Everything you do matters (PART 1)

It's always the little things that can make a big difference.

Imagine being good at tabletop games, I do not claim to be great at them whatsoever, but I do recognize the qualities that great players do have.

• A Strategic mind
• A Tactical mind
• Knowledge
• Luck
• Technical Prowess 

Technical prowess could be broken down into a strategic and tactical mindset.

For those unaware Strategy is about preparation, an overall plan.

Oxford Dictionary says something along the lines of "A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim".

In wargaming this is simply, your plan to beat your opponent and score a victory condition.

In Malifaux this is how you pick your crew to a) score VPs and b) deny VPs for your opponent.

Strategy interestingly come from the Greek Strategia, meaning generalship, which seems fitting.

Tactics is more about your on the fly decisions, or at least your strategies within a game.

This is something that may get covered further in the future.

Before I get to knowledge, luck.

Luck is a factor of the universe, to deny it is not something most gamers can do.

Now I don't want anyone to take this as "be superstitious" a remotely mathematical mind will know that averages, statistics are things, but these aren't hard set things that will be a guarantee.

This is where Luck comes in, the time that the high and low end of chances occur.

Good players make their own luck.

This is a sentence that if you haven't heard, I am glad you now have.

I hope that you read it and do not write it off as it is true to a degree, especially being that luckiness is a lot about perception.

Going back a bit. Knowledge is something that can cover so many bases, in Malifaux it would be how well you know crews, their stats, rules, what people tend to use things for, what your opponent likes to do, how many cards are in a suit, how many AP will it take to get somewhere...

The list is exhaustive.

Technical Prowess is a term I decided to keep separate because, though it can be made up of all if not at least the first two points I simply wanted a way of describing some of the things that I am going to want to explain in this article (or maybe articles?).

If we think about painting and not gaming, technical prowess would be how someone does something, their brush control, their ability to pick good colours without thinking, simply the time they spend going about their actions.

In a way you could even say the tactics within their tactics, but let's not get all Inception on this.

In gaming it can be how they measure, move models, cards etc.

Coming from playing card games a lot one of the things that interested me a lot in Malifaux was using a deck of cards and how that in those games I learnt that, everything you do matters.

So let's break into that now. What am things am I getting at and why?

Order of cards in hand

As a man who lead the crusade about cutting decks and sufficient randomisation such as shuffling, it may be no surprise that in the idea of tracking cards comes to my mind.

Now I fear this may cause people to think I cheat, that maybe I'm "card counting like those Hollywood movies about gambling and BlackJack".

I'm not, if I was that good at it I would use those skills to win money not Malifaux, or would I just do both?

Anyway, tracking cards isn't just about a deck, your hand is something your opponent can try and track and vice versa.

A thing that you will see a lot of card game players do is to shuffle their hand around.

This may come across as something almost like a mental issue, it could be, but usually it is because they don't want to give anything away.

A common mistake, and I will definitely say it's a mistake, is for a player to organise their hand, something which let us not forget is meant to be hidden information and put them in order from 1-13.

This is a sound thing to do when your hand is first drawn as long as you don't make obvious gaps in your hand between those severes and the rest of your hand, just to take a mental note.

However, if the player who has drawn say the following cards (we will ignore suits for now):

2 Twos, 1 Six, 1 Nine, 1 Twelve and 1 Thirteen

If they hold these cards in this order throughout the game and when it comes to pushing through some damage the first time they cheat in the 12, taking the second card from their right.

A huge event happens and the opponent is forced to cheat in their 13, their very right card.

Our opponent later does defensive +1 action, they discard a 2 from their left.

An arguably equal combat comes up. 

We have Ml7 and flipped a 7, they have Df5 and only flipped a 2.

The opponent decides to cheat, they place the 9 from the right of their hand.

Each time so far the opponent placed a card from the right to go high and the one low card came from the left.

The indicator here is that the only reason the opponent is deciding to draw isn't because they don't mind the double negative (or worse) flip for damage, it is because that is the best they can do.

If we can cheat, and assuming this combat is important to us, we should put in a 12  (to go to 19) to get that straight flip.

Our opponent, having cards in numerical order gave away things about the remaining cards they have left.

Also from this point we can partly assume that they will have a 9 as their highest value card.

I will add at this point, I say partly as they may be sandbagging the Red Joker or a card from a specific suit.

First of many small things you can do that are giving things away to your opponent which could mean the game.

If you shuffle your hand every so often, pick cards out from different areas, this will mostly negate this ever happening.

How else though may you give things away?

Sometimes it is, just, what you said

A common thing to hear is "it's not what you said, it's how you said it", usually something more to do with the horrible parts of life.

In game terms this can be true, but simply what you are saying is something that is much easier to stop.

What am I on about?

Here are some lines I have heard people say that can give away so much information

• "I can't beat that"
• "This is the best I can do"
• "I don't want to go higher than this"
• "Didn't want to have to use this"

For now I'm strictly keeping this to do with cards in hand.

Your opponent is attacking you cheat the total of your flip to 5 in your favour, your opponent flipped a 6 and says "I can't beat that" they have just told you they do not have any severes.

If they cheat in an 11 with "This is the best I can do" they do not have any higher cards which is good to note.

If they explain "I don't want to go higher than this" then the coast is probably not quite so clear yet.

"Didn't want to have to use this"? Well they must value something else on the table highly, maybe the suit of that card is important, can we mess up their future plans now?

This lines may sound super dumb, but really a common exchange I hear between players is "are you going to cheat" opponent looks at hand, "I can't".

Don't say that, just say no.

Arguments can be made for how long you should even look, maybe you ponder when you have nothing, you just flipped moderate for damage on a cheatable flip. Pretend you have that severe.

Don't let your opponent know.

Never give up anything. Everything you do matters.

End of Part 1

This blog post was going to continue longer, for now I have decided to break this into parts.

Please tweet me or leave comments on the blog for any future parts you may want me to speak about in this section or anything you are unsure about or disagree with.

I would like to thank the Faux Show guys and their "Don't be a Tao" section, I've wanted to blog or podcast about mind games and these sort of things for a while, listening to Tao's section has inspired me to crack on with it.

Follow their twitter account @FauxShowCa genuinely one of my favourite Malifaux podcasts on the internet.

Where's episode 5? Hypocritical of me right?

-Ben (@psientologist)