A Bad Month For Gaming?

How the mighty have fallen! I have been steaming along at about 70 games played per month since the middle of 2005. In the month just completed I only recorded 28 plays. Woah, what happened there!?

Well, domestic bliss, for one thing. I used to go out gaming 2 or 3 nights a week. Since the arrival of Scrabblette I have stopped going out on Thursday nights (sorry, CyberKev) because often that is the only evening we have alone together. Scrabblette and I usually play a game that night by ourselves, so assuming I would previously play 3 games on a Thursday night, that's a net loss of 8 games per month. Also Wednesday nights have gone from Book Realm to cards with the CyberKevs (sorry, RealmKeeper), which is another 8 games per month. Critical Mass is untouched - Scrabblette has accepted that Critical Mass is a part of our life.

Also in February I didn't get a chance to go gaming on any weekend - I had a lot of things on. For example, thinking about moving house, trying to get fit by playing squash, and visiting my sick mum. My weekends are crazy busy and I haven't been able to make it to QUGS regularly at all. I hope some of those things will change.

I also played fewer short games in February. In December I played 7 games of Diamant and 5 games of Xe Queo!, not to mention Loopin' Louie and Coda and so on. The only short games played in February were 3 games of Quarto. Everything else was somewhat substantial.

The substantiality is an interesting side effect of spending more time gaming with Scrabblette and less with other people. If I'm going to spend 3 hours on one game I'd rather do it at home in my pyjamas with Scrabblette beside me than in a more traditional gaming setting. In February we played Goa, Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Taj Mahal, Wildwords and St Petersburg, each of which took a couple of hours.

It also seems that I've been playing games that I like more than usual. My stats calculate your average rating for games played in a month, and my average for February was 7.4 compared to 6.8 for December. December's average is down because I played Top 50 games I didn't even expect to like such as Railroad Tycoon and Twilight Imperium 3, but 7.4 is one of my best-rating months ever. As those numbers are not inflated by (for example) 17 games of Quoridor (which I rate a 9), that's a good result.

So was February a bad month for gaming or not? I don't know how to judge these things. I would certainly like opinions on this, as a purveyor of statistics. If I pass up a game of Scrabble (which I rate a 10) for 3 games of Diamant (which I rate a 7, I think), have I made a wise choice? Is it better to play 2 games of Tichu (rated 7) or Trias (10) and Dungeonville (5)? Someone somewhere must have a system for this.

In any case, when I got home last night Scrabblette had Through the Desert waiting on the table for me. What more could a man want?

Quarto!

I'm a fan of the Gigamic games, partly because they look beautiful and and partly because I admire simple designs. But mostly because they look beautiful. I've previously blogged about Quoridor, and I think I mentioned buying Batik recently. A couple of nights ago Scrabblette and I sat down to play Quarto! I'd previously played against the kid and didn't understand what was supposed to be so good about it.

This time though, Scrabblette handed me my ass on a platter. Well actually, in the first game I just made a stupid mistake, but then she beat me twice more to prove that it wasn't just my fault I lost. Here's a quick summary of the game: there are 16 pieces, each with 4 attributes - black/white, tall/short, round/square, hollow/solid. Each possible combination of attributes is available on one piece. On each turn, your opponent chooses a piece and gives it to you, and you must place the piece on the 4x4 board. If you make a row of 4 pieces with any attribute the same on all pieces, you win.

It seems easy - you just don't give your opponent any piece that will let him make 4 in a row. Of course your opponent is trying to force you to give him a piece that allows him to make 4 in a row. Scrabblette hasn't given up her secret to winning yet (note to self: try new interrogation techniques), so I'll have to guess at the basis of the winning strategy. You want to give your opponent a piece such that no matter where they place it any piece they give back to you will allow you to win. So if you give them a piece which forces them to leave a row with 3 whites AND a row with 3 blacks, then you will win. It's astonishingly hard to do that. In fact, despite the complete absence of C_nH_2n+1OH in my bloodstream, I was unable to achieve it. At least in the second game, Scrabblette did it.

I might have to start calling her Quartette!

Gigamic Hits the Shelves

The kid and I went to the FLGS yesterday. When I say F, I mean they came to Critical Mass and gave us discount vouchers, that's how F they are. So we had to go and buy 2 games to use out discount vouchers. The good news is that they now stock the Gigamic range of games, in particular the beautiful wooden ones such as Quoridor and Quarto. The very good news is that more shelf space has been granted to board games with a new section holding Thurn and Taxis, Emerald, Ticket to Ride Marklin, Hansa, El Grande and I forget what else. I could have spent $A200 without thinking, but having been to the vet earlier in the day I was a bit scared of doing so (or maybe it was the liver treats upsetting my stomach?). In the end, the kid chose to get King of the Beasts (you don't often go wrong with Reiner), and the kid chose for me to get Quoridor. How come the kid chose both? Because I'll play anything and he has to be the opponent.

We haven't played King of the Beasts yet, but we did have 2 games of Quoridor. It's good! In my troubled sleep overnight I was thinking of cunning and nasty ways to play. It is a 2 player abstract so it's not to everyone's taste, but if you're into that sort of intense thought it is very interesting. You're often wondering whether to block your opponent, advance yourself, or to place a wall that will ensure that your opponent can't block you. I want to play more of it! Unfortunately 2 games might be all the kid can handle, because he got fairly badly beaten. Oh well.