As I mentioned before Jacob and I spent last weekend at Game Storm, the annual gaming convention on the north side of Portland.  The newly renamed Thunderbird Hotel is a fine venue for this event, a bit dated but very affordable with decent amenities.  This year we spent quite a bit of time in the RPGA section, but more on that in a bit.

I'll post day 3 later, then review the sights and sounds of the con (mostly games I watched other people play) in a final post.

Jacob and I arrived Friday evening around 5:15pm.  After checking into the hotel, my first task was to deliver a stack of two-player games (some of them mine, some Eric's) to KC and Jay for their annual two-player tournament.  I had planned to enter the tournament, but Jacob and I ran into Ken and Brandon in the lobby (they shared a room with us) and learned that they were going to try a Living Greyhawk RPGA adventure.  Jacob, Matthew, and I played in a Living Greyhawk adventure last year at GenCon, so this sounded like a fun way to continue with characters we had already made.  One problem: I left all of the materials at home.  Fortunately, we had an accomodating DM that allowed us to mock up our characters for one adventure (we made them as similar to the originals as we could, based on memory).

Our first adventure was a Living Greyhawk intro module.

The party did a great job killing all the bad monsters and stuff and we all survived, with Jacob and I advancing to second level (woo hoo).  The next morning I drove home very early to check on the cats and retrieve our RPGA materials, allowing us to transfer the information from Friday night's adventure to our "real" characters.

Our final game Friday evening was Colossal Arena, which Ken had not yet played.  I'm always happy to bring this game, and I think Ken and the boys enjoyed it as well.  If memory serves me, Jacob came out on top in this battle.

Like I said before, Saturday morning started out for me with a 90 minute round-trip to home.  Jacob stayed at the convention and joined a group playing Car Wars card game and Battle Cattle (combined).

Jacob enjoying Car Wars and Battle Cattle.

Jacob apparently had a blast playing these games, but I don't think they would be my cup of tea.  I probably shouldn't be too quick to judge but will definitely want to try before I buy.

I signed up to play Gettysburg: Badges of Courage, one of the newest Columbia Games block wargames.  I recently picked up this game (along with Eastfront and Rommel in the Desert) largely based on the high praise of Chris Farrell.  Jay and Ken were excellent teachers, setting up a day 2 scenario that played well as a 3v3 scenario.

Ken Crangle, on the right, was our teacher as well as the Union field general (our Meade, I suppose).

While this game shares many similarities with other Columbia block games, it has a very unique command / control and leadership influence system.  Columbia excels at adding twists like this to a base system that helps bring new flair to what could be a tedious model (new setting, same game).

Love those blocks.

Unfortunately we only had 2 hours to play, including instruction, so we barely made it through 2 turns.  I can't wait to play out an entire scneario.

While I was playing Gettysburg, Jacob sat through a 2 hour (!) panel discussion on how to be a great dungeon master. I checked in on him about every 15-20 minutes, and every time I looked in the room he was sitting attentively and very engaged.

Jacob sits enthralled in the dungeon master panel discussion.

Apparently he learned some solid tips that he hopes to apply soon as a DM, including:

• Make the rewards match the effort
• Don't play a PC as the DM
• It is about the fun of the players, not the fun of the DM
• Keep the focus on the story and the players.  Don't get wrapped up in the rules.

Next up was a Havoc playtesting session that KC and I ran.  I bet over 10 games of Havoc were played throughout the convention and we continue to hear excellent feedback on the game.  Perhaps you'll see it published before too long...

KC teaches another group how to play Havoc.

We were all ready for some lighter fare, so KC and Jay brought their collection of knick knacks (I'm not sure how it is spelled).  These are little robot-looking guys that you can play a stacking game with, trying to mimic the player to your right.  We had quite a bit of fun playing the game initially.

Jay tries to outdo us in knick knack.

Then we just started to try and make crazy or unusual stacking patterns.

This was my favorite of the day.  Nice work Ken.

While I finished putting stickers on my Gettysburg wooden blocks, KC teaches Ken, Jay, and Jacob the square version of NW Trek.

Jay ran a friendly session of the leaky lifeboat game.  Jacob loved this game.

Ken, KC, and I then decided to try and tackle Antiquity, the limited print run game published by Splotter Spellen last year.  I had only heard bits and pieces of this game but the scope and detail looked very appealing.  This is a tough game to play straight from the rules - we were an hour into it before we felt comfortable starting our first turn, and that first turn went slowly as we started to figure out the key mechanics (e.g., how do you build a farm if you need seed, when seed is produced by a farm.  Oh, you can explore to find seed.  Got it.).  The best analogy I can give for this game is that of an empire-building RTS computer game like Civilization or Age of Empires.  Each player begins spread out from the others, so there's little to no player interaction early on so we were mostly playing solitaire.  I had to leave after the fourth turn for an RPGA event and Jay took my place.

KC and Ken try and figure out Antiquity.

I came back about 3 hours later and they were still going at it.  I was enjoying it very much when I left and would like to play through an entire game.  I can see how it could be fiddly and slow, but something about it appealed to me.  I just need to find a full Saturday to devote to it (and get down to Albany to play Ken's copy).

I left the Antiquity game for another RPGA Living Greyhawk adventure. This one was a bit more challenging as we had to defeat some dervishes and an Ogre (hey, that's a big deal for 1-2 level characters!) but we all survived to fight another day.

Ken makes an attack roll for his half-orc barbarian.

I had this brilliant idea to teach RoboRally to Ken and Brandon at 10:30pm after about 15 straight ours of gaming action.  Nothing like a light game to close out the evening.  If there was ever a brain-burner game, this is it. Not only do you need to have great geometric spatial awareness, you need to think like a programmer and anticipate what the other robots will do.  I think everyone enjoyed it but it was certainly frustrating when robots got mis-programmed due to fatigue and newness to the game.  We'll give it another try when we are all fresh.

Ken, Jacob, Brandon and I trying out RoboRally.

All in all, a great start to the convention.  More to come soon on the Sunday action.

A couple of weekends ago (on the front-end of the Jacob and Matthew's spring break), we spent the weekend at the coast and had some long-time friends as guests.  Martin Danner, an old friend and former co-worker (he runs Arrowrock Software), along with son Greg joined us at the beach house for one night.  The weather was spectacular - high winds and driving rain (this was the same day the barge ran aground at Cape Disappointment) - but that didn't stop us from taking a beach hike around the north end of Salishan spit.

The fuzziness you see around the ground is the blowing sand.  The wind was gusting in the 40mph range.

This is always a great time to hike the beach, but only if you prepare yourself with raingear to stay somewhat dry and warm.  The harbor seals were very active at the point and we saw around 40 of them.

Jacob posing with two seals.

Sorry about the outage today.  Sometimes with dasBlog (my weblog software) a big clump of entry files will show up with zero content and a weird datestamp, causing the engine to fail (though quite gracefully) to render my pages.  Fixed now.

Jacob and I returned from GameStorm (all of 30 minutes from our house) about 6pm tonight.  Didn't get much sleep over the weekend, so I'm tired and will not write anything up tonight.  I'm off for some more business travel tomorrow night but hope to get things written up tomorrow night.

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.