I failed to mention that I played Parlay recently at one of our lunchtime gaming sessions at work.  I met Jennifer and Paul Sturgis, designers and owners of Real Deal Games, at Origins and picked up a couple of copies of the game.  I only managed a quick demo with Paul at the show, but we had a great time chatting about the gaming business and came to learn that we have a lot in common – Parlay was conceived while Jennifer and Paul were living in Sunriver, OR.

Parlay combines a word-game mechanic (similar to Alpha Playing Cards) with a creative poker mechanic.  We played the 7–card Texas hold ‘em variant that plays like the game we all know and love, but instead of betting rounds players get the option to exchange hole cards.  After all five common cards are turned up, players then decide to stay or fold.  If you fold, you get to score the word value of the best word you can make with your hole and the common cards.  If you stay, you are competing for the best hand point total, which will be a combination of your poker hand (you get a bonus if you have the best poker hand), word bonuses for length, and (maybe) bluff bonuses for calling others on their fictional words.

There was more tension in the stay/fold decision than I expected.  It doesn’t feel like you are betting ala poker – it is more of a press-your-luck, all-or-nothing mechanic.  Do I take the safe points and score my word, or do I try and double up and pull far away from the others?

While you probably won’t like this game if you don’t enjoy word games (Scrabble, Boggle, etc.), if you do it is worth picking up and playing.  Everyone in our group of five enjoyed the game and at least one player immediately went out and purchased his own copy.

This was a good weekend for working on the good ol’ burndown list. We got back from the triathlon at about 3:30pm, and with Matthew away at a Portland Beavers baseball game, Jacob and I sat down to try a couple of two-player games.

First up was Turbo Taxi, the puzzle/race game from Queen Games.  Players attempt to create a 3x3 grid of tiles that will adhere to a few basic rules established by the game, the players, and a bit of randomness.  Jacob had a hard time initially, and I may have been a bit ruthless in solving quickly.  I’m not a big fan of games like this (e.g. Ricochet Robot) but this one is short enough and easy enough to be a nice diversion.

Next Jacob and I tried the Tom Jolly game Cave Troll.  I was surprised by this one, as I expected this to be more of a dungeon crawl / combat game.  Instead I found a decent little strategy game with more depth than the name suggests.  The game reminded me of Dungeon Twister, but it plays much faster and looks to scale pretty well with more than 2 players.  The board doesn’t get very crowded with just two players, so we didn’t find ourselves competing much for gold, instead mostly just trying to outmaneuver each other.  I won the game 57–52, so it was a pretty close match.

Ken and Brandon came over at about 6pm to play one of the biggies on my unplayed list – Quest for the Dragonlords.  I’ll be honest – as I read through the rules leading up to the game night, I was thinking to myself “man, we should just play Conquest of the Empire.”  I stuck to my guns, though, wanting to give the game a fair shake.  The rules aren’t very good – some editing and peer review would have been a good idea (note: I played the 1st edition, so maybe the rules have improved since).  There are still a number of clarifications I’d like to have if I planned to play the game more, but we managed to get by.

There’s a lot of downtime in this game – way too much.  It is also long, and I don’t think the game when played by the full rules would ever be played in less than 3–4 hours.  We played a shortened version we made up – when the first player got knocked out, we did a check to see who was ahead in gold production (a good proxy for the most territory owned).  The quests have too many random elements and it was very frustrating not being able to manage the risk – a bad die roll or two and things can go sideways quickly.  I managed to win, but we were all pretty anxious to be finished.  I’m going to sell the game and the two expansions I have and donate the proceeds to a school program I’m starting this year – more on that in a future post.

Finally, we wrapped up the evening with a game of Loco!.  This is a great little card game, and definitely an undiscovered gem in my collection.  Brandon played very well, edging out Ken and I for the victory.  Jacob was a distant fourth but had fun along the way.

Unfortunately (for her) Julie can only work into her schedule a single sprint triathlon this year.  She had hoped to do the Mid-Summer Triathlon again at Blue Lake, but we had a schedule conflict with our trip to the midwest.  She instead signed up for the Fort Lewis Triple Threat Triathlon held on Saturday at Fort Lewis (near Dupont, WA in between Olympia and Tacoma).  I’m not on the triathlon circuit this summer, mainly because work + coaching baseball and football leaves no time for training.  That’s my excuse anyway.

Julie trained hard for this event, and even got some special conditioning training at the local YMCA to help prepare.  She joined the master’s swim program at the YMCA and held to a rigorous training schedule, focusing mostly on the running and swimming but with a lot of stationary bike work as well.  Her training paid off as she did extremelly well this at this event.

She struggled a bit at the swim, losing about 3 minutes off her normal pace due to some aggressive swimmers around her and a general sense of panic while in the water.  In the future she may go with the second wave of non-elite athletes just to avoid some of the over-aggressive types.  She more than made up for it in the bike and run, averaging over 20mph on the 15 mile run and running about 7:30 miles.  She finished first in her age group and (we think) 5th or 6th overall for the women.  Amazing!

On the way back we we slowed down for a while due a horse trailer fire on the northbound I-5 stretch, I think between Centralia and Olympia.  Second time I’ve been witness to a serious vehicle fire this summer.  At least this time I was going the other way and didn’t get stuck on the interstate for 90 minutes.

Things are not looking good.  A bulk purchase of games at Funagain combined with a lack of playing time over the summer has really set me back on my quest to play all of my unplayed games in 2006.

One of the first steps to recovery is admitting you have a problem, so let me just say it – without some other changes, I don’t think I can complete this project in 2006.  Time for some drastic action.

There are two changes I can make to get into recovery mode:

• Get more aggressive about knocking out the unplayed games.
• Get rid of games on the unplayed list that likely wouldn’t stay in my collection anyway.

I’ve chatted with a few friends like Ken and KC about hosting a burndown party at my house – this is gaming where we focus on quantity, not quality.  Maybe I’ll give points to people that show up to help me knock down the list and do some weighted raffle prizes or the like.  Given that we are entering football season and my Saturdays will be shot September-October, I may need to set aside a Sunday to do this.

The second bullet is more interesting to me and is where I think I can get more help from you, the reader.  I’m going to list all of the games I own but have yet to play, and I’d like those of you with opinions to post a comment with a list of 5–10 games that you think I should dump from my collection.

• Checkers 2000
• Dying Lights
• Fast Golf
• Golden Deuce
• Himalaya Blackjack
• Key-Cue
• QUITS
• 1830 - Railroads and Robber Barons
• Battlestations
• Diplomacy
• History of the World
• Starship Catan
• Britannia
• Corsairs and Hellcats
• Iron Dragon
• Silverton
• Kingdoms
• Crystal of Power, The - DragonLords
• El Caballero
• Loco!
• Maelstrom (a Vortex game)
• Manifest Destiny
• Mag-Blast Second Edition
• Master Labyrinth
• Hellas
• Cave Troll
• Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
• Orient Express
• Hero Clix
• Cannes - Stars, Scripts and Screens
• Quest for the Dragonlords
• Turbo Taxi
• Atlanteon
• Stock Market Game
• Target
• Legend of Landlock, The
• Sequence
• Mille Bornes
• Spy Alley
• 221B Baker Street and Expansions
• Magdar
• Blitzkrieg
• Malefiz
• Stock Market Game, The
• Outdoor Survival
• ASL Starter Kit #1
• Das Ende des Triumvarates
• Kreta
• Warrior Knights
• Ys
• Parlay
• Gemblo
• Socks in the City
• Kunst and Kennis Spel
• Mutiny
• Wie Hund und Katz
• Wordwild
• Paths of Glory

I recently had one my best gaming experiences in a long while – a game of 18FL with Tim, Wes and Eric.  You can read all about the details of the session over at Eric’s weblog, so I’ll use this space to talk about why I had so much fun and why I just placed an order for 1850.

The itch to play an 18xx game has been with me for at least a couple of years.  I even bought a used copy of 1830 on eBay a while back, a largely uninformed purchase that I now regret.  Eric got a similar itch and has had Tim around to help him scratch it – they even attended an 18xx mini-convention here in Portland recently.  April – July weekends are largely consumed with baseball for me so I was unable to attend.

I arrived a bit early so was able to check out the components – very impressive for what is nearly a print-on-demand boardgame publisher.  Eric uses his on poker chips for the money but I think he regrets not including money in his customized order.  I had a hard time remembering what denominations matched what colors at times.

Allow me to explain the basics of 18FL.  I don’t yet know what attributes are in common across all 18xx games (though I can make educated guesses), so these basics may not map to the game you are thinking about playing.

• Players play the roles of investors in companies.  If you have a controlling interest in a company, then you get to control it.  Duh.
• Controlling a company generally means choosing how it expands, how it delivers goods, and how it handles profits.
• Profits can be distributed to shareholders (more dividends translates to appreciation of stock price) or retained for company operations.  Maybe the company needs to buy a new train…
• Players periodically get the opportunity to use their personal cash to buy or sell stock.
• If you have the most money at the end of the game, you win.

The operations of the game felt like Age of Steam or Railroad Tycoon to me.  The business aspects felt like Acquire or Indonesia.  I love the blend and could easily see how the decisions I made as an individual and as a business owner would affect the outcome.  I made a few mistakes but must have done OK as I ended up in a virtual dead-heat with Tim.  Our scores were well within a rounding error of tolerance for this game (a fraction of a percent).  I had a blast and can’t wait to play again.

I ordered 1850 because it centers on the midwest area where I grew up, and includes the town of Burlington, IA.  That happens to be the hometown of my parents and I’m taking my family there this weekend for memorial services for my two grandmothers who passed away earlier this year.

As a final note, Jacob and I took another run at Axis & Allies: D-Day.  Jacob and I played while Julie and Matthew were away and I gave him a choice.  This one hasn’t seen much play since we got into Memoir ‘44, and I’m glad we brought it out again.  We played with the special tactics / event cards, and I’m not sure if they add much to the game other than more randomness and fiddliness.  Jacob enjoyed them though and he thoroughly spanked me as the Germans.  I had horrendous dice rolls early on which sealed my fate.

Magic:the Gathering is having a bit of resurgence around our home of late.  Last weekend I pulled out the Ravnica cards I bought for the New Year’s Gaming event out on the coast.  The idea was to see if we could create some interesting draft tournaments from the card set.

We started by sorting all of the cards into common, uncommon, and rare piles – a total of about 260 cards.  We shuffled thoroughly and created 9 simulated booster backs (12 commons, 2 uncommons, and 1 rare in each pack).  Time for a booster draft with nine randomly chosen boosters.

A booster draft is simple to run – allocate three boosters per player and start by having each player open a single booster. Choose a card you want from the pack and pass the rest of the cards to your left.  Repeat until each player has 15 cards and continue with the other packs until each player has a total of 45 cards.

Now each player has some time (usually about 30 minutes, but we take less) to build a deck of at least 40 cards total, including lands.  I like limited format events like this because it involves deck building, deck tuning, and playing, all in a short period of time.  The meta-game of Magic (deck building and analysis) is appealing to many, but I only have the time and patience for it in a, well, limited way.

We had fun playing with our decks, and I continued to coach the boys on deck building and playing strategy.  There are a lot of subtleties to play that a casual player overlooks.  I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I do understand the timing rules pretty well and have a decent handle on play strategies.  Oh, and everything I learned about strategy I learned reading the first 10 issues of The Duelist.

Last night the boys I did a backdraft, where you follow the booster draft format but instead are trying to draft the worst possible card set.  From this set, one of your opponents will try and build a 40 card deck from the (supposed) trash you left.  This is harder than it sounds, especially with a block like Ravnica which is designed to work fairly well with 3 or even 4 color decks.

Finally, I’ve decided to join a casual Magic: the Gathering Online league with Ravnica block cards.  Matthew over in my Rip City Gamers group is running the league and it sounds like fun.  I actually prefer playing Magic online (real-time) than most other online games (BSW, etc.).  Should be fun.

I haven’t talked much lately about gaming podcasts, but I just have to say how much I like Board Games with Scott.  Scott’s a little goofy (who in this hobby isn’t?), but he does a really nice job on production and he clearly has put in a great deal of thought into staging and producing this series.  I can’t wait to watch the Die Macher episode.

There are some subtleties to how he produces the show that lead to very digestible download times – notice how many of his scenes involve very little changing scenery.  He holds his head still against a high contrast background, uses many shots where he has a fixed camera pointing to the game board with just his hand moving bits around, etc.  Keep up the good work.

I failed to mention in my final Origins post that I participated in an ad-hoc tournament on Friday.  This wasn’t a typical tournament for me – I got roped into a foam sword combat tournament with 7 other players sponsored by Edhellen Armoury.  We played through an elimination bracket and I somehow managed to win.

Jacob and Matthew have coveted those foam swords ever since they first saw that at GenCon a few years ago.  Given that they won’t make it to GenCon, Essen, or Origins this year, I wanted to bring back a special gift for them.  So of course after winning the tournament and getting a taste of play combat, I had to pick up a sword and shield for each of the boys.

These games are played by a strict set of rules – the Belegarth Book of War.  The emphasis is on safety and honor, offering some nice boundaries and lessons for the boys.  For example, you are required to call hits on yourself and aren’t supposed to call hits on your opponent (i.e., no “hey, I hit your arm!”).  I like honor systems like this and the spirit of competition it fosters.

The boys have had some fun dueling in our back yard, and even Julie has joined the action.  I was most surprised by how aerobic the activity was – after the tournament at Origins I was completely spent.

On Saturday morning, Julie, Matthew, and I left home at about 5am to drive to Camp Pioneer to get Jacob at summer camp (more on that in a future post).  We made it home by about 11:30am and after cleaning up and some rest and relaxation, I talked the boys into playing Hacienda with me.

Unlike some other new games that I’ve played recently (most notably Thurn & Taxis), I had no clue going into the game what was going to lead to a good score and thus had a hard time formulating any sort of reasonable strategy.  It comes down to the economics are various choices on your turn.  How important is income?  How much should I focus on blocking other players from markets?  Is harvesting a worthwhile action?

I figured that connecting to many markets would be a good thing.  Jacob and Matthew both had the lead over me at the mid-way point in the game, but I felt good about my position as I expected to be able to connect to 6–8 markets.  One mistake I made was laying down a water tile to block Jacob that in the end just gave him more victory points.  I over-valued income… if the block had prevented him from reaching a market, then it may have been worthwhile.  As it was, I just prevented him from getting some additional herd income.

Jacob forced the game to end 1 turn before Matthew and I wanted (good play on his part), preventing me from reaching my 7th market and giving him the victory.  I beat Matthew by one point.

Everyone enjoyed the game and the wide range of choices offered.  The rules and strategy are not trivial in this game – I would put it on the heavier scale for euro games.  We look forward to playing it again soon.

Day 3 meant final day for me as I needed to scoot back to Oregon to get ready for Boy Scout summer camp with Jacob – I’m going to join him for 4 days out at Camp Pioneer in central Oregon.

I spent most of Friday on the exhibit hall floor, taking some time to play some games with vendors and just chat with other publishers.  My first stop was at the Hidden City Games booth to try out a game launched at GenCon last year – Clout Fantasy.   Now this game doesn’t get the best reviews on the ‘geek, and I was skeptical enough about the game to pass on a try last summer.

Something was nagging me though – perhaps the thought that this might be something the boys would like – so I stopped by to get a demo.  The instructor-lady was very knowledgeable and helpful and did a fine job explaining the game.  Four of us gave it a try with mini sampler stacks of chips.

The idea of the game is that you want to finish with the most victory points on the table when all the chips have been tossed.  Each chip is part of a faction (elves, goblins, centaurs, undead, and merfolk) and has special abilities that can help it knock out other chips or help your own chips.  This is a combination dexterity and tactical game that certainly requires some thought and manual skill.  I played the goblin stack and did well enough to win my match.  I must admit I had fun – fun enough to pick up a starter and a few boosters.  Hidden City Games also gave away starters in the give-away bags for Origins, so I was able to snag two more.  I think the game might be struggling in retail, which gives way to concerns about viability of the product going forward.  If you like dexterity games this one is worth a try.

Next up was a visit to the Rio Grande Games booth to try out their new release Thurn & Taxis.  I had the luck of playing with Randy Schmucker (gamed with him last year at GenCon), Randy’s wife, and John Butitta (regular Counter columnist), and being taught by Jay Tummelson himself.

This is a very attractive game, with the setting Germany and the theme delivering the mail.  Think Ticket to Ride with mail carriages instead of trains.  Comparisons aside, this game was fun and I will seriously consider purchasing it.  There seems to be less conflict and stress in the game than Ticket to Ride, though there is some competition to grab the scoring markers before someone else takes them.  If you want to learn more about the game, why not check out Scott’s detailed video?

I somewhat unwittingly fell into a strategy of “grab some points and end the game quickly”, taking the carriage master 3 times to work my way up the carriage progression and force the game to end.  I never built a route more than 5 segments long, and only managed to grab 3 regional scoring markers.  Still, I finished with the most points and had fun getting there.

After some lunch and a conference call for work, I went back upstairs to the CABS Board Room to try and squeeze in a game and say goodbye to folks before leaving for the airport.  I worked in a game of Can’t Stop (I couldn’t and lost) but the highlight was watching Glen Drover teach Age of Empires III.  I really wanted to get in on this game but alas I had but an hour before leaving for the airport.  I heard enough about the game to think that I’ll like it – a very euro feel to it, more so than even Age of Mythology.

That’s it for me this year – wish I had been able to spend the whole weekend there.  Thanks to Funagain Games for the badge, to Rick and Tom for hanging out with me so much on Wednesday, to Valerie and Tyler for hosting us for BBQ on Wednesday night, and to everyone that sat down to play some games with me.  Until next time…