tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-216467252024-03-07T16:53:50.380+10:00Playing With MyselfLamentations of a board gamer with not enough opponents.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.comBlogger391125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-61838573683232334222014-01-01T11:18:00.000+10:002014-01-01T11:18:20.372+10:00The Numbers for 2013Goodness me, I'm up bright and early in this New Year! That would be because although we saw the year in trying to avoid black riders and escape from the Shire, we discovered at about 12:15am that we really had no idea which way it was to Bucklebury and my teammate decided he'd strike out across Brisbane to his own warm hobbit hole instead.<br />
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Although I don't post here much any more, I do have this tradition of analysing the state of play of my game collection at the start of each year. Here are the previous years' articles:<br />
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-years-ambitions-planning-ahead.html">2007 article</a>
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2009/01/numbers-are-in-for-2008.html">2008 article</a>
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/numbers-for-2009.html">2009 article</a>
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2011/01/numbers-for-2010.html">2010 article</a>
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2012/01/numbers-for-2011.html">2011 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/the-numbers-for-2012.html">2012 article</a><br />
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Since I'm somewhat alert this year I'll also do a bit of a retrospective. The year started (as it often does) with On the Beach and Cancon. OtB is great because it exposes me to a lot of new games, and Cancon is great because I pick up a lot of new games there - mostly from the maths trade, but I do buy some - and that game debt decides what I'll be playing for the next few months. At Cancon 2013 I was playing <b>Agents of SMERSH</b> that I'd got from Kickstarter. That one didn't last long - there was no situation in which I would not rather play <b>Tales of the Arabian Nights</b>, so I passed it on to someone who wanted it more than I did.<br />
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Filler hits early in the year included Martin Wallace's <b>The Hobbit Card Game</b> (which I really like) and <b>Timeline</b>. <b>Timeline</b> pretty much continued throughout the year, and I now have 4 sets.<br />
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In March I put in an order at philibertnet.com, a French on-line games shop. That was the only way to get some things I wanted like <b>Hanabi</b>, the <b>Yggdrasil Asgard expansion</b>, and the <b>Peloponnes Goat expansion</b>. That order arrived just in time for Easter holidays, which was very convenient. We went away with one of my sisters, and played the RPG <b>Fiasco</b> a couple of times. Now that's a great game for people who aren't big on rules.<br />
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The middle of the year was spent playing off the game debt until the mid-year maths trade came along and helped me get rid of some stuff. However about that time I was doing some research into RPG-themed story-telling board games. That's the sort of game (e.g. <b>Runebound</b>) that I like to solo and would like to invent myself. That led to a lot of acquisitions, some P&P stuff from Artscow, the <b>Doctor Who Solitaire Story Game</b>, the <b>Lone Wolf and Cub Game</b>, and various others (most recently, <b>Arkham Investigator</b>).<br />
However during that research I noticed that there was a Pathfinder card game coming out, and that was clearly relevant, so I decided I'd get a copy if I ever saw it in the shops.<br />
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Well... that kinda changed the year. The <b>Pathfinder Adventure Card Game</b> took solitaire gamers around the world by storm. It's not the best story-telling game, but within the limitations of the genre it does a very good job. Paizo has done a great job on it - great components, great support, and new adventures every month. I played it 46 times, so it's my game of the year.<br />
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In September by friend The Famous Game Designer Peter Hawes released his best game yet, <b>Francis Drake</b>. This is a game I have considerable emotional investment in, as Peter mentions me as one of the people wanting him to design something other than an area majority game. He's done a superb job. The game plays well, the components are wonderful, and it makes me excited to see that Peter can design games other than ones where people eat me / steal from me / chop off my head / generally annoy the crap out of me. That's not to say that <b>Francis Drake</b> is a hold hands and sing kinda game, it's just that the aggression is passive, and that's how I like it.<br />
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The end of the year was defined by a trip to Montréal with my wife. We flew into Boston just as the Red Sox were playing in the World Series, and as I'd taken advantage of the trip to get a copy of <b>Strat-o-Matic Baseball</b> from Amazon, I got a bit caught up in the moment. The downside is that I really don't know much about baseball. I also got <b>Strat-o-matic Baseball Express</b>, which I have played. I'm building up to the real thing.<br />
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I can't let the year go by without mentioning the <i>Solitaire Games on Your Table</i> geeklists. The 1 Player Guild on BGG, initially based around fractaloon's podcast (which I don't listen to, I don't listen to any podcasts) has really taken off, and every month there are geeklist items for loads of games that people are playing solitaire. The COIN games like <b>Andean Abyss</b> are very popular, but I don't think I have the concentration for those and the other very complex games. I did get sucked into <b>Navajo Wars</b> though. I've been to Arizona and have seen some of that country. However as I was visiting as an employee of the mining industry I was really more in <b>Silverton</b> country than Diné territory. Learning more about <b>Navajo Wars</b> is something I'm looking forward to this year.<br />
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OK, back to the numbers.<br />
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<div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="color: #274e13;">There are 396 games in this collection. (last year 364)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.58. (last year 6.54)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">Your average rating for this collection is 7.37. (last year 7.34)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">On average you have played each of these games 8.37 times. (last year 8.5)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13;">Your Friendless Metric is 1 (92 games played 10+ times, 59 games never played.) (last year 86, 45)</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.34 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 53.75%. (last year 3.43, 55.24%)</span></div>
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I'm a little bit disappointed that the numbers have deteriorated like that! Although I managed to play a lot of what I acquired, many didn't get played very much and distressingly quite a few didn't get played at all. I am including there 4 mini expansions, which may never get played. There are also 10 <b>Lord of the Rings LCG</b> expansions which are unplayed, and 4 which have been played only once. I've just started playing that game again, so I hope to see that situation improve. Hmm, I should list some of my games on the maths trade... or just dump them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhadqnRBKbnpFIjmT6jHPATN_oD_k4eWw47wk1ty7wy-75cktHVngD1C5C-ACmGjymj2TApJXfaUs5ntIghY5eZVqcH18Js0TlWP2kfVxcEY1-pcLpa312b_RSiXwGCmc0Vr7nheQ/s1600/Friendless2013yearend.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhadqnRBKbnpFIjmT6jHPATN_oD_k4eWw47wk1ty7wy-75cktHVngD1C5C-ACmGjymj2TApJXfaUs5ntIghY5eZVqcH18Js0TlWP2kfVxcEY1-pcLpa312b_RSiXwGCmc0Vr7nheQ/s640/Friendless2013yearend.png" width="640" /></a></div>
The graph is prettier this year! The different colours at the start of each row indicate expansions - you can see where a lot of my problem is coming from! I have a hard core of unplayed games which I've collected, mostly from India. Some of them are pretty much unplayably bad, but some I should take a look at. However at games night, they just don't compare to <b>Francis Drake</b>.<br />
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Oh well, I'm off to give myself a spanking until I cry and promise to do better this year.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-17282625235985546152013-03-03T21:49:00.001+10:002013-03-03T21:49:15.254+10:00Board Games Are Forever<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
A few weeks ago I played the published version of a board game that I'd played a prototype of a few years ago. I sent email to the designer saying I like how it had turned out and I looked forward to getting to play it. The designer, having released several games since then, replied with something along the lines of "oh, that old thing!" That made me think about how we as producers and consumers have very different perspectives. For the designer, that game's a project that's finished as he can't work on it any more; for the retailer it's an end-of-life product that should be dumped to make room for new ones; but for me, it's a new discovery.</div>
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I have several other games by the same designer, which are on list of "classic games to keep forever". Long after the games are forgotten by the cogs in the machinery which produced them, they'll remain treasures in my collection.</div>
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I tend to think of my collection as containing a variety of subcollections. The core is the treasures, that I want to play forever. These are mostly Euros, and they're mostly desperately underplayed. Then, there are the games I keep for particular purposes - children's games, party games - so although I have no emotional attachment to them they have to stick around. There are also the particular collections - the GIPF Project, the Gigamic series, Indian games, that I collect for collection reasons. (For playing purposes, I'd keep the GIPF project except YINSH and TAMSK, maybe, but for collection reasons I keep them all.) And then, there are the games that are just passing through - mostly new stuff I've acquired and not yet played enough to allocate them to any of the other categories. Often I'll play a game I paid good money for and realise "this is a maximum 5 plays game, I'd better think about how I'm going to get rid of it". Now that I realise that that happens and that not everything's a keeper, it makes it a bit easier to let go of things in a maths trade.</div>
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Anyway, with all of this thinking going on, I decided to do some research into the lifespan of games. I know from this picture (x-axis quarters of years, y-axis publication years of games played in that quarter):</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NkBXVp24kSTh3vx2ZV4yQApSKdmEckrKGuWb6IzNB19tRvON0Z9IkhFqreQIPT7Y_iHumM-vDyiRUz03-42eI2Q2O5tKdeUbZkLJGO2wuE0fr0kwr5CzMLGKCiTh4_AGwJPExw/s1600/quarters.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NkBXVp24kSTh3vx2ZV4yQApSKdmEckrKGuWb6IzNB19tRvON0Z9IkhFqreQIPT7Y_iHumM-vDyiRUz03-42eI2Q2O5tKdeUbZkLJGO2wuE0fr0kwr5CzMLGKCiTh4_AGwJPExw/s640/quarters.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NkBXVp24kSTh3vx2ZV4yQApSKdmEckrKGuWb6IzNB19tRvON0Z9IkhFqreQIPT7Y_iHumM-vDyiRUz03-42eI2Q2O5tKdeUbZkLJGO2wuE0fr0kwr5CzMLGKCiTh4_AGwJPExw/s1600/quarters.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NkBXVp24kSTh3vx2ZV4yQApSKdmEckrKGuWb6IzNB19tRvON0Z9IkhFqreQIPT7Y_iHumM-vDyiRUz03-42eI2Q2O5tKdeUbZkLJGO2wuE0fr0kwr5CzMLGKCiTh4_AGwJPExw/s1600/quarters.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
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that I tend to start playing games published in a year about halfway through that year, and continue doing so for 3 or 4 years. Then those games get pushed out by new stuff.</div>
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And is that new stuff really new? What's the lag between a game being published and me playing it? I only know game release dates to year resolution, so I made a histogram of the number of calendar years between a game's release and my first play of it. As you can see here (x-axis number of years, y-axis number of games):</div>
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<img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-AVaFQ_ZAURh11Bau3uF0di2etejkVsHUCU4snRqGUd0D045gSbIZvJbxzTNvcw4yeyg3_uzno-VEzy1ehiDaMqKo9RhkovgxIiAu9tT7YNJD6dYfWcLAYcRd0F1SEVe4pOOHw/s640/lag.png" width="640" /><br />
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I typically play a game the year after it's released. and 50% of the games I play were released 3 or fewer years ago. I've looked at the same graphs for my fellow gamers in the U.S. and Europe, and they seem to get new games about 6 months sooner. This agrees with my perceptions of how long it takes games to get to Australia. Other Australian fanatics seem to have about the same lag as I do.</div>
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And then, how long does a game get played for? This is a hard question to answer, because I've really only been in the hobby about 8 years, and I defined "forever" as being 10 years or more. I made a graph of how long there was between my first and last plays of a game (x-axis number of days, y-axis number of games). Note that this graph necessarily excludes games which I've played fewer than 2 times, which is a lot. Each horizontal line is a game, and the colouring corresponds to my rating for that game - green good red bad.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCrK7zw8z9wS728zE8PPfFtEJL1ZRLMLtQaSitHRcGG-wp81qTsgm0EPAPGaazMl_LDLjIildIWjuntKlmub9i9ywQTs31lIHPHehZvIjUOJOcVW6z2vdQstBtylMiD8zzVwm_7Q/s1600/lifetime.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCrK7zw8z9wS728zE8PPfFtEJL1ZRLMLtQaSitHRcGG-wp81qTsgm0EPAPGaazMl_LDLjIildIWjuntKlmub9i9ywQTs31lIHPHehZvIjUOJOcVW6z2vdQstBtylMiD8zzVwm_7Q/s640/lifetime.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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About 40% of games hang around longer than 2 years. I think I'm doing fairly well to stand against the incoming tide of new games, holding onto the good stuff (as shown by the bottom of the graph being greenish) and dumping the stuff I don't like (as show by the top of the graph being pinkish).<br />
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The factor that stops games being played for longer is, as always, the fact that I have way too many games and not enough time to play them all. This is not necessarily a sign of shopping addiction on my part though, it's more a case of drinking from a fire hose with only a port glass to hold water in. I think if I can identify great games and continue refining my collection, I'm doing the best I can. Also, if great designers would stop designing great games, that would help.<br />
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Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-64202659305976631582013-02-17T13:52:00.002+10:002013-02-17T13:52:49.867+10:00Baudrillard and Board GamesI've been reading on and off <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Baudrillard-Christopher-Horrocks/dp/1848312075/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361069594&sr=1-1&keywords=introducing+baudrillard">this book</a> about the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Before you rush off to read it as well, I have to warn you that it generally has not impressed me, and I generally agree with Alan Sokal's assessment of postmodern philosophy as being obscurantist bullshit. Nevertheless, there was one section that made me think a little.<br />
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Baudrillard did some thinking about consumerism and the value of objects. I'll give a quick summary of the philosophy which will be totally wrong because the first rule of philosophy is that you're not allowed to say anything simply enough for anyone to understand it because then they might refute it. Nevertheless...<br />
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<ul>
<li>Objects have 4 types of value - <i>functional</i>, i.e. how useful it is; <i>exchange</i>, i.e. how much you can get for it; <i>symbolic</i>, i.e. how much it means to you; <i>sign</i>, i.e. what it says about you.</li>
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This bit I agree with - that's why I have a bed (functional), money (exchange), my grandfather's brush (symbolic), a Bencon t-shirt (sign).</div>
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<li>Originally, items were produced for their functional value.</li>
<li>In a consumer society, items are produced for their sign value.</li>
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A striking example of this last point occurred many years ago with somebody that I used to know. That person had friends visiting who looked at our CD collection and said "you haven't got any good music!" Which is of course a matter of opinion, as I had quite a lot of Nick Cave at the time. Anyway, somebody that I used to know was having a birthday so asked me to get her some good music. Upon interrogation, it turned out that it didn't matter what music it was, so long as her friends would recognise it as good music. (It turned out the answer was Nickelback.) This was a classic blatant example of something being valuable for its sign value above its functional value, which horrified me at the time, being quite naive in the analysis of consumerism.</div>
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Baudrillard, as is his wont, continues to take things to extremes.</div>
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<li>In a consumer society, items are acquired for their sign value and their functional value is an alibi for their acquisition.</li>
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That is to say, you don't buy a can of Coke because you're thirsty, you buy a can of Coke because you want to be seen buying a can of Coke and you drink it because that's what it's supposed to be used for. It would be equivalent to buy a can of Coke, throw it away and drink a free glass of water. Exactly which scenarios are silly here?</div>
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Anyway, I'm not here to say whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, as I'm as vulnerable to this sort of self-delusion as anyone. I'm not writing this blog post because I need to write this blog post, I'm writing it because I want to be seen to be the sort of person who writes this sort of blog post! It's all so you'll like me! However it does make me sympathetic to all the people who say "money doesn't buy happiness", "reduce reuse recycle", etc, etc, etc, even if I don't take practical action on those things. Money doesn't buy me happiness, but it does buy me things that show other people what sort of person I think I am, and that gets me some friends and THAT makes me happy.</div>
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OK, onto board games. The most obvious sign of consumerism in board gaming is the Cult of the New - the obsession with getting the newest games being published. I don't know if I've ever really been part of that, as I think I've always been part of the Cult of the Old as well and surely the two can't be mutually compatible? Certainly I do pay attention to what's coming out at Essen, and I have every intention of getting <b>Bora Bora</b> if AdamP doesn't beat me to it, but that sort of activity is just maintenance of my professional library...</div>
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... because the way I want to present myself with respect to board games is as an expert player. This means I need to continue playing the latest stuff and I need to express opinions on it, but I also need to understand the old stuff and have experience with that as well. I try to understand and appreciate games from their cultural and historical perspectives as well, rather than just being known for owning a lot of new games. If I can get myself organised after I've finished writing this I'd like to write a review of <b>Taj Mahal</b>, a 13 year old game, because it's a great game that I value.<br /><br />Another manifestation of the sign value of board games is the photos of games in progress that are posted on Facebook. About once a week I'll take a photo of what I'm playing, particularly if it's pretty, and post it. Within a few minutes I'll have Likes from friends in Sydney and Seattle suggesting that they too are the sort of people who like board games. Well known Idahoan iconoclast DWTripp pooh-poohs people posting photos of some meal they're eating, and posts photos of his old motorbikes and wives - but whether it's food, games or bikes or cats, it's always just a shout-out to your buddies saying "Hey, we both like these sorts of things! We should like each other more because we both like the same things!"</div>
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Is this crass attention-seeking? A former colleague of mine resisted joining Facebook for years because he said "it's all just 'look at me, look at me!'". At the time he was dying of cancer and I explained to him, "yes, it is, and we want you to join because we really are interested in you". It seems sometimes people really do want to give you attention. I know if I can ever make it over to BGG.con I'll have a damned fine time meeting about a hundred of my Facebook friends whom I know are of my tribe, because we've already given each other the right signs.</div>
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Now, as I alluded to above, trying to escape from the system of signs is just another sign. Once players get over The Cult of the New, they become a Jaded Gamer. Then they become a Gamer Who's Trying To Cut Down Their Collection. Off the top of my head, I can name batcut, CyberKev, da pyrate, shawn_low, thepackrat and Vexatious as Australian geeks who are seriously in that phase, and the Aluminium Gamers all have it in mind. Is cutting down your collection, i.e. rejecting consumerism, really a need, or is it still just a sign? What's the purpose of trading away a game rather than just throwing it away? Do you trade just to be part of that tribe?</div>
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I've discussed this matter with CyberKev several times, as we're always open to philosophical discussions on the nature of the hobby. The sad conclusion is that life is a time when you do some stuff and then you die and what you did really doesn't matter very much anyway. At that time your stuff will become someone else's problem. Until then though, it remains as a halo of wood and plastic bits occupying space and bytes, carving out your particular place in the world.</div>
Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-26125245893784371222013-01-03T18:09:00.001+10:002013-01-03T18:09:17.481+10:00The Numbers for 2012Let me get this article written before I see a shiny butterfly and rush off and do something else. This is my annual article about the embarrassing state of my game collection and what a waste of space and money it is. Here are the previous articles in this series:
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-years-ambitions-planning-ahead.html">2007 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2009/01/numbers-are-in-for-2008.html">2008 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/numbers-for-2009.html">2009 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2011/01/numbers-for-2010.html">2010 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2012/01/numbers-for-2011.html">2011 article</a><br />
<br />
<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
There are 364 games in this collection (last year 448).</div>
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<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.54 (last year 6.43).</div>
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<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
Your average rating for this collection is 7.34 (last year 7.04).</div>
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<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
On average you have played each of these games 8.5 times (last year 7.75).</div>
<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
Your Friendless Metric is 1 (86 games played 10+ times, 45 games never played.) (last year 1, 102, 46)</div>
<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: darkgreen; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;">
Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.43 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 54.64%. (last year 3.49, 55.24%)</div>
<br />
This is sort of a good result. I've dropped a load of games, through very conscious and continuous effort. It really is quite an effort to sell games, I spend a lot of time wrapping and posting things. However the amount of trading that I did resulted in a lot of played games going out, a lot of unplayed games coming in, and many of those new games not being played at all. That's not really very productive! There are games like <b>Cuba</b> which I could probably like that I owned for a while and then dumped without playing because it was just crowded out by all the other stuff I have.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrhZ4QQEvaUVeB24SB5LRki7UmNn-f1oxfUO2U-lPWEEbX19ZZnghx9UsVbeu2QdRkKY1gUFD2BVPPgMe1f4PbOgTdM3JdxHuTSHiQJsoGwBbp4P2poYj1SfEFgup330eArCNGvQ/s1600/Friendless.png" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrhZ4QQEvaUVeB24SB5LRki7UmNn-f1oxfUO2U-lPWEEbX19ZZnghx9UsVbeu2QdRkKY1gUFD2BVPPgMe1f4PbOgTdM3JdxHuTSHiQJsoGwBbp4P2poYj1SfEFgup330eArCNGvQ/s640/Friendless.png" width="640" /></a>
<br />
One exercise I tried during the year was to make a list of games I own that I really do want to play. There were about a hundred, which suggests that I have an awful lot of stuff to get rid of still. I do like the constant influx of new games - I read the rules of practically everything - but I don't like that many games just don't turn me on so much and go onto the trade pile very quickly. I'm learning to resist - <b>Kingdom Builder</b> is an example of a game which has many good things about it which I acknowledge I wouldn't use if I owned it. Then there are games like <b>Trajan</b> and <b>Milestones</b> and <b>Village</b> and <b>Macao</b> which I do quite like but don't need to own because other people have them.<br />
<br />
The project continues this year. <b>The Lord of the Rings living card game</b> has a lot to answer for with respect to underutilised games. I'll see if I can maintain the merciless momentum.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-46919649636800488322012-12-06T12:25:00.002+10:002012-12-06T13:13:36.773+10:00Stefan Feld and MeA long time ago I thought Stefan Feld was a completely disastrous game designer. Now I'm his groupie. Here's the story of what happened.<br />
<br />
The first Feld game I played was <b>In the Year of the Dragon</b> in October 2008. I played this game with a cut-throat group, and it went long, i.e. about 3 hours. I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but managed to build up my holdings. Then came a series of random events which I couldn't quite deal with, resulting in my losing a lot of palaces. I fucking hate that. I hate games where you work your butt off to make progress and then it gets taken away from you. I like building games, not wrecking games. So Feld and I were not off to a good start. My BGG comment on ItYotD is: <i>"I'd rather be sick than play this game. If this was the first board game I played, I'd be a stamp collector instead. Frustrating, boring, annoying waste of time."</i><br />
<br />
A couple of months later I played <b>The Name of the Rose</b>. I liked the movie, I didn't like the book, but the game left no impression on me whatsoever and I had to look up whether I'd played it or not. As medieval murder mystery is one of my favourite themes, that's a pretty impressive amount of indifference. No love for Feld yet.<br />
<br />
The next Fled game I played was finally at least OK - <b>Notre Dame</b>. It's another game where it's frustratingly hard to get stuff (like <b>Dragon</b>), but it least it doesn't all get stolen from you at once. I thought it was OK but would need to play it more to get how it went properly - I thought I'd been doing OK and was beaten very badly. I was in no rush to try it again.<br />
<br />
The next game I encountered was <b>It Happens...</b> which is a dice game about anteaters. I played it because there was a very young lady willing to teach it to me, but I realised very soon that it wasn't working for me. At least it has the excuse of being a kids' game.<br />
<br />
Months went by... <b>The Speicherstadt</b> appeared on yucata.de. I had an initially positive reaction, and started a bunch of games before I'd even finished my first play. That was when I discovered that I'd completely overestimated how interesting the game was. It feels to me that you build a points engine, and then the game finishes. So you should have been doing other stuff instead. I admit, the auction mechanism is kinda cool, but kinda cool in a technical way, not in an appeals-to-me kinda way. I stopped playing it. Feld seemed destined to forever produce games that were at best mediocre.<br />
<br />
Then something terrible happened. I won the Big Cochabamba photo competition (blogged about previously). Oh yeah, sure, I got 9 of the hottest new games for free, but a lot of the SdJ kennerspiel nominees were by Stefan Feld. That mediocre guy, who designs games that take my stuff. WELL AT LEAST THEY'RE FREE. So I acquired <b>Luna</b>, <b>Die Burgen von Burgund</b>, and <b>Strasbourg</b>, with a sense of dread.<br />
<br />
The first we played was <b>Strasbourg</b>. This is a very tight auction game with some other stuff tacked on as a consequence of the auction. I quite liked it, though it took me till round 3 of 5 to realise that I'd lose the game in round 1. It did feel like I could achieve stuff and get some points. But still, not a huge hit.<br />
<br />
I was very intrigued by the theme of <b>Luna</b>, so while waiting for opponents I played a solitaire game. That was instructive, as I got the feeling for how the little dudes moved around. We then played a 4-player game, which was also interesting as the players' strategies evolved and conflicted with each other. After a couple more solitaire plays when the rules receded and I was able to focus on what I was trying to achieve, I decided I liked it. You can build shrines, you can get places in the temple, you can score majority points, and generally nobody takes things away from you. I liked that it was complex, I liked the theme, and I liked the bits. Hooray!<br />
<br />
Then we played <b>Die Burgen von Burgund</b>, later called <b>Castles of Burgundy</b> (but it will always be <b>Burgen Burgen Burgen Burgen</b> to me). This is a cool game. I'm not a huge fan of its strategic depth as your plans will often be screwed by uncooperative dice, but it does have that Farmville thing going for it where there's always something to be doing, you're always making progress. I played this game with quite a few people, and eventually realised that it had become popular enough that there'd always be someone around with a copy, and I'd no longer need to suggest it, so I sold my copy. It's a very good game, but not something I need to keep exploring.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, Stefan Feld was pretty much forgiven by now. The last three games had demonstrated to me that he was a designer of great diversity, capable of producing some systems worth investigating (particularly <b>Luna</b>), rather than being a cold-hearted miser who designed nasty games.<br />
<br />
Consequently when <b>Macao</b> was suggested to me, I agreed to play. For the longest time I confused this game with <b>Manila</b>, in which have almost no interest. However <b>Macao</b> was interesting, mostly because, like <b>Luna</b>, there's a lot going on. I did notice for the first time, what I call the Stefan Feld Standard Design Pattern. This is a pattern for structuring the whole game - there's a mini-game for generating resources, then you use the resources to play a variety of min-games on the board involving set collection, map traversal, gathering bonuses, and so on. The games that fit this pattern are <b>Notre Dame</b>, <b>Strasbourg</b>, <b>Macao</b> and <b>Trajan</b> (and <b>Bora Bora</b>, it would seem). This pattern is not necessarily a bad thing, as it's a way of producing complex games that are not too hard to teach, but it is interesting to speculate on whether this is a conscious process or not.<br />
<br />
Anyway, the most recent Feld game I've had the pleasure to play is <b>Trajan</b>. This is probably the most complex of the lot, with the mancala resource-generation game being quite a brain-burner even before considering the 6 or so effects of what happens on the board.<br />
<br />
Okay Mr Feld, you're forgiven. I'm looking forward to whatever you produce next. But there is no way I'm ever again playing <b>In the Year of the Dragon</b>.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-5238043321155019622012-12-05T13:57:00.003+10:002012-12-05T13:57:58.219+10:00Essen ImpressionsWell, my experience with Essen titles is pretty sad, as I don't have enough leave in a year to get to all the places I'd like to go, but I did get some Essen games from Julian at Unhalfbricking who collects money from eager Aussies and invests it in new games for them. In order of play...<br />
<br />
<b>Sheepdogs of Pendleton Hill</b>: very definitely a kids' game, aimed at maybe 8 year olds, but with the chance for some slightly cunning play to amuse adults. You place your shepherds on the hill, the players form combined flocks of sheep, and then the flocks move around. If a sheep (as part of a flock) moves onto the same space as a shepherd from the same player, they both score and are removed from the board. So the goal is to make your opponents' sheep meet their shepherd early while your own sheep trundle up Pendleton Hill for more points.<br />
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<b>Sheepland</b>: not a kids' game, and not a gamer's game, just an old-fashioned Euro. the board starts with 24 or so sheep on 25 or so spaces. There are 6 different terrain types amongst the spaces. On your turn you may move your shepherd, move a sheep, or invest in a terrain type. At the end, for each terrain tile you have you score points equal to how many sheep are on that type of terrain. When we played CyberKev went for lots of investment in terrain, I went for moving sheep into the terrain I already had, and the result was so close I would say both are viable strategies. This is a Euro of the complexity of <b>Heimlich & Co</b> / <b>Top Secret Spies</b>, or <b>Clans</b>. It's nothing special but it's not bad.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island</b>: I bought this for solitaire play, and probably won't bother sharing it with my friends as there are better games to play with them (see below). The game it reminds me most of is <b>Mousquetaires du Roi</b> - there are lots of bits of mediocre quality, and a massive rulebook, but it all works OK in the end. You spend the game sending out Crusoe and Friday and your dog to hunt / gather resources / build stuff / achieve the scenario goals, while the game throws random stuff at you to interfere with your plans. I've only played one scenario so far, but that was interesting enough. The odd selection of bits reminds me of the old version of <b>Prophecy</b>.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Tzolk'in: the Mayan Calendar</b>: Now this is a proper game. You may remember the pictures from BGG, there are big plastic cogs. I'm happy to say that the cogs work well, they're meaningful, they're thematic, and they're fun except if some doofus isn't careful and knocks over all the bits. The big wheel represents time, and as you turn it it moves your workers who are placed on the little wheel so that they can be removed from the wheel to have achieved better stuff. It's something like <b>Macao</b> or <b>The Circle</b> where you plan now what you'll have available to you in a few turns, and the more you wait the more you get. The more you can get your plans working together, the more efficiently you'll generate VPs. We had basically no problems with the rules, everything was where it needed to be, the bits were lovely, and overall the game is a great experience.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-48044611788591934422012-09-07T07:37:00.001+10:002012-09-07T07:37:48.265+10:00Premature EnthusiasmOn Friday mornings I wake up excited that it's the end of the week and I'm going to have a wonderful relaxing weekend (and I never seem to learn that's not going to be the case). If I have time before work I pack the game box with great big long heavy games. Then I go to work and am in a complete rush all day trying to write code and sort out a million problems, and on Friday afternoon I go swimming. Then when I get home on Friday evening I look at the game box and realise I can't remember the rules to any of those games, I'd have to teach them, and I really don't give a fuck, so I unpack the game box and put in a whole bunch of easy stuff like <b>Tales of the Arabian Nights</b> where I can just play without too much fuss. This happens every week, I swear.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-82909257710023129872012-08-16T13:38:00.000+10:002012-08-16T13:38:35.636+10:00FanboiYesterday we had a holiday here so we could all go to the local agricultural show. I hope they didn't miss me... instead I stayed home and watched all three of the Lord of the Rings movies. They are so good, there's barely a mis-step in the whole 9 hours. I know he deviated from the books, but it was almost always for a good reason to fit the movie genre. If I had Liv Tyler in a movie I'd make up lots of extra reasons to show her as well.
The reason I had to watch the movies is that I'm currently reading the books, and I wanted to remind myself of what the movies did to the story. And the reason I'm reading the books is because I've been playing <b>Lord of the Rings: The Card Game</b>, and I wanted to see what role the minor characters in the book played in the game. And of course I've also recently played <b>Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation</b> and <b>Lord of the Rings: Friends and Foes</b>. And of course I've been doing that because I'm an unashamed and irredeemable fanboi.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-14029785391601336972012-08-12T19:40:00.001+10:002012-08-16T13:25:30.648+10:00I Do Not Know What This Post Is AboutI was just rereading some of my old posts on this blog and thinking what a damned fine writer I am and how you guys must be missing me. I think since the invention of Facebook I haven't so much felt the need to write here to tell you what's happening in my life, gaming or otherwise, so you get abandoned.
<P>
Quick summary of life: <i>Dr Scrabblette</i> now has a good job at the University of Technology, Sydney, and commutes to Sydney for half the week at a time. I am still in Brisbane looking after the dog and the kid. The kid is very tall and still at school, but is now way too cool for board games. I'm thinking about selling him and getting a better one. The god, I mean dog, rules the household, though she's always frustrated at how hard it is to get us to play ball.
<P>
Now to games. Currently Critical Mass is meeting once a week at Chermiside, just down the road, and twice a month at Indooroopilly. I always go to Chermside, it just seems sensible. I've been playing a lot of Euros, though I do like getting to bed early on a Friday... as that's a day when <i>Dr Scrabblette</i> is actually home. Last week we played <b>Die Burgen von Burgund</b> then <b>Lord of the Rings: Friends and Foes</b> and my early night was about 1am. Oh well.
<P>
I've also been playing <b>Lord of the Rings: the Living Card Game</b>, "and loving it". As you'd know I do like a good solitaire game and I'm enjoying exploring what they can do in such a system. Luckily I am not so much a fan of winning, as it's a challenging game. I'm getting better with the guidance of AdamP. We often meet up when <i>Dr Scrabblette</i>'s away to play multi-player and maybe have a glass of red wine. We even beat the very nasty <b>Escape From Dol Guldur</b> scenario.
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I am gradually, very gradually, decreasing the size of my games collection. After all these years in the hobby I know what I like and what I can merely tolerate, and I'm planning to just keep what I like and get rid of the rest. Of course getting rid of games is a difficult game in itself, but since the Australian maths trades now include selling and buying games, I'm making some progress. I really don't like selling things! Any price which would make me happy because I'm getting money would also make me sad because someone else is paying too much! An excess of empathy, methinks.
<P>
A couple more things, before I go watch a movie. You may have heard I was learning French; well, I still am. It is going very well. I read "Notre Dame de Paris" earlier this year - that's Victor Hugo's book that had the Hunchback of Notre Dame in it. Victor Hugo is not at all shy about using archaic words and hard tenses, but I got through it. The classical references and Greek and Latin quotations were incomprehensible and tiresome, but also inessential. Also, although I am still a Big Fat Friendless Bastard, I'm no longer a Big Obese Friendless Bastard, I've lost quite a bit of weight through sheer bloody-minded hard work at the gym and swimming pool, and to the detriment of Lena's Bakehouse. This is a good thing!
<P>
In general, life is going well but between walking Her Majesty, going to the airport, and working out, it's also super-busy. Let's hope that in my odd moments of solitude I can get back here a little bit more often.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-84406975231528660082012-01-09T14:49:00.000+10:002012-01-09T14:49:37.297+10:00Beyond Maths Trades<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The maths traders in Australia were discussing whether it was possible in a maths trade to offer multiple items in exchange for one in a maths trade. No it's not, it doesn't even nearly work for reasons which are obvious to mathematicians. However I thought about it for a bit, and realised that with the introduction of a pricing mechanism, there can be such a trade. So I borrowed some symbols from the Z Notation (in which I was trained as an undergrad) and wrote this spec:<br />
<br />
Let <b>I</b> be the set of items in the trade.<br />
Let <b>U</b> be the set of users in the trade.<br />
Let <b>P</b> be the set of prices, objects that can be summed and are totally ordered.<br />
<br />
# every item has an owner, "<img alt="\fun" height="8" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/fun-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="14" />" means total function<br />
owns : <b>I</b> <img alt="\fun" height="8" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/fun-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="14" /> <b>U</b><br />
<br />
# if you don't own anything you're not in trade<br />
ran(owns) = <b>U</b><br />
<br />
# some people assign values to some things, "<img alt="\pfun" height="8" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/pfun-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="14" />" means partial function<br />
values : <b>U</b> <img alt="\cross" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/cross-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /><b> I</b> <img alt="\pfun" height="8" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/pfun-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="14" /> <b>P</b><br />
<br />
# For each user u, there is a function vu, which is the values that user places on items<br />
<b>v</b>u = { (i,p) | (u,i)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><img alt="\mapsto" height="9" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/mapsto-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="10" /> p <img alt="\in" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/in-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> values }<br />
<br />
# and that user at least values the things they own<br />
<img alt="\forall" height="10" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/forall-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="9" />u:<b>U</b> <img alt="@" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/spot-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> owns~<img align="absbottom" alt="\limg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/limg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" />{u}<img align="absbottom" alt="\rimg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/rimg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><img align="absbottom" alt="\subseteq" height="10" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/subseteq-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="9" /> dom(<b>v</b>u)<br />
<br />
# Then a valid solution to the trade is an assignment of items to users<br />
s : <b>I</b> <img alt="\pfun" height="8" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/pfun-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="14" /> <b>U</b><br />
<br />
# the items received by u are<br />
<b>r</b>u = s~<img align="absbottom" alt="\limg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/limg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" />{u}<img align="absbottom" alt="\rimg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/rimg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /><br />
<br />
# the items sent by u are<br />
<b>s</b>u = owns~<img align="absbottom" alt="\limg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/limg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" />{u}<img align="absbottom" alt="\rimg" height="14" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/rimg-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <img alt="\cat" height="11" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/cat-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="12" /> ran(s)<br />
<br />
# such that nothing is assigned to the person it came from<br />
s<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> </span><img alt="\cap" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/cap-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="10" /> owns = <img alt="\emptyset" height="11" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/emptyset-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="11" /><br />
<br />
# and everyone gets a bargain, by their own personal pricing rules<br />
<img alt="\forall" height="10" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/forall-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="9" />u:ran(s) <img alt="@" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/spot-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16px;">Σ (i </span><img alt="\in" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/in-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <b>r</b>u) <b>v</b>u(i) <img alt="\geq" height="9" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/geq-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16px;">Σ (i </span><img alt="\in" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/in-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <b>s</b>u) <b>v</b>u(i)<br />
<br />
# For a solution to be useful, it must be non-trivial:<br />
s <img alt="\neq" height="7" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/neq-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="7" /> <img alt="\emptyset" height="11" src="http://staff.washington.edu/jon/z/zimg/emptyset-m.gif" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-auto;" width="11" /><br />
<br />
# and furthermore, we would like to restrict ourselves to minimal solutions so as to not make offered trades incomprehensibly complex, so if t is a solution, then t is not a subset of s (can't find the right symbols to write that!)</div><br />
It occurs to me that blogspot is maybe not the ideal medium for writing specifications.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-77426927085667981732012-01-05T11:12:00.000+10:002012-01-05T11:12:38.641+10:00The Numbers for 2011<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Wow, I am really crap at blogging these days! When I started blogging, Facebook hadn't been invented, so if I wanted to say something I had to say it here. These days there are too many distractions.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-years-ambitions-planning-ahead.html">2007 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2009/01/numbers-are-in-for-2008.html">2008 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/numbers-for-2009.html">2009 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2011/01/numbers-for-2010.html">2010 article</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b>There are 448 games in this collection (last year 424).</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b><br />
</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b>The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.43 (last year 6.4).</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b><br />
</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b>Your average rating for this collection is 7.04 (last year 7.07).</b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><b><br />
</b></span><br />
<div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b>On average you have played each of these games 7.75 times (last year 7.11). </b></span></div><div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b>Your Friendless Metric is 1 (102 games played 10+ times, 46 games never played.) (last year 1, 89, 46) </b></span></div><div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b>Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.49 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 55.24%. (last year 3.39, 55.24%)</b></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So I had a bit of a blowout in the collection in 2011. Apart from the bonus influx from the Cochabamba competition, I added a few (notably, <b>Thunderstone</b> and a lot of expansions), and got rid of hardly any. That's about to change, but it hasn't yet. Also in 2011 I set up <i>Scrabblette</i> with her own games shelf so she can see how many games she's responsible for us owning (and not playing).</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I didn't do a whole lot of face-to-face gaming in 2011, but I did join up at Yucata.de, and played a great many good games many times. I also played a great many mediocre games many times. Luckily Yucata keeps adding new stuff and I keep changing what I play. Also relevantly, I acquired <b>Yspahan</b>, <b>Oregon</b>, <b>Famiglia</b> and <b>Thunderstone</b> after playing them on Yucata. Each of those got a lot of plays, and so didn't affect my stats too much. I do feel kinda dodgy that I have played the physical copy a couple of times, and the on-line game 50 times, and it counts as 50 plays for me, but that's a dodginess I can live with. There are also some games I own that I play on Yucata but will remove from my collection, and some that I will continue to enjoy to play on-line and in real life.</span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QbUPG7IJqQE/TwTzErcySkI/AAAAAAAAArs/vPdyVhsNaTg/s1600/pogo2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QbUPG7IJqQE/TwTzErcySkI/AAAAAAAAArs/vPdyVhsNaTg/s640/pogo2012.png" width="640" /></a></div>During the year I *did* manage to achieve my goal of 55% utilisation, after trying for several years. I'm fairly impressed that I managed to maintain that even with the Cochabamba influx.<br />
<br />
For 2012, my goal is to decrease the number of games I own. Since I have games lying all over the game room bench, that's pretty much necessary now. However I enoyed the Cochabamba gamefest so much that I intend to do a similar thing this year, i.e. acquire a bunch of games I know nothing about and figure them out and play them. Of course Tom won't be around to send them to me, so I'll have to pay for them myself... which is why I hope to sell a truckload of games from my collection. Trading *would* be an option if there were lots of new cool games up for trade in Australia, but there is not, so I'll just have to take money for them. If <i>Scrabblette</i> asks, that's why all those games are lying all over the game room bench.</div>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-77818104222948354932011-09-18T18:05:00.000+10:002011-09-18T18:05:07.057+10:00The Big Cochabamba Gamesfest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Well, Tom from Switzerland has been here for a few days now, and we've played all of the prize games except <b>Safranito</b>, which will be played soon. I think it's time I started giving some opinions. I'll start with the games I've played more than once, and hopefully do a second post when I've played the others again.<br />
<br />
<b>Asara</b> - Meh. It's a family game, but there's not much to it. It's the sort of game where you can do some things to help yourself, but otherwise you're a sailor on the seas of fate, or player chaos in this instance. People take the stuff you want, put the wrong coloured cards in the wrong places, and generally interfere with your elegant strategy. Some people like that in a game, I don't so much.<br />
<br />
<b>Luna</b> - I chose this because it can be played solitaire. My first solitaire play I was slightly overwhelmed by the complexity of the system, and lost to the AI opponent. My second play I taught the rules with Tom's assistance, so I guess I wasn't as overwhelmed as I thought. I played reasonably well, but we were all efficiently beaten by Tom. I know I have more things to learn. As a solitaire game it's a nice change from things like <b>Ghost Stories</b> and <b>Yggdrasil</b> and <b>Thunderstone</b> and <b>Pandemic</b> where the turns are simple and you're responding to chaos. Luna is effectively randomness-free after the set-up, so it's susceptible to analysis (and analysis-paralysis for those who are so inclined). It's the sort of solitaire game where you can think as deeply as you like, and that won't be deep enough. I like the style, and although I'm not completely convinced by the game, it's intriguing.<br />
<br />
<b>Skull and Roses</b> - This is the second lightest of the games, and is a bit like Liar's Dice but even simpler. It takes up to 6 players and goes for about 20 minutes, so we've been playing it to finish the evenings off. It's not the sort of game you'd gather together specifically to play, but it's easy enough to quickly teach and play a round or two with non-gamers. Now that the SdJ has been defined as being for quite light games, I guess it was a good candidate.<br />
<br />
<b>Die Burgen von Burgund</b> - I've saved the best for last! There's a school of though that says that this is one of those games where the moves are so finely balanced you can't really make a bad one, and so you can't really make a good one either. The best you can hope for is that you take the stuff someone else wants :-). And then in the end, someone wins because the scoring rules say that they have to, and you're not sure whether it was good play or a butterfly flapping its wings in Essen that caused it.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, dBvB definitely has a feelgood factor to it, in that you can almost always achieve something, and you can't screw yourself so badly that you won't be able to make good moves in the future. So in the end, nobody feels like they played really badly and nobody's disappointed. It does take two hours though, so there is some sense that you've taken a long time to randomly select a winner - like <b>Killer Bunnies</b> with all the expansions. Yet despite all this, I like it, and the people I've played with generally agree.</div>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-11937796997667040642011-09-12T09:44:00.000+10:002011-09-12T09:44:26.760+10:00Lancaster<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwGx-NXO-Ctyb4q46jAHKigjp4AIMNvFQ1e54y0CENe25LcVCcb0o3QJ4LanKwpc0xrpx6msDUaLFW0MJxvxf-8UIeaZ92W7jpavuwv9BHSNnpQh2O_Xoyjqx7T46HyUXaBGgscg/s1600/321460_10150363135727125_607767124_9744813_1246971586_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwGx-NXO-Ctyb4q46jAHKigjp4AIMNvFQ1e54y0CENe25LcVCcb0o3QJ4LanKwpc0xrpx6msDUaLFW0MJxvxf-8UIeaZ92W7jpavuwv9BHSNnpQh2O_Xoyjqx7T46HyUXaBGgscg/s400/321460_10150363135727125_607767124_9744813_1246971586_n.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br />
I've received the games mentioned as the prize in my previous post. If I was a more frequent blogger (sorry) I would have told you all about them. Maybe I'll get to that. Anyway, I've been busy punching and bagging and reading rules.<br />
<br />
Lancaster is one of the games with rules in German, so I printed out the English rules from BGG. Last night when I was reading them I didn't have a translated bits manifest, so I was trying to match the HUNDREDS of bits to their German description. There were a few things I couldn't understand, but it was pretty obvious that all the red bits went together, all the green bits went together, and so on for the five player colours. However for one component there were bits in 4 player colours, and not the 5th.<br />
<br />
I figured I'd lost it in the sofa when we were punching it (my sister is a very vigorous bit-puncher) so I went and pulled all the cushions off the sofa. I found two pens and a scrunchie, but no purple castle. So I went to the bedroom where I'd previously tried to read the rules but fallen asleep, and searched in the bed. Not there either. So I went to the game room where I'd say on the sofa to do the bagging, not there either. So I looked for the sprues, to see if we'd missed something. The sprues were in the garbage, and the bag they were in seemed to be full of oil, so the sprues were all oily and tangled together with the world's most annoying teabag. The purple castle wasn't there, and as far as I could tell there was no place it had come from, so maybe it didn't exist at all. However it was really quite yukky searching oily teabaggy sprues.<br />
<br />
I gave up, and spent quite a long time washing my hands and went back to reading the rules. When I got to the special two-player rules it mentioned that each player takes two of the small castle mats... that was when I decided to look at BGG for a parts manifest. Indeed, there are only 4 small castles, in 4 of the 5 player colours.<br />
<br />
In any case, it looks like a decent game that probably won't run too long. Right now, I think I need to go wash my hands again.</div>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-89222608801108695222011-05-31T12:24:00.051+10:002011-05-31T13:50:24.764+10:00Where on Earth is...A couple of years ago, CyberKev told me we would be receiving a board-gaming visitor in Brisbane, who'd be joining us to play games for a while. Tom turned out to be a journalist from Switzerland, and he'd previously been on the panel for the Spiel des Jahre. In fact, he still received copies of the SdJ games, so that year in Brisbane we played <b>Fauna</b> and <b>Der Schwarm</b> and <b>Zack und Pack</b> and <b>Sushizock im Gockelwok</b> and my first play of <b>Dominion</b>, in German. But then Tom had to continue his world tour so he auctioned off his games (woohoo!), and we added each other on Facebook, and off he went.<br />
<br />
Then Tom started adding strange photos on Facebook. Like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-uIdwVfRwGEnNTJayNc8ATKBO6gmvPiU-qDjAc_SngqqXrCQlZNarfEaBrnNulPT5Fokmj4PEo-4uoN9vW_ImM8WXo4mNONhbV_AVymgliozIZuPUSiDcYata8th9Cy0FYWcadA/s1600/107.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-uIdwVfRwGEnNTJayNc8ATKBO6gmvPiU-qDjAc_SngqqXrCQlZNarfEaBrnNulPT5Fokmj4PEo-4uoN9vW_ImM8WXo4mNONhbV_AVymgliozIZuPUSiDcYata8th9Cy0FYWcadA/s400/107.jpg" /></a></div><br />
and this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3AZSyWZ_x4eY17Q_eZu2xWVP5nZHySdww8CKnK6PvdJ3B0edK3tHlALQjb9yzktKBl95h9tnZcO6ka70A_vHCZ0p1QnBGTpnSbXFjR9HnAkflQvpI4CTwhsFK46hOTqYIs-eGxg/s1600/5773_1041155848961_1827518890_93044_5089438_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3AZSyWZ_x4eY17Q_eZu2xWVP5nZHySdww8CKnK6PvdJ3B0edK3tHlALQjb9yzktKBl95h9tnZcO6ka70A_vHCZ0p1QnBGTpnSbXFjR9HnAkflQvpI4CTwhsFK46hOTqYIs-eGxg/s400/5773_1041155848961_1827518890_93044_5089438_n.jpg" /></a></div><br />
and some of Tom's friends started speculating on where these photos were taken. But then one day, it got serious. Tom announced that this was in fact "The Big Cochabamba Photo Competition". The rules were pretty vicious - there were 200 photos of famous and not-so-famous places, all with those little Kinder Surprise dudes in front. As the focus was on the toys, it wasn't always so easy to see the background. For each, you needed to post as a comment to the photo: what country it was in; where it was; what the thing in the photo was. The competition would end at midnight, New Year's Eve 2010, Switzerland time - at the time, in about six months. Whoever had the most points would win. Tactics such as copying, lying, etc, were allowed. The first 5 places would win a copy of each of the SdJ nominees for 2011, and for first prize Tom would come and teach them to you. <br />
<br />
Wow, huge! Apart from being a very sweet prize, it was also a competition that I *wanted* to be good at. I like to be at least faintly aware of the existence of the rest of the world. The first thing to do, being a gamer, was to develop a strategy.<br />
<br />
That involved having lunch with CyberKev. We didn't come up with a really good plan, but we did agree that essential elements of a strategy were sniping, deception, and actually knowing the answers. Furthermore, I was convinced that everybody would forget about the competition, maybe even I would, so it was best to get the answers early and be prepared rather than try to do it all at the last minute. In fact, my primary strategy was to hope that everyone else forgot.<br />
<br />
I started by writing down the numbers 1 to 200 and writing beside each what the location was. I didn't have many answers, maybe 30. There were obvious places like the Eiffel Tower and London Bridge (in fact, both the one in England and the one in Victoria). I then spent quite a while Googling for things like "building that looks like a spaceship on a harbour", which turned out to be the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. I also showed a lot of photos to <i>Scrabblette</i>, who was able to identify the Wrigley Building in Chicago, and one of Stalin's "Seven Sisters" in Moscow. I Googled for obelisks and found that there's one in Buenos Aires, and a couple of Tom's photos were from there. Along with comments from other participants, I think I struggled to about 100 confirmed answers. Although the list was filling up, there were lots of gaps.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu3XwMa3_plDrEuvF8xQ_-HZGmuGHJWktYAf2Bl1hzLwITcRg0Rl0FnKL4YEeEpTatudnYpdIMiQU9Poal0uAJiv3-nZYeN5dudQpz4bV6RC20o4D39RRpfo0dNPFqLRdEfNwEQ/s1600/DSCF0106.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu3XwMa3_plDrEuvF8xQ_-HZGmuGHJWktYAf2Bl1hzLwITcRg0Rl0FnKL4YEeEpTatudnYpdIMiQU9Poal0uAJiv3-nZYeN5dudQpz4bV6RC20o4D39RRpfo0dNPFqLRdEfNwEQ/s400/DSCF0106.JPG" /></a></div><br />
Then I hit upon the idea of searching for tourist attractions in places Tom had been to, and seeing if any of the pictures thrown up by the search looked familiar. Consequently I was able to identify Pablo Neruda's house in Valparaiso, and a few others.<br />
<br />
The search went on. As I was trying to identify exactly which part of the Great Wall of China Tom had been to, it occurred to me that there were photos from Beijing and Ulanbaator and Moscow, and maybe he'd been on the Trans-Siberian railway. Because I would, if I was travelling the world. So I Googled all of the cities at which the Trans-Siberian railway stops. I was able to identify one of the pictures as being the "Rossija", one of the trains which runs that track. By the shape of the banister, I was able to figure out that it was at Irkutsk station. <br />
<br />
I also had the idea that Tom might have left some clues somewhere else on the web. He is a journalist, it's his job to write stuff. Maybe he'd written about playing games on the banks of the River Don, or something. So I searched for Tom and found just one article, in German, which turned out not to mention his holiday at all.<br />
<br />
My next idea was that as some of the photos were of Brisbane, where I live, Tom had probably invited some other people who lived in other places pictured to be in the competition. So all I had to do was cyberstalk all of Tom's friends as well. There were 35 or so people who had "liked" the competition announcement, so I looked at their Facebook profiles to see if they had any photos of their home town. This was just a little bit successful - someone had gone down the Li River in China, or to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, and I was able to confirm my suspicions on a couple of photos.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidnaNJJw40uNFABDM4_CKLCf8vwDf5OgmGniN80hmT5WdJ9J5CNllbT_p_rdvOOl5P30Upb7LCuW5jOpv9ZQYLPLvmn9lpk3DcwjucbSRGJT1FvbODnxaafkoYWBNzQFZ2TUCHgQ/s1600/190.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidnaNJJw40uNFABDM4_CKLCf8vwDf5OgmGniN80hmT5WdJ9J5CNllbT_p_rdvOOl5P30Upb7LCuW5jOpv9ZQYLPLvmn9lpk3DcwjucbSRGJT1FvbODnxaafkoYWBNzQFZ2TUCHgQ/s400/190.jpg" /></a></div><br />
What else could I try? I took note of the date of publication of all of the photos - they weren't all uploaded at the same time - with the idea that they might be clumped by location. They were, a little, and I was able to guess that Tom had been to Tennessee, which I think was how I figured out that the gates with the musical notes must be the gates of Graceland.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL3L8-Vv5K_lWU70Fgo2I2CYUz3E11i0Xc3YmFqhy-SkMMe4rzaSoDC7_qFLtfot9G3Uk5FAjRh0xM_2EvIjzr78ekUgg0KjrAn90_rzJGRy_uqkxSB5sH0_8qcX8LnvStuhsgWA/s1600/bydate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL3L8-Vv5K_lWU70Fgo2I2CYUz3E11i0Xc3YmFqhy-SkMMe4rzaSoDC7_qFLtfot9G3Uk5FAjRh0xM_2EvIjzr78ekUgg0KjrAn90_rzJGRy_uqkxSB5sH0_8qcX8LnvStuhsgWA/s400/bydate.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Time was passing and I had some hard ones to go. There were lots of waterfalls, so I started searching for waterfall pictures. There were lots of photos of Iguazu Falls, and a couple of difficult ones from the Milford Track in New Zealand. I got the New Zealand idea from Pancake Rocks, which I had actually been to myself. There were a few volcanoes, including one with a classical volcano shape. I searched for volcano pictures, and eventually decided it had to be Volcan Osorno in South America... but what was the building in the foreground? I searched the surrouding towns of Patagonia street by street using Google Maps but could not find that building.<br />
<br />
I had another idea. I started searching using Spanish keywords. Don't search for "volcano", search for "volcan", don't search for "church", search for "iglesia". I told Google to return results in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German, and let me worry about understanding it :-). For the South American churches, that was very productive.<br />
<br />
Occasionally people would post an answer, which would set me off searching that town and everywhere near it, in multiple languages. In particular there was this guy called Eric who was posting LOTS of answers. If he was correct, I'd post my answer as well, because the cat was out of the bag for that one. This gave Eric the impression that I was just copying him, when in fact I was spending hours searching for answers. I had loads more answers up my sleeve, but following the sniping strategy I was saving them for the last moment.<br />
<br />
Tom also started posting reminders that the competition was going to end. That messed up my strategy of hoping everyone else would forget! However as people started posting some more answers I got a few more hints - the wooden fort in Russia and the bridge over the Panama Canal were gifts from other people. And of course if they were correct I'd post my answer.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_brnOFVJds4EJoU6jWc5SqRgj5u35xpPRIIqjDzI17hIvcmFiUOkQqKsRnKDPvs0uzxzCevcaKWNAiJncZvVhajCeUBYFoDnWLd37qYP4CCqGK63d06YQxlTSHwwqeHSgqrrOQ/s1600/DSCF0108.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_brnOFVJds4EJoU6jWc5SqRgj5u35xpPRIIqjDzI17hIvcmFiUOkQqKsRnKDPvs0uzxzCevcaKWNAiJncZvVhajCeUBYFoDnWLd37qYP4CCqGK63d06YQxlTSHwwqeHSgqrrOQ/s400/DSCF0108.JPG" /></a></div><br />
By December, I'd seen every bridge, waterfall, church, bell tower, desert and salt flat in the entire world, in 5 languages. I'd hassled colleagues in Beijing and Quebec, and lots of people at work, and had only a few left to go. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF9mXSXfhF3i98bxqiJKyEZ66Y4Ov90JuZIirHPdXLeY8oAqLvpkV09if4nT93MNVpwVcYvxLMVM7Njfl4IfbOxVUuK_HWIEWcH_RNBelUF7iRKptRURoCCbxhFbBGsMi-vGNN-g/s1600/Capture-tom%25C2%25A0-%25C2%25A0Navigateur+de+fichiers-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF9mXSXfhF3i98bxqiJKyEZ66Y4Ov90JuZIirHPdXLeY8oAqLvpkV09if4nT93MNVpwVcYvxLMVM7Njfl4IfbOxVUuK_HWIEWcH_RNBelUF7iRKptRURoCCbxhFbBGsMi-vGNN-g/s400/Capture-tom%25C2%25A0-%25C2%25A0Navigateur+de+fichiers-1.png" /></a></div><br />
On New Year's Eve I made a pass through, and once again answered anything that someone else had correct. New Year's Eve, Switzerland time, was 10am New Year's Day, Australian time, so when I went to bed I knew I'd still have a few hours up my sleeve. Of course I was too excited to sleep well, having worked at this competition for months, and when I woke up in the morning there were of course hundreds of notifications. However I knew I couldn't do anything about other people, I could just hope that having answered many of them before anyone else that I would win any tie-breaker. I just had a few more answers to put in, but I knew I had to be aware of Tom's clock being out of sync with mine, and I had to watch for other people sniping answers to the ones I didn't know.<br />
<br />
I had about 16 windows open, and at about 9:45 I entered my last answers. I knew Eric was on-line, as I'd copied his answer about the Chicago Fish Board or something just a moment before. Good luck to him if he was as obsessed and competitive as me... however as he was in California he might have been partying. I spent the moments until 10am refreshing each window looking for last clues... until Tom closed down the album, and I had to stop.<br />
<br />
Wow, what a rush! And all of a sudden, it was gone. Apart from being tired as one always is on New Year's Day, I felt lost. I hadn't planned for life after The Big Cochabamba Photo Competition. Life returned to normal.<br />
<br />
Then, one day, Tom posted the news that I'd won. (Names removed from the image to protect the innocent.) Michael was a bit of a surprise - he'd only appeared in about December and I've got no idea how much research he did himself, I always considered Eric to be the threat.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9pb4N-3m_aq7ypF3N0ijY2PMC0Suy1NH0dfTqqdfRHyjYOrumrNJRfLdotE5IMf8VCCpnn28xt-uRsYZuMO5AY0ZhrdGqVlF5qw9a2vt6_mrMhIiZEhmc3FYQQLCuWJVmZah_xg/s1600/166524_10150117430282125_607767124_7539717_727091_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9pb4N-3m_aq7ypF3N0ijY2PMC0Suy1NH0dfTqqdfRHyjYOrumrNJRfLdotE5IMf8VCCpnn28xt-uRsYZuMO5AY0ZhrdGqVlF5qw9a2vt6_mrMhIiZEhmc3FYQQLCuWJVmZah_xg/s400/166524_10150117430282125_607767124_7539717_727091_n.jpg" /></a></div><br />
That means Tom's coming to visit! He contacted me a couple of days ago and told me I could actually select 9 games from the list of nominees, as I may already own (true) or not like (also true) some of the final 9 contenders. So, one day some games will arrive, and Tom will come over in September and play them with me!<br />
<br />
It's a very cool prize, but it was also a very cool competition. It's really quite amazing how much you can find on Google, and how many cool things there are in the world to see. Thank you very much to Tom, it's been loads of fun.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-67527442491098970092011-01-01T11:50:00.000+10:002011-01-01T11:50:00.442+10:00Nickels and Dimes and Hits of the Year<b>Dimes</b><br />
<br />
These are games I played 10 or more times in 2010: Bananagrams, Peloponnes, WYPS, Blue Max, Palago, Scrabble, Start Player<br />
<br />
<b>Nickels</b><br />
<br />
These are games I played 5 or more times in 2010: Dominion: Seaside, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Tobago, Zendo, Avalam Bitaka, San Juan, Africa, Antike, Gonzaga, Jaipur, Lord of the Rings<br />
<br />
<b>Hits of the Year</b><br />
<br />
The year was sadly characterised by me going to gaming feeling pretty worn out and not feeling like explaining rules. Consequently I played a lot of easier games, and other people's games (particularly AJ's), because the other people have to teach them. I don't know whether this is a fitness problem, an age problem, or an enthusiasm problem, but it prevented me playing things like Java or Key Harvest.<br />
<br />
<i>Blue Max</i> - this is not really my sort of game, but my good buddy The Evil Count von Walduck built an implementation of it on his site, hexcellgames.com, so I played it quite a few times. However it didn't maintain my interest. If you do like that sort of game, go to the site and join up.<br />
<br />
<i>Peloponnes</i> - This is very much my sort of game, because I play it solo :-). At about 15 minutes a game, you can experiment to see what effect different strategies have. I hope I keep playing it.<br />
<br />
<i>Start Player</i> - No really, we played this. In fact we had a Start Player tournament. It was pretty silly.<br />
<br />
<i>Tales of the Arabian Nights</i> I bought this at AGE in January, because <i>Scrabblette</i> is an Arabian Nights fanatic and I wanted to show it to her. I don't think it's as random as people say, and I try to play to win.I much prefer it with three players, as everybody's always involved and it doesn't go too long.<br />
<br />
<i>San Juan</i> It's good to see at least one old favourite hitting the table, probably because I've given it as a gift so there's often a copy around. I've recovered from my malaise after writing a computer version of it, and I'm keen to play. I won a couple of games with violet building and monument strategy, whose effectiveness surprised me.<br />
<br />
<i>Antike</i> I played this once a couple of years ago, and really liked the theme and thought the game was probably OK, so I acquired it in a trade. What a good idea! It's almost a war game, in that you can fight if you want to, but it's more the threat of combat that plays a part than actual carnage. Otherwise the strategy is to figure out where the easy VPs are (and are going to be) and play to get them. Eventually I started telling people that I always won with a gold strategy so that they'd take some of those points and make me think about something else.<br />
<br />
<i>Gonzaga</i> I just love games with maps of Europe, particularly historical ones, and this game has weird plastic bits, so I had to have it. I quite like it - I'm a little bit hesitant because it's the sort of game where you can be randomly screwed over without warning, and that can cost you a lot. <br />
<br />
<i>Lord of the Rings</i> This is one of AJ's games (which I have my own copy of). Every time I play it I'm reimpressed by how awesomely Knizia captured the themes of the book. Also, I usually win.<br />
<br />
<i>Attila</i> (4 plays) Even better than a map of Europe is a Dark Ages map of Europe, so I had to have this. I finally got it in a trade, or I bought it from someone on the 'geek or something. It's not one of my favourites, but I do enjoy playing it anyway. I just can't get into my head how I can play well, and I don't remember whether I've won at all. But, I'll play any game with Visigoths.<br />
<br />
<i>Big City</i> (4 plays) Another game that really talks to me, and also which I rarely win. I can't believe I've only played 4 times, I feel like I've lost at it about 10 times. Nevertheless, the bits are great, it plays superbly, and I feel like I can do stuff even if it's not scoring points.<br />
<br />
<i>Caylus Magna Carta</i> (4 plays) I really really did not like Caylus, but I gave this as a gift once and when we played it I discovered there were nice rules without the provost, and I liked that a lot better. This is another game where I feel like I know what I'm doing, execute my plan, then discover that I've lost badly. Oh well.<br />
<br />
<i>Deduce or Die</i> (4 plays) This is one of the best deduction games, and CyberKev managed to convince the Evil Count to implement a version of it at Hexcell, so I've played it on-line a couple of times. I hope to play more next year.<br />
<br />
<i>Rootword</i> (4 plays) CyberKev felt the urge to acquire all of the games by Carl Chudyk, the <i>Glory to Rome</i> guy. This is a simple but odd word game, where you can steal other people's words at the risk that they may no longer be able to become words. Eventually he CyberKev sold his copy to me, so I can try it on <i>Scrabblette</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Phoenicia</i> (3 plays) Finally, another of AJ's games, included here because I really enjoy it and for a change, do quite well at it. I don't typically like auction games, but this one has the option to spend your money on something else which is just as good. I pretty much like the theme, understand the different paths to victory, and can handle the timing, so it's generally a positive experience.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-34706677323825880952011-01-01T11:22:00.000+10:002011-01-01T11:22:51.586+10:00Nickels and Dimes and Hits of the Year<b>Dimes</b><br />
<br />
These are games I played 10 or more times in 2010: Bananagrams, Peloponnes, WYPS, Blue Max, Palago, Scrabble, Start Player<br />
<br />
<b>Nickels</b><br />
<br />
These are games I played 5 or more times in 2010: Dominion: Seaside, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Tobago, Zendo, Avalam Bitaka, San Juan, Africa, Antike, Gonzaga, HJaipur, Lord of the Rings<br />
<br />
<b>Hits of the Year</b><br />
<br />
<i>Blue Max</i> - this is not really my sort of game, but my good buddy The Evil Count von Walduck built an implementation of it on his site, hexcellgames.com, so I played it quite a few times. However it didn't maintain my interest. <br />
<br />
<i>Peloponnes</i> - This is very much my sort of game, because I play it solo :-). At about 15 minutes a game, you can experiment to see what effect different strategies have. I hope I keep playing it.<br />
<br />
<i>Start Player</i> - No really, we played this. In fact we had a Start <br />
<br />
<i>Tales of the Arabian Nights</i><br />
<i>San Juan</i><br />
<i>Antike</i><br />
<i>Gonzaga</i><br />
<i>Lord of the Rings</i><br />
<i>Attila</i><br />
<i>Big City</i><br />
<i>Caylus Magna Carta</i><br />
<i>Deduce or Die</i><br />
<i>Rootword</i><br />
<i>Phoenicia</i>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-42025592208603511662011-01-01T11:11:00.000+10:002011-01-01T11:11:08.547+10:00The Numbers for 2010It's that time of the year again, when I look back on the previous year's gaming and am dismayed by the number of new games I bought and did not play, and the games that I have and love and haven't been played for years. This is the fourth time I've done this, here are the previous articles for reference (mine, if not yours):<br />
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<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-years-ambitions-planning-ahead.html">2007 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2009/01/numbers-are-in-for-2008.html">2008 article</a><br />
<a href="http://sologamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/numbers-for-2009.html">2009 article</a><br />
<br />
I currently have 424 games in my collection. Last year I had 425, woohoo! I've acquired a few, so I must have got rid of some as well. Oh that's right, the RSPCA Store in New Farm got a couple of loads.<br />
<br />
<b>There are 424 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.4.<BR><br />
Your average rating for this collection is 7.07.<BR><br />
On average you have played each of these games 7.11 times.<BR><br />
Your Friendless Metric is 1 (89 games played 10+ times, 46 games never played.)<BR><br />
Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.39 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 54.24%.</b><br />
<br />
My average rating for my collection went up from 6.92 to 7.07, as a consequence of dumping stuff I didn't like. My CFM went from 53.41% utilisation to 54.24%, which is much harder than it sounds to achieve! <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjOZlhmH9OyaSWW-0PAckmcoBhm036BVfX2JO0I6_fVfxpR-1RdjL_C85t1yt1dNpeI1lOyZj-4lER3le0F5JF-_HOosGeELYM92oQy7jACSPcU4JHIHB_d_OfitJDHkji8ymNGA/s1600/Friendless.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjOZlhmH9OyaSWW-0PAckmcoBhm036BVfX2JO0I6_fVfxpR-1RdjL_C85t1yt1dNpeI1lOyZj-4lER3le0F5JF-_HOosGeELYM92oQy7jACSPcU4JHIHB_d_OfitJDHkji8ymNGA/s400/Friendless.png" /></a></div><br />
It seems 2010 was generally a year of consolidation, rather than accumulation, which is a nice change. Next I need to consolidate further to games that I actually play. This is a matter of some urgency, as the games no longer fit on the shelves in the game room.<br />
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I dropped to 493 plays last year, the lowest since I really got into the hobby. I have to admit, learning French has taken up a lot of that time, it's a very time-intensive pursuit. The amount of gaming I do at home has continued to decrease :-(. My goals for the new year are to continue down this path, with maybe even a decrease in the number of games I own. They seem to breed.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-50607827184401849442010-08-15T09:34:00.001+10:002010-08-15T09:36:05.314+10:00Scrabble, Encore Une FoisOur friend Miss Jane has just returned from a two month cat fondling tour of Europe. So far we've been able to find out that she went to England where she saw cats, Paris where she saw cats, and Rome where there were entire ancient temples full of cats. Or something like that. However Miss Jane also brought back for me a French Scrabble set (chacun a son mot à dire!), so we played on Friday night. <br />
<br />
We weren't very well prepared, as I didn't take along a French dictionary. I don't have a really good French <b>Scrabble</b> dictionary. Consider the requirements - it would need a really good range of words, particularly acceptable foreign words which are the ones you need to play the odd letters - and it would need verb conjugations so that we can determine whether DEVRAI is indeed the second person singular future tense of DEVOIR as we expected. I have a Petit Robert which weighs a couple of kilos, but it has way too many pages to be convenient to use. <br />
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In the end we played with the Larousse dictionary on my iPod, which worked out OKish. I'll be acquiring a proper French <b>Scrabble</b> dictionary as a matter of urgency though, as we found it quite hard to play foreign words. AÏ is still acceptable, by the way (still a three-toed sloth) and so is WOK, which saved me.<br />
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You might recall that I previously posted that Miss Jane and I played <b>Scarabeo</b>, the Italian word game. Yes, despite her mild-mannered crazy cat lady demeanour, Miss Jane is a polylinguist as well. We found the Italian game to be easier than French, for some reason. Maybe because Miss Jane spent a lot of the French game with absolutely atrocious letters. The French letter selection has more vowels, and still Jane couldn't find any.<br />
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A highlight of the game for me was my luck in finding the right letters for a bingo, so I was able to play SIGNALE for 72 points. However otherwise the game was fairly uninspiring, with letters like the K, W and Z even harder to play in a language we don't know so well. K, W,X and Z are worth 10 points, J and Q are worth 8, and QI is not acceptable. Luckily there are 6 Us instead of 4.<br />
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I can't find the score sheet, but I can say that although the scores weren't spectacular we didn't disgrace ourselves. We'd probably have a good game against a native speaker who didn't play <b>Scrabble</b> much. Sadly, for the moment I've run out of new languages in which I feel capable of playing. In any case, thank you ever so much Miss Jane for indulging me this far!<br />
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</script>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-16534245487574651832010-07-01T21:13:00.001+10:002010-07-02T12:21:48.171+10:00Analyse MeI share many conversations with CyberKev about personality disorders - those that we have, those that we're trying to avoid, and those that we aspire to. After due consideration, I've decided I probably do have a personality disorder, but I don't know what it might be called. Please help, Wise Readers.<br />
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When I find a new thing I'm interested in, I become obsessed with it. For example, board gaming. I acquired 300 games in 3 years, played many more than that, started a web site about it, travelled inter-state to pursue the hobby. <br />
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Then board-gaming went out (not completely, but look at the posts on this blog), and was replaced by anime (which didn't last long), Mafia Wars on Facebook (about 6 months, way too long) and now learning French. Interestingly, learning French takes about as much time as Mafia Wars did and is more useful in the short, medium and long terms. Before board games there was stamp collecting, Neverwinter Nights (18 months), and I forget what else. I'm very old, I've had a lot of obsessions.<br />
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The characteristics of these obsessions are that I spend horrendous amounts of time researching the topic, I spend unnecessary amounts of money on it, I tend to become moderately expert, and often I drop it suddenly. Of course board gaming can't be dropped suddenly, as that's how I met all of my friends and I still have a room full of games, but there's no doubt it has waned. Neverwinter Nights, Mafia Wars and stamp collecting were all dumped overnight. I still have the stamp collection, and I might get back to it one day.<br />
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Am I the only victim of Serial Obsession Syndrome? No, I'm not, I found another person who blogs about it. However, I do think it's a mystery to my wives, all 3 of whom have suffered through these obsessions. If only there was a name for it, I could explain it up front :-). My beautiful <i>Dr Scrabblette</i> is very tolerant, though, and the learning French obsession is at least compatible with her interests. (Also, she can't criticise, she has 6 degrees.)<br />
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I did an on-line personality test which suggested I might be Narcissistic or Paranoid, but since both of them require me to care what other people think, they're obviously not right. I've done many many OCD tests, to try to make my little sister happy, but I've failed every one. Not enough Asperger's, not enough anything. Am I Normal? Tell me! <br />
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On the other hand, I'm not sure I trust you guys. You board game geeks are generally pretty weird.<br />
<br />
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</script>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-10878338024335960402010-06-07T20:51:00.001+10:002010-06-07T20:53:47.693+10:00Scarabeo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-u5hzwcWXnvVnOlVbtVWaH-bRY4kN9ds9NAXAybicaYMDHHrMe0jgX5T0iZZeUiRYzmfXu6_jQkqdUCUzIm1r53myc7xxBaJvPMYbue-H8FGHtdYfCl3oYF2o6-Kkq4vSzybIA/s1600/scarabeo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-u5hzwcWXnvVnOlVbtVWaH-bRY4kN9ds9NAXAybicaYMDHHrMe0jgX5T0iZZeUiRYzmfXu6_jQkqdUCUzIm1r53myc7xxBaJvPMYbue-H8FGHtdYfCl3oYF2o6-Kkq4vSzybIA/s400/scarabeo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
No, I'm not dead. I've been doing other things. For example, learning Italian. Shortly after we started the Italian For Travellers course, I researched Italian games. I discovered there's an Italian variation on <i>Scrabble</i> called <i>Scarabeo</i>, and I set about finding one. I found a BGG user who was willing to trade away his copy, so in exchange for a game I mail-ordered from Nestor Games, a copy of <i>Scarabeo</i> made its way to Australia on a slow boat. It arrived a few weeks ago, but <i>Scrabblette</i> (soon to be <i>Dr Scrabblette</i>) has been too busy to play, and indeed too busy to study Italian. Luckily, on the weekend Miss Jane was looking for a game, and Miss Jane has been learning Italian as well, so we played.<br />
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I have two Italian dictionaries, both of which got a serious workout during the game, but only short time after we started Jane said "We're doing it! We're playing Scrabble in Italian!" The result is shown above. The previous game Miss Jane and I played was <b>Jaipur</b>, in French, so we're really getting quite random.<br />
<br />
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</script>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-72456002652418547272010-05-03T12:07:00.000+10:002010-05-03T12:07:30.760+10:00GonzagaLast night we played Gonzaga again. There were three of us - myself, Other Kevin, and Meng. The inactive countries were Germany and Eastern Europe.<br />
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From the start, we could see that Meng was trying to build a large fief. Kevin was placing in odd places, so was maybe going to bonus sympol points, but soon claimed a sea league. I attempted to cover my 6 symbols as quickly as possible.<br />
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I completed the bonus after 6 rounds and kevin claimed another sea league. Meng's empire stretched from Spain to Russia. I tried to get sea leagues and easy city points, but was blocked inadvertantly by Meng several times. Kevin claimed another sea league.<br />
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In the end, Meng got the bonus for the largest fief, but only 10 symbol points. Kevin claimed only 15 bonus points to go to 97, and I claimed 35 to go to... 95. A glorious victory to Kevin, which demonstrated that the sea league strategy is very effective.<br />
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<div style="color: #274e13;">Ieri, abbiamo giocato Gonzaga ancora una volta. Eravamo tre - me stesso, Altro Kevin, e Meng. Le nazione innative erano la Germania e lÉuropa Orientale.</div><div style="color: #274e13;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #274e13;">Dall'inizio, vedevamo che Meng provava costruire un feudo grando. Kevin piazzava sui posti scompagnati - forse lei tentarebbe guadagnare i punti per le città segrete. Tra poco, lei rivendicava una lega navale. Io tentavo coprire i miei sei symboli il più presto.</div><div style="color: #274e13;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #274e13;">Completevo la gratifica dopo che abbiamo giocato sei turni, e Kevin rivendicava una altra lega navale. L'impero di Meng estendantesi dalla Spagna alla Russia. Provavo creare le lege navale e caprire le città per i punti facili, ma stavo blocato inavvertitamente di Meng parecchi volte. Kevin rivendicava una altra lega navale.</div><div style="color: #274e13;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #274e13;">Alla fine, Meng vincevo la gratifica per il feudo più grande, ma solo 10 punti per le città segrete. Kevin rivendicava 15 punti per le città segrete, per andare a 97 punti. Io rivendicave 35 punti per le città segrete per andare a... 95 punti. Una vittoria gloriosa a Kevin, che dimonstrado l'efficacia della strategia delle lega navale.</div><br />
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<div style="color: #073763;">La veille, nous avons joué encore une partie de Gonzaga. Nous étions trois - moi-même, Autre Kevin, et Meng. Les pays inactifs étaient l'Allemagne et l'Europe Orientale. </div><div style="color: #073763;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #073763;">Dès le debut, nous pouvions voir que Meng essayât bâtir le plus grande fief. Kevin mettait ses carreaux aux lieues divers - peut-être essayait-il d'avoir les points de plus pour les symboles - mais bientôt il marquait les points pour une ligue de mer. Je tentais couvrir mes symboles le plus vite.</div><div style="color: #073763;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #073763;">J'avais couvrit tous les six après six tours, et Kevin encore marquait une ligue de mer. L'empire du Meng s'étendait de l'Espagne a la Russe. J'essayais de marquer les points pour les ligues de mer, et aussi pour les cités faciles, mais j'étais bloqué par Meng, sans son vouloir. Encore une fois Kevin marquait une ligue de mer.</div><div style="color: #073763;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #073763;">À la fin, Meng gagnait les points pour le plus grande fief, mais il ne marquait que 10 points pour les villes secrets. Kevin marquait 15 points pour les cités secrets pour aller à 97 points, et je marquais tous les 35 pour aller à... 95. Une victoire magnifique à Kevin, que démontrait l'efficacité de la stratégie des ligues de mer.</div><br />
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</script>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-28955700478397786782010-04-04T16:23:00.003+10:002010-04-09T09:49:27.977+10:00PeloponnesAs you may have guessed from the title of this blog, I don't mind playing solitaire games occasionally. One I've been planning to get for months, interrupted by holidays and lack of finances, is <span style="font-weight: bold;">Peloponnes</span>. It's an extra-lite civ game, taking 15 minutes per player. I haven't played against opponents yet, but that's certainly correct for one player. Consequently, after getting it yesterday, I've played it 11 times today. I think I'm qualified to write a review now.<br />
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Each player starts with a city on the Peloponnesian peninsula, e.g. Sparta, and this is back in the old days when the amount that a country produced was related to its wealth, unlike Greece today. The city has some number of people, some amount of money, and some ability to harvest wood, stone and food. There are 40 tiles which can potentially be added to the city to improve it. The game runs over 8 rounds, in each of which 5 tiles are available. In a multi-player game an auction is held to allocate the tiles, but in solitaire you just pay the base price for the tile you want, and the other 4 are discarded. So, throughout the game you can make 8 purchases to improve your city.<br />
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The tiles are of two types - terrain, and buildings. The terrain tiles provide some resources - wood, stone, food or some combination thereof, and usually give you some more people as well. The building tiles give you some resources, some people, and some special abilities. The buildings require stone and / or wood to be built, as well as the base cost which all tiles have, which is paid in money.<br />
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After you've chosen and paid money for the tile you want, you add it to your city and receive any people that come with it. At this point you would usually have to pay resources to build a building, but you aren't required to. You may choose to buy the building on hire purchase, in which case you put one of your spare coins on the building, and that coin is captured until you finish paying for it. Otherwise, the building functions as normal.<br />
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Then you gather resources. You just add up how many wood, stone and food you get, and add them to the tally on your player sheet. One of the cities even gives you an extra person at this point - maybe they've invented Catholicism or something. You also receive money by taxing your people - the more people you have the more tax you receive. Now here's an interesting feature of the game - the tracks you record resources on on the player sheet are finite - you will have more resources than you can record. Any extras turn into "luxury goods" and are recorded separately. As luxury goods can be converted back into normal goods at a cost of 2 for 1, that effectively allows you to store stuff, with some wastage. It also simulates trade, when all of my extra food turns into stone if I need it to.<br />
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After income is recorded, there's a chance of some disasters happening. There are 5 possible disasters - earthquake, plague, famine, tempest and decline. Each of them attempts to ruin your civilisation in some way, and will cost you something unless you were smart and rich enough to buy a building which gives you immunity to that disaster (that's some of the special abilities I mentioned). Disasters aren't a complete surprise though. For each, there are 3 tokens, and there's a 16th token which is blank. Every round, 2 disaster tokens are revealed. If all three of one type have been revealed, the disaster happens. Consequently, by the end of the game, all disasters will have happened.<br />
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Three times during the game - once in the middle, once near the end, and once right at the end, there will be a supply round. At that point, you must pay one food for each of your people, and you must pay resources for the buildings you have on hire purchase, or you lose them. The supply rounds are somewhat predictable, but they can turn up at difficult times, and you definitely need to plan for them.<br />
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After 8 rounds of all that stuff, the game is done and scoring happens. First you calculate your prestige, which is the points for all of your tiles plus a few for any leftover money you have. Then you calculate your population score, which is 3 times the number of people you have. Your final score is the lesser of your population and prestige scores. Consequently, if you're playing for a high score, you need to keep in mind how many points you've got and how many people you've got, and try to balance them. People arrive sort of uniformly throughout the game, whereas the high prestige buildings arrive at the end, so it's typical to be behind on the prestige score until right at the end. It's also typical that two disasters happen in the last round, so you need to manage two disasters and the final supply round and balance your scoring all at the same time.<br />
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One wrinkle in the tile collection is the rule about terrain types. For two terrains to be placed next to each other, they must produce a resource in common. So a wood + food tile can go next to a food tile, but neither can go next to a rock tile. There are no rock + food tiles, so if your first tile is a rock-only tile, it's very difficult to get food production going. However, one of the buildings is the Barracks, which allows you to ignore the placement rule and invest in the lucrative single resource tiles. As the Barracks is expensive - it costs two people to play it, as well as its other costs - this strategy has to be deliberately committed to.<br />
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As I explore the game I'm seeing the strengths and weaknesses of the various tiles, e.g. the 3-rock terrain, and it seems that Bernd Eisenstein has put much more thought into this than I have so far. There are subtleties I am yet to understand.<br />
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The solitaire game includes a campaign mode very similar to that of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Agricola</span>, but I'm yet to try it. I think I'll play a few more games trying to get decent scores with the cities that have turned out badly, then go on to the campaign mode. There's a lot to be discovered.<br />
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<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-42806431692584209772010-03-07T21:39:00.004+10:002010-03-07T22:06:23.457+10:00Jaipur al Italiano<span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> and I (and Miss Jane) are learning Italian for some reason which is not clear to me. We're very enthusiastic about at the moment, and I'm trying to use it as an excuse to play games whenever I can. This morning we played <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22497/straw">Straw</a> with Italian scoring. I've been wanting to show <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/54043/jaipur">Jaipur</a> to <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span>, so this evening with the help of <span style="font-style: italic;">il dizionario</span> I tried to teach her how to play in Italian. I've only had two lessons of Italian For Travellers, so this was what we call at work a "stretch target". Anyway, it went like this (see how much you can follow).<br /><br />Jaipur. gioco di carte, per due giocatori (gioco = game)<br />tre rotondo, tre punti di vittorio, una punto di vottorio, per rotondo (rotondo = round)<br />carte di colori - giallo, rosso, grigio, marrone, viola, verde<br />tessere di colori - giallo, rosso, grigio, marrone, viola, verde (tessere = tiles)<br />tessere - una punto, due punti, tre punti, etc.<br />qui è mercato. tre i mercato (mercato = market, cammelli = camels)<br />ogni guiocatore cinque carte (ogni = each)<br />ogni giacotore una pila di cammelli qui (pila = pile)<br />ogni turno quattro opzione (turno = turn)<br />opzione uno - prendo una carta di mercato, no cammello (prendo = take)<br />opzione due - prendo tutto cammello a pila di cammello<br />opzione tre - scambiare carte di foglio è cammello per carte di colori del mercato (scambiare = exchange, foglio = hand)<br />foglio sette carte!<br />opzione quattro - comprare carte di una colore per tessere di punti di colore (comprare = buy)<br />tre carte, tessera gratifico tre; quattro carte, tessera gratifico quattro, etc. (gratifico = bonus)<br />tre pila vuoto, rotondo finere (vuoto = empty, finire = finish)<br />più cammello, cinque punti. (più = more)<br />contere punti. più punti vinceri una punto di vittorio (vincere = win, contere = count)<br />due punti di vittorio, tu vinceri!<br /><br />So with a lot of pointing and guessing and repetition <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> got the hang of it. The first round was a big win to me as <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> struggled to learn the rules and figure out a strategy. The second round, she monopolised the camels and kept me low on cards and she managed a narrow win. In the <span style="font-style: italic;">ultimo rotondo</span> she didn't notice I was going to end the round, and I ripped her off for enough points to win the round and the game.<br /><br />Even if you don't speak Italian, or aspire to, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Jaipur</span> is a great game. It very much fills the role of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Lost Cities</span>, with a little bit more character. Sébastien Pauchon looks like becoming a very good designer, even though he's not Italian at all :-).<br /><table style="width: 679px; height: 25px;" class="geekitem_infotable"><tbody><tr bgcolor="#ffffff"><td valign="top" width="150"><br /></td><td><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-90203134149244479682010-02-09T21:33:00.002+10:002010-02-09T22:03:55.583+10:00Some New GamesI have lots of new games to talk about, but only a little bit of red wine and a little bit of time before bed. So here are some of them.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65565/flicochet">Flicochet</a> - Phil Harding's new game is a cross between <span style="font-weight: bold;">Crokinole</span> and lawn bowls, and could easily be a huge hit. Crokinole boards are expensive (especially in Australia) and his game provides most of that fun for a tiny fraction of the price.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40628/finca">Finca</a> - a very cute game, and easy to teach, but I couldn't figure out how I might play well. There's sort of an easy level, then maybe a mega-genius level which I cannot approach. I have no malice towards it, but I don't think it's a great game.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12902/carcassonne-the-city">Carcassonne: the City</a> - like Hunters and Gatherers, a completely dull variation on <span style="font-weight: bold;">Carcassonne</span>. The original was great, it doesn't need a swarm of mediocre epigone.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/354/sticheln">Sticheln</a> - a nasty card game, but with 7 players like we played it, it seemed kinda random as well. Probably better with fewer players. I like <span style="font-weight: bold;">Flaschenteufel</span> a lot, and this is probably a similar game.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/53953/thunderstone">Thunderstone</a> - <span style="font-weight: bold;">Thunderstone</span> is the fantasy dungeon crawl based on the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Dominion</span> engine. Unlike Dominion, it doesn't work sweetly. Our game dragged, and I found myself wishing that Valerie and Dale had played a billion trillion games of it to make it right.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33604/say-anything">Say Anything</a> - a very party game in which you get points for knowing what people like. Randy, who knew us least well of anyone, managed to win. By the way, my favourite ethnic cuisine is Thai, which I admit was not obvious.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/59765/caption-if-you-can">Caption If You Can!</a> - Phil Harding's party game, which I played immediately after <span style="font-weight: bold;">Say Anything</span>, and felt similar and not quite as good. Still, it worked.<br /><br /><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31105/archaeology-the-card-game">Archaeology: The Card Game</a> - the third of Phil Harding's games to appear in this list. Phil certainly is a diverse designer - a party game, a dexterity game, and a card game. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Archaeology</span> was pretty annoying, as Amanda got sweet card draws and I got shafted by sand storms and thieves. I'd seen some kids playing this, and that's probably the target demographic, because it drives us computer programmers nuts.Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21646725.post-7740410530328795092010-02-09T20:07:00.002+10:002010-02-09T20:42:24.759+10:00Tales of the Arabian NightsThere are a few literary works which are worshipped in our house. Examples include the complete works of Hergé, Goscinny and Uderzo and all derivatives thereof in all languages, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte, and the Tales of the Arabian Nights. I know, when I see something related to the Tales, that we will end up owning it. Hence it was quite astonishing that in the middle of January this year we still did not own the new edition of the board game. The only possible reason is that <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> had been so busy with her thesis that she hadn't had time to think of acquiring it, or encouraging me to.<br /><br />I played it at GenCon Oz last year, and though we had to cut that game short I could tell there was some magic in there. Characters seek their fame and fortune, and find it. They can become miserably wretched or fabulously fabulous. The game is astonishingly well done, and if you don't care that it's kinda random, it's lots of fun.<br /><br />The day <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> left Canberra I realised that Mind Games had it on sale for 20% off. That's a significant saving on a necessary purchase, but I was still in a quandary because I had limited baggage space back to Brisbane. I bought it anyway. As it turned out, <span style="font-weight: bold;">TotAN</span> was only about half of my carry-on luggage quota, so I was able to fit the kids' game Queen Melissa gave me in there as well.<br /><br />Aaron, Amanda and I played <span style="font-weight: bold;">Tales</span> at OtB, and I was quite surprised when Aaron won. My first experience suggested it was a long game, but I'm beginning to think it speeds up a bit as it goes along. If you haven't played it, it's like one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, but much prettier, much more complex, and not so fucking mindlessly stupid. Players have skills (e.g. Seduction, Magic, Courtly Graces, Story Telling) which they can add to over time. Many encounters either require a skill, or you gain one when you fail miserably. In that way characters advance over time, and as you gain skills you improve your ability to gain Destiny and Story points.<br /><br />I've noticed that characters benefit more from assertive actions than from aggressive or timid ones. It's probably better to AID the Old Woman than to ATTACK her or HIDE from her. Of course, I haven't tried a combat-oriented character, maybe they get better results from attacking. It also seems that characters go one of two ways - they either succeed and become wealthy and powerful and have a chance to win the game, or they fail and become enslaved, ensorcelled, envious, outlawed and imprisoned. I thought at first either option was a valid way to play, but honestly, life seems to remain miserable for the characters who take the second path.<br /><br />In my game at OtB I managed to walk a middle path. My bad luck started when I beat an old woman for no obvious reason. I became an outlaw. If I returned to such-and-such a town I would be captured and imprisoned (bad). Then I got lucky in Africa and a rich prince fell in love with me (I play yellow, the yellow character is a girl, I am totally not gay) and I had riches showered upon me. However my home town became the town where my prince was, and that was where I was wanted. I was required to return home to have babies etc regularly, but if I did so I would become imprisoned. I think I actually managed to deal with that, then got pulled overboard by a merman in Timbuktu. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/yh34l29">Timbuk-fucking-tu</a>. Then I ended up on a desert island (in fact, Ireland) which is of course what happens when one falls off one's boat in Timbuktu. Anyway... then Aaron one.<br /><br />Coincidentally, BGG user ibn_ul_khattab was flying through Brisbane on the weekend, and <span style="font-weight: bold;">TotAN</span> is one of his favourite games. Brisbane is only on the way between two interesting places in the entire world (Singapore and Auckland) so I was very lucky to be able to game with him. ibn, the kid, and I gave <span style="font-weight: bold;">TotAN</span> another whirl. The kid fell into the trap of over-extending himself (you know how these young people are, they think they're bullet-proof, then along comes a djinn) and all sorts of horrors befell him. However ibn and I took the path of Having Good Things Happen, and I won on the turn before ibn would have, and then only because I had the ability to go back and choose something better than the mediocre thing that was going to happen. The game only took about two hours.<br /><br />That suggests to me that <span style="font-weight: bold;">Tales</span> might even be the sort of game you can play competitively, if you're in the mood to not do odd things. That's not really in the spirit though - the fun is in finding out what you can get away with.<br /><br />Anyway, I'm enjoying that game. When <span style="font-style: italic;">Scrabblette</span> is done with her thesis (again), I look forward to trying it out two-player. I wonder when they're making the board game of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"?Friendlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05302241085168424095noreply@blogger.com0