Monday Football

My mate Steve and I coordinated a day off work today during our childrens' school break for some gaming.  While our wives were at work I met him at his place for a couple of games of Paydirt.  Paydirt is published by Avalon Hill and is a board game that simulates a game of American football, AKA gridiron.  Steve's version of Paydirt has the team charts for all the teams in the 1991 NFL season.

While my kids and his kids were happily playing Minecraft via LAN in another room, Steve and I sat down at his dining room table and randomly drew teams for our first game.  Our goal is to play through all the teams in Paydirt once, randomly selecting them for each game.  I ended up with the Washington Redskins and Steve got the Phoenix Cardinals.

Paydirt

This version of the Paydirt team charts are based on the statistics of how well the teams did during the 1991 regular season, playoffs and Super Bowl.  The Redskins had a regular season 14-2 win-loss record that year and went on to win the Super Bowl in early 1992 and their team chart certainly reflected that they were the best team of that season.  Steve's Cardinals only had a 4-12 win-loss record in 1991 and his team chart certainly exhibited those statistics.

I won 72-7.  Although there is player choice on which play to make (9 offensive plays consisting of 4 runs/5 passes, and 6 defensive formations) ultimately it comes down to dice roles and chart referencing.  With evenly matched players, a very good team should invariably trounce a very bad team due to probability and their individual team chart.  I guess in that way Paydirt could be called a good simulation.

Does that make for a fun game though?  I suspect casual players and those not interested in American football would not enjoy Paydirt where there is a very real possibility of playing a game with such mismatched teams.  Steve and I do enjoy watching NFL games (him being a San Francisco '49ers fan and me a Philadelphia Eagles fan) and so playing a simulation of a game, irregardless of how mismatched the teams were, was still fun. We must have a rematch of this game in the future though.

For our second game I randomly selected the LA Rams and Steve selected the San Diego Chargers.  In this game our teams were fairly evenly matched with the team charts reflecting statistics in which the LA Rams had a 3-13 season and the San Diego Chargers had a 4-12 season (in other words - both equally crap teams).

This was a much closer and exciting game and was won by Steve's Chargers defeating my Rams 17-14 with a last minute field goal.

Gaming with Grandma - 132

Another Saturday morning gaming session with my mother Sue (AKA Grandma), my wife Debbie and younger daughter Georgia (9.5 years).

Today we chose Piranha, a children's dexterity game designed by Ronald Hofstatter and Arno Steinwender and published by Ravensburger.

Watch out for those piranhas Georgia!

The object of the game is to be the first to get rid of all your piranhas by attaching them either directly to a safari hat suspended from a fishing rod, or to the tails of other piranhas already hanging from the hat.  On your turn you must attempt to place one piranha on either the hat or a piranha hanging from the hat.  Any piranhas that fall during your turn causes the turn to end and the fallen piranhas to be taken into your piranha pile.

We all enjoyed the tension of trying to correctly place the piranhas and the laughs when another player caused piranhas to fall.  It was a tight battle but Deb eventually took the win.