Thanks to Jason Ungerleider, there's a nice little Firefox search plugin for searching BoardGameGeek.  Nice work Jason!

I'll have a sizable post tomorrow about the playtesting we conducted over the weekend, but till then here are a few games played over the weekend.

I managed to be in the office again for some Friday lunchtime gaming, and we decided to try Acquire again.  Eric was in Columbus for a minis tournament, so it was Paul, Arron, Jason, and me.  The last time I played Acquire, I managed to be in on just about every deal and ran away with the victory. This time the near opposite was true and Jason and Paul fought it out hard for 1st place with Jason coming out on top.  I was easily in third place most of the game, but Arron started showing hints of crying again so I eased up a bit and even managed to slip him some of my stock mid game so that he would get a few majorities and not embarass himself again.  Thankfully he finished 3rd, slightly ahead of me, and we avoided a difficult tantrum.

Most of Saturday was spent playtesting some of KC Humphrey's game designs.  At the end of the day we had about an hour to play some of the new games purchased from and hand-delivered by Tom at Boards and Bits.

Doug and I sat down to try the newish Lightning D-Day from Decision Games.  This is a two-player card game somewhat reminiscent of Battle Cards: World Conflict.  I've heard some great reports on this game but so far I'm not terribly impressed.  The rules are vague in many places, though reading the FAQ online is helping a bit.  They certainly could have used some of the white space in the ruleset to further explain how action cards work and talk through more examples of play.  I'll need to play this a few more times before passing judgment.

Doug faces off in Lightning D-Day.  He played the Axis, I was the Allies.

At the same time, Mike, Bill, Greg, Tom, and Jacob gave the new Cathala/Faidutti game Boomtown a try.  I don't believe they finished the game, but everyone appeared to be having a good time and Jacob is anxious to play again.

Boomtown!

Not much gaming action today as Julie and I spent most of the day catching up on some personal work.  Late afternoon as I was putting some games away in the closet, I asked Matthew to try out Buyword.  This is a Sackson design published this year by Face2Face games and was the winner of the 2005 Games Magazine Game of the Year.

Julie helping Matthew out with his letter tiles.

First, a comment about the quality of the components.  Like others, my box came without the scoring table, the money was scattered throughout the box, and many of the letter tiles were stuck together.  The quality of the printing finish on the tiles is also not consistent. The box and the letter bag are first rate though.

This is a great word game with a very creative mechanic.  Players buy letter tiles in groups of 2-5 depending on the die roll, and they pay the square of the sum of the “pips” on the letters they buy.  Letters that occur less frequently (think J, Q, and Z) have more pips.  So if I draw 3 tiles and there are 8 pips on them, then I pay $64 to get the tiles or discard all of them.  After buying the tiles, you then have the opportunity to form a word, scoring (you guessed it) the square of the sum of the pips.  This is a “buy low sell high” game and there are some tough choices.  If you like word games pick this one up - I think it is right up there with Scrabble and Boggle.

I took off for the east side of Portland to help Rita setup for a games playtest day we are running today to showcase and evaluate 4 of KC's game (Pizzza, Havoc, Northwest Trek, and Tres Amigos).  I'll post a report tonight or tomorrow on how things go today.

After setup, I joined KC, Rita and their kids along with Jeff and Jason, who drove up from Medford, for some Thai food.  Afterwards, we hopped over to KC's home for some gaming. I requested something shorter so I could get back home across town at a decent hour, and KC suggested we try his new design, currently named Metro 2.  This game is an extension and rework of the fine Dirk Henn game Metro.

Rita, KC, and Jeff (still munching on some Pad Thai) playing Metro 2.

KC happened upon the design while working on a square-tile variant (as opposed to the original cairo-tile design) of his tile placement game Northwest Trek.  This variant uses offset squares, leaving smaller squares distributed throughout the board (see the closeup of the board below).

Closeup of the Metro 2 board.

These smaller squares either represent 2x ending points (like the central station in Metro) or, if blank, waystations that can be built out as the game proceeds.  These waystations provide both a way to score more points and diminish the points earned by your opponents.  The geometry is also quite a bit different than the original metro, allowing the potential for head-on collision's (only allowed at the end-game if there's no other option).  Everyone that played enjoyed it, though it is a bit more cut-throat than the original game.  I think this is a positive as it leads to a bit more player interaction than Metro.

My friend and co-worker Travis is (!) taking a week off to play GTA: San Andreas.  He's, very humorously I might add, documenting his week there in the first person.

There's been quite a bit of talk about the pros and cons of PodCasting.  Part of this issue is that people get too wrapped up in the technology as opposed to the content.  What does PodCasting have to do with the iPod?  Escapes me...

Anyway, Aldie and Derk over at BoardGameGeek recently launched an audio series called GeekSpeak.  I listened to episodes 1-6 while flying around the country last week, and I was very much impressed.  The interviews are well done and both Aldie and Derk are engaging.  99% of the population (ok, 99.99%) could care less about this content, which makes this model all the more impressive: there's no other way to broadcast this sort of material.  Keep it up guys.

Well, sort of.  Julie and I voted last night while the kids were out trick-or-treating.  Julie dropped the ballots off at the library today.

Ole and Dave: you are not alone.

I support Bush.

There, I said it.

The November issue of The Games Journal is out.  My favorite article this month is “Living the Dream 2.0: Promotion.”  Check it out.

My friend and co-worker John Hibbard has documented his transformation, self described as From Morbid Obese to Ironman.  Best of luck John next week at your Ironman this Saturday - we'll all be pulling for the success you deserve.

Time to catch up on a couple of session reports.

Last Saturday KC and Rita came over to discuss some planning for the upcoming playtest days we are running in November to further develop four of KC's games.  We also managed to sneak in a few games.

Ken joined us for a game of Keythedral, a game KC recently picked up that I had been wanting to try for some time.  We played the Pro Ludo remake, which apparently has better components than the original.  I certainly have few complaints about the bits - this is a nice looking game.  I do wish they would have used numbers and letters for the order and phase pieces - it was always confusing to me what was happening when.

Rita, Ken, KC and playing Keythedral.  KC made some great player aid screens to use in this game.

I'm going to reserve judgment on this game until I play it again as my first experience wasn't too great.  Similar to Settlers, I think that if you make poor choices at the beginning you might be out of running for the rest of the game.  That's the situation I found myself in, but it was still fun along the way.  Ken edged out KC in the end, with Rita and a distant 3rd and 4th.

Ken had to leave so I suggested we play St. Petersburg, which plays nicely with three players.  KC was an old hand at this game but Rita hadn't played yet.  KC got off to a great start with a first round Mistress, which can make it real tough for the other players to keep up.  Some even consider this card broken. 

Rita and KC about mid-way through St. Pete.

I tried my hardest, but made a crucial mistake of not buying some victory points with my market the penultimate turn (I had plenty of cash leftover), which allowed KC to pull out the victory by less than 10 points.  Close game, lots of tension.  I still like this game.

Julie and Matthew took off for Salishan on Saturday afternoon after Jacob's football game.  Jacob and I strategically planned out the next 24 hours:

• Rent a DVD or 2 from Blockbuster using Jacob's gift card (thanks Brandon!).  We picked up The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (watched it) and Willow (will watch sometime this week).
• Pick up a pizza at Papa Murphy's.
• Play a longer two-player boardgame that we hadn't tried yet
• Get in some multi-player computer game action.  We ended up playing some FarCry.
• Head out to a park somewhere to play with a new slingshot rocket toy he got for his birthday

We elected to play Empire Builder, the classic crayon rail game re-published by Mayfair Games. I picked it up on the cheap from Toys R Us / Amazon.  The rules are exceedingly simple so we were off and running in no time.  Fortunately I had already taken the time to apply the multitude of stickers on the load counters.

Jacob and I played very cooperatively - it took a while for him to grasp the importance of not running out of money and maximizing his load and payoff potentials.  Well, not too long, because within about 10 turns he was starting to take the lead and had set up a strong network.

I let Jacob take the picture this time (obviously).  We use our handy dandy poker chips for money instead of the monopoly money.  We prefer to play with open cash.

I opted for a primarily north-south route from the start, originating my line in Mexico City.  Jacob was east-west and had a good network from NYC to Seattle early on.  In the end Jacob was able to capture the victory, surpassing $250MM while I was at about $230MM.  Close game with some real tension at the end.

This game won't appeal to a lot of people - it is a thinking game that requires serious planning and can be a brain burner at times.  It is also a mostly solitaire game - very little player interaction with the published rules.  I think it would be interesting to try out the more competitive public-locking rules that introduces some competition for contracts.

Jacob is looking forward to playing the more complex but thematic Iron Dragon, so expect to see a report on that sometime in the near future.

Saturday marked the end of fall sports for Jacob and Matthew.  Matthew finished the season with a strong win against a Tigard team, while Jacob's team suffered a 20-0 loss against a Tigard team in their medal game.  They both improved dramatically over the season, had a great time, and learned much from their outstanding coaches.  They'll take the winter off for sports, and we'll use that time to start early on baseball prep so they have strong tryouts in the spring.

Matthew's specialty this year was his clearing kicks.

Jacob with his pal and co-lineman Nick Rowlands.  They'll both move up to 5th/6th football next year, most certainly as linemen.