The Masked Carnie

I recently made a post on a message board about the importance of guessing games in strategic gaming, and thought it'd be nice to elaborate on such a point here.  In context, someone stated that he'd rather win in a fighter game (Street Fighter 4) by good fundamental play (referring to spacing, reaction, and combo skill) than win by what he perceived as random guesses.  My response: there are always guesses to be made.  Reaction is absolutely more valuable than prediction, but the ability to predict your opponent is vital.  It will be necessary at certain points, and I argue that it is necessary for any strategic game to be good.

This is essentially an apology post.  By that, I mean I'm explaining my thinking on something that gets me hatred, not any regrets for it.  This primarily comes from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, although I haven't actually played that in a long time.  Why do I sometimes go for the weaker player with nothing going for him rather than the best opponent who's on a roll?  It's nothing personal, even if it can easily feel like it.

As I was watching Star Trek: the Next Generation today, an interesting point came up. How do you win against something better than you? How do you turn the "playing to win" attitude against its user? The answer may surprise you, unless of course you actually read the title.

One of the tenets of Playing to Win is that not only do you do whatever is necessary to win, it can actually be advantageous to sometimes take bad strategies because your enemies won't see them coming. I had an opportunity to exercise this yesterday in Chaos in the Old World. Khorne generally wins by letting his advancement dial get run up, killing anything standing near him. He doesn't usually care about the score track except to consider who's ready to explode there. Well, I had that ridiculous opportunity to actually win by points, and I did so in a rather awesome way.