Eric Arneson just published his Top 10 Games of 2003 list.  I agree with many of his choices, though I haven't played all of the games he mentioned.  I especially appreciate his nods to I'm the Boss, New England, Mystery of the Abbey, Balloon Cup, and Battle Ball.  I don't think Battle Ball would have made my top 10 list, but it is a fun game, especially for one that has a mass market presence.  I'll have to publish my top 10 list shortly...

If you know me or read this site very often, then you know that I travel quite a bit.  So much so that I have a hard time using all of my frequent flier miles, particularly those I accumulate on airlines I use less like Delta and Alaska.  Operation Hero Miles is a great way to support our troops with almost no bureaucracy standing in the way.  Here's some information from their website:

In September 2003, the Pentagon started giving soldiers stationed in Iraq two-week leaves in the largest R & R program since the Vietnam War. Soldiers on R & R or Emergency Leave are flown by the military to Germany or three airports in the United States, Baltimore/Washington, (BWI), Dallas/FortWorth, (DFW), or Atlanta, (ATL ) for free.

The soldiers have been responsible for flights the rest of the way in the U.S. to their destinations, until Congress provided funding for this purpose on November 3, 2003. However, this funding is not yet available and may not be sufficient for all the troops or troops on "Emergency Leave".

More than 470 soldiers a day are arriving in the U.S.

Many soldiers on R&R leave must purchase high-priced last minute airfares to connect to their hometowns once their military flights land at the airports in Baltimore, Dallas or Atlanta. Soldiers on "Emergency Leave" must still pay the full cost of their domestic travel when they are rushed home for the family death, birth, illness or other emergency. The military does not pay the cost of their travel in the United States, so your frequent flyer miles are a huge help.

Americans have donated their unused frequent flyer miles to the Department of Defense to help troops travel home and spend quality time with their loved ones, without worrying about how much it will cost.

I just found a place to use my Alaska and Delta miles!

As I've mentioned before, I recently purchased a new iPod and a used iBook.  I also enrolled in the iTunes service to see what all the hype is about.  The idea of paying about $1 for singles is appealing to me.  There are quite a few artists out there with songs I like but I'm tired of paying 15 bucks to get just 2 or 3 songs I like.

Unfortunately, my first experience with iTunes wasn't all that great.  First off, I don't find the interface to be as spectacular is many others have claimed.  I find myself staring at the screen quite a bit trying to figure out what to do (particularly when it comes to the online store and maintenance of my account).  I chose 3 songs to purchase and download.  Unfortunately, they wouldn't load into the iPod because iTunes claimed it wasn't authorized to play the songs.  I suspected that this was related to the fact that I originally used the iPod with Windows and not OSX.

Around that time I upgraded the iBook to Panther, wiping the box clean with the exception of a few documents I had stored on the iBook.  I didn't backup the downloaded music.

This weekend I wiped the iPod clean and rebuilt the music collection from my library.  I then went back into iTunes to download my music again. I just assumed that once I purchased the music, Apple would track the purchase and allow me to download again at a future date (like Audible).  Wrong!  When you purchase from iTunes, you are getting a one-time download.  This means you better protect the content or you'll have to buy it again.  This is clearly written in the iTunes terms & conditions, but who reads those?  Lesson learned, and I'll make sure I protect the content in the future.

I sent a support request into Apple explaining my problem, and begging to get those three downloads again.  Here was their response:

The Music Store Team has carefully considered your request for a new download. As a gesture of goodwill, we have re-granted your download access for your order history.

Please note that this is a one-time exception to the iTunes Music Store's Terms of Service, which clearly states that you will be responsible for backing up your own system. In the interest of fairness to all customers, the Music Store Team will be unable to make additional exceptions for you. To download again, open iTunes 4 and select Check for Purchased Music from the Advanced menu.  

Very cool.  And I got this response just 24 hours after my inquiry.

Jacob and I cruised over to Kevin's last weekend for some Sunday gaming. Normally a long haul for us, it was very convenient this time because Jacob and I were able to get in some Christmas shopping for Julie and Matthew at the nearby shopping malls.  Jacob spent his own money on his gift for Matthew and was a great helper while we found a few items for Julie.

Kevin always has such a friendly crowd at his place, and the group is usually a good, manageable size (6-9 people).  Onto the games...

Condottierie

As the 'geek likes to say, this is a “card game that's masquerading as a board game” - a fun opener that almost always seems to end too quickly for me.  I'm sure this is partly because each game has been played with 1 or 2 first timers.  Players play cards to participate in an auction for provinces with a goal of owning three contiguous.  Most of the cards have face values, while a some can be played to double a player's bid, force each of the facecards to be worth only 1, or force an auction to end early.  Jacob set up the winning play this game by contesting a province adjacent to his that would give Kevin enough contiguous provinces to win the game.

Unfortunately not enough strength stayed in the hand, and I wound up 1 or 2 points short of Kevin's total (he had few but sufficient cards) and he won the game.

Medina

Domaine

Ahhh, Domaine... this one I've been wanting to try for some time.  Jacob and I saw a large format version of this at GenCon last summer, and since that time it has been on our short list of games to try.  So when the opportunity to play it came up, Jacob and I snatched the box and Sabrina joined us.

Domaine is a very spatial game (you can read an online tutorial).  There is a random layout in each game with the 9 land tiles (a fixed center), and players alternate placing each of their four castles on the board with an adjacent knight.  There are some special squares on the board - some help produce victory points (villages and forests), others produce income (mines), and then there are the meadows which are essentially empty space.  The goal of the game is to segment off chunks of the game board with borders, creating domains around your castles.

If you try and get too greedy and build a huge domain, it will either take too long or your opponent will just disrupt your plans.  Economy enters the game as players must pay gold to perform actions, which include training knights, building borders, or expanding an existing domain into an opponent's.  The card deck composition is creative - cards are labeled A, B, C, and D, and all of the “A” cards are shuffled together, then the B's, etc.  The A's are placed on top of the B's, B's on the C's, and the C's on the D's.  This creates a changing economic environment in the game.  For example, action cards to build borders are more common early in the game and often cost less than later in the game. The easiest way of getting money is selling your action cards - they have a sale price as well as an action cost (the selling price is always less than the cost).  Cards that you sell back to the bank go face up in a pool of cards that your opponents can then purchase back.

We made a few serious rules blunders during play (I was teaching Sabrina and Jacob how to play while I taught myself), the most serious being how knights are handled.  Nobody was building knights early on because we missed the rule that said you can only expand into someone else's domain if you have more knights in the expanding domain than in the opponent's.  This is obviously a critical reason to recruit knights, and without this understanding it doesn't make much sense to ever hire a new one.  We pointed out to Kevin how worthless the knights seemed, and he quickly corrected us.  This came just as the domains were getting completed, so there ensued a rush to build knights.  We also missed the rule that you can't steal a knight adjacent to a castle (hence the configuration you'll see below in the end game).

I held a fairly healthy lead for a while, but Jacob and Sabrina came on strong as they began to complete their domains.  I pulled out the victory by expanding a domain and grabbing a resource monopoly at the end which pushed me slightly ahead in victory points (I was orange, Jacob blue, and Sabrina red).  This game is on my short to-buy list - after the holidays though (hey, it's Christmas - we shouldn't be buying stuff for ourselves!).

Clans

Kevin, Jim, Jeff, and Sabrina then played a game of Clans.  This is most definitely not on my to-buy list.  This is an abstract game with a fairly weak theme, and my one playing with Angela wasn't very enjoyable.  Maybe I should give it another try... but really, why, when there are some many games I like out there?

Aladdin's Dragons

A new guest arrived that I hadn't met before - welcome Greg!  Greg is an experienced gamer but hadn't tried Aladdin's Dragons yet, so I offered to teach it to Greg and Jacob.  I enjoy this game and will rarely turn down an opportunity to play it.  This game is an auction game with a few magical twists (artifacts and spell cards that can be used to disrupt auctions or alter the game mechanics).  Each player has a series of tokens numbered from 1 to 9 (minus the 3), and players take turns bidding face down with the tokens on a number of spaces (caverns where you can get gems, the town where you can get cards and other advantages, and the palace where you can get artifacts).  The player with the most artifacts wins the game.  The basic strategy is to acquire gems early on so that you can by artifacts as the game progresses.  This game is always pretty close when I play it, and this was no exception.  I managed to pull out the victory with one more tile than Greg, and two more than Jacob.

Time to flush the backlog of photos and other content.  As I mentioned before, Julie, Jacob, Matthew and I took the train to Seattle over Thanksgiving weekend.  We stayed at a hotel downtown and explored the area.  We did this 4 years ago and had a great time.  I was determined though to plan just a tiny bit more - we ended up having donuts for Thanksgiving dinner last time for want of an open restaurant.  This time we had a reservation at the Hunt Club restaurant and had a fine 5-course meal.  Julie and I opted out of the turkey for some finer offerings (prime rib and lamb).

On Friday we walked a couple of blocks over to watch the annual holiday parade.  The rain wasn't too bad and it was a fun diversion.  One interesting tidbit: I've been pretty critical of the Segway in the past, but I was proven wrong at the parade.  Look below for the perfect application of this amazing (?) technology.

Much of the time we just spent wandering around.  Seattle downtown is nicely sized.  We were able to roam from Pioneer Square to the piers to Pike Place to the shopping districts with no troubles.  Friday afternoon we did the Seattle Underground tour - highly recommded.

Saturday we played tourist and took a boat over to Tillicum Village.  We walked down to the piers from the hotel and hung out for a while until the boat left.

The village trip was a bit of a disappointment.  I should have expected as much, but for $65 for an adult, the food (salmon) should have been a bit better.  We did enjoy a short hike on the island, and the boat ride was a blast.  Matthew did like the somewhat hokey native American show after dinner.

One highlight of the weekend was a chance dinner at Fadó, an Irish pub.  A great menu, even for kids, and of course some tasty Guiness.  I had the fish and chips.

Thanks to my pack-rat friend Greg, I'm in the process of restoring most of my content.  Things will still be shakey for a while as my ISP stabilizes the environment.  I have a backlog of content to publish as well, including a glorious day of gaming yesterday where we had about 19 people at our home.

I'm still sorting through some configuration challenges on the host machine, so if you aggregate the site with an RSS reader, it will be broken for a while.  Hopefully we'll get this resolved tonight.

My ISP crashed the box where my weblog was hosted.  I may have lost quite a bit of content as well.  My own fault for not having a better backup strategy.

I'll be gradually replacing content as I recover it from various sources, so please be patient.  If you happen to use a news aggregator and have an archive of my postings, please let me know!  You might be able to help me out.

I read in the nimrods blog about this article by Jacob Davenport, designer (or co-designer) of some great Icehouse games like Pikemen and Gnostica.

Few topics have garnered such praise and criticism as Agile / Extreme programming (XP) over the past 4 years.  Its proponents argue that XP is a deliberate and disciplined approach to software development, while its opponents often claim that it is nothing more than a chaotic, shoot-from-the-hip approach that eschews formal requirements analysis and design.  The Truth is, when applied to certain classes of projects, XP is a very attractive, effective approach that can be very successful.

Jacob's juxtaposition of XP on top of game design is interesting, though I wonder what point he is trying to make.  I'm not a game designer, but the two seem so very different to me. Software methodologies exist for one primary reason - to reduce the defects (or, to put it a different way, increase the quality) of a software product.  Usually this means bringing some formality to how we figure out what the problem is (requirements), how we plan to solve the problem (design), solving the problem (programming), and verifying that we solved it (testing).

Game design isn't so much about solving a problem as it is producing a system for entertainment - an act of creativity.  I'm not sure that any sort of methodology would help me become a game designer.  But I will concede that Jacob's ideas make a lot of sense around the area of game and rule refinement.  He has some nice things to say about refactoring and testing that sound applicable to game design.

Mark Jackson took some time to summarize what are called “5 and 10” or “five and dime” reports culled from spielfrieks early this year.  This was a bit late in coming, but better late than never. The results were taken from 64 different gamers, with 5 points awarded if the gameshowed up on their five list (played 5-9 times) and 10 points if the game showed upon their dime list (played 10+ times).  Here is a list of the top 10:

The games on the list clearly fall into a few distinct categories: light filler games that people tend to play frequently (Liar's Dice, Can't Stop, Transamerica, Lost Cities, Take 6) and deeper strategic games that are hugely popular (Puerto Rico, Settlers).  The game in a category by itself, dexterity games, is Crokinole.  You can put Carcassonne in either the light filler category or deeper game depending on your preference .

I've played all of these games except for Lost Cities and Take 6.  Actually I've played Lost Cities online against an AI, but never in real life.

Judging from the session reports I've been reading so far this year, it looks like Puerto Rico will again be at the top of the list for 2003.  A few predictions for new games that we might see in the top 10 for 2003:

• Age of Steam - the only thing that could keep this off the list is its length, which can lower the number of plays.
• Pirate's Cove / Piratenbucht - the Days of Wonder release of the English version of this great game might push it into the top 10.
• Amun Re - a long shot.

Likely it will be tough to displace some of the tried-and-true fillers (like Can't Stop and Liar's Dice) and classics.