I’m heading to Memphis early tomorrow morning, spending two nights there with Thursday night opening.  So far my queries on BGG and Spielfrieks have been met with silence.  Any gamers in Memphis interested in hooking up Thursday night?

I suppose VH1 Classic is supposed to rock, but it sure does.  This is my default live TV channel to have on while I work (must get back to work…) now.  Currently enjoying the sweet sounds of ELO, “Last Train to London”.

I just won (a rare event) an online game of Alhambra at Boiteajeaux, and I must say it is the strangest game I’ve played there (or anywhere).

 

I had a great start, running out ahead of the rest of the players in this four-player game early on.  My problem was that I boxed myself in with my nice Alhambra wall.  The last seven tiles I purchased all went straight to my reserve.  I had decent currency matches that allowed me to do this – I figured depriving other players of their points was worth the effort, and I planned at some point to swap out the lower white tile to open up my wall again.  In the end I won 112–95–94–74.

This is our third year as football parents, and now we have the joy (and often inconvenience) of having both Jacob and Matthew playing.  Of course they are on different teams, at different levels, which almost ensures that each week each of us gets to see only one of them play.

The Sherwood teams had a clean sweep this weekend, with the high school team winning 38–0 Friday night and all of the youth football teams from grades 3–9 winning their games as well (that’s about 12 teams in all).

Jacob is again playing primarily center on offense, also getting some time at tackle as he covers for an injured player.  On defense Jacob also plays defensive tackle.  He’s a solid lineman and the competition is getting fierce at this level – below you can see him squaring off against a nose tackle weighing in at over 200 lbs (Jacob is about 120 lbs in his gear).

Matthew (number 28 below) in his first year is playing fullback on offense and cornerback on defense.  As a third grader he’s doing a great job surrounded by mostly fourth graders handling the ball.

Matthew had three carries in his game on Friday, with one breakaway for 20 yards where he almost score a touchdown but was caught by a lone tackler at about the 20 yard line.

No, that’s not the name of a new boardgame; that’s what Jacob and I did today for the better part of a beautiful Sunday day.  My friend Scott Finney took us out (he really should be a professional guide… this guy is good) on the Willamette River near the St. Johns Bridge for some white sturgeon fishing.  This would be a day of catch-and-release barb-less hook fishing and a chance to land a fish Jacob and I have never caught before.

We fished with shad and smelt off the bottom at about 50 ft depth, with the tackle and approach very similar to the lake trout fishing we do at Keuka Lake.  We started off quickly, getting a hit and fish within the first 10 minutes.  Jacob landed this monster, a fish about 36” long and over 30 lbs.  Things slowed down after that as we hit the slack tide and waited for current to resume.  The fish need water flow to carry the bait smell around (while sturgeon use smell to find food, they aren’t garbage bottom feeders like catfish or carp – you need to use fresh bait), so it was another hour or so before they started hitting again.

We then had a string of 10 more fish landed, ranging from a young small sturgeon (about 2 feet long) to the biggest of the day, a 40”+ fish that Jacob landed.  By the end of the day I was baiting, casting, setting, and reeling in the fish so I think I have a sense of “how it’s done”, but of course the key is knowing where to find the fish.

These fish are amazing – their eyes seem to glow, and it is likely that 10 of the 11 fish we caught are older than Jacob.  As big as these fish were, during the catch-and-keep season, these would all have been too small to keep.

The ChiZo Rising site is finally up.  There’s some great content there… hopefully the game will hit distributors and retailers soon so I can pick up a few more starters.

Apparently the Indianapolis Star reported yesterday (can’t find the story online) that GenCon is leaving Indianapolis.  Peter Adkison, CEO of Gen Con LLC, posted this to the GPA mailing list:

Yesterday in the Indy Star it was reported that Gen Con is leaving Indianapolis.

Consider this rumor control: no such decision has been made.

What is true is that our contract is up after 2006 and we are examing our options. I'll be conducting a four-city tour next week of possible venues throughout the midwest.

My preference would be to stay in Indianapolis as I know first hand how risky it is to move a convention of this magnitude. But I do think it only prudent to compare alternatives and make sure I'm getting a good deal.

If GenCon moves, I doubt I’ll find my way there.  There are other conventions I would rather go to, and the only reason this one makes the cut is that we both have a lot of family there.

Maybe these pictures have made the circulation already, but my friend Ken pointed me to them and figured maybe some of you haven’t seen them either.

After returning from the coast this afternoon, Ken and Brandon joined Jacob and me for a four-player game of Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean.  Here’s a combined session report and review about a game I hope to play quite a bit more in the coming weeks.

Parthenon, published by Siren Bridge Publishing and marketed by Z-Man Games, caught me by surprise when I first encountered the game at GenCon 2005 – it wasn’t on my “check it out” list because I had no forewarning of its publication.  My experience playing a few turns with Rick Thornquist, Valerie Putman, and co-designer Jason Hawkins was strong enough to warrant an immediate purchase.

Most of the components in this game are cards – 440 of them to be exact.  Each player takes the part of an island in the Aegean Sea struggling to take an important role in the Greek empire.  Each island has a custom play mat showing the buildings that player needs to build in order to win the game – no two islands are exactly the same, differing primarily in the basic and rare commodities produced on that island but also in some of the optional buildings that can be built.  The central game board is used only as a guide to the different islands to which players can travel – most of the action happens in front of each player around his respective play mat.

   (from BoardGameGeek)

Each island has its own build deck with cards representing all of the buildings and fleets that can be constructed by that island, as well as a quick reference card and Archon card (more on that later).  The islands specialize in the sorts of commodities that can be produced there, resulting in some interesting balance mechanisms when played with different numbers of players.  There are three core islands used for any number of players, with a fourth player we chose randomly from the remaining three.  Because the addition of the fourth island adds some overlapping commodity production, the fourth island plus the other two players that match up commodity-wise with the fourth island get some bonuses at the start to compensate for the reduced value of their commodities (increased supply —> reduced value, economics y’know).

The mechanic for building out the card is as expected – you produce commodities yourself, but not the right types to do everything you need to do.  Trading is required, and players trade with each other as well as by traveling to nearby and distant lands.  Better deals can be found in the foreign lands, but trips across the Med are fraught with risk.  Players can mitigate these risks in a number of ways, including bringing along armies or warships, pleasing the gods, and building wonders or adopting philosophies that grant special powers.

The game lasts for three years of four seasons each or until the end of a season when a player has built all of his required buildings, whichever comes first.  Our game lasted exactly three hours including instruction and finished after the 1st season in the third year.  We played with the optional forgiving beginner variant that takes away some of the bad event cards that can hamper early development.

The core mechanic in this game is trading, but to be successful a player must plan for a wide range of risks that can often distract the player from achieving the ultimate goal of completing all of his buildings.  There are also opportunities to exploit the current economic situation on the board – we found the commodity shortages in certain ports to be extremely lucrative for players that produced those commodities, especially if they came out early in the year.  We did not find this to be un-balancing though, as there seems to be a decent mix of events and harbor effects that distribute well across each of the islands.

There has been some criticism of this game, claiming that it is yet another multi-player solitaire game.  We didn’t find that at all, with frequent trading, plenty of strategy discussion and positioning, and some interesting application of the Archon mechanic.  At the end of each season, all of the players vote for a player to become the new Archon (you can’t vote for yourself).  The Archon resolves all order-of-play issues, which includes the order in which seasonal events take place as well as the order in which players reveal their actions.  This is important because in each of the 10 phases of the seasons, players act simultaneously.  In most phases order doesn’t matter, but in a few it can make a difference so the Archon role is meaningful.  In one case, the Archon had decide the order of several season events where the order could make the difference between a couple of players keeping most or losing all of their commodities.  A well-placed tribute to the Archon helped the events to be resolved in a beneficial order (though he was under no obligation to do so, even after the “tribute”).

Why does this game work?  I’ll give a few reasons why we all gave it high marks after our first complete play:

• Very little, almost zero downtime.  For a game that lasts 2–3 hours, this is a huge benefit.
• Minimal direct confrontation between players.  This won’t be a positive attribute for everyone, but in games with mixed adults and kids this can be a good thing.
• Civilization / RTS feel.  We love playing real-time strategy games on the computer, and this game shares a lot with that genre, especially Age of Mythology (but without the combat of course).  Players build wonders that grant special powers, adopt philosophies, harvest commodities to construct buildings, etc.
• Tension.  There’s plenty of it in this game.  What event will come up next season?  Am I prepared for it?  Do I take a shot at traveling to Egypt this season to get that much-needed Papyrus, or do I wait a season until I build a warship to provide some extra protection?
• Balanced assymetry.  This isn’t unique to this game, but I think the designers did a nice job of balancing the different islands and providing handicapping when playing with four or five players.  This helps force trading even between players competing for the lead.

There are some similarities between Parthenon and the limited release Antiquity from Splotter Spellen.  If that sort of game interests you, you owe it to yourself to try this one out.  Plus, you can finish a game of Parthenon in less than three hours (try that with Antiquity…)!  I’ll be sure to revise my thoughts on the game if my feelings change after subsequent plays, but for now it is safe for me to say that this is my favorite game so far in 2005.

These game sessions were spread out over the past two weekends.  Last Saturday while Julie finished up her Hood to Coast run, the boys and I decided to bring out Attack! and the Attack! Expansion.  This came out once before and we had wanted to try a full game with the expansion.

The expansion adds a more robust naval combat system, deeper economics, and (optionally) an extra board introducing the Pacific theater.  We played for about 3 hours total before we had to clean up, but this time we were able to take a snapshot of the board and we should be able to resume next weekend.  The game is currently perched on the edge of player vs. player conflict – so far we’ve been spending most of our time conquering neutral areas.  I’m looking good in the far east and have a decent position in the western US (which, by the way, was virtually all communist by the start of the game!). Jacob controls most of Europe while Matthew is holding down Australia and South America.

The economic system of using oil reserves as action points gives a nice throttle on player activity and keeps downtime to a minimum.  I can see why some have claimed that the expansion plays better with some variants, such as limiting political action card plays in a turn and using threaded turns to prevent the “I get to wait through 9 individual turns until my next turn” issue with the rotating start player.  With three I don’t think there are problems and we are having a blast.  I’ll follow up after we play it through to completion.

We’ve spent the holiday weekend here at Salishan with Jan and David and got in a healthy dose of gaming, mixed in with some beach campfires, hiking, and a day trip down to Newport.  Friday afternoon Jacob, Matthew, and I taught David how to play Manila, a game we learned and picked up recently at GenCon.

I re-read the rules as we sat down to play to refresh my brain, and realized that we had been taught wrong.  At GenCon we were taught to place all of the accomplices before movement into harbor began; it turns out that after the first accomplice is placed, a single die roll and movement occurs, followed by the second accomplice round.  This continues until the third movement roll and final disposition of the wagers.

This made the game a little less chaotic and, I think, even more enjoyable.  I’m surprised Manila isn’t rated higher on the geek – I suppose it gets dinged for the gambling / randomness of the game.  Any game this short and fun with decent strategic choices is a winner for me.  Definitely pick this one up or try it with a friend.  I eeked out a win in this game, with Jacob placing a close second.  Bidding for harbor master was much more aggressive in this game, with the bids sometime surpassing 20 pesos.

Sunday morning Jacob and I tried a full game of ChiZo Rising, the collectible Chinese zodiac game that I reported about earlier.  I opened the remaining two boosters from GenCon and incorporated any relevant tiles into the appropriate decks based on creature affinity.  I need to qualify my comments here by saying that I’ve spent no time building tile decks other than filtering out useless tiles.

This game started out with me holding the upper hand and Jacob getting a bit resigned to defeat.  At one point I was up 7 or 8 capture points to 4, but I realized I was in a poor position regarding my creature layout on the board.  I captured four of my own creatures by building a 2x2 square and left myself very vulnerable with isolated creatures on the corners of the play area (this game could really use a play mat with square grids to keep track of tile locations).  Jacob took the initiative back from me (initiative looks like it will be a big part of winning this game… if you can keep your opponent reacting you can go far) and the game came down to whether or not he would have the tile in hand to complete his own 2x2 square and get to 12 points.  He did and beat me 12–8.  We aren’t wild about this game yet – Jacob rates it about a 6, while I’m a bit more generous with a 7 or maybe even an 8.  The scary thing is that I think I need to buy more tiles to decide, as I need to explore the deck building meta-game to see how much depth there is.  I’m also anxiously awaiting the launch of their web site – when is it coming??

This afternoon we brought out one of my recent Goodwill finds – a senior citizen version of the classic betting game Tripoley.  This is a fun diversion, and we play the more strategic variant where you can only claim the hearts bets when you play those cards during the “Michigan Rummy” phase.  Even with this, the game is mostly random with a tiny bit of bluffing during the poker phase.  The kids love it and I’m sure it will come out frequently.

The last game tonight was a two player game of Agora, the hip pocket game from CheapAss Games.  This is a tile-laying, market-building game that I picked up mostly because of a positive recommendation by Joe Steadman on the Dice Tower.  I had to bribe Matthew to play it with me, but he had a blast and hopefully will ask for it in the future.

 

The idea in this game is to build and buy markets that have the most valuable street facing, which is calculated by looking at the number of open segments facing the outside of the market (not enclosed sections, aka alleys).  Each player turn happens in four phases: income, draw a tile (and possibly, special effects), place the tile, and buy a market.  The fun part of the game is tile placement, which is not strictly orthogonal or even constrained by a square grid.  We discovered some interesting ways to place tiles to cut off opponent markets while expanding our own – I’m sure we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg in this game.  It played quickly (about 30 minutes) and is a fun, short diversion.