This will be another brief post - having a blast and don't want to miss out on any gaming!

I continued to play new games to me that were very good, including a few older releases.  Thebes has been on my play and maybe buy list for a while ever since the new Queen games production was released.  Doug and Mimi brought the original version out to Salishan last year but I wasn't interested - maybe the bits weren't nice enough?  A shame as the game is quite good, and as Greg said to me - the mechanics marry the theme perfectly.

Each player is an archaeologists gathering knowledge to conduct excavations in ancient sites (Thebes, Greece, Palestine, etc.).  Excavations are random draws from a bag - possibly too random for some people, but it was very fun and a quick play. This is one of the few new games for me so far that will go on my buy list.

Jim and I then played a quick 2 player game of Fjords.  This is a very fun game that reminded us both of Through the Desert.  I'm not sure I'll ever buy it, but will gladly play the game any time.

I ran a demo session of Carey's new design Bridgetown Races and it went well.  Yehuda was very favorable on the game, and all of the comments were positive.  I also got some good advice on possible mechanic and graphic design changes that could improve the game.

The big game of the day was Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage.  Jim and I taught ourselves how to play the game and played a nail-biter all the way down to the last card plays of the last turn.  It was a 6.5 hour marathon that we played at an easy, learning pace but it was all good - we had no regrets taking so much time and it was a well contested battle.

We each made very rookie mistakes but they must have balanced out perfectly as we went into the last 2 turns essentially even.  Jim was able to lock up most of my troops in Africa which gave him the clear edge but it was still a nice chess game at the end.  We also had some nice help from Aaron Fuegi (former WBC champ) that clarified some of the rules and showed us how poorly we were using our Generals.

The evening ended about 2am with a game of Colosseum, the latest Days of Wonder release.  This is a surprisingly big, heavy game that was good (better than I heard from reading other reviews), but that I doubt I would play much.  There's a lot to process and plan for as you work to put on your shows - it made my brain hurt, especially given how late we played it.  Still, Jeff and Jim really enjoyed it.

Note: Check out the photo stream with more photos over at Flickr.

Wow, what a fun-packed and tiresome first day at BGG.CON.  Jim and I started the day with a 4 mile run at 7:20am.  While it was hard to not just start gaming right away, I think this keeps me in a better frame of mind the rest of day and it was nice to chat during the run to catch up with Jim.  Breakfast was a few pop tarts and Diet Coke from the food mart across the street - we knew we had our 1 allotment of Denny's for the day so we opted for lunch instead.  Breakfast of champions!

Check-in to the convention was on time and painless.  Even though I got the "lesser" prize table ticket, I stilled scored a copy of Stonehenge so I was very pleased.  There were great options and the table - better I think than 2 years ago so kudos to the staff and supporters for setting this up.

Derk and Aldie are very visible during the conference and it was nice reconnecting with them.

Greg Schloesser was very interested in trying out Brass - I was eager to comply and it always helps to have someone teach a game of this depth.  We had a very observant non-player that pointed out a rule I was playing wrong, so I even learned something.  When players supply coal or iron to the demand track they get paid from the bank according to the value slots they supply.  Not sure how I missed this rule...

Even though I played several new Essen releases today, Brass remains my favorite of the show.  I played better this time and pulled out a narrow victory and everyone was in the game until the end.  Response from everyone was very positive.

Jim and I did lunch at Denny's and squeezed in a quick game of Cheapass' Agora.  Not bad, but not great either.  We played too nice and the game ended pretty quickly.

After lunch, Yehuda, Aaron Fuegi, Jim and I tried out the newish Mayfair / Phalanx game Before the Wind.  This is not a sailing game - it is a traditional Euro market game that we played incorrectly.  The English rules are poorly written (I assume the original rules weren't!) and the manner in which players draft and trade cards was not made clear.  This lead to some very pathological behavior (but perfectly reasonable based on our interpretation of the rules) that extended the game to the two hour mark which is much too long for a game like this.  Maybe I'll give it another try with the correct rules, but there are so many other options out there.

Aaron had a great come-from-behind victory with 53 points, and I was pretty close in second place with 46. We all thought Jim would get the win so fought hard to hold him back, allowing Aaron to sneak in.

I pulled In the Year of the Dragon from the game library - this is supposed to be one of the better Essen releases from this year.  It didn't disappoint, but the game is brutal!  We all felt that we were playing poorly and unable to cope with all of the bad events happening, but I guess that's probably the way the game is supposed to feel.

This is about as Euro / dry as you can get.  There's a theme there I suppose, but the game felt very abstract but well designed.  The mechanics are simple and the fact that you can see the events that will happen in the future makes you feel like you should have more control and planning ability than you really have.  This is because competition for specific actions is tough when everyone knows what is coming!  This game clocked in at about 1 hour 40 minutes and I won by a 1 point margin over Tim.

We ended the gaming night with a 4-player game of new Eggertspiele release Hamburgum.  Jim Ginn, Kevin Wilson, and Eric Burgess joined me in the next in the "rondel series" from Mac Gerdts.  This differs from Imperial and Antike in that there is no combat - in fact, there's very little direct player conflict.  This is by far the most Euro-styled game in the series and it was a fun play that lasted about 90 minutes (and we taught ourselves).  This was my second favorite of the day behind Brass.

It looks like the hit of the show is Agricola, so I'll try and get in on a game of that tomorrow at some point.

Julie drove me to the airport this afternoon for my flight to Denver / Dallas for BGG.CON.  This was very nice - I don't think I've had a ride like this in ages!  It allowed me some extra time to prepare, which is good because I needed every spare minute to finish Jacob's football team end-of-year DVD.  My external 300GB drive (Firewire 800 enclosure plus a Maxtor drive inside) has been giving me all sorts of fits lately, with the latest issue being corrupt movie clip files for the DVD that resulted in some artifacts in the final DVD that made my product unshippable. I had to do a repair on the drive (it claimed to be unsuccessful, but I got enough recovered to fix the problem) and was burning the master DVD in the final 5 minutes before we departed for the airport.  The DVD is a mixture of still photos with the Ken Burns effect, title slides, season highlight video clips, and a soundtrack.  For those curious, here are the tools I used:

• iMovie '08 for the video clips, still photos, and titles.  I love iMovie and it does the job very nicely once you get a handle on the interface.  The only big negative here is that you can't easily manage chapter markers in iMovie.
• GarageBand '08 for the soundtrack.  This is cool - you bring the exported movie from iMovie into GarageBand then overlay the soundtrack onto the movie.  Great editing tools, individual track control, plus all the other cool GarageBand effects that I COULD use if I wanted.  In this case I only needed to handle sequencing songs and transitions.  By the way, projects like this make you appreciate Amazon.com's MP3 music service - it sure is nice to be able to embed those songs into videos like this for personal use, something I can't do with protected iTunes downloads.
• iDVD '08 for the final DVD production.  I'm not a huge fan of iDVD (it crashes too often and the interface is obtuse) but it gets the job done for me.

Anyway, back to travel.  After averaging over 100,000 miles per year on United for the past 4 years, this was my first flight since August.  I like going places, but I don't miss the travel process.  PDX was virtually empty and check-in was a breeze, but seeing all of the tired execs standing around chatting on their phones brought back memories of a life I prefer not to return to.  My Red Carpet club membership expires this month, and my 1K status with United next month, so soon it will be back the world of the mortal cattle-car traveler for me.

I'll land about 10:30 tonight Dallas time and hop on the shuttle to the (thankfully close!) hotel for BGG.CON.  I'm excited - very little structured play established so far and I hope to play quite a few of the new Essen releases.  Tomorrow morning I'm likely to play Roads and Boats, Friday afternoon I'll run a prototype play-testing session, and Friday or Saturday evening I plan to try an 18xx game with Tim. Here are some goals and plans for the weekend:

• Play Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage.  I'd love to have someone teach me so I can come back and play with Jacob.
• Meet some new people and establish new friendships.  I should know about 20-25 people at the show, but I'd like to spend some time outside that circle of friends and experience some new interactions.
• Teach and play Brass again.  I enjoy teaching new releases that others are hoping to play so maybe I can make myself available for this.
• Take lots of quality photographs of the happenings and publish them in a timely manner.
• Post a few blog entries while I'm there.
• Go running at least twice.  I've fallen off the wagon since rolling my ankle a few weekends ago playing basketball with the boys and need to start again.  Jim Ginn says he'll run with me so hopefully we can get out Fri and Sun mornings.  My ankle is still swollen but I think it will hold up.

See you in Dallas.

As promised I played a three-player game of the new Martin Wallace release Brass today.  Randy and his son Byron joined me - a first chance to meet these new members of our game group and enjoy a game with them.  We had a blast and I'm happy to report that this a solid medium-weight game from Wallace.

I spent some time researching the game on BGG before playing and noticed no shortage of consternation about the quality of the rules.  I don't think the rules are written poorly, but this is not a trivial game to understand so it is worth taking some time to explore the rules forums for explanations and clarifications.  I found the Important Concepts post in particular to be quite helpful.

This game is about economic development, connection-building, and (of course) resource management.  Like many Wallace games, cash is tight and a little bit of planning can help avoid wasted turn and potentially disastrous consequences.

The most complicated part of the game is the set of rules governing how to build industry counters (where you can build them, what resources are required). Most people will need to read the rules, play a few turns (real or practice), then re-read the rules to figure this all out.  We eased our way into the game, which starts in the canal phase, knowing that our initial options would be limited and we would be unlikely to screw things up too badly.  The game flows pretty easily at the beginning if you follow Martin's advice at the end of the rulebook for playing the game, so I encourage first-time players without a teacher to just dive in and play after a pass through the rules.

The basic idea of the game is to build industry counters that will get utilized and thus generate income and victory points.  Income early in the game is certainly key and the main way to achieve this is by taking at least 3 actions - build a cotton mill, build a port, sell the cotton through the port.  When you execute the sell cotton action you get to flip the mill and port over, moving you up the income track and setting you up for VPs at the end of the canal period.  This is quite a simplification as there are rules for connecting towns, being able to transport cotton to the port via connections, and playing cards to execute the various actions at your disposal.

At the end of the canal period things were tight - Randy - 43, Byron - 39, and Chris - 37.  None of us really knew what to suspect with the transition to the rail period (the final half of the game).  All of the canals are wiped off the board as are all "level 1" industry counters.  It is worth noting now that there are only five different kinds of industry counters (Cotton Mill, Coal Mine, Iron Forge, Port, and Shipyard), but each industry has different levels of development that advance throughout the game.  So the board is almost reset at this point, with each player having about 2 or 3 counters left on the board and no rail connections between towns.

This is where we made our big mistake - coal is critical at the start of this period as it is required to build rail connections.  Sourcing the coal can be a challenge, and nobody had a coal mine on board and there were almost no port connections available.  I made a mistake in telling and executing the rules here, taking coal from an off-board supply when I wasn't allowed to.  This mistake forced us to back up a complete turn and right things, which we were able to do but not without some pain and confusion.  My suggestion: use the natural break between periods to review the rules on rail building and any special rules that only apply to the rail period!

I was very impressed with how quickly Randy and Byron picked up the nuances of the game and we had three very different strategies at play.  While both Randy and Byron focused on building shipyards, I was unable to do so but blocked access the the potential third shipyard location.  I focused on cotton and iron production and Byron built a large number of lucrative rail lines.  In the end we were amazed with the closeness in scores: Byron won with 140, Randy and I tied at 138.  As you can imagine, the tension was very high as we counted the final scores (with Byron's counted last).

The game took us 3.5 hours to play, but it feels like a 3 hour game to me.  I guess you can probably play it in 2 hours with experienced players, but how often does it happen that all players are experienced?

I'll try to play this again at BGG.CON, and perhaps my experience playing will come in handy to teach others that will be excited to try this new release.

What a difference a year makes. Last year I peaked at 118 unplayed games in my collection and went into the holiday season with over 35 games remaining to be played.

While I have been more disciplined this year about acquiring games and incurring burndown debt, the task of finishing the year with no unplayed games is still daunting. I'm keeping all of the games remaining to be played on the closet shelf in the game room.

Some comments on each game:

• Mammoth Hunters - picked this up in a math trade but it still lingers around. Maybe the trade was a mistake, but I think this is a game Julie may like.
• Caylus Magna Carta - a recent purchase, this is sure to get played in the next few weeks. I'm hosting game night on Tuesday so I'll likely push for this one.
• 1870 - little to no chance of this getting played. I purchased it at steep discount and expect to play at some point, but there are other 18xx games ahead in line to be played.
• Reef Encounter - also picked this up in a math trade. I technically played this online once but had no clue what I was doing.
• La Citta - also picked this up in a math trade, and played online once with no clue. Sense a theme here?
• Cash n Guns - I won this on a BoardGameNews contest. These guys were in the booth next to us at Essen 2005 but I never got a chance to play this. Matthew loves it so it will get played.
• Niagara - Maybe I'll bring this to the games class on an open gaming day.
• Winds of Plunder - GMT P500 pre-order that I doubt will get played this year. I probably should have pre-ordered Conquest of Paradise instead.
• Brass - This should get played this coming Sunday - very excited to try it.
• Elasund - Also picked this up at a discount but haven't managed to give it a go yet.
• Friedrich - I've always loved the idea of how the cards make this game click so I picked it up in a math trade. Maybe I'll get this played at the Salishan gaming retreat coming up in December.
• Dune - This is a classic I've heard so much about but have never played. Maybe I can sneak into a game at BGG.CON as I know it was played there 2 years ago.
• 1960: The Making of the President - This will certainly get played before the end of the year, especially considering how much Jacob likes this era.
• Blood Feud in New York - Matthew and Jacob are interested in trying out this mobster game so we should find a way to play it on a Saturday or Sunday before too long.
• Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage - I was thinking this would be an unlikely game to play, but Jacob just started a Roman history unit at school and they are studying the Punic wars as part of it, so that may very well be the hook I need.

Matthew's team won a hard-fought contest 16-0 on Saturday against a team that beat them in the regular season to earn a spot in the championship. Unfortunately, Jacob's team lost a nailbiter 7-6 on a final minute score by the opposing team, so his season ends one game short of the championship. Matthew scored both touchdowns in his team's win, so here are the highlights.

Two weeks from now I'll be at BGG.CON. Are you going? If so, leave a comment so we can meetup there. I'm really looking forward to this. Why?

• I'm going as a gamer, not a vendor
• I'm rooming with Greg Schloesser, so there should be some great conversation. I hope he doesn't snore much.
• I missed Essen, so this will be a good chance to play new releases.
• I'll get to see oooold friends like Jim Ginn and Tim Isaakson.
• Other than GameStorm last spring, this is the only con I'll attend this year.

Jacob invited a friend over for some Magic: the Gathering action. After playing another prototype with Carey I joined in for some fun theme-deck action. I then forced To Court the King on the both of them with the claim "It's just like Magic, but with dice. And there's nothing to collect."

That was good enough for them (like I gave them a choice) and we got through most of a game before it was time to check out the candy loot from Matthew as he returned from begging. There seems to be some depth to the game as the choices on how and when to use the characters are non-obvious. Still, it seems very tactical which will be fine by me if we can play it consistently in 30 minutes. Jacob and Bigfoot seemed to both like it.

Yes, I said last regular season game - we made the playoffs! After an 0-3 start, we won the next 5 games and qualified for the 4th and last playoff spot. This leads to a rematch against the team that beat us 8-0 in our 3rd game. The kids have really pulled together and it is exciting to extend the season for at least one more week.

Here are some highlights from the last game against Centennial, a brutal contest that we won 8-0 (a safety plus a TD). This was a defensive struggle that we thought would end 2-0. Matthew managed to break away on an inside trap play and score a touchdown. In the highlights you'll see Matthew (#63) at middle linebacker on defense and fullback on offense.

Ken and I got together about 2 weeks ago to play Twilight Struggle. This currently ranks as my favorite-game-that-I-rarely-get-to-play. Ken was concerned about the rumors he's heard that the game is broken in some way, but I assured him that it is just a bit imbalanced towards to Soviets. I offered to play the USA to perhaps balance out experience vs inherent imbalance and it seemed to work out just fine.

I was fortunate to draw the European and Middle East scoring cards and control the timing in the early war, which helped mitigate losses for me and keep me in the positive VP territory for the early war and into the middle war. I worked very hard to keep the Soviets out of Central America by holding the Castro card for most of the early game but he made inroads with (I think) de-colonization anyway. Ken learned quickly about scoring and momentum and adjusted in real time quite nicely, balancing out the VPs mid-way through the middle war and setting up a potentially exciting finish.

Unfortunately it just got too late for both of us (around 11pm or so - we didn't start until after 8pm) so we called it a night. We both look forward to a re-match. I also can't wait to try out the new 1960: The Making of the President...