Alice looked at the table which contained her (questionable) rendition of The Settlers. Cecilia looked at the board game, before turning to the third player Alice had managed to convince to join the group. She had invited most of the other researchers she worked with to join the game, but the only ones who had expressed any interest in the idea were Ezrien and Anne. Ezrien was busy today, and since Alice was going to start classes at her magic academy tomorrow, she expected to be busy in the future. Sadly, this meant it was a three player game and not a four player game this time, but Alice hoped that in the future she would get a chance to play other board games with more people. Though, admittedly, that may take a while, since Alice needed to make each game and carve the pieces out of wood, and she was going to spend most of her future free time in the library she had spent a ridiculous amount of money to gain a year of access to.

Anne gave Cecilia a cheery grin. “So you’re the ‘friend who owns an enchantment shop’ that Alice mentioned a few times? It’s nice to meet you!” said Anne, giving Cecilia a warm handshake. “I’ve never been in your shop before today, but the enchanted items are decent quality. For someone so young, you’re doing pretty well at managing a shop on your own.”

“It’s nice to meet you as well,” said Cecilia, who visibly brightened up at Anne’s compliment. “Alice has mentioned you a few times when talking about getting to know the research team. I hear you’ve given her a bit of help meeting new members? Thank you for looking out for my friend.”

“Alice leaves a decent enough impression on her own. Even if she’s a bit quiet and spends a lot more time thinking than talking, she’s at least passionate enough about the team’s goals and her work as a researcher to make up for it,” said Anne giving Alice a mischievous grin. “So this board game is from your homeland?” asked Anne, giving the various numbered tiles a dubious look. Alice was glad that she didn’t need to explain what a board game was. This world, apparently, had a few board games already in place, as well as a few card games played with semi-standardized cards that [Scribes] sometimes produced.

“Yeah,” said Alice, deciding to ignore Anne’s impression that she was ‘quiet.’ “The rules are actually pretty simple – every turn, you roll the dice. Then, tiles with the same number as the dice produce resources, and every player with a settlement or city touching those tiles collects a copy of the resource. For example, if I roll an eight, all of ‘8’ tiles produce resources. If I have a settlement on a ‘brick’ resource tile that is numbered ‘8,’ I get 1 brick. You spend resources to build more towns, cities, and roads. The basic goal is to 10 points, which makes you win the game. Every time you build a settlement, you get one point, and upgrading it to a city gives you another point. The player with the longest road gets 2 extra points, and loses those points if someone else beats their road length. The resource costs for everything are explained in the little panel at the corner of the board. There are more specific rules, such as the robber and rules about settlement placement detailed in the little booklet I gave you. Any questions?” Alice asked.

 “So the objective is to win the dice rolls and acquire resources, thus building enough settlements to choke out your competitors and monopolize as much land as possible?” asked Cecilia.

“That’s… one way to put it?” Said Alice.

“I see,” said Cecilia, nodding. “The important thing to do is mess with the other players as much as possible. If they have no resources they cannot win. In the meantime, you want to monopolize as many resources as possible.”

“Uhhh…” Alice

“Is it possible to trade with other players as well, or are we just working to screw everyone else over?” Asked Anne, giving the board a more careful look.

“You can trade, but only during your turn.”

“Hmm… It’s an interesting way to build up Magic Skills and [Perception],” said Anne, after a moment.

Alice had an ominous feeling about that statement, but decided to move on with her explanation for now.

After a slightly more detailed explanation of some of the more specific rules, the three set up the board. Alice had carved the board itself out of wood, before using cheaper colors made from plants grown in Illvaria to dye different tiles and make it clear which tile produced which resource. Sure, the ocean surrounding the continent looked a little funny when it was grey colored, but blue dye imported from the Corellion Empire cost almost a gold crown for a small quantity, while grey dye was half a silver sun for the same amount. The continent was also kind of lumpy and looked a little funny, but it no longer looked like a potato.

In addition to the board itself, Alice had made ‘special event’ cards out of smaller wooden slats, dice made out of a mixture of wood and iron (the iron being used to give the dice a proper weight and make it sturdier), and a variety of little wooden towns, roads and cities Alice had carved herself. The settlements and cities that she had tried to make with exquisite detail also looked kind of off, but they were serviceable.

Once everyone roughly understood the rules and the board game, Anne went first. She threw the dice into the air… and immediately stretched out a mana tendril towards the dice. Then, electromagnetic mana shot out of her and swapped around the trajectory of the dice. The dice landed on eight. Anne grinned. “Two sheep please.” She held out her hand at Alice, who was managing the resources for the group.

“Anne? What are you doing?” said Alice, trying to resist the urge to glare at Anne.

“What do you mean?”

“You changed the trajectory of the dice with magic!”

“And?” Anne seemed genuinely baffled by the notion that she had done something wrong.

“That’s cheating,” said Alice.

“Why would it be cheating? Isn’t the point of the game to boost your ability to manipulate mana? It seems like an ingenious way to train [Perception] and Kinetic or Electromagnetic magic. Its use for Thermal and Organic mages is a fair bit more limited, since the wood used in the dice is already dead, but it’s quite a clever game. I do think the penalties for having weaker control than the other players is a bit harsh, since you only get resources when you force rolls on the right number, but it’s a decent training method. Isn’t that the goal?” Anne’s genuine confusion made it hard to respond to her statements, and Alice’s bad feeling intensified.

“But- I mean, that’s not-“ Alice felt a sudden headache. Cecilia was frowning. Alice turned to her, hoping that Alice had another ally willing to enforce fair play in the game, before Cecilia experimentally reached out a mana tendril.

“I see,” muttered Cecilia, before she handed Anne two sheep tokens and picked up the dice. She tossed them into the air before shooting out one of her mana tendrils. Anne did the same, and the two immediately began struggling to control the rapid spinning of the dice in midair. Cecilia, whose Perks were much more focused on precise manipulation of mana and boosting enchantment quality instead of ‘active’ mana use, was only able to influence one of the two dice. Meanwhile, Anne tilted the other die to make it a 6 and tried to tilt the second die into a two. Cecilia tried and failed to make it the second die land on four to give her a brick and a wood resource tile, but Anne reached out another mana tendril and slammed the die into the table. After wobbling a few times, the die finally landed on five. The total roll ended up being an eleven. Nobody had any towns or cities on tiles with the number eleven.

“No, Cecilia, wait, that’s not- I mean, aren’t you also upset?”

Cecilia also gave Alice a baffled look. “Why would I be?”

“You aren’t – I mean, that’s not… using magic to change the outcome of the dice isn’t in the spirit of fair play, don’t you think?”

“Why wouldn’t it be fair? She used her own perks and abilities to change the outcome of the dice, right? And we’re all Mages, so using Magic is pretty reasonable. If there were any non-Mages at the table it might be a problem, but we can all influence the dice so it’s pretty fair right?”

Alice felt increasingly baffled by Anne and Cecilia’s attitude towards rigging the dice rolls. Was she the crazy one here?

“What do you mean it’s fair? Isn’t playing the game this way… odd?”

“Isn’t it just normal?” Asked Cecilia, frowning in concentration as she looked at Anne’s sheep and waited for Alice to roll the dice. “I mean, in the first place, it’s similar to a [Gambler] having their Perks activate, right? It’s just that the user needs to be a bit more conscious about what they’re trying to do, and the outcome of the game doesn’t have any money riding on it. Which is a good thing – [Gamblers] only get experience towards their next level while gambling, but they don’t actually learn anything in the process. This game instead trains a lot of different things, from {Basic Mathematics} to Attributes like [Perception] and [Magic]. It even builds skills for a variety of magic abilities, like {Mana Control}. While it might not be terribly optimized for non-Mages… ah.” Cecilia finally seemed to remember Alice’s homeland didn’t have magic or the System in it. She gave Alice a sympathetic look, before shaking her head. “I see. Your games were actually just determined by luck. Don’t worry, here you can control the outcome of the games and play games determined by skill.”

Alice’s bad feeling was fulfilled. Not only did Anne and Cecilia not see a problem with using magic to rig the outcome of the game, Cecilia, after realizing Alice’s circumstances, found Alice’s thoughts about fair play to be absurd. Alice felt a headache begin to build up as she tried to figure out how to convince these two to play the game properly.

Wait, is this actually a problem? Alice suddenly had a strange thought. If three mages were trying to control the outcome of each dice roll, the odds were probably pretty close to random anyway, right? And even though they weren’t playing the game the ‘original’ way, it wasn’t a terrible idea to use the game as a training ground. Anne was a woman who spent her days off working on getting levels and Stats. Cecilia wasn’t quite as obsessed with levelling as Anne, but there was nobody in this world that minded getting a few more Attributes and Levels whenever they could. Even Alice wanted to level up as much as possible, because levels gave her new tools to explore this world, increased avenues to earn money, and reductions in her aging speed. All three of those appealed to her. If Alice could have fun playing the game while getting some Levels and Attributes, wasn’t it the best of both worlds?

Alice wrestled with this thought for a few moments as she looked at the dice in her hands, before she decided to give up and roll with the punches.

She probably wasn’t going to be playing a ‘proper’ game of the Settlers in this world, given how different the culture was. So she instead decided to set up a few extra rules that she ‘forgot to mention.’

First, one could only use magic to ‘spin’ the dice while they were in midair. They couldn’t push the dice ‘up’ with their magic – the could only rotate it. If they seriously altered the influence of gravity on the dice, they were disqualified from getting resources for that turn. This made sure that the dice didn’t infinitely hover in midair as the three mages tried to contest the outcome of each dice roll, adding a fair bit of difficulty to the game and avoiding multi-minute turns. In addition, the group was forced to set an upper limit on how much mana each player could spend per second trying to manipulate the dice. This was mostly a technical limitation – One of the dice slightly cracked when Alice and Anne were getting really into a battle to make one of the dice land on a one versus a six. From then on, the players all limited how much mana they could use at once to keep the dice from getting damaged.

There were all sorts of other disputes in the rules, such as whether using more than two mana tendrils at once was fair, or whether there should be some sort of ‘dropoff’ point where players could no longer manipulate the dice (it was eventually decided that one could not influence the dice once they were ten centimeters above the table, which made it even harder to mess with the dice and, oddly enough, upped the speed [Perception] increased).

The game lasted for a total of thirty-seven turns, before Cecilia threw out three once-per-day Merchant Perks and conned Alice into trading away three sheep and a brick for one piece of wood, letting Cecilia immediately win the game one turn before Alice would have won. In that time, Alice refined her control over Magic in a way she had never expected to, learned why pretty people were always dangerous in this world, and realized that her interpretation of ‘fair play’ in a game was very, very different from the inhabitants of this world. At no point in time during the entire occasion did she find herself bored, and while she found the experience bizarre due to the cultural clash in rules, she had fun. The three played a few more games before Anne decided to go home. Alice returned to her inn room as well, before she started preparing for her first day tomorrow. It had been a surprisingly fun last day of freedom, though to be honest, Alice was excited for tomorrow. Soon, she would finally be able to access the academy knowledge bases and libraries.

Author’s Note:

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

I only recently realized how long it has been since I last showed Alice’s status screen, so I figured it was about time for an update.

Alice is… finally getting to level 50 in classes. The Perks page that has been slowly getting more and more bloated can finally start to stabilize and shrink. I kind of wish I had made ‘combining Perks’ unlock before level 55, just so that I didn’t have to deal with this increasingly ridiculous list of Perks. Blehh.