Bring on the Hedonism!

Hedonism:

1.	the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the highest good.

2.	devotion to pleasure as a way of life

One of my favourite blogs is xkcd.com. Amongst the silliness and touching thoughts for the lovesick there are some pearls of wisdom such as this one:


It turns out that I'm going to be spending quite a few days over Christmas playing games. After all, I hope to play all the ones that I give at least once :-). But that's my reward for being a brilliant yet miserable and grumpy Java programmer for the rest of my life. If I could figure out how to arrange my life to increase the playing of games and decrease the misery, I would. I'd keep the brilliance and the grumpiness though.

It also means that while other people are buying investment properties and cars and food for their kids and so on, I'm buying games. I don't feel guilt about buying games - all I feel guilt about is not playing the games that I do buy! My collection is quite adequate now, and I think I'd like to focus more on the unusual games rather than the latest hot thing (except BattleLore, nothing will stop me buying BattleLore), and unusual games can be more expensive. So what? My money, my life... I've got the Settlers 10th Anniversary Edition, Hameln, Hamsterrolle, Bamboleo... all of the outrageously expensive ones that are just so cool! BTW, see my latest geeklist.

When I die I want the kid to remember me as a dad who was a hell of a lot of fun to be with. Bring on the games.

Send the Children to Transylvania!

I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I got home yesterday afternoon - my order from unhalfbricking.com had arrived. Woohoo, Hameln and Die Dolmengotter! I had no time to read the rules before leaving for CyberKev's place to play, but I did manage to print the rules to Die Dolmengotter from the publisher's site. We didn't get to play it, but we did play Hameln using the time-honoured but a bit boring technique of reading the rules at the table as we set up the game. Wow, this game has a lot of bits! And it's pretty! And it's complex! It reminds me somewhat of Power Grid (3 phases) and somewhat of Goa (many ways to score VPs) and not much of Shear Panic. There's a whole lot more game than I was expecting.

It's very cute - you have houses with men and women in them. The men produce goods such as meat and the women have babies. The babies can get married and move into houses, and the meat can be sold. There are rats everywhere. When enough rats take over the board, the Pied Piper comes along and may take unmarried babies to Transylvania with him (which costs you VPs). What a good idea that is! But it also means that it's a valid strategy to father children upon other players so they have babies to worry about. Also when the girl children get married they can choose a house and the boy player has to pay. This group had played Funny Friends together, so forcing each other to get married and have children was familiar territory for us and we had some fun.

We did play several rules wrong, but one of the Lamont brothers has a good article on BGG about rules that people get wrong. The one we figured out was that when you activate males or females you can do so in multiple houses. This would have made the game move a whole lot faster and there would have been more money to splash around on the optional actions. We agreed that would improve the game, and might give it another run tonight at Critical Mass.

I had read some disparaging comments about Hameln, and that and the steep price ($A100) almost convinced me not to buy it, but I wanted those mice. Now that I've played the game, I'm glad I got it. Where is my kid, anyway?

Let Me Talk About Essen Too!

Although I am stuck at work in Australia, I can't help but be excited about the new games being released in Essen. Here's what I'm interested in, or otherwise.

Leonardo da Vinci: I'm interested in playing, but it hasn't got my interest enough to want to buy it.

Taluva: A must-have for me. Very pretty, almost abstract, plays quickly - many of the things I like.

Hameln: I picked up a copy of Shear Panic last week, and I've decided that Fragor games are simply must-buys. Even if the game sucks I can use them to amuse small children. BTW, Shear Panic is a decent game.

Anasazi: I know almost nothing about the game but I love the theme so I'm going to continue watching it.

Fiji: I've had good experiences with Friedemann, and a game about shrunken heads has to be a good thing, so I'm going to get it. Mara's art is always awesome as well.

BattleLore: I have a 10yo son who liked Memoir '44, and loves the fantasy theme. I guess I'll be buying this for a few years yet.

Emira: I'm always attracted to games with controversial themes, and I owe it to my game buddies to buy a gamer's game every now and then. You can't have too many games about hot women.

Silk Road: I was very keen to support Bruno and Ted, but when I discovered it used that horrible "someone misses out on the auction" mechanic, my interest fell away sharply. I'm very interested in the theme, but are the bits beautiful enough to support a mechanic I dislike?

Graenaland: I like the theme, but need to find out more about the game. Maybe I'll just look forward to playing it.

Formidable Foes: I only just realised this one existed. Same comments as above for Friedemann, though the theme doesn't appeal to me as much as for Fiji.

Khan Tsin: I know nothing, but I'm always up for a good 2 player abstract. It looks nice.

Well there goes a couple of months discretionary spending... On a slightly related note, I only own 4 games published this year. However I own 33 published last year. I guess I won't get most of these till next year :-(.