My Worst Plays
I am playing Root for the first time. There are five us and four of us are new to the game. It takes more than half an hour to learn the rules, which is mostly the teacher talking to one person at a time, since the rules are different for each player, while the rest of us stare out into space.
The game finally starts and each new player seems to just stare at their player board endlessly, confused. I figure out how to program the birds pretty quickly, but then I start nodding off as it seems like an eternity before my next turn.
Finally, when it’s not my turn I just leave the table and start talking to everyone else playing different games at that game day. At one point I catch up with two old friends who I haven’t seen in months and when I return play hasn’t even progressed halfway across the table.
The game comes down to a single die roll, but I don’t care about the outcome – I just want it to be over. Beyond the teaching time, the game lasted 4 hours, compared to the 60-90 minutes listed on the box.
Fifteen years ago, I play a game of High Society on a family vacation. It’s a tense game, and when it’s over the winner jumps up and down and yells out in triumph.
Irritated at their celebration, I mutter something about how even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. Something snaps in the winner, and they jump on me, cursing, beating their fists against my chest. They have to be pulled off of me.
It’s a major family incident and I’m both embarrassed by my classless provocation and spooked by the winner’s disturbing reaction.
Last week I play Res Arcana with my friend and podcast co-host Pat. Most of our games of this have been decided quickly, but this one is going down to the wire. I am a little bit ahead, and I realize that if I play this last round right I won’t be beaten.
I think carefully about every turn, planning everything carefully, particularly around one of Pat’s cards which is the only thing which can stand in my way. After a few very long moves, Pat stares at me quizzically, and says simply “Pass. I win.”
I stare at him strangely, and then say no you don’t. I look carefully at his card in question and realize I have misunderstood the text of the card, and have been playing very slowly for 30 minutes because of a complete misconception. I simply could have passed a long time ago and almost certainly won in the next round had I understood the card.
My face is gripped with frustration and I stalk around the room for a few minutes before I calm down.
It’s 20 years ago, and I’m playing in the World Championship of the Mage Knight Miniatures game at Gen Con. From the over 200 people which began the event, I have reached the semi-finals.
I am very nervous, as winning the tournament would grant prizes worth $5,000-$10000, and just reaching the finals would get me prizes worth $1000-$2000. If I can win this game, I feel confident about winning the finals as my waiting opponent is playing an army that is very weak against my own.
But first I have to get there. My current opponent is playing an unusual army, which is similar to mine only in that most of its value is concentrated into one very powerful figure.
My opponent ends his turn and my heart leaps. He has put himself into a position where his powerful figure can be destroyed by mine in one shot if I make the right move, pretty much guaranteeing me the win. I set everything up, and then all I have to do is roll to hit…and win. I need anything but snake eyes on the dice to hit.
I roll snake eyes.
I stare stonily at the table. In this game, whenever you roll snake eyes, you not only miss, but you take damage. I wound my own figure. My opponent then moves his main figure up to mine and virtually destroys it. I fight on, but I had lost two thirds of my army in one stroke. I come close, but I can’t overcome that loss – I barely lose.
Instead of the satisfaction of a championship and thousands of dollars worth of prizes, there is nothing.
It’s two weeks ago, and I’m playing Brass: Birmingham for the first time. Coal, our rules teacher explains, can only be transported via rail links. I look at him in confusion. Rail links can only be built in the second half of the game.
“Then why would you ever build coal?” I ask. “It could only be used by other buildings in the same city, which wouldn’t use enough coal to activate it. It would be a complete waste. And if you don’t have coal, how would you build these other things?”
The rules teacher said something about how in two cities there could theoretically be enough other buildings to activate a coal tile.
It still seemed awfully strange to me and the other new player. But we soldiered on, and no one built coal – and in fact no one build too much of anything without it – until the rules teacher, perhaps in an attempt to justify himself, built a coal plant near the end of the first age.
When we started setting up the second age, we realized something terrible. Without coal, no one had built iron plants, and the existing iron in the bank had been used up early on. No one had opened up second stage iron plants in their development, meaning that iron could never enter the game.
We’d locked ourselves into a situation where virtually no buildings could be built in the second age – we would simply pass the rest of the game.
Then we realized that if I sold my cotton mill, I could get a free development, which could bring iron back into the game, which would allow everyone to unlock their buildings. We were then able to continue the game.
Although the second half of the game then proceeded without incident, both me and the other new player were underwhelmed by this supposed classic.
“What’s the point of the whole first age if you don’t have iron?” my friend Jon wondered.
Upon returning home, I discovered in a Watch it Played video that our friend had taught the game entirely wrong, which nearly resulted us crashing the game and ending the industrial revolution.
It’s 2018, and I’m so excited – we’ve planned a whole day of Gloomhaven. We’re going to play at least three scenarios. We’re playing a touch one, our first trip to the elemental plane.
We’re doing okay when our Spellweaver makes a huge mistake – they are the closest to a skeleton on the turn they are going to use their signature move to get back all the cards. The skeleton goes extremely fast, runs up to the mage before they can act, and rolls a critical hit doing a ton of damage. It’s just enough to make the Spellweaver discard a card, only they can’t because everything was in their loss pile which they were going to retrieve.
They are out of the scenario and we aren’t even a quarter through it. We brave on, but it’s two hard to play through it all with only three of us. We come a turn or two short.
Confident that we can do better, we restart and for a while we are crushing it. We laugh as we march through room after room.
But near the end we get a couple of bad breaks, and a couple of players are out. We start to get more and more nervous. We realize there’s a small chance we could somehow lose.
And it comes down to our tank having to do one point of damage to clear the last monster and win the scenario. Easy, we think, as long as they don’t critically miss. They pull the card to win and they pull the one critical miss in their deck.
We all sit there, stunned. A couple of us groan out loud. We spend another couple of hours sullenly playing through the scenario a third time, our day wasted.
The above true examples illustrate what I consider the basic categories of terrible plays:
1) The game takes far too long
2) The game is determined by very bad luck (“bad beats”)
3) The game has some acrimonious incident
4) The game is played with huge rules mistakes or misunderstandings
How about you? What have been your worst ever game plays, and do they fit into one of the above categories?