Deck Building Games and Strategy Considerations (related to previous posts, trust me)

When I was in college, some friends of mine played Magic: The Gathering. It's a popular card game for... not sure what to call it. The gaming community probably captures it best, though 'gaming' can also include video games and whatnot, whereas I'm referring more to the geeky/nerdy type of people who like science fiction/fantasy like I do, and often play Dungeons & Dragons and various other board games or card games. Like Pandemic. Gencon is for people like this, and it says it's the "largest gathering of tabletop gamers in North America", so I guess that's the proper tag.

My brothers got into it, independently, shortly thereafter so I'm familiar with it even though I never went past being a casual player. They eventually moved on, though not after buying thousands of cards (and gifting most of them to our second youngest brother, HiTek.)

Anyways, Magic has a few problems, in that a serious player often spends a lot of money buying cards, and thus has better cards in his/her deck. Which means they often have an advantage against people unable or unwilling to spend that kind of money.

Dominion, on the other hand, is a deck-building card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, but without its flaws. Everyone starts out with the exact same cards, and everyone has the chance to buy the exact same cards, so winning generally depends more on your skill in creating a strategy and buying the right cards.

I have to go into a bit more detail for the rest of this to make sense, so please bear with me.

In a deck building game, you have to build a strategy that will give you a winning combination of cards fairly reliably. You draw and play your cards in accordance with the rules of the game, and when you've played through every card in your stack you shuffle the discard pile and start all over.

That means your choices will appear in your deck, over and over, changing a bit with every new purchase or trashing of a card.

In Dominion, there are cards that allow you to purchase other cards (coins: copper, silver, gold. And in some expansions, platinum). There are cards that determine who the winner is (victory cards: estates, duchies, provinces. And in some expansions, colonies.) And there are various action cards, that do various interesting things.

You win by collecting the most victory points (each victory card is worth a certain number of points, so a province is far better than an estate), but most of the victory cards don't do anything in your hand. If you drew a hand of normal victory cards, you'd be unable to purchase anything, or take any sort of action.

A lot of the game is about building a deck that reliably allows you to purchase victory cards, while making them a small enough part of your deck that you're unlikely to get a hand full of victory cards.

This is where the action cards come into play, and I glossed over them because they are many. And varied. But you don't play with all of them at once. Rather, you randomly select 10 from whatever sets you plan to play with (there's multiple expansions, with literally hundreds to choose from), and put them in play.

All players are able to read what the action cards do, all players have the same options on what to buy, and winning depends (mostly) on coming up with a good strategy based on the cards in play. Experience helps, because you have a better sense of which cards have a synergistic effect with each other and are worth purchasing.

To give you a taste of what this means: one of the action cards in the base set is the mine, and it allows you to trash a coin and replace it with a better one. So you'd trash the copper card in your hand (not literally, there's a trash pile to discard it in) and put a silver card in your discard pile. Next time you shuffle your deck, that's one more silver card and one less copper. Do that enough, and you'll reliably have increased purchasing power per card.

In a similar fashion, everyone wants to get provinces (or colonies), because it's far more victory points per card... whereas stocking up on estates will just clog your hand, and make it more likely you won't have enough coin or action cards to do anything interesting.

The strategies you choose are entirely dependent on what cards are in play. One of my brothers, for example, likes to use cards that shuffle through his deck quickly. That is, if you have an action card that says something like "view the top card of your deck: if X place it in your hand. If not, discard it."  He can have only one or two high powered cards in his deck, but having action cards that allow him to find it every single time means he doesn't need more... he just flips through his cards until he gets what he needs, uses it... and quickly runs through his deck, shuffles it all back in, and does it again.

Anyways, I went into this because I wanted to talk about attack cards, and their role in the game. See, some of the actions allow you to effect other players. The thief card, for example, allows you to take coin from other players. They have to show the top two cards of their deck and trash any coin, which you are allowed to retrieve from the trash pile. It generally is a royal pain to deal with, especially when you lose a gold or platinum coin. When the thief in play, pretty much everyone has a harder time getting enough coin to buy victory cards (or much of anything, tbh) and the game can drag on for a lot longer.

There are cards that force other players to discard down to three cards (a hand is usually five), or add a useless 'curse' card worth -1 victory points to your deck, or forces you to pass a card to your neighbor.

Now, when I play this with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards. It's sort of an informal convention, but we tend to prefer it that way. (Ofc, I generally see them when I visit the fam, and we're more likely to play cooperative games like Pandemic anyway. It's been a while since we've played Dominion together, and I'm unfamiliar with quite a few of the latest expansions.)

But when HiTek plays, or my brother and I play with some of his friends, the odds of someone using the attack cards are much greater. Heck, there are even people who seem to take great joy in being as vicious as possible... vicariously, in the game. They're generally quite nice outside of it.

And that's okay, too. Because even though I enjoy the more casual style with the fam, a good strategy would be able to win despite the attack cards in play. If the thief is in play, but the coppersmith is also in play, maybe you stick with coppers and use the coppersmith to increase their value. It would depend on what other cards are in play, though.

Anyways, I wanted to discussion the free marketplace of ideas, the wisdom of crowds (and lack thereof), and ways people try to influence the system in order to get support for their particular point of view, and Dominion seemed a great way to make a few points.

First, that we can establish a 'convention' not to use certain strategies, like purchasing attack cards. Second, that people may not agree to that convention, in which case you need to plan a counterstrategy that takes their actions into account. Third, that once you start using attack cards odds are pretty high that all the other players will, too. (I don't get people who do something shady and underhanded, and then turn around and get upset when their opponents start doing the same thing. You set the standard, you showed them that this is what it took to win, why are you surprised they're doing the same thing, using the same tactics to get one over on you instead? This is also why being a stubborn a-hole to your opponents is a losing strategy in the long term. Sure, they may give in the first few times. It's easier, and they don't really want a fight. But if you have repeated encounters, and they're always losing, eventually they get fed up and decide to get just as stubborn as you. Next thing you know, you're caught up in a pissing contest. Maybe a stalemate, maybe you'll have to concede something, or maybe you wind up in World War III... who knows? But constantly trying to one-up people instead of looking for a win/win is a risky strategy. At least, if the game involves repeated rounds with the same players.)

The fourth bit, the one I puzzle over sometimes, is how you can get people to change the game. Like, once the attack cards are in play, is that it? Are we just forced to accept that the game involves thieves, pirates, and brigands? Or - if everyone finds it unpleasant playing the game this way - can we get everyone to agree to NOT use such tactics?

The latter, well. It's a bit like a social dilemma, in which you'd need everyone's cooperation. And probably some sort of penalty for anyone who thinks they'd get some sort of advantage (generally just a short term one, since everyone else will then start using the same tactics) by breaking it. I think the key there, at least, is having the majority of the players agree that they're not really enjoying the game like this.

So, I dunno. If 'everyone' cheats in a game like soccer, but the players don't really like a game where winning matters less on how good they are at kicking and passing and whatnot than how good they are at cheating... maybe there's interest in cleaning up the game.

And maybe there isn't. I think the first step, though, is getting people to ask themselves whether they're really okay with it. After all, if most people are thrilled at a free-for-all where anything goes, well... good luck getting anyone to agree to restrain themselves.

National Strategy - Idealism

I want to talk about idealist vs. realist foreign policy, but I've kind of been scared to.  Or rather, I'm scared of the possible conclusions. 

How so?

Well...if we say that we should live up to our ideals, then what's to keep us from going around and trying to make everyone else do so as well?  "Become a capitalist democratic federal republic or we'll invade!"  (Which is essentially what Russia claims we do).

Then there's the problems at a strategic level.  Same problem we faced in a counterinsurgency.  If you try to be everywhere at once, you're going to be rather weak everywhere.  You won't be anywhere in sufficient strength to really make a difference (if your opposition is determined). 

It's also the same problem with tackling poverty, I think.  If some wealthy philanthropist decided to give all their money away equally, everyone would end up with such a small amount that it wouldn't make a difference.  Idealism may be great in theory...but how do you apply it to the real world dilemmas of our time? 

How do you apply idealism about human rights, say, consistently?  If Russia and China think we're not serious about human rights, it's hard to blame them...we've been so inconsistent.  (Though I think they believe human rights is just something we bring up to conceal a more selfish interest, rather than understanding that it's mostly genuine and the only inconsistency is that our realists don't feel it's worth risking our necks over.)

At the same time, idealism is actually pretty important.  It what's gives us a future worth fighting for.  A future TO fight for.  Head in the clouds and unrealistic though idealists may be, their the ones that actually make the world a different (and sometimes better) place.  Those who accept the world the way it is and learn to conform, realistic though they may be, are pretty much ensuring that the future is just like the present.  In all it's flaws.

Not only that, Jim Collins noted that the corporations that lasted all had a greater purpose than simply 'to make money'.  In a similar fashion, I think most people need to feel like their group is about more than selfish survival.  That's what I like about this facebook meme:





No matter what you call us vs them, you can see that each side is pretty much exactly the same.  That what you call them is just a matter of perspective.  Is this always true?  No, I don't think so.  Yet to reasonably say that our side is better, we have to be about something more than just "raison d'etat" 

Otherwise, well...a government is a government is a government, and it probably doesn't matter too much who is in charge so long as they make the trains run on time. (Since someone might misunderstand - I'm half joking here.  Later on I might go into different economic systems and what they mean, or discuss the development of nationalism, and how little it mattered in earlier time periods.  Right now it would be too much of a digression.)

That's enough for now.  I still haven't gotten to the heart of our own strategy, but this seems like a good stopping point for now.

Counter-Terrorism, Oversimplification, Etc.

In college I took hapkido and tai chi.  Even a little bit of push hands.  It's been years since I've done any of it, but some of the lessons stuck with me still.

Push hands is a little bit like an old childhood game.  The one where you put your front foot next to someone else's foot, grab each other by the hand and try to unbalance the other person.  Except, of course, the stances and point of contact are different.

As for lessons learned - first of all, when you're in contact with the other person you can kind of sense where their balance is.  Where they're moving to, and from.  (In the military sense - when you're in contact with the enemy you have a sense of where they're moving to.  It's when you lose all contact that they become unpredictable.)

Second - in push hands, once someone loses balance the other person has control.  If your opponent loses their balance, you control where they go.  In order to win, you need to keep your balance while making them lose theirs.  If they're moving towards you, maybe you should go with it...even aid them in that movement.  Make them overextend.  Then they lose their balance, and you can direct them easily. 

So many people think battle is straightforward.  Attack.  Block.  Swing, block, swing.  A fight like that can easily become about brute strength, stamina, and speed.  It's comparatively simple...and makes you forget that there are other options.  Instead of blocking, just give them a little assist.  As they move farther and faster than they intended, they overextend and lose their balance.  Meeting strength with weakness can do the same thing.  (This is all situationally dependent, of course.)

So Vietnam, for example, could be seen as an overextension by the United States.  We lost our balance.  Funny enough, though, the Soviet Union then overextended in Afghanistan.

I brought this up for two reasons.  First because we all too often get locked into an 'attack/block' mentality.  It's important to remember that there are other options. 

The second reason?  We have to know when we're overextending. 

On a side note - when reading about the spy games during the Cold War it seemed that the Soviet Union regularly kicked our butts.  This may be a misleading impression, since I'm sure there are some things still classified...but the Soviets generally seemed to do better at building their spy networks.  Yet they're the ones that fell apart in the 80's...so apparently winning the spy game wasn't as critical as you'd think.

I'm part of that curious generation just old enough to remember the Cold War without being forged in it...and young enough to adapt to the internet and all the new technology that came out since then.  The logic of the Cold War was very black and white.  And during that time, we misread situations time and time again.  Focused more on communism, for example, and overlooked nationalism.  I believe our misreading the situation caused a lot of damage to our own national security. 

In the last decade or so terrorism has become the new thing...and I see some of the same mentalities.  Black vs. White.  Oversimplification of the issues.  When you see situations through that lens, you are just as likely to misread the situation and propose strategies that backfire.

This bothers me.  I think I hate terrorists as much as anyone, and I don't want them to succeed.  Yet I find, time and again, that the people who ought to be allies seem blindly determined to think in terms of attack/block...to the point where they actually make it harder to fight terrorism.

First Step

I said I would talk about a strategy, but the first question is "strategy to do what?".  After all, I could be talking about our strategy for dealing with the South China Sea (and btw, if you want nightmares...just think what would happen if one of those flybys turned into a shooting incident after we elect the next president.)  Or I could talk about our strategy for fighting slavery.  Or our strategy for improving schools.

But in some ways those don't seem appropriate right now.  So to steal a campaign slogan, I want to talk about a strategy to Make America Great Again. 

Immigration is a hot topic, right?  I've talked about how I don't think a wall is an appropriate answer, mostly because you'd have to staff the wall well enough to respond to any attempts to tunnel under or fly over the wall.  Plus you just push illegal immigration to other channels.

But if a wall won't work, what will?

Let's start talking about supply and demand.  Illegal immigration is a problem for two reasons.  One - people are coming from places where the economy sucks.  Two - smuggling people over the border is a business closely tied to the drug trade.  The coyotes and so forth often also smuggle illegal drugs, and may even use these immigrants as drug mules.

So we need to do the following: reform our drug policy, encourage development and stability in the economies to our south, and create a closer relationship with Mexico.

I started with our drug policy, because the war on drugs has ramifications far greater than just filling up our prisons, putting money in the pockets of criminals, and costing us money in terms of law enforcement and prisons.  The war on drugs has, frankly, failed.  I have heard a cop say that they won't even bother arresting someone for marijuana, not unless the person is being arrested for something else and they want to add to the charges.  My town, btw, had a referendum on marijuana.  Not anything binding, no legislation changing policies.  Just something to see what support there was.  I stopped by there but couldn't vote in it because technically I live outside the city limits.  There was a tremendously long line and the local newscaster was there trying to find someone who opposed the measure.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, did.  When you've got a law that's not even being enforced by the people who are supposed to be enforcing it, you've got a bad law.

Aside from all our domestic issues, however, our policies also have a direct impact on Mexico (and other nations to our south).  We apply pressure to them if they even talk about changing their policies, in order to try to stop the flow of drugs.  Meanwhile, our attempts at interdiction raise the price of drugs...put more money in the hands of the criminals, and makes it easier for them to corrupt law enforcement and state officials in their home countries (and some of the money gets into the hands of terrorists and other enemies of the US, but that's another story).  While I don't think we can claim all the credit, or blame, for what goes on elsewhere our policies do have an impact.  And a pretty bad one, at that.

End the war on drugs.  But don't do it stupidly.  I'm not going to say exactly what the policies should be (i.e. legalize everything?  Decriminalize it?  Decriminalize some and legalize others?) but we clearly would have to focus more on rehabilitation.  That, and we'd have to decide how to handle criminals in prison for drug-related offenses.  We now have some examples of what may or may not happen.  We can look at Portugal, or if you insist on something domestic we can look at the states that have already gone down this path.  I am, btw, very annoyed that I can't find an awesome article about a man who helped end the criminal organizations that grew during Prohibition.  He basically ensured that alcohol wasn't taxed too highly at first, so that the industry could compete with those who were still illegally selling it.  Once he put them out of business then they raised the tax rate.  Fascinating article, wish I could find it.

With the tax money (and that would be at the state level, so it's really up to them) the money should be used to revitalize our infrastructure and schools.

I brought this up as a serious proposition, not because I want to get high and not because of any libertarian views, but because our drug wars also have an impact at the strategic level.

As for development - given how little we actually seem to know about developing other countries (ex. Haiti) this would require a great deal of discussion on what would actually work.  Some of the problems seem tied to our own patronizing attitudes and poor understanding (i.e. let's fly in, save the day by building a school, and pat ourselves on the back for doing a good job regardless of whether the school is still in use a year later).  Since I'm trying not to get into the nitty gritty details yet, I'll leave that for another time. 

As for creating a closer relationship with Mexico, that's partly for geo-strategic reasons as well.

Tools in the Kitbag.

Is it better to have a poor plan, well-executed?  Or a great plan, poorly executed? 

I generally think the first is better, because if it's well-executed than you will adjust the plan as needed.  On the fly.  And it will achieve your goals.  The best plan in the world will get you nowhere, however, if you can't actually put the plan into effect.

I started with that because I'm trying to minimize what's required before getting to the good stuff.  I could go on and on for ages on background info, but then I'll never actually get to writing about a particular strategy.  As I thought about why I didn't delve right in, what was so important I had to write about it before going further, I realized I wanted to make it clear that there's no Magic Strategy that will Fix All Ills.

Strategies are just tools in your kit bag. 

That is, they each have their special time and place.  Using the wrong strategy at the wrong time can be like using a hammer to put a screw in the wall.  Or worse, using a saw.  Using the right strategy, but executing badly, can be just as bad as using the wrong strategy.

Always stay in touch with events as they develop, and adjust your strategy as needed.  (With a keen understanding of when and how to do that.  The 'Good Idea Fairy' is a problem because if you get that good idea too late, trying to act on it can screw everything up even worse.  Picture half your people failing to get the message before it's time to act, and still acting on the old plan.)

So with all caveats in place, an emphasis on sound implementation over all else, and the understanding I'm only lightly touching on some pretty deep topics, I'll finally get on with it.