If we shadows do offend

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HOCKEY

Greetings sports fans and welcome to-

Wow, that was a LOT of people clicking the ‘X’ button at once.  Okay, so the stereotype is that people who play boardgames are not the type to enjoy the sports-ball.  I get that.  But it’s not everyone, so I expect a few people to still be here.

Also, there are many a-game out there that are based on sports that are fun to play even if you don’t have any knowledge of the game.  Take Blood Bowl, for instance.  Orcs and Skeletons playing American football (kinda) while slinging spells and crushing each other.  FUN!  Or Time of Soccer, a tough management game where the actual playing of a match is a simple roll of the dice, yet hella fun.

But there are also games that are made for the sports fan, the kind of guy who likes to get their nose into the nitty gritty.  Or just people who like math.  Statistics is definitely a must for these folks because we are going to enter the world of Sports Simulation.

The sport I am going to focus on for the next few posts will be hockey, because that is my sport of choice.  However, if you can think of a sport, odds are there is a Sports Simulation game somewhere based on it.  Looking at Plaay.com, which is just one company I see: Hockey, Baseball, American Football, NASCAR, Football, Entertainment Wrestling, Bowling, Golf, Canadian Football, Lacrosse, and Roller Derby.  Phew.

So what, exactly, are Sports Simulations, and why are they a “thing,” that’s different than boardgames or are somehow different than what you would find at your Friendly Neighborhood Gaming Store?

The difference is usually in what their intent is.  Boardgames’ intent is to provide a balanced, playable contest between players (or between the players and the game mechanics) to provide a fun evening.  Sports Simulation’s intent is to provide a realistic result of a particular game/match/whatever.  The amount of detail and realism and the amount of fun and balance is different from game to game and company to company.

So, while a boardgame version of hockey might let you roll buckets of dice to check an opponent and have him go flying into the boards in epic fashion, it would also only play 16 turns of a game and result in 4 shots each of which the goalie only has a 1 in 6 chance in blocking.  Not exactly realistic, but it might be fun.

A Sports Sim can be as granular and realistic as tracking the puck every second of the game, rolling for each pass to see whether the pass is made or intercepted based on the accuracy statistics of each player in their past season’s games, with a single game taking 5 or 6 hours to actually play out or as quick as rolling a few dice to see what the final score was, who scored the goals and who sat in the penalty box to create the box score page in the paper the next day.  10 minutes, tops.

Most games fall somewhere in the middle, letting you watch some bits of the action in detail, while glossing over other bits.  Player input is from the coach’s point of view: Making the lines, when to hold back players on the line change, when to pull the goalie and not much else.  Might not sound like fun, but 2-player hockey games happen all over the country as coaches watch their teams win and lose, and they are able to trade players and do all that weird nerdy stuff that your office mates do with their fantasy football teams and yet they still think playing a boardgame is somehow weird.

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Anyway.

Let’s look at how this works.  90% of the game is based on the individual player:

Well, if that just isn’t the greatest player ever! (ahem)  In Hockey Blast, all players have the following stats:

Shot – Assist – Traits (Speed, Skill, Smart, Power, Hit, Star) – Offensive Play Maker (Triangle) – Defensive Play Maker (Square) – Power Play Defender (Circle) – Power Play Offense (CircleStar) – FaceOff Percentage – Fight Rating – Injury Rating and Penalty Rating

First we see Wayne has 3 stars in his Shot Rating, which is derived from the average number of goals made by the team.  If you shoot around average, you get 1 star, if you shoot half again better, you get 2, if you shoot double that average, you get 3.  So you know that Wayne Simmonds gets double the average amount of goals the typical Philadelphia Flyer gets.

Same goes for Assists, so he’s average when it comes to that.  Which is weird considering he’s always right there with his butt in the goalie’s face, but all these numbers I pulled off of hockey-reference.com so who can argue?

The traits I must admit I have added randomly.  Each team gets a certain amount of traits based on their total points (not goals) by the end of the game.  You get more points, your team gets more traits.  So at the end of the 2017 season, Philly ended up with 47 traits which I randomly assigned to the top 13 players.  I simply don’t know enough about the entire NHL to know who is better suited for “Skill” than “Hit” or “Power.”  I figure if I do it randomly for each team, it’ll even itself out.

The Triangles and Squares are for “making plays” and are based on a bit more complicated math than I will type out here.  Usually each team gets 3.5 of each of them (a half will be an outline of a square or star or something, which only counts if your team “has momentum”), but if actual points don’t match what your traits say you should have, they get altered.  Yeah, it took me about 3 seasons before I figured it out.  Purchase the how-to guide from plaay.com if you want to see it (only $3).

Circles and CircleStars are based on the team’s ranking in Power Plays and Power Play Kills.  Philly is ranked in the middle for Power Play kills so gets the normal 2 Circles given to the best two defenders on the team, but they rank near the lowest on Power Plays, so get no CircleStars, meaning there will be many attempts that they will lose because no player has that ability.  Dang.

Face Off Percentage is easy to add to the card as that’s a statistic that’s grabbed right off the player’s stat page (though you want someone that’s done more than 100 or so face offs for it to count).

Fight number is based on Penalty Minutes.  You spend a lot of time in the box, you’re probably more likely to fight.  The higher the number, the more likely to drop the gloves.  It’s an inexact science.

Injury rating is based on how many total games played in the season.  Nothing fancy there.

Penalty rating is also based on Penalty Minutes.  Very similar to Fight Number.

And there we have it.  Our Players.

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So, my goal was to replay last year’s playoffs.  I looked up the schedule and found the first games that were played on April 11th, 2018:

Los Angeles Kings at Las Vegas Knights

Minnesota Wild at Winnipeg Jets

Philadelphia Flyers at Pittsburgh Penguins

I was still in the process of making all of the player’s cards for last season, and it would seem that I already had Philly and Pittsburgh, so I guess that will be the first game I shall replay!  For those of you who are curious, the game ended in a ridiculous 0-7 sweep by Pittsburgh.  I hope this game will be a little bit more exciting.

Here’s my board.  It looks huge, but this is just one way to play.  What comes with the game is a little 8 1/2″ by 11″ rink with spots for one line at a time.  Every time a line change occurs, you deal one card from each pile to the bottom of the deck.  This adds some time to the game, so this way we have 4 offensive lines and 3 defensive lines all showing and we just put markers beside which line we’re using at any one time.  Saves time, though it’s a bit easier to mess up.  So our first lines are marked and we get out our little book that contains all the charts and things we’ll need for the entire game.

There’s only 15 pages in this bad boy, and you really only use 2 of them 80% of the time.  So here we go, the face off between Claude Giroux and Sidney Crosby to start Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs!

A roll on the Face-Off Chart scores an 8, and the Home Team wins the face off, letting Crosby cut the puck back to Kessel or Hornqvist.  Then a roll on the Normal Minutes chart comes up as a 5: “Penalty Event.”

Yup, definitely a Penns/Flyers game.  A Penalty in the first minute.  A few rolls later, it is determined that Giroux is cited for Interference.  Guess there was a bit of a late hit on Crosby there.

This gives Pittsburgh Momentum for the next two minutes.  This mechanic “simulates” the seeming swings that hockey tends to have when a team is “clicking.”  It also means Giroux is sitting in the box for a bit.

Woops, my bad, guys.

This time Voracek takes the Face Off and wins against Crosby.  However, he burns very little time as a roll on the Power Minutes chart shows a Play made by the Man Advantage team.  A roll on that chart shows a pass from 03 to 02 to 01 for the shot.  That means its: Crosby to Kessel to Hornqvist for the shot.

Here’s how shooting works.  You add up the Assist stars of the first two players and the shot stars of the last player and add all of them together.  You want the black die to be less than this number to be a shot on goal.  So in this case we have 2 + 2 + 2 = 6.  So everything but a 6 is a successful shot on goal.  Yeesh.  Maybe 0-7 is a possibility.

The goalie, however, has stars in “Play,” in our case Mrazek has 2 1/2.  Flyers don’t have momentum, so he only has 2.  If the white die shows 2 or less, then the shot is blocked, no matter what.  Then you just roll both dice and see what happens.

And according to the Goal chart, that’s a one-timer.  So a pass over the blue line from Crosby to Kessel, who slides it over to Hornqvist who fires it straight into the net.

So in 1 minute of play, we’ve had a penalty and a goal.  Whoooo boy.

Back to normal minutes, let’s get to the second minute of play with the second lines.  A roll of 7 shows us Wayne Simmonds wins the Face Off, but it is immediately followed by a Lull.  What’s that, you ask?  It’s 3 minutes of play where not much happens.  Lines change, maybe a penalty happens, but it runs out.  Maybe some shots, but they didn’t have much of a chance.  Either way after three minutes we end up right back where we started, with Simmonds and Malkin facing off.

It’s a neat mechanic that prevents us from playing out every single second of every game. So we roll again, and this time roll a 12!  Another win by Simmonds, but an “Unusual Result” happens.  I think I’ve only seen this happen once, so let’s see what happens: 9 – Equipment problem – Brian Dumoulin apparently just faceplanted due to a rut in the ice that needs to be fixed.  Huh.  So let’s look at what has happened so far –

19:30 – Interference 2:00 Giroux

19:00 – Goal Hornqvist (Kessel/Crosby)

15:00 – Game halted for ice issue.

Five minutes of hockey with about 7 rolls of the dice.  Obviously, the closer the dice come to ‘7,’ the more typical your game is going to be, but sometimes strange things happen, as we’ve already seen.  So now after a brief rest, our third lines come out and we go to another Face-Off.

Brassard wins the face-off, but we get another Lull.  So we go again.  Brassard wins again!  But on the Normal Minutes chart, I roll a 7 which is…..Lull!  Another 3 minutes pass.  6 minutes since the game was halted for the ice issue and little has happened.  Most of the crowd are on their third pretzel.

Brassard kicks the puck back again.  We roll a possibility for an odd man rush!  Of course, with the third line, it’s unlikely, but let’s see.  We roll to check o3, which is Brassard (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!).  If he has a Triangle, he creates a Play and Pittsburgh gets a shot off, otherwise the Flyers gain possession.  No Triangle here, so the Flyers take the puck from Brassard and go on Offense.

And roll 5, for a penalty event.  But it’s on defense this time!  Jamie Oleksiak, and we roll a major penalty (he has a penalty rating of 1.5), so let’s see what he did!  High Sticking + Injury.  It appears to be Travis Sanheim who was the recipient of the High Sticking, but he’s only out for the rest of the game.  Ian Cole is called in to take his place.  Oleksiak takes a 4 minute major.

Awww, rub some dirt in it.

8 minutes left in the period, and 4 of them will be a Philadelphia Power Play.  Could be the chance to tie things up.

But there’s 0 minutes left in my day, so that will have to wait.

You can find part 2 here.