My friend Dave and wife Melanie just returned from China with a new adopted daughter.  Congrats Dave; you'll be busy and tired for quite a while but it will all be worth it.

I periodically do bulk game orders for my local group through Boards and Bits, my favorite online retailer.  This works reasonably well, though with my work and travel schedule lately it has been a challenge to deliver all of the games to my group.  Chuck and I arranged for him to stop by on his way home from work in Wilsonville tonight, and as long as he is stopping by why not play some games?

Originally we had planned on 2p games as I was expecting Julie and the boys to stay out at the coast all week.  They came back mid day and Matthew was around, so we let Matthew choose a game off the shelf.  His all-time favorite is the Lord of the Rings boardgame, a cooperative game.

The stars were aligned tonight (read: somebody must have stacked the event tile deck) because we sailed through Moria, Helms Deep, Shelob's Lair, and Mordor in an almost effortless fashion.  Our family's previous high score was 79 (60 for destroying the ring plus 19 shield points) and we blew that record away tonight with a score of 88.

We had about an hour left and Chuck had never played St. Petersburg, so that was a logical choice.  This game is still top shelf for me - plays quickly, is easy to teach, and plenty of tension.

Chuck picked up on the mechanics and strategy quickly, made great choices and pulled out the victory in the end.

I'm the Cubmaster for Cub Scout Pack 710 - been doing it for 2 years now and will likely do it for one more until Jacob moves on to Boy Scouts.  My favorite event each year is the pinewood derby.

This year we held a workshop at Sherwood High School, hosted by the most excellent technical education teacher John Neibergall.  The high school has an outstanding shop for woodworking, metal work, and computer-aided design.  John is very involved with scouts in the area and had some Boy Scouts from a local troop there to help coach the Cubs.

John makes some cuts for Nick, Jacob, and Matthew at the wood shop.

One of my goals in running the derby is to keep it somewhat competitive but to allow the kids to race as much as possible.  We impound the cars after final weigh-in and assign each car a unique number.  I use the outstanding spreadsheet from Chris Sutton to divide the kids into groups and automatically generate heats.  This allows each car to race 5 or 6 times across different lanes to help neutralize any lane advantages.

The freshly painted track setup in front of the PA and projection system.

I project the spreadsheet for all to see and we keep the action going non-stop.  One challenge in previous years was judging placement in each race.  I would assign four adults to watch the finish line, each one assigned to a lane.  This was problematic at times, especially when we had photo finishes.  This year we decided to purchase a Microwizard K2 LED timer and it worked like a charm.  It has a tolerance down to 1/1000 of a second and we still had a tie during one of our races.

Our shiny new timer.

I'm past due for some postings, so expect to see a bunch over the coming week.  Work and travel have been exceptionally heavy recently so there hasn't been much gaming activity.

From October through spring break I run the chess program at Jacob and Matthew's elementary school, Archer Glen.  This year I taught two classes before school, a beginner class with 1-3 graders and an advanced class with 2-5 graders.  Jacob and Matthew are both in the advanced class and helped me with the beginner class when they could manage to wake up early enough.  Julie was kind enough to cover for me when travel kept me from teaching.

This year we only entered the team in a single tournament, the Chess for Success regional tournament.  This is a great program in the state of Oregon that fosters chess at all levels.  This was going to be a rebuilding year for the team (no strong 5th graders and only three 4th graders that I thought were competitive) so I mixed the team up a bit to give some strong 2-3 graders the opportunity to play.

The 2004-2005 Archer Glen chess team.

The kids had a great time; unfortunately Jacob was sick so the team was left without one of its top 3 players.  They finished near the bottom of the region but I'm confident we'll have a much stronger showing next year.

I came upstairs to the playroom around 7pm and found Jacob setting up Vanished Planet for a solitaire playing.  I offered to join him and he kindly accepted the offer.  We decided to play with the expansion rules, which add some very interesting racial advantages to the game.

I went to mention first how stellar the support is for Vanished Planet.  I received an email late last year indicating that they had completed an expansion to the game.  The asked if I would like it sent to me for free.  Well, sure!  A few weeks later an envelope arrived with a rules sheet and color cards with the racial advantages.  Hopefully their strong showing as the best family game of the year in the Games 100 2004 list is helping clear their inventory and, hopefully, lead to more games in the future from this company.

The racial advantages are similar to those you'd find in Cosmic Encounter; in general they break the rules in some way that provides some uniqueness to the race.  One nice twist is that each race has two abilities to choose from, with the stronger ability requiring a higher victory point total to win the game.  I suspect that these haven been thoroughly playtested, though, as Jacob and I had a quite easy time winning the game.  I chose the Meeyat - Industrialist benefit, giving me a total of 15 tags to place instead of the usual 10.  This has the affect of a much higher resource production peak.  The expansion rules allow you to tag anomalies, allowing instaneous travel between those tagged by players.  This allowed me to tag them without giving up substantial resource production.  Jacob played the Rikae, which meant his fleet came pre-equipped with a translocator.  This allows him to teleport around the board, very useful for certain types of goals that come up.

We played with 4 creature growth cards in the event deck this time.   Creature growth is also handled differently - instead of it growing all 6 tentacles with each growth card, you roll 3 dice to determine three different growths (therefore, it is possible for one to grow much faster than the others).

As I said, we won fairly easily.  We always find ourselves buying a Comm Relay to get new goals after the satellites have been consumed by the creature.  This seems to be a must-have to win the game.  Next time we'll play with more creature growth cards - a great aspect of this game is that it allows you to easily scale the difficulty.

I'm upgrading my rating on the geek for this game to an 8.

Perhaps a new tradition?  We'll see...

Last night Jacob, Matthew and I played our two favorite cooperative games (ok, our only two): Lord of the Rings and Vanished Planet.

Lord of the Rings ranks as one of our favorite family games, and is the game responsible for getting me back into the gaming hobby.  It was a gift from Julie's brother for Christmas 2002, and after doing some searching on the web for this Knizia guy I eventually found BoardGameGeek and the rest is history.

Jacob, Matthew and I work our way through Shelob's lair.

We always play on the easy setting with Sauron starting as far away as possible.  This session played very quickly with the fellowship racing to Mt. Doom and destroying the ring, matching our best ever score of 79.

Jacob requested that we play Vanished Planet, the cooperative game released in 2003.  This game doesn't have the best reputation, but we quite like it.  My biggest complaint is the fiddly nature of the game and lack of consistency in colors and symbols.  A group that plans well together can outperform those that play this as multi-player solitaire.

Jacob, Matthew, and I try and save the universe from the creature.

In this session we were victorious, saving the universe with about 1-2 creature growths to spare.  We only played with a single creature growth card in the event deck; next time we'll try 2 or 3.

Oh yeah, we finally broke out The Amazing Labyrinth last weekend.  This is a classic Ravensburger game, and I wanted to teach Julie so that she could play it during the school gaming program at Archer Glen elementary.  Lately they've been playing Blokus and The Legend of Landlock, so this should add some nice variety.

Matthew and I wait seemingly forever for Julie to get off the phone and make her move.

I like the game, though it is a bit long.  Fortunately it is easy to shorten the game by using fewer treasures.  Also, Julie had a problem in class with some students peeking ahead into their treasure stacks, so she will probably have players draw from a common pile the next time she plays.  Then she can easily control the time as well by choosing a smaller target like 4 treasures.

The weekend gaming ended with a day of mostly longer fare.  Doug left around noon, the rest of us departed around 4pm.

George and Mike squared off in a game of War of the Ring.  I need to play this game!  Jacob and I have played a few turns but couldn't finish and had to clean up.  I believe the Fellowship (George) had the upper hand in this game when they decided to call it quits.

Doug, Dave, Jacob, and I played the new Martin Wallace game Struggle of Empires.  This game has potential, but man I had a rough start.  You see, to move troops across open waters you need to make a single d6 roll.  If a 1 comes up, you roll again.  1-2, you lose the unit to sharks, 3-4, the unit has to return, 5-6, no effect.  I'm sure my memory is off here, but out of the first 10 times I tried to move units this way, I think I rolled a one 8 or 9 times.  Shame on me for trying to be so bold as conquering India I suppose.  There's some real game under the hood though and I look forward to playing again.

After Doug left we watched some NFL playoff football.  Pick Picknic seemed like appropriately light fare.  This was my second play of this game (the first was the original Hick Hack in Gackelwack) and I think it is quite fun.  It is basically a silly guessing game - think of a much lighter version of Hoity Toity.

Mike, Dave, and George play El Caballero.

Jacob and I play Dracula, a solid 2 player game with a memory element that doesn't bother me too much.  This needs to come out more often as it plays quickly and has some decent strategy around hand management.

One of my personal highlights of the week was watching Dave play Bop-It Extreme.  Apparently the best way to score high is to get your whole body in synch with the music.

All right folks, this one's coming at you photo-blog style.  On Saturday Eric was able to join us for most of the day - proving that you can get in a solid day of gaming on the coast and still be home in time for SNL!

Jacob and I started the day with a game of StreetSoccer.  This is a fine game - even better in real time I was to realize, having only played it before on LittleGolem.

Mike, Dave, George, and Doug playing Einfach Genial. I've heard this can be a good 2x2 team game as well.

Jacob teaches George and Eric how to play StreetSoccer.

I've played Bohnanza the card game exactly once before.  There have been a number of expansions to this game, and this day we tried Bohnaparte.  This is a wargame variant that adds direct conflict between the players in addition to the traditional trading.  I like the original better.

Jacob takes over as the GM and teaches George and Doug how to play Doom: the Boardgame.  They played through the first scenario victoriously.

Eric and Mike try out Tortuga, a pirate-themed card game.  Opinions were unfavorable on this one, but the cards sure looked nice.

Next out was Santa Fe Rails, another Alan Moon train game (this one is pretty popular this year).  I believe Dave pulled out the victory in this one with me a close second; maybe it was the other way around.  The key to this game is certainly collecting enough city cards to score; if you focus too much on scoring via connections you may end up wasting opportunities to collect cards.

Time for Mall World.  I wasn't sure what to expect in this game - it is fairly complex and I didn't quite get what was going on until about halfway through the game.  Dave spent most of his time trailing but surged ahead at the end.  There's something in this game that I liked and I do want to play again - it has some interesting mechanics and the theme is solid.

George and Doug playing Carcassonne: the City.  More on this game later.

We wanted to do at least one game with everyone, so that of course meant Bang!.  I, the loyal deputy, was shot down by my very own sheriff.  I believe Mike was the renegade and won the game.

Player elimination begets side games, so Eric and Jacob take each other on in Yinsh.  This was a first play for Eric and Jacob squeaked out a victory.

Once I was eliminated from the Bang! game, Eric, Jacob, and I played a game of Carcassonne: the City.  This is my favorite Carc game yet - much more strategic and with the coolest bits I've seen in a while.

The bits look nice enough on their own, but as the walls get built out around the city you feel like you are playing with blocks.

Mike and Dave challenge each other in Blue Moon.

Some folks in the group had expressed some interest in some RPG action, so I volunteered to DM a game of Dungeons & Dragons, 3.5e.  We played for about 3 hours total, which is hardly enough time to get very far.  We had some fun roleplaying action and plenty of laughs.

To close out the evening we played Buy Word.  I didn't think it was nearly as bad as Doug is indicating.

Let's see, where was I...

Have I mentioned that work has been pretty busy lately?  I'm at the point where I almost feel guilty taking any time to write entries even when I do have a moment to relax and take a breath.  It is therapeutic though and I really should make the time.

Getting back to the gaming weekend out at Salishan, I was last talking about the gaming up until Doug arrived on Friday afternoon.  I wasn't expecting him until the evening and it was a pleasant surprise to see an email from him Friday morning that he would arrive early.

Dave and I were playing the Game of Thrones CCG when Doug arrived (Jacob was reading).  Doug talked Jacob into a game of Yinsh (or vice versa), a game my kids have been playing quite a bit lately.

Doug, Jacob, Yinsh.

For those of you not familiar with Yinsh, it is part of the Gipf series of two player abstract games.  I own Yinsh but haven't even played it yet.  I have played Dvonn quite a bit and love it; Yinsh looks even more interesting to me.  All of the games of Yinsh I've seen tend to be close with quite a bit of tension - it seems like a game where you can come from behind and win.  Dvonn, on the other hand, often feels like it is over halfway through the game.

Time for a four-player game.  Doug and I were very interested in breaking out another scenario from the Settlers of Catan Book; we opted for a rematch of The Great Race, a scenario we played out at Sun River last year.

Setting up the board for Das Grosse Renen.

The only goal in the game is to be the first to cross the board and build a city near one of the gold mines - victory points are for sissies!  The exploration process was quite humorous, with Doug and I discovering most of the unknown territories.  Doug had a knack for discovering more seas, while the first two lands I discovered were (1) redundant with lands on which I already had settlements, and (2) well equipped with the number 12 for my resource-producing pleasure.

Hey, 12s may be uncommon but I'll be rolling in it when they do come up!

I made Doug, Dave, and Jacob promise to do the chicken dance each time a 12 came up thereafter.  They got to entertain me just once the rest of the game.  I shouldn't be too bitter though, as I managed to win the game due to an excessive production of sheep at the end of the game (plus a sheep port).

At this point Mike and George arrived, and Dave brought out Dawn Under, a purchase he made during a stop at Rainy Day Games on our way out to the coast.  This is, ugh, a memory game that has something to do with vampires, coffins, graves.  It is a nice looking game that would probably appeal to families if it weren't for the theme (though the vampires are quite cutsie).

Yes, Doug, I too wanted to drive a stake through this game.

George was then eager to try a new dice game he picked up called Sharp Shooters.  We were all a bit skeptical on this one and gave him a hard time, but in the end I think it was better than any of us expected.  Think of it like a game of Yahtzee where players share dice.  There's some strategy in timing as you want to avoid setting up your opponents for scoring opportunities, but you still need to push your luck a bit to score.  I'd play it again and I'm certain my kids would like it.

George getting the dice and chips ready for Sharp Shooters.

Last weekend I had a small group of friends out at the beach house for some gaming.  This is my mostly regular gaming group, the RipCityGamers, and was an experiment of sorts.  This group has a long-standing tradition of going to Doug's Sunriver house twice a year; I had the pleasure of attending the event late last spring.  I offered up the beach house as an off-cycle choice and several of the core group took me up on the offer.  Mike and Eric have already done some writeups on the weekend.

I drove Jacob and Dave out Thursday evening, stopping for some burgers and frosties along the way and arriving about 9:30pm.  After unloading the games, I went to work installing some speakers and a receiver while Dave challenged Jacob to a Magic: the Gathering duel.  They used a couple of decks I've had around for about 7-8 years with Dave winning easily.

Friday morning after canoeing we sat down for a game of Runebound.  This game is holding up pretty well for us when played with three.  There's no deep strategy here, but I like the role-playing element (in terms of character-buffing and collecting) and downtime has definitely decreased as we all learn the game rules.  There's usually only a small amount of player interaction in the game, though in this instance Dave and I went hero vs. hero.

Dave, Jacob, and I in the loft for a game of Runebound.

Dave had a shot at defeating High Lord Margath but couldn't pull it off.  After several dice rolls left me stranded in the hills, I was able to move in and defeat him myself.

Next up was Einfach Genial, the Knizia abstract released last year.  I quite enjoyed this in my only prior play in Melbourne. I'm pleased they didn't try to paste a theme on this game.  Teaching it is simple, scoring is simple, and I think there is probably some serious depth in strategy.  Player interaction is high as there are many opportunities to block opponents to minimize their scoring opportunities in their weakest colors.  Dave blew Jacob and me away; Jacob and I effectively tied with me barely winning on the fourth tiebreaker color. 

We'll be simply ingenious.

Dave challenged Jacob to a chess game, winning handily but providing some good coaching along the way.  It would be great if they could play more together - Dave would be a much better teacher at this point than I.

Chess near the opening.

Next, Dave brought out Station Master. This is a relatively new game that I new almost nothing about, and I was pleasantly surprised.  This is a light card-game with a serious take-that element to it andit was a fun ride. 

Dave and Jacob building out their trains.

Players take the role of station masters, outfitting train locomotives with cars and passengers.  Cars are cards played from a player's hand, while each player has a collection of chips representing passengers.  Each chip has a hidden value from 1 to 3.  When a train is scored (after it fills up), players score the value of the train times their own passenger count.  Sometimes the train value will be negative.  There are cards that can swap cars between trains, you can put animal cars on passenger trains to spoil them, etc.  Most of the strategy comes in how the passenger chips are played.  Fun one and given the low price I'll probably pick up my own copy.

The last play of the day before Doug arrived late Friday afternoon was A Game of Thrones: CCG.  Dave had been working on a deck so I played a weaker deck to try some real playtesting (at least I'm sticking to the story that the deck was weaker - couldn't have been my play).

Dave squares off against me in A Game of Thrones: CCG.

I like this game for its depth and for the theme - most everyone who has read the books in this series is eagerly awaiting the next one.  Seeing the characters and locations come to life in the game artwork is very appealing.  I held my own in this game for a while, but over time Dave was able to dominate and we eventually called the game.