2020 Mastery Challenge

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It's once again time to contemplate mastery during 2020. Due to career commitments, the only goal for 2020 is to not have a goal. Career goals are paramount, and very time consuming. For 2020, game play needs to simply be a casual diversion rather than a serious hobby. I will keep track of H-index scoring, which is easy enough.

Here are the challenges from 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019:

2020-12-31: Current average plays for count of owned games: 925 / 117 = 7.90.

November 9, 2020

This will likely be my last update for 2020, until my annual Mastery challenge article on December 31.

Lacking any other place to put them, here are some LotR house rules for Ranged and Sentinel for single hand solo, drawn from the post on Reddit:

  • Exclude Gandalf from the following.

  • Pay one matching resource for a character with Sentinel to defend without exhausting, limit once per round.

  • A Ranged character may exhaust to deal 1 damage to an enemy in the staging area, limit once per round.

  • A Ranged character may exhaust to attack an ALREADY engaged enemy first, limit once per round.

More actual thoughts shortly.

Shortly after I wrote the June update, the whole country went nuts over police brutality, with a lot of racial tension in the air. Since I live in a somewhat mixed neighborhood, and close to a rough neighborhood, I stopped walking in the mornings as I no longer felt safe. There were a lot of marches, including some running up San Pablo. Pretty weird.

I did get 100 plays of Absolutely Aces recorded, that's going to be the highlight of the year, considering I have 3 other titles (Sorcerer, OCS Burma, First Team: Vietnam) I have not yet finished. I do a turn or two, then put them away and start a new game. Not good. I need to finish things I start, not indulge a habit of starting things and not finishing them. I'd like to close out 2020 finishing First Team: Vietnam, Sorceror, Lotr "We Must Away Ere Break of Day" first Hobbit quest, and OCS Burma. That doesn't seem like much, but it's actually a lot of time considering my work load and energy level.

June 13, 2020

Lockdown more or less continues. I'm personally mostly staying home, venturing out for a morning walk and getting groceries once a week. Meanwhile the news media is telling us the country is melting down. I think there is truth in that, but I also believe the media is both aiding and abetting it, and percieves itself benefitting from the meltdown. So I mostly avoid reading the news.

But all that is stupid, this is about games.

It turns out not commuting leaves me with more time and energy to squeeze a game in now and then. Over the last few weeks, I've been able to get solo games of Absolutely Aces in most every evening. The game plays very quickly, less than an hour even if I record every move. I've 54 plays at the time of this writing. I do not know how many total plays I want to rack up before moving on, but I'm thinking maybe 100. At my current rate, that would wrap it up around the end of July. After that I'm planning to do the same thing with a different game, but I haven't chosen one yet.

April 26, 2020

We've now been on "lockdown," for 6 weeks. Lockdown being a euphimism for house arrest. It's not quite that bad, I could spend a lot of time out and about provided I had a plausible excuse for being out of the house. I am not happy about it from a theoretical point of view, but I do very much like not commuting!

In any case, I'm trying to do a bit better at getting a game in once a week. Not always succeeding, but gradually doing better than earlier in the year.

March 22, 2020

Here we are in March, in complete lockdown in California, which changes the game situation considerably. It now makes sense to get a 2020 Mastery Challenge scoped out. It turns out working from home all the time means it's really hard for me to shut it off, it's all work all the time, except on weekends, where I end up having so many projects in flight I can't decide what to work on.

Two games I think I do want to play next are:

  1. The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora, and
  2. Tobruk.

Both these are classics. I've had Tobruk out and set up in the past, probably before I got serious about logging plays. It's also a game that I purchased in my very early teens, and did not play at that time.

I could also shoot for 900 plays for 2020. That's not so hard when Lord of the Rings LCG is in rotation.

H-index is another target, I'm almost at 14.

Or move the average plays from 7 to 6, which would be 25 new games if I did not replay anything at all, even more if I did.

H-index

Much of the rationale is identical to 2019: will mostly play LotR LCG almost surely. H-index 14 will be a by-product.

  1. 143/116 Lord of the Rings LCG will almost surely remain my most-played game in 2020. It's fairly easy to get to the table, has a reasonably short time window for playing (1-3 hours), and it's fun. If I were to have a goal in 2020, it might be to get all the way through the Heirs of Numenor cycle, sweeping up the Hobbit boxes and print on demand scenarios compatible with progression style play. Since I'm stuck on Shadow and Flame in Dwarrowdelf at the moment, that might be a lot to ask for. We'll see how it goes.

  2. 101/5 Absolutely Aces is a tiny card game, with maximum 10 cards total in play at any one time. It is played in rounds, which makes it a no-brainer to set up while doing chores. I expect to play quite a bit of it in 2020.

  3. 63/63 Hive No plans to play Hive in 2020. Too engrossing and I cannot bear to play it badly.

  4. 44/44 Ogre The G3 and S3 maps are now in my house. Ogre will definitely get more play in 2020.

  5. 31/31 Zombie Dice May catch a few games here and there, I usually pack it along when I go to other places to play.

  6. 27/27 PanzerBlitz Nothing planned for 2020.

  7. 26/24 Star Realms should see a few plays in 2020.

  8. 21/20 Race for the Galaxy is always good for a few random plays here and there. If I end up getting sick in bed (doesn't happen often), this would something I'd play online during that time.

  9. 20/20 Silver Bayonet Remains casualty of losing the local game store venue. Might set up a long running campaign.

  10. 19/19 Fire in the Lake Had a good run with Fire in the Lake in 2018, but again, it's that venue problem. We'll see what happens.

  11. 17/17 6 Nimmt! will reserve plays for 3 or more people.

  12. 15/15 Cathedral is a solved game, and I don't have a copy, and the copyright holder is quite restrictive on distribution. If I find a copy for a buck or two I'll pick it up and learn the solution. Otherwise no plans on playing.

  13. 14/12 Battle for Moscow I still haven't really cracked this game in the same way I cracked Target Leningrad. Would be worth playing a few times to really see how to win it as the Germans.

  14. 13/13 Ogre: Objective 218 Will likely set this up to play between chores, although that didn't happen in 2019.

  15. 13/13 Vietnam Solitaire Time to start using the Special Edition Rules. Most of the time I play using standard rules.

  16. 12/12 Hapsburg Eclipse Good chance this will get back into rotation this year. I think I've playing it wrong for a long time, and I want to try out some new strategies. This is another game which fits well in between chores.

  17. 12/12 Objective Kiev I've cracked the German side, now to figure out how to win as the Soviets.

  18. 12/12 Pandemic My usual partner for this game is no longer a gaming opponent or partner. If I play it in 2020, it will be with the In The Lab expansion.

  19. 12/12 Soviet Dawn Time to revisit for a few plays, didn't get around to it in 2019.

  20. 12/12 StarForce Would like to play the solitaire situation several more times, at different locations.

  21. 12/12 Target Leningrad probably won't see a play in 2019, would prefer to bring The Arduous Beginning into rotation, which only has three plays at the moment.

  22. 11/11 Leaving Earth Will almost surely get played. I really like the game, I can set it up and leave it for a period of time, and it's easy to document play via spreadsheet. Also, I have not yet played the Stations Expansion, which seems like an obvious thing to do this year.

  23. 10/10 Flash Point I almost always play this solo, it's something good for chores days. Really ought to get this out in 2020.

  24. 10/9 OCS May set up the Kasserine scenario in Tunisia II, or take another crack at Operation Compass in DAK2. We'll see. I'm heartened by getting a Burma game in during 2019. As it turned out, I did get a Burma game in, but that was it.

  25. 7/7 France '40 Probably won't play this year as it's pretty involved and there are other things I want to do instead. I do have an interest in developing smaller scenarios for the game.

  26. 6/6 Android:Netrunner should move up in the ranks pretty fast as I now have a regular opponent.

  27. 4/0 High Frontier 4 All is now on this list as it arrived late in the year, and I'm super stoked to be playing it.

  28. 1/1 Other COIN This is COIN other than Fire in the Lake. Would like to get a play of Cuba Libre in this year.

Wargame-specific H-index

My wargame-specific H-index started 2019 at 10. Wargames are so much more time consuming that this index will increase much, much more slowly than the overall H-index. I do not expect much progress on this list in 2020.

  1. 44 Ogre
  2. 27 PanzerBlitz
  3. 20 Silver Bayonet
  4. 19 Fire in the Lake
  5. 13 Battle for Moscow
  6. 13 Vietnam Solitaire
  7. 12 Objective Kiev
  8. 12 Soviet Dawn
  9. 12 StarForce
  10. 12 Target Leningrad
  11. 12 Hapsburg Eclipse
  12. 10 OCS
  13. 7 France '40
  14. 5 Phantom Leader
  15. 4 Ottoman Sunset
  16. 3 The Arduous Beginning
  17. 2 Winter War
  18. 1 COIN
  19. 1 Combat Commander
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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.