A co-worker of mine asked me over dinner tonight what would be some good boardgames to introduce to younger kids (5-7).  I have my own ideas, which I'll share in a bit, but first its a good idea to see what other folks have already said on this topic.  To that end, let's head over to BoardGameGeek to check out some of the relevant GeekLists.

• Games good for adults to play with children - I think this is the best list for that age group.  Bohnanza, Apples to Apples, and Franks Zoo are classics.
• Favorite Children Games for Adults - A few good titles here - I personally loved playing Hick Hack in Gackelwack the one time I played it.

The other lists out there are geared towards older / more advanced kids, but I'll mention a couple of the better ones:

• Games My Kids and I Love to Play! - I like this list because it hits on something I've learned with my boys - theme is critical!  Do they like playing Settlers of Catan and Samurai?  Yes, but I'll tell you it is a LOT easier to get them to play Age of Mythology or Star Wars: Epic Duels.
• Games Non-Competitive Kids Enjoy Playing with Adults - Some great titles here that my kids have really taken to - Matthew and I played a lot of Balloon Cup this summer.

I've already posted Jacob's current list of favorite games - I hope to post Matthew's soon.  Here's my list of some great games to get kids steered away from the standard roll & move games:

• Apples to Apples - More of a party game than anything else, it is still a great way to ease kids into this hobby.
• Fluxx - Many adults hate this card game with a passion, but kids tend to like the chaos and lack of skill required to win the game.
• Balloon Cup - A great little card game - easy to learn, quick to play, but with some nice strategy.  A great counting game for kids.
• Capt'n Clever - I don't like this game very much, but Matthew does.  It is very simple, easy to learn, and has a cute theme.
• Star Wars - Epic Duels - A fantastic game and amazing value. Can you say theme?  If you have boys that like Star Wars, get this game.
• Dragon Delta - A great game to move to once your kids are ready for something a bit more advanced.  A cool theme and a nice “programming“ mechanic that gets kids thinking ahead.
• Lord of the Rings - The Confrontation - Another nice two-player game with a great theme.  Similar to Stratego, but more subtle strategy.
• Carcassonne - This is an easy game to play, but can take some time to learn how to score it properly if you are learning from the rules.  Kids love laying the tiles and building castles.

Finally, it is probably worth mentioning how to find these games.  I think the best place to start is always a local game store.  Maybe you have a local Wizards of the Coast or Gamekeeper store.  If your searches fail, then try one of the fantastic online stores like Funagain or GameSurplus.  Funagain is my favorite because the are in Oregon and ground shipping only takes one day.

The biggest event each year for the boardgame hobby is Spiel, held in Essen, Germany each October.  There are quite a few Essen reports available online, but if you read only one be sure to check out Mark Johnson's report in The Games Journal.

One interesting part of Mark's commentary was his take on the crowd makeup at Essen.  To quote:

It's an impressive sight. Essen was generally so packed with people that getting through the aisles was difficult. And this was only Friday! The next day's attendance would be even greater. The crowd, while thick, was a lot more pleasant than those that I've rubbed shoulders with at American conventions. You know what I mean? A very normal crowd. More twenty-something guys than anything else but not overwhelmingly so. There were lots of women, children and older folks too. Everyone was clean and generally sociable.

In a nutshell, there were far fewer of the weirdos and nerds so prevalent at the American cons I've attended. If boardgaming is ever to gain as much of a presence in our society, it will need to see a similar shift in audience. Wider participation in our hobby isn't likely as long as we've got so many games about orcs or gamers wearing costumes. Actually, there was one hall (of about six) that featured various dragon-y things, swords and armor merchants. Craig Berg called it the American convention inside Essen!

Having attended a few American game conventions (GenCon and the local Game Storm), I can see where Mark is coming from.  The people-watching is a unlike most other gatherings (think trekkie convention), but there can be negatives. There were signs all over the Indianapolis convention center that read something like this:

Avoid Gamer Funk -
All of the Local Hotels Provide Shampoo and Soap
Use Them!

I don't think this is a serious concern in the areas we attended - the boardgaming set tends to not fit the gamer stereotype as much as the roleplaying gamers.

Apparently there's a big toy contingency as well as a hall dedicated to kids.  I must find a way to work a family trip to Germany around Speil next October!

Today was supposed to be an afternoon gaming session at Kevin Graham's, but unfortunately Jacob wasn't feeling too well.  We were all suffering from some form of allergy attack (perhaps related to the cold weather here coupled with our heating system kicking in coupled with an air filter that desparately needed cleaning).  So we decided to stay home and not risk it across town.

Jacob, Matthew, and I elected to play another game of Age of Mythology from Eagle Games.  We've played this 1.5 times and were eager to give it another run.  We randomly drew cultures; Jacob was Egyptian, Matthew was Greek, and I played the Norse.

The first thing I need to mention is that in our first 2 games (we never finished the second game), we didn't play correctly.  I discovered this early in today's game as I was referencing the rules.  In the first 2 games, we played that every player took the chosen action in turn unless it was an attack.  This means that if one player chose build, then the others would build after that. I guess I was just too used to playing Puerto Rico and didn't read the rules carefully enough.  Only on the gather and explore actions do all players get to take the action.  Obviously this changes the dynamic quite a bit, and I think the game is a bit easier when played correctly. 

Things started off in a very confrontational manner.  Jacob (pictured below) decided to attack quickly - he went after both Matthew and me in the first turn.  With his elephants in hand, it made sense since they have an edge up on other mortal units.  He defeated both of us and stole resources.  He took things a bit too far though, and continued attacking until his own military was depleted, and that cost him dearly as Matthew and I sought revenge.

I opted for a build strategy while maintaining just enough defense to deter attacks on me.  I was able to make a few opportunistic attacks when either Matthew or Jacob ran out of military units.  Jacob and Matthew also need to work on their strategy and tactics for this game - they play “gather all“ cards too frequently, and this allowed me to race even farther ahead.  They both sensed my advantage and started dumping victory point cubes in the wonder category, assuming that I would never advance far enough to build a wonder.  They were wrong...

This turned out to be a very lopsided game.  Jacob in particular usually stays even with me (he beat Ken and I in Wallenstein last weekend), but his mistakes early on hurt him.  I ended up winning all categories (largest army, most buildings, and wonder).  Chris 22, Jacob 1, Matthew 1.

Julie, Jacob, Matthew, and I sat down for a game of Piratenbucht this afternoon.  It was a busy day with other activities, but with 3 hours free in the afternoon it sounded like a great idea.  This is probably our most played family game with all four of us - a fun dice fest with a great theme.

My strategy was mostly avoidance of the other players, and it worked out well.  I didn't have to fight anyone until I had built up my ship, and then I couldn't lose.  I raced out ahead in fame points and quickly became a target for everyone else.  I also didn't make any friends by tipping off the Royal Navy...

Jacob had terrible luck - if he wasn't fighting a stronger player, he had to face Blackbeard.  We play with the variant where Blackbeard moves either 1 or 2 islands after the players have moved, so you never know where he's going to end up (though he is easy to avoid).  Sometimes you just really want to get that treasure on an island where he may be headed though.

At game end, I thought I had it wrapped up - an eight point lead on the closest competitor (Julie), with only tall tales to reveal.  I only had one (I discovered Atlantis), but Julie racked up 10 points!  The picture below is where Julie revealed that she was, in fact, Blackbeard all along.

We were running out of time, so we declared me the winner since I had more gold.  I think we were supposed to fight another head-to-head battle, which she probably would have won.

I gave Jacob and Matthew a project a few weeks ago - write down what your 5 or 10 favorite games are with reasons.  I promised to publish them, so here is Jacob's list.

Star Wars Epic Duels

Age of Mythology

Wallenstein

I’m The Boss!

Tigris & Euphrates

You can view the presentations from the PDC sessions here.

Among all of my activities outside of work, Scouting is probably most dear to me.  I'm the Cubmaster for Cub Scout Pack 710 in Sherwood, and both Jacob and Matthew are Cubs.  Julie, as anyone who is involved with the Pack would agree, is the one who really runs things.  I'm mostly a figurehead.  Julie is a den leader, the secretary, and does 90% of the legwork behind my job.  Mostly I get to run the Pack meetings and implement the activities she plans.

This week at our Pack meeting we decided to do some play-acting with a twist.  We live in Sherwood, and Robin Hood is a common theme in our fair town.  We decided to tell the story of the first meeting of Robin Hood and Little John.  In the photo below, that's me on the left, our good friend Vince Meichtry playing Robin Hood, and Julie narrating.

What made this skit particularly fun was the mad-lib element.  Julie gathered a collection of nouns, verbs, etc. to fill into version 2 of the story, complete with props.  The kids were rolling on the floor laughing.

Joe Long from Microsoft gave a nice talk on the technology roadmap for Indigo, with a nice dose of prescriptive guidance for those of us who need to do distributed application development today but want to be mindful of the future.  The talk was framed around this question: how do we support incremental upgrades of clients and/or servers as we move to Indigo?

Joe suggested two approaches to this problem:

• We can teach the existing infrastructure new protocols.  For example, if I have a component written that gets deployed and accessed via Enterprise Services (COM+), Microsoft can shim in some new bits under the hood to teach enterprise services how to talk via Indigo.
• We can teach the new infrastructure about the existing legacy protocols.  For example, if I write a new Indigo service, it could fall back in some fashion to talk via DCOM.

Microsoft is opting for the first approach - move the underlying protocols forward and don't look back.  This does place some constraints on what you do today and what might or might not work in the future.  Joe covered several of the common cases, which I'll briefly discuss here.

COM+ Binary Interoperability

Interesting stuff here - the goal is to not force a recompile of clients or servers by utilizing a bridged service environment.  There are a few requirements for this to work though:

• Servers must have a type library for metadata
• Components must be COM+ / Enterprise Services.  Sorry, your ATL DCOM NT Service won't magically be accessible via Indigo.
• You must be explicit about interface types when used as parameters, i.e., don't pass around IUnknown references.
• Avoid explicit use of COSERVERINFO.
• Custom proxy/stub marshalling will not be supported.

MSMQ Binary Interoperability

I was a bit confused on this point, but it appears that Indigo will provide Indigo compatibility by automatically exposing MSMQ servers via web services.

ASMX Web Services

No real concerns about interoperability here, since this is SOAP/XML.

.NET Remoting and WSE

Out of luck - don't expect much help here.

Migrating Code to Indigo

I won't go into extensive detail here - you can check out the presentation yourself if you would like more details.  The gist of changes revolves around instantiation of servers and proxies - everything else can pretty much remain the same if you are writing ASMX web services or Enterprise Services components today.  .NET remoting is mostly orphaned, though porting won't be too difficult.  The use of "new" to create client proxies will not be supported.

Where Should We Host Server Components?

I asked this question at the end of the talk.  In the Longhorn world, as in today, there are two primary hosts for components - IIS / ASP.NET, and Enterprise Services.  Joe's recommendation was to use ASMX web services by default and host in IIS.  If you need Enterprise Services, go ahead and use it but opt for the library component model and still host in IIS if at all possible.

I was able to have dinner last night with two of my oldest (their not old, but you know what I mean) friends: Mike and Becky Sattin.  Becky's new husband Bob also joined us.  Mike and I first met back in the 1978 or 1979 timeframe, and immediately found we had a lot of common interests.  At that point in our lives, we were most interested in playing new computer games on his Apple II computer (Wizardry, Olympic Decathlon, Castle Wolfenstein) and sports simulation board games by APBA.  And we often spent some late nights at his house playing Dungeons and Dragons.

I moved away from Indianapolis in 1982 to Albuquerque, then Omaha. In 1985 I moved back to Indianapolis and finished high school where I had started (North Central HS).  During the move transition from Omaha back to Indy, I lived with Mike and his parents.  I'm forever grateful for the hospitality they showed me during that challenging time.  Becky was away at college at Washington University, and she was one of the key influences that led me to attend there.  While I was living away from Indy, Mike managed to become a very accomplished local musician - his living room was full of guitars, drums, keyboards, and other equipment for his band.  You can listen to some his early music with the band Avanti right here at MP3.com.

Mike moved to Los Angeles around 1987 to follow his muse and take a shot at the music scene there.  We've stayed in touch over the years, and when I lived in LA briefly in the early 90s I was able to see him play often, I think with the band Ptexas Pteradactyls.  He has been involved in a number of bands since then - Superfly Connection and Captain Pants to name a few.

Mike has a number of projects going on right now - he did his own take on White Stripes and is involved with the band Chromosome Tea.  He also works with Little Dawnee Frinta.

I flew into LA late last night from Portland for the Microsoft PDC conference.  My outbound flight was delayed due to slowdowns in the LA area from the fires, and I didn't get into LAX until around 1:30am.  The night-time descent through the valley and into LA was surreal - we could see the glow from the Simi Valley fires, and the smoke permeated the cabin so much that my eyes watered.  I'm glad I'll be spending most of my time indoors here - the outside world is hazy and the smell of smoke and ash is pervasive.

I lived in LA for a short while back in the early 90s, and one distinct memory of the place is a sequence of one natural disaster after another.  This is a hardluck state...