From the article archive
Game Ideas Un limited: Wait
This idea will be difficult to illustrate without--well, without an illustration. My illustration comes from playing Solitaire.
If you've played much Solitaire during the course of your life, you've probably at some point been playing it while other people were in the room. Even if you haven't been, odds are good you've been in the room while someone else was playing. It catches my attention that in such circumstances, at least one of those not playing will look over the shoulder of the player and start giving advice on how to play. That advice usually amounts to telling you that you can move a certain card that you have not moved, on the apparent assumption that you've overlooked it.
There are a couple of things I've noticed from this; one of them is that most people don't know how to play Solitaire. That is, they know the rules effectively, but they don't understand any strategy behind it. They will tell you to move cards that could indeed be moved, but which on the one hand don't improve your position in the least and on the other might make your position worse.
It is important to understand in Solitaire that there are very few moves which do not have the potential to make your position worse. You can always safely move an ace or a two from the play stacks to the ace piles; moving a three could, under certain circumstances, cost you the game. I'll illustrate.
Let us suppose that as the cards lay, neither red ace has yet appeared. The three of spades is sitting visibly on the top of the right hand pile, six unknown cards beneath it; the deuce of hearts is sitting alone on the left end, that is, no cards hidden beneath it. On the remaining five piles are various cards, none of which is a king, ace, deuce, or three. Most players will tell you to move the deuce of hearts to sit atop the three of spades. Why? You are told to do this for no better reason than because you can. Yet that move gets you absolutely nothing and weakens your position--it reveals no hidden cards and reduces your options for the next move.
To clarify, let us now turn over the top three cards in the deck. What card appears? Of course, it is most likely that the card which is there is not relevant to anything here; on the other hand, you're going to turn over seven more sets of three cards, any one of which might make a difference. Let's look at some of the possibilities.
- It is possible that that card is the ace of spades, and that the spade deuce sits beneath it (or is otherwise about to be revealed). By playing the ace-deuce of spades to the ace piles, you can now follow it with the three, which opens one of the six hidden cards in that right-hand pile. The bottom card in that pile is the most difficult card to uncover in the game, so getting through that stack should be a priority. Note that had you moved the deuce of hearts to the three of spades, you would now be unable to open that pile, and might remain so, particularly if the ace of hearts and three of clubs are both locked within it.
- The first card could be the diamond deuce. This requires careful thought. If (as I have so far implied) you are going through the deck three cards at a time, and when you finish the stack you will go through it again, the ability to take this third card out of the deck could be of significant strategic importance: doing so will shift the remaining cards one place, giving you access to six cards which were otherwise unavailable. Yet you might not wish to do that at this time. After all, it could be that on the next turn of the cards you will remove two cards from the deck, and then no others. Had you moved the deuce of diamonds from that first position, your deck would now be locked into showing you the same seven cards you had already seen. However, if without moving the deuce you remove no other cards, or three other cards, or any number of cards divisible by three, moving the deuce will get you a new set of cards in that deck. So you would want to keep that option open, to use it when it matters. Of course, if you've already moved the deuce of hearts to sit atop the three of spades, that option is gone; you'll need to produce a red ace to advance the game.
- That first card could be a king; it could be very useful to move the deuce of hearts out of the way so that the king can land on the table, giving you a place to play a queen. This would be more clearly true if the top card on the sixth pile is a queen of the opposite color, as the move would be made immediately, opening one of five hidden cards. In this case, the right move would most likely be to place the deuce of hearts atop the three of spades. See, you think, moving the deuce of hearts was the right move. Yet why should you have moved it before this instant? What benefit was there in having that open place for the king before you knew you had the king? No, the right move was to wait, not to move the two until there was a strategic benefit to doing so.
We can understand this sort of thinking in games in which the choices are more clear. If you sit down at a chess board, there are twenty possible opening moves you can make, and a like number of responses. Each of those moves leads to other possible moves, which lead in turn to others. There is not an infinite number of possible games; however, the combination of moves and responses is so great it would be difficult to calculate. Yet you may only make one of these moves. Thus you recognize that you must make moves which have strategic benefits which outweigh their disadvantages.
Role playing games are in some sense far more complicated than chess. I cannot imagine a moment in a game in which my options were so few as twenty. However, as with chess, at any moment in play I am limited in my choices by the fact that I must choose, that is, that I cannot do all of the things I might do at this moment, but am limited to a small number of these. If I am going into combat, I can probably choose a weapon and an angle of approach; in some games I can also choose a defense or a combat style. However, in most role playing games, I cannot choose three weapons, two directions from which to attack, multiple defenses, and more than one combat style. I have to pick what I think will work.
As with Solitaire, though, it may be the case that there are times when I need not choose. I might have enough money to buy item A or item B, but not yet enough to buy item C; but if it is not essential that I have any of those items at this moment, it might be strategically better to keep my money in my pocket until I need to make that choice.
That is the message of this column: sometimes it is better not to choose, to leave the deuce of hearts sitting where it is until there is a clear advantage to putting it on the three of spades, to not castling your king to the king's side until you see whether it would be better to castle to the queen's side, to not making the decision until the decision matters.
It is easy to get trapped into answering the question what are we going to do if? It is certainly important to consider those questions, and to have possible answers. Yet it may also be important to keep those answers fluid--to be able to make that decision when it matters, and not be locked in to an answer which isn't strategically best at that moment.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.