Win At Checkers

On one of her visits to all libraries of the known world Scrabblette found a book called Win At Checkers by Millard Hopper. I had Checkers rated a 5 which on my interpretation of the BGG rating system means "I might want to play this again some day". It's only a small book so I started reading. Mr Hopper writes very nicely and pretty soon I was hooked.

Checking the user comments for Checkers at BGG reveals many comments like "hate this game", "broken", "solvable". Broken and solvable aren't true, unlike ZERTZ which has a known strategy for first-player win on the standard board yet is rated 7.55 compared to 4.77 for Checkers. Don't get me wrong, I like ZERTZ, but I think Checkers is rated very unfairly. Consider that ZERTZ took the "must capture" rule from Checkers, and GIPF took the "if you can't move you lose" rule from Checkers. It's true, Checkers is a simple game, but GIPF is simpler and is rated 7.09. A lot of the user comments also mention that Chess is better. Maybe so, but Chess is a totally different sort of game that just happens to be played on the same board.

I think Checkers suffers very badly from the "bottom of the toy box" syndrome. People grew up with a copy of Checkers and they never really understood it and it got dumped in the bottom of the toy box. They may not have understood the "must capture" rule, or had arguments with their siblings about the rules and hence associate the game with family arguments and lost pieces and their annoying aunt forcing them to play with their whiny little sister. Monopoly suffers from the same bad associations and is similarly despised at BGG.

After reading Mr Hopper's book about how to lure your opponent into traps, I dragged out my checker board and started working through some of the longer explanations (there aren't many of them). Scrabblette challenged me to a game. Of course Scrabblette wasn't clear on the rules and hadn't just been reading a strategy book... then the kid came to visit and he hadn't been reading a strategy book either. The book doesn't actually help so much, though. I can recognise a position where I can force you into a trap but I have to wait for you to put yourself into such a position. I also know basic strategy such as "attack gaps in the defence" and "attack along the single corner line", but putting those ideas together into a good game is beyond me. Of the 3 computer opponents I've played on the easiest level I've only beaten one of them.

I changed my rating for Checkers to a 7. If I play more and start to understand it that might go up. For a game that is so closely related to some of the great modern abstracts, Checkers sure has a poor reputation.

Alcohol + Python Interpreter = ????

It's Friday night here and Scrabblette is STILL away... what's a man to do but have a drink? And if that man is an abstract game fan? And has an unfettered Python interpreter at his fingertips? Well...


You see when I discover a new abstract game I think "that would be so easy to make if only I had the board...". And so often the board is something so simple you could code up an image for it even if you were drunk...


So, what games have I done? Well, more than I can be bothered uploading here. It's a program... it can do heaps of stuff without much modification.


So I'm only uploading a selection of things that seem useful. The achi board is for a game I added to BGG recently called Achi - search the web for the rules. The 10x10 board is for Amazons (or International Draughts). The GIPF board is for Gute Nachbarn (or GIPF). The hexagon board is for Hex. The 7x7 board is for the original version of Breakthrough.


If there are other boards I could make a game board for, please let me know. I'll need a project for when I attack the rest of the bottle of red wine :-).

They Have Some Really Good German Games In Germany (Part 4)

Paradux - this is an interesting 2 player abstract which uses apparently the same pieces as GIPF. Your aim is to get 4 of your balls in a row. However whenever you move a piece, you must move an adjacent opponent's piece as well. I have GIPF, so I suppose I can try it out.

Piraten, Planken & Peseten - Another pirate game about walking the plan which comes with a cute little pirate ship. I don't care how you play it, that is just *too cool*.

Popeln - A 2 to 4 player card game about picking your nose. The BGG description says "The best picker is the one who optimally uses length, width and angle to fish out the fattest boogers". How can I go past that?

Spinnentwist - A 2 player abstract about male spiders trying to cross a spider web to mate with a female spider without getting eaten. Don't I know the feeling, buddy. It seems to be an abstract with a great theme.

Sputnik - A Gigamic game with even cooler bits than all the other Gigamic games I'm already in love with. Apparently we're trying to blast off our rockets and avoid black holes and big bangs and stuff. The rockets are so cool... and I trust Gigamic to make a decent game.

Subulata - Another 2 player abstract about being grasshoppers. Maybe something like Hive with a board? I just noticed a lot of these games are abstracts - luckily my attraction to abstract games coincides with "games that have no text and so can be bought from Germany".

Dimes for 2006, Except You Know I Wouldn't Do it the Normal Way

My nickel and dime list is on boardgamegeek. You can go look at it there if you want. What I'd like to talk about today is the designers for whom I scored at least 10 plays in 2006. There are actually 29 of them, so I won't even mention all of them, just the ones who made an impression on me.

Reiner Knizia (20 games, 68 plays) - Reiner is the king of designers, and it's almost impossible to avoid playinghis games. He was my #1 designer last year and probably will be this year as well. Having said that though, I'm becoming less enchanted with many of his games. Ingenious, Poison and Ra saw a lot of play this year, but I need a rest from them. Some of his other games such as E&T, Through the Desert, Battle Line and Rheinlander need to be played more this year. I'd like to play Amun-Re, but I don't mind if I miss out on Medici and Modern Art. In any case, RK has designed such a variety of games that there'll always be something for me to play.

Richard Borg (8 games, 32 plays) - I'm not sure it's fair that Borg gets credit for Bluff - did he really invent it? I heard it was a game played by pirates in the 17th century! Nevertheless, the Command & Colors system will keep him in my list of top designers and I still like playing Wyatt Earp.

Bruno Faidutti (10 games, 32 plays) - There are many of Bruno's games that I like a lot and would like to play more - Castle, Citadels, Mystery of the Abbey, China Moon for a start. There are also a few others I don't mind. With luck, he'll see more play this year.

Kris Burm (6 games, 32 plays) - I missed out on my ambition to get the whole GIPF Project onto my nickel list last year, but if I liked YINSH a bit more I might have tried harder. However I expect ZERTZ, GIPF, DVONN and PUNCT to be played quite a few times this year. Last year I bought ZERTZ on the exact day my wife told me she was leaving me (in March) and as a result didn't get to play it until about July or August. I expect I won't have that problem again this year!

Wolfgang Kramer (10 games, 22 plays) - As the numbers might suggest, Kramer has designed a lot of games but I don't come back to play them regularly. Of those that I've played I really only like Tikal, Torres and Celtica, so I'd struggle to call him one of my favourite designers. However I like Tikal and Torres A LOT, so I'd like to try Mexica and Java this year.

Doris & Frank (6 games, 17 plays) - Doris and Frank produce consistently good games, and although it took me a while to warm to Frank's Zoo I'm finally getting used to shedding games. This pair is almost on my automatic must-have list, if only to see what the hedgehogs are up to this time.

Klaus Teuber (7 games, 10 plays) - What this says to me is that I don't play Settlers of Catan enough. I'd also like to get Hoity Toity to the table more often, but I seem to be the only person who thinks that it's a game of skill.

The question that strikes me at the end of this list is: Where's Friedemann? I like Funny Friends and Fearsome Floors, so where is he? Fearsome Floors - 4 plays; Funny Friends - 3 plays; Fische Fluppen Frikadellen - 1 play. I don't much like Power Grid, and he's not a hugely prolific designer, so he misses out. This year I hope to acquire Fiji and Formidable Foes, so maybe they will pump his numbers up. And I really should play FFF some more, after I bought 3 copies of it.

That's all for now. I wonder what gems these guys will produce for me this year?

Do You Like Games You Don't Understand?

I played Caylus for the first time today, and I was kind of meh. It's an interesting game, but there are too many things to think about and I'm not sure I'd ever do a good job with it. I like the building track, and if Caylus was simply an economic game trying to build the right sets of buildings so that my economy functions more efficiently than yours, I think I'd like that. I find that adding the castle and the royal favours makes Caylus so complicated I'll probably never do a good job with it. I can't grok the long-term consequences of my actions.

I think Princes of Florence is somewhat similar - there are just too many things going on. I'm all at sea when I play that, and consequently I don't enoy it so much. I suspect Goa and Louis XIV are a bit like that as well. Maybe just a bit too complicated. I like games that I can get my head around, even if it's only just, such as Tikal, Tigris and Euphrates, and Elfenland. They're the limit of complexity that I'm comfortable with and consequently a challenge to play. Easier games like San Juan, GIPF and Hare and Tortoise that I understand really well become old favourites that I can play to relax.

What I want to know is, do people often like games which confuse them? Are all the people who rate Caylus highly super-mega-smart? I have a Ph.D. and a genius IQ, but it confuses me. Are Caylus fans the absolute intellectual elite of the planet? If not, what's so good about a game that's confusingly hard? Do people like playing a game where they feel lost? Is there some different sort of intelligence that they have and I don't? I need feedback here, because it just doesn't make sense to me.

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.

The Hot Chick That Plays GIPF

Last night, Scrabblette and I consummated our relationship. We put the kid to bed, turned the lights down low in the bed room, climbed into bed, and laid out the GIPF board. Then I explained the rules and we started playing. What else would we do?

Speaking from my limited experience, the hardest part of GIPF for beginners is the ease with which you can make bad mistakes. Several times Scrabblette completely missed my threats. In fact, three times she missed threats in exactly the same spot, which prompted a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair and stuff. Nevertheless, I could see she was trying to set up traps for me, and several times I was reduced to a single move to avoid losing pieces, and once she managed to sustain the pressure enough that I did.

Anyway, she says she likes that game. Excellent news! Sadly she's leaving today for a long-planned holiday overseas, and I've been reduced to playing Tichu with the evil Count von Walduck. I hope he shaves.

BTW, my new ambition is to get the entire GIPF series on my nickel list for this year. I need to play 2 games of DVONN and 5 games of YINSH to achieve that. I think I've got the DVONN covered, but I need volunteers to play YINSH in December.