After spending 4 hours this morning at Beaverton Toyota getting my car worked on (regular maintenance plus some repairs from vandalism at the Portland airport), I joined Jacob and Matthew at the Rude household for Brandon's birthday.  No photos from that event, though I do have one from our evening play of Vanished Planet.

Trias

Ken and I played the two-player variant of Trias, the game of plate tectonics and dinosaur migration.  There have been some complaints about the theme of this game, claiming that it is too dry or abstract.  I love the theme!  I can visualize the continents forming and the dinosaurs migrating (and swimming).  This game plays better with more than two, but we had a good time and a very close finish with my just edging Ken out.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers

This is now my favorite version of Carcassonne.  I like the scoring in this as there appears to be more equity between the rivers and forests (as opposed to the roads and castles in the original).  The addition of the bonus tiles adds a fun dynamic.  This was a close game as well, with me beating Ken by less than 10 points in a 120+ point game.

Coloretto

Ken, Tracey, and I played a single hand of Coloretto, with Ken winning the hand with 37 points.

Vanished Planet

Jacob, Matthew, and I broke out my new copy of Vanished Planet.  Feedback on this cooperative game has been very mixed, but it is a winner in our house.  The boys absolutely love the theme, and cooperative games are a great family activity (especially in a competitive household like ours).

Ok, round 2 of trying to make this post.  As much as I like dasBlog, the browser based editor can drive me nuts.  I was 90% through this session report when I accidently clicked the back button, losing all of the content.  I'm sure I'll write this much more eloquently the second time around.  Greg Hughes gave me some good tips on using Outlook to compose and post directly into dasBlog, so maybe I'll start using that.

Last Thursday I joined the RipCityGamers for Die Hard Thursday - so named because it is usually a smaller turnout.  Not so this week - there were 8 of us, including our guest David Chapelle from Atlanta.

New England

Half of us split out for a game of New England, one of my favorites.  David, Doug, George and I tried to be the most successful pilgrim on Plymouth Rock. David had never played it but picked up the mechanics quick enough to make a very decent showing. With four players things are pretty tight - many more opportunities to conflict with other players than in the three player game. It was a balanced game that came down to the last round.  Three of us were tied for the barn majority (I already had the most pilgrims), and turn order played to my favor as I was able to grab the 10 spot and go first, grabbing the last available barn.  This was a substantial point swing and allowed me to the game with 31 points. David came in second with 28 points and Doug edged George out in the tie breaker at 26 points. If the turn order had been different, or if George was able to take the 10 spot (he had only 8 shillings), it would have been even closer.

Maya

I still haven't played this game, but DavidE gave a brief report:

The buzz on Maya is that it's a blend of familiar mechanisms with a fairly pleasant outcome. As blind bidding was one of those mechanisms, it probably will never make it into the common rotation, but it was definitely decent.

Cronberg

This is a game I had never seen nor even heard of.  Feedback was favorable though, with George reporting:

Peter taught this little game to Doug and I. Simple rules, simple concept, but not so simple to master. doug and I made the rookie mistake of placing lots of tiles early in the game only to give Peter good spots to put his men down. Very lopsided scoring was the result.

Luckily this game plays very quickly. Including teaching it took us 15 minutes to complete our first game so we gave it another go. This time Doug and I knew better than to place tiles early on which resulted in a final score of 44, 45, 56.

New Eden 2

Next was an opportunity for a few of us to play KC's latest prototype New Eden 2, the successor to the game New Eden (mentioned before right here). New Eden 2 is a very different game, with only the theme in common with its predecessor.  Think of this game as a zoom-in on one the hexes in New Eden.

New Eden 2 is essentially a tile laying game where players are trying to build roads of a sufficient length to allow them to build buildings.  Each building consists of two colors, and each player has a hidden goal of two colors that he is trying to build (important but not critical - it just gives bonus points for each building containing those special colors). This game borrows from mechanics in a number of games I've played, including Carcassonne, Attika, and TransAmerica.  But don't get me wrong - this is a very unique, fun game to play.  It certainly doesn't feel like a prototype since the bits were all very high quality.

DavidE and I were in the lead most of the game, partly because we joined roads early on and were able to build off of each other fairly regularly. DavidE pulled out the victory in the end, with me a close second.

DavidE had some high praise of the game (including some valuable feedback for KC):

...it is definitely Thumbs Up, and, in my opinion, perfectly publishable as it is, and as good as any mid-weight game released in the past year. Sure, you could tweak a subsystem here or there just for kicks, but dammit this game should be in print!

I tend to agree with David on this point - this game doesn't need much more work and it is certainly better than a number of games I played over the past six months.  Nice work KC!

Just an FYI - my MSN handle is brookscl_97140 at hotmail.com.

You can register online here.  We plan to go this year, with Jacob and I probably attending for three of the days.  Perhaps Matthew will be ready as well.

I played a quick solitaire game of Vanished Planet tonight to acquaint myself with the rules and get a feel for the game play.  Maybe I'll write a review after I get a chance to play it with the boys this weekend, but for now I'll share a few first impressions:

• This game is difficult.  I played on the easiest setting and lost, though I was close.  There is a countdown effect similar to Sauron approaching the fellowship in the Lord of the Rings Boardgame.
• There are some human factors issues with the game.  I found it very difficult to read the symbols for the different resource and personnel types.  There is too much use of dark colors like black and purple with too little contrast.
• The quick reference on the back of the rules could use some work.  For example, the symbols for the professions should be shown next to each profession since they are referred to in the purchase cost for some of the technologies.
• There are too many levels of indirection in the game, which leads to a certain fiddlyness.  I'm sure this will become more natural over time, but simple things like distinguishing between a trade station or research station can be tough. Why not just use the resource symbols for these locations on the game board?  Or use an iconic representation that would look good on the map but still be appropriate for use on the cards.
• I didn't realize until too late that the creature will eat the satellites fairly early in the game, which put me in a bind.  I only had one goal by the time they were consumed, which made it nearly impossible to win.  I had to spend too many resources to build a Communications Relay so that I could retrieve goals from my home planet.  Had I been able to save those resources for the actual goals I would have won the game.
• The rules could use some work - the specifics seem to be bit scattered around the main rules, the tutorial, and the quick reference.

These notes are mostly negative, but I did enjoy the solitaire play and look forward to trying it with a group.

Bowing to pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, the great folks that built A Game of Thrones Online have taken the game down.  Apparently one of the concerns is physical game ownership of the players that are playing online:

They did have one interesting requirement, however, which has compelled me to launch a question on the forum (http://www.agotonline.com/forum/):

All judges and PBeM games 'must be structured in such a way that it is impossible to play without owning a copy of the game.'

I am not sure how we can comply with this request.  In reality, there is no way to determine whether a human judge needs a copy of the game since the rules are published on their Web site.  Though we heavily encourage ownership of the game and very much want everyone to own a copy, I can't know for sure that every player owns a copy.  (Or do we just need one of the five players to own a copy?)

I think this is a bad move by the Fantasy Flight.  They run the risk of alienating the very individuals most likely to evangelize their games.

I took a bit of a chance and ordered the game Vanished Planet, a cooperative game published independently.  I've heard it is insanely difficult to win, but the mechanics and theme looked interesting enough to give it a try.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to try it this weekend, and I'll certainly report back when I do.

Julie and I have recently converted to nearly all digital photos, and while I like my Nikon Coolpix 2500 it is pretty challenging getting photos to turn out the way I'd like.  About 10 years ago I bought a Canon Eos Elan for Julie on her birthday, and that has been our workhouse for 35mm ever since.  We didn't go nuts on lenses, adding only a zoom lens to the lens that came with the camera.

I've always thought that some day we would get a digital body for those lenses, but $1500+ is just too much to justify.  When Canon announced their Digital Rebel last year, my ears perked up and I started to seriously consider it.

We also discovered that our local Walgreens will do 4x6 printing of our digital photos for only $0.29, so there's some potential savings in development costs (i.e., only print the photos you like).

My only hesitation right now is an ignorance of the quality of the Digital Rebel body vs. some of the other options.  Since my price point is certainly below $1000, there really aren't any other options (other than wait).  Any commentary or feedback would be appreciated.

After a long week of travel to the east coast, and a busy week of activities for the kids, we were all content to lay low and take it easy this weekend.  On Saturday, we did a bit of shopping and saw the movie Miracle, a great flick about the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team.  I'm thrilled that Jacob and Matthew can get a taste of how momentous this event was; for those of us who lived through it stands as one of the most memorable events in our lifetime.  For me, only the Challenger explosion, the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the Sept 11 disaster stand out as much.  The movie was fantastic - a great script in the same league as The Rookie and other Mike Rich classics, though he didn't get writing credit for this one due to some weird writer's guild ruling.

After the movie we just had to stop in at Fry's, and we picked up the PC game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This game is amazing and kept the men of the house engaged for the better part of Sunday.  If you like role-playing computer games and are a Star Wars fan, you must get this game.

Come join the clash of kings at A Game of Thrones Online.