GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Advice For The Troubled Gamer

Many years ago I used to publish a local newsletter. Eventually gamers far and wide began writing in and asking my sage advice on everything from gaming issues to gamer issues, to romance and even for help fixing their cars. I finally began running an advice column in the newsletter in hopes that I could reach out and help other gamers in need. Particularly those who weren't confident enough or too embarrassed by their issues to write me.

Periodically I'll run some of the best of the more recent cries for help I receive on a constant basis. Perhaps you'll find yourself in here somewhere... and if so, maybe my unerring insight and common sense will make your life as a gamer even better.

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Dear DW,

I’ve been having quite a bit of trouble lately with my dice. No matter what game I play I pretty much suck at dice rolling. I have kept my local store in business by purchasing new dice every time I game, and I game every night. Nothing seems to help.

So tell me DW… do I have negative waves? Am I cursed? Is the game store selling me factory seconds? Perhaps all my gaming buddies cheat. This is really making me feel worthless and I am close to just giving up games altogether.

Help me out here DW. What’s wrong and how can I change things and stick with the hobby I love so much?

Martin Feeblemeister
Clinch, Utah

Marty,

I wish I could help you out here but it seems obvious to me what your problem is. Frankly, Marty… you suck at games. My calculations lead me to believe you own nearly 7,000 sets of dice and only 3 different games. I’ll help you out this way my friend; I’ll buy all your dice for $150, just to ease your pain a bit. And I suggest you donate your copies of all three games; Risk, Monopoly: The Vatican Edition and your D&D books to the local thrift store. I’ll call your local retailer and congratu--- errr… commiserate with him to help him through the sadness of losing such a great customer. Good luck!

DW


Dear DW… you overwhelmingly sexy stud muffin…. Grrrooooowlll…purrrrrrr…

I was in your store the other day and when I saw your personal game collection behind the counter I just felt all gooshy and quivery inside. How did such a exceesively macho man like you get this far without being snagged up by hordes of game-loving females?

I’m tellin’ ya here and now lover boy, you’re the man for me. Anyone who not only plays all those fabulicious board games, but also owns them is my own personal male love machine and I’m going to grab you right up… along with your precious collection and take you to my double-wide where you’ll live like a king.

See ya tonight baby-bumpkins!

Lotta Rhumpus
Athol, Idaho


Hello again Lotta!

Sorry to say… but I had to hock my collection after your last visit to the store. You certainly haven’t lost any weight over the last 12 years have you? I should have known when you had to get all six of your kids to push you through the door that there would be trouble. And I certainly should have realized that the 12 packs of Ding-Dongs, the three 64 ounce Mountain Dews and the Family-sized bag of Cheetos would have made it near impossible for you to use the door to leave without damaging the building.

The cost of a new door frame, the rebar and concrete work and a new door was a lot higher than when you last visited my store in Boise. Not to mention the case of Valvoline and silicone lubricant I had to buy to get you unstuck… that stuff is pricey!

But thanks for the visit Lotta, and I have to say the shock collars you invested in really do help in keeping your kids under control. I also think you made a wise choice in getting rid of your old van and replacing it with that 2-ton delivery truck. I’m guessing you have saved enough on not having to replace your suspension every 1500 miles to maybe even buy something the next time you visit a game store.

I’ve emailed you the address of my two competitors in Boise, they’re really handsome guys and they have even more games than I used to have.

DW



Yo DW!

I don’t need any of your lousy advice man. I’m just letting you know I buy all my game stuff online and at distant stores where the discounts are deep and excessive. You have always been over-priced and you’re a mean and evil person. I have limited funds man and I’ve asked you before to sell me my game crap at 40% off and you’ve ignored me every time. Well, I just want you to know that I think you’re a real dickwad and I’m glad you’re changing careers.

I’m pretty sure it’s also your fault that I can’t seem to find a D&D group, you probably have talked bad about me to all the other players. So because of what you’ve done to me I think you ought to let me put up a notice on your bulletin board and let me use your store for a D&D campaign. That’d go along way towards paying me back for all the emotional damage you’ve done to me over the years.

Treat me right man and I might let you sell me something, maybe even save your store for you. LMK

Richard Hedd
Nyssa, Oregon


Gee Dick,

I’m really sorry you feel that way. Now that I think about it I realize I don’t deserve your business. I’ve emailed you the address of my two competitors in Boise as I’m sure they will appreciate you for what you are. I have also emailed you the address of a very charming young lady named Lotta. She has a ready-made game group of six and I’m certain she’ll treat you like a King. Have fun!

DW


Dear DW,

Since I totally admire you and trust your gaming judgement I need some help. Here’s my problem; no matter how hard I try I just can’t get any enjoyment from most of the top games on BGG. Ra, YINSH, Attika, GIPF, Blokkus, Goa, E&T, Puerto Rico… them and a dozen more I have bought all leave me feeling empty and sterile. What am I missing? These are the games that supposedly have made board gaming enter a Golden Era. Is it me?

Emery Wietenstiengenzen
Upper Padduca River, NY



Hey Emery,

Nothing wrong with you at all Bud. Those games pretty much suck, each and every one. The main reason BGG hasn’t required members to post an image of themselves is that after years of playing Euro games a person literally has all of their life siphoned out of them from a total lack of fun. Their juices run dry, their skin draws tight around their jaws and teeth in a frightful parody of Mister Sardonicus, Their hair falls out in patches and they murmer in low, eerie monotones about how much better it is to play a game where luck isn’t a real factor. If BGG allowed personal images of Euro Gamers it would create a panic sell-off in the over-produced, dry, boring and lifeless game segment. Dozens of Middle Eastern immigrant German factory workers and scores of Chinese peons would be jobless as the Euro Game industry came tumbling down. Not a pretty picture at all Emery.

The problem you’re having isn’t with you my friend, it’s with them. Most Euro games are actually Satanic creations designed by the same three men who, while they claim they’re German, are actually part of a planetary conspiracy to convince the energetic, playful, dice-chucking, laughing, pizza-munching, Coors-swilling fun people on this planet that they’re not really playing a game if it isn’t boring, with drab art, zero theme and made with excessive amounts of unnecessary cardboard and wood pieces. Once we are convinced that Euro-Snoot garbage is fun, we'll be their puppets.

Run, don’t walk, to your local game store and grab up a copy of Monsters Menace America or Monopoly: The Vatican Edition, or Cranium or Apples to Apples or perhaps Axis & Allies… anything that involves dice, laughing, swilling and fun.

Play two fun games and email me in the morning.

DW

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That abut does it for this week. I hope some of this helped you out. It did get me to thinking... since I'm changing careers anyway, maybe I ought to look into the field of helping out others in need. It suits me I think.

What the Fudgesickle? Game Considerations

Oh yeah, there's been a spate of some 'topics' on this, and you can't fault these folks for desiring their subjects if THEY feel that this is warranted. In fact, the GEEK's own "Maverick"-Joe Scoleri, has gotten into the mix with his 'design' of a game concerning a 'pony-polo' one, which is based upon something that the "Mongolian Horsemen" are wont to play. This also involves the "ball" consisting of some poor animal's carcass or maybe it's just the head, but whatever that is, then it must be quite the 'sight'! Now, there even was someone just during this past week on the "Geek", who proposed a "Hip-Hop Lyricizin'!" sort of 'game', and that's been getting some discussion going with mostly a 'bad rap' for this-pun accorded. I had made mention to a fellow ''Geek'' in the CHAT there-hello ''Xlyce'', that maybe HE ought to see about producing a GAME based upon the ''Canadian Football League'' and utilizing a 'system' that I was particularly fond of. It isn't a very complicated sort of 'game' that I had in mind, since I was keen on this certain type and I hope that he'll seriously consider this. But if you really want to check out some ''odd ducks'' that are oozing from people's minds, then check out the ''Boardgame Designer's Guild'' website, you won't be disappointed!

I'll reiterate this here for those that might not give a listen to a truly decent show called ''the Dice Tower'' put on by Joe Steadman & Tom Vasel, but they have a really nice game offering for their ongoing 'Contest'. This will consist of a complete copy of "Memoir 44" PLUS the most recent expansions for that! Not too shabby eh? You'll have to give them some decent 'props' for this as that's a lotta gaming then, for those that are so inclined. I won't detail just what YOU'd have to 'do' for this, since it'd defeat the purpose of listening to them and it is in their #22 episode that you'll find out more upon the matter. ALSO, check out what Joe Steadman has up for trade considerations and he's got those listed upon the ''GEEK'' itself, as well as his 'own' BLOG for that. Despite what you might believe, then ole JOE does have quite a few NON-'Wargames' as well, so if you get the chance then swing on by one or the other 'place' and check 'em out 'dawg'! There's even going to be some 'horse trading' ('dogs' unloading?) going on during the upcoming ''BGG Con'' next weekend, so I'm sure that there'll be plenty of LISTs detailing that aspect in the following weeks! Oh yeah, even the ''ShillKing'' himself will be making an 'appearance' there and with plenty of copies of his games. Now, while I do sincerely wish HIM the very best on that, although there are plenty of others who would 'do' otherwise. I don't know if that somewhat 'celebrated' game between HIM and ''Derk'' ever took place at ESSEN just recently, so maybe we'll find out more upon this eh? I'm sorry NOT to be able to attend this year's ''GEEK Con'', but I just can't.

Something that I do intend on attending and is the FIRST for itself as well, is an upcoming ''ConQuestNW Seattle'' and this is going to take place next February! It'll be during the ''President's Day Weekend'' of which is Februrary 17th~20th '06, and is going to be at the Marriott Sea-Tac Airport Hotel. There's also a ''So-Cal'' version that is to take place in Sacremento and that'll even combine a ''Sci Fi'' feel for it too. This will be going on from April 6th~9th '06, to be held at the Red Lion Hotel, and if anyone is interested in being a part of either of them, then please do. Whilst 'reccon'ing these just now, then I also find that there's to be a ''ConQuestLA'' and that'll be making its debut on January 13th~16th '06, at the L.A. International Airport Hilton, and it almost sounds like the 'place' that the ''Gateway'' Con is usually conducted within. If anybody knows if this is the case, then please inform others upon the fact for their ease of locating the events. This just occurred to myself from what I'd already written here, but they just 'need' a MARCH 'Con', and they'd have a great candidate for that with the folks down in Portland, Oregon! So, maybe they ought to contact some of them there and get on the ball for this, as I'm sure that some sort of accomodation could be reached. I have attended some of the gaming conventions in the Metro Portland area from time to time, and they are a GREAT bunch of folks for this, so let's see this become a ''Surreality'' then guys & dolls!

Crusader Rex

Got to play my second game of Crusader Rex a couple of weeks ago, this time with John Haba of gamezendo.com. John had had more experience with CR than I, so we agreed that I would take the Saracens (who I had also played in my first game with Marty McMartin). I'll also mention here that I haven't read any online strategy discussion (except the designer's suggestion that defending players run away rather than hole up in fortresses) and so will use that as my excuse if I ramble on about stuff that has already been hashed out somewhere else.

A good chunk of my six initial draws from the pool were Kurds to be deployed in Damascus; this made me happy since I had done fairly well for myself pushing up the middle in my first game and I saw no reason to head in a different direction in this one. My first goal was to take Tyre in order to cut John's forces into two halves; this would make it easier to eventually move on Tripoli, as it would be tough for John to counterattack from the South since the roads that lead to Tyre and Banyas from that direction are narrow and will only accommodate two attacking units. Certainly he could utilize sea moves to get around me (which he later did), but this is a relatively slow process.

On the first turn, 1187, I feinted northward from Egypt, got John to contract his forces in the South, and then moved West from Damascus to take Beaufort. I believe I even made it to Sidon on the coast that turn, but that may have taken place in the following year. I also grabbed Krak des Chevaliers, which almost seems like a foregone conclusion.

My hand of cards was relatively weak in 1188, so rather than following through and pushing into Tyre I ended up just shuffling units around in the rear so as not to lose any newly drawn Aleppo units to winter attrition; at the time I was unhappy with my lack of progress, but in retrospect this was a good thing to do; I would soon need the Aleppo Turks to help cover the ground I had taken in the middle of the board. I did do one useful thing, however, which was to take Tartus, just north of Tripoli; certainly I couldn't defend the position against a concerted attack, but it did cut off free movement between the center and the North. The Frank units between Sidon and Tartus were being held gently in place, like an ugly orange beetle with its legs pinned between two delicate fingers....

One of the interesting things about CR is that the wintering rules force players to pack their offensive maneuvers into small bursts before everyone has to run for cover. I had stalled too long in the second year, so in 1189 I immediately pushed four of my best units into Tyre. John had two units hunkered down there, and called north two more from Acre. It was a massacre, however; if I remember correctly the original two Frankish blocks were eliminated, and the reinforcements beat a retreat soon after they arrived. My blocks only took two step losses. I took advantage of the confusion to also take Tiberias so as to slow down any attempts to get behind me in Tyre by moving East from Acre towards Banyas or (gulp!) Damascus.

My next move was to bring the rear guard in Damascus forward to occupy Tyre while Saladin and his pals moved north and camped outside of Tripoli, though I don't remember whether that happened at the end of 1189 or the beginning of 1190.

It should be mentioned at this point that I had really good cards that year and John had really crappy ones.

You didn't need to be a swami fortune-teller to know what was going to happen in Tripoli. The two gentle fingers had turned into a pair of pliers, and the hammer was hovering just overhead. I blasted in with eight or nine blocks via three different roads, and when the dust cleared there was nothing left of the Christians in Tripoli except the echo of a Hail Mary and a stain on the ground.

It was 1191 at that point, and the reader might be wondering when the Crusaders are going to come charging in to the rescue. John was wondering the same thing. He finally drew all three Germans at the very end of 1190, but still only had two out of three of the French and the English. In fact, here's how dismal things were for John: at one point he was down to two blocks in his draw pool, and they were the missing Frenchman and Brit. Ay caramba!

Anyway, Barbarossa and his comrades started drifting into Antioch, and so John started to show a little backbone in the North. To be fair, he had pushed back a little before this point as well, but the counteroffensive never gained any momentum. Anyway, a nasty force elbowed its way into Artah, and another slipped through the front lines southeast and then west into the region around Krak des Chevaliers and Montferrand, so I had to spend a little time and energy shooing the holy rollers back into place.

We were now poised at 1192. The Germans were in the North, more Crusaders were on the boat, and a frightened, ominous hush descended on Tripoli.

And I had to go home.

It was very disappointing, but we just couldn't finish. The game up to that point had ended up taking three and a half or four hours, and my family was waiting for me to get home so we could all have dinner. Why can't these stupid wargames ever end on time?

Regardless, I think the outcome was pretty clear. My ace strike force of Saladin and his cronies were hanging out in Damascus playing cards, so all they had to do was to spend one movement point to bolt to Tripoli and I'm sure I could have held it for the year. John had taken back Tartus by this point, but if I remember correctly I still held Krak des Chevaliers, so there wouldn't be any easy two-pronged attacks on his part; basically, I had enough Arabs loitering around the North to react to any sudden moves he made. An end run at Damascus from the area around Jerusalem might have been an option, but it would have taken a great hand of cards on his part and a really lousy one on my part to pull off, I think.

So ultimately I would say yes, this is a tough game for the Christians to win.

Does the Frankish player have any chance at all? Maybe, I guess. The only thing I could suggest from my perspective is that the Frank needs to prod and pester the Saracens constantly in order to slow down their advance; he doesn't need to do any real damage, he just needs to be a nuisance. Because the winters demand that offenses be fast and coordinated (they have to get wrapped up before football season, you understand), the Arabs cannot be allowed to have any zen moments of clarity, or they will gather up all their actions and use them in a concerted way to do Mean Things to the Christians. John did use this tactic to some extent in our game, but not as much as he could have. Anyway, after meeting Saladin in a few dark alleys, I would guess it's easy for the Frankish player to get spooked into thinking that all the Saracen forces are bad-asses, but that's not quite true. Had John pushed back against the crust more methodically, he might have found one or two mushy spots. Such an approach can make a difference I think; after all, even though I was kicking ass and taking names, note that it took me until late 1190 or early 1191 to actually get my fourth city; had he distracted me a little more, and had the crusaders made a more timely entrance, things might have been a lot different.

Overall I enjoyed myself and I think Crusader Rex is a fun and exciting game, or at least it is for the Saracens. The demands of wintering mean that things don't settle down into a static front line; offenses tend to wax and wane, and there is enough room on the map for jabs and darts and general mobility. Also, I like that the game manages everything with a relatively small rule set; while I enjoy a challenge, I don't have any passion for military history, and I prefer it when the complexity is in the game, not in the rules. Nothing is as aggravating as playing a wargame for four hours and suddenly realizing that some peripheral but influential exception or bit of upkeep was neglected three turns ago, thus leading to an erroneous chain of events that can't be untangled.

Musings, Ramblings and More Ramblings.

The past few months have been slow game months 'round these parts. A fellow I work with got activated with his Army Reserve unit, so I fell on my sword and agreed to cover his shift until they can find a full time replacement, so far no one has even applied. Prior to that I was working 3 jobs. Two of those jobs allowed me a very flexible schedule and I could usually play a game on a moment's notice.

Given my druthers, I'd rather be driving a cab as my primary job. Cab drivers just have better stories. Admittedly, I get pretty good stories from working as a nurse, but as a nurse I'll never slam on the brakes at 80 miles an hour, sending a drunk into the dashboard just so I can get his attention.

"If you would just shut your pie-hole I wouldn't have had to do that. Now, shut your trap and put out the cigarette."

"My nose is bleeding."

"I said, shut your pie-hole."

"You bastard."

The thing is, if he hadn't called me a faggot and complained about the service non-stop since he got into the cab, I would have let him smoke. If he wouldn't have called me a bastard after hitting the dashboard the first time I wouldn't have had to do it a second time. I still see the guy from time to time and he acts like my best friend, go figure.

Some of the best nursing stories are rendered moot because I have to keep a certain level of confidentiality. For example, I've seen a jackass making a scene in the store and have had to bite my tongue. The story about the time I gave him a suppository would be hilarious at that particular moment, but not so funny if I were to tell it later without the context of him throwing a fit in the Electronics Department.

Sometimes the two jobs collide. I can't very well say, "Hey buddy, that gal you're going home with sure is cute, but do the initials "chronic-yeast-infection" mean anything to you?" I at least get to tell those stories to other nurses, so they don't entirely go to waste.

It is odd that both professions frequently have funny stories that revolve around puke, but until a nurse can say, "What, you're out of money? Don't worry about it. We'll just call it even. Oh no, it's not a problem at all. I'll just keep the six cases of beer you put in the trunk and we'll be square," the cab stories will always be better, and will almost never involve suppositories.

But that's not what I'm writing about today. I'm writing about a topic I have almost no experience with; game conventions.

This general lack of gaming I mentioned in the first paragraph got me thinking about BGG.con and how I now wish I could attend. I priced airline tickets the other day, and it was significantly cheaper to fly from Alaska to Dallas than from Alaska to Seattle. Who'd a thunk? Now I'm kicking myself for not going.

Dame Coldfoot and myself have only been to one convention. BRIMFROST. It is the only game convention in the state. It is a smallish affair hosted by the Anchorage Miniature Game Club. Not surprisingly it's tilted heavily toward miniature games. There was an Advanced Squad Leader tournament, and a Circus Maximus game that featured a huge, home-made board that drew a multitude of players and observers (self included). The wife and I were able to play several board games, none of which were planned, but all of which were fun. We had a lot of fun. Both of us are looking forward to more game conventions, but if we want to go to the big ones we will have to pick one each year and plan well in advance.

I think the missus and myself will be attending BGG.con next year, assuming there is one. I would have liked to attend this year, but we had already planned to spend 3 weeks with our families over Christmas. One trip in November and another in December would have just been too expensive, and would have taken too much vacation time. Dame Coldfoot would have to get a part-time job to finance both trips, and possibly two.

Oddly enough, Dame Coldfoot is lobbying for the Essen trip. So far I have managed to keep her away from Chris Brooks' website. He's posted a number of nice pictures of castles and scenery from his Essen trip. If she were to look at those I would be doomed to make the trip. I would rather be locked in room with Potterama and nothing but Knizia games to play, than spend 20+ hours on planes and in airports, both ways. No thank you. The thing that kills me most about the Essen trip is that there is a non-stop flight from Fairbanks to Frankfurt in the summer months. Takes less than 8 hours to make the trip by flying over the Pole. If it was a year-round flight I would never miss the Essen Game Fair, it would take significantly less time to fly to Germany than to GenCon, or to BGG.con.

For the time being we will have to content ourselves with BRIMFROST in March. Dame Coldfoot is enthused, possibly more so than I am. She has been watching the price of airfares to Anchorage for a couple months. Word on the street is that Advanced Civilization and TI3 games are planned. The convention will feature more organized boardgaming than in previous years. I have volunteered to run any boardgame they might need help with. We'll see.

Have fun at BGG.con. Keep the rest of us unfortunate, home-bound folks posted, and maybe we will see you next year.

Good gaming,
Coldfoot

Games to Watch For: Essen '05

October is inevitably a good month for German games, thanks to to the hundreds(?) of new releases at Essen. Word slowly trickles over to the States about the best, and in the weeks and months that follow the games trickle over as well.

What follows is my listing of what I think are the games coming out of Essen with the most potential. It inevitably ended up being a list of gamers' games, not card games or fillers, no matter how deserving they might be. Some are actually reprints, or games otherwise being made widely available to America for the first time, but the main point is this: for most people they'll be new.

I've offered up my best representation of each game, but I actually haven't seen any of them yet (except Elasund), so I can't guarantee accuracy, especially not for the "Like:" area. Feel free to add your own thoughts or comments below.

Games marked with a star(*) made my first-cut list, and I think are likely to be the biggest movers in the year to come

Caylus*

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/18602
Authors: William Attia
Synopsis: resource management & castle building
Background: France, 1289
Like: Keythedral, Puerto Rico
U.S. Publisher: Rio Grande Games

This is by the company who released Ys last year (though the designer is a newcomer). It's getting some recognition as one of the gamer's games of the fair. The big idea of the game seems to be that you can build buildings which do special things and which others players can use too, for a fee. Each turn you place your pieces on the buildings & then get to do stuff. The placement is rather like Keythedral, it appears, which leaves me with some concern because I thought that that particular game system was so chaotic as to be astrategic.

Elasund: The First City of Catan

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19526
Authors: Klaus Teuber
Synopsis: city building & conflict
Background: Catan
Like: Candamir, New England, Settlers of Catan
U.S. Publisher: Mayfair Games

Some people may well consider Settlers of Catan over and done with. To a certain extent it's from an earlier period of game design that isn't 100% in tune with the modern German games that excite many. However there's also a number of us that are thrilled to see another Catan variant. The big idea here seems to be that instead of trading between players the main interaction comes through a higher degree of interference during the building process (which is where it reminds me more of Domaine than Settlers).

(Since I first drafted this article, I've played Elasund. Though it uses some of the core mechanics of Settlers, including a die roll that produces resources that are in turn used to build things, it's very different from the core game. There's a lot of strategy & tactics here, and it's a surprisingly thoughtful game. One of the players called it "New England done right", and though I like New England, I think the comparison of this as a somewhat kindred game is apt.)

Hazienda

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19100
Authors: Wolfgang Kramer
Synopsis: economics, connections, card management
Background: Argentina, the 1940s
Like: ?
U.S. Publisher: Rio Grande Games

This game hasn't really gotten much attention, but as one BGGer said: Kramer + HiG. That's a potent combination. I haven't really been able to tell if this is one of his tactical heavy games or not. There's clearly some connectivity gameplay and some economics which are a bit more unusual in a Kramer design. I'm waiting to learn more, but this is clearly a game to watch for.

Il Principe

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19650
Authors: Emanuele Ornella
Synopsis: auction, resource management & city building
Background: Italy, The Renaissance
Like: Oltremare, Settlers of Catan with auctions
U.S. Publisher: Z-Man Games

Last year's Oltremare was a great reimagining of Bohnanza: a new and unique game that still scratched the same itch. Its author this year released Il Principe, which looks like a resource-management city building game (ala Settlers) but with some auctions and other complexities. This one hasn't generated as much excitement as some of the others on my list, but I have faith in the author based upon Oltremare.

Mesopotamia*

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19301
Authors: Klaus-Jurgen Wrede
Synopsis: civilization building & resource management
Background: Mesopotamia, the Ancient World
Like: Settlers of Catan
U.S. Publisher: Mayfair Games

I've been saying for a bit that I think that Phalanx Games have been on an upward trend. Maharaja and Alexander the Great were both above-average gamers' games, and this one, by Carcassonne designer Klaus-Jurgen Wrede, just seems to be continuing that trend. I haven't seen enough about it yet to entirely understand it, but I think this one could be a new Settlers of Catan.

Punct

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19764
Authors: Kris Burm
Synopsis: abstract connection
Background: N/A
Like: Twixt
U.S. Publisher: Rio Grande Games

I haven't been a big fan of the GIPF series of games, but I'm pretty sure that the release of the last in the sequence is going to be a big deal for many gamers. This one looks somewhat like classic Twixt to me, except using variably sized pieces. The big idea is apparently that you can not just place pieces, but move them too, something which I think could add a lot of depth to many connection & other railroad games.

Railroad Tycoon

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/17133
Authors: Martin Wallace & Glenn Drover
Synopsis: economic, resource management & connections
Background: The Age of Steam
Like: Age of Steam
U.S. Publisher: Eagle Games

Speaking of Railroad games, here's a true entrant to that genre. Prior to the release of Conquest of the Empire I was really hoping for a slightly simplified version of Struggle of Empires with some additional development work that in the end would be superior to the original. I didn't get that (though CotE is every bit as good as SoE, just in a different way), but hope springs eternal. I'm hoping that Railroad Tycoon will be the slightly more approachable game that I wish Age of Steam was. We'll see. I don't really see a big idea here, as this is the nth iteration of a tried and true railroad system, but that may well be enough in itself.

Reef Encounter

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12962
Authors: Richard Breese
Synopsis: tile laying & set collection
Background: A Coral Reef
Like: Acquire, Tigris & Euphrates
U.S. Publisher: Z-Man Games

One of the most talked about games of '04, Reef Encounter is finally going to be widely available in the U.S. in '05 thanks to Z-Man Games. I'm not convinced that there is a new big idea behind Reef Encounter. Instead it seems to have won converts with some combination of its original theme, its shrimp meeples, its Breesian author, and its serious strategic play. This is one of the heavier German games of Essen '05, and may be the heaviest game on this list.

Siena

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/18932
Authors: Mario Papini
Synopsis:card management & economics
Background: Siena, 1338
Like: ?
U.S. Publisher: Z-Man Games

I feel a bit like a shill, listing so many Z-Man Games, but the honest answer is that they've fairly quickly burst onto the designer game scene, both with their own releases (Parthenon) and with a singularly good taste for German reprints & coproductions. Siena is another of their upcoming games which is getting a lot of recognition. I don't really have much understanding of how it works, other than the fact that it's a card-driven economic game that seems to have enough serious gameplay to keep it interesting. The big idea here simply seems to be beautiful art: the background of the board is a classic mosaic.

Tempus*

URL: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/17161
Authors: Martin Wallace
Synopsis: civilization building & warfare
Background: Generic Hexland
Like: Civilization, Parthenon
U.S. Publisher: Cafe Games

This is a new Martin Wallace game that's been getting attention most of the year. The big idea is "a civilization game that plays in under 2 hours". It appears to have neat technology & warfare rules, pretty much what you'd expect from the genre.

---

Some games that I didn't include in my list because I've already reviewed them but I still think are good games for this Fall Season include: Beowulf: The Legend (FFG), The Hollywood! Card Game (FFG), and Parthenon (Z-Man). The one other game that I left off this list, but almost made it on was Byzantium, the newest Warfrog game, which is as well rated as some of the others that appear here. A third Wallace game on the list just seemed like overkill, however.

What Was Your Name Again?

I’m one of those people who has a very difficult time remembering people’s names no matter how hard I try to imprint it on my memory when I’m introduced. I’ve tried repeating their name immediately as in, “Hello, Betty, nice to meet you”. I’ve tried using word association as in “Betty—Betty Rubble from the Flintstones”. I’ve tried using humor or rhymes such as “Betty Spaghetti”. All to no avail because at the end of the meeting I’m thinking, “Was it Betsy…Beatrice…Bernice…I know there was a ‘B’”.

How is it, then, that I have stored in my memory hundreds of game names ready for almost-instant retrieval? I read or hear a game’s name and I get an instant impression of the board (Tigris & Euphrates) or a unique piece (who can forget the Castillo in El Grande?) or a mechanic (Modern Art), even the number of players (Lost Cities, Puerto Rico). I know instantly if it’s a card game, a dice game, a heavy game, a light/fun game or an abstract. If someone is looking for a game with certain requirements—middle to heavy strategy, plays well with 2 but can handle more—I immediately think of Torres, Hansa, Carolus Magnus, Samurai—but don’t ask me who wanted to know. Many of the games’ names are in a language that I don’t even know and yet I have no trouble remembering them. Why the hell can’t I remember the name of that guy my husband introduced me to the other day?!
~~~~~~~~
Bridges of Shangri-La

The other day an online friend asked me about Bridges of Shangi-La. In my comments I had qualified it as being after just one play, so do I still like it.

I was embarrassed to have to tell him that I hadn’t played it again but I didn’t want him to think it was because it was a bad game. I wandered around the house for the next hour trying to determine why this game doesn’t jump out and demand to be played again. It’s a very good game and I’m glad to have it in my collection but…

The final analysis, with much soul-searching, is this: it’s very much like a mutli-player DVONN.

The wide-open, random board set-up facing you offers dozens of movement options at the beginning of the game so it feels very random and chaotic for the first game or even two. Then you begin to see the subtle strategies you could employ to try to manipulate your position or your opponents’ movement.

The play area shrinks in size as the game progresses so that your options become less and you are faced with the reality that each move now is critical; you may even realize that some of your earlier moves were not a good idea.

You can play this game in a quick, lets-see-what-happens manner, but this is a deep game where careful planning and plotting can make a difference. You can study the board trying to find the perfect move but eventually someone will mention that they have to go to work on Monday.

I think Bridges is a game that has to be played several times in a short span of time to become comfortable with and begin to appreciate its subtle depth. That is why it waits patiently on the shelf for a day when we can explore it thoroughly.

Qualifier: this is after only one play.
~~~~~~~~
Taj Mahal

This week I got to play Taj Mahal for the first time. This was an online version which can be found at http://hilinski.net/games/online/tajmahal/ but it isn’t a play by email game so that makes it a little harder as you have to arrange a meeting time which is convenient for all the players.

You can play alone against AI opponents, which is what I did before the big game. This let me get used to the interface, which isn’t bad considering all that has to be displayed. One screen shows the players’ area: your card hand and what you’ve won, the cards your opponents play, the draw cards and the special cards. Another screen shows the board and another screen shows a summary of what each player has won and their scores. A separate screen has the chat area, which can be annoying but you get used to it.

Two of us were new to the game but there was little need for teaching since we’d done our homework, which is a good thing since flipping between screens/chat would make it very difficult for teaching to a total newbie.

The game flowed along very nicely and took about an hour with 4 players. There was one memorable elephant fight which I was glad I was not a part of, having elected to drop out before drawing a card but it was good fun to watch! I thought I did pretty well for a first play even leading for awhile during mid-game but in the end the scores were 40-42-42-46 with myself in last place.

This is a brilliant game with several ways to score points, different paths to take strategically, hand-management with tough decisions and a sort of bluff/push-your-luck feel, and yet does not bog down with analysis paralysis. I highly recommend it and am in the process of acquiring my very own copy to inflict on my family.
~~~~~~~~
Until next time, remember what Thomas Edison said: I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Mary

Roll Against Your Wisdom To Post Here

In Dallas, Tex, BGG.con
A stately pleasure-con decreed :
Where Derk and Aldie, website ran
With games piled to infinity.

Up in a hotel room.

So twice three thousand miles flown
Through taxis, flights, and missed connections :
Boxes enough to build a home,
Of fragrant types in all distractions ;
And will be meeples lurking on a throne,
Enclosing many fields and walled projections.

But oh ! that deep romantic sense of gamer's guile
Down in the pit of a geeky gamer's breast !
A holy sense, awakened all the while
A game is taken from the great game chest,
As Gawain must have felt ere a child,
Hearing first his fate to lead a quest!
As if the Earth a trembling beneath the feet,
A mighty horde of gamers trampling in
And sounds of armies lost and won therein
Down in the Dallas halls of humid heat
Resounding cries of tactics overthrown
And the heartrending ache of missing tiles
Needed to complete the game in style
But five tiles down after the game is won.
A dice is cast, a fortune is made known
Winners and losers both enjoy as one
The satisfaction of the game well done
And midst it all the ever present hum
Of Aldie's pointy silver microphone!

The gaming vendors offering a pleasure
Given to all those who pay the price
They will weigh out games by measure
Equally to naughty and to nice.

It will be a miracle of rare import,
To play even one tenth the games they have !
To play them well and still be a good sport
Will make the time there spent a treasure trove
Although my beatific Miss
Must stay behind and work while I am gone
It serves her right, for she enjoyed the bliss
While I worked through her last vacation.
Still, I will miss her anon
Even while I revel in the hiss
Of games and gamers playing at the con.

Oh, that with music, trumpeting, and song
I could throw a con in my hometown
This nice! This big! This full of fun!
All who click my site would soon swoon
All should cry, "Sign me up, anon!
And I will be arriving soon!"
Registering con-space and hotel rooms
To play from break of day, and all day long
And fun and laughter would descend upon
My stately city of Jerusalem!


Rowrr,
Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ The sweet smell of success

Peee-yew! Fer Chrissakes, what died in here?

I wrinkled my nose and drifted over behind the counter where my dad was sniffing the air and grimacing. He leaned over and said quietly, “Which one of these people did that?”

“I don’t know dad, but seeing as how there’s about 12 billion square miles of open air right out the door you’d have thought he’d have stepped outside for a moment.”

The scourge of Idaho gaming had struck again and he was in the store right now. My dad, my daughter and my son, all part-time help at the store, had been tagged by the sneaky bastard before. We even had a name for him, The Silent Farter. But none of us had ever caught him because he always waited until the store was full of gamers and casual shoppers before floating a nuclear SBD out into the air that I paid the rent on.

We squinted our eyes and started our survey of the customers. We must have looked like a couple of U-Boat officers scanning the skies for enemy aircraft as we focused in on each customer in sequence. Neither of us really knew what to look for, we’re native Texans, raised in the tradition of the Old Southwest… the one where you don’t pass deadly gas in public or shoot someone… unless they deserve it.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out which of about 15 people had passed silent gas in an enclosed space? It’s not pleasant work, of that you can be assured. And even if I did figure out who the culprit was, what was I going to do? Ban him from the store? Make a citizen’s arrest for Indecent Public Display of Odiferousness? Not to mention, there were at least three females in the store. What if one of them was the Silent Farter?

I’ve heard many complaints over the years about “smelly gamers” and how unpleasant the odor can be in game stores and yes, sometimes that’s true. At the same time, people who smell bad or get their kicks breaking wind in public don’t just shop at game stores, so it’s unfair to profile in this manner. Whichever customer had done the dirty deed also shopped for groceries, clothes, home furnishings and other items. So if he snuck out an SBD in the Piggly-Wiggly produce section just as you happened by, would you then proclaim all food shoppers to be uncouth and all food stores as being inhabited by nothing but smelly eaters?

No, of course not. But game stores are typically between 500-1000 square feet and the air can get a bit dense in them, especially on a busy day. This was a busy winter day. It was cold outside and the store was hopping with pre-Christmas shoppers. And amongst the seemingly innocent throng of Geeks was a person with an intestinal issue that he was inflicting on everybody else. So I tried a new ploy.

I walked to the door, opened it wide and announced to the general public, “The air’s a bit stale in here, you guys don’t mind of I prop this door open do you?” There were a couple of smiles and nods and even several looks of relief as I propped the door and let in the clean smelling 20 degree air.

It’s my opinion that a substantial portion of the board gaming consumer base is particularly critical of the “other gamers”. The most critical would be, based on my conversations at trade shows, internet sites and Cons, the Euro Gaming portion of the gaming public.

But really folks, to be fair, people in general emit odors. Belches, farts, body odor, perfume, cigarette breath, garlic aroma, cheesy foot smells and more. It’s not as if bad smelling people suddenly sprung into existence when the first game store opened it’s doors. But if you read the threads on http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ you’ll find bad smells to be one of the primary justifications many Euro-Snoot gamers have for not shopping locally.

So let’s just get this whole notion of smelly gamers sorted out right now…okay? In 1968 I took a trip from Spain over to North Africa. I wanted to see Morocco. Oh, I saw it all right, but not very clearly. That’s because my eyes wouldn’t stop watering from the thick, putrid aromas that assaulted my nostrils. Add to that the wonderful experience of the Moroccan toilets… basically a hole in the ground and a wash basin to clean up with afterwards, and even the bathroom in the seediest game store I’ve ever entered was pleasant by comparison.

Yet I don’t hear gamers complaining about how smelly Moroccans are.

And I don't even want to get started on the corner Pissoir's in downtown Paris. I've used one of those in the summer and it made me wish for the fresh smelling aroma of the Bullfighting stadium in Juarez every time I had to relieve myself.

I got on an elevator in the Prudential building in Boston one day and there was one other person in the same car as me. As we began our ascent I was blindsided by a horrible aroma that could be nothing else but an award-winning SBD. The well-dressed man on the elevator with me never looked at me, never changed his stance or even flinched. This reminds me of the old saying; “if there’s only two people on an elevator and one of them farts, everybody knows who did it.”

So I guess I’ll have to assume that Bostonians, and well-dressed ones in particular, are rude, smelly people. Right?

Wrong. As I’ve already stated, people in general have smells. And gamers aren’t any more or less smellier than any other group of people… well, except perhaps for the Hippies of the late 60’s. Oh man, there is almost nothing worse than three weeks of unwashed BO poorly masked by 6 ounces of patchouli oil imbued with the cloying stench of low-grade marijuana. But that’s another subject altogether. Suffice it to say I quickly learned that investing in a good stereo was a terrific compromise, it allowed me to experience the Jimi Hendrix Experience without having to experience the Jimi Hendrix Experiencers themselves.

“Don’t these people ever bathe?”

My dear old Dad was noticeably annoyed by the Silent Farter because we now had to put on coats and mittens to run the cash register and he kept hitting the wrong keys with his cumbersome thermal mitts. When the temperature in the store dropped to freezing I finally relented and closed the door. The ancient heater in the basement was running so hard it sounded like a tunnel auger was getting ready to surface in the D&D section. The customers had pretty much cleared out, making their purchases and rushing out the door.

“You know Dad, everyone who was in here bought something.”

“True. So what?”

“Well, I guess my point is that in retail we have to accept that we can’t always decide what is and isn’t acceptable from our customers. Are we going to put up a sign that says; we reserve the right to refuse business from people who stink!”

“Well, these people just don’t have their heads screwed on right.”

“I’ll give you that Dad, but it’s not as if we can run some sort of smell-check at the door and then throw out anyone who ate at Taco Time before coming in here. Though I suppose we could add a few packs of Gas-Ex to the chips and candy bar racks.”

My very non-scientific analysis of gamer-stench over the last 25 years or so has led me to the conclusion that the RPG Geeks and the CCG Geeks do tend towards having the highest number of offensive smells. So I suppose if you wanted a completely sterile game store you could draw that clean-smelling crowd by opening up in a high class mall with nothing but the highest ranked board games from BGG and the International Award committees like the SDJ Geeks in Europe.

That’d probably do the trick too. Mainly because there would be very few human beings who would ever enter that kind of game store. It’d sure be clean and fresh smelling.

It all makes me wonder though, do the Game Geeks who complain about the smelly game store crowd ever get outside their home? Attend concerts, go to a mall, a movie, a Monster Truck show, WWE wrestling, a sporting event, a fair, anything? And if they do, are they typing away on other fan oriented sites carping about how smelly the seats were at the opera? Or what an offense it was when they walked into the locker room at their gym?

I don’t think so. But I could be wrong. Coldfoot mentioned one of the BGG favorites a few days back… Aaron Potter, otherwise known as Potterama. I could imagine him doing exactly that.

But I couldn’t imagine him or Geeks like him actually lowering themselves to enter a real Game Store on a regular basis.

In retrospect, I will miss the money, the friends, the fun and the humor of over two decades of running a game store. But I suppose I won’t miss the smells. A career change will definitely make my daily life more clean and fresh smelling and that will be -

Oh crap! Look at the time! I gotta run. I need to shovel the manure out of the corrals before it gets dark!

See ya next week.

Upon the past Week

Well...to start off with then we've "LOST`d" 'Rick Thornquist' and ''the GameWire'', while preceding that, there was poor 'DERK' of the GEEK having a parcel of his`n becoming ''LOST`d'' too-the 'prequel', with resultant LOSS of many materials of which he'd have entertained 'us' with. The 'Games Journal' done 'bit' the proverbial ''dust'' as well, while I wouldn't put it past ''you-KNOW-who'' to be a factor in these demises, ya kno? Then, there was that higly touted ''Mega-Powerball Lotto'' that I didn't WIN, nor could I have since I can't BUY a 'ticket' for that around here`n! But someone down in ''Medford, Oregon'' is one lucky 'sunuvaBLIP'! ain't it GRAND to just 'dream' of having THAT obscenely alluring amount of 'moola'? oh well...what would YOU 'do' if`n you HAD to 'deal' with that? First thing that I'd DO is list someone ELSE's phone number as MINE, along with a WRONG 'address' heh heh. Now we DID have someone close by here that had WON a huge amount ($92-Million) and they were DELUGED with 'mail' at around '2' FULL Mail Trucks JUST for THEM! Talk about some hard-up folks, or worse-mostly others looking for ''hand outs'' and probably 'from' the 'asking' for such! I'd often wondered IF someone were to WIN any ''Lotto'' and then proceeded to DONATE the entire amount TO some 'Charity' function, or even have a 'Church' CLAIM this 'Prize', would they THEN be able to obtain the FULL amount? I doubt it as I'm sure the damm 'Gubbamints' would TAX it just to get their 'grubby Gubbamints' mitts upon WHATEVER they 'can'! It's some ''Hard Work!'' to keep on robbing the POOR to further enrich the RICHest of the RICH! sing it on 'so' ole ''Grubya''!

On the PLUS side, then there's going to become a NEW ''Games Review'' magazine that had a short-lived 'announcement' ON the ''GEEK'' previously, and how's about giving that some well deserved attentions with as little 'belittlement' as possible? Sure, they didn't do themselves any 'favors' to SOME with their errors, but c'mon! WHO amongst 'us' hasn't done likewise? There were even a few who WERE making their own 'errors' and NOBODY called 'them' upon the carpet for those!?! It must have been some 'short-memory & narrow minds' that couldn't POINT them 'out' until now? Someone even had ''the gall''-(the 'GALL' I tells ya!) to accuse 'moi' of being ''pre-deterministic'' in my 'opining' in certain circumstances, of which I CAN although I 'RESERVE' that 'Right' where it is applicable. NONE of what I've ''gone off'' about wasn't of 'irreasonible' concerns, since I was MOSTLY talking about disappointingly 'current' sub-standards in GAMES in general...mostly. Other times, then it had to 'do' with someone's 'Corporate' DECISIONS and the 'impact' that those had compounded upon in regards to GAMEs, where this was ''imbecil`d'' to the 'N'th degree! Yeah, yeah 'those' are supposed to be ''money grub`n'' AS their main concern, but WHEN they won't produce WHAT many are clamoring FOR, then WHO are 'we' to turn to? Well, I'm glad that I brought this UP! Since I'm quite prolific in producing my OWN 'stuff', and I don't mind in the least 'sharing' these once someplace can produce them, then I hope to be able to accomodate many with these then.

I had already contacted the likes of ''CinC'' about THEM producing a more extensive LINE of 1/48ooth scale Naval Vessels for uses in the 'Milton Bradley' version of ''Axis & Allies'', while I had been assured that this would occur, just not WHEN. As it stands right now, then you can adapt those for EACH of the various Nationalities, so I encourage ANY to obtain some packs of these for their 'Gameplays', and also encourage THEM by doing so. They've STILL got their *Special* DEAL on the ''A&A'' TANKs, and it is quite the savings on this amount of full metal castings of these Historical vehicles. 'XENO Games' also produces the pieces for the ''Fortress America'' game and maybe even that ''Sushi-Jalapeno'' game as well. while I like their 'Bomber' aircraft in the latter, although they have 'it' being designated as a 'Fighter'! I'll be using those as ''Heavy Bombers'' for the ''F.A. Expansion Pack #1'' Game myself, as I have some 'Fighters' already AND will even reconfigure others for that 'inverted wing' looking kind that is 'seen' upon the front box coverart. The 'Soviets' had a couple of these under development as this first started out as the ''Su-37'' and then it is now known as the ''Su-47b'' currently.
You can clearly see this here and I can scarcely imagine the amount of componentry that has to be involved, to keep such an unorthodox lay-out such as what is displayed with this~airborne! Not since the ''Wobbly Goblin'' 'F-117', or the 'B-2' Bomber has a 'design' garnered such attentions as what was witnessed with THIS! There's even more 'bizarre' versions floating about and you just have to keep on the lookout for those wherever you can.

Post-Season Wrap-Up

Another Essen has come and gone. The Super Bowl/World Cup of Boardgame Geekdom is over for another year. There will be one major post-season event for serious geeks, BGG.con will be held next month in Dallas. After Dallas it will be a short off-season before pre-season events start again in February with the opening of the Nuremberg Toy Fair. The traditional start of the Boardgame Geekdom season, as always, will be Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends in April.

Major highlights from the past season include the Reiner Knizia episode of Geek Speak, the rise in the number of boardgame podcasts and blogs, and the demise of the Games Journal. Certainly the re-release of Ra, Age of Steam, Through the Desert, Twilight Imperium, and For Sale were significant events this past season.

Thomas Liesching came out on top in the final geek rankings. His game Niagara won the coveted Spiel des Jahres.

Coach of the Year was undoubtedly Rick Thornquist from Team Gamewire. He got a good late round draft pick in geek Ryan Bretsch. Team Gamewire member Tom Vasel was the point leader with over 100 game reviews and a grand-slam, hat-trick, quadruple-double with The Dice Tower podcast. His only serious competition was Shannon Appelcline from Team RPG.net. Shannon scored 85 reviews and also was a starter on Team Gone Gaming. Thornquist had even more success with Team Gamewire in the timely-game-news and on-the-scene-reporting competitions. (Note: This article was written before the announcement of the demise of the GameWire.)

The best showing by a referee must have been Matthew "Octavian" Monin from Team BGG. He made a few controversial calls under pressure, but stuck to his guns. He irked me with a couple calls, that in my opinion weren't even close, but the instant replay left enough doubt that the call stood. Octavian was called upon to make the calls no one else wanted to make, and over the course of the season his judgment proved to be among the best.

Team CardChess lead at the end of the season with the most fouls, despite a strong showing by Team Moon at the start of the season. Team Berg might have been in the running, but no one was paying attention to him. Team Moon was ahead by two lengths going into the first turn then stalled, and was destined not to move for the rest of the season. Team Potter, an amateur team which has been a strong contender for the most fouls in recent years, disappeared soon after the season opened. I fear some tragedy may have befallen this perennial gadfly. Although he and I rarely saw eye to eye, if anyone has news of his whereabouts a notice of such would be appreciated.

Although the most fouls is generally considered to be a sprint event, Team CardChess stood the sport on its ear and slowly chalked up points all year making it a marathon. By mid-season at Origins fans were tiring of the event as it was clear no other team would even be in the running.

A couple of minor highlights from the past Boardgame Geekdom season include Alfred's "Best of the Blogosphere" over at the orange blog. I am thrilled that the number of boardgame blogs has increased to the point we can have a weekly "best of" list. A couple of daily blogs have been introduced, including this one. Credit Adam at Gamefest with coming up with the idea of a daily, game related, team blog a couple years ago.

The ever insightful John "Scribidinus" O'Haver got a job that took him away from near constant monitoring of BGG, but Robert "Grognads" Wesley was drafted to fill those big shoes and has done so admirably.

The World Boardgame Championships was moved to a new stadium. The move was made from Maryland to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Participants reported the humidity was just as bad in Lancaster. Non-participants reported that it isn't the world championship of anything, except the organizers' egos.

The Chicago International Toy and Game Fair seems to have stalled in its efforts to become the American Essen, but hope is still alive as the GenCon organizers are gossiping about changing the location from Indy. In my estimation Chicago and the International Toy Fair are just too close to GenCon to build up a large following. One or the other will have to move for the Toy Fair to gain traction.

That's it for this season. One last bash at BGG.con and us diehard fans will have to content ourselves with late-night re-runs on BGG-2, and ConSim-2.

CF

The Collector Bug

In halycon bachelor days, I was a collector. My bookcases overflowed with variant editions of Michael Moorcock and H.P. Lovecraft. When I stumbled upon one of my favorites with a different cover, I gasped, scooped it up, and ran at once for the cash register. Multiple editions of roleplaying books graced my shelves, and I could adroitly explain to you the differences between every edition of Call of Cthulhu from first to fifth, and I could even shake my head and sadly state, with quiet assurance, that there was never a Pendragon second edition, that Chaosium just skipped from first edition to third, with nary a backward glance.

As you might expect, my purchase of board games suffered from this affliction as well. I'd long noted the identical spines of the Avalon Hill bookshelf games, which fit together so beautifully on the shelves, but it was TimJim Games which truly fed my addiction. Like those Avalon Hill stalwarts, the spines of the TimJim boxes were equally designed to entice any obsessive-compulsive purchaser, but they also went a step further, and put product numbers on the spines in very large, highly contrasted, boxes.

Outpost, my first purchase, was #1001, and so naturally I got Mystic War (#1002) when it was released. Even today I look at that shelf of games, and think, "I should find a copy of Time Agent (#2002)", because I've heard decent things about it, and because it would look so good on my shelf next to Age of Exploration (#2003) and Suzerain (#2004). Not that I ever liked any of the TimJim games I bought, mind you, except Mystic War, but the numbers, the numbers, I had to match the numbers.

That's right, I was a twenty-something collector.

Collecting Board Games Today

I like to think I've given up the collector bug nowadays, that I've expunged it like an unwanted virus. As a rent-controlled apartment transformed into a 30-year mortgage, and as my discretionary income plummeted, I like to think that I matured and gave up such silly things. I like to think that while I used to collect books and games I now instead buy books to read and games to play, as odd as that might sound.

And I did break up my TimJim collection last year by selling off Outpost. I got a dozen or so games in exchange, any one of which has probably gotten more play than that ancient behemoth. But four more TimJim Games still sit on that shelf in my closet, all unplayed for at least half-a-decade. Nearby are my copies of Dragon Pass, Nomad Gods, and Elric, all set in the same worlds as some of my favorite RPGs, but which I will probably never play again.

So I'm a recovering collector, but I can't quite give up my secret stash.

And darn these modern publishers and their ever seductive consistency. How will I ever truly get better when they constantly dangle their tawdry box designs in my face?

Alea, oh how I hate them! They have become my greatest nemesis since TimJim, for their box spines match beautifully and they place numbers most prominently on their boxes. And, these aren't arcane SKUs, but instead simple counting numbers, like "1" and "2".

Even now I look at my shelf of Alea big-box games, and I cringe at its disharmony. Reading across you can see "4", "6", "7", "blank", and "9" (though I pretend I can see the "8" on my copy of Mammoth Hunters, even though it doesn't exist). Even as I pretend that my collector bug is gone, I know that Palazzo is higher on my buy list than Tower of Babel, because the former is #2 in a new Alea series, while the other is just some random Hans im Gluck release. And I know I'll buy #10 in the big-box series when it's released next year, no matter how light I hear it is, because how could I not?

Subtle Collecting

Thankfully, not all publishers are sultry seductresses like Alea. Take Fantasy Flight Games or Days of Wonder. They know how to satisfy my collecting urges without forcing me to admit that I'm actually toting up all the numbers to lay out on a shelf. They know the art of subtlety.

Days of Wonder hides their overtures within the designs of their big box games. Take a look at any two, and you'll probably see it. Turn a box so that you can see all the edges and you'll discover that on every right-hand side there's a portait of someone or something from within the game. Take Shadows Over Camelot for a spin and you'll see Merlin, Gwen, Morgan, and a pair of fighting knights adorning the four sides. Except, and this pains me to say, there's one flaw in DoW's big-box consistency, and it appears on Mystery of the Abbey, where the character portraits all appear not on the right-side of each box edge, but rather on the left!

Fantasy Flight plays a similar game with the sides of many of their big-box games. I believe it started with Lord of the Rings, but look at Arkham Horror, Runebound, or Beowulf and you'll discover it there too. These games (and presumably more) all sport bindings holding the box together. Metalwork, knotwork, whatever, you'll see it, running up and down the box sides and cutting across, transversely. Stack a pile of these Fantasy Flight Games together and the bindings all match up, holding your pile of games together.

Casual collecting, you could call this. Perhaps it's not the same thing as true collecting, as matching up the numbers, but it's at least a close susbstitute. You don't have to get the entire set, but every one improves the beautiful gestalt of your gaming shelves.

Conclusion

It makes me crazy sometimes, this collector bug that I've gotten rid of but that still haunts my dreams. I look at my copy of Hoity Toity, a half shelf away from my Alea Games, and I think, "I bet the German edition is a lot cheaper now that Uberplay has rereleased it. I could just give away my Uberplay ed and then fill in one of the spaces in my Alea collection." And I ponder about the new releases of Ra and Winner's Circle, and wonder if those might drop out the eBay markets on those games too. Whether the new editions might be better is of no consequence, because the older ones match

I don't give in. I hold steady. Hoity Toity stays firmly on my shelf, and I don't move Mystery of the Abbey away from the rest of my Days of Wonder games, even if it does look wrong.

But what's this that arrived on my doorstep just the other week? Dungeon Twister. With such an attractive spine, and look, an "S" in a circle (for Starter). I can imagine the supplements already, with their bindings and their numbers and their pictures all lining up perfectly. Will they have letters, perhaps a "A" or an "X"? Or will they have numbers, a standard "1" or a "2"?

I can imagine them already, bravely marching across my shelves.

But I'll play them, I will, honest.

I'm not a collector any more.

PS: Welcome to my new blogging day, on Thursday. You should see my scribblings here every week now, while Alex has scooted over to my previous spot, biweekly on Saturdays. His next column should be up two days from now.

Games, Games and More Games

We talk about it for months. We scour the internet for news. We envy those who are making plans to travel to Germany. The anticipation builds in equal parts to our fear of how much money we’ll be spending in the near future. Yes, it’s Essen time again.

Like the rest of you, I’ve checked the daily updates on GameWire where Rick Thornquist does a great job keeping us informed and I’ve read several blogs which unselfish (and lucky) gamers have posted from the Essen Game Fair. As I read the short summaries for games that I had thought would make good additions to my collection, one by one they were crossed off my list until I’m left with only 4 possibles. That’s a good thing, right?

Granted, many of the new games didn’t even make the list because they are longer and more complex than the games that prove successful in my house, and I don’t really need any more brainless fun games so that eliminates another large portion of the new games but I did expect to have a list of 8 to 10 games that I seriously needed to know more about.

Now I’m trying to figure out if it’s me or is it the games. Do I have so many games that it’s hard to find something that sounds different? Do I have such great games that I can’t bring myself to buy something that doesn’t sound great, too. Maybe our tastes in games is too narrow which eliminates many great games.

Dare I ask if the designers are not coming up with new and original ideas that are also great games? Aqua Romana is compared to Metro but with a twist to add strategy. Hacienda reminds a couple of posters of Through the Desert and I detect a bit of Magna Grecia in there with the connections which earn money/points. I could be wrong but Aloha sounds like Tongiaki with a press-your-luck twist.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, especially if the games are good, but I don’t feel the need to add them to my collection. Two years ago I would have jumped on Hacienda with its tile laying/card management style but today I’m less than enthusiastic. Maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through, the I’m Bitchy And Hard To Please Phase.

The games that still remain of interest to me are Kaivai, which I’d like to hear more about, Big Kini, which seems to be one of the hits of this year, Hey! That’s My Fish, which Mr. Thornquist made sound like a simple yet interesting puzzle of a game, and Castle Merchants, which I’m not quite sure of but haven’t crossed off yet. Aqua Romana is still in consideration, too, since I don’t have Metro.

The good news is that my husband and checkbook are both relieved.
~~~~~~~~
DVONN

I’ve been playing DVONN for the last week, not face to face since no one in my household will play with me (everyone say, “awwww”) but online with Jasen (Baldboy_1) Robillard, who has been great about teaching a novice the ins and outs of this brilliant game.

I had played it once or twice before in a haphazard, this-looks-good kind of way but the more I play it and the more I understand the strategies in it, the more impressed I am with the genius of the rules. The limitations on movement—which pieces are free to move, how far you can move them, and the dvonn movement—combine to create subtle strategies that you don’t see immediately as you do in the other GIPF series games. The first impression I had was that it’s a lighter abstract that anyone can play and have a good time with. This is still true because it can be played that way, but this is also a heavy game that takes a great deal of analyzing and planning to play well. I‘m not a fan of abstract games but this one intrigues me and I’m totally hooked. I may never be very good at it but I’m sure having a lovely time learning. Thank you, Jasen.

Misc. Games

I haven’t been playing many face-to-face games due partly to the need to get the house and yard ready for winter but I did get to introduce a friend of Cori’s to Through the Desert and Attika. The latter is a bit tough to teach to someone who hasn’t played many board games but I thought he did very well managing his hand and blocking temple connections. Cori won with all her buildings placed. Through the Desert was a runaway for yours truly since I’ve had so much practice with tough opponents online. Our guest seemed to enjoy it but he didn’t realize the importance of getting to those oasis and came in dead last.

Richard and I also played a couple games of Fjords between supper and television time. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is more strategy to this game than most people give it credit for or I wouldn’t win with such consistency. And I have to say that I’m very tired of hearing how the Go half of the game is over in 2 minutes! The game is in the tile laying/farm placement decisions! The final bit is just a way to determine how well you’ve played the game. It’s a scoring mechanism, albeit a different breed of scoring mechanism.

Until next time, may your camels be swift and plentiful.

Mary

Every Day is Games Day

1. This morning I wanted to wake up at 8:30. Time was counting down. It was already 8:27 and I had the complete set of endorphin cards, but I still hadn't managed to discard my last two dream cards. Finally I pulled a "rational thought". I didn't need it, but I managed to trade it for a second "circumstance" card, which allowed me to draw from the external events deck. Luck was with me. I got "mosquito", which let me discard my remaining two dreams and wake up on time. Sharon was only a round behind me, but Dave was still stuck in REM, and John's bladder wasn't yet full.

2. I had to get dressed. I can't stand getting dressed with John; he's a new dresser. I kept giving him the sock drawer, but he kept going for shirts, so both of us kept clashing. Meanwhile, David and Sharon were practically colluding, dressing each other. By the time David was dressed, I only had a pair of pants and a pair of shoes.

3. Breakfast was worse. I needed to make omlets, french toast, and tea, but I could only get the ingredients for salad, cereal, and tarts. David had a monopoly on eggs, and my oldest kid had already made his one trip to the store to bring me tea and bread. I needed eggs! I only had my smallest son left, but I was trying to save him for an emergency, expecting Sharon to steal my bread. Too late. I should have sent him, since John finished his cheese sandwich, melon, and coffee. I was this close.

4. Driving to work. 'Nuff said. I never win this one and today was no exception. I tried a narrow route, but everyone except David had the same idea. David left us in the dust.

5. At work I had 8 projects to complete. I managed some excellent trading here. foisting off two big projects for which I didn't have the resources for four matching medium projects, all of which I could finish with only three resources. An easy win.

6. They wanted to drive home again, but I took the train. Another close one. I almost caught two trains at once, but John maneuvered his train in front of one of mine. I got stuck behind his train and I couldn't catch him before the train ride was over.

7. Game group. My happiness factor was "win at least once", my personalities were "rules lawyer" and "meeple stacker", and I owned "Puerto Rico", "El Grande", and "Time's Up". I tried to play one of my games first, which would allow me to get the happiness factor out of the way without much difficulty, but I got voted out. I managed to guess John's personalities ("whiner" and "bored") before any of the others, which put me in the lead. I also completed my happiness factor by winning two games, but it wasn't enough to beat Sharon's which was "play at least one game you propose". We ended up playing only her games ("Ursuppe", "Tikal", and "For Sale"), which gave her enough of a bonus to win. Nobody ended up guessing David's personality of "reserved", although Sharon nailed his other one: "cause chaos".

8. Bedtime. I grabbed the blue mattress, pink pillowcase, and green bedspread early on, but stalled from then on. Sharon hit the sack first with all the linens, and then humiliated me with a "kick another player out of bed" card. Like I wasn't losing already.

Another typical day ... for an aspiring game designer.

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ How dare you make money!

"So I wanna sell this book."

Eureka! What a find!! A used 3rd Edition D&D Player's Handbook, version 3.0, not 3.5.

"Okay, you want cash or trade?"

"Cash, I gotta bail my mom outta jail."

I could script this one before I even opened my mouth again, but when you'e a friendly and compassionate game store owner you go through the motions, despite knowing it will turn out badly.

"Sure, I'll give you three bucks."

"WHAT!!! Three bucks??? Crap man, I paid like $30 for this thing!"

I looked at the book again, it was the initial release, with a $19.95 price on the back, barely visible where the ink has worn off due to multiple Mountain Dew spills.

"Actually, it's got $19.95 marked on the back. Plus, the book is worn, Wizards of the Coast published a revised edition three years ago and I figure by paying you three dollars I'll only lose two dollars when I sell it."

Now comes the indignation, then the anger.

"That's like total crap man, this book cost me a lot more than three bucks."

"Yes, and that was four years ago and you've used it. Now, will three bucks help you make any headway for mommy's bail money?"

"F**k you man! You guys are all thieves!"

As the angry young man with the incarcerated mother left I began to reflect on twenty-three years of buying used books, games and cards and the astonishing ignorance and disdain that the general public seems to have regarding retail.

What the hell is it about a game store that brings out the tendency in some gamers to automatically assume they're being ripped off? Is it the fact that we're all brothers-in-arms... and sisters as well... and that the average gamer figures owning a store means you don't really have a jorb? I mean "job".

Cruise on over to http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ and you'll see thread after thread about how this game store rips people off and that game store sucks. When you winnow the threads down to their roots what you'll discover is that what pisses these specific gamers off is that they feel somehow entitled to a good deal, or a freebie.

"Yeah, I've been shopping in DW's store for like 15 years."

"That's a long time man."

"Damn straight it is. Hell, I put DW's kids through college! That's how much I spend in here. Right DW?"

"Sure Stewie, I'll make sure Marshall and Jaimy send you a card at Christmas."

In truth, Stewie, and about 50 more like him, probably spent a total of $5,000 each over a period of 15 years of shopping at my store. That represents maybe $2,000 in profit. Spread out over 15 years that's $133 a year.

Thankfully, I didn't count on Stewie for my kid's college fund. They'd be working a collections desk at Sears Credit if I had. Which, by the way, is what Stewie does for a living.

I got an email from a sometime customer a few weeks ago. To sum it up, he said...

I'm going to purchase about $1,000 in 40K goodies. I'll buy it from you if you sell it to me for $675, which is $100 profit for you.

I guess I was supposed to jump up, shout Hoo-Rah! and thank him for the $100.

Not that I hold it against the guy for wanting to get a 35% discount, everybody likes that. But it just irked me that a gamer figured I ought to do that for him, because, after all, he has a real job and he needs to conserve his hard-earned money. Since I only run a game store, $100 from him is, I suppose, an expression of his selfless generosity.

So while I was contemplating how I might respond to his miserable offer... without letting on what a jerk I can be if I want to, he emails me again, letting me know that a store some 30 miles away took the deal. Cool. I guess they needed the hundred more than I did. It's nice to know that Gamers are so considerate of the people who make a living providing the goods to them. I'd bet they were jumping up and down shouting, "WOO HOO! $100 whole dollars!!!"

The day that particular Gamer takes a 75% decrease in his pay so I can get my computers and printers cheaper is the day I'd take his measly $100.

About 17 years ago I worked at a Mercedes dealership... selling Mercedes. Go figure. So this micro-surgeon comes in one day and wants a $50,000 car. I shoot him a deal. He says "I'll be back." He comes back with offers from seven other Mercedes dealerships, each one at about $7,000 less for a similar car. "Why should I buy from you?", he asked.

"Well, because," I said, "you make about $800 an hour. I figure you already invested 5 hours just getting those quotes. That's what? $4,000? And then there's the hour here the other day and the hour now. And since I'm going to say "not a chance" to your offer, that means you'll need to spend another several hours dealing with people in Seattle or Salt Lake, or Denver or Portland. Then you'll have to spend time ensuring the car gets here and is what you ordered. On top of which, if it isn't, now you'll be dealing with people hundreds of miles away who could give a crap who you are."

"In short, they low-balled you Doc. You can probably buy the car for that, but I think by the time you're done you'll have lost as much as you saved. It's a better deal for you to negotiate with me. I'll knock a few thou off and you'll have the car tonight."

The doctor didn't follow my advice. Over the next several days he worked me like a slot machine. He also called every Mercedes dealership from Cody, Wyoming to Indonesia. In the end my boss told me to sell him the fricking car, at about $6,000 off. I think he just wanted to get rid of the guy.

So the Doc invites me out for a Scotch a week after he gets his Mercedes. We're talking and I said, "Hey Doc, if I needed my foot re-attached, what would it cost?"

"Oh, probably about $15K."

"So would you cut me a deal?"

"Not a chance DW. Doctors ain't cheap. Do you know how much it cost me to become one?"

I think that pretty much summed it up for me. Since the car wasn't a necessity, it, and the people who make their living providing the cars, weren't really working. Expensive cars are fun. Right? And so are games. If it's fun, then why pay a fair price for it?

Now I may be wrong about some of this, but...

"Hey DW!"

"Yes?"

"Wanna buy my Star Wars miniatures?"

"Sure Elmore... let's see... hmmm... I'll give you $12 for the whole box."

"TWELVE BUCKS! Jaysus Christo DW! These things are worth 7 times that on eBay!"

"That they are Elmore. So I have a question for you."

"Yeah..."

"Why are you here, instead of home listing these things on eBay?"

"Man... that's so much work. You gotta have PayPal, you gotta wait a week, you have to pack them and go to the post office. It'd be much easier for me if you just paid me what they're worth. Howsa bout it DW?"

"Good point Elmore. Now that I look at it that way, I'll give you $6.50 for the whole box."

A career change can definitely be a good thing. Maybe I need to get a real jorb.

The ''Göt Nüttin'' Report

Yep, this went over this past weekend around here`n, while another 'Spiele-Fest' was taking place elsewhere around the 'Gaming World', in case some happened to 'miss' that. I didn't even get a chance at that 'Toys Я Us' *Special* on the 'games' deal, since I couldn't afford to at this time. But, I don't wish to enrich the coffers of that ''HasBORG'' fellow if I can help it any, he's such a 'tool' of the ''establishment''! Now, what I don't mind so much is when I have a ''Earned Rewards'' CARD that I get every so often, and use THAT to make some 'purchases' with, since then I don't feel as culpable because I'm ONLY ''paying sales taxes'' for those, HA! ''I gots YOU sucka!'' So, what else is going on? Well the ''Fishermen of CATAN'' is coming around, while I'll just await upon the 'DWTripp' version with ''the Goat-ropers of CATAN'' then, myself. I figured that I had better emphasize BEST upon the subject of the latter, as I didn't wish to 'get' ole 'DWTripp' into any misconceptions and the like, had I NOT. So I don't really know or care as to the particulars about HIS 'predilection' for them thar GOATs, yet I'd be willing to take him UP on any offers to try some ''Barbequed'' manner of such. ''Shish-ke-billy-bob-goat'' spears sounds right mighty tasty to ME! I'd imagine that it is fairly close to Lamb or Mutton overall and as long as it wasn't undercooked, then it's fine as well. None of that ''Deranged Fed Mental Disease'' for 'moi', thank you very much! I've got enough of my own 'providing' to keep me going as it is.

For those so inclined, then I have it on GOOD '411' that ''Larry Harris Game Designs'' is working upon an 'A&A'-"D-Day" style GAME that will be covering ''Guadalcanal'', in the works! There promises to 'be' NEW kinds of Naval Vessels & perhaps even some LAND or AIR types as well, of which these would be geared towards their individual requirements. While I'm just speculating upon certain aspects for THIS that may or may NOT be taken into considerations, ole 'Larry' has made it well known that he'd like to keep it as simple for ease of playings as possible. So NO there won't 'be' any ''Japanese Kabuki'' Units being represented, or the 'Marine Corps Dog Troop' as well, for 'those' who'd WANT such! They also might have to go along with perhaps the likes of 'Eagle Games' for any distinctive MINIs for this, as he's taken UP with them for the time being. Let's HOPE that there'll ONLY 'be' a disparity in actual 'playing surface' to provided 'mapboard' of around 30% wasted space instead of the 'usual' 70%! YES! that has been a 'qualm' of mine in their regards for MOST of their 'Historical' line of games, and THEY may not like this 'fact', but it's relevant just the same.

As for the fine fellow on the side here, then YEP that's a version of the CATS chap of 'infamy' with his even worse than YODA elicitations! With ''Take every ZIG off!'' and even the fine ''Make your TIME!'' are a few of the other more notable or 'memorable' ones as well. I can't recall just which GAME this is taken from, so if anyone else can provide some background upon him, then by all means, please back me up on it, thank you very much! Oh yeah, and why not show what other 'exclamations' HE was prone to emit, if you can think of some of these too.

How to Turn Family and Friends into Gamers Using Subterfuge, Mind Control and Violence

It's Essen time again, which of course means that everyone is busy scouring the internet for steaming little tidbits about what's new in the hobby and no one is in the market for my particular brand of nonsense. So, I might as well take advantage of the recent demise of The Games Journal and pick its pockets for a piece I wrote in 2002. It's a little silly, but what the hey. (In my own defense I should also say that I had a hectic couple of weeks and only got halfway through the piece I had intended to write).

Doctors. Lawyers. Policemen. Hundreds of people walk around every day and don't play games, and no one knows why. Scientists of all nations are baffled. Ancient philosophers studied the phenomenon in vain, and atheism was born. Rather than trying to understand this illogical behavior, let us instead focus on strategic methods to redirect people's perverse urges to write screenplays, build bridges or start families into healthy, wholesome gaming.

The problem, perhaps, is that board games have the stigma of being intended for children. Sound familiar? The scene: you have invited some old friends over for "TV or something". Once they have all settled in, you nonchalantly pull out your brand new, eighty-dollar Roman chariot race simulation with its one hundred and fourteen mahogany tokens, nine-inch pewter emperor, laminated conversion charts, and coveted three-sided die. "Hmm," you say, innocent as a baby snake, "I wonder if this would be any fun?" It is at this point your so-called friends look at you and say:

"A board game? What, like Sorry?"

Those who have been at the business end of the hated and feared "Sorry" remark know all too well the tears of bitter shame that follow.

One answer to this vexing problem is the card game. The card game has completely different connotations for the American drone. Cards are considered "cooler", thanks to their association with drinking, gambling and magic tricks. Maybe if people started betting on Candyland or played strip Careers the world would be a better place (I can only assume it would be), but for now we will have to make do with the way things are. And so, the point is this: the first step to dragging the rest of the world down to your level is the card game. I have had my own greatest success with Bohnanza, that delightful German game about the Cartwright family. Just as pot smoking inevitably leads to heroin and horse tranquilizers (are you listening, Mom?), Bohnanza is the first step on a long road to all-night tournaments of Die Macher where the winner is the last to collapse from fatigue or diet cola poisoning. This is a good thing.

It is important, however, not to scare off your potential converts. Gamers tend to like variety; they will have barely tasted the nectar of one flower before they are ready to buzz off to another. Your average newbie, however, is not so fickle. Once you have gotten them hooked on Carcassonne or Lost Cites, they will want to play that game ad infinitum, agonizing as this will be to you. Any suggestion of trying a different product will seem to them a wanton breach of fidelity, and, if repeated, they will come to regard you with mistrust. You must let them thoroughly drink in their first experience with a real game before you introduce the next one. If you would tempt a married woman away from her husband, it is best to wait until the bridal flowers have wilted. After she has been unfaithful once, each succeeding conquest will be progressively easier.

There are other methods of winning non-gamers to your camp, however. If you happen to have children, you can use that fact for a sly little ruse I like to call "The Fireman's Gambit." I call it this because it sounds cool. I do not personally know any firemen but I wish them the best of luck. Anyway, the crux of the biscuit is that it is quite easy to prey on your friends' innate sense of intellectual superiority. You invite said cronies over, again, for "TV or something". When they arrive, however, they find you standing over an open box and a set of rules. The look on your face is that of a monkey trying to understand a carburetor. You scratch your head slowly and bite your lip, your forehead wrinkled from the vain attempt to understand what is beyond you.

"I bought this game for my kids", you say, innocent as a 1-800-flowers.com gift basket of poison, "but I can't seem to figure it out. Can you guys make any sense of this?"

Your friends, filthy snobs that they are, will pat you on the head with an affectionate smile and help you out of your misery. "Poor fellow! Not too swift upstairs you know. Better let us take care of this, pookie."

Suckers! Soon you will all be playing a rousing game of El Grande, and then we will see who the smart one is. It's you, of course! You knew that! Why didn't they?

There is one last little fiendish ploy I know of, one which I call "The Wrath of God." It is quite simple. Innocent as a pink bayonet, you invite your friends over for—yes, you guessed it—"TV or something". Here's the trick: just before they show up, pitch a brick through the front of the TV. When they arrive and find out that their precious television is "experiencing technical difficulties," they will fall on the floor and start crying like babies. A warm blanket or a cup of hot cocoa is helpful at this point—try to remember your Red Cross training. After about fifteen minutes of no-TV, their self-esteem will be shattered and they will feel helpless and confused. It is at this point that you introduce them to the concept of alternative forms of entertainment. German board games! Of course! Have we been so blind all this time? Blinking and sniffling, they will get up off the floor and bend to your will like a bunch of cheaply-dressed sheep. They may even be willing to clean your gutters or wash your car—the disorientation of no-TV can be just that extreme.

As gamers, it is our sacred duty to cure the world of bungee-jumping and stamp collecting. What's the point of going to an opera if you can't make the little Nibelungen fight each other? Who wins at hiking? All these pastimes are pathetic and they know it. We shall not rest until Settlers of Catan is an Olympic sport, played life-size on giant padded hexagons, where burly Austrian women run back and forth laying down colored railroad ties and try to trade live sheep with wiry Jamaican girls pushing wheelbarrows of bricks.

Master or Grasshopper?

First off, I do admit that I don't beat my wife nearly enough. That's a worn out joke in our game group, maybe you can get some mileage out of it.

Now that we have that out of the way, this week's guest blog is by my (fictional?) wife, Dame Koldfoot, who may or may not be the person I was referring to last week when I referred to "the player who is always confused", I will never tell. Only myself, Dame Koldfoot, and the guy who thought the game was broken will ever know.

Enjoy,
Coldfoot



Coldie loves to buy games, almost as much as starlets love to purge before a casting call and Brazilians love to wax. Coldie has over 250 games, with all but the best stored in the shed collecting dust. I have played maybe half of the “good” games occupying six floor-to-ceiling shelves in the game room. One of my longstanding complaints about being married to an avid (could I say addicted?) gamer, besides the cost of the games, the room to store the games and the time Coldfoot spends away from home playing games, is learning a new game. I don’t mind learning new games, but I want to master the games I’ve played before moving on.

If given a choice, would you rather learn a new task or master the knowledge you already have? There are advantages and disadvantages to both learning and mastering. In my career as a paralegal, I would rather be the master of a task than attempt to learn a new one. It is disconcerting trying to interview a witness when you know nothing about the case or issues being litigated. On the other hand, it is comforting to know when my supervising attorney asks, “Are you sure this is how it should be done?” that I can answer with a resounding, “Absolutely.”

In learning a new game, there is a sense of excitement: opening the shrink-wrap, punching the pieces, examining the artwork, and analyzing the rules. The cards are still shiny, the scent of new cardboard and plastic wafts from the box, the four year old has not stuffed any tokens up her nose yet. You set it up, try a practice game and then evaluate your mistakes, all the time looking forward to the next play.

On the downside, there is the confusion of rule interpretation, the placement of tokens, the indecision of which card to play. There is the disconcerting feeling of uncertainness. “Did I play that right?” “What will happen if I place here?” “I am so hosed because my play backfired on me!”

The mastery of a game is comforting. I’ve been playing pinochle since I was 12. Yet, I still feel like I have not mastered the game. I will never be as good a player as my grandpa. However, in the intervening 20 years or more since I’ve been playing, I have developed my method for how much to bid, counting tricks, tracking the high trump card and knowing when to take the lead or give it up. I could not have done this if I played the game just a few times. It is the same as if I only went to work a few times a year—I would not be as good a paralegal. I was lucky Coldie also played pinochle and would spend Saturday afternoons with my grandparents and me playing cards.

When you have mastered a game, you know the rules, the strategy, the pitfalls. You know when to play a certain token, when to attack or fall back, when to trade or hoard your commodities, what and when to build. You (usually) know your opponent or partner and his or her tactics. From your comfort seat, you can try new strategies without the disconcerting feelings of not knowing what the hell you’re doing. “If I buy the large warehouse, then I could try to hoard tobacco to later ship from my own wharf. But I still have the office, so my coffee is safe if Coldie chooses the Trader.” It’s hard to develop your strategy or try new plays in a game you know when you’re always learning new games. The length of time in between plays causes me to forget the rules, how the use the components and what I wanted to try differently on my quest for mastery. I am not, however, advocating playing the same game ad nauseum.

So, would you rather be the master or the grasshopper? For me, I think I would rather be a master. It boils down to the fact that Coldie and I are both fiercely competitive. I don’t feel like I have mastered a game until I have whipped him many times in a row. I am looking forward to the day when he admits that he doesn’t beat me as often as he should.

Dame Koldfoot

Ethics in Gaming 5.0

For what it's worth, the last submission to The Games Journal. Unfortunately, unedited.

Board games are excellent opportunities for examining the good and bad ethical qualities in yourself and others, and for cultivating good ethical practices. More often than not, games naturally lead to developing these good qualities.

Games Teach Ethics

Games, by their very nature, teach ethical principles. The vast majority of games require patience and fair play, which tends to be naturally enforced by your fellow players. You are required to adhere to various rules. You are expected to finish what you have started, unless you can peaceably obtain consent from others to resign. You are expected to be gracious, both in winning and losing. And so on.

Strategic games are a perfect facility for opening the mind to intellectual and emotional growth. For some games, a single playing is enough to break open those rusty neurons and get the mind thinking. However, the real path to growth is gained only through repeated play as you work to develop yourself.

A single game can teach perseverance and fortitude against opposition, but most games last no longer than a few hours, at most. A few hours of fortitude is not much in the real world. By working to get better at a game for months or years at a time you develop a type of moral quality that simply cannot be gained from casual play. This type of perseverance can be learned in games and transferred to other aspects of your life.

Consideration before acting is another important principle you learn while playing. Whether or not your group allows you to take back moves, at some point you have to commit to your actions. When you make a mistake, you will soon know about it in a game, a lesson not always as accessible to you in other areas of your life.

Parallel to this are the principles of leadership and teamwork. Certain games require you to make decisions on the spur of the moment. There is not always time for consideration, yet you must act! In other games, you win or lose only by your ability to cooperate with others, either because you need their resources, or because you win or lose as a team. Balancing all of these requirements is often tough. By facing these choices, you can develop within yourself stronger skills to deal with these issues.

Another essential lesson from games is delayed gratification. It begins when you understand that you may not just pick up your piece and move it to the end of the game board, and continues until you realize that you are not going to be able to win the game until you have worked hard at learning the game through playing it numerous times. This helps you to navigate the cognitive dissonance between the disparate goals of winning the game and having a good time: that, while working towards winning, the essential part of a game is the process, rather than the goal.

For younger children, or people who act like younger children, playing games is an important step in developing a good appreciation for etiquette. In the case of games, this is the sometimes arbitrary limits and rules imposed by a game or game group, and the contentment that can be gained by not violating them.

Speaking of young children, of paramount importance in all areas of life is the acquisition and practice of good manners. Games can be a perfect step in helping with this, if, as a parent, you can manage to set a good example while losing (or winning) to a persnickety four year old.

All of these lessons, and many more, can be carried from the field of gaming into the rest of your life. In this way, games inculcate ethical principles.

Playing Games is Valuable

More than this, however, playing games is a worthwhile activity in and of itself.

Studies indicate that people learn better through play, rather than through rote lessons filled with facts. Many games are excellent for teaching math and vocabulary. Some games, chosen with care, teach history or politics. It is a magical thing to watch children actively want to learn.

More than this, by its nature of being a coordinated activity, playing games forces you to identify with and cooperate with another person. The act of arranging with another person to spend time committed to following a thread of action from one end to the other is an act of defiance against the world of the self-absorbed and the transitory.

In our short life, there are many distractions that tempt us to abuse and lose our time. Few activities are inherently a waste of time, but for many activities it is difficult to gain something permanent from indulging in them. So many people in this day and age choose activities based only on how entertaining they are at this very moment, after which they are the same bored person that they were before.

While I seemed to have just denigrated the concept of “entertainment”, let me say that the very act of allocating precious time to play a game sends an important message to yourself and to others: that enjoyment IS important. That enjoyment is, in fact, a goal. Not an all-pervasive one, but an important and necessary one, nevertheless.

More important than entertainment is transformation of character; any good game should be able to provide both. It is the nature of games that a game requires something from you in order to make it happen. Games, other than mind-numbing die-rollers, require active participation. The more active the participation, the more likely the game imparts some important transformative benefits.

We need to balance the things we do in order to live with the things we live for: love, play, faith, community. So often nowadays we choose only easy, passive activities:­ sleeping, reading, watching television, playing on the computer, etc. Make sure you allocate some of that time for others and with others by playing games.

Warning: This Blog May Cause Choking

I was watching T.V. last night when I saw a commercial for one of the many types of drugs that are now available to make our lives better, happier and healthier. This one began by telling you that there were no sexual side-effects. Whew, that's a load off my mind! But at the end we are informed that it may cause seizures. Well, as long as it doesn’t cause sexual side-effects, no worries. Do these people even HEAR what they’re telling us?

This led me to thinking of the many silly product warnings that I’ve read about such as the warning on a can of spray paint which passes on the useful hint: do not spray in face. How about the baby stroller that has the mind-boggling caution: remove child before folding? My favorite is the chainsaw warning which many men will appreciate: do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals.

This, in turn, led me to wonder what dangers lurk in our game boxes? I know that people who love strategy games tend to be quite intelligent and not prone to doing incredibly stupid things, but could there possibly be some people out there who must be told the obvious? Some games may need a precautionary warning to prevent injury to the user or damage to the game itself, or to keep disillusionment to a minimum, which can also be the basis for frivolous lawsuits.

BLOKUS—pieces have sharp corners that could cause injury when thrown with great force..

SEA SIM—no fish were harmed in the making of this game.

PLUNDER—do not play with the boats in the bathtub.

THROUGH THE DESERT—the camels are not edible.

WALLENSTEIN—do not remove the ledges from the tower; pieces are supposed to get caught in there.

MAHARAJA—do not hit glass pieces with a hammer.

TRIAS—very small pieces which can cause breathing problems if inserted in the nose.

ROBORALLY—robots are not battery operated.

SHADOWS OVER CAMELOT—be careful when handling Excalibur; you’ll poke your eye out!

MEMOIR ’44, AXIS & ALLIES, war games of all sorts—parental guidance advised. Teenagers may become violent and go on a shooting spree, killing their family, friends and neighbors.

FORMULA DE and other race car games—do not play this game on the street.

MONKEYS ON THE MOON—NASA has found no evidence to prove that monkeys ever existed on the moon.

QUEEN’S NECKLACE—trying to pawn the necklace and rings will make you look like an ass.

Well, it was just a thought.
~~~~~~~~

Contest Winners

My thanks to everyone who took the time to try my Name & Number Contest and for the compliments you gave me in your emails. Here is what was in the jar:

2 towers from Die Magier von Pangea
1 ship from Hansa
2 temples from Magna Grecia
15 fish from SeaSim (Ocean)
14 pieces (6 men & 8 ships) from Hellas
1 YINSH ring
3 trees from O Zoo le Mio
3 planes from World in War: Combined Arms 1939-1945
8 coins from Kontor
8 red camels from Desert Oasis (Oasis)
43 pieces (40 cubes & 3 dice) from Carolus Magnus
1 airplane from Screaming Eagles
2 place holders from Can’t Stop
30 Phoenix pieces
6 blue dinos from Trias
1 round, short piece from Quarto
4 knights from Torres
13 trains from Union Pacific
2 towers from Meridian
3 pieces (2 pieces & the crown) from Rosenkonig

Total of 162 pieces

The closest guess for total number of pieces was from Mr. Johnson. If you’re reading, I need to know your BGG name.

As for naming the 20 games, there were actually 4 people who got them all and many who got 18 or 19. Well done! The first to email me was Chad Krizan, who wins the 15 GG. Since everyone doesn’t read this blog at the same time, or have time to sit down immediately to puzzle out the answer, I’m giving 5 GG to the other three people with the 20 correct game names: Katie Harris, Morgan Dontanville and Kevin O’Brien.
~~~~~~~~

Games

Sunday I finally got to try Ta Yu with 3 players, one playing the bad guy who tries to thwart the efforts of the other 2. Richard, Chris (my son), and I thoroughly enjoyed the twist that the 3-player variant puts on the game.

We played twice so I got to taste the roles of both the bad guy and the good guy. It’s fun being the bad guy but I also felt the pressure to fight being the kingmaker. If both players are pretty much in an equal position and the piece you choose can harm either one, you must now choose which player to slow down. After the first game, Chris complained of his lack of choices so for the second game we played with one piece in hand, which I like better since you have some choice without being bogged down with TOO many options.

I’d like to get a chance to play the 4-player partnership game but I’m worried that it would be quite slow, though that can be just the thing you’re looking for if you’re in a chatty mood. Just for the record, I haven’t won a game of Ta Yu yet which means, of course, that we’ll just have to keep playing it!
~~~~~~~~

Until next time, remember: chance favors the prepared mind.

Mary

Ode to the Games Journal

As some of you may have heard by now, The Games Journal has decided to throw in the towel. A sad day.

If you look at some of the later issues, a great number of the articles were submitted by Greg, himself. For the October issue, there was only a single submission: Ethics in Gaming 5.0 by yours truly. Greg wrote to me two weeks ago and told me that he wouldn't be able to publish the journal with only one submission and that he was throwing in the towel.

I suspect the lack of submissions to TGJ is due to the great number of blogs and other private web sites. It used to be easier to send an article to someone else to publish rather than go through the trouble of doing it yourself. This is no longer true.

Still, there is something to be said for having a collection of articles in one place all having been checked by an editor for length and quality. Self-publishing simply means that other people have to wade through everything to find the good stuff; and some of that good stuff could be better with a bit of editing.

Alfred's "best of the blogosphere" posts, along with all of those other blogs that point out good material on the net, such as Techdirt, are doing the "collecting job" that a journal should do. The difference is that, unlike a monthly journal, a blog journal (or "blournal") "publishes" as necessary instead of once a month with a certain number of articles. The other difference is that a blournal doesn't edit the articles it links to.

TGJ, like the Game Cabinet, published hundreds of useful and excellent articles in its time. Among my favorites:

Two summaries of the games industry:
To Boldly Go
A Brief History of Gaming

The tactical art of trading in games, first in a series of articles on game strategy:
Trading

The fine art of teaching games:
Teaching Rules

A look at game systems, first in a series:
Game Systems

Hosting a Games Day, which I refered to before starting my own:
Games Day

Groundrules for gaming in a game group:
Groundrules

Misadventures in Gaming, just one of a long series, the rest of which used to be on the Terminal City Gamers site (are they still on line somewhere?):
Misadventures in Gaming

The story arc in a game, first in a series of game design elements:
Story Arc

Game Design by Wolfgang Kramer:
What Makes a Game

A good overview on dice:
Dice Fest

A survey of board types:
Boards

How games and computers could interact:
Bits and Pieces

You'll note how many of these are precient to the topics we write about here on Gone Gaming. I left out all of the reviews, puzzles, letters, and so on.

So long TGJ.

Greg: what are you going to do next?

Everyone else: on we go.

Redesigning Empire Builder, Part One

As I said last month, I've got a few different topics that I'd like to cover in this column. This one is the final, and last, of the three, following "Don't Get Me Started" and "Views and Reviews". At right you should see the rhyming title "Game Design with Appelcline", and this is where I'm going to talk more coherently about the design of games.

The Empire Builder Series

I like the Empire Builder series of crayon railroad games. Something about their freeform nature, where you start with a blank slate and slowly fill in that canvas, appeals to my right brain and makes me think that I'm really creating something. Beyond that it has a neat puzzle aspect to it, where at any time you're juggling a set of three demand cards, each with three demands, and trying to figure out how to best and most efficiently serve them. Creativity + Puzzles together define some of my favorite game design elements.

As a result the Empire Builder series of games is, perhaps, the only games that I played in college that I still play today. Dune, Dragon Pass, Hacker, and others now largely gather dust, but I play a couple of tabletop games of Empire Builder (or one of the variants) every year, and I play the Iron Dragon computer game with much more frequency than that (albeit with frequent swearing at the slow and dumb AI).

Unfortunately Empire Builder is dated. The original game was released in 1980 and though there have been a lot of neat new maps, events, and terrain types since then there have been very few changes to the basic game. As a result, the game is too long and doesn't make good enough use of its components. It's also too solitaire and it's got some rough corners that any modern developer would probably smooth right out. Unfortunately, Mayfair doesn't seem too inclined to change the game. And who can blame them? Based on the continual flow of Empire Builder variants I have to imagine that the games remain good sellers, and that's something that you don't mess with.

But they should. The games are enjoyable enough that they deserve an even wider audience than they have right now. So, in this column and the next I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and offer up how I'd redesign Empire Builder if I had the chance.

I'm working on the assumption that any new version of the game would have to keep the base ideals of the original game: building track by drawing on a board with crayons, then moving goods along those tracks in trains in order to meet randomly drawn demand cards. However, even with those tight constraints I think there's a lot of room for change and improvement.

Redesigning the Cards

In recent years Mayfair has slowly been rereleasing their Empire Builder games, and as they have they've been producing nicer looking boards, boxes with prettier covers, and even some new money. What they've largely missed, however, is a redesign of the demand cards.

Demand cards tell you what to do in Empire Builder. Each one lists three different cities, each of which wants a different good. You pick one of those goods to deliver to one of those cities and then you receive a payout.

This might have all worked somewhat well in the original Empire Builder, which was set in the United States, but as the series expanded to different locations it start centering games on maps that people were less familiar with. As a result you now had to constantly look up where each item was available at and then where both those source cities and the destination cities were located on the map. Mayfair tried to make this easy by including reference charts listing where everything was, but it meant that there was always a lot of looking up of locations whenever you got a new demand card.

If there's one thing that The Settlers of Catan taught us, it's that things don't have to be this way. You can incorporate a lot of game information on the cards and other components that you include in a game. And, I think this is the place to really start redesigning Empire Builder.

Nearby I've mocked up a card from Australian Rails (above right) and then I've offered a simple variant (left) of it which simply lists the map grid location of the destination city. With a day or two's work you could probably revamp all the existing cards without changing their layout, and you'd end up with a game that had, perhaps, 20% more usability.

Of course this is in no way the be-all or end-all. Better would be to list all the places where your goods could come from as well. So I tried this out in the new card design that you can see nearby (right). It indeed has all of the information: where a good comes from as well as the grid locations for both those sources and the destinations.

I have no doubt that this card does the job. However, it also loses a lot of the simple elegance of the original design, and there's no good focus on the two most important factors: goods and destination. Instead everything mashes together into a singular whole.

This card design stuff can be tough.

I'm happier with my second try at the same, left, which I think makes the information easier to quickly assess. I'm sure it could be better, but I'm putting together a quick sample rather than actually doing a graphic design. The main point is that all the information is in one place, rather than requiring flipping through a booklet or memorizing a bunch of information. I think Settlers has really shown the power of this type of design.

I think another thing that Settlers taught us, which I wasn't able to mock up here, is the value of graphical information in place of simple text. In my ideal card design for Empire Builder each demand would be graphically depicted via a map. You'd see the overall area covered by the game, with source cities marked in red and the destination city marked in green. Maybe there'd even be lines between these points listing the minimal costs for getting from one place to the other, to make it easier for you to assess which source you wanted to go to.

The problem with this final possibility is that the teeny little cards, with three demands each, can't really accomodate it. You'd either need larger cards or, more rationally, you'd need to put a single demand on a card rather than three, and that delves further into upsetting the base design of Empire Builder than I want to this week.

Conclusion

If I've offered one insight into game design this week, I hope it's that graphic design is very important. I'm fairly convinced that The Settlers of Catan has succeeded as one of the best-selling Games of Ours not just because of its gameplay, but also because of its very good and utilitarian graphic design sense. Empire Builder shows how non-utilitarian component design often was just one gaming generation before Catan, but also how there's simple room for improvement.

Next time I'm going to finish up my survey of Empire Builder by talking about some of the other design that could be overhauled to create a richer, and generally improved, twenty-first century game.

PS: Game Store Confidential should be back in this space next Monday.

Something I'm going to go ahead and TRY

Sorry to disappoint many IF they figured that this 'involved' Psychiatry in any form or manner, but WHAT I 'meant' is that I'm going to 'see' about doing some a GINORMOUS 'favor'. One of my favorite series of games are '4' done upon some ''American Revolutionary War'' Battles by 'Oldenberg Grenadiers' and of which there were to have been around '6' MORE! I've included a 'clipping' as you can view here, that HAS these listed upon this. You'll need to 'click' on it to enlarge that to look closely upon the other 'titles' that were to have been. There are even some ''Campaign'' games of which were to 'cost' a bit more, but I'd bet that they'd have been well worth what little 'Extra' this might have entailed. Considering the quality of the 'ones' that WERE produced and distributed, then I see the standards would have been kept up too.

Now, what I am 'proposing' to DO is to ''re-issue'' these on my very OWN with some upgrades of my 'own' devising as well, for those already out. I'm hoping to ''flush out'' these folks and FIND out just what happened to the rest of them! Somebody has to have gotten a lot of 'work' done on the 'future' additions to this 'Line' of games in order to be able to present them in many publications with advertisements for such. I don't recall having this particular 'flier' in ANY of the games that I had gotten, while I did obtain mine around 1975 or 1976 and later on. It was only a few years ago that I was even made 'aware' of it from an old magazine that I have and was thumbing through, when it caught my attention. After careful reading upon this, THEN it became evident that I, along with many others, had been missing OUT from the enjoyment of possibly others in this entire 'uncompleted' series! Sure, lots of companies went out on a limb in this regards, while many would complain that I 'may' be diluting the VALUE of the games that 'they' still have by doing thusly. For those of YOU who aren't too familiar with them, then these 'command' Collector's PRICES at around '8'-times or more than what they originally 'cost'! I've had some others that have been able to fetch even ever greater 'ratios' for their price that I had 'paid' for them, like how's about '31'-times for a prime example? But to be 'fair', then I will mention that this particular 'game' that got the highest 'return' did only 'cost' me a mere '$2' when I bought that, while I had it for a couple of years AND it consisted of around '4' Games in a 'Set' or SERIES for them. I knew that I wouldn't ever get around to actually playing any of those and I needed the money instead, at the time. Even now, I'm willing to part with certain ones IF they can get me an indecently 'rewarding' PRICE for that.

Continuing on then, I don't wish to manufacture these 'Games' and THEN 'ask' for an outrageously ridiculous PRICE, in case some are wondering. I also realize that there are many others, since these were first created, that have become readily available and still are. I've got some of them as well and mainly due to them covering additonal 'Battles' that hadn't 'been' done until then. Still, I always liked just HOW these played out with their elegantly easy and simple approaches for this particular 'era' that they covered. When we were able to sit down and actually PLAY a couple of them within the span of one evening's 'sessions', then that displays to ME, just so much the better these are for gaming enjoyment. Sure, we'd have to get used to them at first, but once we did, then we could quickly proceed with the current game and take on another with little difficulty soon thereafter. I won't promise to 'match' their production values on this, since I don't have the 'means' for that, but they won't 'be' some cheap or chintzy appearing 'products' either! If I could keep this around $20~$30 with plenty of ''do it yourself'' on whomever's part, then that'd make it worthwhile for myself and any others that have always wanted to try them out, but couldn't AFFORD to due to their circumstancs. I'm still considering just which 'style' to pursue on these with, such as 'iconic' Soldiers, or maybe just the NATO symbols with spruced up 'Flags' and the like for ease of production. One thing I'd like to avoid is to have these become 'gaudy'(*stunned silence!*) as I've seen in some others that are akin to this period of Historical gaming. Those are all just fine for those who like that sort of 'thing', while I prefer NOT to have them looking like some ''Circus Warfield'' myself, if YOU can 'believe' that! So, if anyone reading this is mildly interested, then let me know and I'll keep you updated upon their 'progress' or whatever. Don't worry, as I intend on 're-doing' almost ALL of the major components and I will be bringing this 'project' onto my own 'blog' so's NOT to get these guys into any 'trouble' that may be resultant from it.

Five Games I Don't Like

Often when I review I choose to talk about games that I like, to help spread the love and bring more gamers into the fold of my favorites. It's a rarity that I specifically pull out a bad game to write a review about--unless it seems to be generating a lot of unwarranted publicity (or unless I've been given a review copy, which pretty much necessitates a review unless it was sent to me cold).

This week, however, I want to change things up a bit, and to talk about a number of the games that I don't like, all of which are considered classics.

Chess

What better place to start than the king of games, what most folks think you're talking about when you say you're playing a "serious" game.

Chess has, I think, been corrupted by its own success.

Back in High School I used to try and play Chess. I'd go by the Chess club at lunch because that's what all the nerds did. But after a year or so I gave up the habit, because I never found Chess that enjoyable--it had too wide of a decision tree, and thus required too much thought--and because I decided that the Chess club members were even more socially retarded than I. That's simply a statement that I really have tried Chess, however, not a statement of why I don't like it.

The biggest actual problem with Chess is the huge amount of literature that has been written about it: the exhaustive listings of starting moves, strategems, and counter-strategems. The necessity to have memorized these hundreds or thousands of standard strategies turns Chess into a game of memory rather than strategy.

That we can now program computers to play as well as the top humans says a lot about how staid and automatic this game has become at any truly competitive level.

Scrabble

Scrabble has much the same problem. It can be perfectly enjoyable at a non-competitive level where players drop down words with their spouses, friends, or loved ones, and might know that "aa" and "qat" are perfectly acceptable words, but not a lot more.

Where Scrabble falls apart, however, is again at the competitive level. It was Word Freak which showed me how truly degenerate Scrabble play is among professionals, with its descriptions of obsessive and continuous memorization of 3-, 4-, and even 5-letter words. Like Chess, Scrabble loses its strategy at higher levels of play and instead becomes a game of memory.

Bridge

Bridge is a fine, though not particularly notable, trick-taking game. The bidding system for Bridge is what really stinks.

I played Bridge for a while when courting my then wife-to-be, and in the process I studied crib sheets carefully. I learned what bids to make with how many points and started to eke out the meanings of what my partner might mean when she was making a bid herself.

I eventually came to the realization that there was no real game to the bidding of Bridge, it was simply the act of learning a secret code--a foreign language--and then applying that linguistic knowledge. And I decided that if I wanted a foreign language in my gaming I'd do better to work on a more useful one, for example by playing A Game of Thrones entirely in Spanish:

"You deseo ... uh ... ser un amigo con blanco. Lobos blancos? Blanco y verde solamente amigos. Muerto ... muertamos rojo. Uh ... Rojo no juega. El pollo rojo esta en la casa loca, mis amigos."

Texas Hold 'em

Before I got involved in European games, I used to have a Poker night every week. It was always Dealer's Choice play, and inevitably someone would offer up one of the Texas Hold 'em variants to play. Usually these games just confounded me, because I didn't understand where the game was.

More recently I was given a review copy of a Texas Hold 'em computer game, and I've now spent several hours trying it out. And I've come to the conclusion that this is scarcely a game worth playing.

Clearly Texas Hold 'em is intended to be a game of almost pure bluff. You're given two cards, and then you can combine those with a set of (eventually) five face-up cards to form the best five-card hand you can. You never get to see anyone else's cards until the very end, and so you have to make your assessment of other peoples' strengths solely based on their bids (and their past behavior).

However, as a game of pure bluff, this is one of the more boring that I've seen. In a 10-player game, you can usually expect 6-9 players to fold before any cards are flipped face-up. The vast majority of games end with the penultimate person folding. For the most part, you don't want to stay in unless you have a pocket pair or a nice high matched set in your hidden cards. So round after round after round it's nothing but "fold", "fold", "fold", "call", "fold", "fold". I think it speaks a lot for how broken this game is that in most games two players are forced to bid--else the folding which takes up the vast majority of gameplay would take up just about all of it.

The forced bids (which increase in value throughout the game) also seem to largely break endgame play where the last few players have to bid every round and the amounts are so high that victory swings back and forth based largely on the draw of the cards.

The problem with Texas Hold 'em is, pretty clearly, that it was developed for TV play. The one "exciting" part of the game is when a couple of players are "all in" and then you slowly reveal the common cards one at a time to see who the actual winner is. Of course, this is a probabilistically random event, with no strategy at all because you've already made your bidding decisions.

On TV these showdowns can look great, and conversely you don't have to sit through hours of people folding. In real life you do, marking Texas Hold 'em as a failure in my book despite its immense popularity.

Puerto Rico

At last we come to one of These Games of Ours. To be honest, I do like Puerto Rico. I think it's an entirely clever and fun game and I often enjoy playing it with some of my best friends.

What I don't like, however, is many of the people who play Puerto Rico. As Puerto Rico has gained renown as one of the most strategic and thoughtful games of the German Invasion, it's begun to suffer from Chess Syndrome, with pre-programmed moves and "optimal" strategies slowly sucking the life out of the game.

Take a moment and listen to the conversation at one of the nearby Puerto Rico tables:

"Well, I would have won if I hadn't been sitting to Jeremy's right, and he kept taking Producer when there was no logical reason for him to do so."

...

"So I took Producer which of course meant that Jamie Sold, then Alexa shipped, which was exactly what I expected because it then let me build on the next turn, though that played into Alexa's hands who had saved up a larger store of money, but if I'd instead built with my then lesser resources, then Jamie would have produced, I would have gotten left with no coffee and Alexa would have shipped anyway, and shipping wasn't an option for me either because then Jamie would still have sold and Alexa would have refused to produce at all ..."

...

"No, no, if he took builder then you have to grab a quarry with settler. Anything else is a subpar move."

There's nothing like a bit of I-know-better-than-you-itis to destroy the fun factor of a game.

(Jeremy Avery expanded on this same topic a while ago in The Jedi of Puerto Rico, though I only found that article after I drafted the above. Ironically my use of the name "Jeremy" in one of my examples had nothing to do with his scribing.)

Final Notes

Perhaps listing this as five games I don't like was a bit strong. I actually like Scrabble and Puerto Rico, two of the games on the list, and if I didn't find it as boring as staring at a blank wall, I'd think the gameplay of Chess was OK.

However each of the five games I list this week, from Chess to Puerto Rico, has what I'd call meta-problems: issues outside the central focus of the game which can still destroy any fun that the game can offer.

Published moves, rote memorization of words, secret codes, made for TV play, and obnoxious know-it-alls, while somewhat beyond the internal scope of these games, still can contribute to their fun (or lack thereof) in the real world.

Christmas in October?

Or a Cruel Joke Perpetrated by the Game Gods?

Into the game store I flew like a flash,
Tore open the doors and looked at the stash.
The light of the neon shown with a glow,
illuminating the games on the shelf there below.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a fabulous game and eight tiny reindeer.

On Saturday morning my kids were invited to a 7-year-old's birthday party set for that afternoon. I got tagged to run into town to pick up a birthday present. Since my wife had reluctantly given me the checkbook to buy a present, I thought I would press my luck and stop by the game store to pick up Alexander the Great. Since the game store is on the way to WalMart I stopped there first.

As I got out of my car and approached the game store I had trouble restraining myself. I could see my breath in the early morning air. A couple puddles were frozen over in the parking lot. Not a breath of wind to be felt. Ahhhhhhh, my favorite time of year, not too hot, not too cold. I had a premonition there was something magical in the air.

I got into the store and what did I see? Not eight tiny reindeer, but something nearly as thrilling... Age of Steam.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! SCORE!!!! High fives all around!! CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER! Alexander was quickly forgotten and I excitedly picked up the only copy of Age of Steam.

I first decided to buy Age of Steam about 10 minutes after it went out of print 2 years ago. It was widely available from on-line stores one day, and, without warning, sold out the next. As soon as it sold out there were promises of a reprint to be available in October 2004, possibly even available by GenCon 2004. It has been a long wait.

After fondling and paying for my latest game I rushed to WalMart, bought some cheap, plastic crap that a seven year-old would like, and rushed home to play with my new toy. I devoured the rules, but I still wasn't comfortable enough with the game to play on Saturday afternoon.

That afternoon we played Rheinlander and Louis XIV after the birthday party, I then pressured everyone at the birthday party to reconvene the next day for a game of Age of Steam.

So, with a better grasp of the rules, three of us got together on Sunday afternoon for our first game of AoS.

Unfortunately, I was the only person who had been anticipating the re-release of this game.

It went over like a fart on a crowded bus.

The one player who is always confused when we first play a game, was still confused, but also bored because I had to refer to the rule book often, generally put-off with my enthusiasm for the game, and sympathetic to the third player who was convinced that the game was broken after I explained how expenses were calculated.

Despite everything, we played a couple rounds. The game was going all right, but we realized all of us had made significant strategic mistakes and mutually agreed to start again. I thought a restart might soften some of the negative feelings toward the game, and bring an air of positivity to the room.

Big mistake.

We should have never restarted. On try 2 there was only one route that was available that could score points on the first round. That route was a good one, though. All the goods could be transported back and forth between both cities. The first two players tied up the available routes between those two cities and left the third guy with nothing.

There were, literally, no goods that could be transported after that. Not even if you were to build a new city. The three of us pored over the board for several minutes looking for a route that could be utilized on the first turn, and there was none, nothing, zip, nada. There wasn't even a route that could be utilized if we let him build 4 rails instead of the 3 he was entitled to.

But forget the first round. Even if you wrote off the first round and set yourself up to transport goods in the second round, you could, at most, before goods were replenished at the end of the first turn, transport 1 good, 1 space during the second round, even with two engines.

Three of us pored over the map looking for any possibility, there were none, nothing, zip, nada.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. I mean maaaaaaaaaaaaan. What are the odds of that happening? That was the final straw. The game was deemed "broken" and everyone found an excuse to leave.

Had I been the third player everything would have still been okay. I would have continued to play, looking for an advantage later in the game. But with feelings running high that the expense phase was broken, the game didn't stand a chance. Looking back, I should have just volunteered to go last. As it was, I was so disappointed that I wasn't thinking clearly.

I may have to seek opponents from outside of the state if I am to ever play Age of Steam again. And, make no mistake, I will play it again.

I was very impressed with the system. The rules were better organized than other Martin Wallace designs, and the game felt well developed to me. After one, partial game, I think the economic system has been greatly improved, yet simplified over other 18xx Railroad games. The player actions seemed a little hokey, but they seemed to be well developed, and appropriate to the goals of the game.

Mark my words, in this The Year of Our Lord 2005, the Seventh Day of October, in the Early A.M Hours Alaska Time. I will fly to Seattle before I will wait another two years to play Age of Steam. I will fly to Botswana to play another game of AoS if I have to.

I was very intrigued. It may be a "10".

Tichu (Passing strategy)

What cards to pass is an important part of Tichu strategy. When deciding what to pass, there are several goals that should weigh on one's decision. These are:

1)Enabling one of the two players in your partnership to be able to call Tichu with a strong chance of making it, if possible.

2)Eliminating hard to play cards (losers) from your hand, especially, low single cards.

3)Not passing the same card to a given opponent as your opponent passed them, setting them up with at least a double, and possibly turning a double into a bomb.

For goal number one, you should determine whether your hand is probably going to be strong enough to call Tichu. If it is, then you probably do not want to pass a winner (Ace, Dragon or Phoenix) to your partner. Instead, a good rule is to pass a relatively high single card, getting it out of your hand. This pass doesn't hurt your partner, and possibly gives them a high double or triple to use as a winner. If you need to pass your partner a lower single, it is justified in this case, as you are going to call Tichu. Your hope here is that your partner will help you out, and increase your chance to make a Tichu by passing you an Ace, Dragon, or Phoenix. However, if your hand is so overpowered that you could pass one of those winners to your partner and still have a very high chance of making Tichu, you should do it, in hopes that it helps them to go out 1-2 with you.

If your hand is not strong enough to call Tichu, then you will probably want to pass a winner to your partner, hoping to enable them to call.

For goal number two, you are passing two low single cards to your opponents in most cases. I should note that if you have a straight which has a couple extra duplicate cards in it, then those cards should be considered singles. For example, 8776554 should be considered and 87654 straight, and an extra 7 and 5 singles. The 7 and 5 would be good cards to pass to your opponents. In a case where you have only one or zero low singles, but you have a low pair, especially a very low pair like 2s or 3s, you should pass the low pair, one card to each opponent. One benefit of this is that it is not possible for you to have handed your opponents a 4 of a kind bomb.

For goal number three, you should develop a passing scheme with your partner. An example could be 'pass odd, low, left'. This would indicate that one is trying to pass an odd card left and an even card right, or barring that, the lower card left and the higher card right. If both players on a team do this, it minimizes the chance that you will each pass one of your opponents the same card. For example, if I am passing a 2 and a 3, and my partner is passing a 2 and a 3, we each pass our 3s left (to different players), and our 2s right to different players, so each opponent gets a 2 and a 3 from us. Without this rule, there is a 50% chance that we would have just passes one opponent a pair of 2s, and the other a pair of 3s, which is far worse for us, as those cards take less time to get out of their hands, and might create a bomb.

If one is passing two odd cards or two even cards, they pass the lower one left and the higher one right. While this isn't perfect, it is a greatly reduced chance of passing a duplicate card. Obviously, any system will work, as long as you agree to it with your partner ahead of time.

A couple notes on passing certain cards:
If you have the phoenix, and you aren't going to call Tichu, you should almost certainly pass it to your partner unless it is critical for something like a long straight for you, like 345P789, where without the phoenix you are left with a number of singles. This is because there is a significant chance it will enable your partner to make a straight out of some singles or to extend a straight, and can be a huge help in their calling Tichu.

If you pass the dog to your partner, it had better be because you are going to call Tichu. If you pass the dog to your partner, you may have just wrecked their Tichu. If you don't call one yourself, it could end up costing you 100 points. Of course, if after receiving the pass, your hand is wrecked and you cant make it, don't call it and lose another 100 points, but if your hand is such that the Tichu would be shaky unless the pass is good for you, you probably shouldn't pass your partner the dog. Instead, you might pass them a winner, hope they call Tichu, and help them by playing the dog yourself.

I don't recommend passing the Dog to your opponents, unless there is a player on their team that is just calling Tichu almost every hand. In that case, they could be using a plan of having the other player always pass that player their best card, to enable Tichu. Here, you could give the dog to the constant Tichu caller. Another exception, of course, is if an opponent has called Grand Tichu, or for some reason called Tichu before the pass. Here, you would always want to pass the dog to that player, since it is the lowest loser of all, and they must waste a lead getting rid of it.

The 1 is a card that you probably have no need to pass. Definitely don't pass it to your opponents, and there is probably no need to give it to your partner. One except ion is if someone has called Grand Tichu. Here, if you have the 1, get it to the player before the Grand Tichu caller, and have them play it and wish for an Ace. This 'wastes' an ace from the Grand Tichu caller's hand.

Name and Number Contest

I'm not sure where this idea came from but I hope we can have a little fun with it. This contest offers the chance for 30 GG, 15 for each half of the contest. The jar in the pictures contain pieces from 20 different games, some have just one piece represented, others have several pieces. Your mission, should you decide to take it, is:

1) to name as many of the games represented as you can. This answer should be emailed to me at: sodakladygamer@yahoo.com.

2) to guess how many pieces are in the jar (which is about 1 1/2 cups in size). This answer can be posted right here on the blog.





~~~~~~~~
Games

Call me crazy if you'd like, but my husband and I really enjoy Fjords but I wondered what would happen if there were more tiles so you play only one round rather than 3. To this end, I bought a second copy and, after marking the tiles so they could be separated out again, we gave this a try. We used 6 farmhouses and all of the field markers.

The game started quite normally but after I'd placed 4 houses, there were still half the tiles to play which meant I would have to very selective with the last 2. I was worried that we would be forced to create an island before we'd gone through most of the tiles since there are many more water tiles, but that didn't happen. In fact, we ended the game with EVERY tile placed! The final result was very close with Richard beating me by 4 points.

We liked this variation which seems to force you to think more carefully about when and where you place your farmhouses and makes the placing of the field markers less obvious since there are several places which demand immediate attention. I'm considering using only 5 farmhouses as a way to make it even tougher.

We only played once but I can see this as a nice change from the normal play. I would also like to try playing with 3 players just to see if that would work. Unfortunately, that means begging or threatening to get my daughter to play with us! I think 3-player would offer a totally different strategy when placing farmhouses since there are 2 interlopers you have to fend off.
~~~~~~~
Until next time, Clubs are trump.

Mary

Happy New Year

The Jewish holidays are upon us. Starting Monday night and going until Wednesday night is Rosh Hashana (the new year). That's why I'm posting this blog entry early.

Next week we have Yom Kippur, Wed night to Thursday night. After that, Monday night to Tuesday night is the "first night" of Sukkot (Tabernacles to you Latin speakers; outside of Israel, the "first night" is two nights instead of one, and therefore goes until Wed night) and the following Monday night to Tuesday night is Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah (I won't translate that one for you. Suffice to say, a strange combination of praying for rain and dancing around semi-drunk; again, outside of Israel, two nights.)

The JSGC is hosting a Game Day on Oct 23.

God willing, the day after Simchat Torah, Wed night, Oct 26, I am headed for Dallas, in order to be at BGG.con. While in the U.S., I hope to get a chance to pimp my game. To whom ... I'm not exactly sure. I hope, at least, to get a chance to talk to the publisher currently interested in it. I will have other copies to play at the con and to send to game groups and reviewers who may be interested, in the hopes of generating some combination of critical feedback/good review in order to spur on publication.

Contact me if you want a copy.

I will also be bringing complete sets of the best/most interesting of my Puerto Rico buildings (while I'm making mockups of my game, why not print these at the same time? I asked myself. Why not indeed? I replied.). Contact me if you want a copy.

So, what is it about cons? I've never been to one. The closest I ever came was back in the days when my information about the gaming world came from Dragon magazines. I really wanted to go to Gen Con. I lived in NY, and Gen Con was in Ohio. The only person I knew who could drive and might be interested in going was Gary, otherwise known as "The Prince of Darkness". He said that it wasn't worth it - he calculated the cost of the trip based on how many speeding tickets he could expect to receive every 100 miles.

That didn't stop me from planning what I would do at Gen Con down to the last detail. The Gen Con supplement in the Dragon had a list of every scheduled game session, according to module type, game system, DM, and who knows what else. It must have been 20-30 pages of information in teensy script. I made this huge calendar and went through every single session description looking for the most normal, and therefore the most interesting games, to me. No wierd systems, no "humorous" games - just adventure, thievery, hack-and-slash. Straight AD&D.

The exception was a good game of Cosmic Encounter, which was occasionally scheduled, if I recall correctly. I was always up for that.

I filled out the registration form, making sure every block of time, morning to night, was filled with exactly what I wanted to do and play. I just never mailed it. Sad.

I must have had tons more fun preparing for the con then I ever would have had actually going. How much do we actually experience while something is happening, anyway, compared to the anticipation of it happening? I remember my first wedding; actually, I remember the blur that was my first wedding.

My D&D campaigns were the same. It didn't matter if I was the player or the DM. As the player, I read and re-read the Player's Guide a dozen times, looking for every little rule in the equipment (including making my own), the spells, and the languages that never came into play. The alignments - yeesh. As the DM, every page of the DMG and the MMs: I, II, and the FF. Every potion chart. Every word about weather. Of course, I then went on to design dungeons with an endless series of 30 by 30 rooms and random monsters and treasure. Sure, playing was fun. But think of all the enjoyment I got off-hours.

That must have been why, when the nineties came around, Magic was such a natural fit for me. A game that required preparation. Yes! I never had tons of money to spend, and frankly, I never really cared. I bought maybe a few dozen starters and boosters, traded for a few hundred commons, and inherited a few thousand commons from a friend (all of which I gave away to others to help them start their own collections).

I built and rebuilt decks. I scoured and read every major site on Magic strategy and deck building - The Dojo, MTG-STRATEGY-L, r.g.t-c.m.s, etc... I never had any of the key cards in the major tournament decks, except by some accident (I had a Necro or two, an Armageddon, etc...) I had no desire to go spend more than 10 cents on any card. Never did. Never will. I had no desire to play competitive in the cons. I played with my friends.

We played constructed deck maybe five or six times when we first started, because that was what the rulebook said. Then we began mixing cards together and played draft games, and we never looked back. The building, the preparing, the playing - they are a lot of fun. Beating someone because I have better cards than they do isn't.

Now I have a game group. I read tons of web sites. I buy very few games. Before I play, I read all the rules, try to make everything ready before people come. More preparation.

And preparation for the con. I still don't know what is going to happen, but I scour web sites looking for things to do, people to play with. And I will be missing half of it! I will be staying near the Valley Mall, about 8 miles north of downtown on Willow, so from Friday evening until Saturday evening I will be unable to play. Unless some kind souls want to travel up to the house I'll be staying in, in which case I can play with you there.

And how do I budget my time? Do I plan on playing all Thursday night, possibly missing gaming on Friday, or sleep Thursday night and play on Friday? What about Saturday night/Sunday? Will there be a place for me to drop off in the hotel, since I won't be staying there? What is going to happen? Panic in the streets!

This brings me back to the New Year. The Jewish New Year is one of repentance, and looking forward to doing better in the coming year, kind of like New Year's resolutions times a thousand. From the outside, it looks like Rosh Hashana is one (two) day(s) of preparation for a year of activity, but that is incorrect. We spend thirty days before Rosh Hashana preparing for one/two days of prayer and transformation. That transformation is then supposed to carry us through the year, because afterwards we are supposed to be better people.

So which is it? The preparation? The doing? Both? That kind of tension is what makes life interesting.

Yehuda

Game Store Confidential ~ Wyatt

The three things that have meant the most to me in my life beyond the usual candidates we all have; such as family, friends, church, patriotism, military service and whatnot, have been my children, my involvement with games and my involvement with motorcycles.

Yes, kids are “family’, but having been married and divorced enough times that I’m writing a self-help book about the subject, I have to separate children and family. As for my extended family… they can “bugger off”, as the Brits would say. I’ve been gone from Texas for so long I wouldn’t recognize them, nor them, me. This is probably a good thing. Not having a close connection to them has been a real financial boon for me.

My dad and mom are still alive and kicking, thanks to really good genetics and just plain stubbornness and I consider them and my kids to be the real family.

Motorcycles are a solitary pastime for me. I don’t belong to clubs, riding groups or anything organized. If I want to ride my Harley I just get on it and ride it. If I don’t need to stop and take a leak, then I don’t. No annoying female passengers nudging me in the back when we pass a gift shop or rest stop. No riding buddies honking at me to slow down or to pull over so they can put a fresh Tucks pad on. Just me.

Games, being interactive and requiring at least one other human being, are a fine substitute for having a circle of friends to ride with, drink with or root a football team on with. I can move anywhere in the country and within a matter of weeks be sitting around a table with a bunch of like-minded Geeks having a great time over a board game.

Women (sorry girls, I don’t mean those of you reading this, I mean those who aren’t reading it) are interchangeable. Well, at least they have been for me. By and large I get along with them and while I’ve never had any problems getting involved with women, it can get a bit messy when the time comes to part company. I’ll get back to you when I figure out how to make that painless.

Then there are my children. Believe it or not, they are even more important to me than games or motorcycles. I know that may shock some of you, but it’s true. Anyway, I have three of them.


Jaimy is my oldest. She worked in my store as her first job and I fully intend to write about that one day. It was hilarious because she’s a real looker and the effect she had on the gamers is legendary in Idaho. She’s currently an agricultural biologist with the US Customs Department in Chicago. She’s married to a semi-struggling artist who, big suprise, she met when he used to come into my store in the days I sold alternative comics. If you like the style of art I refer to as Urban, look him up and buy some of his stuff. His name is Noble Hardesty and apparently enough people buy his art for him to be considered a professional.

Marshall is my next oldest. He worked in my store as his first job. It was hilarious because he really wanted to work anywhere else…preferably somewhere that had actual attractive young females as customers. Marshall turned down an outstanding career as a programmer with a Defense Department contractor when he was 20 and working there on a summer internship. He stated firmly that creating government spy software was not part of his lifetime plan. He is also married, to a nice, attractive young woman and they run some sort of network solutions and web business in far northern California. Marshall made his first fortune at age 14 by selling his Magic cards at about a 4,000 percent profit.

And now to the subject of my contribution today. My youngest son, Wyatt.

I’ll be the first to admit that at my age I have absolutely no business having a 3 year old boy. And he is three today… even though I don’t think he knows it, or particularly cares. He will though, enjoy the cake and the additional construction equipment that he’ll receive for his party.


I am completely and unalterably addicted to this little guy. Wyatt is nothing like my other two children and they were pretty darned special when they were three… well… Marshall was special because I didn’t actually tie him up and keep him contained to a small closet until he was 18… but Wyatt is different.

I have never been around a happier, more affectionate and more charming child. He is a bug catching, backhoe-loving, motorcycle-admiring little tank. He rarely cries even though I already can count three scars (little ones) on his handsome face. He does throw fits, but then so do I when I don’t get what I want. He has three older half-sisters who haven’t got a clue what to do with him so he hasn’t decided to talk a whole lot yet, he just orders them around in Wyatt-speak and they oblige him like little robots in skirts.

Of the three kids, I think Wyatt will be the gamer. Jaimy and Marshall could care less about board games. There’s an attitude and intensity about this little guy that I sense will develop into a love of the mental process and handling of cards and pieces that games require. Wyatt, I think, will fall naturally into that niche.

One thing, for those of you who don’t have kids, that is a common misconception about toddlers and young kids is that they have a short attention span. They don’t. They have an attention span that is easily satisfied, not short. There’s a world of difference. This morning I got into my Urban Assault Vehicle and Wyatt wanted in. So I put him in my lap, fired it up and sat back to operate the throttle and brake while suggesting that he ought to turn this way rather than drive over that horse or turn back to the right rather than take that gate out.

He drove around the upper part of Mosquito Acres maybe three times and then he was done. No mas. Finito. If my dad had done that with me on my 3rd birthday I’d have happily driven the truck until the fuel ran out. But not Wyatt. He just wanted a taste and then he wanted to head back inside and see if there was anything left to break… or whatever he went back inside to do.

There’s just something about this kid that is compelling and unusual… maybe it’s his compassion and joy in just about anything he’s invited to participate in, or perhaps it’s his willingness to take a struggling earwig and put it in his sister’s hair or maybe it’s just plain old dad loving his own kid. But I think my next 15 years are going to be as much fun and as fulfilling as the years while my two older children were growing up.

I’m pretty sure Jaimy and Marshall are going to make a ton of money… so I haven’t paid close attention to my retirement account. I just hope Wyatt becomes a game geek in addition to whatever else he chooses to do with his life. I get a warm feeling about the notion of me being a crotchety old game geek, rolling up to the house on my Harley (probably a Trike by then), pulling a copy of the latest and greatest new game out of the saddlebags and going inside to teach the young whippersnapper a thing or two about life.

A nice image, for me.

Happy Birthday Wyatt.

Stating the case for ''state of the art''

With some very vivid & descriptive 'ideas' regarding just WHAT would become the ''latest & greatest'' regarding boardgame 'designs', then from the sounds of it, you can easily see technology rearing its head on this. I'm sure that many would envision some sort of 'gaming table' in which you could push some buttons or enter a ''game ID'' and have that become visually & virtually displayed then. Sure, that'd be nice, as long as you don't have power outages, or your data gets 'corrupted', while for some others then they happen to LIKE the 'feel' of their 'bits' as well. I'm in the latter 'group' myself since I've actually been creating my own kinds for various games for close to a couple of decades now and from scratch in most instances. I've got a good gaming 'buddy' that I LOST to computer gaming a good while ago, and he's not coming back! He's always trying to get ME to join him on this, and I did for a while, but I didn't get the same satisfaction as I would with 'boardgames'. Yet, when I press him about turning over his 'collection' to me, of which I would compensate him handsomely for this, then he insists that he just wants to 'keep 'em' for the nostalgia factor- ain't that about a BLIP!?! Hell, at least with my OWN amassing of these, then I did have a 'dream' for creating numerous ''Gaming Libraries'' across the entire WORLD with these, hence my acquiring numerous copies of certain titles that I felt would be most 'popular'. If others would be inspired to do likewise, then maybe we can resurrect the sense of 'community' from our efforts on this?

Then we have the folks that think that there's enough game designs being formulated and released as it is, and they could be correct on this. Still, others lament the next 'Expansion' for the likes of certain games, when they'd just as soon SEE some other 'fresh' creation instead. What can you say? Those people are just milking that for what it's worth and maybe they ARE in some sort of 'rut', in regards to this. So just seek out some other games from another that would interest YOU, and maybe get out of your OWN 'rut' too. My GAWD! They're even remaking ''the Fog'' movie! Maybe to have that take on an even greater 'relevance', then they could have at LEAST gone with reworking of the main title to: ''the SMOG'', as many folks could definitely relate with THAT! What's next: ''Insolvent Soylent Greeners''? To paraphrase the late, great 'one': ''these kids these days have NO 'respect' I tell ya!'' Plenty of people wish to have an original design reprinted with practically the same old 'style' as that, while others look forward to the 'updated' version of such. In most cases, then the subsequent COST factor also increases significantly due mostly to inflation or production of such. I think that with some companies adopting the ''Pre-Order'' doctrines for some of their products, then this may just become the case for the smaller facilities, as then they can count upon those to gear up and get something completed without going broke in the process. The other larger ones can afford to go with what they're currently doing, since they may have many other things that could 'buck up' any flagging sales for the time being.

As another matter to keep in mind, then I recall some criticisms from certain people-they KNOW who they are-about myself and any others 'critiquing' games. Their response was to inform us to design our OWN and have these undergo scrutiny, while I have no problem with such. Yet the whole notion that ''you can't criticize something UNLESS you've done likewise'' is fairly moot, since I don't have to 'be' a Movie producer, Book writer, or Musician to truly appreciate another's efforts, and then decide for myself whether or NOT I'd like something of theirs. Considering that not too many so-called 'reviewers' have the SAME 'credentials' in regards to one another, then just HOW would anyone expect to gain experiences in this? Sure, I readily admit that my 'style' tends to offend plenty of people, who factiously tend to overlook their OWN gaming preferences, I'll mention. I guess they should just 'restrict' themselves to the likes of CHESS or Checkers with their ''Black & White'' connotations for this?
''my EYES! zee 'goggles' zhey do NUTHINK!''

A Whole Lot of Nothing

I've always been ambivalent about rating games. My first instinct was that it was impossible, pointless, and probably not healthy. Why should I assign a number to something as fluid and mysterious as the fun of a game? It would be like bar-coding butterflies, or keeping a tally of how many chews I got out of a piece of gum. After all, the one necessary ingredient of any game is enthusiasm, and enthusiasm feeds on itself; to nail such a thing down would be to stunt its growth and my own. If I played a game, thought it was okay, and assigned it the number 'six', how could I ever get caught up in the fun of playing it again knowing that somewhere in the distance there were supposed to be seven, eights, nines and tens? Conversely, could an assignation of a 'nine' keep me from letting go of something when it was time to move on? Would I owe a debt of loyalty to a cardboard box?

In time, though, I saw that the ratings do have their uses. They are a helpful way to define one's thoughts about gaming, and a very easy way to convey that information to others. I could write a whole essay on the balance between control and chaos or work expended versus points gained, or I could just tell you that Euphrat & Tigris is an eight and Taj Mahal is a nine, and from that you could probably peg what sort of gamer I am and would know whether you would ever want to sit at the same table with me.

So for a while it was something that I enjoyed working at, as it was a way of defining an aesthetic which seemed so clear and yet was not so easy to put into words.

The catch is that there are sucky things in the world, or stuff that I just don't happen to like, and so, regardless of the positivity in the original intention, once I started assigning numbers to games, some stuff had to wind up in the bottom half of the scale. What could I do? If I don't like something, what else can I say except that I don't like it?

Certainly I could just shut up and say nothing, but there was trap set in all of this, which is that little bit of vanity in me which would like people to take my opinions seriously. I mean, anyone can say "I like this and this and this," but the follow-up question that no one wants to hear is "fine, but who gives a rat's ass?" If one wants to be discerning, one needs to know both sides of the coin, the good and the bad, and if one wants to be perceived as discerning, one needs to illustrate that knowledge. After all, if I only tell you which ten games I like, you'll never know whether I like those games because they're good or if I like them because I like everything I play and those are the ten games that I've happened to play.

So, as I said, in addition to the earnest and well-intentioned recommendations of games that I liked, I also gave bad ratings to games that I didn't like. Why not? It all makes sense, in an abstract, mule-headed sort of way.

And yet...I often felt a twinge of guilt when the subject of negativity came up in the various online fora devoted to our hobby. One comment that particularly struck me was something which my blogmate Yehuda said last month: "I think this is a great lesson in life, and one of the hardest. You must always ask yourself before you say anything negative: Why am I speaking? What am I trying to accomplish?" I immediately agreed with this thought, and in fact I felt that I could have written the same words myself, but in hearing this idea from someone else, I was suddenly struck by the question of whether had I ever really taken the advice to heart.

Was what I was doing really serving any purpose? I'm not so sure.

In reading other people's opinions online, one thing has made itself aggressively clear to me: there is no hobby game so inimical to my tastes that there isn't someone out there who loves it to death. Now, inasmuch as the hobby ought to be about having fun, and inasmuch as you believe what I said above about the one necessary ingredient to any game being enthusiasm, am I doing more harm than good by publicly knocking games for no reason? Sure, if someone asked me a direct question about whether I liked something, I would say so if I didn't, because presumably the person only asked me because they knew my tastes, knew that they jibed with their own, and were interested in hearing what I had to say; however, to just leave a judgment of "three out of ten" hanging out in cyberspace might turn someone away from something they could have really enjoyed.

The counter-argument, I suppose, would be that negative comments help steer people away from mediocre or bad stuff, but I've come to the realization that that is not my function in life. If you're a person who feels that he or she can't afford to take a chance on buying a game that he might not like, my advice to you is to not buy anything and to enjoy the games that you already have.

So, the upshot of this whole long, boring thing is that I ditched most of my low ratings on BGG, and toned down the comments that were left behind so that they were more expressive of a point of view rather than a judgment. In short, I think I would rather base the way I use the ratings on a recommendation model rather than on a critical one; the message can be "this is what I like" instead of "this is what I think." Maybe on seeing the absence of that pleasing bell curve some people will doubt whether I am a critical thinker, and so may not take what I say very seriously, but, well, so what?

I must admit, though, that I did keep a couple of lowish ratings for games that I actually own. For some reason I feel like if I shelled out for a game and it's still cluttering up my shelf I have the right to thumb my nose at it a little. I might change my mind about that later, though; maybe I'll make 'six' the cutoff point, or 'seven', or 'eight', or maybe I'll just wipe it all out entirely.

I'll finish this little bit of nothing by saying that all this isn't intended to be a put-down of critics, even ones who are habitually negative. A good critic can be a very useful person; a good critic will let the reader know his frame of reference, his standards, and the logic behind his statements. If you disagree with a good critic, you at least know why and can apply your knowledge of your two different frames of reference to what that person says and get predictable results. An excellent example of a good critic is, of course, Chris Farrell, whose experience, insight and writing skills make for some great reading, if you happen to share his aesthetic. Most importantly, he has a good set of priorities, I think: he just wants something that's interesting, replayable and fun. Me too!

Unfortunately, the mistake I made is in thinking that just because a good critic is a useful thing to have, everyone ought to play the critic. I don't think that's true, or at least I don't think it's true for me. As much as I'd like to, I don't have the time or mental space to do justice to that role. I still want to continue to write critically about games, but only about those for which I can claim to have some enthusiasm; probably my writing is most worthwhile when I'm getting people excited about playing games and not the reverse. That I can make time for.