Buckets of New Games

A couple of orders arriving and a visit to the FLGS has caused a sudden influx of new games at my house. That's a good thing, but it involves making more room in the study and also paying careful attention to the Friendless metric. The Friendless metric is currently at -17, with 42 games played 10 or more times and 59 games never played. Anyway, here are the new games.

Attika - I like this game a lot! I played it once about a year ago and I eventually decided if I wanted to play it again I'd have to buy it myself. We played a 4 player game which I won, and a 2 player game against Scrabblette which she won. I'm not really clear how she beat me... maybe better management of her new game tiles.

Trans Europa - I like this game a lot too! I already blogged about that.

Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld - Still not played.

Skybridge - I've been wanting to buy this for a while, but the FLGS is hard to get to. I went in to buy Skybridge and came out with 3 games. The kid and I played this and it's WEIRD. I just don't get it at all. I managed to stop him laying one of his bridges and we still tied.

Quixo - Another Gigamic game. I played this in the FLGS (the kid beat me) and wanted revenge so I took a copy home and played Scrabblette and she beat me too. Maybe I'll beat BIL.

Sputnik - This is a really cool looking Gigamic game from their children's series. It plays quite similar to TAMSK without the hourglasses. I kicked the kid's butt.

Formidable Foes - We haven't played this yet. It looks very nice, but I don't think it will play like Funny Friends. I like Friedemann's attitude, so I'm looking forward to playing it.

Techno Witches - We haven't played my copy but I did play the copy I bought for my niece. With my copy we can play up to 8 players.

Blokus Trigon - We played this with 4 players and yeah, it's Blokus. It's funny having the new shapes - you just imagine the shape you need then go find it without any real understanding of whether it's there or not. I now have all three versions of Blokus, and I'm not sure why.

Memoir '44 Pacific Theater - We haven't played this yet. In fact I haven't even read the rule book.

Kahuna - I generally like the Kosmos 2 player series, though Hellas wasn't very good. Kahuna sounded dull but when I realised it was by the same designer as The Bottle Imp I decided to get it. It's much more interesting than I expected. Scrabblette suffered a big ambush attack where I took over two islands and destroyed four of her bridges in one turn. But now that she's seen what sort of game it is I'm sure she'll play differently next time.

Of course with all of those unplayed games I was feeling quite guilty about the Friendless metric so we've been trying to play some of the backlog. In fact, for the Critical Mass games meet on Friday night I packed an entire box of new or unplayed games. It's sad that I can do that, and will be able to again next time as well.

I also updated the stats program to calculate the average number of times I've played each game that I own. It was at 4.31 but dropped to 4.29 after the trip to the FLGS where it still lingers. I'll monitor that number this year and think about incorporating it into whatever goal I set after the Friendless metric goal is achieved.

Here are the other new games I've played.

Cows and Leopards - This is apparently a popular game in Sri Lanka, but either they have better rules in Sri Lanka or Sri Lankan people are simple and easily amused (and I don't think for a second that's true). Scrabblette and I played one game which was doomed for stalemate the entire time. The game came from the library in some sort of teacher's aid kit, but I hate to think that kids get taught that people in Sri Lanka play crappy games.

Chathurvimshathi Koshtaka - This is an abstract that Scrabblette brought back from India. It was described in Sanskrit in the 18th century but I'm guessing nobody has ever played it much. I did a reasonable job of demolishing Scrabblette's position but the game slowed down a lot when she was down to only a couple of pieces. If we managed to get down to one piece each, the game would not have finished. As it was, Scrabblette made some bad moves on purpose so we could finish sooner.

Spin & Trap - I've played 3 games of this now, and written a review. (BTW, I've been writing lots of reviews recently as part of a fund-raising drive to get Scrabblette an avatar. I'm hoping she'll rate some games so I can figure out what she'll play with me and so is worth buying.) It's a decent abstract that I keep getting beaten at.

Landlord - Acquired at the same time as Spin & Trap, we spent some time playing this and more time discussing what the rules probably meant. Scrabblette has emailed the publisher for clarification. The rules we used seem to work OK. It's an interesting abstract where a move can have big consequences that you can sort of predict.

Let me talk about reviews... for some reason I own a lot of games that nobody much else does. As I actually know something about the game I consider it my responsibility to write some forum articles so that prospective buyers can get at least some information. With that reasoning, all I needed to do was to identify the games which I had played and nobody had opinions on, so I added a "Users Rating" column to my "Plays of Games Owned" page. Now I can go to that page, sort by Users Rating and easily see what games I've played that nobody much has rated. They're usually the ones that need reviews or session reports. I encourage all literate readers of this blog to do the same.

Abstract Fetish

I never used to like abstracts. And considering the abstracts I knew, such as Checkers, Dominoes, Tic Tac Toe, Connect 4, and so on, fair enough. I still don't like those games. I still don't like Chess much either, but I can see that it has some interest, I just find the movements of the pieces too complex. But then I played Blokus and liked it. Then my mate from Funatical loaned me a copy of DVONN, and I liked that too. And then he loaned me YINSH. And then I realised that I might not be so down on abstracts after all, and collected the complete GIPF series. And it has continued from there. With brother-in-law as a usually willing opponent, and occasionally the kid, I've played a lot of abstracts this year.

One of the advantages is that they're usually quick. If you've got half an hour for a game, you can fit at least one and sometimes 3 plays in. Gobblet and Quoridor play very quickly. They're also easy to explain. You can explain and play Gobblet twice in the time it takes to explain Hameln. That's not to say it's not worth the effort to play harder games, but it's certainly easier to keep the interest of a casual gamer if the rules explanation is quick.

Recently, my interest in abstract games has turned into a complete fetish. I looked at Stephen Tavener's ratings and examined all of his 9s and 10s. I looked at all the games that Clark Rodeffer may be interested in trading for. DAYS later my wishlist had grown bigger than my belly. And because many of the games are out of print, so had my want list. Then came the want-list purge as described in an earlier posting, and most of the abstracts survived. Why? Because good abstracts do get played. The kid and I can fit a game in most evenings. I'm much more confident that if I buy Kris Burm's new game SHMESS that I'll be able to play it a few times. I don't feel so guilty about buying games that will actually get played.

Abstracts are also often pretty. I have 3 of the Pin International Collection on a rack in my living room, I have two of the very beautiful Gigamic wooden games, and all of the GIPF Project's beautiful bakelite. I need more places to display all of these games, but I do love to look at them. Oh yeah, and beautiful glass Chess and Backgammon boards that I bought in a set for $A20. There's something mathematically enticing about abstract games.

So my wishlist now contains 26 or so abstract games, from a total of 87. Yeah, I still can't get past the amusing card games and chunks of plastic, but that's a lot of abstract games that I want. And I know I can't trust Santa...

BTW, for those who are wondering what has happened to Scrabblette: she's visiting family overseas and taught her nephew Blokus Trigon last night. She shares many of my fetishes.