Pax Porfiriana 7

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I'm playing someone taking the Bernardo Reyes hacendado. This person picked up the Senator Albert Fall card right away, which means all plays of American enterprises give the gold to him. Since Bernardo Reyes gets troops for 1/2 price, this person also picked up a bunch of troops, and also managed to get an early assassination card.

So I'm pretty stuck. Pretty much everything I do at this point feeds my opponent win conditions. There is another Assassination card coming up, I hope I'll be able to get it. That would at least allow me to remove the monopoly on American enterprises.

I think I'm going to lose this game on the first Topple card, waiting on opponent now.

This has not been a particularly satisfying past week for playing online games. I believe I've lost at every single one of them, and in most cases, quite badly if not spectacularly. I just don't have the bandwidth to really dig into games spread over several days, especially when I don't know the game very well. It's just not fun. It's not the losing, it's that I'm not learning anything because I cannot spend the focus time.

This is probably related to so-called professional decline, which I suspect is mostly related responsibility overload. Perhaps there is cause and effect: young people aren't granted responsibility because their minds aren't capable of handling it. As in "physically" incapable. Who can say?

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What to play next?

Deciding what to play next is always a tough call when faced with a closet full of games, all of which were purchased with intent to play. Here's one I'm dealing with the decision.

  • Something New: this means both something new to me and a game which has been published recently, within the last two or three years.
  • Something Classic: I've acquired a number of games properly considered "classic" which haven't yet been played. The current example would be PanzerGruppe Guderian.
  • Something Again: mastery requires constant practice, which means playing games many, many times to allow nuance to appear.
  • Something Vietnam: as I'm on a Vietnam binge. I don't have all the Vietnam games ever published, but I can say that I have a lot of them, and probably more than most people.
  • Something Obscure: as it's fun to poke around in the dustier corners of game design.
  • Something Different: break away from the same old publishers and try a game from one of the new kids on the block. Or, conversely, dip into legacy with a classic tried and true.
  • Something Light: once in a while it's nice to actually finish a game all the way through in one sitting, in an hour or two.
  • Something Heavy: if possible, it's nice to set up something big and complicated which can be left out for days or weeks or even months, for a leisurely stroll through a very large or long game.

There are surely many more ways to choose, but the above method keeps me busy enough, helps me get both breadth and depth into my play, and provides me with a sense of progress.

The odd man out

When there is an odd man out:

  • Have a solo game ready to play.
  • Keep score or advise on a game in progress.
  • Referee a game in progress.