in being a vector to spread this wonderful malady of board gaming. Go to cons when you can and try and learn some new games there. Bring a few good games along when you go to visit your friends in faraway places. Some of your friends are gamers now. Some with be gamers in the future, if you infect them.