Playing Well With Others

The Defiler is secretly a Triarch Stalker...

A new league has started up and it's got a little wrinkle.  Team games.  It's an interesting dynamic.  I think of myself as a very sociable person, but playing with people is not the same as playing against them.  I've had two games of this and am expecting several more weeks of it.  Thus far, I'd have to say it hasn't panned out quite how I had hoped.

There are a number of things that could be contributing to this.  I'm playing a new army.  Or rather, returning to one.  I thought I'd give the Word Bearers and there current book one last hurrah before sixth edition and a new Chaos book.  It's been an adjustment.  Game night is also under a little bit of a time crunch for the first time in a while.  But the overall deciding factor feels like the trouble of having four or five or six people involved in a game.

Simply finding a game becomes more stressful.  Because the league is set up as something akin to a campaign, there are restrictions on who can pair with whom.  Suddenly, navigating the pool of players becomes a lot more complicated.  Additionally, no one comes with a prepared list because no one know who or with how many players they'll be paired, and everyone still wants to take all of their toys, so points levels get pretty bloated.  This, plus plenty of waiting around during shooting and assault phases, leads to extremely long games with what feels like even longer periods of inactivity.  This past week saw four and a half hours of game finish just through turn five.  I like 40K, but that just doesn't work for me.

I am also struggling with "Are you sure you want to do that?"-itis.  I make mistakes as part of my human condition, but it's easy to live with your own mistakes.  Playing with a partner, particularly one who makes a series of decisions that make you grit your teeth and look to see how other games are going, has the effect of pulling my focus away from enjoying the table top and focusing on other things.  At the same time, I don't want my teammate to feel like I'm pushing him out of the way to play both his army and mine.  With an opponent, it feels natural to give advice to a player who isn't as good, and just as natural to shut up when playing someone more skilled. 

I'm not throwing in the towel yet.  We'll see what happens this week.  Hopefully, I'll have a game that reverses the trend.