F$@& Kingmaking

 

This idea came from my burn the game film recap.  I had such a terrible night that I only affected the outcome of 1 game, Samurai.  Sometime during the game Mike left open some bait on Monks or Nobles for me to capture, failing to notice that with one move I could capture two Rice.   That ended up being critical in determining the winner.  Mike and I tied on Rice, Ryan and Mike tied on something else, and Ryan won the 3^rd goal, thus winning the game.  So I crowned King Ryan, 12^th ruler of Samurai.  I didn’t do this on purpose, I really was just trying to get tokens and suck a little bit less.  Screwing Mike was just a happy accident.

It got me thinking about Kingmaking in these games; playing not to win, but choosing who does win.

Some games it is just inevitable.  The mayhem of Smallworld pretty much guarantees that someone gets picked on.  Car Wars is the same way, crossing anyone’s front arc is dangerous, especially Bad to the Brown’s.

 

Take a thousand points of damage

Take a thousand more.

Because I’m Chris Brown, Chris Brown

Chris Brown to the bone

The secret to winning these games is to be dangerous but not obviously so.  Having an overt power combo just makes everyone gang up on you.  So don’t do that. 

And some games it just matters very little.  No Thanks is over so quickly, that I find I don’t care if someone takes the card I needed to fill my inside straight, especially if I got greedy and let it spin twice.  I mean, that’s really on me not my opponents.  Any Steve Jackson card game falls into this category too.  The only time I ever played Munchkin, Mike crowned me King.  Munchkin is just so incredibly hard to win otherwise.  It’s worse than Uno.  In Uno, you only have to worry about your adjacent neighbors; in Munchkin everyone at the table can thwart you.  So Mike allowed me to win on his turn or something, and the only thing I am upset about is that I didn’t think of a way to allow him to win first.

I’m also not above unreasonable in game vendettas too.  Someone screws me early, taking me out of the game?   Oh yeah, I will try hard to make sure someone else wins.  Because taking things personally is fun!

Now a steady diet of kingmaking frustrates me.  Let’s pretend that we play with someone who never really tries to win but just alters the course of games.  Unless that guy is hilariously funny, I bet he doesn’t get invited back.