Everyone in my address book has been invited to join quechup.com. Don't do it! It's a virus. I caught it from esteemed blogger Yehuda:
http://jergames.blogspot.com/2007/09/ignore-invitations-from-quechup.html
and there's more about it here:
http://www.geekradio.com/?p=225
P.S. I just had a thought. If you did give it your email account password, start emailing people NOW and telling them not to join up. That's what I should have done.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Three New Word Games
Scrabblette and the kid and I, and my sister and her family, went to beautiful Bundaberg on the weekend to visit my baby sister and her baby daughter. And Pete. PETE HUNGRY! PETE EAT BABY! Here's a gratuitous baby photo because she's so cute:
As there were a lot of us (7 and a dog) we rented a house for the weekend, right on the beach. So close to the beach that Miss Swimming Fanatic heard the ocean as soon as we arrived (at 11pm) and begged at the door to be allowed out to go for a swim. There was a lot of this:
DOG SMELL LIKE FISH! PETE EAT FISH! By my count, I took the dog to the beach 4 times, Scrabblette took her at least twice, and Uncle Scott took her once or twice. And she still spent most of her time sulking about not being allowed to go out.
Anyway, on with the story. The games I managed to play over the weekend were all word games and all were new to me.
Wordrop
Wordrop is a simple game for 2 or 4 players, though I really don't understand why it wouldn't work for 3 or even 5. You have a plastic frame like a Connect 4 frame and you drop letters into it - one letter per turn. You score one point per letter for every word you make that includes that letter, reckoned upside down, inside out, backwards, forwards, any which way. With a well-placed I it's easy to make 9 points with IF, IT, ITS and ID, so we figured it was primarily a game of making 2 letter words.
When all 100 letter tiles are placed the game ends and highest score wins. This game was a bit unusual in that there is no randomness - players get to choose any tile they want. However I doubt two games will be the same.
I think Wordrop is a great game for learning two letter words for Scrabble, but otherwise not very interesting. In my game I beat my sister by about as many points as she forgot to score.
Pick Two!
Pick Two is a crossword game. There are 240 letter tiles. Each player (from 2 to 6) starts by drawing 8 and arranging them into a crossword using "valid" words. When someone has completed their crossword they say "pick two" and everybody takes 2 tiles and has to rearrange their crossword to fit them in. When you've run out of tiles to draw everybody scores points (and that's bad) for the letters they haven't placed into their crossword yet.
I liked this game because it was very tense. I was playing against Scrabblette using only 180 tiles. She started off very fast and called "pick two" quite a few times while I was stuck with stupid Vs. She also got a lot more wilds than I did! I got my act together and caught up as she drew some Qs. We only played 1 round of a recommended 5.
Scrabblette didn't like it so much because there was no player interaction. I liked it because I totally trust Scrabblette to make legal words and I felt under pressure for the whole round (maybe 10 minutes?). When a game gets me pumped like that I enjoy it. Scrabblette suggests a cooperative variant may suit her better, whereas I'd like to try it with 6 players.
Word Jam
The final game we played for the weekend was Word Jam. PETE wasn't around to EAT GAME, and Trixi doesn't know any words yet so she didn't play either. However everyone else did, from the 6 year old to the venerable Scrabblette.
In Word Jam you deal 5 consonant cards. One of those consonants is worth 1 point, one is worth 2, two are worth 3, and one is banned. There's also a random category that you must make words from, like Scattergories. In the picture W is worth 1, H worth 2, G worth 3, L worth 3, and S is banned. The category was "singers". I thought of the Wiggles, which contains an S and so is not allowed. "George Thorogood" would have been worth 11 points (3 Gs, 1 H) and would have won me the game if I'd thought of it then! "George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers" would be worth 0 points because of the S.
Anyway, each round new consonants and a new category are dealt. Players then think of a word until someone thinks they have a good one and says "Open Sesame!". That player then becomes Ali Baba. The other players then choose to side with either Ali Baba or the thieves. Players then have 20 seconds to think of a better word. If one of the thief players can give a better word he becomes Head Thief. If Ali Baba had the best word, he gets some points and the players who sided with him get fewer. If the Head Thief beat Ali Baba, then he and the other thieves get some points. As the game proceeds the points awarded become higher. After 8 rounds whoever has the most points wins.
I didn't go for this game particularly, as the Scattergories thing doesn't attract me at all. On the other hand, even the 6 year old was able to play a creditable game, and that's got to be good for a word game. In fact, in the last round only non-gamer-elder-niece and 6yo-gamer-nephew scored any points at all. Sister won this game fairly comfortably. My strategy was to always bet on Scrabblette finding a better word, but it appears this sort of game is not her forte either and we went down together.
Not long after we had to start the long long drive home, only stopping in to visit my dad for Father's Day. PETE DRINK ALONE. YEAH WITH NOBODY ELSE.
As there were a lot of us (7 and a dog) we rented a house for the weekend, right on the beach. So close to the beach that Miss Swimming Fanatic heard the ocean as soon as we arrived (at 11pm) and begged at the door to be allowed out to go for a swim. There was a lot of this:
DOG SMELL LIKE FISH! PETE EAT FISH! By my count, I took the dog to the beach 4 times, Scrabblette took her at least twice, and Uncle Scott took her once or twice. And she still spent most of her time sulking about not being allowed to go out.Anyway, on with the story. The games I managed to play over the weekend were all word games and all were new to me.
Wordrop
Wordrop is a simple game for 2 or 4 players, though I really don't understand why it wouldn't work for 3 or even 5. You have a plastic frame like a Connect 4 frame and you drop letters into it - one letter per turn. You score one point per letter for every word you make that includes that letter, reckoned upside down, inside out, backwards, forwards, any which way. With a well-placed I it's easy to make 9 points with IF, IT, ITS and ID, so we figured it was primarily a game of making 2 letter words.
When all 100 letter tiles are placed the game ends and highest score wins. This game was a bit unusual in that there is no randomness - players get to choose any tile they want. However I doubt two games will be the same.I think Wordrop is a great game for learning two letter words for Scrabble, but otherwise not very interesting. In my game I beat my sister by about as many points as she forgot to score.
Pick Two!
Pick Two is a crossword game. There are 240 letter tiles. Each player (from 2 to 6) starts by drawing 8 and arranging them into a crossword using "valid" words. When someone has completed their crossword they say "pick two" and everybody takes 2 tiles and has to rearrange their crossword to fit them in. When you've run out of tiles to draw everybody scores points (and that's bad) for the letters they haven't placed into their crossword yet.
I liked this game because it was very tense. I was playing against Scrabblette using only 180 tiles. She started off very fast and called "pick two" quite a few times while I was stuck with stupid Vs. She also got a lot more wilds than I did! I got my act together and caught up as she drew some Qs. We only played 1 round of a recommended 5.
Scrabblette didn't like it so much because there was no player interaction. I liked it because I totally trust Scrabblette to make legal words and I felt under pressure for the whole round (maybe 10 minutes?). When a game gets me pumped like that I enjoy it. Scrabblette suggests a cooperative variant may suit her better, whereas I'd like to try it with 6 players.
Word Jam
The final game we played for the weekend was Word Jam. PETE wasn't around to EAT GAME, and Trixi doesn't know any words yet so she didn't play either. However everyone else did, from the 6 year old to the venerable Scrabblette.In Word Jam you deal 5 consonant cards. One of those consonants is worth 1 point, one is worth 2, two are worth 3, and one is banned. There's also a random category that you must make words from, like Scattergories. In the picture W is worth 1, H worth 2, G worth 3, L worth 3, and S is banned. The category was "singers". I thought of the Wiggles, which contains an S and so is not allowed. "George Thorogood" would have been worth 11 points (3 Gs, 1 H) and would have won me the game if I'd thought of it then! "George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers" would be worth 0 points because of the S.
Anyway, each round new consonants and a new category are dealt. Players then think of a word until someone thinks they have a good one and says "Open Sesame!". That player then becomes Ali Baba. The other players then choose to side with either Ali Baba or the thieves. Players then have 20 seconds to think of a better word. If one of the thief players can give a better word he becomes Head Thief. If Ali Baba had the best word, he gets some points and the players who sided with him get fewer. If the Head Thief beat Ali Baba, then he and the other thieves get some points. As the game proceeds the points awarded become higher. After 8 rounds whoever has the most points wins.
I didn't go for this game particularly, as the Scattergories thing doesn't attract me at all. On the other hand, even the 6 year old was able to play a creditable game, and that's got to be good for a word game. In fact, in the last round only non-gamer-elder-niece and 6yo-gamer-nephew scored any points at all. Sister won this game fairly comfortably. My strategy was to always bet on Scrabblette finding a better word, but it appears this sort of game is not her forte either and we went down together.
Not long after we had to start the long long drive home, only stopping in to visit my dad for Father's Day. PETE DRINK ALONE. YEAH WITH NOBODY ELSE.
Monday, September 03, 2007
The Gathering of Friendless
I'm behind in my blogging but I should mention that I've started my new game event, the Gathering of Friendless. For the inaugural meeting Scrabblette was keen to play and the kid was with his mum so we invited people who liked to play word games and their husbands. The attendees ended up being me, Scrabblette, CyberKev, Jane and Hubertus, and we didn't play any word games at all.
We started with TransAmerica which ended up as a tie between Scrabblette and me. Then we moved on to Bamboleo which ended up as a tie between CyberKev and me. Then we played China which ended up as a tie between CyberKev and me until CyberKev managed to find, scribbled in the margin of the appendix to the codicil of the coda of the amendment to the German edition of the rules that if there was a tie then he won because he'd played the fewest pieces. Pah!
Then it was time to go to sleep, and we all agreed we should do it again.
We started with TransAmerica which ended up as a tie between Scrabblette and me. Then we moved on to Bamboleo which ended up as a tie between CyberKev and me. Then we played China which ended up as a tie between CyberKev and me until CyberKev managed to find, scribbled in the margin of the appendix to the codicil of the coda of the amendment to the German edition of the rules that if there was a tie then he won because he'd played the fewest pieces. Pah!
Then it was time to go to sleep, and we all agreed we should do it again.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Got My Butt Handed To Me
Another game of Scrabble against Scrabblette at scrabulous.com. A glorious victory to her - 368 to 295 using Australian scoring rules. My best word (and only bingo) was BEETING which I'm not very proud of because it's only in the dictionary and we can't find out what it means. I had a chance to play TIDALLY but couldn't figure out where to put it and had to play DELAY instead. There weren't many turns in this game - about 11 each. Scrabblette keeps making long words and using up all the letters. I got stuck with loads of vowels and struggled badly in the beginning, which is how I ended up making RIB and ARIA. There's always next time...
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Return of Return of the Heroes
With things gradually returning to normal around our house, I'm back to playing with myself. In particular, thanks to Andy Josefson's very nice translation and rewrite of the Return of the Heroes rules, I decided to try that one again. It's a stunning game - stunningly beautiful map cards, and stunningly bad rules. Anyway, with the rewritten rules it makes enough sense to play. I'm trying to decide whether Scrabblette was trying for the best shot of the game room decor or the best shot of my messy hair...
Anyway, onto the game. I was able to set the game up without spending 15 minutes searching through the manual for the section where it tells you what coloured tiles go in the bag and what gets left out. Already I was enjoying myself. I was the priestess. I set the royal castle (area J) and the Dark Tower (area H) at opposite corners of the board, and put my home tile (M) in another corner. The temple was close to my home, and the white village was in the 4th corner of the board.
With home, the temple and the castle all along one edge of the board, it was quite a while before I needed to go much away from that row of tiles. Solitaire rules start the big market on the board, so I went shopping and bought a magic staff and a pair of boots which I needed to give to a ranger should I ever meet him.
While I was traipsing around the solitaire rules dictated that servants of the Nameless One regularly appeared, and I started to notice that the locations they appeared in reminded me of the appearance of the dark riders in Lord of the Rings - a shadowy figure is seen around Don Hobiro's home, an evil being is seen in the very grounds of the royal castle, and so on. I started to warm to the game. The solitaire rules also suggest that you should complete the game in 45 turns or die trying... but as it turned out I forgot the quest I was supposed to be doing and didn't even complete the second part of it (take the orb to the king) until turn 48. The king wasn't even present for a long time - how was I supposed to do that quest? I did spend a lot of time completing tasks and investigating random encounters in the hope that tiles I needed would come out of the bag.
Anyway, I discovered that I could easily defeat some of the servants, and beat up quite a few of them until turn 55 when I finally completed my quest and hence was allowed to attack the Dark Tower. I immediately set off, but on turn 60 a troll beat me up at the base of the Dark Tower itself. The troll had 2 hit points, and the 2 hit point monsters are very dangerous indeed. Furthermore, he could only be hit by red and green which were my weak points. Early in the game I'd been badly beaten up by the knight as well, but I was still amazed that someone who thought she could challenge the Nameless One could be beaten by a troll.
Then followed a miserable period as I suffered 2 defeats and got lost in the forest on my way to the temple for healing. I risked my last life point fighting a servant of the Nameless One, but my armour had been destroyed. After being healed I passed through the market to buy some new armour then travelled to the white village for some more healing (inflicted by 4 servants) before attacking the Dark Tower from the direction that didn't have a troll.
This time it was easy - I defeated another servant, then a guard, and the Nameless One was revealed to me as the Deep One. I hit him 6 times in a row and victory was mine! So then I had this Dark Tower of which I was undisputed master, and what's a girl to do? Muahahahaha.
MY SCORE:
Overall, I enjoyed this adventure. I think next time I will be stressing less about whether the game is going to suck and consequently will have more fun and be more involved in the story. I know a guy who has In the Shadow of the Dragon for sale... I've been looking for an excuse to buy that :-).
Anyway, onto the game. I was able to set the game up without spending 15 minutes searching through the manual for the section where it tells you what coloured tiles go in the bag and what gets left out. Already I was enjoying myself. I was the priestess. I set the royal castle (area J) and the Dark Tower (area H) at opposite corners of the board, and put my home tile (M) in another corner. The temple was close to my home, and the white village was in the 4th corner of the board.With home, the temple and the castle all along one edge of the board, it was quite a while before I needed to go much away from that row of tiles. Solitaire rules start the big market on the board, so I went shopping and bought a magic staff and a pair of boots which I needed to give to a ranger should I ever meet him.
While I was traipsing around the solitaire rules dictated that servants of the Nameless One regularly appeared, and I started to notice that the locations they appeared in reminded me of the appearance of the dark riders in Lord of the Rings - a shadowy figure is seen around Don Hobiro's home, an evil being is seen in the very grounds of the royal castle, and so on. I started to warm to the game. The solitaire rules also suggest that you should complete the game in 45 turns or die trying... but as it turned out I forgot the quest I was supposed to be doing and didn't even complete the second part of it (take the orb to the king) until turn 48. The king wasn't even present for a long time - how was I supposed to do that quest? I did spend a lot of time completing tasks and investigating random encounters in the hope that tiles I needed would come out of the bag.
Anyway, I discovered that I could easily defeat some of the servants, and beat up quite a few of them until turn 55 when I finally completed my quest and hence was allowed to attack the Dark Tower. I immediately set off, but on turn 60 a troll beat me up at the base of the Dark Tower itself. The troll had 2 hit points, and the 2 hit point monsters are very dangerous indeed. Furthermore, he could only be hit by red and green which were my weak points. Early in the game I'd been badly beaten up by the knight as well, but I was still amazed that someone who thought she could challenge the Nameless One could be beaten by a troll.
Then followed a miserable period as I suffered 2 defeats and got lost in the forest on my way to the temple for healing. I risked my last life point fighting a servant of the Nameless One, but my armour had been destroyed. After being healed I passed through the market to buy some new armour then travelled to the white village for some more healing (inflicted by 4 servants) before attacking the Dark Tower from the direction that didn't have a troll.
This time it was easy - I defeated another servant, then a guard, and the Nameless One was revealed to me as the Deep One. I hit him 6 times in a row and victory was mine! So then I had this Dark Tower of which I was undisputed master, and what's a girl to do? Muahahahaha.
MY SCORE:
- completed quest +5000
- defeated Nameless One +5000
- 1 magic item +1000
- 24 experience cubes +12000
- 8 gold pieces +800
- 42 turns too long -21000
Overall, I enjoyed this adventure. I think next time I will be stressing less about whether the game is going to suck and consequently will have more fun and be more involved in the story. I know a guy who has In the Shadow of the Dragon for sale... I've been looking for an excuse to buy that :-).
Friday, August 17, 2007
Flat Pack Philosophy
I'll let the pictures tell the story. Photos by Scrabblette.
I have some more work to do on drawers (which is much easier since I bought an electric screwdriver yesterday), and the table arrives Tuesday. It looks very nice with the spotlights on, but we couldn't get a good photo in the low light.
Is "Stockholm Syndrome" when you can't help thinking you have to go back to Ikea to get some more stuff?
I have some more work to do on drawers (which is much easier since I bought an electric screwdriver yesterday), and the table arrives Tuesday. It looks very nice with the spotlights on, but we couldn't get a good photo in the low light.
Is "Stockholm Syndrome" when you can't help thinking you have to go back to Ikea to get some more stuff?
My New Games Room
I got all the games unpacked and put them in the games room. Yes, I HAVE A GAMES ROOM!
Here's some gratuitous photos of a bad way to store games.
Now some furniture would be good.
What's a Good Game for a Total Newbie?
And when I say "a total newbie", you don't get much newer than this. This is my baby sister with her daughter Trixi, born 4:45am this morning.
Friday, August 10, 2007
If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?
My dog seems to be wondering what the heck is going on in our house. She spends a lot of time waiting for us to do something she understands.
We're moving house. This is boxes ready to go in the garage. These are mostly games, but that garage is now full of everything. I can't believe how much stuff I have.
I'm sure when my dog gets to the new place she'll love it. The man is coming to sort out the fences tomorrow.
We're moving house. This is boxes ready to go in the garage. These are mostly games, but that garage is now full of everything. I can't believe how much stuff I have.
I'm sure when my dog gets to the new place she'll love it. The man is coming to sort out the fences tomorrow.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
The Girl Is Good
Friendless vs Scrabblette playing via Scrabulous on facebook.com. A narrow victory - 381 to 377. Friendless got 3 bingos to Scrabblette's 1, but Scrabblette's lowest scoring play for the game was 21 points. This is one of the tensest and toughest games I've played.
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