Playing the Game of Miniature in Solitaire: Inspiring and Therapuetic

[Reginald Rutledge]

For some of us, playing with others is so important to our competitive drive and energy and that's something many will never give up. For others, being involved in the world of solitaire can be inspiring and therapeutic.

After playing in leagues for 16 years, I find myself longing just to play alone. One of the things that bringme back to this method of play is seeing so many people who have collections of teams! I find that most impressive.

Being a miniature football company owner, you would think that I probably have a large stock of teams. On the contrary, I had none before I established this new venture called the NFL Greatest Teams Solitaire League. Even my team of Dallas Cowboys, which I played with in the BAM are not mine anymore.

You see, every team I've done, by the time I finished it, someone had already claimed them. While the enticement of dollars is great, at the end of the day, I found myself poor! I had nothing to show for my 16 years of being in a league and 8 years of owning a company.

I always said, "The reason I wanted an EFL company was so that I could have any and every team I wanted". However, that never seemed to materialize.

But when I see coaches who are wealthy in teams, I am envious! I think it's great to be able to pull a team off the wall and play a game. It's great looking at 40 unique custom poses on a team and knowing, these are not duplicated. It's great knowing you start with a regular stock pose and transform him into a totally different player! You relish the fact that you can re-create any player in the universe! You have a sense of serenity in your life that you've not had since your childhood.

What's great is that you've got the ability to play any team in history against another one. Create the moment and make it happen! Now that winter is coming in on us, there will be great days where I can just go into my EFL room, turn the lights on a stadium, hear the roaring crowd, turn on the video camera, and play the game I like it to be played.

This is what awaits anyone who wants that type of quiet time. I treasure those moments. The great thing about doing this is you get to be intimate with players, stadiums and other things which will enhance your experience.

Having created 5 teams in 7 days tells me I will not have a problem getting to the 32 teams. What is both inspiring and therapeutic is seeing how I create those teams. It's one of the greatest things in the world to take an all white player and paint the skin tone, then the jersey and pants, and then put the facemask and logos and turn him into who you wnat him to be.

Guys have done this forever and I've seen some of their awesome collections. If mine can be a fraction of what these guys have done, I will definitely be happy. This type of work is therapuetic in that it may take you away from a tragic event or some worries that you may have.

For this reason and many more, I am so geeked up in playing solitaire. The inspiration and therapy alone will be great in helping me move forward in this league.

Reg

[46defense]

well said double "R". i enjoy playing with the guys in my league,but there is something about playing solitaire that just gives me a whole different kind of enjoyment of playing the game that it hard to describe!!!!!!!!!

[Orleanian In Exile]

I have found this same satisfaction in my own solitaire baseball association, of which I have now finished the championship of my fifth season which capped a pair of pennant races that literally came right down to the wire. I experienced both amazement and disappointment —in that the two teams I ended up emotionally pulling for got beat out for the final round and that a worst-to-first Cinderella team (which ended up in a 20-inning marathon for it's first game of the year and lost in the end) took the championship over a perennial powerhouse which has yet to win it's first one. I found myself quite taken aback by the various twists and turns in my games, the heroic plays and the dumbest mistakes which cost a team it's game, and it really is a whole different level of involvement in a private world you get to enjoy on your own terms. And I have also begun to experience that same enjoyment in my experimental electric football games, both in the testing of various rules and game tweaks as well as the competitions on the vibrating field.

[46defense]

your solitaire baseball a strat-o-matic type game?

[Orleanian In Exile]

No, it is based on a set of rules and tables devised by the sportswriter Jeff Sagarin and inspired by Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.; J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor. The table of rolls derives from over 50 years of combined statistics up to the point when Sagarin wrote the game.

[RavennaAl]

Reggie, I know how you feel. I recently finished my solitaire season, and documented it in a full season long post. (It's in the RULES WORLD forum in the Solitaire section) It was quite an undertaking and a real eye opener. I had my suspisions before I started as to how it would play out. What I didn't take into account is that these little guys have minds of their own. Each team developed it's own personality, and they never failed to amaze me.

Each team had strengths and weaknesses, and some teams matched up better against certain teams, and not very well against others. I used passing dice for about half the games and sticks for the others. You would think, statistically speaking, that the QB's would be about equal, since I used the same system and was the only person making the decisions who I was 'throwing' to. And yet, somehow, one QB stood out way ahead of the other 7. In fact, 2 were consistantly better than the rest. Some guys were 'streaky', in that they would get hot and complete several passes in a row, and then get cold and missed several in a row.

One team finished consdierably worse than the rest, and yet with just a few breaks here or there could have just as easily finished with their won-loss record reversed. I had one team that just seemed to quit when they got far behind, and another that somehow kept fighting back when they got way behind. I can't explain why they did what they did, but it sure was fun being able to just sit back and watch them. I can't wait to add a few more teams and start again next year

[Orleanian In Exile]

Originally Posted by RavennaAl

Reggie, I know how you feel. I recently finished my solitaire season, and documented it in a full season long post. (It's in the RULES WORLD forum in the Solitaire section) It was quite an undertaking and a real eye opener. I had my suspisions before I started as to how it would play out. What I didn't take into account is that these little guys have minds of their own. Each team developed it's own personality, and they never failed to amaze me.

Each team had strengths and weaknesses, and some teams matched up better against certain teams, and not very well against others. I used passing dice for about half the games and sticks for the others. You would think, statistically speaking, that the QB's would be about equal, since I used the same system and was the only person making the decisions who I was 'throwing' to. And yet, somehow, one QB stood out way ahead of the other 7. In fact, 2 were consistantly better than the rest. Some guys were 'streaky', in that they would get hot and complete several passes in a row, and then get cold and missed several in a row.

One team finished consdierably worse than the rest, and yet with just a few breaks here or there could have just as easily finished with their won-loss record reversed. I had one team that just seemed to quit when they got far behind, and another that somehow kept fighting back when they got way behind. I can't explain why they did what they did, but it sure was fun being able to just sit back and watch them. I can't wait to add a few more teams and start again next year

It's bizarre but that is how it seems to work out. You notice patterns developing with your teams season-by-season. In my baseball, my Utopia Philosophes, for example, have in four seasons developed a tendency to play their best ball when struggling to come from behind in the standings to roar into the final stretch week. They've taken three league pennants and two championships in this manner. I've got two teams which have become bitter rivals and seem to play their most aggressive games when matched up against one another. Two of my Notional League teams found themselves deep in the hole around midseason and mounted comeback drives in the second half that saw one just miss out on the n.1 seeding for the Transcendental Series tournament and the other just missing out on a postseason slot. The first one had started out strong, had the league lead through much of the first half of the season, then went into a dive and fell below .500 before they began their climb back upward; the other started out slow and was just about in the cellar at midseason when they began to claw their way upward to challenge the league leaders.

For this year, I extended the season by an additional six weeks and reduced the active rosters from 16 to 12: from three starting and three relief pitchers to just three pitchers who would double on starting and relief rotation, and one utility fielder most often used in a pinch-hitting situation, and for some pitchers the change seemed to inflict a negative effect. Last season, Barnabas Collins of the Sussex Vampyres won the Satchel Paige award for finishing the year with a 1.79 ERA, the second-lowest in the league that season, and a 4-2 W-L record. He pitched much the same way for most of this season but seemed to go into a terrible slump in the last five weeks; blowing games and saves, going in some innings where he couldn't seem to find the strike zone, and winding up with 5-5 record and an ERA somewhere in the 3.80s (haven't updated the stats yet so that's just a guess). Almost as if the added stress of extra games and relief appearances got to him down the stretch.

And all this in a game which is determined entirely by the random rolling of three dice. It is, to say the least, a phenomenon.