Rita informs me that the City of Gresham is holding a Family Game Day to celebrate TV-Turnoff Week.  Mike Deans, Rita, KC, and others will be there running a wide range of family and kids games.  Details:

Parks & Recreation is hosting the City's first TV-Turnoff Week Family Game Day from 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday, April 28, at Gresham City Hall in the Conference Center, 1333 N.W. Eastman Parkway.

It had been far too long since we had been family camping, so back in January Julie and I decided to book some time in a Yurt in one of the Oregon State Parks.  Ever the crafty planner, I chose the Bandon area knowing that I could probably squeeze in 18 holes of golf at one of the world reknowned courses at Bandon Dunes.  Bullards Beach is about as convenient to Bandon Dunes as you can get without staying at the resort, so we stayed there (great article on Bullards Beach here).

Yurts in Oregon are ideal for off-season camping.  Weather on the Oregon coast is unpredictable at best, and for extended camping (we went for four nights) a tent can turn into a somewhat miserable experience when dealing with high winds, sleet, and hail.  All of the cooking is still down outdoors and you can experience campfires, hiking, etc.

Bandon is a bit of a long drive from Portland - around 4 hours or so.  We weren't in a hurry leaving Saturday and departed around 11am, stopping for lunch in Albany.  This was my first experience locating a restaurant with my new Blackberry 8800 / GPS / TeleNav and it worked like a charm, finding us a cozy Mexican restaurant with outstanding service.

On Sunday we visited the West Coast Game Park, a smallish zoo with an expansive petting area that exceeded our expectations.  I don't think I've ever seen a better big cat exhibit - they had three lions, 3-4 tigers, 5-6 black panthers, and other assorted smaller cats.  Matthew is in heaven when he can get up close and pet the animals and had a blast directing the deer herd.

On Sunday afternoon we took a horseback ride on the beaches south of Bandon.  This was probably the highlight of the entire trip for all of us - beautiful horses, beautiful scenery, and an excellent guide resulted in a ride to remember.  My horse was the most eager of the bunch and was always quick to trot and race ahead, an event that Jacob and Matthew always anticipated as their horses would often accelerate to keep up with me.

Monday morning brought my golfing adventure and an early 8:30am tee time at Bandon Dunes.  The weather started off spectacularly clear but cool, but after four holes things went sideways quickly.  Literally: the winds picked up to 25-30 mph and the hail and sleet came in.  This lasted about 3 holes and I was very thankful to have good raingear handy (a must for Oregon golfing).  My caddy was excellent, and I recommend getting one for your first visit to the course unless you are there with experienced Bandon golfers.  He really helped me through a few of the holes and had me putting from off the green whenever I had a clear line to the whole and was within 15 yards of the fringe.  I stayed within myself and shot an 89, not bad for my first time on the course with some bad weather.

We ate entirely too well on the trip, trying out many new dutch oven recipes that I suspect will start turning up on Jacob's menus with his patrol in Boy Scouts.  The menu included fresh baked biscuits and sausage gravy, Mexican casserole, homemade beef stew, and cherry dump cake.

The trip closed out with a driving tour south of Bandon.  I would have liked to have made it all the way to Gold Beach, but the rest of the family wasn't too keen to spend that much time in the car.  We hit some fabulously intense weather along the way, getting gusts in the 50mph range when stopping to check out another lighthouse.

My goal was for day 3 to be a day of rest for me - no events to run, ideally playing a longer thoughtful game.  Downtime wasn't a big concern as I knew I'd have a few errands to run (like checking out of the hotel and gathering my crates of games).  Sounds like a great day to play an 18xx game, which was exactly what happened.

Nate Sandal hosted 1825, with the idea that he could scale the game up or down depending on how many players joined.   We had 4: Nate, Matt Riley, Kenny, and me.  Nate chose to play unit 1 and unit 2.  We started at 8am and hoped to be done by noon. How foolish of us.

Kenny was brand new to 18xx, Matt had a small amount of experience (1 game, I think).  I've got 3 games under my belt, and Nate has played a bit more than that.  The rules in this game are pretty straightforward, but we may have played with way too much money in the bank thus prolonging the game.  With the combined units, we had quite a few companies operating - 2-3 for each player.  This resulted in quite a bit of downtime, which wasn't a problem for me this day but in normal circumstances might have been a detractor.

Side note: Playing 1825 made me appreciate the amazingly good quality of the Deep Thought Games productions.  So much thought goes into the human factors in those productions, ranging from the tokens to the company cards to the on-board hints.  The quality is even more striking when you play an 18xx game that isn't produced by Deep Thought (like 1825).  Knowing that Deep Thought can't be making much money and that it is mostly a labor of love, I'm compelled to pick up a few more games while they are still available.  I get the feeling that at some point they'll just decide that their time is worth more.

The biggest challenge for me in 1825 was understanding the tile upgrade paths.  I tend to play these games intuitively without a lot of route planning beyond the next turn or so, but the restriction in tiles and upgrades makes advanced planning a bit more critical in 1825.

Matt brought out his PowerBook to start tracking money during operating rounds and to calculate the final scores.  This is a huge help, especially given that we were using paper money which I think slows down the game (relative to chips).  Final scores:

• Chris 11130
• Nate 9938
• Kenny 9286
• Matt 8458

I somehow continue my streak of solid 18xx showings.  I've won 3 out of the first 4 games I've played, and I'm not sure how.  Jacob and I plan to play 1889 this Sunday morning (well, at least *I* plan to, I haven't told him yet) as I think he might really latch onto this game system with a shorter, smaller introductory game.

Speaking of Jacob, after we left the convention we drove over to Flying Pie pizza to meet one of my oldest friends - the Smiths, who were my next-door neighbors in Indianapolis from 1978 - 1982.  Debra (check out her husband Chris Hornbecker's photo gallery) lives in town here and just had a baby 3-4 weeks ago, so my old best friend Robert and father Jerome were in town.  Great to see old friends like this, and Jacob and I managed to get in a game of Knizia's new Dragon Parade while waiting for them to arrive.  Jacob quite likes it and I agree - this would have been a great game for my games class this year.  I think it is less interesting with 2 players than with more, but could get quite chaotic with 5.

Tim Shippert put together a nice geeklist describing how he won the Kniziathon at the recent GameStorm convention.

I just learned today that a friend and fellow gamer, Jason Sato, passed away this afternoon after suffering a stroke while gaming last night at the Game Depot inTempe, AZ.  Jason was not a close friend of mine, but I did experience several spectacular gaming sessions with him during visits do Arizona.  I always found him to be warm, welcoming, and highly intelligent.  My condolences to his close friends and family.

After too little sleep, Jacob and I swung over to the "other side" to play a roleplaying game starting at 9am on Saturday.  The game: Spirit of the Century, the adventure: Aces Harrington vs. the Snow Monster. Paul Tevis has talked up this RPG and it has been on my maybe-buy list for a while, and I was frankly surprised to see it show up on the GameStorm agenda.  I had a lot of fun, Jacob less so - I think it speaks to the audience for the game and its reliance upon player creativity and maturity.

Spirit of the Century uses the fudge system for resolution, a system I was familiar with but had never played.  Fudge uses six-sided dice with two minuses, two blanks, and two plusses.  You roll four dice, sum the dice, then add to the base ability (generally zero to seven).  The game setting is pulp in the 20s/30s (think Indiana Jones), and I played an Inuit Hero from Canada. The six adventurers were snowed in at a lodge in Canada and squared off against New York mobsters and a German mad scientist working on mind control for grizzly bears.

Back to my comment on player creativity and maturity: this system relies on collaborative story telling where players can alter or contribute to the story line by bringing forward aspects of their character using fate points.  Two of the aspects for my character included "respect for authority" and "lover of nature".  At various plot or action points in the narrative, it behooves the players to invoke these aspects to try and alter the tide of events.  The challenge is (in a well-run game, in my opinion) that the player needs to creatively introduce this aspect as part of the narrative.  For example, I wouldn't say "I'm a lover of nature so I'll use a fate point to reroll my attempt to release the bears".  Instead, I might say "I'm furious that the scientist has violated the order of nature with these dastardly mine control devices!  I must scare this bear away so that he flees the scene, so I rely on my hard-earned knowledge of grizzly bear intimidation forms to frighten him."  Jacob had a hard time getting into the rhthym of this game - his experience (and preference, I think) is the D&D style of tactical problem solving and combat.  These are both different forms of roleplaying - Jacob does get into his character when playing D&D.  It's just that the emphasis on narrative in Spirit made it difficult for him to enjoy the game.  That's OK - he'll likely get there at some point.  I know I had a blast.

The rest of the afternoon was spent playing Knizia games and running the Kniziathon.  Like I said, more on that in another post.

Saturday night was a marathon, semi-engaged game of Arkham Horror.  There were two big sessions going on, and I'm glad (for a number of reasons, mostly the company) that I ended up with Doug's group.

Still, this was a huge group (8 players) with plenty of down-time.  OK given that I had some other errands to run while playing, but it definitely pushed the game later into the evening and under normal circumstances I would prefer 4-5 players.

The game is fun, and reminds me of a mix between the board-RPG games from Fantasy Flight (like Doom and Descent) and Betrayal at House on the Hill.  I think it was too late and we were all too green to collaborate like we should have, and I suspect that's where the game really shines.  I know most of the time I was just doing my own thing, and doing it rather poorly at that.  The base mechanics are easy to understand, though I suspect the learning curve would be steep if you learned the game from the box.  The game wasn't great enough for me to consider running out and purchasing it, but I definitely want to try another game with fewer players.  Would be nice to swing a trade for this for my copy of Doom.

(You can see all of my GameStorm photos on my Flickr photoset.)

I'm coming back to this blogging thing with a flurry.  I expect to make no fewer than 5 posts over the next week, so strap on your seatbelts, I'm back!

I spent a lot of time preparing for this GameStorm - I ran the Kniziathon and co-ran the two player tournament.  I'll talk more about the Kniziathon in a separate post and stick to the other stuff that happened on day 1 of the convention.  I consider day 1 to be Friday (making Thursday day 0 of course, because there were a few events that happened Thursday night).

The GameStorm staff selected the Sheraton PDX Airport hotel for the convention this year, by far the best venue they've had and I made it clear to the organizers (Aaron, Aaron, and Beverly) that a return to the same hotel next year would be most appreciated, even at a price premium.  Jacob and I shared a two-queen room with Ken and Brandon for $100/night, and this is one of the recently upgraded Sheratons with improved beds and showers.  Plenty of space and comfortable accomodations combined with nice gaming digs made me a happy gamer.

Jacob and I arrived about 8:15am on Friday to set up the Kniziathon HQ booth.  Most of the daytime hours were spent playing various pickup Knizia games, plus a scheduled session of Amun Re that I ran for 8 people from noon to 2pm.  Even with a new player we played the game in about 90 minutes.  This game is definitely in my top 2 or 3 games list and packs a lot of punch for its short playing time.  I also played Ra, Through the Desert, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, and Pickomino during the day.

After a quick trip to Subway for dinner with a small group, KC and I kicked off the annual Friday night 2-player tournament.  Last year we had a dismal turnout - only about 6 people participating.  This year we made it part of the Kniziathon and made it an all-Knizia affair and ended up having 20 gamers participate.  We ran the tournament for three rounds, Swiss-style, in three hours.  The first round we played Lost Cities, then did a player's choice for subsequent rounds with the "white" (vs. black in chess terms) player choosing the game.  We saw Battle Line, Carcassonne: the Castle, Through the Desert, Ingenious, and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation played multiple times.  After three rounds Chris Ballowe and Jeff Ganong were tied with three points each.  They agreed to a fourth playoff round, with Chris coming out on top after a game of Battle Line.

Starting around 10pm, I spent the next 3-4 hours tabulating interim results for the Kniziathon.  More on that later.

This is a review of the party game GiftTRAP.  I received a complimentary review copy and am way past due in posting my review. Julie, Jacob, Matthew, and I sat down to play this and had quite a good time.

The components for the game are first-rate - right up there with the best party games I've seen lately (Liebrary, Wits and Wagers for example).  The game comes in a gift box with a nicely designed packing approach on the inside where the board provides some structure for storage.  The player bits come in individual mesh gift baggies.  The cards are solid, full color, and the text is high contrast and easy to read.  This is a nice package and you won't be disappointed with the physical design.

GiftTRAP is a game about knowing your fellow gamers and their preferences, a common mechanic also seen in games like Apples to Apples and Attribute.  Each round consists of a number of possible gifts being put on display equal to the number of players plus one.  The players in turn places markers on the gifts that indicate what the player would like vs. not like, with a few shades of gray in between.  They also indicate what gift they think each other player would most want to receive.  Players score points on a giving track and a receiving track based on how well they give to others and how well others give to them.

The scoring and tracking mechanics are my only complaint.  It was confusing to everyone how to track points on both scales given the reflexive nature of give/receive.  I'm sure we'd become pros at it after a while, but I can't help but think it would be an obstacle to casual gamers.  This is similar to my complaint about Wits & Wagers: the game itself is a blast, but the scoring and winner determination almost seem to be an afterthought.  Still, it is a party game and the journey is more important than the final destination.

The game is light and fun and leads to interesting conversations, even in our intimate family setting.  I think it would work well as an icebreaker as long as folks aren't too wrapped up in winning.  The game is at its best when you've got one gift that is perfect for multiple individuals, and others that aren't good for anyone.  How do you decide?  How will you explain it after the results are revealed?  The banter and laughter that result from these dilemmas are what the game is all about.

My friend and co-worker Milind Pandit recently published a webinar on a great product management topic.  Enjoy.