Tap tap tap. Is this thing still on?

Wow - a lot has happened in the past month! As many of you know, CheckFree completed its acquisition of Corillian back in May. I started working at Corillian in September 1999 and served as the Chief Technology Officer since early 2001. After helping complete the transition work for integrating the two companies, it was time to reflect on next steps for me - 8 years in one place is a long time for me! The longest I had even lived in the same city prior to moving to Sherwood, OR was 4 years.

I was very impressed with how CheckFree handled the transition, and they offered me a very attractive role in the company. Still, after discussing at length with Julie, I felt it was time to move on and take some time to reflect and think about what's next for me. July 13 was my last day at CheckFree/Corillian. You can either call me unemployed or say I'm on a mini retirement (thanks Timothy Ferris) - in any case, I don't expect to resurface as an income-generating organic being until at least November.

I'm only 12 days into this mini-retirement but there should be no surprise that I'm loving it. Here's a short list of what I expect to do over the next few months:

• Get back to posting more regularly. I promise to post every day for the next three months, with the exception of days when I don't feel like it. I have a backlog of posts to write on topics such as baseball, photography, and Max Michael and family visiting.
• Do a lot of photography. I'm taking an online course at BetterPhoto and am loving it.
• Coach football. I'll be assisting my friend Jim again this fall, running the defense for Matthew's 5th-6th grade team. This starts August 6.
• Get back to playing more games. I'm averaging 1 session per month right now, and I'd like to get it up to 1 per week.
• Reflect. My main "work" to do over the next 3 months is to reflect, brainstorm, and start acting on some of the vocational ideas I have churning around in my brain right now. I'll probably write about this process right here.
• Hang out. Be more of a day-to-day presence with Julie and the boys. Jacob and I are out at Salishan right now. We golfed yesterday and plan on doing some surf casting on the beach in about 45 minutes. This sort of casual time is critical right now for the boys.

Stay tuned!

The kitten is, for now, going to be called "Kitten". We think she's pretty cute.

I'm 99% certain that this is the first digital photograph I ever took.  Back in April 1997 I purchased an Epson PhotoPC 500 for a tidy sum (I bet you can buy a decent DSLR body for the same amount today!) and tried it out with some shots of Jacob at age 2.  Hard to believe I've been taking digital shots for over 10 years now.

Gaming sessions have been few and far between over the past 2 months.  I looked at my game journal and noticed an entry on May 1 (my session at Mike's) and one play of Battleground: Fantasy Warfare with Jacob on May 15.  Needless to say I was excited to host a few friends for gaming last night.

We had a special guest: Peter Drake from Lewis and Clark College.  Peter is a professor of computer science there and will be using 24/7: the Game as a game to implement for a spring CS course next year.  He is using agile development techniques (eXtreme Programming I believe) and wants to have periodic visits from a real onsite customer, so he reached out to Sunriver Games.  Last night was a chance for him to meet the designer, get a copy of the game, and join us for some gaming.

I invested no time ahead of the session learning anything new (I'm itching to play Winds of Plunder) so I suggested the classic Union Pacific.  Most of us have played the game many times, but we still managed to screw up the rules.  We forgot to have each player secretly lay down a company share at the start of the game.  When the first scoring round came up, nobody had any shares out so nobody scored.  Probably not a big deal.

I always enjoy this game, but lately I wonder if I should just be playing Ticket to Ride (or one of the expansions) instead.  There's less tension in UP than TtR I think, and it can become all too clear who is going to win as you hit the second to last scoring round.

Peter wanted to learn how to play 24/7 so Carey taught the game and we played a four-player partnership game.  Dave and I absolutely crushed Carey and Peter, nearly doubling their score.  There's a decent amount of luck-of-the-draw in the game but I always enjoy it.  We had some nice discussions about how to best implement an artificial intelligence (AI) for the game, something Peter will likely include in his class.

We completed the evening with a game of Loco!, the Knizia card game.  I played this once before and enjoyed it then, but playing it a second time makes me realize just how chaotic the game is.  We all struggled with choices on what cards to play - either we just don't get the game, or there really aren't good approaches to the game with four players.  I think I would have enjoyed a game of Tichu or Die Sieben Siegal more.

Simple test from TextMate.

I can't let May go by with only one post, so here's a quick rundown of what's been going on:

• CheckFree's acquisition of Corillian closed in the middle of the month.  Exciting times!
• I attended RailsConf 2007.  Learned a little, experienced a lot.  I plan to do a post on what it's like to be an outsider at that show.

• We spent Memorial Day in Bend and Sunriver, OR doing our annual trek for baseball tournaments.  Tons of photos were taken - enjoy.
• I have not played a board or card game since the session on May 1.  Hopefully I'll break out of that drought as we take the train to Seattle this coming weekend to see the Mariners play on Saturday night.
• Max Michael of Stratamax Games will spend 3 days with us in July as he takes his first trip to the sunny Pacific NW.  We'll spend most of the time out on the coast.
• A bought a MacBook Pro, and I love it so far.  Jacob and I are excited to start recording some guitar tracks in Garage Band.

This has been a pretty good year for me in terms of making gaming sessions.  I've been able to host most of the time when I'm scheduled, and I've managed to make it to Mike's a few times on Tuesday nights.  I was hoping to play an Ystari game (Ys or Yspahan), but it looked like a group wanted to learn and play Thurn and Taxis so I offered to teach.  George, Carey, and George's friend & co-worker joined me.

I like this game but it took longer than it should.  I was thinking too much and everyone was getting used to the rules and subtleties which dragged things out a bit.  I think we played in 2 hours including teaching - this should be a one hour game.  I have my own copy now thanks to the GameStorm math trade so I'll try and get the kids to play it (fast!).  George won the game, picking up the nuances quickly which is not unsurprising.

Meanwhile Doug, Mike, and Dave played Factory Fun and seemed to enjoy it.  Dave likes puzzle games.  They also played Hey! That's My Fish and Die Sieben Siegel.

Dave wanted a party game and when Liebrary was offered I jumped all over it.  There was some reluctance in the group, but I challenge everyone that played to claim that they didn't have fun.  There were lots of laughs and groans and by the third card everyone was in the mood and making legitimate efforts (i.e., that's when we stopped seeing opening lines referring to Daryl Hannah in a derogatory way).  George was exceptionally good at the game for a non-native English speaker and beat us all, though I was a close second.

Thanks Mike for hosting.

The chess season for me is officially over for school year 2006-2007.  It was a fun year and a first chance for me to start getting involved with the program at Sherwood Middle School (where Jacob goes now).  I took a break from teaching a morning chess class at Archer Glen Elementary to focus on the Game On! games class Julie and I taught twice per week, but still managed to run an after school chess club that was the nucleus of our tournament team.

Our tournament season kicked off with our own Sherwood elementary friendly competition - the Jack Weeks Cup, named in honor of the man who really got chess started in Sherwood (he recently moved to central Oregon).  Archer Glen managed to retain the cup this year, but it wasn't easy - we had to go to seven rounds to find a team winner.  Our team was very balanced with all but one of the 10 team members scoring four points or more.  This photo shows all three teams from Sherwood:

I also helped out with Jacob's middle school regional event where the team managed to tie for first and qualify for state.  Jacob just barely missed the qualifying cut to join the team at state (they can only take five players to state) but as a 6th grader he'll have two more years to qualify.

Archer Glen did decently well at the regional tournament (posts for 2006, 2005, 2004) finishing just above the middle of the pack in what is probably the biggest and strongest region in the state.

While the team didn't qualify for state, Matthew had an outstanding regional and went into the fifth and final round with a perfect score of 4 points.  He faced off against what is one of the 2 strongest players in his age group in the state (he has about a 1300 USCF rating, Matthew is unrated).  Matthew lost the game but qualified for state and had a blast competing there.

Our last event of the year was a local chess tournament, the Whitford CMCC tournament.  The kids had a great showing, finishing second overall.  One of the middle schoolers I brought, Brogan, finished with 4 points and took home a top 10 trophy.

I used a pretty heavy hand with Jacob last weekend in an attempt to get him to try out an 18xx game with me.  After witnessing my marathon game of 1825 at GameStorm he was convinced this was a game he would not like and that would be way too long.  I did my homework with my local group of resident 18xx experts and settled on 1889 as a nice intro 2-player game that could show him the true light of the 18xx gaming world.  Eric was nice enough to loan me his copy, another high-quality production from Deep Thought Games.

1889 takes place on Shikoku Island in Japan.  Plenty of challenging terrain, but a small board size and simplified rules made it perfect for a first game with Jacob.

The game was very easy to teach despite this being the first game I've played without a more experienced player at the table.  Other than some of the quirky rules around laying tiles, I think the game system just makes sense if you have a basic understand of markets, banking, and business.  And if you don't know those basic concepts, what a great way to learn them.  Jacob caught on very quickly to the basics and even started to see some of the benefits of "synergistic" operation of his two companies.  With only two players involved there wasn't a significant amount of cross-company benefit.  Of course we also played a few rules wrong - significant rules that altered the course of the game but in the end didn't matter in terms of enjoyment and desire to play again.

What did we screw up?

• We blew past the certificate limit one turn because we just weren't paying attention.  We knew the rule, had discussed it, but we just forgot.  Fixed it with a sell-off the next turn.
• The bigger issue: we missed the 60% maximum individual ownership in a company rule.  I should have known this but missed it and this had a pretty big impact on the game.  You can see from the picture below how missing this affected company ownership.

This caused some companies to be fully sold out when they probably would have stayed with a few shares in the bank, pushing their stock up artificially.  Maybe it was a net no-effect on the two players, but it was still a pretty big mistake that we'll fix next time.

Speaking of which, there will definitely be a next time for Jacob as he loved the game and has brought it up a few times since we played.  I'm going to buy 18FL as I think it is similar scale with more familiar terrain and he's looking forward to getting into another game soon.

I decided to turn this post into a tutorial as well as a report on running a Kniziathon.  I suppose the idea could be transferable to any game designer with a significant library of games (Moonathon, Teuberathon, etc.), but it certainly helps having not on a large number of games in the collection but a wide range of lengths and depths of games.

The first thing you need to do if running a Kniziathon is to check out Kevin Jacklin's Kniziathon guide over at the Convivium.  This is where I learned everything I needed to know, and we were lucky enough to have Kevin in town to provide some friendly guidance along the way.

Most of my preparation work involved preparing materials to provide on-site as well as for publication online and in the GameStorm program.  I'm including these materials online, so feel free to copy / revise /extend as you see fit.

• Kniziathon Player Guide
• Kniziathon Scoresheet
• Kniziathon Placard
• Kniziathon HQ Sign

I thought it was important to have an HQ area - somewhere to learn more about the Kniziathon, turn in scoresheets, and look for pickup games.  Jacob and I set this area up early on Friday morning, including a set of about 25 Knizia games from my personal collection.  I took a risk and allowed folks to use my games for pickup sessions without any sort of formal checkout process.  I put mailing return address labels in each box and didn't have any wander away.  Hopefully they are all still complete!

I recruited a set of willing volunteers to man the HQ with me from 8am - midnight on Friday and 8am to 4pm on Saturday.  Despite several no-shows, this worked out fine and people were able to get the information they needed, play ad-hoc games, and turn in scoresheets with or without my personal presence.  Having Kevin around to teach and play games certainly helped.

KC and I ran the two-player all-Knizia tournament Friday night - a great way to increase participation in both the tournament and Kniziathon.  Having 20 participants over 3 rounds produced around 25-30 scoresheets. After the tournament it was time for tabulation of the first day's results, a process that took about 3-4 hours and kept me up until 2am Saturday morning.  I used a custom database implemented in DabbleDB which made the process mostly easier - I say mostly, because the responsiveness of a web-based application can sometimes slow down the rapid data entry process I'm comfortable with.  Still, the app made tabulation and final scoring a snap.

Saturday was much easier - not as many scoresheet turn-ins, plus most of the players were already in the system so data entry only involved entering game scores and not new players.  Final tabulation took place from about 3:30pm to 4:30pm, giving me plenty of time to prepare for the awards ceremony with Reiner.

GameStorm donated a 2008 registration, Maginor, Atlanteon, and Dragon Parade.  Reiner and Kevin showed up with three nicely designed trophies.  We didn't have a prize or trophy explicitly for the youth winner (my own Jacob!), so it was nice having four available so that Jacob could choose first.  He chose Dragon parade.  It was a huge highlight for him to shake hands with Reiner and get a dollar bill signed by him.  The dollar bill was handed out to the players that tied for fourth overall after I said they "didn't finish in the money" - Reiner quickly interrupted, reached into his wallet, and handed each player a dollar bill that he proceeded to autograph.

The winners were Tim Shippert, Tom Powers, and Zontziry Johnson (results are also posted over at the Convivium).  I was proud to be a part of this event.  Thanks to all of the volunteers that helped me out: KC, Ken, Doug, Jacob, George, Mike, Kevin, the GameStorm staff, and of course Reiner Knizia.