We spent a great weekend in Newport, OR.  Our hotel was on the beach and the weather was perfect - 60s and sunny during the day.  Friday we took the behind the scenes tour at the Oregon Coast Aquarium - I highly recommend this, especially if you've been there before and want to try something new.  One highlight of the trip was sampling the various brews from Rogue brewery - I highly recommend the Yellow Snow Ale and the Buckwheat Ale.  The other big highlight was seeing migrating grey whales on our whale watching cruise with Marine Discovery Tours.  Jacob and Matthew each got turns at the helm of the ship.

Ken Rude and I spent a morning last Saturday with a local gaming group that regularly plays Advanced Squad Leader and is open to newbies interested in learning the game.

I played Squad Leader, along with the two expansions Cross of Iron and Crescendo of Doom, back in the late 70s / early 80s when I was very into the Avalon Hill war games.  I loved the scale of the game - squad level tactics, with counters representing single leaders, tanks, or small squads of infantry.  It was (is) a complex game, but it was clearly my favorite of the AH games.

The morning was a disappointment though.  The hosts were very kind, and one of the group members walked Ken and me through a simple scenario (infrantry only, a few machine guns, basic rules).  There is a price you pay for the realism of this game - rules complexity that almost demands you focus on this game in absence of any others.  Ken crushed me (he was the Americans, I was German) but we both walked away wishing we had spent the morning playing lighter games.

I think in the future if I want that level of realism in squad level tactics, I'll let the computer manage the rules and just play Laser Squad Nemesis.

Ken Rude and I traveled to Kevin's house for our first gaming session with the Portland Gamers.  Kevin is the gracious host for this group, and Jeff had gamed a few times before with Kevin.  Doug, Mimi, Ken, and I were all newcomers to the group.  Thanks to Kevin for hosting - I think everyone had a great time.

Attendees: Chris Brooks, Ken Rude, Jeff Fisher, Doug Walker, Mimi Walker, Kevin Graham

Games Played: Zendo, Dragon Delta, Fist of Dragonstones, Condottiere, Bohnanza

Zendo

Played By: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.
Game Length: 45 min.
We played Zendo as an opener while we awaited possible late arrivals. Nobody turned up, but we had fun teaching Doug, Mimi, and Ken this Zen game with Icehouse pieces.
Winner(s):
Finish: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.

Dragon Delta

Played By: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.
Game Length: 60 min.
Chris brought this game of Chinese youths competing to lay planks to cross the delta. Everyone enjoyed this game, though we realized part way that I've been playing wrong: all players turn over their cards for the current round before the first player takes their action. This could certainly affect choices made when placing planks, removing planks, etc.
Winner(s): Chris B.

Fist of Dragonstones

Played By: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.
Game Length: 60 min.
This is a game worth playing once, but possibly not more frequently. It has a nice theme, and interesting bits, but the blind bidding frustrates people. Poor Doug was frequently just barely on the losing end, which is most annoying. We only played to 2 victory points to cut the game short.
Winner(s): Ken R.

Condottiere

Played By: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.
Game Length: 60 min.
Kevin introduced this game - Doug and Mimi had played before, but the rest of us haven't. This is a much more pleasant bidding and bluffing game than Fist of Dragonstones, and one I might consider adding to my collection. There does appear to be a strong luck element in the draw.
Winner(s): Ken R.

Bohnanza

Played By: Chris B. Ken R. Jeff F. Doug W. Mimi W. Kevin G.
Game Length: 60 min.
I requested this for a closer since I've heard so much about it but have never played. Definitely a light game, but I think my kids might enjoy it. One thing I like is that there is very little downtime with all of the trading going on.
Winner(s): Mimi W.

Session Report generated by GameTracker (©Goldraven 2002)

Overview

Battlecards is an expandable (not collectable) card game of World War II.  DGA Games released their Western European Campaign (Great Britain vs. Germany) in 2002 and will be releasing a Pacific Theater Campaign (United States vs. Japan) shortly, with sets for the Russian Front and African Campaign to follow.  When you purchase the basic set you get three decks: a Great Britain Arsenal deck, a Germany Arsenal deck, and a set of "Conflict" cards.  The Arsenal cards come in three flavors: ground, air, and sea.  The Conflict cards control the events of the game. There are 5 expansion sets available for the Western European Campaign that add new Arsenal and Conflict cards. As it stands now (without additional campaigns), this is essentially a two player game (though DGA has published some variant rules to play multiplayer in a single campaign, I haven't yet tried them).

How the Game is Played

The allied and axis players start with their Arsenal decks, which can be customized with the expansion sets or even additional starter sets.  The game plays just fine with the basic set, and I'll limit my discussion to that starting configuration.  The deck of Conflict cards is shared by each player.  Each player starts by drawing 6 cards from their Arsenal and deploying three of them to the front.  The deployed Arsenal cards will be used for battles, and battles may use any combination of the ground, air, and sea forces.  The German player begins the game by drawing a Conflict card and performing the action specified. Conflict cards loosely fall into the following categories:

• Military Buildup - allows the player to draw cards from the Arsenal deck into his hand, deploy some of them, and discard the rest
• Retained Action - allows the player to hold onto a card for later use.  These cards can be used to disrupt the enemy's actions or give bonuses in future battles.
• Immediate Action - allows the player to immediately take an action to help their own forces or disrupt the enemy.  Examples include capturing an enemy unit or reorganizing a deployed stack of cards into two stacks (Divide & Conquer)
• Battle - allows the player to enter into battle with the enemy if the pre-requisites are met and if the aggressor chooses to fight.

The combat system is fairly straightforward but does present some twists that caused confusion initially.  Each Arsenal card has 6 numbered attributes: attack values for ground, air, and sea, and defense values for ground, air, and sea.  In addition, each arsenal card has a firing phase from 1 to 4.  Combat occurs in phases: all phase 1 units get to fire first (aggressor then defender), then phase 2, etc.  This allows, for example, anti-aircraft guns to shoot down enemy planes before they get a chance to attack.  Combat is resolved by using the Conflict deck as a random number generator.  Let's say a bomber is attempting to attack an enemy ship.  The bomber has a sea attack value of 15, while the ship has an air defense value of 5.  The attacker draws a card from the Conflict deck, and if it is greater than the defense value but less than or equal to the attack value (in this case, from 6 to 15), then the enemy ship is destroyed.  At the end of the 4 phases if either player has lost all of the Arsenal, then combat is over and the winner gets to keep the Battlecard.  If forces still remain, either player can choose to withdraw and concede victory to the other player but still retain some of their forces.

Some Arsenal cards are weak in and of themselves in combat, but provide valuable bonuses to other units.  Fighter, for example, are usually most valuable either shooting down other planes or providing support to bombers through combat bonuses (sounds like real life, yes?).  It is these capabilities that create for interesting tactical and strategic decisions in the game - there are a limited number of powerful cards, so a balance of forces is critical.  In our games we've found the battleships to be the most powerful units - they fire early in the round (phase 2) and several of them can fire up to 4 times.

Play continues until one player wins a key final battle or achieves a certain number of victory points.  This game is quite long - I play with my two sons (ages 6 and 8) and we find ourselves often stopping after 90 minutes with only half of the victory points achieved.  A full game will last from 2 to 3 hours.

The Arsenal and Conflict decks get cycled several times during the course of a game, and it is rare for card to be eliminated from the game completely (leader assassinations are one example).

Quality of Components

The card quality is outstanding -  better than any collectable card game I've played and with outstanding photography for artwork.  I wish more card game manufacturers would go with The rules could use some work - I would prefer a small booklet version of the rules and it needs more explanation of certain characteristics of the game, particularly the special combat effects of certain cards.  The online FAQ makes up for this, but the rules should be more self-contained.  Hopefully they'll fix this with some of the upcoming expansions.  Future expansions will also come with a placemat with areas for deck and deployed forces placement as well as a rules summaryS.

Quality of Game Play

I love playing this game, and look forward to exploring the subtleties of force deployment and deck construction in future games.  There is tension created when Battlecards are drawn - should I go into combat yet?  Should I wait until I deploy more forces, potentially allowing your opponent to do the same?  There are also difficult choices in Arsenal card deployment - should I focus on balancing forces or should I beef up just my air and sea forces initially?  I played most of the Avalon Hill hex-based wargames back in the day, and I love games with WWII themes.  This is clearly a simpler game than any of those, but with the shorter playing time combined with the quality artwork and depiction of forces, I'll be playing this one for a while.  For now I'll be rating this game an 8 - it might get an even higher score with the upcoming release of the expansions and potential for strong multiplayer campaigns.

Mikko has an interesting post on Books About Games.  It reminded me of a fantasy book I read in the early 1980's called Hobgoblin, which was about a teenager that gets caught up in a role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons.  One interesting aspect was the game system: it was a hybrid role playing and card game that looked similar to Magic: the Gathering (10+ years before it was published of course).

Stephen Glenn from Funagain Games has posted a fantastic interview with Reiner Knizia, the genius behind the games Euphrat & Tigris, Samurai, Lord of the Rings, and a multitude of others.

I had the pleasure of attending the GameStorm convention in Portland, OR last weekend.  I had business travel on Friday and a Cub Scout Pinewood Derby to run most of Saturday, but managed to spend time at the con Saturday evening and most of Sunday.  I went by myself Saturday, but brought the whole family on Sunday.  KC Humphrey ran an excellent "Intro to Euros" session on Sunday that I thought would be perfect for my wife Julie, son Jacob (age 8), and Matthew (age 6).  I had originally planned to just take Jacob, but Matthew became pretty distraught at being excluded and I decided to take a chance and bring him.  He has played Carcassonne, Settlers, and a few other similar games.

Saturday Evening - Solo

Settlers of Catan - Cities and Knights

I have played Settlers of Catan as well as the 2 player card game, but never this expansion.  It took a while to understand the mechanics, and I found myself trailing most of the game (we played 5 players on the 4 player board).  I really enjoyed the added complexity of this expansion - there are more choices to make and more tension created by the raids.  I enjoyed this so much I bought the expansion from a retailer at the convention.  I ended up finishing in the middle of the pack with 8 victory points but only got that close when an opponent interrupted one of the two leaders' longest road with a knight, giving me the new longest road.

Carcassonne

I managed to get in two casual games of Carcassonne in the open playing area. I played against two opponents that were just learning, and there was some initial confusion on the scoring, particularly for the farmers.  I won the first game and finished second in the second game.

Sunday - with the Family

Our morning was spent with KC Humphrey and Jay Schindler who were running the Intro to Euros track, designed primarily to introduce families to German-style games.  We hit it off - KC and Jay were just fabulous with the kids; they made the day worthwhile.

Liar's Dice

Believe it or not, I had never played this game, and it was the biggest hit of the day with the kids.  Probably because it was the first time they were able to repeatedly call their mother a liar!  This is a keeper and I'll be looking for this at a thrift store soon.  Matthew, Jacob, and Jay won with 5 dice (we stopped when the first player ran out of dice).

Viva Pamplona

The theme was a blast - running with the bulls in Pamplona and accumlating bravery points.  We raced along trying to stay close to the bull, and KC ended up accumulating the most points.

Wildlife Adventure

I loved the cards and theme for this game - traveling the world trying to locate endagered species.  We played very cooperatively, and Julie was the first to go out and accumulated the most animals.

6 Tage Rennen

I've heard that this game about bicycle racing is fairly rare (it was published in 1988).  It was moderately enjoyable, but I don't see much replay value.  This is a game where a random factor would actually help.  Coming from behind seems almost impossible.  Toni, a young girl that joined us for a while, pulled ahead at the end for the victory.

Aquarius

After finishing the Intro to Euros session and having some lunch, we spent about two hours at a Looney Labs demo.  I've played Fluxx and several of the Icehouse games, so was eager to try a few more Looney games.  We first tried Aquarius, a card game similar to dominos.  Very light but enjoyable, but given a choice between this and Fluxx I think we'd usually choose Fluxx.  Matthew won this one.

Martian Chess

Jacob and I gave the Icehouse game of Martian Chess a try next - even though we have several Icehouse stashes we had yet to try this one.  We both found ourselves making bonehead moves - it is hard to get used to controlling the pieces by location, not color.  I sneaked by and won 15-12.

Chrononauts

Jacob and I sat down with two others to try this.  It looked a bit daunting for Jacob given the historical context for the game, but we both loved it.  Definitely a heavier game than Fluxx (in fact, the heaviest Looney game that I've played).  Jacob sneaked up and won this one.

Carabande

I've always wanted to play this - our family has enjoyed carom boards (we have one and several of our Indian friends do as well), so the combination of a flicking game with racing was a sure hit for the boys.  They spent 90 minutes here and we had to drag them away.  Not sure I want to fork over the $ for my own copy, but I'll give it serious consideration.

I ordered and received Battlecards earlier this week.  Haven't played it yet, but the cards are extremely high quality and I hope to play it this weekend at Portland's Gamestorm convention.  I'll write up a review before too long.

As Scott mentioned yesterday, we've been playing with InfoPath and we were sufficiently impressed.  We had some great meetings with Microsoft today, and took some time to demo the tools for some Microsofties that hadn't had the time yet to see the environment.  We did the same demo - building a simple front-end for adding new weblog entries to ChrisAn's BlogX.  Demo worked great - went from nothing to spell-checking front-end in less than 3 minutes.

Someone then mentioned how cool it would be if the .xsn specification file was completely transparent as well (read: XML), but we were disappointed to learn (after opening in Notepad) that it is clearly a binary format.  How could they stoop so low?

So what do I learn after arriving in my hotel room and pulling down my feeds in NewsGator?  Clemens points out that it is just a CAB file.  And inside you can find tidy little (OK, so not all of them are quite so little) XML, XSLT, XSD, JS file.  Pleasant surprise.

Tim Schutz was kind enough to send me a free deck of his Alpha Playing Cards for review.  Tim has done some great work, and his focus on gaming systems rather than just games is very appealing.

An Alpha deck consists of 74 cards - 42 consonant cards, 30 vowel cards (each vowel card has two vowels printed on it), and 2 wild cards.  You can purchase a deck from tjgames, or print one out for yourself.  There is a similar mass-market game called Quiddler that is similar, but I find the card distribution and extensibility better in Alpha.

I have played several different games with Alpha with adults and kids.  It has already become a staple filler game for our family.  My 2 sons (ages 6 and 8) enjoy some of the simpler games, and we've found interesting variations of the games that allow us to handicap the adults to let the kids be more competitive.  Let's discuss a few of the games.

makeAword
This is a great, open-ended game for kids where the victory conditions can be tuned and tweaked to suit the audience.    7-10 cards (more cards make the game easier) are dealt to the middle of the playing area, and players alternate making the best word possible from the inventory.  The cards are refreshed after each player makes a word.  The winner can be determined by points, funniest word, word with most consonants, etc.  This one is Matthew's (6) favorite.

6x6
A solitaire game in which you try and use up all of the cards in a 6x6 grid.  This solitaire game is the better of the two - I found there were more choices to make and strategic elements than in WordSolitaire.

Alpha War
This is modeled on the game War played with standard playing cards.  The deck is split in two, and players alternate dropping cards in the center of the table.  Once three cards are on the table, a player can either make a word or pass.  When a player makes a word, she gets to keep the cards.  The goal is to capture all of the cards.  Matthew enjoys this one as well.

WordSnake
This is an unusual game and one I expect to play more.  There are no turns - play happens in real-time - it reminds me of some of the Icehouse games.  Each player is dealt 13 cards, and a central pool of 9 cards is placed in the center of the table.  The dealer calls "1,2,3, GO!" and players proceed to try and build a word snake - words with at least 3 letters, where each successive word begins with the last letter of the previous word.  Play ends when a player uses all of their cards and calls "Stop!", or when all players pass.  Players score points for letters in words, and lose points for leftover letters.  The game is tense, frenetic, and fun.

AlphaRummy 500
This is rummy for Alpha cards.  Melds are made by making words of 4 letters or more, with bonus multipliers for longer words.  You can also play cards on existing words to make new words.  My wife Julie and I played this one and had a blast - we expect to play it again.

Summary
If you would like a "portable Scrabble" that can be played quickly and is easier to teach kids, get this game!  I strongly recommend it for educators and home schoolers.  The price is right and you might even enjoy designing your own games.

Odds are, you haven't heard of this game.  You won't find it on the shelves of your local retailer and you won't see see 16 year olds lugging it to LAN parties for death matches.  Laser Squad Nemesis is a turn-based, tactical, squad-oriented game played via email.  It has a real-time feel to it though - this isn't like most hex-oriented turn-based war games.

The game is very light weight and approachable.  The client is free to download and you can get started quickly with the tutorials.  In a LSN game you are pitted against a single opponent - each can play one of four races (Marines, Machina, Spawn, or Greys).  There are a variety of maps to choose from and a flexible map editor is included with the game.

Once you have tried the tutorials, you can play up to three games against a real opponent before paying for a subscription, though you are limited to playing the Marines on just a few maps.  This try before you buy philosophy is very attractive, and subscriptions are low-risk if you want to get your feet wet playing the full game ($7 for 1 month, $15 for 3 months).

A Laser Squad game begins with force deployment - each player has a number of force points and an area on the map on which they can deploy their forces.  This is a key strategic element to the game - which units to use, where to deploy them - decision based on both the map and the race of your opponent.

Gameplay involves controlling individual units in an attempt to either wipe out the opponents units or destroy the opponent's headquarters.  The central LSN server resolves each turn and emails the turn results to each player.  I won't go into strategy here (you wouldn't to follow my advice any way - I'm still a rank amateur), but there are great guides published and a continuous stream of community participation.  The masterpiece of strategy guides is the Grenadier's Bible.

I've had no problems finding random opponents and recruiting friends - this community has critical mass and the game is here to stay.  If you are a fan of X-COM, Squad Leader, or would just like a break from the frenetic pace of RTS or FPS, try this game.

I'll be using this space to talk about gaming (boardgames mostly), technology, software development, and just random thoughts.

I'm the CTO at Corillian Corporation, and we provide software and services for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions.

I'm a family man, with two amazing boys and a beautiful wife.

One of my favorite hobbies is games, primarily German-style boardgames.  You can learn more about these types of games at BoardGameGeek; you can even view my ever-expanding collection there.  I'll periodically post game reviews, session reports, and other items of interest for gamers here.  If you are ever in the Portland, OR area and want to meet up for some gaming, let me know.