2005

I'd hoped to have the second part of my gaming history ready in time for today, but things went awry and it never quite gelled, so instead I'll just say thank you to my Gone Gaming blogmates and to all our readers. Special thanks go to Coldfoot for his initiative and for including me in the project. I hope that 2006 is another great year for the hobby.

Holidays and Games: A tale of a car trip, a shop, a calamity and the game publisher that saved Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year and the Compliments of the Season to all our readers. We're back home and recovering from our 860 km trip north to Sydney to spend Christmas with Fraser’s family.

To make the 10-hour car trip easier on all of us, we decided to split it over two days. In setting our day 1 target at Wodonga, 3 hours north of Melbourne, I confess to having had an ulterior motive. Wodonga's Twin City Albury has a games shop, with an ex-employee who posted regularly at BoardGameGeek. We were intrigued enough by her posts to want to see the shop for ourselves.

And what a games shop we found!

When we arrived, just after 10am on a Thursday morning, the shop was BUSY. There was a good range of customers – gamers and non-gamers, children and adults, families and single people. The shop itself was clean and brightly lit, with walls lined with games and a range of giant chess pieces (available for hire) in the window to draw people in. There was none of that back room/slightly dingy feeling that many games shops seem to have.

Up the front, there were children's games, with a range of Knizia's children's titles displayed prominently over a couple of shelves. Moving through the store, we saw a pile of Carcassonne, with a "recommended" notice that went into some detail about its Spiel des Jahres win. Settlers was prominently displayed, including a copy of the new Settlers chest (I looked but didn’t buy) and there were other big piles of 'featured' Euros on tables throughout the shop. A display folder held reviews of games for shoppers to browse, and many games were shown with little personal notes about what great games they were. When we asked about 'Essen games', Phil (the owner) disappeared into his back room and came back with a range that included Big City, Attribute and Shear Panic (!). More common games, including a range of -opoly variants, are further back in the shop - the opposite of the usual layout where Euros are banished to the back corner.

This shop challenges many larger games stores to lift their no-pun-intended.

Phil and his staff are clearly excited about games, and about helping their customers discover new games. They run a very accessible shop which offers something for everyone, whatever kind of gamer they may be. The shop has close ties with local game groups, which are clearly very active and enthusiastic – one local member publishes a regular game review in the regional newspaper, alongside their film and DVD reviews. A staff member is paid to visit local schools to demonstrate games and spread the word more widely – he clearly does a great job, as one school asked him to come back and run a full day program for them (and paid him for it too).

Phil is a guy who believes in his product, and works hard to promote it. With around 100,000 people in the region, we felt that he would have to work to build his market, but he's clearly doing it very successfully and enthusiastically.

We left with Big City, Attribute, Pick Picknic, Guillotine (for Fraser's 12 year old cousin), Halli Galli (another gift), a 'Diablo' toy for Biggie and a puzzle called Rush Hour, which has been recommended to me (as a game) by several parents at Biggie's school. Not a small haul.

Rush Hour is an interesting toy and would, I think, appeal to many gamers. It’s clearly a big seller for this year, and the shop had a big display with giant-sized pieces for customers to try. It’s a fun little puzzle, in which you try to move a gridlocked car off the 'roads' (a 6x6 grid).

The puzzles are divided into four difficulty levels; the 'easy' ones are definitely easy, later puzzles less so, and we've not tried the 'Expert' level yet but I hear they can seem diabolical. Additional card sets are available too. We took it to Christmas lunch and all the kids (aged 6-12 or so) gathered around to play it, while some of the parents snuck peeks too. Otto's keen just to play with the toy cars. Back home, it was the adults' turn to fiddle with it. At heart, it's a very dry abstract, but the theming works well – I'd recommend it for anyone over eight, possibly even younger. It's also very well packaged, which impressed me. They even supplied the elastic band to hold the lid on!

A brief stop at Mind Games Albury on the way home netted us a copy of Gargon, an older Rüdiger Dorn game. I've been a Dorn fangirl since getting the Louis XIV bug, and very much enjoyed this lighter card game when a friend brought it round recently for us to try.

We didn't do very much gaming at all on this trip. It was hot and humid, and swimming pools were a higher priority than scoring tracks, especially for the kids. We gave Biggie, after much pleading, a copy of Connect Four for Christmas. It had a good run, as did Boggle and Auntie's set of dominoes. We managed most of a game of Bohnanza one hot evening, played Gulo Gulo with a BGG buddy and his family, and I think one of Fraser's stepbrothers may be interested in Ticket to Ride, especially the Märklin version, but all in all not much gaming was done. We hope that our holiday at the beach will see rather more gaming - we're both on leave until the end of January, so we should have plenty of time for it.

Fraser and I didn't give each other games this year – our gifts were a casualty of the need to pack the car, although I did manage to buy a dice tower for Fraser (it's the "woodburned sample" with the F on the front), which was waiting for him at home. I do have something coming (from adamspielt! yay!) from my BGG Secret Santa, a last-minute activity that really added some fun to the Christmas season thanks to Tom Vasel. My mark got a copy of Power Grid and some Meeple-shaped gingerbreads - I'm still terribly proud of the Meeple-shaped cookie cutter that I made before Christmas. We got a big parcel from another BGG buddy today, who had ordered in bulk from Boards & Bits and forwarded some games to us on the slow boat, which feels like our Christmas gift to ourselves.

With gaming sessions planned for January 2nd and 6th, as well as whenever our friends want to play, the gaming outlook is fine for 2006.

Before I finish, though, there’s a special story that I have to tell:

How Looney Labs saved our Christmas.

A month or so ago, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a copy of Zendo from Looney Labs. They were offering a free copy of "Flowers and Fluxx" with every order over a certain amount – essentially, a copy of Fluxx with some little plush posable flowers.

Being a sucker for any kind of freebie, I ordered a set. When it arrived before Christmas (in about 4 days – how's that for prompt shipping!), we decided to give one little flower to each of the six girls or women we were looking forward to spending Christmas with – our daughters, Fraser's sister, and his cousin and her two daughters, who were travelling to Sydney from New Zealand. We packed them up in the bags of presents and loaded them into the car.

Christmas Eve came, and we finally got the girls settled into bed around eleven (we'd been out visiting the cousin and her family). We retrieved all our bags of presents to wrap them, while Santa did his special magic. We'd left some of the larger gifts at home, so I wrapped a gift for each of the girls – a toy for Otto and a copy of Connect Four for Biggie, before sorting out the rest of their smaller gifts (mostly books) from their individual bags.

Disaster!

When we packed the car, we had done the unthinkable: all of Otto's carefully chosen gifts were still in Melbourne.

That's right. I left my daughter's gifts in another city, and didn't realise until it was too late to buy things anywhere except a 7-11.

We had nothing to give our almost-three-year-old, who had been looking forward so desperately to Christmas.

I was calm for about half an hour, then had a spectacular meltdown. Which just proves that melting down can be constructive, because I didn't think of anything while I was calm!

We had bought her a magnetic "Maisy Mouse" playboard to use on the car journey, which we'd never given her. Retrieving it from the car, I wrapped it. Things were looking better, but it didn't feel like we had a proper gift for her yet.

Then inspiration struck. Forget supplementing other presents with plush posable flowers, we had a bouquet for our little darling.

Well, that bouquet of flowers was the first gift she opened, and the one she carried with her all day. She kissed them, she cuddled them, she showed them to everyone. We played guessing games where we hid one flower and she had to guess what colour was missing. They were in her hand when she dozed off in the car, and in her hand when she sleepily toddled into her auntie’s home at eleven o'clock that night. They were the gift that the other kids wanted to look at and play with, and the gift that she guarded most fiercely – even overcoming her reticence to speak to one of her stepcousins (she'd never met any of them before) to ask for her flower back.

So thankyou to everyone at Looney Labs. You saved Christmas.

LINKS:
Mind Games Albury http://www.mindgamesalbury.com
Looney Labs: http://www.looneylabs.com/

Lastly, a reminder about our very own Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. If you've not already read about them, please do so and nominate your favourite sites, articles and podcasts for this prestigious award.

You know you want to.

May your Meeples be Gingerbread Meeples,

Melissa.

Happy New Year

With 3 days remaining of 2005, I took a look at my game statistics for the year and was sad to see that I’d only played 211 games—a lot less than I’d LIKE to have played. I hope next year will be better, but I won’t hold my breath.

Within that 211 games were 83 different games, many of them with just 1 play, but several that found their way to the table many times.

Memoir ’44—10 plays. A light war game that’s fun to play as long as you don’t mind the quirks that luck can play on you.

Attika—9 plays. Great as a 2-player game that my husband doesn’t mind playing with me. I really like resource management and that’s what this game is all about.

Architekton—8 plays. I kept coming back to this one trying to figure it out because it just doesn’t feel quite right. The basic idea is great but it never really played out all that well, in my opinion.

Fjords—8 plays. Fjords got many plays because it’s so quick and we really enjoy it. I’ll play this at the drop of a meeple.

Shadows Over Camelot—7 plays. Cori and I really enjoyed this at first but, as I figured, it doesn’t have the staying power to draw us back repeatedly.

Ta Yu—7 plays. A very good 2-player game with fabulous pieces. Richard and I like it for a quiet, pensive time together. Two plays were with 3 players which makes the game a bit different, strategically, but still very good.

Plunder—6 plays. Richard and I really enjoyed this for a while but I haven’t been drawn to it recently. There’s a lot going on in this game and yet it feels light when you’ve played it a few times.

Jambo—6 plays. One of my favorite Kosmos 2-player games with it’s variety of card abilities.

Titicaca—6 plays. An interesting area-control game with auctions, building and merging of areas. It also plays pretty well with just 2 players.

Ingenious—5 plays. I’m not totally impressed with Ingenious but it’s a good game to play with my son and his girlfriend.

StreetSoccer—5 plays. A fun time for 2 players when you want something light and fast. There are strategic choices to make but the roll of the die can still jump on your back and make you holler for mercy.

Through the Desert—5 plays. Still one of my favorites and I often use it with new gamers since it’s easy to explain and not that hard to comprehend but it displays well the idea of Euro-games—your decisions matter.

Corsari—4 plays. A simple variant of Gin Rummy which my husband likes very much and often suggests we play.

Crazy Chicken—4 plays. This simple card game is one of my favorites when we’re too tired for a heavier game.

Hansa—4 plays. I’ve played this many times with 2, 3 and 4 players and I still enjoy it. Managing Action Points is always fun for me, combined with balancing your selling and building which makes this one of my favorite lighter games.

Rheinlander—4 plays. One of the best games I bought this year with its take-over area control and hand management. I hope to try out the 2-player variant soon which Chuck Messenger posted on BGG recently. It sounds like a very good scaled-down version which keeps the play tight.
~~~~~~~~
Game Buying Update

For those of you regular readers who are curious, no, I still haven’t bought any new games! I haven’t even been tempted in the last 2 weeks although I have been checking the Boardgame News site regularly.
~~~~~~~~
Games

It’s been a very dry couple of weeks here so the only game I have to mention is Flandern 1302. Christmas Eve I persuaded Cori and Richard to give it a trial run with me and I have to say we were less than bowled over by it. We were pretty bored for the first half of the game and, although a couple more plays may improve our opinions, I doubt it will ever become one of our favorites.

On reading the rules, I felt it has the possibility for some clever moves and forward planning but the first game didn’t see us using the neutral guild to our best advantage. I would like to give it another try but I’m afraid I may not be able to convince Cori to give it another chance.
~~~~~~~~
Until next time, I wish you a Happy New Year filled with Love from your friends and family, Peace in your life and your mind, and Joy in everything that you do.

Mary

The Gone Gaming Board Game Internet Awards

Dear readers,

I, and the staff of Gone Gaming, are proud to announce the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards. There are plenty of awards in the board gaming world that reward the games themselves, but none of them cover the online world of board games. This award seeks to fill that gap.


Award Categories

This award will honor the best of the world of online board gaming as nominated by our readers, and includes the following categories:

Best publisher site
Best game news site
Best game information site
Best game community site
Best game club site
Best online journal/magazine
Best online gaming site
Best new site (2005)

Best strategy article (2005)
Best promotional/advocacy article (2005)
Best humorous article (2005)
Best article series (2005)
Best session report (2005)

Best blog
Best blog post (2005)
Best podcast/videocast
Best podcast/videocast episode (2005)
Best new blog/podcast/videocast (2005)


How this works

I will post separate entries on this blog, one for each of the above categories. To nominate a site or article, simply respond to the appropriate post with your nomination before the deadline (see the rules, below). Note that it is ok to nominate your own article or site.

After receiving the nominations, the staff of Gone Gaming will review the nominated sites and vote on them. The votes will be collated and ranked, and the winners will be posted to this site.

Winners and runners-up will be able to place an image proclaiming their win on their site. There may be up to five runners-up in each category.


Rules

1. Valid sites for this award should primarily cover modern board gaming, including Euro-style and wargaming. Sites that primarily cover old-style board games (such as Chess), CCGs, RPGs, poker, or miniatures are not eligible. In case of doubt, the Gone Gaming staff will decide on the validity of a site.

2. Sites will be judged based on their English language content. Unfortunately, we are not able to judge non-English content at this time.

3. A site nomination will be deemed invalid if the Gone Gaming staff says so. Update: Invalid nominations will be removed, in order to avoid clutter.

4. You can nominate a site in more than one category. However, please nominate a site in a category only if it is appropriate.

5. A site should only be nominated once in a category. Before nominating a site, please check to see whether or not it has already been nominated. Update: Duplicate nominations will be removed, in order to avoid clutter. Remember: you are not voting for a site, you are only nominating a site.

6. The Gone Gaming blog may not be nominated. Sites by Gone Gaming members may be nominated.

7. A nomination should be in the following format:

For a site:
Site name
URL with hyperlink

Gone Gaming
http://boregamegeeks.blogspot.com

For an article:
Site name
Post Name
Post URL with hyperlink

Gone Gaming
foo post
http://boregamegeeks.blogspot.com/foo+post

8. If your site is nominated but you do not want it to be in the voting, please send me an email (shadejon-[at]-gmail-[dot]-com) with your site name, URL, and a statement that you do not wish to be nominated.

9. Nominations close at midnight (EST) at the end of Saturday, Jan 14. The awards will be announced by midnight (EST) at the end of Saturday, Jan 28.

The Gone Gaming Staff

Update 12/28/05: The Gone Gaming staff has decided to remove the "online game store" award for various reasons.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best New Game Blog/Podcast/Videocast

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Game Blog, Podcast, or Videocast. In general, any blog, podcast, or videocast that went online in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Podcast/Videocast Episode

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast Episode. In general, any episode of a podcast or videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate an episode, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Episode
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Games Episode 22
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/22

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Podcast/Videocast

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Podcast/Videocast. In general, any podcast or Videocast about board games, either for a particular game, or in general, will be considered.

To nominate a podcast/videocast, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Blog Post

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog Post. In general, any blog posting about a board game or board gaming that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Blog

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Blog. In general, any blog that is primarily about board games will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Session Report

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Session Report. In general, any report on a board game session, either for one particular game, several games at an event, or for a convention, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts Evening
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/evening

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Article Series

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Article Series. In general, any multi-article series about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

Note: point to the first article of the series.

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts, Part 1
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win1

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Humorous Game Article

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Humorous Game Article. In general, any article about board games, either for a particular game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
Ho Ho Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/hoho

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Promotional/Advocacy Article

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Promotional/Advocacy Article. In general, any article about a board game or board gaming, either for a particular game, or in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
Hogwarts is Great
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/great

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Strategy Article

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Strategy Article. In general, any article about game strategy, either for a particular board game, or board games in general, that was posted in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a post, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
Name of Post
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
The Winners Guide to Hogwarts
http://www.hogwartsgames.com/win

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best New Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best New Site. In general, any site that is primarily about board games and went online in 2005 will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Online Gaming Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Gaming Site. In general, any online site that allows you to play board games will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Online Game Journal/Magazine

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Online Game Journal or Magazine. In general, any collated and edited online regular journal or magazine about a board game or board games will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Club Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Club Site. In general, any online site maintained by or for a board game club will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Community Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Community Site. In general, any site that provides for people to communicate about board games will be considered, including web sites, chat sites, bulletin boards, or mailing lists.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Information Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Information Site. In general, any site that posts information about board games will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game News Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game News Site. In general, any online site that regularly posts news about board games will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

GG:BGIA Voting Post: Best Game Publisher Site

For more information on the Gone Gaming: Board Game Internet Awards, please see this post.

This post is a placeholder to accept nominations for the GG:BGIA for Best Game Publisher Site. In general, any online site maintained by a board game publisher will be considered.

To nominate a site, respond to this post with your nomination in the following format:

Name of site
URL of site with hyperlink

e.g.

Hogwarts Games
http://www.hogwartsgames.com

Nominations will be closed at midnight following Saturday, Jan 14, 2005.

Christmas & Hannukah are HERE and so am 'I'

"Merry Christmas" and "Happy Hannukah" to those who celebrate such! With a "Bestivus of a Festivus" for the restuvus!

Happy Holiday

Everyone at Gone Gaming wishes you a wonderful holiday season full of love and laughter.

The following is an excerpt from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “The Christmas Attic” album, printed with the kind permission of TSO. I think is has a beautiful message for everyone no matter what their belief.

Dream Child (A Christmas Dream)

In the night
Was the dark.
In the dark
Was the dream.
In the dream
Was the Child
And myself
There unseen.

And all that night the snow came down
To heal the scars our lives had found
And the dreams that lay broken.

And there upon a bridge of dreams
Across the night we walked unseen
With no words ever spoken.

And then on through that night
We did walk for a while
And our steps turned to blocks
And the blocks turned to miles.

Then we followed a path
For as far as we could
Till we found ourselves there
In an evergreen woods.

There were thousands of candles
Upon every tree.
It was beautiful
But there was one mystery,
For with all of those candles
You must understand
That the only one lit
Was now in that Child’s hand.

And there upon that Christmas scene
The candle wax of melted dreams
And the years they had taken.

And as the snow did gently fall,
He one by one relit them all
Till each dream was awakened.

And there to that light
That young Child showed to me
All the things that he dreamt,
All the things that might be;
How for everything given,
That something is gained.
Strike one match in the dark
And all the world’s not the same.

And when I awoke, well the Child he was gone
But somewhere in my mind
I believe he lives on.
And somewhere in my life
Between here and the end,
On a long winter’s night
I will dream him again.
~~~~
Lyrics by Paul O’Neill
Music by Paul O’Neill, Robert Kinkel and Jon Oliva

The Dance of Theme and Mechanics in Games: A Fantasy

Warning: The following blog contains 1686 calories per serving. Serving size is approximately 1 paragraph.

Ava Jarvis is another of the distinguished voices on Boardgamegeek. You probably know her as BilboAtBagEnd.

I hesitate to say that she is one of the distinguished female voices on BGG, because Ava rarely makes an issue of the fact. Her's is the distinguished voice of an experienced gamer. I confess that I no longer pay attention to the "what-game-would-my-wife/girlfriend-like-to-play geeklists", but I think Ava ignores them even more than I do. You will find her making insightful comments on the "best-heavy-abstract-two-player-games-designed-by-Tibetan-monks-and-based-upon-Go geeklists", which, I must confess, I tend to ignore also.

If I were to ever respond to one of those "which-BGGer-would-you-most-want-to-play-with geeklists" Ava would be near the top of my list, and not for a light game either.

At any rate, have a Merry Christmas and heeeeeeeeeere's Ava.

Theme on a game is like icing on a cake: it helps make a cake quite irresistible, usually provides a welcome counterpoint in texture taste compared to what it's covering, and can occasionally save a not very exciting torte. Mechanics, or the cake, must be there. Cake is cake. There may not be a lot, or it may be as thick as a brick, but you need a cake to... have cake. Otherwise icing is merely a moist puddle on the table.

Some people prefer their games with quite a lot of icing, complete sugar masterpieces with little marzipan treasure chests, sugar-spun dragons, and blue-gel lakes. Some people prefer, and even insist upon, a cake with a simple and delicate sugar glazing that barely hides the cake, much less overcomes its flavor. Most of us don't mind either extreme, and are fine with the regular celebratory-cake that is in between.

People can get rather heated up about icing, actually.

"Hey! That cake has barely any on it. How can it be any good? It seems kind of... boring."

"What do you mean barely? Look, there are little *scallops* along the edges, and the berry mixed in really does add something to the taste. It doesn't have to have little sugar meeples to be good, you know."

"That cake is so loaded with icing it makes me sick just looking at it. How can *they* eat it up?"

Perhaps instead of looking at games, I mean cakes, in terms of amount of icing in ratios to amount of cake, we can gain a better understanding of approximately what point people start arguing that an abstract is over-iced, or that a dungeon-crawl is not iced enough...

-------------------------------------------------------

Moving away from the confectionary comparisons, the issue of theme comes up quite a bit. But for an aspect of games much discussed amongst a population that, in large part, thrives on numbers, theme is a very touchy-feely quality. People usually say, "that theme is pasted on", referring to an actually large range of theme scale points (if such a thing existed). Or else they say, "it drips with theme", while talking about German games. We talk as though a game either has theme or hasn't, as if theme were some afterthought we could just slather on in the right proportions, and the game author either put on too much or too little.

But theme and mechanics dance through many games. Sometimes theme leads, and sometimes mechanics do. Sometimes theme and mechanics both tango together, and sometimes mechanics is left to dance on its own in the spotlight. It all comes down, as in many games, to numbers. And that number is four, and three, and two, and one. I think of them as the four spheres.... although perhaps it's better to think of them as the four points, since they are less locations as milestone markers on the path....

FOUR is the least number of points needed to form a three-dimensional shape: the tetrahedron.

Any less, and you have at best a plane. Three-dimensional shapes are "real" in the sense that they are in our world and we can grasp them, manipulate them in ways that we can easily relate to. Here you find the games that definitely do drip in theme, and few people, if any, would disagree. Typically these are the adventure games of great and sometimes exhaustive detail, for it is detail that brings ideas to life. Magic Realm very firmly anchors this point of the path. Talisman, Descent extend it, and you can see, farther up the path, Return of the Heroes.

In the games that live here, or that exist near here, theme leads the dance, and mechanics serves theme. Suppose that we were to pick the theme of panning for gold in some Lost Valley. Why, there are different kinds of gold in different kinds of locations. Mountain gold would be harder to pick... yes, it would require special equipment that you make out of the raw materials of the land. There will be wild animals and fish, they can be a sort of resource, alongside the timber wood, which you can more effectively chop with special equipment...

In the question of chicken and egg, theme seems to have come first, and the mechanics were chosen to support the theme.

But this is not the only relationship mechanics and theme can have, you'll note as we walk up this path, past small wooden houses and little encounter tiles, until we reach...

THREE is the smallest number of points that describe (and will always describe) a plane.

In terms of three dimensions, planes can be looked upon from many angles, and I think this is why so many arguments can crop up in this area, between Four and Two. What looks flat and linear to one person will look almost tetrahedral to someone else.

But if you look straight on, you'll see the loop. At Three, we find games that effect a peculiar synergy between mechanics and theme. Mechanics and theme inform each other, affect one another. But the mechanics were formed first.

The seminal game here is Lord of the Rings. Like any Knizia, the mechanics are sound and could almost exist by themselves---indeed, they are recognizable variants of mechanics from other games of his. The Hobbit cards people will recognize from Taj Mahal and Ivanhoe. Appropriate card suits---friendship, travel, fighting, hiding, and the Ring as the joker---are used here. But the theme does not stop there. Theme informs mechanics: different scenario boards require different suit focus, yield different rewards, and are harder or easier in particular suits depending on what scene from Tolkien's epic is being played. In Moria, you will need to fight well to get out of Balen's Tomb and out of the mines (and fighting is the main suit that needs to be advanced on that board), but only some well-timed fleeing will get you enough life tokens to stay out of harm's way. Yet fight not enough, and you will not be able to stop the taxing and horrifying events from occurring. Some events you can stop---be well-hidden and far enough through the mines, and you won't fall prey to being trapped between a Balrog and a hard place. But the mechanics don't stop there. Mechanics inform theme: the Hobbits must cooperate, and divide their attentions efficiently in order to get through a scenario. Sacrifices must be identified, judged, and---most importantly---made.

Note that there's actually quite a lot of road between Three and Two. Take a look at Shear Panic. At its heart, it's just another abstract, but the scoring track really shears the theme for all its wool. "Staying close to Roger the Ram" or "Staying as far away from the shearer" carries as much thematic weight in the world of Shear Panic as "making sure that Shelob doesn't attack" does in Lord of the Rings (both game and book).

Not all games between Three and Two are completely coupled to their theme. If we take a look at Richard Breese's Reef Encounter, it is arguable that another theme can be applied. But that theme would have to wedge itself into the conceptual niches of the coral-scoring parrotfish, the protective shrimp, and the breeding and moving corals. You need thematic components that "eat" tiles, protect tiles, and a thematic representation for the tiles themselves that could grow and spawn, and attack overnight in strange stomach-turning ways (yes, I watched Blue Planet's Coral Seas episode, from which this game is based).

I could even have used Tigris & Euphrates as an example, which has a river-valley civilization theme that would need to be quite rudely uprooted and replaced, not just with respect to the leaders and temples, farming and the river, or the marketplaces and flexibility.... but also with respect to the two rivers wending their way on the board.

You'll note that the path is rather crowded here, as we begin to walk into....

TWO points will always form a line.

The idea of "two" is that of balance---duality, Yin and Yang, brother and sister, twins. But balance is a concept that belongs to mechanics---and not to theme. In this area of the path, theme serves mechanics, and there is much less of a relationship between the game and its theme. Mechanics wear themes light around here.

This is not to say that theme is entirely dispensable, and there are undoubtedly quite a few shades of gray between the feedback loop and the flatline.

Around and about here are games like Torres---whose theme of knights and towers is a pleasant decoration of an abstract of height and action point manipulation. But while knights and towers are associated in mind, it's more in the way that a knight and a rook would go together in chess. The relationship of knights and towers to scoring go a bit beyond typical association, although it does help to think in terms of knights controlling higher towers in larger castles as having more worth.

Ra is another example, and more likely closer to the seat of this area: suitable Egyptian objects are used for the sets that we wish to collect, but apart from that, there is not much in the way of Egyptology-orientated meaning. It's nice to have one of each of those monuments, or to have a couple of gods to spend within the current epoch, but another theme involving commonly associated objects could fit in (and did---as the less classy but more modern gangster theme of Razzia! showed, although it would have been nice if more elements from Ra, like the disasters, had also been added in).

The games here could do without theme, but they would be harder to grasp. Associativity, even light associativity, is a wonderful thing for understanding. The towers in Torres have doors that the knights can walk through, and which help express a certain attribute of movement in the game that would otherwise be difficult to describe elegantly. But we understand doors in towers. Likewise, whatever the theme used in Ra, it helps that if we have one set category that comprises eight related but distinct items (like monuments), a set category with a relationship that can be expressed as one-requiring-many (the niles and floods), appropriate disaster examples for a set, etc.

We're starting to reach a rather overly bright bank of light, like a Steven Spielberg special effect gone haywire...

ONE is a single point in anywhere---from one dimension up to as many dimensions as you like.

From one comes the rest---so we may regard this point of the path as belonging to games of pure mechanics, no theme need apply. At the single point, games here need to be elegant and simple, since there is no theme to hang associations upon. The time-honored Chess may actually be considered to be a little bit off from this final location, towards Two: the knight on horse jumps, the rook moves like a siege engine, and the pawns are reminiscent in power and scope like foot soldiers. Games like Hive would be in a similar position.

But with the simplest of games---such as Go or the games in the GIPF family---there is no theme between you and the game. There does not need to be: in this sphere (and this place may, perhaps, truly be thought of as a sphere, a much more localized and polarized point), the mechanics can become almost like theme, or perhaps they are theme. Go is often thought of, written of, and played like military formations and movements, with tactics that sometimes seem straight out of The Art of War. YINSH is often described as feeling "highly energetic"---a much different feeling, brought out by its mechanics, than the methodical pushing that is GIPF itself, or the harried race-the-clock flipping of TAMSK.

One question occurs: If mechanics are theme, then are theme mechanics?

And here endeth the tale. I'm glad you made it all the way through, and hope you enjoyed it, or were at least a little bit amused.

Peace.

Schools of Game Design

Last week I talked about three game designers, and classified and categorized their works. This week I want to move a step up the food chain, and instead talk about schools of game design, to once more try to categorize, classify, and index.

The central idea is that game designs can, as with most creative works, be grouped into schools of design, each with their own character and their own quirks. In the modern gaming world, I believe there are four broad schools of design--mainstream, Anglo-American, Euro, and hybrid--though each of those schools also has sub-schools within them.

Mainstream Games

Mainstream games are those ones that you probably grew up with. They appear in Toys R' Us, Wal-Mart, and the closets of many American families. Most mainstream games: have a superficial or no theme; have little concern for the actual mechanics, which tend to be rudimentary or monotone at best; and have little opportunity for real strategy (with the notable exception of the abstracts).

Abstract Games: These are largely traditional games that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. This category includes Chess, Checkers, Go, Backgammon, Othello, and others. Unlike most mainstream games, these ones are well-designed, and do allow for strategy. They're the only real gamers' games to hit the mainstream, and probably have only achieved their success due to their long history.

Some twentieth-century designs like Alex Randolph's Twixt did manage the same mainstream appeal. More recent games, like the GIPF project clearly fit into this categorization, but haven't necessarily penetrated the larger markets.

Besides their other characteristics, most mainstream abstracts are two-player.

Examples. Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, GIPF, Go, Othello, Twixt

Family Games: Of the three types of mainstream games, family games are the ones that are most likely to actually have some theme behind them. However, looking at them from a modern perspective, I think the theme for a Stratego or a Monopoly is actually much more tenuous than even Knizia's most transparent themings. Sure, the themings exist, but they usually don't have much or any interaction with the rules. This low attention to theming probably bespeaks the evolution of family games from abstract mainstreams.

Family games otherwise meet the general classifications for mainstream games, including rudimentary mechanics and low strategy. They support surprisingly large numbers of people, with Monopoly running to 8, Boggle to 6, and Mille Bornes to 6. Thus their main differentiation from party games tends to be that they require more concentration.

(I could further separate family games into couple games, family games, and kid games, but have elected not to, mainly because I don't find the category at all interesting. The only big difference is that theming usually increases as the age of the players decreases.)

Examples. Boggle, Mille Bornes, Monopoly, Scrabble, Stratego

Party Games: Finally, party games meet every one of the critera I laid out for mainstream games, and perhaps are the definitive mainstream game as a result. In addition they tend to have one other characteristic: they allow for, and perhaps even support, conversation.

Many party games allow for this by the fact that there's no ability to plan ahead for your next turn. They're entirely tactical. Trivial Pursuit, or almost any other trivia game, fits into this category. So do some creative games like Cranium, where each player takes a turn based solely on the card draw that turn.

Alternatively party games may have little downtime, but instead constantly support conversation and interaction. Most of the other creative games work like this, including Win, Lose, or Draw!, or any other game where lots of people are trying to figure out what one person is doing.

Examples. Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, Win, Lose, or Draw!

Anglo-American Games

Anglo-American games as we now recognize started really appearing in the sixties and seventies. Their genesis seems to have been from the hobby game market, first appearing from miniatures game manufacturers (and thus Avalon Hill) and later roleplaying game manufacturers (and thus TSR, Steve Jackson Games, and many others). (Miniatures and RPGs are two more Anglo-American games that I've avoided in this essay.)

As with mass-market games there really isn't much emphasis on mechanics. However, the themes are often much tighter to the game, which isn't a surprise given that many miniatures games and roleplaying games alike are heavily simulationistic, and so the same companies would be offering up similar design philosophies.

Together these form what I call a "top-down" design philosophy: building from theming down to mechanics.

Wargames: I'd count pretty old games like Diplomacy and Risk as the first Anglo-American wargames. They really took off in the eighties with games like Conquest of the Empires and Axis & Allies, and in the more specialist field, Kingmaker, Dune, and History of the World, and are seeing another resurgence now primarily due to the efforts of Eagle Games.

Besides holding to the general characteristics of Anglo-American games, including good theming and simplistic mechanics, most Anglo-American wargames are fairly long (4-12 hours being typical, but they're still shorter than the miniatures battles they descended from) and they often depend upon very agressive players. (Some of the designs fall apart if one or more persons casually waits for the other players to eat each other.)

Examples. Attack!, Axis & Allies, Conquest of the Empire, Diplomacy, Dune, History of the World, Kingmaker, Risk, Wizard's Quest

Beer & Pretzels: If anything beer & pretzels games have even more solid theme than the rest of the Anglo-American genre, and they also often try and be funny. There's still not much attention to mechanics and many older beer & pretzels games are pretty fatally flawed, most often in endgame resolution which frequently drags and drags and then eventually awards a pseudo-random winner.

The name "beer & pretzels" generally refers to the fact that these games are meant to be light and funny, the type of thing you'd play while screwing around with your friends. Although the game lengths don't always support those ideals (since beer & pretzel games can run from an hour up to several) the mechanics often do, because they tend to be simplistic, low strategy, and somewhat random. Beer & pretzels also often contain a "take that" mechanic where you actively attack the other players, most frequently with an arbitrary card draw. (For whatever reasons, more beer & pretzels games are card games than anything else.)

Examples. Hacker, Illuminati, Kings & Things, WizWar

Other Designs: Although a great number of Anglo-American designs seem to fit into one of these former two categories, there are still a large scattering of other releases. As with all Anglo-American designs they tend to be top down, and are often heavily simulationistic. The goal is to mirror some real-world situation, often in excrutiating detail, and often without a lot of concern for game length or game design.

The main differentiation between these, and the afore-mentioned beer & pretzels games which also cover many genres, is that these other designs are by no means light and can be even longer than the average beer & pretzels. (I've literally never completed a game of Source of the Nile, and not for lack of trying.)

Examples. Age of Exploration, Empire Builder, Source of the Nile

Eurogames

Whereas Anglo-American games tend to be top-down designs, Eurogames tend to be bottom-up, starting with mechanics and building upward toward theme. Alan Moon and Reiner Knizia are perhaps two of the designers who show this tendency most obviously, since we've seen their games transform in different printings--or have heard stories of the same. A game of Egyptian mythology (Ra) became a gangster game (Razzia) while Through the Desert was apparently about manor grounds or somesuch before the pastel camels showed up. And with Moon we can see the different variants: Clippers vs. Sante Fe Rails or Union Pacific vs. Airlines.

The Eurogames seem to share the goals of some Anglo-American games: creating real gamers' games that we geeks enjoy to play. However, besides the increased attention paid to mechanics Eurogames also tend to be a lot shorter. Most run in 60-90 minutes. 2 hours is notable, and anything greater is way outside the norm. (However in the last year Eurogames seem to have bifurcated with designs going either simpler or longer, a trend that I'll look at more in my yearly review in two weeks' time.)

German Design: The Eurogames movement really originated in Germany, and so the games there most closely reflect the ideals of the movement generally. The themes of German games can be really thin, especially when compared to the more simulationistic Anglo-American releases, but contrariwise the mechanics can be really strong.

Though we talk about German designs, I think there are many people of other nationalities who fall straight into the category, including the aforementioned Alan Moon, as well as Richard Borg--two American designers. Leo Colovini, an Italian designer, is also very abstract yet mechanistic (though for more on the Italian design dilemma, see below). As I mentioned in my last article, I don't really find the founder of the current Eurogames movement, Klaus Teuber, to produce games that are that German. His games are too openly random and too well themed to really fit into the category.

It's also worth noting that games actually coming out of Germany don't tend to be war-oriented, a pretty big change from Anglo-American games where that's a major focus. I still think games like Memoir '44 meet all the criteria for a German design, despite their basis in conflict, but you don't see that sort of thing coming out of Germany itself very often, due to the country's history.

Examples. El Grande, Memoir '44, Ra, Ticket to Ride, Torres, Tigris & Euphrates

French Design: I'd like to believe that different countries have different national characters for the games they design; it fulfills my natural belief in order. It's also clearly not entirely true, as evidenced by my earlier discussion of American & Italian designers who fit right into the German mold. In addition, as the Internet continues to evolve, it continues to erode national identities, creating a more homogeneous whole.

Nonetheless, I do think French designs tend to have some features in common more often then not. First, their themes seem to commonly be sturdier and more integrated than those of German designs. I don't know if their designs are top-down or bottom-up, but both the mechanics and the themes seem to come off pretty well. Second, their designs seem to place a much greater emphasis on randomness. You're more likely to find dice in a French game, but you're also more likely to find cards, tiles, or powers that allow for pretty abrupt & massive upheavals.

I think Dungeon Twister is a somewhat interesting example of the genre because it calls itself "luckless", but there's actually a lot of randomness based upon how blind placements occur at game start and how blind bids occur in combats. It might not be a roll of a die, but there are a lot of different types of randomness.

Finally, the French seem more willing to create wargames. If you see a solid wargame design that runs in two hours or less, it's probably French.

As I wrote last week, though a definitive German design, I feel like The Settlers of Catan falls squarely into the norm of the French design movement.

Examples. Citadels, Condotierre, Dungeon Twister, Fist of Dragonstones, Mall of Horror, Mare Nostrum

Italian Design: I actually have no idea if there's a national character for Italian designs. I feel like I should be able to spot one because I've been somewhere between a dozen and a score Italian games at this point, but I haven't been able to turn anything up. Leo Colovini's games are entirely German in design. Some of daVinci's game play like American beer & pretzels games (Bang), some like mainstream family games (Dancing Dice), and some like hybrid party games (Ostrakon, Word Jam).

The one thing that I can say about many Italian designs is that I find a lot of them non-intuitive when I first examine them. I can't see how they're going to work. That goes for Colovini and daVinci designs alike. But, whether that's a start to an answer as to what the Italian game character is, I dunno.

Examples. Bang!, Cartagena, Clans, Dancing Dice, Ostrakon, Word Jam

Hybrids

As you'd expect, hybrid games are those which mix together two different schools of game design.

Anglo-American-German Design: These are the most common mix. They mix Anglo-American design with German sensibilities. As a result you end up with games that are a bit on the long side (often 3-6 hours), but which have solid German mechanics, often including auctions and sometimes dipping into majority-control or other mechanics that you wouldn't find in traditional Anglo-American games. Most of these games are wargames, but Age of Steam is an example of a more general Anglo-American game that has been built with German sensibilities.

There are two design houses pushing hard on this area right now: Warfrog and Fantasy Flight. Eagle Games may be moving in this direction too.

Examples. Age of Steam, Conquest of the Empire II, A Game of Thrones, Railroad Tycoon, Struggle of Empires

Other Hybrids: Clearly, any of these categories could be hybridized. The other pretty big category of hybrids are Eurodesigns which are actually family games or party games. I already mentioned a few daVinci gams that fit into this category. I think some of the Kramer and Knizia designs that we hardcore gamers don't like might fit into the same category.

Examples. Barbarossa, Ostrakon

Final Notes

By the time you folks read this, I'm going to be out of town. My parents are taking me on vacation to Kauai, the place where they plan to retire in a couple of years. It's been a really hard year, and my wife & I couldn't have afforded this vacation on our own, so thanks guys!

I'd love to see your comments when I get back, so please tell me what you think about these classifications and tell me where I'm wrong (or right). If you can, tell me what holds together Italian game design that I couldn't see, and what national characters I missed. I'll follow up on the comments in about a week, so check back by a week from Friday if you want to see what I thought about what you thought.

I'm going to be barely back in town next Thursday, but I'm not going to try and get a column out. Hopefully there will be someone to fill in. I've already got plans for next year: a review of the year 2005 in gaming; an article about winning games; some more articles on designers with Alan Moon, Bruno Faidutti, and Michael Schacht a few of the people I really want to write about; and eventually some longer articles about designers with some neat diagrams of game relationships. I'm also considering whether to revise a series of article I wrote about game design two years ago (or whether there's a book someone might want to publish in there).

A few final thanks for the year. Thanks to Coldfoot for inviting me to write in this blog, even after I originally ignored his mail for a bit because my email box was overwhelmed at the time. And thanks to all of you for reading and for commenting. I've read every comment made here, even when it was well after the fact, and even if I didn't respond. Some of those comments have definitely influenced my thinking.

As as for the rest: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the rest. I'll be thinking of you when I'm sipping a margarita in a beach chair. And if you miss me next week, take a look at this article that I wrote last time I was on Kauai, four years ago. It has some pictures of me & my wife on the island, and of course thoughts on games.

A Winter Game

Richard, Cori and I sit down at the kitchen table to play a game—it doesn’t matter which one, pick any game that takes longer than 5 minutes to set up and play.

Before we finish setting it up, Serek (Cori’s black cat) wants outside. I get up from my place beside the door, open the door and use my foot to push open the pet door in the storm door. If you don’t offer this bit of courtesy, the cats will sit there for any length of time trying to determine if it’s safe to go out, so the expedient thing to do is push up the flap and offer a word of encouragement: “GO!”

I barely sit back down when Bear (my black cat) decides that if Serek is going out, he wants out, too. Repeat above process to hurry Bear on his way. “Oh, wait for me,” Spencer (Cori’s long-haired black cat) says and scoots out the door after Bear.

O.k., let’s see. Cori took her turn but before I can comprehend her actions, there’s a “thunk” at the door. That’s the sound of the pet door swinging inward and hitting the inside door. Richard stretches sideways, leaning at a precarious angle from his chair, and opens the door. In bursts a cold cat. Serek has found out that it’s cold outside and even the birds are hiding somewhere with their feathers puffed up for warmth.

Ten seconds after the door is closed, there’s another “thunk.” Yes, Bear has made the same discovery as Serek. No, Spencer isn’t right behind him; that would be too easy. We get in a whole round before he’s bored and wants back in but by now, Serek has forgotten that it’s cold and miserable outside and wants to give it another go.

Rinse and repeat until we humans have had enough and yell at the cats in our hopelessly optimistic way. Much of our concentration is now gone as we listen to cats meowing and clawing at the doorframe in their attempt to make us change our minds. If we can hold out long enough, they will go away and play. Unfortunately, that can be as distracting as opening the door.

We manage to take another couple of turns when a terrible cacophony of hissing, yeowling and thumping of small bodies assaults our ears. “SPENCER!” He’s the biggest and a bit of a bully so the other cats do not enjoy his idea of a good-natured romp.

Now Tucker (our Corgi) figures it’s a good time to go outside and leave the madness behind but at least he doesn’t require the same flap-opening courtesy that the cats do and pushes his way through and into the cold. His expedition lasts five minutes which lets us play uninterrupted for that long.

Suddenly I feel a sharp pain in my leg just above the knee. Hello, Bess (my tortoise shell baby). She’s feeling neglected but doesn’t really like to be held so I reach down and pet her head and Cori checks to make sure there’s food in the cats’ bowl.

Now who’s turn is it? Mine? Well, let’s see. I think I’ll…

With the grace only a feline possesses, Bess has landed on the table. Luckily, she’s barely touched the board but if you try to pick up a cat and remove it from where it wants to be, the physical fight that ensues results in something getting destroyed. The best bet is to help the misplaced kitty to a more desirable setting with a little push in the right direction.

Whew, that was close. Alright, it’s my turn, right?

Meeoowww. Claw, scratch. Serek wants out. -----

So, my friends, who’d like to bring over their brand new copy of Caylus to teach to me and my family? I hear it’s a great game and only takes about 4 hours.
~~~~~~~~
Until next time, laugh, love and wonder.

Mary

Parlor Game Geek

So, what did www.ParlorGameGeek.com look like in 1870?

Aldie's avatar on the front page



Top 10 Games

Rank Game Value
1 Puerto Rico 8.609 (just kidding)

1 Charades 9.451
2 Crambo 9.204
3 Lookabout 9.115
4 Blindman's Bluff 9.110
5 The Post 8.757
6 Alphabet Minute 8.453
7 Shadows 8.209
8 The Endless Story 8.176
9 Forfeits 8.095
10 Dictionary 7.997

Recent Review

The Bellman

Review by Sir Thomas Vincent Assalinus, III, Esq.

The latest offering from Fortnights of Amazement, The Bellman is a new simultaneous-action dexterity game that builds upon the success of last century's Blind Man's Bluff. In fact, if you liked the latter, you will like the former, since they are essentially the same game with reversed roles.

Opening the box I wasn't surprised to see that the components were of high quality and up to the usual standards for a Fortnights of Amazement game: the game comes with no components. Or box, for that matter.

Players begin by choosing The Bellman: youngest player, oldest, whatever. Everyone else now puts on a blindfold, while the Bellman requires a metalic ringing device of some sort. We weren't sure what to use for this, so we just gave him two metal rods to bang together, which worked out ok. The Bellman begins making noise while moving around the room.

In order to win the game, one of the blindfolded players must "catch" The Bellman. At this point the winner starts off another game as The Bellman. That's it.

Comments:

1) Components: The usual stuff for this sort of game.

2) Rules: The rules were simple and elegant. There were a few rules questions, such as what to use for a ringing device, and whether players can swing large 2x4s while wandering around the room (the rules didn't say that you couldn't), but we managed ok (with a few injuries).

3) Luck: There was a fair amount of luck, but tactics also came into play. Catching The Bellman is trickier than it seems, especially as all the players are playing simultaneously and their efforts are working against each other. Definite high replayability in this regard.

4) Theme: The theme matched the game mechanics very well. You really felt like you were running around trying to catch some idiot ringing a bell.

(Hey, a bell!)

5) Player interaction: There was a lot of interaction, as each player moves simultaneously while trying to acquire limited resources ... resource. As a bonus, there is no early elimination or runaway leader problem. Everyone felt like they had a chance right up to the very end of the game.

6) Fun Factor: We had a blast playing The Bellman. Several times during the game we were laughing our heads off. Especially when Charles reached out to grab The Bellman and ended up grabbing Victoria on her ... elbow.

Bottom line: This is a great party game, another in a long line of great games from Fortnights of Amazement. Highly recommended.

Recent Geeklist

Games played at last evening's tea party at McEssen Manor. Mr and Mrs Alderan Derksington were our hosts, along with Mr M______ and Ms N________ who are visiting from E_______ on the coast.


Mr Gregory Shloessington
Tennesee Estates
Wilburshirstirsustichire

My dear fellow game enthusiasts and compatriots,

It is with warm wishes and a jolly countenance that I send forth this Geeklist, along with the hope that it finds you all in the best of health. I cannot begin to express the happiness and enjoyment we received from our visit to McEssen Manor last evening. The food, wine, and surroundings were simply divine, but mostly the company was of the highest standards, blah blah blah and so on for five pages until so I present to you here a list of the games in which we partook on that very evening that I have mentioned herein, and these are as follows:

Alphabet Minute - One of personal favorites, as to which the Mrs can so attest. As you know doubt recall, the game requires two players to select a piece of paper containing a subject and a letter of the alphabet from among many such papers that had been previously placed into a hat, and then the two players had to converse about the aforesaid subject. The first sentence spoken by one of the players was required to start with the aformentioned letter of the alphabet, and each subsequent sentence was required to be spoken by the other player and to start with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, and so on until the discourse has returned to a sentence that began with the original letter of the alphabet that had started the conversation. All of this was to be accomplished within the short time of sixty seconds, or the players would each forfeit a point. I must admit that I faired rather poorly in this game, having used up sixty seconds with my first sentence. [Note: I also saw this on Whose Line is it Anyway?]

Animals - This being, of course, last year's expansion to the familiar and illustrious Blind Men's Bluff, wherein a player who is caught must make three sounds as an animal named by the catcher. The catching player must then attempt to identify the caught player using these sounds, and, if he or she cannot, the caught player is let free, and the other player must return to his or her industry of catching another player. As for myself, I do not favor expansions over the original game overly much, with the exception of the nine princely expansions to that all time classic game of swapped identities, Mundane Encounter. In any case, this game was ended after Lady Williams, arrayed in a darling blindfold and dark marroon calico print dress, stumbled over Mr Thonquinton's great dane "Snuffles", and fell into the lake.

Crambo - Of course we played this old chesnut. It was quite an excitement, too. Lady Sodak was so excited, she ended up quite flushed and had to lie down and be brought her smelling salts. [One player tries to guess a word after being given a rhyme for that word. The player guesses by asking players one by one about the word by describing the word he wants to guess. For instance, if the real word is "bath", the player is told that it rhymes with "path". The player then asks someone if it is a system for calculating numbers (thinking that the word may be "math"). The player who is asked this question must say "No, the word is not 'math'." The player wins either by guesing the word, or if a player to whom he asked a question does not know what word he is describing.]

Anklen Memo - I josh with you, of course.

Shadows - This lovely game, wherein players must pass behind a screen while another player tries to guess who that player is, was a rousing success, and thoroughly entertaining. I must confess that I was so amused that I even went so far as to tap my cane delicately upon the floor and remark "Hear, hear". I do so make a fool of myself at parties. During our game, Mr Beasley couldn't recognize Mrs Beasley's shadow from the rear end of the horse that had stumbled behind the screen. To top that, noone was able to recognize Mr Grognads form in any way whatsoever.

Recent Session Report

Hot Boiled Beans: Session Report by Mr Clooless.

Score: 1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

Jim started out as it and Mary was his target. We all shouted "Hot boiled Beans", and then he was cool, cool, cool, warm, warm, cool, warm, cool, warm, warm, hot, hot, hot, and then he won.

Mr C.

P.S. How do I get a GeekGold for this?

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OK, I won't bore you by doing the rest of this, but, for your own amusement, try to see how these games would rank against modern games which you have rated, and which have benefitted from over a hundred years of evolution. Are today's games better?


Blind Man's Bluff - one blinfolded player must catch any other.

20 questions

Charades

Detective - One player is thief, one is detective. Thief doesn't know who detective is. Thief tries to steal handkerchief from middle of circle before detective catches him.

Dictionary - aka Balderdash.

Forfeits - each player must give an item and then do a truth or dare for the item to be returned to him or her.

How, Why, When, and Where - Players must guess a word by asking only "How do you like it", "Why do you like it", and so on. The answerer may fool the guessers by having used a homonym word and answering for the homonym.

Lookabout - One player hides an object, the last to find it loses.

Pass the Slipper - One player must guess where the slipper is that is being passed around by the other players.

Proverbs - One player must guess a proverb spoken by others, where one word of the proverb, in order, is introduced somewhere inside each sentence spoken by the other players.

Ten Fine Birds - Players try to repeat an ever increasing list of objects (like I went to a picnic and brought a ... and a ... and so on around the circle).

The Ball of Wool - Players try to blow it off the other side of the table against the puffing of the other players who are trying to do the same.

The Barnyard - Each player is an animal, and must make the right noise when his name is said during a story, or when the word "barnyard" is mentioned.

The Courtiers - One of several variants of Simon Says.

The Endless Story - One player starts a story, each player continues for exactly one minute, and the last player must wrap up the story using all elements said by other players within one minute.

The Minister's Cat - Players describe the Minister's Cat using letters of the alphabet around a circle. ("The minister's cat is angry." "The minster's cat is beautiful." ...)

The Name Game - Each player places 10 pieces of paper containing a noun into a hat, and each player has 30 seconds to guess as many as s/he can as the papers are pulled out from clues given by the puller.

The Post - Each player chooses a location ("London", "Brisbane", ). Postmaster calls out two locations who must change seats before he can take one of theirs.

Throwing Up Lights - two players converse about a word without speaking it. As each other player guesses, they may join the conversation. The last to guess loses.

You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile - One person must make anyone else smile, who then becomes "it".

Yehuda


Resources:
http://www.victoriaspast.com/ParlorGames/parlor_games.htm
http://www.oldfashionedliving.com/parlour-games.html
http://www.funjoint.com/parlour.htm
http://members.aol.com/StoryRoot/inquire_within_ms.html#Ch%203

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Caution! Abnormal Blog Ahead

Last week my entry for the blog indicated I’d probably be all sentimental and maudlin for the next two weeks, what with it being Christmas and all. So here’s my sentimental blog about why my game store; Dark Horse Games, was successful and why it enjoyed a lifespan triple that of most of the game stores I've visited.

Dark Horse Games was unique in many ways. Probably the best thing about it was that it had an atmosphere of friendliness. It really wasn’t always the most inviting place physically, though we tried to keep it reasonably clean and uncluttered. But it was operated with the concept that people who came to us for games were people who were like us, our ilk. And if you’re going to be part of an “ilk”, then our philosophy was to treat your own ilk well.

On a business level I consider my personal skills to be average at best, purely stupid at worst and randomly lucky or horribly flawed in between. I can’t even count the amount of mistakes I made in 23 years and looking back, it’s a wonder to me that anything I did worked.

But it worked. There were even spectacular years. Ones where I made enough money to actually imagine that I might possibly be brilliant, or at the very least, pretty damned lucky. No matter though, I spent it all foolishly or pissed it away on wine, women and song.

Over the next 10 days I’ll box up the remains, put it all in storage and slowly dribble it off on eBay for the next couple of years. And for the first time, I’m doing this without the people who are really the reason Dark Horse Games was a great store. My family.



Jaimy, Mel and DW surrounded by Gamer Goodness.

That’s because they don’t live here anymore. My lovely daughter Jaimy lives in Chicago. My handsome son Marshall haunts the redwoods of Northern California in Eureka and my dad, who is also my idol, is still over in Boise, running a VFW chapter, being a money manager of some sort for the Salvation Army and doing errands for his long time companion Evelyn.

The real credit for the longevity of Dark Horse goes to them. My two children because I really, really wanted to give them an opportunity to learn how to work. I may sound like an old fashioned parent, which I guess I am, but I have known several thousands of teenagers over the years and the one common trait that afflicts so many of them is a lack of understanding the basics of work. Timeliness, completion of duties, adherence to a standard, courtesy, acquisition of new skills, the instilling of adequate self-discipline to power them through the drudgery of work they don’t enjoy and a myriad of other traits that are what I believe truly shapes a person’s future.

And to my dad because he was there when I needed him to be. Because he never complained, never asked for anything, was gracious when I compensated him and because he’s a gentleman, a hero of a horrible war and just a fine human being.

Jaimy started working for me when she was 14 years old. She’s very pretty. Her mom is of Sicilian/Italian descent and Jaimy lucked out by receiving the dark Italian beauty that drew me to her mother. Imagine if you will, a pretty little 14 year old running the counter in a game store that primarily deals in RPG’s, Warhammer, war games, CCG’s and other arcane products like alternative comics and tarot cards. She was stunningly successful. Everybody liked her. The kids from her high school who were gamers were in awe. She was hit on repeatedly by many of them and even by some who ought to have known better. I watched her winning ways with them and damned if she didn’t do just about everything right. And Jaimy wasn’t a gamer. Not by a stretch. I tried very hard to get her into Magic when it appeared, but she didn’t care for it. Really, she didn’t care for games at all. But she did love many of the alternative comics like Sandman, Death and anything by Evan Dorkin.

She worked for me for about three years and by then her brother Marshall was ready to take her place and she moved on to other jobs outside of my control. Probably one of the best things that has ever been said to me was when she told me that it was her experience at Dark Horse that helped prepare her for the real world and smoothed out her unwarranted judgments about people based on their appearance or social skills. She thanked me for not letting her go to work at the usual McDonald’s or other job mills for teenagers.

I reckon though that she’s the cause of every success she has experienced so far. She got a tough degree in Biology from U of I, in one year less than the norm. She’s traveled in Europe and deep into Mexico. She speaks Spanish well enough to be considered Spanish-speaking and she is the most determined and unrelenting person in my family when she has a goal in mind. She’s had quite a few really hard decisions to make in the last year and she has held her ground and stuck to her principals. I admire her more than any woman in the world. For some reason she is currently an Agricultural Customs Officer based out of O’Hare in Chicago. Not in a million years would I ever have guessed she’d be doing that. But it’s a great and vital job and I don’t doubt she’ll get exactly what she needs from the experience.

When my oldest son Marshall came to work for me he was a real test. In truth, when my oldest son Marshall was born he was a real test. What a monster. Defiant, smart, stubborn, literate, sneaky, compassionate towards animals and despite the evidence that he is a family-oriented person, he gave us all hell for years. He hated working for me. I started him at $2 an hour and when he asked why so little I told him I figured I was only losing $1.50 an hour that way. But damned if he didn’t take to it like a duck to water. He played Man O’ War, Settlers, and many other games with the guys. When Magic hit in late 93’ he’d just started at Dark Horse and he got hooked. Marshall played the game well and he spent almost all of his money on cards. Betas and Unlimited and Arabians and Legends. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars, all at cost. He devised a plan to make 60 card decks of commons and sell them for $2 each at the store and we sold hundreds of them. He painstakingly put them together one by one and lots of people loved them because they worked so well for casual play.


Marshall, his beautiful wife Michele and some extremely excellent dogs.

One of the best trips in my life was when he and I went to Origins together when it was in San Jose. He went wild, packing his backpack with Legends packs and selling them for $5 each. He kept $1.50 from each one, gave me the rest and he probably made $400 during the Con.

Then one day he asked me to sell all his cards on Usenet for him. He said he was done and wanted a computer, a nice guitar and a mountain bike. When I sold them Marshall probably netted about $3500 pure profit. Not bad for a 14 year old kid. He quickly blew $1,000 on a pc from some local loser who was building total crap. The junk pc Marshall bought broke so often that he got mad. So mad in fact, that he fixed it. And then he made it better. And then he got my approval to get internet access. I never heard the sounds of pc games from his room. All you ever heard was him playing blues on his guitar or cursing at his array of computers or typing furiously on this or that hidden hacker site.

Marshall always treated every customer like they were special and he never once uttered a negative word about geekiness or misfits, he just seemed to understand people, why they were there buying games and that "normal" is a myth. He also went to U of I but he only lasted two years. He had a summer internship at a defense contractor in Washington and they asked him to stay on… at $45K per year. He told me about it after he turned them down. Seems he had ethical considerations about what the feds wanted and what he was good at. He had decided that networks deserved privacy, not incursion and he was morally inclined to deliver defense rather than attacks.

As a dad it was hard for me to bite my tongue. That’s a lot of money for a 20 year old kid. He was right, of course. I have no idea what he makes today but its way more, even adjusted for inflation, than I did when I was 25. I guess he’s some sort of Unix savant and he gets to live in a remote coastal town and take care of servers that are hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away.

Perhaps that $2 an hour was the right thing to do? Perhaps. Or maybe he’s just smarter and more mature than I was at his age. I choose the latter and I suspect all I did was give him a place to learn what he needed to learn so he could move on to what he really loved.

My dad pretty much saved my store. He retired, sort of, in 1987 and moved up from New Mexico to help me with my kids. They lived with me and only visited their mother twice a month. When I got strapped for help at Dark Horse my dad stepped in. That was 1988 and he was there until the middle of this year. 17 years. After retirement. Everybody… and I mean everybody loves Mel. Gamers would come by just to talk to him. Or perhaps to talk at him. We had a substantial military contingent and they saw the real thing in my dad. It took him a few years to get over some of the odd habits, social ineptitude and strange behavior of the RPG and CCG crowd, but despite having been born in 1926, Mel overcame his Depression era, military-haircut, Texas Gentleman prejudices and he never missed a chance to work the counter. It had to have been odd for a newbie in the store to be greeted by a gray-haired older man who frankly, didn’t have clue one about anything we sold. He never showed any interest in any of the games either. None. Mel is just not gamer material.

No matter what trouble I got in, no matter how distressed I might have gotten financially or during a divorce, or whatever, my dad was like a rumbling diesel engine, never stopped running, always there when you needed him, never complaining and totally skilled at making any human being who walked in the store feel good.

In retrospect folks, the reason every gamer ought to have a local store like Dark Horse is not because of people like me. I was pretty much just a facilitator. I wouldn’t have had squat without the three people who really made my store work. My two kids because I needed to have a place to school them in ways that traditional school doesn’t offer and my dad because I’m pretty much a flaky goofball and he is the frickin’ Rock.

The main thing that makes great local stores great is they are filled with gamers and hopefully with people behind the counter like my dad and my kids.

Bottom line for me, the reason I don’t want to own a game store any longer is that the goals I strived to achieve with the store have now been met. My kids have grown up (well, except for the new one, but that's another tale), my dad is loving life as he approaches his 80th birthday and I have a whole new set of goals and some unfinished business that I want to tackle.

My advice to those who want to own a game store is to have a really good excuse to embark on that particular adventure. If you happen to have one or even several local stores but find yourself critical of them, give them another chance, try looking at them as people like you instead of as mere merchants. I’m convinced that retail stores are the foundation of board gaming and its recent and past success. I’d hate to be without one and even though many things can be bought for less online, there are plenty of good things that a nice local store offers that aren’t about the money.

Being a game store owner is truly a blast. It's very, very difficult to suceed at it but if you surround yourself with family or good friends, treat the customers as you want to be treated and are willing to buy used instead of new for a decade or so, the pay-off trancends money by quite a bit. To be honest, I have ten times more respect for someone who owns a really crappy game store than I do for the gamer who does nothing but complain about how crappy that particular store is.

In the end, it's just games... we're not talking about vital medicine for sick babies here. Be nice to your local store and if they haven't learned how to be nice to you, have the courtesy to tell them so... and perhaps even ask them to change.

Have a damned Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukah, and a Kool Kwanzaa and for you atheists, have a nice holiday and I hope you get many fine lumps of coal.

WELCOME to ''the machine''

Well, first off, allow ME to heave a hearty "Welcome" to our latest 'blog`r & blog`ette', the 'Team' of ''Melissa Rogerson & Fraser McHarg'' along with ''biggie'' & the 'ubiquitous' ''OTTO''!~'she's everywhere, she's here & there, in fact I think she's in my hair!' Good to have you ALL around and ''OTTO'', YOU can 'get' in MY hair anytime, baby! Just don't be doing any 'macrame' stuff though, the 'knotting' is difficult to comb out. They should provide an overall unique approach as one of the few 'gaming couples' that I can think of, and they're ''bringing UP baby'' to become dedicated 'playahs' as well, so the BEST to them upon this. In case some folks weren't also aware of this lil 'factoid', then they're from ''OZ'' to boot! That's the ''place of the folks down under'', you 'unter-podian'! And yes, I 'hear' that Miss 'Melissa' has a lilting voice as she belts out her rendition of ''the people under the stares of those over the Rainbow'', so yeah it's quite GOOD! While poor ole 'Fraser' is known to stumble through while his memory fails upon some lines to ''IF I only had a 'Zombie' to obtain a 'Brain' with!'' They cap this 'off' with ''biggie'' singing about ''How MUCH more is that ''OTTO'' going to 'deposit' in the droopy drawers?'' GREAT 'entertaining' group of people to be around, or so I've 'heard'! Well, that IS what I've been told! So, give them your attentions for whatever you may here, and look forward to their amblings & ramblings & gamblings upon 'gaming' matters.

Just a quick ''shout out'' here to ''Scott Nicholson'' and his recent debut of some games upon his local 'Public Broadcast Channel', looking GOOD there 'mon'! I've just viewed this, as it was 'posted' upon the ''GEEK'' site so check him out there! This is his 2nd time on that particular program and let's hope that HE becomes a 'regular' guest of theirs, to promote ''better gaming through osmosis'' or whatever it takes. Keep up the excellent ''JORB!''

Another ''shout out'' to our very OWN ''DW Tripp'' for being the ''Geek of the Week to Speak or Tweak yer Freak amongst Meek who Seek some Peek at his Physique!'' Goats NOT withstanding, as he will have you know, since they're ''E-vile'' critters! Yet, they's quite tasty as he is quick to point out. I hope to take him UP on his 'offer' about those sometime when this can become 'arranged', and most likely upon his NEW 'place' of ''Mesquite 'O' Goat Ranch''. 'Teriyaki' is pretty decent too, ya kno?

There is also the debut of the ''Forward Observer'' for the 'grognards' amongst you, upon the ''BGG'' site with several choices of articles concerning several gaming aspects. Those may, or might not have ALL of the 'group' participating upon their 'topic', as some of us are not too 'hip' upon certain subject matters. This happens to cover several approaches at introducing anyone who is vaguely interested upon learning MORE about ''Wargames'' in particular. I've managed to contribute something substantial upon the 'A-H' 1964 "Midway" game regarding the ''Coral Sea'' Variant for that, with an entire SHEET of 'upgraded' aircraft 'silhouettes' graphics for that. They actually NOW appear as they should have been in the first place, instead of the generic looking kinds that were 'done' with this. I eagerly anticipate even expanding upon that with other 'works', while some will even become an 'O'riginal of sorts, as I take on some 'pet projects' that provide an even simpler manner to get 'grognardsterlings' going with these.

Winning, Losing and the Killer instinct

First of all, thanks to Coldfoot and the team for the invitation to join them here. Fraser and I will share this spot, blogging opposite Joe Gola on alternate Saturdays. We'll most likely be writing about the joys of gaming with young children (our daughters are 7 and 2), as well as the pleasures (or not) of gaming with a spouse.

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There’s something special about beating your spouse in a game. The thrill of grinding them into the dirt - watching them wriggle and squirm, then lose by a good margin anyway - can fill us with almost unsurpassable joy.

I’m definitely no exception. And when I win, I make sure I rub it in.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband, and I think I’m usually a good loser and a good winner. It’s just that he’s better at games than I am.

Games at our place fall into three categories: the games I win, the games he wins, and the games that can go either way. By far the largest of these categories is the second one.

Now there are games that I just can’t bring myself to care about losing, at least publicly. I lost our first 13 games of Snakes and Ladders to Biggie and Fraser. Then I won one and promptly lost the next ten or so. We don't play that game anymore.

There are other games that can go either way when we play. Lost Cities, Balloon Cup, Schotten Totten – even Attika – have a pretty even win/loss record. We enjoy these games, but they're rarely the first game off the shelf when we sit down to play.

And there are some games – some wonderful, wonderful games – at which I just beat him.

It’s important to say upfront that I claim no particular greatness at these games. I lose most of my online Tigris and Euphrates games – but of all the games we have played together, Fraser has won two at most. While Fraser is still trying to remember the French phrase for “where is the palace”, I am gaining influence and completing key missions in Louis XIV. And let’s just say that my Trias dinosaurs have a much better understanding of continental drift than Fraser’s.

There’s a pattern to our wins and losses, which holds true most of the times we sit down to a new game.

The first time we play, it may go either way. Often, we agree to treat it as a learning game and call the result before we’ve finished the entire game. If we play it out, the result is usually very close, unless someone made a heinous error.

The second and third games, more often than not, go to me. Not always, but enough for there to be a noticeable trend. You’d think I would have learned not to get cocky about this by now, wouldn’t you, but I will still excitedly issue the challenge: Come on, try to beat me and my obvious aptitude for this new game, Mr I-have-lost-them-all-so-far.

Then he does.

Again and again and again. Until I am completely mortified and Reepicheep-like in my defiant – and baseless – challenges. It’s hard to accuse someone of being afraid of your superior game-play and strategy when they have won the last seven games you played, but I’ll try.

It took nine almost back-to-back games of Puerto Rico before I could beat him with any regularity. Now we’re broken for Puerto Rico with other people, because we’re both wired to beat up on each other to the exclusion of all else. It’s a friendly kind of rivalry, but it can’t be fun for anyone else, especially people who aren’t so familiar with the game.

Oddly, I almost invariably do better against computer opponents than he does.
So what’s going on? Is this just a (gleefully accepted) chance to publicly mock my husband’s losing streaks? That would be an acceptable reason in itself, it's true, but there are some underlying reasons why these patterns hold true so consistently.

There are fundamental differences in the ways we approach games. To Fraser, they’re puzzles waiting to be solved. Those first few games, he’s experimenting with strategies, trying out new techniques, wondering whether it will be better if he does it this way or that, and generally enjoying himself. I’m following the script that led to victory in the first game, either for me or for someone else, experimenting a little but never veering far off that basic strategy. Once he finds a better way to play or win, it will take me a game or two to replicate or block his strategy – and by then he’s found a way to stymie that as well. I do my thinking and planning before the game starts and, if I’m lucky, at one or two key moments during the game; he does it more consistently as the game progresses. The first time he beat me at Tigris and Euphrates, he threw me by attacking me and causing conflicts from his very first move. I'm wise to that now; he'll have to come up with something new if he wants to throw me like that again.

Once that winning pattern kicks in, though, so does my bloody-mindedness. I will demand to play the game over and over, just watching for the weak point that I can manipulate to my advantage. Given the choice, I’ll almost always pick a game where Fraser wipes the floor with me over another game, desperate to claw back a little self-respect. Gaming is never so serious - or so tense and bloodthirsty - as when I'm fighting to regain my dignity.

At the heart of it all, the truth is that I enjoy the social aspects of gaming as much as I do the mechanics. I'll always play to win, but when we play with a group I’m satisfied with a good showing, happy to not be absolutely dead last, glad to have indulged my love of a good game.

When I beat my husband, though, I reserve the right to behave badly.

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Gaming with the girls

Not much gaming was done this week, as we prepared for our Christmas holidays. We’re driving interstate to stay with (non-gaming) family, so decisions about which games to pack will be difficult as space is tight.

Last week at game night, with only 3 players, we played Gargon and Elfenland. Gargon is a very nice card game by Rüdiger Dorn and we played three quickish hands of it – it’s fairly light and not a lenthy game, which makes it a good start or finish to a game night. It's nicely designed, too, which is always a plus. I’ll look out for a copy.

It was my first game of Elfenland, and I liked it a lot, although it felt a little thin with only three players. This is a game that Biggie (aged 7) has been begging to play, so it might make another showing this weekend. She’s played Ticket to Ride, so she’s already familiar with the face up/face down selection method – it’s exciting for her when she realises that she already knows game mechanics.

We tried Zendo with Biggie one night this week, now that my much-awaited copy has arrived. She’s played something similar at school, which they call “Are you in my club?” so she was familiar with the basic idea. Fiddling with the Icehouse pyramids was an added bonus, and I found her playing it solo this morning (although I'm not entirely sure how you play Zendo solo). My prediction was that I would like it, Biggie would love it and Fraser would probably hate it. That was pretty accurate, although Fraser was lukewarm rather than anti. I did find that I broke most of my “gaming with kids” rules to skew my guesses to be just a little bit wrong, and to lead her towards the correct solution. In the next few weeks, I’d like to get out some more logic and deduction games, so that we can lead up to Clue(do) early next year.

I also tried a variant of Koffer Packen (Pack your Suitcase) with Otto (aged 2). This is a lovely memory-style game where the cards are laid out face up, then turned over. Children then have to remember where the cards are and name them before turning them up. We played a home-grown variant where we chose some cards, then looked at one and turned it face down. “Look at the truck. Now let’s turn it over. What’s on this card? A truck! Well done! And this one? A comb! Oh you are good at remembering things" – I found she could easily remember 6 or 7 cards when they showed things that were directly relevant to her experience – a truck, a ball, a bucket and spade.

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May your meeples be good meeples.

Melissa

The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series

I don't remember exactly when Iain Cheyne first came to my attention, but it must have been nearly 2 years ago. His blog was one of the first boardgame blogs that I discovered. His blog was also one of the most frequently updated blogs and that was always appreciated.

Iain has been blogging since before blogging was cool. I believe Iain even had a blog before his current one, but I am not personally familiar with that endeavor. Iain was much more than helpful to me when I was just starting to blog. He offered some helpful advice about posting pictures to my blog (which was giving me fits at the time) and generally seems like a nice guy. He even sent me a bunch of RSS links when I was getting my RSS thingy up and running.

Thank you Iain, and the rest of you enjoy. CF


First of all, thanks to Koldfoot for honouring me with an invitation here. Rather than talk about games in general, I thought I'd go into detail about a series of games The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series. I rank the original game as one of my only perfect 10's, but the series is rarely discussed and this sort of game is not published any more, so I think they deserve a little more limelight.

Rather than being a deduction game like Sleuth or Zendo, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a detective game. You are put in the position of one of Sherlock Holmes' helpers, the Baker Street Irregulars, and given a case to solve, usually in parallel with Sherlock himself. You are given a set of clues:

• a long list of crime fighting contacts, like Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard or Porky Shinwell, an underworld informer.
• a map of Victorian London
• a newspaper archive
• a London directory, full of peoples' names and addresses.

After poring over them, you get a book of disconnected paragraphs, rather like the Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure books of the early eighties and you go forth and try to solve the crime, typically a murder, in the shortest possible number of steps. Once you think you all think you have solved the crime, you finish reading and someone reads out the solution. Sherlock then explains how he solved the murder, typically in a quarter of your time and you marvel at his brilliance and your own stupidity.

What marks these games out is the attention to thematic detail. The writing, clues and graphic design are all very evocative. The language is very close to Conan Doyle's. It is as close a hybrid between gaming and literature as you will ever find. These are the perfect games to play with people who love literature, but are less keen on games themselves. The strength of the theme and the free-form mechanics make it feel like a role-playing game with the work taken out. You still have to think hard and take notes to solve the problems, but at least you do not spend your whole time looking up rules or role-playing.

The original game had two modes of play, either competitive, reading the paragraphs in silence and racing to the solution, or collaborative, reading the paragraphs together and discussing the solution. I much prefer collaboration, as it moves more quickly and it is an excellent way for people to get together. In later expansions, the competitive mode was dropped. Because of this, the game suits less competitive gamers but also might alienate the opposite. It is definitely the best team game I have played as a real story comes out of it. I would much rather play this with a few friends than organise a Murder Mystery dinner.

This is also the best solitaire game I have ever played. If you ever enjoyed Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, you will love this.

Replayability is a problem. After playing a case, it is finished for you. On the other hand, several of these games were published and I am nowhere near exhausting the gameplay in them:

• Adventures by Gaslight - an expansion based in Paris. I have not yet tried
  this.

• Queen's Park Affair - a stand-alone supplement. This is actually one huge case and my wife and brother ran out of stamina pretty quickly. I recommend you play this solo or only with a dedicated group. I really wanted to like this as I grew up about a mile off the map you see below, and you can almost see my workplace at the western end of the map. I will have to finish this solo sometime.

• West End Adventures - a stand-along supplement. It includes a set of cases like the
  original game. I thought some of the details were less authentic, like a few stray Americanisms that jarred a little. Otherwise, it is just as good and it has my favourite box cover.
  

• Mansion Murders - a stand-along supplement. I have not played it. A review at the Geek claims:
  

At least one of the 5 cases in this game requires that you've not only played the original, but that you remember details from some of its cases clearly. This was very disappointing to my group, as it not only made it impossible for us to solve that case, but it also spoiled a case from the original game before we got to it. I recommend that you only play this game if you've already played and finished Consulting Detective.

• Gumshoe - The same system ported to the 1940's Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler. I have not played it, but the components are amazing, even more detailed than the previous games. There are mug shots, autopsy reports, fingerprints, a lavish map and the regular telephone directory etc.
  

Other companies made paragraph based boardgames, but these are the only ones I have.

I asked my wife for her comments. She said the number of false leads the players were given irritated her, but she says she will still play it with me. I agree there are false leads, but that is what makes the game challenging and makes it feel authentic. It is certainly the hardest game I have been able to persuade her to play with me more than once. She was put off by our Queen's Park Affair debacle. I hope I can persuade her to try a shorter case again, so she can remember what she enjoyed in it the first times.

She also pointed out that the amount of data you are presented with is overwhelming. That is realistic as you are trying to solve the mystery in as lifelike a way as possible, but these games do not hold your hand. This is intimidating for the first game or two, but becomes easier with experience as the cast of characters, map and telephone directories stay the same.

A couple of years ago, Chessex had them in stock, and the original is very available on eBay and at the BoardGameGeek marketplace. I highly recommend you pick up a copy if you want an original, challenging gaming experience.

As a final note, if you're really stuck about whodunnit, think of the most unlikely person it could be...

The images in this post were taken from the BoardGameGeek and are used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 licence.

Three Designers: Knizia, Kramer & Teuber

I like puzzles. No, not necessarily the sort that you'd fine in Games magazine, but instead puzzles where you slowly build up pieces of information, only to see a larger pattern suddenly emerge. Tactical games often satisfy this desire in me, be it Australia or Dungeon Twister, because you can imagine the chaos of possible turn, but then a sudden, perfect move abruptly emerges. I suspect Sleuth would satisfy this urge too, and I have no idea why I don't own a copy of that yet.

This like also influences my writing, and so I often have a desire to categorize, index, and sort, hoping to again find that ever-elusive pattern underlying the mundane. And that's what I'm going to do this week, in the first of what I expect will be many columns about game designers.

Here I'm going to give overviews of three of my favorites, and talk a little bit about what I feel holds their games together. The three designers I've choosen for this installment are, I think, the three biggest influences on the current Eurogaming scene: Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer, and Klaus Teuber--the Special K's, to quote another website.

#1: Reiner Knizia

Reiner Knizia is, in my mind, the father of the modern Eurogames movement. Sure, it was Teuber that broke the field wide open, but Knizia really seems to have envisioned the lightly themed, heavily mechanical style of play which is emulated by most modern German designers.


In general, I'd call Knizia the "elegant designer". He has a superb ability to create simple mechanics that allow for deep and meaningful strategy & tactics. In addition he seems to be a superb developer, producing games that are well-considered, without sharp edges, and largely picture perfect. Some Knizia games aren't to my liking, but it's rare that I see a Knizia game that has an actual flaw in it (though some do; no one's perfect).

The biggest problem with Knizia's designs is that he produces a wide variety of games, from ultra-ultra-light to medium-heavy, and they're for a wide variety of audiences. A lot of people seem to be expecting him to put out a certain type of design (usually, one of those medium-heavy games), and so they're disappointed by everything else. This year Knizia put out at least three games that I think will be enjoyed by gamers for years to come, two medium-light designs, Tower of Babel and Palazzo, and one medium design, Beowulf: The Legend, and they were mostly met with undeserved scorn and derision. Buck up, folks, not everything is going to be Tigris & Euphrates or Through the Desert.

I'd further classify Knizia's games by saying that they're almost all "auction games". By this I mean that you offer up scant resources in opposition to other players for the chance of winning some prize. You have what used to be his "auction trilogy", now including High Society, Medici, Modern Art, Ra, Traumfabrik, Amun-Re, Taj Mahal, The Merchants of Amsterdam, Palazzo, and Beowulf. You also have closely related trading games, such as Res Publica and Tower of Babel, differentiated mainly by the fact that the auctioneer isn't required to take the "best" bid. His bidding games, like Titan: The Arena and Goldrush are similar, except the items you have to "bid" are much more random. Even two of his very popular "tile-laying games", Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates, shade into the same categorization, since your have various values of certain currencies (a 3 buddha, 5 temples) which allow you win certain prizes (a city, a civilization). I'll grant that the last one is starting to stretch the definition, but the mathematical maximization is still there, and perhaps that's not a surprise given Knizia's mathematical background.

Perhaps the only top Knizia game that doesn't seem to fit into this style of play is Through the Desert, which places more importance on board position and majority control than just about anything else Knizia has done. (Well, actually, Carcassonne: The Castle and Tigris & Euphrates place a huge importance on board position, while Tower of Babel is a rare majority-control game for Knizia, but for someone with this many games, there's going to be exceptions to everything.)

My Reviews¹: Through the Desert (A), Taj Mahal (A), Ra (A), Amun-Re (A), Tigris & Euphrates (A), Modern Art (A-), Carcassonne: The Castle (A-), Lost Cities (A-), Razzia (A-), Beowulf: The Legend (B+), Samurai (B+), Blue Moon (B+), Lord of the Rings (B+), Easy Come, Easy Go (B+), Titan: The Arena (B+), Tower of Babel (B), Palazzo (B), Quo Vadis? (B), High Society (B), Buy Low, Sell High (B), Relationship Tightrope (B-), Poison (C+), Tutankhamen (C+),Gold Digger (C+), Res Publica (C), Galaxy: The Dark Ages (C), Kingdoms (C), Spy (C),Loco! (D+)

Interviews: Funagain (1999), Gamefest, on Einfach Genial (2004), BGG podcast (2005)

#2: Wolfgang Kramer

If Reiner Knizia is the father of the Eurogames movement, Wolfgang Kramer is its grandfather. He's been publishing games since 1974 and some of his games are utterly foundational. Kramer usually designs his games with other people, Michael Kiesling being his most frequent, and I think most successful, goto guy, but I'm not going to try and differentiate. All of Kramer's collaborations are fair game here (and in other similar articles I plan to write).

At heart I'd call Kramer a "tough designer". Most of his games have a diamond heart. They require deep strategy or very thoughtful tactics in order to succeed. He's done some light and fluffy stuff, but they're either less-common or less-well-known than Knizia's, and Sunken City is the only game I can think of that really disappointed people solely because it was too light.

Kramer shows a lot of versatility & originality as a designer, and this makes some of his games, as already noted, foundational. El Grande kicked off a whole genre of majority-control games (though some are arguably the result of Sackson's Acquire instead). 6 Nimmt! no doubt influenced later simultaneous-play card games. Heimlich & Company could easily have been Clans' predecessor. Other top-level games that show Kramer's versatility but haven't necessarily had the same effect on the industry include El Caballero (tile-laying), Pueblo (spatial geometry), Goldland (exploration), Daytona 500 (racing), and of course Princes of Florence (auction).

However Kramer's biggest category of games are "tactical games". These are largely action-point-based systems which fit my core definition of a "puzzle game". They allow players many opportunities to try and figure out how to do clever things on a turn-by-turn basis with limited resources. Entrants include Tikal, Torres, Java, Mexica, Maharaja, and Australia. These are all inevitably collaborations with Kiesling.

For some reason I haven't actually reviewed many of Kramer's games, though he's one of my current favorites, as evidenced by his inclusion here.

My Reviews¹: El Grande (A), Torres (A), Maharaja (B+), Java (B+), Mexica (B+), The Princes of Florence (B), Saga (B), Category 5 (B-), Sunken City (B-)

Interviews: Games International (1990), Game in the Box (2001), Gamewire (2004), Interviews by an Optimist (2005)

#3: Klaus Teuber

Finally we come to Klaus Teuber, Eurogaming's kindly uncle. His games are very approachable, but surprisingly are outside of the norm for German games. Where most German games are lightly themed, his aren't, and where many try and reduce randomness, Teuber happily uses dice. In many ways Teuber's games are closer to modern French designs than German ones (a topic I'll get back to next week). Nonetheless a lot of the success of Eurogames, both in Germany and in the United States, is due to the singular influence of The Settlers of Catan.

For that reason, Teuber is inevitably the "Catan designer". Catan makes up at least half of Teuber's output, and definitely most of his better known games. Besides the core game, and the Seafarers and Cities & Knights supplements we also have historical scenarios, licensed versions, and more recently full variants like The Settlers of the Stone Age and The Starfarers of Catan. Most recently Teuber has stepped away from whole-blown Catan system, but he continues to use the same basic idea: randomly produce resources, manage them, and build new stuff with them. Anno 1503, Candamir, and Elasund all fall into this later design period. A more general way to describe most of Teuber's output is "resource management games" but that's really just code for Catan.

A few of Teuber's older designs including Barbarossa and Hoity Toity have been reprinted recently. They're a bit old and creaky, and as far from the German norm as Catan, but still quite good games. Oddly enough his two other hit games were originally meant to be part of a mega-Catan game. The game that became Entdecker would have showed the settling of the island, The Settlers of Catan its development, and then Domaine the warfare that followed. Entdecker and Domaine, however, are totally distinct from Catan-like mechanics, and in fact are each quite stand-out games in their genres (exploration and warfare) and I personally think they outshine the more popular Settlers.

Reviews¹: The Settlers of Nurnberg (A), Entdecker (A), Domaine (B+), Elasund: The First City (B+), Barbarossa (B+), The Settlers of Zarahemla (B+), The Kids of Catan (B+), The Settlers of Catan (B), The Settlers of Canaan (B), Anno 1503 (B), Hoity Toity (B), Starship Catan (B), The Seafarers of Catan (B-), Candamir: The First Settlers (B-), The Settlers of the Stone Age (B-), The Cities & Knights of Catan (B-), The Settlers of Catan Historical Scenarios I (B-), The Starfarers of Catan (C+), Oceania (C+), The Settlers of Catan Card Game (C+)

Interviews: Gamewire (2004), Catan Online (2005)

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1. Review Links. A few caveats on these rating links: note that my letter grade incorporates both the components and the gameplay, though at an approximate 1:2 ratio. Also note that it's hard to keep this sort of rating accurate over years of reviews, so the resultant rankings may not be 100% accurate, though I've tried my best (and indeed have gone back and revised a few reviews once I saw everything together for this article). In addition, these listings don't try and be complete; they're a combination of my actual reviews, plus a few ratings I felt comfortable throwing out for stuff I've played but haven't reviewed (yet).

Learn History Through Games

This week we were pointed to a site with a discussion which was inspired by Matthew Baldwin’s list of the 100 best games. One comment caught my eye and made me think: “…it’s hard enough getting adults to play a board game anyway, much less one with the unappealing and sounds – boring – as – all – (expletive deleted) title of ‘Age of Steam.’ .”

I would think that a man would be curious, at least, about a game centered around the age of steam. There are many museums dedicated to steam-powered machines and they attract a lot of visitors interested in the mechanics of these wonderful machines. Why doesn’t the name of the game conjure images of massive steam locomotives, their tracks being laid by the muscle and sweat of men instead of sounding “boring”?

I suppose, to the uninitiated, the titles of some of our favorite games aren’t as appealing as Sorry, The Game of Life, Clue, Connect Four, etc., etc., but to me they suggest a visit to another place or time—of course, I’m tainted. Many of our games are inspired by actual people, places, times or events so that we occasionally get a bit of a history lesson just by opening the box.

Wallenstein is a game which centers on the Thirty Years War. It comes with an historical booklet and each character’s card has a short biography for those who are interested in the background of the theme. But of course, war games are an obvious history lesson. I love to read the historical background for each of the scenarios in Memoir ’44.

Most games don’t come with a packaged history but you may be curious enough to do some research. Google “Stephsons Rocket” and you’ll find many sites with information on this innovative steam engine design. Perhaps you wonder how closely the game of Puerto Rico reflects the history of the island. There are several sites which can sharpen your historical knowledge. A search for “Tikal” will show you some wonderful photos and maps of the archaeological site. And I’m guessing that most of us know that Carcassonne is a real place, a fortified city in southern France.

Hansa was designed around the Hanseatic League, a group of merchant associations in the cities of Northern Germany and the Baltic. At one time there was a very nice article on BGG explaining how well the game mechanics reflected the actual history of the time but, sadly, I couldn’t find it.

I think we’re lucky to be able not only to sharpen our brains but broaden our knowledge through the games that we play. It’s a shame that some people are put off by something simply because they are ignorant of the subject matter.
~~~~~~~

Last week I put in an order for Hacienda and Das Ende Des Triumvirats, both not in stock until (probably) after Christmas. That’s it! I’m not buying any more games this year!

That puts this year’s game acquisitions at 39. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? So I’ve decided that I don’t want to hear or read about any great games that I don’t already own. No checking the new reviews on BGG, no reading of BoardGameNews, no checking the online retailers to see what’s new in stock and I refuse to listen to my internet friends discuss the pros and cons of games they like. Don’t tempt me, don’t inform me, don’t dangle that gaming-carrot in front of my face. (Side note from the daughter: “Yeah-that’ll happen!”)

While I’ll never be content to play the same 10 games over and over, I really do have enough games to satisfy even my love of variety. I have games easy enough to use when introducing someone new to gaming, I have light, fun games, I have many medium-weight games and a few heavier games. I should be set for whoever enters my door.

I’m sharing this early New Year’s resolution with all of you so you can join my daughter in saying, “Yeah, right” when you find out I’ve placed another order. Let’s see…I still haven’t broken down and bought Colovini’s Alexandros, I’d love to have the new version of Oltremare and that Hey! That’s My Fish might be a nice, quick play for Richard and me. Eep! I have to go call my psychiatrist now, Dr. Meepolous.
~~~~~~~

Until next time remember, sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd.

Mary

I can complain too: my top ten problems with the game world

The top ten endemic problems in the board gaming world, as I see it. You probably won't, but that's ok. That's because my two main priorities are the promulgation of
board gaming to the masses and the utility of board games and their components.

Rules

Length: Many of the best games in the world have short rules, but that is not the case with the majority of the new games. They have long complicated rules. Can the game be explained in a hundred words or less? No? Well it's not going to challenge Sorry and Monopoly for dominance in Toys R Us, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks. Can't you make it into a basic game, with the more complicated rules included as an "advanced game"? I guess, like fine wine and art, some good games will never be for the masses.

Problems: Did you playtest this thoroughly, including all the possible rule exceptions? Did you consider what will happen if someone bids everything on his first turn, or discards his hand on every turn? Does the game flow without the theme, or does it have to be played only with "the right group of people"? Does it HAVE to include action cards where some of them are twice as good as others and you pay a lot for them and you only get to pick one?

Clarity: Spelling. Grammar. Proper use of pronouns and possessives. If the sentence sounds awkward when it is read out loud, it is too awkward to include in the rules. Try recording yourself actually teaching the game and then transcribe and edit it. Use clear examples of normal play and use pictures whenever possible. Are all the rules about a certain type of action in one place? Is it clear what changes are made for a variable number of players? Are there rules ambiguities?


Theme

I would be happy to never see another offensively themed game in the name of humor ("Slap prostitutes! Har har! What? If you don't like it, you don't have to play it.") Frankly, I would be happy to never see another game where you could root for the Nazis or any other forces from history, simulation or not. Or where you shoot cops, kill children, make fun of minorities, etc...


Boxes

Attraction: Although we would like to attract adults, face the fact that we are going to have to attract kids. Gear our marketing and graphics to interest them, and the grown ups may join in. Or, like Harry Potter books, can we have "two versions", aimed at children and adults? And how about licensing? A large number of games are bought because they have the licensing behind them. We can do the same without sacrificing game play for many games. Naturally, licensing is no substitute for an actual game in there.

Suitability: I want the market standard, please. And all components should fit back into the boxes in a neat way. And be made of recycled and recyclable materials.


Components

Standards: Easy to distinguish standard colors and patterns, non-offensive non-stereotypes, all necessary components to play (but see Modularity), and stable pieces that don't break or fall over. Fancy pieces are suitable for niche markets or
people looking for "high quality of life" items. You have to balance this against price.

Modularity: I would like pieces from one game to be usable in other games. I would like to be able to buy just the parts of the games that I need. I don't need any more 6 suited decks, pawns, checkers, or dice.


Publicity

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people I ask still don't know what Settlers of Catan is. What are we doing, here? Where's the PR? How come Daryll Hannah and Jamie Lee Curtis are still playing Candy Land?

We need big displays in Toys R Us, in malls, clever television ads, TV shows with characters playing the games, and so on.


Distribution

We need to BE in Toys R Us, malls, and so on, or noone will be able to buy the games even if they've heard of them.


Price

Price is still keeping consumers away from the best games. Can't we make two versions: the nice component version and the mass-produced version? We can combine this idea with the kids/adults versions.

Also, with better distribution channels, those of us not in America or Germany can buy these games, too.


Support

I would like game companies to be responsive and error on the side of service. How much will you lose by giving away just a tad too much to a handful of people while making all of the rest of your customers sing your praises?


Accessibility

Whenever possible, games should be suitable for all ages and produced in a such a way that low-sight and color-blind players can participate.

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That's not so difficult, is it? Just compare this to my top ten problems facing the real world; doesn't this list make the game problem list look easier?

1. Universal access to clean water, food, fuel, medicine, and shelter.
2. Cessation to the destruction, and restoration, of our air, water, and land.
3. Universal access to personal security: to be free from bodily harm
due to acts of violence, disease, or natural disasters.
4. Universal access to personal liberty: to be free from kidnapping, slavery, or unreasonable government control.
5. Freedom from racism, sexism, caste systems, and other organized or personal forms of unjustified restrictions and intolerance.
6. A cessation of terrorism and war as means of solving disputes and political gain.
7. The separation of all non-civil based authorities (e.g. religion) and governmental laws.
8. An active promotion of consideration, ethics, and manners.
9. An end to unreasonable patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and a liberal policy promoting sharing and fair use.
10. A better system of material exchange other than unrestricted capitalism, which causes noise pollution, work pollution (seeping into our non-work lives), excessive garbage, radio and EMF pollution, food pollution, and identity pollution (the eradication of the individual).

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ A great year of gaming

I decided that this week I'd try and cover the games I enjoyed the most in 2005. With only a week or so left before Christmas and then the New Year to follow it seems like a good thing to do.

And... I'm so frickin' behind schedule in just about every aspect of my life I have nothing else ready! Maybe things will settle out for me in the next month or so and I can get back to the serious job of making fun of games, gamers, publishers and anyone else who happens to appear on my radar. But for now, I'd like to bask in the warm glow of 2005.

Memoir '44 remained a favorite of mine and while it has recently fallen by the wayside that's only temporary. I rule in Memoir '44. Well, at least I rule so long as I roll the good dice... the sweet one's you know. Like three tanks when I make an armored assault against the Germans. I love this game and I resolve to play it another 50 times or so in 2006.

Power Grid saw many plays. What an awesome game. And now that I have the expansion map it'll reappear in 2006 for sure. This game rates a "9" for me on The Geek and I suspect it will stay there for a long time. The rules though, are horrible. What a mess. I know everybody thinks that guy Jay at Rio Grande walks on water and turned fish into wine or made bread from horse manure or something. He may be great, but he sucks at translating. It took my fuzzy, myopic and aching head about a year to find all the errors in the rules... along with the hidden gems. You know, like how to actually win. Not to mention, the guy who designed it is just weird. But man, he did good and I appreciate it muchly.

Axis & Allies Miniatures also got some play from me but not nearly enough. I found it to be a great little game and I think the miniatures are excellent. One of my last purchases this year will be the Flames of War rules because I fully intend to use those cool little tanks and men for a table-top game. I'm at a point where I don't want to paint any more. My thanks to Hasbro ~ Hasborg for those who speak Grognads ~ for making a fine game.

Robo Rally was a bit of a disapointment but only because the quality did not justify the price. I bought it anyway. Now I have everything from the beginning to present of this great game. The game itself is awesome and a lot of fun. I'd recommend you find a deal on this one, it's worth owning but not at $50.

Struggle of Empires and Conquest of the Empire. What an outstanding system. My hat is off to Martin Wallace, Eagle Games and whoever else is involved. I own both of these, have played them a number of times and I love this system.

Which means I also like Age of Steam. A nice, nice game. Here again though the $50 reprint seems quite a lot when you can get Railroad Tycoon for near the same price. Both games are "9" in my book and I'd recommend Railroad Tycoon if you enjoy great pieces, attractive and thematic art and an outstanding value. If you're a pissy little Euro-Newt and prefer your toast dry and your milk warm then by all means go overpay for Age of Steam. You'll feel better and still retain your pretentious veneer of superiority.

Star Wars Miniatures was a flash in the pan for me. I like it. But like many collectible games, it dried up quick for me. Overall WotC did a fine job with this game and it's very nice to look at and plays easy. I guess I would have stuck with it if it was exceptional. It's not. Perhaps a "7" at best.

Ticket to Ride Europe hit the table along with it's older brother many times. Everything that can be said about this game system has been said. I prefer Santa Fe Rails and played it as many times. Alan Moon is a pivotal designer in my book and I think he created a game system here that will make new gamers and cause many smiles for years to come.

Runebound is another game that I played a number of times and found to be a terrific experience. FFG did a great job here and my copy will see the table a number of times next year. I want to mention this... I hate Talisman. It sucks. Playing that game is like spending three days in the Juvenile Lock-up in El Paso, Texas and trying to convince the Warden you really didn't think anyone would get hurt. Especially your cousin. Not that anything like that ever happened to me, but I can imagine how horrible that would be, And that's how I view Talisman. A horrible, horrible game where you sleep on a thin, cold mattress and shower with a bunch of guys name Jesus, Manny and Loco. But I always wanted to like Talisman. I did like the price mine brought on eBay, but the game is devoid of anything but dice rolls and card screwage. That's why I love Runebound. It delivers what Talisman never could. Runebound is the equivalent of your Dad finally deciding the lawn needed mowing and coming down to talk to the Senor Noriega (The Warden) and getting you out of Juvey. If you had ever been there I mean. Which I wasn't. But I can imagine how nice it would be to get out. That's Runebound to me... sweet freedom and a freshly mowed lawn.

I also played a bunch of race games. Everything from Formula De to Regatta to Daytona 500 and more. I pledge that I will one day write about the Formula De league I used to run. It was a wonderful experience and there are a few people I want to embarrass. I will play race games whenever I can and I'm going to get a copy of that really cool European one with the large cars. If you have one and want to trade, email me. I also pulled out my old copy of USAC Auto Racing and vow to inflict it on my local gamers next year. It's awesome and can probably be had on eBay for $5 tops.

I should also mention El Grande, Vegas Showdown, Through the Desert and even Puerto Rico, I played them all and many, many more. Looking back though, there have been so many great new games that the old ones seem to be moved to the back and the new ones are what everyone wants. They aren't any less attractive, they're just, well, they've been played and there are so many new, unplayed ones that they don't get the love they used to. Even Bang!, which I played quite a bit in 2004 only saw my table a half a dozen times. And it's a fantastic game.

But what with Caylus arriving, Friedrich to be here soon, Reef Encounter, Command & Colors Ancients, World of Warcraft and many, many more, I wonder how many times I'll play the ones that slipped into the shadows the second half of 2005. Sitting on my table, still in the shrink, are Descent, Fairy Tale and Techno Witches. I don't think they'll make it this year because we're planning to learn Caylus, do the World of Warcraft thing and maybe even try out the new Power Grid expansion.

Hopefully you had as much fun being a Game Geek as me this year. My last few additions to this great blog will probably be all Christmassy and New Yearsy, but you can expect be to be back on top of things in 2006.

Oh yeah... and my cousin came out okay. He still limps and he slobbers a lot, but damned if that dump truck didn't look awesome when it exploded.

Shades of 'Grey' matters to come!

We're in the process here at the 'blog' of obtaining a replacement, for someone that is moving on, and we ALL wish `em the BEST in this as well. That's the nice 'element' about this, in that WE can adapt to the situation as it evolves, while we do appreciate everyone's efforts for what they've managed to accomplish for while they were around. For whomever is 'selected' then we offer our comraderie in their endeavours here, or elsewhere, as the case may become furthered. I won't divulge just WHOM we're approaching upon this 'concern'-just yet. Some of the others here haven't had the chance to reflect upon the 'contenders' being touted, so there's that consideration to take into accounts about the matter. It is hoped that sometime later on in the week's 'blog' contents, then a decision will be announced, and the newcomers can be 'Welcomed' in a befittingly appropriate manner. Then perhaps, we won't have this ''Sat-ur-day 'blog' gap'' is alright for NON-writing'', that has been occurring too often. I understand that this may have been due to other's committments as well, so that could very well have been a factor for this too.

For those of YOU who may be keeping up with some 'things' of mine, then I have some additional '411' to impart. I just discovered an unusual 'source' of potential ''gaming'' materials that someone could actually take to the NEXT 'level' for them! This is a 'series' of small figurines that I've been obtaining at my local $Dollar Tree Store, and of which I've seen at least '5' complete SETS of these 'guys'. These go by the 'name' of ''Micro Icons'' and they comprise the following' types': a "Kung Fu" SET: a ''Commandos'' SET; a ''Bikers'' SET; a ''Punk Rock`rs'' SET; & a ''Mexican Wrestlers'' SET! Each of them has around '3' packs of figures with '4' in those, while an additional '2' more 'packs' have a *Special* setting for their particular 'group' for a total of '5' per 'Group'. These also have a small magnet imbedded within their foot for 'display' purposes, while an enterprising 'person(s)' could be devising some game methods in which to apply them for. You can even 'mix & match' them for whatever you'd have in mind upon this, so keep an eye open for those IF you're so inclined. These are already ''pre-painted'' and have a dozen or more appearances and stances for them ALL . So that'll make a LOT of 'lazy & no-talent'-(I KEEEED!) folks happiest and of course there'll be others who just HAVE to make theirs more 'distinctive' as well, to 'show off' their talents in this regard. Just apply yourselves to where you're most able to then, while others shall too.

For the ''grognards'' amongst YOU, then fairly soon there is to be the ''Forward Observer'' 'group of GEEKs' to keep you informed upon materials of import for yourselves. This is going to be 'musings upon' from us all in that, to foster our 'interests' for those who happen to LIKE these as well. It may NOT have them ALL taking part in any particular 'subject' or 'topic' that could crop up, since not everyone is completely 'up to date' in many matters, of which I fully admit to that myself. That is WHY we'll leave those to them that can bring about a well derived synopsis for whatever is currently the ''soup du jeur'' in WARgaming circles. I know that I may be letting the 'cat outta the bag' in some respects here, while I just want to keep up hopes for anyone who would gladly be accepting of our collective 'knowledges' for this. I heartily expect to be able to further create additional 'expansions' for many of my OWN games within this, as well with assisting others who have the same aspirations for THEIR 'designs' in mind. It'll be something to look 'forward' to 'observing' as this transpires during its course of events, and you might even recognize MANY a fellow 'Geek' inspired by one another to greater heights in their 'projects' as those are completed, and brought forth for others to gaze upon with eager anticipation & expectations. Now, I've already commenced on initiating this 'process' by introducing a BASIC set of 'Rules' for gaming applications at the BGG site. To which I intend to 'expand' upon them with FULLY complete 'Scenarios' of which then any can commence to PLAY using those, as long as they possess the 'bits' or can readily obtain those. For a basis on which to begin this with, while ''Exclusive Rules'' pertaining to the situation for EACH individual 'topic' will then be more easily understood with as these unfold. I am even looking upon many games of what I already currently have, of which I can then 'apply' THIS upon, and for those who would like to as well. Hey! who 'says' that these can NOT be 'done' in this manner? Just YOU, I guess! So, go ahead or stay behind, just get outta the 'way' of the enjoyment of any others that WILL partake of these 'notions' for one & ALL!

In Search of Lost Time, Part 1

I often wonder to myself what it was that led me down the road to gamerism. Is it a genetic predisposition? Social conditioning? A pathological anomaly? Sometimes I worry that the hobby is a prolonged state of morbid nostalgia, or the mollycoddling of a Freudian desire to return to an oceanic moment, and maybe it's so: one of my earliest memories of playing a board game is at heart a memory of family harmony; it was a dark Christmas night in the mid- to late seventies, the lights were low, a fire crackled in the fireplace, and my parents, brother and I sat together at a card table in the middle of the living room; something about the moment in time had me under a spell, and the orthogonal boundaries of the game table seemed to encompass all that was significant in the known world, like a flat earth drifting in space. The game of the night was Dungeon Dice, and my two main recollections of the experience are that I was disappointed at losing and that there was an argument over who had to be the old man with the spoon. Nonetheless, this memory remains while others fade, and the fire is still warm in that room somewhere in the back of my mind. Why is that, I wonder?

Strangely, though, I don't remember board games as being a particular favorite among our various childhood toys; certainly they weren't in the same league as Smash-Up Derby cars, Legos or Star Wars figures. Of course, it didn't help that many of the games were flat-out terrible. Among our collection were the dreary, TV-spawned Emergency! and The Starsky and Hutch Detective Game, the cool-looking but insanely frustrating Haunted Mansion Game which our parents refused to play a second time, and the paranormally pedestrian Bermuda Triangle Game with its magnetized doom cloud that picked up your game pieces at random and gave them back when it damn well felt like it. The bottom of the barrel was an ugly, boring, sadistic game about identifying and collecting license plates; the idea of memorizing the color schemes of the license plates of the fifty states seemed as idiotic a pastime back then as it does to me today, and I feel a certain sense of satisfaction in knowing that this vile bit of nonsense is absent from the Boardgamegeek DB.

Not all the games were bad, though. Careers was certainly tolerable, even if I never won. The goofy humor of the wacky (if overlong) Mad Magazine Game was right up my alley for sure. We also enjoyed a few plays of 10-Four, Good Buddy, a game produced to cash in on the CB radio craze, of which my father was an enthusiastic participant (though not a trucker). We kids could also relate to the theme because we had seen the movie Convoy. However, our favorite board game of the time was, no doubt, The Sinking of the Titanic, a game in which the ship part of the board pivoted on a wheel so that it could actually submerge itself beneath the waves. It's true that the aimless second half really does convey the feeling of being adrift at sea, but this was made up for by the exciting first half in which players raced against the rising water levels to hit the lifeboats or collect useful castaway-type items like water and rations and magazines. For some crazy reason, getting this game was a real event for us; perhaps it was the first deluxe board game that my brother or I ever received as a present, and so there was a certain mystique about it.

However, what truly pointed me down the path of The Gamer Way was a good old deck of playing cards. Aces and spades were definitely in our blood; my parents' bridge groups (ladies' and couples') have plodded along without blinking for nearly my entire lifetime. I have no explanation for their unswerving devotion for the game, as they would never call themselves gamers, but my childhood memories of the rooms full of serious, contemplative, silent faces color the endeavor as being some kind of religious ritual: solemn, unquestioning, inescapable. However, at one point my mother did turn heretic and try to organize a mah-jongg club, though this faltered, perhaps because she was more enamored of the little bakelite blocks than she was of the game itself.

As a family we played Rummy 500, and lots of it, and there was always an argument between my mother and father over the rules of the game; my father insisted that in order to take a card off the draw pile, the player had to be able to immediately meld that card using cards in the player's hand—in other words, if there were three sevens in the draw pile, you could not simply pick them all up and put them down in front of you. My mother was of the opposite opinion, and Dad typically characterized her version of the rules as being a degeneration typical of her morally questionable hometown of Brooklyn (my Dad having grown up over the border in Queens). Now, as an adult with his own copy of Hoyle's, I finally can pronounce my mother correct in this ancient family feud. Sorry Pop.

We played the game many, many times, much more than it perhaps deserved, and I think it is this reiteration of the game, the transformation of a simple set of rules into a code through which reality is refined into patterns of logic and luck, that unlocked that weird little door of rampant gamerism. When a game is played often enough that it ceases to be a hiatus from reality and becomes instead another form of reality, and that, I think, is the essence of gaming. The game is no longer a postcard, but becomes a place in the world that you can visit.

Next week: Nerdiness in the 1980s

On Spiel des Geek

The Boardgamegeek administrators are kicking around the idea of presenting boardgame awards. I've read the comments. I've given it some thought. Here are my two cents, which are soon to be the most widely ignored two cents ever offered.

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Quick Run Down of Some of the Major Boardgame Awards.

The Spiel des Jahres names the best game to be released in the previous year. It is an industry award with the goal of promoting and selling games.

The International Gamers Awards names the best game to be released in the previous year. The goal is to name the best game from a gamer's perspective.

The Deutscher Spiel Preis names the best game to be released in German speaking countries in the previous year. The goal is to name the best game from that year from a gamer's perspective. The DSP is sponsored by a game magazine.

Games Magazine names the best game released (usually) in the previous year. It purports to serve as a buyer's guide for current games.

Mensa... ah... who cares.

What all these major boardgame awards have in common is that they limit themselves to games from the previous year, other than Games Magazine which mostly names games from the previous year. (Games has the added burden of naming 100 games to their list, so there is often a need to overlap from various years in order to meet that goal.)

The boardgame world does not need another award for games released in the previous year. There are already numerous such awards.

What the boardgame world needs is a game award that reflects the enjoyment gamers got from a game over the previous year. That would be a meaningful award, especially when polling a population that isn't watered down with a lot of people who are only familiar with games available at the "box stores". Such an award would be more meaningful than an award to the best game to be released in a particular time frame.

Here's how it would work. Every game in the BGG database could be voted on. No limits based upon pre-selected nominees. No limits based upon the release date. The only criteria being the game you enjoyed most, or thought was the best game you encountered that year.

Who cares if Puerto Rico wins the Spiel des Geek (SdG) 3 years in a row? It is a very good game, and has staying power. The BGG award would simply recognize that the majority of voters (who would comprise the largest group of voting boardgamers in the world, BTW) think that Puerto Rico is the best game available for 3 years running. (I am not claiming Puerto Rico would win, nor that there has been nothing better for the last 3 years, I'm simply using it as an example of a game that could be the most-loved game for several years running.)

By opening up the voting to every game in the Boardgamegeek database, small print-run games that get all the buzz in Essen will be effectively out of the running for a SdG. So what? They tend to win or be nominated for other awards already. Only a few elite and otherwise lucky gamers will ever get a chance to play small print-run games unless a large company picks up the title for a subsequent release.

BGG does not need to focus on games released in a certain time period any more than a pollster needs to have an agenda when taking a poll. The very nature of BGG would ensure a fairly recent game would come out on top, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. If some small "indie" game that was the toast of Essen fails to win, so what? It simply means that it garnered lots of press, but was impractical for most gamers to play.

Voting for the Boardgamegeek award should simply be based on the following criteria: What boardgame gave you the most enjoyment in the last year? Or something close to that. That criteria coupled with a broad audience would eliminate the "elite" nature of awards such as the IGA, eliminate the "lowest-common-denominator factor" of the SdJ and bring an accessible, yet enjoyable, game to the forefront.

The hype associated with newly released games would be mitigated, unlike other game awards. Game hype is usually generated by a small number of gamers who have either not played the game or only played a couple times. It is not unusual for hyped games to win awards and then fade into obscurity due to the elite nature and artificial time constraints of most game awards. By specifying that your SdG vote be for a game you have played, the hype would be drowned out by the general gaming public. If the hype pans out, the game might win the award in the next year once the game is widely released and gamers have had a chance to play a few times.

If the powers that be deem that there is a need for a nominating process, that process should be as I just described, with a subsequent round of voting. I.e. Let all BGGers vote on any game they choose, take the top 10 as the nominees, and have a second round of voting limited to the nominees.

Just let me make one more comparison and you can sleep on my idea before totally discarding it. Consider music awards. Every year there are numerous music awards presented, all of them recognize music and musicians that were prominent in the previous year. How often are music awards handed out to mediocre talents? Quite a few, to say the least. You can win a music award simply by being controversial and getting some press. The key to winning most major music awards is to stay in the public eye for the 6 months prior to the award ceremony.

How many mediocre talents get into a music hall-of-fame? A few, no doubt. But by and large, when voters aren't limited to the previous 12 months and have a chance to look back on the impact a musician had on the industry the cream will tend to rise.

The Spiel des Geek would not be a hall-of-fame type award. There would be no requirement that a game be released at least 10 year previous before it could be voted on, but without the constraints of an artificial time limit, superior games would tend to receive the award.

And just to nip it in the bud, the Games Magazine Hall-of-Fame is not a hall-of-fame. It is simply a list of games that have been in print for a long time.

Good Gaming,
Brian "Coldfoot" Waters

Note: I will be out of town for the next few weeks. Look for guest bloggers to be covering for me on "Gone Gaming" until January. Until I get back, I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy New Year

Shannon's List of Do's and Don't's for Game Component Design

I've long been convinced that the reason for The Settlers of Catan's huge success wasn't its simple, yet strategic, gameplay, nor the fact that a lighter, more random game is more likely to appeal to families. Instead, I think it was largely due to its superb usability. Settlers' clean, intuitive & well-done player aid is the heart of the game's ease of use, and thus I think the heart not only of its success, but also the overall success of the Euro-games movement.

Thus whenever I've reviewed a game, I've looked very carefully at the design of the components, and in particular at their usability. Below I've listed about 50 of these lessons learned. They're not necessarily the 50 most important; I'm sure I missed the third biggest thing that any component designer should know. Instead they're just the first 50 or so items that came to my mind first and/or the ones recently mentioned by other gamers, by my wife, or by myself in my last 9 months or so of reviews.

Feel free to add on your own in the comments section, and maybe next year I'll update this article with a new and improved version!

Box Design

Do use cardboard for your boxes, not cardstock, unless you're making a relatively small card game.

Do consider the very shallow boxes now being used for games like Hansa and China. You get plenty of space for a board, and then a more appropriate amount of space for everything else.

Don't use a vastly oversized box and especially don't try and disguise the vast oversizedness by putting in a plastic tray that takes up 90% of the box.

Don't put out every one of your games with a different sized box and different branding.

Also see The Problem with Game Boxes and The Collector Bug for more of this rant.

Cover Artwork

Do have beautiful & evocative artwork that gives a feel for the theming you're trying to convey.

Don't print artwork that might be offensive to any large constinuency that you want to sell too. Cover nudity doesn't go over well in American, nor do slaves in chains, and especially not a combination of both; swastikas go over particularly poorly in Germany where the postwar criminal code actually makes it illegal to publicly show them, except for scholarly purposes.

Tray Design

Do include finger holes for any set of tiles, hexes, or cards that you provide a slot for, so that players don't have to dump your box to get the pieces out.

Do figure out what happens to the pieces in your tray if your box gets set on its side, particularly if your game is bookshelf sized.

Don't inset tray dividers notably below the level where the map or rulebook will set, else you're just asking for pieces to go all over.

Game Boards

Do fill the unused parts of your board with rules that players might not easily remember, like anything you'd put on a player aid sheet (see below), especially including victory point tables, action point tables, and combat tables.

Do try and minimize the number of folds in your board. Four panels is expected, two is really nice, and six is excessive unless you're producing a really big board.

Do use your board to pump up your theming. Named spaces and unnamed spaces have no functional difference, but the former can make a huge difference in how people vizualise & enjoy your game.

Don't go so artsy with your board that it becomes hard to use.

Don't make grossly large boards that are mostly or largely unnecessary. Most players will prefer a smaller board (and thus a smaller game) over a large one and will prefer no board at all, to allow for a card-sized game, if that board really wasn't needed.

Scoring Tracks

Do include a scoring track for your game, even if players just need to add up a couple of different things at the end.

Do try your best to make sure your scoring track will accomodate the highest score you expect players to earn in 90-95% of games.

Don't create a scoring track that players will have to wrap around 3 or 4 times.

Don't have your scoring track wrap at anything but a power of 10.

Don't even think about creating a scoring track where players mark their 10s digit with one marker and their 1s digit with another. It's unclear, easy to mess up, and doesn't do a good job of intuitively showing the rankings in a game.

Wooden Bits

Do make sure that your wooden bits are the right size for the spaces they go into. Don't make them too big, even by a little bit!

Do try and use the most appropriately themed wooden bits you can, especially if your game has multiple wooden bits that get put in the same places. The more inappropriate wooden bits your game has, the most opportunity there is to mix them up.

Don't use those darned wooden cylinders which hit the table, roll, then bounce straight onto the floor, where they're eaten by the family dog.

Plastic Bits

Do make sure that your plastic bits are the right size for the spaces they go into. Don't make them too big, even by a little bit!

Do cut your plastic pieces off the sprues before they get to your customers. No one likes to spend 2-4 hours doing so on their own.

Don't make plastic molds which such ridiculously small bases that the resultant pieces just fall over.

Cards

Do consider the readability of your cards not just in the hand, but also from across a table if your cards will ever permanently be played to the table or drafted from the table. Icons can help a lot here.

Do make sure that your most vital card information is visible when your cards are fanned. This means that you shouldn't put the info that players will use to select the card in the middle of the card or most of the way down an edge.

Do duplicate that vital information on two or four corners.

Do carefully consider the layout of your cards if they have any complexity. Similar layouts for different types of cards can highlight similar or identical information by putting them in the same places. Different layouts for different types of cards without any similarity of information can make that differentiation that much clearer.

Do think about ways that your cards can be stacked on the table to preserve information yet save space if there are going to be a lot of cards on the table.

Do be very careful about your card backs. Don't use the same card back for different types of cards unless there's a good reason for doing so (usually so that players can hide which types of cards they have in their hand) and really don't change your card back in a supplement or expansion, even to a slightly different hue.

Don't use a thinner than normal cardstock, and especially don't use a partially see-through cardstock.

Don't think that icons do the whole job. Text and icons are good as backups of each other. Unless your icon designer is a genius anything else will impact the usability of your game, and that's not worth the internationalization benefit.

Don't, for Knizia's sake, even think of printing a card with no explanation of what it does, assuming that players will memorize the list of card abilities from the rulebook.

Tiles

Do invest in good die-cutting, especially if you're producing a tile-based game where it's important that tiles sits flush up against each other.

Player Aids

Do include player aids in your game, particularly if different units have different powers, if players have action points they can spend on different things, or generally if you have more than one of two things that players have to remember. Look at The Settlers of Catan for the best way to do this sort of thing or Memoir '44 as a good example of player aids for different terrains or Java, Tikal, Mexica, or Torres as good examples of how to summarize action point usage. You can also be clever and sometimes include this stuff on the map, as noted above.

Do figure out how to quickly summarize your player aid information using icons and pictures.

Don't produce player aids that solely have huge blocks of text summarizing what to do, because they generally won't get read.

Color Usage

Do seriously consider using the most common four colors--red, green, yellow, and blue--as four of your core colors for a game, because players will have an easier time remembering what color they are if they often play the same color.

Do include some permanent reminder of what color each player is, be it a player aid, a special token, or just the expectation that each player will always have some pieces of his color in front of him.

Don't use multiple colors in the red-pink-orange spectrum.

Don't use multiple colors in the blue-purple spectrum.

Don't use the same colors as a player color and for some other purpose (e.g., a goods color, a track color, etc.) in your game, or you'll confuse players.

Also see The Problem with Colors.

Rulebooks

Do include pictures and examples, as both make rules easier to understand.

Do include summaries and do pull out important rules into sidebars.

Do consider an index, if it might be at all appropriate.

Do include a glossary for any cards, tiles, or other items in your game which might have special powers. This is a great place to address any weird questions about those individual items and about interactions between them.

Do look at how Alea does their rulebooks and mimic that, as they make the best in the business.

Don't include new rules in examples.

Don't have a bolded, named section, then include some of the rules related to that name elsewhere--unless you have a reference in the text.

Today's Theme is Theme

The theme of a game is the basic concept which unites the mechanics and pieces of the game into a single representative whole. Many games do not require a theme to provide a logical reason for the moves such as Go, Checkers, Chess, Blokus and the GIPF series of games. Their rules are simple and their objective is clear but their options for play are so varied that it can take years to master (such as Go).

Why, then, do so many people demand that a game have a deep theme that immerses them in another place or time? There are many strategy/Euro-games that have simple rules with well-defined objectives which are basically abstract games but have had a theme added which adds flavor and fun to the game.

I have often heard that Through the Desert is “dry” and the theme is “pasted on”. Would the game then be better as a purely abstract game with no basis in reality? Could we place a wooden marker on most of the starred spaces on the board and declare that you win points for placing one of your pieces adjacent to it, then place randomly chosen chits of varying values on spots on the board stating that you can pick these up when you place one of your pieces on it? I don’t think it would be as popular as the oasis trees and the watering hole chits but the game play would be the same. If the theme is pasted on, it was done with a creative and colorful brush.

Let’s look at Torres, another game which has a pasted on theme. There are no beautifully crafted miniatures representing the King and Knights so the game takes on the appearance of being totally abstract. Do we need a logical reason why a group of blocks are to be built no higher than they are wide any more than we need to know why the Bishop in Chess can only move diagonally? No, but it does add something to the game play so why ignore a brilliant game simply because you cannot immerse yourself in the trials of your Knights?

Some games do require a theme, however thin, which will not just add to the atmosphere of the game but help to make sense of the rules themselves. Games like Reef Encounter, Vinci and Capitol need the theme to hold the rules together but does that theme immerse you in the time and place? I doubt it but I also doubt that the game would sell without it.

I hate to hear “it’s a good game but the theme is pasted on” as if that’s a bad thing and detracts from the game play itself. For myself, I don’t care if I’m playing the part of a King, a merchant, a pirate or a disgruntled postal worker; it’s how the game plays that counts. The next time you think that a game’s theme isn’t rich enough or doesn’t make you want to speak with a funny accent, think what it would be like with no theme at all.
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Games

A couple weeks ago I saw someone on BGG asking if there are any gamers in the Rapid City area so I contacted Jeremy Likens and planned a game night with him and Mike on a day when both Richard and Cori would be home, Dec. 4th. Late in the morning of that day I received a phone call from Mike who told me he and Teresa wouldn’t be able to come because he’d just become a father that morning. How’s that for a good reason to miss a game night? Congratulations to Mike and Teresa, and welcome to the gaming world, Brin.

Jeremy had requested several games that he’d like to try so the four of us sat down to Stephenson’s Rocket. I’d only played it a couple of times and that was a while ago so we were on pretty even footing as to strategy. Jeremy started with the Blue line and collecting city tokens, Cori quickly moved the Green to merge with Orange, Richard concentrated on Purple’s southward movement taking over any lines in the way, and I took the Yellow in the southeast and the Grey in the north. Being the first game for Jeremy and Cori, we really didn’t concentrate on the veto very much, which I’m sure is not a good idea in a cutthroat game, so we all pretty much did as we wanted most of the time, feeling out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. As the game progressed, Purple ate up everything in it’s path and earning Richard and I money for 1st and 2nd place stations, respectively. Blue also did well, meandering to cities so Jeremy could earn money for his goods tokens, and picking off the Yellow and Grey lines in the process. When the final merger saw Blue gobble up Purple, the majority of the shares fell to me. Jeremy’s majority in most of the goods was not enough to give him the win and my majority of shares fell short of what I needed to beat Richard who had made considerable money from his stations during the game.

As we were finishing up SR, Cori’s friend, Melissa, showed up so when the game was over, we sent Richard for pizza while the 4 of us played Through the Desert, another game Jeremy had wanted to try. The only Euro-game Melissa has played is Settlers but TtD is an easy game to teach and play so there were very few questions or misunderstandings. Everyone played well and there was plenty of nastiness, which I don’t often see with the new players I’ve taught. The game end was close but I just can’t remember if Cori won or I did.

We were just setting up Taj Mahal when my son, Chris, arrived after a fun day of snow-boarding and with a bump on his head. Ah, the joys of winter sports. So we dealt in another hand and I proceeded with the rules explanation, which I thought I did pretty well. Keep in mind that the only game of TM I’ve played is an online one where the interface makes sure the rules are followed so you take it for granted. We spent a lot of time going over nuances of the rules and re-explaining how the different items work but in the end we all agreed that this was a game we’d like to play again. The scores were very close, especially since 4 of the players had never played before. I squeaked in the win with 35, Jeremy close on my heels with 33, Cori right behind him with 31, followed closely by Melissa with 29 and Chris with 27.
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Until next time remember: only the mediocre are always at their best.

Mary

Don't sue me, Richard

The scene: 1992, Wizards of the RPG boardroom. Three Wizards sit around a table.

Wizard 1: What are we going to do? This company is losing money. Our RPG line is sinking. We're being threatened with a lawsuit. We need something new, cheap, and easy to sell!

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: What do you mean, "Yes, sir"? I need ideas, not "yes, sirs"s from a horde of Zork shopkeepers!

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: Oh, shut up! Go gain a stat. Well, what about you? Got any ideas?

Wizard 3: Ummm, not really, sir. Oh, wait. There's this guy Richard waiting to see you, sir. Something about a monkey game.

Wizard 1: A monkey game? I said cheap! Oh well, send him in. What have we got to lose?

Enter Richard.

Richard: Good morning, Mr Wizard 2.

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Richard: Good morning, Mr Wizard 3.

Wizard 3: Good m...

Wizard 1: Yeah, yeah! Cut the crap. What have you got for us?

Richard: Oh, sir, this is a different sort of game. Each player controls a live monkey that has to navigate a maze. Players tell their monkey how to navigate the maze at the beginning of each round, and then they let their monkeys go simultaneously. Only, the thing is, they have to tell the monkeys what to do before each round. They can't talk to the monkeys while they're in the maze. As the monkeys move, they crash into each other, get turned around, slip on banana peels, and so on. Hah ha ha! And they all throw bananas at each other! If a monkey gets hit by a banana, he gets confused. It's great! Har har ho ...!

Richard dissolves into laughter.

Wizard 1: That's your game?

Richard: Wait, there's more! The monkeys are all different. One is stronger. One punches harder. One can throw things further. And so on. And you pick the monkey at random before the game starts! Hee hee! Ho ho! Hahahaaaa...

Wizard 1: This guy's one cleric short of a party. Different starting abilities? Forget it. Sounds like Cosmic Encounter. Crap game. Throwing bananas? Live monkeys? Cripes! What about a normal board game with toy robots?

Richard looks up, stunned.

Richard: Hey! Great idea!

Wizard 1: Wizard 3, go work with him on it. But this isn't helping! I need something I can put out now! Haven't you got anything else?

Wizard 3: Yes, sir.

Richard: OK, I've got this collectible .... ah Richard begins to sneeze. ... collectible ... aaahh ... collectible car .. CHOO! .. game. Excuse me.

Wizard 1: Car game? Did you say collectible car game? Hey, great idea!

Richard: No wait! I meant collecti ...

Wizard 1: Yeah, ok! Got it, go get me some paper! Wizard 2!

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Richard: But, Mr Wizard 1! I ...

Wizard 1: What, are you still here? Did you forget to put on trunks on your way to the gene pool? Go get me some paper! Hut hut! Unless you don't want a published game with licensing fees!

Richard gulps.

Richard: Uh, yes, sir. Ok!

Exit Richard.

Wizard 1: OK, here's how I see it. Each player has to collect cars, and each car is different. Some are rare, and some are common. Players can't play with more than 4 of any type of car during each game, and they have to use .. Wizard 2!

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: How much money do we need to make this year? $1,000,000?

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: OK, no less than 60 cars in their car bag. Each time it is their turn to play, they pick a car at random out of their bag. Then they either roll it across the floor at their opponent, or place it in such a way as to block their opponent from rolling it at them. If you hit your opponent's car, it's out of the game. Otherwise, if you hit your opponent, you win if you break their nose ... no, wait, if you hit them three times.

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: Oh, shut up! It's a wonder you ever found the fallopian tubes. Wizard 3?

Wizard 3: Sounds good, sir. What about special types of cars?

Wizard 1: Special cars? What special cars? This isn't Cosmic Encounter! Crap game!

Wizard 3: Yes, sir. I mean, cars you can play when it's not your turn. Different color cars that are better than others in certain ways, like green cars, blue cars, and so on.

Wizard 1: Excellent! Great thinking Wizard 3. Go double your salary. Where's that paper guy?!

Richard retuns.

Richard: Here you go, sir. Sir, if I may add ...

Wizard 1: Thank you, man. Just what I needed. Go double your salary.

Richard: Sir, how about a collectible card game, not CAR game, but CARD game?

Wizard 1: What? Cards? Who in their right mind would pay money to buy collectible pieces of cardboard?

Richard: Well, sir, they buy baseball cards ...

Wizard 1: Oh yes. Well, we'll give each car a coaster to sit on. Comes with the car. Very good. Go double your salary.

Richard: I meant the card is the main feature.

Wizard 1: Fine, fine. Buy a coaster, get a car. I don't care. Richard grimaces. I've got it all worked out. Gentleman, we're going to be rich. Well, all except for you, Wizard 2.

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 1: What should we call this game? Anyone? Wizard 2? Or are you still leaving the Intillect Devourers hungry?

Wizard 2: Yes, sir.

Wizard 3: Hmmm... perhaps, something pretentious, with an appeal to the rich kids, you know. How about: "Cars and Coasters"?

Wizard 1: Sounds like another damn RPG. How about: "Car Wars"?

Wizard 3: Already used, sir.

Richard: (sarcastically) How about "Traffic: the Splattering"?

Wizard 1: Yes. Just about right, anyway. We'll work on it. Double your salary. Anything else, wizards?

Wizard 3: I think we'll need a new name under which to publish this game, to protect it from the impending lawsuit, sir.

Wizard 1: Yes. Good idea. Any suggestions?

Richard: (sarcastically) How about "Wizards of the Coaster"?

Wizard 1: Done! Double your salary, man.

Richard: I don't have a salary, sir.

Wizard 1: Then triple it. Ah ha ha! Collectible cars! This thing is going to be huge!

And the rest, as they say, is history.

For the time being

I'm going to fill in here for ole "D W" for now and make
"YOUR HEAD A SPLODE!" ready? then WE go!

WHY I should ''give any 'chits'!''

Yep, I'm proclaiming the 'title' for my ''saying mark'' while in a more elaborate and expansive 'setting', since I really DO! The FULL 'one' for 'moi' would be as follows:
''YES! HE really does 'give a 'chit'!''
I'm only making this 'distinction' so YOU all can 'know' where and whom that's 'O'riginally from! It's in keeping with my methods for the 'madness' that I claim for my 'fame'! I'll be following this UP with whatever I can in the meantime for whichever takes my 'fancy'.

Now I have presented the following somewhere along the line of some 'blog' and I display this HERE now. It is an actual LINE of "minis" that were mated WITH an actual couple of "Wargames" to combine these aspects for a more visually appealing GAME! For anyone wishing to VIEW these up closer, then CLICK upon the photo to enlarge it. To duplicate this 'offer' today would be truly expensive since at the time they were much cheaper than what they COST now.
This can still be accomplished using whatever it is that YOU have available, as those more recent "RISK" games have just such for their 'Armies'. Then there might be a NEED for like a "Leader" type Unit, so attach a home-made 'pennant' or FLAG for that. Maybe have an 'initial' for them on this too, with distinctive markings as well for those who are more 'talented' for it all. I woudn't permanently affix them to any GAME counters, but with some of that removable 'sticky gob' stuff, then these can be utilized for a quick "Fog of War" gaming effect. *NOTE* that this works BEST for those GAMEs that have just 'one' counter side and where a 'stacking' limit of 'one' single counter of those per HEX/'square' is USED in a 'game'. For those NOT so obvious, then adapt these to the likes of the SPI/S&T/TSR/DecisionGames series, and even "Blue & Gray", as you can 'flip' counters that are beneath the figurines IF you don't GLUE them or make them stay in place on purpose. Just be careful for movement of them at the very least anyway, since you don't want to fiddle with THEM. It tends to lend a elegante and distinguished 'aire' about this any-hoo. I can hardly await the entire "Napoleon's LAST Battles" QUAD with THAT! w00t 4 'moi'!

As a last note, then in our region a call is being made to replace our aged 'Ferry Fleet' AND why not have a "hovercraft" version of this, and 100s of 1,000s of them INTEAD? Just think of the many 10,000s that could have avoid ANY catastrophe by hoisting upon that to FLY across water, swamps, etc. that others can't presently? What's with folks who 'believe' such? Don't 'want' THAT? How's this then, obtain an "escape balloon" or series of them to 'escape'? Take or make your pick! I might combine them BOTH myself heh hehHEH!

Winter in Alaska. Perfect Gaming Weather. I Mean... If You Can Keep Your Water Pipes From Freezing.

I wasn't too concerned on Monday morning when I got the call from Dame Coldfoot, "We have no water." Frozen water pipes are a simple fact of life in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fortunately, by simply turning the thermostat up to 90 it is a problem that is easily resolved in an hour or two. My only clue that this wasn't a normal water-pipe freeze-up was the fact that it was only -30. The pipes usually don't freeze until it gets down to -50.

Long story short, all my free time has been spent thawing frozen water pipes this week. I didn't get a chance to do much else, hence this short post.

It was a very bad week for writing, and for gaming, and for sleeping, and for bathing. I do have a couple memorable quotes from my 5-year-old, though. They revolve around poop and the inability to easily flush the toilet. I won't share them here, just know that I will still be giggling about them fifty years from now if I am lucky enough to live that long.

For now I will count myself as lucky that it was the water pipes that froze and not the sewer line. Entirely too many Alaskans have stories about exploding toilets secondary to sewer line freeze-ups. Odds are everyone will eventually have an exploding toilet story if they live in Alaska for long enough. I take some solace from the knowledge that there will probably be some good blogging quotes related to such an event.

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Earlier in the week I had promised to post some pictures over on my blog. Since I didn't get the chance I thought I would switch things up and post some Alaskana on Gone Gaming this week.

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High noon in Fairbanks, November 23 or 24. The shadows are quite long this time of year, even at noon. We are south of the Arctic Circle, so the sun does rise and set every day of the year, although it isn't up for long this time of year.

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Snapped this picture about two weeks ago at 9 a.m. Note the depth of the snow on the rail. That snow took about two weeks to accumulate. Wind is rarely an issue in the Fairbanks area. Even though it gets colder here than it did where I grew up in eastern Montana, the general lack of wind makes winter weather much more tolerable than winters in the Dakotas, Wyoming or eastern Montana, in my opinion.

For you non-Americans, you can barely make it out on the face of the thermometer, but -40 is about the same temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.

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I've mentioned it in other forums before, but summer in the interior of Alaska is probably the worst boardgaming environment in the world. Summer is so short, and the days so long, that everyone has better things to do than to play games. Many people are working 80 hour weeks trying to get a year's worth of work done before winter sets in. Many spend their free time fishing, others have seasonal jobs in the tourist industry, still others need to fit 8 months of softball into 3 months.

Winter is the boardgame season in the Alaskan interior. Winter here is roughly October through April. The average daily temperature in Fairbanks is below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius) for the months of December, January and February. The average temperature is below freezing (32 F.) for the months of October, November, March and April.

For those of you who wonder how the rest of the seasons break down, it's like this: Summer is June, July and August. Autumn begins and ends in September. There is no Spring in Alaska, mid-April until mid-May is called "Break-up". Break-up is that time of year when river ice starts to break up and melt, and seven months of snow accumulation slowly turns into millions of acres of arm-pit-deep mud and mosquitoes. Unlike most of the world, when the trees finally turn green in mid-May it is a sure sign that summer, not spring, has arrived.

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And now for something completely different:

What's this? Hasbro has signed Jamie Lee Curtis to advertise their wares for this Christmas season?

Hasbro? Jamie Lee Curtis? The actress with the most famous cleavage in Hollywood?

If anyone wants to take the bet, I've got five bucks that says they completely blow this opportunity. After all, we are talking about the company that owns the Avalon Hill catalog and just sits on it. Hasbro could influence the game buying habits of pimply-faced geeks for the next two decades if they played their cards right.

With Jamie Lee Curtis as the spokesperson, Topless Taboo could be bigger than Naked Twister. Naked Twister didn't even have a celebrity spokesman, and it's been around for years. (Never heard of Naked Twister? Take Twister, and add the Naked expansion.)

Look for them to put her in a turtle neck and push the PlaySkool line.

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I'll be back next week with real boardgame content, hopefully.

Thanks for your indulgence,
Coldfoot

Supporting Your Locally Owned Game Store

I moved to Berkeley in 1989 and discovered a game store called Games of Berkeley, located near the corner of Shattuck & University Avenue--at the edge of the downtown drag in Berkeley.

I was neither particularly impressed nor particularly unimpressed with GoB when I first arrived. It seemed about on par with the game stores that I'd frequented before I went away to college. They got the newest products in promptly and had a decent depth of back stock. I mostly bought roleplaying games at the time, but I'm sure GoB had a decent selection of the Avalon Hill and Milton Bradley board games which were common at the time. And I know that they had an overdecent selection of science-fiction books, puzzles, and kites. (Yes, kites. Lots of them.)

What I didn't know was that Games of Berkeley had been purchased by the Game Gallery chain of stores shortly before my arrival in Berkeley and for the next 10+ years I saw a store where I'd once been able to actually buy gaming items slowly deteriorate. In 1991 I moved to just around the corner from GoB, and that was a good thing. GoB's ordering policy had gotten so bad by this point that if you didn't stop in the store on the day a new roleplaying product arrived you were likely to miss the initial shipment, and then odds were about 50/50 that the staff would never figure out how to reorder the book.

In 2002 I started buying games again after a several year hiatus. I'd never unlearned my GoB habit, but as I soon learned they'd gotten worse, not better, in the time I'd been less involved with the hobby. After a frustrating three to four months where I made one or two dozen trips to Games of Berkeley before I was able to get all six of the core Settlers of Catan games, I finally threw up my hands in disgust.

I knew, for utterly unknown reasons, that I was supposed to support my local store, but I couldn't see why I should keep throwing my money at them when they did everything they could not to serve me. Not only did they have bad ordering practices and bad reordering practices, but their staff had gotten increasingly aloof, unhelpful, and unprofessional. So, I ventured into the mysteries of funagain.com and timewellspent.org. And it was good. Gaming bounty was mine, with friendly staff & in-stock items.

And the discounts, oh the discounts ... Do I hear a 20%? How about a 25%? Can I get a 40%? Hallelujah!

I could buy so many games, even on a constantly tightening budget.

Locally Owned v. Local Stores

At the time I took this as a referendum against local stores which offered me nothing special, and charged higher prices for the privilege. Really, though, it was a referendum against chain stores, even small ones like Game Gallery. They're dens of mediocrity. They set up standards of business practice to minimize their costs, and in doing so ensure that no individual store actually operates well.

After the fact (Games of Berkeley since having been bought out by an independent owner) I learned that that senseless policies were being handed down to GoB by corporate higher-ups. For example each store had limits to how much they could spend on products each month, and these limits had nothing to do with sell-through rates or restocking, or whatnot. They got $XX,XXX to spend each month, period, and if they didn't spend it on the newest Magic: The Gathering, they were toast, hence the minimalist ordering policies.

This all brings me to the first point that I want to make in this article: local stores versus locally owned stores. Games of Berkeley in that time period was a local store, but it wasn't locally owned. It was a great contrast to Comic Relief, my favorite comic store for the last 14 years, which always has great staff, great selection, and a friendly atmosphere. It's got a great owner too, Rory Root, and his presence, enthusiasm, and love for the field makes all the difference, turning Comic Relief into a place that I enjoy and want to visit, as opposed to Games of Berkeley which was a source of frustration and annoyance for those many years.

In late 2004 I started visiting a new game store, EndGame. It was down in Oakland, several BART stations away, but I'd been looking to expand my gaming horizons past my Thursday night review games, where I got to play each game just once or twice, and I'd learned that EndGame had a regular game night on Wednesdays.



EndGame was such a breath of fresh air, because it was not just local, but locally owned. Their gaming area was a beautiful mezzanine that overlooked the store. It was spacious and full of tables. And gamers.



The store itself was nice too. They don't order everything, but they actually order with intelligence and forethought. Because they're local owners who are familiar with the hobbies that they serve, they're also familiar with which items their customers will actually like. So, for example, they ordered Farfalia, an interesting trick-taking game, but not the other three daVinci Games released at the same time (Abracadabra, Moby Pick, and Mr. Bill), all kinda so-so kids' games.



After I'd attended EndGame for a few months, and it was obvious that it'd become a regular part of my routine, I gave up my online ordering, except for imported items (which EndGame doesn't carry because they can't make a profit on them). It's been a tough struggle, and it's a confusing one bounded by questions of ethics and morality. Money is tight, and so I have troubles affording the games I want now that I'm paying retail, but to date I've avoided the siren call of discounters since I started EndGaming. And, unlike that strange, reasonless loyalty that I once felt to Games of Berkeley, I now understand why.

Ethics, Morality & Economy

In short, you shouldn't have blind loyalty to local stores, nor even to locally owned stores. Instead you should reward stores that provide you with services that you desire and need.

EndGame provides me with a few very important services. The most important is their gaming area. I'm there just about every Wednesday, from 6.30pm to 10.30pm or so. I get to play lots of games I really like from my own collection, and I also get to play brand-new or older games that I don't own (and often couldn't afford due to expensive secondary mearkets). I have a guaranteed set of opponents every week. (EndGame often has 20-25 people at the height of an evening.) And, I can do all this gaming without having to clean my own house before-hand or afterward (let alone the fact that my old Arts & Crafts era house doesn't have any rooms big enough for gaming to ever be truly spacious, like it is at EndGame).

Beyond that, EndGame gives me the benefits I'd expect of a good gaming store: good stocking policies, good restocking, and friendly, knowledgeable staff. They also have a used game section, which I've never actually partaken of, but which I really appreciate in a game store. I used to travel out to Gamescape in San Francisco (by bus!), just to browse their used games, so I hope to eventually come across some things I want here.

There's no doubt in my mind that I "desire and need" the services that EndGame offers. However, unfortunately this becomes a question of economics & morality for everyone who visits the store.

The question of economics is obvious. I used to buy almost all my games from timewellspent, where I'd get about a 35% discount on average. By saving up for huge orders (an inconvenience in itself) I probably ended up paying 30% off even after shipping. That's an extra game for every two purchased, which is pretty hard to argue with when you're already short on money.

Conversely, EndGame doesn't (and probably couldn't) charge for the services that I actually use and enjoy--most notably, the gaming. That's where the ethics come in. I have to make the moral jump to rewarding EndGame for the free service that they offer (gaming) by purchasing my games through them.

On the one hand, it's an obvious answer: if I (and others) didn't buy their games, then they wouldn't have the store, and thus I wouldn't have the gaming space. On the other hand, because there's no direct link between the two I could "get away" with buying all my games from discounters, and just bringing them to EndGame to play.

(Ironically there's a game that makes this exact question of community v. personal good its main point. It's Terra, by Bruno Faidutti, and though I didn't think it made a particularly good game, it was a thought-provoking one. The dilemma, by the by, is called "Olson's Paradox", and Faidutti describes it well at his website.)

We all have to make our choice on that type of morality, but I think it's important to frame the dilemma as such. It's not just a question of getting your games cheaply, but rather if your local (and probably locally owned) game store provides services that you want to continue, and if you should thus support them in the way they make available--through game purchases.

Additional Economics

What I've mentioned thus far is the question of personal economics and morality, but whether you support a locally owned store can actually be a bigger topic than that, because there's also questions of community economics and morality. In other words, you can improve your community by shopping at a locally owned store--but again it's a question of whether you're willing to put your own money out to do so.

There's a few ways in which locally owned stores can support your community.

First, there's a general understanding (though not necessarily a consensus) that brick-and-mortar stores help spread a hobby. The idea is, that if people can come into a local store that's bright, well-lit, clean, and has friendly staff, then they'll be more inclined to make a purchase, and possibly enter the field through a gateway item. If all sales are done online, the argument goes, then this avenue of attracting new people to a genre won't exist, because people are much less likely to wander through a random website than through a random store that caught their eye.

I say there's not consensus on this topic because over on the roleplaying side of things there are constant nay-sayers who claim that brick-and-mortar stores just aren't necessary. These people are increasingly making their sales through PDFs and other online formats, which disallow brick-and-mortar stores from being a possibility. Personally, I think these peoples' "success" speaks for itself; former autoships of 1500-3000 books for a mid-level roleplaying publisher are turning into first-month sales of 50-200 books for a top-level PDF publisher. If the core industry can't even be bothered, how could new people ever be brought in?

So I'll stick with the statement that a locally owned store, with an actual storefront will bring new people into our industry. And, I think I saw ample evidence of this just last night, when I saw someone wander into EndGame while I was playing, and later wander out with Shadows over Camelot and Bohnanza, two gateway games if I ever saw them.

Second, besides supporting the gaming community, locally owned stores can actually support your local community too. Book stores are another segment that is really feeling the squeeze from online sellers, and one of our local book stores has the following flyers in their window as a result:



So, besides supporting whatever good stocking, good staffing, and gaming that your locally owned store allows, shopping there can also support your hobby and your local community.

You don't have to offer that support.

You can just assume that someone else will do it, and it'll be enough to keep your local stores going for when you need them.

But shouldn't you be that someone else?

EndGame: http://www.endgameoakland.com
Comic Relief: http://www.comicrelief.net/