Gaming Goals, 2016 Edition

I used to have annual gaming goals on a regular basis some years ago. I stopped after a while because they were too ambitious, and I usually changed my mind about my goal as the year went on.

This year, I've decided to restart the tradition, dividing the goals into a couple of different categories. Given I've slowed my Euro buying considerably (everything feels like mechanism stew after a while, and we rarely play games more than a couple of times in my group), most will be wargaming related, although not all.

First up, my solitaire goals:

• Play the entirety of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Wrath of the Righteous to completion. This should not be difficult, as I am a huge fan of the system and enjoy the game immensely, even if it's difficult to get my group playing. I got through most of Rise of the Runelords but one really bad session with me screwing up mechanism after mechanism (usually forgetting to close locations when facing the Villain) that resulted in one really bad luck event that killed the entire party. I just didn't have the gumption to put in new characters partway into the fifth adventure set. I struggled with the base set scenarios for Wrath after scanning the cards into CardWarden on my iPad, but have found the adventure path scenarios to be much more playable (and they have nerfed the base scenarios about the time I just gave up on them). I'm one scenario away from completing the second set, and it won't be hard to finish up. A great game to play during my recovery from surgery in a couple of months.
• Document the solo play of four long wargames. I did some of this in the past, but there are a few games out there I'd like to track in regular reports. At present, I've got Sixth Fleet set up on the side table, arrayed for the long World War Three scenario (the advanced scenarios are "different" in how likely the wide array of minors will be involved). I've started at a Low preparedness level to keep the range of units on the map manageable, and while I'm planning to play the Long scenario, I may shift to the Medium scenario (which only modifies the Armistice die rolls every third turn) if things are dragging. Expect to see regular session reports on this for the first couple of months, and my plan is to have this game finished up by the end of February. 

Next up, my ASL goals:

• Become comfortable with the full Infantry rules and much of the standard terrain. Actually, I'd call this a modest goal. Having a regular partner and getting involved with the local Bezerk Commissars group, I expect this won't be an issue at all. We may get into Guns and even a few vehicles, as this stuff isn't that far off from the SK material, but there is a huge leap in the infantry rules. 
• Play ASL in a tournament setting more than 200 miles from Portland. Chris and I have discussed making some sort of road trip to play at a tournament or two (or three). This may end up being at BottosCon next November, we will just have to see. There are tons of opportunities for cons, especially in the summer.  This will need to either include the wives or pass the spousal aggro test. 

Third, my "opposed" war-game goals:

• Learn OCS and GOSS. This will probably involve some solitaire activity getting the system learned, and in fact I've started with OCS already as Reluctant Enemies is on the table. This was originally supposed to be a great intro to the system, but the replay of the first turn neglected to note the placement of units on the map, and thus was very difficult to follow along with. There has been an extension of the example that includes the second turn as well as the starting position, so this should be much easier. At worst, I will learn one (I have already played OCS before years ago, Tunisia, so this is very doable).
• Play a large scale game via VASSAL. Probably an OCS or GOSS game, although this may end up being one of the monster SCS titles like Day of Days. Many options here. I've had terrible luck with more than one opponent, and other than Chris it can be difficult to get someone playing live, so this will probably be async once we have the system in question down. Note I'm not saying we'll finish, but I intend to give it a good shot.

Fourth, everything else:

• Play Pandemic Legacy, Season One. This may end up being a solitaire exercise, if only because my gaming group struggles to get a consistent set of players from week to week. I've spoken to someone who played solitaire and enjoyed it, although obviously it would be more fun with others. 
• Play PACG in an organized play setting. This is the least likely thing, in large part because I haven't found a store running this in my area. I really want to try out the class decks in the format they were designed for, but playing solitaire in this format strikes me as requiring more management than I want to do because of the way the class decks work. With a new base box coming out soon, this seems like the time. Biggest problem will be missing one or more sessions because of surgery, although this I can play in my sleep. Usually.
• Run an RPG campaign. I am a really good DM. I do voices, I engage the players, I generally do a very good job of prep as well as play. When I suggested doing this with the group, there were several people interested. I figure I'll be able to have a monthly group at best, and that can be difficult. I'm planning to run a Pathfinder adventure path campaign, although I don't expect to get through the whole thing in a calendar year. This is a very high priority for me. 
• Play an Imperial Assault campaign. My friend Jesse is going to start a campaign in the near future (once the NFL is done with it's season) and has invited me. Now that I'm not gigging, this is much more likely, but it will almost certainly cut into RPG time. If nothing else, I will run a full day mini-campaign with Twin or Return. 

Hey, look at that, Tom Vasal! I have ten things in my list!

Why do I think this is a more realistic list? Partly because some of the activities are solitaire and some are not. Being retired, I have a lot of time to devote to the solitaire and async activities, although most of the multiplayer activities are going to take up weekend time and there are a limited number of those. Also, some of these goals interlock and are really just extensions of what I'm already doing (ASL comes to mind). 

The biggest threat, of course, is surgery and my recovery. From previous experience, I can tell you that trying to absorb anything involved while on opiates, which will be about a month, is difficult. The other trick, which you would never expect, is that I will need to observe "sternal limitations" which mostly means strict lifting limits of 10 lbs the first month, 15 the second. I am not so much suggesting that I won't be able to play "heavy" games (yuk yuk) but that I won't be able to lean on a table as I'll effectively be lifting 40 lbs or so. From experience, I know this is a difficult habit to break, and I do like standing while playing war-games. This combined with being artificially stupid will limit the activities from mid March through mid May. That said, I expect to finish my PACG campaign during that time, and I fully expect to be running an RPG after the first month of surgery. 

Kind of nice to be making goals again. One of the reasons I decided to retire from gigging was to spend more time gaming with friends and this list crystalizes my goals. 

I intend to post regular status reports on the goals, so stay tuned. 

Next up, at least gaming wise, I intend to start documenting my Fleet game. I also have some things to say about the NFL...

Sometimes They Come Back

Start of a new year, and it seems like a good time to start this up again. It's been a little less than three years since my last entry, right about my 50th birthday, but really not much has changed.

Ha!

Since my last post, I have...

• Bought and moved to two houses, one after the other,
• Lost my mother to old age and my older brother to complications from heart surgery,
• Lost the first dog my wife and I raised from a puppy,
• Gigged more or less continually in my band, The Insensitives, then retired from pro music for a bit, 
• Sang with my old church choir on a tour of Ireland, and getting a postcard from Bono thanking us for singing the U2 song "MLK" as part of the tour (which featured yours truly as the soloist),
• Learned to play ASL. OK, learning. Because, ASL, and,
• Sold our vacation house at Sunriver, the source of so many awesome gaming retreats,
• Had open heart surgery to replace a bad aortic valve, found out I was about one chili cheese fry away from a massive heart attack so ended up with a triple bypass as well, had the surgeon tell my wife I needed to massively change my lifestyle if I wanted to live more than a few years, and so I did. 50lbs lighter, exercising regularly, and eating food that is keeping my heart from more blockages.

But wait! There's more!

• And having another open heart surgery in two months because yet another valve went bad, and had the bad form to do so after the last surgery. So one more artificial valve, yay! On the plus side, they did an angiogram a couple of months ago when diagnosing the 

It's been a busy few years. I had to completely throw out my wardrobe and buy new clothes. Twice. Because weight loss wasn't the goal, eating well and exercising was, but the weight loss was a side effect. I had to get a new driver's license because I no longer look like the photo I had of me at 50. People don't always recognize me, even people I've known for decades. To be honest, I don't know that I'll ever get tired of that. 

I also have a somewhat different attitude about life. As you can imagine. Having someone tell you you could die any second because of multiple 95% blockages in your heart's arteries and that you need surgery in less than 48 hours tends to get your attention. If you're paying attention, you learn that everything is simultaneously vastly important and completely irrelevant, all at the same time. No wonder most people live in self-denial and pretend everything is fine and will continue as it always has. 

And so it is, at the start of a New Year (said start being largely the result of the Roman adoption of the Julian calendar to coincide with the election of Consuls, then formalized by Pope Gregory and not being tied to any relevant astronomical phenomena, like you'd think), and it seems like a good time to start recording my thoughts again.

I have a lot to discuss, like taking up Advanced Squad Leader last year. Like how to change your diet and be happy about it. Like what it's like to recover from major surgery where the perpetrators would be brought up on torture charges had it not been something I wanted. Like figuring out what the important bits are.

Like most things, everything is part of a continuum, constantly changing, growing, dying. This blog is a part of that, and I'll cover a lot of the past couple of years as well as what's currently going on as we go. No idea how long I will keep this up, there is a very small but significant chance I will stop involuntarily as a result of surgery. Given that my brother died because of something that no one in the hospital had ever seen before, oxygen not going to his brain for a few minutes during surgery, I'm very aware that we are all living on borrowed time and it can end at any point. We like to think we have a lot of control over our lives, but really not so much. We can barely control our bodies and we think of those as "ours" (hint: they aren't). 

First up will be my gaming goals for 2016. Yes, I have some. Because prioritization is a good thing, and if you want to do something now is a pretty good time to do it. Stay tuned...

Holy Shit, I'm 50

Not quite sure how it happened (OK, I *do* know how it happened, but was apparently not paying attention the whole time), but today I have been around for 50 years. 50 years of smartassery, skipping class, challenging authority, and tunage. Which should sound like "toon-udge".

I celebrated by playing a couple of nights in the sports bar of the Spirit Mountain Casino with my band, The Insensitives, then helping to host a jam session last night at the Dog House Saloon in outer SE PDX with same band (and a *lot*, and I mean a *lot* of other musicians). That seems to be, aside from hanging with the grandcritter, where most of my energy goes these days. I tell people I rock and roll like no one is watching, and I guess that more or less says it all. Hope my knees hold out.

Fifty years is a fair amount of time for a human. Until pretty recently, 50 was a good long life, especially before the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s. I think of what my father was like when he was 50, although to be fair I was seven and so he seemed pretty freakin' old at the time and I'm not sure I have a terribly accurate picture. His passion, at least the public ones, were gardening on a scale that most people would now call obsessive and woodworking. I find it ironic that we both ended up working with our hands but in ways that required our brains, given that I consider that we were very different people otherwise.

Here's the funny thing about 50 - It's really a meaningless amount of time in the grand scheme of things. I don't just mean insignificant on a cosmic scale, seeing as I personally am not living on a cosmic scale. Much better to measure things in a relatively meaningful way. What I mean is that 50 years really comes down to a period of time that is only significant because of the amount of time it takes our planet to circumnavigate the local star plus the fact that we have ten digits on our extremities. If we only had eight fingers, a la Mickey Mouse, 50 would actually be what we call 40 and not all that interesting. Instead, our 32nd birthdays would be a big deal (eight digits, or all fingers, plus four, or digits on one hand). And we would call that our 50th birthday. 100 in base 8 would be 64 in base 10.

I've lost you again, haven't I? And yet you keep right on reading.

When I turned 40 (and I'm back in base 10 again for those of you completely befuddled), which was ten years ago for those keeping score at home, it was a Bad Year. Well, except for my daughter coming into my life. That was great. But otherwise, it sucked. I lost my singing voice for more than six months and was never really sure it was coming back. My country, a country I'd been taught was the best and most noble country on earth, decided to invade another country for reasons that we'll probably be arguing about for quite a while but almost certainly involved maintaining access to a whole lot of a dwindling energy resource. My country, along with a "coalition" that included such major world powers as Bulgaria (sorry, Bulgarians, but let's just be honest about your overall level of importance outside of the Balkans and perhaps ice dancing), displaced a million Iraqis, killed about a tenth of that number, created about twenty thousand terrorists, and trumped it all up as an exercise in elective democracy.

Hey, it's my birthday and I'm going to make a political statement. Get your own blog and do the same when it's your birthday.

Anyway, it was a bad year.

That year, I stopped celebrating my birthday. People would call or send me cards or texts, and I would politely say thank you and change the subject. No going out for dinner, no letting people know, no special anything, although my wife and a couple of relatives would give me cards. I also let my mother be especially nice to me. Otherwise, no celebrating. It wasn't that I was trying to pretend I wasn't getting older. Really. No, really. I simply didn't see the point. Birthdays, like weddings, had been presented as this fantastic day that was Your Special Day, but without the dress and a quarter million dollar debt at the end. And it's not.

I mean really. A few people remember and say something nice, but otherwise the world is just as doomed and shitty as it always is. People are still total pricks to each other, sometimes in truly terrible ways, like displacing a million people so you can see if your army can really take over a country on the cheap. Or shooting up a bunch of school kids. I really have to wonder sometimes why we try at all. There aren't a lot of Special Days out there and the ones we do have collectively seem to involve Giant Space Rocks exploding over people with car cams. *Then* we get excited.

But for the world in general, and really for anyone who doesn't know me and there are lot more of them out there than there are of those who do, there's nothing special about it at all.

You know what's special about today? After three straight nights of rocking my ass off at two different venues, including humping PA and keyboards to the last gig, and dragging my sorry ass into bed sometime after 2am and waking up feeling like it's the second day of Daily Double workouts on the high school football team, I get to do nothing. Well, I get to let the dogs out every fifteen seconds to eat dirt or sneak some bamboo from the yard. You can't trust those mutts for a second. They didn't even let me sleep in, the ingrates.

OK, I get a new microwave delivered and installed today, which means that the panel on the POS4000 model we've suffered with for the last five+ years will finally stop shifting by about a 32nd of an inch every time you press a button and the entire thing, which now has no handle and several cosmetic blemishes, will finally end up where it belongs, the rust pile. Really, though, that's more of an imposition than fun. I am, however, going to put together the stamped metal model of a T-34 tank that my wife surprised me with. Somedays you realize you married the right person after all.

Otherwise, today will probably mostly involve napping. Once I let the dogs out for the 50th time.

I may also clip some counters.

I am definitely not leaving the house, however. Because that would involve dealing with people, most of whom did not get the Special Day memo. Screw them.

I'm certainly not going to be playing the piano today. My fingers are pretty sore from all that rock and roll.

For those that know me, I'm mostly just having fun with this post. There's truth in everything I say, but a lot of tongue too, firmly planted in my cheek. The simple truth is that there are Special Days all over the place. I had one just the other day, Valentine's Day, when on our way to have dinner downtown we ran into my son-in-law and my four year old granddaughter, who was not expecting to see us. She and Dad had just gone out for a very nice dress-up-and-use-our-manners dinner, and she was already having a great night, but when she saw us she lit up like fireworks. So did I.

Last night at the jam, and all weekend long at the casino, people kept coming up to me and complimenting me on my musical skills, which is always nice. I'm smart enough to know that most people are completely incapable of making any sort of critical assessment of how well I play and sing, but the fact that I'm touching them with the music I'm making (and the jam sessions definitely have a high percentage of people who know their shit, so that's different) is what it's all about. In other words, it's nice to know, even after 50 years, that you're doing *something* right.

So happy birthday to me, and to everyone who is having a Special Day but not taking it *too* seriously. It's best, I find, to let the Special Days find you and to embrace them when they come, then let them go bump into someone else without trying to chain them to the bed and make them dance on command. Will today be a Special Day for me? No idea, but having had more than my share of Special Days in the past week, I'm more than willing to sit back down and let someone else ride the roller coaster.

Happy Birthday, everyone.

2012: What I've Learned

I'm a big fan of Esquire magazine. Not the fashion tips, which are lost on a techie in the Pacific Northwest, but the articles are generally very good and the interviews also very interesting. This month, the magazine's focus is a series of comments, garnered through interviews but distilled so that it appears the subject is simply ruminating on a variety of topics seemingly at random. 

I can't resist a year-end recap, and I've gone into tremendous detail in years past on what games I thought were great and what weren't, but this year I'm going to try something very different (and you will see why below), and go with the distilled interview format, which Esquire calls "What I've Learned". 

In 49 days, I will turn 50. Something poetic about that.

At the same time, kind of disappointing that I didn't do the math yesterday.

I've always felt that I have the financial resources to be an ethical person. In other words, it's easy to be "good" when you have a full stomach, a warm house, and perhaps the most stable financial future one can have these days. 

Turned out that I also had the financial resources to hoard games. When my wife lost her job late in 2011 and we suddenly had a $1000/mo hole in the budget, the first thing to go were games. Not so much to sell, but that I stopped buying them. 

After a decade of preordering everything GMT Games put out, I cancelled everything but Virgin Queen. That was the only wargame I purchased all year. 

Euros followed a similar path, although I did buy a few. Mostly, I'm buying expansions to games I already have. Even that, though, is starting to tail off. Biggest category was multiplayer strategy games, like Eclipse. 

Sometimes a switch just flips in your head and you look at the world and what is important to you differently. In my case it was that the hamster wheel of acquisitiveness more or less came off of it's axel. Suddenly, instead of me in a game store saying, "Hey, I don't have that," I'm saying "Hey, I don't want that." And it's happening with video games and movies for me as well. About the only place where I'm not terribly discriminating is in iOS games, which are effectively crack cocaine for me. 

Even when my wife got a great new full time job and we ended up financially better off for the year than if she hadn't lost her old job, the acquisitiveness just seems to have petered out. While I still fight the desire to go into a store and buy something, anything, at the same time if I go in I'm simply not as interested in what's there. 

I guess this is what you call your mid-life crisis. When you become wise enough to realize that the framework of your relationships isn't the same as your relationships. I consider myself fortunate to have the relationships - many don't and then you end up with a Viper or too much hookers and blow. 

Although the Viper would have been cool. 

Here's the thing about games: The best part of gaming is who you play with.

I've known that for years, and I still really like playing certain games, but suddenly the game is nowhere near as important as the relationships that I've been building for 15 years through playing them. 

The person I'm most excited about playing games with: my granddaughter, who likes to cheat at Candyland. She's pretty sneaky. However, she's also easily confused about which direction you are supposed to go in sometimes (the board is essentially a back and forth scoring track, which I consider a cardinal sin in human factors design), but that ends up being a wash a good part of the time. 

Candyland is a terrible game, a game on a rail, a game that demonstrates that fate rules our universe, a game that is used as a pejorative as often as not for a terrible game. Unless you are playing it with your 4 year old granddaughter, then it's the Best Game Ever. 

Nice to see I can learn something from a 4 year old. 

That said, I'm looking forward to when she is old enough for Mice and Mystics or role playing. 

The best part of life is who you play with. 

In about ten days I will go off to the Oregon Coast to enjoy two+ days of gaming and excellent companionship in my gaming group's annual winter retreat. When we started doing these retreats in the late 90's (starting with the Sunriver retreats in the fall and spring) I was so excited to play the games. Now I am excited to be in very close quarters with good friends and the games are there to hang our memories on. 

2012 was a decent year. It had it's challenges (musically it's been a very mixed bag, for example), and in some cases those challenges give me no choice but to continue to learn about acceptance. 

Acceptance is really just faith that the things you have no power over are going to turn out OK, despite all evidence and history to the contrary. 

Acceptance is realizing that we are all simply eating time as we shuffle towards oblivion, but trying to do good anyway, and have as much fun as possible while doing it. 

Acceptance is understanding that New Year's Day is just another day, one where you can't really go shopping and there's nothing good on TV and Netflix is down. Again. The damned thing isn't even on an astronomically significant day, like the Winter Solstice. Even the calendar is based around whatever Julius Caesar thought was a reasonable point when he got tired of March slowly creeping up into autumn via the lunar calendar. It's like turning 50, a date which has significance solely because we have two hands of five fingers each. 

If we were all cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, with three fingers and a thumb on each hand, the important date would be 40, base 8, which is actually 32 in base 10. 

I think that's a significant age for hobbits. Do they only have four digits on each extremity? I can't say, I refuse to go watch the movie in the theater because it looks like it was shot as a daytime drama. 

Didn't we give up on making half-hour cartoons into feature films in the 80's? Sometimes I think humans are incapable of learning anything at all.

Yeah, I'm getting crankier all the time. I consider it the only upside of the warranty running out at 40. That's 50 in base 8, by the way.

I've lost you, haven't I. Guess I'll need to accept that too. There's a lot of that in my life. 

I suppose that I will continue popping up with my stream-of-consciousness and navel gazing from time to time, but no one wants to read about how cool my gaming friends are, and as long as the game gets us to the place we want to be, I really don't care what game it is we're playing. 

As mid-life crises go, that's a pretty good one to have. 

The Viper would be good too. 

Happy New Year. 

I will end with one of my favorite Doyleisms:

Here's to looking up your old address. 

I'm not quite sure what it means either, but it always makes me smile and remember a good friend who left us in 2012. Maybe we can get through 2013 without losing too many more. 

An Open Letter To NFL Fans and Replacement Refs

I am a huge Seattle Seahawks fan, and a huge fan of the NFL. It is the only professional sports league I follow with any regularity at all, and I include college athletics in that category. After the embarrassing win last night over the Packers, I can only say that the replacement refs must leave, and they must leave immediately.

The trick is how this can be accomplished. As many have said, so long as the owners are getting revenue, they will continue to avoid the $100,000 in extra benefits per club per year the refs are asking for. I believe that a boycott of games would help, but like most "gas-outs" (where people were told not to buy gas on a given day), there is little chance of this actually happening.

No, what we need are for one of two things to happen.

First, and I believe the best, is for the replacement refs to simply refuse to work. Really, replacement refs, are you enjoying yourselves? Is this in any way, shape, or form worth the money you're being paid to try to accomplish a job that you are, frankly, completely unqualified to take on? Do you really need Bill Belichek chasing you across the field at the end of the game? No. In a word, no. This is not worth it. Just refuse to take part in this charade, regain some self-respect, and see how quickly the league and the owners cave to the demands of the trained officials who do this job well. Week 4 is not going to be better for you, it will be worse. Much worse. We know you're doing the best you can. Unfortunately, that's not even remotely good enough. Please, just stop enabling the joke that is the 2012 NFL season.

While I'd love to see this happen, I believe that the real motivation will come via the fans, but aside from those who pay for tickets, they only have one way to pressure the league. With a boycott of products advertised during NFL games.

This could actually be kind of fun. While you watch your favorite team play, write down who is advertising during the game. Put together a form letter (a simple sample is given below) and send a copy to every advertiser via email telling them you won't buy their products while the game is in such a shambles. Advertisers pressure the networks, and the networks pressure the league. You can also boycott NFL Network advertisers, all six of them.

Help stop the sick joke that is the NFL referees lockout. Because you know that if this continues even a few more weeks, this season will have a giant asterisk next to it in the record books.

Here's a sample template letter you can cut and paste:

Dear NFL Advertiser,

Because of the replacement referee debacle currently unfolding at NFL games throughout the league, we have decided to temporarily boycott all products advertised during NFL games. We are very sorry to do this, but unfortunately we don't see any other way to convince the league that the game we love has been severely damaged by the continued lockout of the trained referees. As such, we ask you to put whatever pressure you can on the networks and the NFL to call a halt to the lockout immediately. Once the lockout is over, we will go back to purchasing and using your products. Thank you for recognizing that the NFL is the crown jewel of American sports and can only continue to be such with effective and competent officiating. Thank you for your time.