Team Play Follow-Up

Summoner Wars and Heroscape --

Tuesday I got in a team game of Summoner Wars with my buds (my first play) which is a very simple war game.  The session largely broke into two independent games with a bit of cooperation and didn't have a lot of interaction between teammates.  A good game, there's plenty of room to support each other but the form factor tends to encourage separation instead of integration.  Visually the game separates the teams.  On my next play I'm going to need to work to break that.

But last night I played Heroscape with my boys in two teams of two.  Heroscape almost insists that you mix up your units because the maps are so screwy and hexes don't project straight lines into your thinking so much.  There's pinch points and favored positions.  I took the opportunity to put Red Coats on high ground so they could lob stuff down on anyone coming nearby.  This decision gave me the opportunity to explain the "let them come to us" concept to my teammate, a seven year old.  He had advised me not to strand my guys up on this high hill, but I told him what they could do given they could reach six spaces in all directions near the center of the board.  He in turn put his guys into my range so that anyone coming to attack them would have to deal with the shelling.  This strategy also gave my other seven-year-old a good reason to ask for help from his teammate (ten-year-old brother) when his troops got into trouble -- he had no fliers and needed someone to clear the Red Coats out.  He needed air-support.

Everyone's units were in a brawl in the middle of the board so inter-player support just came naturally.  We each had firm control over our own units, but priorities and the resulting tactics were being determined together.

This second example is more of the kind of thing I'm looking for these days, and I think it does the gaming community a bit of good.  It eases the path into our more complex games.  Your mentor is truly coaching you from a position of common ground.  Naturally the mentor needs to make sure you're contributing, making your own calls instead of just doing what you're told, but that's an issue regardless of circumstance.  It is for this reason that I think Heroscape stands up as an iconic title, given its younger target market and simple rule set.  Young players can focus on the geometry and pressure aspects of the battle instead of dealing with the rules in short order, and quite frankly I don't think there's a game out there doing a better job of putting a wingman into the mix.

It doesn't hurt that Grimnak can swallow opponents whole, either.

S.