Boardgaming anecdote
Last night, I found myself playing the Age of Mythology board game for the first time, and the endgame situation was the kind of memorable transcendental moment that demands recording. I expect most of you aren't familiar with the game, but the gist of it is that it's an empire-building type game (Like the computer game it's named after) where the ultimate goal is to get the most victory points, which can both be accumulated over the game and won by being the best at something at the end of the game. If there's a tie for total points, it's broken by whoever has the most resources.
I had the second-to-last turn, when we really started trying to figure out who had a shot at winning. Both me and the player who'd take the last turn (Call him D) had scored five points over the course of the game through entirely different manners, and the only contested "best of" was having the most military units, which was worth, coincidentally, five points. Another player (M) had no points, but 12 units, which was the most at the time. I recruited units on my turn, and got up to 12 as well; tied objectives go to nobody, though, so D and I tied with five points.
While I was recruiting, D realized that things would probably come down to resources, so he asked everyone to count up their resources. After buying a few units, I still had the most, but the difference between me and him was enough that defeating me in combat and taking a few resources as spoils could make the difference. D was nowhere close on anything else he could get points out of, so the only thing he could do was attack me and go for the resource tiebreaker. If I lost units during the battle, M would get the five points for the most units objective, so it'd be a three-way tie for points, so whoever had the most resources would win... which was whoever won that battle on the very last turn. We both had strong enough military forces that we'd be on about equal footing for the fight, and I'd had been losing a lot of fights even when I had the upper hand, so things looked bleak for me.
But when pondering my strategy for that battle and looking over my units, I noticed that one of my units, the Mummy (I was playing Egypt) had the special ability that if it defeated another unit, you added another Mummy to your army. So I played the Mummy first, and managed to defeat what D played against it... and then retreated, added the new Mummy to take my army to 13 units, took the five points for the largest army, and won the game with ten. I had to give up the resources, but since there wasn't a tie for points any more, resources didn't count for victory. You can make your own "losing the battle and winning the war" joke.
Coming down to tiebreakers on several levels (One of the other "best of" objectives was also tied) made for a tense worthwhile ending, but the game felt like we'd all had a good fight to get there, and that's a good thing. It's interesting to see that a game designed to be a multi-hour game of building yourself up up coming down to The Last Battle like that; I'm curious if that was an intended effect of the design.
I had the second-to-last turn, when we really started trying to figure out who had a shot at winning. Both me and the player who'd take the last turn (Call him D) had scored five points over the course of the game through entirely different manners, and the only contested "best of" was having the most military units, which was worth, coincidentally, five points. Another player (M) had no points, but 12 units, which was the most at the time. I recruited units on my turn, and got up to 12 as well; tied objectives go to nobody, though, so D and I tied with five points.
While I was recruiting, D realized that things would probably come down to resources, so he asked everyone to count up their resources. After buying a few units, I still had the most, but the difference between me and him was enough that defeating me in combat and taking a few resources as spoils could make the difference. D was nowhere close on anything else he could get points out of, so the only thing he could do was attack me and go for the resource tiebreaker. If I lost units during the battle, M would get the five points for the most units objective, so it'd be a three-way tie for points, so whoever had the most resources would win... which was whoever won that battle on the very last turn. We both had strong enough military forces that we'd be on about equal footing for the fight, and I'd had been losing a lot of fights even when I had the upper hand, so things looked bleak for me.
But when pondering my strategy for that battle and looking over my units, I noticed that one of my units, the Mummy (I was playing Egypt) had the special ability that if it defeated another unit, you added another Mummy to your army. So I played the Mummy first, and managed to defeat what D played against it... and then retreated, added the new Mummy to take my army to 13 units, took the five points for the largest army, and won the game with ten. I had to give up the resources, but since there wasn't a tie for points any more, resources didn't count for victory. You can make your own "losing the battle and winning the war" joke.
Coming down to tiebreakers on several levels (One of the other "best of" objectives was also tied) made for a tense worthwhile ending, but the game felt like we'd all had a good fight to get there, and that's a good thing. It's interesting to see that a game designed to be a multi-hour game of building yourself up up coming down to The Last Battle like that; I'm curious if that was an intended effect of the design.