We head out for GenCon Indy this Wednesday morning for some quality family time and four days of gaming goodness.  This has turned out to be a successful formula for our family:  Jacob and I spend four days gaming, Matthew joins us for one day, and Julie spends two days up in West Lafayette with her grandmother.  We’ve also arranged for family get-togethers on Thursday and Sunday night.  We’ll get back Monday morning in time for me to work and for the boys to hit football practice.

I’ve made my Backpack planning page for GenCon public.  I’m coordinating a BoardGameGeek meetup this year, so if you are going, join us at 9am Saturday morning at GameBase 7 (the open boardgame checkout area).  Jacob, Matthew, and I will be wearing our dark blue BSW t-shirts.  Come join us for some friendly chat and open gaming!

It was my turn to host the southside Tuesday game night for the RipCityGamers group.  My attendance at RCG events has gone up dramatically since I started hosting (surprise).  We had a huge turnout this week – 11 players in total. 

In the kitchen, Chuck, Doug, KC, and Mike played a game of Around the World in 80 Days.

Chuck and Doug during their game of Around the World in 80 Days.

Here is how the session went in Doug’s own words:

First up was Around The World In 80 Days. While certainly not winning the award for Best Use Of Box Space, and having gotten some lukewarm reviews, I found myself enjoying this little gem. Basically you pick one of a set of face up travel card that depicts either a ship or a train and also a number of days (ships range from 4 to 9, trains from 2-5). Each travel card has an action associated with it based on how it was placed near the board. For example, if you pick the card next to the balloon icon, you may roll a die to try to shave some days off of your trip. Next, you can move to the next location on the board, but only by playing the designated cards from your hand. For example to move from San Francisco to NYC, you must play two train cards. The sum of the numbers on the cards determine how many days it takes to make the trip. The goal is to use as few days as possible without being the last player to make it back to London.

There are several other mechanisms that I won't go into, but I'll mention that I felt they added flavor without feeling tacked on.

Chuck got off to a fast start, and I think he collected darn near every "first player in" marker there was. However, he spent quite a bit of time doing so, and thanks to an early Submarine card I was able to get my time down early and keep it there. I was also aided by Chuck, who was sitting to my right, spending a lot of time taking the First Player travel card and thus giving me a good selection of cards to choose from.

Mike and KC brought up the rear, and both of them made a lot of good plays that kept them in the running. I was fortunate to have all of my balloon and elephant rolls go well the first time, and I think I spent a total of two gold coins the entire game. I also managed to avoid the detective (who adds two days if you end up in the same locale he's in), but stuck it to the other players regularly.

In the end, Chuck and I got into London first, although Chuck had used up 79 days to just make it under the wire. I managed to get in in 69 days, which is a tough score to beat and only KC looked to have a real shot. Since he had to not be the only person not back in London at the end of a turn to avoid an automatic loss, he managed to use a couple of action cards to minimize his time down to eight days that would have tied me. However, since I got in first, I would have won the tiebreaker. In any event, in his attempt to find cards to help him get into London cheaply, he drew a storm card that added two days to both his and Mike's time (Chuck and I were safe in the Club by then, and thus didn't lose days), and so his final score was 71. Mike limped in in the same round, avoiding an auto loss, but his total was 80 days, giving Chuck third anyway.

It's light, it's fast, it's wacky, but I had a great time. And that was *before* I won! Despite a grossly oversized box, this is a nice little game that I'll be picking up.

A few of us were in the mood for some Settlers action, so we decided to play Seafarers of Catan, an expansion I’ve rarely played except for some scenarios from The Book.  Jacob and I will be playing Giant Seafarers at GenCon next week, so this was a good opportunity to brush up on the rules.  Jim and Rita joined me and we played one of the exploration scenarios.

Rita and Jim help me setup Seafarers of Catan.

Jim moved out in front early in the game – the dice rolls were leaning his way (many 5s and 6s, almost no 8s) and did a great job exploring and positioning himself for more settlements out in the unknown lands.  Rita was mostly hosed throughout the game but enjoyed herself; I made a charge at the end and got myself to 11 points before Jim finally pulled out the 12 point victory.  Rita and I were both convinced that Jim could have won 2–3 turns earlier but were not going to help him out at all – one more turn and I would have been the victor. 

In the kitchen after Around the World in 80 Days completed, the same group pulled out my copy of Industrial Waste.  This was an eBay auction win for me and I haven’t tried it yet, but it is good to know that the game is complete.

Chuck, Doug, KC, and Mike playing Industrial Waste.

Once again, Doug did a nice writeup:

Next up was Industrial Waste. I could not remember why this game didn't work with four players (it works nicely with two), but it became apparent as the game went on. To end the game (not win, end) one player has to move his factory token to the 20 column of the growth track. However, if the accident card comes up (there is one in the deck), and you've got too much waste sitting around (which was common for us), your factory tokens move back one or two spaces. As such, both Chuck and I were one card play away from ending the game in a couple of situations, hesitated as we felt we weren't in a good position to win, and ended up getting dragged back down the growth track.

After two hours of this, we gave up and called the game. Chuck won handily, I'm sure I was in last place or close. The game itself is really fun and has a lot of opportunity for screwage, but my god not for that long. The last 30 minutes were excruciating. What a shame.

The problem is that you have a set size deck regardless of the number of players. Since you play 15+ cards every turn with four players but only 9+ with two, that means that the accident card comes up much more often with four players and since it's impossible to always have a bribe card handy to stave off falling back on the growth chart, we saw a lot of ebb and flow. I suppose more savvy players might be able to avoid this, but since only the person who thinks they will win wants to end the game, I really don't think that anything can save the four player version with the possible exception of adding a second deck with the second accident card removed (and possibly reshuffling when an accident appears).

Mike Deans had this followup:

I was just going back over the rules to see if we missed anything, and we did. I don't think we were reshuffling the card deck after the accident came up. This would only have made the game longer if we did, however, as the accident card would come up more often!

Reading comments on the Geek there are a lot of positives for this as a 4-player game, so I'm not sure how/what we doing wrong. I think we may have been bidding too high for resources at the start, and not focusing enough on managing waste output. I'd be interested in giving it another go.

Upstairs, the kids / young adults engaged in a four-player game of Doom: the Boardgame with Jacob as the game master.

Jacob explains the rules to Jenna, Colin, and Graham.

 I don’t know too much about what happened in this game, other than the fact that the Deans boys now want their own copy of the game.

Wednesday night after football practice Jacob asked to play Take it Easy.  This is a fantastic light puzzle game that plays quickly.  Julie plans to introduce this one to the game sessions she runs at school.  It has some great spatial elements, requires a small amount of analysis, and the scoring uses single-digit multiplication.

Julie, Jacob, and Matthew playing Take it Easy.

 I usually do well in this game but got crushed by everyone; Julie was the victor.

Here’s a quick report on what has been going on at my lunchtime gaming group.

Last week we played two light games: For Sale and Leapfrog.  For Sale continues to be my favorite filler and I think it will continue to come out frequently this year.  I especially like how easy the game is to teach and how close the scores tend to be at the end.

Eric brought in his copy of Leapfrog, an interesting race game with extremely cool froggy bits.  The mechanics are simple – each player has a fixed number of bid tokens that influence how his or her frog moves.  In general you are trying to get your frog into the lead but each round has some twists that keep things interesting.  Extra frogs (when you play with fewer than 6 players) move randomly.  I’m not a big fan of blind bidding / bluffing / out guessing games (some would say For Sale is a blind bidding game but it doesn’t feel that way to me) so this wasn’t my cup of tea.  This would be a good one for kids given the cute little frogs.

Yesterday we gave King of the Elves a try.  This Alan Moon game isn’t highly regarded but I think it is a decent game.  It can play quickly as you can choose to the end game after as few rounds as you like; we played three rounds and I think the responses were favorable.  Arron and Tamara both did much better than I, though I’ll blame the fact that I never drew a gold bonus card on my poor showing.  Playing this reminded me of how much I enjoyed my one and only playing of Elfenland – maybe I can play it again at GenCon this year.

Hey, sign my guest map! Tell me where you are from!  Just double-click your location and leave a note.

Back in May I mentioned that Julie and I committed to doing a sprint triathlon this summer.  This weekend Julie and I finished the Mid-Summer Triathlon, held on the NE side of Portland around Blue Lake.

Julie swimming her first leg.  She had a great time of around 13 minutes for the half-mile swim.

Saturday Julie participated in the women’s sprint triathlon, which is about half the distance of a full olympic triathlon (1/2 mile swim, 12.5 mile bike, 3 mile run).  She set some lofty goals for herself and surpassed them easily; in fact, she finished 38th overall and 7th in her age division.

Julie with Jacob and Matthew after her finish.

I’m not surprised that she did so well, having trained with her.  She has stayed in much better shape than I over the years and if she’s conitnues training I think she could become competitive.

After Julie’s event the boys participated in the splash, pedal, and dash event.  This was a fun little event – 50 yard swim, 3/4 bike ride, 1/4 mile run.

Jacob getting ready for his swim.

The best result from this event was that both boys are now very interested in getting into some more competitive events – we’re going to try and get them to run a 5k with us sometime before the end of the year.

Matthew takes off on the bike segment.

I was more than a bit nervous about my event.  The swim in particular is intimidating, even though I’ve been training for several months.  Swimming more than a few lengths of a pool was unheard of for me just a short year ago, and I still think I have a ways to go technique-wise.  I definitely have a ways to go conditioning-wise.  My goal for the tri was to finish in less than 1:45 – to do that I thought I needed to finish the swim in 20 minutes.  This is about the pace I’ve been able to do in the pool.

Here I am running from the swim to the transition area for the bike ride.

 Things in the lake were a bit tougher than I expected.  My split time there was around 23 minutes or so (results haven’t been posted yet).  At least I know what I need to work on…

Near the finish of the bike leg.

 The bike portion was a blast – mostly flat along Marine Dr. and the Columbia River.  I was able to average about 16–17MPH without really pushing myself too hard.  This is significantly better than I’ve been able to do around Sherwood on rides that involved more hill climbing and wind.  I finished the bike in just over 45 minutes, just slightly over my goal.

My chase team follows me in at the end of my run.

The run portion went almost exactly as expected.  My pace these days is at around a 10 minute mile, which offers plenty of room for improvement.  To think that in high school I could run about 6:30 pace… a small amount of weight loss and more speed training should get me closer to an 8 minute pace.

My supports with me after the finish.

In the end I’m glad I did it, but this is not something I want to do more than 1–2 times per year.  Julie and I have committed to doing more events throughout the year (mostly runs) to keep us focused, then resume triathlon training in the spring for (perhaps) the same event.  This is a great one for beginners as the bike and run are both flat.

Here are some tips for Podcasters to make the listening experience a bit more user friendly:

• Number your episodes sequentially.  This makes it easy to determine if I've missed an episode and helps sort them in my media library and my playing device.
• Include the episode number in the first 10 characters or so of the title tag.  Most media players do not have a lot of screen real estate and it can be very difficult to select the right episode without this information early in the title.  Check out the Tips from the Top Floor feed; each of the episodes starts with tftf## title making it extremely easy to sort and view them in my iPod.  Boardgames To Go also does a good job in this area, while the Dice Tower has been inconsistent in their title tags (though they do keep the episode number).  GeekSpeak (BoardGameSpeak?) uses date information in the title but I would rather see them go with a format like bgs## - Show Title instead.  Dates are better left in the RSS or Atom tags, which leads to my next point...
• Include the pubDate tag in your feed!  If you do this, you don't need to put it in the title.  The Dice Tower needs to add this to its feed.
• There are a number of iTunes-specific RSS tags that are probably worth considering if you want to play well in their classification scheme. 

There are a few new(er) ones on the block worth mentioning:

• Lumbersmiths - Jeff has been a long-time reader of my weblog and is now recording the adventures of his own gaming group down in Dallas (hey, we need to hook up at BGG.Con!).  So far he's doing a fine job - I especially like the photos.
• Gone Gaming by Boredgamegeeks - This looks promising.  While similar to the GameWire collection of weblogs, there are two things that stand out as better for me: I can read all of the entries together at the site, and the RSS feed has full content.  I understand why GameWire does not (they want to direct traffic to GameFest), but reading postings offline is a must for me so full-content RSS feeds == goodness.
• &games  – Not a new weblog, but I only recently discovered it.  Coldfoot does a nice job and has some entertaining commentary.

We had a family meeting Wednesday night and decided to do a game night Friday evening.  Jacob and I will be on the coast at Adventure Cove camping with the Cub Scouts while Matthew and Julie will spend the week at Camp Ireland at day camp – we needed some time together with just the four of us.  Consensus was to start with a light opener then tackle the new Days of Wonder release Shadows Over Camelot.

I was eager to finally try the light auction game For Sale. I recently picked up the Uberplay reprint and was able to teach the game in less than 5 minutes; we played in about 20.

Jacob, Julie, and Matthew during our game of For Sale.

This was a big hit!  Jacob pulled out the victory with Julie and I close behind tied for second.  Matthew wasn’t that far back and everyone enjoyed it.  I love games with a simple mechanic or two that can be played quickly.  For Sale is played in two phases: first is the buying of properties, second is the selling.  When buying properties, a number of cards are turned up equal to the number of players who then bid in clockwise fashion for the privilege of getting the best property.  When a player passes he gives half of his bid (rounded up) to the bank and takes the worst available property.  The player with the highest bid after all of the other players have passed pays the full amount of the bid and gets the best property.  This is repeated until all of the properties have been auctioned.

Next comes the selling phase.  In addition to the property cards, there are an equal number of “checks” that correspond to the income from selling cards.  This phase starts with a random draw of a number of checks equal to the number of players – the checks are valued anywhere from 0 to $15,000.  Each player secretly chooses a property to sell, then all players simultaneously reveal.  The best property revealed gets the best check, and so on.  Simple but elegent, this one should come out often.

We then decided to learn and play the new cooperative game Shadows Over Camelot.  Coop games are generally a big hit in my family, and for many reasons I like Jacob and Matthew to play games where they work together rather than against each other.

Jacob and Matthew strategize in Shadows Over Camelot.

 The production of this game is, as expected, first rate (read about the mechanics here).  Learning the game was not trivial – I’m glad I was able to observe part of a session at work first, as learning from the rulebook was a bit challenging for everyone.  We misplayed a few rules in our first game, and I suspect we are violating the spirit of the discussion/cooperation rules.  Who cares – we had a blast.

Julie, Jacob, and Matthew examining the board.

We lost our first game to the siege engines but it was close.  Everyone wanted a re-match tonight (Saturday) so we gave it another try.  It played much faster this time and we won fairly easily.  In both games we played without the traitor – I wanted us to win as a group before introducing that element of the game.  Next time we’ll give it a try.