The Anniversary Tour Kicks Off -- Idaho

THE GONE GAMING FIRST ANNIVERSARY TOUR

Just over a year ago Brian (Koldfoot) emailed me, along with a few others, and suggested the idea of a group blog that covered board gaming from a variety of different perspectives. The idea was the blog would be fresh daily because no one needed to contribute more than once a week.

Now I'm not sure why the others agreed, but I said yes because my fragile ego needs constant stroking. And what better way to build a false sense of emotional stability than bashing the people who I made my living from for 23 years?

Frankly, this is a great group of people and I eagerly await each writer's weekly (or sometimes monthly) contribution. Grogs left us this year to do other things, but now we have Kris Hall filling in along with other guests from time to time. Another thing that makes this group a good one is that we really do all get along. Sometimes I think that's only because we've never actually met each other... but I could be wrong about that. At least one of them might like me in person.

Another unusual thing about this group is that we're all filthy rich and we decided to squander untold amounts of money and foolishly waste a week traveling the world and gaming in the homes of our fellow members. Have fun this week. I know I will.



The Gone Gaming Gang.

That's Fraser floating angelically above us. Then, from left to right, DW, Shannon, Yehuda, Mary and our founder, Koldfoot.

Melissa and Joe disappeared just before this photo was snapped. Koldfoot kept muttering they didn't want to be seen with us, but I can't imagine why.








Monday 8:30 am - The Tour kicks off in a small rural shitehole somewhere in Idaho

I am so frickin' happy that that my Gone Gaming Buddies showed up here on Monday. That's because of religion. Not that I'm unreligious. I'm actually a pretty spiritual guy. In fact, I have even written and had published an article about the metaphysical qualities of dice. I'd think that qualifies me as both a reverent individual... and a gamer.

Nonetheless, being a gamer means you often have to adapt to the various rigors and demands of organized religion. So many of the gamers I have known and enjoyed over the years had to go to church when I'd have preferred they invade Russia with me. Saturday was out for my Jewish friends, Sunday for my Mormon and Catholic friends. No Wednesdays for the Jehovah's Witnesses I've gamed with and Tuesdays and Thursdays can be difficult for many of the more strict Baptists.

I long ago gave up gaming with people who go to church in a tent. I'm not overly fond of snakes and it gets real distracting when their eyes roll back in their heads and they drop onto the floor and start rolling around speaking in tongues.

But Monday seems to be the day God looks the other way and says, "Go ahead, if you must, make the Romans pay, mete out the punishment Rommel deserves, hack up a few Orcs, whip those slaves into gear on the sugar plantation and assassinate a few Italian Princes for good measure."

Of course my big plan was to get a poker tournament going. I figured I could use the money for the trips to Alaska, North Dakota, Connecticut, Israel and Australia. Getting to Shannon's place in California would be the easiest because we all know that Berkeley is more a state of mind than it is a physical location. As the airport van dropped the crowd and thier gear off I was already counting the extra money I could liberate from these cityfied Euro Gamers.

Before I could even get the cards and poker chips out Shannon had spread all sorts of charts and graphs out on my table. Everyone was jabbering about the connections between this German game designer and that French guy and how that American designer was influenced by so-and-so. Nice graphs and charts, Shannon. So we all ended up playing The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon instead of 7-card stud. Shannon won. Then Mary won. Then Coldfoot won. Then Melissa and Fraser won. Then Joe won. Then Shannon won two in a row and we all agreed the game sucked.

So I suggested a poker tournament. Mary kept trying to pull that idiotic sounding Hoity-Toity garbage out of what I thought was a steamer trunk, and turned out to be her handbag, but I managed to overpower her and shove it back in. During the struggle Koldfoot was setting up Advanced Civilization, having pushed my poker chips and cards aside and so I was drafted to play that mind-numblingly boring game. I lost. I forget who won. I think it was Koldfoot, but it might have been Joe. Or maybe it was Shannon. I know it wasn't Mary because she kept trying to sneak the freakish sounding Hoity-Toity into the "to play" pile. I spent more time hiding that one than I did advancing my civilization. Go figure.

As expected, after what seemed like 11 rounds of Kevin Bacon and a full game of Advanced Civilization, it was lunch time. So I treated. I felt like going for the classy comestibles and so sprung for toaster sandwiches at the local Sonic Burger. My pick-up wouldn't hold everybody so Joe, Mary and Melissa had to ride with me on the Harley.

I insisted Shannon drive the truck. Cruel, I know, because he doesn't drive. But after subjecting us to Kevin Bacon, he needed to be punished. So him, Yehuda, Fraser and Koldfoot got in the truck. What a hoot. Five minutes to get it into reverse, stalling it half a dozen times... Yehuda yelling directions, Koldfoot making seal noises and flapping his arms like flippers all while Fraser sat there looking ill. I kept Joe and the girls amused by doing wheelies on the Harley (pretty easy with them adding extra weight on the back) and then multiple stoppies everytime we circled back around the block and saw that Shannon was still in deep trouble... trying to get out of the driveway.

Somehow Shannon managed to get the truck to our destination without ripping the entire drive train out, but I think he came close. Despite the loud exhaust on my Harley and the joyous shrieks of Joe and the girls on the back, I could still hear Fraser yelling something that sounded like "effing drongo" at Shannon. Hmmm... probably some form of Aussie encouragement or something.

While we were at the Sonic Burger Shannon suggested most of them ought to take a cab back to my place. A great suggestion. Except there are no cabs within 30 miles of my town. Lucky for him I spotted Merle, the hay farmer who lives just past me. He just happened to be cruising by in his stack wagon and was more than happy to let everyone ride in the back. Koldfoot said he'd drive my truck, claiming he was going to do some psychic healing on it after Shannon's abuse.

My thinking was that I could easily get back to the house and get the poker tournament set up before anyone else brought out something European... or worse, something French. What I didn't know was that Merle had just picked his stack wagon up from the performance shop where he'd installed a fuel management chip, piped the damned thing and thrown in a turbo charger for good measure. I figured I was in trouble when he popped the clutch and the whole rig lifted off the front tires, belched a cloud of black diesel smoke into the sky and burnt rubber all the way down highway 52.




Merle runs a New Holland model 1037, similar to this beast. Only Merle's is flat black, has flames painted on it and is further adorned with little chrome skulls glittering along the frame and the cab doors.









Koldfoot made some comment about how he didn't know human eyes could get that big around or look that horrifed as we watched the Gone Gaming crowd disappear at warp speed, clutching the rails of the wagon and screaming in almost perfect harmony.

By the time I got there they had set up Citadels and I suffered through several games of that stinker. I was assassinated. I had my money stolen. The warlord tore down my town. The architect outbuilt me. The magician took all my good cards. Yehuda was King. Then he was King. Then Yehuda was King. I finally asked him if we should just start calling him Your Highness Yehuda. Needless to say. I didn't win a single game. But Poker was still in the plans.

Unfortunately, I had to take a leak.

When I got done and walked out into the gaming area Fraser had set up Formula De. Finally! A game I like.

Melissa crashed me out. Joe cut me off at every crucial corner. Koldfoot's pit stops were better. Mary just smiled smugly and got in my way. Yehuda and Shannon were terrible drivers but they always seemed to be ahead of me. Fraser won. Then he won again. Then mercifully, Joe suggested we play poker... but first he had a game that was a favorite. Okay I figured, no big deal. He'll want to play Amun-Re or some other bleached-out and bland Euro thing and then we can get to the real gaming. So instead he pulls out Tower of Babel.

As he's explaining it I started feeling like I had played this game before. So I say, "Wait up a sec Joe. We already built wonders of the world in Civ. And this seems like just another tile-laying, VP scoring rehash of every other tile-laying, VP scoring game with language independent cards I've ever seen."

"Not so DW", Joe replied. " This one is better. I have the Hans im Gluck version."

Whereupon he proceeded to thrash everyone at the table by virtue of not only being the only one who actually understood the hideous mess, but also because he had wisely not eaten any of the tater tots at Sonic Burger. The rest of us were intermittently absent several times each. Taking care of business, as it were.

Once our stomachs settled down everyone (but me) wanted to play again. Shannon won this time but truthfully, I think Joe let him win because Shannon was the only other person who could pronounce the publisher of the game correctly without sounding like Colonel Klink.

Yehuda immediately suggested we try some Victorian Era parlor games and so grudgingly I trooped into the living room with the group. The two Aussies seemed to excel at the games and I think Fraser won most of them. I suspect they cheated, signaling secretly in a distinctly Aussie married couple manner, but I could never prove it. As for me, I didn't have a clue what we were playing but I did my best and thought I was actually going to win some of the word games but Shannon sat there with a huge dictionary he'd pulled out of Mary's Steamer Trunk and proved, with charts and graphs, that I was never quite on the money. Thankfully, I had been sipping scotch all afternoon so I am reasonably certain I had a good time anyway.

The afternoon was wearing on into evening so I abandoned all hope of a poker tournament and treated the Gone Gaming crowd to a pit BBQ of roasted goat, corn-on-the-cob and wild asparagus. The only tense moment was when Mary and Melissa finally understood why I had a live goat tied up outside. Joe, Shannon and Yehuda saved the day by suggesting they and the girls go back inside and play a few rounds of Yahtzee, leaving me and Koldfoot to handle the goat. Koldie is pretty good with a knife.





There's nothing like a tender roasted goat after a long day of gaming. Plus, you can make warm little booties for the children from their hide.













So, having gamed all day, enjoyed two good meals and savored the sunshine and ambience of Idaho, the Potato State, I called Merle up and asked him if he could help me get the group to their rooms. Since the only motel in my town was full up - due to a statewide bovine artificial insemination convention - I had booked them into the local upscale Bed & Breakfast... Frozen Dog Digs.

Mary and Melissa looked at me like I was a madman when I mentioned the name but I assured them that the original frozen dog dated back over 100 years and they most likely had disposed of the carcass some time ago. By that time the house was shaking to the tune of Merle's souped-up stack wagon and we all loaded their luggage onto the bed, along with Mary's handbag. I followed them to the Digs and helped them settle in for a nice, peaceful Idaho evening of listening to the locusts eat green stuff, slapping at mosquitos and watching the irrigation ditches overflow.

It's what we do best out here in the sticks.

I wish I could tell you more about how totally cool the first day of the tour was but I have to get up early. We're all going to Yehuda's place next and he lives in Jerusalum. Which I think is somewhere east of Kansas City.

Daughter the Younger's requests

In my last entry I mentioned that Daughter the Younger was starting to really play games. She has come along in leaps and bounds since then. A week later I posted a GeekList Games that Daughter the Younger plays. I mean *really* plays as opposed to *plays with*, destroys or eats. because she was upto four games. This week Melissa came down with the flu so has spent most of the time cooped up in the bedroom. One of the things that has entertained Daughter the Younger has been games. She has been demanding quite a few including ones she should have no idea how to play.

Dominos has been played a lot this week, she doesn't mind that our set is missing two pieces. She has gotten over her dislike of blanks and the majority of our games are proper games. Every now and again we just build farms. One she had spread the dominos over three rooms and in our first hunt we managed to find all but four pieces. I told her that we were not going to play any more games until we found all of the Dominos. About half an hour later she found the last piece and gave it to me and announced "We can play games now". Of course, I then had to sit down and play a few games with her :-)

Piggy-back is still a big favourite. I have tried to convince her that we should only have two piggies each, but she will have none of that, three is the number.

There are a few other games that she has been consistently been asking for all week, I am not entirely sure why these are her picks, but anyway here are the top three requested games from our three year old daughter.

The game with lellow and horsies. Take a guess at what you think that might be and then click on the link and see if you were correct. I couldn't figure it out at first until she pointed at the box. The first time we opened it up she selected a set of pieces and starting putting them on the board. She then helped herself to a bunch of cards and laid them down in front of her as if she was playing a route. I didn't actually bother to check to see if her cards made a valid route :-) We only got this game a week and half ago, I figure she saw Melissa and I playing it a few times, so she wanted to get in on the action. Did you guess Thurn und Taxis?

YINSH. I figured she must have been watching Daughter the Elder and I play this a couple of times over the last week or so. I opened it up and she said "I will be white, you will be black" and took the baggie of white rings and opened it up and started placing the white rings on the board. She also knew that when you moved you placed a counter of your colour face up inside the ring and then "jumped" the ring to another spot. Another thing she had observed was that to win you had to take three of your rings off the playing area and put them in the scoring spots. The only things she hasn't actually picked up are the movement rules of the rings, flipping counters and knowing that once you get five in a row you take them and one of your rings off the board. You really do forget just how observant little children are.

Ingenious aka "the blue game with white writing". I think she might have seen this played face to face once or twice, but she has watched Melissa play it a lot on BSW. When I opened the box and set up the board, she demanded both the scoring tracks and the tile holders. I managed to convince her that we didn't need the scoring tracks. We have played it a couple of times now and I would say 90% of her moves are legitimate in that they would score decent points. Towards the end game, she either gets a little bored or just wants to place pieces in a bit more haphazard fashion. If I let her draw her own replacement tiles from the bag I do have to remind her that she is not meant to look, one time yesterday she announced "I am going to get myself a good one" as she drew herself a double red. She also knew that the tile holders stacked together, which I thought was quite amazing since I am sure she had only seen it out of the box at most twice.

Children definitely are a constant source of amazement.

Hmmm Meeples taste like...

Current Crises, Future Games

You’ve spent years working toward a final peace accord. On the eve of signing a treaty, a fanatic splinter group from your opponent’s camp attacks one of your outposts with great loss of life. Do you ignore the attack—and violate the never-show-weakness principle that has guided all your military actions? Or do you risk the peace settlement and retaliate?

In the July 23rd edition of the Sunday New York Times there was an article in the Arts & Leisure section by Clive Thompson on computer games that deal with real world problems. One notable game was called Peacemaker, and it lets players step into the shoes of either the leader of Israel or the Palestinian people to try to resolve the Middle East trouble spot. The game was invented more as a teaching tool than as competition for Grand Theft Auto, but it sounded fascinating nevertheless.

It made me wonder: where are the board games dealing with real world topics? Why aren’t designers making games about the issues that will shape the future of world? Is it because they have no interest in designing them? Or do they fear that the market will not support games that lack little plastic trains, tanks, or dragons?

I refuse to believe that game designers aren’t up to the challenge of tackling thorny current issues. And I do believe that a game can be both a compelling simulation and educational (in the broadest sense of the word) at the same time. Hard-core wargamers are turning to Ed Beach’s Here I Stand because they like the multi-player competition and rich historical detail. But as they try to capture Vienna or debate Martin Luther or circumnavigate the globe, they get a lesson in Renaissance and Reformation history. (Of course, it may be that the type of person who plays Here I Stand is the type of person who doesn’t need a lesson in Renaissance and Reformation history, but that’s beside the point.) Later this year, Decision Games will reprint A Mighty Fortress, SPI’s original six-player game of Reformation conflict that inspired Ed Beach to create his masterpiece. Isn’t it odd that there will soon be two games of religious conflict in the 1600s, but no reasonably realistic games about the religious, political, and military conflicts of the 21st century?

Here are three suggested game proposals dealing with topical issues.

Oval Office
There have been a lot of games dealing with presidential elections, but none dealing with the mechanics and challenges of governing America from the Oval Office. In this two-player game, players become either Republican or Democratic presidents trying to implement their political agenda while dealing with the unexpected crises that wind up on the president’s desk. At the beginning of the game, each player looks through a selection of Republican or Democratic policy cards, and secretly chooses cards to be his primary and secondary policy goals.

During the average turn, each player can attempt to woo Congress, improve foreign relations, court the general public (to improve his poll numbers), or please various interest groups. Each turn, each player also draws three crisis cards, and selects one card which he can play on his opponent. Crises may be natural disasters, terrorist attacks, Middle East conflicts, flu pandemics, Supreme Court nominations, political scandals, or economic problems. Players must solve these crises as fast as possible because each unsolved crisis that lingers into the next turn saps the president’s popularity and final victory point total. Some crises can be solved without the cooperation of Congress, but often Congressional action is required. Getting Congress to cooperate can be difficult—because the opposing player also acts as the Congressional opposition. Mid-term Congressional elections are a litmus test of each president’s effectiveness—and an opportunity for each party to try to gain seats in the House and Congress.

Will you place cronies and lobbyists in positions of power and reap vast campaign contributions while risking the effectiveness of the government? Will you try to get a modest health insurance benefit through Congress, or will you go for the big victory points by trying to get a controversial universal plan approved even as the HMOs bankroll ads attacking your plan? Will you take unilateral action against that saber-rattling dictator, or will you try to get United Nation sanctions passed by a Security Council that is filled with nations jealous of American power? All these painful tradeoffs can be yours when you occupy the Oval Office.


NGO.
In this medium complexity Eurogame, players control non-governmental organizations trying to eliminate poverty and eradicate disease around the world. Players must balance their efforts to lobby governments, raise funds, and recruit volunteers with the necessity of sending aid workers to areas of the world that may be dangerous. Players choose weather to develop long-term projects that may have lasting results or to respond to the crisis of the moment. It’s all here: Irish rock stars, altruistic software billionaires, donor fatigue, famines, tsunamis, civil wars, and kleptomaniac third-world governments. Can you persuade western governments to increase their aid? Can you orchestrate a cease fire in a war-torn country? Can you provide malaria-preventing mosquito nets to Africa’s children? A consciousness-raising game that pays tribute to some of the most altruistic and courageous people on earth.


The Shape of Things to Come
A game of political, ideological, religious, and military conflict in the first half of the 21st century (in the same big-picture vein as Twilight Struggle). Players take control of the USA, Russia, China, the Islamic world, and (in a five player game) Europe. Each player gains victory points for increasing the prosperity of their region, but each player also has his own unique agenda. The USA gains points for increasing democracy around the world. Russia and China gain points for increasing their prestige and influence relative to the USA. The Islamic player gains points for religious expansion, acquiring nuclear weapons, creating a nation of Palestine, or removing outside influence from the Middle East.

Each player faces dilemmas that mirror real-world problems. The USA can strengthen international institutions that lessen the costs of dealing with regional or global crises, but this may put limits on American unilateral action. The Islamic player can unleash terrorism that reduces American or Russian victory points and hurts their economies. But terrorism also limits the prospects for Islamic democracy and prosperity (and can become a genie that refuses to return to its bottle). All the non-USA players can increase their democratic/human rights infrastructure as a way improving their economies, but democratic populations demand that more resources be spent on increasing standards of living. The USA player can degrade the American democratic/human rights index to improve its ability to fight terrorism, but this also weakens American prestige.

Event cards depict crises that are both threats and opportunities. These include: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the struggle for Kashmir, Taiwanese independence, Chechen rebellions, North Korean saber rattling, AIDS in Africa, leadership struggles in Saudi Arabia, nuclear and bio terrorism, and the on-going energy crisis. Meanwhile, global warming is a ticking bomb that threatens to destroy all players unless they unite to take action. A moderate complexity game about the struggles that will shape our lives in the coming decades.

Adventure Games, Part Two: In the Cards

Last month I posted an article about Fantasy Flight Games and their recent emphasis on adventure games. However, the adventure gaming genre is a lot bigger than just Fantasy Flight. As I mentioned in that article, the genre has been around for a while, with classics like Milton Bradley's HeroQuest and GW's Talisman. I missed out on Candamir, but it's clearly a German entrant to the genre.

And, the adventure gaming genre is a lot bigger than just board games too. There have been a ton of card games that meet some or all of the criteria of the adventure game genre. This week I'm going to concentrate on a lot of also-rans, or not-quite-adventure card games, that nonetheless meet a lot of the criteria of the genre. Then in a couple of weeks I'm going to return with a third article in this series, covering a card game that's just as much an adventure game as Runebound or Arkham Horror, and that's Atlas Games' Dungeoneer.

Before I get going, I'll offer a reminder of my basic definition of adventure games: they're board and card games built on the same model as roleplaying games. They center on characters, and tend to have two core mechanics: a model for character description and a task resolution system. Inevitably, one of the basic tasks tends to be combat (though that's not a requirement). Most adventure games also have you controlling a single adventurer and completing quests, but that can vary, and some of these near-miss adventure card games clearly show alternatives.

The Near Misses

Following are a set of four card games that almost meet the definition of adventure card games. Though they don't entirely meet my definition, they nonetheless have some interesting characteristics that true adventure games might learn from.

Illuminati (1983). In the last couple of years we've seen products like Candamir and Return of the Heroes, but for the most part, adventure games have been an Anglo-American phenomenon. That's not too much of a surprise, given that they've generally been published by roleplaying publishers, a genre of publishing that blossomed in the US.

Illuminati offers is a fine early example of a near-adventure game by a U.S. RPG publisher (Steve Jackson Games). It shares some a few characteristics with full-fledged adventure games, but deviates pretty widely in the details. Instead of characters you have organizations, but like adventure-game characters, they're entirely unique. Each organization is defined by a few basic characteristics--power and income--and each has a special power too, which is another common element in adventure characters.

There isn't a full-fledged task system, but the game system does include a few different tasks (taking controls of groups and destroying them) which use the same basic mechanisms, and which include various modifiers to a die roll, typically based on characteristics, just like an adventure game does.

So, this is pretty far from an adventure game, but it also is an interesting early ancestor. And, it's been built on itself, with variants including Hacker (1992) and Illuminati: New World Order (1995).

You could find a lot of other early games which include some of these same characteristics, but from here I'm going to jump straight on to some more recent cards games which are much closer to the genre.

Portable Adventures (2002). There's a distinct subset of adventure games where, instead of controlling a singular adventurer, you instead control a whole party of adventurers. This is one of them (along with cousin game, Battle of the Bands). I think controlling a party puts you further from the adventuring ideal, because you don't get the same feeling of personal connection with someone that you're playing, but they still have similar mechanisms.

Conversely, Portable Adventures use an entirely common adventure-game mechanic for victory: you complete quests, and those quests give you victory points, and those victory points eventually give you the game.

However, the Portable Adventures are weak in my core definition of adventure games. The characters aren't well modeled: each just has a value and a special power, nothing complex. Likewise, the task resolution system is very weak. It's only used for completing adventure, and you just add up character values, with a single chance to roll a die and take out some opposing characters.

One of the neat aspects of Portable Adventures is that they're multigenre. There are two of them, Lair of the Rat-King and 8th Grade and they're totally compatible. This points to one of the advantages that adventure card games offer over adventure board games: they're much easier to expand; the Portable Adventures show a really wacky and expansive way to do so.

Camelot Legends (2004). Camelot Legends is another game in the precise same mold as Portable Adventures. You have a group of characters and you send them around trying to complete quests and gain victory points.

The difference is that Camelot Legends has much more thorough modeling. Each character has a full six different attributes, plus a special ability. Now the attributes are functionally identical, they just affect different quests (and potentially different characters). However having those differentiations gives that much more individuality to the characters. (If anything the characters are actually too diffentiated. With each player having a small party of characters it's pretty hard to keep track of who can do what, a danger of the multi-character adventure game.)

The task system is entirely one-dimensional and simple, much like that in Portable Adventures. Each quest has a target number and you have to add up the values of the appropriate attributes for your character to meet it.

One of the other game elements found in Camelot Legends is that it has locations, sort of. There are initially three different places in the game, marked by cardstock sheets, and more can appear. Each character is at one of these locations at any time, and can (abstractly) move between them on his turn.

I'm not certain that locations are entirely necessary for a true adventure game, but they certain add a lot to the experience.

Im Auftrag des Konigs (2004). In recent years there have been some European adventure games, including Candamir and Return of the Heroes, they're just rarer than their Anglo-American brehtren. This German Arthurian card game came out the same year as the American Camelot Legends and is striking for how different it is.

Really, Im Auftrag des Konigs is a role/action system that's somewhat like more recent games such as Antike and Siena where the action roles are located on a roundel that you have to move around. Here, much as in Siena, the roundel represents locations, here 8 total. There's a Camelot location where you can do Camelot actions and a number of wilderness locations where you can take on certain quests.

Each player plays a "knight", but there's actually no difference between them. That's an attribute shared by another German adventure game I mentioned, Candamir. The European adventure games haven't really caught on to the idea of widely differentiated characters. You can train your characters in Auftrag, but it provides cards rather than any actual intrinsic gainm, another difference from more Anglo-American games.

It's mainly the theming that makes me thing of Auftrag as an almost adventure game, but the quest system helps. One of the ways you get victory points is through quests. You satisfy them by going to a certain location and having certain values, but here it's the values of cards rather than the values of characters. And that gives you victory points.

I suppose you could see Auftrag as a hybrid Euro/adventure game.

My Reviews: Camelot Legends (B-), Im Auftrag des Konigs (B), Portable Adventures (B)

Charting It Out

With all that said, what characteristics do these various pseudo-adventure games have, what characteristics do they lack, and what interesting elements do they offer to the genre? I have, of course, created a chart to detail this:

	Illuminati	Portable Adventures	Camelot Legends	Auftrag
Stats	Power (attack). Resistance (defense). Income.	Character Points.	Combat. Diplomacy. Adventure. Cunning. Chivalry. Psyche.	Strength. Skill. Courage. Wisdom.
Equipment	No.	Cards.	No.	No.
Board	Abstract network.	No.	Abstract Cards.	Circle of Cards.
Movement	No.	No.	Abstract.	Move around circle based on horse card selected.
Victory	Create a network.	7 Adventure points from "quests".	Most victory points from quests.	Most points from quests, court, and tournaments.
Unique Systems	Characters are actually organizations. Core tasks aren't simple combat, but have more nuances.	Multiple genres that can be combined. Many cards have two values for rightside up and upside down, an easy method for character fatigue.	Characteristics differentiated only by tasks they affect, not what they do. Characters differentiated by notable, "take-that" type powers.	Very German. Characters take communal "roles" for actions. Skills modeled as expendable cards rather than permanent gains.

Conclusion

One of the most interesting reasons to look at not-quite adventure games like this is that they aren't stuck in the standard molds, and thus they show how the adventure game could grow and expand themselves. I'd love to see more full adventure games with German mechanics like those in Im Auftrag des Konigs, for example, or to put more thought into different sorts of tasks, like Illuminati offers.

And that's it for card-based adventure games this week. In two or three weeks I'll be back with Atlas and Dungeoneer. Next week, however, I'm going on vacation (all I ever wanted). I'll see you then.

Just let me have my game couch and I will be happy.

What do these games have in common?

Antike, Tempus, Kreta, Die Macher (English edition), A Storm of Swords, Age of Empires, Byzantium, War of the Ring Expansion, Nexus Ops, Ticket to Ride: Marklin, HamsterRolle, Canal Mania, Thurn and Taxis, and Blokus Trigon.

Answer: I don't own them.

And that is a situation that needs to be rectified.

Problem: I don't have room for the games I do own. The overflow games have found a spot on a mostly unused love seat which the kids and I have come to call "The Game Couch".

My wife calls it unacceptable. I offered to get a bigger couch (you know, one with enough room to stack games and sit) but that idea got vetoed.

The wife suggested selling some games. I vetoed that. My collection is barely at a respectable size.

A long time ago my dog claimed the space under our bed as his own. He is now getting too fat to crawl under the bed, so I thought about storing games under there. My wife pointed out that I am fatter than the dog. Of course I won't need to actually crawl under the bed, I have kids for that. I'm pretty sure her two cents were a veto simply masquerading as a smart-alek comment.

Looks like I'll be installing some shelving in my free time. Frankly I don't see a lot of difference between shelving and a game couch. The main difference is that shelving will never serve a purpose other than game storage. A game couch has many uses. Off the top of my head; a game couch can be used to store games, to set a chainsaw, or for a fat dog to sleep on.

The second difference is one of aesthetics, and that is the important difference for my wife. Functionality, you see, is rarely a concern for women. Aesthetics are much more important to the fairer sex. Don't believe me? I have two words for you: High Heels.

For example, the basket thingee hanging from the shower head is only for shampoo or conditioner. Never mind the fact that one bottle of ketchup and two cans of Nalley's Beef Stew fit perfectly. In fact they fit much better than either shampoo or conditioner. Do you think she will let me store beef stew and ketchup in the basket perfectly suited for such storage? Of course not. If it were up to me I would install a couple more of those baskets in the shower in order to store even more beef stew and ketchup.

For some reason women would be incredibly embarrassed if a guest saw a can of beef stew in the shower. Go figure. Personally, I would be embarrassed to have guests over and not have beef stew to serve, especially if that can in the back of the cupboard, the one that I thought was beef stew, turned out to be lima beans. I would die of shame.

Back to the situation at hand. Storing games in the shower basket is out of the question. Fortunately Dame Coldfoot and I are of one mind on that point. Storing games in the sewing room is also out of the question. Dame Coldfoot is of one mind on that point.

If I'm losing the game couch and the sewing room is off limits, I'll simply need more shelving. The wife is pulling for shelving fastened directly to the wall, I want to expand the current system:



Right now, I figure I am at that point where no matter what I do it will be wrong. I put up shelving here, she will want it there. I fasten shelving to that wall, she will want it in the other room.

Hmmmmmm. Maybe I'll just fasten the game couch to the wall. Aesthetics be damned, we're talking functionality here.

Yeeeeeeeeeeah. Ya' know what? That's not a bad compromise. Can't believe I didn't think of that sooner.

---------------------------------------------
If you missed it here is a link to a very useful geeklist: Availability status of the top 150 games. Thank you for the effort, mateybob.

Encounter 5/9

Encounter

By Yehuda Berlinger. Copyright 2006, Yehuda Berlinger. All rights reserved.

(Chapters: 1, 2, 3, and 4)

WARNING: Contains sexual situations, and may not be suitable for children 12 years old or under.

Chapter 5: Empath

At 10:30 pm NY time, 5:50 am Jerusalem, Sarah was already fuzzed, which was unusual. She watched Mitchell cross the threshold into his apartment in Soho, his long black coat rippling behind him like Doppler waves.

She dozed peacefully in her Jerusalem bed, and restlessly in Long Island. She rode the subway back to Queens with her keys in her curled-up fist, ready to ward off any potential rapists, as her friend Avi had instructed her. She stepped under the irregular spurts of hot water in her uptown apartment shower.

Sarah followed him into his apartment as he minded on the single halogen spotlight. The apartment was an almost empty studio. His boots echoed loudly as he walked to the kitchen. As he walked, he waved her in the general direction of the room's only furniture, which included a battered chrome and black cloth Seaman's fold-out.

He messaged: "Have a seat. I'll make coffee."

She messaged back: "Thank you."

She could see a bathroom painted in some dull pinkish color, partially visible through a half-open door. She heard the cat before it shot out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, white fur on edge. Mitchell opened a bag, poured into a bowl, and placed the bowl on the floor. He murmured something; she couldn't hear what. Another cat, this one grayish blue, appeared at a narrow window through which Sarah could see regular luminescent slits on the exteriors of other buildings. This one scrambled to the floor, and then streaked into the kitchen.

Sarah looked around at the bare walls.

It was an old-style studio, with uneven wooden floors of some generic species of wood and a high ceiling. Aside from the fold-out, there was a low black metal trunk and a black glass coffee table supporting two fat law textbooks, a silver scanning pen, and a scribbled up notepad. Part of the table could be flipped up to a wi-net monitor. The room was otherwise empty, if you didn't count the full-length digital wall opposite the window. The fold-out was lightly laced with white and gray cat hair.

After a moment, the sounds and smells of coffee floated into the living room along with whistles of Bach. Bach whistles delicately slipped into real and ambient from some hidden speaker system. A green diode in the upper left corner of the digital wall winked rapidly.

Sarah removed her jacket, laid it neatly on the side arm of the fold-out. She wore a sleeveless black T and dark suit pants. She stepped out of her pumps, ran a toe over the wood grain on the floor, rubbed her palms together and sat down. Legs crossed and uncrossed. Placed her right arm on the back of the couch and lay her head in her hand.

Message: "How do you like it?"

"Black."

Mitchell returned with two blue ceramic cups which he placed on the coffee table. His coffee appeared to be mostly milk. It was off-white.

"It's been unusually cool, hasn't it?" he asked. "Whose soul are you, tonight?"

The halogen dimmed as the digital wall began to glow in a swirl of purples and blues. The table changed to waves of seawater green. Sarah's eyes reflected the diffuse light from the table.

"Quite cool, yes. It may get hotter again soon," she answered. "My mind and body may be subject to a diverse consciousness, but my soul is always my own. I'm fuzzed, if that's what you're asking."

Sarah, moved a little closer to Mitchell on the couch. Mitchell didn't move at all, damn him, other than to grin. The wall became the first flying scene from Dumbo. Bach continued to play.

"Soon, yes. A warm front coming in from the West, I heard." "How can a soul be owned, even by itself?"

"I heard that, too. But it may snow in the south," she added, eyes in a mock warning. "Come here and find out. And add me to your damn system's access list."

Dumbo changed to rain on evergreens. Thunder could be faintly heard under the music.

"Snow. That's not what I heard. I heard rain. Wet ... and rainy." He leaned towards her, his mouth brushing hers, softly. "Here you go. Don't do anything I wouldn't do." Sent her the access key.

In West Hempstead, Sarah broke into a drenching sweat.

"I guess we'll just have to wait ... and see ..." her voice trailed off. He was kissing her now, or she was him. Or both. "Don't worry, I'll try not to break anything." She changed the rain to a pulsing red circle, the music to violins sounding out a heartbeat.

Waves of red pulsed across the wall, speeding up until they were faster than human vision could follow. The violins played a single poignant melody, like echoes of a human soul.

In her bed in Jerusalem, Sarah's right hand crept down her belly while her left hand gripped her breast.

In less than ten seconds she was gasping, "Now. Now. I need you now." She rasped, or messaged, or some combination of both.

On the subway, Sarah's face was flushed and burning. What the hell? Her crotch was damp. She was worried it was going to be noticeable; she imagined that it already must be. A group of young black men across from her were laughing and cursing, evidently trying to impress an amiable black girl who may have been one of their girlfriends. She very badly wanted to hide. She curled up on the seat, tears beginning to stream down her hot cheeks.

Then she was twisting, arching, gripping, and raking his back with short unpainted nails.

In the shower, Sarah moaned, gripped the soap and sank to the shower floor, fingers dancing furiously.

Mitchell was barely inside of her when she had already finished her first and was starting on the second.

In some small corner of her mind, she thought, That was fast, but it got no further than that.

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Politically Correct Gaming?

Current events can be such a pain in the ass.

The last couple of gaming sessions I have enjoyed were blissfully free of any discussions of the world around us. A fellow gamer from SLC (that's Salt-Lake-City for you Yankees) was in the area on business and we managed to squeeze in some Command & Colors: Ancients and a couple of Memoir '44 sessions. Thanks Steve, for treating me like a dog in my own home... usually I let the host win a few.

With the temperatures exceeding even the expectations of Al Gore - OH MY GOD!!!! WE"RE ALL GOING TO MELT!!! SEE MY MOVIE TO SAVE THE PLANET NOW!!! - it was pleasant to take a break from watering my lawn, my sparse collection of flowers (still in pots) and watching the truck melt in the driveway. Shaun and I decided that Memoir '44 was in order when we played Saturday night. And not one mention of current events was made. Trying to figure out how to beat Rommel in Libya was a lot less stressful. For us. It was certainly not stress free for the Allied tankers in 1942 though. They were hopelessly outmatched.

In fact, I even allowed my dog to lounge around under the table while playing... just in case Al Gore had someone checking to see if pets in Idaho were being properly protected from the impending destruction of the planet and the rising CO2 emissions from his private jet. You know, the one he always seemed to be sitting in during his movie. Here's my proof that the dog is being well cared for -





This is "Shy". Which is exactly what she is, shy. I offer this photo evidence as proof that even though I may be a Conservative Hate Monger, I do love dogs. So I can't be all bad. Besides which, Shy doesn't have doggy gas problems and she's never pooped in the house. Amazing what a few beatings will do, eh?











If you're like me then you probably don't discuss politics, religion, criminal records or anything that's potentially, uh, exciting while you're gaming. It's not that I consider it bad form, I usually don't. But to be fair, you and I probably don't agree on many things. In my view why should we bring those things to a game table? Since I live in a red state there's a high probability that most of the people I game with will agree with the following:

* Low taxes generate a better economy

* The proper response to someone attacking you is to attack them back. Times two.

* The UN is a viper pit of corruption and that small piece of real estate should be razed, it's occupants sent packing back to live under the yoke of their despots, tyrants, dictators and mass murderers... or back to France, whichever is worse.

* We should start drilling for oil off the coast of Florida right now. The Chinese are.

* Communism has failed.

* The economy will not collapse if illegal aliens are stopped at the border and made to actually follow the laws we have.

* There really is difference between unintended (collateral) loss of life in a war and the intentional massacre of innocent men, women and children by terrorist groups... who operate behind the human shield of their own women and children.

* Some people are so evil that they really do need to be killed. Now.

* Children become better people when allowed to compete and succeed or fail on their own merits.

I could go on and add at least another twenty or thirty "current event" or hot topics that most of my game crowd would agree with. And my local gamers aren't all cut from the same bolt of cloth, they are diverse. Yes, there are solid blue-collar types, high tech executives, a programmer or two, a systems analyst here a college student there, a teenager in school, one is a geologist, another an former military officer, a guy who owns a small trucking company... you know. The normal group of people. A cross-section.

So anyway, I visit BGG at least 5 times a week. Like you, I go to the gaming database, check out the reviews and commentary on games I like and also on games I'm considering and, of course, I read some of the Geek Lists and some of the forum threads. The forum is always a potentially dicey place and the discussions can become heated. The same holds true for many of the Geek Lists as well. So, to continue... apparently there is a group of guys over in the UK who have designed a game called The War On Terror. They decided to go to BGG and announce an October release date. They have nice website and have posted art, rules and other goodies.




The boardgame does have what we might call "curb appeal". It's a brightly-colored and humorous look at people who get paid between $20,000-100,00 to blow up small children and their mothers.










Even if you haven't read the two threads they started in the forum I'd bet you can imagine the controversy there was about the subject matter of the game. Both threads are an interesting read and a great example of why I never go out of my way to bring current events up at a gaming table. A fair amount of the people who posted on the thread were upset that the game is being made. Outrage even, from one or two. Others staunchly defended the game while agreeing that the subject was a tad distasteful and a large group felt the topical subject was fair game and then fell into two camps: The I'm ordering it camp, and the looks okay but I won't buy it camp.







The game comes with one of these stylish ski masks. I plan to wear mine when I pick my little boy up from daycare. No sense coddling the youngsters, they should learn early not to fear and reject things they don't understand.








The most interesting responses though were the several people who felt the game subject was out of line because it was topical. They argued that Puerto Rico, where the underlying foundation of the economy was the abduction of blacks in Africa, by stronger African tibes, the selling of those slaves to European slave traders, the horrible transportation of the helpless victims to Puerto Rico (and other islands) and then the brutal working conditions where the average slave survived only 5 years, where allowing them to marry and breed was more expensive than just getting more slaves from Africa, so families were banned... that brutal piece of history is okay as a theme for a game because it happened a few hundred years ago.

If you carry that logic further you would conclude that anything evil or destructive, as a theme for a game or a subject matter, is fine so long as it isn't current. War games are okay, just not ones that deal with current or very recent wars. Which I suppose means that there is no evil so evil that it can't be a game subject so long as it is distant history and not likely to offend anyone in the here and now.

I gave this some thought and realized that political and religious differences in gamers has never really played a part in who I game with. If you read my little list above you could hardly call me anything but very opinionated and very firm in my views on the world. But I can't see how avoiding evil or bad behaviour as a game subject makes anything better or worse. To me, it's a non-issue. Refusing to play a wargame involving the English suppression of Scottish patriots doesn't change that history. Nor does playing it. Choosing to only play games that involve the Italian Rennaissance doesn't make the oppression of the lower classes in Italy go away, nor does it remove from history the terror of warring merchant fleets, imprisonment and assassination. Not to mention the toll paid in human life and suffering for prized merchandise from the East.

So here's what I think. I think that unless you're playing an abstract game like chess or Go or one of the goofy looking GIPF ones, then you're most likely playing a game that has a theme based closely or loosely on human history. The last time I checked, the history of humans on this planet has pretty much always involved death, suffering, inequality, oppression, murder, mayhem and injustice. But human history is also one of a gradual advance towards the opposite of evil. If you had told me back in the 60's that the internet could exist I would have agreed. Being a fan of Science Fiction and having a restless mind, I knew instinctually that such things could exist. But, if you had said that not only would the internet exist, but that China and the USSR would allow it's oppressed masses access to that level of communication with the outside world I would have laughed at you.

Last week I sold about $200 worth of out of production miniatures to a gamer in Moscow. And if you pay close attention to the little flags on BGG I think you'll see a couple that originate from China and a few other "evil" places.

I'm not sure what, if anything, this proves to anybody. But my thinking is that bad things are more likely to go away when confronted and dealt with. Since the most popular games involve humans and history of some sort, then evil will always be a seed in many games popular within our niche. So yes, I sent the fledgling publisher in the UK a pre-order for their War on Terror game. Playing it won't make more terrorists and it won't lessen terror. But ignoring it won't make it go away.

Besides which, it's possible that the game will become one of those sought-after eBay gems. And fairly gained profit is always good.

A household revolution

I think I may be on to something.

Last night was our semi-regular game night. Fraser got home from work and announced that he had a surprise for me, but only if I cleared off the dining table for game night. (usually we have a bit of an argument about who has to do that)

Some tidying and cleaning later, the surprise emerged - our very own copy of Thurn und Taxis (technically, of Thurn and Taxis) - newly arrived in Australia and collected that very morning.

Despite never having played it face to face before yesterday, Thurn und Taxis is easily one of my favourite games. I rate it a 9.5 at BoardGameGeek - Always want to play it, don't see that changing for at least the foreseeable future. I've played it nearly 70 times at BSW, often a couple of times in an evening. I like the route building aspects, the hand management and the scoring options, as well as the possibility of winning or triggering game end in different ways. It's a very simple game to learn - I think it could almost work as a gateway - but it's definitely deeper than it appears on first play. And it looks so beautiful - I have to admit, I am a sucker for a pretty game.

Apparently I am not the only one, either. This evening, as Fraser and Otto packed away Colour Clowns, Otto announced that she wanted to play another game - "The game with the horsies and yellow". Fraser was perplexed, but I knew immediately what she'd meant - we had enough trouble keeping her away from it last night when we were playing. I think Biggie could probably learn (for the nights when Fraser won't indulge me), but it's still a long way beyond Otto.

Anyway, back to my grand plan.

We need a games / household chores index - an exchange rate.

This is timely, because our cleaner is going away for five weeks, so we will need to pay a bit more attention to housework than I usually try to.

A new game for cleaning the table (which had, admittedly, accumulated a lot of junk) seems a little extravagant to me. I think Fraser may have pegged the prices at the generous end. That suits me when I am being bribed, anyway, although it might make it harder to buy favours myself.

I'm thinking if a new game appears just for cleaning the dining room table, all this housework may run us into bankruptcy - the cost of paying someone to mop the floors, dust and clean the bath once a fortnight pales into insignificance.

So let's just look at playing games.

Cooking dinner is probably worth a game of Thurn und Taxis. Let's get that in there up front. Especially as I usually do the cooking at chez nous (Fraser does the dishes - should there be a reward for that?)

Sweeping and mopping the floors is a pretty sizable job. I think I might be willing to pay Fraser a game of Formula De if he does that.

Princes of Florence is a toughie. I need to find something Fraser really wants to get that one onto the table, especially as it involves getting other people over. Maybe if I do my tax he might succumb.

Making the beds and doing the laundry? I don't mind that so much. But I want to encourage Biggie to help out more with chores like that, especially if she'll start putting her own clothes away. San Juan is popular with her at the moment, and probably an appropriate reward.

Which leaves me straight into games as behavioural modification.

If Biggie does all her chores for a week, I could teach her to play Ingenious. Or play Yinsh with her, despite being the world's worst Yinsh player ever.

I just need to think this idea through some more. See, if I start offering games as treats, will my family somehow get the idea that I should only be allowed to play games after I have done some housework, or scored a new work contract?

That would never do.

What do you think? Got some trades to suggest?

See you in LupusLanding,

Melissa

Build Your Own Game Convention

Coldfoot has invited me to become a contributor to this site, and you will probably be seeing my musings on Fridays. But sometimes it is better to listen than pontificate, especially when dealing with corners of the gaming world I know little about.

As a member of the Appalachian Gamers club, I occasionally rub elbows with members of the larger local wargamers club, the Kanawha Riflemen Wargming group (which specializes in miniature gaming). This spring, I started hearing people daydreaming about creating a local gaming convention. And then one night, I showed up at Ted Cheatham’s house for the weekly game session and learned that the daydream had become a reality. There will be a new game convention in Charleston, West Virginia in October.

I was delighted to learn that two members of the Kanawha club who occasionally show up at Ted’s house are also two of the main movers and shakers behind this convention: Nick Gillispie and Travis Reynolds. (Anyone who went into the miniatures room at Origins this year will remember Nick’s fantastic Lord of the Rings Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith dioramas). I decided to do an e-mail interview with them to learn more about how to go about forming a new game con. Travis was the one who had time to respond in detail.


KRIS: What is CharCon? When and where will it occur?

TRAVIS: CharCon is a convention focused on gaming that will take place in Charleston, West Virginia at the Charleston Civic Center on October 6th & 7th.

KRIS: How did CharCon begin? How much money did you guys have to come up with?

TRAVIS: Well, for several years a few of our close knit group have talked about different ways that we could become more involved in the gaming community. Give a little something back. At one time, we were discussing the idea of opening a game store, the kind that caters to the gamers. Life being what it is and always interfering, that never got off the ground. So, we started talking about doing a convention. We casually discussed it for awhile and then Nick and I just decided to get on it, and we are making it happen. I would guess that when it is all said and done, the pre-show costs will be between $2000 and $2500. Hopefully we will generate that much with some left over to get started on next year!

(Note: Nick says that expenses have run about $1500 so far, but he suspects they will rise).

KRIS: When will gamers be able to register? How much will it cost?

TRAVIS: Gamers will be able to pre-register sometime prior to August 1st. We will have pre-registration on our web page (www.charcon.org) and at several of our sponsor locations (Treasures, All About Games, etc.). The super affordable price is only $15 for both days and $8 for Friday, $12 for Saturday. Children under 12 get in for $5 a day. Members of HMGS or gamemasters who run a minimal amount of games will receive a $5 discount. Anyone interested in checking things out can pick up a visitors pass for $3.

KRIS: What kind of gamers will the con appeal to? What events will occur?

TRAVIS: Hopefully all of them! We have a large variety of events planned. Miniatures of all sorts. Historical, Fantasy and Sci-Fi. We will have a ton of collectible games like Heroclix, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering and more. There will be plenty of board games for everyone to play. Role Playing Games will be covered in ample supply (including games of Shaintar:Immortal Legends being run by the creator Sean Patrick Fannon!). Plus, many games will be run in a tournament format with prizes for the winners. If we are missing something, please let us know!

KRIS: What are your goals for CharCon? How do you define success?

TRAVIS: Goals...man that’s a good question. Well first I would like to see attendance be enough so that Nick doesn't take a bath on fronting the money! I want everyone who attends to have fun. I would like to see some younger kids who come in to play say Yu-Gi-Oh see some fabulously created miniature game and say, "WOW! I want to play that!" Then I would like to see some visitors come in because they saw it advertised or someone told them about it and they like what they see enough to upgrade to a real badge, play games and have a blast! If some of these things happen, then we have given back to gaming. If some good looking gamer broad or LARP queen were to fall head over heels in love with Nick because he just has the darned nicest LOTR terrain, well that would be good to I suppose. Oh and if we can make it through the weekend without Dave Gilligan incessantly complaining, that would be ok with me.

KRIS: What has been the hardest part of organizing the con? What has been the most rewarding aspect?

TRAVIS: Trying to remember everything has been a task. We have been pretty lucky in that Nick and I have been able to do most of the planning and we have some people waiting in the wings to help us with key elements. Its kind of a dive to get something like this started. Ask me the hardest part on Sunday the 8th and see what I say! Most rewarding so far would be seeing people we don't know on forums we just stumbled across talking about our Con. That was a rush.

KRIS: What advice would you give other gamers who might want to start a con in their areas?

TRAVIS: First, attend some other Cons. Get a feel for what you want to do and how other people do it. Nick and I spent most of Origins just networking with people and asking questions. Next, establish a core group of people you can count on. We have a board of directors. It includes a Webmaster, a Print Marketing Director, an Events Coordinator, a Customer Service Director. Nick and I are the directors and we pick up the slack on a few other things (like Vendor/Sponsor Liaison, Accounting, Registrations Coordinator). Also, pick one person to be in charge. Matters can be discussed as a group and if everyone agrees--great. If not, you need someone to make decisions. Sometimes things need decided on now and can not wait. I don't just say that because I am in charge of our Con, it truly is a vital piece of the puzzle. After that, pick a venue and reserve it. We went with a high profile venue that gives us lots of space and hopefully will give us some foot traffic. Go with the best thing you can arrange and afford. Once that is done, you only have about 1000 more things left....

KRIS: And is there anything you would like to add?

TRAVIS: I hope CharCon is a huge success and we are able to keep it going for years. Just about everyone we have talked to has been hugely supportive and willing to lend a hand. We don't have aspirations to grow to be a huge con or anything of that sort, but if we can add some gaming to the local area culture and let a bunch of people have tons of fun in the process...great!

If It's Broken, Don't Replay It!

Last month Larry Levy offered up a column that he called The Curse of the Learning Curve in which he opined that players should have patience with new games, lest they throw out something good just because of a bad first-time experience.

I can agree with some of Larry's point. It does take some time to really figure out some games. However I disagree with some of his specifics. In particular, I see a big difference between a game that offers a first-time player a shallower experience (because they didn't understand the subtleties) and a game that offers a first-time player a broken experience (because it just didn't work).

Broadly I see four different types of game design that are related to "the learning curve", and in the first two cases I'd fault the designers and developers with bad design.

Case the First: Players Breaking the Game

The worst thing that you can experience in a first-time gameplay is a broken game. This was surely the case with one of the examples that Larry provided, Fifth Avenue. Therein players could place businesses to end the game very quickly, even when it wasn't in their best interest to do so.

Larry brushed this off as "groupthink", but I'd instead describe it as a natural consequence of a game with a nonintuitive strategy. It's not immediately clear which strategies are best in Fifth Avenue, and thus it's not really a surprise that one or more brand new players might try out the thing that happens to end the game.

Larry also said that it "probably couldn’t have been anticipated", and here I'd disagree even more. There's a way to anticipate exactly this sort of thing: blind playtesting. You give a group your game and your rules, then you let them play and you see what happens. Then you do it again and again. Big problems will turn up, and they'll turn up frequently--and then you go back to the drawing board.

If players can break a game through normal gameplay, it's broken. Period, end of sentence. It's a little better if a game can only be broken through subpar gameplay. And it's even better if players can only break it through purposeful, subpar gameplay. But it's still broken, and now we're just talking about degrees.

Sure, there might be a great game in there. It might be easy to figure out how to play that great game, just as the designer intended it. Or, you might keep stumbling around and never figure out the style of play that worked for the designers. I've experienced both situations with games I've tried out. But, the designer (or really, the publisher) still released a broken game.

A better designer or developer would track down the way that players could break the game, and they'd counter them. In Fifth Avenue you might put some cap on business building. It might cost the game some of its elegance, but traded off against even some percentage of first-time players experiencing a game that doesn't work, that's well worth while.

Of all the learning-curve experiences that I discuss in this article, this is the only one that I consider a deal-breaker: the game shouldn't have been published.

(And to close off, another of Larry's example fits into this category for me: Antike. As he notes, players can make that game stagnate through "bad" play. That's another word for broken.)

Case the Second: Players Ruining their Own Game

A less critical problem is when a first-time player is able to make sufficiently bad decisions in a sufficiently unforgiving game system that he ruins his own game, putting himself at such a deficit that he's totally unable to recover. Age of Steam is truly the poster-boy for this type of unforgiving gameplay.

Some players enjoy the challenge of this sort of gameplay, and I'd in no way call it "broken" like I did the previous category of play. However, it is very unfriendly and generally not what I'd consider a good style of play.

For me, a good game allows for players to come back from deficit. If not, there's no reason to continue playing the game after that first fifteen or twenty minutes, as it just becomes a however-many-hour-long festival to annoint the already clear winner.

Beyond allowing players to come from behind, a good game should also guide them in how to play well. I suspect many unforgiving games fall down at least partially in this regard.

So, though I wouldn't call a game with this failing "broken", I would say that it's limited its own appeal, and I wouldn't fault at all a player who decides never to play it again after a terrible first-time experience.

Case the Third: Players Being Confused

Another category of games which have a learning curve are those that are too opaque. I think a lot of Italian games fall into this category, for reasons that I've discussed previously. Il Principe is a fine example of a game that made little sense to me the first time because of the multiple interconnected systems. Many auction games generate this sort of confusion for first-time play because players can figure out how to value things. Michael Schacht's Hansa is another example of a game where the action-victory interface is sufficiently disconnected that, 7 plays later, I still dont' know how to play well.

Now players being confused isn't necessarily a game-breaker. I've been rating these issues in descending order of importance, and so confusion falls somewhere below players totally blowing their own games.

However, confusion isn't a good thing either. A clearer game will result in more enjoyment. Especially in an era where a game might only be played a few times, a designer should do what he can to clarify those first-time plays. Auction games sometimes do this with minimum bids, like those in Ostia. It's amazing how much that single benchmark helps out. Designers who think about these first-time inclarities and improve up them will just be improving their game as a whole.

Case the Fourth: Players Not Seeing The Depth

In Larry's article, he generally suggested that people should hang in there, and try out a game again to try and find its hidden beauty. I generally disagree for all of the cases that I've outlined already. If players can break a game, totally mess themselves up, or are generally confused by a game, then that's because the designer didn't produce a game that was robust, fair, or clear enough. Maybe there's a good game there, but I'll happily suggest that players move on rather than digging.

However there's a fourth case where I generally agree with Larry, and that's for games that have greater depth which you can only discover through additional plays. People often talk about this when they play Reiner Knizia games, and a second or third or fourth game suddenly opens up new realms of possibility.

Game designers have to be careful here, because if their game don't offer sufficient depth of play a first time out, players will have no reason to try again, but if a designer can manage to make a good game great through additional plays, that's well worth while, and shows the sort of thing that additional plays should reveal.

Conclusion

Yes, there's definitely such a thing as first-timer's impatience, and yes, people often move on from a game without having discovered the exact formula that turns it into a great game. But, generally, this is a perfectly valid and reasonable response. There's a glut of games on the market. If something doesn't seem to be working, then move on to the next one, and maybe you'll encourage that designer to make his next game work all the time rather than just part of the time.

It's evolution in action.

You Might Be A Gamer If...

This was originally posted on my personal blog but I had no fresh ideas this week so I’ve updated this with a couple of new lines.

If the emergency kit in your car’s trunk includes a game for any situation, you might be a gamer.

If your idea of a Square Dance is four people moving around a Formula De board on your kitchen table, you might be a gamer.

If you’ve ever spent more money in a week on games than on groceries, you might be a gamer.

If it’s extremely important to figure out what game the Peanuts gang are playing, you might be a gamer.

If your wife asks you to take out the trash and you grab the Monopoly game, you might be a gamer.

If someone asks you “Have you heard the news?”, and you immediately think that the new game you’ve been waiting for has finally been released, you might be a gamer.

If you knock out a wall in your home to improve access to the game table, you might be a gamer.

If you take a German language course just so you can read the original rules, you might be a gamer.

If your idea of an innovative thinker is the guy who decided to make game pawns that look like little wooden people, you might be a gamer.

If you ever returned that thoughtful gift from your mom and took the money to your local game store to buy a new game, you might be a gamer.

If the first thought you have when you wake up to a blizzard is that it’s Game Time, you might be a gamer.

If receiving your income tax return means finally placing that big game order, you might be a gamer.

If you’ve ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible dream involving cardboard and a large glass of soda, you might be a gamer.

If your favorite designer isn’t interested in fabric color and texture, you might be a gamer.

If your dog gets excited by the sight of the UPS truck coming up the street, you might be a gamer.

If you bought your house mainly for the “game room” you could create, you might be a gamer.

If you carry a picture of your game collection in your wallet, you might be a gamer.

If you buy small Ziploc bags by the case, you might be a gamer.

If you have game rules lying on the back of your toilet instead of the Reader’s Digest, you might be a gamer.

If your dream vacation includes a small bag of clothes and a large empty suitcase, you might be a gamer.

If you have to rearrange some part of your living space to make room for your games, you might be a gamer.

If you’ve ever turned down a date simply because it was on Game Night, you might be a gamer.

If your 3-year-old knows what a DVONN is, you might be a gamer.

If you want your epitaph to read “He/she played a good game”, you might be a gamer.
~~~~~~~~
SLOW
Gamer Crossing

Mary

Game Group

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. - Joseph Addison

At 5:15 I head for home, stopping at Hebrew University (Givat Ram campus) to pick up Rachel. We arrive home by 5 to 6. As usual, we are pressed for time.

Between the two of us, we form hamburgers from the defrosted meat, chop vegetables, and defrost some pitas. Game night is supposed to start at 6:30.

While Rachel finishes the meal, I place an insert into the table, and bring in the small card table from outside. I unpack and unfold the chairs from the closet, setting up the card table in the living room.

We are ready to sit down to eat at 6:15 or 6:20, which is when Brendan arrives. Brendan catches an infrequent bus from Hebrew University (Mt Scopus campus), so if he didn't arrive early, he would arrive late. He brings with him 2 "mana chama"s, packaged plastic food items that require only hot water to reconstitute. Sometimes we ask him to join us for dinner, and sometimes he insists on eating his plastic food.

We are not done eating when Guy and Nate arrive at 6:28, usually with Binyamin following. Itamar may be with him. Binaymin has brought some games in his bag, probably a few new ones that none of us have played. They talk about games, and may start a warm-up game while we finish eating - something new and short, or San Juan, or similar.

They ask "who is ordering"? There's always a few people ordering food from the local Burger's Bar. Nadine arrives. Elijah arrives. Elijah always orders a steak salad. Nadine usually orders a single burger, spicy. You need at least two people ordering or they won't deliver.

Adam and Gili arrive, and maybe Ben, and some others. Altogether we may now be between ten and fifteen people. If we're over ten people, I let everyone sort out what they will be playing. If under ten, I need to help arrange the games, dealing with the usual chorus of "I don't like that", "I really want to play that", "We played that last time", "I'll play anything but that", "That doesn't work with X players", and so on. So far, this has never taken more than ten minutes.

As requested, some of the players bring snacks, typically some sort of cookies, chips, or similar items. Even though I'm not ordering food, I place the food order now, unless I have to explain a game in which case it will have to wait until the explanation is over. For most games, other people can also explain them, now.

Games explanation is always: 1) These are the victory conditions. 2) These are the primary means of obtaining the victory conditions. 3) This is how each turn works. 4) So, as you can see, the primary paths to obtaining the victory conditions are X, Y, and Z, or a combination thereof. 5) A few things to remember, and a few exceptions.

If David is there, we plot how we can split off from the others to play Magic at some point during the evening: Rochester draft from my cards. I take 20 cards at random from each color, and another 20 cards from artifacts/gold/special lands, shuffle, remove 30, and we draft from that. Then we build decks and I lose three games to him.

Otherwise, if we are lucky, the shorter games have ended by 7:15 or so, and the main games may start. Intro games are often abandoned in favor of the main games, in order to not keep people waiting. As the first game ends, I take out my pen and paper and begin writing down games played, by whom, and scores.

Sometimes with ordering food, a short game, figuring out which game to play, latecomers, and explaining the rules, the main game may not start until 8:00. That eliminates certain games from a number of the participants who have to leave by 10:00 - no Power Grid, Caylus or other games that take too long. Instead, they will opt for Taj Mahal, Puerto Rico, Prince of Florence, or similar.

The noise gets a bit loud, and people are asked to hush. There is a constant chatter about what moves to take, what other players should do, clarifications on the rules. The phone rings at least four times. The food arrives, and everyone starts figuring out how much money to pay and how much tip to give the delivery guy (not required in Israel, but we usually give, anyway). Then people have to figure out where to eat, which are the meat silverware and the meat sink, where is the garbage, and please don't put that cup so close to the game.

If we're lucky, games will end at close to the same time. Those that ended a little earlier may finish eating, talk, surf the net, decide what to play next, or go to the bathroom. If we're unlucky, the Amun-Re game is only at round four by 10:00. People admonish each other to move quicker, yet still take a long time to decide what to do on their own turn. But everyone is pleased with the game.

If the first games end by 9:30, another main game will be started. If later than 10:00, a shorter game, such as Settlers or San Juan. If after 10:30, maybe some Bridge hands.

If a new game has been played, judgment is passed. A poor game will likely not be seen again. A game that some like and some don't will, and it will enter the roster of games that we argue about the next time a game has to be chosen. My own game collection doesn't vary too much, but a borrowed game may be returned, and I may have traded and received the trade recently. Mostly, new games are brought in by others. Mostly Binyamin.

I will complain that I'm losing, but not seriously. Binyamin will complain that he made the wrong move because he didn't understand the rules. Nadine will suggest that we rewind the game several moves so that someone can redo their turn. Elijah will furrow his brow, or be bored. Adam will warn you not to move where he wants or risk his vengeance. Gili will do whatever is the opposite of what was suggested in order to try something new. Brendan will ask if we can play Apples to Apples after this.

Gili or I will heat up water at some point. Gili drinks Chico, while I drink tea. Brendan drinks cocoa.

Some leave at 10:00 or 10:30. Rachel warns everyone else that she wants game night over by 11:30. On a good day, she will be drawn into a Puerto Rico game with variant buildings and enjoy it, although she will be chomping at the bit to get to her next turn already. She'll win. On a bad day, she may be sucked into the PR game when she had other things to do, and regret playing. In this case, she'll lose.

By 11:30, the last game is almost done, and by 11:45 it is done. There will be a bit more talking as I herd people out the door saying "Goodnight! See you next week!"

After it is over, the tables go out, the chairs are folded, the garbage is thrown out, the cups put into the dishwasher, the insert removed, the floor is swept, the games put away, and the counters cleared. I used to stay up and write the session report on the computer, but now I wait until the next day.

Somewhere in the fabric of the night, the tendrils of gaming and companionship bind us in a web that, though we scatter from the group, bring us back again.

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ How stupid is too stupid?

Back in my teenage years I came across a definition of stupidity that made me rethink a lot of how I view the world around me. The particular writer I was reading at the time defined stupidity thusly:

Lack of awareness about: Time, Place, Form, Event

What this particular definition made me think about was that perhaps some of people's stupidity can be explained not by a hazy assertion that they lack native intelligence, but instead by the fact that perhaps they aren't properly applying the intelligence they do have.

With that in mind, let's talk about my favorite game - Poker. In the late 60's, when I was in Los Angeles, I played in a table stakes game every Friday night. It was required that I win because I had no real income and was a student at the time.

One particular night there was a big hand I was involved in that came down to me making a decision based on something I could possibly have known but had failed to know. That something was the amount of Tens that I had seen. You see, I had a pair of Sixes in the hole and the other two Sixes were laying face up in my hand during a game of 7 Card Stud. My eventual opponent in the hand (a jerk named Jack from Hawaii who's Daddy had bought him a Mustang just like the one Steve McQueen drove in the movie Bullit) was showing three Tens and he was betting the frickin' farm.

After Jack and I each received our last card, the down card at the end, I bet to Jack's check and then Jack chortled, called the bet, and raised the amount I had left on the table. I was terrified. And for good reason. There was over $600 in that one pot, which was a small fortune at the time and every nickle I had was in the pot if I called the raise. But hey, I had four of a kind. How could I lose?

Easy, I could lose if Jack had four Tens. And I couldn't for the life of me recall having seen another Ten during the hand. So I had to decide based upon my assumption about the location (place) of that missing Ten. If Jack had it I was screwed. If he didn't then he would have to have four-of-a-kind in the form of three hole cards and his remaining open card, which was a Nine. As it dawned on me that I had paid no attention to Nines and had no recall of having seen one, I realized this was possible, though very remotely so.

What would you do?

This type of decision point is common in most good board games and to my eternal shame, I victimize myself with self-induced stupidity in way too many games for me to have any real bragging rights about situational awareness. Here's a couple of examples of what I'm talking about... stupidity that is self-induced and one that I think shows how what many people often think of as stupidity is really just a person who's not as far along the learning curve as you are.

I know a guy down in Boise who's a Captain in the Fire Department. For several years he got heavily into Warhammer and played in every tournament we held. I never once saw him win a single game. I watched as he made one dumb decision after another. He blundered through each game, totally unaware of anything about the enemy force. He had no concept of their unit capabilities, their magic tools, their armor, movement rates, nothing. Every game of Warhammer for this otherwise intelligent guy was one shocking and upsetting suprise after another.

So here was a guy who had intelligence, responsibility and was in most aspects of his life, a smart guy. But he was as dumb as a bag of hammers when it came to Warhammer. And it was self-induced. Instead of buying or borrowing the army books for the enemy forces, he chose to remain unaware of anything about Warhammer other than what his High Elf army could do. Every game was another sad tale of him being blindsided by his own stupidity and then grumbling and bitching about how lousy the rules were for days or even weeks after a tournament.

I fell victim to my own stupidity many times in one of my favorite games - Railroad Tycoon. Having played endless hours of the PC version of RRT I had a mindset (which could be defined as an assumption of Time, Place, Form and Event) about what the game was all about. But that was a mindset about the PC game, not the boardgame. In my first 30 games of RRT I only won three of them... my losses could be traced to my poor assumptions about the game. Since I have a pretty high opinion of my own mad gaming skills, a 10% win rate was horrifying to me.

So I thought about the particular definition of Stupidity that I started this article with. And I studied the game, as well as the decisions the two evil RRT kings in my neighborhood were making. Since neither one of them had a preset idea of RRT from the PC game, they were able to identify the most effective moves to make and maximize their play. I got un-stupid pretty fast on RRT when I began to view it in present time, as it's own game with it's own form, it's own events, it's own timing and so on. My win ratio increased to 25% just by removing the self-induced dumbness I was victimizing myself with.

You may be like me in agreeing that social game playing, in particular board gaming, has positive effects on our lives. I do know that it brings together many people who might normally never have the pleasure of each other's company. It increases communication skills, especially in teens and children and gaming exercises the brain muscles. I plan to play games until the last breath of life is forced out of me. My thinking is that if there is such a thing as re-incarnation I'll be better equipped to buy larger quantiites of small print run collectible games next lifetime. That's assuming, of course, that at least some intelligence carries forward to the next lifetime.

But playing games does have it's darker, stupid side. For example:

* Puerto Rico is the best game evar... as evidenced by it's #1 status on BGG

* Railroad Tycoon is dumbed-down Age of Steam

* Hasbro, or as Grognads would say, Hasborg, has an evil conspiracy in place to keep classic games out of print

Actually, this last one, the Hasborg Affair shows how really stupid some very intelligent people can get. For the most part I think the vast majority of consipracy theories demonstrate how unaware some people can make themselves in order to justify a mental position that the conspiracy exists to begin with.

I was watching a talking head show the other day and the talking heads were interviewing a guy who is a professor of something or the other at some highly acclaimed university somewhere in the upper midwest... you can tell I was really paying attention. As it turns out this professor is part of a network of other acclaimed professors, all tenured at highly thought of universities in the midwest and northeast who have some sort of website that is intended to educate the world that the 9/11 attacks on New York were actually a conspiracy cooked up by George Bush and his evil band of malicious cohorts in order to... well, in order to... I dunno. Do something awful? No matter how the two talking heads asked the question of why the Evil Bush would do that, the Acclaimed Professor shifted his answers away from that and back to the whole idea of the conspiracy to begin with.

Eventually one of the talking heads, who is normally a sullen and dull witted Liberal, asked a very intelligent question: Okay then, the airliners were really remote controlled and the Twin Towers were pre-wired with high explosives... so then, where are all the people who were supposedly on the airliners?

Acclaimed Professor couldn't answer that. But he did make the point that just because several hundred people might have gone missing, that didn't prove the conspiracy theory was false.

To which the normally belligerant and screeching Liberal talking head asked a follow up question: Since this theory would require several thousand people being involved, how is it that the evil and malicious Bush Administration has kept it a secret? For Chrissakes! The White House can't even cover up ol' Dick Cheny shooting a buddy in a remote section of Texas! How are they keeping this under wraps?

Acclaimed Professor couldn't answer that. But he did make the point that just because the conspiracy hadn't leaked, it didn't prove that no conspiracy exists.

Right.

The professor reminded me of the Fire Captain and his Warhammer failures. The answers to most questions are available to the vast majority of intelligent people. But getting the answer requires making an effort to KNOW the Time, Place, Form and Event of a situation. The degree of stupidity we all exhibit in a situation is proportional to what we have failed to know about it.

Mister Fire Captain chose to not know enough about Warhammer to ever win a single game of it. He ended up getting so frustrated and pissed off that he totally swore off gaming. I even invited him many, many times to come to our board game nights and have some positive experiences... but he refused. It's my opinion that he refused for a specific reason - that being, if he came and played other games, found he enjoyed them and could even win at them from time to time... then that would cause his carefully constructed belief that Warhammer is flawed to crumble and prove that he was just being stupid when he played it.

A few of you may know that I have a young son... he'll be 4 years old in October. My little buddy has a mild case of what is defined as oral apraxia. That means he doesn't communicate well because he can't properly make all the right sounds required for clearly intelligible speech. In reading about his situation I came across a description of what children like my little guy go through internally (emotionally) when they fail to talk at the same level other children their age do. They are embarrassed. Yes, a 3 year old can be embarrassed. And it's very, very normal for late-talking children to not even attempt to talk because they "know" they will garble it, get frustrated and feel shame.

Working with my little boy is tedious and often frustrating for both of us because he first needs to understand what is going on with him, then he has to have the will to discover, for himself, what is required to overcome it. Doing that with a human being who can't communicate well to begin with is difficult at best and requires extreme degrees of patience and restraint on my part and huge amounts of willingness on his part. I'm fairly certain though that viewed from the "outside", many people just assume the little guy is stupid or slow. Which, when you think about it, actually makes them stupid... using the definition at the beginning of the article.

Aside from the emotional commitment and bonds of love, I don't view my boy's situation as being anything different than a board game situation or, for that matter, a real life situation of politics, career, romance or lifestyle. It's all about knowing. And what you know is usually less important than what you're willing to know about any given situation. Discovering the exact Time, Place, Form and Event would mean you have the truth of it. Discovering some of the truth makes your game more fun and enhances your experience... win or lose. I think the same thing can be said about anything in life and for me to draw parallels to life by using board games is not outrageous in the slightest. You can learn a lot about people by observing how they approach a board game.

So. I called Jack's raise... shoved my last $14 into the pot and waited. He laughed loudly and obnoxiously, called me a total dumb ass and spat out, "What kind of f**king idiot are you? Why would I bet that much if I didn't have the Full House?"

Why indeed? Jack did the right thing. He did what I would have done, he had Tens over Nines and that is a poker hand worth betting the ranch on. But I think that poker hand is really a lot like life - he decided that I was bluffing. There was nothing I had showing that would make him suspect I had four-of-a-kind. So he probably never saw it coming. I had more knowledge about the hand than he did but I still paused and had to consider if I was being stupid. What where the chances that he had the 4th Ten as opposed to the chances that it had been a card in a folded hand or was still in the remains of the deck? On top of which, I had over $200 in that pot and only $14 in front of me... it would have been really stupid to fold a powerful hand at a time like that.

So I won, he lost. But we both made the right decisions. Jack just didn't have the same level of awareness about the hand that I did. I know he felt stupid afterwards. I would have. But that's the beauty of the games that have the most appeal to me... nobody has perfect information and everybody is a little stupid at every single decision point in the game.

THE COMING TRIUMPH OF THE WARGAME-EURO HYBRID

Once again, this is the last reader submission in the queue. Surely you have better things to do at work than work. Write an essay on the evolution of Meeples, we will post it. Your boss will understand.

Got a 5000 word essay on Mancala that's been kicking around in the back of your head trying to get out? Edit it down to 75 words and 3 pictures and we will post it.

Got some interesting pictures?

What's the state of boardgaming in Debuke, Legos, or your town? Tell us.

Surely someone games with some goofballs they want to tell us about?

Have an idea for a boardgame contest, such as the standard "Can you identify which game these pieces come from" contest? Got a better idea?

Once again, here is Kris Hall. Click on the title for the link to his group, the Appalachian Gamers.
Enjoy.


For a lot of strategy gamers, Sid Meiers’ Civilization is still the gold standard of computer games. Much of the fun comes from the game’s ability to accommodate an enormous range of playing styles. Players can win as Genghis Khan-style conquerors or as Gandhi-like peacemakers. Science and religion are as much a part of the game as armies and fleets. It is often more thrilling to complete a favorite Great Wonder than to smite your annoying neighbors. In short, Civilization seems to be as much the computer equivalent of a Eurogame as the computer equivalent of a wargame.

Boardgame designers may finally be catching up to Sid Meiers. Although wargames have been around for decades, and Eurogames have increased rapidly in popularity in recent years, the wargame-Euro hybrid (WEH) is still a sub-genre in its infancy. But it is an infant that is growing swiftly. These hybrid games have the potential to appeal to both the large wargame community and the larger Eurogame community, but too often their popularity has been limited by rules complexity and long playing times.

Here are some obvious wargame-Euro hybrids:

Civilization/Advanced Civilization/ Age of Renaissance. These are the grand old men of the wargame-Euro hybrid trend. These were (of course) civ-building games with some simple warfare rules. These games had a solid base of fans, but the long playing times kept them from being mainstream hits. These games may be due for redesign and reprints.

Warrior Knights. In Fantasy Flight’s new redesigned game of medieval conflict players send armies to lay siege to each other’s castles. But they also vie for control of the national assembly, and gain faith points that could make them the head of the church. They can invest in trading expeditions to the far East, and pay to improve both the defenses and income from their cities. This game still leans more to the wargame side of hybrid spectrum, but it is a prime example of the evolving genre. Perhaps the biggest problem with the game is that once players finish grabbing the neutral cities the game is almost over. A good variant would allow each player to start with one or two low-level cities to help speed inter-player conflict.

Twilight Imperium 3rd addition. Twilight Imperium is Fantasy Flight’s eternal labor of love. The latest version of this galactic conquest game contains a choose-a-role mechanic straight out of Puerto Rico. Add a tech tree, trading options, and victory conditions that don’t force every player to be a galactic warmonger all the time, and Twilight Imperium comes closer to the center of the hybrid spectrum than almost any other game. Three drawbacks to the game are its high price, long playing time, and intimidating rules book (although the example-laden rules book is much easier to learn than its 45-page count would suggest). Twilight Imperium has inspired more player-designed variants than any other boardgame I’ve seen--indicating a healthy community of fans (and some frustration with the Imperial Strategy Card, a card that rewards players big victory points for doing nothing more than choosing the card). Until some other game company decides to challenge Fantasy Flight in the galactic empire arena, Twilight Imperium will remain the sole in-print boardgame equivalent of the popular Master of Orion series of computer games.

Twilight Struggle. Not an expansion to Twilight Imperium, but a wildly-popular GMT game of cold war conflict. This card-driven area-majority game comes from a company known for its complex wargames, but TS also appeals to open-minded Euro-gamers. Reportedly, this is one of Alan Moon’s favorite games.

Byzantium. Martin Wallace’s game of medieval near-eastern strife would seem to be pure wargame at first glance. But some unusual design decisions (players control armies on both sides of the conflict) and the wooden-cube management aspect of the game give it the feel of a hybrid.

Serenissima. You may be scratching your head and wondering why I’ve included this game of Renaissance merchant trading in a list of wargame-Euro hybrids. But that’s only because we’re used to hybrids being wargames with some Euro chrome grafted on. Serenisima is a Euro game with some wargame chrome grafted on. Give this game to some mellow Euro-gamers and all you’ll see is a lot of cube shuttling. Give it to some rabid wargamers and be prepared for constant pirate action.

Mare Nostrum. I know less about this civ-building game than any other game I’ve mentioned, so I will just note that it seems to be a low-complexity hybrid game about the growth of ancient Mediterranean nations. It reputedly has some game-balance issues, but it was successful enough to warrant an expansion.

Sid Meier’s Civilization—The Boardgame. This Eagle Games boardgame version of Sid Meiers’ classic had the near-impossible task of trying to recreate the computer game experience. Not surprisingly, it did not take the gaming community by storm. The long playing time was one factor that limited the game’s appeal (players seem to be more tolerant of long computer games than long board games).

There have also been quite a few games over the years that borrow some of the characteristics of the WEH without fully qualifying. Some are:

7 Ages. This civ-building game from Australian Design Group has an epic feel to it, but the complex rules and long playing time have limited its appeal. And the cardboard counters make it seem more like a wargame.

Here I Stand. In this new GMT game of Reformation military and religious conflict, players can rack up points by sponsoring voyages of discovery, converting regions from one religion to another, getting the Queen pregnant (if you play Henry VIII), building Saint Peter’s in Rome, or even translating the Bible into the vernacular of various regions. The main reason this game fits the wargame profile more than the WEH category is the game’s high complexity and long playing time.

Princes of the Renaissance, Struggle of Empires, and Conquest of the Empire (with the Martin Wallace rules). These Martin Wallace games stand at the edges of the WEH category. Princes of the Renaissance doesn’t qualify because of the lack of conventional conquest in the game. Struggle of Empires and Conquest of the Empire allow players to develop their nations in non-military ways to a limited degree, but are still basically wargames.

War of the Ring. There have been several games with this title over the years, but the Nexus/Fantasy Flight version is the champ. Although this strategic treatment of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is almost all wargame, the hunt for the Ring adds an all-important sub-system that gives War of the Ring some of the feel of a hybrid.

Empires of the Middle Ages. This Decision Games reissue of the old SPI game has many Civ-building aspects to it, but is too dry and complicated to fit comfortably in the WEH category. And the pieces are still cardboard chits.

Conquistador/New World. This old SPI game and its Avalon Hill redesign are as much about colonization and plunder as combat. But the complex rules and cardboard chits make the games feel more like wargames than true hybrids.

Supremacy. This out-of-print game featured economic development as well as military combat, and plenty of toys. But it was still more wargame than hybrid, and the infinite number of expansions made the rules increasingly unwieldy.

Why do so many designers like to design wargame-euro hybrids? I believe there are several factors at work.

1) Wargame hybrids mirror history and the real world better than pure wargames, at least when we consider long periods of time. Most nations fight wars at one time or another, but the successful nations are good at a lot of things other than military conflict. If you want to make a strategic game about World War II, you don’t have to give your players economic or production decisions. But if you want to make a game about the whole 20th century, your game had better have more in it than armies and warfare.

2) A lot of gamers aren’t interested in games that concentrate solely on military conflict. Some gamers find war so distasteful that they avoid pure wargames. But some of these gamers will tolerate some military conflict in a game if there are other aspects that appeal to them. By increasing the breadth of the subject matter, game designers can make their games appeal to a wider audience. For example, I can occasionally get my wife to play a Euro game of moderate complexity, but I wouldn’t bother trying to get her to play a wargame more complicated than Risk.

3) Adding non-military sub-systems into a game with warfare gives the players more layers of decisions. Even a devout living-room Napoleon may realize that games can be more interesting if there is more to decide than which unit should go in which hex.

4) Layers of sub-systems mean that games don’t have to be zero-sum contests. In other words, different players can be succeeding in different aspects of the same game. In a tight game of War of the Ring, the Shadow will be on the verge of conquering Middle Earth even as Frodo is scrambling up the slopes of Mount Doom. In Warrior Knights, one player may have the most cities, a second player might have the largest armies, a third might have the most votes in the assembly, a fourth might be the head of the church, and a fifth player might have a fortune invested in trading voyages which will result in enormous profits. Much of the conflict comes from each player trying to make his advantage in one area create dominance in other areas. The inter-play of the various sub-systems of hybrid games often creates fun in ways that purely military games can’t match.

I believe that someday a game company will design a WEH game with the right balance of military conflict, civ-building, accessible rules, and fun toys, and that when they do, their sales will shoot through the roof. A comparable example might be the success of Caylus. There were plenty of resource conversion games before Caylus—such as Goa, and Princes of Florence. But the Caylus mechanism of placing workers to activate buildings created constant direct competition between players, and the large menu of building tiles meant a huge number of options for players at all times. With Caylus everything clicked together to push the resource-conversion game genre to a new level, and the sales figures increased to reflect this. Someday something similar will happen with the WEH genre.

Let me make some fairly safe predictions about this future hit game.

1) I believe it will be strategic rather than operational or tactical. Military operations fit better with non-military elements at the strategic level. This is another way of saying that it will be a Civ-building (or at least an economic-development) game as well as a wargame.

2) The basic rules will be of simple or moderate complexity. There may be advanced, optional, or expansion rules which will push the game’s complexity into the high category, but the basic game’s complexity will be tolerable to most Euro-gamers. All other things being equal, the more complex the game, the fewer copies that get bought.

3) The basic game will be played from start to finish in under four hours. Maybe under three hours. Again, there may be options for longer games, but only moderate game length leads to big sales figures.

4) The non-military aspects of the game will be of at least equal importance with the military aspects. This hit won’t just be a wargame with a production mechanism grafted on. Non-military paths to victory will be viable options. Players will rack up points by growing their cities, developing their technology, exploring their world, or improving their culture.

5) The game will have great toys. Along with plastic military pieces, the game will have miniature cities or cathedrals or universities or factories or trains. At the end of the game, the board will look as colorful and developed as the board at the end of a game of Railroad Tycoon or Mexica.

This future hit could be a game of competing fantasy empires, galactic empires, gangster empires, alternate history empires, or a slice of real history that lasts only a century or two. The nations of the game might not be generic empires, but actual countries with lots of historical abilities and limitations. Cards might throw large amounts of historical events and detail into the mix and root the game in a specific time period. (Card-driven wargames have shown that one way to limit the complexity of rules is to shoehorn the history onto cards rather than into the rules).

Finally, let me point out a few WEHs coming soon to a store or internet site near you:

Shogun. This re-themed version of Wallenstein from Rio Grande Games is due out in August.

Tempus. This new Martin Wallace game is reputed to be Civ-building made simple. The 20 or so copies available this year at Origins disappeared in a twinkling. It’s from Café Games and is due out in August.

Conquest of Paradise. This GMT game of civ-building in the South Pacific may have traditional cardboard wargame-style counters, but the game mechanics may help it appeal to Euro gamers. Due out later this year or early next year.

Age of Empires III. This game of New World colonization and conquest from Eagle Games inspired rave reviews from those lucky enough to play it at Origins. It’s due out in August or September.

All of these games are reputedly of medium complexity. It will be interesting to see if any of them become breakout hits.

Wargame-Euro hybrids are one of my favorite sub-genres of games. I am convinced that we will see more and better hybrids in years to come.

Daughters, BSW vs FtF and some new games

Daughter the Younger
A couple of days ago I played what I would consider the first or second game with Daughter the Younger. We played Color Clowns properly. We took it in turns to roll the dice and place the appropriate shape to make the required color as determined by the dice roll. As I mentioned in my review it's quite a tedious game towards then end, but the pattern recognition, turn taking and appreciation of mixing colours are all very educational for a three year old. The two of us have played this many times before, but previously we have just been playing with the bits as opposed to playing the game. I'll have to see if there is a complete set of Tummy Ache left after her "playing" with it. If there is I think this could be the next cab off the rank. We also got close to a real game of Dominos this week, mostly following the rules of placing pieces. In about two years we should have that home grown four player Settlers game. For now if we could just convince her not to go and help herself to games off the shelves, some of "her" games would be more complete and ready for real play.

Daughter the Elder
We picked up Yinsh and Dvonn recently because they were heavily reduced. Melissa and I have played a couple of games of Yinsh and so far she has scored one ring. She was a bit tired for our first game, but will free admit that abstracts are not her forté. The first game I played with Daughter the Elder she lost three to two. The second game she won! The third game was mine, but again only three to two. She picks up quick our girl, and not only abstracts. The last game of San Juan we played was a tie. In the majority of games we play with her we just play straight rules, no handicapping for anyone, so she is doing this on her own. I keep forgetting that she was quite a mean Chess player by age six, so I shouldn't be surprised that an almost eight year old will beat me after a couple of outings of a game, but I am.

BSW vs FtF
Last weekend I played three five player games of Power Grid, two on BSW during the Lupis Landing on-line convention and one face to face at ConVic 4 (although you will only see the latter appear in my games logged stats as I only log face to face games). The comparison of the games reinforced the opinion that I have had for a while which is that I do better at most games face to face than I do on-line. In face to face games, especially ones like Power Grid, I tend to be more aware of what is going on and what position different players are in. In on-line games the end game seems to suddenly sneak up on me, even though all the information is theoretically available to me as per the face to face game. For some reason I don't seem to concentrate as much with the on-line games and play much more in a by the seat of my pants style. This seemed to be backed up by the fact that I came fourth in both the BSW games and second in the face to face game.

In card games like 6 Nimmt! , Diamant or Lost Cities I do quite well on-line, but as soon as the complexity gets upped a bit I seem to flounder in the electronic environment. I even found this against computer opponents. On the PC version of Saint Petersburg Melissa can consistently beat the computer version at a much higher level than I can, yet when we play face to face I usually beat her.

New (to me) games
In the last few weeks I have managed to chalk up quite a few first plays for games - Age of Steam, Saboteur, Mü und Mehr, Tombouctou, Poison Pot, Express, Memoir '44, and Yinsh.

Age of Steam
I actually picked up my copy of Age of Steam about two years ago based on extensive GeekBuddy Analysis and other research at BGG. Following up the conclusion of that analysis I also have the first three expansions and about a fortnight ago I finally played it!

All I can say is my GeekBuddies did me no wrong, I really enjoyed it. I didn't go bankrupt and I ended the game in the middle of the field. It has a lot of fans at the weekly Gamers@Dockers and monthly Eurogamesfest sessions so I hope to get to play it again soon. I wasn't even aware that there was a fourth (official) expansion for this out until this week. Another thing to keep my eyes out for.

My analysis after a single play is that Age of Steam is not the super heavy that it is sometimes made out to be and whilst Railroad Tycoon craps all over it in terms of components, Age of Steam is the one that I would prefer to replay the most.

Saboteur
After a couple of games my conclusion is that it needs six or more players for a better experience. Wise man say - with eight players and only two saboteurs, the gold will most likely be found. The scoring does seem rather arbitrary, but it is a fun filler type game that can keep a lot of people occupied. We found at ConVic 4 that it can be picked up by non-gamers very quickly.

Mü und Mehr
So far I have played Mü and The Last Panther out of the Mü und Mehr box. With Mü the bidding and, more to the point, the bidding strategies and tactics take a few hands to start to get your head around them. It is an interesting game with quite a bit of depth once the bidding is down pat. The Last Panther is really a nothing more than a Hearts (or fill in your local regional name) variant, not that there is anything wrong with that - it was a mainstay of lunch times in my first year at University.

Tombouctou
This game is nicely themed, the mechanics of moving the camel trains works well, it scales well and the scoring system is interesting. However I my overall impression was only lukewarm. We played it four player, there were five important bits of information available each round, but any individual player would only find out about three of them. It felt like an artificially constrained version of Cluedo to me. I could utilise the information that I did know, but the complete ignorance about the other two seemed to make it a bit of a luckfest about who was going to be robbed or not.

Poison Pot
This was one of the games that John Farrell brought down on his visit to Melbourne for ConVic 4. A ruthless abstract which caters for two or three players. I only played it once and got slaughtered, but I would happily play it again.

Express
I believe this can be played as individuals, but I it would seem to be much better as a partnership game. Dates back to 1990 and there seems to be a nod to Mille Bornes with the disaster cards. It has its own clever mechanics though, the passing of cards between partners as the locomotives is one that particularly stands out. Certainly not a filler, but still a game I would certainly play again and wouldn't mind obtaining.

Memoir '44
The Manly Man, Joe Steadman is correct, this is not a simulation. It is however a nice and simple game. So far I have only played one of the simple starting scenarios but look forward to working my way through the other ones.

Yinsh.
As mentioned above, I have played it with Melissa and Daughter the Elder. I like this a lot.

One thing I noticed doing some of the research for links etc. for this piece is that whilst my games logged stuff is almost up to to date, my games owned is not and my ratings are, in some cases, woefully out of date. There are games I have played many times that I still haven't rated or commented on. I need to bite the bullet, extract my collection and review all ratings. The only problem being that could cut into game time :-)

Mmm meeples taste like...

Coldfoot on death, obits, a couple non-depressing items, and the ultimate test to determine your fitness to belong to the cult of night owls

Lost a boardgamer to the War on Terror. Commence with the 21-die-roll salute.

I only played with Gordy a couple times. He was a tough opponent and a very, very likeable guy. Gordon spent most of his time in Iraq in the two years I knew him. He leaves behind a wife and two children.

From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner 7-4-6
Gordon 'Gordy' Cook
Second-generation Fairbanksan Gordon "Gordy" Joseph Cook, 36, died July 2, 2006, in Sadr City, Iraq, while working as a civilian contractor.

Gordy was born Nov. 18, 1969, in Fairbanks, the youngest son of Billie and Cornelius "Bud" Cook. Gordy was a star center football player while attending West Valley High School. After graduating in 1988, Gordy enlisted in the Marines.

Throughout his military career, Gordy served in the Marines, Air Force and Army. He was stationed in several locations overseas including Subic Bay in the Philippines, North Korea and he served in Iraq during Desert Storm.

Gordy and Michelle Coben were married in 1999. They have two children, Kameron and Emmy.

In 2003, Gordy decided to work as a civilian contractor during Operation Iraqi Freedom and spent most of the last three years in Iraq.

Gordy was a partner with his sister, Heidi, in the Old F.E. Gold Camp in Chatanika.

He was preceded in death by his father Cornelius Cook and grandmother Gertrude Crosman.

He is survived by his mother, Billie of Fairbanks; wife Michelle and children Kameron and Emmy, currently of Olympia, Wash.; brothers, David, wife Linda and their children Aidan and Aisla of Ames, Iowa, Art of Seattle and Walter of Fairbanks; sisters, Heidi Cook and children, Kyle and Meighan of Fairbanks; Sandra Boatner of North Pole and Marnie Sheridan and husband Mick and their children, Karl, Heidi, Brian and Julie, of Dublin, Ireland; aunts and uncles, Carl Crosman, Carol Cornelius, Aileen Marsh and Marnie Metz.

Services will be announced at a later date.

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

I arrived at my nursing job recently and there were 3 other obituaries posted on the wall. All of them were people I knew.

Obits are routinely and frequently posted in my workplace, all of them people we knew. A couple months ago a certain fellow passed away. When I saw his obituary my first thought was: He might have liked German games, I should have taught him Samurai that night he couldn't sleep.

Chances to play games at work are very limited, but I now have my copy of Samurai in my car, just in case the opportunity arises. I don't know why Samurai immediately came to mind but it is simple, quick, thought provoking and scales very well. I think it's the perfect game for my purposes as a nurse.

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How good is Puerto Rico?

Looking at the game rankings on Boardgamegeek, the number one game, Puerto Rico is 0.25 points higher than the next highest ranked game, Tigris and Euphrates. How significant is a quarter point difference? A quarter point is greater than the difference between the number two game and the number six game. A quarter point separates the number six game from the number sixteen game, and the number sixteen game from the number thirty eight game.

A quarter point difference puts Puerto Rico in rarefied air, definitely in a class by its self. Is it that good?

On the other end of the spectrum, the lowest rated game, Tic-Tac-Toe, is quarter point lower than the next lowest game, Bingo. How is that? You at least have a couple decisions to make in Tic-Tac-Toe, Bingo is strictly passive. In fact the next 4 lowest ranked games are passive. From the lowest they are, Chutes and Ladders, LCR, War, and Candyland.

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Less than four months until BGG.con. Wooooo-hoooooo.

Note to self: Don't piss off any more users on BGG.

Yeah. Like that'll happen.

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Oooooops. Failed already.

OK. Starting NOW. No pissing off weak kneed, pro-terrorist, anti-gun, mentally unstable, anti-free speech, anti-bathing, communist leaning, pro nanny state, Klingon speaking, Dungeon Twister playing, non-spellcheck users on BGG.

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Just out of curiosity, is there anyone out there who works the night shift in the U.S. or Canada who can't answer this question off the top of their head:

What's Richard Hoagland's middle initial?

If you know, do you know what the M stands for in Linda M. Howe?

Who recently died: Lex, Ramona, or Yeti?

If you've been working the night shift for no more than the last 20 minutes you should be able to answer those questions. How about these:

Who is a nutjob: JR, RC, or JC?

Linda Howe was:
A) In the Missouri legislature
B) Miss Idaho
C) Science advisor to Walter Kronkite

Who was the premier nutjob 5 years ago? Leonard, Hank, or Harriet?

Who was denounced by the government, his personel file "lost", and could only prove that he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory because his picture had been in the local paper a couple times during his stint at the lab?

Reaching back 10 years or more:

Where was Paco from?

Who was the guy who worked at the Post Office in somewhere in California?

Where was/is Mel's hole?

What did Bugs shoot?

What was "that one caller" supposedly flying over when he was shot down by the U.S. Air Force?

I could go on, but I will finish with this:

For the title of The Grand Master, Cult of Night Owls, what was Al Bielek's birth name? (No Googling, please.)

Sorry if you don't know what I am talking about. I would love to tell you but I can't. I would then have to kill you. Even if there are only seven people reading this blog, that is entirely too much travelling for me to kill all of you just to keep a secret.

Plus, I'm morally opposed to killing off our readers.

Strategy of a Game: Blue Moon, Part Two: Flit & Mimix

This is the second in a series of strategy articles about Blue Moon, which I'll be publishing about once a month here at Gone Gaming. If you haven't already, you'll want to read my original discussions of the game and my strategy notes about The Hoax & The Vulca.

This time around I'll be moving on to cover the first two standalone decks, The Flit and The Vulca. These notes originally appeared at RPGnet in a slightly different form, but have been revised, expanded, and edited for inclusion here.

As before, I'll be starting out with some looks at card counts in the decks. I'm building on my listings from the last article to put everything into perspective.

Card Counts

Here's a breakdown of the card types in the decks:

Card Types	Leadership	Characters	Boosters	Support
Flit	3	14	13	0
Hoax	3	18	3	6
Mimix	2	23	2	3
Vulca	3	18	4	5

These are pretty dramatic departures from the original decks, with the Flit having slightly fewer characters, but a huge numbers of boosters and the Mimix being very heavy on characters.

Here's card icons.

Card Icons	Free	Gang	Pair	Prot.	Repl.	Retr.	EShield	FShield	Stop
Flit	0	0	10	0	0	11	2	1	1*
Hoax	0	0	0	0	0	3	1	2	1*
Mimix	3	1**	13**	0	0	1	1	1	3*
Vulca	0	0	1**	0	0	0	2	1	1*

* Keep in mind that each deck tends to have a mutant with the icons: earth shield, fire shield, stop. Thus a base number of 1/1/1 for these last three icons is normal.

** This count includes 1 gang/paired card whose matches don't appear in this deck.

We can see a lot about the strengths of the decks just from this chart. The Flit has a mess of paired boosters and retrievables, while the Mimix has almost half a deck of paired characters. We'll get back to these ...

Finally, here's some combat value counts:

Counts	Earth Sum	Earth Max	Fire Sum	Fire Max	2C Max Play
Flit	45	4	44	4	8 either
Hoax	44	5	55	5	10 earth
Mimix	69	6	70	6	8 either
Vulca	46	5	69	7	14 fire

Max shows the highest card of the type while "2c max play" shows the highest value possible when playing two cards, usually a character plus a booster or support.

Mimix looks quite strong, but that's just because of its Character card bias, while both decks (particularly the Mimix) can very easily exceed a two-card play because of their pairs, and the frees for the Mimix, so the 8 attack values can actually go much higher.

Deck #3: The Flit

Strengths: Retrievable characters, multi-paired boosters.

Weaknesses: Low-value characters. Utter dependence on boosters.

Cards of Note: The following cards are of particular note in the Flit deck.

Commence Mega Launch (Leadership). Even better than a paired booster, you can play this card, then drop any number of boosters onto the table, hopefully jumping immediately to six cards and blowing your opponent out of the water.

Fel-Nar-Gan (Character). The Flit deck mutant is a really nice match for the rest of the deck, because it allows you to swap the element of the fight if you have no cards in your combat area, and that's pretty easy to do if you've been bouncing Flit back into your hands.

Various Characters (Character). There's a bunch of Flit with kinda' neat powers, that aren't extraordinary. In particular: Cheepchirrup (2/2) limits your opponent to just 1 card play, and so is great if your opponent hasn't gotten out any support. Trillilling (2/2) ignores your opponent's boosters, Flitterflutter ignores your opponent's support, Tittertweet ignores your opponent's special effects, and Cark Kamikaze Crow doubles the value of his boosters. Various of these will be particularly effective against various decks, depending on whether they depend on boosters, support, or special effects to win

Strategy: The strategy of the Flit is beautifully mirrored in their theming. They dive down and pull up in an arial dance, and sometimes they make large, sudden attacks that their opponents don't expect at all.

Much moreso than in the basic decks, it pays to generally play low when you're playing the Flit. Drop the lowest character you can, then retrieve it. Rinse, lather, wash, repeat. This will cause your opponent to waste cards while you're having no impact on your own card supply.

You almost always want to retrieve your retrievable cards. This does have some deficits. You won't draw new cards after your first retrieval. In addition, you're not building your combat area up to the 6 cards required for a double-dragon reward. However, you can utterly bamboozle your opponent.

Be aware that you're going to eventually have to "sacrifice" some of your Flit, because when you win a duel the winning Flit is going to be discarded. If you have a choice, think about which Flit you don't mind going away. Also consider that you might sometimes want to sacrifice a Flit before the battle ends to ensure that you hit 6 cards. The easiest way to do this is to play a Flit with two boosters followed by a Flit with two boosters. It costs 40% of your paired booster supply, but if it gives you a two-dragon swing, it's probably well worthwhile.

The boosters do work the best as pair, because they can let you make a sudden increase to a hard-to-match number. A 7-8 is quite possible, while a 10 is doable in a perfect world--but probably overkill.

Ideally during a fight you'll want to bounce a few retrievable characters off the table while your opponent is playing early cards. Then, when you think you've seen his best hand strength hit him with one of the special characters and a good pair of boosters; between the special effect limitations and the high value he'll have a hard time matching you.

Counter Strategy: I'm generally not a big fan of card counting, but if your opponent is playing the Flit you must keep track of the retrievable cards that they've retrieved. Unless you're just trying to cycle your hand or increase your combat area to 6 cards you never want to play a card whose value is lower than or equal to a retrievable that you know your opponent is holding. Generally, if you can play medium-value characters (4+) rather than low-value characters (1-3) you have a better chance of keeping your opponent on the defensive. Otherwise, you'll just be watching him drop and retrieve cards as you edge the combat value up.

If you can keep the combat value at 4 or 5 you'll generally be forcing your opponent to either play boosters or drop out of a fight. However try and keep some support, boosters, or high-value characters on hand to defend against a sudden Launch.

Also don't be afraid to drop out of a battle just to kill one of your opponent's retrievables, particularly the better ones. They're a limited resource. Even if you lose a dragon you may be hurting your opponent's chances for the future.

Finally, be very aware of any anti-booster cards you might have, because if you can prevent the play of boosters, or ignore them, you'll greatly hurt a Flit player's chances to win. Consider those cards very valuable in a fight against the Flit.

Deck #4: The Mimix

Strengths: Strong characters which can be easily combined

Weaknesses: Few special effect texts, with the best (shamans) pretty hard to play.

Cards of Note: The following cards are of particular note in the Mimix deck.

The Two Call Spirits (Leadership). Call Spirit of the Underworld lets you recover something from the discard pile, and Call Spirit of the Battlefield lets you retrieve something from the combat area. These should both be used to help put pairs of Mimix together.

The Four Shamans (Character). These four 2/2 characters represent most of the Mimix's special effect characters. They're all hard to play because of their low values, and the Shaman of the Afterlife and Shaman of the Here and Now are even more dificult because they have "stop" symbols on them. As a result, you should play Shamans whenever you have an opportunity, starting off duels with them, or responding with them if your opponent starts off low. Every one of the Shamans let you draw a card (from the draw deck or the discard), thus allowing you another opportunity to get pairs of Mimix.

Virgins of Pure Fire & Earth (Character). A 6/1 and a 1/6. Don't bother playing them paired, as they're almost as good on their own.

Strategy: Playing the Mimix is all about playing the pairs of Amazons. You've got tons of character cards, so you shouldn't be afraid to play them, and you want to play them as pairs whenever you can, to make up for the general lack of boosters and support in this deck.

The trick is, of course, getting the pairs. You don't want to just depend on luck for this; instead you should concentrate on using the cards you have that can help you set up pairs. As already noted, that's the shamans and the Call Spirit cards. I see much of the Mimix gameplay as a dance between Shamans and the Amazons. You play the Shamans whenever you can to create pairs of Amazons, and otherwise you tread water until you're ready to drop a pair down together, hopefully as a crippling blow.

One of the hard decisions with the Mimix is always when to play a character when you don't have its pair. Generally it's better to do this with the weaker cards than the strong ones; you can quickly remember which category a card fits into by looking at its moons (from 0-2) or by summing up its fire + earth values to remind you of its paired total (from 5-8). In addition, remember that the Heroine of the High Flames doesn't have a pair in this deck (it's in the Vulca deck), so you shouldn't be concerned about playing her. Likewise, as already noted, because the Virgins are so offbalanced, you probably want to play them standalone anway

You should also be more willing to play an umatched card if you haven't yet used the cards which let you retrieve a played card yet. (That's the two Call Spirits and the Shaman of the Afterlife.)

When you drop pairs, you should try and match them up with the boosters, support, and free characters in this deck. However, those other cards are very rare and thus should be treated as real commodities. Don't spend them early, if the numbers are still low, unless you think that your opponent just offered his best shot. Do try and use them when you're dropping down a good pair, in the hope of totally overpowering an opponent. (This can be quite important since the Mimix otherwise max out at 8 for a pair.)

Counter Strategy: The Mimix's greatest weakness is ultimately their dependence on paired, no special-effect characters. Thus, particularly effective cards against them are ones that limit the playing of cards (say, to just one in the combat area) and ones that require them to play characters with special effects. The latter can knock the Mimix straight out of a fight since every one of their special effect cards is a 2/2.

Generally, pressing a fight quickly can hurt the Mimix. The faster you hop to the high numbers, the less likely they are to be able to build up to their pairs. In addition, always try and jump the duels straight up to "3" or higher. This will prevent them from playing their Shamans unless they waste a bosoter or support when they do so (and that's not even possible with the two Shamans who have stop icons.)

Support can be particularly effective against the Mimix, because they have to match it with expendable cards, so don't be afraid to play Support against them early in a fight, forcing them to waste better resources throughout the battle.

In Defense of the Homemade Game

“…if you play the game, you should own it, unless the rights have been released.” This is a quote from a recent thread on BGG regarding homemade versions of games, which turned into a fairly lengthy debate, and sums up the general consensus for games that are still in print.

I often make mock-ups of simple games, some are out of print and some are yet-to-be-released, to decide if I should try to hunt down a copy in the case of the former or buy the game when it finally becomes available.

My latest experiment was Um Krone Und Kragen (To Crown A King) which is soon to be released in English. My impatience got the best of me so I quickly printed up 2 sets of the card translations and dug out my tube of Stack (14 dice in 4 colors and some rules. It was awarded “Best New Family Game” by Games Magazine at some point—says so right on the tube!)

Sunday evening my husband, Richard, and I sat down to try it out and we both had fun with it so I’ll be placing my next order as soon as my Friendly Not-Quite-Local Online Game Store gets it in.

But what if I hadn’t liked it or I liked it a little bit but could be satisfied with occasionally playing the mock-up version? That would be bad, right? I would have deprived the designer, the publisher and the store their profit. Me and my ilk could be responsible for the early demise of a board game, casting a blemish on the reputation of a designer and throwing the whole board game economy into disarray. To top it off, I would not be allowed dessert for a month. We’re all in agreement then, I’m sure.

Except…how is that different from the people who have commented that they played a friend’s copy of something and really liked it but they don’t feel the need to own the game since they can play Fred’s copy? Or the people who have a game store locally where they can play games so they don’t buy their own copy which no one at home will play? Or the people who go to Cons and try dozens of games, many of which they don’t care for enough to buy?

Maybe my moral fiber is frayed at the edges, but I don’t feel one bit guilty about my homemade games. Taking the last piece of pizza rather than saving it for my husband’s lunch, on the other hand, did give me a bit of a twinge.
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A meeple by any other name would score points just the same.

Mary

The Ludonimicron

The whole thing occured in May, 1989.

I was the Mac and Unix lab supervisor at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT, a Jesuit college. I was responsible not only ensuring that the professors and the students could use the computers, but also for maintaining network connections to other universities.

I spent a lot of time on the fledgling Internet at that time. Gopher was the 'next big thing', you might recall. It was a new way of accessing many new documents that were previously only available at other institutions. Suddenly, all of these documents came online and were accessible to anyone who knew how to use the software.

It was early May, the second or third. I was browsing around Gopher in some university's archives when I stumbled upon a link entitled "Research into the Ludonimicron". I admit that I was bored, and a bit curious. So I clicked the link.

The first page of the document appeared on my screen. Apparently, the paper contained information about a long lost book called the "Ludonimicron". The first page of the paper was basically an abstract, with the name of the researcher (Dr. Jim Benneth) and some esoteric lines about board games and mythology.

As I was ready to page down to the next page, my screen suddenly went blank. I remembered thinking that that was quite strange. I pressed a few keys until I found myself back in the parent folder, but the link to the paper was now gone. I rooted around on the site but couldn't find it. Nor was there any listing for "Ludonimicron" anywhere else on Gopher.

A call to the university in question revealed that Professor Benneth no longer worked at that university, and in fact, hadn't been seen in about four years. No listing for a Jim Benneth was in the local white pages of that university's city. And that was that.

I confess that I forgot all about it until a week later.

I was browsing through the stacks about Mythology at the university library at Yale, New Haven, when I came across a very old book on the shelves without any sort of title on the spine. It was bound in black leather and was closed with some sort of metal clasps.

Taking it down, I was able to open the clasps without much difficulty. The impression on the inside page revealed this to be "Essays on the Field of Board Game Mythology". Recalling my previous encounter with that subject last week, I decided to sit down and have a go at studying the subject.

I sat at one of the tables in the library reading the first essay, which was entitled "Polynesian Board Games of Antiquity". This was a fascinating essay about board games which occupied my time, interrupted only briefly by some commotion near the librarians desk. Apparently the librarian and her manager were having some sort of argument. When I looked up, they were looking directly at me but then quickly turned away.

I ignored them and continued with my reading. There were some detailed old maps of Easter Island on one of the pages. It was then that I noticed in a very old hand on the side of the map "est 950? ref. Ludonim." I was convinced that that was a reference to my mysterious book.

I was keen to continue reading, but I needed to use the facilities. When I returned the book was nowhere in sight.

I went to the librarian's desk asking if they knew what had happened to the book I was reading, but they denied having taken it or even knowing anything about it. Furthermore, they denied that such a book existed in their library. When I pointed out to them that I had taken it from their own shelves, they suggested, very curtly, that perhaps some individual had left it there by accident and had now retrieved it. In any case, they implied that there was nothing more that they could do to help me.

I wasn't convinced by this cold dismissal, but there didn't appear to be anything else that I could do, so I left. However, I decided that I needed to find out more on the subject. As I was planning a trip to South America the next week, anyway, I decided to do some research on Easter Island.

The only way to get to Easter Island is to fly to Chile and then take a single passenger plane out to the island. I arrived in Chile without much difficulty. At the airport I hailed a taxi and was picked up almost at once by a rough looking local. Aside from his unkempt appearance he also had curiously yellow eyes.

I asked him to take me to a local flight headed for Easter Island. He said that only one pilot goes regularly to the island, one Captain Lopez. I thanked him and we set off for and arrived at Lopez's hangar forthwith. Later, I learned that there were a few other pilots who also make the journey, although none with the regularity of Lopez.

One possibly significant event occurred before we left. As Lopez started plane, I saw him looking curiously at some of the instruments. I asked him if there was anything wrong and he said that he couldn't tell that something was definitely wrong, but he had a feeling that something was odd. He asked if I wouldn't mind a slight delay while he gave the plane another once over, just to be on the safe side. I said that I didn't mind.

What he discovered made my blood run cold. It turns out that the main fuel line on the left wing had been cut. It was quite fortuitous that we did this final inspection; without it, the plane would probably have fallen into the ocean halfway to its destination and I wouldn't be here to write any of this. It was unclear how the fuel line had been cut. Lopez discounted any foul play, since the plane's hangar was always locked when he wasn't with it. To this day, I haven't discovered how this could have happened.

Anyway, we arrived at Easter island without any further delay. Many of you already know about Easter Island's great claim to fame: great statues of various figures that dot the island at various intervals, seemingly at random. What is less well known is that these pieces sometimes move about.

Of course, I am not suggesting that they move by themselves. Obviously, the natives on the island move them occasionally for some reason. Why, it is not known. How is also not known, as some of these statues are quite large. Also, no one has ever seen anyone move the pieces, but it is generally assumed that the movement is done at night.

There are some local laws in place that prevent verification of this assumption. One of these is a curfew that is enforced on the island; all non-natives are required to stay indoors from dusk to dawn.

Although foolish in retrospect, my first few days I openly asked around, searching for any information about the "Ludonimicron". All that I got were polite stares and head shaking. It was obvious to me that no one knew anything, or was willing to say anything. I also noticed that I was very casually being watched. I put this down to general nervousness about tourists on the island, but I must admit that I began to get a creepy feeling on the back of my neck. I could never pinpoint a particular set of eyes on me, but their weight began to feel oppressive.

I hadn't meant to violate their local laws, but one evening I had to escape from this constant feeling of scrutiny. I snuck out the back of my cabin and wandered through one of the island's thick groves of trees. Ahead of me I began to see firelight and hear chanting and drumming. I crouched down among the foliage and crept up to the edge to see and hear better.

A great native ceremony was going on. People were dancing and jumping around one of the great statues. I watched for a few minutes, and then smiled to myself, convinced that that was all. Just as I turned away to go back, however, the dancing stopped. I stood for a few moments more, and as I watched, a table and two chairs were brought into the circle, and two of the dancers sat down. A chess board and pieces were then placed on the table and the two began to play a game of chess.

I couldn't see much from my vantage, but it looked to me like the pieces on the chess board were made to look like the statues that dotted the island. I smiled to myself. It's just a bit of local fun and games, not very much different from my own American culture. As I stood up and turned around, I came face to face with one of the island's native security guards. He wasn't smiling.

I was escorted back to my cabin and the next morning I was asked to leave the island. Forced to leave, more like. As the plane that I was on flew back into Chile, I could see the checkered fields of farms spreading out like a great game board around the airport.

I eventually landed back in Newark, NJ, and made my way to the bus that would take me to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, for transfer to the train back to New Haven, CT.

It was there that I met "Mr X". He wore a trenchcoat and dark glasses, even though it was three in the afternoon on a cloudy day. He called me by my name.

"Mr. Jonathan Berlinger?" he asked.

Started into the simple truth, I answered, "Yes. Who are you?"

"My name is unimportant," he said. "Mr. Berlinger, I've come to warn you that you are in great danger. You must stop your research."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him, slightly annoyed. "Who are you? How do you know my research?"

"Let's just say that I know what it is that you are searching for. I once searched for it myself. You have to stop. They know that you're looking, and they won't let you find it. Right now, you are in great danger."

Ordinarily I would have laughed at some stranger telling me this at a bus stop in New Jersey, but the way he glanced around when he said this made me shiver, even though it wasn't that cold out.

"What's going on?" I asked. "Who are you? Why are you telling me this?"

"Look," he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. "You don't know what you're getting into. You have no idea how far this goes. You and I and everyone around us are part of a game, Mr Berlinger. It's being played around us. You're making the wrong moves, and if you don't stop, you are going to be eliminated."

"Are you threatening me?" I asked, dumbfounded.

"Not me, Mr Berlinger. Not me. Look around you. All around you is the game. Do you think it's a coincidence that the heads of corporations are called the 'board' of directors. Chairman of the 'board'? Coincidence? And the military, Mr. Berlinger, always playing war 'games'. Listen to the military briefings. 'Strategy'. 'Tactics'. 'Game plan'. Mr. Berlinger, this game is more than you can handle. Please take my advice and get out of it while there's still time. It may already be too late."

I blinked. "Are you telling me that a bunch of people are running the world and playing it like a giant board game, sir?" I asked.

"No, Mr. Berlinger, I never said that a bunch of 'people' were doing anything of the sort. Now I really must be ... "

"Wait! I don't understand! No people can be that powerful. No human beings could ... No human beings ... No humans ... " I stopped and stared at my mysterious stranger.

"I really must be going, Mr. Berlinger. Good day. Please heed my advice." And with that, he disappeared into the crowds.

I must admit that my conversation with this stranger had shaken me. I got on the bus, thinking fiercely about what he said, and unwilling to believe what he was implying.

As the bus approached the Lincoln Tunnel, I began to feel a deep sense of fear and nausea. I looked up through the windshield at the mouth of the tunnel. As anyone who has ever approached the Lincoln Tunnel before knows, the inside of the tunnel is lined with lights, and you can see into the tunnel for some distance before the tunnel bends out of sight. On that day, I couldn't see beyond a few feet into the tunnel before my sight ended in what I felt was an inky, malevolent darkness. Only two lights gleamed in that darkness, and they looked to my fevered imagination more like eyes than lights.

I stood up and ran to the front of the bus and yelled at the driver to let me off. He told me to sit down. Only after I threatened that I was going to throw up did he pull over and let me off. I dropped off the bus and fell to my hands and knees as waves of nausea swept over me. As I watched the bus enter the tunnel, it seemed to glow briefly and then fade out of existence. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Everything seemed normal. The lights in the tunnel were back and the traffic was moving just as it normally does. All evidence was that my imagination had simply gotten the better of me, but I wasn't willing to take any chances.

In August I moved to Israel and changed my name to Yehuda. I got divorced and remarried. I moved three times, and I changed jobs about ten times. After fifteen years I have finally begun to relax. I haven't seen any more mysterious strangers or dark tunnels, nor have I run across any further mention of the mysterious Ludonimicron; of course, I have resolutely not been looking for it.

My life is now back to normal and I get on with my day to day activities. I'm happily involved in the game community as a blogger, a player, and a group organizer. All of the strange occurrences of that freakish month are now in the past. Every day I go to work and come home without any incidence.

Although, I do have a new coworker named William whose eyes are a very odd shade of yellow.

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Does this copy of Gettysburg make me look phat?

For the last couple of weeks I've been carrying on about 2-player games, war games and the meatier, edgier side of board gaming. Before anyone gets the idea that I don't like multi-player games, just remember, I am the most vocal apologist for Railroad Tycoon in existence, I rate Power Grid right up there at a "9" on BGG's near perfect rating system and I own all 27 of the various Ticket to Ride games, expansions, modules, add-ons and underground maps.

I suspect though, that I'm having the gamer equivalent of a mid-life crisis. I may be a deeply troubled individual... no really, I mean it... despite the fact that I appear to be completely normal... there may be issues.

I'll start off with Hannibal: Rome Vs. Carthage.

I have a copy sitting in a Priority Mail cardboard box leaning on my couch. Still in the shrinkwrap. And I'm wondering why I have it. The nice gamer Geek I traded with will certainly be happy with what he got from me. But still... I have enough problems getting people to play war games as it is, why take one of these gems off the market? In fact, why do I own as many games as I do?

When I go out into my garage I see about 200 games on the shelves. And then I look at the boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of accumulated games, miniatures, RPG books, CCG's and other assorted merchandise, all collected over 23 years of owning a store... and I ask myself: do I need this? In fact, do I want it?

The answer is... no.

For nearly 25 years I collected, painted and played miniature games. I lived for it. Board games, which I also collected and played were well loved, but it was miniature games that ruled my life. I estimated about three years ago that I had acquired 40,000 to 50,000 miniatures. While it's true that 70% are unsold product from my store, that still leaves 10,000 or so that I actually deluded myself into thinking I was going to paint... or something.

Same thing with RPG's. I haven't played D&D since 1986. I did play some GURPS in the 90's, but that's it. Yet I bought probably 300 RPG books for myself. What the hell was I thinking?

Board games haven't escaped either. I don't particularly like Carcassonne. So why do I own two copies? Plus an expansion or two and the Castle one... which is a dumb ass game if there ever was one. Every week it seems I open up another mystery box from one of my storage units and find it full of board games that I wanted to save. Most of which I really don't want to play. That's because when 4 to 6 of us get together it's too easy to play what we know. Fortunately, we also enjoy the games we play. For the most part.

Back about 6 years ago I concluded that I wanted a simpler life. I was single and my house was too big. It was as if the realization that I was at a crossroads where I could sell off the big house, dump an amazing amount of stuff on eBay and somehow refocus my life to be more harmoniously aligned with my gaming hobby was a signal to create mass confusion and yet more insanity.

That's about the time I met my most recent romantic partner, took her and her three warped out little girls in, got her pregnant, bought a ranch and accelerated my personal game buying binge to ludicrous levels. So now, 6 years later, I have sold the ranch, disentangled myself from what was a doomed relationship anyway, worked out a custody arrangement that is so mellow that I won't want to embarrass most "normal" people with the details. And I have a huge garage full of games and game related stuff. And I still have a 10x15 storage unit full. Oh yeah, and an 8X10 storage shed full... that last one is back at the ranch, padlocked to keep the warped girls (now insane teenaged girls) out.

It'll take me another three years to sell all of this stuff on eBay. But I have to get rid of it or I'll never be able to focus.

My acquisition of Hannibal has brought this whole seething mess lurching back into the forefront of my pitiful little mind. Boardgamegeek is an interesting place to go read one sad tale after another from people like me... who buy games but often wonder why they do it. I wanted Hannibal to play it. And if I'm lucky, I'll play it as many as ten whole times. It's probably going to end up being another Fortress America for me. I refuse to sell my copy of Fortress America, even though I haven't played it for at least 15 years. What if I want to play it... and I had already dumped it on eBay for a measly $80? That would be a disaster. Must keep Fortress America.

My lovely wife from the 70's and 80's, Cinthia, the Sicilian one, used to ask me why I never got rid of any clothes. I usually didn't have an answer, but once, during a period where the Survivalists were all the rage and Red Dawn was a hit movie, I pointed out that when the Marxists conquered the weakened and greedy America, we'd have plenty of clothes. So she asked, "Does that goes for the 2,500 albums you have stacked to the rafters too? You want music to listen to between mortar rounds?"

I feel like a heroin addict at times with all this game buying. I have a list of at least 15 board games I NEED that are either recently published or coming out soon. And yes, I am down with GMT for at least 5 titles on their P500 list. And I scour eBay and BGG once or twice a week looking for inspiration... buying inspiration, that is. And all the while I'm doing that I'm on eBay selling off stuff that I really, really needed but now can't stand to even look at.

I'm selling my Undead army. All 5,000 points. I've sold a collection of Man O' War ships that made a noticable dent in what my Harley cost me... except I kept 2,000 points of Bretonnians, 2000 points of Empire and 1500 points of Chaos Dwarves. You never know when someone may want to throw down and play Man O' War. If they ever do... I'm ready. And almost every day I look over the mountains of boxes in my garage and have to make decisions as to what stays and what goes. If I was any weaker I'd just figure out how to go on welfare and use my eBay profits to rent storage units everywhere so I could buy and store yet more games.

Stupid huh?

Like earlier this year, I sold my copy of El Grande, for more than I paid for it. Also my copy of Warrior Knights. As well as several other games that had seen quite a bit of play. Why the hell did I do that? Duh, because they're being reprinted dummy. And I want the new one! The new Warrior Knights has already been played at my table and I'll probably call the local store this week and have them get me the El Grande reprint. But you've never done anything like that... right? Right. And now I'm reading all about Eagle's new game... what is it? Something III or something like that? No matter, I want it. And I shall have it. Besides which, not only do I like the games Eagle publishes, my boards never warp.

Anyway, I think I figured the whole thing out today. About why some people like myself buy games we don't play, won't play or can't play. I was reading a novel I bought at the local thrift store... because the little burg I live in doesn't have actual retail stores... and there was this hugely obese chick in it. And she's being transported to Wyoming by the main character, Fletch, who despite the fact that Chevy Chase, who is as idiotic and retarded as a box of rocks because he won't shut his mouth about politics, despite the fact that Chevy Chase played Fletch in a movie or two, I like Fletch. So he was telling the fat chick that she really wasn't hungry. That she just thought she was. To which she replied, then what am I feeling when I feel hunger pains. Fletch, who is a towering mountain of intellect and clarity when compared to the bottom-feeding retard who played him in the movies, replies that she is feeling what normal people feel but normal people understand that they aren't hungry. Normal people realize when they overeat that the ensuing hunger pains are just the body signalling that it can process food again.

So this dialog about why some people eat more than they require and others don't really opened my eyes a bit about people who acquire games they will most likely never play. And I'm not talking about real collecters here. Real collectors build shelves, have their games entered dutifully into spreadsheets and become founts of knowledge about arcane publishers and products that most of us could care less about. Game collectors are aliens who defy understanding. According to Fletch, I'm the gaming equivalent of a fat person. People like me don't actually need all these games... we just think we do.

I'm not suggesting that any of us ought to cut our game collections down to just those we play... I still won't sell Fortress America or my Man O' War fleets... I'm just relating an insight I had, on a personal level, about the possible malady I've been suffering from for nearly 40 years. Game Obesity.

Every so often some FNG on boardgamegeek does a list that asks what 10 games (or 5 or 20, pick a number) you'd take if you were stranded somewhere... possibly a desert island? Ten games? That's a bit severe. But I am starting to feel like there is an optimum game number for each Geek. Like those optimum weight charts... every body has certain requirements and not all bodies are the same. Ten games would be starvation for most of us, except those few gamers who have only their wifey and inlaws to game with... and she's a Canasta Whore. I think my number is actually closer to 100 games.

So that's my resolution. To cut back on my games collection until it reaches a nice, even 100 games. Then I'm going to get a cheap spreadsheet and start keeping track of the games I actually play. Except for the ones I'm probably never going to play but will keep because, well, because they're cool. And then I'll have to make allowances for that selection of Richard Berg games that are really, really good, but are just a bit over-the-top rules-wise. And I should hang onto several that might bring a healthy eBay profit. I also don't think card games should count either. Games like Bang! and Fairy Tale and Battle Line are pretty small and how about those decks of that fantasy card game that plays like miniatures? I have some and I think they are too small to count as actual games. Another thought is having emergency back up copies... they shouldn't count against the 100. I have two copies of at least 10 games, just in case they go out of print or my dog chews one up or something.

Yes, now that I think about it I do believe that this game reduction program will work out mighty fine. If I cut back enough I'd have room in my garage for my 100 games (plus the exceptions) and I'd be able to fit a VR1000 in there next to my Fat Boy. Hmmm... maybe I'll be calling the game store and the Harley dealer this week. One can't be too thin now, can one?

MY FIRST ORIGINS

We are still soliciting guest submissions to Gone Gaming. This is the last submission in the queue. As a reader of Gone Gaming I must say that all the submissions so far have been entertaining, I look forward to posting more. If you have something to say about boardgames send it to us at gonegaming@gmail.com, we will probably post it. Thanks to those who have already sent us material, you are welcome to send us more.

Once again, here is an enjoyable read by Mr. Kris Hall. Enjoy.
CF

Until this year my experience with gaming conventions was limited to an hour checking out the dealer’s room at a convention in a hotel near the Los Angeles airport. But a move to West Virginia has placed me within driving distance of Columbus, and an invitation from Ted Cheatham (who does video reviews for the Boardgame News website) to go to Origins was impossible to resist.

Maybe all real gamers have been to Origins or other major conventions, and a description of what to expect would be like me giving swimming lessons to a group of Navy SEALS. Nevertheless, let me inform any possible existing convention virgins what they are missing by not making the pilgrimage to Columbus.

Shock and awe. I spent my first couple of hours just walking around and staring in stunned silence at the cornucopia of cardboard. Almost every game I’ve ever heard of and a large number that I hadn’t beckoned to me from the dealers’ booths.

I stopped by the Fantasy Flight booth and was able to confirm for myself that World of Warcraft does indeed have 1,763,759 little plastic demons, dragons, and owl-bear-reindeer monsters. I hadn’t brought the family forklift with me so I was unable to leave with a copy of the game. I stopped by the Decision Games booth and was able to examine the maps of two upcoming Strategy & Tactics games. I was happy to learn that 1066 will not be a tactical treatment of the Battle of Hastings, but a four-player strategic simulation of the conflicts surrounding the Norman conquest.

But I was also riveted by all the non-gamer barnacles that cling to the Origins man-o’-war. One booth sells enough real metal swords to outfit an orc army. Another sells padded medieval weapons that allow would-be Bravehearts to hack at each other without ending up like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Another booth sells plush Cthulhu-and-friends toys culled from H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares. Still another dealer sells fantasy art that may have been obtained from the Barad-dur gift shop’s going-out-of-business sale.

The miniature-gamer sub-cult has such an abundance of toys that they command a convention room of their own. I’ve never been a miniature gamer myself, but it sure is fun to check out the museum-quality dioramas. I was surprised to learn that the six-foot-long Helm’s Deep model was owned by a guy that I’ve gamed with.

Ted Cheatham had warned me not to expect to find discounted prices for games from any of the major dealers, and this turned out to be mostly true. But I spotted at least one bargain: the L2 Design folks were selling copies of Bitter Woods 4th edition with it’s expansion kit for about $65. This is a substantial discount from the original price, or prices I’ve seen on E-bay.

Of course, no gaming convention would be complete without doing some actual gaming. I sat down at the Rio Grande booth to examine an open copy of Thurn and Taxis only to find a gamebooth gnome appearing instantly to teach me the rules. Two other passers-by were quickly lured into playing the game. The game lasted little more than half an hour, and I soon found that all the rumors were true. Thurn and Taxis is indeed a user-friendly, quick-playing game in the same vein as Ticket to Ride. For me, T&T is so much like Ticket to Ride that I don’t feel compelled to own both games. But I’m sure it will be a popular game this year.

Next I returned to the Fantasy Flight booth for a demo game of Warrior Knights with three white-and-silver-haired gentlemen as opponents. Once again age and treachery bested youth and enthusiasm, and I was soundly defeated. But the experience placed Warrior Knights on my soon-to-be-purchased list.

Going out to dinner with ten other gamers and game-company employees resulted in me hearing a variety of rumors and game reviews. Eagle Games didn’t have a booth this year, and rumors were flying that the company was being bought. But no one seemed to know exactly who was doing the buying, so perhaps the rumors aren’t true. On the other hand, Glenn Drover apparently showed up with a copy of Age of Empires III to demo. Gamers who were lucky enough to play the demo raved about it. I was told that we can expect to see Age of Empires III showing up about the time of the Essen convention, and my mouth is watering in anticipation.

Another gamer I met had played a demo copy of the GMT World War II tactical slugfest Combat Commander, and came away very impressed. He said it compared favorably with Memoir ’44, and added that he had quickly placed his order with the GMT Project 500 list for Combat Commander and it’s expansion. Perhaps this game will be the happy medium for gamers who think Memoir ’44 is too light and Advanced Squad Leader is too unwieldy.

So did I enjoy Origins? Of course. Would I return? Yes, again. Although I probably won’t be heart-broken if I am forced to miss a year. I won’t go to Origins to buy games because I can save money by purchasing from on-line dealers. But I will go to Origins to check out games and learn which ones I truly want to buy. All wargamers know that good intelligence saves lives. And dollars.

Virtual Conventions

We're having a virtual convention this weekend, so we don't have much to say. It's working well - find a bunch of people, get them to set aside a weekend for online gaming, then play play play.

Unfortunately, it doesn't leave a lot of time for writing blogs in between sessions.

What it does do, though, is eliminate the restrictions of time and space that can be so frustrating with friendships that have been made around the world. And with a little flexibility, especially with regard to timezones, everyone can play what they want to. Supplement it with Skype and you almost feel you're in the same room - well, at least on the same continent - as your opponents.

Best of all, you can go to the con without ever getting out of your pyjamas.

We started a GeekList to list what was played, so you can see the wide variety of games that have seen 'table time' this weekend.

I'd be keen to do this another time, maybe as a single day rather than as a whole weekend (Fraser is off to a *real* con today and taking the girls to my mother's so I can play all day). We probably need to schedule more specific games ahead of time, although that can be tricky when working in 4 or 5 timezones and trying to find people to play in everything. I'm not sure what time Fraser came to bed last night but it was after 2.30 (I know, because I left him playing Power Grid...)

Like at a con, I'm trying new games, and seeing old favourites played differently than my regular gaming group plays them; trying new tactics and retiring old ones. It doesn't replace the feel of actually being somewhere with a big group of gamers, but it comes close enough that we are all subconsciously looking for our favourite game night snacks.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think my Princes of Florence opponents might be logging in.

See you in LupusLanding.

Melissa

DenaliCon

Spent another enjoyable 4th of July weekend (June 30-July 4) camping and playing games under the midnight sun. A few of us gamers held DenaliCon II near the entrance to Denali Park, Alaska (Mt. McKinley). Denali Park is located between Fairbanks and Anchorage in the mountains known as the Alaska Range.

Due to the fact that the fourth was on a Tuesday this year fewer people were able to attend, primarily because they couldn't get time off from work on Monday. On the bright side, those who did come stayed for longer, and there were a few new faces. At the high point on Sunday there were 10 adults. Eight of us, plus kids, stayed for most of the weekend.

The weather was "unsettled". It alternated between drizzly rain in the mornings and evenings, and mostly cloudy for the rest of the day. But don't get me wrong, the weather was not bad, nor was it a hindrance to enjoying the weekend. If anything the weather was just dreary enough to create bad-photo-weather (not enough light for most of my pictures), and people who would have liked to spend an afternoon hiking stayed at camp and played games instead.

This was as clear as the weather got.


The weather was mostly overcast with low clouds all weekend.


Fortunately we had a cabin rented to play games in the event of inclement weather, and between us we had enough blue tarps to erect our own awning. Blue tarps are a bit of an institution in Alaska. They are found in abundance and are frequently the butt of jokes. Blue tarps are used to shelter snowmobiles and abandoned cars, to cover boats in the winter, to shelter accumulated junk from the snow, as ground cover to set your accumulated junk on, as an awning to cover your perpetual yard sale, and no neighborhood would be complete without a few blue tarps on roofs to help stop the leaks.

When most people fly over the state, they look out the window and marvel at all the lakes and rivers. Sorry to disappoint folks, but most of those aren't bodies of water, those are blue tarps.

This is the only non-blurry picture of me that I could find.



Age of Mythology under the blue tarp, which, I should add, I won.


Also played Twilight Imperium, Command and Colors, Ricochet Robots, Dark Tower, Revolution: The Dutch Revolt, El Grande, King Me, Caylus, and numerous other games.

The unforgettable moment of the weekend occurred during a game of Powergrid. Larry was on the verge of winning before the "Phase 3" card was turned over, all he had to do was build 2 houses to force the end of the game. I had a ton of money left over from the previous round, so I fell on my sword. I spent a ton of money building to block Larry's expansion, unfortunately I had to stop at 14 houses or I would have forced the end of the game. Moe and Curly followed my lead, and Larry was forced into a losing position. If he built the 15th house to force the end of the game another player would supply as many cities with power and Larry would lose in the tie-breaker (most money).

Larry was still in the driver's seat going into the next round until Shemp bought all but one barrel of oil out from under him. Shemp had 3 oil powered plants and was able to store all of it legally. This move allowed Moe to pull a come-from-waaaaaaaay-behind victory. It was classic.



I must say that it was the most fun I have had since the last Fourth of July. I'm already planning for next year.

Upcoming Companies, Part Two: Face 2 Face, Jolly Roger, Your Move

Last week I started a series on up-and-coming game companies who are producing some interesting games this year, and who may well be some of the notable movers and shakers in the American market in the years to come.

This week I'm presenting the second half of that series, with spotlights on Face 2 Face, Jolly Roger, and Your Move. In each case I've gotten some comments and thoughts from the game publishers as well.

Face 2 Face Games
http://www.face2facegames.com/

I shouldn't play favorites, but nonetheless I think that Face 2 Face Games is the coolest of the publishers that I'm highlighting here, and that's because they're doing something very different: they're bringing great old games back into print and are producing new editions of foreign games without U.S. distribution.

Face 2 Face started out back in 2001 as MonkeyGod Enterprises. They were a d20 publisher of roleplaying adventures and sourcebooks, but as with a lot of smaller publisher, they got caught when the d20 bubble burst a few years back. Face 2 Face was originally announced as an imprint of MonkeyGod back in 2003, but it pretty quickly became its own company instead, publishing board games rather than RPGs.

Face 2 Face's original publications were the "Sid Sackson Signature" series. This line began with the first American publication of Sackson's I'm the Boss (2003). It's been followed by BuyWord (2004), a never-before-published Sackson game which won the Games 100 in 2005, and Sleuth (2004). Meanwhile Face 2 Face has also kicked off a signature series of Reiner Knizia games--all games not currently available in the United States, including the excellent Rheinlander (2005), the just-released Winner's Circle (2006), the upcoming kid's game Dragon's Secret, and Genesis, which I know nothing about.

Face 2 Face has put out a smattering of other games, but it's really their Knizia & Sackson lines that shine. The production has been a bit slow, with just 3 Sackson games and 2 Knizia games out in four years, but the quality has been high and the prices reasonable for the components.

Regarding their future, Lawrence Whalen Jr. says, "We have often been asked what direction Face2Face Games is going in (reprints of the classics, imports of excellent European titles, or completely new games), but quite frankly we are not really focused on one approach over the other. We are simply seeking games that blend an elegant mechanism with a good measure of theme. We will continue producing high quality games, be they Sackson classics or exciting new designs."

I've only reviewed one Face 2 Face game, Boomtown (B+) and Winner's Circle (B+). Of the others, I've also played I'm the Boss, Rheinlander, and Sleuth and I think each is superb for its category of games (negotiation, majority-control, and deduction, respectively). Overall, I'd say that Face 2 Face has maintain a line of consistently high-quality games.

Jolly Roger Games
http://www.jollyrogergames.com/

Jolly Roger Games is one of the smallest companies that I'm highlighting here. It got its start back in 1997 when Jim Dietz was winding down his game store business ... because he wanted to become a game designer instead. He ironically got some early advice from another of the people highlighted in this series, Ron Magin of Cafe Games. He soon published his first game, a miniatures game called A Nation on Trial (1997).

JRG's early games are all very American, including the beer & pretzels zombie game, Maul of America (1998), and the hackmaster-esque fantasy game, Orcs at the Gate (1998). Jolly Roger produced some roleplaying books too in those early days, but hasn't published anything new in that genre in a while. Jim Dietz says, "We haven't given up RPG work, but it isn't a high priority and nothing has been submitted that makes me go 'Whoa.'"

I first became aware of JRG when I received copies of Four Dragons (2004) and Victory & Honor (2004), two excellent trick-taking games: both good variants of a traditional form, and also releases more in line with Europe gaming. Four Dragons often makes its way into my game bag. Moon & Weissblum's Clocktowers (2004) and Faidutti's Knock! Knock! (2004) were two more card games that propelled JRG toward the Euro-scene.

Although most of JRG's recent games have been card games, this isn't necessarily a trend. Dietz says, simply, "The best games we've had here [recently] have been card games." This year JRG has already put out Dynasties, a majority-control board game that soulds like it's right out of the Kosmos two-player catalog. Up this summer are two more card games: the trick-taking Great Chili Cookoff, and an odd card-playing game called Graverobbers. Then, this winter, it'll be back to board games, with a released planned before Christmas.

Of the future, Dietz says, "Jolly Roger is in an interesting position--JRG is self-sustaining and in for the long term. Origins will mark our 9th year of existence. But to expand requires a lot of capital--and I am conservative. So we continue to move slowly. The object really is for JRG to continue with sustained quality of products in terms of components and game play. I think that is showing--and we have a nice balance of 'rookie' game designers in with established presences (Moon/Weissblum/Faidutti) in the game industry."

My Reviews: Four Dragons (B+), Knock! Knock (B-), Victory & Honor (B)

Your Move Games
http://www.yourmovegames.com/

Game companies come from all directions. A few of the small companies I've covered in this series come from the roleplaying world, while Cafe Games was originally a jobber. Your Move Games comes via an utterly different route. Robert Dougherty originally founded a New England game store by that name, riding the tide of Magic: The Gathering. It now organizes New England regionals for Magic, and includes two stores, one in Somerville, MA, and another in Providence, RI.

Chad Ellis was a player at Your Move Games and together with Robert went into the game publishing business. On this expansion, Chad Ellis says, "When we went into business together we decided to use the YMG brand since [Robert had] already built up some awareness for it in the gaming community and because it felt like 'our' brand to both of us since I'd been on the team for years." The brand expansions seems to have been successful. The first time I brought a Your Move Games to the table, one of my regular players, who also enjoys Magic: the Gathering, was very excited because of the connection. I ended up giving him the game when I was done reviewing it.

Your Move Games' first publications appeared just two years ago: Space Station Assault (2004), a space-combat card game for two players, and Succession (2004), an American-style negotiation and auction game. Unlike the other companies I've mentioned here, I don't think that Your Move Games is going in the direction of Eurodesigns. Instead, they seem to be producing pretty solid American games, but they're also willing to innovate and are opening up some new ground.

Battleground to be exact, which is a miniature combat game built on non-collectible cards. I think it's an interesting idea. I enjoyed playing TSR's Battle System when I was young. It allowed me to engage in open-ended tactical warfare without spending a gazillion dollars on miniatures. The idea here is similar, but more attractive, with colorful cards standing in for miniatures. The first three decks have recently been supplemented by elves, so I presume the line is doing OK.

Though this sort of game isn't exactly my cup of tea, it's good to see people innovating within the field and expanding its boundaries. It looks like this is going to be YMG's direction for the future too. Chad Ellis says, "We're concentrating almost entirely on Battleground: Fantasy Warfare. Our fifth faction, the Dwarves of Runegard, will be out this summer in time for GenCon Indy and we're doing our homework for an expansion into historic factions in 2007."

My Reviews: Space Station Assault (B-), Succession: Intrigue in the Royal Court (B-)

X-Play Reviews a Board Game

(For those who don’t know about X-Play on G4 TV, they review video games and most likely do not spend their money on card board unless it temporarily encloses something electronic.)

-Announcer’s voice: And now, 2 people who think macaroni and cheese is finger food, here’s Adam Sizzler and Morgan Wedd.

Adam: Hello and welcome to X-Play. Today we’re doing something a little different. The powers that be…

Morgan: That’s the high muckety-mucks who pay us and have threatened to trade us to a local morning show in South Dakota if we don’t do this review…

A: Yeah, them. They’ve asked us to review a board game. Now for you youngsters with calluses on your thumbs, and eyes that fear the light of day, a board game is an ancient form of entertainment where people gather around a table full of cardboard, paper, and wood, metal or plastic in direct competition with each other to reconfigure these items in some way which results in earning points or money. My guess is that you should have at least one these board game things around in case the electricity goes out and you forgot to buy extra batteries for your handheld game.

M: Right, batteries. I knew there was something I was supposed to buy before I go home tonight.

A: The game we’re reviewing is Settlers of Catan and since it’s a multi-player game, we tied a couple of interns to chairs and sat down to try it out. When you open the box you find some wooden pieces that look like sticks and houses, a deck of cards, a pair of dice and a bunch of cardboard hexagons in several colors which represent different types of land that produce different commodities. There’s also a rule book which you have to READ! That’s right, there’s no in-game tutorial to show you how it works.

M: That’s when it’s nice to have interns to force to do your work while you go out to lunch in a nice restaurant.

A: You’d think with all our technology, they could include a DVD showing how to play the game so people aren’t forced to wade through pages of rules. Anyway, when we came back from lunch, the interns had set up the game and figured out how to play.

The idea of the game is that you’re a poor but hard-working settler trying to expand your colony by gathering the necessary commodities to build settlements and roads or to upgrade your settlements to cities with electricity for TVs, computers and game consoles. You can also buy cards with special abilities.

So on your turn you roll the dice, collect commodities if you’ve got more luck that a bad guy in a Clint Eastwood movie, and then you can trade your commodities with other players, the native inhabitants (who are shrewd negotiators) or take it to a port to trade overseas. Finally, you can build if you’ve managed to accumulate the necessary goods.

M: You don’t get to shoot anything or blow anything up, which I think is a big drawback. I thought it would be more fun if you could bomb someone’s road when you roll a 7!

A: That would be fun, Morgan, but a roll of 7 sends the Robber to steal commodities like a Robin Hood who has a disturbing attraction to sheep. Turns keep going around the table until someone gets 10 points. Points are earned for each settlement and city, the longest road and the most knights (which are cards you can buy). It wasn’t too bad, actually, if you like just sitting around using your brain and talking to people. Morgan, did you know interns have names?!

M: Someone told me that once but I didn’t believe them.

A: To sum up, I wouldn’t mind having this around for when my parents come to visit but for myself, I’d rather play Ratchet and Clank Go On Vacation. I give it 3 sheered sheep out of 5.

Does anyone know where I can buy a portable generator?
~~~~~~~~

Until next time, I’ll be the Blue player.

Mary

Elegance in Games

I'm trying to pin down an elusive quality of a game. It is the game play to game rules ratio (let's call it the PTR). It is not necessarily a predictor of what is good. It is a predictor of what is elegant.

What is game play? Some combination between the objective depth of the game in terms of strategy and tactics combined with your relative enjoyment of the game. Game rules refers to the extent of the core set of mechanics; clarifications about the rules don't count.

I'll just go through a few games to illustrate their PTR ratio.

Go is the poster child for a high PTR game. The number of rules is pitifully small: alternate turns, place stones, remove groups with no liberties, end after both players pass, count up controlled spaces. That's five rules. A few clarifications about the rules are also required, particularly with regards to scoring.

The amount of game play that results from these rules is very high. A human who spends his or her entire life studying the game will likely be only most of the way towards being an expert in it. Each game plays differently, and most games present unusual or interesting challenges.

Go is a very elegant game. Let's call the game rules of Go "5" and the game play "100". That gives Go a PTR of 20. Of course, if you can't stand Go, your PTR for Go will be lower.

Many other abstracts have this high PTR ratio, although many have more rules, and certainly most have much less game play possibility. Connect Four has elegant rules, even simpler than Go's. However, the game play is much more limited. Connect Four's rules are 2, but it's game play is something like 8, possibly even less. That gives it a PTR of 4. (Connect Four is actually solved, but most people don't know the practical method of implementing the solution).

As the game play shrinks, or as the game rules increase, the elegance decreases with its PTR.

Tigris and Euphrates's rules are more complex than Go's, for sure: how to set up the board, six action types (place leader, move leader, remove leader, place non-blue tile, place blue tile, place disaster, cycle tiles), possible monument placement, two possible conflicts with a few rules for each one, possible leader displacement, possible treasure acquisition and which one, point acquisition, two actions per turn, two game ending conditions, and scoring. We can call the rules of T&E something like 20. Assuming an average like for the game, the game play is about 75. PTR score: 3.5.

That doesn't mean that T&E is less fun than Connect Four. Only that it is marginally less elegant. Some might argue that elegance is not the game play divided by the game rules, but the game play minus the game rules. In that case T&E measures up more like we would expect. Let's call that equation PMR.

Go then has a PMR of 90, T&E has 55, and Connect Four has 6. That looks slightly better, but let's continue.

ASL has a tremendous amount of rules. Even though most of what look like rules are clarifications on the essential rules, there are still a lot of essential rules: initial setup, goals, terrain and atmosphere rules (many), turn order rules (many), weapon and unit rules, effects that occur after certain rounds, and game ending conditions. Remembering the specific effect of every weapon involved is also part of the game. That gives it a rules level of about 65 or more. YMMV, but I would put game play at about 90 or 95; I don't particularly like it, but there is no denying the depth of the strategy and tactics. PTR is about 1.2 to 1.5. PMR is about 20 to 25. Is that bad?

Not if you only care about game play. Is ASL elegant? Kind of. It is less elegant than Connect Four or Tigris and Euphrates, but it does provide higher game play.

ASL's has an ability to fold into the ruleset many different categories of weapons and vehicles and so on without having to alter the ruleset. That may be thought of more as comprehensive then elegant.

What games have a PTR lower than 1? How about Monopoly? Of course, this again depends on how you evaluate game play, but I would put the rules at around 12, and the game play (official rules, no house rules) at around 10. Is Monopoly less elegant than Tigris and Euphrates? The rules are simpler! Yes, but the resulting game you get out of those rules doesn't seem to me to be "worth" the amount of rules that are required to play the game.

For me, a high PTR is indicative of beauty and elegance in a game. There are objectively low PTR games that I like (Caylus), and high ones that I don't (Chess), but when I look at high PTR games I feel a certain satisfaction with the design that reminds me of art. That the design was waiting to be uncovered, and if this designer hadn't invented it, somebody else would have.

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ The best game you never played

Today I've decided to do something that I am not very comfortable with.

I'm going to discuss an actual game.

No cheap shots at Gamer Girth Syndrome. No picking on the Liberal Weenies. No laser-sharp and insightful commentary on why EuroSnoots are really only pretend-gamers. In short, I'm going to tell you about a game you might have actually liked if it hadn't been for one man's fascination with the devil.

Since the majority of Gone Gaming's 17 readers are probably board gamers exclusively... well, except for MWChapel who used to play real games and now has become a EuroSnoot... and then MisterJohnson, who I know to be a manly gamer... the rest of you are pretty much babes-in-the-woods when it comes to the more hardcore offerings... anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. I was talking about how most of you probably don't have a clue about games that aren't played on a finite board. Or perhaps CCG's or RPGs. Well, hopefully I can give you a little insight into a genre of board gaming and one game in particular that you probably missed, but that had you been exposed to it when it was around, it might have made you a more...er...hmmm...a more better gamer. Yeah, that's it... a more better gamer.

Way back in about 1993 there was this guy from Toronto, Canada who apparently had some money and some degree of common sense. His name was Marco, and along with a guy named Derek and another guy named Clark he published a boxed game that included miniatures that was aimed squarely at Games Workshop's domination of the table-top and big-box miniature game market. Before you start ho-humming that aspect of the market you ought to realize that Games Workshop eventually became a publically held corporation and it was revealed that they were making and selling several hundred million dollars worth of metal and cardboard every year.

Compare that, if you will, to the current combined sales of the entiriety of what we lovingly call "EuroGames" and you might see why Marco and his buddies went with miniatures. Why eat sawdust when you can feast on steaks?

Marco's company, Global Games, published a boxed game named LEGIONS OF STEEL in 1993 that compared very, very favorably with anything Games Workshop had ever produced. It was a similar size. It had miniatures. It had great rules. It also had more real value for the price point, which was about 15% less than Games Workshop's boxed sets. Legions Of Steel (LOS) also had metal miniatures. And it had geomorphic boards that fit together like jigsaw pieces similar to the much revered Space Hulk board game.

And, for my money, it was an all-around better game than anything from Games Workshop.

The problem with pretty much anything GW has ever published has always been the fuzzy rules. The multiplicity of potential permutations of what does, or does not, happen in any given combat situation. In order to play 40K, GW's biggest seller, you really have to steep yourself in the hazy logic of the 40K universe and you have to come to the table prepared to argue your point. In fact, you have to be prepared to clash with not only your opponent's army, but also his interpretaion of his army, your army, the rules, the special rules that aren't in the rulebooks but do exist in back issues of the White Dwarf magazine... which you don't have.

LOS, on the other hand, is as straighforward a combat game as I've ever played. Part of what makes it that way is it's played on a mapboard that you build and weapon ranges and movement are counted in map squares rather than measured in inches. Line of Sight, a huge sticking point in 40K is simply center-of-square to center-of-square. 40K is not a staged game, meaning there aren't provisions for playing a simplified version and then adding in levels of complexity as you become comfortable. LOS has basic rules and advanced rules. In fact, LOS's additional expansions added various races and rules that allowed you to tailor-make your complexity level to the relative skills of the players.

Another selling point of LOS was the miniatures. Most people who saw them or played LOS really liked the miniatures. They really, really, really liked the fact that the cost of a blister pack, relative to 40K, was about 30% less.




These two miniatures retailed for about $19 total in 1995. The equivalent GW 40K models, which would be a Terminator and a Dreadnaught would have cost about $35 back then.










And the LOS universe was compelling. Not that GW's 40K isn't. But hey, we all have wondered from time to time about Orcs and Elves in space. And the weirdness that is Chaos in 40K stretches the sensibilities after 25 years of reading about how powerful and all-encompassing Chaos is. LOS offers a science fiction setting that borrows heavily from Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series of novels. In it's basic form, LOS pits a future human culture against a machine-based invading force. The goal of the machines is identical to the Berserker's goal - extinguish all life. Machines rule. To add richness and diversity to the LOS setting Global Games issued expansions that brought other sentients into the game and allowed players to pick and choose what force would fight what.












You can see why I liked Legions of Steel. The sheer variety of interesting miniatures made most players desire to buy and paint new units to get on the table. I was just as addicted as anyone.

Finally, and here is what I LOVE about Legions of Steel, the actual movement and shooting mechanics of the game are gloriously simple. What Marco and company did was generate the perfect D6 combat system. Rather than build complexity into the specific unit, it's armor, it's latent powers or even it's level, LOS adapted the tried and true "kills" system. Meaning, every specific unit needs to be killed a specific number of times and then it's dead. Most war games use it. In LOS 90% of the untis die with one kill. Rather than using the convoluted system that GW uses, the LOS system for determining hits is ingenious and at the same time, simple. What complexity exists in LOS is reduced to a simple line chart for each weapon. The design of the game allowed for a vast array of weapons, each having diffferent capabilities and at the same time reduced the need for referencing to the simple one-line for that weapon.

Here's a scan of a 40K weapons player aid. Look it over and you'll get a feel for how many different locations in the rulebook you'll possibly need to access to use it properly.

Here's a scan of the ADVANCED rules LOS player aid. There are two references to the main rules and both those weapons are specialized and unique enough that after one or two uses you will get it. Some of the data on this player aid is not used at all in the basic rules.





So if this game is so great and if Marco and his partners so brilliant, what happened? Why didn't Legions of Steel and Global Games make it?

That's the big question, and sort of the reason I trotted you through this whole love-fest I have with Legions of Steel. Here's what I think happened -

I met Marco several times at Origins and also at the GAMA trade show. What a great guy. Smart, personable and a fine marketeer. My store became a hotbed of LOS activity and I had a whole LOS section, tournaments and special combo deals promoting the game. Global Games shipped me demo's and prizes and for almost a year I really thought Global Games had a shot at challenging Games Workshop domination of the miniatures gaming segment.

For the uninitiated, selling miniatures for war games is as profitable as CCG's. More so really. Except for the initial two years of MTG, most CCG's have to be sold at huge discounts or the players will merely log on and buy at wholesale from online vendors. Loyalty is close to non-existant in CCG's. Loyalty is everything in table top games because it's the store that finances the array of minaitures, the expansions, the tables and terrain that all allow you to play, sample and enjoy your investment. Think of CCG's as dotcoms that may allow you a quick profit and think of miniature games as solid blue chip stocks that give you healthy returns year after year.

But, it was not to be. Back in about 1996 I sat at the hotel bar in Columbus and listened to Marco extoll the virtues of his new game. The one that would really put Global Games on the map. The game was called Inferno. Essentially, it dealt with battling demons and their minions in the Seven Levels of Hell.

What a crap idea.

I went to his booth the next day and played the game. It sucked. It was similar in many ways to BattleTech. It had big models, about 54mm and it had little tiny ones, the minions, at about 6mm. The art sucked. The concept was boring. The rules confusing. In short, it was Marco's baby, but almost nobody else cared. And I told him exactly what I thought. I explained that, to me, Global Games already had a profitable franchise and my store was in the first two years of what I predicted to be the run-up to a decade of profitablility with Legions of Steel. Marco and company had even published a rule book adapting the LOS rules to 40K-style table top gaming and had begun selling vehicles for the system. It was called Planetfall and it was easily as good as 40K.

But to listen to Marco, to see the fire in his eyes, it was easy for me to see that he was taking the money from LOS's success and sinking it into this new game... which was a stinker. Being a good and supportive retailer I ordered a case of the Inferno, a 6-pack of each miniature pack, several of the additional cardboard terrain "towers" and I told him I'd give it a shot. For your information, a case of the game was 6 copies. Sitting next to me right now, in 2006, 10 years later, is one of the sealed copies of Inferno. The other 4 and the demo copy I already sold on eBay, along with the remaining packs of miniatures. If you followed that, you'll understand I sold exactly one of the boxed Inferno game. One.

Within 2 years, actually a bit less, Global Games passed away.

I may be wrong, there may have been other factors at work behind the scenes, but I still tie the death of a great company and the removal from the market of one of the best games ever to one guy's passion for demons and Dante's visions of Hell.

On Saturday evening my buddy Shaun came over and we played Legions of Steel. I taught him the game in about 15 minutes. I helped him a bit with the concepts of leadership, movement and the few little twists that LOS has that make it great. He pummeled my marines with his machine troops... as is normally the case in the basic learning scenarios. He loved the game. The beauty of the weapons tables. The simple combat resolution. The multitude of choices that a player can make, the tactics, the understanding that every action has subtle effects on future actions... LOS is like Shrek the Ogre... it has layers. Simple to look at. Simple to learn. You don't get bogged down with minutia and constant back and forth rules searches. Arguments never happen because the rules are clear.

And, you can't walk into a store and buy the damned thing.

If anything I have shown you today or said is interesting to you then I suggest you hit eBay and start by buying a basic boxed set. There ought to be miniatures out there as well and there were several of the expansions that came shrinkwrapped with tons of extra tiles to expand the combinations for scenarios. I have designed and played scenarios that covered a 4x4 table and for my money, this is probably the best miniature game I ever played.

If you know Marco or have any information on what really happened to Global Games and the ownership of Legions of Steel I'd be interested. I'm easy to find via www.boardgamegeek.com, so shoot me an email.

In the meantime, why not see if you can locate a copy of this gem? You may be suprised, and you may even become less snooty. Have a terrific 4th of July. And if you're not American, have a terrific 4th of July!

VARYING SUPPORT FOR VARIANTS

If there was ever any doubt, let there be none now. I am an idiot. My apologies to Kris Hall, who I introduced as a female a couple weeks ago. Kris, if I ever meet you, just give me fair warning and you can deck me. I extend the same offer to your wife.

Here is his second article for Gone Gaming. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago I had my first win with Railroad Tycoon. The victory was all the sweeter because on the first turn I went last, and got stuck with the location that the other four players didn’t want. My first route connected Manchester and London, and while the other guys were fighting over routes in France, Germany, and Russia, I quietly dominated the British Isles. Only in the last third of the game did I bridge the English channel and move into Holland and France.

What’s that you say? Railroad Tycoon has a map of the eastern United States, and there are no European expansion boards?

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that we used a European mapboard drawn up by Chris Boote. You can download the board and the appropriate cards from the Railroad Tycoon page of Boardgamegeek. It’s an amateur-designed variant.

How did the variant play? Just fine. I may even prefer the European map to the original because the cities are more evenly distributed. And I like that instead of Tycoon cards there are extra-point cards that can be claimed by anyone who fulfills the necessary conditions.

There are a lot of amateur variants on the internet, and many of them—maybe a majority—can be found on Boardgamegeek.

But aren’t most variants just suggestions for fixing broken games?

Not at all. In fact, the opposite is true. Gamers tend to design variants for games they love. A lot of variants are usually a sign that a game is popular, not that it is broken. In fact, when I’m trying to decide whether or not to buy a game, I don’t just read the reviews of game on Boardgamegeek—I check out the number of available variants. Reading the variants tells you a lot about the original game, and the more variants I see, the more confidence I have that the original game is a good one.

Last November, Shannon Appelcline wrote an essay about scenarios for this website, and described how they add value to the original game. Variants add value as well, and for the same reason. If a game has ten variants or ten alternate game boards, then the original game has greater replay value. There’s a good chance that some of these variants will be boring or inappropriate, but it only takes one or two good ones to add value to the original game.

And there is an added bonus for game companies concerning amateur variants: the companies don’t have to spend time or money designing them. The gaming community does the work.

Amateur variants are just part of a larger trend of consumer participation in the development, production, and advertising of consumer goods that has been made possible by the internet and other advanced technology. The most sophisticated example of this trend would be open-source software which is developed by the computer geek community. Another example would be multinational corporations soliciting consumer participation in company advertising efforts. In the May 28th edition of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Rob Walker wrote an essay describing how companies like General Motors and Mastercard are using consumer-created advertising to market their products. The amateurs creating these commercials may be aspiring film directors more interested in developing their careers than in the products they are hawking, but that doesn’t affect the quality of their efforts, or their usefulness to the corporations who reap the benefits of their creativity.

So if giant corporations can tap the creative potential of the world for their own efforts, gaming companies can surely find ways to harness the collective imagination of the game geek community.

So how can game companies promote variants? What policies should they adopt?

1) Companies should feature variants on their websites, and make them easy to find. Some companies have message boards where postings about variants can be found, but often a gamer will have to wade through months of other postings to find them. If I was a marketing director at one of these companies, I’d suggest that any decent variants should be available right on the pages for individual games. Or maybe there should be a button on the company’s main page labeled “Variants.”

To their credit, some companies already do this. Days of Wonder has a page devoted to amateur maps for the Ticket to Ride series (go to www.ticket2ridegame.com. and click on the rules and goodies button). Some skeptics might think that promoting amateur maps that can be down-loaded for free would cut into the sales of the professional Ticket to Ride games. But Days of Wonder is smart enough to know better. The kind of rabid fan who would download and paste up an amateur Ticket to Ride map is the kind of fan who is very likely to sell his pet to a science lab just to afford Ticket to Ride Antarctica when that finally arrives. And in the meantime, Days of Wonder is building up goodwill in the Ticket to Ride cult by making it easy for the cult members to play on variant game boards.

2) Game companies should actively encourage variants by holding contests for the best variant. Many game companies already hold contests related to individual games. You might argue that the ease-of-entry factor would ensure that trivia contests and other simple contests will have broader appeal than design-a-variant contests, and that is probably true. But the design-a-variant contest could add lasting value to the game. And because the prizes of such contests are usually inexpensive, companies could experiment with variant-promoting contests with little risk.

When I started writing this essay, I thought I was ahead of the curve. But I had written most of it before I saw that Mayfair Games has a Settlers of Catan Scenario Design contest (enter at www.Mayfairgames.com) with five first place winners allowed. Winning scenarios may be published in Games Quarterly Magazine. I predict it won’t be long before others follow the Mayfair lead.

Here are some other contest suggestions:

Eagle Games could hold a design-an-alternate-game-board contest for Railroad Tycoon. Yes, they are planning to eventually release professional expansions, but a contest would generate excitement in the gaming community, and would probably have little impact on future sales. Just ask Days of Wonder.

Fantasy Flight could have a design-an-alternate-monster contest for its Fury of Dracula game. A werewolf is the most logical alternate monster because it’s linked to a day/night cycle the way Dracula is. This contest would surely add value to FOD because there is only one basic scenario for this game.

Rio Grande or Ystari Games could have a design-a-building-tile contest for Caylus. They could either produce twenty or thirty of the best tiles as a low-cost expansion or just place them on their website as a free download.

Mayfair or Rio Grande or any company with a big stable of games could have a general design-a-variant contest. The three gamers who design the best variants for any of their games each gets a prize.

I foresee the day when gamers will be able to find a whole smorgasbord of variants for most popular games on company websites. And there will be a lot of postings on Boardgamegeek that sound like this: “You think playing Railroad Tycoon Middle Earth is good with Bob Johnson’s Galadriel Silver Cube variant? Try it out with Amy Green’s Sauron Express option and Harry Smith’s troll train cards—it’s the best Tolkien railroading experience ever!”

It’s time the game companies started exploiting the creativity of gaming community. This is one kind of competition where everybody wins.

Kris Hall

A Tale of One City

This post was originally going to be a primer on how to start a new town on BSW, and what to do once your town is founded. When I look back over the discussions we had along the way, though, it's more of a collection of instant messenges, posts and emails, with the odd link to information that is actually useful. After all, every town needs an unexpurgated history.

What surprised me was how many players on Brettspielwelt know nothing about the 'metagame' - the part where you join a town, elect a town council, build new gamerooms, trade with other towns, etc. I think it's something that BSW does well, especially by allowing people to choose to participate in that part of the BSW offering or to not participate, just playing games instead. This potted history is really for metagame players - I've not explained many of the terms and concepts.

And while this is a scary long post, it's a whole lot shorter than it could have been :)

February, 2006

Back in February, a couple of friends offered to show me around this German boardgaming site they played on. I'd visited once before, briefly, but ran and cowered in fear at the sheer volume of information and players.

April, 2006

Early April.

Melissa in AU: We should designate a weekend for Werewolf: The Gathering
Melissa in AU: And have a BSW orgy (in a non-sex kind of way)
Belash: it'd be fun... online + forum :)
Belash: that's be really cool
Belash: a BSW/Werewolf bgg.con
Melissa in AU: Yes!
Melissa in AU: Lynches every hour ... heh
Belash: we'd like to play other games in between
Belash: plus Skyping
Melissa in AU: Yes
Belash: a 24 hour marathon to get all timezones involved
Melissa in AU: I think if we scheduled it, say, 2 months in advance then people would be able to plan to take that weekend as "me time"
Melissa in AU: so as not to upset partners...
Belash: like July ish... 7thish....
Melissa in AU: oh this would be fun!
Belash: it'll be a great time
Melissa in AU: Shall we do it?
Belash: Plan PBEM games of Tikal, Hoity Toity, Reef Encounter et al at Spielbyweb
Belash: Hansa and Samurai at Mabi
Belash: Tonnes at BSW
Belash: ET here
Belash: bgg
Melissa in AU: Yeah. And BSW. And some sort of silly ww game to run all weekend.

And so, the BGG Werewolf Community Virtual Convention was born. (It's next weekend, by the way - open invitiation - this is a shameless plug - hope to game with you then!)

Late April, 2006 - possibly the 29th

Fast forward to late April. All the best ideas get thought out on Microsoft Instant Messenger:

Belash: What do you think about starting a new bsw town?
Melissa: Oooooo fun

As you can see, I had a clear understanding of the amount of work and research that would go into founding and maintaining a BSW town. Not.

Not long afterwards, I start with the emails.

Blah blah blah ... lots of information about founding a city, culled from http://www.brettspielwelt.info ...

I guess this means I *am* interested ;) But there is a lot of work to do before we would be able to go ahead with it.

15 minutes later ...

Subject: knew I would find it eventually
http://www.brettspielwelt.info/tutorial/found.html

more info

3 minutes later ...

Subject: oooo
If we started things now or soonish, we could plan to found our town on June 1st and then have it up & running in time for the con.

sorry to spam you with messages.

May, 2006

May 1st

Melissa in AU: I found a really good forum post about founding cities
Melissa in AU: It's in German though ... translating it for you now
Melissa in AU: So, Greig, we need a PROJECT PLAN!!! LOL!
Belash: Oh god... a Project Plan
Belash: thank god you're trained! ;)
Melissa in AU: LOL!
Melissa in AU: Not really... but we need to decide what we need to do & get a bit of a plan going, so we don't lose momentum and miss out on having our city ready by July.
Belash: we have to gauge interest as well... If we can't get enough people to sign up, making any sort of plan will be moot
Melissa in AU: We need a name, etc - did I send you the stuff from The Boomer's page about what to submit?
Melissa in AU: We need forests & things for the wolves to hide in ;)
Belash: i was hoping forests as well :)
Melissa in AU: Heh. Theme it up, baby
Melissa in AU: The haunted house only costs FIVE THOUSAND TALERS ARRRGH
Belash: old rickety houses... need to get rid of my cave...
Belash: dirt roads
Melissa in AU: And space reserved for when we can afford a haunted house
Melissa in AU: And Lupus something for the name
Melissa in AU: Lupus Landing?
Melissa in AU: Lupus Lane?
Belash: We could have a contest ;)
Belash: whoever wins gets to pick the first game
Melissa in AU: Fun :)
Melissa in AU: Ooo, no.
Belash: NO? :P
Melissa in AU: We need to pick our first 2 games really carefully, I think
Melissa in AU: Games that get played a LOT by us
Melissa in AU: So if someone won and said "I want to put Backgammon in the hut" that would not work
Belash: We can provide a list of Five games they can choose from
Melissa in AU: So how much planning do we do before we 'announce' it?
Belash: we should announce by end of the week
Melissa in AU: What do we need before then?
Melissa in AU: Basic skeleton submission, with room to add?
Belash: We should send out personal invitations to people we know are online and post a message to others
Melissa in AU: Should we invite people already or wait a few days to do it all at once?
Belash: at least give an idea of what we are planning and how
Melissa in AU: Whee! This is exciting!
Belash: actually... let's do something tomorrow
Belash: go back to early idea... no need to do work if noone is interested
Melissa in AU: I think we need some sort of skeleton to show people there has been some thought
Melissa in AU: Not just 'let's make a town! It would be FUN!' but 'we thought it would be fun to have a town, blah blah blah, this is what we are planning tentatively, what do you think?'

...

Melissa in AU: hello! I am doing Research
Belash: A hell of a lot of it too!
Melissa in AU: Oh you have no idea...
Melissa in AU: GUILDS!
Melissa in AU: But here is the exciting thing: Many guilds (of games we are probably interested in) give donations of 3000 Talers if you build their game in a room. And St Pete gives 5000 Talers
Melissa in AU: Basically, it looks to me like there is a lot of support once you get founded - you just have to get the Alderman to approve

Belash: by looking at the list.
Belash: we have Ingenious - good solo, plus can play 2-4 effectively - quick and earns points
Belash: San Juan - mostly utilized as a 2er. decent game length
Belash: Caylus - Long, heavier game - mostly 2er, but played with 3 and 4 as well
Belash: T&T - longer game - 2er mostly, 3 &4 as well... however... no guild = no talers....
Belash: I think for my tastes TransAmerica should be a game. Plays to six in good time... allows more members to play together. easy to learn and teach
Belash: siedler - quick 3er. very popular game on BSW = easy to get opponents
Melissa in AU Greig - Belash So we have nothing for LOTS of people - do we need Attribut or something similar?
Belash: and while it is important to get games that give money, we need ones that continue to earn money as well...
Belash: should we post the proposal and send out invites at the same time?
Melissa in AU: I think so. With a link to the proposal thread
Belash: hey... the ranks will be simple !
Melissa in AU: Roles?
Melissa in AU: What is the highest? Seer? Or just roles up to w12 and then standard english titles?
Belash: Werewolf!
Melissa in AU: LOL! Of course!
Belash: so W18 = Werewolf
Belash: W17 = Seer
Belash: what else?

...

Belash Melissa in AU W18 - Moderator W17 - Werewolf W16 – Seer W15 – Hunter W14 – Sorcerer W13 – Bodyguard W12 – Cultist W11 – Witness W10 – Medium W09 – Lover W08 – Mason W07 – Cobbler W06 – Tinker W05 – Vanillager W04 – Rookie W03 – Newbie

...

Melissa in AU: you thought of any good town names?
Belash: GreigCity
Melissa in AU: oo i like that one
Belash: Lycanthropcity
Melissa in AU: oo that's good. Ditch the p though - lycanthrocity
Belash: Ok. I think we should post what we have. Then as people show interest and propose new ideas, to have them added to our original Proposal.
Belash: Also, should we provide a list of possible City names in this proposal, which will be posted on Bgg, but not necessarily to the Alderman
Melissa in AU: back ... I think we ask people to propose city names
Melissa in AU: Then we can propose any we like too. Also game room names.
Melissa in AU: Then we all vote on it if no consensus appears
Belash: Or, we go with Greig City...
Melissa in AU: Also, do we put something in our application about there being many small towns but not many small English-speaking towns ... to distinguish us from the other applications
Belash: once we have people sign up, they will hopefully bring new ideas to the table that we can incorporate

...

Belash: I like the idea of an Eastern Forest and a Southern lake...
Belash: and the town square is VERY important... they even have a ... can't think of name feel stupid.... hanging device :P
Melissa in AU: OK now I forgot the word too
Melissa in AU: Gibbet
Melissa in AU: And maybe stocks
Belash: i think the square should be concrete... otherwise the blood will be tought to get rid of... with fountains...
Melissa in AU: LOL! Isn't that a bit fancy?
Belash: and the gibbets or whatever in the centre of square....
Belash: there is an actual gibbet
Melissa in AU: really? Wow!
Belash: is there a location you were thinking about?
Belash: does it say that there is bonuses to being in one place over another?
Melissa in AU: different resources
Melissa in AU: Nowhere does it explain WHAT resources you get WHERE
Melissa in AU: So when do you think you will post? Tonight?
Belash: we can post what we have now, if you like... We can say City Plan to follow...

A forum thread appears:

melissa and I have decided to attempt to create a Werewolf based town on brettspielwelt. We have done research into the creation of a town and what is required from a metagame standpoint. I have had some experience in the metagame, acting as a Treasurer and Security Officer for my current town, while melissa has done an amazing amount of reading to prepare herself. We have found that most of our games played are with other Werewolf players, and thought it would be a great idea to take our community to the next level.

...

If you are interested, and we know that you are, please post below your intention to join the city. Also, if you are interested in taking on more responsibility in a metagame role, please let us know.


Thanks,

Melissa and Greig.


PS. You may have noticed that we don't yet have a name for our city. We figured it would be more fun to have a contest to name the city. All citizens can enter ideas, and then we can vote on them. The winner gets something special. Not to be missed! Really!

The first response appeared 2 minutes after the post was made. Our 'target' was 12-15 people; we had 12 within twelve hours.

May 2nd

Our first setback. We discovered an old forum thread on BSW where someone had proposed starting a werewolf city, and been shot down by the (existing) German werewolf city, Düsterwald.
Much fretting ensues.

Melissa in AU: When I read that thread, I started to think of our proposal doc as more of a business case for the new city.
Melissa in AU: And I realised that we needed to include our 'Unique Selling Point' - what makes us different from the other cities.

...

Belash: some things we have to think about in our plans.... where will our W12's live?
Melissa in AU: In their own homes? Or do you mean, will we have a residential neighbourhood?
Belash: should we have a community of homes?
Belash: yes... a residential neighbourhood
Melissa in AU: Quite possibly. We need to think about the buildings we will have at the start & later. I like the idea of a (couple of?) little farming communities. And a cluster of townhouses, too.
Melissa in AU: Maybe starting with the huts sort of scattered, so it looks random but will fit with our future city plan

May 3rd

Problem solved:

Belash: Good morning :)
Melissa in AU: I was so tired last night ... went to bed at 9:30. But I am busting to hear about your conversation with the Düsterwald mayor!
Belash: everything went well :)
Melissa in AU: You said - amazing!
Belash: I talked about the international appeal of boardgames and how BSW brings people together... we are a small community from across the globe who have a common interest... yada yada yada :)
fretting over.
Melissa in AU: You rock.
Belash: she understood and will definately support our town
Melissa in AU: that's fantastic!
Melissa in AU: And you said we have Xand?
Belash: yes. xand is joining.
Melissa in AU: fantastic!

May 4th ...

Thinking ahead

Melissa in AU: I was thinking I would start on translating our proposal - doesn't matter if there are still changes, at least I have something started
Melissa in AU: It is probably unnecessary to translate, but I think it's polite
Melissa in AU: we have 16 people already!!! 1xW17 2xW15 2xW12
Melissa in AU: Shall we go with Lupus Landing for now?
Belash: yes.
Melissa in AU: And need to update the proposal with your discussions with Dusterwald - that we have discussed the idea with them and they have no objections
Melissa in AU: Or can I say they were supportive?
Belash: say o objections :)
Melissa in AU: Oh! We need room names in there!
Melissa in AU: Neither of you has laughed at Wolves on a Train. It still cracks me up :)
xandryyte: I like the name, it's funny :)
Melissa in AU: SJ: Wolves in violet? Silver Mines for Silver Bullets?
Belash: don't forget, we a re basing this on bgg werewolf right?
Belash: can always "borrow" game names
Belash: LynchTheProvost

May 5th

Belash posted to the forum thread on BGG:

With 16 or so members signed up we would be one of the larger cities citizen wise in BSW. We hope to expand and have already noticed some of you werewolf players enjoying BSW more often! While our attempt is not guaranteed, we feel that we have done a very good job with the proposal, in our discussions with others, in obtaining support and planning this whole thing out. We are really excited and hope everything works out. As soon as we know what will happen, we will let you all know. Hopefully, it will be sooner than later and a resounding yes!

meanwhile,

Belash: I talked with the Alderman today, couvus
Melissa in AU: and?
Belash: she said she looked forward to our proposal

Belash sends me a new map ...

Melissa in AU: i like the roadd around the tower
Melissa in AU: Why is there a random statue? Is that someone that has been turned to stone?
Belash: it's in honour of me.
Belash: :P
Melissa in AU: Ah, okay
Melissa in AU: And I take it the middle townhouse hosts the day spa?
Belash: yes
Belash: there whould be tress throughout, like around huts
Melissa in AU: We made Hansestadt very quickly. Yay us!!
Belash: That's where it would go ;)
Melissa in AU: ;)
Belash: i like the idea of a center of town and building out from there
Melissa in AU: what did you think of the idea of naming buildings after games? Had we already discussed that?
Melissa in AU: after ww games, that is
Belash: i liked the idea to a point...
Belash: but, if we name it HarryPotter, those in Hogwarts may take offense
Melissa in AU: so with a bit of common sense applied?
Melissa in AU: Heh! Or we could really build those 3 townhouses and name the middle one "The Xandryyte Day Spa" ;)

May 6th

Melissa in AU: anything from couvus?
Melissa in AU: ^^^ wants it to happen NOW dammit ;)

later...

Melissa in AU: should I im her? just to say, did you get it?
Belash: you might as well im her... do it in german though ;) impress her
Melissa in AU: will do once i put otto to bed
Belash: have you done it?
Belash: how about now?
Belash: and now?
Melissa: lol wait for otto to sleep
Melissa in AU: i think she is sleeping ... will transfer her soon
Belash: Rock a bye baby....
Melissa in AU: OK gonna do it now... absurdly nervous
Melissa in AU: she's just getting to her emails
Melissa in AU: she promised not to laugh too loudly about any mistakes in my german ;)

Here's the actual text (with translation) of that conversation:

[I asked whether she had our proposal, she said whoa! I've just come in, checking my emails now]
[please don't laugh too hard at my crappy German, ask me any questions you like. She said German is easier for her than English ;) ]

couv@Innenstadt: so, ich habs mir durchgelesen
couv@Innenstadt: kein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept

[Melissa's heart stops. Alderfrau says "I've read it. It's not a good and well-thought-out concept."]

couv@Innenstadt: upd
couv@Innenstadt: ups
couv@Innenstadt: -k
You say: lol!

[Oops! Oops! Forget the 'k' (this changes 'not a' to 'a')]

couv@Innenstadt: ein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept
couv@Innenstadt: ein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept
couv@Innenstadt: ein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept
couv@Innenstadt: ein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept
couv@Innenstadt: ein sehr schönes und gelungenes Konzept
couv@Innenstadt: !!!!

[" a good and well-thought-out concept." (x5)]

You say: *g*
couv@Innenstadt: blöde tastatur

[stupid keyboard]

And here's our conversation afterwards:

Belash: was she laughing as you typed to her?
Melissa in AU: "a very good and well thought through concept"
Belash: really?
Melissa in AU: hold on though... looks like a deferral...
Melissa in AU: I think she's going to boot it to her successor
Belash: the one who wants to put in new cities?
Melissa in AU: If they are still the only candidate, yeah
Belash: ask her if there is anything more needed :)
Belash: tell her our city can be her legacy ;)
Belash: ~is dying to know what's being said!~
Melissa in AU: sounds good but not absolutely great
Melissa in AU: I think it's "if I don't do it, my successor will"
Belash: so what she is saying is that it WILL be approved... maybe by her, if she has time... but definately by her successor
Melissa in AU: sounds like it. But she can't absolutely promise that
Belash: well then tell HER to approve it :P
Melissa in AU: lol
Belash: I'm breathing into a bag here! ;)
Melissa in AU: finished chatting. She's going to read it again, get back to me if she has questions
Melissa in AU: She thought it was a REALLY GOOD proposal

May 11th

Melissa in AU: someone is running against Tootles
Belash: ah. and they don't want new cities...
Melissa in AU: No, they are just running against him for the hell of it
Melissa in AU: There seems to be an expectation that Tootles will win
Belash: that's good.
Melissa in AU: He is from Heaven & Hell which I think is C100
Belash: should we talk with tootles?
Melissa in AU: He wants to found 17 new cities so that he can found C200 as Hell & Heaven for the 2nd userIDs of all the Heaven & Hell people ;)
Melissa in AU: I think I will leave it to couvus to hand over ... not sure

May 13th

An idea...

We should have birthday parties! Online! And invite all our friends to play games with us on bsw!
It would be fun.

Melissa in AU: I started a Lupus Landing web page today ... haven't uploaded it though. I warned you I can be obsessive, didn't I?
Melissa in AU: And did you see my birthday idea?
Greig - Belash: yes, I like it :)
Melissa in AU: all about community ...
Belash: groups hugs every fifth Sunday ;)

May 14th

Melissa in AU: I think all this faffing around trying to get a city founded is just so much bullshit.
Melissa in AU: Am pissed off now
Anonymous correspondent: i agree. we have plenty of people. a decent theme. and then we can't do it
Melissa in AU: what's the bloody holdup?
Melissa in AU: 6 of our people are W2 & below... I wonder whether that's the problem
Melissa in AU: But I think that shows we are bringing new people in
Belash: no... you only need 5 people.
Belash: we are going to be ok'd very soon

May 15th

A new Alderman, Tootles, took over today. The BSW Alderman is elected for one month, from the 15th of the month. They are essentially the chief of the Metagame on BSW for that month, with responsibility for approving new cities, looking after old ones, etc.

Belash: hello busy bee... if you have a minute or two I can teel you about my conversation with Tootles
Melissa in AU: Ooh - you talked?
Melissa in AU: Lucky I didn't pester him when I saw him online :)
Belash: w chatted for a while, made jokes
Belash: I found him prior to sending our Proposal in
Belash : anyway, he said he was going to talk with ARMstice first, to ensure he was able to build new cities
Melissa in AU: fair enough - first day on the job and all...
Belash: and that would be tomorrow or the next day and then we could go from there
Belash: our chat was amicable.
Melissa in AU: Did you say "What, you mean your election program was all a LIE??? You don't really want to build 17 cities???"

...

Melissa in AU: Tootles is writing a (daily?) diary of being Alderman - the first one was pretty funny
Melissa in AU: Can you post something to the thread? Just to let people know how it's going? I think we are losing a little momentum :(
Belash: still writing... but very important topic
Belash: need two things...
Belash: A crest
Belash: and a banner

May 16th

xandryyte: I really would like to be one of the founding members... I will be home right at 4 PM BGG Time each evening... I *could* sign on during lunch between 11 - 11:30ish...
Melissa in AU: I'm the same.
Melissa in AU: We'll make it work.

...

Belash: maybe we are doing a bunch of work for nothing :(
Melissa in AU: Did Tootles not sound enthusiastic today?
Melissa in AU: I made a LupusLanding channel.
Belash: he sounded fine. he is very good and chatting without giving anything away... a great ww player prolly ;)

May 18th

Melissa in AU: I love that ET has street names
Belash: Greig: lissa! I'm coming to Melbourne! Lissa: When? Greig: August 1st Lissa: Out of town. sorry. Greig: I'll be there for six months Lissa: by out of town, I meant moving.
Melissa in AU: LOL. Moving to CHINA
Melissa in AU: And changing my name
Belash: oh.. with the city plan, I just have roads and coloured areas where we should build
Melissa in AU: I need to go ... bedtime
Melissa in AU: Excellent!
Belash: sleep well.
Melissa in AU: We need, I think, 2 farms and 1 townhouse
Melissa in AU: at least, I plan to need the townhouse real soon now ;)
Belash: 3 farms :( 17

May 19th

Melissa in AU: Gaah! I can't believe I have been studying the german pages and there were english pages on the old site all the time...

May 20th

Melissa in AU: Did you see I had a list of what we need to do when we go live? I think that will be helpful
Melissa in AU: Also couvus IMd me last night which was unexpected
Belash: yes, I saw both :)
Belash: I saw the list of Games
Belash: there were definately some I'd like to use
Belash: and others that will be used, but in the future
Belash: we could even use them to name our game rooms
Melissa in AU: Yes! I want Rock Island Asylum, The House on Demon Hill, Disco Inferno ... maybe not Panty Raid ;)
Melissa in AU: Some would work ... I do like our game room names so far, though
Belash: Bewitched for the witchhouse
Belash: Curse of the Lighthouse for the... Lighthouse
Melissa in AU: Yes
Melissa in AU: exactly
Belash: but those are down the road
Melissa in AU: But we can save the,
Belash: we are going to need to get money... immediately
Melissa in AU: Rivers Edge for the Harbour maybe
Melissa in AU: Yes!!!

May 21st

Thinking about layout ...

Belash: you want the huts close to the square?
Melissa in AU: there is the square, which is paved & has gallows
Belash: yes
Melissa in AU: and a crossroafds further north
Melissa in AU: which i thought might have been the original village meeting place
Melissa in AU: with the huts around it rather than around the newer, more affluent town sqyuare
Belash: so make a second, smaller town square
Belash: ?
Melissa in AU: just cluster the huts around that unpaved crossroads
Melissa in AU: as we got richer, we made it all that much fancier
Belash: and then move everything up there as well? change the farms and so on?
Melissa in AU: a bit ...

May 22nd

Getting impatient...

Melissa in AU: I think I will log in to bsw and just watch & see if Tootles logs in.
Melissa in AU: he hasn't posted his daily diary for a couple of days

May 23

still growing ...

Belash: WE GOT ARKI!
Melissa in AU: OMG!!! Wow!
Belash: Another game room!
Melissa in AU: Ecellent!
Melissa in AU: YOU ROCK!!
Belash: i didn't do anything
Melissa in AU: or whoever got arki rocks
Melissa in AU: xand?
Belash: i responded and gave a bit of an update
Belash: CapAp made W12
Melissa in AU: Excellent - he got to w12 and I got to w8 - now we just need shug & a couple of others to make w3

May 27th

Melissa in AU: I have to ask: any word from Tootles?
Belash: nope
Melissa in AU: *sigh*
Belash: you will know the minute I do.
Melissa in AU: I am really tempted to PM him to explain why we need more notice ... *sigh* ... I was REALLY pissed off earlier in the week
Belash: literally, I had about 45 seconds of internet access, and I only checked to see if Tootles had written
Melissa in AU: fretting
Melissa in AU: fretting
Melissa in AU: fretting

...

Belash: I think we should plan to be founded
Melissa in AU: And I have a 5-step contingency plan
Melissa in AU: Oh! We are going to have a parade when we are founded.
Belash: and plan for next Sat night/Sunday morning for you or next Sun morn/Sun night
Belash: a parade?
Melissa in AU: I'm planning to take the Mon off work so I can stay up late late
Melissa in AU: Yes.
Belash: LOL
Melissa in AU: Not sure how to do it - maybe line up in a row.
Belash: now that is funny!
Melissa in AU: You, me, CapAp, Ann, etc.
Melissa in AU: You go to one of our rooms, I ghook you.
Melissa in AU: You move on while CapAp ghooks me.
Belash: omg
Melissa in AU: I move on while Ann ghooks him
Melissa in AU: I think that is how to do it.
Belash: doesn't the mayor have to approve such things
Melissa in AU: Meanwhile I ghook you again
Melissa in AU: LOL
Melissa in AU: we were playing st pete and talking about it - I think it's a great idea :)
Belash: I leave you alone for four days and I have a parade on my hands!
Melissa in AU: Meanwhile there was talk of a demonstration in ARMfeld about the bloody still-waiting-to-hear-if-we-are-being-founded bullshit ...
Belash: if i had one of those "shake head" emoticons, he'd be living it up on our conversation
Melissa in AU: lol
Melissa in AU: I think a parade is great! LOL!
Belash: perspective i guess ;)
Melissa in AU: I am such a baby. I love that stuff.
Belash: when we get to the parade, I will be supportive and excited!
Belash: maybe I'll start in the first city founded and make our way through the entire world before returning to LupusLanding! :D
Belash: /goto C1-1
2Belash: /goto C2-1
Belash: ...
Melissa in AU: yes
Belash: /goto C100-1
Melissa in AU: /C1-1 then /C1-2
Melissa in AU: not through other cities
Melissa in AU: people might be playing, could be annoying
Belash: ALL of the CITIES :)
Belash: It's a PARADE!
Melissa in AU: all their game managers
Melissa in AU: LOL
Belash: well, I wouldn't know their games manager numbers.
Belash: can I plan a route? :)
Melissa in AU: we could find out...
Melissa in AU: please!
Belash: through all of the english speaking towns
Belash: and ARMfeld
Melissa in AU: at the least
Belash: the first one founded and Dusterwald
Melissa in AU: we could line it up with them in advance
Belash: oh god no.
Melissa in AU: change our appear/disappear messages
Melissa in AU: just do it, you reckon?
Belash: feels suddenly too sick next sunday to participate in the parade

I realise now that we never did that parade ... hmm ...

May 28th

The stress is getting to us ...

Belash: it's been two weeks since we sent in our proposal
Melissa in AU: THREE weeks honey
Belash: to him?
Melissa in AU: two weeks since we sent it to him
Belash: two
Belash: :D
Melissa in AU: but still three weeks
Melissa in AU: Oh - one bad thing I discovered while poking around
Melissa in AU: The custom ranks cost 15000 Taler :(
Belash: really?
Melissa in AU: yeah
Belash: we'll save up then
Melissa in AU: I think we should - first thing after town hall
Melissa in AU: or even before depending on our Taler-to-Resource ratios
Belash: yup


...

Belash: Lots of rank promotions already
28/05/2006 9:19:39 AM Greig - Belash Melissa in AU we are up to 28!! people!
Melissa in AU: That's a big town
Belash: it is getting really big!
Melissa in AU: I just hope they play a lot... that's a lot of resources to find for tax!

May 30th

xandryyte: I just got some GREAT news...
xandryyte: Geniesse will be moving to LupusLanding too... And he has high enough of a level for a game room... He wants St Pete :)
Melissa in AU: Fantastic!
Melissa in AU: That makes 30, btw. With, I think, 5 w15+

June, 2006

June 1st

I am teaching some people how to play Thurn und Taxis ...

(09:41:58) -- Kronprinz Tootles enters BrettSpielWelt and leaves the real world.
(09:42:03) MelissaInAU: So you are the first player (because you have the picture of the post horn)
...
(09:46:24) xandryyte is not a wolf.... but she just might be the Seer.. Shhhhhhh
(09:46:33) xandryyte :)
(09:47:09) MelissaInAU: hi xand
(09:47:16) MelissaInAU: Tootles is on and it's the 1st - shall I hassle him?
(09:48:46) -- Heaven&Hell [C100] - (Tootles, Minni)
(09:49:28) MelissaInAU: remember, the last we heard was that he would announce it on the 1st
(09:52:52) xandryyte: Yeah, that's true, he did say the 1st... [sigh]
(09:53:04) MelissaInAU: what the hell.
(09:53:34) SybotCB: ?
(09:54:05) xandryyte: wth, she will ask Tootles ;)
(09:54:27) MelissaInAU: *tell sent
(09:54:32) MelissaInAU: let's see what happens
(09:54:39) MelissaInAU: and it's my go ... sorry

Meanwhile, in another window...

(09:54:11) You say: also, schon der 1. Juni :-) - hast Du Deine Entscheidung betrl. einer LupusLanding-Gruendung getroffen?
(09:54:37) Tootles: jop
(09:54:44) Tootles: LL ist eine der 5 neuen Städte
(09:54:51) Tootles: morgen gehen Mails an die Gründer raus
(09:54:53) Tootles: wegen Terminfindeung
(09:54:58) You say: Wunderbar!!!
(09:55:03) You say: Danke danke danke :-)

And in the now somewhat forgotten game of Thurn und Taxis ...

(09:55:08) MelissaInAU: YES!!!!!!
(09:55:23) SybotCB: approved?
(09:55:25) xandryyte: WHA?!?!
(09:55:47) MelissaInAU: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(09:55:52) MelissaInAU: WE ARE ONE OF THE 5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(09:55:54) xandryyte: AHHHHH!!!! YES!!!!!!
(09:55:59) SybotCB: yeah
(09:56:01) MelissaInAU is virtually crying
(09:56:02) xandryyte: AWESOME!!! :) :)
(09:56:08) xandryyte is too!!
(09:56:37) xandryyte: And BGG is down and you can't announce it yet :(
(09:56:48) MelissaInAU: changing my MSN message
(09:56:48) SybotCB: hehe
(09:56:53) MelissaInAU: Wish I had a cellphone number for Greig
(09:56:57) MelissaInAU: sorry Chris
(09:57:02) SybotCB: no problem
(09:57:26) xandryyte: omg, omg, omg!!!! :)
(09:57:46) xandryyte: I am soooo excited now!!! :)
(09:57:59) MelissaInAU: OMG!!!!!
(09:58:01) MelissaInAU -)
(09:58:04) SybotCB: our own city :)
(09:58:04) MelissaInAU: He's being really nice
(09:58:16) SybotCB: now I need to get to W8
(09:58:16) xandryyte: really? wow!!
(09:58:24) cad614 verdichtet sich aus einer Wolke glitzernder Partikel.
(09:59:15) xandryyte: I want to shout to the world!!! ;)
(09:59:18) MelissaInAU: Me too!
(09:59:21) cad614: why?
(09:59:36) cad614: do you have something important to say?
(10:00:05) xandryyte: yes...
(10:00:10) xandryyte is bursting
(10:01:29) xandryyte: cad, we have approval on our new town!! :) :)
(10:01:29) MelissaInAU is totally distracted
(10:01:32) xandryyte: hehe
(10:01:52) cad614: new town?
(10:02:05) xandryyte: yes!
(10:02:07) MelissaInAU: LUPUS LANDING!!!!!!!!!
(10:02:17) MelissaInAU: xand you will need to reset the motto in the channel.
(10:02:37) MelissaInAU: Tootles has been having PC problems
(10:02:45) MelissaInAU loves him now :-)
(10:02:53) xandryyte: Oh... I see
(10:03:30) MelissaInAU: Chris, you need to discard down to 3 cards in your hand
(10:03:34) xandryyte: Do you know?
(10:03:36) SybotCB: oh
(10:04:16) xandryyte: Ok, how should I word it? ;)
(10:04:33) MelissaInAU: Just YAY!!!!! OMG Incoherent ;-)
(10:04:39) xandryyte: hehe
(10:04:42) SybotCB: nice
(10:05:20) MelissaInAU: I have it in my MSN now
(10:06:12) xandryyte: There, how's that?
(10:06:26) MelissaInAU: LOL xand that is great

And in our LupusLanding channel:

(10:06:01) -- User 'xandryyte' sets the channel Motto to: WE ARE OFFICIAL!!! OMG! OMG! OMG! YEAH!!!!!
(10:07:05) -- Anonymouse enters the channel.
(10:07:28) Anonymouse: official?!?
(10:07:51) MelissaInAU: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(10:07:53) SybotCB: as in we are now BSW referee's
(10:07:58) MelissaInAU: We are a YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(10:08:05) Anonymouse: (: (:
(10:08:06) SybotCB: we have to pop from game to game and make sure everyone is playing by the rules
(10:08:47) xandryyte: WAHOO!!!!! :) :) :) YEAH!!!!!
(10:09:24) MelissaInAU: I told him Sunday is our preference for founding, he will look into his availability
(10:09:35) xandryyte: Now if BGG was up to announce it there!!
(10:09:44) MelissaInAU: I know!!!!!!!!!!!!
(10:10:07) MelissaInAU: Official confirmation will go out tomorrow
(10:10:52) MelissaInAU: I have emailed Greig
(10:10:52) xandryyte :)
(10:10:59) MelissaInAU: and CapAp
(10:26:54) MelissaInAU: back!
(10:27:04) MelissaInAU: Now I want everyone to log in here and have a party!!!
(10:27:27) xandryyte: I wish!!
(10:28:05) -- People in this Channel:
(10:28:05) -- 'Anonymouse' (Landlord [W12] from ARMfeld) since (0:21:03.181)
(10:28:05) -- 'MelissaInAU' (Businesswoman [W8] from ARMfeld) since (1:14:09.060)
(10:28:05) -- 'xandryyte' (Elector [W17]Botschafterin from EnglishTown) since (3:09:10.569)
(10:28:05) -- There are 3 active players on this Channel
(10:28:10) MelissaInAU: It's just fantastic
(10:29:51) xandryyte :) :) :) :)
(10:29:51) MelissaInAU just saved her main chat window text too
(10:29:58) xandryyte: hehe
(10:30:56) MelissaInAU: I am a bit manic about saving logs ... wish the BSW client would do it automatically
(10:32:05) xandryyte: yeah...
(10:33:14) MelissaInAU: I just IM'd Fraser to tell him ... not that he will care except that I will be less stressed ;-)
(10:55:15) -- Spielguy enters the channel.
(10:55:24) xandryyte: Hiya! :)
(10:55:55) MelissaInAU: Didja see the message? Didja? Didja?
(10:56:02) xandryyte: hehe
(10:56:13) Spielguy: Sunday? Good to go?
(10:56:45) MelissaInAU: we hope it will be Sunday
(10:56:48) Spielguy: You might even get me up early for that
(10:56:52) MelissaInAU: Alderman has to confirm his availability
(10:57:08) MelissaInAU: 10 pm for me ... I already warned Fraser I will be LATE to bed
(10:57:35) Spielguy: Good news indeed. Hope it all comes together
(10:57:42) xandryyte: Its 10 for you? wow... I thought Bel said it would be 8... :(
(10:58:33) MelissaInAU: Nah. 8am EST is 10pm for me, 2pm for Alderman, 1pm for Javal
(10:58:49) MelissaInAU: That's okay ... staying up till 2 is easy, that's 4 hours
(10:59:07) xandryyte :)
(11:03:04) -- oilslider enters the channel.
(11:03:14) xandryyte: Hiya!! :)
(11:03:21) Spielguy: hey
(11:03:25) oilslider: hello all
(11:03:26) MelissaInAU squeals read the message! read the message!
(11:03:34) xandryyte: hehe
(11:03:44) oilslider: I CANNOT HELP BUT READ THE MESSAGE!!!111!!
(11:03:49) xandryyte: LOL!!
(11:03:50) MelissaInAU ) :) :) :)
(11:03:51) oilslider :-)
(11:04:23) oilslider: so is it this sunday then?
(11:04:32) xandryyte: We hope!!
(11:04:36) MelissaInAU: we are waiting for confirmation of time
(11:04:40) oilslider: I won't be there :-(
(11:04:49) MelissaInAU :-(
(11:04:51) oilslider: I'll be vacationing
(11:04:51) xandryyte :(
(11:04:56) MelissaInAU :-)
(11:05:06) xandryyte: well, vacationing is good!
(11:05:13) oilslider: yes
(11:05:16) oilslider: it is
(11:06:30) -- People in this Channel:
(11:06:30) -- 'Anonymouse' (Landlord [W12] from ARMfeld) since (0:30:41.927)
(11:06:30) -- 'oilslider' (Apprentice [W3] from ARMfeld) since (0:03:28.347)
(11:06:30) -- 'Spielguy' (Lehrling [W3] from ARMfeld) since (0:11:24.099)
(11:06:30) -- 'MelissaInAU' (Businesswoman [W8] from ARMfeld) since (1:52:38.174)
(11:06:30) -- 'xandryyte' (Elector [W17]Botschafterin from EnglishTown) since (3:47:39.683)
(11:06:30) -- There are 5 active players on this Channel
(11:13:05) -- acekim enters the channel.
(11:13:13) xandryyte: acie!! :)
(11:13:19) oilslider: heya, ace
(11:13:19) acekim: hi terri
(11:13:27) acekim: whassup?
(11:13:55) xandryyte: Not much... How are you?
(11:14:02) MelissaInAU :)
(11:14:12) acekim: Hi Melissa
(11:14:15) MelissaInAU: xand is fibbing ... there is great excitement
(11:14:25) MelissaInAU can't do the poker face thing
(11:14:47) acekim )
(11:14:54) xandryyte: hehe
(11:14:55) acekim :)
(11:15:27) acekim: so you're approved?
(11:15:38) MelissaInAU: yes indeed we are
(11:15:43) MelissaInAU: *we* are approved
(11:15:49) MelissaInAU: not *you* are approved
(11:15:57) acekim looks at his W1 ranking
(11:16:20) acekim: cool that's awesome
(11:16:27) xandryyte: oh... We will work on your rank!!
(11:16:31) MelissaInAU: we'll get you there ... you have 3 days ;)
(11:16:35) oilslider: yeah, ace
(11:16:39) oilslider: we can share a pigsty
(11:16:44) oilslider: i get top bunk
(11:16:50) acekim: I'm on bottom
(11:17:19) MelissaInAU has a very classy townhouse to herself
(11:17:30) MelissaInAU: ... just waiting for Javal to move in too ;-)
(11:29:12) -- Rostok enters the channel.
(11:30:14) -- #Motd: [xandryyte] WE ARE OFFICIAL!!! OMG! OMG! OMG! YEAH!!!!!
(11:30:44) xandryyte: Hopefully come Sunday... YES!!!
(11:31:36) -- People in this Channel:
(11:31:37) -- 'Anonymouse' (Landlord [W12] from ARMfeld) since (0:55:48.646)
(11:31:37) -- 'oilslider' (Apprentice [W3] from ARMfeld) since (0:28:35.066)
(11:31:37) -- 'MelissaInAU' (Kauffrau [W8] from ARMfeld) since (0:01:22.203)
(11:31:37) -- 'Spielguy' (Lehrling [W3] from ARMfeld) since (0:36:30.818)
(11:31:37) -- 'Rostok' (Servant [W2] from ARMfeld) since (0:02:26.769)
(11:31:37) -- 'acekim' (Day Laborer [W1] from ARMfeld) since (0:18:38.285)
(11:31:37) -- 'xandryyte' (Elector [W17]Botschafterin from EnglishTown) since (4:12:46.402)
(11:31:37) -- There are 7 active players on this Channel
(11:31:50) Rostok: just thought your message was new and something had happened today.
(11:31:58) MelissaInAU: Yes, it is
(11:32:06) MelissaInAU: We have been approved
(11:32:10) MelissaInAU: it is just a question of time
(11:32:23) Rostok: oh ok - that is new news then. coool...
(11:32:35) MelissaInAU: Yes indeed :)
(11:32:43) Rostok: still got a couple of days to get upto W3 -
(11:33:01) xandryyte :)
(11:34:28) MelissaInAU: We'll get you there, no worries :-)
(11:34:52) MelissaInAU: And if you end up reaching day 3 by playing in LupusLanding on Founding Day ... well, that's pretty good too :-)
(11:35:04) MelissaInAU: ack! W3 not day 3 :-)
(11:37:43) -- arkibet enters the channel.
(11:38:10) acekim: hey ark!
(11:38:15) arkibet: Hiya, folks!
(11:40:10) arkibet: wow - So Sunday it will be official?
(11:40:21) acekim :)
(11:40:37) MelissaInAU: We are hoping / asking for Sunday
(11:40:45) MelissaInAU: it depends on the Alderman's timings
(11:40:59) arkibet: gotcha! Nice Prop file, btw
(11:41:21) MelissaInAU: thanks :) It needs a little tinkering ... WHEN WE HAVE OUR OWN GAMEROOMS!!! (lol)

June 2nd

Melissa in AU: GREIG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Belash: Howdy!
Belash: in a cyber cafe
Melissa in AU: Greig - Belash SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Belash: What?
Melissa in AU: Squee! Look at my tagline.
Melissa in AU: Do you know already?
Belash: I didn't!!!!!
Belash: SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Melissa in AU: Tis a YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Belash: YAHOOO!!!!!!
Melissa in AU: I posted a chat transcript to the main thread
Melissa in AU: Xand and I were almost in tears
Belash: I was so pissed today! Actually had my wife check my email...
Melissa in AU: Well actually I *was* in tears
Melissa in AU: (blushes)
Melissa in AU: I IM'd him at 1am on the 1st with "OK, so it's the first, got an answer for us?"
Belash: I am so pumped!!!!!
Melissa in AU: I emailed you!
Melissa in AU: Or was she just looking for Tootles?
Belash: yes.
Melissa in AU: ah, ok
Belash: no email from him
Melissa in AU: He was meant to email you yesterday - said he would
Melissa in AU: I reiterated our preferred timeframe
Melissa in AU: We chatted for a while ... he was very friendly ... says he's been having PC problems ...
Belash: my heart is beating a mile a minute!
Belash: LOL
Melissa in AU: Tell me about it :)
Melissa in AU: I will email you the transcripts -- I saved LupusLanding, my main window AND the Tootles chat
Melissa in AU: when you get home
Melissa in AU: Congratulations, Mr Mayor
Belash: I am so relieved
Belash: thanks :$
Belash: I will do some work Saturday night
Melissa in AU: We announced it ... I was sorry to do it without you, but felt people deserved to know
Belash: send out invites for the ww game and so on
Melissa in AU: I've told people the Sunday time and said it depends on Tootles' schedule etc etc
Belash: absolutely!!! this is a joint effort! sometimes when one team member can't perform a function, another has to pick up the slack!
Melissa in AU: LOTS of people are planning to be there

C187 LupusLanding was founded on June 4th, 2006.

There is no saved log of our founding, because we were all too excited. Also because most of the chat went on over Skype ... and I'm afraid there was rather too much excitement. It's even possible that there were squeals.

Apart from the five founding members, Belash (Mayor), xandryyte (Deputy Mayor), MelissaInAU (Treasure), CapAp (Warehouse manager) and Lord_Muck, there was a huge collection of members online at the ridiculously early hour of the morning (I think it was about 6am in parts of the US).

As at today, July 1st, we have thirty four members, plus a few "members in waiting" who aren't yet able to join a town. That makes us the 27th largest of the 189 cities on BSW - which brings its own special challenges for us, but ensures that there are always plenty of gaming buddies to play with.

We have fifteen gamerooms, and we are saving to become a member of the bsw Hanseatic League. Some of our plans have changed since those early discussions, but many have remained the same and the overall vision of the town is very much as we discussed at the end of April.

One exciting development is the translation of the german "Spielleiter" puppet that runs werewolf games - the rules aren't exactly the same as the ones we are used to, but the games are quick and very fun, if somewhat silly. To watch a game in progress, /tell wereModerator peek

We can, I think, be proud that our original aim of building and fostering our community, and of providing a friendly environment for gaming, has remained the primary premise of our town. I'm particularly excited by the number of people who have joined or visited bsw for the first time as part of the extended LupusLanding family, and by the fact that many of them have chosen to stay with us.

See you in LupusLanding!

Melissa