Pelican Sheep Station

Scrabblette and I spent the last week at Pelican Sheep Station near Goulburn, New South Wales. As even Australians don't know where Goulburn is, it's near Canberra. Goulburn is quite a decent little town - secondhand book stores, internet cafe, all the mod cons. Unlike Canberra.

I clocked up 69 plays while we were there - many children's games and party games, but also a decent number of capital games. I was badly beaten at Goa, Attika, Rheinlander and St Petersburg, but won at Alexandros, On the Underground, Through the Desert, and Unpublished Prototype. In addition I played Crokinole for the first time, and for the fifth time, and with any luck my board will arrive home with CyberKev.

My favourite new game was Crokinole, my favourite old game was Alexandros, my least favourite new game was Dungeon Twister and my least favourite old game was Balloon Cup.

Trades!

As mentioned in earlier posts, I've been doing a big clean-up of the game collection. You guys are noticeably NOT volunteering to trade my dross away from me. However, anything half decent is being snapped up, and I've completed some trades this month.

Nexus Ops for Africa - Nexus Ops is a very sweet game- nice bits, very good mechanic for encouraging war without turtling or complete player destruction, and easy enough to play. However even that much player confrontation doesn't really work for me, and I couldn't see myself getting much play out of it. On the other hand, Africa is a decent mid-weight Euro that I quite like, and I've already played 3 times. I think I liked the 2 player games better than 4 players, as with 2 players I expect the screwage (e.g. the kid dumped an antelope where I was about to put a camp for 5 points), and with 4 players I feel picked on.

China for Java - I like Tikal and Torres a lot, and am very interested in trying out the rest of the Mask series. I bought China because I wanted Web of Power, and it turns out that I wanted the theme more than I wanted the game. I'd much rather control Frankreich than Wu. China will be missed by people other than me, but if I can get Web of Power I may be forgiven.

Thurn and Taxis for Ticket to Ride: Marklin - Thurn and Taxis is a beautiful beautiful game, but I could never make any sense of the strategy, and that bugged me. In fact I never came better than third in a game, until I played 2 player when I actually won. So I traded it to the guy I beat... so he can lose at it? On the other hand Ticket to Ride is a game of which my opinion varies from "brilliant" to "boring". It's sort of a good connection game, but it's sort of boring when people block your routes... I can't make up my mind. But the big issue is that Scrabblette likes it. Scrabblette particularly likes the U.S. map (which is why we own TransAmerica as well as TransEuropa), so I will also have to get the base game, and I'll probably get Switzerland as well while I'm at it. I got Marklin as a stop-gap, and because I like the model trains and the 4+ engines.

We're Going Gaming For a Week

But only one week. I think all of these will fit in the car. Visible: Bamboleo, Roads and Boats, Carrom, Dancing Egg Game, BattleLore: Call to Arms, Balloon Cup, Army of Frogs, Tzaar, Die Dolmengotter, Super Scrabble, Primordial Soup.

A Word So Weird It Must Be An Australian Animal

"It's OK! I've overstood! It's a Wordy Rappinghood!"

The other day Scrabblette was waching me play Scrabble on-line and saw me play JABIRU and asked "what's that?" This is the only word ever Scrabblette has not been able to tell me the etymology of. It's a type of stork. That suggested to me that many Scrabble players may not know some types of animals that are native to Australia, so I've compiled a list of some of them. I've checked these against SOWPODS, use them in a TWL game at your peril.

ANEMONE
BILBY
BITTERN
BOOBOOK
BROLGA
BUDGERIGAR
BUDGIE
CASSOWARY
CORELLA
CORVID
COUCAL
CRAKE
CUTTLEBONE
CUTTLEFISH
DRONGO
DUGONG
DUNNART
ECHIDNA
EMU
FROGFISH
FROGMOUTH
GALAH
GALLINULE
GOANNA
GOATFISH
GREBE
GURNARD
HEELER
JABIRU
JACANA
JUMBUCK
KANGAROO
KOALA
MOORHEN
NANNYGAI
NIGHTJAR
NUMBAT
PADEMELON
PARDALOTE
PIPIT
PIPPY
PITTA
PLATYPUS
POTOROO
QUOKKA
QUOLL
ROSELLA
ROUGHY
SKUA
STINGAREE
THYLACINE
WALLABY
WOMBAT
ZEBRAFISH

NANNYGAI's a pretty good one, isn't it? Your opponent is sure to challenge! By the way if anyone knows where my Tom Toom Club CD is, could they please tell me?

The Great Game Reorganisation Continues

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm doing a sort-of-major shake-up of the game collection. The point is that I have many more games than I play, and I only want to have a few more games than I play. It occurred to me that if I did get rid of some of the games that I did play and didn't like very much that would be a good thing, but my optimism maintains its stratospheric heights, and a lot of games are staying in case they get better with experience and I get an opponent who likes them, and all that sort of stuff.

The first obvious result has been the reorganisation of the games shelves. I now have one set of shelves for kids and party games, one set of shelves for word and abstract games, and one set of shelves for proper good games. Of course I love the word and abstract games as well, but it's harder to find opponents for them. I'll take photos one day, but if I do it this evening the light won't be good and the photos will be grainy.

I also revised my ratings on BGG. Mostly it was minor, but I did promote a whole lot of 9s to 10s.

Attika - my purchases of Attika, Taluva and Funny Friends last year really made me take notice of Marcel-Andre Casasola-Merkla as a designer. Attika is a very nice combination of (sort of) economic engine and connection game. It plays very nicely with 2 to 4 players.

Domaine - I previously had this at a 10, but I tired of it a little but now I'm hungry to play again. It's bordering on too aggressive for me, but I know that being attacked is a sign of weakness and the game is all about managing your weakness to hold together your domaines long enough to win the game. I much prefer the simple card purchase system over the Lowenherz auction, and I like the geometrical challenge of getting the limited number of fences into the right places.

Hare and Tortoise - It's a serious math nerd game and I'm a serious math nerd. Sometimes it's just frustrating as described in my session report, but I realise now that I should have been using a different strategy and it was my own fault for losing.

Rheinlander - This is now my only 10 I don't own, and I've never even won it - CyberKev has beaten me every time. I really can't grok the scoring system. But I love the way the duchies can expand and threaten each other and sometimes the card you desperately need really does show up. And it's all over in 45 minutes! My plan is for this to be my first purchase of the new year.

St Petersburg - Yes, it's a very strange game, but once you get past the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot stage it's brilliantly tactical. I love the art work, I love the theme, and I love economic engines. That Michael Tummelhofer sure is a smart guy.

Tigris and Euphrates - another sort-of aggressive game, but you just have to realise that the empires are not mine and yours, they are mine and ours. It's a sharing game! I love the connection / disconnection aspects, and the possibility of really great moves.

Tikal - A very thinky game, with connection aspects and the potential for great moves again. Hey, I'm seeing a theme here! It involves a lot of counting, but that's something that sort of comes naturally to me, and my plotting and planning keeps me engaged for the entire game.

Torres - Another game with connection aspects and the potential for great moves. I love the way someone tries to escape onto a really tall tower all by themselves, and maybe with the right action card and a cunning plan you can catch them and take their stuff. The components are stunning, and sometimes I just scatter them on my bed and roll around naked. Oh hang on, no, that's a different game.

Game Room Stocktake

I just did a stocktake using my collection checklist as found at:

http://friendless.servegame.org/stats/checklist_Friendless.html

If you're on the stats you have one too. Sadly, I found all of the games I thought I owned and seven more. There goes the Friendless metric. *Sigh*.

Yes, Agricola Really Is That Good

I spent this evening at CyberKev's house playing the print'n'play version of Agricola. This version is a combination of Melissa's translation and (someone I forget)'s paste-up art, all printed on cyberkev's printer. In case you think that's illegal or immoral or something, cyberkev and I both have preordered it - Zev is getting money out of us anyway! So, onto the game.

Agricola combines the good bits of Puerto Rico, Caylus and Roads and Boats, which is pretty clever because I didn't even realise Caylus HAD any good bits. The good bits of Caylus were that you could put a token on a building to do stuff. In Agricola that bit is translated to "you have a person who goes and does some work". The bad bits of Caylus were building ownership, bailiff / provost backstabbery bullshit and stupid theme about building a cathedral or castle or something that only served to interfere with the rest of your plans. Agricola has none of that crap.

I found the selection of actions to be much more like Puerto Rico (and hence San Juan) where you're just hoping that the other player won't take the action (role) you want to take. Even better, if the scum does take it, there's often a second-best alternative. In our 5 player game the number of available actions seemed to be just enough so that even if you got an action you didn't really want you didn't feel like you were completely doomed, you just had to change plan. That way I remained engaged with the game instead of wishing I was somewhere else.

The similarity with Roads and Boats is in the extremely simple yet effective economic system. In Agricola it's simple - two animals produce a baby, a field produces a fixed amount of produce like a Roads and Boats mine, more family members can do more work. The costs of things were such that I managed to usually buy the things I wanted without wasting turns saving up. The balance of the economic system was pretty sweet in the way that Puerto Rico and Power Grid's fuel system have done before.

We played the family game. As I was first player I started with some wood but was left at the mercy of the other players to show me a strategy to implement with it. I started sheep farming, built some pens and stables, got some more sheep, branched out into boars, had a baby. I felt like I hadn't achieved much but then I built a huge pen which took up most of my land. As the game closed down I tried to maximise points and put in a vege patch and a wheat field. I ended on 29 points due to having no unused fields, and the two winners only had 31. I felt like that was a creditable performance. Furthermore, the game only took 3 hours in a group where even Klunker seems to take an hour.

I'm so excited about this game that when my copy arrives I'll probably play with myself for days... My prediction is that Agricola will reach at least #2 on BGG.

One of Those Boring Retrospective Articles

I hate TV at this time of year, when all the stories on the news shows are "let's take a look at what happened throughout the year". I was there, I did see it, and I KNOW you're only showing it because it's cheap television. Stop wasting my time. I will now demonstrate the height of hypocrisy by doing the same thing myself.

Game of the Year

With 59 plays, more than the next four contenders combined, my Game of the Year has to be Scrabble. I enjoy it a lot, and I can play on-line which means my opponents and I don't need to synchronise in time and location. Given that one of my most regular opponents lives in Beijing, that's just as well. I enjoy Scrabble a lot, and now that I know the 2 letter words hope to play a little bit more seriously in 2008.

Highlight of the Year

The gaming highlight of the year has to have been Scrabblette finding the "Connection Games" book for me. It led to an obsession that has had a massive impact on the games I buy and play. It sure would be handy if I had an opponent with a similar obsession, but the mathematical aspects of these games have kept me amused for hours. Not to mention implementing Hex for Facebook.

Best New Game of the Year

I've probably played only about a dozen games published in 2007, so I'm choosing from a small pool here, but the best of them so far is definitely Unspeakable Words. It's nothing deep, but it's easy to teach and fun to play and does reward skill.

Happily Unplayed Games of the Year

At the end of last year I realised there were a few games I was completely over - Ra, Geschenkt and Poison, for starters. I wanted to avoid playing them for a while. Given that I didn't play them at all in 2007, I guess I succeeded. Their banishment is over now, and while I still won't be rushing to play them I may not avoid them as assiduously.

Sadly Unplayed Games of the Year

I know it's a long time since Ozvortex came over for a game of C&C Ancients, but I didn't realise it had been a whole year. I guess a lot of 2007 was occupied by moving house. I also didn't play GIPF, DVONN or PUNCT, which doesn't seem right.

Ambitions

Apart from my ambitions with regards to managing my collection as described in an earlier post, these are the things I want to achieve in 2008:

• Find more opponents for 2 player abstracts so I can start playing the again.
  
• Play more of my capital games, e.g. St Petersburg, Tigris & Euphrates, Domaine.

That is all. See you next year.

Yavalath and Teiglith

Readers may have noticed my obsession with connection games this year, culminating in me voluntarily playing Ticket to Ride last night. The more I know about games the more I have to admit that Ticket to Ride is a sweet design and a perfectly decent game. I lost to Scrabblette, by the way. Anyway, that's not the point of this article. The point is that my obsession comes from reading a book called Connection Games by Cameron Browne. That book was probably one of the defining characteristics of my 2007 gaming year.

Somehow late one night I looked up Cameron Browne on the internet and discovered that he was actually a Ph.D. student at the Queensland University of Technology (sound of jaw dropping here) which is the same university that Scrabblette is a student at. And he's in the same faculty. In stunned amazement I stalked him a little further, only to discover that he currently lives overseas and is finishing his Ph.D. remotely. But, it was amazing to find that the author of such a good book used to live in Brisbane, and with a slight twist of fate we would have met years ago.

Anyway, I contacted him by email and just over a week ago Scrabblette and I attended his final seminar for his Ph.D. I sort of assumed his research was on Hex but it was actually on computer generation of (what BGG calls) abstract strategy games. He implemented a rule description language, an algorithm to combine games using a genetic algorithm, and some automatic criteria to judge the goodness of the games. He then generated some games and tested them with real people and with the automatic criteria. The correlation between those results told him which of the automatic criteria corresponded to what people wanted in a game. He then generated some more games. In his seminar he present 4 games generated by Ludi, his computer program.

The games sounded pretty decent to me (in a Hex / Go / Connect 4 sort of way), so I emailed him asking for the rules. So now I present Yavalath and Teiglith, by Ludi and Cameron Browne.

Yavalath

For two players. The board starts empty. Players take turns adding a piece of their colour to an empty cell. A player wins if they make 4-in-a-row of their colour, but lose if they make 3-in-a-row of their colour without also making 4-in-a-row.

Teiglith
For two players. The board starts with a White piece on each edge cell. Players take turns moving a piece to a connected cell (diagonals are not connected). The destination cell need not be empty; pieces may stack. The first player who cannot move wins.

(I think there's a rule that you can't unstack pieces, and presumably that you can't move stacks.)

I'll see if I can get someone to play Yavalath with me. Let me know if you try it.

Recent Scrabble Scores

Hoo boy have I been playing a lot of Scrabulous recently! I've been on leave and have had enthusiastic opponents. I don't know whether it's because of what I learnt from Joe Edley's book, but I've been making a lot more bingos and some poor opponents have been hit with 2 or 3 a game. In one game I got 3 of them and my opponent got 2. My scores from the last 15 games: 309, 398, 393, 374, 373, 394, 462, 321, 409, 359, 451, 289, 334, 343, 377. That's an average of 372, which is about what I reported in November. I've been working on learning the 3 letter words, but there's lots of weird ones in there. FUB FUD FUG FUM.