Playing With Myself

Beyond Maths Trades

2012-01-09T14:49:00.000+10:00

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:

Let I be the set of items in the trade.
Let U be the set of users in the trade.
Let P be the set of prices, objects that can be summed and are totally ordered.

# every item has an owner, "" means total function
owns : I  U

# if you don't own anything you're not in trade
ran(owns) = U

# some people assign values to some things, "" means partial function
values : U  I  P

# For each user u, there is a function vu, which is the values that user places on items
vu = { (i,p) | (u,i)  p  values }

# and that user at least values the things they own
u:U  owns~{u}  dom(vu)

# Then a valid solution to the trade is an assignment of items to users
s : I  U

# the items received by u are
ru = s~{u}

# the items sent by u are
su = owns~{u}  ran(s)

# such that nothing is assigned to the person it came from
s  owns =

# and everyone gets a bargain, by their own personal pricing rules
u:ran(s)  Σ (i  ru) vu(i)  Σ (i  su) vu(i)

# For a solution to be useful, it must be non-trivial:
s

# 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!)

It occurs to me that blogspot is maybe not the ideal medium for writing specifications.

The Numbers for 2011

2012-01-05T11:12:00.000+10:00

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.

2007 article
2008 article
2009 article
2010 article

There are 448 games in this collection (last year 424).

The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.43 (last year 6.4).

Your average rating for this collection is 7.04 (last year 7.07).

On average you have played each of these games 7.75 times (last year 7.11).

Your Friendless Metric is 1 (102 games played 10+ times, 46 games never played.) (last year 1, 89, 46)

Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.49 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 55.24%. (last year 3.39, 55.24%)

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, Thunderstone 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 Scrabblette with her own games shelf so she can see how many games she's responsible for us owning (and not playing).

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 Yspahan, Oregon, Famiglia and Thunderstone 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.

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.

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 Scrabblette asks, that's why all those games are lying all over the game room bench.

The Big Cochabamba Gamesfest

2011-09-18T18:05:00.000+10:00

Well, Tom from Switzerland has been here for a few days now, and we've played all of the prize games except Safranito, 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.

Asara - 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.

Luna - 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 Ghost Stories and Yggdrasil and Thunderstone and Pandemic 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.

Skull and Roses - 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.

Die Burgen von Burgund - 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.

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 Killer Bunnies with all the expansions. Yet despite all this, I like it, and the people I've played with generally agree.

Lancaster

2011-09-12T09:44:00.000+10:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where on Earth is...

2011-05-31T12:24:00.051+10:00

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 Fauna and Der Schwarm and Zack und Pack and Sushizock im Gockelwok and my first play of Dominion, 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.

Then Tom started adding strange photos on Facebook. Like this:

and this:

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.

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.

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.

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 Scrabblette, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Nickels and Dimes and Hits of the Year

2011-01-01T11:50:00.000+10:00

Dimes

These are games I played 10 or more times in 2010: Bananagrams, Peloponnes, WYPS, Blue Max, Palago, Scrabble, Start Player

Nickels

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

Hits of the Year

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.

Blue Max - 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.

Peloponnes - 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.

Start Player - No really, we played this. In fact we had a Start Player tournament. It was pretty silly.

Tales of the Arabian Nights I bought this at AGE in January, because Scrabblette 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.

San Juan 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.

Antike 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.

Gonzaga 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.

Lord of the Rings 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.

Attila (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.

Big City (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.

Caylus Magna Carta (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.

Deduce or Die (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.

Rootword (4 plays) CyberKev felt the urge to acquire all of the games by Carl Chudyk, the Glory to Rome 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 Scrabblette.

Phoenicia (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.

Nickels and Dimes and Hits of the Year

2011-01-01T11:22:00.000+10:00

The Numbers for 2010

2011-01-01T11:11:00.000+10:00

It'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):

2007 article
2008 article
2009 article

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.

There are 424 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.4.

Your average rating for this collection is 7.07.

On average you have played each of these games 7.11 times.

Your Friendless Metric is 1 (89 games played 10+ times, 46 games never played.)

Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.39 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 54.24%.

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!

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.

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.

Scrabble, Encore Une Fois

2010-08-15T09:34:00.001+10:00

Our 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.

We weren't very well prepared, as I didn't take along a French dictionary. I don't have a really good French Scrabble 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.

In the end we played with the Larousse dictionary on my iPod, which worked out OKish. I'll be acquiring a proper French Scrabble 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.

You might recall that I previously posted that Miss Jane and I played Scarabeo, 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.

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.

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 Scrabble 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!

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Analyse Me

2010-07-01T21:13:00.001+10:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Dr Scrabblette 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.)

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!

On the other hand, I'm not sure I trust you guys. You board game geeks are generally pretty weird.

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Scarabeo

2010-06-07T20:51:00.001+10:00

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 Scrabble called Scarabeo, 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 Scarabeo made its way to Australia on a slow boat. It arrived a few weeks ago, but Scrabblette (soon to be Dr Scrabblette) 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.

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 Jaipur, in French, so we're really getting quite random.

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Gonzaga

2010-05-03T12:07:00.000+10:00

Last night we played Gonzaga again. There were three of us - myself, Other Kevin, and Meng. The inactive countries were Germany and Eastern Europe.

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.

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.

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.

Ieri, abbiamo giocato Gonzaga ancora una volta. Eravamo tre - me stesso, Altro Kevin, e Meng. Le nazione innative erano la Germania e lÉuropa Orientale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Peloponnes

2010-04-04T16:23:00.003+10:00

As 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 Peloponnes. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solitaire game includes a campaign mode very similar to that of Agricola, 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.

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Jaipur al Italiano

2010-03-07T21:39:00.004+10:00

Scrabblette 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 Straw with Italian scoring. I've been wanting to show Jaipur to Scrabblette, so this evening with the help of il dizionario 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).

Jaipur. gioco di carte, per due giocatori (gioco = game)
tre rotondo, tre punti di vittorio, una punto di vottorio, per rotondo (rotondo = round)
carte di colori - giallo, rosso, grigio, marrone, viola, verde
tessere di colori - giallo, rosso, grigio, marrone, viola, verde (tessere = tiles)
tessere - una punto, due punti, tre punti, etc.
qui è mercato. tre i mercato (mercato = market, cammelli = camels)
ogni guiocatore cinque carte (ogni = each)
ogni giacotore una pila di cammelli qui (pila = pile)
ogni turno quattro opzione (turno = turn)
opzione uno - prendo una carta di mercato, no cammello (prendo = take)
opzione due - prendo tutto cammello a pila di cammello
opzione tre - scambiare carte di foglio è cammello per carte di colori del mercato (scambiare = exchange, foglio = hand)
foglio sette carte!
opzione quattro - comprare carte di una colore per tessere di punti di colore (comprare = buy)
tre carte, tessera gratifico tre; quattro carte, tessera gratifico quattro, etc. (gratifico = bonus)
tre pila vuoto, rotondo finere (vuoto = empty, finire = finish)
più cammello, cinque punti. (più = more)
contere punti. più punti vinceri una punto di vittorio (vincere = win, contere = count)
due punti di vittorio, tu vinceri!

So with a lot of pointing and guessing and repetition Scrabblette got the hang of it. The first round was a big win to me as Scrabblette 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 ultimo rotondo 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.

Even if you don't speak Italian, or aspire to, Jaipur is a great game. It very much fills the role of Lost Cities, with a little bit more character. Sébastien Pauchon looks like becoming a very good designer, even though he's not Italian at all :-).

Some New Games

2010-02-09T21:33:00.002+10:00

I 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.

Flicochet - Phil Harding's new game is a cross between Crokinole 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.

Finca - 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.

Carcassonne: the City - like Hunters and Gatherers, a completely dull variation on Carcassonne. The original was great, it doesn't need a swarm of mediocre epigone.

Sticheln - 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 Flaschenteufel a lot, and this is probably a similar game.

Thunderstone - Thunderstone is the fantasy dungeon crawl based on the Dominion 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.

Say Anything - 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.

Caption If You Can! - Phil Harding's party game, which I played immediately after Say Anything, and felt similar and not quite as good. Still, it worked.

Archaeology: The Card Game - 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. Archaeology 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.

Tales of the Arabian Nights

2010-02-09T20:07:00.002+10:00

There 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 Scrabblette had been so busy with her thesis that she hadn't had time to think of acquiring it, or encouraging me to.

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.

The day Scrabblette 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, TotAN 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.

Aaron, Amanda and I played Tales 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.

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.

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. Timbuk-fucking-tu. 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.

Coincidentally, BGG user ibn_ul_khattab was flying through Brisbane on the weekend, and TotAN 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 TotAN 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.

That suggests to me that Tales 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.

Anyway, I'm enjoying that game. When Scrabblette 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"?

Hard Work January

2010-02-09T19:14:00.004+10:00

Goodness me, how busy life can be! I'd barely returned from India when I was off for a week to the Australian Games Expo and On the Beach. It seems I rarely get a chance to blog these days, even though I'm weaning myself off Mafia Wars.

The Australian Games Expo is a gaming convention held in Canberra on the Australia Day weekend. It was originally conceived by Phil Davies of Mind Games Canberra and Albury as a retailers' convention to be held in Albury. There were a couple of flaws in the plan, e.g. Albury is quite hard to get to for people like me, and the retailers all agreed to sell games at regular prices. So I would travel for 24 hours to get to the middle of nowhere to pay full price for games? I didn't attend the first few times.

Luckily, Australia has charismatic gamers such as Queen Melissa and Neil Thomson (from Albury), who organised free gaming in the vicinity of the convention, and made it attractive to people who just want to play games and can't fit any more in their suitcase on the way home. It also moved to Canberra, which is more annoying than Albury but easier to get to. This year as well, we organised the Australian Maths Trade to finish shortly before the convention, and Julian from unhalfbricking organised for geeks from all over the country to drop their games at his stand. That was a very clever move, because he got to meet the ones who weren't already his customers.

Phil has decided to hand administration of the con over to a team of young professionals, and I wish them the best of luck. I do hope they recognise that the Australian gaming community is not a mass of faceless consumers, it is in fact a well-informed, well-organised network. The leaders of games clubs know each other from BGG and increasingly Facebook, and increasingly in real life as well. Any Australian board game con is enhanced by the presence of Giles (caradoc) working for Rio, Mickey and Mike from Paradise Games, Alison and Neil from Caterpillar Games, the Albury front-row forwards, and of course Her Majesty Queen Melissa and her royal court.

Scrabblette was in Canberra the day before the con started for a conference in her field, so she spent the weekend in Canberra with me. That meant I wasn't able to go feral and game myself into a blithering mess of caffeine and pizza; instead I went to the National Library and the Art Gallery (impressionists display) and the Botanical Gardens. Consequently I spent most of my time at the con just chatting to old and new friends - Shingo, Tim Woodhams, Sacha Spinks, gmcnish, Da Pyrate, sbszine, Phil Harding, Alvin, mr_lunch, fFish, tiggers etc... people I'd desperately love to see more of, if only Australia was a smaller place.

Once Scrabblette left for Brisbane again I got a chance to play some games, and the first was Tobago which Giles taught to me and some guy called Nick. Wow, that's a cool game. It's just at that level of being pretty easy, but you can still apply thought to increase your chances. The deduction aspect is so much fun. We managed to borrow fFish's copy to play at On the Beach, so I enjoyed it twice more. After Tobago I was looking to play Maori, but couldn't find an opponent. I noticed a table of guys trying to figure out Stone Age, so I decided to play with them and teach them that game. Stone Age is a pretty easy game to teach because the theme works so well. I discovered as I was playing that two of my opponents were BGGers... but the other guy won. I also managed to play Finca, which I would play again but I hesitate to say it's a good game. It's just outrageously pretty.

After the con I was off to On the Beach with Julian etc. Julian was quite stoked with the sales he'd made, and had good information on what new games he needed to stock, e.g. Tobago. Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff to put back on his trailer, such as all the unwanted Martin Wallace games. I rode up to Jindabyne with Brendan Mahony from Adelaide, his daughter, and AJ.

A few people have asked what On the Beach is. It's sort of like an Australian Gathering of Friends. It grew out of ConVic (Julian's convention) where a few of us saw the Australian gaming community being born, and had the idea of getting together for a week each year and being good buddies and playing a heck of a lot of games. The theory is that we hold it somewhere in the middle of NSW where people from Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney can congregate with maximum inconvenience to everybody. We're very limited for space, because finding accommodation for a week in country Australia is limited to shearing shed dorimtories and suchlike. At the moment we've found a nice ski lodge which is happy to have customers in summer. Because space is limited, and because we don't want to spoil a good thing, we're very very selective about who gets invited - generally we want people who want to play lots of games, and aren't psycho bastards, no matter how many times you get blocked out of a city - because, we're going to be there for a week, we can't afford group dynamics problems.

Anyway, I had a great time at OtB this year, and there is very little evidence that I was actually the psycho bastard everyone hated. My good geekbuddy aaronseeber and I played a few abstract games, CyberKev coerced us all to play his party games, and Julian and Brendan played their Martin Wallace games in a back room where nobody could be grossed out. Peter Hawes was tirelessly teaching his games, as always! M. Squelart was an astonishingly good breakfast chef, while Brendan had the bacon and eggs under control. Aaron Seeber cooked some lovely dinners then AJ did the dishes. Randy (genesteeler) and Melissa (not the Queen, another one) were invited as well, and I thought were great people to have around. It helps that my gaming tastes tend more towards Melissa's than towards Brendan's or Kevin's :-).

I played 68 games in 6 days at OtB, including 18 that were new to me. However, that will have to be for another blog post.

AFTER

2010-02-01T21:45:00.004+10:00

71 plays on the trip away, but playing loads of games still doesn't make up for acquiring 4 new ones (net). Utilisation is down by 0.17%.

There are 429 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.39. Your average rating for this collection is 6.91.

On average you have played each of these games 6.75 times. Your Friendless Metric is 1 (89 games played 10+ times, 48 games never played.) Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.26 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 52.87%.

BEFORE

2010-02-01T19:39:00.001+10:00

I just spent the last week gaming myself stupid. I wonder what effect it will have on my stats?

There are 425 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.38. Your average rating for this collection is 6.92.

On average you have played each of these games 6.75 times. Your Friendless Metric is 1 (88 games played 10+ times, 48 games never played.) Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.28 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 53.04%.

What We Did in India

2010-01-14T18:58:00.001+10:00

Book shopping. These are just the ones for me.

The Numbers for 2009

2010-01-06T18:41:00.002+10:00

The numbers this year are slightly wobbly, as I was away over New Year (on a plane!) and some of my games are in transit from India. Nevertheless I'll work with this close approximation. Here are the articles from previous years, for comparison.

2007 article
2008 article

In 2007 I had 369 games, in 2008 400, now I have 425. At least the 2nd derivative is negative. The BGG rating for my collection has decreased (like I give a damn) and my rating has slightly increased.

There are 425 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.4.

Your average rating for this collection is 6.92.

On average you have played each of these games 6.78 times.

Your Friendless Metric is 1 (90 games played 10+ times, 46 games never played.)

Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.31 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 53.41%.

2009 was a frustrating year for collection management. Scrabblette was not available to play games most of the time due to her study, yet she was often available to tell me not to dispose of any of the games I wasn't playing. I will seek revenge this year. For example, I will get her to play many of the Indian games that have been lying around untouched since her previous trip.

My Continuous Friendless Metric improved, but not as much as I wanted, and my Friendless Metric headed in the right direction, but way too slowly. My game room remained full. More shelves are not the answer - fewer games is.

I only recorded 644 plays for the year, fewer than the previous 3 years. I guess the demise of Scrabulous is responsible for some of that, but also the kid's reluctance to do essentially any of the same things as his dad, Scrabblette's business, and a whacking great holiday to a country without CyberKev helped. I also missed conventions due to saving up leave to go on the whacking great holiday :-(.

I also played fewer new games (90) than in the previous 4 years. To some extent I've figured out what I like and I can recognise a game I won't like, and both CyberKev and I are acquiring fewer new games.

What ambitions do I have for the new year? I'm not going to put numbers on it this time, as I've failed to make them 2 years in a row already. So I'll just say I want to play the games I like lots of times. See how we go with that!

The Ganjifa Man

2010-01-03T16:37:00.011+10:00

I had a couple of goals on our Indian holiday, including to try lots of new things, and to get some ganjifa cards. Let us say I wasn't considering the second and had severe misgivings about the first when we arrived in Bangalore and saw this sign:

It turned out this was just around the corner from where we were staying, and holding each other's hand tightly and chanting to ourselves "just looking not buying", Scrabblette and I walked over to see what was going on. It turned out what was going on was that a bunch of stalls had been set up in the car park of the Reliance Mart, selling various handicrafts. This was the type of stuff that we'd been desperately avoiding all holiday, but we were somewhat more relaxed when the salesmen weren't so pushy. I particularly liked the stuff at one stall, from which we eventually brought home this little guy:

Scrabblette mentioned that this was the sort of art work done in Orissa, which we weren't going to. As we were looking through the items we found a round piece which Scrabblette identified as a ganjifa card. We'd actually seen ganjifa cards earlier in the trip, in the museum in Mysore, but only one set had been on display and we weren't allowed to take photos. The attendant at the museum said they had lots of them in the store room :-(.

Anyway, we asked the Orissa guy whether he knew where we could get ganjifa cards, and he said that he did in fact have some, but not at the stall. He'd made them himself and people didn't buy them. Woohoo! He didn't want to tell us the price till we'd seen them, so we suspected they were expensive. However, one set took him 22 days at 3 hours per day - hand painted - so what should we expect? By the way, here's Orissa guy's card:

We went off to Hampi for a few days, and when we got back eventually organised to get back to the stall when he was actually there - shops open late in India, which really didn't work for an impatient Australian trying to fit a holiday into winter daylight hours. Sure enough, as promised, he had several sets of ganjifa cards, of which we bought this one:

The horrifying price was 2500 rupees, i.e. about $A60, which I was happy to pay. I was also thinking about potentially paying a $A75 quarantine fee to get them irradiated if necessary (I think they're painted on palm leaf), so I didn't expect this project to be dirt cheap in the first place. In any case, Orissa guy and I both went away happy.

I've been looking for rules for games with them, but haven't got any authoritative descriptions yet. Apparently there is Naqsh which is basically poker, and that doesn't interest me at all; but there are also Hamrang and Ekrang. My best knowledge so far is that they're some sort of trick taking game, where you have to play 2 cards per trick. I'll post again when I've figured it out.

Holy Cow, India!

2009-12-05T15:25:00.002+10:00

It's time for our annual holiday again. Remember last year we considered OMGESSEN!, but didn't get ourselves organised and ended up in WTFCAIRNS? instead. This year we've planned for months to go to HOLYCOWINDIA! and we're leaving tonight. It's very exciting and somewhat stressful - I don't remember ever going away from home for this long before.

The plan is to do some of the standard tourist stuff, e.g. the Taj Mahal and Jaipur just to mention two games (but not Bombay), but also to meet Scrabblette's family which is spread all over the country. It seems that in India, like Australia, places that are near each other are still quite far away, and we'll be spending lots of time travelling. That's good, I want to see what the countryside is like. Very very different to Australia, I think.

The nephews and nieces know that I'm the board game guy, so we're taking over a load of games that have been retired from my collection. I would take more but we're limited in the baggage we can carry. We're also taking Trivirsity to play ourselves - it's easy to carry, plays quickly, and all three of us can play.

My dog knows something is going on, but she doesn't know whether she's involved or not. She suspects not, or else she'd be dancing around the house getting in the way. In fact Miss Jane will be coming to stay with her, which will be fun for both of them. At least Miss Jane will know that we're coming back one day.

My stats program will be at the mercy of the elements. It's too complex to leave notes for Miss Jane on how to deal with IP address changes and hardware restarts. If your stats stop being generated, I'm sorry they'll have to wait till the New Year. I do hope to record a few plays myself while I'm away, so I'll be as interested as anybody.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and good gaming until then.

Santorini

2009-11-10T15:43:00.004+10:00

The moment I saw it I was entranced by Terraliptar's photo of this game on BGG. When Gord eventually decided to make some more copies, I got him to send me one. I didn't realise it wasn't going to be exactly like Terraliptar's customised copy, so Scrabblette and I fixed it up by painting the domes and putting it in a proper box. So now, my copy is just like the one in the photo.

Scrabblette and I played a couple of times, but it's one amongst many many games I own that are underplayed. Consequently, when I headed out with the kid on Sunday afternoon, to a location where there would potentially be gamers, I took it along. The planned worked out excellently - Darryl the gamer had come along and offered to sit in one of the comfy chairs and play games with me (notice stern scowl from kid who knows everything).

I hadn't played for a year or more, so we muddled through the first game with Darryl knowing much more about the rules than I did. Eventually I spotted a winning fork and won the game. For beginners, a fork is when you have the option of two good moves and your opponent can't prevent both.

Darryl then suggested we use the God Powers, which had never really interested me. I drew Hermes - "you may move two steps each turn", and Darryl drew "if you place a dome you can play a turn with your opponent's piece". Darryl had the good sense to set up a lot of places where he could place domes, so when I moved two spaces and set up a threat, he'd play a dome, move me somewhere stupid, and destroy the threat. I managed to win that game by setting up a threat that took two steps to get to, and blocking Darryl's access to the place where he could build a dome.

We played again with different God Powers. I had the power of pushing my opponent's pieces one space if I started next to them, and Darryl had Aphrodite - if I started my turn next to his piece I had to end my turn next to his piece. So I could push him around, I just couldn't get away from him! I figured that was a pretty useful power.

In Santorini one is always trying to get away from the opponent and set up a winning move before the opponent comes stomping in his muddy boots and puts a dome on your plan. On a 5x5 board, getting away is quite a challenge - often I would use a threat to coerce one of the opponent's men to go somewhere awkward. Pushing was another option! Sadly in the third game Darryl set up a winning fork that I didn't see coming, and beat me.

That was all the gaming for the day. When a storm suddenly hit the park we ran for the car as fast as we could and still got saturated. Anyway, Santorini is a great game, and it's a crying shame that someone like Gigamic hasn't produced it yet.

Wordle

2009-10-29T08:57:00.003+10:00

Wordle produced this map of the words I use in my blog. We do a lot of this at my house.

A Good Heart These Days Is Hard To Find

2009-09-22T20:36:00.003+10:00

Here's an interesting story about board gaming which has made me think, and also got an annoying song stuck in my head. When I was at uni there was a student in the year below me who lived at the same residential college. Because of his haircut we called him Feargal Sharkey. I never had much to do with him, but I met him again at a barbeque a couple of years ago. He has kids now.

Not long after that, or maybe even before that, it's all hazy now, Feargal also turned up to a Critical Mass day of games, as he's a long-time gamer buddy of one of the Critical Mass stalwarts. So, although we don't see each other so much, Feargal and I are basically friends.

Anyway, on Sunday at Gencon Oz I was playing games with some little kids (aged 7 and 8) while their dad was playing Chaos In The Old World. Feargal had temporarily lost his kids in the seething maelstrom of geekness so sat down to play Giro Galoppo with us. I cafrefully explained the rules to the kids, with special emphasis on the Things You Should Not Do, i.e. you should not play a card which lands you on a jump or the river or the moors. The 8 year old totally got it, the 7 year old totally did not. The 8 year old rushed to the front, the 7 year old lagged sadly behind. I was in second place with a slight chance of catching the 8 year old, so I set out after her. Feargal was at the back with the 7 year old.

As the game rushed to its quick conclusion, I noticed that Feargal was making some bad moves himself. Awful moves. Even worse than the kid who totally did not get it. In the end, the little girl won and Feargal came last. I mentioned later "Mate, you are the worst Giro Galoppo player I ever saw." Feargal just smiled.

I wonder whether Feargal knew that the 7 year old had just won Viva Topo! and totally flogged us in two games of Whirlpool?

Stop Crying

2009-09-14T19:04:00.002+10:00

A few weeks ago my kid started playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. Until then I'd ignored it, just like everyone else, but I figured at least I could sign up and help him passively. I had a bit of a poke around, clicking on a few things, but it didn't make much sense. My kid was generous enough to help me. The days went on, and I was surprised by how complex a game it was. It didn't make much sense. I'd managed to buy a few properties and get some income going, and I helped my kid when I could. Then I got robbed.

I mean, some other BASTARD attacked me and damaged my properties and reduced their income. I couldn't believe someone could be so mean. I was ready to give the game up. I consulted with a couple of mates who also play it, and they didn't think that me being robbed was very exciting news. I repaired the damage and thought about it.

Eventually I went to the Zynga forums (Zynga is the company that makes the game). I found an article written by a poster called "Stop Crying", and it was his guide to how to play the game. His basic point was, when something bad happens, stop crying and play better. Suddenly I got it. After a week or so playing, I finally understood the game.

Very soon I was cruising the streets of New York looking for someone to beat up. I got good advice on how tough was tough, and set about making myself that way. A couple of weeks later I was almost invincible, for my level. And I was nasty... I started robbing myself, working on the hypothesis that the weak must suffer for the strong to prosper. That's what the game is about.

Of course, I'm only strong for my level. I'm level 80 and the toughest player I know of is just over level 1000. That's amazing. He could wipe me out without breaking a sweat. Of course, I'm so insignificant as to be below his attention, which is why it doesn't happen. Mafia Wars encourages players to interact with others at about their level, so of equivalent strength.

It turns out to be a very good game. The most fun is when you rob someone so badly they put you on the hit-list, and then when you've recovered from being killed you go rob them again. Because the correct response to being robbed is not to provoke the robber, it's to get tougher so he can't do it. Or else to ignore him so he goes away.

Does the "stop crying" principle apply to confrontational board games? Not so much, I don't think. Mafia Wars has the benefit that damage you receive can be repaired - you heal automatically, you can save up to repair your properties, and the bad guys just can't take your stuff at all. Board games are generally less merciful - when someone destroys your stuff in Twilight Imperium, it's gone, and you're hosed. Board games also work on the principle that all players are equal, whereas Mafia Wars somewhat segregates players of different strengths. Furthermore, board games have only one winner, and the others can be reasonably called LOSERS. Mafia Wars doesn't even have an end, so although there's necessarily less emotional involvement in the outcome, there's no point at which it's ascertained that you're a loser.

Anyway, please excuse me, MarshmallowBear keeps hit-listing me, and I'm gonna go rip him off some more.

Sweet Jane Loves Sheep

2009-08-16T14:43:00.002+10:00

Then came a terrible fire. It turned out Liliana had built the 3 children's bed rooms of some sort of flammable stone, and the place died with an awful sound... actually the sound of 3 little girls being burned alive. Sweet Jane was distraught! Maybe she even became slightly unhinged... maybe there was some sort of madness gene in the family. They were left with nothing but sadness, a two room wooden hut, and three burned chunks of meat.

Jane and Liliana were left with no choice but to start again. Liliana built a fireplace and then a cooking hearth, and took night courses in wood carving. Sweet Jane gathered wood to build new rooms. On the very day that Liliana built the new rooms, two babies arrived in the mail from Magnus Spiele - Jane had been shopping! They named the two girls Marianne and Nina.

Magnus Spiele had had a sale on on baby lambs, as well, and Jane bought some of those. They were called Fluffy, Floppy and Lumpkin. Floppy was very tasty, but Fluffy and Lumpkin were kept as the girls' pets and slept in their beds with them. With Sweet Jane's tender care, Marianne and Nina and Fluffy and Lumpkin grew to be big and strong. Liliana set them to work, gathering clay and reeds, going fishing and sowing vegetables.

Time went buy, and Magnus Spiele had another sale, from which Sweet Jane bought a baby boy called Rumpelstiltskin and some boars called Snorky and Snumpy. Liliana still hadn't finished fencing the pastures, so Snorky and Snumpy lived inside as well. It was all very cosy. Eventually Liliana did get around to fencing the pastures and made the animals live outside... just on the same day that some cows called Buttercup, Daisy and Lakshmi arrived in the mail.

What a house they had! Animals and children in every bed! Faeces of four different species in every corner! Fortunately, Sweet Jane was born for that sort of work, and she was an excellent mother to all of these little mail-order orphans. Admittedly, every now and then one of the babies ended up on the dinner table, but you would have done the same in their situation.

Life was good for Jane and Liliana. Rumpelstiltskin built a basket weaver's workshop when he was 4, and they all lived happily. For a while.

Editors Notes: K Deck, Sweet Jane played by Wet Nurse and Animal Keeper. Score 62 points (target 55). No minor improvements - Wet Nurse doesn't work well with them.

The Ballad of Sweet Jane

2009-08-15T19:31:00.002+10:00

Those of you who've been reading my blog since December may remember the story of Sordid Johan, a particularly demented individual who made several careers in farming. Let me tell you about his cousin, Sweet Jane. Those of you who know me in real life may think you know which Jane I'm talking about, but you're wrong. That one probably doesn't even have a sordid cousin.

Sweet Jane was a caring soul, who lived in a small wooden shack with her partner Liliana. They'd met at university where Liliana had been studying forestry and Jane had been looking for a husband. An alcohol-fuelled night on a field trip showed Jane that she didn't really want a husband at all, she wanted Liliana. Together they set up house.

Times were tough. Jane hadn't graduated, and wasn't qualified for anything. Liliana grew trees, but had trouble with anything edible. One desperate day Jane went fishing and Liliana "found" some sheep and slaughtered them. The empty plowed fields outside the hut seemed symbolic of an empty future.

One day Jane said to Liliana, "Why don't we put some of this wheat in the ground, instead of just keeping it lying around the house?" Liliana's botany lessons suggested such a thing might work, and while she was out planting forests the next day she did just that. Astonishingly, the wheat seeds turned into wheat plants.

Whilst continuing to eat sheep, the future was looking brighter for Jane and Liliana. They harvested some of Liliana's forests, and made plans to experiment with putting vegetables in the ground to see what would happen. Jane's rock garden had grown ominously large, which gave Liliana an idea... she built an oven and baked the wheat to make bread. No more lamb! The future was bright indeed! Yet, still, Jane felt unfulfilled... she needed something Liliana couldn't give her.

Babies. Sweet Jane dearly wanted babies. Lots of them. One day while Liliana was working hard on building their house, Jane secretly visited a nearby village where there'd been a horrible massacre. Coincidentally, it was the village where her cousin Johan lived. Apparently the parents of three adorable triplets had been horribly murdered, and the words "red right hand" were written on the walls in the victims' blood. Late that night Jane returned home carrying three baby girls.

She named the girls Hilda, Hattie and Holly. Jane nursed the babies so they grew up big and strong. By the age of two the girls were going fishing and sheep-rustling by themselves, which was just as well because Liliana couldn't cope with the excess work of feeding three new mouths. The girls worked furiously hard, and many improvements were made to the house - a pottery, a joinery, and stone walls! Sweet Jane was happy.

Editors Notes: K Deck, Sweet Jane played by Wet Nurse, Liliana played by Forester. Score 56 points (target 50). No minor improvements. Hilda, Hattie and Holly appear courtesy of "Song of Joy" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Yes, it's likely all of my Agricola stories will be in poor taste.

I'm In Love With Bombay

2009-08-05T21:57:00.002+10:00

I recently bought a copy of Bombay, the game from Ystari which obviously has the wrong name. I obviously wasn't hung up on the Ystari thing because I disliked both Caylus and Mykerinos, and haven't bothered to try the others. However I do love Bombay.

It's essentially a pick-up-and-deliver game, with the sex appeal coming from the elephant miniatures which can actually carry two little cubes of "silk". I was just explaining to my boss today how good interface design in games prevents you from doing the wrong thing - nobody will accidentally have 3 bales of silk in Bombay. Players have 3 action points on a turn with which they may move, purchase silk, sell silk, build palaces, or, if there's nothing better to do, just get some money.

The market mechanism is quite clever. There are 17 silk cubes in total - 5, 5, 4 and 3 in 4 colours. Each phase you draw 9 of them to place on the markets, and the most common get the cheapest price. This means that if you know the colours - purple is 4 and yellow is 3 - you can buy uncommon colours at good prices. Obviously if you have 2 yellow still on your elephant when 9 are drawn from the bag, yellow is not going to be the cheapest colour and that's quite an asset you have there.

The action points and movements are not quite so inspiring - it always seems to be just a bit too far to go to achieve quite what you want. Restricting yourself to what you can achieve profitably is part of the art of the game. More interestingly, once a player has built a palace on an intersection, if another player passes through there the owner of the palace gains a rupee. Going out of your way to avoid other people's palaces often isn't feasible, so building palaces can be quite lucrative. If movement was easier, that wouldn't work, so the designer has balanced the movements and actions nicely to support the palace toll.

There are 4 cities on the board - Bombay, Indora, Nagpur and Hyderabad - and each demands 3 different colours of silk. With these sets of colours allocated randomly, and the locations at which you can buy each colour allocated randomly as well, the starting conditions of the game are different each time. The best move for the first move of the game depends on how far it is to the silk vendors, how far it is to the cities that demand those colours, and what colours are available. Furthermore, there may be multiple excellent moves - the first player may buy the only yellow, the second player may buy an orange which is in demand nearby, and the third player may rush to build a palace on the intersection the others need to cross. Sometimes there really is nothing good to do, and that's when you can take a rupee.

There are bonuses at the end of the game, and they're extremely important. The person who has the highest combined total of palaces and clients (loose women collected along your travels) gets a large bonus, with smaller bonuses for the minor placings. Players who've sold at 3 of the 4 cities get 4 rupees, and if you've sold at all 4 you get 8 rupees. These bonuses make the palaces and tolls strategy, and the buying and selling strategy approximately equally viable. What combination of those strategies you choose depends on the tactical considerations along the way.

It's common on BGG to say that the game is weak because it's a viable strategy to never do anything and take a rupee each time - in particular Tom Vasel said this in his video review. I mentioned this to Scrabblette who pointed out that if one player did that in a 2 player game it would be equivalent to the other player playing solitaire. Of course I couldn't resist, and sat in bed playing the game. I played twice and scored something like 26 and 29, whereas the recalcitrant player only scored 18. In the 5 player game I played I scored 33. I think one of the players scored less than 17 (which is what you would score by doing nothing, as each player gets one less turn in a 5 player game), so he would have been better off doing nothing... but chances are he got screwed over a few times. Yes, some players might score better by doing nothing, but they won't win.

Finally, Bombay plays astonishingly quickly. In our first game Scrabblette and I were amazed to discover after a few minutes that we were a quarter of the way through. I think our first game took 30 minutes, the 5 player game maybe stretched as long as 75 minutes, and the solitaire games were about 15 minutes including lots of thinking. It's an impressive achievement to fit this much room for thought and strategy into such a small time.

Overall, I'm very impressed with Bombay. It has great bits, multiple ways to win, player interaction, all the things that people say they want in games except for Daleks and an interminable playing time. It's currently rating 7s on BGG, which astonishes me, as this is a truly great design.

WYPS

2009-07-30T21:59:00.002+10:00

Someone mentioned the game of WYPS on my geeklist the other day, and being the word game geek I am I checked it out. It's very cool! No doubt some of you are familiar with the Game of Y, an abstract strategy game that looks like this:

The object of the game is to form a single chain of your colour that connects 3 sides of the board. This is very much like Hex. It has all sorts of nice properties like someone must win, and only one person can, and the rules are dead simple.

WYPS is similar, except that rather than just taking turns to place pieces on the board, players add words.

The letters in the top left corner are the NEW letters you may use in your word. They go on empty spaces. The letters in the top right are the letters that will be used to replace the ones you use for your opponent's turn. The letters on the board are in two colours - yours and mine. My new word MUST involve at least one new tile, and whenever I add a tile I add it in my colour. My word may involve as many old tiles as I like. And when I've made my word, I can change of the letters in my word from your colour to my colour.

And the first player to connect all three sides with a chain of their own letters wins the game.

Easy, huh? Well there's quite a bit of strategy of the abstract placement / blocking / forking type, and also the word-finding buzz that makes Scrabble and other serious word games so good. WYPS is not available in physical form yet, but the designer Richard Malaschitz is working on that. For the time being you can play WYPS on-line at littlegolem.net. I think I've played 20 games so far.

To All the People I've Offended...

2009-07-25T23:08:00.004+10:00

King Toad is a GameWright children's game where as part of play the players have to say "Ribbit", then poke out their tongue from 1 to 4 times, then say "Ribbit" again. I submitted to BGG photos of Big Ben showing how a toad catches insects:

and Little Ben getting it half right:

The pictures were rejected because they didn't show the game, were irrelevant, and were offensive.

Eminem said it best.

Does Winning a Game Make You Like It?

2009-06-26T14:06:00.002+10:00

I don't like console games. The kid got a GameCube last week and has been playing Medal of Honor or something on it. I tried to play with him but (a) I'm really bad it, and (b) I have no ambition to be better. I don't want to play any more. A similar thing happened on the PS3 as well but I can't even remember the name of the game. I've also noticed the same problem with board games - Bucket Brigade / Honeybears was really dull, Niagara annoys me to the point of hysteria, I enthusiastically dislike El Grande... yet I really enjoy many abstracts and word games which are ranked down around 4000 at BGG.

What I'm wondering is, do I dislike games because I suck at them, or do I suck at them because I dislike them? I don't know if I can tell. I suck at Chess and Go as well, but they get some degree of respect from me. I can't locate any highly-ranked game that I dislike despite having won at it, except maybe Railway Tycoon... and that loses most points because it was too long. To be fair, though, and game I don't like I don't get experience at and so I'm not in a position to win.

I'd like to better understand why I don't like some games, but I can't think of insightful experiments.

Should You Play Games With John?

2009-06-25T07:02:00.002+10:00

I recently created a Facebook quiz along the lines of "How well do you know me?". In general those quizzes are pretty stupid, but they need not be - they're just general purpose multiple choice quizzes. With sufficient effort you could implement university assessment on Facebook! Anyway, my questions were along the line of:

1)	All the best games involve:
a)	trains
b)	zombies
c)	pirates
d)	dice
e)	black and white

to which there is exactly one answer that matches me, but I'm not going to say what it is.

Sadly I made a mistake on Question 5 - I reordered the answers and forgot to change which was the correct one. I'm not able to go back and edit the quiz. In this discussion I'm going to change the marks to reflect the answers I intended. Congratulations to CyberKev and Scrabblette who know me well enough to tell me I had a mistake.

Top of the class is, of course, Scrabblette, with 90%. She got the question about Kramer wrong. Knowing Scrabblette she would have looked on the extended stats site to find my most-played Kramer game and picked that one.

In second place, and scoring very highly for someone who doesn't even live with me, is Pateke on 80%. Pateke did live around here for a while and we played games like St Petersburg and Hansa, but sadly he left to travel the world. I miss you dude! We were meant to game together!

Next, on 60%, is my brother-in-law who is now working in Iraq and is not often available to game. For someone who can't remember which one is DVONN and which one is Gobblet, that's a good score.

Ack... I'd better wrap this up as it's time to go to work. Other notable scores were CyberKev with 50% (just as well, since we game together about once a week whether we're compatible or not); both of my sisters on 40%, and Kalyani on 10%. I find down around 30% are the people who have a significantly different idea of fun to what I do. Actually, I suspect they're right and I'm wrong.

For more details, go here : http://apps.facebook.com/quizdoyouknowme/quiz.jsp?q=11103616

Tilted

2009-06-13T11:34:00.003+10:00

I haven't been doing a lot of gaming over the last few months, due to a sense of ennui or existential angst or general slackness or something. And the anime thing which I mentioned earlier. But I think also I'm changing what I want from gaming, or maybe what I'm getting from it. Scrabblette has mentioned that when you do something as intensely as I do gaming it becomes like work, and that's definitely the case. I've been doing this for 5 years and 3000+ plays, and I've potentially taught people how to play 1000 of those times. That's definitely a lot of effort.

One thing I've definitely been feeling is that I'm less interested in playing new games, less interested in acquiring new games, and more interested in playing the old ones. My efforts to decrease my collection have been stymied by (a) reluctance to simply dump games, and trading doesn't really decrease the number of games you have, and (b) Scrabblette still assesses my collection on whether a game is good or not, not on whether I need to own it or not, so she resists many of my attempts to get rid of things. When I went gaming last night I stuck St Pete and Puerto Rico and Upwords in the game box. They're all old favourites, and that's what I want to play.

This morning I have been revising my ratings on BGG in line with how I feel at the moment. Although there have been no huge revisions, there have been a significant number of small ones, so I feel that rather than my tastes having seismically shifted, they've just tilted a little. Let's review some of the changes.

Torres - from a 10 down to a 9. Yes, it's a great (intense) game, but I don't always feel enthusiastic about it and doubt that I will want to play it forever.

Trias - from a 9 down to an 8. I used to rate this 10, but I don't think I've won in the last few years. That in itself is not enough to get it demoted, but dammit, I KNOW what I'm doing, and I often come last. I don't even think it's because people pick on me. I don't think the game rewards experience, and if it rewards skill I'm damned if I know what the skills of the game are. My current hypothesis is that the strategy is illusionary.

Axiom - from a 9 to a 10. I really love this freaky game and I can see there's a lot of play left in it. It's easy to teach and it messes with your head. I just need an opponent. Other than Mikey, 'cause he beat me.

Milleranagrams / Snatch - both gained a point. These are very similar speed anagramming games, which, as mentioned in my previous post, I rock at. For putting me in the zone they get high ratings.

Thebes - from an 8 to a 7. I find myself not so keen to play this, and when I do I see the winner being determined by the luck of the tile draw rather than strategy. I don't mind some luck in my games, but that amount of luck in a game that requires that amount of thought seems unfair. I would dump my copy if I was allowed.

Memoir '44 Expansions - several dropped a point. I've realised one of the great things about Memoir is that it's simple, and the expansions make it not simple. Yes, they're fun, but they're not as good as the original.

That's enough of that sort of talk! My feelings of boredom / yearning / unfulfilled desire remain strong, so I expect I will continue to tilt in the coming months. I can be sure I'm not tilting towards Ameritrash like some other BGGers have - if anything I'm tilting towards word games and abstractness. Maybe I'm getting old or something.

Intensity

2009-06-13T11:12:00.003+10:00

There are a few games that I find very intense, i.e. when I'm playing them I get extremely involved and find myself on edge. Examples include Pick Two, Taj Mahal, St Petersburg and Domaine. These are great games, no doubt, but I don't find the same thing with other (allegedly) great games such as El Grande or Cosmic Encounter. I don't know what the difference is, I guess it's something in the mechanics intrigues me and sucks me in.

Anyway, the problem is that I find some of those games, in particular Taj Mahal, to be so intense that it's exhausting. In a given evening, I can only play one game of Taj, and sometimes I look at it on the shelf and think "No, I can't face it this evening." Having to teach the game first, which is almost always the case, makes it even more work. As a consequence, I will often put something easy to teach like Metro or Qwirkle in the game box instead of Taj.

So what should my rating for Taj be? A game that is totally awesome but I can't always play? I'll always play Metro, so should I rate it higher than Taj even though it's clearly a lesser game? I've bumped my rating for Taj up to a 9 nevertheless, as I feel I should rate the game on how I feel about it in the right situation, i.e. when my blood sugar levels are right and I've had plenty of sleep.

By the way, playing Pick Two with me is intense for everybody. In case you haven't played, there's a large pool of letter tiles. Each player starts with 8, and needs to arrange their tiles into a valid crossword formation. When someone achieves that they say "pick two" and everybody takes 2 more tiles, and they rearrange their crossword to add them. When someone has achieved that, then they say "pick two". And you keep going until the tiles run out, and score (negatively) for the tiles you didn't fit into your crossword. Speed word games are my forte, and I like to keep the pressure on, so my opponents find it hard work. Some people admit there's no point playing against me... but I don't care because I am in the zone when I play and that's a great feeling.

Over My Dead Body

2009-06-04T09:50:00.002+10:00

I was asked the other evening, during a game of the painfully tedious Cavum, whether I'd ever played Through the Ages. No, I haven't, and I don't intend to, but I decided to do some investigation to solidify my reasons. The first thing I discovered was that I totally had it confused with Age of Empires III, an Ameritrash game I have no interest in whatsoever. So, I had even more reason to do the research.

The first place to look is the number of players and playing time. It's 2-4 players, which sounds reasonable. A minimum of 2 players suggests to me that it's not a negotiation game, which is good news to me. A maximum of 4 means that I'll only be waiting for 3 other players between my turns. However the playing time is 4 hours. This rings an alarm bell - what the hell is happening for 4 hours? I don't like long games, so at this point I'm looking for clues that I'll dislike Through the Ages for the same reason as I'll dislike other long games, so I go to the last pages of the user comments.

Miklos Kuti says "3 player game, from start to finish with rules explanation took 7 hours". OK, I've already decided I will never ever play this game. Chris Farrell (who is not me) says "This is a totally linear game in which all you can do when it's not your turn is sit around and wait. There is no player interaction to speak of. And that downtime can get extreme, especially late when players have many actions." Chris Darden says : "It's like Race for the Galaxy except not as elegant, the turns take 10x longer, and you can target specific people to hurt their progress. Not only can you target people, but the opportunity exists to dogpile on people (with person after person attacking the same player on the same turn). This will not only take the leader down a notch, but knock him out for a good, long time."

Oh good, so there's screwage as well! There's nothing that makes me more miserable than concentrating on a game for hours to then be screwed over by some jealous arsehole. Maybe next time they make their bed I could come shit in it... it is completely beyond me what's fun about a game like that. So, the only way I'll be playing Through the Ages is posthumously. I guess that means CyberKev will have to organise the time and place...

Spirited Away?

2009-05-29T16:45:00.005+10:00

OMG WTF has happened to Friendless? He hasn't written on his blog for a month except for that piece of crap about the harem which wasn't even funny, and just look at how few games he played in April:

Has he lost interest in blogging? In gaming? Has he stopped playing with himself?

I think it is a bit of some of those. I know I haven't felt like playing complex games so much, preferring to carry around games that are easy to teach rather than those that are interesting to play. Sometimes, when you teach five games in an evening, it's just not so relaxing. Critical Mass is now every week, which is kinda good, except I'm teaching games all the time. New people are being trained up as geeks... one day they will teach me games.

Besides that, Scrabblette is working hard in the evenings and I have no regular opponent. The kid is now obsessed with youtube and some sort of really fricking annoying dancing and music and on-line games and so on, so he's no use to me either.We've also started going to the gym so I spend quite a bit of time physically exhausted. However, there is one much more sinister thing going on in my life...

Anime.

I bought the kid a couple of volumes of manga (Japanese comic books) for Christmas, and read one of them on the bus on the way home from work. It was Death Note volume 1. Holy dooley, it was so good! Over the next few months I bought all of the other Death Note volumes (12 volumes at $15 each), and several other series as well. None of them are anywhere near as good as Death Note, but some have my interest.

Then in about March we discovered there was an anime (Japanese animation) meet-up near us, so we started going along to that. The kid had a great time because he got to hang out with cool people who knew the same pop culture as he did, as opposed to people like me who got bitten once by Harry Potter and aren't having a bar of that Twilight crap. So I asked the guys for anime recommendations and ended up watching X by Clamp and some Studio Ghibli movies (such as Spirited Away).

I recognised what was happening to me from what happened to me when I discovered BGG - I'd found a new topic of interest and I was trying to become an expert in it. That's how I operate. I was reading anime sites, browsing shops, asking for recommendations from everyone I could find. Once I realised that, though, I decided I could do it a bit smarter than I did with board games where I had to buy pretty much everything I wanted to try.

I discovered that the Brisbane City Council library has a reasonable range of anime and manga, so I've been borrowing lots of those. I've discovered I don't much like the boys' manga (such as Naruto) and the girls' manga (such as Peach Girl) is more readable but tediously boring. I do like Hayao Miyazaki's movies, but otherwise the things I enjoy are pretty hard to find. That's why I'm confident that anime won't take over from board gaming.

Nevertheless, doing all this research takes a long time. I almost own all of the Studio Ghibli movies now, which Scrabblette's niece approved of when she visited, but it took me maybe a dozen evenings to watch them. Hayao Miyazaki is the creative genius behind most of them. He combines "nice" stories with stunning art and (preferably) some spiritual elements to produce some very cool works of art. When I get my harem my concubines will love them.

There's a whole new world in manga. Japanese people have very different ideas on sex to Westerners, so there are genres like "yaoi", which titillates teenage girls, and "ecchi" which titillates teenage boys... and these are astonishingly popular. Everyone's heard of "hentai" which involves tentacles, and then there's all the fighting anime which is put on Western TV to get five year old boys hyped up. In Japan, there's manga or anime for every taste, and I really do mean every taste.

Anyway, this thing will sort itself out. Eventually I will be sick of crappy anime and look for something to do, and Runebound will still be there, waiting for me.

By the Time You Read This I Will Probably Have a Harem

2009-05-26T12:44:00.002+10:00

I just went over the road to grab my lunch from the cafe, and while I was waiting started reading a teen-girl magazine - it might have been called "Girlfriend" but as the masthead was torn off I can't be sure. Anyway, the first 20 pages or so were various quizzes and self-assessment tests such as "What's your Facebook IQ?", "Does he really love you?", "What's your dominant chakra?" and all that sort of crap. It occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing BoardGameGeeks ask all the time - "How many plays have you recorded?", "What's your favourite genre?", "What game should I buy next?". And if there's one person poised to exploit statistics for personal fame, it's me. With a few tweaks I should have some star sign histograms and Ladio Gaga vs Pink comparisons running pretty soon, and then the teenagers will adore me.

I will just talk to Scrabblette about adding a room onto the house to keep the girls in and I can start inviting some fans over. I bet this is how Hugh Hefner started.

Indian Games

2009-04-19T10:44:00.008+10:00

Scrabblette recently returned from India with a swag of Indian games for me. You'd expect a country of a billion people to have a history of unique games, but we haven't seen much evidence that's actually the case. Chaturanga is a predecessor of Chess and is an Indian game; and Parcheesi is famous in the west as Trouble and Ludo, but otherwise there don't seem to be many of them. OK, two of the most popular games of all time are Indian, but where are the modern Indian games?

One company which is trying to preserve Indian gaming heritage is Kreeda. This company is a very small operation producing affordable games for an Indian market. This concept excited me, so Scrabblette procured anything that looked interesting.

Sadly, Kreeda games are not up to the quality we've come to expect from Rio Grande (though they are about the same quality as Milton Bradley). Vanavaas and Search for Sita are simple roll-and-moves aimed at teaching children the stories of the Ramayana. Ashtaa Chemmaa is a form of Parcheesi, and Kalanay Belanay is a completely choiceless game. Sadly, the rules to Dahdi did not make it back from India (we suspect Scrabblette's nephew may be involved). Chaturvimshathi Koshtaka is almost an interesting abstract game, but suffers from the same fault as many traditional games in that the rules are not precise enough to describe a game with any tension.

The pick of the product line is Battle of Lanka, another game based on the Ramayana. For those who aren't familiar with the story, the climax of the Ramayana is a battle between Rama's army, including his champion Hanuman, and Ravana's army.

The game is a card game where players are attempting to collect larger armies than the other players; including accessories that the armies use to increase their power. The cards don't particularly match any of the Ramayana stories I've read, but I'm just a beginner in Indian culture. We found the game to be quite playable, particularly with 4 players.

I have a bunch of games from another Indian publisher as well, but this article is long enough already, so I hope to post again soon.

Palago

2009-03-15T17:01:00.005+10:00

I mentioned in an earlier article about gamerz.net that Cameron Browne had designed a game called Lambo. Lambo is a fun game to play on-line, but it just screams "Bakelite!" and you always wish you had tiles to flick around. As I said, Lambo had become a very interesting game, so Cameron talked to the people who specialise in Bakelite hex tile games, the Tantrix people, and they agreed to publish his game. It's a marriage made in whatever good place atheists believe good marriages are made in, because Cam has many tile-laying designs.

Lambo had to have its name changed, though. Originally the name was derived from Mambo, one of Cam's previous games and also the name of an Australian clothing company. While the name Lambo probably wouldn't run into any trademark issues, it also maybe didn't inspire people to think of a great game. The name Palago is more likely to work - it has the "Go" part, reminding people of a great two player game which is nothing like Palago, and a "Pala" part which reminds people of the Pacific islands of Palau where Oliver Sacks found so much to write about. Or maybe people will have not heard of either of those parts of the name, and they will think it's a cute little game.

During the week my copy of Palago arrived, and I showed it to everyone who'd sit still. I still think it's a very interesting game, though I've been unable to convince my opponents yet. Maybe it's better if they don't get beaten. If you're interested, you can play and buy Palago on-line. If you want to play on gamerz.net, let me know.

Confrontation

2009-03-15T15:11:00.007+10:00

Many of you are probably wondering "how come John is writing on his blog all of a sudden?" The fact of the matter is that I always have things to say, but don't often have the time. Today I've decided to neglect everything else and make the time. That's why I will go to work tomorrow in dirty clothes and with no breakfast, and no work has been done on the stats in a week. Don't complain, you got blog posts to read.

One of the features of games I often discuss with CyberKev is confrontation, in particular the difference between multi-player games and two-player games. In a multi-player game, I don't understand why people feel the need to attack me, when other people are plainly nastier, smellier, and less deserving of victory. I even have a special T-shirt for wearing to game with CyberKev, as illustrated on Ozvortex's blog. I get particularly annoyed because whenever we play a game where the primary strategy is to attack the leader, CyberKev wins. I don't get how he does that. But when he says "hey, look how well John's doing", what I hear is "everybody let me win". And almost inevitably, that's how it works out. CyberKev should go into politics.

When we discuss this, CyberKev asks questions like "what about two player games? That bastard opponent is picking on you all the time." Um, yes, of course. In a two player game, what is good for the opponent is bad for me, and vice versa. It would have to be a pretty odd two player game to allow a move which was bad for both of us, though I'm sure if Santiago or In The Year of the Dragon were able to be played two player they could achieve it. But generally, if my opponent picks on me in a two player game, I'm not shocked by their meanness.

I've been reading "Hobby Games: The 100 Best" for a few months now, and I was surprised to read a comment in it in the review of Vampire: The Eternal Struggle:

Still, because VTES requires at least three players, with most sessions including four or five, games feel less confrontational than traditional one-on-one trading card duels.

Huh? I thought about it for a second and realised that yes, two player games are confrontational. That's kinda the definition. But they don't confront me (just so long as I get my rent money by next Friday). Even when I play squash on Saturday mornings I don't feel like I'm confronting my opponent. We're just doing an exercise which happens to require two people.

I get the impression from what I read on BGG that some people, particularly non-gaming wives, do feel confronted in two player games, even in Lost Cities - the opponent is mean if keeps the cards that you need, apparently. When I first started gaming with Scrabblette she seemed a bit taken aback by how mean I was when I played games, but she soon learned to play like me - to win. To me, it's much more confronting when my opponents have to choose whom they screw over and they choose me - they could have been nice to me, but they chose not to.

I tend to avoid games where hitting the leader is an important strategy. If I'm the leader it's because I'm doing something right. There's some sort of meta-skill related to being able to convince others who the leader is while not obviously being a conniving backstabber that CyberKev has that I don't. (BTW, I'd like to point out that for all of the negotiation / political games CyberKev has beaten me at, he has always always played honorably, and that just makes it more amazing.) I prefer games where you can see what the objective is, and whoever plays best to achieve that objective wins the game.

Being blocked by an opponent is much more acceptable to me than having my stuff taken off me - I guess if I'm going to be interfered with I prefer a subtle nudge rather than a brutal shove. In a great game like St Petersburg, for example, you might block me by taking a card I want into your hand - and that disadvantages you as well, whereas in a crap game like Twilight Imperium III you were in my base killin' my dudez! *MY* dudez!

Anyway, I've run out of ideas for this rant for the moment. Inspire me with your tales of confrontation.

Eat the Germans!

2009-03-15T09:45:00.003+10:00

Yesterday we (me, Scrabblette, the kid, and Sammy the puppy dog) went to visit our friends Marianne and Ronja, because it was Marianne's birthday. At the left is a photo of Sammy greeting Ronja at my front gate when she came to visit once. Sammy and Ronja like to hang out together, complaining that we won't let them inside. When we do let them inside they get very excited and run around knocking things (like people) over.

Anyway, Marianne has a lot of German friends, so the party roughly consisted of two groups - the English-speaking gamers, and the game-speaking Germans. In the afternoon we united for a game of Werewolf, capably moderated and explained by CyberKev (who deserves a medal for always moderating and rarely getting to play). There were 15 of us all up, making it the biggest game of Werewolf I've played, and the maximum size supported by my deck. We had two werewolves, a seer, and 12 villagers.

Of course, I got to be a werewolf. I was kinda looking forward to relaxing on the deck, eventually being eaten and having a quiet afternoon, but the luck of the cards meant I'd be prowling the streets all night and having to shave twice in the morning.

On the first night the werewolves awoke, and my co-lupine was Nina, one of the German people. I knew from experience that killing someone I knew to be a threat was bad, for example, my kid usually makes life difficult for me in Werewolf, but killing him would throw suspicion on me, so he had to live. I didn't know who Nina knew, so we couldn't easily choose a German person for the same reason. However there was a guy who was neither a gamer nor German, so we killed him. Poor guy.

Morning came, and I instantly adopted my villager attitude. Working on the same theory that I'd used to avoid killing the kid, I asked who knew the guy who had been killed. Wolfgang immediately jumped on me, saying "you're asking a lot of questions, maybe you're the werewolf!" which of course was very true. I think though if I'd been a villager I would have done the same thing. Luckily, though, the rest of the group responded with "you're very quick to accuse, maybe YOU'RE the werewolf!". I decided to keep my mouth shut and see what happened.

Eventually the group had 8 votes to lynch Wolfgang (an unfortunate name for this game - it means "he who goes (hunts) like the wolf"), including Nina but not including me - I didn't need to be seen to be murderous, and they strung him up. Night came, and when Nina and I opened our eyes she suggested one of the German guys, so I agreed. Morning came, and I just quietly watched. Nigel and Marianne were leading the discussion, and was working on theories involving the people sitting near the dead people - Lucia, Hubertus and Nina. Again the tall poppy syndrome struck, and Nigel was lynched. It was dangerous to say anything in this game! It's not really like me to be quiet in Werewolf, but I might have been even if I was a villager, with this crowd.

Hubertus suggested Nina may be a werewolf. I wasn't clear where he'd got that idea from - maybe he was the seer? I kept him in mind. Hubertus is easy to trust, and was a potentially dangerous adversary. I didn't want to speak out against him though, so I had to see which way the village was leaning. I think they lynched Lucia next (this time, because she was too quiet). As Marianne had been throwing some accusations in the completely wrong direction, Nina and I ate her that night - best to give those suspicions some sustenance :-). Sorry, birthday girl! For some reason though, the crowd turned against Nina again. Hubertus pointed out that she had been quick to jump in on some of the bandwagon votes, which I'd noticed was true, so maybe she'd been a little careless. I'd been very careful about that - only voting to lynch Nigel when the day was really dragging on and we had to lynch someone to progress the game. Anyway, on the second and final vote to lynch Nina, I voted with the villagers. Sorry, partner! I even joined in with the cheering when we discovered she was a werewolf.

That was just in time for the village - I think we were down to 8 players now, and if two of them had been werewolves that would have been terribly difficult. The village was still in with a chance, with only me standing between them and victory.

I was still trying to figure out who the seer was. Hubertus didn't obviously have any information he shouldn't have. Someone did ask what the seer knew, and Scrabblette gave an awkward answer, so I suspected her as well. However I thought if Scrabblette was the seer she would have checked me out, and she hadn't been speaking against me, so I wasn't sure. I did have the feeling though that the seer was in the group of three to my right - Scrabblette, the kid, and Newman - so I killed the kid. It wasn't him.

With the noisy people out of the game the quiet people were forced to talk more. DrAnnalog is always very quiet, Miss Jane started to speak up, Werner started to speak up. Suspicion was still aimed at the German end of the table though, and the villagers chose to lynch Lucia who'd been under suspicion for a while. She was not a werewolf. Overnight, I killed Scrabblette who was indeed the seer, and had only checked out innocent people, most of whom were dead now.

With only 6 of us left, the argument boiled down to "who voted to lynch Nina?" and "who didn't vote to lynch Lucia?". I was on the villager side of both of those votes, so there was still no suspicion on me. At this point I was working with DrAnnalog and Hubertus to figure out which of Werner, Jane and Newman was the remaining werewolf. That was a good position for me to be in. It was clear that all of us were on the right side of one of those votes, which didn't help at all. In the end we decided to kill Werner. There was no good reason to, but that certainly didn't worry me! It was someone else's idea so I went with it!

Overnight, I killed Hubertus, leaving DrAnnalog, Newman and Miss Jane in the game. I completely trusted DrAnnalog, but I was suspicious of Miss Jane and not sure about Newman. At this point I was playing a fairly active role as a villager, which is of course what a werewolf needs to do. DrAnnalog was looking at Miss Jane, and that was whom I was hoping to lynch as well, so when Newman indicated he would agree, we strung her up.

With Miss Jane died the last hope for the village. Overnight I ate one of the remaining villagers, and woke the other up in the morning and ate them as well because I'd run out of cereal. A glorious victory to the werewolves!

Nina, despite dying played a fundamental part in the wolf victory. She helped some of the early bandwagons get rolling, and my betrayal of her was an important factor in the victory. For example, when Miss Jane was defending herself, her argument was "I voted to lynch Nina, so I'm not a werewolf", to which I responded "I voted to lynch Nina too, so you have to die."

The closest I felt I came to being caught was right at the very beginning, when Wolfgang accused me. Good work to Wolfgang, but I was luckily able to retreat and let him become an example to others. It was an excellent game, though stressful and tiring. BTW, Germans are crunchy.

Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-15T08:09:00.002+10:00

One of the hot games on BGG at the moment is Battlestar Galactica. I've been ignoring it. If it doesn't come with a life-size miniature of the '80s Cassiopeia:

I'm not very interested. Nevertheless, that was what was on the table at CyberKev's place, so that was what we played. Adam gave a quick rules explanation, some of which I followed, but I figured there was so much writing on the board it would all become clear. That was almost true by the end of the game.

First of all, I would like to say OMGSTARBUCKSAGIRL! I hope those coffee people don't mind that they've named their chain after a hot little blonde girl, instead of a (presumably) hot little blonde boy:

Maybe he was the male equivalent of Cassiopeia in the '80s? Anyway, more cute girls is better. When we chose characters Phil took Starbuck so I couldn't have the other cute pilot - if we're playing characters I like to choose someone I don't mind looking at for several hours. If I wanted a female character I needed to be the president, and with my feeble understanding of the rules I figured it was best for the human race that I didn't do that. I took Gaius Baltar instead.

Of course, I was completely ignorant of the fact that Baltar is well-known for being of dubious loyalty. In fact, looking at Wikipedia, there's a lot about him I was completely ignorant of. It's interesting that in the '80s series Baltar was a shadowy, obviously evil guy, but the modern-day equivalent is that he's a womaniser. How times have changed! I wonder if he's evil enough to smoke?

At the start of the game each player receives a loyalty card, like in Shadows Over Camelot, except this card tells them whether they're a Cylon or not. The very clever mechanic that represents Baltar's dubious loyalty is that he receives two loyalty cards, and if either says he's a Cylon then he is, which gives him about a 50% chance of being one. I wasn't, but of course I was under suspicion.

To complete the list of roles selected - Trevor was the admiral, CyberKev was the president, Adam was the Adama pilot, and the Evil Count was the janitor or handyman or something. So, onto the game.

The first two things that happened to us were Cylon attacks, so we sent the pilots out to fight them. That didn't work very well - Starbuck got injured and Adama had to go get petrol for his Viper or something. However the Cylons weren't obviously hurting us either - I guess if combat was more effective it would be more of a fighting game than the sort of political cooperation game that it is.

I quite like the way cards are played to achieve cooperation or betrayal. Each player has a hand of skill cards of various colours - yellow is political, blue is engineering, and there are 3 other colours. As a minor politician I was drawing two yellow cards and some others each turn. At the end of your turn you have to take a crisis card which represents an obstacle to be overcome by the crew. The challenge specifies what colours can be used to defeat it, and what total value in those colours must be attained to succeed. Cards of the other colours count as negative. Two cards are drawn from a random pool and added to the contributions, then each player adds as many cards as they like without revealing what colours those cards are. When all the cards are collected, they're shuffled and the total calculated. Nice cooperative players like Baltar will have contributed the good colours, but wicked wicked Cylons might have put in the other colours. Given that there were only two random cards added to the pile, if there are more than two bad cards contributed, someone is a Cylon.

That didn't happen to us for quite a while. In fact we were a team of overachievers, regularly scoring 10 more than we needed. We figured either the Cylons were not revealed, i.e. the Cylon loyalty cards would come out in the second round of loyalty, or the Cylons were trying to be tricky. Either way, we were doing well.

Some of the crisis cards have an icon which means "progress on the hyperjump track". After you've revealed a few of those cards you have the option of warping the ship and actually making some progress towards Earth. If you decide to jump before you're not quite ready you might lose some of the colonist ships on the way which costs you population. Oh goodness, now I've got to explain that as well. The BSG (as opposed to the BGG, the BFG, or even the BBG) has a certain amount of fuel, food, population and morale. The crises that befall you whittle away those values, and if any of them fall to zero the Cylons win. The BSG is escorting a fleet of colonist ships containing, for example, ugly dirty people who don't get to be on the TV show. When the Cylons attack, and they have no Vipers to fight, they destroy colonist ships, each of which costs you some amount of fuel, food or population - so losing fights means you come closer to losing the game, and having no Vipers defending is pretty bad.

Anyway, when you hyperjump you leave behind all of the Cylons you were fighting. You may alos not be organised enough to get the word out to all of the ugly dirty people, so you may lose some population as well. We figured a few times that if we didn't jump the Cylons would destroy colonist ships anyway, so if jumped early and lost some population we'd still be better off. The show's not about those people anyway.

When you hyperjump you move a certain number of steps toward Earth. The Admiral draws two travel cards, each of which grants you a certain number of steps and a penalty, and of course the higher the number of steps the higher the penalty. Our Admiral was extremely cautious, meaning that after 3 jumps we'd only moved 4 steps of a required 8. Not only were we still a long way from home, but the game was taking a really long time and I was starting to doubt the loyalty of the Admiral.

After 4 steps, more loyalty cards are handed out. If you receive a Cylon in this batch, you suddenly discover you're a Cylon. By that time we knew there was a Cylon amongst us, and as the bad cards were red - pilot cards - we suspected Phil or Adam. Even worse, we discovered that the Evil Count von Handyman was a Cylon sympathiser and we had to throw him in the brig.

The game then entered a long political phase, during which the BSG seemed to be becalmed. Although the handyman was in the brig and was known not to be a Cylon, it was a political argument to try to get him released. We needed to pass a yellow-purple skill check, and someone kept throwing in red cards. We strongly suspected Adam(a), and wanted to throw him in the brig as well, but that was a purple-green skill check and red cards kept disrupting that as well. The Cylons were also out to get the Admiral, i.e. trying to depose Trevor so they could steer the ship themselves. Looking back I can see the beauty of the struggle, but at the time it just seemed to drag.

Madam President brought some sanity to the situation with an inquiry into the imprisonment of the handyman. When Adam(a) blatantly voted against releasing him from the brig, we knew we'd found a Cylon. Shortly afterwards, we figured out that Starbuck was a Cylon as well. BOTH of our pilots were bad guys. We began to think we were screwed, as there was nobody to fight the Cylons and they'd just pick off our colonist ships whenever they got the chance.

Still the game did not end. The interstellar wind picked up and we started moving again. The political machinations over the Admiralty had been resolved in our favour, and the Handyman had been appointed Acting Admiral. He certainly drove a lot faster and more recklessly than the previous guy. As the nuts and bolts started to fall off the BSG we jumped twice, and were in sight of home - just one more warp to win the game.

There still wasn't much hope though. The Cylons called all of their friends on the CB radio and told them where we were, and we were under attack with no defence. Adam(a) finally played a super-crisis which pushed us over the edge, and I think the last of our population died. The Cylons won!

Well, it might have been exciting, except by this time I was trying to sleep between turns. We'd been playing for 4 and a half hours or so, which is more than I care to spend on any game, especially after my bedtime! I can see how parts of the game are well-designed, and it all seems to work, but... I just don't care. I don't care for the theme, and I don't want to spend that long playing any game. If you like the TV series, and if you like long games, and if you like Ameritrash, then this is an EXCELLENT game for you. I won't be playing it again, but I hope you enjoy it.

Find a Home for Frankie

2009-03-12T09:22:00.001+10:00

This is Frankie. You can read his story on DrAnnalog's blog. He needs a home. How can you say no!?

Friendless Sings the Blues

2009-02-20T15:37:00.002+10:00

Last year Scrabblette and I went to the Brisbane International Film Festival and saw an animated movie called Sita Sings the Blues. It's an animated movie combining part of the Ramayana and some '20s American jazz music. Strangely, it works brilliantly. However the author has a problem - although the recording of the jazz is out of copyright, the arrangement is not. I don't even know what an arrangement is. But before Sita can be released, the author has to pay $50,000 in copyright fees. That would be easy enough, with half the world on the "no copyright, free content, information wants to be free" bandwagon, but of course hardly anyone has heard of the movie. So far the effort at questioncopyright.org has only raised 15% of the required money.

After I donated my small amount, I received a copy of the movie in the mail. The author is going to release it for free download when she's allowed to. You can help! Make your donation, watch the movie, and tell everyone how great it is!

Happy Birthday Melissa!

2009-02-15T14:30:00.004+10:00

The legendary Melissa celebrated her birthday yesterday. Wouldn't she have loved to get a Norden gateleg table OMGLIKE I DID! I only got it because my study kinda sucks - it's too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and too far from the rest of the house, which means I've been using the dining room table as my study for a couple of months. Scrabblette wants to use the dining room table for her study, so we had to find somewhere else for the computer to do. It disturbs me a little that I have a new table and its primary purpose is not to play games on - what am I turning into?

BTW, for anyone considering purchasing one of these from IKEA, here are some interesting facts. They weight 42kg, and aren't on wheels, so they're not as portable as you might think. The screws are made of a really soft metal so I had to screw 31 of them in by hand, which gave me blisters. The assembly took me about an hour I suppose, and wasn't very hard if you've done as much IKEA stuff as I have.

My Game Room: A Video Tour

2009-02-13T17:55:00.002+10:00

Here's a video tour of my game room. It's no Academy Award winner, as I was learning how to use the camera and it was early in the morning. But, it might be enough to make you jealous.

More Glory to Rome

2009-02-04T23:44:00.002+10:00

In response to Todd D.'s question above, we're using version IV of Glory to Rome. Which we did again tonight. This time we used the building powers, and although the game took longer this time we played with the full deck, so we got the proper experience. We were also a whole lot more savvy - we were wary of putting valuable stuff into the pool, and played more jokers and so on.

In our first game, I won because I had a lot of builders. I think I might have even had a builder client. I had some good stuff in my stockpile and squirreled it away and got good points that way. In the second game that was never going to work.

I started rather poorly I thought - building a purple building and a blue building. With so much work to do, I invested in Architect and Craftsman clients. When I finally finished one of those buildings it gave me the special power that any leader or follower cards I played went into my stockpile... which was pretty sweet. I also made a building that allowed me to play a card from my hand into my stockpile when I was Labourer. So I had a steady stream of cards going into my stockpile, and the clients to build with, so I just needed to crank that machine to get some good building done. One of the things I built was a Statue (+3 VP), so I ended the game on 17VP.

The Evil Count had a good machine going, with Architects and Craftsmen as well, whom he could also press-gang into Labour. As he was sitting to my right I had no hope of working a Labourer strategy, so the direct stockpile feeding worked nicely. CyberKev had a sweet building which gave him the benefit of marble buildings before he completed building them, so he started a lot of those. I couldn't see what Ozvortex was doing so well, as he was down the other end of the table... I think he had a Labourer client as well, which took away some of the Evil Count's advantage.

Anyway, I had no great strategy other than described above, but I realised that I was ahead on points and should try to end the game, so I did. I'd considered leading Merchant, but the Evil Count had a wicked combo which would have gamed him at least 6 points, and I think CyberKev and Ozvortex would have benefitted a lot as well, so it's lucky I didn't.

I do like Glory to Rome, but the building powers change the game quite dramatically. The Evil Count's building which gave him effectively 2 or 3 free Labourer clients meant we just couldn't put anything into the pool. CyberKev had special powers for all of his marble buildings and so had a hand size of 11. I felt completely underpowered - all I could do was build buildings. I like the effect of buildings in Puerto Rico, where they have a power but it's not so blatantly strong. Sure the hacienda gives you more guys, but its other subtle effect is to make the game end faster. The small market is not so great, but the few times you use it it's sweet. Glory to Rome's buildings tend to hit the game with a hammer.

In the end though, we liked it and will play it again.

Conflict of Heroes

2009-02-04T06:43:00.002+10:00

I recently got excited and bought Conflict of Heroes Awakening the Bear - a game about the Eastern Front in WW2. I was hoping it was a heavier version of Memoir '44, which I love. Instead it's a lighter version of ASL, which is not so bad but not as good as I'd hoped.

I've only played ASL SK1, only Scenario 1 at that, but I'll try to compare them. The things that are missing from ASL include: leaders, the CRT, rules about carrying machine guns, counter exhaustion, and all of the fire phases. Leaders are abstracted away as Command Action Points - action points you can use to do whatever you want. The CRT is replaced by a random chit draw, and the chits remind me very much of the results from the CRT in ASL, but they say on them what the effect is rather than me having to remember. The fire phases are replaced by a very clever action-reaction system which I guess I'll have to describe.

The game takes place over a number of rounds - 5 in the first scenario. Each round consists of a number of player turns. On a player's turn he may activate up to 1 unit and receives 7 action points (APs) to use with that unit. APs can be used to move, fire, rally, whatever. Throughout his turn the player takes a number of actions which can be: expend APs (on the activated unit), expend CAPs (on any unit, even those which have run out of APs), play a card, or take an opportunity action. An opportunity action is where you take an unactivated unit and do one (any) action with it, and it loses its chance for activation later in the round. So to use an unactivated unit you have two options - use CAPs, which run out, or use an opportunity action which prevents activation later.

Anyway, after each of the player's actions, the opponent has a chance to take an action in response. As the opponent has no activated unit, he can't use APs, he can only use CAPs, cards, or opportunity actions. These moves are non-optimal use of resources, but sometimes necessary. For example, if it's your turn and you try to run your guys across a field in front of my machine gun, I will use CAPs to shoot at you. Or, if you turn your tank on my machine gun emplacement, I will use an opportunity action to move them into the forest out of your line of sight. If you can force me to use my CAPs and opportunity actions on defence, there'll be fewer action points I can use on offence.

When you choose to do no more actions on your turn, the turn marker passes to me and I can now do as many actions as I like, but again I can only activate one unit (to get APs) on my turn. Other units can be used, but they need to be powered by CAPs or OAs. We alternate taking turns until both of us in succession choose to use no action points on a turn - either because we're exhausted, or it's tactically wise. Then the next round starts, and all units get refreshed (so they can become activated again), we get our CAPs back, and we dice for initiative. Once you understand how it works it's pretty sweet.

The physical components of the game are very very nice. The map boards are like those from ASL except they're heavy enough to double as tank armour. The chits are chunky and attractive. The cards... OK, I don't like the artwork on the cards so much, but physically they're fine. The rule book is kinda big - don't try to read it on a crowded bus - but it gets its message across (caveat: I'm only up to the part where it says "now play scenario 2"). The box is a bit flimsy, and mine was damaged before it got to me. If only they'd taken lessons from the guys who made the C&C Ancients box.

In play (I've only played the first scenario) the game feels similar to ASL. Gun emplacements control a large space, so you need to avoid them. This provokes tactics like sneaking towards the objective under cover of forest so you can get to a position with a good view. Roads are not as powerful in CoH - roads are exactly equivalent to open fields as far as I can tell, so the ASL strategy of controlling the road is not as effective. I'll have to play more to get a better feel, but I'm sure with CoH I'll get to tanks much sooner than I ever will with ASL SK, because that will probably be never.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. I could still go for something a little simpler, but I do appreciate the strength of the simulation compared to the complexity of the rules. Memoir is a great game but it is practical for infantry to run across in front of a tank without being scared, and that's maybe not so realistic. Conflict of Heroes gives much of the ASL feel, with only a fraction of the complexity.

New Games This Month

2009-01-31T11:34:00.006+10:00

I haven't done a whole lot of gaming this month (i.e. not as much as I want to) for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my personal game slave Scrabblette was away, and secondly, Scrabblette came home again. Scrabblette is one of my favourite opponents, but when she got back from being away for almost a month we had a backlog of movies to watch, presents to play with, a dog to dogsit, and so on. In particular I haven't played many new games this month, but that's also quite deliberate - I already have a lot of games that I like, and I'd just like to play them a lot more. As I've only played 4 new games I can give each of them a quick review.

Curses - Curses is perhaps the stupidest party game I've ever played. It has a lot of competition, e.g. The Dancing Egg Game. In Curses, each player is given curse cards requiring that they behave in some manner, such as they have to talk like a pirate, or they can't bend their elbows, or they have to wave their hands around whenever they speak. If a player fails to do any of the things required by their curse cards they can be called out as a curse breaker, at which point they lose the curse. When they've lost three curses they're eliminated from the game. The funny part comes when they have to talk like a pirate and not bend their elbows and wave their hands around when they speak ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It can be hard work, and if you play with kids like I do it can be fairly merciless. Add to those curses a requirement that whenever you're touched you have to say a nursery rhyme (in a voice like a pirate), and add kids who keep poking you, and you've got a challenging game. It is of course, kinda funny, and the kids loved it, but I'd prefer something a lot more cerebral.

Glory to Rome - This is a card game somewhat like San Juan on steroids, where each card can be used as raw materials, a building, or a character. The objective is to build enough buildings that you can steal enough raw materials to become the richest player. It's a pretty clever design, and I enjoyed the basic game. I haven't played the advanced game yet, where the buildings have special powers, but it seems there'd be a lot to keep up with. Although I liked the game I wasn't so impressed with the components, so I hope a bigger publisher picks it up. It definitely has depth and deserves a lot of play.

Slam Dunk Card Game - I would normally avoid children's card games, but this was designed by Knizia so it's worth a look. A guess it's a combination of Ra and Snap. Only Reiner could make it work. Essentially there are some donut cards which are worth points in particular combinations. Some are just worth negative points. One player lays cards down, and the others may slap their hand down on the table at any time to get the cards that have been laid. At the end of the game players calculate their points from the cards they've collected, and whoever has the most points wins. It's not so interesting, but I would play it with kids.

Der Schwarm - This is a German game based on the book by Frank Schatzing (which he wrote in German). I don't really understand the plot so well, but it seems there's something (called The Swarm) growing in the ocean which can change ocean currents and possess sea creatures. Players play research expeditions competing to find out the most about this swarm. The swarm is meanwhile eating their ships, attacking them with sea creatures, and generally being difficult. In our sole play we misplayed a rule which made it a bit too easy, but we liked it anyway. Players gather their actions by a Vikings-like auction, then execute those actions one by one. There's some cool player interaction as you see what actions other players have gathered and prepare to defend against them. Exploring the swarm is something of a connection game, and there are ships, whales and a giant crab which are remiscent of Escape From Atlantis. The kid and I enjoyed it, and we went out the next day and bought the novel (in English). It's almost 900 pages so I'd love to see the kid read it.

This Picture Needs More Thumbs

2009-01-25T14:27:00.001+10:00

Most Played Designers, 2009 Edition

2009-01-24T21:50:00.002+10:00

Lacxox's geeklist (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/38463) reminded me of the articles I wrote a couple of years ago about how many plays were recorded for each designer for the users pf the stats. I realised that now I have the plays in a database, an updated version of those numbers is no more than an SQL query away. In case I forget, here's the query:

select d.name, sum(p.quantity) from designers d, plays p, games g, gameDesigners gd where p.game = g.bggid and d.bggid = gd.designerId and g.bggid = gd.gameId group by d.bggid order by 2 desc

So that's ALL plays recorded by my 600+ users (including plays of expansions). What are the answers?

Reiner Knizia 69673 plays - an average of 117 plays per user
Alan Moon 26208 plays
Wolfgang Kramer 20931
Thomas Lehmann 17086 - holy dooley, I bet they're mostly Race
Klaus-Jurgen Wrede 16975
Andreas Seyfarth 15938
Richard Garfield 15481
Klaus Teuber 14935
Richard Borg 13120
Michael Schacht 13104
Uwe Rosenberg 13103
Bruno Faidutti 11843
Friedemann Friese 10283
Donald X. Vaccarino 8877 - the new sensation, it's all Dominion!
Stefan Dorra 8430
Martin Wallace 8404
Aaron Weissblum 7992
Brunot Cathala 7625
Dirk Henn 6615
Michael Kiesling 6469
Rudiger Dorn 6282
Sid Sackson 6249
Bernd Brunnhofer 6109
Franz-Benno Delonge 5965
Stefan Feld 5963

I've left out Uncredited (2nd place) and Michael Tummelhofer (practically identical to Brunnhofer). Here's a quick list of the next guys: Burm, Gimmler, van Ness, Colovini, Daviau, Hostettler, Cassasola Merkle, Tavitian, Cornett, Maublanc, Yianni, van Moorsel. I like this list much better than Tom Vasel's list of allegedly great designers I've never heard of.

Now, what if I do this: (which are the most played games)

select g.name, sum(p.quantity) from plays p, games g where p.game = g.bggid group by g.bggid order by 2 desc

Let's go till we find something I haven't played :-).

Race for the Galaxy 13103
Magic 11023
Dominion 8878 (Donald X. Was 8877 above, the database must have been updated)
Lost Cities 7480
Carcassonne 7324
Ticket to Ride 6451
San Juan 5984
Settlers 5935
Puerto Rico 5846
Power Grid 5560
Agricola 5521
St Pete 4580
Ingenious 4429
Tichu 4387
No Thanks! 4375
Diamant 4313
Ra 4280
Hive 4049
Loopin' Louie 4003
For Sale 3956
Crokinole 3856
Bohnanza 3735
Pandemic 3714
Category 5 3690
Coloretto 3544
Liar's Dice 3521
Go 3387
Hey! That's My Fish! 3360
Tigris & Euphrates 3340
Can't Stop 3335
Memoir '44 3220
Notre Dame 3217

I haven't played Notre Dame, and don't really need to.

Friendless Metric Planning

2009-01-24T21:00:00.005+10:00

We had a Critical Mass day of games today. I played Crokinole, Vikings, Fairy Tale, Fist of Dragonstones, La Citta, TransAmerica and Buyword. But that is not what this article is about.

I realised while I was playing Vikings that it's a great game that I should eventually play 10 times. Actually, if I had fewer games I could see it easily getting to 30, but lets' not get ahead of ourselves. Remember that the Friendless Metric is calculated like this: count how many games you've played 10 or more times, and call that number n. Then figure out how many times you've played your nth least-played game. That's your Friendless Metric. Mine is currently at 1, and I'd like to get it to 2. To achieve that, I need to increase n by 39, or play 39 games so that they increase to 2 plays (or else dispose of them). Let's say I do half of each, which games would be the ones that get to 10 plays? Last year I increased my number of games played 10 times by 25, so 20 would be a reasonable number for this year.

OK, so Vikings is one of them. It's currently at 5 plays. My opponents are still falling for the fishermen trap, so I need to educate them. Then I need to start playing with the special tiles. I couldn't ever be bothered playing with the auction variant - too much time wasted for negative amounts of enjoyment.

Rheinlander is currently at 9 plays, and I like it a lot, so I'd expect it to hit 10 this year. It's a 45 minute multi-player war-sort-of game. That's about how long that sort of game needs to be.

Tri-virsity and Ticket to Ride are at 9 plays each, and Scrabblette likes both of them, so I suppose they'll be played during the year. Scrabblette also likes Carrom (8 plays), Attika (8 plays) and Alexandros (7 plays) so it shouldn't be pushing the friendship too far to get each of those to 10 plays.

Cathedral, Igel Argern and Xe Queo! are at 9 plays each, but don't get played so often. Gecko3D and his kids will probably play Igel Argern, and I'll probably be able to convince Uncle Scott to play Cathedral and Xe Queo! Xe Queo! hasn't been played for a long time though. It's a very quick 2 player game, so it doesn't really fit in often at games meets, the kid is over it, and it's not Scrabblette's sort of game at all.

I'm up to 10, but it's getting a little more difficult. I cart a lot of games to games meets, but often end up playing other people's games. Maybe 1 in 5 games I take to a meeting gets played, and it's often the latest thing rather than an old favourite. For example, I played Stone Age 5 times last year without really trying, because other people wanted to. I would have preferred St Petersburg.

I played Africa 7 times last year because I pushed it on a lot of people. That's because I really like it! Not everybody else did. But it's easy to explain and quite quick, so I can probably get it played another 3 times this year. Rumis is currently at 9 plays, and one more seems practical.

What about Kris Burm games? Several are already over 10 plays. I would like to play GIPF much more, but it's not on gamerz.net and I've used up a lot of my potential plays with Scrabblette and Uncle Scott already. ZERTZ is currently at 8 plays, so I hope I can find 2 more plays of that this year.

A week or two ago CyberKev and his wife Dr Annalog came over and played Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper with me. Dr Annalog likes card games, so maybe if I play my cards right I will get one more play of Mystery Rummy: Rue Morgue this year. Scrabblette is not so keen on card games though.

Now we're getting into the really difficult territory - games that require 5 or more plays. I've left out some games, such as Lord of the Rings and Shadows Over Camelot which are at 7 or 8 plays, but I can't really predict when I'm going to play them next. Scrabblette doesn't go for the thick themes, but they sometimes happen when playing with other groups. They may get to 10 plays this year, but I'm not betting on it.

Now, wishful thinking territory. Upwords is at 5 plays. I really like Upwords. All I need to do is invite Miss Jane over for dinner every week, and I'm sure I'll be able to arrange it. Scrabblette sometimes plays Upwords as well.

Ingenious Travel Edition is at 4 plays. Scrabblette likes this, but will there be 6 opportunities to play it? Last year we played 2 games while waiting in restaurants, and I think 2 games on the tilt train. Opportunities like that don't come along every year.

Kogworks is also at 4 plays. The kid says he likes it, but it's hard to get to game with him these days, what with Habbo and iTunes and skating and being too cool for Dad. At least he still likes Pandemic. Uncle Scott may have to be my Kogworks victim, or maybe his boy young Benny.

Asterix and Obelix is only at 3 plays. It's a very light and simple card game, but it deserves more than 3 plays. I think I've almost booked Scrabblette for the entire year. Maybe the kid. Maybe Benny. Maybe I can make new friends.

Finally, Hacienda. I like Hacienda a lot, but I've only played it 3 times. I want to understand it better. I might be able to get Scrabblette to play, but it's more the sort of game that gets played at games meets. 7 plays in a year at games meets would be a lot though. Still, I fancy my chances better with something lightish like Hacienda than with Key Harvest or something hefty.

Goodness. This seems like a tough target. I have some playing to do.

New Year's Ambitions

2009-01-10T23:24:00.002+10:00

Here's my New Year's gaming ambitions:

get my number of games played 0 times down to 25.
get my number of games played once down to 40.
get my utilisation up to 55%.
get my Friendless metric to 2.

I have non-gaming ambitions as well, but you'll all just laugh if I tell you whom I want to have sex with.

The Numbers are in for 2008

2009-01-01T10:14:00.003+10:00

Well, 2008 has ended (for me) and my final games played stats have been generated. I referred back to this article many times during the year, so I've decided to do it again this year.

There are 400 games in this collection. The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.58.
Your average rating for this collection is 6.90.
On average you have played each of these games 6.17 times.
Your Friendless metric is 1 (77 games played 10+ times, 41 games never played)
Your continuous Friendless metric is 3.19 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 52.06%

Compared to the old image, we can see a few things. I had 359 games then, I have 400 now. I've traded away at least 30 during the year, so I acquired about 70 (that's lower than previous years!). Despite that, my utilisation has increased from 47.33% to 52.06%. It was higher a month or so ago, but the Maths Trade in November and the arrival of new Gigamic titles at the FLGS caused a late drop. My ambition for the year was to raise that number to 55%.

My other ambition was to decrease my number of games played 0 times to 25, and my number of games played once to 40, and that didn't happen either. I really tried! I gave games to Lifeline, I gave games to friends and family, I brought out loads of obscure unpopular titles and forced them on people. I'll readopt that ambition for this year as well - I still may not succeed, but it does keep me thinking about what to do with that dirty little corner of the collection. And of course I expect to acquire fewer new games this year, which should make life easier.

Over the last year my average rating for games I've played has increased - this can be seen by inspection of that column in the Plays By Month table on my stats page. That's a good trend, and suggests that I'm doing something right. I don't have a clear idea of what else I can do at the moment... other than turning Scrabblette into a game slave. Now THAT's an idea.

Sordid Johan Gets An Axe, or, Johan Causes A Fence

2008-12-31T16:39:00.003+10:00

Time went by, and the chief's daughter became older and more bitter towards Johan for his perverted ways and smoking in the house. Johan should have recognised she was suffering from an iron deficiency because he never bothered to feed his family meat, but Johan always had his mind on less salubrious solutions. That's when Johan met the axe. There it was, in the window of the general store, beckoning to him, and Johan fell in love.

The other great love of Johan's life was his sweet daughter. All grown up now, she had built the pottery and the basketmaker's workshop without her lazy father's assistance. Yet, she still loved her father dearly. Perhaps madness ran in the family, perhaps it was a misplaced Cupidean arrow, but soon Johan and his daughter realised they loved each other in a way that was forbidden. Johan of course recognised this as the course his life was destined to take, and showed his daughter the axe, and told her his plan.

Several days later, news arrived at the neighbouring villages of the terrible massacre. Disguised as a rich grocer and his trophy bride, Johan and his daughter avoided detection, though maybe the authorities were reluctant to search too hard for such a lunatic. Johan worked off his anger and frustration by chopping wood with the axe, and within weeks of arrival in the new village had built a five room wooden house. Of course, the next task for him and his young bride was to fill the house with squealing brats, and Johan's daughter work as energetically at that task as she had with others. Johan completed his third family in record time.

If there was one thing Johan excelled at, it was delegating work. He set the babies to work digging a Carp Pond with their rattles, making a Fireplace out of mud, forcing them to build an Outhouse as part of their toilet training. The children scoured the countryside searching for more resources to build additions to the house. Johan's life had never been better. He scored 76 points against a target of 59. (Note: I think I used the Builder's Trowel wrong. I assumed it gave you a free Renovate + Major Improvement action, but on consideration it probably really only gives you what it says it gives you. So this score probably should have been at least 2 points lower.)

Cheaters never prosper, and all good things come to an end. Johan's daughter eventually realised what a good-for-nothing her father / husband was, and had him arrested for his various crimes. She got the house, the pottery, the basketmaker's workshop, the fireplace, the clay oven, the well, the stone oven, the carp pond and the outhouse. He got 8 food.

But then, he got lucky, in all senses of the word. The local sheriff was a tough woman who loved "bad boys". Why else would she have taken that job? A dangerous lunatic like Johan was just the kind of man she was looking for. When she "took him to jail", the two were never seen again.

They settled in another village, where Johan took a job as a merchant specialising in major and minor home improvements. Having lost his axe, Johan found it much harder to establish himself this time. He again used a builder's trowel, but did it correctly this time. He planted fruit trees, built a mini-pasture, and subcontracted out building of many improvements to his house. However Johan resented his honest way of life, and decided to join the Masons so he could pull some strings. Sadly, he misunderstood... it was actually a course in masonry, not masonics. Johan acquired a useful skill despite his best efforts. Despite his best efforts, Johan couldn't reproduce the success he'd had with his axe and the baby slave pack. He scored 74 points compared to a target of 62.

Of course, now that he'd somewhat reformed, Johan's wife found him not so attractive. Life's like that sometimes.

To be continued...

The Fairly Sordid Tale of Johan the Hedge Keeper

2008-12-31T09:29:00.005+10:00

As John the Meat-Seller got a bit boring, I dumped him after seven games and started a new solitaire Agricola campaign. I now have lots of games of Agricola under my belt, and find the campaign mode more relaxing than my "must get 60 points" target. Johan is using the E-deck still - I'll get to K and I and Z and X later. Maybe not X. I'll play that with the kid. Anyway, one thing Johan realises is that it's not necessary to max out everything if he can make equivalent or better points by doing something else.

Well, that's his excuse for being so lazy in the first game. Of course, feeding your family is worth the most points, but it also requires a huge number of actions, so it's the activity most ripe for optimisation. That's why Johan learned to brew beer. He figured beer made him fat, it would make his babies fat as well. So Johan started his career as a master brewer. He later became a conservator (renovate straight from wood to stone). That caused a problem, in that if he wasn't going to have a clay house at any stage, he couldn't use clay to add a room to it. Consequently Johan used all of his wood adding rooms to the house. When the Chief's Daughter came to stay, and mentioned flirtatiously how she liked stone houses, Johan couldn't get the place renovated fast enough. Then he realised he had no fences, and hardly any animals, and that in fact the rest of the farm looked like it was run by a family of drunken fat slobs. That's when Johan hit upon the idea of becoming a hedge keeper. Just in time, the hedges grew, the animals were herded in, and Johan scored 59 points compared to a target of 50.

Johan then decided to change his ways. Abandoning his family, and eloping with the chief's daughter to another village, Johan presented himself as an itinerant hedge keeper. However, passing the window of the general store, Johan spied a baker's oven and decided it was the finest thing he ever had seen. Johan then resolved to become a baker. Living from his savings, Johan worked hard in the fields growing grain while the chief's daughter went fishing. Soon he was able to build a clay oven and purchase the oven upgrade kit from the general store to build his baker's oven. With his elite baker training, Johan was able to bake 2 grain to 5 food each in the harvest phase, and the family had as much bread as they could eat.

Of course, they had nothing else. When the children were old enough they asked "Mummy, are we vegetarians?" to which she answered "No darlings, Daddy just refuses to cook meat in his oven. Why don't you run down to the shop and get a kebab?" As before, Johan just couldn't find time to get around to the fences, and didn't get any animals until round 13. That was just in time to max out points for boars, and of course there were flocks of sheep. Johan never did quite finish the fencing, and ended up with 3 pastures, but one of them held 14 sheep. Having built a pottery and a basketmaker's workshop, Johan scored 63 points compared to a target of 55.

Johan noticed the chief's daughter was looking older and worse for wear. He wondered if the next village needed a baker.

To be continued...

Clusium, 225BC

2008-12-30T15:36:00.005+10:00

Ozvortex came over this morning to play C&C Ancients, and we played Clusium, 225BC. This was in the time when the Romans were trying to subjugate the Gauls. For the first match, Ozvortex played the Gauls and I took the Romans.

This photo is of Aneroestes "the Wolf" and Concolitanus "the Merciless" planning their attack.

Concolitanus chases the Roman light infantry all the way across the board and eventually destroys him.

An unidentified Roman commander chases Aneroestes off his own side of the board (no banner for that).

Aneroestes seeks approval from Concolitanus for her role in a crushing victory.

Other than the photos, I don't want to talk about the match. I didn't make any clever moves, and hardly even any competent ones. I was thoroughly outplayed in the rematch as well, for a 12 banners to 5 loss.Ozvortex did a brilliant job of harrying my cavalry with his evasive light infantry, and I couldn't come up with an alternative plan. Well done to Ozvortex!

Ozvortex gives a very detailed account of the game on his blog.

Depressed

2008-12-28T12:13:00.002+10:00

Yes, we all miss Scrabblette but we're not all quite so demonstrably miserable!

400!

2008-12-27T19:40:00.003+10:00

I received a gift voucher from a games store from Miss Jane for Christmas (thank you Miss Jane!) so yesterday as our part of stimulating the economy we headed off to the new LGS to spend some money. I was quite impressed - they do have a large range. Sadly my wishlist has shrunk a lot over the last year, and there were no intersections. However, as usual, Scrabblette found a new word game - Word Spin, and we decided we also needed Anasazi. I've sort of avoided Anasazi because it rates very badly on BGG. However, those 2 games took my total of games owned (not counting books, but counting expansions) to 400.

Word Spin is a very cool set of bits, but the game is not very interesting. We sort of made up some rules and played while I was watching the cricket. I think next time we play we'll need to make the rules a bit more solid. Also, it's a game that can benefit from having multiple sets.

We played Anasazi this afternoon, and I was confident during the whole game that I was well ahead. I thought Scrabblette's secret colour was white, and I had more of those than she did. At the end, she got a majority only in red, though reds were worth 4 points each. Then we revealed secret colours, and she had red! So reds were worth 8 points each for her! The final score was 51 to me, 50 to Scrabblette, and I'd hung on for the narrowest of victories.

In other news, Scrabblette is off to India for a holiday in a couple of hours. That will leave me (and the dog, and the kid, half the time) home by ourselves for 4 weeks. Normally I would cope easily but I'm sick at the moment, with a viral thing I think I got from the kid, and I'm not very enthusiastic about having to look after myself. Still, it's better to be sick at home than to be sick on a flight. I'd like to get a lot of gaming done while Scrabblette is away, but I can't see myself going anywhere very much for a week.

John the Meat-Seller Goes To Monte Carlo

2008-12-21T21:16:00.003+10:00

John the meat-seller has been continuing his adventures. Last time we talked about John he had been a meat-seller, clay deliveryman, carpenter and master brewer, and had scored 70 points in the 4th game of the campaign.

He started the 5th game with 4 food which gave him a comfortable buffer at the start of the game. The occupations available included the plow maker (when you plow, pay a food to plow an extra field) so my plan for the first phase was an occupation, 2 plows, 4 grain, and a sow. That gave me bucketloads of grain, an advantage which I mostly failed to exploit - after all, I was a meat-seller, not a baker. It was a lacklustre game, and John scored 68 with a target of 64. The other occupation I took was seasonal worker, and I think it was my enthusiasm to use that which caused most of the problems.

Game 6 started with the plow maker as the kept occupation, of course, but only 2 food left over, and they got used up doing the plowing. The best occupation on offer was the stone carrier (when you take stone you get an extra one). That not only gave me access to more stone, but also let me get enough stone to do useful things a turn earlier. That was much more of an advantage than I'd guessed. In addition to the usual Clay Oven, John was able to build a Stone Oven... and a Well and a Reed Pond and a Bean Field and a Basketmaker's Workshop and a Half-Timbered House. All of those children were kept busy busy busy! Of course the score was huge - 77, compared to a target of 65.

At this point I wondered about the wisdom of continuing to play the campaign - 77 points is enough to claim a win, and each game is similar to all of the previous ones. I wanted to see what occupation John would learn next, so I continued. So we're in Game 7 - John has 6 permanent occupation cards and only gets dealt one occupation. Luckily it was useful - the Mason. He gives you a free stone room once when you have 4 stone rooms. I realised that gave me an opportunity - if I was going to get a room for free, I could pay for one less, and if I declined to build the wooden one I'd been doing I could use wood earlier in the game for fencing.

I started with 6 food, so I didn't need to work to feed my family in Phase 1. I was able to plow 4 fields and sow 3. I got to work on the house-building in Phase 1, but still couldn't fit a Family Growth into Phase 2. I did have fences built by the end of Phase 2, and by the end of Phase 3 had a 3 room clay cottage with a fenced sheep yard and a kid looking after them. I immediately built another clay room, and added another kid, and then with all my stone renovated and with my secret masonic powers made a new room appear. With 3 rounds to go in the game I had my full family and 5 room house, with several ovens. It was then a matter of waiting for the resources to come out and to milk them for as many points as possible. I made it a policy to add a Major Improvement each round, and ended up with a Clay Oven, Well, Stone Oven, Baker's Oven, Basketmaker, Pottery, Quarry and Clogs. Yes, I did give an oven back when I built the Baker's Oven - I built the Stone Oven twice.

John was clearly now some sort of superman - doing 7 jobs at once and adding massive improvements onto his house with a snap of his fingers. I decided then that that would be the end of John's career - clearly nothing is beyond him now, and he can't get any more occupations in the 8th game of the campaign.

I'll start a new campaign soon, if this Christmas thing will give me a chance.

I Got Bitten By An Intrepid Ibex

2008-12-19T09:28:00.002+10:00

Oh what a disaster! On Monday evening I clicked on the update manager on my Ubuntu box - also known as friendless.servegame.org, and it told me there was a new distribution release. I was previously running Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex was now available. The Ubuntu update process has always worked beautifully for me, so I did it without hesitation.

Of course if something didn't go wrong I wouldn't be telling this story. After all the updates were installed and the machine rebooted, nothing happened. It got as far as starting the GUI and just hung with a wait cursor. So I restarted in safe mode and grabbed the kid's laptop so I could Google a solution. I eventually figured out that it was GDM - Gnome Display Manager, which is responsible for starting X and managing user logins, which was hanging. So I tried upgrading that, removing it, whatever, only to realise that my wireless networking hadn't started either.

By this time I'm onto the second day of debugging. It took me a long time to figure out that the interfaces wifi0 and ath0 are the same thing, but I have to work with ath0. There are very good instructions on the Aetheros site about how to get ath0 going, so I followed them exactly. It all worked up to the point where I use DHCP to get an IP address. It couldn't get one. The router sees my machine connect, but won't give it an address. I figured out I can install a debugging tool for the Aetheros driver, but I'd need networking to do that.

This morning I tried turning off security on the wireless router so I could connect even if I had the security stuff wrong. The router instantly became inaccessible to everything. Well, I guess it's secure. I had to take the laptop to the router, connect with a cable and turn the security back on. Then I gave up on the wireless networking problem and set up the card table next to the router so I could connect my machine using the cable. That at least allowed me to install all of the debugging software, but I haven't had time to use it yet.

The beautiful part of Linux is that everything else still works. I started the web server and the stats generator, so extended stats is working again, for the moment. This evening I'll have another bash at getting wireless working again because I don't really like having my computer on the card table. I'd just like this problem to go away, it's not very interesting. Damned ibexes.

Fifty Reviews!

2008-12-15T16:52:00.003+10:00

A few weeks ago I wrote my 50th review on BoardGameGeek. Since they introduced the system-awarded microbadges I'm trying to collect a set of Golden Session Reporter, GeekLister, Reviewer and Image Uploader. I have gold in the first two, and silver in the others. I don't even have copper in anything else, so I have no ambitions there, but for the record the options are File Uploader and GeekBadge Designer.

Anyway, to get my silver Reviewer badge I needed to have written 50 reviews, and I spent a long time at about 41. Now that I've got to 50 I'm thinking of the gold badge for which I need 100, and I'm thinking that's a long way off. I just checked to see how long it has taken me to get to 50. My first review was submitted in November 2004, so that's 4 years! There's no way I plan to take 4 years to get the gold badge, so I'll have to up my rate.

Fifty is a lot of reviews! I got to 40 without really noticing I was doing it, so I wondered where they all came from. Here's the year-by-year breakdown.

2004 - 2 reviews
2005 - 19 reviews
2006 - 1 review
2007 - 15 reviews
2008 - 17 reviews (and one more submitted)

There were a few patches where I wrote a lot. In 2005 I acquired quite a few games from thrifting, and had some quite odd ones lying around the house. I always feel more motivated to write about a game that's uncommon so that I can get the word out about it. For example, I wanted to warn other people away from Batman & Robin - the Board Game, and wanted to alert them to the pleasures of Nodwick - the Card Game. In 2006 my life was very focused on things other than writing game reviews, though I did play a lot of games that year, and the only game I managed to review was The 24 Card Game, and that's STILL the only article for that game.

In 2007 I found a few more odd games, particularly from Scrabblette's visit to India, so they needed to be talked about. One day in December I figured it would be mighty useful of me to talk about all of the Runebound expansions I own, and I reviewed 6 of them in one day. Then at the beginning of this year I played a lot of children's games, assessing them for an award, and so wrote reviews of them as well. It seems people want to review the games they want to play, whereas I like to review the games I think people will be glad to find any information about. No four year olds are going to review games, so I'm happy to do that job on their behalf!

That was where things stood when the microbadges arrived, and I decided I had to write more reviews. It's a little hard to get motivated sometimes, which is why progress has been slow. I've mostly continued reviewing word games and children's games, but occasionally I'll write about something more popular. I just HAD to write a review of Rheinlander because I thought Greg Schloesser's review didn't do one of my favourite games any justice.

Yesterday I wrote my 51st review, and today my 52nd, 53rd and 54th. I don't know how long this burst of energy will last, but I can't see myself knocking out another 46 reviews this evening. I'm not Tom Vasel, after all :-).

The Partial Adventures of John the Meat-Seller

2008-12-09T20:07:00.004+10:00

Yesterday I finally got around to trying solitaire Agricola with the standard game. As described in earlier posts I'd trained on the family game and now I understand what you have to do to succeed. The thought of other players interfering with my plans still annoys me, so I'll be playing solitaire for a while yet :-).

Of course my very first hand of occupations and minor improvements seemed like a basket of treasures compared to the family game! However with no Storehouse space to get food from, and the different Day Labourer, I knew I'd have to change my plans. Furthermore I just wanted to play for the fun of it rather than plan everything like I needed to do to score well in the family game.

I knew the chief (+1 VP per stone house) would be a good idea, as he'd take some of the pressure off me aiming at the points target. I knew the stone carrier (+1 stone when you take stone) could come in handy towards the end of the game, and the hedge keeper (+3 fences free when you build fences) would have some use, but as I only build fences maybe twice in a game it wouldn't be huge. However the meat-seller (convert meat to food in any oven) would be of use during the game - he's essentially a fireplace - so I aimed to get him first.

I had to modify my standard plan of 3 grains and 3 plows to fit in the early occupation, but I figured if I was going to be relying on meat to feed myself I could afford to fall behind in the grain production. The meat-seller plan worked reasonably well, and an awful lot of sheep died to feed my family. The spindle (bonus food if you have sheep at harvest time) and the baker's oven (bake bread for 2 grain gives you 5 food each) also came into play, and I didn't want for food during the game. However at scoring time I was a bit short in all of the animal categories, and scored 56 points.

That was basically OK because it gave me three food to take into the next game. With at least two starting food you don't need to eat grain or day labour to feed your family in the first harvest, and that's an extra action you get, and possibly an extra grain field you can have in production. So in order to assure future stability of my food supply I took the meat-seller as a permanent occupation.

Game 2 was much more difficult, as there were no occupations or minor improvements to help me get food. There was a clay deliveryman (bonus clay rounds 6 to 14) and a clay roof (use clay instead of reeds when you extend) and a mason (bonus room when you get 4 stone rooms) so I tried to form a strategy around those. With all of the clay I built myself 5 clay rooms, then upgraded them to get a 6th stone room for free. Looking back, I think that was a mistake - I didn't need 6 rooms, and it cost me a point for the field I missed out on. My score for game 2 was 57. I decided that the clay deliveryman might be nice to have at the beginning of the game, so I made him a permanent occupation.

As I started Game 3 (with only 1 spare food) I realised I was de-facto developing a strategy for the campaign meta-game. My choice of the meat-seller and the clay deliverman had pretty much guaranteed I would get a clay oven and my family would become meat eaters rather than bread eaters. And one occupation from this game would be added to my permanent collection, so I needed to take the future games into consideration. I didn't like many of the occupations I received in this game, except for the carpenter (build a room for 3 of the base resource plus 2 reeds), so he was the only one I added. I sort of like the potato dibber as well, until I realised at the end that it hadn't gained me any points.

Anyway, I figured out the strategy for this game. With a strong supply of clay I could build 1 wood and 2 clay rooms, and get the clay oven as well. In fact I build the extra rooms so quickly I ended up getting my 5th family member before Family Growth Without Room appeared, and I had lots of spare actions. I hadn't thought very hard about what I would do in this situation, but I ended up building a pottery which earned my 5 VPs at the end. With all of my people working for me I scored 4 points in 4 categories, and got a well as well. My score was 63 compared to a target of 59.

That game left me thinking there was more I could do. I had a really good combo with the clay deliveryman and the carpenter, so for the next game I'd like to get someone like the Chief who can give me VPs, or someone to get food more easily. As I had a couple of bus trips intervene between Games 3 and 4, I worked on a plan. It was pretty sweet.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. This one didn't even survive the deal of the occupation cards. I received the master brewer (convert 1 grain to 3 food when feeding the family) and decided I wanted him for the future and might as well get him in phase 1. My plan was PLOW / GRAIN / PLOW / GRAIN / PLOW / GRAIN / FISHING / SOW (remember I had 2 food from the previous game), but I needed to put an occupation in there. I figured out I could do PLOW / GRAIN / PLOW / GRAIN / PLOW / GRAIN / OCCUPATION / SOW, and then convert a grain to food to feed the family and eat another grain. (BTW, my interpretation of the rules is that the first occupation per game is free - that's what it says in the book - but I could have made it either way.) That left 4 food on the Fishing space, which I would be able to use later. Using my speed-building strategy I had plenty of actions and was able to build a dovecote (5 food), animal pen (about 10 food I think) and the well (5 food), and I had so much food available I didn't need to eat sheep at all. When I finally took the sheep and pigs that had built up I needed to eat some of them because they didn't fit in my pastures. I maxed out 7 categories (not cattle) and received 14 points for improvements, for a total of 70. The target was 62, so I'm fairly pleased about that.

For the next game I won't need to fish in the first phase, and I'll only need to use one grain at the first harvest. There'll be spare time to get an occupation in Round 4! I'm hoping it will be Chief or something that gives me VPs, as that should set me up to complete the campaign fairly easily, and I can focus on stupidly large scores rather than on food.

To be continued...

Oh Yeah! I Rock! 61!

2008-12-01T21:27:00.003+10:00

Well, after a dismal failure yesterday (56) I've at last achieved my goal - a 60 point solitaire family game of Agricola. In fact, I got 61. It took every trick in the book and a touch of luck as well.

The touches of luck were:

sheep came out second, rather than 4th. When I started eating them I effectively got 2 bonus food, and was able to breed them as well.
family growth without room came out in round 12 rather than round 13.

The added tricks were:

use day laborer to get an extra clay (and an extra food) at just the right time.
defer plowing and sowing until the plow and sow action came out.

For the theorists out there, the order of the action cards was fences, sheep, sow, improvement, stone, renovations, family growth, vegetables, boars, stone, cattle, family growth, plow & sow, and renovations.

I'm going to stop playing the family game solitaire now, and start playing with the occupations and minor improvements. I hope to be a bit more relaxed about it, instead of planning every game turn by turn before I play it.

I Like the Top Ten

2008-12-01T14:46:00.004+10:00

Dominion has entered the BGG Top 10, pushing out Through The Ages. That to me, is an improvement. I can't even bring myself to try Through the Ages - there seems to be way too much theme and way too much time, and it just looks boring. This from someone who loves GIPF. I think my problem is that it looks like the game is doing all the playing for you.

That is not to say that I think the Top 10 are all excellent games... I'm no MWChapel. I don't like Power Grid, Twilight Struggle, El Grande or Caylus either, and Princes of Florence is not something I rush to play. I don't know why I don't like Princes so much... maybe because of the mish-mash of mechanics I can't figure out what it's trying to do. Oh hang on, it has a sucky auction...

There have been quite a few games in the Top 10 I wasn't interested in enough to even try, and they've all fallen out. Age of Steam, War of the Ring, Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, Shogun, Paths of Glory and 1960 have all been studiously ignored. Mostly they're longer games, and I really fear being stuck for 3 hours in a bad game, as happened when I played Twilight Imperium (that was 10 hours!).

I don't like long movies either.

One Goddamn Reed!

2008-11-27T22:42:00.003+10:00

I planned out the 60 point game of Agricola on the bus this morning, where I'd get a fireplace and a well and a stone oven and 60 or more points depending on how the cards came out. The cards came out nicely - Sheep came out second which meant when I slaughtered them for food I had 4 more food than in the worst case scenario. Then Family Growth came out first in its group, so I was able to reorder my plans and have a baby two turns sooner than planned and get two extra actions. That put me well ahead of the plan, but I had to do a lot of work to figure out the consequences as some actions which depended on a certain number of resources being available couldn't be brought forward. Then in about round 12 it all went screwy - I'd forgotten to gather food for the last harvest, and I had no reeds for the Renovation to stone - I'd taken reeds in round 5, when I should have taken them in round 6. I had to move Family Growth without Space from round 13 to round 14 in order to take reeds, which meant I had one action less in the last round and couldn't take sheep. Having one sheep instead of 8 cost me 3 points, and I ended up with 58!

As I write this I think I probably could have planned to eat a cow (which would have cost me a point) but I would have been able to do the Family Growth (which would have got me an extra action, 7 sheep and 3 points). Maybe that's what I get for playing at bed time.

Earlier in the evening I played Dominion with the kid... we used a random deck for the first time. It was Bureaucrat, Chancellor, Witch, Spy, Market, Woodcutter, Smith, Remodel, Adventurer and umm... maybe the Money Changer - no cost 2 cards. We both took Witches of course, and both used Remodel to change Curses into Estates. However I took fewer action cards than he did, got more money, and when I started remodelling Golds into Provinces I was well ahead. Remodel defined the game more than the Witch did, no matter how much fun she is. I remodelled my Estates into Remodels, and planned to remodel my Remodels into Gold, but that never quite worked. With no +2 Actions and no Chapel to hurry things along it was a bit of a longer game than I've played before. My final score was 54, the kid was 29.

Edit: CyberKev points out that we played with too many Province cards - you're only supposed to have 8 in a 2 player game.

Friendless the Crap Agricolyte

2008-11-26T21:00:00.003+10:00

Agricola arrived on Monday. It's interesting but not exciting... exciting was past in about April. I read the rules that night, and settled down for a couple of solo family games. It is still a good game, despite the sorry saga attached, and it got me sucked in. In my first game I played as if I was playing multiplayer, and ended up with a miserable 33 points. I realised afterwards I'd spent too much time taking resources that would still be there later anyway - in multiplayer they won't be. I also decided I should try to use the combo actions better, e.g. Sow and Bake Bread. With those ideas and another glass of red under my belt, I went on to score 44 points in the second game. I went to bed trying to figure out an optimal field placement.

The next morning I wrote down all the actions and the major improvements and spent the bus trips to and from work trying to figure out a better plan. I decided that I would work on a plan involving a Clay Oven so that I could play a mega-move involving Renovation, Major Improvement and Bake Bread for 5 food. As there are two Renovations in a game then I could choose another Major Improvement, and that was to be the Cooking Hearth so I could convert animals to food or Bake Bread to get 11 food in one turn. So that meant I needed 3 clay for the Clay Oven, 4 clay for the Renovation, 4 clay for the Cooking Hearth.. and there were only 14 clay in the game, so I couldn't also build a clay hut. So I had to build a wood hut, and along with 15 wood for fences and 8 wood for stables, that was all the wood used up as well. If I wanted 5 houses I'd have to build two stone houses, which is difficult because the stone arrives late in the game. I put a lot of thought into this plan, but was twice interrupted by the bus arriving at its destination.

This morning I got up early to test out my incomplete plan. Sure enough, on about Round 7 I was at a loss what to do next - it's easy to plan the start and the end, but there are too many combinations in the middle. I could tell I wasn't going to manage a 5th house, so I took a 5th field instead. I got maximum points for fields, pastures, vegetables, sheep, family members and stables, and missed one on each of grain, boars and cattle. I got 8 points for 4 stone rooms and 3 points for Major Improvements, for a total of 55.

Let me pause this narrative to say there are some posts on BGG which say "oh yeah, I played the family game solitaire, got 60 on my first try...", to which I reply (a) HOLY CRAP! and (b) what rules mistakes did you make? On my 3rd game with over an hour's planning I only got 55. I'm no savant, but I'm no goose either. For someone to get 60 on their first game is unbelievable. Anyway, I have heard of someone getting 62. When I can manage 60 I'll start with the cards and try the campaign mode.

After this morning's experience I've decided I need to get more than 3 points for Major Improvements. My revised plan involves a Stone Oven and a Well worth 7 VP in total. I'll probably need a Fireplace as well so I can convert animals to food. To execute this plan I'll need 29 wood, 13 clay, maybe 8 reeds, and at least 10 stone. I can get away with 28 wood if I lose a point on pastures. I have two more bus trips tomorrow to work on this plan!

I'd love to be playing now, but the school Christmas concert has sucked my soul, and I have to go to sleep. Goodnight!

Shilling Dominion

2008-11-23T10:31:00.003+10:00

There was a bit of a fuss on BoardGameNews.com about Valerie Putman and Dale Yu "shilling" for Dominion, i.e. writing about the game they were developing in a way that was perceived to be promoting the game. I can sort of see where the critics were coming from, i.e. BoardGameNews.com is usually perceived as an independent source of news about board games, and in this case it was clearly not independent. On the other hand, Valerie and Dale's columns never purported to be about anything other than their experiences in the gaming hobby, and that was what they were doing.

The thing that slightly miffed me was not that they were telling me about this allegedly great game, it was that yet again I was being told about a great game that I couldnt have. It was like teasing. I just skipped over those columns because it was just too frustrating. The scars that I bear from the Agricola experience are long and deep, and still growing. What a fuck-up that is. So Dominion was on track to piss me off like Agricola has pissed me off.

However the Dominion experience has been a much happier one. Remember I ordered Agricola last November and don't have it yet. I first heard about Dominion in April after CyberKev returned from the Gathering of Friends. He told me it was a very good game, and CyberKev can usually tell these things. Sure, he said the same thing about In The Year of The Dragon, and that sucks, but I can recognise that it's a decent game that I just happen to despise. But then a couple of weeks ago, Tom the Swiss Guy turned up in Brisbane with a German copy of Dominion. All of a sudden Dominion was a real game that people could get, and I started to pay attention to it.

We played it under less-than-optimal circumstances - in German, with 5 players. It's only supposed to take 4. And I came dead miserable last in the interactive game. As I hate being attacked in multi-player games (I have a shirt which "Why are you attacking me? <- Attack them ->") it wasn't conducive to my enjoyment at all. We even played a rule wrong - we played that you could buy a curse and give it to someone else. So everything was against the game. Nevertheless, I recognised that my awful performance was mostly my own fault, and the game wasn't so bad.

After the interactive game we looked at the other cards in the box. Some of them were really cool - Throne Room lets you play another action card twice, Chapel gets rid of those painful curses, while the Witch inflicts them. We switched out all of the cards which we'd used a lot in the interactive game and switched in some of the others and played again. I can't remember the cards in the game, but Witch and Gardens were two of them, and I realised they could work together so I invested in Gardens. I won that game.

That was Wednesday. On the Friday the kid played it with Tom the Swiss Guy and liked it, so on the Monday I emailed the FLGS and asked if they had Dominion. They ordered it in, and it arrived on Wednesday. I'm up to 7 plays now, and would expect to pass 25 before the end of the year.

What I mostly like about the game is the puzzle of how to play a particular set of cards. Having read Valerie's strategy tips on the Chapel I play Big Money pretty well, but First Game just confuses me... I can't work strategies that depend on the Dorf / Village. Of course any deck that includes the Thief will break a Chapel strategy as well, so I don't know how to handle that. I like that I can be a wizard sometimes and hopeless other times. My kid likes that too.

Yeah, sure, Dominion has been hyped. But as someone on BGG said, hype is overhyped. Good games bring their own hype. Don't avoid Dominion just because someone said it was good, play it first and then avoid it if you still want to.

The Fiction of the Filler

2008-11-23T09:36:00.003+10:00

There's been a bit of debate on BoardGameGeek about whether a filler like Dominion should be ranked as highly as it is. There are a number of wild assumptions in that debate, such as:

Dominion is a filler
Fillers do not deserve to be rated highly
Proper games are long or heavy games

That's all crazy talk of course. BGG has a very strong bias towards heavy games - not ASL heavy, but Puerto Rico heavy. BGG's audience loves that sort of game, and people who love that sort of game are attracted to BGG, so it's self-reinforcing.

It's also reinforced by the point of view that if a game is light it's not a proper game. I know a couple of guys who like to play at least one meaty game per game session (and strangely, they all agree that it should be Power Grid.) I almost agree with them. I certainly like to play games that require some thought, and an evening of dexterity games and Bohnanza would underwhelm me. However I do see value in a lot of shorter games which require thought - Hey! That's My Fish! is a perfect example.

However games like H!TMF! get lumped in with games like For Sale! as "fillers", which is almost a derogatory term. What does "filler" mean, exactly? I was under the impression that it was supposed to mean "a game that you play to fill in time while waiting for other players", but I also recently saw it defined as "a game you play to relax between meaty games". That second definition is biased towards meaty games in the extreme... if you never play Power Grid is there no reason to play For Sale!?

The first definition is pretty weak as well. This is what happens at Critical Mass where I experience most of my multi-table gaming... four players complete a game of Reef Encounter. At the other table, phase 3 has just started in Power Grid so they won't be much longer, so when they're done the tables can cross-pollinate. The Reef Encounter people decide to play Ingenious as a filler. Two of the players haven't played Ingenious before so the rules need to be explained, then a great deal of thought is put into each move of Ingenious. The Power Grid people finish, and notice that the Ingenious game is only half over, so they start Through the Desert. And so the evening passes without anyone swapping tables at all.

Obviously, the Reef Encounter players may as well have just started Key Harvest instead of falling for the filler fiction - Ingenious is just as much of a game as any other, and it probably takes 45 minutes no matter how quick you imagine it might be.

The only games that PROPERLY work as fillers are games that can be abandoned in an instant. At Critical Mass I often set up one of these as people are arriving, with the intention that when people come in there's something to play, and they can peel off to other games when they get organised. Games that work in that way are Set, My Word!, Bamboleo and Ricochet Robots. Tsuro is almost as good because the games are over quickly, players can learn the game by watching, and it plays from 2 to 8, so when one game is finished some people can leave and others can join the next game. However almost anything else is not much use as a filler.

As for Dominion, it's a great game, but it doesn't perform many of the functions that I need from a filler. Some people may classify it as such, but they probably like Power Grid anyway.

Friendless Names First Black Gaming Opponent

2008-11-19T09:12:00.003+10:00

The news this morning that Barack Obama has named the first black attorney-general (of the U.S.) reminds me that it's important to emphasise people's race when talking about them. Especially if that person is black, you need to mention what they've done. Hence I feel it important to tell you about my first black gaming opponent.

Rowdy was my best mate in the late 70s when we went to school together for 4 years. He wasn't African-American (I think I'm still waiting for my first African-American gaming opponent), he was Dutch-Indonesian. As a result he had a bit of an identity crisis - he didn't know whether he wanted to be a brown superman or Johan Cruyff. As Johan Cruyff was not famously good at cricket, and that was what we played, I think he emphasized the brown superman aspect. And when I was stuck bowling for an hour and I just couldn't get through his defences, the brown superman claim was (a) credible, and (b) annoying.

Anyway, the only board game I can recall us playing together was Chess, and he was better than me at that too. I've got no idea whom I ever played against other than Rowdy, but lack of experience was no reason to be happy about losing. I remember I did beat him once with a very cunning plan where I had an attack set up behind a wall of pawns down the left hand side. When he attacked the wall of pawns the trap was revealed and I burst out to attack the rest of the board. I think that was the last game of chess I won until about 2004 when I played against my kid.

Rowdy (and I) are all grown up now, and we're back in touch. He has two gorgeous kids. He's still better than me at cricket, and I see no need to spoil my Chess record. Maybe one day I'll make him Australia's first Dutch-Indonesian attorney-general.

Gamerz.net

2008-11-16T21:20:00.007+10:00

The last few months have been an absolute disaster for gaming. Scrabblette and I spent probably 3 months being sick, during which time we were miserable as well. Being sick meant I couldn't go out to game with the guys, and being miserable meant I didn't even game with Scrabblette and the kid. I made a conscious decision to try out some PBEM gaming at gamerz.net so that I was at least playing something... and besides, I might find some interesting new games. Here's what I've been playing.

Conhex - Conhex is a proper abstract somewhat related to Hex. I'd like to tell you about the differences, but to be honest after about 10 games I don't really understand it. I think I might win one of my next 5, unless my opponent is getting better as well. I've improved a lot since my first embarrassing games.

Lambo - Lambo is one of Cameron Browne's new designs, and it's probably my favorite so far (though I like Mambo a lot too). One player is blue and one is white, and the aim is to complete a group of your colour (so blue won this game). When we first started playing people were losing games due to stupid mistakes. When we learnt what a stupid mistake was, people stopped losing, and very soon neither player could force a win. A couple of rule changes later, it seems to have settled into a very interesting game.

Superbo - This is the curiously attractive love child of Mambo and Lambo, i.e. it's a game Cam invented using the tiles from both games. One player plays red and one player plays blue. The objective this time is to complete a group of your colour containing an eye (a white hole), so blue has won this game. I don't really get the game yet (by which I mean Cam keeps beating me) so I'm not convinced it's as good as either of its parents.

Mutton - Mutton is a design from Cameron Browne and abstract game guru Stephen Tavener. It's a very curious asymmetric deduction game - one player is a team of wolves in sheeps' clothing, and the other is a farmer with a shotgun. As the wolves eat the sheep, the farmer blasts away trying to kill the wolves. The wolves' score is the number of sheep that die. Then the players switch sides and the new wolves try to get a better score.

I find Mutton to be quite a brain-burner, but it has a luck factor that can ruin your game - if the farmer has 6 options and guesses right, the wolves are in trouble. Nevertheless, there are few games which involve shameless ovine sacrifice, and it's an interesting game for that alone.

First Aussie Maths Trade Retrospective

2008-10-19T21:08:00.005+10:00

As we head into the Second Aussie Maths Trade, let's take a look back at what happened in the first - in particular, how successful have the games I received been? We can assume I only traded away things I didn't expect to play, so if I played what I did get, I've won. N'est-ce pas?

Architekton - played once with Scrabblette. She wasn't impressed. I'd play it again but may not have that choice.

Clans - played five times so far, I think. This was a very successful trade.

Attribute - played four times so far. I don't like it so much, but my kid refuses to let me give it to my sister. So, I guess that was successful.

Terrace - played once, and I'd be happy to be rid of it, but the kid likes it and won't let me. Apparently my game collection is a democracy now.

Blackbeard (old edition) - I received two copies, and played one of them solitaire. It was a fairly sucky game but I will probably do it again one day. I'm trying to trade off the second (better) copy.

Warhamster Rally - One play. I like it, but the kid says it's like Roborally but too hard. OK, the hex map is confusing. I'm keeping it for the moment.

Keythedral - unplayed so far, but I really really want to. It's the sort of game I like. After playing Key Harvest I'm really getting into Richard Breese.

Scotland Yard - unplayed so far. I'll have to remember to start taking it out with me.

Cabale - only one play, and it was alright. It will really be up to Scrabblette whether it hits the table again or not.

Stonehenge - I haven't played this yet though I'm interested in playing the Faidutti game. Some of the others stink. It's a bit of a disappointment.

Meridian - played twice so far. Scrabblette seemed to like it, but we haven't played again, and it went over OK at Critical Mass despite a massive rules screw-up.

Hacienda - I love this game! It has become one of my hits for the year, and I'm amazed to find out I've only played it 3 times. I must get it out more!

Overall, 19 plays, and Hacienda, Clans and Meridian (and Attribute, I guess) have found homes where they're very much appreciated. I guess it's not such a brilliant success rate, but it's better than paying full price for games on spec.

If You Drink Then BGG You're a Bloody Idiot

2008-10-12T20:04:00.003+10:00

Had a glass of wine with dinner, visited BGG, now I'm running a Maths Trade.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/35609

Fair enough, I did trade the second-most games last time. I'll see if I can get Gomez on the hook for next time.

Ooh! Ooh! I Have an Idea!

2008-10-12T13:16:00.003+10:00

I was just pondering the futility of being sick and staying home and still not having an opponent to play games against. So it occurred to me that if I was really smart I'd get a medical degree and work part-time. I'd still be immensely rich AND I'd be able to write doctor's certificates for my game buddies like CyberKev and Ozvortex, and they'd be able to stay away from work and play games with me. Ooh! Isn't that cunning?

Then it dawned on me... Mikey and Dupytren have already done this...

O'Brien Loses!

2008-10-10T16:00:00.011+10:00

I was sick yet again today - Scrabblette and I have been plagued with colds all winter long. At least this time I felt well enough to have another bash at ASL. I had unfinished business with the first scenario and wanted to know what would happen if the Germans played better. Of course, for old times' sake I used Sgt O'Brien as the American commander in the middle of Vierville. He did a very good job there last time when the Americans won, but I was rooting for the Germans this time.

As a quick aside, I have played games with a fellow who always plays Germany. I thought that was just a forgivable quirk, but have since got the feeling he's a white supremacist of some sort. Apparently they're just misunderstood patriots... anyway, rest assured I'm nothing like that. It really disturbs me that such people still exist.

Anyway, the Germans brought on their first two squads - Baumann to oppose O'Brien in the town, and Harpe to the intersection to guard the road in from the north where the American forces were. Praun brought reinforcements through the forest to the south of the town.

This plan worked well for a while, as Harpe's control of the road prevented the Americans from entering the town. Eventually however a detachment of O'Briens squad and the reinforcements forced Harpe out of his shelter.

In the town, O'Brien had had some success in fighting off Baumann, but Weiss arrived with more reinforcements. Praun had no success at dislodging O'Brien.

With Harpe's forces scattered, American reinforcements under Dunn swept into town. Baumann was killed, but his troops were rallied by Weiss who advanced again to face O'Brien.

Weiss's reformed squad attacked O'Brien with everything they had. Suddenly, Praun and his men made a run for the building at L3, the only victory point they had any chance of reaching. The Americans, now abandoned by the scaredy-cat O'Brien, were unable to bring sufficient firepower to bear to stop Praun, and he reached the safety of the building.

It was now the last turn of the game, and the Americans needed to dislodge Praun from L3 to win the game. Dunn's stack had 36 fire power, so they stormed the building to destroy the German forces.

Dunn was pinned by the defensive fire, and without his leadership the Germans' 15 fire power forced all of the Americans to flee for cover. When the game ended, Praun controlled L3 and the Germans won.

It might sound like the Germans got lucky, and indeed they did. The Americans didn't make a mistake in not covering L3 - O'Brien just didn't have the fire power to look after it, and Dunn had been held off by Harpe for so long he was unable to arrive in time to save the day. The unluckiness for the Americans was that Dunn got pinned in the final attack - he missed his morale check by 1, and that prevented his -2 DRM from being applied for the rest of the stack. Anything from that stack that didn't break would have gone into L3 during the advance phase, and the game would have been decided by Close Combat.

I was very impressed by the way Harpe's squad was able to control the road enough to hold back the Americans' overwhelming force. Harpe's guns had 6 range which meant they could shoot to the very west side of the map in normal range. It was impossible to sneak past them. I was also impressed by how long O'Brien hung on - Praun and Baumann initially intended to drive him out of his building and occupy N6 and N5, but he just wouldn't go.

I do like this game, it's a pity there are so many rules. I forgot to use CX counters this time, and I even forget why you would. The next scenario has machine guns which come with a whole lot more rules. Oh dear.

Life Intrudes

2008-10-06T12:53:00.004+10:00

Loyal readers, please excuse me for my recent lack of postings! I've been very busy not playing games, and it's shown in the number of interesting things I can think of to tell you. I'm now on my third cold for the season. Scrabblette is as well, except she hasn't had any obvious breaks between them, so she's been constantly sick since the beginning of July.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Scrabblette and I meeting (and also her birthday), so I asked her to marry me. And she said yes. The first person she told was the kid, who'd suspected something like that might happen although he had no inside knowledge whatsoever. I think he's been nagging her about it for a while. I guess he approves.

Anyway, I had a very good day of gaming on Saturday... let's see if I get back here soon to write about it.

WTFCAIRNS?

2008-09-19T10:16:00.003+10:00

I'm very bad at taking holidays. I only just figured this out this year. My ex-wife used to organise holidays all the time and I didn't cope very well with that but at least we went. Neither Scrabblette nor I organise holidays, so last year I spent most of December lazing around at home (writing blog posts and playing games, it seemed). Anyway, Scrabblette and I had a vague plan this year to go to OMGESSEN! but I eventually figured out I'd spent too many days going to game cons around Australia and didn't have enough days leave available to make a trip to Germany worthwhile. Although I'd like to go to the Spiel Fair I'd LOVE to go touring around Germany and France, and it just wasn't going to work this time.

We considered some other possible holidays, such as HOLYCOWINDIA! (not enough days leave still) and travelling from Adelaide to Darwin via Alice Springs and Uluru on the Ghan (maybe not good value for money, and aimed at couples, not couples with a kid). In the end though, we settled on a trip to Cairns on the tilt train. It's a 24 hour train trip, which IS a long time, but it's pretty good for Queensland Rail. A train that goes almost as fast as a car is considered pretty amazing technology around here.

Cairns is a nice place - it has beaches and rainforest and mountains and so on. However I've been there a few times and it's not so exciting for me. However Scrabblette hasn't been there and it's one of those places that people come to Australia to see, so we have to go there eventually. So we're leaving today, and getting back on the 29th, hence cramming a quite long holiday into a space it barely fits in.

Of course we have quite a few games packed. As my opponents will probably be just the kid and Scrabblette I had to choose games they would actually play with me, so we have Scrabblette's favourites and a couple the kid added. One day I'll find someone who likes Key Harvest and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, and I'll sneak off to somewhere secluded with them... even if they're a big fat sweaty ugly guy. But anyway, we have Alexandros and Attika and Buyword and Mystery Rummy: Rue Morgue and I snuck in the E&T Card Game just in case...

BTW, don't get any ideas about sneaking round and stealing my Mask series or anything from my house... Miss Jane will be caretaking for us, and my vicious guard dog will still be home. In all likelihood I will be blogging while on holidays, but I don't know whether it will be about holiday stuff or games played!

Negative Christmas Presents

2008-09-08T11:19:00.003+10:00

Many followers of this blog, like me, live in a consumption-oriented society. Since we moved house last year I've stopped accumulating furniture but we're accumulating DVDs, CDs, books and games at an apparently increasing rate. When we moved in there was heaps of space in our house, but we've expanded to fill it.

My baby sister is experiencing the same problem, even though she is much younger than me and has years of accumulation to catch up on. In email about plans for Christmas she wrote:

"We certainly do not need any more stuff,( if you know any people without stuff they can have some of ours,)"

It occurred to me that a good family thing to do would be to help each other actually get rid of stuff. Maybe we could:
* help each other clean out the shed / bookshelf / liquor cabinet (yes, even my liquor cabinet is overfull).
* rent a skip
* bring a ute around and cart some stuff to a charity.

So the Christmas objective would be to end up with LESS stuff than before. That certainly works for me. Any ideas?

Where The Fuck Is Agricola?!

2008-08-30T10:33:00.003+10:00

I preordered Agricola in December, and it still hasn't turned up. Frankly, I've got the shits with everyone involved in the process, and I certainly won't be preordering from Z-Man ever again. I've held my tongue about this for a long time but it hasn't helped. This has been an absolute cock-up. I also have no interest in dealing with Lookout Games in the future after Hanno's hysterical outburst on BGG.

It'll probably be here on Monday, now that I've blown my stack.

The Bitches Love ASL

2008-08-13T18:14:00.004+10:00

I'm a big fan of solitaire gaming (because the quality of opponent is higher :-) so I've been faintly thinking for a long time about some more serious solitaire war-gaming. Anything by Richard Berg just seems to be appallingly complex, but my Facebook friend MerricB has good things to say about ASL SK1, so I've been thinking about trying that. Coincidentally a local gamer offered to sell me his, so I bought it and tried to play it today on our Ekka holiday (google it).

I think my dog figured out if she sat next to the board then she'd get to cuddle with me. It didn't work. All my hands were in use holding the rule book and scratching my head.

For the non-gamers in my audience, ASL is Advanced Squad Leader - a World War II squad level game. Think of it as the game of Saving Private Ryan where you're Tom Hanks' commanding officer. In this particular scenario, the Americans have occupied a French village called Vierville and the Germans are attempting to reclaim it. This is my initial set-up with Sgt O'Brien controlling the crossroads.

The Germans attack from the top and the bottom (east and west) and the American reinforcements arrive from the right (north). As there was good cover for the Germans on the left hand side of the board, and not much on the right, the Germans chose to attack from the southeast and southwest. O'Brien and his men held off the German commanding officer, forcing him to retreat into a building, but the half squad at the other end of the road was quickly eliminated.

Eventually the Germans realised they'd made an enormous strategic error by not occupying the building in hex R7 (the rightmost American unit). That unit controlled a vast area around it, and along with O'Brien they protected the entrance to the village for the American reinforcements. The Germans probably should have occupied the building even further to the north as well.

With the roads open to American reinforcements, the centre of Vierville was soon decorated with stars and stripes and apple pies and photos of Mae West, and the German forces suffered some heavy fire and were forced to retreat. They eventually sent O'Brien crying back to his mummy, but Highsmith arrived with more firepower and prevented any hope of German occupation of the centre of the village. O'Brien had won the war for the Americans!

Overall, this was a decent experience, but I did spend an awfully long time trying to figure out all of the rules which applied to each situation. I think I've made enough sense of movement and Defensive First Fire now, and will be able to play a lot more smoothly next time. Routing (i.e. broken forces retreating, potentially under fire) wasn't so bad, but I know that I missed the rule about units which fail morale checks being degraded. I remembered it too late and decided not to apply it. I'll have to read the rule book again and play again to see how it works.

It seems to me that the game is not so much about killing, but about controlling area. It was very often the case that forces crumbled under fire without taking casualties, and became ineffective without being dead. In a real world scenario, this might relate to everybody hiding behind buildings and being unable to progress or reunite; or getting lost in some trees. In Saving Private Ryan a sniper effectively stalls the progress of the squad as they struggle to find a safe way past him. There's much more of that sort of disablement, and not so much death. If a squad can establish a position overlooking a road they can lay down so much firepower on the road that anyone who tries to use it will break and so cannot progress down the road. There's enormous power in controlling the paths to the objective.

Next time, the Germans will know that.

The Games Shelves Are Chocka-Block

2008-08-03T15:30:00.006+10:00

My dad called yesterday to find out if I was still playing with myself... I guess he wants to see the old family traditions preserved. So I guess I'd better write something. Actually July was the month in which I recorded the most hours spent playing games ever - 13.5% of the time in the month was spent gaming. Between that and Scrabblette getting home after 3 weeks there wasn't much time for blogging.

Anyway, I was looking at some photos of my game shelves from when we moved in here almost a year ago, and they look sparse compared to now. It seems these days games are coming to get me - I no longer need to hunt them down. I've been trying to behave myself, but they keep getting in. Here's my game shelves and why they're like that.

Shelf 1 - Kids' Games and Party Games

The red boxes in the bottom left contain Big-Ass Trias and my home-made copy of Mambo. The plastic rack in bottom right is the Digimon CCG. The egg cartons are Eiertanz. The big plastic rack up the top id the Harry Potter CCG. Various odd games are stuffed in all of the corners. The base is a drawer containing Heroscape. I want to make this the kids games, party games and Ameritrash shelf, but I need to clear some space.

Shelf 2 - Abstracts and Word Games

This is the set of shelves that attracts Scrabblette most. The drawer at the bottom contains Command and Colors stuff - Memoir, Ancients, and Battlelore. The small drawers contain card games, score sheets, non-slip mats, odd dice, and one whole drawer of non-English rules. The games in the bottom left below Hive are Santorini and Twixt.

Shelf 3 - Euros and Ameritrash

This rack is the problem child. It's where games I totally must have are destined. The bottom shelf is Days of Wonder and FFG. Stacked on the top you can see the Mask trilogy (all 4 of them) and various Ticket to Rides and Friedemann Friese stuff. Lots of yummy Euros in the middle. The right-side racks include some Lego cars for playing with on the city streets mat we have, and bowls for putting counters into. The white sack is Polarity and the blue sack is Bagh Chal pieces. The drawer below the shelves contains most of my trade pile, and some older games such as Careers which I don't want to throw out but don't want to display either.

I think my next collection management project should be moving the Ameritrash to Shelf 1. Shelf 3 needs more space.

People I Gamed With at GenCon

2008-07-08T10:53:00.002+10:00

For me, one of the highlights of a con is getting to game with lots of people. GenCon was certainly a success in that regard. CyberKev often points out that we could do just as much gaming at his house, and that would be for free, but would CyberKev remember to invite all of these people? And would they all come? And would they all fit?

BGG user names: Harley22, jacko_p, elphiecoyle, cyberkev63, Tyndal, BladeMaster777, pryllin, Pateke, mikey, OzGamer, thunderbirdsix, Peter Hawes, Gecko3D, jwalduck, arnoldrimmer, mickeyjames, Ozvortex, John Reid, smee62

From QGG: Vanessa

From LXG: Graham, Sonny, Rebecca, Claire, Nigel

From Critical Mass: Miss Jane, Anna,

From QUGS: Darryl, Julie

From Canberra EuroGamesFest: Jenny, Phillip, Eric

Scott the on-line Carcassonne guy

Mikey's friend Nick (is he on BGG?)

Some guy who played Guillotine and I never got his name

Dave and Steve who played Puerto Rico

Bertie's friend Craig

James who played Nerd Trivia

OzGamer's friends Mark and Nick

mickeyjames's friend Aaron

Jim and his son Aidan / Adrian

Three random people who played Dancing Eggs

That's 46 different people. What a social butterfly I am!

The Best Four Days in Gaming?

2008-07-07T09:10:00.005+10:00

I've just spent the last 4 days gaming at GenConOz. OMG what a lot of hard work! We arrived about 9am each day and gamed until it was time to go home and go to bed. This is what I played:

Race for the Galaxy	4
My Word!	3
Carcassonne: The Discovery	2
Clans	2
Guillotine	2
Pictureka!	2
Puerto Rico	2
Taluva	2
Vikings	2
Africa	1
Chang Cheng	1
Dancing Eggs	1
Entdecker	1
Genesis	1
Jenga	1
Keltis	1
Mr. Jack	1
Nerd Trivia	1
Power Grid	1
Prophecy	1
Relationship Tightrope	1
Rheinländer	1
Ricochet Robots	1
Santiago	1

I'm a bit amazed I played 4 games of Race. I'm also amazed that every time I play I see new cards. In those 4 games I won once and came second all the other times - and they weren't 2 player games.

All the games of My Word! were on Thursday evening when we were too tired to play something more thoughtful. Carcassonne: the Discovery was easy to teach because almost everybody there already knew Carcassonne, and it's not so different. I think it's a bit lighter than the original because there aren't titanic struggles over fields.

Both plays of Clans were on Sunday morning while we were waking up and more people were arriving. The box says it's a game for 2-4, but we played with 5 without any noticeable problem. I think I'm even beginning to understand it now. I definitely want to play it more. Scrabblette will probably like it.

Guillotine was the Saturday morning game. Play at the con was characterised by people agreeing to play a game, someone new arriving, changing the game to accommodate more players, then someone else new arriving... so if you're playing at a time when people are coming in it's probably best to be playing something quick and easy so people can join in and spawn off new groups frequently. Guilltone performed that function for us on Saturday.

Pictureka! is boring and broken. Play it with small kids. The games of Puerto Rico were much more serious. The second game was a massive 5 player struggle where I pursued a corn strategy with a very experienced player sitting to my right and two newbies across from me. It was so frustrating seeing my corn ships always loaded with tobacco! However the one time he skipped taking Captain I shipped 8 corn for 9 points. I won the game by 2 points.

Taluva, Vikings and Africa are all games that I like, and was able to find people to teach them to. I will continue to play all of them when I get the chance.

Chang Cheng was a new game to me, but I found it to be a very uninspiring area majority game in the same style as Reiner Knizia's Samurai, i.e. I play a piece in an area then the player to my left makes some play to take it off me. That sort of game just doesn't interest me.

Dancing Eggs was my idea - I was too tired to think but I figured I could get a good group to play a stupid game. We did play and we had fun, but after the first game finished there weren't more people volunteering to play. Oh well.

Entdecker is a game that I've been interested in for a while. I like the map, but I didn't find the gameplay to be very satisfying. I lacked money for quite a portion of the game, completely failed in everything I attempted, and came convincingly last. Also, the game went for an hour and a half which was pretty long for someone who couldn't win. I'm no longer interested in it. That same group then went on to play Relationship Tightrope which was decreed to be Much Too Bad To Play, so after one round we played Rheinlander instead. This was the first time I'd ever played without CyberKev, and the first time I won. Well, at least I've won one now.

Genesis is a simple game with some interesting tensions between cooperation and competition and the need to do too many things all at once. This was my third play and I'm yet to win.

The con had also organised for a large pile of Jenga boxes to be in the gaming area, which of course were used to play giant Jenga. At one stage when we were wondering whether a player was coming back or not we even had a game ourselves. That game certainly kept the cosplayers amused.

Of course we don't have a real copy of Keltis, but CyberKev made his own in much the same way that McGyver manufactures escapes. He played a couple of times, but I wasn't very impressed and only had one game. It seemed to me that one track with a few clover leaves on it was a big advantage to the people who had those cards... and I didn't. Well, it's only a Spiel des Jahre, nobody said it had to be a GOOD game.

The kid and I played one game of Mr Jack in which I, as Jack, forgot when I would have to declare light or dark and was quickly defeated. We also played a 9 player game of Nerd Trivia with some people we really didn't know very well, so it was interesting trying to bet that they knew the answers to the questions. The kid came second!

I was gaming in a group of 5, and 3 of the others said Power Grid was their favourite game. I only played it once before and wasn't so impressed, but I agreed to play it again. Three hours later, I still wasn't impressed AND the canteen had closed so I'd only had chips for dinner. It just seems to be an awful long build-up to a very sudden and inevitable finish... and the connection part of the game is basically irrelevant. It might be several more years before I play it again.

I think it was Saturday morning when I found myself gaming with some of the very smart guys from Critical Mass. Mikey is not averse to dice rolling so I suggested Stone Age. It's a very nice game with a strong theme and everyone soon got the hang of it. I had 6 multipliers for huts, but didn't realise how difficult it would be to actually buy huts in a 4 player game with everyone else buying them as well. Meanwhile Andrew had been accumulating tools and tool multipliers, and his 56 point bonus for those won him the game.

The same group then went on to play Prophecy which we borrowed from the Funatical stand. We rushed through the rules and didn't really understand them, so we spent a lot of time searching the rule book to find things out, e.g. what the heck was experience used for? After a bit over an hour we realised the game was going to go for a very long time so we agreed that the first player to kill something in the Astral Plane could win... and Mikey did that. It's an OK game but I don't care to play it competitively. Solitaire might be OK.

Early one morning... Friday?... it was all a blur... the kid and I played Ricochet Robots against Tyndal from Adelaide and got completely flogged. I wasn't with it that morning, but I suspect Tyndal is very very good at it.

I also played one game of Santiago. I played it once before and was impressed with the cleverness of the design but thought I didn't like how it played much - too much screwage. This time, I realised that I really HATE the screwage. It's like the provost gone wild. Santiago is a beautifully designed game but it is definitely not a game for me. Although I have nice things to say about it, I rate it a 4.

Finally, I played a game of the upcoming Gigamic title Inside at the Funatical stand. It totally sucked. However subsequent investigation on BGG suggested we'd missed a very important rule which would make the game much more interesting. I'd like to play again with the correct rules, because it sounds much better played properly. The Gigamic series are beautiful games and some of them (such as Quoridor) are absolute classics.

Finally a few notes on the con in general. It wasn't as big as I expected it to be, which turned out to be great. The board gaming area was quite big and often had about a hundred people in it without being crowded at all. LXG had a portion of their game library there, and we took our own as well, so there were heaps of games to play. The facilities were perfectly adequate. We met lots of new people, none of whom turned out to be arseholes. From my perspective, nothing went wrong, and that's basically an achievement to be proud of.

A Message from Trixi

2008-06-29T19:33:00.002+10:00

Introductory Level Pandemic

2008-06-29T07:15:00.003+10:00

I recently received Pandemic for my birthday, even though it's not my birthday yet. I need to do a proper birthday post, but that can come later. Anyway, for the last week my project has been to explore Pandemic in a slightly rigorous way. I played the solitaire game on introductory level with all 10 different character combinations.

Yes, I know introductory level is for babies and sissies... but at the moment I'm more interested in seeing how the game works than plonking hundreds of cubes on the board. Anyway, out of 10 plays I had 9 wins. Here's a brief summary:

1. Researcher and Medic - WIN - 1 outbreak - 3 epidemics - 1 eradication
2. Researcher and Dispatcher - WIN - 4 outbreaks - 3 epidemics
3. Ops Expert and Dispatcher - WIN - 0 outbreaks - 3 epidemics
4. Ops Expert and Researcher - WIN - 3 outbreaks - 3 epidemics
5. Scientist and Researcher - WIN - 0 outbreaks - 1 epidemic
6. Ops Expert and Medic - LOSE - 8 outbreaks - 4 epidemics
7. Scientist and Dispatcher - WIN - 6 outbreaks - 3 epidemics
8. Scientist and Ops Expert - WIN - 0 outbreaks - 2 epidemics
9. Dispatcher and Medic - WIN - 6 outbreaks - 3 epidemics - 1 eradication
10. Scientist and Medic - WIN - 0 outbreaks - 3 epidemics

In the game that I lost the character whose turn was next had a cure ready and was at a research station, so I lost it by one action! I think I'd been a little negligent looking after the yellow disease in South America, but there's a reason for that. Anyway, the first point I'd like to address is:

WHICH IS THE BEST CHARACTER?

There are essentially 3 skills in the game: finding cures, moving, and curing the population. The important thing to realise about that game is that although curing the population is in your face as the obvious and most urgent thing to do, it's actually the least important with regards to winning the game. Not doing it will lose you the game, but doing it won't win for you. Finding cures is most important. Moving is a secondary function which assists you in doing the other two things. I tend to categorise curing the population as a tertiary action which is only there as a minor concern to stop the game ending before you win. With that in mind, the roles of the characters are:

DISPATCHER - helps movement.
OPS EXPERT - helps movement.
MEDIC - helps cure the population.
RESEARCHER - helps find cures.
SCIENTIST - helps find cures.

Yes, the Ops Expert is all about movement! By establishing research centres he lets the other character move around the board freely. In particular, if the other character needs the Beijing card to find a cure and the Ops Expert can get to Beijing, he can establish the research centre and still have the Beijing card when the other character gets there. That's much more difficult for other characters. Not having to go to a research centre can save each character a couple of movement steps, which can possibly add up to a complete turn of actions over the course of one card transfer.

The Dispatcher is obviously about movement, and I think he's more powerful than the Ops Expert. He just needs to get to Beijing and he can drag the other character straight to him. He can then send the other character away again, in many cases. I've realised the Dispatcher can be lots of fun, but more on that below.

The Researcher is a brilliant character because of her ability to transfer cards. Other characters go to such a lot of effort to transfer cards and it's often the rigmarole involved in that which loses them the game. The Scientist is similarly excellent because she just needs to get fewer cards. It's much more often the case that the Scientist will draw a cure from the deck and not require any card transfers at all.

That leaves the Medic as my least favourite character, because he performs only the tertiary function. He's hard to move, he's not much use in finding a cure. While he's doing nothing the diseases keep spreading, and THEN he acts like a hero cleaning them all up. Well, it might be too late! If he'd been more useful earlier in the game ten million people wouldn't have died in Calcutta!

I suppose the strongest character would be the Researcher, though the Scientist is very close. However my favourite for making cunning plans is the Dispatcher, and particularly his ability to move another character as if he was moving himself.

WHY DID I LOSE ONE?

The game I lost was with the Operations Expert and the Medic. As I've mentioned, the Medic is the worst character for finding a cure, and the Ops Expert is not much more help, so this is probably the worst possible combo. That game was also the one where an epidemic came out earliest, so the diseases were hitting us before we'd found any cures. Now here's something I learned from Critical Mass: if you haven't had an outbreak, adding 3 cubes in an epidemic won't cause the first one. Because if you haven't had an outbreak then the cards for all of the cities with cubes on them are on the top of the deck, not on the bottom. However in this game I had an early outbreak and I think the second epidemic caused a further outbreak... and it was all downhill from there. I was amazed we got to 3 cures before the game ended in a couple of nasty chain reactions. It also seemed that we just didn't have the cards we needed to get to anywhere useful, and whatever colour cards I decided to discard would be the ones I drew next. I will play that scenario again a few times to see what my success rate will be like.

WHAT WAS THE EASIEST WIN?

I was completely stunned in one game when the Scientist and the Researcher pulled off a win after only 1 epidemic. However these are the two characters best suited to finding cures, and they just hung around each other near the research stations, and kept transferring cards and finding cures. I had the extra bonus of being dealt the Atlanta card to start with, so I could fly directly to the most dangerous spot to treat the disease. This game took just 8 turns.

BASIC STRATEGY?

As you need to find cures to win the game, I only try to manage the disease cubes, not remove them, and focus on finding cures instead. Yes, it's vital to remove a third cube (leaving 2) from any city, but it's more important to transfer cards than to remove the the second cube (leaving 1).

If you need to remove cubes or transfer cards (other than with the researcher) then you'll need a good transport network to move around in, so establish some research stations as early as you can. I like to start the game, if possible, by flying somewhere, driving to the next city, and establishing a research station there. Often I just don't have appropriate cards and that makes the game difficult. It's ALWAYS worth the effort to use a card to establish a research centre on a city of each colour, because if you need to transfer cards you can use the research station to get to the vicinity quickly.

Transferring cards is *so* difficult without the Researcher that I tend to wait for almost enough cards for a cure to accumulate in one hand before making plans to transfer. When we do get on the trail of a cure I try to get the characters to cooperate to get all of the cards and a research centre in the same place.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

Lots of things. The powers in this game work together pretty sweetly sometimes, and there's scope for clever moves.

1. I tend to not notice when I hold cards for nearby cities and hence could use the "fly anywhere" ability. I need to keep more of an eye on that.

2. It's a very strong position to be holding a card for a city already containing a research centre. This can only happen with the Ops Expert or with a government grant. It allows you to move to any research centre, then to the one you hold the card for, then to anywhere. Maybe the Ops Expert should be looking to set up that sort of move.

3. The Ops Expert is effective as a trailblazer who goes into an area and establishes a research centre so other characters can get in there fast.

4. The Dispatcher can move another character on his own turn. It wasn't until game 9 that I realised that that includes driving. That's so cool! I had found a cure for a disease and desperately needed to remove some of its cubes from the board before it outbroke. So the Dispatcher drove the Medic through that area, and the Medic removed 8 cubes on the Dispatcher's turn - the Medic's presence removes cured diseases. I look forward to figuring out more fun ways to use the Dispatcher now that I've realised that.

WHAT NEXT?

I have unfinished business with the Medic and the Ops Expert. I want to see whether I got unlucky, or whether they really are hard to win with. After that, I think I will repeat this experiment on normal level. That'll keep me quiet for a while.

The Meeple of the Moment

2008-06-21T19:47:00.002+10:00

Holy dooley. We went to lunch with Scrabblette's cousin today and it turned out to be a surprise birthday party for me. Lots of work friends, family, and gamer buddies. No time to report now as the gamer buddies are arriving at my place soon for more gaming. I got a boatload of presents (see above).

Cooperative Tile Laying Games

2008-06-21T09:35:00.004+10:00

As I was reading the rules of Hacienda the other evening I realised that the rules of the game would influence how the players laid out the tiles. "Realised" is too strong a word, maybe I just began thinking about that. This idea has been floating around my head since learning Key Harvest, and it's inspired by Key Harvest's rule that your largest group scores one point per tile and your second largest group scores 2 points per tile. That simple rule encourages you to make your groups of tiles the same size. And as the rules point out, that's what Keywood, the ruler of Keydom, is trying to encourage. Keywood understands that the rules are a mechanism by which the players can be coerced to form a pattern of the designer's understanding. In that sense, by competing, the players cooperate to form a pattern of the style intended by the designer.

In Hacienda the goal pattern is long chains of land tiles with herds attached. However large herds don't score much, whereas connecting to markets does, so the herds tend to be small. Well, it depends on the map I suppose, but there are certainly times when it's much better to make more small herds. The rule that land groups only score if they contain 3 or more tiles prevents players from laying a single land tile near a market and attaching a herd to it - players tend to have only a few land groups.

Consider what would happen if we changed the rules of Carcassonne so that everybody who has a meeple in a city scored it. Joining into a city would about as good as before, but everybody in the city would be trying to complete it, compared to just those players who are currently leading in the city. This slight change in motivation would probably lead to more completed structures and fewer ugly gaps in the map.

Other tile laying games where the players cooperate to form a pattern include:

Architekton - except, as mentioned in my previous post, there is motivation to make the pattern ugly.
Attika - you're encouraged to play your group together and not build many settlements. If only that would work for me!
Ingenious - players generally form clumps of one colour, until the blocking starts. Ending the scoring track at 20 rather than 18 would cause slightly larger groups of each colour.
Java / Mexica / Torres - in these games the rules are more complicated because there are more types of tiles and Mr Kramer has more complicated intentions for you. I just realised Hacienda is very much like those games, though a bit simpler.
Santorini - does a good job of encouraging the players to form that lovely Greek island landscape with very simple rules.
Go - OK, so nobody explicitly designed Go as far as we know, but the rules create some beautiful structures. Sometimes it's really messy, too.
Taluva - the desire to place your towers and temples causes settlements in the mountains. Quite simple rules generate gorgeous mountain villages. I don't understand what there's not to love about this game.
Gheos - This is an example of a game where the rules completely fail to generate a nice map. A player builds a continent with a civilisation and the next player tears it down. It's like building sandcastles with your 3 year old son - nothing remains for very long. This is probably the major reason the game didn't work for me. I *like* the cooperative nature of tile-laying games, and Gheos is all about breaking things.

New Games Played

2008-06-21T08:16:00.002+10:00

Wow, I've been fairly slack at this blogging thing. I suspect I've been using all of my creative energies actually writing new code at work. Also, I ran out of ideas for a while. Now I have ideas but am not sufficiently lacking in alternative entertainment to make writing them down the best option. Anyway, I've been playing the games received in the math trade so I'll share my opinions with you. Because I know my opinions are important to you.

Architekton is a semi-abstract tile laying game. By "semi-abstract" I mean a game where the theme is pasted on - other examples would be Through the Desert and Alexandros. Michael Schacht and Leo Colovini do semi-abstracts almost exclusively. Scrabblette and I like them a lot, but I think I liked this one more than Scrabblette did. Scrabblette was happily matching tile edges together when I went and deliberately played one that didn't match against one of her buildings. That was when she realised that I actually was an opponent, but I think the thought of deliberately not matching a tile edge disturbed her. I liked the game, but I think it would be very different played more viciously.

I received Attribute with the intention of giving it to my sister, but my kid liked it so he complained that "they already have Apples to Apples, why can't we keep this one?" Well, OK. We played it with my sister's family as well and they seemed to like Apples to Apples a little better as the scoring is easier. My nephew's comment was "this game would be better if I could read". Attribute is a fun game if you've got a group of friends who can pay out on each other, which I deliberately emphasized by choosing topics such as "my belly". And the rule in our house now is that bananas are elegant. Don't talk to me, talk to the green sheep.

Terrace and Blackbeard I've already discussed elsewhere. Blackbeard will get another go, but it's not a great game.

The kid and Jane and I played Warhamster Rally. This game was surprisingly like Roborally or Flying Carpet, and it took a few minutes of play to figure that out. The Dork Tower theme is confusing to people who know nothing about Dork Tower, and the kid found that the game was harder than he'd expected. Once I realised what was going on I totally ruled and easily won the race. We didn't have any deliberate screwage in our game, and although that's against the designer's intent I prefer it that way. Games where I invent a great plan and get it screwed over by malicious opponents (damn them, why must they oppose maliciously?) don't engage me. Warhamster Rally is cute and a decent game, but I don't think the kids will play it with me :-(.

BTW, after we played Warhamster Rally the kid pulled out Frank Branham's other game, Nodwick, and we played two rounds of that. That's a game where the silly play matches the silly theme, and even Scrabblette the abstract girl joined us to play that. It's a bit like Bohnanza without rules, or Pit with the handbrake on.

Scrabblette and I also played Cabale. Whenever I try a new abstract game, particularly one with nice bits, I wonder whether it's going to be a decent game or just something someone dreamed up and decided to sell, trusting that difficult rules would confuse people into buying it. There was no need to worry about Cabale, it is an interesting game. It's played on a hex-hex board, and there's a rather confusing rule where you need to move your runner in an elbow move, i.e. along a straight line, around a corner, along another straight line. Eventually we figured out that it was easier to barricade the other runner than try to defend your own scoring markers, so we got into a battle where the first priority was blocking and scoring was secondary. As I'd noticed this a little earlier than Scrabblette, I was able to build a wall preventing her from getting near the high-scoring spaces. She did the same, but the area I was locked into was better than the area she was locked into, and I rushed to finish the game before anything bad happened. The rules take a bit of understanding, but a very decent game emerges.

That's all we've played so far. Having read the Stonehenge rules I can't help but agree that it's a project designed to make a number of mediocre games, but I would definitely like to try the one designed by Bruno Faidutti. I have some ideas for games of my own as well, but I'm not very motivated to design a game when I have so many others to play anyway.

Loot from the Maths Trade

2008-05-25T15:52:00.003+10:00

Ozvortex recently posted his results from the Great Aussie Maths Trade on his blog. I've been meaning to do so myself. Sorry, my article will have fewer pictures than his.

Caribbean is a cute game, but I found it somewhat frustrating to play with no room for great moves and a whole lot of groupthink screwing everyone over. I received Architekton by Michael Schacht in exchange for it. Architekton is a 2-player semi-abstract of the type that Scrabblette and I play a lot.

Cave Troll is a reasonable game, with nice minis, but I really can't see myself getting excited to play it many times. In fact, maybe never. So it has gone somewhere where it will be more loved, at least temporarily, and I am receiving Clans in exchange for it. I've played Clans on-line but never against a real person. It is a very strange game but I may grow to love it. Colovini and Schacht both produce the sort of games that Scrabblette likes, so it's worth a try.

Chrononauts was an OK game a couple of times, but players trying to win turns it into a painful process. I have swapped this for a copy of Attribut which I will give away to someone who likes that sort of game.

Creeper is one of those abstracts that gives you a complicated system and asks you to understand it better than your opponent. We played it once and couldn't get motivated to play it again. It leaves another hole in the Pin Collection rack, but there was no point keeping it. I received Terrace in exchange for it. We've played Terrace once, and may not play it again as it seems to have major stalemate problems. No net loss, anyway.

FBI was one of those dime-a-dozen pointless card games, and it wore out its welcome with us very quickly. The kid loves spy themes and this one didn't work for him. I exchanged it for a copy of Blackbeard.

Fiji is a very strange game by Friedemann Friese - maybe the pinnacle of the art in blind bidding games... but I find it hard to teach and not so much fun to play. I received Frank Branham's Warhamster Rally in exchange for it. Fiji may be the better game, but I think I'll have fun playing Warhamster Rally with the kids.

Formidable Foes is another Friese game that really fell flat in this household, so I've been looking to trade it for quite a while. I'll be getting Keythedral for it. I don't know much about Keythedral, but I do like Key Harvest and I'm beginning to realise that Richard Breese makes really heavy connection-oriented games, so I need to check it out.

Gloom and the Unhappy Homes expansion did not trade. Scrabblette refuses to play them because she can't read the cards, but maybe I can play them with the kids now that the littlest has (mostly) learned to read.

High Society is an OK game, about the same style as For Sale and Relationship Tightrope. It's not a style of game that holds my interest, so I was pleased to exchange it for Scotland Yard. It's an old game, but still well-respected.

Illuminati is a game I have fond memories of, but I've discovered it's not even nearly my style any more. I exchanged it for a copy of Cabale, a wooden abstract game. I have no idea whether I'll like it or not, but it will be at least as good as Illuminati.

Octiles, Jumpin' Java, Sputnik, Megalith and Triominoes did not trade. Octiles is a perfectly decent abstract game... but I think more than half of the abstracts which did trade did so because they came to me.

Wildwords, Wordigo and Worddrop did not trade either. Nobody wants word games. Wildwords is really quite a good game - I'm trading it because I got two copies.

Katzenjammer Cats is a tiny little card game which I didn't think much of, and I traded it for Stonehenge, the 5-games-in-1 from Faidutti, Selinker, Borg, Ernest and Garfield. With that pedigree there's got to be something in there that Scrabblette and I will like.

The Reef and Saga didn't trade either. That's because they're boring.

Lord of the Rings Risk (Trilogy Edition) is a game that I bought shortly before I discovered BGG, in order to play with the kid. We tried it once, but he's since refused to play. I don't want to play Risk, so there's no point keeping the game. I'll be receiving Meridian (another Colovini) in exchange. There's a much higher chance I'll play it.

Travel Rummikub did not trade. I don't remember choosing to own it, so it's not a surprise nobody else wants it.

Runebound: Crown of the Elder Kings did not trade. Are there no other Runebound players out there? This expansion is aimed at increasing player interaction, which is not relevant to someone who plays solitaire.

Spy, Tatata!, Wench, Xactika, Chiamo didn't trade. It's a pity, because I really don't want them.

Travel Blokus was an abstract that I was able to get rid of. It's a decent game, we have Blokus Trigon and don't need the other two.

Wizard Kings is a game I was very excited about, and Columbia Games had a deal where you got free shipping if you spent over $100 (U.S.). It turned out I didn't like the game very much at all, and it only got played once. Well, THAT was a lot of money down the drain. And then they brought out second edition which basically screwed over the tradeability of first edition. So I exchanged it for Hacienda which I've wanted to play for a long time and never found a copy of.

Aton is a highly-ranked abstract game, but I just thought it was strange. It was complex and not much fun. I traded it for another copy of Blackbeard. Oh well.

The Sad Tale of "Black" Jack Blood

2008-05-25T10:56:00.002+10:00

I recently acquired Blackbeard in the Great Australian Maths Trade, with the intention of playing it solitaire. I set it up last night but was too tired to tackle the opaque rules, so I got into it first thing this morning. I must say, Berg has done a spectacular job with this game - it's the only solitaire game I've played where I was bored by the down time. What a talent the man has!

But seriously, the way you tell whose turn it is is to draw a card, look at the 3 player line, and it will tell you Player 1, Player 2, or Player 3. I was Player 3. I had one turn near the start of the game where I sailed over to near a merchant ship. Players 1 and 2 then had lots of turns during which Emmanuel Wynne had an entire career (rising to 11 Notoriety) and was killed by a warship off the Gold Coast. The merchant ship I was chasing sailed back to England, down the west coast of Africa, circumnavigated the globe, discovered the Northwest Passage, and was finally placed in a museum, all before I got a second turn.

Wynne was replaced by the effeminate Oliver La Buze. About this time I got a few turns, and La Buze and Blood chased pirates in the Caribbean while Christopher Condent grabbed two prizes off the coast of Madagascar, and returned the booty to port much to the joy of his scurvy-ridden crew. I discovered a fat prize off Jamaica, but couldn't capture it, and return to port for repairs. La Buze suffered a similar fate with the same ship. While I waited in port, La Buze repaired his ship, returned to attack the merchant again, and let it escape. La Buze headed north to search for more prizes, while I headed south towards the South American coast.

Sadly, all I found there was a storm which caused damage to my hull, leaving my speed at -1. I limped into Curacao to repair the damage. While I was there, a warship appeared off the coast, and for some reason decided to attack me. An unidentified warship can move d6 movement points, and it needed a 6. So it rolled one. The warship attacked my immobile sloop, and "Black" Jack Blood was killed.

So let's look back at the wicked career of the man known as "Black" Jack... he attacked a ship once. He claimed no prize. He took nothing. He got caught in a storm. That was the highlight of his career, really. Then he died. "Black" Jack gained no loot and no notoriety.

If you want to have an exciting pirate adventure too, you should get this game.

Math Trade Shipping

2008-05-18T18:29:00.017+10:00

I volunteered to coordinate shipping of games from Brisbane in the Australian Math Trade. Ozvortex came to visit this afternoon and we packed a few of the boxes.

Games Coming From blacksoilbill

Games Coming from hvddrift

Games Coming From Mikey and jwalduck

Games Coming from Friendless

Games Going To Albury

Games Going to Sydney

Games Going To Adelaide

The Parcel for Albury

I posted this on Monday morning.

The Small Parcel for Sydney

The Big Parcel for Sydney

Ozvortex and The Kid Design a Special Box For Adelaide

Oh I Wish

Almost Everything for Melbourne

The Fate of the Dinosaurs

2008-05-03T17:36:00.003+10:00

It wasn't a meteor that killed the dinosaurs, it was a great big hand descending from the skies.

We played Big-Ass Trias at Critical Mass last night. I felt I was in a good position, but the game ended before I thought to try to convert that position into points and I ended up coming last. I'll try to write up a session report.