Bad Decisions

Any decision other than "hit them with the club" is a bad decision. I wish SABGJeff would learn that. He throws away the club voluntarily and turns easy wins into nailbiters.

Now to get SABG in the Paper....

I made the front page (unnamed runner, left side of pic, below the fold) of the SA Express News today for my other hobby, running. Of course, we ran 18 miles, not the seven listed in the caption, but I was too tired and hungry to talk to the guy with the little notebook at the end.

In more pertinent news, Ticket-to-Ride Europe on the X-Box 360 is great fun! We had a 4-player game last night with Jon, Chris, Steve, and I. Though we couldn't get the chat function to get us all on the same channel, it was as close to an SABG experience I can imagine without driving.

Games also played this weekend at Steve's house: Epic Duels; Nexus Ops; gazing at Here I Stand components and trying to convince Steve it will be fun; lots of C&C: Ancients (after I left); Warriors of God; Star Wars Risk: Trilogy Edition (which actually doesn't suck).

In other news, I keep hoping for Successors to ship this week.... its mid-August, isn't it?

There is a new template on BGG for a dice tower made by cutting and folding a single piece of card stock that I need to try this week. If you can't find, I'll send it to you. With a little photoshoping and a color printer, this could have some real possibilities. Plus, if its unlucky for me, I won't worry about making it pay the ultimate price for disobedience!

Diplomacy is fun. Germany is your friend.

Quick monday report (I was distracted by something)

The baseball regular season finished not. Two more games to play before the world series match-ups are determined. The good news is I can throw out my Padres scouting report.

Couple of plays of Smarty Party with some surprisingly hard categories and some surprisingly (even for Smarty Party) wrong answers.

Groo was coo enough.

Union Pacific was alright.

Acquire was fun as always. I thought I was doing ok considering my horrid start when I got majority and minority in the two final companies. Alas. I've never played with six before and it feels very different.

Ciniplex was too hard for me. I guess I'm not the movie buff that I once was (another victim of my blatant disregard of rule 1).

Ben and Steve seemed to really enjoy Ricochet Robots.

Thanks for letting me play Nuclear War not.

Now for a digression. It has come to my attention that some of you have been withholding information about critical hilarious blogs for up to six months. Is there anything else you aren't telling me???

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll go first:

Drew Bledsoe's blog: You should definitely start from the beginning of the archives here.

Fire Joe Morgan: Thanks for keeping this comedy gold to yourself Dennis and Chris

I was linked to this by Brian's blog a while back. That single post was one of the best things I've read, but in general I'm pretty disappointed with this one after that.

Transformers

So has anyone else seen the latest USAF recruiting film, aka Transformers: The Movie? What did you think? No spoilers here, but my favorite part had the cameo by Furby.

Dump This

Warning: off topic (for the most part) post ahead.

Back when I used to read the Bridge World magazines regularly, there were infrequent discussions about an oddity that was (allegedly) occurring in tournaments that they called sportsmanlike dumping.

The main gist of the situation was that the format of some of these tournaments made it so that in theory you could increase your chances of winning the entire tournament by losing a match. The issue was somewhat controversial. Some people believed that it was ethical to lose in such a situation since winning the tournament is the true goal. Others believed that playing sub-optimally on purpose was damaging to the game. I come down pretty firmly in the second camp.

There were multiple ways this type of situation could arise but a solution to one of them stuck with me as a nice answer to that particular instance of the problem.

Those of you who have discussed sports to any degree with me know that I think of the three remaining major sports left in this country (I can't count hockey anymore) basketball has the most entertaining base product out there. Meaning if I'm flipping random channels on the TV and hit a sporting event between two teams with whom I have no inherent rooting interest, I'm much more likely to watch a basketball game than the others. On the other hand, despite Bud Selig's best efforts and Bill Simmons propaganda to the contrary, I think the NBA is the worst run league out there.

There is an epidemic of atrocious officiating. Horrendous decisions have been made by the league offices during the playoffs that have ruined the competitiveness of them. Changing the ball was moronic. The dress code is stupid. But I'm ignoring all of that. What I'm interested in is the fact that dumping or tanking as it is called in the NBA seems to be an acceptable event to the commissioner's office.

Last year you had teams falling all over themselves trying to lose at the end of the season so they could drop from the fifth seed and playing the Mavericks in round one to the sixth seed and playing my Nuggets instead because of the seeding system in place then that guaranteed a top 3 seed to a division winner. So the NBA, as is typical of them, slapped a temporary fix band-aid on the problem and changed it so that division winners are only guaranteed a top 4 seed.

This year you had teams falling all over themselves trying to lose by the middle of the season so they could increase their chances of getting a top 2 pick in this years NBA draft. Fans were openly rooting for their teams to lose even going so far as to boo when their teams did something inappropriate like playing to win the game. It was very nice to see that the teams engaging in this behavior were not rewarded by the random number generator but that does not change the fact that the behavior happened.

Also this year, in theory at least Dallas had incentive to try to lose games to drop out of the 1 seed and avoid a warriors team that matched up well with them on paper and that at the end of the season was playing at a level far exceeding that of the 7 seed lakers.

In my opinion, league offices should do everything in their power to eliminate any incentive to lose.

So back to the solution that one bridge tournament did: The top seeds at the end of the round-robin portion (regular season) got to pick their opponents from the other qualified teams in the bottom half during the knockout (playoffs). This simple fix for both the first and second rounds along with seeding only by record would completely eliminate incentive to lose to allow better playoff positioning.

I understand that this would reward a team that was a 1 seed more than in the current system and would punish teams that did not finish in the top 3, but there is a saying a friend of mine likes to use in this situation: "get better". The regular season is 82 games long. What happens there should be meaningful and there should be a strong incentive to not take half the regular season off and then turn it on in the playoffs.

As to the draft situation, I really like the idea of an equal weight lottery among all 30 teams for the top three spots. The remaining picks would go in reverse order according to record. This eliminates jump points where ones expected draft position improves more by being one spot lower in the standings at some points than others. As far as competitive balance is concerned, I think doing something radical like this might convince the NBA GMs who see their yearly appearance in the draft lottery as a birthright (at least apparently from the types of moves they make) that they need to do their homework and collect pieces intelligently in free agency. If this happened, maybe we would see more turnover in the playoff teams.

Also, if you go back and examine drafts from say the past 10 years, you will find that there was typically at least one good player both available at pick five and at least highly thought of to be drafted in the top 10 picks. So a team with a poor record will still get a shot at a good player assuming they do their homework and know who he is. Every once in a while you might even be able to grab a franchise player around then.

Yes, it would be ridiculous if the Suns, Spurs or Mavericks got Oden or Durant. Ridiculously intriguing.

How does this topic relate to boardgaming? If we did leagues of some sort I guess this could arise. I dunno, any ideas?

Mostly Random...

Ben wondered recently "Comment 29 to this post... perhaps the most ever?"

Nope.

Even thought the thread that his musing was in has hit 35 comments, it still falls short of the record - a whopping 41 in a thread Ben himself started last December.

While browsing through the archives to find this useless trivia nugget, I learned several things.

We've only hit 30+ comments about half a dozen times.

Usually, the thread is about a wargame or a game with a ton of plastic.

I miss the SABGers who've moved on: Kendahl, Patrick and Simon.

Michael has always been verbose; he writes very entertaining and very accurate session reports.

It's high time Ben and I played War of the Ring again.

Do we still have comments for guests turned off? Was that to prevent spam? Was spam ever a problem?

My Sat AAR

First off, sorry for sort of dropping the ball on the Alamo screening of 300. This project at work is kicking my butt, and I just wasn't able to spare any clock-cycles for planning.

I'm hoping to read some great session reports from games, but at least I can report two coats of white on the ceiling and one coat of light blue on the top third of the walls. Tomorrow we hope for a 2nd coat of light blue and one or two coats of dark blue. We'll do any touch ups during the week.

We went to the Alamo for the 1:30 show of 300 and had lunch. I forgot to mention one of the best things about the drafthouse: the pre-show. They often have funny, entertaining videos before the show, and this time they were playing some documentary about the making of 300. They had interviews w/ Frank Miller, the director, etc. They were offerring a "Greek special" for lunch, but it included feta, a no-no for pregnant women. I had the "Wild at Artichoke Hearts" pizza, while Meredith had the "Blue Hawaii." If nothing else, the drafthouse is efficient. We're able to easily fit in dinner and movie on weeknights.

What a visually stunning movie. My favorite part was the rhino charge. A spartan chucks a spear and hits the rhino. The massive beast continues to bear down, while our hero is standing there sort of like he's thinking: "Nothing but net, baby." The camera cuts to behind his shoulder, watching the beast continue unabated. Then the camera slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y pans down the guy's back, filling the screen w/ a cape such that you can't see the rhino. I bet that pan took like 10 seconds to get to the guy's feet where it stops. Just as it stops, the dead rhino slides into the frame. The soldier never moved. Amazing.

I was also interested in the philosophy underlying the movie. Frank Miller's imagination is fevered to say the least, but he's got some interesting substance. In Miller's Sparta everyone is expected to carry their weight. If you can't, then, nothing personal, but you're out. Xerxes's philosophy is quite a contrast: "Leonaidis asks that you stand. All I ask is that you kneel."

Newest SABG Member

No, I'm not recruiting space aliens, at least not yet. That picture is among the first portraits of "Sprout" Kostek. I'm sure there will be many more to come in the future.

The doctor told us he was 90% sure Sprout is a girl, then minutes later he said "Oh, hey, what's that?" and changed to 90% sure it's a boy. After that, I hope you understand if my confidence is not high.

Sprout's ETA is late June/early July.

Off Topic: The Red Baron

This is another in a series of off-topic geek related posts regarding interests on the periphery of our board gaming hobby.

The upcoming movie The Red Baron looks like it might be the cure for the hangover still lingering from Disney's Flyboys. Germans seem to have a knack for making good war movies like Das Boot, Stalingrad, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Downfall... perhaps its their technical accuracy and willingness to show war in all its gritty detail.

Lena Headey who plays Richthofen's girlfriend, i.e., the obligatory love interest, is also the female lead in another war-related movie I'm anticipating in 2007, 300. Being the love interest of both Leonidas and Richthofen in a single year is pretty impressive.

Bringing this back to the world of board gaming, I'm feeling the need to pull Wings of War back off the shelf.