Saturday, December 31, 2005
2005
I'd hoped to have the second part of my gaming history ready in time for today, but things went awry and it never quite gelled, so instead I'll just say thank you to my Gone Gaming blogmates and to all our readers. Special thanks go to Coldfoot for his initiative and for including me in the project. I hope that 2006 is another great year for the hobby.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Holidays and Games: A tale of a car trip, a shop, a calamity and the game publisher that saved Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year and the Compliments of the Season to all our readers. We're back home and recovering from our 860 km trip north to Sydney to spend Christmas with Fraser’s family.
To make the 10-hour car trip easier on all of us, we decided to split it over two days. In setting our day 1 target at Wodonga, 3 hours north of Melbourne, I confess to having had an ulterior motive. Wodonga's Twin City Albury has a games shop, with an ex-employee who posted regularly at BoardGameGeek. We were intrigued enough by her posts to want to see the shop for ourselves.
And what a games shop we found!
When we arrived, just after 10am on a Thursday morning, the shop was BUSY. There was a good range of customers – gamers and non-gamers, children and adults, families and single people. The shop itself was clean and brightly lit, with walls lined with games and a range of giant chess pieces (available for hire) in the window to draw people in. There was none of that back room/slightly dingy feeling that many games shops seem to have.
Up the front, there were children's games, with a range of Knizia's children's titles displayed prominently over a couple of shelves. Moving through the store, we saw a pile of Carcassonne, with a "recommended" notice that went into some detail about its Spiel des Jahres win. Settlers was prominently displayed, including a copy of the new Settlers chest (I looked but didn’t buy) and there were other big piles of 'featured' Euros on tables throughout the shop. A display folder held reviews of games for shoppers to browse, and many games were shown with little personal notes about what great games they were. When we asked about 'Essen games', Phil (the owner) disappeared into his back room and came back with a range that included Big City, Attribute and Shear Panic (!). More common games, including a range of -opoly variants, are further back in the shop - the opposite of the usual layout where Euros are banished to the back corner.
This shop challenges many larger games stores to lift their no-pun-intended.
Phil and his staff are clearly excited about games, and about helping their customers discover new games. They run a very accessible shop which offers something for everyone, whatever kind of gamer they may be. The shop has close ties with local game groups, which are clearly very active and enthusiastic – one local member publishes a regular game review in the regional newspaper, alongside their film and DVD reviews. A staff member is paid to visit local schools to demonstrate games and spread the word more widely – he clearly does a great job, as one school asked him to come back and run a full day program for them (and paid him for it too).
Phil is a guy who believes in his product, and works hard to promote it. With around 100,000 people in the region, we felt that he would have to work to build his market, but he's clearly doing it very successfully and enthusiastically.
We left with Big City, Attribute, Pick Picknic, Guillotine (for Fraser's 12 year old cousin), Halli Galli (another gift), a 'Diablo' toy for Biggie and a puzzle called Rush Hour, which has been recommended to me (as a game) by several parents at Biggie's school. Not a small haul.
Rush Hour is an interesting toy and would, I think, appeal to many gamers. It’s clearly a big seller for this year, and the shop had a big display with giant-sized pieces for customers to try. It’s a fun little puzzle, in which you try to move a gridlocked car off the 'roads' (a 6x6 grid).
The puzzles are divided into four difficulty levels; the 'easy' ones are definitely easy, later puzzles less so, and we've not tried the 'Expert' level yet but I hear they can seem diabolical. Additional card sets are available too. We took it to Christmas lunch and all the kids (aged 6-12 or so) gathered around to play it, while some of the parents snuck peeks too. Otto's keen just to play with the toy cars. Back home, it was the adults' turn to fiddle with it. At heart, it's a very dry abstract, but the theming works well – I'd recommend it for anyone over eight, possibly even younger. It's also very well packaged, which impressed me. They even supplied the elastic band to hold the lid on!
A brief stop at Mind Games Albury on the way home netted us a copy of Gargon, an older Rüdiger Dorn game. I've been a Dorn fangirl since getting the Louis XIV bug, and very much enjoyed this lighter card game when a friend brought it round recently for us to try.
We didn't do very much gaming at all on this trip. It was hot and humid, and swimming pools were a higher priority than scoring tracks, especially for the kids. We gave Biggie, after much pleading, a copy of Connect Four for Christmas. It had a good run, as did Boggle and Auntie's set of dominoes. We managed most of a game of Bohnanza one hot evening, played Gulo Gulo with a BGG buddy and his family, and I think one of Fraser's stepbrothers may be interested in Ticket to Ride, especially the Märklin version, but all in all not much gaming was done. We hope that our holiday at the beach will see rather more gaming - we're both on leave until the end of January, so we should have plenty of time for it.
Fraser and I didn't give each other games this year – our gifts were a casualty of the need to pack the car, although I did manage to buy a dice tower for Fraser (it's the "woodburned sample" with the F on the front), which was waiting for him at home. I do have something coming (from adamspielt! yay!) from my BGG Secret Santa, a last-minute activity that really added some fun to the Christmas season thanks to Tom Vasel. My mark got a copy of Power Grid and some Meeple-shaped gingerbreads - I'm still terribly proud of the Meeple-shaped cookie cutter that I made before Christmas. We got a big parcel from another BGG buddy today, who had ordered in bulk from Boards & Bits and forwarded some games to us on the slow boat, which feels like our Christmas gift to ourselves.
With gaming sessions planned for January 2nd and 6th, as well as whenever our friends want to play, the gaming outlook is fine for 2006.
Before I finish, though, there’s a special story that I have to tell:
How Looney Labs saved our Christmas.
A month or so ago, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a copy of Zendo from Looney Labs. They were offering a free copy of "Flowers and Fluxx" with every order over a certain amount – essentially, a copy of Fluxx with some little plush posable flowers.
Being a sucker for any kind of freebie, I ordered a set. When it arrived before Christmas (in about 4 days – how's that for prompt shipping!), we decided to give one little flower to each of the six girls or women we were looking forward to spending Christmas with – our daughters, Fraser's sister, and his cousin and her two daughters, who were travelling to Sydney from New Zealand. We packed them up in the bags of presents and loaded them into the car.
Christmas Eve came, and we finally got the girls settled into bed around eleven (we'd been out visiting the cousin and her family). We retrieved all our bags of presents to wrap them, while Santa did his special magic. We'd left some of the larger gifts at home, so I wrapped a gift for each of the girls – a toy for Otto and a copy of Connect Four for Biggie, before sorting out the rest of their smaller gifts (mostly books) from their individual bags.
Disaster!
When we packed the car, we had done the unthinkable: all of Otto's carefully chosen gifts were still in Melbourne.
That's right. I left my daughter's gifts in another city, and didn't realise until it was too late to buy things anywhere except a 7-11.
We had nothing to give our almost-three-year-old, who had been looking forward so desperately to Christmas.
I was calm for about half an hour, then had a spectacular meltdown. Which just proves that melting down can be constructive, because I didn't think of anything while I was calm!
We had bought her a magnetic "Maisy Mouse" playboard to use on the car journey, which we'd never given her. Retrieving it from the car, I wrapped it. Things were looking better, but it didn't feel like we had a proper gift for her yet.
Then inspiration struck. Forget supplementing other presents with plush posable flowers, we had a bouquet for our little darling.
Well, that bouquet of flowers was the first gift she opened, and the one she carried with her all day. She kissed them, she cuddled them, she showed them to everyone. We played guessing games where we hid one flower and she had to guess what colour was missing. They were in her hand when she dozed off in the car, and in her hand when she sleepily toddled into her auntie’s home at eleven o'clock that night. They were the gift that the other kids wanted to look at and play with, and the gift that she guarded most fiercely – even overcoming her reticence to speak to one of her stepcousins (she'd never met any of them before) to ask for her flower back.
So thankyou to everyone at Looney Labs. You saved Christmas.
LINKS:
Mind Games Albury http://www.mindgamesalbury.com
Looney Labs: http://www.looneylabs.com/
Lastly, a reminder about our very own Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. If you've not already read about them, please do so and nominate your favourite sites, articles and podcasts for this prestigious award.
You know you want to.
May your Meeples be Gingerbread Meeples,
Melissa.
To make the 10-hour car trip easier on all of us, we decided to split it over two days. In setting our day 1 target at Wodonga, 3 hours north of Melbourne, I confess to having had an ulterior motive. Wodonga's Twin City Albury has a games shop, with an ex-employee who posted regularly at BoardGameGeek. We were intrigued enough by her posts to want to see the shop for ourselves.
And what a games shop we found!
When we arrived, just after 10am on a Thursday morning, the shop was BUSY. There was a good range of customers – gamers and non-gamers, children and adults, families and single people. The shop itself was clean and brightly lit, with walls lined with games and a range of giant chess pieces (available for hire) in the window to draw people in. There was none of that back room/slightly dingy feeling that many games shops seem to have.
Up the front, there were children's games, with a range of Knizia's children's titles displayed prominently over a couple of shelves. Moving through the store, we saw a pile of Carcassonne, with a "recommended" notice that went into some detail about its Spiel des Jahres win. Settlers was prominently displayed, including a copy of the new Settlers chest (I looked but didn’t buy) and there were other big piles of 'featured' Euros on tables throughout the shop. A display folder held reviews of games for shoppers to browse, and many games were shown with little personal notes about what great games they were. When we asked about 'Essen games', Phil (the owner) disappeared into his back room and came back with a range that included Big City, Attribute and Shear Panic (!). More common games, including a range of -opoly variants, are further back in the shop - the opposite of the usual layout where Euros are banished to the back corner.
This shop challenges many larger games stores to lift their no-pun-intended.
Phil and his staff are clearly excited about games, and about helping their customers discover new games. They run a very accessible shop which offers something for everyone, whatever kind of gamer they may be. The shop has close ties with local game groups, which are clearly very active and enthusiastic – one local member publishes a regular game review in the regional newspaper, alongside their film and DVD reviews. A staff member is paid to visit local schools to demonstrate games and spread the word more widely – he clearly does a great job, as one school asked him to come back and run a full day program for them (and paid him for it too).
Phil is a guy who believes in his product, and works hard to promote it. With around 100,000 people in the region, we felt that he would have to work to build his market, but he's clearly doing it very successfully and enthusiastically.
We left with Big City, Attribute, Pick Picknic, Guillotine (for Fraser's 12 year old cousin), Halli Galli (another gift), a 'Diablo' toy for Biggie and a puzzle called Rush Hour, which has been recommended to me (as a game) by several parents at Biggie's school. Not a small haul.
Rush Hour is an interesting toy and would, I think, appeal to many gamers. It’s clearly a big seller for this year, and the shop had a big display with giant-sized pieces for customers to try. It’s a fun little puzzle, in which you try to move a gridlocked car off the 'roads' (a 6x6 grid).
The puzzles are divided into four difficulty levels; the 'easy' ones are definitely easy, later puzzles less so, and we've not tried the 'Expert' level yet but I hear they can seem diabolical. Additional card sets are available too. We took it to Christmas lunch and all the kids (aged 6-12 or so) gathered around to play it, while some of the parents snuck peeks too. Otto's keen just to play with the toy cars. Back home, it was the adults' turn to fiddle with it. At heart, it's a very dry abstract, but the theming works well – I'd recommend it for anyone over eight, possibly even younger. It's also very well packaged, which impressed me. They even supplied the elastic band to hold the lid on!
A brief stop at Mind Games Albury on the way home netted us a copy of Gargon, an older Rüdiger Dorn game. I've been a Dorn fangirl since getting the Louis XIV bug, and very much enjoyed this lighter card game when a friend brought it round recently for us to try.
We didn't do very much gaming at all on this trip. It was hot and humid, and swimming pools were a higher priority than scoring tracks, especially for the kids. We gave Biggie, after much pleading, a copy of Connect Four for Christmas. It had a good run, as did Boggle and Auntie's set of dominoes. We managed most of a game of Bohnanza one hot evening, played Gulo Gulo with a BGG buddy and his family, and I think one of Fraser's stepbrothers may be interested in Ticket to Ride, especially the Märklin version, but all in all not much gaming was done. We hope that our holiday at the beach will see rather more gaming - we're both on leave until the end of January, so we should have plenty of time for it.
Fraser and I didn't give each other games this year – our gifts were a casualty of the need to pack the car, although I did manage to buy a dice tower for Fraser (it's the "woodburned sample" with the F on the front), which was waiting for him at home. I do have something coming (from adamspielt! yay!) from my BGG Secret Santa, a last-minute activity that really added some fun to the Christmas season thanks to Tom Vasel. My mark got a copy of Power Grid and some Meeple-shaped gingerbreads - I'm still terribly proud of the Meeple-shaped cookie cutter that I made before Christmas. We got a big parcel from another BGG buddy today, who had ordered in bulk from Boards & Bits and forwarded some games to us on the slow boat, which feels like our Christmas gift to ourselves.
With gaming sessions planned for January 2nd and 6th, as well as whenever our friends want to play, the gaming outlook is fine for 2006.
Before I finish, though, there’s a special story that I have to tell:
How Looney Labs saved our Christmas.
A month or so ago, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a copy of Zendo from Looney Labs. They were offering a free copy of "Flowers and Fluxx" with every order over a certain amount – essentially, a copy of Fluxx with some little plush posable flowers.
Being a sucker for any kind of freebie, I ordered a set. When it arrived before Christmas (in about 4 days – how's that for prompt shipping!), we decided to give one little flower to each of the six girls or women we were looking forward to spending Christmas with – our daughters, Fraser's sister, and his cousin and her two daughters, who were travelling to Sydney from New Zealand. We packed them up in the bags of presents and loaded them into the car.
Christmas Eve came, and we finally got the girls settled into bed around eleven (we'd been out visiting the cousin and her family). We retrieved all our bags of presents to wrap them, while Santa did his special magic. We'd left some of the larger gifts at home, so I wrapped a gift for each of the girls – a toy for Otto and a copy of Connect Four for Biggie, before sorting out the rest of their smaller gifts (mostly books) from their individual bags.
Disaster!
When we packed the car, we had done the unthinkable: all of Otto's carefully chosen gifts were still in Melbourne.
That's right. I left my daughter's gifts in another city, and didn't realise until it was too late to buy things anywhere except a 7-11.
We had nothing to give our almost-three-year-old, who had been looking forward so desperately to Christmas.
I was calm for about half an hour, then had a spectacular meltdown. Which just proves that melting down can be constructive, because I didn't think of anything while I was calm!
We had bought her a magnetic "Maisy Mouse" playboard to use on the car journey, which we'd never given her. Retrieving it from the car, I wrapped it. Things were looking better, but it didn't feel like we had a proper gift for her yet.
Then inspiration struck. Forget supplementing other presents with plush posable flowers, we had a bouquet for our little darling.
Well, that bouquet of flowers was the first gift she opened, and the one she carried with her all day. She kissed them, she cuddled them, she showed them to everyone. We played guessing games where we hid one flower and she had to guess what colour was missing. They were in her hand when she dozed off in the car, and in her hand when she sleepily toddled into her auntie’s home at eleven o'clock that night. They were the gift that the other kids wanted to look at and play with, and the gift that she guarded most fiercely – even overcoming her reticence to speak to one of her stepcousins (she'd never met any of them before) to ask for her flower back.
So thankyou to everyone at Looney Labs. You saved Christmas.
LINKS:
Mind Games Albury http://www.mindgamesalbury.com
Looney Labs: http://www.looneylabs.com/
Lastly, a reminder about our very own Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. If you've not already read about them, please do so and nominate your favourite sites, articles and podcasts for this prestigious award.
You know you want to.
May your Meeples be Gingerbread Meeples,
Melissa.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Happy New Year
With 3 days remaining of 2005, I took a look at my game statistics for the year and was sad to see that I’d only played 211 games—a lot less than I’d LIKE to have played. I hope next year will be better, but I won’t hold my breath.
Within that 211 games were 83 different games, many of them with just 1 play, but several that found their way to the table many times.
Memoir ’44—10 plays. A light war game that’s fun to play as long as you don’t mind the quirks that luck can play on you.
Attika—9 plays. Great as a 2-player game that my husband doesn’t mind playing with me. I really like resource management and that’s what this game is all about.
Architekton—8 plays. I kept coming back to this one trying to figure it out because it just doesn’t feel quite right. The basic idea is great but it never really played out all that well, in my opinion.
Fjords—8 plays. Fjords got many plays because it’s so quick and we really enjoy it. I’ll play this at the drop of a meeple.
Shadows Over Camelot—7 plays. Cori and I really enjoyed this at first but, as I figured, it doesn’t have the staying power to draw us back repeatedly.
Ta Yu—7 plays. A very good 2-player game with fabulous pieces. Richard and I like it for a quiet, pensive time together. Two plays were with 3 players which makes the game a bit different, strategically, but still very good.
Plunder—6 plays. Richard and I really enjoyed this for a while but I haven’t been drawn to it recently. There’s a lot going on in this game and yet it feels light when you’ve played it a few times.
Jambo—6 plays. One of my favorite Kosmos 2-player games with it’s variety of card abilities.
Titicaca—6 plays. An interesting area-control game with auctions, building and merging of areas. It also plays pretty well with just 2 players.
Ingenious—5 plays. I’m not totally impressed with Ingenious but it’s a good game to play with my son and his girlfriend.
StreetSoccer—5 plays. A fun time for 2 players when you want something light and fast. There are strategic choices to make but the roll of the die can still jump on your back and make you holler for mercy.
Through the Desert—5 plays. Still one of my favorites and I often use it with new gamers since it’s easy to explain and not that hard to comprehend but it displays well the idea of Euro-games—your decisions matter.
Corsari—4 plays. A simple variant of Gin Rummy which my husband likes very much and often suggests we play.
Crazy Chicken—4 plays. This simple card game is one of my favorites when we’re too tired for a heavier game.
Hansa—4 plays. I’ve played this many times with 2, 3 and 4 players and I still enjoy it. Managing Action Points is always fun for me, combined with balancing your selling and building which makes this one of my favorite lighter games.
Rheinlander—4 plays. One of the best games I bought this year with its take-over area control and hand management. I hope to try out the 2-player variant soon which Chuck Messenger posted on BGG recently. It sounds like a very good scaled-down version which keeps the play tight.
~~~~~~~~
Game Buying Update
For those of you regular readers who are curious, no, I still haven’t bought any new games! I haven’t even been tempted in the last 2 weeks although I have been checking the Boardgame News site regularly.
~~~~~~~~
Games
It’s been a very dry couple of weeks here so the only game I have to mention is Flandern 1302. Christmas Eve I persuaded Cori and Richard to give it a trial run with me and I have to say we were less than bowled over by it. We were pretty bored for the first half of the game and, although a couple more plays may improve our opinions, I doubt it will ever become one of our favorites.
On reading the rules, I felt it has the possibility for some clever moves and forward planning but the first game didn’t see us using the neutral guild to our best advantage. I would like to give it another try but I’m afraid I may not be able to convince Cori to give it another chance.
~~~~~~~~
Until next time, I wish you a Happy New Year filled with Love from your friends and family, Peace in your life and your mind, and Joy in everything that you do.
Mary
Monday, December 26, 2005
The Gone Gaming Board Game Internet Awards
Dear readers,
I, and the staff of Gone Gaming, are proud to announce the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. There are plenty of awards in the board gaming world that reward the games themselves, but none of them cover the online world of board games. This award seeks to fill that gap.
Award Categories
This award will honor the best of the world of online board gaming as nominated by our readers, and includes the following categories:
Best publisher site
Best game news site
Best game information site
Best game community site
Best game club site
Best online journal/magazine
Best online gaming site
Best new site (2005)
Best strategy article (2005)
Best promotional/advocacy article (2005)
Best humorous article (2005)
Best article series (2005)
Best session report (2005)
Best blog
Best blog post (2005)
Best podcast/videocast
Best podcast/videocast episode (2005)
Best new blog/podcast/videocast (2005)
How this works
I will post separate entries on this blog, one for each of the above categories. To nominate a site or article, simply respond to the appropriate post with your nomination before the deadline (see the rules, below). Note that it is ok to nominate your own article or site.
After receiving the nominations, the staff of Gone Gaming will review the nominated sites and vote on them. The votes will be collated and ranked, and the winners will be posted to this site.
Winners and runners-up will be able to place an image proclaiming their win on their site. There may be up to five runners-up in each category.
Rules
1. Valid sites for this award should primarily cover modern board gaming, including Euro-style and wargaming. Sites that primarily cover old-style board games (such as Chess), CCGs, RPGs, poker, or miniatures are not eligible. In case of doubt, the Gone Gaming staff will decide on the validity of a site.
2. Sites will be judged based on their English language content. Unfortunately, we are not able to judge non-English content at this time.
3. A site nomination will be deemed invalid if the Gone Gaming staff says so. Update: Invalid nominations will be removed, in order to avoid clutter.
4. You can nominate a site in more than one category. However, please nominate a site in a category only if it is appropriate.
5. A site should only be nominated once in a category. Before nominating a site, please check to see whether or not it has already been nominated. Update: Duplicate nominations will be removed, in order to avoid clutter. Remember: you are not voting for a site, you are only nominating a site.
6. The Gone Gaming blog may not be nominated. Sites by Gone Gaming members may be nominated.
7. A nomination should be in the following format:
For a site:
Site name
URL with hyperlink
Gone Gaming
http://boregamegeeks.blogspot.com
For an article:
Site name
Post Name
Post URL with hyperlink
Gone Gaming
foo post
http://boregamegeeks.blogspot.com/foo+post
8. If your site is nominated but you do not want it to be in the voting, please send me an email (shadejon-[at]-gmail-[dot]-com) with your site name, URL, and a statement that you do not wish to be nominated.
9. Nominations close at midnight (EST) at the end of Saturday, Jan 14. The awards will be announced by midnight (EST) at the end of Saturday, Jan 28.
The Gone Gaming Staff
Update 12/28/05: The Gone Gaming staff has decided to remove the "online game store" award for various reasons.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best New Game Blog/Podcast/Videocast
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Game Blog, Podcast, or Videocast. In general, any blog, podcast, or videocast that went online in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Game Blog, Podcast, or Videocast. In general, any blog, podcast, or videocast that went online in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Podcast/Videocast Episode
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast Episode. In general, any episode of a podcast or videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate an episode, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Episode
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Games Episode 22
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/22
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast Episode. In general, any episode of a podcast or videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate an episode, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Episode
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Games Episode 22
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/22
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Podcast/Videocast
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast. In general, any podcast or Videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or in general, will be considered.
To nominate a podcast/videocast, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast. In general, any podcast or Videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or in general, will be considered.
To nominate a podcast/videocast, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Blog Post
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog Post. In general, any blog posting about a board game or board gaming that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog Post. In general, any blog posting about a board game or board gaming that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Blog
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog. In general, any blog that is primarily about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog. In general, any blog that is primarily about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Session Report
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Session Report. In general, any report on a board game session, either for one particular game, several games at an event, or for a convention, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Evening
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/evening
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Session Report. In general, any report on a board game session, either for one particular game, several games at an event, or for a convention, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Evening
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/evening
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Article Series
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Article Series. In general, any multi-article series about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
Note: point to the first article of the series.
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts, Part 1
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win1
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Article Series. In general, any multi-article series about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
Note: point to the first article of the series.
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts, Part 1
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win1
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Humorous Game Article
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Humorous Game Article. In general, any article about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Ho Ho Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/hoho
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Humorous Game Article. In general, any article about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Ho Ho Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/hoho
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Promotional/Advocacy Article
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Promotional/Advocacy Article. In general, any article about a board game or board gaming, either for a particular game, or in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts is Great
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/great
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Promotional/Advocacy Article. In general, any article about a board game or board gaming, either for a particular game, or in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts is Great
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/great
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Strategy Article
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Strategy Article. In general, any article about game strategy, either for a particular board game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Strategy Article. In general, any article about game strategy, either for a particular board game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best New Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Site. In general, any site that is primarily about board games and went online in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Site. In general, any site that is primarily about board games and went online in 2005 will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Online Gaming Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Gaming Site. In general, any online site that allows you to play board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Gaming Site. In general, any online site that allows you to play board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Online Game Journal/Magazine
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Game Journal or Magazine. In general, any collated and edited online regular journal or magazine about a board game or board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Game Journal or Magazine. In general, any collated and edited online regular journal or magazine about a board game or board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Club Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Club Site. In general, any online site maintained by or for a board game club will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Club Site. In general, any online site maintained by or for a board game club will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Community Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Community Site. In general, any site that provides for people to communicate about board games will be considered, including web sites, chat sites, bulletin boards, or mailing lists.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Community Site. In general, any site that provides for people to communicate about board games will be considered, including web sites, chat sites, bulletin boards, or mailing lists.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Information Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Information Site. In general, any site that posts information about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Information Site. In general, any site that posts information about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game News Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game News Site. In general, any online site that regularly posts news about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game News Site. In general, any online site that regularly posts news about board games will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Publisher Site
For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Publisher Site. In general, any online site maintained by a board game publisher will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Publisher Site. In general, any online site maintained by a board game publisher will be considered.
To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:
Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink
e.g.
Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com
Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Christmas & Hannukah are HERE and so am 'I'
"Merry Christmas" and "Happy Hannukah" to those who celebrate such! With a "Bestivus of a Festivus" for the restuvus!
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Happy Holiday
Everyone at Gone Gaming wishes you a wonderful holiday season full of love and laughter.
The following is an excerpt from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “The Christmas Attic” album, printed with the kind permission of TSO. I think is has a beautiful message for everyone no matter what their belief.
Dream Child (A Christmas Dream)
In the night
Was the dark.
In the dark
Was the dream.
In the dream
Was the Child
And myself
There unseen.
And all that night the snow came down
To heal the scars our lives had found
And the dreams that lay broken.
And there upon a bridge of dreams
Across the night we walked unseen
With no words ever spoken.
And then on through that night
We did walk for a while
And our steps turned to blocks
And the blocks turned to miles.
Then we followed a path
For as far as we could
Till we found ourselves there
In an evergreen woods.
There were thousands of candles
Upon every tree.
It was beautiful
But there was one mystery,
For with all of those candles
You must understand
That the only one lit
Was now in that Child’s hand.
And there upon that Christmas scene
The candle wax of melted dreams
And the years they had taken.
And as the snow did gently fall,
He one by one relit them all
Till each dream was awakened.
And there to that light
That young Child showed to me
All the things that he dreamt,
All the things that might be;
How for everything given,
That something is gained.
Strike one match in the dark
And all the world’s not the same.
And when I awoke, well the Child he was gone
But somewhere in my mind
I believe he lives on.
And somewhere in my life
Between here and the end,
On a long winter’s night
I will dream him again.
~~~~
Lyrics by Paul O’Neill
Music by Paul O’Neill, Robert Kinkel and Jon Oliva
The following is an excerpt from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “The Christmas Attic” album, printed with the kind permission of TSO. I think is has a beautiful message for everyone no matter what their belief.
Dream Child (A Christmas Dream)
In the night
Was the dark.
In the dark
Was the dream.
In the dream
Was the Child
And myself
There unseen.
And all that night the snow came down
To heal the scars our lives had found
And the dreams that lay broken.
And there upon a bridge of dreams
Across the night we walked unseen
With no words ever spoken.
And then on through that night
We did walk for a while
And our steps turned to blocks
And the blocks turned to miles.
Then we followed a path
For as far as we could
Till we found ourselves there
In an evergreen woods.
There were thousands of candles
Upon every tree.
It was beautiful
But there was one mystery,
For with all of those candles
You must understand
That the only one lit
Was now in that Child’s hand.
And there upon that Christmas scene
The candle wax of melted dreams
And the years they had taken.
And as the snow did gently fall,
He one by one relit them all
Till each dream was awakened.
And there to that light
That young Child showed to me
All the things that he dreamt,
All the things that might be;
How for everything given,
That something is gained.
Strike one match in the dark
And all the world’s not the same.
And when I awoke, well the Child he was gone
But somewhere in my mind
I believe he lives on.
And somewhere in my life
Between here and the end,
On a long winter’s night
I will dream him again.
~~~~
Lyrics by Paul O’Neill
Music by Paul O’Neill, Robert Kinkel and Jon Oliva
Friday, December 23, 2005
The Dance of Theme and Mechanics in Games: A Fantasy
Warning: The following blog contains 1686 calories per serving. Serving size is approximately 1 paragraph.
Ava Jarvis is another of the distinguished voices on Boardgamegeek. You probably know her as BilboAtBagEnd.
I hesitate to say that she is one of the distinguished female voices on BGG, because Ava rarely makes an issue of the fact. Her's is the distinguished voice of an experienced gamer. I confess that I no longer pay attention to the "what-game-would-my-wife/girlfriend-like-to-play geeklists", but I think Ava ignores them even more than I do. You will find her making insightful comments on the "best-heavy-abstract-two-player-games-designed-by-Tibetan-monks-and-based-upon-Go geeklists", which, I must confess, I tend to ignore also.
If I were to ever respond to one of those "which-BGGer-would-you-most-want-to-play-with geeklists" Ava would be near the top of my list, and not for a light game either.
At any rate, have a Merry Christmas and heeeeeeeeeere's Ava.
Theme on a game is like icing on a cake: it helps make a cake quite irresistible, usually provides a welcome counterpoint in texture taste compared to what it's covering, and can occasionally save a not very exciting torte. Mechanics, or the cake, must be there. Cake is cake. There may not be a lot, or it may be as thick as a brick, but you need a cake to... have cake. Otherwise icing is merely a moist puddle on the table.
Some people prefer their games with quite a lot of icing, complete sugar masterpieces with little marzipan treasure chests, sugar-spun dragons, and blue-gel lakes. Some people prefer, and even insist upon, a cake with a simple and delicate sugar glazing that barely hides the cake, much less overcomes its flavor. Most of us don't mind either extreme, and are fine with the regular celebratory-cake that is in between.
People can get rather heated up about icing, actually.
"Hey! That cake has barely any on it. How can it be any good? It seems kind of... boring."
"What do you mean barely? Look, there are little *scallops* along the edges, and the berry mixed in really does add something to the taste. It doesn't have to have little sugar meeples to be good, you know."
"That cake is so loaded with icing it makes me sick just looking at it. How can *they* eat it up?"
Perhaps instead of looking at games, I mean cakes, in terms of amount of icing in ratios to amount of cake, we can gain a better understanding of approximately what point people start arguing that an abstract is over-iced, or that a dungeon-crawl is not iced enough...
-------------------------------------------------------
Moving away from the confectionary comparisons, the issue of theme comes up quite a bit. But for an aspect of games much discussed amongst a population that, in large part, thrives on numbers, theme is a very touchy-feely quality. People usually say, "that theme is pasted on", referring to an actually large range of theme scale points (if such a thing existed). Or else they say, "it drips with theme", while talking about German games. We talk as though a game either has theme or hasn't, as if theme were some afterthought we could just slather on in the right proportions, and the game author either put on too much or too little.
But theme and mechanics dance through many games. Sometimes theme leads, and sometimes mechanics do. Sometimes theme and mechanics both tango together, and sometimes mechanics is left to dance on its own in the spotlight. It all comes down, as in many games, to numbers. And that number is four, and three, and two, and one. I think of them as the four spheres.... although perhaps it's better to think of them as the four points, since they are less locations as milestone markers on the path....
FOUR is the least number of points needed to form a three-dimensional shape: the tetrahedron.
Any less, and you have at best a plane. Three-dimensional shapes are "real" in the sense that they are in our world and we can grasp them, manipulate them in ways that we can easily relate to. Here you find the games that definitely do drip in theme, and few people, if any, would disagree. Typically these are the adventure games of great and sometimes exhaustive detail, for it is detail that brings ideas to life. Magic Realm very firmly anchors this point of the path. Talisman, Descent extend it, and you can see, farther up the path, Return of the Heroes.
In the games that live here, or that exist near here, theme leads the dance, and mechanics serves theme. Suppose that we were to pick the theme of panning for gold in some Lost Valley. Why, there are different kinds of gold in different kinds of locations. Mountain gold would be harder to pick... yes, it would require special equipment that you make out of the raw materials of the land. There will be wild animals and fish, they can be a sort of resource, alongside the timber wood, which you can more effectively chop with special equipment...
In the question of chicken and egg, theme seems to have come first, and the mechanics were chosen to support the theme.
But this is not the only relationship mechanics and theme can have, you'll note as we walk up this path, past small wooden houses and little encounter tiles, until we reach...
THREE is the smallest number of points that describe (and will always describe) a plane.
In terms of three dimensions, planes can be looked upon from many angles, and I think this is why so many arguments can crop up in this area, between Four and Two. What looks flat and linear to one person will look almost tetrahedral to someone else.
But if you look straight on, you'll see the loop. At Three, we find games that effect a peculiar synergy between mechanics and theme. Mechanics and theme inform each other, affect one another. But the mechanics were formed first.
The seminal game here is Lord of the Rings. Like any Knizia, the mechanics are sound and could almost exist by themselves---indeed, they are recognizable variants of mechanics from other games of his. The Hobbit cards people will recognize from Taj Mahal and Ivanhoe. Appropriate card suits---friendship, travel, fighting, hiding, and the Ring as the joker---are used here. But the theme does not stop there. Theme informs mechanics: different scenario boards require different suit focus, yield different rewards, and are harder or easier in particular suits depending on what scene from Tolkien's epic is being played. In Moria, you will need to fight well to get out of Balen's Tomb and out of the mines (and fighting is the main suit that needs to be advanced on that board), but only some well-timed fleeing will get you enough life tokens to stay out of harm's way. Yet fight not enough, and you will not be able to stop the taxing and horrifying events from occurring. Some events you can stop---be well-hidden and far enough through the mines, and you won't fall prey to being trapped between a Balrog and a hard place. But the mechanics don't stop there. Mechanics inform theme: the Hobbits must cooperate, and divide their attentions efficiently in order to get through a scenario. Sacrifices must be identified, judged, and---most importantly---made.
Note that there's actually quite a lot of road between Three and Two. Take a look at Shear Panic. At its heart, it's just another abstract, but the scoring track really shears the theme for all its wool. "Staying close to Roger the Ram" or "Staying as far away from the shearer" carries as much thematic weight in the world of Shear Panic as "making sure that Shelob doesn't attack" does in Lord of the Rings (both game and book).
Not all games between Three and Two are completely coupled to their theme. If we take a look at Richard Breese's Reef Encounter, it is arguable that another theme can be applied. But that theme would have to wedge itself into the conceptual niches of the coral-scoring parrotfish, the protective shrimp, and the breeding and moving corals. You need thematic components that "eat" tiles, protect tiles, and a thematic representation for the tiles themselves that could grow and spawn, and attack overnight in strange stomach-turning ways (yes, I watched Blue Planet's Coral Seas episode, from which this game is based).
I could even have used Tigris & Euphrates as an example, which has a river-valley civilization theme that would need to be quite rudely uprooted and replaced, not just with respect to the leaders and temples, farming and the river, or the marketplaces and flexibility.... but also with respect to the two rivers wending their way on the board.
You'll note that the path is rather crowded here, as we begin to walk into....
TWO points will always form a line.
The idea of "two" is that of balance---duality, Yin and Yang, brother and sister, twins. But balance is a concept that belongs to mechanics---and not to theme. In this area of the path, theme serves mechanics, and there is much less of a relationship between the game and its theme. Mechanics wear themes light around here.
This is not to say that theme is entirely dispensable, and there are undoubtedly quite a few shades of gray between the feedback loop and the flatline.
Around and about here are games like Torres---whose theme of knights and towers is a pleasant decoration of an abstract of height and action point manipulation. But while knights and towers are associated in mind, it's more in the way that a knight and a rook would go together in chess. The relationship of knights and towers to scoring go a bit beyond typical association, although it does help to think in terms of knights controlling higher towers in larger castles as having more worth.
Ra is another example, and more likely closer to the seat of this area: suitable Egyptian objects are used for the sets that we wish to collect, but apart from that, there is not much in the way of Egyptology-orientated meaning. It's nice to have one of each of those monuments, or to have a couple of gods to spend within the current epoch, but another theme involving commonly associated objects could fit in (and did---as the less classy but more modern gangster theme of Razzia! showed, although it would have been nice if more elements from Ra, like the disasters, had also been added in).
The games here could do without theme, but they would be harder to grasp. Associativity, even light associativity, is a wonderful thing for understanding. The towers in Torres have doors that the knights can walk through, and which help express a certain attribute of movement in the game that would otherwise be difficult to describe elegantly. But we understand doors in towers. Likewise, whatever the theme used in Ra, it helps that if we have one set category that comprises eight related but distinct items (like monuments), a set category with a relationship that can be expressed as one-requiring-many (the niles and floods), appropriate disaster examples for a set, etc.
We're starting to reach a rather overly bright bank of light, like a Steven Spielberg special effect gone haywire...
ONE is a single point in anywhere---from one dimension up to as many dimensions as you like.
From one comes the rest---so we may regard this point of the path as belonging to games of pure mechanics, no theme need apply. At the single point, games here need to be elegant and simple, since there is no theme to hang associations upon. The time-honored Chess may actually be considered to be a little bit off from this final location, towards Two: the knight on horse jumps, the rook moves like a siege engine, and the pawns are reminiscent in power and scope like foot soldiers. Games like Hive would be in a similar position.
But with the simplest of games---such as Go or the games in the GIPF family---there is no theme between you and the game. There does not need to be: in this sphere (and this place may, perhaps, truly be thought of as a sphere, a much more localized and polarized point), the mechanics can become almost like theme, or perhaps they are theme. Go is often thought of, written of, and played like military formations and movements, with tactics that sometimes seem straight out of The Art of War. YINSH is often described as feeling "highly energetic"---a much different feeling, brought out by its mechanics, than the methodical pushing that is GIPF itself, or the harried race-the-clock flipping of TAMSK.
One question occurs: If mechanics are theme, then are theme mechanics?
And here endeth the tale. I'm glad you made it all the way through, and hope you enjoyed it, or were at least a little bit amused.
Peace.
Ava Jarvis is another of the distinguished voices on Boardgamegeek. You probably know her as BilboAtBagEnd.
I hesitate to say that she is one of the distinguished female voices on BGG, because Ava rarely makes an issue of the fact. Her's is the distinguished voice of an experienced gamer. I confess that I no longer pay attention to the "what-game-would-my-wife/girlfriend-like-to-play geeklists", but I think Ava ignores them even more than I do. You will find her making insightful comments on the "best-heavy-abstract-two-player-games-designed-by-Tibetan-monks-and-based-upon-Go geeklists", which, I must confess, I tend to ignore also.
If I were to ever respond to one of those "which-BGGer-would-you-most-want-to-play-with geeklists" Ava would be near the top of my list, and not for a light game either.
At any rate, have a Merry Christmas and heeeeeeeeeere's Ava.
Theme on a game is like icing on a cake: it helps make a cake quite irresistible, usually provides a welcome counterpoint in texture taste compared to what it's covering, and can occasionally save a not very exciting torte. Mechanics, or the cake, must be there. Cake is cake. There may not be a lot, or it may be as thick as a brick, but you need a cake to... have cake. Otherwise icing is merely a moist puddle on the table.
Some people prefer their games with quite a lot of icing, complete sugar masterpieces with little marzipan treasure chests, sugar-spun dragons, and blue-gel lakes. Some people prefer, and even insist upon, a cake with a simple and delicate sugar glazing that barely hides the cake, much less overcomes its flavor. Most of us don't mind either extreme, and are fine with the regular celebratory-cake that is in between.
People can get rather heated up about icing, actually.
"Hey! That cake has barely any on it. How can it be any good? It seems kind of... boring."
"What do you mean barely? Look, there are little *scallops* along the edges, and the berry mixed in really does add something to the taste. It doesn't have to have little sugar meeples to be good, you know."
"That cake is so loaded with icing it makes me sick just looking at it. How can *they* eat it up?"
Perhaps instead of looking at games, I mean cakes, in terms of amount of icing in ratios to amount of cake, we can gain a better understanding of approximately what point people start arguing that an abstract is over-iced, or that a dungeon-crawl is not iced enough...
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Moving away from the confectionary comparisons, the issue of theme comes up quite a bit. But for an aspect of games much discussed amongst a population that, in large part, thrives on numbers, theme is a very touchy-feely quality. People usually say, "that theme is pasted on", referring to an actually large range of theme scale points (if such a thing existed). Or else they say, "it drips with theme", while talking about German games. We talk as though a game either has theme or hasn't, as if theme were some afterthought we could just slather on in the right proportions, and the game author either put on too much or too little.
But theme and mechanics dance through many games. Sometimes theme leads, and sometimes mechanics do. Sometimes theme and mechanics both tango together, and sometimes mechanics is left to dance on its own in the spotlight. It all comes down, as in many games, to numbers. And that number is four, and three, and two, and one. I think of them as the four spheres.... although perhaps it's better to think of them as the four points, since they are less locations as milestone markers on the path....
FOUR is the least number of points needed to form a three-dimensional shape: the tetrahedron.
Any less, and you have at best a plane. Three-dimensional shapes are "real" in the sense that they are in our world and we can grasp them, manipulate them in ways that we can easily relate to. Here you find the games that definitely do drip in theme, and few people, if any, would disagree. Typically these are the adventure games of great and sometimes exhaustive detail, for it is detail that brings ideas to life. Magic Realm very firmly anchors this point of the path. Talisman, Descent extend it, and you can see, farther up the path, Return of the Heroes.
In the games that live here, or that exist near here, theme leads the dance, and mechanics serves theme. Suppose that we were to pick the theme of panning for gold in some Lost Valley. Why, there are different kinds of gold in different kinds of locations. Mountain gold would be harder to pick... yes, it would require special equipment that you make out of the raw materials of the land. There will be wild animals and fish, they can be a sort of resource, alongside the timber wood, which you can more effectively chop with special equipment...
In the question of chicken and egg, theme seems to have come first, and the mechanics were chosen to support the theme.
But this is not the only relationship mechanics and theme can have, you'll note as we walk up this path, past small wooden houses and little encounter tiles, until we reach...
THREE is the smallest number of points that describe (and will always describe) a plane.
In terms of three dimensions, planes can be looked upon from many angles, and I think this is why so many arguments can crop up in this area, between Four and Two. What looks flat and linear to one person will look almost tetrahedral to someone else.
But if you look straight on, you'll see the loop. At Three, we find games that effect a peculiar synergy between mechanics and theme. Mechanics and theme inform each other, affect one another. But the mechanics were formed first.
The seminal game here is Lord of the Rings. Like any Knizia, the mechanics are sound and could almost exist by themselves---indeed, they are recognizable variants of mechanics from other games of his. The Hobbit cards people will recognize from Taj Mahal and Ivanhoe. Appropriate card suits---friendship, travel, fighting, hiding, and the Ring as the joker---are used here. But the theme does not stop there. Theme informs mechanics: different scenario boards require different suit focus, yield different rewards, and are harder or easier in particular suits depending on what scene from Tolkien's epic is being played. In Moria, you will need to fight well to get out of Balen's Tomb and out of the mines (and fighting is the main suit that needs to be advanced on that board), but only some well-timed fleeing will get you enough life tokens to stay out of harm's way. Yet fight not enough, and you will not be able to stop the taxing and horrifying events from occurring. Some events you can stop---be well-hidden and far enough through the mines, and you won't fall prey to being trapped between a Balrog and a hard place. But the mechanics don't stop there. Mechanics inform theme: the Hobbits must cooperate, and divide their attentions efficiently in order to get through a scenario. Sacrifices must be identified, judged, and---most importantly---made.
Note that there's actually quite a lot of road between Three and Two. Take a look at Shear Panic. At its heart, it's just another abstract, but the scoring track really shears the theme for all its wool. "Staying close to Roger the Ram" or "Staying as far away from the shearer" carries as much thematic weight in the world of Shear Panic as "making sure that Shelob doesn't attack" does in Lord of the Rings (both game and book).
Not all games between Three and Two are completely coupled to their theme. If we take a look at Richard Breese's Reef Encounter, it is arguable that another theme can be applied. But that theme would have to wedge itself into the conceptual niches of the coral-scoring parrotfish, the protective shrimp, and the breeding and moving corals. You need thematic components that "eat" tiles, protect tiles, and a thematic representation for the tiles themselves that could grow and spawn, and attack overnight in strange stomach-turning ways (yes, I watched Blue Planet's Coral Seas episode, from which this game is based).
I could even have used Tigris & Euphrates as an example, which has a river-valley civilization theme that would need to be quite rudely uprooted and replaced, not just with respect to the leaders and temples, farming and the river, or the marketplaces and flexibility.... but also with respect to the two rivers wending their way on the board.
You'll note that the path is rather crowded here, as we begin to walk into....
TWO points will always form a line.
The idea of "two" is that of balance---duality, Yin and Yang, brother and sister, twins. But balance is a concept that belongs to mechanics---and not to theme. In this area of the path, theme serves mechanics, and there is much less of a relationship between the game and its theme. Mechanics wear themes light around here.
This is not to say that theme is entirely dispensable, and there are undoubtedly quite a few shades of gray between the feedback loop and the flatline.
Around and about here are games like Torres---whose theme of knights and towers is a pleasant decoration of an abstract of height and action point manipulation. But while knights and towers are associated in mind, it's more in the way that a knight and a rook would go together in chess. The relationship of knights and towers to scoring go a bit beyond typical association, although it does help to think in terms of knights controlling higher towers in larger castles as having more worth.
Ra is another example, and more likely closer to the seat of this area: suitable Egyptian objects are used for the sets that we wish to collect, but apart from that, there is not much in the way of Egyptology-orientated meaning. It's nice to have one of each of those monuments, or to have a couple of gods to spend within the current epoch, but another theme involving commonly associated objects could fit in (and did---as the less classy but more modern gangster theme of Razzia! showed, although it would have been nice if more elements from Ra, like the disasters, had also been added in).
The games here could do without theme, but they would be harder to grasp. Associativity, even light associativity, is a wonderful thing for understanding. The towers in Torres have doors that the knights can walk through, and which help express a certain attribute of movement in the game that would otherwise be difficult to describe elegantly. But we understand doors in towers. Likewise, whatever the theme used in Ra, it helps that if we have one set category that comprises eight related but distinct items (like monuments), a set category with a relationship that can be expressed as one-requiring-many (the niles and floods), appropriate disaster examples for a set, etc.
We're starting to reach a rather overly bright bank of light, like a Steven Spielberg special effect gone haywire...
ONE is a single point in anywhere---from one dimension up to as many dimensions as you like.
From one comes the rest---so we may regard this point of the path as belonging to games of pure mechanics, no theme need apply. At the single point, games here need to be elegant and simple, since there is no theme to hang associations upon. The time-honored Chess may actually be considered to be a little bit off from this final location, towards Two: the knight on horse jumps, the rook moves like a siege engine, and the pawns are reminiscent in power and scope like foot soldiers. Games like Hive would be in a similar position.
But with the simplest of games---such as Go or the games in the GIPF family---there is no theme between you and the game. There does not need to be: in this sphere (and this place may, perhaps, truly be thought of as a sphere, a much more localized and polarized point), the mechanics can become almost like theme, or perhaps they are theme. Go is often thought of, written of, and played like military formations and movements, with tactics that sometimes seem straight out of The Art of War. YINSH is often described as feeling "highly energetic"---a much different feeling, brought out by its mechanics, than the methodical pushing that is GIPF itself, or the harried race-the-clock flipping of TAMSK.
One question occurs: If mechanics are theme, then are theme mechanics?
And here endeth the tale. I'm glad you made it all the way through, and hope you enjoyed it, or were at least a little bit amused.
Peace.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Schools of Game Design
Last week I talked about three game designers, and classified and categorized their works. This week I want to move a step up the food chain, and instead talk about schools of game design, to once more try to categorize, classify, and index.The central idea is that game designs can, as with most creative works, be grouped into schools of design, each with their own character and their own quirks. In the modern gaming world, I believe there are four broad schools of design--mainstream, Anglo-American, Euro, and hybrid--though each of those schools also has sub-schools within them.
Mainstream Games
Mainstream games are those ones that you probably grew up with. They appear in Toys R' Us, Wal-Mart, and the closets of many American families. Most mainstream games: have a superficial or no theme; have little concern for the actual mechanics, which tend to be rudimentary or monotone at best; and have little opportunity for real strategy (with the notable exception of the abstracts).Abstract Games: These are largely traditional games that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. This category includes Chess, Checkers, Go, Backgammon, Othello, and others. Unlike most mainstream games, these ones are well-designed, and do allow for strategy. They're the only real gamers' games to hit the mainstream, and probably have only achieved their success due to their long history.
Some twentieth-century designs like Alex Randolph's Twixt did manage the same mainstream appeal. More recent games, like the GIPF project clearly fit into this categorization, but haven't necessarily penetrated the larger markets.
Besides their other characteristics, most mainstream abstracts are two-player.
Examples. Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, GIPF, Go, Othello, Twixt
Family Games: Of the three types of mainstream games, family games are the ones that are most likely to actually have some theme behind them. However, looking at them from a modern perspective, I think the theme for a Stratego or a Monopoly is actually much more tenuous than even Knizia's most transparent themings. Sure, the themings exist, but they usually don't have much or any interaction with the rules. This low attention to theming probably bespeaks the evolution of family games from abstract mainstreams.
Family games otherwise meet the general classifications for mainstream games, including rudimentary mechanics and low strategy. They support surprisingly large numbers of people, with Monopoly running to 8, Boggle to 6, and Mille Bornes to 6. Thus their main differentiation from party games tends to be that they require more concentration.
(I could further separate family games into couple games, family games, and kid games, but have elected not to, mainly because I don't find the category at all interesting. The only big difference is that theming usually increases as the age of the players decreases.)
Examples. Boggle, Mille Bornes, Monopoly, Scrabble, Stratego
Party Games: Finally, party games meet every one of the critera I laid out for mainstream games, and perhaps are the definitive mainstream game as a result. In addition they tend to have one other characteristic: they allow for, and perhaps even support, conversation.
Many party games allow for this by the fact that there's no ability to plan ahead for your next turn. They're entirely tactical. Trivial Pursuit, or almost any other trivia game, fits into this category. So do some creative games like Cranium, where each player takes a turn based solely on the card draw that turn.
Alternatively party games may have little downtime, but instead constantly support conversation and interaction. Most of the other creative games work like this, including Win, Lose, or Draw!, or any other game where lots of people are trying to figure out what one person is doing.
Examples. Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, Win, Lose, or Draw!
Anglo-American Games
Anglo-American games as we now recognize started really appearing in the sixties and seventies. Their genesis seems to have been from the hobby game market, first appearing from miniatures game manufacturers (and thus Avalon Hill) and later roleplaying game manufacturers (and thus TSR, Steve Jackson Games, and many others). (Miniatures and RPGs are two more Anglo-American games that I've avoided in this essay.)As with mass-market games there really isn't much emphasis on mechanics. However, the themes are often much tighter to the game, which isn't a surprise given that many miniatures games and roleplaying games alike are heavily simulationistic, and so the same companies would be offering up similar design philosophies.
Together these form what I call a "top-down" design philosophy: building from theming down to mechanics.
Wargames: I'd count pretty old games like Diplomacy and Risk as the first Anglo-American wargames. They really took off in the eighties with games like Conquest of the Empires and Axis & Allies, and in the more specialist field, Kingmaker, Dune, and History of the World, and are seeing another resurgence now primarily due to the efforts of Eagle Games.
Besides holding to the general characteristics of Anglo-American games, including good theming and simplistic mechanics, most Anglo-American wargames are fairly long (4-12 hours being typical, but they're still shorter than the miniatures battles they descended from) and they often depend upon very agressive players. (Some of the designs fall apart if one or more persons casually waits for the other players to eat each other.)
Examples. Attack!, Axis & Allies, Conquest of the Empire, Diplomacy, Dune, History of the World, Kingmaker, Risk, Wizard's Quest
Beer & Pretzels: If anything beer & pretzels games have even more solid theme than the rest of the Anglo-American genre, and they also often try and be funny. There's still not much attention to mechanics and many older beer & pretzels games are pretty fatally flawed, most often in endgame resolution which frequently drags and drags and then eventually awards a pseudo-random winner.
The name "beer & pretzels" generally refers to the fact that these games are meant to be light and funny, the type of thing you'd play while screwing around with your friends. Although the game lengths don't always support those ideals (since beer & pretzel games can run from an hour up to several) the mechanics often do, because they tend to be simplistic, low strategy, and somewhat random. Beer & pretzels also often contain a "take that" mechanic where you actively attack the other players, most frequently with an arbitrary card draw. (For whatever reasons, more beer & pretzels games are card games than anything else.)
Examples. Hacker, Illuminati, Kings & Things, WizWar
Other Designs: Although a great number of Anglo-American designs seem to fit into one of these former two categories, there are still a large scattering of other releases. As with all Anglo-American designs they tend to be top down, and are often heavily simulationistic. The goal is to mirror some real-world situation, often in excrutiating detail, and often without a lot of concern for game length or game design.
The main differentiation between these, and the afore-mentioned beer & pretzels games which also cover many genres, is that these other designs are by no means light and can be even longer than the average beer & pretzels. (I've literally never completed a game of Source of the Nile, and not for lack of trying.)
Examples. Age of Exploration, Empire Builder, Source of the Nile
Eurogames
Whereas Anglo-American games tend to be top-down designs, Eurogames tend to be bottom-up, starting with mechanics and building upward toward theme. Alan Moon and Reiner Knizia are perhaps two of the designers who show this tendency most obviously, since we've seen their games transform in different printings--or have heard stories of the same. A game of Egyptian mythology (Ra) became a gangster game (Razzia) while Through the Desert was apparently about manor grounds or somesuch before the pastel camels showed up. And with Moon we can see the different variants: Clippers vs. Sante Fe Rails or Union Pacific vs. Airlines.The Eurogames seem to share the goals of some Anglo-American games: creating real gamers' games that we geeks enjoy to play. However, besides the increased attention paid to mechanics Eurogames also tend to be a lot shorter. Most run in 60-90 minutes. 2 hours is notable, and anything greater is way outside the norm. (However in the last year Eurogames seem to have bifurcated with designs going either simpler or longer, a trend that I'll look at more in my yearly review in two weeks' time.)
German Design: The Eurogames movement really originated in Germany, and so the games there most closely reflect the ideals of the movement generally. The themes of German games can be really thin, especially when compared to the more simulationistic Anglo-American releases, but contrariwise the mechanics can be really strong.
Though we talk about German designs, I think there are many people of other nationalities who fall straight into the category, including the aforementioned Alan Moon, as well as Richard Borg--two American designers. Leo Colovini, an Italian designer, is also very abstract yet mechanistic (though for more on the Italian design dilemma, see below). As I mentioned in my last article, I don't really find the founder of the current Eurogames movement, Klaus Teuber, to produce games that are that German. His games are too openly random and too well themed to really fit into the category.
It's also worth noting that games actually coming out of Germany don't tend to be war-oriented, a pretty big change from Anglo-American games where that's a major focus. I still think games like Memoir '44 meet all the criteria for a German design, despite their basis in conflict, but you don't see that sort of thing coming out of Germany itself very often, due to the country's history.
Examples. El Grande, Memoir '44, Ra, Ticket to Ride, Torres, Tigris & Euphrates
French Design: I'd like to believe that different countries have different national characters for the games they design; it fulfills my natural belief in order. It's also clearly not entirely true, as evidenced by my earlier discussion of American & Italian designers who fit right into the German mold. In addition, as the Internet continues to evolve, it continues to erode national identities, creating a more homogeneous whole.
Nonetheless, I do think French designs tend to have some features in common more often then not. First, their themes seem to commonly be sturdier and more integrated than those of German designs. I don't know if their designs are top-down or bottom-up, but both the mechanics and the themes seem to come off pretty well. Second, their designs seem to place a much greater emphasis on randomness. You're more likely to find dice in a French game, but you're also more likely to find cards, tiles, or powers that allow for pretty abrupt & massive upheavals.
I think Dungeon Twister is a somewhat interesting example of the genre because it calls itself "luckless", but there's actually a lot of randomness based upon how blind placements occur at game start and how blind bids occur in combats. It might not be a roll of a die, but there are a lot of different types of randomness.
Finally, the French seem more willing to create wargames. If you see a solid wargame design that runs in two hours or less, it's probably French.
As I wrote last week, though a definitive German design, I feel like The Settlers of Catan falls squarely into the norm of the French design movement.
Examples. Citadels, Condotierre, Dungeon Twister, Fist of Dragonstones, Mall of Horror, Mare Nostrum
Italian Design: I actually have no idea if there's a national character for Italian designs. I feel like I should be able to spot one because I've been somewhere between a dozen and a score Italian games at this point, but I haven't been able to turn anything up. Leo Colovini's games are entirely German in design. Some of daVinci's game play like American beer & pretzels games (Bang), some like mainstream family games (Dancing Dice), and some like hybrid party games (Ostrakon, Word Jam).
The one thing that I can say about many Italian designs is that I find a lot of them non-intuitive when I first examine them. I can't see how they're going to work. That goes for Colovini and daVinci designs alike. But, whether that's a start to an answer as to what the Italian game character is, I dunno.
Examples. Bang!, Cartagena, Clans, Dancing Dice, Ostrakon, Word Jam
Hybrids
As you'd expect, hybrid games are those which mix together two different schools of game design.Anglo-American-German Design: These are the most common mix. They mix Anglo-American design with German sensibilities. As a result you end up with games that are a bit on the long side (often 3-6 hours), but which have solid German mechanics, often including auctions and sometimes dipping into majority-control or other mechanics that you wouldn't find in traditional Anglo-American games. Most of these games are wargames, but Age of Steam is an example of a more general Anglo-American game that has been built with German sensibilities.
There are two design houses pushing hard on this area right now: Warfrog and Fantasy Flight. Eagle Games may be moving in this direction too.
Examples. Age of Steam, Conquest of the Empire II, A Game of Thrones, Railroad Tycoon, Struggle of Empires
Other Hybrids: Clearly, any of these categories could be hybridized. The other pretty big category of hybrids are Eurodesigns which are actually family games or party games. I already mentioned a few daVinci gams that fit into this category. I think some of the Kramer and Knizia designs that we hardcore gamers don't like might fit into the same category.
Examples. Barbarossa, Ostrakon
Final Notes
By the time you folks read this, I'm going to be out of town. My parents are taking me on vacation to Kauai, the place where they plan to retire in a couple of years. It's been a really hard year, and my wife & I couldn't have afforded this vacation on our own, so thanks guys!I'd love to see your comments when I get back, so please tell me what you think about these classifications and tell me where I'm wrong (or right). If you can, tell me what holds together Italian game design that I couldn't see, and what national characters I missed. I'll follow up on the comments in about a week, so check back by a week from Friday if you want to see what I thought about what you thought.
I'm going to be barely back in town next Thursday, but I'm not going to try and get a column out. Hopefully there will be someone to fill in. I've already got plans for next year: a review of the year 2005 in gaming; an article about winning games; some more articles on designers with Alan Moon, Bruno Faidutti, and Michael Schacht a few of the people I really want to write about; and eventually some longer articles about designers with some neat diagrams of game relationships. I'm also considering whether to revise a series of article I wrote about game design two years ago (or whether there's a book someone might want to publish in there).
A few final thanks for the year. Thanks to Coldfoot for inviting me to write in this blog, even after I originally ignored his mail for a bit because my email box was overwhelmed at the time. And thanks to all of you for reading and for commenting. I've read every comment made here, even when it was well after the fact, and even if I didn't respond. Some of those comments have definitely influenced my thinking.
As as for the rest: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the rest. I'll be thinking of you when I'm sipping a margarita in a beach chair. And if you miss me next week, take a look at this article that I wrote last time I was on Kauai, four years ago. It has some pictures of me & my wife on the island, and of course thoughts on games.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
A Winter Game
Richard, Cori and I sit down at the kitchen table to play a game—it doesn’t matter which one, pick any game that takes longer than 5 minutes to set up and play.
Before we finish setting it up, Serek (Cori’s black cat) wants outside. I get up from my place beside the door, open the door and use my foot to push open the pet door in the storm door. If you don’t offer this bit of courtesy, the cats will sit there for any length of time trying to determine if it’s safe to go out, so the expedient thing to do is push up the flap and offer a word of encouragement: “GO!”
I barely sit back down when Bear (my black cat) decides that if Serek is going out, he wants out, too. Repeat above process to hurry Bear on his way. “Oh, wait for me,” Spencer (Cori’s long-haired black cat) says and scoots out the door after Bear.
O.k., let’s see. Cori took her turn but before I can comprehend her actions, there’s a “thunk” at the door. That’s the sound of the pet door swinging inward and hitting the inside door. Richard stretches sideways, leaning at a precarious angle from his chair, and opens the door. In bursts a cold cat. Serek has found out that it’s cold outside and even the birds are hiding somewhere with their feathers puffed up for warmth.
Ten seconds after the door is closed, there’s another “thunk.” Yes, Bear has made the same discovery as Serek. No, Spencer isn’t right behind him; that would be too easy. We get in a whole round before he’s bored and wants back in but by now, Serek has forgotten that it’s cold and miserable outside and wants to give it another go.
Rinse and repeat until we humans have had enough and yell at the cats in our hopelessly optimistic way. Much of our concentration is now gone as we listen to cats meowing and clawing at the doorframe in their attempt to make us change our minds. If we can hold out long enough, they will go away and play. Unfortunately, that can be as distracting as opening the door.
We manage to take another couple of turns when a terrible cacophony of hissing, yeowling and thumping of small bodies assaults our ears. “SPENCER!” He’s the biggest and a bit of a bully so the other cats do not enjoy his idea of a good-natured romp.
Now Tucker (our Corgi) figures it’s a good time to go outside and leave the madness behind but at least he doesn’t require the same flap-opening courtesy that the cats do and pushes his way through and into the cold. His expedition lasts five minutes which lets us play uninterrupted for that long.
Suddenly I feel a sharp pain in my leg just above the knee. Hello, Bess (my tortoise shell baby). She’s feeling neglected but doesn’t really like to be held so I reach down and pet her head and Cori checks to make sure there’s food in the cats’ bowl.
Now who’s turn is it? Mine? Well, let’s see. I think I’ll…
With the grace only a feline possesses, Bess has landed on the table. Luckily, she’s barely touched the board but if you try to pick up a cat and remove it from where it wants to be, the physical fight that ensues results in something getting destroyed. The best bet is to help the misplaced kitty to a more desirable setting with a little push in the right direction.
Whew, that was close. Alright, it’s my turn, right?
Meeoowww. Claw, scratch. Serek wants out. -----
So, my friends, who’d like to bring over their brand new copy of Caylus to teach to me and my family? I hear it’s a great game and only takes about 4 hours.
~~~~~~~~
Until next time, laugh, love and wonder.
Mary
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Parlor Game Geek
So, what did www.ParlorGameGeek.com look like in 1870?
Aldie's avatar on the front page
Top 10 Games
Rank Game Value
1 Puerto Rico 8.609 (just kidding)
1 Charades 9.451
2 Crambo 9.204
3 Lookabout 9.115
4 Blindman's Bluff 9.110
5 The Post 8.757
6 Alphabet Minute 8.453
7 Shadows 8.209
8 The Endless Story 8.176
9 Forfeits 8.095
10 Dictionary 7.997
Recent Review
The Bellman
Review by Sir Thomas Vincent Assalinus, III, Esq.
The latest offering from Fortnights of Amazement, The Bellman is a new simultaneous-action dexterity game that builds upon the success of last century's Blind Man's Bluff. In fact, if you liked the latter, you will like the former, since they are essentially the same game with reversed roles.
Opening the box I wasn't surprised to see that the components were of high quality and up to the usual standards for a Fortnights of Amazement game: the game comes with no components. Or box, for that matter.
Players begin by choosing The Bellman: youngest player, oldest, whatever. Everyone else now puts on a blindfold, while the Bellman requires a metalic ringing device of some sort. We weren't sure what to use for this, so we just gave him two metal rods to bang together, which worked out ok. The Bellman begins making noise while moving around the room.
In order to win the game, one of the blindfolded players must "catch" The Bellman. At this point the winner starts off another game as The Bellman. That's it.
Comments:
1) Components: The usual stuff for this sort of game.
2) Rules: The rules were simple and elegant. There were a few rules questions, such as what to use for a ringing device, and whether players can swing large 2x4s while wandering around the room (the rules didn't say that you couldn't), but we managed ok (with a few injuries).
3) Luck: There was a fair amount of luck, but tactics also came into play. Catching The Bellman is trickier than it seems, especially as all the players are playing simultaneously and their efforts are working against each other. Definite high replayability in this regard.
4) Theme: The theme matched the game mechanics very well. You really felt like you were running around trying to catch some idiot ringing a bell.
(Hey, a bell!)
5) Player interaction: There was a lot of interaction, as each player moves simultaneously while trying to acquire limited resources ... resource. As a bonus, there is no early elimination or runaway leader problem. Everyone felt like they had a chance right up to the very end of the game.
6) Fun Factor: We had a blast playing The Bellman. Several times during the game we were laughing our heads off. Especially when Charles reached out to grab The Bellman and ended up grabbing Victoria on her ... elbow.
Bottom line: This is a great party game, another in a long line of great games from Fortnights of Amazement. Highly recommended.
Recent Geeklist
Games played at last evening's tea party at McEssen Manor. Mr and Mrs Alderan Derksington were our hosts, along with Mr M______ and Ms N________ who are visiting from E_______ on the coast.
Mr Gregory Shloessington
Tennesee Estates
Wilburshirstirsustichire
My dear fellow game enthusiasts and compatriots,
It is with warm wishes and a jolly countenance that I send forth this Geeklist, along with the hope that it finds you all in the best of health. I cannot begin to express the happiness and enjoyment we received from our visit to McEssen Manor last evening. The food, wine, and surroundings were simply divine, but mostly the company was of the highest standards, blah blah blah and so on for five pages until so I present to you here a list of the games in which we partook on that very evening that I have mentioned herein, and these are as follows:
Alphabet Minute - One of personal favorites, as to which the Mrs can so attest. As you know doubt recall, the game requires two players to select a piece of paper containing a subject and a letter of the alphabet from among many such papers that had been previously placed into a hat, and then the two players had to converse about the aforesaid subject. The first sentence spoken by one of the players was required to start with the aformentioned letter of the alphabet, and each subsequent sentence was required to be spoken by the other player and to start with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, and so on until the discourse has returned to a sentence that began with the original letter of the alphabet that had started the conversation. All of this was to be accomplished within the short time of sixty seconds, or the players would each forfeit a point. I must admit that I faired rather poorly in this game, having used up sixty seconds with my first sentence. [Note: I also saw this on Whose Line is it Anyway?]
Animals - This being, of course, last year's expansion to the familiar and illustrious Blind Men's Bluff, wherein a player who is caught must make three sounds as an animal named by the catcher. The catching player must then attempt to identify the caught player using these sounds, and, if he or she cannot, the caught player is let free, and the other player must return to his or her industry of catching another player. As for myself, I do not favor expansions over the original game overly much, with the exception of the nine princely expansions to that all time classic game of swapped identities, Mundane Encounter. In any case, this game was ended after Lady Williams, arrayed in a darling blindfold and dark marroon calico print dress, stumbled over Mr Thonquinton's great dane "Snuffles", and fell into the lake.
Crambo - Of course we played this old chesnut. It was quite an excitement, too. Lady Sodak was so excited, she ended up quite flushed and had to lie down and be brought her smelling salts. [One player tries to guess a word after being given a rhyme for that word. The player guesses by asking players one by one about the word by describing the word he wants to guess. For instance, if the real word is "bath", the player is told that it rhymes with "path". The player then asks someone if it is a system for calculating numbers (thinking that the word may be "math"). The player who is asked this question must say "No, the word is not 'math'." The player wins either by guesing the word, or if a player to whom he asked a question does not know what word he is describing.]
Anklen Memo - I josh with you, of course.
Shadows - This lovely game, wherein players must pass behind a screen while another player tries to guess who that player is, was a rousing success, and thoroughly entertaining. I must confess that I was so amused that I even went so far as to tap my cane delicately upon the floor and remark "Hear, hear". I do so make a fool of myself at parties. During our game, Mr Beasley couldn't recognize Mrs Beasley's shadow from the rear end of the horse that had stumbled behind the screen. To top that, noone was able to recognize Mr Grognads form in any way whatsoever.
Recent Session Report
Hot Boiled Beans: Session Report by Mr Clooless.
Score: 1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
Jim started out as it and Mary was his target. We all shouted "Hot boiled Beans", and then he was cool, cool, cool, warm, warm, cool, warm, cool, warm, warm, hot, hot, hot, and then he won.
Mr C.
P.S. How do I get a GeekGold for this?
OK, I won't bore you by doing the rest of this, but, for your own amusement, try to see how these games would rank against modern games which you have rated, and which have benefitted from over a hundred years of evolution. Are today's games better?
Blind Man's Bluff - one blinfolded player must catch any other.
20 questions
Charades
Detective - One player is thief, one is detective. Thief doesn't know who detective is. Thief tries to steal handkerchief from middle of circle before detective catches him.
Dictionary - aka Balderdash.
Forfeits - each player must give an item and then do a truth or dare for the item to be returned to him or her.
How, Why, When, and Where - Players must guess a word by asking only "How do you like it", "Why do you like it", and so on. The answerer may fool the guessers by having used a homonym word and answering for the homonym.
Lookabout - One player hides an object, the last to find it loses.
Pass the Slipper - One player must guess where the slipper is that is being passed around by the other players.
Proverbs - One player must guess a proverb spoken by others, where one word of the proverb, in order, is introduced somewhere inside each sentence spoken by the other players.
Ten Fine Birds - Players try to repeat an ever increasing list of objects (like I went to a picnic and brought a ... and a ... and so on around the circle).
The Ball of Wool - Players try to blow it off the other side of the table against the puffing of the other players who are trying to do the same.
The Barnyard - Each player is an animal, and must make the right noise when his name is said during a story, or when the word "barnyard" is mentioned.
The Courtiers - One of several variants of Simon Says.
The Endless Story - One player starts a story, each player continues for exactly one minute, and the last player must wrap up the story using all elements said by other players within one minute.
The Minister's Cat - Players describe the Minister's Cat using letters of the alphabet around a circle. ("The minister's cat is angry." "The minster's cat is beautiful." ...)
The Name Game - Each player places 10 pieces of paper containing a noun into a hat, and each player has 30 seconds to guess as many as s/he can as the papers are pulled out from clues given by the puller.
The Post - Each player chooses a location ("London", "Brisbane", ). Postmaster calls out two locations who must change seats before he can take one of theirs.
Throwing Up Lights - two players converse about a word without speaking it. As each other player guesses, they may join the conversation. The last to guess loses.
You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile - One person must make anyone else smile, who then becomes "it".
Yehuda
Resources:
http://www.victoriaspast.com/ParlorGames/parlor_games.htm
http://www.oldfashionedliving.com/parlour-games.html
http://www.funjoint.com/parlour.htm
http://members.aol.com/StoryRoot/inquire_within_ms.html#Ch%203
Aldie's avatar on the front page
Top 10 Games
Rank Game Value
1 Puerto Rico 8.609 (just kidding)
1 Charades 9.451
2 Crambo 9.204
3 Lookabout 9.115
4 Blindman's Bluff 9.110
5 The Post 8.757
6 Alphabet Minute 8.453
7 Shadows 8.209
8 The Endless Story 8.176
9 Forfeits 8.095
10 Dictionary 7.997
Recent Review
The Bellman
Review by Sir Thomas Vincent Assalinus, III, Esq.
The latest offering from Fortnights of Amazement, The Bellman is a new simultaneous-action dexterity game that builds upon the success of last century's Blind Man's Bluff. In fact, if you liked the latter, you will like the former, since they are essentially the same game with reversed roles.
Opening the box I wasn't surprised to see that the components were of high quality and up to the usual standards for a Fortnights of Amazement game: the game comes with no components. Or box, for that matter.
Players begin by choosing The Bellman: youngest player, oldest, whatever. Everyone else now puts on a blindfold, while the Bellman requires a metalic ringing device of some sort. We weren't sure what to use for this, so we just gave him two metal rods to bang together, which worked out ok. The Bellman begins making noise while moving around the room.
In order to win the game, one of the blindfolded players must "catch" The Bellman. At this point the winner starts off another game as The Bellman. That's it.
Comments:
1) Components: The usual stuff for this sort of game.
2) Rules: The rules were simple and elegant. There were a few rules questions, such as what to use for a ringing device, and whether players can swing large 2x4s while wandering around the room (the rules didn't say that you couldn't), but we managed ok (with a few injuries).
3) Luck: There was a fair amount of luck, but tactics also came into play. Catching The Bellman is trickier than it seems, especially as all the players are playing simultaneously and their efforts are working against each other. Definite high replayability in this regard.
4) Theme: The theme matched the game mechanics very well. You really felt like you were running around trying to catch some idiot ringing a bell.
(Hey, a bell!)
5) Player interaction: There was a lot of interaction, as each player moves simultaneously while trying to acquire limited resources ... resource. As a bonus, there is no early elimination or runaway leader problem. Everyone felt like they had a chance right up to the very end of the game.
6) Fun Factor: We had a blast playing The Bellman. Several times during the game we were laughing our heads off. Especially when Charles reached out to grab The Bellman and ended up grabbing Victoria on her ... elbow.
Bottom line: This is a great party game, another in a long line of great games from Fortnights of Amazement. Highly recommended.
Recent Geeklist
Games played at last evening's tea party at McEssen Manor. Mr and Mrs Alderan Derksington were our hosts, along with Mr M______ and Ms N________ who are visiting from E_______ on the coast.
Mr Gregory Shloessington
Tennesee Estates
Wilburshirstirsustichire
My dear fellow game enthusiasts and compatriots,
It is with warm wishes and a jolly countenance that I send forth this Geeklist, along with the hope that it finds you all in the best of health. I cannot begin to express the happiness and enjoyment we received from our visit to McEssen Manor last evening. The food, wine, and surroundings were simply divine, but mostly the company was of the highest standards, blah blah blah and so on for five pages until so I present to you here a list of the games in which we partook on that very evening that I have mentioned herein, and these are as follows:
Alphabet Minute - One of personal favorites, as to which the Mrs can so attest. As you know doubt recall, the game requires two players to select a piece of paper containing a subject and a letter of the alphabet from among many such papers that had been previously placed into a hat, and then the two players had to converse about the aforesaid subject. The first sentence spoken by one of the players was required to start with the aformentioned letter of the alphabet, and each subsequent sentence was required to be spoken by the other player and to start with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, and so on until the discourse has returned to a sentence that began with the original letter of the alphabet that had started the conversation. All of this was to be accomplished within the short time of sixty seconds, or the players would each forfeit a point. I must admit that I faired rather poorly in this game, having used up sixty seconds with my first sentence. [Note: I also saw this on Whose Line is it Anyway?]
Animals - This being, of course, last year's expansion to the familiar and illustrious Blind Men's Bluff, wherein a player who is caught must make three sounds as an animal named by the catcher. The catching player must then attempt to identify the caught player using these sounds, and, if he or she cannot, the caught player is let free, and the other player must return to his or her industry of catching another player. As for myself, I do not favor expansions over the original game overly much, with the exception of the nine princely expansions to that all time classic game of swapped identities, Mundane Encounter. In any case, this game was ended after Lady Williams, arrayed in a darling blindfold and dark marroon calico print dress, stumbled over Mr Thonquinton's great dane "Snuffles", and fell into the lake.
Crambo - Of course we played this old chesnut. It was quite an excitement, too. Lady Sodak was so excited, she ended up quite flushed and had to lie down and be brought her smelling salts. [One player tries to guess a word after being given a rhyme for that word. The player guesses by asking players one by one about the word by describing the word he wants to guess. For instance, if the real word is "bath", the player is told that it rhymes with "path". The player then asks someone if it is a system for calculating numbers (thinking that the word may be "math"). The player who is asked this question must say "No, the word is not 'math'." The player wins either by guesing the word, or if a player to whom he asked a question does not know what word he is describing.]
Anklen Memo - I josh with you, of course.
Shadows - This lovely game, wherein players must pass behind a screen while another player tries to guess who that player is, was a rousing success, and thoroughly entertaining. I must confess that I was so amused that I even went so far as to tap my cane delicately upon the floor and remark "Hear, hear". I do so make a fool of myself at parties. During our game, Mr Beasley couldn't recognize Mrs Beasley's shadow from the rear end of the horse that had stumbled behind the screen. To top that, noone was able to recognize Mr Grognads form in any way whatsoever.
Recent Session Report
Hot Boiled Beans: Session Report by Mr Clooless.
Score: 1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
Jim started out as it and Mary was his target. We all shouted "Hot boiled Beans", and then he was cool, cool, cool, warm, warm, cool, warm, cool, warm, warm, hot, hot, hot, and then he won.
Mr C.
P.S. How do I get a GeekGold for this?
OK, I won't bore you by doing the rest of this, but, for your own amusement, try to see how these games would rank against modern games which you have rated, and which have benefitted from over a hundred years of evolution. Are today's games better?
Blind Man's Bluff - one blinfolded player must catch any other.
20 questions
Charades
Detective - One player is thief, one is detective. Thief doesn't know who detective is. Thief tries to steal handkerchief from middle of circle before detective catches him.
Dictionary - aka Balderdash.
Forfeits - each player must give an item and then do a truth or dare for the item to be returned to him or her.
How, Why, When, and Where - Players must guess a word by asking only "How do you like it", "Why do you like it", and so on. The answerer may fool the guessers by having used a homonym word and answering for the homonym.
Lookabout - One player hides an object, the last to find it loses.
Pass the Slipper - One player must guess where the slipper is that is being passed around by the other players.
Proverbs - One player must guess a proverb spoken by others, where one word of the proverb, in order, is introduced somewhere inside each sentence spoken by the other players.
Ten Fine Birds - Players try to repeat an ever increasing list of objects (like I went to a picnic and brought a ... and a ... and so on around the circle).
The Ball of Wool - Players try to blow it off the other side of the table against the puffing of the other players who are trying to do the same.
The Barnyard - Each player is an animal, and must make the right noise when his name is said during a story, or when the word "barnyard" is mentioned.
The Courtiers - One of several variants of Simon Says.
The Endless Story - One player starts a story, each player continues for exactly one minute, and the last player must wrap up the story using all elements said by other players within one minute.
The Minister's Cat - Players describe the Minister's Cat using letters of the alphabet around a circle. ("The minister's cat is angry." "The minster's cat is beautiful." ...)
The Name Game - Each player places 10 pieces of paper containing a noun into a hat, and each player has 30 seconds to guess as many as s/he can as the papers are pulled out from clues given by the puller.
The Post - Each player chooses a location ("London", "Brisbane", ). Postmaster calls out two locations who must change seats before he can take one of theirs.
Throwing Up Lights - two players converse about a word without speaking it. As each other player guesses, they may join the conversation. The last to guess loses.
You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile - One person must make anyone else smile, who then becomes "it".
Yehuda
Resources:
http://www.victoriaspast.com/ParlorGames/parlor_games.htm
http://www.oldfashionedliving.com/parlour-games.html
http://www.funjoint.com/parlour.htm
http://members.aol.com/StoryRoot/inquire_within_ms.html#Ch%203
Sunday, December 18, 2005
WELCOME to ''the machine''
Well, first off, allow ME to heave a hearty "Welcome" to our latest 'blog`r & blog`ette', the 'Team' of ''Melissa Rogerson & Fraser McHarg'' along with ''biggie'' & the 'ubiquitous' ''OTTO''!~'she's everywhere, she's here & there, in fact I think she's in my hair!' Good to have you ALL around and ''OTTO'', YOU can 'get' in MY hair anytime, baby! Just don't be doing any 'macrame' stuff though, the 'knotting' is difficult to comb out. They should provide an overall unique approach as one of the few 'gaming couples' that I can think of, and they're ''bringing UP baby'' to become dedicated 'playahs' as well, so the BEST to them upon this. In case some folks weren't also aware of this lil 'factoid', then they're from ''OZ'' to boot! That's the ''place of the folks down under'', you 'unter-podian'! And yes, I 'hear' that Miss 'Melissa' has a lilting voice as she belts out her rendition of ''the people under the stares of those over the Rainbow'', so yeah it's quite GOOD! While poor ole 'Fraser' is known to stumble through while his memory fails upon some lines to ''IF I only had a 'Zombie' to obtain a 'Brain' with!'' They cap this 'off' with ''biggie'' singing about ''How MUCH more is that ''OTTO'' going to 'deposit' in the droopy drawers?'' GREAT 'entertaining' group of people to be around, or so I've 'heard'! Well, that IS what I've been told! So, give them your attentions for whatever you may here, and look forward to their amblings & ramblings & gamblings upon 'gaming' matters.Just a quick ''shout out'' here to ''Scott Nicholson'' and his recent debut of some games upon his local 'Public Broadcast Channel', looking GOOD there 'mon'! I've just viewed this, as it was 'posted' upon the ''GEEK'' site so check him out there! This is his 2nd time on that particular program and let's hope that HE becomes a 'regular' guest of theirs, to promote ''better gaming through osmosis'' or whatever it takes. Keep up the excellent ''JORB!''
Another ''shout out'' to our very OWN ''DW Tripp'' for being the ''Geek of the Week to Speak or Tweak yer Freak amongst Meek who Seek some Peek at his Physique!'' Goats NOT withstanding, as he will have you know, since they're ''E-vile'' critters! Yet, they's quite tasty as he is quick to point out. I hope to take him UP on his 'offer' about those sometime when this can become 'arranged', and most likely upon his NEW 'place' of ''Mesquite 'O' Goat Ranch''. 'Teriyaki' is pretty decent too, ya kno?
There is also the debut of the ''Forward Observer'' for the 'grognards' amongst you, upon the ''BGG'' site with several choices of articles concerning several gaming aspects. Those may, or might not have ALL of the 'group' participating upon their 'topic', as some of us are not too 'hip' upon certain subject matters. This happens to cover several approaches at introducing anyone who is vaguely interested upon learning MORE about ''Wargames'' in particular. I've managed to contribute something substantial upon the 'A-H' 1964 "Midway" game regarding the ''Coral Sea'' Variant for that, with an entire SHEET of 'upgraded' aircraft 'silhouettes' graphics for that. They actually NOW appear as they should have been in the first place, instead of the generic looking kinds that were 'done' with this. I eagerly anticipate even expanding upon that with other 'works', while some will even become an 'O'riginal of sorts, as I take on some 'pet projects' that provide an even simpler manner to get 'grognardsterlings' going with these.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Winning, Losing and the Killer instinct
First of all, thanks to Coldfoot and the team for the invitation to join them here. Fraser and I will share this spot, blogging opposite Joe Gola on alternate Saturdays. We'll most likely be writing about the joys of gaming with young children (our daughters are 7 and 2), as well as the pleasures (or not) of gaming with a spouse.
There’s something special about beating your spouse in a game. The thrill of grinding them into the dirt - watching them wriggle and squirm, then lose by a good margin anyway - can fill us with almost unsurpassable joy.
I’m definitely no exception. And when I win, I make sure I rub it in.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband, and I think I’m usually a good loser and a good winner. It’s just that he’s better at games than I am.
Games at our place fall into three categories: the games I win, the games he wins, and the games that can go either way. By far the largest of these categories is the second one.
Now there are games that I just can’t bring myself to care about losing, at least publicly. I lost our first 13 games of Snakes and Ladders to Biggie and Fraser. Then I won one and promptly lost the next ten or so. We don't play that game anymore.
There are other games that can go either way when we play. Lost Cities, Balloon Cup, Schotten Totten – even Attika – have a pretty even win/loss record. We enjoy these games, but they're rarely the first game off the shelf when we sit down to play.
And there are some games – some wonderful, wonderful games – at which I just beat him.
It’s important to say upfront that I claim no particular greatness at these games. I lose most of my online Tigris and Euphrates games – but of all the games we have played together, Fraser has won two at most. While Fraser is still trying to remember the French phrase for “where is the palace”, I am gaining influence and completing key missions in Louis XIV. And let’s just say that my Trias dinosaurs have a much better understanding of continental drift than Fraser’s.
There’s a pattern to our wins and losses, which holds true most of the times we sit down to a new game.
The first time we play, it may go either way. Often, we agree to treat it as a learning game and call the result before we’ve finished the entire game. If we play it out, the result is usually very close, unless someone made a heinous error.
The second and third games, more often than not, go to me. Not always, but enough for there to be a noticeable trend. You’d think I would have learned not to get cocky about this by now, wouldn’t you, but I will still excitedly issue the challenge: Come on, try to beat me and my obvious aptitude for this new game, Mr I-have-lost-them-all-so-far.
Then he does.
Again and again and again. Until I am completely mortified and Reepicheep-like in my defiant – and baseless – challenges. It’s hard to accuse someone of being afraid of your superior game-play and strategy when they have won the last seven games you played, but I’ll try.
It took nine almost back-to-back games of Puerto Rico before I could beat him with any regularity. Now we’re broken for Puerto Rico with other people, because we’re both wired to beat up on each other to the exclusion of all else. It’s a friendly kind of rivalry, but it can’t be fun for anyone else, especially people who aren’t so familiar with the game.
Oddly, I almost invariably do better against computer opponents than he does.
So what’s going on? Is this just a (gleefully accepted) chance to publicly mock my husband’s losing streaks? That would be an acceptable reason in itself, it's true, but there are some underlying reasons why these patterns hold true so consistently.
There are fundamental differences in the ways we approach games. To Fraser, they’re puzzles waiting to be solved. Those first few games, he’s experimenting with strategies, trying out new techniques, wondering whether it will be better if he does it this way or that, and generally enjoying himself. I’m following the script that led to victory in the first game, either for me or for someone else, experimenting a little but never veering far off that basic strategy. Once he finds a better way to play or win, it will take me a game or two to replicate or block his strategy – and by then he’s found a way to stymie that as well. I do my thinking and planning before the game starts and, if I’m lucky, at one or two key moments during the game; he does it more consistently as the game progresses. The first time he beat me at Tigris and Euphrates, he threw me by attacking me and causing conflicts from his very first move. I'm wise to that now; he'll have to come up with something new if he wants to throw me like that again.
Once that winning pattern kicks in, though, so does my bloody-mindedness. I will demand to play the game over and over, just watching for the weak point that I can manipulate to my advantage. Given the choice, I’ll almost always pick a game where Fraser wipes the floor with me over another game, desperate to claw back a little self-respect. Gaming is never so serious - or so tense and bloodthirsty - as when I'm fighting to regain my dignity.
At the heart of it all, the truth is that I enjoy the social aspects of gaming as much as I do the mechanics. I'll always play to win, but when we play with a group I’m satisfied with a good showing, happy to not be absolutely dead last, glad to have indulged my love of a good game.
When I beat my husband, though, I reserve the right to behave badly.
Gaming with the girls
Not much gaming was done this week, as we prepared for our Christmas holidays. We’re driving interstate to stay with (non-gaming) family, so decisions about which games to pack will be difficult as space is tight.
Last week at game night, with only 3 players, we played Gargon and Elfenland. Gargon is a very nice card game by Rüdiger Dorn and we played three quickish hands of it – it’s fairly light and not a lenthy game, which makes it a good start or finish to a game night. It's nicely designed, too, which is always a plus. I’ll look out for a copy.
It was my first game of Elfenland, and I liked it a lot, although it felt a little thin with only three players. This is a game that Biggie (aged 7) has been begging to play, so it might make another showing this weekend. She’s played Ticket to Ride, so she’s already familiar with the face up/face down selection method – it’s exciting for her when she realises that she already knows game mechanics.
We tried Zendo with Biggie one night this week, now that my much-awaited copy has arrived. She’s played something similar at school, which they call “Are you in my club?” so she was familiar with the basic idea. Fiddling with the Icehouse pyramids was an added bonus, and I found her playing it solo this morning (although I'm not entirely sure how you play Zendo solo). My prediction was that I would like it, Biggie would love it and Fraser would probably hate it. That was pretty accurate, although Fraser was lukewarm rather than anti. I did find that I broke most of my “gaming with kids” rules to skew my guesses to be just a little bit wrong, and to lead her towards the correct solution. In the next few weeks, I’d like to get out some more logic and deduction games, so that we can lead up to Clue(do) early next year.
I also tried a variant of Koffer Packen (Pack your Suitcase) with Otto (aged 2). This is a lovely memory-style game where the cards are laid out face up, then turned over. Children then have to remember where the cards are and name them before turning them up. We played a home-grown variant where we chose some cards, then looked at one and turned it face down. “Look at the truck. Now let’s turn it over. What’s on this card? A truck! Well done! And this one? A comb! Oh you are good at remembering things" – I found she could easily remember 6 or 7 cards when they showed things that were directly relevant to her experience – a truck, a ball, a bucket and spade.
May your meeples be good meeples.
Melissa
There’s something special about beating your spouse in a game. The thrill of grinding them into the dirt - watching them wriggle and squirm, then lose by a good margin anyway - can fill us with almost unsurpassable joy.
I’m definitely no exception. And when I win, I make sure I rub it in.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband, and I think I’m usually a good loser and a good winner. It’s just that he’s better at games than I am.
Games at our place fall into three categories: the games I win, the games he wins, and the games that can go either way. By far the largest of these categories is the second one.
Now there are games that I just can’t bring myself to care about losing, at least publicly. I lost our first 13 games of Snakes and Ladders to Biggie and Fraser. Then I won one and promptly lost the next ten or so. We don't play that game anymore.
There are other games that can go either way when we play. Lost Cities, Balloon Cup, Schotten Totten – even Attika – have a pretty even win/loss record. We enjoy these games, but they're rarely the first game off the shelf when we sit down to play.
And there are some games – some wonderful, wonderful games – at which I just beat him.
It’s important to say upfront that I claim no particular greatness at these games. I lose most of my online Tigris and Euphrates games – but of all the games we have played together, Fraser has won two at most. While Fraser is still trying to remember the French phrase for “where is the palace”, I am gaining influence and completing key missions in Louis XIV. And let’s just say that my Trias dinosaurs have a much better understanding of continental drift than Fraser’s.
There’s a pattern to our wins and losses, which holds true most of the times we sit down to a new game.
The first time we play, it may go either way. Often, we agree to treat it as a learning game and call the result before we’ve finished the entire game. If we play it out, the result is usually very close, unless someone made a heinous error.
The second and third games, more often than not, go to me. Not always, but enough for there to be a noticeable trend. You’d think I would have learned not to get cocky about this by now, wouldn’t you, but I will still excitedly issue the challenge: Come on, try to beat me and my obvious aptitude for this new game, Mr I-have-lost-them-all-so-far.
Then he does.
Again and again and again. Until I am completely mortified and Reepicheep-like in my defiant – and baseless – challenges. It’s hard to accuse someone of being afraid of your superior game-play and strategy when they have won the last seven games you played, but I’ll try.
It took nine almost back-to-back games of Puerto Rico before I could beat him with any regularity. Now we’re broken for Puerto Rico with other people, because we’re both wired to beat up on each other to the exclusion of all else. It’s a friendly kind of rivalry, but it can’t be fun for anyone else, especially people who aren’t so familiar with the game.
Oddly, I almost invariably do better against computer opponents than he does.
So what’s going on? Is this just a (gleefully accepted) chance to publicly mock my husband’s losing streaks? That would be an acceptable reason in itself, it's true, but there are some underlying reasons why these patterns hold true so consistently.
There are fundamental differences in the ways we approach games. To Fraser, they’re puzzles waiting to be solved. Those first few games, he’s experimenting with strategies, trying out new techniques, wondering whether it will be better if he does it this way or that, and generally enjoying himself. I’m following the script that led to victory in the first game, either for me or for someone else, experimenting a little but never veering far off that basic strategy. Once he finds a better way to play or win, it will take me a game or two to replicate or block his strategy – and by then he’s found a way to stymie that as well. I do my thinking and planning before the game starts and, if I’m lucky, at one or two key moments during the game; he does it more consistently as the game progresses. The first time he beat me at Tigris and Euphrates, he threw me by attacking me and causing conflicts from his very first move. I'm wise to that now; he'll have to come up with something new if he wants to throw me like that again.
Once that winning pattern kicks in, though, so does my bloody-mindedness. I will demand to play the game over and over, just watching for the weak point that I can manipulate to my advantage. Given the choice, I’ll almost always pick a game where Fraser wipes the floor with me over another game, desperate to claw back a little self-respect. Gaming is never so serious - or so tense and bloodthirsty - as when I'm fighting to regain my dignity.
At the heart of it all, the truth is that I enjoy the social aspects of gaming as much as I do the mechanics. I'll always play to win, but when we play with a group I’m satisfied with a good showing, happy to not be absolutely dead last, glad to have indulged my love of a good game.
When I beat my husband, though, I reserve the right to behave badly.
Gaming with the girls
Not much gaming was done this week, as we prepared for our Christmas holidays. We’re driving interstate to stay with (non-gaming) family, so decisions about which games to pack will be difficult as space is tight.
Last week at game night, with only 3 players, we played Gargon and Elfenland. Gargon is a very nice card game by Rüdiger Dorn and we played three quickish hands of it – it’s fairly light and not a lenthy game, which makes it a good start or finish to a game night. It's nicely designed, too, which is always a plus. I’ll look out for a copy.
It was my first game of Elfenland, and I liked it a lot, although it felt a little thin with only three players. This is a game that Biggie (aged 7) has been begging to play, so it might make another showing this weekend. She’s played Ticket to Ride, so she’s already familiar with the face up/face down selection method – it’s exciting for her when she realises that she already knows game mechanics.
We tried Zendo with Biggie one night this week, now that my much-awaited copy has arrived. She’s played something similar at school, which they call “Are you in my club?” so she was familiar with the basic idea. Fiddling with the Icehouse pyramids was an added bonus, and I found her playing it solo this morning (although I'm not entirely sure how you play Zendo solo). My prediction was that I would like it, Biggie would love it and Fraser would probably hate it. That was pretty accurate, although Fraser was lukewarm rather than anti. I did find that I broke most of my “gaming with kids” rules to skew my guesses to be just a little bit wrong, and to lead her towards the correct solution. In the next few weeks, I’d like to get out some more logic and deduction games, so that we can lead up to Clue(do) early next year.
I also tried a variant of Koffer Packen (Pack your Suitcase) with Otto (aged 2). This is a lovely memory-style game where the cards are laid out face up, then turned over. Children then have to remember where the cards are and name them before turning them up. We played a home-grown variant where we chose some cards, then looked at one and turned it face down. “Look at the truck. Now let’s turn it over. What’s on this card? A truck! Well done! And this one? A comb! Oh you are good at remembering things" – I found she could easily remember 6 or 7 cards when they showed things that were directly relevant to her experience – a truck, a ball, a bucket and spade.
May your meeples be good meeples.
Melissa
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