A Bug's Life

I had a good Stabcon. Often it does terrible things to my health, but I managed it well and could skip out of the hotel carrying all my own luggage. (Somewhere in the mists of time is my post about playing Twilight Imperium for 10 hours and having to be carried out on a trestle table)

For the first time I played a game that was almost entirely negotiation, alliance and persuasion. In Intrigue, each player runs a kingdom that can hire up to four professionals (scribe, bishop, medic, scientist) and pay them one of four salaries (1, 3, 6, 10). You also have eight professionals of your own (two of each) who you send out to find work in neighbouring kingdoms. You earn money in two ways: your employed people earn a salary each round; and your neighbours bribe you to give them the highest salary slots or to choose their medic over someone else's. You take their bribes, then make your decision, and a lot of positions that were agreed to be permanent may suddenly change in the face of new, higher bribes. The size of bribes changes as players establish what the market value of the positions are in this game. I hate this sort of thing! There are no rules, there are no fixed prices, and people can agree a deal, take your hefty bribe, then stick you in the $1 slot and laugh in your face. Bah! You have no power, no basic rights, if everyone freezes you out you can't get anywhere by yourself. And yet - negotiation happens, people try different lines of argument, you have to co-operate to get on, and deals become increasingly based on thwarting the person they expect to win rather than who bribes highest. I won (to my enormous surprise), after taking a non-threatening 3/5 place through the game I ended up in a good position, and a neighbour decided to kingmake me over the bloke he games with every week. I found it very hard to be in that game, and very hard to persuade people to favour me without a cold hard line of accounting to back me up or any form of contract protection. It's totally not the way I reason, and was really interesting to play through.

And there were other games and they were good too. I still have the Snap! skills of my 7-year-old self (Schiki Micki, Snap!-like but with a couple of extra dimensions). I have the Ursuppe/Primordial Soup expansion set now, which opens up this game of evolutionary strategy, genes and amoebas, and hundreds of tiny coloured cubes of food/poo, to 5-6 players instead of 3-4.

My favourite was the new Battlestar Galactica game, which plays a lot like Shadows Over Camelot. It is basically co-operative, the Galactica crew deal with crises (food shortage!) and repel raider incursions. However, one of you may be a Cylon and working to make you lose resources and basically die! When someone offers to help, who do you trust? When a big negative card gets thrown into the voting heap (face down) was it one of the random cards, or is there a traitor in your midst and if so who? Don't go throwing people into the brig without good reason, you need every good human you can get to help prevail against the onslaught of attacks. It's really finely balanced, survival cannot be taken for granted.

Also read Life of Pi (vg) in my copious spare time. Enforced rest periods are good for the book habit, and vice versa :-)