Thursday, February 16, 2012

Noli Illegitimos - An Offside Report

Completely out of period, but I couldn't resist a spot of Howard Pyle

I asked the players of the Noli Illegitimos game of two weeks ago, if they'd be willing to give us the benefit of their thoughts on the game. Savage and The Admirable Deegan stepped into the breach.

Another object lesson in the universal rule that all war is lack of information. Conrad got plenty of excecise conveying our grand strategies through the filters of both the possible and the probable, and it made for the best example of this game type I've yet seen. Even hours later myself and Mr E were comparing notes and discovering that neither of us had a firm grasp of what the elephant actually looked like. Looking forward to more of this sort of thing.

Savage

"That naval Kriegspiel was really good fun to play. I think a big Kreigspiel (like that or the Waterloo game we played previously) could do with having the players' full attention, rather than running it in parallel with another game which might (if for no other reason than being physically there in front of us) grab a greater share of of our attention. I'm conscious that you were spending a lot of time backstage, keeping the game engine running and making it all look effortless, whereas in fact there is a lot of admin - meaning that if we weren't also playing other games you might worry that we'd have downtime between orders, waiting for you to come back.

That "downtime worry" might be something that could be avoided by having more individualised objectives, whereby we would be jockeying for position within our faction as much as planning the downfall of the foreign foeman. In Saturday's game, for example, our turns could have taken us much longer (without being any less fun) if each of the three of us on the French side was trying to curry favour with the Directorate in separate ways. That's just one idea; I might dig out those rules and find out a little more about how the engine room operates, and chat with you again about it?"

The Admirable Deegan


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