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Month: September 2024

Another Avalon Hill Game on the Top 10 List

Another Avalon Hill Game on the Top 10 List

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Among the older games in my top 10 games list are several from the old school game company Avalon Hill. I’ve already posted about one of them on this blog. It was kind of inevitable for any nerdy gamer in the 70s or 80s who was into thoughtful strategy games to get caught up in this particular series. Another Avalon Hill game I played a good bit of in high school was Diplomacy, #9 on my list.

Diplomacy is a game of recreating the Great Power conflicts in Europe of the early 20th century, and had mechanics where you made alliances to support other players’ military campaigns. But the actual moves were written down secretly and simultaneously, which created an opportunity for backstabbing. It was a very tense and fun game for this reason.

In high school, we had a fun “live action” format (like PBEM before email) where one person would act as referee, handing out paper copies of the map’s current state to the players, and collecting everyone’s moves in written form. The moves were due once or twice a week, and if you didn’t turn them in or they were confusing to the ref, they would just revert to your units holding. The ref would calculate the new game state and hand out maps again. Our tools for making the maps were markers and photocopiers.

This was a great format because it meant that during the days when players were plotting their moves, they could easily meet in private to negotiate all their diplomatic shenanigans. Backstabbing was easier too because you could double-deal without the other players having any inkling of what you were doing, though there was always the chance for real life spying and eavesdropping to try to figure out what deals the other players were making. It was exciting and engaging and we got in a few games in my time in high school.

In college, I played with friends in the Wargamers Club, which was the only club I ever joined there. We only played Diplomacy around the table, but in a big room in the student center where people could meander off to the edges for their diplomatic discussions. It’s not as good a format as “live action,” but there were still shenanigans since you could talk to everyone whether or not you were actually coordinating with them, to disguise your true intentions. You could try to outsmart other players with deceitful negotiations, and the tension would build until you got to the glorious moment of a successful betrayal. Or you might suffer the ignominy of being betrayed yourself. Great fun.

One time I played a game that wasn’t so much fun, because some players didn’t seem to get the game. Really, they just played differently than what I was used to. I wrote a session report about it here: A Game without Double-Dealing, or, Don’t These Guys Know How to Play Diplomacy?

After college, I don’t think I ever played Diplomacy again. The closest game to it that I have played since then is A Game of Thrones (yes, based on the familiar series), which also has players coordinating moves and potentially backstabbing one another. I did have one great moment in Game of Thrones, which you can read about here: A Machiavellian Move in a Game of Thrones.

I’m not sure why I never played after school. The spirit of Diplomacy just wasn’t there in my new gaming circles, I guess, but I will always have fond memories of the game from my past.

Blog Retrospective

Blog Retrospective

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It’s been over 7 years since I started this blog. That was in early 2017, when I was strongly motivated by political events at the time to jump back into posting about the generations and the social era, as I had done in an earlier blog in the 2000s. The mood shift was palpable, I suppose.

In the years since, I have blogged the most about the current social era, which I call a “Crisis Era,” in keeping with the generational theory of which I am an advocate. This is a tumultuous time of political conflict and realignment (as you’ve probably noticed) and there will surely be much to blog about in the future.

I’ve also blogged about my personal life, including topics such as work, leisure, family and relationships. If you are a long time reader, you got to see me move from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, and then live through the pandemic. It’s been a time of rapid change both for me personally and for the world at large.

One theme of this story has been my adjustment to being middle-aged. For my generation, Generation X, this means (hopefully) calming down – refraining from the wild and risky behavior of the past – and settling down – finding one’s roots after a life adrift. That is the life script of my generational archetype, and I truly believe that those of us who are successful at living that script will fare better once this era has come to an end, as all eras must do.

There are a still a few more years left of this Crisis Era, just as there a few more years left for me as a middle-aged person. In a couple of years, God willing, I will turn sixty, and not long afterward age into elderhood. Who knows what the world will look like then? I’m not sure what more I’ll have to blog about either. Maybe I’ll just start writing poetry or something like that.

For now, thank you, dear reader, for staying with me. I can’t promise you a bright future, just encourage you to keep your chin up, because we have a lot more change to live through.