Pokémon (the card game)

Yesterday I played the Pokémon card game for the first time. I feel sort of culturally enlightened. I was always against the idea because of the whole rigged-in-favor-of-whoever-has-spent-the-most-money theme. That's still a valid complaint, but my son just got a couple of starter decks, so by playing with default cards we sort of bypassed that element. And I have to say that the card game just might be more interesting than the video game, as heretical as that sounds. And yes, my son beat me.

I was using a deck with electric and fire Pokémon, while he had water and some fire. He never ended up using any of the fire ones. I tried not to, and the one time I did it backfired because of the whole water-beats-fire thing. What really bugged me about my deck is that it was so hard to get energy cards attached to my Pokémon, so I couldn't attack very often. And even when I could, the good attacks use up an energy card. My son didn't have that limitation. If I cared enough to get additional cards to modify the deck, the first thing I'd do would be to swap out some of the lame Pokémon for more energy cards. But mostly I think I just don't like the deck. That said, I'm going to try again and see if I can come up with a working strategy.

One thing I will say in favor of Pokémon is that it doesn't have the nastiness of Magic. I've seen people play that, and it was kind of interesting, but there's also the whole undead theme that permeates that game. Although I did take a sharpie to one of the trainer cards in order to lengthen a shirt, so that's another complaint. And the game isn't as fun as Splendor, which is the other card game we got for Christmas. But I keep winning at that, so I'm afraid my family will bail on it eventually.

Oh, and one more thing: What's up with the accent mark in the name? It seems that the Japanese word for "Pocket Monsters" does stress the "e", but they don't in English. So in English translations, they shouldn't write the accent mark. Or we should all be saying "Po-KE-mon" instead of "PO-ke-mon".

Monopoly for Preschoolers

My kids like Monopoly. But they’re too young to do addition. And the biggest hassle of that game is always making change. So my wife and I came up with some alternate rules to facilitate playing as a family without driving any one member of it insane.

• All bills count for the same amount: $1. There are enough $1 bills for each person to start with 10 of them; you can add $10s in if you need more.
• All money values are single digit values: take the maximum of $1 or the hundreds digit specified. (i.e. Math.Max(1, originalValue % 100).) So a property listed at $280 would be worth $2. A fine of $75 would cost $1.
• Instead of needing a monopoly to build houses, you can build a house when you land on a property you already own. It costs $1 to build a house. If you land on a property with a house, you can add another for $1. Likewise, if you have four houses, you can replace them with a hotel for an additional $1.
• If you land on a property owned by someone else, you pay that person $1, plus $1 for each additional house (or a total of $6 if there’s a hotel).

Chess

I’ve played a few games of chess with one of my coworkers over e-mail. I think I’m getting better, although I still occasionally do something really stupid, or almost do something stupid but catch myself before I hit Send – although if I were in a real game I probably would have made the move. So that’s lame. I sort of think of the following levels of chess skill:

• Novice: Learning the rules
• Beginner: Knows the rules, learning tactics like forking and forcing checkmate with limited material
• Intermediate: Knows about forking, pinning, etc. and how to watch out for them. Learning overall strategy
• Advanced: Understands strategy, learning patterns of moves like well-known openings
• Masterly: Can look at notation and form a picture of what happened, thinks a zillion moves ahead, etc.

I’m in the Intermediate category, and I’m pretty content to stay there, for two reasons:

1. I have no interest in memorizing sequences of moves.
2. Almost nobody is advanced, and the game’s no fun if you win all the time.

I don’t actually have a lot more to say on the matter except that I‘m pretty pleased with a comeback I recently had. Here’s where it all turned around. I had lost a rook due to stupid oversight (got my king away from a potential fork only to lose my rook anyway to a rook + queen fork). But instead of capturing my opponent’s knight, I sacrificed some material in order to lure his king out into the open.

(Excuse the bad HTML – one of the few weaknesses of Windows Live Writer.)

Oh, and for the record, this same opponent has beaten me soundly on his fair share of games. I’m not gloating here – I’m just glad my last-ditch effort pulled off!

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
8	N					R	K		8
7	p	Q		p	N	p	B		7
6		p	N					p	6
5					p				5
4									4
3					p		B		3
2	p			N		p	p	p	2
1		R		Q	K			R	1
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

So my opponent (White – as in white text) has just captured my rook at A8. I could take his knight with my rook and even things out a little, but I figure his king is just waiting to castle. And if he does that, I’m in big trouble. (Note how he’s already punched holes in my line of pawns – my own king isn’t exactly safe.)

So instead,  I (black) move N E5. Now I’m threatening N D3 + (the “+” is “check”). White is evidently not worried though. He moves N B6 – his knight is still in danger, but now he’s got an additional pawn out of the deal.

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
8						R	K		8
7	p	Q		p	N	p	B		7
6		N						p	6
5									5
4									4
3				N	p		B		3
2	p			N	K	p	p	p	2
1		R		Q				R	1
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

Now, finally, I take his knight. But now he gets to take my knight too – so instead of being behind in a knight-rook trade, I’m behind by a whole rook (plus the extra pawn he already had before this disaster). But here comes the good part: Q A6 +

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
8						R	K		8
7				p	N	p	B		7
6	Q	p						p	6
5									5
4									4
3				K	p		B		3
2	p			N		p	p	p	2
1		R		Q				R	1
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

As an aside, I had recently read about “fianchetto”, which is where you stick your bishop next to the corner (in this case, G7) and leave it there, guarding the long diagonal. In this case, it works out beautifully because my queen and bishop are working together to create this huge space in the center of the board where the king can’t go. His only choice is to move farther and farther out into the board. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out where to go from there, but here’s the final board.

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
8							K		8
7				p	N		B		7
6		p						p	6
5						p			5
4					K				4
3					p		B		3
2	p			N	Q	p	p	p	2
1			Q		R				1
	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

(Note how Q A3 would have prevented me from advancing that pawn until I got my king clear of that diagonal, but it would have just delayed the inevitable.)

(Maybe a better exercise for the reader would be go figure out how to win as white. But whatever.)