Give Me a Light ... No, Civ Light!

One of the Holy Grails of modern game design seems to be "Civ Light", a game that inexplicably is like Francis Tresham's 1980 masterpiece Civilization, yet at the same time is not. Every year lately one or two games come out that are proclaimed--by designers, fans, or both--to be this Grail, and every year each and every one fails to live up to the standard--potentially because it sets an impossible bar.

In this article I want to look at first Civilization itself, then the many contenders for the "Civ Light" throne. In the process I'll give each game a "Civ Score", which is a 4-point score based on how well the game mimics the four core Civilization gameplay elements of civilization advance, resource management, trade, and warfare and measure the "Weight" of the game, based on BGG stats. Though both stats are clearly somewhat arbitrary, I think they offer relatively analytical measures of how each game approaches the Civ Light ideal.

Civilization (1980)

Author: Francis Tresham
Major Game Systems: Civilization Advance, Resource Management, Trade, Warfare
Score: 4.00/4 Civs :: 3.80/5 Weight

Comments: Like some of the best board games out there, Civilization is truly a creative endeavor. You feel like you're creating and expanding a civilization because it gains a unique character as you expand it in certain ways across the board and as you select certain civilization advances to build.

I think that the idea of "civilization advance" (or technology, if you prefer) is potentially the core of a civilization game and ultimately the aspect that pretty much no other game has ever duplicated. In Civilization players have numerous different advances they can build, each of which gives some advantage to their civilization, and many of which are built into "trees", where one advance is required in order to purchase another.

Other players consider the trade the most important element of gameplay, and it is a well-developed system in Civilization. There is warfare, and you do have to be careful about how you collect (and use) resources, but the simple idea of trading in order to collect sets of increasing value can make or break your game (and likewise adds another element that many Civ Light games don't have).

It's probably been at least 10 years since I've played Civilization and that falls to its main flaw: game length. Civilization can easily be a full day event running at 12 hours, plus or minus, and in an era where a 2-4 hour game is stretching it, Civilization is pretty much never going to hit the table, hence the desire for "light" variants, by which most people mean: a faster, more elegant version of Civilization that nonetheless has all the core attributes.

Vinci (1999)

Author: Philippe Keyaerts
Major Game Systems: Civilization Advance, Resource Management, Warfare
Score: 1.50/4 Civs :: 2.88/5 Weight

Comments: I don't know that anyone actually ever called Vinci Civ Light, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's a game where you're trying to build up Civilizations in Europe by taking advantage of unique technologies and are trying to gain controls of specific territories whose resources advantage you.

However, the "Civilization Advance" feature is relatively vestigial. Each civilization has its own pair of advantages, and there's no way to improve or build upon them. Likewise, the resource management is solely a player-specific conduit to victory points. The only fully developed Civ system is warfare, and by its core importance, the game is actually distanced quite a bit from Civ proper, which included warfare as an option, not a necessity.

Overall, not a Civ Light game at all, but a wargame that does include the interesting facade of some of the same ideas.

Mare Nostrum (2003)

Author: Serge Laget
Major Game Systems: Civilization Advance, Resource Management, Trade, Warfare
Score: 3.00/4 Civs :: 2.99/5 Weight

I'm surprised this game didn't get more attention as a Civ Light game, though maybe it did back in 2003. In summary, it's got all of the elements, and it was purposefully (and well) designed to fit the niche.

Resource management and trade are both precisely in the Civilization mode, with your collecting typed resources and then trading those to get the right sets to build what you want. Likewise there's a solid combat system that nonetheless isn't exactly the point of the game: you can win without it, but you'll probably have to face it at some time.

Mare Nostrum's biggest failure in the Civ Light contest, and perhaps what knocks it from the competition entirely, is its lack of any sort of meaningful technology. There are Wonders of the World, and they're crucial to the game, but each is unique, and there is no tree, so these just aren't built or used in the same way as technology would be.

Also, the game length is a bit long, trending toward the 3 hour range, when most of these others can eke by at 2. And, I have one game design complaint, which is the ending can be very sudden. But, these are minor in the face of how well Mare Nostrum otherwise pulls off this style of gameplay.

Overall I'd consider Mare Nostrum the current winner of the Civ Light crown, with the major caveat that you have to not consider technology crucial.

Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean (2005)

Author: Andrew Parks, Jason Hawkins
Major Game Systems: Civilization Advance, Resource Management, Trade
Review: RPGnet (B)
Score: 2.00/4 Civs :: 3.06/5 Weight

Comments: In many ways, this isn't a bad adaptation of the most important aspects of a Civilization game.

The trade is best, because it's a complex system that allows trade with both other players and to the game system. Better, the system is set up to make trades mutually advantageous. The resource management pretty closely ties in to that because each player can produce certain resources and has to figure out ways to get the rest.

The biggest failing of Parthenon as a Civ Light game is ultimately in its limited scope--and this may well be an issue that ever contender for the Civ Light crown will face. There are very limited numbers of resources and limited ways to generate there and overall a limited scope for expansion. Technology isn't really built into a tree, and every player is trying to gain the exact same levels of tech, with the only difference being who does what first. You have no way of deciding that you want to head off in a certain direction because you're constrained by what you're allowed to build. Mind you, this all contributes to the tightness of the game, which is what makes it work, but it also keeps it away from being a true Civ Light game.

Likewise, the lack of a a true game board is likely to make anyone looking for a true Civilization game to turn away, and as noted in the overview above, there's no actual warfare either.

On the whole this is only a tiny bit closer to the Civilization ideal than Vinci. It turns out to not be a Civ Light game at all either, but instead a resource management game with a facade of Civilization.

Antike (2005)

Author: Mac Gerdts
Major Game Systems: Civilization Advance, Resource Management, Warfare
Review: GG Top Ten, Mini-Review (C+)
Score: 2.75/4 Civs :: 3.08/5 Weight

Comments: I really wasn't too enthused about this game after two plays, but in weighing it on the Civ Light barometer, I begin to understand better where other peoples' enthusiasm comes from. This game entirely neglects trade, but for the other three aspects of Civilization, it hits almost entirely dead on.

The Resource Management is a core part of the game, and it's both very different from Civilization and well-considered. There are only 8 technological advances, but there is a tiny bit of a tree (with each branch having two nodes), and unlike Parthenon there's no guarantee that everyone is going to hit all the levels. I find the combat somewhat troublesome because it feels too costly and too weighted toward the defender, but that's ultimately an issue of game design.

And it's in game design generally that Antike let me down. Besides not liking the combat dynamics I also feel like the victory points are set up in such a way that the entire game can bog down in some situations. Overall the game's just got too many sharp corners for me.

On the whole I'd say that Antike is a pretty good Civ Light design, minus the trading, but it's a pure indie design with enough awkward play and sharp edges that it'll always have somewhat limited appeal.

Tempus (2006)

Author: Martin Wallace
Major Game Systems: Resource Management, Warfare
Score: 1.50/4 Civs :: 3.24/5 Weight

Comments: Tempus has been long-hyped as Civ Light and is now facing some backlash, and I think it's pretty easy to see why when you measure it up as a Civilization style game.

Tempus gets the weight of warfare about right: it's important, but not central to the game. And that's about where it leaves Civilization land behind. There is a sort of resource management, but it largely centers on board position, and which lands you control and with which pieces at any time--a pretty far stretch from the handheld resources of the most Civilization like games. (There are cards but they're just random special-power cards that you can buy.) There's likewise (and not surprisingly) zero trade.

However, where Tempus falls down (as a Civ Light game), and where it's most likely to disappoint, is on the question of technology. In short: there isn't any. There's a theoretical "technology track", but all players advance along it simultaneously, and at best any player might be one space ahead on any turn. It thus ends up being just another resource to manage.

Don't get me wrong. Tempus is a very clever game that I'm quite happy to play. Its style of resource management, and the strategy that it entails, is quite clever. However, though it has the facade of a Civ Light game, like Vinci and Parthenon it's really a totally different sort of game.

Conclusion

In chart form, here's my rundown of the Civilization-like games, from most to least:

Game	Civ. Score	Notes
Civilization	4.00/4	Way too long for a "light" game.
Mare Nostrum	3.00/4	Largely misses Technology. A bit longer than others.
Antike	2.75/4	No Trade. Technology a little light. Some developmental issues.
Parthenon	2.00/4	No board. No Warfare. Technology is light & ubiquitous.
Vinci	1.50/4	A wargame with Civilization facade.
Tempus	1.50/4	A resource game with Civilization facade.

On the whole, this analysis tells me a few different things.

First, not a single game has passed the 75% level for trueness to Civilization gameplay in a Light format. Mare Nostrum is the closest by hitting 3 out of 4 elements almost dead on, but it's near total ignorance of technology just about knocks it out of contention. Antike is next, but various systems come up short, and I also don't particularly like the development work.

I'll add and clarify that I'm measuring these games based on similarity to Civilization. I think they're all good or better games, with Antike slightly trailing the pack.

Second, I found this analysis interesting for where it shows Civilization-light games being created: 2 French designs, 1 English design, 1 American design, and 1 German design. The Civ Light games are coming from all over, but clearly more from countries with a strong Anglo-American influence (which makes me wonder if we'll soon see Civ Light games from Italy as well).

Third, I increasingly wonder if a Civ Light game might be a mirage. The core element of Civilization as I said, is the joy of creating this unique, expansive civilization. I'm not entirely sure if this can be done in a short game, and looking at how limited the technologies are in every one of these games just increases my belief.

On the other hand, writing this article makes me want to go try my own game design skills at the problem ... which makes me believe that we'll keep seeing entrants in this genre for years, whether the goal be a will o' the wisp or not.

Coldfoot on Customer Service, Rude Bastards and Why You Need to Ignore Them

Today's well thought out, humorous, insightful article on game awards was scrapped to bring you this rant.

Warning: If you are an a-hole, or are offended by the use of that word, skip this blog today.

The snot-nose whiners, and the defenders of snot-nose whiners are at it again.

The always-looking-for-a-reason-to-be-offended, and I-am-never-ever-responsible-for-any-misfortune-I-may-suffer crowds have two main issues lately:

1. Is the customer always right? Is every person who walks through the door of your Friendly Neighborhood Game Store (FLGS) a potential customer who needs his ass kissed and his every whim indulged?

And 2, which I won't be touching on today: Does an obvious pricing error obligate a store to sell an item for said price?

As some of you may know, I drive a taxi from time to time. As a taxi driver I am not an employee, if I don't have customers I don't get paid, as such I do not believe in alienating customers.

What most of you don't know about me is that I may be the most laid back person you could meet. I have been known to pick a drunk out of a snowbank at -50, give him a free ride home, and listen to him call me a faggot for the whole trip. I will normally put up with a ton of crap before I am even tempted to put my foot down.

It is this perspective from which I write.

First and foremost, some of the people who walk through the doors of a business are assholes. Assholes drive off paying customers and good employees. You will find that assholes are tolerated in direct proportion to the amount of money they spend. If you are an asshole, you will find you get better customer service if you are known as a big spender.

Secondly, most assholes know they are being rude. This holds true if the jackass in question is normally a nice person who is merely having a bad day, or if it is a person who is always a jackass. The latter may complain and threaten to never again patronize a business if they are called on their rude behavior, but most jackasses are so self centered that any threat is forgotten as soon as they need something. The former may even feel the pang of guilt after they leave the store.

As I mentioned, I will usually put up with quite a bit of crap just to turn a buck. While that is true, it is also true that I have pulled one particular bitch out of my cab and left her sitting in the street. This particular handicap woman uses her disability to manipulate people, and I, like everyone else, tolerated it for quite a while. After yanking her out of the taxi she is still a bitch, but you know what? She is no longer a bitch to me and she still rides with me, perhaps more often than before.

I have sped up to 70-75 miles per hour and slammed on the brakes to propel one particular jackass into the dashboard. He hit the dashboard twice that night. I have gone on to give this particular asshole many cab rides. When he is drunk he is a loud, unreasonable jackass. When he is sober he is slightly less annoying, but you know what? He still remembers hitting the dashboard and he laughs about it every time he gets in a cab with me.

At the time, both of these individuals swore they would never ride with me, nor utilize my cab company again. I am quite sure that they both told their friends about the mean, unreasonable cab driver they had to endure. They probably milked the story for all the sympathy they could. When the sympathy well ran dry both went right back to calling the same cab company that they had always called as soon as they needed a ride.

I contend that self centered, malcontent, snively whiners (or assholes, if you will) seek affirmation for their actions by posting on the internet because deep down they know that they are wrong. Furthermore, despite their vocal protest to the contrary they will generally not boycott a particular store for long.

More often than not in the horror stories we read about FLGSs the writer will admit some fault, but then completely disregard that fact and place the full blame directly on an employee. Frequently the employee could have handled the situation better. The snot nose whiner will take that kernel of fault on the employee's part and weave a story around it. He will then twist the story around that fact in an attempt to exonerate his own actions. The discussion then centers on how the employee should have responded, instead of how the whiner caused the whole situation by being stupid.

Just because someone is whining, does not mean they not responsible for the situation they find themselves in.

I am sick of otherwise reasonable people reading these stories and focusing on the insignificant point the author wants them to focus on. If the author gets enough sympathy he is emboldened to continue his rude behavior.

Our hobby is pretty marginal as it is. Brick and mortar game stores are not making money hand over fist, they do not need unreasonable malcontents spreading internet rumors about them. Unfortunately this is unavoidable. Reasonable people need to be more critical of the stories they read and quit piling on in their criticism of FLGSs. I say almost unequivocally that the whiner will return to the store where he had his bad experience. He just needed to feel superior for a few minutes by posting a trumped up story on the internet.

The whiner will be smarter when he returns. If he was booted from the store at closing time he will show up a few minutes earlier the next time. If the store wouldn't sell him his games at a 30% discount, he'll ask for a 20% discount. Make no mistake, he will return, and he won't post the story of the excellent service he received when he wasn't being an asshole. Hopefully reasonable people won't boycott the store simply because some whiner needed an ego boost.

Note: Before someone else points it out, I have to count myself as a snively whiner. I had a bad experience with an on-line game store which I wrote about in my blog. Like other whiners I was partially at fault, which I glossed over in the story. (I had never before disputed a credit card charge. Knowing what I know now, I would have handled that part differently.)

That Way Madness Lies

You're not going anywhere until you've cleaned that room like I told you to. I don't care if your stupid friends are playing in ten minutes. You should have cleaned it up this morning when I told you to. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Have fun playing games with the other babies. I can't believe he goes out to play games with his friends.

I know. Isn't it time he grew up?

Hey loser. Watch where you're going. Freakoid.

Hey freak! Yeah, freaky! Hey loser! Kiss this, you faggot. What a jerk.

You're late, again. You're always late. We started playing without you. You'll have to wait.

(Psst, I don't want to sit near him. He smells.)

I don't want to play with him. He's no fun to play with. You play with him.

Didn't you listen when I explained the rules? Hello? Space cadet?

You don't want to do that. That's a stupid play.

Come on. This is ridiculous. This isn't even playing a game. It's no fun to play when one person throws the game. He's giving you the game. He's not playing right. What's the point of even playing?

You're not very good at these games. Why do you play them?

You can't play. It's too hard for you. Anyway, we already said we were going to play this before, and it only works with three players. It doesn't play well with four. You can watch TV.

You have to go. It's getting late. Come on time next time or don't come. When you come late it wrecks the games.

You can't sit there, kid. You got drugs on you? Waiting for a homo to pick you up? Move along. Get out of here.

You're late again. What the hell is the matter with you? Didn't I tell you to come home by 11:00? Didn't I? Answer me. You never listen. Think you're so high and mighty, better than everybody else. Get out of my face and go to your room. You're grounded mister. And you can forget about playing games next week.

Turn off that damn music and go to bed.

Turn off the damn light. What the hell are you crying about? You shut up, or I'll give you something to cry about.

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ There's never a Commie around when you need one.

What I think the world needs is a good ol' fashioned Commie Threat. That's right. Communists! The Evil Empire! A worthy enemy, one that doesn't cause the ACLU to swarm like flies on a cow patty. Commies were the best thing going back in the 70's and 80's for us old time gamer people. They didn't bring charges of racial profiling or have the NY Times declaring that the unwashed (voting) masses of Middle America needed to understand and sympathize with some screwball religious fanatic's psychotic urge to destroy everything gamers hold dear.

Like... you know... us.

In the 70's and 80's Commies were the subject of a ton of great board games from SPI, Avalon Hill, West End Games and many other fine publishers of Conflict Simulations. Commies were manly enemies. They didn't drive trucks loaded with detergent and gasoline into buildings full of women and children. They had the balls to build a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons that, like the NATO folks (that would be...us), could destroy as many earths as you could possibly imagine.

Being a person who grew up with the famous public school anti-nuclear explosion drills, the ones where we lined up alphabetically so we could properly exit the school into a radiation zone or where we ducked under our desks to keep the atomic firestorm from singeing our eyebrows, I had a great appreciation for threat and conflict. Being drafted simply made my appreciation more acute. But whatever you want to say about those days, pretty much anyone could agree that we all understood the lay of the land. War was about tanks and men in Germany. It was about Hunter/Killers and Boomers in the North Atlantic. It was about ICBM's, SAC, Star Wars, High Frontiers, CIA, KGB, free press or oppression. War and conflict, along with the resulting games, was a whole lot less about religious fanaticism and a whole lot more about building huge armies and machines and escalating things until one side finally ran out of money.

Whatever your politics and whatever your nationality, it's hard to argue that free markets, Ronnie Reagan and corporate investment didn't temporarily make the world safe enough for Bill Clinton to get elected and start fondling the staff.

The games of the 70's and 80's reflected that whole struggle. They were manly games. Games played on hex maps with tiny little cardboard chits. Even the non-war games tended towards the same levels of complexity and aloofness, read the whole history of Warhammer 40K to get a feel for how even Games Workshop adapted topical themes into a hugely successful franchise. In the 80's my store in Idaho sold several thousand bucks worth of GHQ tanks and armor miniatures to the M1-A1 training facility here in Southern Idaho. Tankers flew in from all over the country to play the same games we played in the store's game loft at night.

Man, I miss the Commies. Now we have all these panty-waist Euro Games and the subsequent arguments on sites like BGG where elite Euro gamers argue about dainty little things... like elegance and scalability. They build huge collections of drab, boring little boxes all packed with near identical painted wooden cubes and discs and they even sometimes show disdain for the roots of modern board gaming. As I have pointedly reminded you before, some of these people actually are concerned that their wives will not be happy unless they find games that include the little woman. Jaysus, just buy her a frickin' copy of that Lost Cities deal and tell her to get you another beer! For Chrissakes! It's not as if your life and hers will tumble into a frenzied and destructive spiral of lawyers and crying children if she doesn't get to play a frickin' game with you.

Actually, I take that back. I've read enough of the Euro Snoot threads on BGG to at least comprehend that some gamer's lives will crumble if Momma doesn't get her way. Whatever.

A week or two back Shannon wrote on this blog about the differences and similarities between adventure board games and role-playing games. In many ways what Shannon wrote made perfect sense. The whole genre of adventure board games, like RPG's, is a stunted path that ends in pretty much the same place any time you play... kill the UBG. Level up. Now, go kill the even more ultimate UBG. Level up. Repeat, rinse, repeat, zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What Shannon made me think about was why I never really cared for most RPG's. In a nutshell, I didn't like them because they were usually no more than wimpy guys playing pretend at being non-wimpy guys. It's a rare role-playing session where anything even remotely resembling actual role-playing (and the accompanying intelligence) is displayed. Even in the early days when my old partner Ian and I began playing... back about 1979, the campaigns almost always devolved into people clamoring for XP's or arguing over who ought to really get the amulet, sword, armor or whatever other piece of imaginary junk the DM rolled up.

In today's RPG world there are several thousand pounds of manuals and player aids that add a veneer of respectability to role-playing. A thin veneer. That's because players tend to buy the manuals and study them so they can confound the DM and other players and end up getting the extra XP's and goodies so they can kill more bad guys and level up quicker. WotC is smart. They sell D&D the same way Chevy used to sell cars.... "Yep, you can have this new Impala for only $1700! 'Course, if you want an engine, a radio and some lights, it'll cost ya' a bit extra."

The creators of modern miniature games have taken expandability to even loftier heigths. When I was a top retailer for Games Workshop my numbers told me that if I sold you a basic 40K or Warhammer game for $60 I could expect between $500-1800 in income from you during the following 18-24 months. That's why I always discounted the basic games. WarMachine, Confrontation, CMG's, they all use the same tactic: sell the gamer just enough stuff so when he plays he gets his ass handed back to him on a dirty dish. He'll be back for more goodies, and soon.

I'm not complaining mind you... I've made my living from selling expandable products. From games to expensive cars to software. And while I understood why a company or government agency might want to add fax or PC capability for it's mainframe users, or why a Mercedes owner might want to add an electric shock module to the hood emblem, I always had a bit of a negative reaction to gamers who believed the solution for the hollowness they felt in their gaming experiences would be remedied by a new D&D book or a more potent 40K unit.

Role-Playing suffers the most from this issue I think. Because role-playing is mostly the same thing every session. It's about as exciting as...oh... I dunno... Puerto Rico. Yeah, role-playing is like playing Puerto Rico. Everybody knows what their job is and everbody wants to sit to the left of the newbie.


THE PRICE OF FREEDOM


Except for one little RPG that West End Games published back in the good ol' days when gamers were men, and smelled like it, and when we had serious threats to contend with... like Commies and an invasion from Cuba. We also had movies like Red Dawn.... everybody together now.... WOLVERINES!!!!

And ABC did the Amerika mini-series. Milton-Bradley bought the rights to an SPI game called Invasion America and dumbed it down to create Fortress America. Tom Clancy made sense in those days. Along with Dale Brown and a few other military fiction writers. And West End Games had this guy working for them by the name of Greg Costikyan, who, among other accomplishments, designed the classic Creature that Ate Sheyboygan for SPI. With the talented crew at West End he also designed The Price of Freedom RPG.

I loved it. I loved it soooooo much more than Twilight 2000... even though Frank Chadwick (despite being a Commie) did some really cool things with Twilight 2000. But getting into the role of a NATO guy trapped in Europe after the BIG WAR and struggling to hijack a submarine so you could get back home to Alabama always seemed to be a little unrealistic to me.

But The Price of Freedom, now there was an RPG you could sink your teeth into. That's because it was theoretically taking place in the here and now. When you fired up a group of players for a POF session they could practically see the Cubans parachuting into the playground of the local elementary school. The weapons, the situations, the actions, the tools, they were things each and every one of us were familiar with. No magic swords, no stupid Orcs. Just shotguns, deer rifles and the pick-up sitting right there in your driveway.

I began running POF shortly after it was published and it was a huge success for our group. War gamers, miniature gamers and haters of all things girly and associated with fantasy came out of the woodwork to play. It helped immensely that what Costikyan had done was take basic and sound war gaming mechanics, add some RPG-like embellishments and throw in an enemy that was real and that you could go see on any large college campus... usually in the teacher's lounge.

The boxed set of Price of Freedom looks and feels like a war game. It has counters, just like a war game. It has various TO&E's, just like a wargame. The lists of military and civilian hardware were all very familiar, some of us even owned many of the weapons or had used them courtesy of Uncle Sam. Reading through the GM and Player books was like reading the best war game rules I had ever read. All the terms and mechanics were familiar. The rules describe terrain, movement rates, target acquisition and all the associated items that most gamers of the era could easily grasp. In short, it was a war game in role-playing clothes.

And the best part?

You got to play the ultimate character. Yourself.

Here's an excerpt from the Player Book:

Exactly what is so important varies from person to person: for some, it's family: for others, ideology: for others, their jobs: and so on. But when you threaten what is most important to someone, he will do whatever he can to protect it, and nothing will stand in his way. In game terms, the thing is the character's passion.

If that's not a recipe for role-playing yourself in a grim situation, then I don't know what is. And that's exactly what my main group of players did for nearly two years. With me at the helm, running the Soviet Overlords and their Cuban minions, sending out the Political Officers and KGB operatives, our group single-handedly mucked things up so badly for the Soviets in Idaho that they eventually decided that a few million acres of potatoes and a couple hundred thousand head of cattle just weren't worth it.

Costikyan also used an element that I liked and had only seen once before, in the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, the Hero Point. Every player began with one. Others could be earned at the GM's discretion. Hero Points allowed players to do things that real people in tight situations often did, despite all odds. If you recall Robert Duvall standing on the beach, watching his boys surf, exclaiming, " I love the smell of napalm in the morning", as bullets whizzed by him, then you understand Hero Points. I was miserly with them, but my players learned and they were creative. They were smart and they knew that in this RPG, if they died, then they'd have to play someone new... probably some pesky neighbor or the ex-wife's new boyfriend or some equally distasteful personnae.

In The Price of Freedom, you had a commitment to your character. You had a reason to survive. You were motivated to be intelligent, to lie, to be a cheater, to steal and to make things bad for the UBG's. You knew the only way to win was to survive and everyone knew that there was no Ring of Reincarnation in this game.

Overall, I think what West End created was close to the perfect role-playing game. A fantasy that was steeped in real life. It was better than Call of Cthulhu (which I admit, was very, very good) and it was a nice break from the only other RPG worth playing... Paranoia. Strangely enough, Paranoia was designed by, you guessed it, West End Games, and Costikyan had his hand in that one too.

We all know why The Price of Freedom had such a short life span. We won the Cold War. We outspent the Commies. They all became capitalists, eagerly trying to sell suitcase nukes and T-34's to anyone with a turban and a gold tooth. And so, the best RPG ever created quickly became a footnote in gaming history.

I'm not going to suggest that the same formula for an RPG would work in this modern world of ours. It wouldn't. The current war is all about truly evil UBG's. And this time... they have lawyers.

A Life of Games

Matt Carlson joins the Gone Gaming crew from over at www.GamerDad.com where he writes a biweekly column about boardgames. Whereas his GamerDad Unplugged columns tend to target boardgamers new to the hobby, Gone Gaming will serve as a regular platform to informally discuss thoughts and analysis more appropriate to fans who are already deeply steeped in the boardgame hobby.

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Hello. My name is Matt Carlson, and I like games.

There, I’ve said it and now I can begin the healing process – but I don’t want to be healed. I think it’s because I’m a happy sort of guy. I am usually happy because I like to be happy. I’ve come to terms with that and seek out being happy. One thing I enjoy is playing games. While the word “Play” may give a middle school drama coach a heart attack, for most people it conjures up memories of having fun with other people, just for fun’s sake. Whether its “playing” tag with a bunch of little kids, “playing” a game of casual sports with other adults, “playing” a family board game, or “playing” a computer game, I enjoy playing.

This was true even as a small child. I loved games. For Christmas each child in our family would get a game from Santa. I usually looked forward to that present more than any of my higher-priced toys from my parents and relatives. My family would have official family meetings; each of us children would have a job. I was in charge of “Games and Snacks”, making the family play some sort of game together at the end of the meeting. I even spent my meager spending money on games. Each month my father would take each kid out to dinner alone to talk, AND we would be able to buy anything we wanted from the store (less than $3 if I remember.) I was in heaven because there was a whole series of cheap Disney-brand board games for sale at Walgreen’s for about $3 each. It was a sad day when they eventually raised the prices up to $5. One of the earliest purchases I remember making with my own money was sending away cereal box tops (plus shipping and handling) to buy a football game that consisted of a piece of cardboard with little red sliders on it that you slid back and forth to simulate a game of football. While many of my childhood games have been lost to the ravages of time, I still have a good-sized collection of board games hidden away (or not so hidden) in my house. I’m not so much of a collector as a board game lover that has a hard time parting with any of his boardgame “friends”.

Being a ravenous game-player, I was always interested in playing a game, but to my surprise, not everyone I met was all that excited about it. In the late 70s, I came across a few of the earliest mass market consumer electronic games and I was hooked. Here were games I could play ALL BY MYSELF! I didn’t need to spend the work to drum up two or three more players just to play a game of Monopoly or Payday. As long as I had a battery, I could play my Mattel Football. I was pulled into computer and video games because it was a way to play games. Sure, a little handheld electronic game isn’t going to replace a good board game, but that’s when I stumbled across computer games. Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI) had published Galactic Gladiators, a science-fiction based squad-level combat game for the IBM PC. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was a wargame that I could play against the computer – no need to try to con my older brother into playing yet another game! As the years went by, I continued to fall into a computer game (and later, with the Nintendo 64 and an actual income, video games) rut, but still preferred to play face-to-face boardgames whenever possible.

In the 90’s, with the arrival of collectible card games and Settlers of Catan I finally hit my boardgame stride. I had a circle of friends who enjoyed playing these types of games, and the new games were such that I felt that I could teach them to most of my friends and acquaintances. This coincided with an increased income and I began to acquire what might be thought of as a game collection. Sure, I had a whole pile of games from my youth, but now I was looking at games with a whole new viewpoint. These new games had all the rich decisions I found in my larger, more complex games, but the rules were simple enough for the games to be easily taught to an unsuspecting friend. Of course, the lure of the quick fix of computer and video games continued to plague me. It was so simple to pick up a game and play whereas a good boardgame required coordination of 4 or more people. But even in the area of video games I remained a fan of games that were closest to what I liked in board games.

In the heyday of the 90s, I started my own web site as a way to spread the good word about the many more cerebral types of computer games out there – wargames, strategy games, etc… This blossomed somewhat and then put me in contact with a new website about family computer gaming, www.GamerDad.com. I was able to help out with the site, and in late 2004 even started up a column about boardgames. I figure there have to be piles of people out there who would just love modern boardgames if they would only give them a try. Currently, I write a regular column over at GamerDad entitled: GamerDad Unplugged.

If I can convince just one video game player to pick up a board game and enjoy it, that’s one more person in this world who just might sit down and play a board game with me…

Museum prep

Our exhibit at the Melbourne Museum starts next Friday, so I've had a really busy week trying to get everything ready. Expect me to talk of nothing else for the next month or so.

We have had some fantastic offers of help, although we are still finding staffing the demo games every weekend a bit heavy going.

Here's where we'll be - it's a little out of the way, but the demo games really move us into the main part of the gallery.



I've built a rudimentary website to provide extra information for people who are interested. This will also include a list of all games exhibited (ideally, of all games demoed each week, but I am not sure my energy will stretch that far after a full day at the museum...)

Trying to select 11 or so games that are "representative" of what we like about games is really really tough. Here's the list we have so far, and the text I've written to accompany the displays. I think we have room for one more game ... maybe

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On the wall:


Shadows over Camelot
Serge Laget & Bruno Cathalla
(Days of Wonder, 2005)

Winner of a special “Fantastic game” prize from the German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) council in 2006, Shadows over Camelot is a co-operative game for up to 7 players.

Players take the roles of Knights of the Round Table, working together to stop the siege of Camelot and complete various quests including retrieving Excalibur and the Holy Grail. Each Knight has a different special ability which allows him to change or bend a rule (for example, to draw 3 cards instead of 2).

The tension in this game comes from the feeling of impending doom as players struggle to balance all the conflicting threats. If that’s not enough, players can use the optional rules to add a traitor to the mix – one (unknown) Knight who is working against the rest of the group.

The very strong and engaging theme of Shadows over Camelot pulls players in to the game, and the high production values and beautiful game boards enhance the gaming experience.



Sunda to Sahul
Don Bone
(Sagacity games, 2002)

This game by an Australian designer is played by 2-4 players, or can be played as a solo puzzle. The theme of the game is the migration of people down the Indonesian archipelago into New Guinea and Australia.

In this simple but engaging game, players place jigsaw tiles to build the archipelago of islands, while also claiming land rights over particular ‘nodes’ (points where several tiles meet). All pieces on a completed island score double points, so players have to balance the need to complete islands with the benefits to them if they extend the island (and possibly place more pieces on it).

A variety of optional game rules which can be combined in different ways extend the game for experienced players.

Don’s second game Freya’s Folly was launched at the international games fair in Essen, Germany, in 2005.

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Out for people to play with
(The local distributor has kindly offered us some spare sets of pieces for if when they go missing.

Blokus
Bernard Tavitian
(Educational Insights, 2000)

Blokus is a very popular “abstract” game – that is, a game that does not have a theme attached to it. Traditional abstract games include Go, Othello, Backgammon and Ludo (and even Chess).

The rules are simple – 3 or 4 players take it in turns to place a piece. The only rules are that a piece MUST touch another piece diagonally (it may not touch along any sides).

A single player can also play Blokus as a puzzle – see if you can get all the pieces of one colour onto the board at once, following the rule that they cannot touch directly but must be connected on the diagonal.

You are welcome to play with this Blokus set, but please make sure that you leave all the pieces beside the board when you’re done.

“Travel Blokus” (2005) is a slightly smaller version for 2 players – and “Blokus Trigon” is a new (2006) version where the pieces are made up of connected triangles rather than squares, and are place on a hexagonal board.

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In the display cases:


Nacht der Magier - “Magicians’ Night”
Jens-Peter Schliemann & Kirsten Becker
(Drei Magier Spiele, 2005)

This unusual dexterity game was nominated for the 2006 German “Kinderspiel des Jahres” (Children’s game of the year) award.

Each player takes a piece with a different symbol – crescent moon, lightning, ring or star. Your aim is to be the first player to push a cauldron (red piece) with your symbol into the recessed area in the centre of the game stand. As soon as a piece falls off the game area, a player’s turn ends and the next person can start pushing.
The trick? The game is played in pitch dark – fortunately the symbols on the pieces glow in the dark.


Shear Panic
Fraser & Gordon Lamont
(Fragor Games, 2005)

This is one of the more collectible games in our collection. Released for the Essen games fair in November 2005, the print run of 550 copies was completely sold out before the fair opened. Although originally priced at 25 Euros, there were reports of this game selling for up to 80 Euros during the event.

This was a self-published and home-produced game, but it has since been picked up by a major game company and a re-release is imminent.

The combination of a rule book full of bad puns, some great little sheep pieces and fiercely competitive game play made this a huge hit.


Plus and Minus
(unknown designer, c. 1940s?)

We found a copy of “The most intriguing game ever invented” in a beach house we hired during January 2005. When we finally got around to playing it, we found it to be a great little maths game.

The rules are simple – add the number on your card to the number on the card played by the previous player, then move one of your pawns that many spaces forward, or backward if the total is negative. The goal is to get all of your pieces to land exactly on 25 – if you go over 25, you have to go back to the start.

It took us a couple of months to track a copy down on eBay, but we found it eventually. Maybe it’s not “The game everyone has been waiting for for years!” but we’d agree that it’s “Absorbing for the Adult, Interesting & Instructive for the Children.”



The Settlers of Catan
Klaus Teuber
(Kosmos / Mayfair Games, 1999)

“Settlers of Catan” (1995) won the German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award for that year, and is widely credited as being the game that kick-started the popularity of Eurogames (European-style boardgames). Players earn raw materials and trade them with the other players, then use them to build cities and settlements, expand their armies and build special buildings.

Settlers of Catan was followed by expansions The Seafarers of Catan (1999) and Cities and Knights of Catan (2000), by a cardgame version (1996), by 5-6 player expansion sets for all expansions, by a travel edition and by the Starfarers of Catan (1999). Starship Catan, a card version of Starfarers of Catan, was released in 2001, and The Kids of Catan, a simple building game for young children, in 2003. More recently, Candamir: the first Settlers (2004) and Elasund (2005) have built on the Settlers success story. There has even been a novelisation of the story of Candamir.

A Mormon adaptation, The Settlers of Zarahemla, was released in 2003, and die Siedler von Nürnberg (The Settlers of Nuremberg) was released in 1999 to commemorate the 950th anniversary of the city’s charter. There are several special editions of the Settlers games, including the very rare “das Wasser des Lebens” or “Whisky Settlers” (1997), a re-theming of Settlers based on the production of scotch whisky and issued in conjunction with the Glen Grant Distillery company. The most notable, though, is the tenth anniversary 3-D “Treasure Chest” edition (2005) which retailed for nearly $800 Australian. Sadly, and for obvious reasons, this edition is not in our collection.

The first Australian Settlers of Catan championships were held in June 2006 at the Australian Games Expo in Albury. The winner, Dennis Bodman, will represent Australia at the world championships in Essen, Germany, in October.



Power Grid
Friedemann Friese
(2F-Spiele / Rio Grande Games, 2004)

In Power Grid, players compete to power cities – by building connections to the cities, buying power plants, and fuelling them with the appropriate raw materials (coal, oil, garbage or plutonium).

Power Grid is probably the “heaviest” (most complicated) game that we have on display here, as there are so many different factors for players to balance – can I afford to buy a new power plant? If I buy it, can I afford to power it? Will I be able to connect to a new city? Would it be better to buy a more expensive but environmentally friendlier wind plant?

Power Grid is probably Fraser’s favourite game at the moment.


Ra
Reiner Knizia
(Alea / Rio Grande Games, 1999)

Reiner Knizia is considered one of the world’s great game designers. His prolific output is matched only by his enthusiasm for innovation – one recent game uses a special ink that can hold an electrical charge.

The game Ra features an innovative auction mechanic (players bid for tiles, aiming to collect groups of particular tiles in each of the three Epochs of the game). The player must balance the conflicting needs by collecting a variety of different types of tile but at the same time collecting sets of the same tile. This theme of balancing different requirements is often a feature of Knizia’s games.

Ra is widely considered one of Knizia’s best games, with the main criticism being that the ancient Egyptian theme is incidental to the game.


Amun-Re
Reiner Knizia
(Hams im Glück / Rio Grande Games, 2003)

Reiner Knizia is considered one of the world’s great game designers. His prolific output is matched only by his enthusiasm for innovation – one recent game uses a special ink that can hold an electrical charge.

In Amun-Re, each player takes the role of a pharaoh, aiming to build more pyramids than any other. To accomplish this, players first acquire a province, which they can trade and farm. The profits from trading can buy new provinces and building stones to erect pyramids. Players can use power cards and can offer sacrifice to Amun Re to help them achieve their goals.



Tier auf Tier
Klaus Miltenberger
(Haba, 2005)

Tier auf Tier (“Animal upon Animal”) is a delightful and beautifully produced children's dexterity game in which players take turns piling wooden animals on top of one another.

Although this is billed as a children's game, we have found that it is enjoyable for adults and children alike. It's also a game where children have some advantage when playing with adults, due to their smaller and sometimes steadier hands.

Big City
Franz-Benno Delonge
(Goldsieber / Rio Grande Games, 1999)

In Big City, players compete to build a city, adding residential and commercial buildings and factories, as well as tram lines, parks, a town hall and a range of special buildings including shopping malls and cinemas. Before they can build, though, each player must acquire the rights to the pieces of land that they need for building.

Big City is a light-to-medium-weight game and typically takes around 45 minutes to play, of which the first 5-10 are usually spent oohing and aahing at the pretty plastic pieces.

Big City has been out of print for a couple of years now, but copies occasionally appear on eBay and on game trading sites. There are no verifiable rumours of a reprint at this stage.


Puerto Rico
Andreas Seyfarth
(Alea / Rio Grande Games, 2002)

Puerto Rico is generally considered to be one of the three best “Eurogames” ever, and is one of Melissa’s favourites.

The 3-5 players are plantation owners in Puerto Rico, growing a variety of crops, which they sell at the trading post or ship back to the old world. Strategically building commercial buildings to gain an advantage, in each round players must choose a role that will give them a slight advantage - but each other player can also take that action.

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Other stuff:

It's been suggested that we should exhibit 2 versions of a game, to show the difference a reissue could make. We're considering

Britannia
Lewis Pulsipher
(Avalon Hill, 1986 / Fantasy Flight Games, 2006)

Two different versions of this popular medium-weight historical wargame, which re-enacts the struggle for control of the British Isles from the Roman invasion of 43AD to the Norman conquest in 1066.

The new edition from Fantasy Flight games looks much prettier than Melissa’s 20-year-old copy. While the rules have been updated for the new edition, the basic game remains the same – but is now accessible to a new generation of gamers.




We will also have a PC running a selection of Scott Nicholson's video reviews of boardgames:
Video Reviews
Many thanks to Scott Nicholson of http://www.boardgameswithscott.com for his permission to show these boardgame reviews.

You can see Scott’s reviews at his website, or subscribe to automatically receive new reviews through iTunes.

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We also have a folder of game reviews, I've spoken to the museum shop and promised the guy there that I'll give him a list of games we're displaying (with distributors ...), I'm not sure what else is left. I have that nagging feeling that I've forgotten something, though.

Almost--but not quite--roleplaying

A month or two ago I played a game of Fantasy Flight’s Descent with my gaming group. This game is an elaborate dungeon crawl with lots of plastic heroes and monsters. Nothing we haven’t seen before, but it seemed nicely done. I didn’t feel a need to rush out and buy myself a copy, but that may have more to do with the subject matter than any problems with the game. I was never a big roleplaying guy.

But wait, you say—isn’t Descent a boardgame? It really isn’t roleplaying at all.

Well, that may technically be true, but Descent is certainly a second cousin of Dungeons and Dragons, the original and longest-running RPG. As with D&D, in Descent you pick a character, you fight monsters and gather treasure, and you strengthen your character by gathering magic items or by improving your character’s abilities. A game of Descent is meant to be played in one sitting, and is thus a more self-contained experience than an on-going RPG campaign which could last for years. In fact, Descent resembles one chapter of a larger campaign, and I could see some clever Dungeon Masters using Descent to model a dungeon-crawl episode of their own campaigns.

Descent is only one of a half-dozen board games that seem to model the RPG experience. Along with Descent, Fantasy Flight has Runebound and World of Warcraft. Other games of this mini-genre include Heroquest, Dungeoneer, Return of the Heroes, and a Dungeons and Dragons boardgame.

But who is playing these games? And why? I would think that any die-hard roleplaying gamer would prefer a true campaign with all the limitless possibilities that a great DM can offer to players. Wouldn’t a real roleplayer find these games too cut-and-dried, too confining?

Or are these games being played by gamers who aren’t real roleplayers, but who would like to sneak up on the roleplaying experience without actually buying all the costly tomes that seem to be an obligatory part of Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs? Are these games meant to be roleplaying for boardgamers? Are they roleplaying lite?

I’m really just asking the question here. I don’t have any definitive answer.

I do know something about the fun-potential of roleplaying games because although I may not have immersed myself in this world, my brother has. Kyle has been playing and running RPGs since his college days, and he has played D&D, Dragonquest, GURPS, and at least one home-made system that he invented when the others didn’t satisfy. I have learned a lot about these games through brotherly osmosis. A good roleplaying campaign can have the complexity and depth of a good novel. When creating campaigns, Kyle tries to not only include plenty of action opportunities, but interesting characters, gripping mysteries, complex and deplorable villains, and even excruciating moral choices. One of his villains magically poisoned an entire village and then made sure the villagers knew that the only cure was drinking the blood of an innocent girl that the villain left bound in the village square. (I can’t remember if his heroes found a satisfactory way out of that dilemma).

This kind of complexity is exactly the kind of thing that D&D style board games lack. Fantasy board games capture only the most obvious aspects of roleplaying: the fantasy setting, the collection of plunder, the gradual improvement of character abilities, and the fighting. Real character and plot are the first casualties when an RPG becomes a board game. Combat and plunder are certainly enough to sustain a board game, but I still wonder why someone would choose to play Runebound when they could play a real D&D campaign. Or am I overlooking something as simple as a lack of good DMs?

Let me repeat that I am not knocking these board games themselves. Just this week I started doing some solitaire tinkering with Arkham Horror, another Fantasy Flight production. Now, Arkham Horror is not a board game version of Call of Cthulhu, the Lovecraftian RPG or even Call of Cthulhu, the collectable card game which Fantasy Flight also sells. Arkham Horror is a re-design of the 1984 board game that was put out by Chaosium. But it certainly seems like a second cousin of these Call of Cthulhu games.

I bought Arkham Horror last January in my annual games-I-should-have-gotten-for-Christmas-but-didn’t purchase. Some of the members of my gaming group are fond of the game, but Arkham Horror takes too long to play at one of our weeknight gaming sessions, and so I haven’t had the opportunity to play it with a group yet. But we are only eight weeks from Halloween, and the spooky-themed games are going to be coming out of the closet soon. I thought I’d teach myself the game while I had a free moment.

At first the mechanics of Arkham Horror seemed a little too repetitive. A gate opens, and you close it. Another game opens, and you close it. But the Great Old One kicked the collective butts of my investigators, and a challenge is always a good way to hook a gamer. And at least the game didn’t seem too easy (it has a reputation for being too easy—at least for experienced players). In spite of my underwhelmed initial reaction, I wanted to try it again.

And soon I was hooked. I haven’t actually finished a full game yet (I give up if I’ve been playing for four hours and the situation seems hopeless), but I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of the game. I like the rumor cards that add new threats and mini-quests to the game. I like playing spot-the Lovecraft-reference (I grew up in Rhode Island and am a fan of the old Providence coot). I like the suspense that comes when a really formidable monster finally appears on the board. I even like the epic length of the game (up to a point—I hope no session of Arkham Horror ever drags on for seven hours or more).

I think this year Arkham Horror will be the Halloween game of choice.

But do I have an impulse to check out the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game? Try to find someone who is running a Lovecraftian campaign? No, not really. I guess I prefer to be almost—but not quite—roleplaying.

Six Degrees, The Second Edition

Next month my first article will be published over in Knucklebones magazine. It's a bio on Bruno Faidutti and his games. To celebrate that I'll be publishing a few new articles about Bruno here in Gone Gaming. So, enjoy, and be sure to pick up the November 2006 coverdated Knucklebones when it hits your local game store to read more about "the master of chaos".

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Based upon the hypothesis that game design is a particularly collaborative type of creativity, this February I posted an article I dubbed Six Degrees of Collaboration wherein I showed the interconnectivity of the game design world based upon who had done full-fledged collaborations with whom.

I was quick to discover that the center of my chart was Bruno Faidutti, a French game designer who had done work not with just other French designers, but also Americans, Germans, and Italians. He was the lynchpin that hung the whole world of game design together.

Since then I've been occasionally expanding and tweaking my chart, as interest and knowledge strike me. Bruno Faidutti's central role hasn't changed much. His 10 connections on the previous chart have expanded to 11 connections in this chart plus a pseudo-connection. However I've been able to fill in much of the periphery, discovering entire new game companies who connect back to Faidutti.

In the process I also learned a bit more about collaboration ...

Types of Game Collaboration

In my initial article I detailed three different types of collaboration: true collaboration, serial collaboration, and developmental collaboration. To those I add a fourth type of collaboration: supplemental collaboration.

True Collaboration: A (usually) peer-to-peer type of collaboration. Two designers work together in order to jointly create a game. It can be face-to-face or it can be offline. It's the prime type of collaboration described herein.

Developmental Collaboration: A hierarchical type of collaboration. A designer creates a game, then a developer revises it. Typically I don't consider developmental collaboration sufficiently interesting to be listed on this chart (though, make no mistake, it's crucial to the success of most games). However, when developmental collaboration rises to the point where both creators' names are listed on the game box, then it's included herein. This seems to happen most often in American releases, such as Arkham Horror or Runebound.

Serial Collaboration: A hierarchical type of collaboration. One creator designs a game, then another creator designs another game using the same core system. Carcassonne and Empire Builder both offer examples of this.

Supplemental Collaboration: A hierarchical type of collaboration. One creator designs a game, then another creator designs a supplement for that game. Again, this tends to happen most frequently in American releases with Arkham Horror and Dungeon! both being examples on the chart.

Schools of Game Design

We can look at collaborations via another means: the nationality of the designer. Last December I outlined several different schools of game design and differentiated between the national characters of Anglo-American, French, German, and Italian games. As I've continued to build out my "Six Degrees of Bruno Faidutti" chart, it's become obvious that these national characters influence not just the way that designers make games, but also the way in which they engage in collaboration.

Anglo-American Collaboration: Anglo-American engage in collaboration through corporations. We see this through large numbers of American game companies, most prominently TSR, FASA, and SPI. The very similar graphing of Games Workshop shows that this style of working together isn't limited to this side of the pond. These ongoing business relationships make collaborations much more common in the United States, and if Anglo-American games are disproportionately represented in my chart, it's because they also have many more collaborations through their corporate entities.

Also notable is how loyal these corporate entities remain. Very few Anglo-American designers seem to engage in collaborations with more than one company. You have a Gary Gygax who moves from Avalon Hill to TSR or a Scott Haring who moves from TSR to Steve Jackson Games, but these are the exceptions (who helpfully provide us with connectivity), not the rules. More often an Anglo-American game designer seems to remain in collaboration with his choosen company until: he leaves the industry, the game company goes out of business, or he strikes out on his own to form a new company.

French Collaboration: French collaboration was the basis of my original article, and seems to exist as networked collaboration. Designers collaborate with friends in a very freeform manner, and are perfectly happy to design a few games each with a lot of different people. Granted, this definition is currently based largely on Bruno Faidutti's work, but we see similar patterns with his direct contacts, Ludovic Maublanc, Serge Laget, and Bruno Cathala.

Days of Wonder, a French-American company, appears in the chart for the first time in this new edition, and it's remarkable that their pattern of publication seems to match the French networked collaboration model rather than the corporate collaboration model of American companies. Ignoring the public-domain Gang of Four, every Days of Wonder game designer has a Faidutti Factor of 2 or less. With a dozen games under their belt, that can't be a coincidence.

(A suggestion to Days of Wonder for a new marketing slogan: "Two Degrees of Bruno Faidutti, and proud of it!")

German Collaboration: There were comments on my original article asking why the Germans were so poorly represented. Simply: they don't seem to collaborate. More frequently German designers seem to be fierce individualists, or else have one or more co-designers with whom they do lots of work.

In this newest chart I have pushed as many of the German designers together as I could, but they don't actually fall into a cohesive whole like many of the other categories of designers do. Klaus Jurgen-Wrede and Reiner Knizia are only connected through serial designs of Carcassonne on one side and Avalon Hill's developmental design of Titan: The Arena on the other. Nearby Wolfgang Kramer only connects up through a developmental design of Daytona 500. We only get to HiG's Bernd Brunnhofer through Bruno Faidutti's serial design of Democrazy. Friedemann Friesse is at the center of a fine cluster of indie German designers, but you can only get to that through a pseudo-connection from Bruno Faidutti to Marcel-Andre Cassasola Merkle. (The role selection system in Faidutti's Citadels came from Merkle's Verrater.)

Italian Collaboration: Though the Italian side of this chart is still pretty sparse, I did do a lot more work this time looking at the Italian landscape of collaborative design. It looks to me like it's geling around a corporate collaborative model much like the United States, but that it's still in a sufficiently early stage that you can't really connect people yet. As seen in my recent "Six Degrees of Italy" chart (reprinted to the right; click for a larger view), there are lots of separate designer communities, only one of which connected back to the main chart through Venice's Jagd der Vampire. Oddly, I see more three-person and four-person collaborations in Italy than I found elsewhere (including the newly founded group Acchittocca), and so I'm left wondering if the "design studio" is a unique aspect of Italian collaboration.

I think we're really going to see the Italian design community gel in the next five years, if daVinci and other leaders in the market continue to find success.

The New Chart

And so let me finally present the new chart. It has considerably more designers than the old one did. Here's some of the major new discoveries:

Old American company Chaosium was added thanks to a link that didn't exist six months ago: the first Arkham Horror supplements, designed by Robert Vaughn. This let me link in Arkham Horror itself and from there a number of Chaosium employees. I was actually surprised that the Chaosium folks didn't do more board game collaboration, but then they've primarily been a roleplaying company for the last 25 years.

Just for fun, I put myself on this chart too, in the Chaosium section. I've got weak (for board game) connectivity to: Greg Stafford (RPG work), Lynn Willis (RPG work), Kevin Jacklin (RPG work), Charlie Krank (Mythos development), and Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson (Arkham Horror development). If you want you can draw in all those connections on your copy of the chart; the arrangement of the companies is correct for them. And, that would provide a cross-link from Chaosium down toward Reiner Knizia.

But moving back to actual board game connections ...

The new game Funny Friends was another one that opened up connections to several new designers, here Friedemann Friese's aforementioned friends. The connection is weak, because it goes through the serial borrowing of a single game mechanic, role drafting, but it's an openly acknowledged borrowing, so I've included it on the chart.

FASA and Games Workshop both appear on this new chart thanks to a link from Derek Carver that I'd been too lazy to follow-up on in my first iteration of this chart. However I was even more surprised to discover that FASA in turn linked up to Bill Fawcett, who was also already on my original chart. I'd missed his connection because of his alternatively using William and Bill as name in his design work, something else that seems to happen more often in American designs for some reason. In any case, this created a new crosslink on the chart that helps to hold everything together.

SPI and West End Games are two more American companies that appear for the first time, all through Steve Winter's supplemental work on Sniper. (You'll note that all of my major new connections are slightly weak, through supplements or mechanic borrowing.) The SPI section is pretty amazing in how it forms an almost perfect wheel around the late Redmond Simonsen. His influence on wargaming design, and thus board game design in general, can't be underestimated, and I think that's clearly and graphically shown by his position at the center of SPI creativity. Given his love of graphic designs, I think he would have approved.

With all that said, here's some charts. On the left is the old chart, for comparison purposes, and on the right is the new one. Just click on either to see the full-sized chart.

The Old Chart:

The New Chart:

Conclusion

I sure this won't be my last iteration of the Six Degrees. I've still got a couple of old paths that I want to track down, and every month brings new collaborations as well. Me, I'm still waiting for my holy grail: the connection to Klaus Teuber. I think the missing link will ultimately be the Atlantis expansion to Settlers of Catan. I just need to wait for some of Teuber's collaborators there to do more original work of their own. My current money is on Stefan Risthaus as being the one who'll bring Klaus Teuber into the world of Bruno Faidutti.

Special Guest Blogger--R.E.D.

I was searching blogs when I happened upon one written by a young Meeple and he was kind enough to give me permission to publish his first entry here at Gone Gaming. I hope you enjoy this peek into his life as much as I did.
~~~~~

My name is Reginald Eugene Daniel but my friends and family call me Red. My father’s a farmer and I help him a lot by keeping watch over his fields. Not much happens around here usually but it’s a good place to watch what’s going on in the city and surrounding area.

Last week someone finally bought the farm near us. His name is Beauregard Lionel Ulysses Eddrick (we just call him Blue) and he wanted us to share our field with him. Pop got so mad he turned maroon! It didn’t take long for him to call our cousin, Richard Elliot David, to come and help me guard the field. We managed to keep that old Blue from stealing our farm and being able to sell to the surrounding cities. It wasn’t all hard work, though. We went down to the river and made mud balls to throw at Blue. Now that was fun!

My mom’s second cousin once removed on her father’s side is one of the city guards. He says the city is growing so big that they might have to increase the number of guards. Boy, I’d sure like to do that. They get to wear a cool looking uniform and the girls just fall all over them. But Pop says he needs me here on the farm.

When I feel down about that or just feel like talking, I sometimes go and visit the priest in the nearby monastery, Father Gregory. He’s a real nice guy and very helpful even if he is old and his skin is kinda green. He’s very easy to talk to and I even told him about this girl I met who tends the pigs in the field across the road. Her name is Yolanda Eileen something. Her shape is wonderfully flat and she has blonde hair. She’s beautiful.

The most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me was the day I met a thief on the road. We talked for a long time about what it’s like to be a thief and I felt so sorry for him that I shared my lunch with him. I thought he could probably use it since he didn’t look too healthy. His skin was kinda gray looking and there was a big bump on his head. He said thank you very politely and then rode off towards the city. I think about him once in a while and hope he’s doing o.k.

Well, I better get to bed so I’ll be ready for another day of guarding the field. I hope I dream about Yolanda. I wonder what our kids would look like.

What? Another Gone Gaming Article?

Yehuda

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Screw the mail, where's my Howizter?

I'll be making quite a few people cheerful today.

That's because this will be a relatively short entry. The last several days were consumed by visiting relatives from California, which included my brother, his daughter and son-in-law, their two kids and my mother. Along with that, my daughter flew in from Chicago, my dad drove out from Boise, my son Wyatt was here and thus commenced three full days of non-gaming activities.

Thankfully, all but the oldsters agreed to go to the rodeo with me... so despite not gaming, I at least got to see large animals pound arrogant humans into the dirt.

I did want to comment on Thurn and Taxis though. I finally managed to get my copy of this Rio Grande reprint into play a week or so back and it was a unique setting for me. An old buddy of mine and his wife were visiting Idaho and I managed to get Jumbo-Tron to come over and the four of us played this interesting looking Euro.

First off... I don't agree that it's "too much like Ticket to Ride". That's an accusation I've seen bandied about frequently. The similarity I think most detractors are talking about is the mechanic of snagging valuable VP's away in a stack of VP's that reduce in value as each one is scored. T2R:Marklin uses this same mechanic and it's a common enough one that singeling it out is pretty petty.

I believe this particular game will be played at my house a couple more times and then go onto the trade and/or eBay shelf. Here's why -

* It's not as easy to teach newbies as Ticket to Ride
* It's a bit too long as a Gateway Game
* Overall, it's a medium-boring game

I'm not suggesting Thurn and Taxis isn't a decent game, as Euro's go, it is decent. It just doesn't have a hook. You know, it doesn't grab me and give me the desire to play again and again.

On top of which, who really gives a crap about cartrights, mail routes and VP's? While I admit the game itself plays well and is smooth, at no point did I feel immersed. For the most part it seemed I was solving a puzzle, allocating my little wooden cities to maximize VP collection and racing to get a Level 7 Mail cart in order to end the game... all while parceling the wooden cities out quick enough so as not to have any left to count against my score.

All this makes me wonder why on the detractors of the game on BGG didn't accuse the designers of stealing from Age of Steam as well as Ticket to Ride. After all, the mechanic of getting a higher level Cart is similar to getting a train in Age of Steam that "goes faster".

Anyone who has bothered to look at my game ratings on The Geek knows I do like some Euros, so it's not like I'd pick on Thurn and Taxis because it's a Euro. It just isn't an exciting or fetching Euro. Keythedral is a great Euro. T2R as well (and yes, I catagorize the T2R series as Euro's). Age of Steam is a medium heavy Euro that is tough and appealing. RRT is a medium heavy Euro that is Americanized and highly replayable. I even pre-ordered the Roads & Boats reprint from Tom because of all the clamor over what a fantastic game it is.... and for $130+ it had better be a good one.

It's my humble opinion that Thurn and Taxis will win the big SDJ award but even that is meaningless to many because Niagra won that already and Niagra is one of the silliest games I've seen produced since I bought my kids a copy of Hungry, Hungry Hippos back in the 80's.

All this discussion really does is exhibit how much I enjoy conflict and aggression in my games. I bought Thurn and Taxis, true. But what I really want is Tide of Iron. Or Combat Commander. Or pretty much anything where people can sit down in the evening, crack open a beer or a Gatorade and start blowing the hell out of each other. Or, if weapons aren't involved, screwing each other over in an overt and "in your face" fashion.

By the way... if you have parents or grandparents in their 80's, invite them over. Every time I get around my octogenarian parents I come away feeling a little smarter, a little more humble and feeling a little more positive in general.

Have a great week and hopefully I'll be back Monday with some new insouciance designed specifically to piss off the largest number of gamers.

Is Ra broken?

There has been much discussion about seating position problems in games, usually but not always centred on Puerto Rico. This is usually a static seating problem, for example if you are an average Puerto Rico player, but sitting the left of a village idiot you will be enhanced to the status of Puerto Rico Grand Master, or so some of the discussions seem to imply.

Why is it that nobody has talked about the dynamic seating issue in Ra? In Ra you don't have the Village Idiot problem, you have the Junk Bidder problem.

The Junk Bidder is the player who has at least two low Sun tiles, usually with values under five. Let us say, hypothetically of course, that you are the player to their left with a God tile and one reasonable Sun tile left. You may, or may not hypothetically speaking, have six different monument tiles and no civilisation tiles.

Round after round, one of the two monuments you want, nay need, comes up. Every single time the bag reaches the Junk Bidder they casually dismiss it and call Ra, meaning that yet again you won't be able to use your hypothetical God tile to pick up that seventh monument type. With the God and a bid you thought that you should be able to pick up both a monument and a civilisation tile for an easy ten points before the end of the epoch without any problems. The first time a monument piece that you want is there the Junk Bidder calls Ra, but you need to pass so that you can use your God tile later. Unfortunately there is enough interest in the auction that one of the other players bids and the Junk Bidder is left with all torturous Sun Tiles intact. The third time this happens there is, again hypothetically speaking, one of the monuments you need and a civilisation tile. Of course the Junk Bidder calls Ra, this time you figure you will just take the two points for the God and bid. Of course you are outbid by one of the other players who both seem determined to leave the Junk Bidder empowered to do their worst against you.

Three vitally important monuments and a civilisation tile have now gone, you still have your God and Sun tile and the Junk Bidder is still sitting with their three and four Sun Tiles that are turning your life in one of abject misery. An epoch that started so well is heading towards an end with a whimper with you turned into a blubbering incompetent wreck who can't get anything.

If this hypothetical game had actually occurred you would have gone from leading in the first epoch with six different monument types to coming dead last at the end of the game.

I suppose I should not discuss this with MrSkeletor or he will campaign against "another broken Reiner".

Speaking of MrSkeletor I must commend him for raising general table banter and trash talking to a new height this week during a game of Beowulf. Has anyone noticed that a quarter of the board is missing? Or did Doug just get a dud copy? However, I digress.

As well as the usual "take the risk, it's only a scratch" and "you don't have three wounds yet" type of comments that seems quite common in our group, MrSkeletor elevated the experience by reading out his interpretations of the thematic descriptions for each encounter along the way. I'm still not entirely sold on the game and the monumental risk taking events that occurred did seem to encourage a little too much "speaking in Danish" from Anna and myself according to Doug, but I would play it again even without MrSkeletor's commentary.

How to spot a gamer child
I had opened up a new game this morning and when I picked up the counter sheet I noticed that all of the pieces except for one red one had fallen out in transit. Daughter the Younger wandered into the room, looked at what I was doing and said "You need to push the red one out Daddy". Now I must stop writing and play a game with her since she has been asking me so nicely (actually saying "please" without prompting). She is requesting the yellow one with red writing and the grey one.

Mmmm Meeples taste like...

The Two-Player IGA Nominees

I won’t make any predictions about who could win or lose the IGA two-player competition because I know nothing about the politics of the organization or what they like to look for. But I’ve played three of these games, and Shannon Appelcline has played the other two, so between us we have something to say about all of them. First, here are Shannon’s comments on Punct and Travel Blokus.


Punct is an abstract game that centers around building connections across the board, with two cool differences that you don't find in most games of the sort. First, you can build three-dimensionally by bridging some pieces over others, and second you can move pieces after they've hit the board.

Despite not liking abstracts in general, I like this one, and would say it's the best 2-player game I've picked up since last year's (very different) Dungeon Twister. On the downside it degenerates into form of trench warfare at the end, with lots of back and forth.

I think Punct has some cachet as the last GIPF game, but I don't think that's enough to offset the non-sexiness of being a pure abstract, and thus I'd rate Punct as a dark horse candidate for the IGA, though a deserving one if it does win. (And I'll comment that Dvonn, a GIPF game, did win in the past, and in the first round of voting even.)

Travel Blokus is this year's 2-player version of the Blokus game, made smaller and more compact for the traveler (though for gamers I suspect its main appeal is the 2-player aspect, not the travel design). As with Blokus you try and get most pieces down through clever play of your shapes to the board.

Like Punct, this is another abstract that I like anyway. It's a very thoughtful game and one that allows for a lot of skill. Sometime's it's even more thoughtful than I'd personally like, but I certainly can't hold that against the game.

However, I couldn't possibly see it winning the IGA. It's a knockoff of an original, with very little to distinguish it on its own. A prize for Travel Blokus would just be a way of saying that the judges regretted not giving Blokus any recognition back in 2000.

Aton is a quick-playing Egyptian-themed gem. Like all gems, it is small, shiny, and highly-polished. Aton is a majority-control game from designer Thorsten Gimmler. It is published by Queen Games, and distributed by Rio Grande here in the USA.

But don’t we have enough majority control games? I mean, with El Grande, and San Marco, and Capitol, and Web of Power, do we really need another one? And what’s so special about this one?

Well, if the games mentioned above are grand but intricate multi-player contests, Aton is a rapier-quick duel. Over a series of turns, two players each allocate four cards to four different spaces to determine their capabilities for that turn. Each card is numbered from one to four. No text, no special abilities. The four allocation spaces determine how many quick victory points are earned that turn, how many opposing markers can be removed from the board, which of four temples your markers can be placed in, and how many new makers you get to allocate this turn.

The game board is divided into four temples, each of which holds several spaces of different colors and some bonus point spaces. Players can earn points for controlling the majority of spaces in one temple, or for controlling the majority of certain colored spaces on the whole board. There are sudden-death victory conditions to keep both players on their toes: if any player grabs all the spaces in one temple, or all the green or all the yellow spaces, he wins instantly. Otherwise, first player to gain forty points wins.

The game supposedly has an Egyptian-theme (two religious factions are fighting for control of the temples) but the theme is paper-thin. As far as I am concerned, this is an abstract token-placement game.

I am not the ideal person to sing the praises of this game because I usually dislike abstract games. And yet I like Aton. It has the elegance of simplicity, and creates dilemmas by offering several alternate paths to victory. Although both players draw cards from their own deck each turn, both decks are identical. Luck is therefore not a huge factor in the game. Aton is simple enough to play with non-gamer friends, but deep enough to intrigue real gamers.


Twilight Struggle is a GMT Games’ grand strategic treatment of the Cold War conflict. Designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, Twilight Stuggle has sent Alan Moon into such ecstasies of gaming rapture that GMT now quotes Moon on their website.

What’s so original about this game? Isn’t it another one of those card-driven games that GMT churns out like Cracker-Jacks? And once you open up the hood and take a look at the engine, isn’t it just another majority-area-control game?

Yes, it is both. And yet how else to turn the non-hot-war aspects of the Cold War conflict into a boardgame than with red and blue political influence markers slugging it out in the far corners of the globe? The area-majority mechanism gives the game a simple but powerful engine while the cards provide theme and period flavor.

One of the innovations of Twilight Struggle is that players are usually required to play event cards that benefit their opponent. One or two cards can be allocated to the Space Race each turn where nasty events are neutralized, but usually each player holds too many enemy-benefiting cards for that strategy to work completely. This often makes each turn an exercise in damage control. A Defcon Status track also makes nuclear war a possibility if the players don’t keep tight control of their own worst impulses. (The very first game I played ended after only a turn or two when the Soviet player accidentally triggered a Dr. Strangelove scenario).

While the card-driven wargame genre has of late been producing increasingly complex games (Here I Stand being the prime example), Twilight Struggle has gone in the opposite direction. This is a wargame that is so simple that many non-wargamers enjoy it.


War of the Ring, Battles of the Third Age is both a new mini-game about operational-level campaigns in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and an expansion for the grand-strategic-level game War of the Ring that won last year’s IGA award in the two-player category.

I can’t give a truly objective opinion of this game because I was one of its playtesters. Probably it’s most unworthy playtester. While playtester Alex Rockwell was e-mailing complex mathematical analysis of all aspects of a new game change to the designers, I was sending statements along the lines of “Sauron keeps winning. Am I doing something wrong?”

War of the Ring, Battles of the Third Age is one of the leading examples of a small trend that is emerging in the gaming field: giving players variant mini-campaigns on the same subject matter as a previous game while simultaneously expanding that original game (The other Fantasy Flight game that does this is the just released A Game of Thrones, Storm of Swords expansion). This gives players a lot for their money.

War of the Ring, Battles of the Third Age contains both a Rohan scenario and a Gondor campaign as well as elements that expand the original War of the Ring game. Both campaigns use army and character pieces from the original game, but have rules that have been adjusted for the operational scale of the scenarios. Combat is handled in more detail, and different kinds of units now have differing combat abilities. These scenarios were designed to have shorter playing times than the original game while still being meaty wargames with plenty of options. Most gamers find the Gondor campaign to be more interesting than the Rohan scenario.

The expansion for the original War of the Ring game includes characters, creatures and military units that only appeared on cards in the original game. Both players get more options at the cost of making the playing time of the game slightly longer. There was some attempt to address the complaints that the game favored the Shadow player, but I don’t think this problem has been completely solved yet (and there are a few players who still insist that the game favors the Free Peoples).

Would the IGA judges give an expansion the two-player award the year after they honored the original game with the same award? I have no clue. I only know that the game is worth buying if you are a War of the Ring fan.

The Multiplayer IGA Nominees

There are, over the gaming year, five different major awards. The first two are the German awards, the SdJ and the DSP. Then there's the RPG industry award, the Origins, and finally the American mass-market award, the Games 100. It's pretty easy to pigeon-hole each of these:

• The SdJ is a German award for a casual or family game.
  
• The DSP is likewise a German award for more serious games, though the results have been getting more casual as they've started to let the masses vote.
  
• The Origins board & card game awards are, first of all, more beauty contests than anything else, where people vote on companies as much as products. In addition they tend to award American take-that style play. If you're looking for a new Munchkin, look here. (Since splitting into the Origins award & Choice awards, Origins proper has gotten somewhat better, while the Choice awards continue to be about what you'd expect.)
  
• The Games 100 are a very eclectic mix, centering on ultra-casual strategy-light games that'll appeal to the (American) mass market, but extending somewhat to more gamist games, thanks primarily to the fact that they get to name 100 picks.
  

... and then there's the IGA, the International Gamer Awards.

I don't say that out of any disrespect, but rather because I have no idea what they stand for. Chris Farrell made the same comment last year, but based on that year's nominations suggested that there was a "new emphasis on some decent, off-mainstream games". Of course, Ticket to Ride: Europe won, and it was one of the two most mainstream games on the list.

I think part of the reason that the IGA continues to confuse me is because they insist on being international. Of this year's 11 multiplayer nominations, five don't have any real English-world distribution--Antike, Das Ende Des Triumvirats, Indonesia, Jenseits von Theban, and Un Krone und Kragen--though Antike, Das Ende Des Triumvirats, and Un Krone und Kragen are scheduled for September while Indonesia was published in a bilingual edition and has us much distribution as you'd expect for an indie game from Netherlands that's at least trying to get into the U.S. A sixth game, Blue Moon City, is just two weeks' old is in US printing. I honestly can't see how nominating games not particularly available to their primarily English-speaking audience is that helpful to anyone but the most diehard grognards, and I can see how it makes the IGA awards fade right into the spectrum between the SDJ and the DSP--which explains why I don't know what they stand for, because as far as I can tell they're just a second edition of the DSP.

If I ruled the world, the IGAs would explicitly and specifically give awards to gamers' games available to the English-speaking American public, because neither the Origins Awards nor the Games 100 go for that demographic. You could thus use American publication dates rather than German publication dates, differentiating the IGA even further from its German brethren. But I don't run the world, and so I'm afraid that in another year the IGA is going to be even more confused, given the entry of another (as if we needed that) gaming award on the scene, the Geekies.

Enough rant, I want to talk more about the games up for this year's multiplayer IGA.

(If you want to know about the two-player IGA, look to tomorrow's post.)

The Multiplayer IGA Nominees

The IGA put up 11 nominees for this year's awards. Despite the fact that I usually try and get to the new games as fast as I can, I've only played five of them. (Though I probably would have gotten to Blue Moon City last week if Tempus hadn't been available for play too.) Here's my general thoughts on everything I can talk about to any extent, with a bonus comment from Coldfoot, who played one of the six I hadn't.

Antike is a new entrant into the Civ Light category, and its a pretty good contender for that Holy Grail in pure scope of gameplay. You have your technology, your warfare, and your resource management; the only thing really missing from the old Civ formula is trade. On the downside it's a poorly developed game with issues with both combat and victory, where things can go badly if you play "wrong". I've ranted more than once about OK games that could have been truly great if an external developer had gotten to them. This is another, and I doubt it'll win the IGA for reason of these sharp edges.

Blue Moon City is a game that I haven't gotten to play, but that I'm looking forward to. As a Knizian resource-management game I think it's going to be fine release, but the hype I've heard thus far is pretty low key, which suggests to me that this is going to fit right into Knizia's more recent category of strategic games like Tower of Babel that are nonetheless very light weight.

Caylus is pretty clearly the most strategic game on this list among those that I've played. It's Puerto Rico for people who think that Puerto Rico is too simple and short. Like Antike I think it could have been a truly great game if it had some outside development, but unlike Antike I think it's already a pretty fine game (though again it has gameplay problems if you play it "wrong", a recurring theme among indies). If the IGA judges decide on a heavy-weight game, I have faith that it'll be this one.

Des Endes des Triumvirats is a game that I feel is just wasting space on the IGA nominations list, along with Indonesia, and Jenseits von Theban. These games have gotten so little buzz that they're going to be pretty unknown to most anyone who looks at the awards, and I think the public and the awards would have been better served by these games actually showing up in the awards during a year in which they'd seen American publication. And I can't see any of these winning an IGA award as a result.

Hacienda is a decent tile-laying game by Wolfgang Kramer that reminds me a bit of Through the Desert with a lot more complexity. You score points by building sets of land and in the process must manage funds through the placement of animals. It's got a lot of interconnected systems that work together decently well, but never click as a whole. It's a good game that I've played 5 times since its release and that I'd give a solid "B" to, but I don't think it's award-winning material.

Coldfoot offers the following on Indonesia:

Indonesia is clearly the best game among the handful of nominees I have played (Caylus, RR Tycoon, Hacienda, and Thurn and Taxis), although I have high hopes for Antike. There are some production gaffes, which is not that uncommon for these small-publisher games, and there are a jillion cardboard chits, both of which will weigh heavily against Indonesia in the final balloting. Indonesia is a game of production, distribution, business mergers, and expansion. It is almost an exercise in book keeping, still it is less book keeping intensive than some other fine Splotter-Spellen games. There is some hubbub on the net about the so called "shipping strategy", but I'm here to tell you that the shipping strategy is much more viable as the number of players increases. Keep that in mind and don't let the shipping companies go for less than they are worth, which will change with the number of players.

Mykerinos is the one game that I'd previously heard of and was surprised to see on this list. It's a recent Ystari release that had none of the sturm und drang of Ys or Caylus. (Would you look at that ... every one of their games has a "Y", then a "S" in it.) Further, I've heard some concerns about degenerate play. So, I think this one is a pretty longshot for the IGA, but that's spoken from a position of ignorance as I've never played it. (I really should.)

Railroad Tycoon was a game that I was surprised didn't show up in the Origins awards. It wasn't even nominated. (But then, that's always been a problem with the Origins; great games sometimes randomly don't win because they weren't submitted.) In the landscape of American games, I can see Railroad Tycoon as a great contender. It's a great Eurostyle game with some pretty random cards, some kick-ass pieces, and a very long playing time, and thus it should really become the King of the American Games. Among Eurogames, it's a photocopy of Age of Steam with some systems improved, some not, and I can't see the IGA being awarded to a photocopy: if they'd wanted to highlight this game, the publication of Age of Steam was the right time. (But then I would have offered the same argument after last year's nomination of Ticket to Ride Europe.)

Thurn und Taxis is what I see as the other strongest contender for the IGA, with the difference between it and Caylus mainly being whether they decide to honor a light game or a heavy one. T&T is a connection game with aspects of card management, brinkmanship, and role selection. It all fits together into a superb harmonious whole that's enjoyable to play. In many ways it feels like an attempt to create an entirely new and original Ticket to Ride and in that it succeeds, except for the fact that it's a bit more shallow in replayability. I had no doubt that T&T would win the SdJ due to its German theming. That's not going to help in the IGA, which drops it down a little in my handicapping.

Um Krone und Kragen I haven't played due to its lack of release in the U.S. However, it's gotten some nice hype due to its design by Tom Lehmann and its description as "Super Yahtzee". I've heard enough about the game that it's interesting me much more than it originally did, and I'd place it as a dark-horse third-best contender for the IGA, after Caylus and Thurn & Taxis.

Conclusion

That it's for my thoughts on the IGA. I like and respect a lot of people involved in the award, and I have no doubt that a bunch of good games were put up, but I'm still confused as to its reason for existence. The schizophrenic split between the sorts of games you'd see in the main German awards, and the indie games that aren't available in the U.S. anyway confuses me, and so I'm still not sure what the IGA offers that other awards don't. However, I'll keep an eye out for the results, and if the winner is something I haven't played, I'll inevitably make an attempt to try and play it.

For more on the IGA watch for tomorrow's Gone Gaming when Kris Hall will talk about the 2-player nominees with some help from myself.

From the Book of I Teuber, Chapter 11

1. In the year of Mississippi Queen, during the reign of Knizia the Wise, a Gamer of Gamers came forth from the Bayou and walked amongst the Children of Hasbro. His name was Greg which means "He Who Writes Session Reports".

2. Greg first appeared unto the Children of Hasbro in the Land of the Spielfriek-ites, a tiny land with abundant groves bearing large fruit, and sheltered by great mountains. The inhabitants were few but were eager for the Word of Boardgames.

3. In the Land of the Spielfriek-ites Greg spoke with a knowledgeable voice and the Words he spoke resounded in the halls of kings far beyond the shadow of the Moderator Mountains. He spoke with a kind, yet mighty voice and said, "Hear me ye Children of Hasbro and listen good for I bring unto you the Word of Good Boardgames and Good Card Games from a far land that is called Germany."

4. The Spielfriek-ites listened and all who heard him said, "Here is a good, wise and humble man. Surely he knows of which he speaks."

5. Greg spread the Word of Good Boardgames amongst the Spielfriek-ites and they prospered. They multiplied quickly and the land bore much wool, grain, clay, ore, and timber which was used to make meeples, little wooden houses and colored cubes of varying sizes.

6. Heeding the Words of Greg and other wise men, the Kings, Merchants, Farmers and Priests of the Spielfriek-ites gathered much treasure and their Leaders acquired many followers making them safe from neighboring Kings, Merchants, Farmers, and Priests.

7. However, the next generation in the Land of the Spielfriek-ites grew discontented and bickered amongst themselves. The Children grew haughty and prideful in their knowledge of Games and scorned newcomers who came to hear the Words of Greg and other wise men.

8. That generation's displeasure with newbies was magnified every time one was heard to say, "Hey! I just played this great game called Catan something. Have you heard of it?" and "Gathering of Friends? What is that?" The older generation became jaded by the attitude of the younger.

9. Greg spaketh unto the young people saying unto them, "Have ye not heard my message of Boardgame Evangelism? Or have ye heard and not heeded? Your fields abound with corn, sugar, indigo, tobacco and coffee. Why are ye unwilling to share this bounty with the Children of Hasbro in less fortunate lands?" The young people listened not and continued to throw barbs at newcomers.

10. Greg dreamt one night of a Meeple saying, "The Children of the Spielfriek-ites have turned away from The Message of Good Boardgames and have grown discontented by the words of rules lawyers, chit-chatterers, and malcontents.

11. Neither abandon, nor forget the Spielfriek-ites, for their fathers were good and generous people and their grandchildren will likewise hear and be faithful. Nevertheless venture forth from this land and spread the Word of Good Boardgames amongst the Children of Hasbro in the land of the Geek. And Lo, create the International Gamers Awards to counteract the abomination which is the Games Magazine Game of the Year."

12. Greg arose and left the Land of Spielfriek-ites. On his journey he accepted neither gold nor cash donations, but survived on a stream of "review copies" delivered by the FedEx man every morning with regularity.

13. On his journey Greg met other wise men and created the IGA as the Meeple had instructed. He proclaimed the Word of Good Boardgames, and returned often to the Spielfriek-ites to share and to glean Words of Boardgame Wisdom.

14. One day on Greg's journey a pastel camel stood in his path and proclaimed, "A Spielfriek-ite named Derkes awaits in the Land of Dallas. Seek him out in the lowliest hovel, littered with beer cans and discarded pizza boxes, for he proclaims The Word of Good Boardgames and is a good and faithful servant."

15. Greg gawked at the camel and said, "Art Thou not a camel, how speakest to me as Thou wert a person?" The camel just winked. Greg said, "Surely none but an animal could live in a hovel such as Thou describest?" The pastel camel spat upon Greg, and would respond no more.

16. Greg found Derkes as the camel had proclaimed. Upon seeing Greg, Derkes offered a hand in "High 5" fashion and said, "Hark, The Gamer of Gamers. Two days ago a pastel camel appeared unto me saying, 'A man from the Bayou will arrive in two days. You must copy and paste his Words for all to see, especially for the Children of Hasbro who live in the shadow of the Moderator Mountains, but even unto those who live in the far corners of the Earth.' That smarmy camel then spat upon me, but I see it is You of whom he spoke."

17. Greg spaketh, "Arise, bathe yourself, and begin copying and pasting the Word I have given unto the Children of Hasbro, for I see that you are a True and Faithful Servant of Boardgames. I have an appointment with Prince Aaddam from the Land of Gamefest."

18. Derkes arose, gave Greg a bear hug, a slap on the back, and swore a few times. Between games of Tichu Derkes copied and pasted the Words of Greg for all the True Geeks to see. So spreadth the Word of Good Boardgames unto the Children of Hasbro in the Land of the Geek, and Lo, even unto those scattered beyond the corners of the Earth.

Game Awards, Pro and Con

Board Game Geek announced that it was starting a game award only a few weeks ago, and now come the IGA nominations for best games. It's game award season. Actually, all year is game award season.

Much has been written about game awards, pro and con. In fact, there is really little to say that hasn't already been written somewhere, by somebody. I can sum up some of the sentiments:

PRO:

Game awards attract mainstream interest in games, which benefit the publicity of games.

Game awards boost sales of the nominated games.

Game awards provide a topic of discussion for the game community, which result in information about games being made more readily available.

Game awards inspire designers to produce better games.

People naturally like to rank things and pick bests. Witness the plethora of top ten lists at the end of every year, as well as the continuing popularity of "list posts" on blogs.

Game publishers and designers really deserve our attention and thanks, and awards are a good means of giving these.

CON:

Game awards are the industry congratulating itself, which is both arrogant and full of nothing.

The same games are going to win most awards, so why have more than one? Especially, why have duplicate awards drawn from the same voting groups?

The vast majority of voters will only have played a few of these games; which results in popular games more likely to win, rather than better games.

Games are not meant to be "best" for all types of people, but serve only the target group to which they were marketed. Ranking them is therefore useless.

In particular, why would BGG have a game award when they already have a ranking system. How will they be any different?

How do you decide what games are included, and what aren't, based on publication date? What constitutes a board game, anyway? Or a light game? Or a card game?

And how do you handle game expansions, reprints, print and play games, free variants, and so on?


All well and good, both the positives and negatives. For my own part, I am kind of indifferent to these awards. I've seen too many good games without awards and too many bad games with them. My tastes are also skewed compared to the tastes of the masses, but not directly opposite them, either. So awards serve as no prediction for me as to whether or not I will like something.

When I see game awards, I am only reminded of all of the games that I have yet to play, and of all the other people who seem to be able to get their hands on so many more games than I do. Oh, well. At the very least, it gives me something to blog about.

Yehuda

IGA Finalists Announced

The International Gamers Awards committee is extremely proud to announce the finalists for the 2006 IGA in the General Strategy category. Games released from July 1, 2005 – June 30, 2006 are eligible for consideration. This complete list of this year's nominees includes:

GENERAL STRATEGY GAMES - Multi Player category

Antike
Designer: Mac Gerdts
Publisher: Eggertspiele & Rio Grande Games

Blue Moon City
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Kosmos & Fantasy Flight Games

Caylus
Designer: William Attia
Publisher: Ystari Games & Rio Grande Games

The End of the Triumverates
Designers: Max Gabrian & Johannes Ackva
Publisher: Lookout Games & Z-Man Games

Hacienda
Designer: Wolfgang Kramer
Publisher: Hans im Gluck & Rio Grande Games

Indonesia
Designers: Joris Wiersinga & Jeroen Doumen
Publisher: Splotter Spellen

Jenseits von Theben
Designer: Peter Prinz
Publisher: Prinz Spiele

Mykerinos
Designer: Nicolas Oury
Publisher: Ystari Games & Rio Grande Games

Railroad Tycoon
Designers: Glenn Drover & Martin Wallace
Publisher: Eagle Games

Thurn und Taxis
Designers: Andreas & Karen Seyfarth
Publisher: Hans im Gluck & Rio Grande Games

To Court the King
Designer: Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Amigo & Rio Grande Games

GENERAL STRATEGY GAMES - 2 Player category

Aton
Designer: Thorsten Gimmler
Publisher: Queen Games & Rio Grande Games

Travel Blokus
Designer: Bernard Tavitian
Publisher: Educational Insights

Pünct
Designer: Kris Burm
Publisher: Don & Co. & Rio Grande Games

Twilight Struggle
Designers: Ananda Gupta & Jason Matthews
Publisher: GMT Games

War of the Ring: Battles of the 3rd Age
Designers: Marco Maggi, Francesco Nepitello & Roberto Di Meglio
Publisher: Nexus & Fantasy Flight Games

For a detailed look at the nominated games, as well as the committee members and their qualifications, please visit the International Gamers Awards website at: http://www.internationalgamersawards.net/

Balance in Multi Player Games

Matt Thrower, MattDP on BGG, stepped up to the plate (with some arm twisting it seems) and sent some material you should enjoy. Thanks Matt.

If any of you would like to submit an article about boardgaming (or a related subject) to Gone Gaming, we would be appreciative. However, in a week or three we will be adding a new face to our regular line up. He or she is an established blogger of note and will be posting on Sundays. Guest submissions will have to be posted as regular contributors take time off.

Send submissions to gonegaming@gmail.com

Now, heeeeeeere's Matt,


Well, I seem to have railroaded myself into writing an interesting
article about game balance in multiplayer games. I mentioned in
passing on BGG that I had some interesting thoughts on the subject but
nowhere to post them; smugly believing I could fool people into
thinking that I did sometimes think interesting things without
actually having to prove it. Sadly, Fraser kindly suggested I could
post it as a guest spot on the "Gone Gaming" blog and so unwittingly
called my bluff. So here I sit, better hope this turns out to be worth
the billing!

This all came out of discussion users on the 'geek were having about
Puerto Rico on the subject of negotiation in multiplayer games. I'm a
big fan of negotiating games simply because I think the human element
helps keep the game endlessly fresh but sensible points were made
about it potentially spoiling a finely balanced game like Puerto Rico.
Which is true, but I digress because this has little to do with what
I'm about to discuss, just setting the scene. So bear with me here.

Now I don't much care for two player games, or at least two player
games that don't scale well up to more players if need be. After all,
you never know how many people are going to turn up to your game
night. But one thing about two player games is that you can pit your
skills (or luck, or dexterity, or whatever) against your opponent
without any form of outside interference. A two-player non-random
abstract like Chess is nothing else other than a test of the relative
players' skill at the game at that given time and place. You've got
nowhere else to hide. If you want to sit down and test your perfect
analysis machine against someone else's then two player abstracts are
the way to go.

As soon as you enter a third player into the game equation though,
things inherently get messy. It doesn't matter what mechanics your
game uses, if there's three playing then it's possible for the action
of one player to help one of the other two players more than it does
the third player. This is inevitable because the actions of players in
a game need to cause interaction between the players and they need to
help to advance or obfuscate the plans of one or more of those
players. Otherwise you don't have a competitive game: you're either
looking at a co-op game or some form of multiplayer solitaire. You can
see the ramifications of this in even the most finely balanced and
cleverly designed games. Puerto Rico has the left/right hand player
problem where a weak player going directly before you hands you a huge
advantage. Settlers has a kingmaker issue where cards or the robber
can be used to bring down the leader to the advantage of the second
placed player. Ticket to ride can suffer from too much blocking. I
could go on, but I'd bore you, presuming I'm not boring you already of
course.

I'm in my thirties, and I've been gaming for a long time which is a
roundabout way of saying that I was an active gamer back in the 80's
when old-fashioned conflict games had their heyday. I don't recall
that I ever had a discussion about imbalance in multiplayer games back
then. Which isn't to say that it wasn't a problem: I've already argued
that it's inescapable in multiplayer games. It's just that we never
noticed it. The reason, I suspect is because multiplayer conflict
games lend themselves to being played with a heavy negotiation
element, whether one is specified in the rules or not. If you're
playing a game where you can ally with other players, or at least
spend an entertaining ten minutes trying to persuade people of your
peaceful intentions before you nuke them all back to Kansas then
you're tacitly accepting that you're playing an imbalanced game.
Furthermore you're at a situation where you're attempting to correct
or take advantage of that imbalance in as part of the strategy you're
employing to win.

The upshot of all this is that it strikes me that multiplayer game
designs which encourage, or at least aren't ruined by negotiations
amongst the players are always going to be one-up in balance terms at
least against multiplayer games which try to be colder and more
analytical. I'm not attempting to argue that one approach is better
than the other – rather I'm suggesting that if number crunching
analysis games are your thing you might be better off sticking with
two player games because no-one's ever going to solve that balance
problem to perfection. It strikes me that some of the more highly
rated games on the 'geek are designs which have minimised the impact
of this imbalance and I wonder if that's part of their appeal. I
haven't played enough of them to make any reasoned argument in that
regard.

The other facet of this little rant is to demonstrate another reason I
like negotiation games, because then the issue of balance is something
I can forget about and just play the game. Someone on the 'geek said
that after a while endless negotiation made every game they played
feel like the same old game of politics no matter what game they were
actually playing. But me, I reckon humans have been enjoying the game
of politics for a lot longer than they've been enjoying two player
abstracts. So I think it'll last me a while yet :)

Music for gaming

I was thinking recently about finding appropriate music to listen to when we are gaming.

Here's my list.

I want to play Through the Desert while listening to In the Desert, by Michael Flanders & Donald Swann.

I want to play Mystery of the Abbey while listening to gregorian chants.

I want to play Euphrates & Tigris while listening to The Rivers of Babylon, by Boney M.

I want to play Pirates' Cove while listening to In the Navy, by The Village People.

I want to play Nautilus while listening to Yellow Submarine, by The Beatles.

I want to play Funny Friends (Fiese Freunde Fette Feten) while listening to I spent my last $10 on Birth Control and Beer, by Two Nice Girls.

I want to play Arche Opti Mix while listening to Uncle Noah's Ark, by The Wiggles.

I want to play Coloretto while listening to Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club.

I want to play Manhattan while listening to Super Womble.

I want to play Frank's Zoo while listening to Mammal, by They Might be Giants.

I told Fraser I wanted to play Ticket to Ride while listening to Morningtown Ride, by The Seekers, and he looked at me as if I was nuts, then dragged out a Beatles CD to remind me of the song, umm, Ticket to Ride. oops. So make Morningtown Ride, umm, Ticket to Ride: Europe. Because of the passengers.

Which leaves me with a need for another train song. Maybe the song about the Pufferbellies would be good for Age of Steam.

I want to play Zoo Sim while listening to the Dublin Zoological Gardens, by The Wiggles (with Morgan Crowley)

I want to play Samurai while listening to Big in Japan, by Alphaville.

I suspect I can live without playing Britannia while listening to God Save the Queen.

I would love to play Dawn Under while listening to the soundtrack of Once More with Feeling, the Buffy Musical episode.

I want to play Hexentanz while listening to Ding Dong the Witch is dead from the Wizard of Oz.

Is St Petersburg on the Volga? I suspect that the Song of the Volga Boatmen would be forgivable for theme points, even if it reveals my woeful lack of geographic knowledge.

I want to play Schrille Stille while listening to anything by Heino. (Actually, I suspect that silence might be preferable)

I want to play Ace of Aces while listening to Snoopy vs the Red Baron.

I want to play Deutschlandreise while listening to Alphaville's To Germany with Love.

For TransAmerica, I would be very tempted by Please Come to Boston, by Joan Baez. I had a "full Baez" the other day with LA, Denver and Boston.

I want to play Cleopatra and the Society of Architects while listening to Walk Like an Egyptian, by the Bangles.

Fraser wants to play Star Fleet Battles while listening to the Star Trekkin' song, by The Firm.

I want to play Fifth Avenue while listening to New York New York, by Frank Sinatra.

I want to play Bang! while listening to I shot the Sheriff (any version).

I want to play Red Empire while listening to Back in the USSR, by The Beatles.

I think I need to play Circus Flohcati while listening to The Ecstasy of Dancing Fleas by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra

I really want to play Igloo Pop while listening to Eskimo, by Corky and the Juice Pigs.

I want to play Diplomacy while listening to Everybody wants to Rule the World, by Tears for Fears.

I want to play Mille Bornes while listening to 500 miles, by The Proclaimers.

I want to play Nuclear War while I listen to We will all go together when we go, by the inimitable Tom Lehrer.

I want to play Werewolf while listening to the Doug Anthony All-Stars' cover of the Hunters and Collectors song Throw Your Arms Around Me. OK, I want to play werewolf, and I want to listen to the song. The two together are just gravy. And maybe Hungry Like the Wolf, by Duran Duran, just for extras.


And I just want to play Princes of Florence, regardless of background noise.

What do you think? Have I missed one of your favourites? Have I revealed more of my iTunes library than was perhaps advisable?

May all your Meeples hold a tune,

Melissa

Table Games, Mini-epics, and Retirement Games

I’m getting ready to send another order to my online game store. There’s some new things I’d like to buy, and some older games that I want to add to my collection. So I’ve been pondering my choices, and once again I face the question that confronts most gamers sooner or later:

Do I buy the games I love, or do I buy the games that will truly get played?

Of course, phrasing the dilemma this way is at least partly a false choice. Because there are lots of games that I truly love, and that get lugged to my gaming group and get played. Repeatedly. And of course I’m never going to buy a game that I hate.

But there are games that look attractive to me that I know will sit on a shelf for years if I buy them. Many of these are wargames. And I know that if I dwell on them, read favorable reviews, and look at the photos of them posted on BGG, I may cave and acquire yet another strategic military simulation that may never feel the smooth varnished surface of a table beneath its hex map.

To clarify my thinking, I decided to do more than just ponder the merits of specific potential purchases. I’ve started to consider the various categories of games, and which categories are the most desirable. For me, it’s convenient to divide games into four categories: light table games, heavy table games, mini-epics, and retirement games. Here are my definitions of each.

Light Table Games. You know—fillers. These are the simple family-friendly games that can be played in an hour, or maybe an hour-and-a-half. These are games that I can play with my in-laws, and non-gamer friends. Many of these are eurogames, and gateway games for newbies. Games in this category that I already own include Clue, Settlers of Catan (my wife’s favorite), Union Pacific, and Ticket to Ride Europe.

Heavy Table Games. These are meatier, more complex, and can take longer to play than light table games, but they can still be played in under four hours or so. In other words, the gamer games. These are the games that I usually play with my gaming group. Many of my favorite games fall into this category. Some that I own include Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Fury of Dracula, A Game of Thrones, War of the Ring, Conquest of the Empire, Liberte, and Serenissima.

Mini-Epics. These are games that can last for hours and hours, but still can be completed in one day. Most of these are wargames (and I mentally throw many quick-playing wargames into this category just because I don’t play two-player wargames with my gaming group). Games in this category that I own include Paths of Glory, Here I Stand, For the People, Third Reich, Totaler Krieg, and Europe Engulfed. Arkham Horror gets shoved into this category because it sometimes takes more than four hours to play.

Retirement Games. These are games that I probably won’t be able to play until I retire (or at least until my daughters grow up and leave home). These games need a room dedicated just to gaming so the game can be left set up for days or weeks. I only own a couple of these: Decision Games War Between the States, and the SPI/TSR version of Advanced ETO. Huge wargames can still sometimes fascinate me, but this is the category that I try hardest to avoid. In my more disciplined moments, buying these seems a waste of money.

So back to the eternal question. Do I buy the games I love the most, or the games that will get played the most?

I’ve decided to buy only games in the first two categories. Even though I could easily buy nothing but heavy table games, I think I’ll pick up a light one just to have an additional game to play with non-gamer friends and in-laws. Right now, Around the World in 80 Days is my prime candidate for a light game purchase. I’ll suppress my inner Napoleon and avoid purchasing any wargames. But I’m not sure if this is because I’m becoming wiser with the passing of time, or because there aren’t any new wargames around this second that beam the phrase “Buy me!” directly into my subconscious.

As the years go on, I’m sure my game collection will bulge with eurogames, while my remaining wargames will disappear into the storage room. But every now and then, I’ll pull out a box, unfold the paper maps, and imagine cardboard armies advancing across the hex-covered terrain. And I’ll whisper to the box:

“Wait till I retire.”

Adventure Games, Part Three: Dungeon Delving

In 1974 Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the first ever roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. It grew naturally out of the wargaming industry. In 1972's second edition of the Chainmail miniatures game Gary Gygax introduced all sorts of fantasy critters--including wizards, heroes, hobbits, dwarves, balrogs, and ents--to the world of medieval wargaming. Dungeons & Dragons was just the next step. It gave players the opportunity to take the individual roles of some of those heroes in smaller-scale skirmishes.

I use the word "skirmish" purposefully because that's what the earliest Dungeons & Dragons games really were. A look at the earliest D&D supplements reveals that they were little more than tactical exercises, where players moved from one room to the next in a dungeon, cavern, or other carefully keyed location--and fought whatever they found within.

Roleplaying games matured slowly. There were a few village adventures early on, which offered some ability to interact with people other than at the tip of a sword, but they were scattered and far between. It was at least 1984, and the release of TSR's Dragonlance before people started to realize that roleplaying adventures could tell stories too.

Which is all to say that it's an entirely modern bias.

A Brief History of Adventure Game

Which brings me back to a topic that I've covered in two previous columns: adventure games. I previously discussed how Fantasy Flight Games is recreating the genre (in part 1) and how card games have also advanced the genre (in part 2). This week I want to talk about a second major player in the genre, Atlas Games, but first I want to finish up that history of the genre that began with those early roleplaying games.

Adventure games have generally been very closely tied to the RPG genre. Dungeon! (TSR, 1975) was one of the earliest examples and it really wasn't that different from the Dungeons & Dragon game which had released the previous year. Both allowed the play of individual characters whose main purpose in life was to wander a dungeon and kill monsters, and neither was really that much about roleplaying. Magic Realm (Avalon Hill, 1978) was another game that tried to be a board-based roleplaying game. Afterward the adventure game genre cooled down a bit, and a pen-and-paper model of roleplaying started to dominate.

There was a lot of experimentation in the 1970s and early 1980s, but the previous hey-day of the adventure game really ran from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s.

Talisman (Games Workshop, 1983-2003) used a similar model to those other early adventure games. Players each played a specific character over the course of a game and tried their best to meet their goal--arriving at the center of the board. It's main difference from an early Dungeon or Magic Realm was that it was massively supported. New characters and boards kept the game lively up through 1988, then the game enjoyed a brief resurgence with a new edition and a few supplements in 1993. A few years ago Games Workshop released a grossly overpriced fourth edition, then promptly announced that they were done with the line.

Arkham Horror (Chaosium, 1984) wasn't well supported at all, but it continued the trend of early games like Dungeon and Arkham Horror by explicit connections to an actual roleplaying game (here, Call of Cthulhu). We again see the ties between RPGs and adventure games, because Richard Launius was genuinely trying to produce a board game version of Chaosium's horror RPG.

HeroQuest (Milton Bradley, 1989-1993) was the other hit adventure game of the previous golden age. It offered the closest simulation yet of an RPG, with a gamemaster who laid out rooms in accordance with a scenario and individual characters who could actually improve from adventure to adventure (by collecting money, then improving their lot with better items). Several supplements each offered new "adventures".

Since the demise of the two major 1980-1990 adventure game lines, the genre has been pretty empty. We've had the near-adventure card games that I mentioned in my previous article, plus many others like Munchkin (Steve Jackson Games, 2001). Foreign publishers have gotten in on the genre with games of various sorts from Return of the Heroes (Pegasus, 2001) to Candamir (Kosmos, 2004)

But there's nothing truly notable until you come to 2003 & 2004. In 2004 FFG really kicked off a new era of adventure games with their first Runebound (FFG, 2004) and their Doom (FFG, 2004) boardgame. But the year before that another strong adventure game would appear, and one that was uniquely a card game: Dungeoneer (Citizen Games, 2003). The result has been another golden age of adventure games, with continued and well-supported releases from FFG and a whole new set of Dungeoneer boxes from their second publisher, Atlas Games.

So, adventure games have a long, though sporadic history. One of the really striking aspects of adventure games is how closely they match the aesthetics of early RPGs. Just like the original D&D (and that early Dungeon!) they continue to be about storming through some mapped lairs and improving the abilities of your characters while killing stuff.

On the flip side, adventure games haven't really grown a lot since their debut almost 30 years ago. HeroQuest's style of gamemaster-based gaming was a big innovation as was their idea of a continuing campaign. Though some of the modern FFG games use gamemasters, the idea of campaigns seems to have largely been lost.

Though it hasn't yet reached its full potential, I think that Atlas' Dungeoneer is another adventure game which offers the opportunity to stretch the boundaries of the genre.

Dungeoneer: Quest for the RPG

Dungeoneer is uniquely a card game that's also a true adventure game (unlike all the pseudo-adventure card games that I discussed last time). You use some of the cards to lay out an actual map of a dungeon (or wilderness), then explore that dungeon with characters, avoiding tricks and traps and trying to pick up items and complete quests along the way.

One of the flaws with having a dungeon master in adventure games is ultimately that one player tends to have less fun or more responsibility (depending on how you measure such things). Dungeoneer does away with that by effectively having everyone be the dungeonmaster. Each player gets to sick monsters and bad events upon the other players depending on how much peril those players have collected. Likewise each player gets to participate in laying out the map for the dungeon/wilderness by laying down a card on his turn.

The most unique element of Dungeoneer (and the place where it can outpace some of the adventure board games) is that over a half dozen card sets have been published for it, and they're all compatible to various degrees. You can mix multiple dungeons together without problem. You can use wilderness and dungeon decks in parallel. (Each wilderness deck has numerous "portal" cards which can lead to dungeons.) Only the newest deck, "epic dungeoneer" is a little less compatible because it offers an adventure at a different level (levels 4-7 rather than 1-4).

The result is an always variable adventure game that can be fine-tuned for the exact adventure that you want.

I've said elsewhere that I think that adventure games miss a few notable elements of RPGs, namely: roleplaying, storytelling, and campaigns. Though Dungeoneer doesn't yet support them, I think the current system is versatile that it could expand to include them.

1. Roleplaying

This is the hardest element to include any official support for. The main problem is that a board game is, out of necessity, entirely objective. Conversely roleplaying is entirely subjective. It takes an unbiased observer (the gamemaster) to determine the success of roleplaying in RPGs, and the model for adventure game gamemasters thus far has mainly put them in the role of biased participant.

Thus I don't see much opportunity for true roleplaying in adventure games except as a natural outgrowth of the game's theming and color, and therefore a side dish rather than a main course. Dungeoneer does have decent theming and color, but so do most other adventure games. Though its tightly concentrated card decks, Dungeoneer might get a slight leg up, but not much.

2. Storytelling

Likewise storytelling is a somewhat hard sell in adventure games. The only way to really accomplish it is through a coherent story told via the game components--which Dungeoneer provides.

However, one of the advantages of a totally modular system of the sort that you find in a card game design is that you can always mix and match cards as you see fit. Thus a player could, if he wanted, create an arbitrary mix of cards which told the precise story he wanted. The most recent release, Epic Dungeoneer: Call of the Lich Lord also showed how to extend this card-based storytelling by including certain quests and monsters which are laid out at the start of the game, and through an "event" which has a permanent effect upon the game until it's resolved.

Fixing cards doesn't require any new components. Likewise, writing an event that takes place doesn't actually require a card to do so. You could write it on a piece of paper. Thus, it'd be pretty easy for a player to create some unique stories with the cards of Dungeoneer.

Which leads me to another idea that I've discussed before: scenarios. Atlas Games could easily release a set of scenarios for Dungeoneer as a gaming book. Each scenario would require one or more decks of cards to play, and might be composed specific cards from those decks. More importantly each scenario would have special events and special quests which existed only in that scenario writeup and which would have various notable effects upon the game.

3. Campaigns

The idea of campaign adventure games, where players use the same characters over multiple games, has only been well-explored by HeroQuest. However, Dungeoneer is tantalizing close to this ideal. Especially as I look at the new Epic adventure, I consider ways in which a player might raise his character all the way up from level 1-7 (or 1-10 when Legendary Dungeoneer) is released.

Here's one method I envision.

Each game is played as a competition, but players don't actually increase their levels during the game. (They just collect their quests, and use those as victory markers.) So, you play a level 1 game, then a level 2 game, etc. Each time, you still have to complete three quests, and whoever does so first is considered the "winner" of the game. At the end of the game each player marks down a number of items & traits that they had at the end of the game (probably a number equal to the level of the game they played or maybe half the level). When the next game starts they get to keep those items & traits.

Thus, you get a campaign of 10 games (by the time Legendary Dungeoneer comes out), with continuity of character and slowly increasing power throughout the campaign. Each week you play in a different wilderness or dungeon (probably iterating from one to the other, to represent the traversal of geography).

Here's another method I envision:

Players set out a huge map with a wilderness and three linked dungeons (for heroic, epic, and legendary levels). The wilderness also has global quests for all the levels of play, so that at any point a player can choose to try and complete wilderness adventures or else dive into the appropriate dungeon. You make sure to keep the decks for each locale separate, to preserve the feel of each dungeon.

Players thus level up from 1-10, through a massive interlinking set of plays.

The downside of this is that it'd be a very long game. A Dungeoneer game can last 1-3 hours, with Epic seeming to go a bit faster than the original. If that power curve continues, you're probably talking 5-8 hours for a full 10-level Dungeoneer game, plus a massive amount of table space.

But, it's possible. And if you could figure out ways to preserve your state (say with special electrostat boards which could maintain the layout of a set of cards even when put away), this would become much more reasonable timewise.

Given that there's only one Epic game out thus far, and no Legendary decks, this is all a flight of fancy, but I think it's a good one, and I look forward to see how it evolves officially in the future.

Conclusion

Adventure games have a long history, but they haven't grown as much as they could have over that timespan. I think that Dungeoneer if well-expanded and developed, shows part of the potential of the gameplay style, and it's something that I hope will continue to grow.

Scattered Thoughts

This week I finally broke down and bought Ticket to Ride (the original version). I resisted for a long time since I don’t really need another light game but when my husband announced he wanted to invite people from work over for a cook-out, I had visions of finding someone who showed an interest in all the funny-sounding games I have laying around. Luring someone to the dark side is a dream I have yet to fulfill and Ticket to Ride sounds like the perfect bait. Of course, the reality will probably be horseshoes, Guitar Hero on the PS2 and, if I’m really unlucky, a bunch of drunks gathered around for a rousing game of LCR. Send good thoughts my way, please.
~~~~

My husband and I played a few games of Blokus Trigon this week but I don’t enjoy keeping track of two sets of pieces so we created our own Trigon Duo. Actually, we shrunk the board in 2 ways for 2 different kinds of play. First, I marked off the first two rows facing each player and one row from each of the four side edges. This makes an almost perfect size for 2 players. Second, I marked off only one row facing the two players and two rows off of each of the sides. This creates a very tight, almost impossible, sized board which we played as a two-player puzzle trying to fit as many pieces on the board as possible.
~~~~

If you’re interested in card games that you can play on your computer against AIs, check out the Thanos card game site. The downloads are all free and the interface is pretty nice. This is a good way to try out many types of games from simple trick-taking games to point trick-taking games; from climbing games to rummy type games.
~~~~

My most-played game for the first six months of this year is a war game—Command & Colors: Ancinets.
~~~~

Until next time, if you can’t stand the heat, turn on the air conditioner and play a board game.

Mary

Index for Gone Gaming 02/06 - 07/06

Index for 08/05 - 01/06 can be found here.

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A six month index, Feb '06 - Jul '06 (tags are arbitrary and inconsistent):

Coldfoot Al Grande: Private Eye (humor) Big Head of Pointless Steam (social) 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 (personal) Coldfoot on Firearms, Romance, and Being a Sneaky SOB (social, internet) Count Your Blessings (personal, pictures) DenaliCon (session report) Eagerly Awaiting Winter (personal) From the Book of I Teuber Chapters 12 & 13: (humor) From the kitchen of Dame Coldfoot and Wolfgang Krocker: Boardgame Salad (humor) Game Notes (reviews) Gaming from 60 B.C. to 1 A.C/The pre-history of modern games (market) A Good Excuse to Play More Games/Finally Came Up With a Tag Line (social) I missed posting the last couple Fridays (personal) It's a cooperative game, not winner take all (internet) Just let me have my game couch and I will be happy. (personal) New Epidemic Sweeps the Nation (social) Odds and Ends/Here I Stand (personal, review:Here I Stand) On Being a Stranded Boardgamer (social) The Search for Kids Games (social, reviews) Settlers Primer (reviews:Catan series) Trading Places (personal, social)	GROGnads the BIG 'game' A (sports, design) CONTACT! (market) "Cruising" around the 'Gaming World' (social) the "Doctor" is in the 'hizz-ouse"! (personal, market) OLD "habits" are 'hard' to break (personal) "Tactics & Strategy" of 'development': the Watching (market) to fondly bid adieu (market) Urine the "Euro-nuch" ZONE (internet) WHAT the "hey all" (design, personal) What's NEW "pussycat"? (personal) YOU may be NEXT (social)
sodaklady Adaptations For Two Players (rules) Board Game => Card Game (market, review:Commands & Colors: Ancients) Conversations in Gaming (personal, humor) A Game I'm Looking Forward To (preview:Mauerbauer) The Game Psychiatrist--The Substitute (humor, review:Flandern 1302) Games in Rhyme (puzzle) In Defense of the Homemade Games (ethics) Is It Just a Phase Or Do We Evolve? (social) Join Me On Tranquility Island (personal) A Lesson From Bess (personal, session report) Life: The Game (social) Miss Manners: Online Play (social) No Easy Answer (market) One Is The Loneliest Number (social, review:Bolide) Time For A Vacation (personal) X-Play Reviews a Board Game (humor) You Might Be A Gamer If... (humor )	Alex Rockwell/Kris Hall Alex Caylus, the new Addiction! (strategy) Kris Build Your Own Game Convention (interview) THE COMING TRIUMPH OF THE WARGAME-EURO HYBRID (market) Current Crises, Future Games (market) MY FIRST ORIGINS (con) SPITEFUL GAMERS AND SUICIDE BOMBERS (social) VARYING SUPPORT FOR VARIANTS (market)
Yehuda Board Game Violence Special Report (humor, social) Do You Like Brussel Sprouts? (social) Elegance in Games (design) Encounter 5/9 (prose) The Game Cabinet (internet) Game Design (design, personal) Game Group (social) Game Koans (humor) A Gamer's Haggadah (humor) Games that I have never lost, and never will (humor) Generic mainstream news articles, so you won't have to read all those other ones (humor, market) Grog and Mog (humor) If - A Europoem (poem) Inside and Outside the Game Experience (design) Is it My Turn? (design) Lazy Tuesday: Chess Pictures (pictures) Love Songs and Poems (humor, poems) Ludolinguistics (social, humor) The Ludonimicron (prose) Opponents say the darndest things before you squash 'em (humor) Please, I'm begging you ... don't make stupid plays just to get the game over with! (social) Session Report (humor) Skype Me (personal) Social Dynamics (social) Topic Du Jour: Game Burnout (social)	Joe Gola Blue Moon (review) Blue Moon City (review) The Door to the Outside (personal) Getting Literal, in More Ways Than One (design)
DWTripp The best game you never played (review:Legions of Steel) Does this copy of Gettysburg make me look phat? (social) Geeky Goodness (social) THE GONE GAMING FIRST ANNIVERSARY TOUR (social) How stupid is too stupid? (personal, humor) How to avoid being a Whiny Little Puke (social) How to grow a set and not be a whiner (social) How two French guys ripped me off and stole my game design (personal, market) I changed the names to protect the guilty (social, design) Is that a humungous telescope in your pocket? Or are you just happy to see me? (social) Movin' On Up! (personal, session report) Make room! Make room! (personal, reviews) Nasty Suprises (design) Please, I'm begging you...take your turn before something horrible happens! (social) Politically Correct Gaming? (social) The Politics of Gaming (social) The Price of Being Lazy (or) Why Appelcline Is My Hero (session report, personal) Sick Day (personal) Somebody Needs A Hug (social) Who you really ought to thank for the Golden Age of Gaming (social) Who's at your table? (humor, social) Why Easter sucks & four miniature game recommendations (personal) Why Johnny can't game: Spousal interference and the effects of Panty-Waist behaviour on the Board Game industry (social)	Shannon Appelcline Adventure Games, Part Two: In the Cards (market) Anatomy of a Game: Blue Moon (strategy) Anatomy of a Game: Carcassonne, Part One: The Original Game (design, strategy) Anatomy of a Game: Carcassonne, Part Two: Balance & Tiles (design) Anatomy of a Game: Carcassonne, Part Three: Cooperation & Competition (design) Anatomy of a Game: Carcassonne, Part Four: Complexity & The Rivers (design) Computerized Board Games: Six Mini-Reviews (reviews) The Creature that Ate the (Gaming) World (market) Fantasy Flight's Adventure Games & That Old Time Roleplaying (market, reviews) Games to Watch For: Nurnberg '06 (market) The Golden Age of Board Games (market) If It's Broken, Don't Replay It! (design) The Italian Design Scene, Part One: The Analysis (market) The Italian Design Scene, Part Two: The Reference (market) Last Season's Hot Games: A Top Ten from Essen 2005, Part One (reviews) Last Season's Hot Games: A Top Ten from Essen 2005, Part Two (reviews) The Problem with Blind Bidding (design) The Problem with Luck II (design) Six Degrees of Collaboration (market) Strategy of a Game: Blue Moon, Part One: Hoax & Vulca (strategy) Strategy of a Game: Blue Moon, Part Two: Flit & Mimix (strategy) A Theory of Board Game Design: Definitions of Terms (design) A Theory of Computerized Board Game Design (design) Three Collaborative Designers: Faidutti, Colovini & Schacht (market) Upcoming Companies, Part One: Atlas, Cafe, Cheapass (market) Upcoming Companies, Part Two: Face 2 Face, Jolly Roger, Your Move (market)
Fraser and Melissa Another report on the Australian Games Expo (session report) Busy few weeks (personal, reviews) Daughter the Younger's requests (personal, kids) Daughters, BSW vs FtF and some new games (personal, reviews) Gaming at Work (social) Gaming with the Infantry (reviews, cookies) A household revolution (social) In the kitchen (personal, cookies) Inaugural Australian Games Expo (con) Museum excitement - and an experiment (personal, podcast) An old flame rekindled (session report) Quiet Night at GameDockers (session report) Quiet times (session report, internet) Ratings where BGG and I agree the least (reviews) School Game Evening (session report) “Sleep Well, darling. Don’t let the Meeples bite.” (prose) Some lunchtime card variations (session report) A Tale of One City (internet) A Tale of Two Cities (session report) Two evenings and an afternoon of gaming (session report) Virtual Conventions (internet) Watching the development of Strategy and Tactics (social) Where the Geek and I (occasionally) disagree (ratings)	Guests Dwayne: Bring 'em Back Alive!! Big-Game Hunting for fun & profit. (market) Dwayne: Bring 'em Back Alive: Disorder in the Court (social, internet) Gerald McD: Gaming with a Grandma (personal) Gerald McD: Gaming with Parents, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins (personal) Jay Little: Games that Tamper with the Space-Time Continuum (personal) John Farrell: Building a Gaming Culture (personal) Josh Adelson: Incompleteness (bizarre) Sagrilarus: Taking a "Risk" to Teach Strategy (education) Sexy Amy: Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it. (personal)

GAME STORE CONFIDENTIAL ~ Blood on the Gaming Highway

"Hey DW? How much is your rent here?"

"What do you pay for a box of Magic cards DW?"

"How much do you make every year selling games?"

Me, being the uber-friendly type, I always answered my customers questions. Of course I always lied, but I answered them anyway. But I have never felt any obligation to reveal to customers or anyone else the answers to questions that really are personal.

There are two sources of inspiration for today's thoughts: Mel Gibson and Eagle Games.

Mel Gibson because he pissed off a bunch of Jewish people, made the Liberals in Hollyweird happy and made the majority of people in America who don't have thier own TV news programs wonder what the fuss is all about.

Eagle Games because they ran out of money and had to sell everything off, which generated somewhere between 10-13 pages of snickering, bickering, speculation, postulation and constipation on BGG.

I'll deal with the whole Mel Gibson thing first... mainly because I don't think he's a gamer and he just happened to get drunk the same week Eagle Games closed down. Okay....Mel Gibson? Hmmmm.... Mad Max! Drank some shooters and said bad things? Ahhhh.... okay. Who gives a crap? And if you do, then you might possibly be as creepy as the customers who used to ask me how much my mark-up was.

Eagle Games though, that's a whole other level of creepiness. Because Eagle is part of a very personal hobby there is an intense interest in everything about it... including the reasons it failed. On the one hand I think a certain level of interest is healthy and natural. On the other hand the creepy thing creeps me out. You know what I mean. When casual interest and even bona fide concern and compassion turns into an almost unhealthy speculation and accusation from a contingent of gamers who want to feast on the bones of people who have had problems in their lives, failed at business or just, in general, hit a few bumps along the way.

The Forum thread on BGG ran the gamut from huffy know-it-alls declaring Eagle Games business model flawed and therefore doomed from the outset to Glen Drover personally screwing over the Eagle staff, BGG and anyone else he could get his claws on. For the most part the thread devolved into a 250+ entry session of rubber-necking an accident. After all, when you really think about the fact that Glen is a member of BGG and has been a great supporter of the industry and BGG itself, then it's a little creepy to read some dufus game geek's opinion that the reason Eagle failed was that every Glen Drover design was horrible.

I'm not really suprised by this because I've been around long enough to have seen it happen with SPI, TSR, Heritage, Grenadier and a few others. And even when I have known the pertinent facts about the how and why of a failure - such as TSR's demise and rescue by WotC - I have still been flabbergasted by the feeding frenzy on false facts and the eerie bloodlust surrounding the scene of a gaming accident. Oddly enough, Glen posted on the thread and explained loosely what happened. I'm not sure I would have done that personally. Nonetheless, like an accident scene, the thread still has 30+ posts after Drover's... the Game Geek equivalent I guess to lingering around after the bodies have been removed to discuss how much bloood is pooled on the highway.

All of this makes me curious about why some people personalize their gaming hobby to the extent they do. Role-players, CCG players and most certainly Games Workshop players do. And they tend to take the personalization to obscene levels. I'm sure that several of you may have read and/or participated in the old Games Workshop newsgroup that was moderated by a very harried GW staffer. That bit of usenet history is worth looking up if you want to read how truly mean, nasty, creepy and generally insane some gamer's can get about game companies. The only unsenet group I recall seeing that inspired so much hate and bile was the anti-Scientology newsgroup. Both of them were extremely popular in the 90's... before the WWW graphical upgrades reduced usenet to a porn ghetto.

I think part of what happens is that some fans personalize games to the point that they have trouble seperating their emotions about themselves from their emotions about distant people and distant companies. Eagle Games has inspired some of the most emotionally troubled commentary on BGG that I've ever seen. It's almost like watching British soccer fans from two different camps brawl. Or NASCAR fans of one driver getting into a shouting match with another driver's fans. Eagle Games has inspired bad feelings amongst some Euro-Snoots because some EuroSnoots are basically snooty pricks. To be fair though, some war gamers are arrogant assholes... although I can't really think of anyone in particular at the moment.

How you are in your life outside gaming will, I think, transfer intact to how you conduct yourself in game sessions, on BGG or other gaming sites and in general around other fans of board gaming. If you are so smugly assured that any game you choose to play is superior because, well, because you are superior, then that attitude will be there wherever you go. I don't see any real difference in the smugly superior gamers than I do in the 40K players who carp endlessly about how evil Games Workshop is.

What I think is that game companies rise, fall, succeed, fail, grow, shrink and just in general have "lives" similar to our own. Sometimes they do well and other times they do poorly. Game designers have hits and misses. Some games work for some people and not for others. The creepy part of all this for me is the tendency for fans to group at the scene of an accident and lay down one erroneous verdict after another about what happened and why it happened. And if you read that thread on BGG you can easily see that some people have trouble hiding their glee at Eagle's demise.

In 1987 I sold my 50% interest in Dark Horse Miniatures to my partner. The company was making money, though not huge amounts, so my reasons for selling were personal not economic. Within two years my partner and his new partner had nose-dived the miniature company into oblivion. So, for a number of years afterwards when I attended the trade shows, Origins or GenCon, I was treated to all manner of rumors about what happened... along with more than my share of very personal questions about the failure of the company. Oddly enough, most of the other people I knew who owned or ran competing companies were very graceful and if they engaged into rumor-mongering, they were very discreet. I believe that is because nobody in the gaming industry who has half a clue about how things need to work for the industry to grow wants to see anyone fail.

Failure is bad, even if it's a competitor. Failure is a reminder of how tenuous one's hold on success in a fan-based industry really is. Every product is a risk. There is never, ever enough money. Even the mighty can (and do) fall.

At the moment I own several different Eagle Games and I like them. In fact, I suppose I need to get a copy of Wits & Wagers so I can have a party game in my collection. I personally am not at all pleased by what happened to Eagle and to Glen and Keith. But I understand exactly how such things happen. I do have empathy for them... though I admit to not having real sympathy for anyone on this planet other than helpless women and children and, of course, my own kids... when they can't convince me to buy them something they really, really want.

I think most people don't enjoy seeing failure... and now that I've said that I am getting this weird feeling that a scary amount of people do like seeing others fail... so maybe most people that I'd like to be around don't enjoy seeing others fail. I'm not happy about Eagle ceasing to exist, even though I only own three of their games. I wasn't happy when TSR went into bankruptcy, or when Avalon Hill stopped making war games. I do understand that as something as fan-based as the game industry evolves there will be a higher than normal percentage of casualties... it just doesn't make me happy when I see them.

So, I say good luck to Glenn Drover and Keith Blume and I hope to see them back producing games again. In the meantime... maybe you have a copy of Wits & Wagers you want to trade for? And you know, maybe I ought to get me a back-up copy of Railroad Tycoon while I'm at it.

The Anniversary Tour—Connecticut

At 2:15 PM on Sunday the eight of us staggered off the plane from Australia, unwashed, unshaved, pale as lab rats, and, frankly, somewhat delirious from lack of sleep. Ordinarily Danbury Airport does not receive international flights, but, because of the high-profile nature of the Gone Gaming Goodwill Tour, Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell (R) insisted on our touching down in CT for a formal greeting by her cabinet and the various local chambers of commerce. Pro that she is, she did not bat an eye at the dazed and blinking group that literally fell down the stairs onto the tarmac (with mid-air Yehuda inexplicably screaming "It's under a big doubleya!!!"), but instead smiled and greeted each with a gift of a golden nutmeg, the highest honor that the state can afford to bestow. It was a touching ceremony, right up to the point when a wild-eyed Brian bit one of the Governor's staffers on the hand, and then we had to hightail it into our taxis.

I had originally planned to bring the group to Mystic Seaport and Mystic Aquarium, but on Thursday my wife Charlene sent me a telegram indicating that the ships on exhibit at the seaport had all been commandeered by Admiral Mullen and the Commander-in-Chief for a blockade of Tierra del Fuego, and moreover that Pebbles the Beluga whale was experiencing a bout of violent enteritis which was causing the entire aquarium to smell like the ass end of a porpoise. Undaunted, we did the next best thing and went to the Sycamore in Bethel, a 50's-themed diner which serves food so heavy and incapacitating that it was very nearly classified as a Schedule I narcotic in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. A round of Dagwoods and some homemade root beer mellowed out my guests in a hurry, and by the time the check had come a glassy-eyed Mary had slouched her way under the table and then quietly informed the group that she was building a fort. Yehuda was unable to partake in the meal, sadly, but luckily we had some kosher goat leftovers from Monday and we were able to make him a sandwich.

At 4:30 we were back at my place, and Charlene met us at the door under a red, white and blue banner reading "Welcome International Visitors and the Gone Gaming Goodwill Tour." My seven guests brushed past her without a word and went directly to the game shelves.

"Typical euro-poop," drawled D.W., shaking his head. "I've dug more flavorful stuff out of my ear."

"No Trias, no Magna Grecia, no Torres...kind of a let-down, really," said Mary.

Shannon stifled a yawn.

"I came all the way back to America for this?" muttered Yehuda.

"Did you remember to feed the wallaby before we left?" Melissa asked Fraser.

"How about Puerto Rico?" asked Brian.

"Veto!" growled D.W.

"How about El Grande?" asked Shannon.

"We just played that on Friday," groaned Yehuda.

"El Caballero?" Proposed Fraser.

"I'm sick of area influence," said Mary. "Let's play something different."

"Lucky Loop?"

"What? That game sucks."

"Clash of the Gladiators?"

"How is that any better?"

"Tower of Babel?"

"More Knizia euro-poop. Bzzzt! Next!"

"What about Struggle of Empires?"

"And have to wade through a Warfrog rulebook? No thank you."

"Oh, they're not that bad..."

"Bzzzt! Next!"

"Power Grid?"

"Auctions again? Puh-leeeze."

"We can't have any auctions? Well that rules out Merchants of Amsterdam, High Society, Princes of the Renaissance, Amun-Re, Palazzo and Fifth Avenue."

"How about Taj Mahal?"

"If you'd read my article last week, you would have learned that Taj Mahal is actually a rolling Stansky auction with half-stops."

"I think you mean a modified double blind auction."

"Atlantic Star?"

"Bzzzt!"

"I know perfectly well what I mean. It's a Stansky auction."

"Say, is that the Hans im Glück edition?"

"Double blind!"

Is Royal Turf open or closed betting?"

"Stanksy!"

"Depends on the variant you use."

"Double blind!"

"Which one plays better?"

"Stansky!"

"Depends on how many are playing."

"Double blind!"

"We could split into two groups."

"Stansky, you insufferable buffoon!"

"Let's do that. I want to be on a different game from Fraser. He keeps kicking me under the table."

"Double blind, you pompous orangutan!"

"What? I do not!"

"Stansky, you stinking planarian!"

"Do too! Look at my ankles! They're covered in bruises!"

"Double blind, you festering gobbet of guttersnot!"

"Maybe if you kept your crummy ankles on your side of the table we wouldn't have this problem!"

"Yeah, really, quit being an under-the-table hog!"

"Oh! I will slap your face, you witch!"

"Oooh! How about Durch die Wüste?"

"GODDAMMIT NO MORE EURO-POOP!!!!"

At this point the argument began to take on a wheezy, gasping character as various hands closed around various windpipes, but it was just at that moment my six-year-old son walked into the room holding a cardboard box.

"Do you want to play Candyland?"

Melissa let go of the fistful of Mary's hair that she had been clutching. "Oh, what an adorable little boy!"

Coughing as Brain grudgingly relinquished his throat, Fraser muttered "well, it does have a strong theme, D.W."

"Actually," announced Yehuda as he loosened the strings to the tile bag that Shannon had knotted around his neck, "I've been working on an advanced variant." He took the box from my son and walked it over to the table.

"With the advancement track and the special power selection you were talking about?" said Mary. "Oh, I'd like to try that."

"Interestingly, if you overlay a hex grid onto the board, you will actually get a fairly good 18xx map," said Shannon.

"Hey, that sounds pretty cool," said Brian. "Can you work that into the design, Yehuda?"

"Candyland 18xx...why that's genius."

"Look, minis!" said D.W. as he picked up one of my son's Thomas the Tank Engine trains. "Cool!"

"You know," said Brian, if we pull the little bazookas off these army guys and glue them to the trains...."

"Holy goat shit. This just might work."

"Okay, everyone, gather 'round. The start player takes Skarloey, nineteen shares of stock, two face down bonus cards and one from the display, a mounted howitzer and twelve influence cubes..."

So we played Advanced MechaCandyland 18xx. I started out with Percy and was able to upgrade to Salty, but Melissa blocked off my route to the Sugar Plum Forest and I had to make a long, circuitous detour through the Molasses Swamp. Yehuda and D.W. got into a pissing match and ultimately Sir Topham Hatt led the fourth battalion deep into Berlinger territory to liberate the Gum Drop People. With the tide turning, Melissa and Mary signed a trade agreement which effectively destroyed the market for Fraser's toffee, basically putting him out of the running and generating a certain amount of huffy Australian sulking. Shannon executed a perfect builder strategy but neglected to gain majority shareholder status of Sodor Railways, allowing Brain to swing Cranky the Crane two extra steps along the peanut brittle action rondelle. My son was flying under the radar nicely and was only two lollipops away from winning the game when the phone rang. I got up and answered it.

"Hello?"

The voice on the other end was strange; it had a kind of stop-and-go quality to it, like a car with a bad timing belt; it was sort of like if Thurston Howell III and Snagglepuss had a baby that grew up to use a lot of rabbit-ear air quotes. "Hey, euro snoots and 'snoot-"ettes,"' what's going in the realm of on? That is, iff'n you can 'catcherate' the drift of my wood, ell-oh-ell!"

"Er..."

"...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay...."

"Um, can I help you, sir? For whom are you calling?"

"'Eh wot?' Only for the lords and ladieez of 'blogtirpation' and all things gonegamery, you erf, and I think you know for what 'moi' am 'driving' at here in this rumble seat (wink!)! Knock on 'wood' (for those that are the 'creem' of weak) unless you don't have the 'hammers' for such an endeavor, and in that case you'd better just 'insinuate' your head in the sand and hope that someone 'builds' a castle around it! You savvy?"

"What? Is this about the car for sale? Well, it's a '99 Ford Escort, fair condition, but the tires are practically new. Would you like to come by later this week, maybe after five?"

"Crrrrrretin!!" At that point I was subjected to nearly twenty minutes of bafflingly incoherent invective which finally ended with a screamed shout of "Your head a-splode!!" and an angry click.

There was silence when I returned to the living room. The game had disappeared from the table and was replaced by a loudly snoring Brian. Passed out nearby on two of the chairs were Shannon and Yehuda, tidy piles of annotated rules on their laps. Mary was curled up on one end of the couch, while on the other Fraser and Melissa were leaning against each other, fast asleep, each holding half-finished postcards to Biggie and Otto. The only ones left awake were my six-year-old son and a grizzled old coot from Texas, both sitting on the floor and playing with toy motorcycles.

"Mine's a Harley! Brrrrrm!"

"Harley! Brm!"



No wallabies were harmed in the writing of this post.

The Anniversary Tour -- Australia

It was a great day in Melbourne when the Gone Gaming crew arrived on their world tour. Sadly, we weren't able to supply a mayoral reception, but we did manage a minibus and the girls were waiting with a giant "welcome gamers" sign. You come to Australia, you expect to see the beach - at least that's what we'd figured when we made our plans. And the beach is where Fraser and I get a lot of gaming done, so we had, in expectation of our friends' visit, hired the big old house we go to every January and loaded the bus up with what we considered an appropriate assortment of games.

DW, after learning our destination, immediately demanded to be put off the minibus so he could go to the Harley rentals booth at the airport. We left him (muttering something about "price-gouging convicts") with a chorus of reminders to "Drive on the left!" and headed for Lorne.

DW had done his research and knew that there was a beach (and a motorcycle GP track) at Philip Island, but was eventually persuaded that it was Lorne we were going to.



We figured our friends might want to see some native Australian animals, so a stop at Victoria's Open-Range Zoo was in order. We all enjoyed seeing the cheetahs, monkeys, lions, rhinos, giraffes, zebras and hippos, although Shannon and Mary seemed to think something was missing (I can't imagine what - but Fraser and I were mighty annoyed that the meerkats seemed to like them better than they liked us). When we piled back into the bus, there was quite a spirited discussion of what you might call rhinocerous-shaped playing pieces (rheeples was the popular favourite, although Coldie put up a strong argument for rhiples.). We believe this stopover gave time for DW and his Harley to cruise down the rest of the Great Ocean Road and then back again to Lorne.

But life is not all about boardgames (strange as that may seem to some). Destination number one was not the gaming table but the beach. It was pretty funny to us that we'd gone from Summer in Alaska to Winter in Melbourne and really hadn't changed our clothes (in fact, it got warmer) - and that Fraser and I were both rugged up in our winter gear while the others were wearing their chic resort casual best. Weirdly, Coldfood muttered about sauerkraut every time he came near us - I wonder whether he had Australia and Austria confused. It was great to catch up with Yehuda, who was staying with some jewish friends just around the corner from the house we had rented.





That's all of us at the beach in Lorne - from left to right, Fraser (and the remains of our sandcastle), Joe, Melissa, DW, Shannon, Yehuda, Mary, Brian (Coldfoot). What you can't see in that shot (Sorry ladies) is the lifeguard.





We dissuaded the overeager hordes from a swim in the ocean - when there's nothing between you and Antarctica except some water, you want to be sure it's a HOT day before you risk the chill factor - and headed up the hill to the house, after a stop at the Newsagent where Yehuda collected a copy of Australian Monopoly for his collection. (We didn't have the heart to tell him that all Australians grow up with the English Monopoly set).

We had a surprise waiting for Shannon - some friends from Melbourne's "Cthulhu Conglomerate" who knew him from his Chaosium days were waiting for him at the house, with a copy of Arkham Horror and a set of Mythos cards. That took care of him for a while.

Coldfoot seemed surprised at the house's lack of double glazing and insulation, and that the pipes ran up the outside of the house. He was amazed that the very old thermometer was inside the house, and very puzzled that it went over 100ºF (and not below 0ºF).

After getting everyone a beer, Fraser, Coldfoot, Mary and I settled down for a game of Hansa, which we bought on Mary's recommendation - or, to be more accurate, on the mind control that Mary exercises through Geeklists and forums. Meanwhile DW, Joe and Yehuda took it in turns to get whipped by Biggie at first Connect Four and then San Juan (Biggie later asked me what a "namby pamby nancy Eurosnoot game" meant). Our surprise guest Grognads made a great showing at Make 'n' Break, though.

Time for the serious stuff now - the group divided for Power Grid and Princes of Florence. While the others set up, Coldfoot and I had a quick game of Colour Clowns with Otto - although I am not sure where she got the idea that "I will crap in your weaving hut" is an acceptable thing to say to a gaming partner.

The poker chips being used as substitute Elektros in Power Grid were the closest that DW got to a game of poker, although he was pretty excited at the opportunity to play for "peanuts".

By "peanuts", he meant Australian Dollars.

If only there had been a TV at the house, he might have had a chance to catch some of the WPT Poker show.



We barbecued the national coat of arms for dinner - roo and emu sausages, washed down with a couple of bottles of good Aussie red. And a salad. And a couple of bottles of good Aussie white. And some beer, to keep things lively. And, to make things really Australian, we added Fairy Bread, Pie Floaters and Pavlova with passionfruit and strawberries. It was a shame Yehuda couldn't stick around for dinner, I think he would have enjoyed the rather rowdy game of Apples to Apples - although sadly, no-one seemed keen on my plans for Werewolf.

With time running out for this leg of the tour, we decided it was time for a good Australian game. I pushed for Freya's Folly or Sunda to Sahul, but Fraser wanted the sheep - and out came his ancient copy of Squatter, Australia's greatest-selling game. I sat this one out, but enjoyed listening to everyone developing their sheep stations and increasing their sheep herds and the sizes of their wool clips.

By now, it was getting late, so we told the girls it was time for bed, settling them to sleep in the minibus. Biggie wanted to keep gaming, and let her displeasure be known, telling Fraser, "You are cruising for a smiting, Daddy."

I wonder where she learned to say that.

The drive back to Melbourne was uneventful but pretty, as we took a detour through the city centre. We had planned to visit Eurogamesfest but were running short of time, especially as we were somehow catching a time machine back to the US to avoid missing a day due to the International Date Line. If we'd been taking a commercial flight, we would have had to leave before we'd arrived, which is never fun.

It was sad to leave the kids again, but exciting to be on the way to the next stop on our world tour. We felt that this travelling makes us kind of suck as parents, though, as tomorrow is the Bigster's 8th birthday. The truth is, we'd have been happy to keep going for a few more weeks - next time, we might try to spend a bit longer at each stop.

The Anniversary Tour--Alaska

The Gone Gaming Anniversary Tour next arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska. Oh to be home again! Up to this point the heat was killing me. Even in Berkeley it was scorching hot. To tell the truth, it had been so hot up to this point that the red shirt I've been wearing might as well have been a turtleneck sweater. "Why didn't you take off the red shirt?", you are thinking. As fate would have it I needed to wear the red shirt just to hide the giant pit stains on the blue shirt. My 24-hour antiperspirant didn't even last until noon in Idaho, and I had already gone through half of my second can by the time we left South Dakota.

We were fortunate, the flight from San Francisco to Fairbanks was painless with only a brief stop in Seattle. Although the midnight sun is waning everyone was surprised that the sun was still up when we arrived at 11:00 p.m. Since it was too late to see the sights we retired to Coldfoot Manor for a late night game.

Yehuda suggested we play a game with an Alaska theme. I was stumped. Alaska Monopoly was out, as was The Yukon Gold Rush (Alaska Monopoly by another name). An Alaska theme. I drew a blank. Someone spotted my copy of McMulti, a game about drilling for oil, refining it, and bringing the finished product to market, and suggested playing a game of it.

"Nah," I said, "the only thing most Alaskans know about the oil business is that they get a check from the state every year from the profit on oil leases." Then a light bulb went off, "How about Caylus?" I said.

"Caylus?!? For an Alaska theme?"

"It's perfect. Every round you get money just for playing. It's the perfect Alaska theme. Only five can play, though."

DW looked pretty skeptical. "Caylus? That's one of them Eurosnoot games. You guys play, I'm going to bed." So DW - being old and all - retired early while Shannon, Yehuda, Mary, Joe and I played a game of Caylus. The Aussies decided to sit on the porch (wearing jackets, of course) with Dame Coldfoot under the midnight sun to marvel at a land without snakes, poisonous insects nor crocodiles.

We were up early the next morning to see some of the local attractions before the tourists started congregating. We piled into a rented Suburban and saw the sights. I drove, thank you very much. After all the walking in Berkley on the previous day there was no way I was going to walk my fat ass any further than was necessary.

The pipeline.



The Santa statue at Santaland RV Park in North Pole.


The Musk Ox Farm.

(Picture deleted on the advice of counsel)

There was an incident at the Musk Ox Farm involving French tourist on a BMW motorcycle. I decided not to post that picture until the lawyers give the OK. I might post it on my blog after the litigation is over.

After a brief wait at the Santa statue, waiting for the North Pole Fire Department to rescue Fraser from dangling on Santa's nose (you can't take Aussies anywhere), we went into Fairbanks to look around. Joe and DW had heard stories about "Two Street" during the glory days of the pipeline construction, and requested we take a trip downtown.

Two Street is an affectionate name for Second Avenue. In the pipeline heyday of the 70s and 80s it consisted of bars, hookers, and illegal poker games. Today there is a Marriott, a parking garage, and numerous touristy stores selling Russian Matryoshka (stacking dolls) and authentic Alaskan jade figurines made in Korea. Only two bars remain on Two Street, and the rumor is that one of them will be out of business by this winter.

DW spotted the card room just off of Two Street. He excused himself while the rest of the group wandered the shops. He didn't stay long, he came out muttering, "Pan? What the hell is pan? Card rooms are for poker. What's this pan-euro-card-game crap, anyway?"

"Pan is the game in Fairbanks, DW."

"Looks like they're playing... playing..."

"Rummy," I ventured.

"Rummy. In a card room no less. If I wanted to play Rummy, I'd play Ticket to Ride."

Including the brief stop on Two Street to shop for souvenirs, we saw everything there was to see in Fairbanks in about 45 minutes. We let DW stew in the back seat still mumbling about Alaska and card rooms, and it was back to Coldfoot Manor for games.

I would have liked - nay, would have loved - to have played an RPG with this group. I know Yehuda and DW have experience with RPGs and Shannon - well, let's just say - Shannon is the RPG man. I had to hold my tongue though, I don't own any RPGs, nor do any of my acquaintances. Then again, this wasn't the Gone RPGing world tour.

To start things off we all played a game of Formula De, which came to be called the one-lap-death-match, or Formula DeMolition Derby. When the smoke cleared Mary crossed the finish line first, never having gotten out of second gear. Melissa was the only other survivor. Her brakes were shot, the transmission was fried and all four wheels were flat, but she survived. That was good enough for second place. And just between you and me... (looking around cautiously) After seeing Shannon drive a pretend car, I think it is a good thing that he doesn't own a car. Ahem. Anyway...

After Formula DeMolition Derby I heard rumblings about a charades rematch. That wasn't happening. Not on my watch. We hurriedly broke in to two groups for Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon while Mary was in the bathroom. After that time just flew. I know I played one game of Puerto Rico and another of El Grande. I'm not sure what the others played, I didn't keep track because I was having too much fun. The important thing was that we didn't play charades... again.

Then it was off to the airport. Fairbanks to Anchorage to Seattle to LA to Honolulu to Tokyo to Seoul to Singapore to Port Moresby? , yes to Port Moresby and eventually to Australia (that's what you get when you use PriceLine) for the next leg of the tour. Accounting for the time change we arrived about a week after we left Fairbanks. DW tells me that if we had flown the other direction we would have arrived about a week before we left Fairbanks. We'll have to remember that on the next tour.

All I can say is: Thank God it was winter Down Under, I have heard that Australian antiperspirant is made from seaweed and smells like sauerkraut.

The Anniversary Tour--California

I'm not a big fan of travel. Since 1996, I've been working at a company that had a GenCon presence almost every year, and I've only reluctantly been dragged out there three times. Beyond that, I usually enjoy working too much (and feel too responsible for it) to take much time off, so my wife and I don't do a lot of traveling either. Just a trip every year or two.

Which all goes to say that I was happy to have the anniversary tour stopping in my home town, Berkeley, CA. It was a day of home rest before the return to the road.

I think everyone was expecting a bit of a culture shock, but Berkeley's really a pretty normative college town. Sure the student body sometimes goes off sending calculators to Nicaragua, and the City Council occasionally writes up resolutions declaiming this or that national issue, and sure the whole city is a Nuclear-free zone, but that's all pretty far removed from regular life, which is more likely to center around book stores and cafes than protests and smoke-ins. (Heck, I think it's even been more than a decade since the last smoke-in at Berkeley, and I wouldn't even know where to tell you to get pot around here ... not that anyone asked.)

So everyone arrived in the city, and I showed them around the campus. I think they actually wanted to see San Francisco, but I'm stubborn that way. I told them we could see San Francisco tomorrow. (Ha!) But in any case, I love the Berkeley campus, and I know lots about it, so show them I did.

I showed them Sproul Plaza and talked about the Free Speech Movement that split the university asunder in the 1960s. Everyone but Yehuda seemed pretty bored by that, and I think Yehuda was just being the perfect gentleman. I showed them Dwinelle Hall where my campus gaming group met for four years, and told them about the labyrinthine hallways and the two brothers who built the building but couldn't agree how it should connect up. I thought DW might be excited by the idea of sojourning through its dungeon-like corridors, but he instead seemed entirely entranced by the nubile young co-eds who were about and showing generous amounts of skin thanks to one of Berkeley's rare hot days.

I showed them other interesting campus areas too, like Strawberry Creek and California Hall (where, speaking of nubile co-eds, we had some nude-ins last year) and finally, after circling around the campus some more, we ended up at the Campanille. Joe and Yehuda alike seemed intrigued by the ideas of tons of rare and secrets books being housed in the tower.

A passerby was kind enough to take an obligatory picture at the Campanille, and afterward we trekked back to my house, about a mile south of campus.

I think some of the others were a bit disgruntled by the amount of trekking we did. We must have covered 4 or 5 miles heading out to campus, circling around, and back. I scarcely noticed because it's been 17 years since I had a car now (and maybe 15 years since I've driven one, other than this week's debacle in Idaho), but some of my more vehicle-bound guests were feeling the exertion more.

Thursdays is usually my review night. I have a regular group of friends with whom I play one or two new games every Thursday. We talk about each game afterward to compare strengths and weaknesses. I take notes, then I write up reviews, usually the next Monday and Tuesday.

However this week I decided to let that all go, and instead let my Gone Gaming friends play whatever we all decided on. I'd been tempted to invite my normal Thursday-night group over too, but I was already concerned about how I was going to fit eight players into my relatively small dining room, let alone 12 or 13.

We started in on the normal what-should-we-play bit, and Mary said that we should try and play something together. I had visions of Charades filling my head, and once this decade was already enough for me. The black team from South Dakota still thinks that my one-motion Charade for Puerto Rico was brilliant, and I just didn't have the heart to tell them that holding up a single finger to designate the #1 BGG game was about as far as my Charades skills extended.

Fortunately I had an 8-player game in the hole. When Melissa mentioned the word "werewolf", I knew I had to act quickly. I said "hold on a second" and hustled upstairs to the junk room. (We won't tell DW that I store all of my American games from Runebound to Empire Builder in our spare bedroom, out of sight, nor that my wife and I call it the junk room because it tends to accumulate ... junk.)

And so I came back downstairs carrying Arkam Horror with the new Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion included.

"How about this one?" I said. It seemed an entirely appropriate offering, since I had a minor hand in its release, and it was previously published by a Bay Area company that I used to work for, Chaosium.

DW, puzzled, said, "That's not a Eurosnoot game!"

And indeed it wasn't.

Everyone gamely agreed, even though I know it wasn't quite some peoples' sort of game. But one of the advantages of American-style games is that they tend to rise or fall based upon the quality of the company, and we had the best.

It took us three and a half long hours, but we defeated Nyarlathotep. Melissa and Mary formed a brilliant one-two pickup team for health and sanity. DW kept wildly diving through gates and surviving against all odds. Yehuda browsed all the stores, collecting artifacts that were of use to us all. Joe worked out teamplay optimizations that were always right and which we sometimes listened to. Brian and Fraser were the big monster busters, while I kept offering up what everyone could do, though they were all doing fine on their own. In the end Joe became the new First Citizen of Arkham. And then we put the game back away into a billion different plastic bags. (I get them for 10 cents each at my local game store. Go ahead and offer up your own punchline there.)

Only afterward did we break up, and play a few more games separately, until the night grew too deep. Joe, Mary, Brian, and I did another Torres game, because it's one of my favorites. Meanwhile DW couldn't talk anyone into anything else from my stash of American games, but that's well enough because I don't think there was time for another. I saw him, Yehuda, Fraser, and Melissa finally settling down to a game of Hoity Toity, which I think was purposeful irony on Melissa's part. There was a bunch of Knizia fillers, since I have a full shelf of them, too and some other short stuff. After Yehuda collapsed on the couch suffering from severe jetlag, we even got in a 7-player game of Citadels despite DW's agonized cries about it being a French game. Mary always acts so nice, but she kept assassinating me, darn it. I'm happy to say that Brian won that one, not our assassin queen.

It was a wonderful day and I wouldn't change a thing. Well, maybe one thing. I think my cat, Cobweb, liked Mary better than she likes me.

The Anniversary Tour--South Dakota

It felt like a dream, all my Gone Gaming friends in my home, discussing and playing games, laughing and teasing each other like kids on a sugar high. Although you’re all probably familiar with DW’s acerbic wit, Joe’s wonderful sense of humor and Yehuda’s wild imagination, you’d probably be surprised to hear how delightfully silly Shannon can be. We were all wiping tears from our eyes and gasping for breath when he pulled a green wig from his satchel and did a brilliant impersonation of Friedemann Friese. DW was a little late because he'd flown home to check on his goat--the sole survivor of our visit to Idaho--and then drove his Harley to North Dakota, where he called for directions. "South Dakota, DW," I told him. " Doesn't that two-wheeled beast do right turns?"




Fraser, again displaying his amazing sense of balance, Brian (Koldfoot), Shannon, myself, Joe Gola, DW and Yehuda at Mt. Rushmore.




Anyway, we started off the day’s activities with a trip to Mt. Rushmore which turned out to be more exciting than you’d imagine. The crowd of tourists were less than impressed when DW tried to ride his motorcycle through the Avenue of Flags. You’ve never seen so many angry tourists at one time and their language was more colorful than all the flags on display put together. After explaining to park security that he was from Idaho, they let him go and gave us a stern warning to keep an eye on him.





The Avenue of Flags, minus DW and his Harley.






In the gift shop we were not surprised to find copies of South Dakota Monopoly, which we all purchased. Just kidding. Only Yehuda bought one.

To start off the day’s gaming, I wanted something we could all play together which leaves pretty slim pickings since I don’t have any party games. I suggested Charades using game titles and since no one threw a giant hissy-fit tantrum, we broke into 2 groups, each with the sole purpose of driving the other team crazy.

We drew Go pieces to determine the teams. The black team DW, Brian, Shannon and Joe vs. the white team Fraser, Melissa, Yehuda and yours truly. A couple of rules were established—only English titles were allowed and no expansions. The teams each came up with 5 titles, one for each player and an extra in case of any disputes about the qualifications of a title.

Since this was all my idea, I volunteered to go first. I reached into the pile of folded paper and pulled out… Conquest of the Empire. My brain froze. Con. Quest. Empire.

“Are you ready?” asked Joe, keeper of the time.

“Uuhh,” I hesitated. Empire. Conquest. “Sure.” After signaling that this was a 4-word title and I was going for the 1st word, I proceeded to hack and slash at a make-believe opponent ending with my foot proudly placed on my opponent’s make-believe chest.

“Fight.” “Sword.” “Slash.” “Triumph.” O.k., now we’re getting close. Work with it, guys, and I did that “come on” finger waggle. “Victory.” “Conquer.” Ah-hah! Pointing at Fraser and then doing the so-so see-saw movement with my hand, I manage to draw “conquest” from my brilliant teammates who then filled in “of the” all by themselves.

Empire. Oh, boy. First syllable—draw an “M” in the air. “M. Empire! Conquest of the Empire!” Oh, yeah. Time to do a little happy dance!

First up for the black team was Joe who read his chosen title, then open and closed his mouth a couple of times like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. Joe Gola, speechless. It was a moment to cherish.

Finally, he signaled he was ready. Two words, first word: and he commenced to tie something around his waist. "No, wait," he signed, hands waving in the air. He then put something over his head and across his chest from left shoulder to right hip. A sash. Yes.

Second word, first syllable, small word—and he takes some imaginary item and clutches it to his chest. Me. My. Yes, my is right.

Second word, second syllable, sounds like—standing on his toes, palm on his head then rising straight up. Grow? Stretch? No. Now he bends his knees, reaches his hand out in front of him, palm down and about 2 feet off of the floor. The next moment, he’s stretched on his toes with his hand stretched way over his head. Ah-hah…tall! Sounds like tall…fall, wall, hall. Hall!

Sash My-hall...Taj Mahal. We were so impressed that there was congratulations and applause from both teams.

Fraser’s turn now. He reads the title and his eyes pop open with amazement. “Crikey, you guys are vicious!” Snickers and full-scale guffaws emanate from The Beastie Boys on the other side of the room.

After a few head-scratching moments, Fraser says he’s ready to give it a go. Two words, first word, sounds like—he points towards the ceiling, drawing a large square with his finger. A whole in the roof? No. His fingers rain down something from the ceiling and then he shields his eyes. Ohhh, a skylight. Yes! Sounds like skylight—twilight, of course. Twilight Struggle? No. Twilight Imperium? Yes! Well done, Fraser. High fives all around.

A quick game of rock-paper-scissors awarded the next turn to DW who almost choked on his tongue when he read his title. “I’m not doing this! This is bullshit! Who came up with this?” as he uncrumples the paper to show us. Fingers point in all directions, smiles on every face.

“That’s a legitimate clue, DW. If you don’t do it, you forfeit the game,” Yehuda tells him. Unanimous agreement from the remaining white team members. “Come on, DW,” adds Melissa, “don’t spoil the fun.”

“YOUR fun,” he grumbles, but his mind finally begins to think of a plan. Two words, the whole thing at once—he squares his shoulders, tips his nose high into the air, and with a sharp twist of his head averts his gaze from all of us. Amidst the laughter, Brian manages to say, “Euro-snoot!” Hand signals signify that they’re on the right track so ideas are flung faster than DW can keep track of. Snooty. Arrogant. Blue-nose” Cocky. Snob. No, no, DW signals. This obviously isn’t working. Time to try something desperate.

Second word, two syllables, first syllable--he turns his back to everyone and mimes a man urinating. By now his team is nearly useless with laughter but a red-faced DW finishes his make-believe business and flushes. He then points at the imaginary facility. John. Toilet. Yes, now shorten it, says DW’s hands. Toi? Yes. Second syllable—he curls his index finger and drinks from an invisible cup then points at the contents. Coffee. No. Tea. Yes. Toi-tea. And a light dawns in everyone’s eyes and the whole team yells, “Hoity Toity” and breaks into cheers, both for their brilliance and DW’s.

Yehuda demonstrated his gentlemanly side by insisting that Melissa take the next turn, which turned out to be lucky for her since she got an easy one while Yehuda…well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Melissa read her title, thought for a moment and a sly smile slid across her face. “Right! I’m ready.” Two words, second word, sounds like—she took a finger and outlined her pocket, then stuck her hand in it and pointed to it with her other hand. Pocket. Yes. Sounds like…socket, locket, rocket. Yes, rocket! “Stephenson’s Rocket,” Fraser said, jumping up from his seat and giving his wife a hug. Oh, yeah. Record time, 18 seconds. It was our good luck that Fraser’s waiting for this one to be reprinted so it was pretty much in the front of his mind.

Next up was Brian who read his title and declared it was illegal. “This isn’t English!”

“But it’s the English title,” we argued.

“This isn’t an English word, it’s not any language; it’s a made up word!”

We relented, DVONN was discarded and he drew another paper from the dwindling pile. “I changed my mind. I’ll do the first one; I love the first one; sorry I said anything.”

Nope. No way. You wanted it, you got it.

Two words, first word—Brian points to Fraser and Melissa then draws a house in the air, a roof and two walls. Their house, Australia? Yes! Make it longer, though, he signs. Australian? Right! Now the tough part. Second word, four syllables, first syllable—he points to all the guys on the black team, towards Yehuda and Fraser all while nodding his head “yes”. Then he points to Melissa and me and shakes his head “no”. Boy. Man. Ah! Almost. Men! Second syllable—small word. A. Yes. Men-a. “Menopause—Australian Menopause!” Joe yells. Oh, get real! Who would play a game called Australian Menopause? Melissa and I exchange a look and yell, “We would!” while laughing at the men. “Minotaur,” guesses Shannon. No.

Brian is thinking furiously while all this is going on, I can tell by the glassy look in his eyes. An idea! Third and fourth syllables—twelve fingers are displayed (not all at once, of course) and he sits in a chair looking bored but watching some action going on which we can’t see. Twelve, h reiterates. Don’t you get it? Suddenly DW realizes what Brian is doing. Jury! Men-a-jury. They threw this weird sounding word around a few times before Joe and Shannon both heard it at the same time. Australian Menagerie. They finally got it but it took a while, which hurt their total time score especially considering Melissa’s quick turn. One last player to go for each team.

Yehuda drew from the last 2 pieces of paper for our side. An eyebrow went up and a happy grin lit his face. “Ready!” he said. Two words, first word, three syllables, first syllable—and he quickly points to the black team, Fraser and himself while nodding his head “yes”. Men! Menopause! Laughter ensues. Shhh, we’re wasting time. Second syllable—small word. A. Yes. Menagerie again? No. But he points towards the black team, specifically Shannon. Minotaur? Exactly! Minotaur Lords? Yes!

Well, that was a very lucky break for us and now we’re ahead by quite a bit with only Shannon to go for the black team. He’s going to have to pull off an incredible feat in order to give his team the win.

Shannon takes the last remaining piece of paper from their pile, reads it and actually laughs! Oh-oh, what’s going on in his ingenious mind?

Two words, whole title at once—and with a big grin on his face, he holds up one finger in front of him. That’s all. My team and I do a mental head slap as the black team yells Die Macher and Puerto Rico, knowing one of them had to be the right answer. Puerto Rico! The number one most popular game on the Geek. Why we didn’t see that coming, I don’t know but there it is. Shannon got his title in 5 seconds to win the game for his team.

From the laughter and discussion of the game afterwards, I’d say everyone had a good time. By the way, the last clue, the one we didn’t have to use, was Advanced Civilization. Ewwww.

We then split up to play various games with different combinations of people. I got to play Trias with Fraser, Melissa and Shannon and let me warn you that the soft-spoken Melissa is a devious dino dunker. She’d sooner send your little guys swimming than look at them. She managed to win by a fair amount.

I played Das Ende Der Triumvirats with Yehuda and Brian. Crassus Yehudus won with a Competence Victory, Caesar Brianus had been elected Consul once and Pompeius Marius seems to have spent way too much time lying around eating peeled grapes or something.

My dream of playing Command & Colors with DW came true, too. We played the Lake Trasimenus scenario with me as the Carthaginians through the luck of the draw. Good thing, too, because I barely managed the win even though they start with a stronger position. This was a great experience and I think I learned a few things from a master wargamer.

Finally, I got to play Torres with Joe, Shannon and Brian. This was a very close game, hard-fought to the very end. Shannon won with me behind him by 2 points. Joe and Brian finished 2 and 3 points behind me, respectively. I play Torres a lot online and do very well but this is different since I don’t have all the time in the world to walk through all of my options. But we all took our time planning our moves while trying to ignore the rowdy game of Hacienda in the other room.



Two tired kitties after a long day with strangers.



It was a wonderful day and I wouldn’t change a thing. Well, maybe one thing. I think my cat, Bess, liked Shannon better than she likes me.

The Anniversary Tour--Jerusalem

Today is the official one year anniversary of this blog. Thank you for reading.

For the coming year we are offering a new service. In addition to the current service that allows you to read the complete posts for free AND comment, there will be a new subscription based service that allows you to read and comment on the same posts for pay.

A subscription to Gone Gaming makes a nice gift. The beauty of this gift is that its value is as much or as little as you need it to be. You know the story. A friend gives you a $100 gift - what can you give your friend in return? If you spend too little, it looks like you're a cheapskate. If you spend too much, it looks like you're trying to imply that your friend is a cheapskate. With a subscription to Gone Gaming, you get a hand written receipt that you can give to your friend indicating exactly how much you paid for the subscription, so that you can both call it even.

In order to complete the subscription, send any amount of money to my Paypal account. You won't regret it. Or I won't regret it. One of them.

---

I must admit that I was both surprised and impressed that my Gone Gaming friends actually made it to Israel at this time of distress. It was nice to see friendly faces from abroad.

Tactfully, we avoided talking about the situation and politics. I took them for a visit to some of the main sites of Jerusalem: the open air markets, the beautiful buildings, churches, mosques, and museums, and of course the old city and the Western Wall. I got a passing boy to take a picture of us in one of the tunnels near the Western Wall:

After that we started walking back to my place to play some games.

To get to my house from the old city, you have to pass some interesting areas. Here are some things we saw on the way:

Right outside the Western Wall plaza, we stopped to observe a commotion. There were dozens of Arabs trying to load three camels with different types of goods. I couldn't see in the bags, but the bags had printing on them, so I discovered that they were tobacco and coffee, and also some corn, sugar, and some sort of barrels of ink. The guys were trying to load them onto these three camels, but not all of them would fit. And the camel drivers were arguing that they could only take one type of good, and only as much as would fit onto the camel's backs (some camels looked stronger than others). There was a lot of muttering, and one guy said that he was going to go get his own camel. DW was disgusted with the whole affair, for some reason.

A little further down the road, we came upon some electric workers trying to install new power poles. Jerusalem originally ran off of small generators, and then as those generators got worn out, the electric company needed to buy larger and cleaner generators. Rising fuel prices and shortages also dictated what type of power generation was appropriate for that year's work. Shannon seemed intrigued.

Eventually we came to Sultan's Pool. Sultan's Pool often has big fairs of arts and crafts, and today was no exception. Major arthouses each try to provide the nicest facilities, services, and amenities so that local artists want to work for them in this type of public atmosphere. It gives them prestige, I guess, and they can also sell off the paintings and sculptures when the artists are finished. Fraser and Melissa bought some pretty stuff for their kids.

Also around Sultan's Pool was a large concession area. Some big fat important person was traveling around from stand to stand eating things. Everyone wanted to look at him, but no one had the guts to actually go into a stand while he was in it. They always waited for him to leave a stand first, before they went in. One thing about the concession stands is that the larger your group, the faster you got served. If there were three or four groups in front of you, you might as well go somewhere else. Joe tried to squeeze past some of the lines, but that got us all thrown out.

There were also some stands of people selling souvenirs. These are also kind of strange. They take things out of their bags one at a time, waiting to see if anyone wants to buy the lot. If the lot gets too big, they just junk the whole thing and start over. Eventually, after they make enough for one day, they just get up and leave, without selling anything else. Very curious. Brian bought some Armenian looking wooden camels, only to find out that they were made in Alaska.

Although some of us were anxious to get home and play games, we passed by the Cinematec. Some of us were tired and wanted to see a movie, so we watched some long fantasy trilogy; I forget which.

After the Cinametec you pass the old Railway station. We saw a lot of workers laying tracks around in preparation for the new train line to Tel Aviv. As they lay tracks, they would roll barrels of stuff back and forth on them to each other. Some were obviously better track layers than other, while some were better at moving the barrels. There were also guys in charge of bringing out new barrels and dumping them, seemingly at random, at each work station. Mary wanted to keep watching the foreman and we had to drag her away.

Just a little detour brought us to the Emek Refaim market. It's a lovely place with home grown and cooked foods, local artist's goods, and tables full of spices. It's funny to watch some people shop. There was this one guy who tried to buy some spices, only to discover that he didn't have a bag to put them in. So he put back the spices and went to buy a bag, only to find that he didn't have any money! He went home to get money, bought a bag and put a spice in it. He wanted to buy more, but he didn't know how to carry it! So he went home again, brought his son, stood his son on the side, and every time he bought more spices, he would put it in a bag and hand it to his son. Very amusing to watch. I wasn't interested in shopping for spices, however.

The market itself is rather interesting. It started out as some small stands, and then paths grew and it spread out to make more stands. Meanwhile, the new stands got bigger, pulling in more income. But the customers can be capritious. Some days they will keep hitting the same stands over and over, ignoring the bigger stands. Other times they will spread out equally. And there are always soldiers walking around.

Finally we walked along Derech Hebron. Derech Hebron always has new stores popping up. Investors are always looking for stores to invest in with their limited resources, so when stores open up, they try to buy shares in the store. Anyone with a simple majority earns all the revenue from the store - so they invest enough, but not too much. This leave them vulnerable to other people suddenly getting more shares then they have. Israeli laws prevents direct investment in a company that others already own, but people get around it by buying neighboring stores and then merging them together. After the businesses close, the investors go and count their money and start all over again.

Well, it was a long walk, but we made it home. Then we played some games, but I forget which. That night we went back to the airport and flew to Mary's house in South Dakota.

Yehuda