Friday night the boys and I tried out Battlestations, the sci-fi sorta-RPG with ship-to-ship combat.  This is a game I received in the BoardGameGeek secret santa gift exchange, and it has been a struggle to get out.  The main reason?  I think this is a difficult game to teach yourself, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

We played one of the intro missions and even used a pre-generated character for Matthew (a marine).  Jacob took on the role of the scientist.  I played the bad guys, and probably had too much of an advantage given that Jacob/Matthew had to fill out their ship with weaker “bots” (essentially commandable non-player-characters).

I wouldn’t have been able to get started in the game without reading Jason Little’s Battlestations – Example of Play walkthrough.  The rules could use oh so much work – it is way too easy to get lost in the trees and never see the forest.  As difficult as D&D 3.5 may be to learn, I think it is probably much easier for newbies to get into it given the narrative play examples included in the box.

In the end it wasn’t a very satisfying experience.  Too many rules lookups, the game felt fiddly, and it didn’t keep Matthew’s attention very well.  We won’t give up, though, and will try another session with Ken and Brandon to see if it gets better with more players and with a more experienced GM.  I’ll report back of course, but right now I’d be hard pressed to recommend this over other sci-fi RPGs like Star Wars D20.

 Not much about gaming in this post… all personal stuff.

About 2 weeks ago I took the family out to the midwest to attend memorial services for my two grandmothers who both passed away over the past 9 months.  We flew direct to Chicago and met up with my uncle Larry, rented a car, and drove the 4+ hours to Burlington, IA.  The drive was reminiscent of the many, many drives I made as a child across various segments of the midwest.  In the midwest alone I’ve lived in Dubuque, Altoona, and Urbandale IA, Louisville KY, Omaha NE, Indianapolis IN, St. Louis MO, and Dayton OH.  So as you can imagine I’ve made the drive across and up/down Illinois many times.  Julie and I had about our fourth date as a weekend trip from St. Louis up to Chicago in early spring 1990.

There was nothing but looking forward to this visit for me.  While I miss my grandmothers, they are both in a better place now and neither one was in good shape for their final years.  A visit to Burlington, the hometown of both of my parents and my “anchor” growing up, was just the place to bring some closure and re-visit some distant memories and distant relatives.

Thursday evening started with a Burlington Bee’s single-A minor league baseball game.  What a great time – cold beer, beautiful summer evening, and baseball like it is supposed to be played.  One highlight that evening was noticing that David Peterson of Aloha, OR plays for the opposing team (the Clinton LumberKings) and getting a chance to chat with him after the game.  He was a start player at Aloha high school and went on to play for George Fox.  He is clearly homesick, and looking at his stats I’m not sure how much longer he will last in professional baseball.  But he is the minor league story – kids doing their best to make it and doing what they love most.  After our chat he gave Matthew one his baseball bats with his name and “Texas Rangers” branded into it.

On Friday we had a personalized tour of Burlington by our old family friend Lyle Magneson.  Lyle as the distinct honor of teaching me all of the card tricks I know today, and I’m not too proud to say that doing card tricks is one of my best skills (girls only want boyfriends who have great skills after all).  We hit all of the great sites in Burlington, the city that “could have been a contender” and was a major player in early rail and river commerce along the Mississippi.  The highlight of course was a visit to Snake Alley, the true crookedest street in the world (eat your heart out San Francisco).

Saturday was time for services in Mt. Pleasant IA (for Grandma Brooks) and in Burlington (for Grandma Gardiner).

Saturday afternoon and evening we had an extended family picnic out at Crapo Park.  Good food, picnic games, and a 5 on 6 softball game (man do I miss playing recreational softball!) all made for a wonderful afternoon.

To family reading this: it was great seeing you all in Burlington, and remember that we love visitors out here in the distant northwest!

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.