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.

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?

I Can't Wait for Scrabblette to Come Home

Because frankly, as good as CyberKev is at Rheinlander, I don't want to play Footsies with him.

Scrabblette is STILL overseas visiting family. How many families does she have? Doesn't she know I need someone to organise my life so that the game-playing and the housework happen in sensible proportions? Actually, yes, she does know all those things and we're constantly in touch and she'll be home soon. I'm looking forward to it and I've been thinking of games I'd like to play with her when she gets back.

I know what you're thinking, but no, this is not one of those horrible double entendre articles that make you alternately snigger and grimace. I'll do one of those later if I can figure out how to write it without offending my audience. This is a serious list. Scrabblette has decided that her favourite types of games are word games and abstracts. They're two of my favourites as well, but I also like deduction games, dexterity games and whatever that type is that includes Tikal, Domaine, Rheinlander, Bridges of Shangri-La, Tigris & Euphrates and Trias. But still, I have a lot of word and abstract games to play with her.


Through the Desert - Besides being a beautiful game, this is quite a lot like Go but without the intensity.






Taj Mahal - I haven't played this yet, but of the two Indian themed games in the BGG Top 50 this seems to be the lighter. Also, the little taj mahals look really nice. Maybe not Scrabblette's type of game, but I think she'll like the theme.




Hey, That's My Fish - This is the highest ranked abstract game that I don't own, which is good incentive to buy it. As well as playing it with Scrabblette, the kids might like it.





Scrabble - I have to confess that we haven't actually gotten around to playing this yet. We've played Scrabble Cards and several other word games, but not this one.





ZERTZ - We played GIPF once and she seemed to enjoy it, and ZERTZ is probably just as good. Furthermore it doesn't have a board, in fact everything is made of Bakelite, so we could play this at the beach or in a park or in any number of romantic places. Besides, I'm really itching to play it again.



Tigris and Euphrates - Gentlemen, now you see just how attractive this woman is :-). Yes, there are some women out there who will play E&T, and I'm yet to see whether Scrabblette is one of them, but I have a kinky fantasy where she enjoys playing this. You have to admit that's pretty kinky. If she doesn't like it I'll try to play it with my brother-in-law, although he's a bit hairy.


Now, I know what you're all thinking. What about Lost Cities? I have had good experiences with Lost Cities in the past, but I think Scrabblette is more capable than that. We'll see when she gets back, in 222 hours.

No Really, Quoridor is Awesome!

After losing my first game of Quoridor to the kid yesterday I took it with me when I went to visit my sister. Brother-in-law (BIL) is a fan of 2-player abstracts, so I showed him how to play. We played 7 games during which we both learned a lot about the game and our strategies evolved. First we started by trying to block the other player. I started fighting back against that by placing walls to prevent blocking, allowing me to make a corridor to the far side of the board. Then we realised that you could let your opponent go down a long corridor then block it, forcing them to go all the way back. Nasty. So then we realised that the defence against that was to block off the other ways that the corridor could go, i.e. make it more restrictive, so that your opponent was not allowed to block it off. I've just been playing against the kid, and I realised that when you're heading down a corridor your opponent is making for you, the best defence is to block the back end of it so your opponent may not block the front. Awesome. Every couple of games I find a new strategic aspect of this game. I love it.

BTW, BIL played against his 5yo son, and the 5yo kicked his butt. While BIL and I played Zertz the three kids had a Quoridor tournament amongst themselves. It's the most attention I've seen a game that did not require parental involvement get from the kids.

Zertz, At Last

Let me state first up that I am not going to put any silly accents on words that don't deserve them. It's OK to make silly names for games, but making them hard to type is unacceptable, so Zertz it is.

Anyway, I bought this game a long time ago, not coincidentally on the day my wife told me she wanted to leave me. As my life consequently changed a lot, it became very difficult to organise a time, an opponent, and a good mood to play this game, even though I'd been looking forward to it since reading Stephen Tavener's strategy article. But last night at BookRealm, while the other guys played Zombies 3, Walter and I had a good session of 2-player games.

All I could remember from the strategy article was "go for the white balls", and "use sacrifices to control your opponent". So indeed, I used sacrifices to control Walter, and I made him take a heap of black and gray balls to the point where he had almost won the game and I had maybe 2 white balls (we were playing 3/4/5/6 rules, not 2/3/4/5 Blitz). We weren't really clear on what we were doing, until I realised that the archipelago we'd created could easily be used to capture a white ball. I tried setting up some traps, i.e. if Walter didn't see what I was doing I could make gains, but it turned out that he did see what I was doing and that cost me big time. So I stopped doing that.

I managed to hold on to win the first game, and started to get into it more in the second. Walter was still thinking some moves didn't matter, but I found I could often set up a trap in one or two moves, so it was worth thinking every time to see how I could do that. I won the second game easily. In the third game, Walter could see what I was doing and started trying to do it himself. I got cocky and managed to give him a free white ball, but he made a mistake forcing me to capture and gave me three balls. I think he must have made another bad mistake as well, because I ended up winning the third game with 3 of each colour.

So I liked this game, and so did Walter. I can't imagine how hard it will become when my opponent knows what he is doing as well as I do - the required lookahead will do me in, I reckon. I want to play more.

I have now played all of the GIPF Project games, and I think my order of preference (best to worst) is Gipf, Zertz, Punct, Dvonn, Yinsh, Tamsk, with Tamsk a distant last. I want to play them all again. I hope my next wife will play them with me...