I managed to spend most of Monday in nearby Tigard with some new friends in the Rip City Gamers group.  It did a bizarre thing (for Portland) Sunday night: it snowed!  Jacob was planning on joining me for the day, but the snow was too inviting so he decided to stay home and build snowmen and snow forts with Matthew.

Mike Deans was kind enough to host at his home for most of the day (10am until the late evening).  Mike, Chuck, KC, and I were the early arrivers.  KC and Mike were already playing Odin's Ravens, so Chuck offered to teach me the Game of Thrones CCG.  Many came and went as the day moved on, and I had to leave around 5:45pm.  Several attendees were kind enough to send in reports from the games I missed, so I'll include their commentary in this session report.

Odin's Ravens

KC won this one against Mike. KC took a big lead in the first hand which Mike whittled down a bit in the second. However, KC finished off the game with a fine set of plays in the third hand. Still one of Mike's favorite 2 player games.

A Game of Thrones CCG

Chuck taught me how to play this game and our first go turned out to be an extremely tight game that went right down to the last turn.  Chuck shouldn't have killed his guy with the power stone on him as that would have meant the win.   Chuck likes the plot card mechanism although the sealed decks seem have too many really powerful cards.  Chuck: “It's probably not a CCG worth getting into right at the moment but I'd certainly play this if someone else had some decks.” I really did enjoy playing this game and may have to snag a few more starter decks to see if it grabs me.

Balloon Cup

KC wanted to try this one, and Mike had only played it once with Graham. Mike claims he didn't teach it too well, and they made a few errors to start with which largely set Mike up for the win. However, it was worthwhile playing again as Mike wasn't sure there was much beyond pure luck of the draw in this game. Mike is still not sure there is a huge amount of game there, but it is fun to play.

Age of Steam

Chuck says it best: “We then fired up for the big Age of Steam game.  Now I have to go on record and say that I REALLY didn't like this game after our first abortive attempt at Sun River last year.  The group was not in the mood and poor Doug was struggling with the rules after only reading them once through.  It was painful and I left with such a bad taste that it became the only Martin Wallace game I didn't like.  However, everyone else figured it out and really got into it and my general appreciation for all things Wallace eventually got me to give it another chance.  I played the Wales expansion with Mike and Dave last Friday (nice but I think it really needed four players) and so more or less had the system down.  I had received some tips from Dave on strategy which I won't reveal but obviously Dave does it so much better as I pretty much botched the thing by over capitalizing and not getting enough runs early on to cushion the maintenance pain.  By the time I finally got my middle line established, Mike had built around me and was taking the goods I really wanted to use.  In the end, KC's superior track building strategies I think won the game for him although Chris and Mike gave him a good run for his money.  Patrick and I suffered at the back of the pack me with too much maintenance costs and Patrick perhaps with not enough.”

I had only played Age of Steam once before so was thrilled when this came out.  I've played Volldampf several more times and was beginning to think I liked that predecessor more than this deeper game.  This is a great game, and the track-laying and role-choosing add some difficult choices to the game that I find very appealing.

Foppen

Chuck: “We then played a few hands of Foppen which is a nice little trick taking card game.  I did well early but obviously it was due to good card deals rather than skill at card play as my huge lead went to an incredibly large deficit when I wasn't smart enough to dump high cards when others were going out.  Nothing like going from first to way last in two easy steps but this gets a Will Play Happily rating from Chuck.”

New Eden

I was eager to have another try at KC's prototype for his game design New Eden.  I briefly mentioned this game earlier this month, and I promised to share more details this time around, so here goes.

New Eden is a game about planting crops.  KC provides the following background in his rules:

In the race to the stars, the critical step for a newly discovered world is crop development, needed to feed those who would soon land to settle.  Different companies and ideologies struggle to be the first to create their own stable environments, competing against other Planters and often against the land itself.

KC, Michael, Chuck, and I joined for a four-player game.  This mandates the use of a smaller game board; there is also a larger one that (I believe) supports five or six players.  KC made some great quick reference guides, so we consulted one of them for the starting positions.  The four player games calls for each player to have three planters and three workers, and each of us starts in one corner of an approximately round world.  There are no choices to be made in starting configuration, this is fixed.  We did discuss briefly after playing if there would be value in having a variable starting configuration.

The goal of the game is to score victory points, which are earned through having crop majorities on game board hexes.  Bonuses can be gained based on crop location (e.g., near a lake or on a mountain) or proximity to other crops of the same player.  The game lasts two seasons, with a scoring round after each season.

The turn sequence looks like this:

1. Players choose and reveal their actions for the turn.  Each player maintains a hand of 5 action cards, which mandate a specific action that a worker or planter will take on this turn.  Choosing an action also requires that each player show which unit will perform the action, and in which direction the unit will initially move.
2. Players move their units in action card order.  Each action card has a turn order number from 1-16 on it, so 1's go first and 16's go last.  Ties are decided by the judge, and the judge role can be stolen through a fuel auction that occurs whenever there is a tie.
3. Players perform the action specified on their action card.  This might include planting crops, stealing crops, terraforming, retrieving an already-deployed planter, etc.  This action card is then discarded.
4. Players can discard up to two cards from their hands then draw cards to refill their hand to five.  There is one special card: the Planter.  This card can always be retrieved back into a player's hand and doesn't have to be discarded after use.  Recycled cards go back to the bottom of the player's deck (potentially resurfacing later).
5. Players refuel, possibly selling stolen crops to get new fuel resources.  Fuel is the primary economic unit in the game and is spent to move workers and farmers across the terrain.  Moving across a normal hex costs one fuel unit, turning 60 degrees costs two units, etc.

This turn order repeats until one or more players have no more workers or planters to send out on actions.  This usually fixes the number of turns per season at six for the four player game, though it could last seven turns if every player plays the Mechanic action card to rescue a Planter for reuse.

The game board has a sort of north-up orientation that affects how planters plant their crops.  When you land a planter on a hex, it plants three crops - one to the north, another to the southwest, and another to the southeast.  If any of those hexes are occupied by another planter, then a crop will not be placed there.  This makes for a sort of puzzle mechanic in this game - how do I optimally send out and position my planter to maximize the hexes where I will have a majority of crops?  The typical pattern of play is for players to send out one or more planters early on to lay out crops, then use workers to put down additional crops to gain majority or steal away enemy crops to achieve the same goal.  Another interesting mechanic is that when a planter lands on a hex it can steal up to two enemy crops (unless the hex is in a protected state because it has four or more crops on it).  In short, there are plenty of ways to screw your neighbor to try and maximize your scoring opportunities.

I played a decent game again, but KC staged a great comeback in the second season to come away with a rather large victory.  I think I made the mistake of going after Chuck with one of my last workers instead of KC.  I'm not a huge fan of diligently tracking victory points for every player so I was winging it a bit when tracking who was in the lead.  It was still a great time and one of the two best games I played all day (the other being Age of Steam).

KC has offered to loan me a prototype to take on the road as I travel in 2004 to evangelize this game a bit.  This game is polished in many ways: the rules are in near publishable form, the cards and board look great, and the game itself is pretty well tuned.

Crokinole

I had the opportunity to sit in and play for a few minutes on Patrick's board - wow - what a difference a good board makes!  We have a very old carom board at home, but now I can see why many folks invest in nice Crokinole boards.  There's a great mix of tactics and dexterity in this game and I hope to play again soon.

Patrick “whooped [Mike's] ass big time” when they played one on one. KC and Mike later took on George and Patrick. George and Patrick won the first game, but Mike doesn't recall if they managed to exact revenge in the second. Either way up, it was a fun game and a great change of pace.

Die Sieben Siegel

Trick taking game where you have to predict how many tricks of each color you will take during the round. The better your prediction, the more points you score (or rather, the less negative points your score). To sum it up, “I (George) suck at trick taking games.” Interesting predicting mechanic, but Thumbs Down for George after one play.

King's Breakfast

There are six suits of breakfast foods and you try to maximize the value of the cards in your hands by increasing the number of cards in each suits in the king's breakfast. But you also
want to get more of the high value cards by taking them in your hand instead of moving them to the king's table. So it becomes a balancing act of having the same number of cards in each suit in your hand as there are corresponding cards on the king's table. But don't get too
many or they will be worthless. Fun little filler game, although George still has that nagging feeling that we messed up on the player turn cycle.

Finstere Flure

Mike managed to win this one with Dave, George, KC, Michael and Patrick also playing. Mike managed to get all his pieces chomped in the first round which turned out to be A Good Thing as he was able to keep all his guys together in a sneak around the edge play while the monster was off on other business. At the end he sacrificed a token to divert the monster from his other 2 tokens to allow them to exit. Mike is still only luke warm on this game, “don't know why.“

New England

George played a magnificent game and scored a fine win. He managed to get the 2 10-point square cards which gave him a great start and he balanced his buys better than Mike did to win by 2 points. Still one of Mike's favorites and I'm amazed that it hasn't his the table since the May Sun River event.  I'm sorry I missed this one!

Royal Turf

Chuck then played Royal Turf with Michael and KC and Chuck won pretty handily.  We think KC had only played once before and it was Michael's first go so Chuck had a bit of an advantage and won in pretty much a landslide.  Chuck likes this game a lot although it suffers a bit in groupthink on the betting after only a few plays.  Still, Chuck is thinking of buying this game which means it goes on his Will Request to Play for shorter, filler games.

Fist of Dragonstones

Dave, Michael, and Chuck closed with Fist of Dragonstones which Chuckand Dave agree is one of the best blind bidding games they've played (ed.: I can't stand this game!).  Still, while Chuck likes some aspects of blind bidding, a game built pretty much solely around it is too much of a luckfest to earn his highest honors so it stays at a Will Play Happily.

For reference, here is Chuck's game rating scale:

Since everyone else is creating their own rating system, I'm coming up with my own.  Rather than a numeric system, here are my ratings;  Won't Ever Play Again, Will Play Only If Nothing Better To Do, Will Play Happily, or Will Ask/Request/Demand By Name For This Game to Be Played.  Clearly my system is better than arbitrary numeric ratings as this is relevant to what people will actually play and like.  I hereby demand that Dave re-do his survey and re-correlate people although I imagine I'm still the black sheep of the group.  See, that B+ in my Advanced Statistics class was a fluke after all.

I don't play collectible card games (CCGs) much any more.  If I do, it is usually with pre-constructed starter decks or with out-of-print games (like 7th Sea) that I can come by cheaply.  I'm not so much of a “board game elitist” that I won't admit that I love these games though - I just don't have the patience or time for deck construction.  After my first play of the Game of Thrones CCG yesterday I'm seriously tempted to buy some more cards and dig into it a bit more.

I found a link to this pseudo session report from Fantasy Flight Games about an upcoming non-collectible card game called Frenzy.  What makes this game different is the real-time aspect:

The key to Frenzy is the real-time aspect. There are no turns or order to play. You just lay down the cards as fast as your attention can keep up. The great thing about this is the game has just enought things going on to strain your mind, but not so much that you can't keep track.

Sounds pretty cool to me.  The website indicates this will have a December release, but I don't believe it is available yet.

Yes, I'm very lucky that my beautiful wife Julie is originally from Las Vegas and that her wonderful mother and step-father (Jan and David) still live there.  It clearly doesn't suck heading there for Christmas about every other year.  It's not like I'm a big gambler or anything, but I always love hitting the casinos once or twice to play some small-stake craps, Caribbean stud, or one the many other poker variants popping up in casinos these days.

Last May the four of us spent a long weekend in Vegas, and Julie and I had a date together on the strip, staying at the Aladdin Hotel.  We were fortunate that trip to get upgraded to a wrap-around luxury suite and had a fabulous time.  It was so much fun that we spent another night on the strip, this time at Bally's, while Jan and David watched Jacob and Matthew.  Win-win for everyone!  Bally's is the old MGM Grand (yes, the one that had the fire back in 1980) and is in a great location near the Paris and the Bellagio.  We took a taxi down to Mandalay Bay to see Mama Mia! and had dinner at the Rumjungle.  The evening finished with a small amount of gambling (I played Caribbean Stud) and music in one of the Bally's lounges.

There were a lot of other highlights that week.  I'll convey these with some more photos and commentary.

Sunday after our successful game day, Jacob, Matthew, and I decided to play another game of Warcraft: The Boardgame.  The last time I played a three player game, we used the standard scenario out of the rules.  This time we downloaded and played the Orcs for Sale! scenario published at the FFG website by the game's original designer Kevin Wilson.

This scenario has a fairly symetric layout and a standard victory point-based objective for players.  The added twist is the ability to hire (fully upgraded) mercenary orcs at mercenary camps (any of the two-point objective spaces) for a cost of four gold.  Players play each of the other three races (Night Elves, Humans, and Undead).  These Orcs are very powerful and can be obtained early in the game.  The one catch is that they must always be accompanied by one of your regular units.  If they are ever left alone, they return to the pool of available mercenaries.

One key element of every Warcraft game I've played to date is resource scarcity due to (random) depletion of gold mines and forests.  This forces players to rush to the center and claim additional resource centers.  Jacob and I pushed to the center, and he decided to attack me when we were fairly closely matched.  I urged him to reconsider since the only benefactor was likely to be Matthew, but he attacked anyway.  Unfortunately for him, the dice went my way and most of his military was devastated.  It can be very difficult to come back from a setback like that, and this one battle dropped him out of contention for good.

I was able to gain control of the center and fight of Matthew as he came in.  It was only a matter of time before I was able to grab my 12 victory points and win the game.

We still enjoy this game, but I'm finding it great on theme but light on strategy.  Similar to the computer game, the “rush” strategy seems to payoff and it can often come down to who gets luckiest rolling the resource dice.  I'm seriously considering some variants on resource depletion to allow for more strategic buildup.

One other note - we still haven't played this game by the rules based on some recent postings at the Warcraft Yahoo group.  These are fairly major mistakes, so make sure you temper my remarks with the clarifications I'm about to give.

1. We really bungled up the player and phase sequence.  There are 4 steps to each turn: Move, Harvest, Deploy, and Spend.  We had each player doing all 4 steps in turn.  We were supposed to have each player move, then each harvest, etc.  When all 4 steps are completed, the starting player rotates to the next clockwise.  I can see this having a huge impact on gameplay.
2. During the spend phase, you are supposed to be able to do only one of the following: Train units and works, Construct buildings and outposts, and Upgrade a unit type.  In our games we allowed players to do all of these actions as long as they had the gold.  This limitation serves to throttle play a bit and might help avoid the rush situation I mentioned.

Sigh.  I thought I was pretty good at reading and interpreting rules, but these were pretty serious misses on my part.  I'll report back after another session where we play by the correct rules.

Welcome Iain!  Added to my blogroll...

Julie and I hosted an all-day gaming event/party at our home in Sherwood on Dec 13.  I invited all of my usual gaming buddies plus the folks over at Rip City Gamers, a local gaming group.  I also took the opportunity to invite a few folks from work that are into boardgames.  The result was about 20 people at our house from 1pm until the last straggler left around 11pm.  There were a ton of games played.  I'll provide a lot of pictures here along with links to the games, but I can only provide commentary on the games I played.  In the future I might adopt a system like Greg Schloesser's - he hands a slip of paper to each group of players playing a game and has them write a brief summary, final scores, and player ratings from 1-10 for the game.  This makes for much more complete session reports, and he has some great data to track game quality (and we love data, right?).

Liar's Dice

Dave and George showed up promptly at 1pm, so we started with a game of Liar's Dice until more folks arrived.  Of course as soon as we would start to play, new people would arrive and so we would stop, explain the rules, and start over.  By the time we actually started the real game, we had 10 people playing (I used both a Liar's Dice box and a Perudo set to give enough cups and dice).  To accelerate the game, we played the following variants:

• If you lose a challenge, you lose a number of dice equal to the delta between the bet and the actual.  So if I bet 10 5's but only 8 are on the board, I lose 2 dice.
• If the bet is exactly correct (e.g., I bet 10 5's and there are exactly 10), then all players beside the bettor lose a die.

Some people dropped out quickly due to bad luck (when there are 50 dice in the game, it isn't hard to miss by 5 die). The game wrapped up in about 30 minutes - I think it was down to me and George at the end, with George coming out on top.

Triple Crown

George brought out this vintage (1988) horse racing game - Dave, Jeremy, and I joined in.  Each player gets a horse and secretly writes down whether he hopes to win, place, or show in the race.  Three races are played in all (hence the name of the game).  Starting gate order is determined randomly for each race.

On each turn, the player with the horse in front (ties go to the horse on the outside) goes first.  The player can choose from any of three dice (slow, medium, or fast).   If you use the slow dice, you get a payoff coupon that pays a great return for win, place, and slow.  The fast die, of course, will get you farther but with a lower payoff.  So the basic idea of the game is to first decide how aggressive you want to be (your secret goal) then to move at an optimal speed where you maximize your position and payoff.

There is still the random element of the die roll, and it bit me twice.  In two of the three races, I was three or four spaces away from the finish line.  I made the decision to use a slower die that gave me a 5 in 6 chance of crossing the finish line but would of course provide a better payoff.  Both times I rolled the lowest number possible, didn't cross the line, and saw my opponents' horses cross in front of me.  I ended the triple crown with no money, and George won the overall crown.  I'm no Seabiscuit.

Carcassonne

Kevin and Mike played a game of Carcassonne while Jim watched.  Jim is very new to these sorts of boardgames and is quickly getting indoctrinated.  For some reason my kids don't enjoy this game so I rarely get to play it.  This game included a huge set of tiles, including Rivers, Inns & Cathedrals, and Builders & Traders.

Medina

Yes, yet another time where I get to watch someone else play this game without ever trying it myself.  Next time I game with Kevin I'm going to play it!

Bridges of Shangri-La

This new Uberplay game was brought out - very nice looking.  The game is not getting the best reviews - in fact, some folks on spielfrieks are saying it is one the bigger disappointments of the year.  I still would like to try it and judge for myself.  Jeremy won, followed by Kevin, Mike and Jim. Mike really likes this game. It is fairly easy to teach, yet some thought is required. “I find it in the same mold as Trias, another of my favorites, which also requires some thinking. I guess that is what 'dry' means!“

Piratenbucht

Aaarrrgh!  This favorite of Matthew's came out, and I quickly taught Brandon, Kara, and Kim how to play.  For such an apparently simple game, the rules are a bit complex and there is much to remember.  I haven't yet tried the newer English language Days of Wonder version.

Puerto Rico

This game started around 1:30pm and went on for at least two hours.  I can't remember who won, but Jacob told me he finished in last place, way behind the leader Doug.

Corsairs

I tried to teach this quickly to George, KC, and Kim, then realized I just hadn't played enough to have the rules locked down in my head.  Luckily KC is good with rules and quickly caught the rest of the group up.  This is an OK game - fairly simple to play, but it hasn't come out much since I bought it last spring.

Metro

Bill brought this transportation game - I'm dying to try it, but didn't get a chance this day even though it was played twice.

Settlers of Catan - Cities and Knights

Much of my time was spent playing the Cities and Knights expansion to Settlers of Catan.  I've been playing the online version quite a bit lately and when Bill suggested this I jumped at the chance.  So Julie, Bill, Wendy and I settled down for a game - this expansion can take quite a while to play - ours lasted around 2.5 hours.

This expansion adds a number of elements to the basic game of Settlers:

• Periodically the barbarians invade, so players must recruit knights to protect their cities
• Commodities (essentially finished goods derived from basic resources) are produced from some of the cities in addition to resources
• Walls can be built that allow players to hold more cards in hand without being robbed
• Players can use commodities to upgrade their economies, giving additional benefits and potentially granting victory points

Despite the longer playing time, I like this expansion very much.  The main reason is that there are usually more options on each turn.  One thing I don't like about the basic game is that very often a player has nothing to do on a turn - not the case in this expansion.

I managed to win the race to 12 victory points.  I was awarded a couple Defender of Catan victory point cards plus I managed to get a Metropolis.

Foppen

I don't know much about this trick taking game by Friedmann Friese.

For Sale

After Foppen, Jeremy taught For Sale to the same group.  Don't know who won.

Wyatt Earp

I refreshed a few folks on the rules to this great rummy variant (my favorite).

Metro

Metro came out again.

New England

I purchased this recently but hadn't yet played my version - my first and only play was with the Arizona Boardgamers back in September.  It didn't disappoint - I really like this game.  It is very easy to learn, but I look forward to exploring different strategies.  I initially started to go for a pilgrim advantage, thinking that the early income would help and if I can maintain the lead it would be worth some nice victory points.  But KC was able to race ahead so I focused my efforts elsewhere.  I got some nice card draws that let me build 3- and 4- tile configurations, and I jumped into the lead.  I thought I had plenty of breathing room on the last turn, but just in case I built a barn to pull into a tie for the most with KC and Jim, nullifying their advantage.  I was lucky I did - I only ended up winning by a single victory point over KC.

What the Kids Did Most of the Afternoon

Just had to include this photo.  Jacob, Matthew, Brandon, and Kara played some games early on, then retired to the playroom for some good old fashioned make believe. 

KC's Prototype: New Eden

This was the highlight of the day for me.  KC Humphry has designed a very good game that I am eager to play again.  I'm running out of time here so I won't describe it in full - I hope to play again on Dec 29th, and if I do I'll write up a more detailed review.

Players take the role of leaders that are settling and terra-forming a new planet, competing with each other for geography and agriculture.  Players have farmers and workers - farmers place and harvest farms (surprise), while workers carry out activities specified on action cards.  There are some very creative mechanics in this game, and the use of action cards as some interesting choices and great flavor.

KC is a great teacher and was very patient as we picked up the basics and started to move into strategy and tactics.  I managed to win the game, but I suspect KC was pulling some punches with us newbies.  I can't wait to play this again and I hope KC finds a means to publish this game.

Sticheln

Ken, KC, and I wrapped up the evening with this perplexing trick taking game.  The game is perplexing because trump is always whatever suit is not lead, and because each player is trying to avoid taking tricks in their own chosen poison suit.  I never quit managed to figure out some of the tactics for how to play my cards - you do want to take tricks (that's how you score points), but it can be a challenge to dump cards on your opponents and avoid taking your own poison suit.  I'd like to play this again, though my initial impression was not as strong as Die Sieben Siegel.

Jacob, Matthew, and I sat down over a week ago to play another round of this Risk variant.  This was our first attempt at a three player version and we made some tweaks that ended up being quite painful for me.  The rules specify that in a three player game, two should play the evil side and one the good side.  I took on the good side.  What the rules don't say is that the two evil players should unite against the good player (i.e., it is supposed to be a free-for-all).  Well, I let Matthew and Jacob team up against me and it wasn't pretty.

Risk has enough issues with runaway leaders (the more territories you control, the more troops you get, so it is very hard to catch up once you fall behind) in a regular free-for-all, but this was out of hand.  I was lucky to conquer any territories at all during my turns, and that only left me more exposed to their attacks on subsequent turns.  In short order Sauron's and Saruman's forces swept over Middle Earth, dooming mankind and the other good races to an eternity of servitude and just plain bad times.  And its all my fault.

Jacob has the opportunity at school to do some extra projects (reading assignments, math, and now science).  He designed an experiment around plant growth with different watering conditions.  The question he wanted to answer was “how does the temperature of the air and water affect the growth of pea and bean plants.”  His hypothesis was that the plants would only grow with warm air and cool (not hot) water.  So he planted four seeds outside and four inside (two each of bean and pea).

He did some great work on this project, taking digital photos and tracking progress along the way.  He also did most of the computer work for his final report poster, including some nice work in Microsoft Publisher.  Here he is finishing the final report.

This game sat on my shelf too long - in fact, it was the only "big box" game remaining in my game closet that I had yet to play. I know, compared to many that isn't a bad track record - I've seen a number of game collections with 10 or more games still in shrink wrap.  Still, I'm a gamer not a collector and I want to play what I have.  Ken Rude and I arranged a late evening during the week where we could get together to try this one out.  Brandon, Ken's son, joined us for a three player game.

Serenissima is not a new game - it was released in 1996.  I picked up because, well, I'm still a wargamer at heart and I find it hard to resist games that can be played in a single sitting but still harken back to the days of youth playing Avalon Hill war games.  That's why Wallenstein is at the top of my list of games right now.

This is not exactly a wargame though - economy is at least as important, and it is through the trading and shipping of goods that money and ultimately victory points are earned. Each player takes on the role of one of the great nation-states on the Mediterranean - Venice, Genoa, Turkey, or Spain.  In a three-player game, Turkey is not played.  Each player starts with 2000 ducats, 10 sailors, and two galleys.  Each turn starts with bids to determine player order.  This turn order is used within each of the turn phases, which are:

1. Buy trade goods, build ships and fortresses, hire sailors
2. Movement
3. Combat
4. Capture and control ports
5. Sell goods and generate income

The goal is to control shipping ports and to fully populate their warehouses with a diversity of trade goods (there are 7 in all).  There are three kinds of ports - large (6 goods in the warehouse), medium (4), and small (2).  Players score 10 points for each large town with a filled warehouse, 5 points for each medium town with a filled warehouse, and 2 points for each small town with a filled warehouse.  Towns with unfilled warehouses score 1 point each, and if you control your main city you score 10 points.

Combat between ships or from ship to port is a function of the number of sailors on each side.  In ship to ship combat, each player attacks simultaneously and rolls a d6, adding the number of sailors on the galley to the roll.  Divide the result by 3 and round down, and that is the number of sailors on the opposing galley that are sunk.  It is possible to capture opponents' galleys if you eliminate their sailors and have enough of your own to move over and capture (each galley must have at least 1 sailor).

Within each galley there are five holding slots, and these can be filled with any combination of sailors or trade goods as long as there is at least 1 sailor and no more than five total items on the galley.  A ship's movement range is equivalent to the number of sailors.  So it is clearly an advantage in both movement and combat to have more sailors on board; however, this will limit the number of trade goods that you can carry around.  You can check out the complete rules right here.

Ken played Genoa, Brandon was Spain, and I played Venice.  Things started off nice a peaceful - I expanded east into Turkey and was getting a decent diversity of goods.  Ken capitalized on some goods that Brandon had not yet traded yet in any of his ports by trading that good to his major town.  Twice he earned a 1000 ducat bonus for these trades!  While it helped brandon populate his major town with goods, this was clearly a good move for Ken since it allowed him to quickly get an advantage in both ships and sailors.

As so often happens in three player games, the first to get aggressive often pays dearly.  I decided to attack an ill-defended port of Ken's (I believe it was one of his gold ports) and successfully capture it.  Unfortunately it brought on his wrath and not only did I lose that port back to him the next turn, I also lost two ships in the vicinity.

Ken played very well - he intuitively figured out (I suspect now that this is a common game strategy) to diversify his fleet by keeping some trade ships around with few sailors (usually 2) while building a separate fleet of combat ships with 5 sailors each.  These ships, with their extensive range, were able to wreak havoc on my ships and ports.  We decided to cut the game a bit short (I think we played only 8 turns instead of 10), and though I did a pretty good job of holding off his final attack, he did manage to take a port away from me at the end.  It didn't matter much though - Ken had filled a good portion of his medium ports (because of the shortened game, nobody got a completed large port) and beat us handily.  I don't have the final scores in front of me, but Ken beat me by at least 10 points, with Brandon finishing behind me by about 10 points.

Fun game - I suspect it can be played in 2-3 hours and I look forward to playing it again.  One criticism of the game is that it often follows the same pattern - trade or the first 2/3 of the game, then just start hammering the opponents by attacking.  Ours certainly played out the same way.

Eric Arneson just published his Top 10 Games of 2003 list.  I agree with many of his choices, though I haven't played all of the games he mentioned.  I especially appreciate his nods to I'm the Boss, New England, Mystery of the Abbey, Balloon Cup, and Battle Ball.  I don't think Battle Ball would have made my top 10 list, but it is a fun game, especially for one that has a mass market presence.  I'll have to publish my top 10 list shortly...

If you know me or read this site very often, then you know that I travel quite a bit.  So much so that I have a hard time using all of my frequent flier miles, particularly those I accumulate on airlines I use less like Delta and Alaska.  Operation Hero Miles is a great way to support our troops with almost no bureaucracy standing in the way.  Here's some information from their website:

In September 2003, the Pentagon started giving soldiers stationed in Iraq two-week leaves in the largest R & R program since the Vietnam War. Soldiers on R & R or Emergency Leave are flown by the military to Germany or three airports in the United States, Baltimore/Washington, (BWI), Dallas/FortWorth, (DFW), or Atlanta, (ATL ) for free.

The soldiers have been responsible for flights the rest of the way in the U.S. to their destinations, until Congress provided funding for this purpose on November 3, 2003. However, this funding is not yet available and may not be sufficient for all the troops or troops on "Emergency Leave".

More than 470 soldiers a day are arriving in the U.S.

Many soldiers on R&R leave must purchase high-priced last minute airfares to connect to their hometowns once their military flights land at the airports in Baltimore, Dallas or Atlanta. Soldiers on "Emergency Leave" must still pay the full cost of their domestic travel when they are rushed home for the family death, birth, illness or other emergency. The military does not pay the cost of their travel in the United States, so your frequent flyer miles are a huge help.

Americans have donated their unused frequent flyer miles to the Department of Defense to help troops travel home and spend quality time with their loved ones, without worrying about how much it will cost.

I just found a place to use my Alaska and Delta miles!

As I've mentioned before, I recently purchased a new iPod and a used iBook.  I also enrolled in the iTunes service to see what all the hype is about.  The idea of paying about $1 for singles is appealing to me.  There are quite a few artists out there with songs I like but I'm tired of paying 15 bucks to get just 2 or 3 songs I like.

Unfortunately, my first experience with iTunes wasn't all that great.  First off, I don't find the interface to be as spectacular is many others have claimed.  I find myself staring at the screen quite a bit trying to figure out what to do (particularly when it comes to the online store and maintenance of my account).  I chose 3 songs to purchase and download.  Unfortunately, they wouldn't load into the iPod because iTunes claimed it wasn't authorized to play the songs.  I suspected that this was related to the fact that I originally used the iPod with Windows and not OSX.

Around that time I upgraded the iBook to Panther, wiping the box clean with the exception of a few documents I had stored on the iBook.  I didn't backup the downloaded music.

This weekend I wiped the iPod clean and rebuilt the music collection from my library.  I then went back into iTunes to download my music again. I just assumed that once I purchased the music, Apple would track the purchase and allow me to download again at a future date (like Audible).  Wrong!  When you purchase from iTunes, you are getting a one-time download.  This means you better protect the content or you'll have to buy it again.  This is clearly written in the iTunes terms & conditions, but who reads those?  Lesson learned, and I'll make sure I protect the content in the future.

I sent a support request into Apple explaining my problem, and begging to get those three downloads again.  Here was their response:

The Music Store Team has carefully considered your request for a new download. As a gesture of goodwill, we have re-granted your download access for your order history.

Please note that this is a one-time exception to the iTunes Music Store's Terms of Service, which clearly states that you will be responsible for backing up your own system. In the interest of fairness to all customers, the Music Store Team will be unable to make additional exceptions for you. To download again, open iTunes 4 and select Check for Purchased Music from the Advanced menu.  

Very cool.  And I got this response just 24 hours after my inquiry.

Jacob and I cruised over to Kevin's last weekend for some Sunday gaming. Normally a long haul for us, it was very convenient this time because Jacob and I were able to get in some Christmas shopping for Julie and Matthew at the nearby shopping malls.  Jacob spent his own money on his gift for Matthew and was a great helper while we found a few items for Julie.

Kevin always has such a friendly crowd at his place, and the group is usually a good, manageable size (6-9 people).  Onto the games...

Condottierie

As the 'geek likes to say, this is a “card game that's masquerading as a board game” - a fun opener that almost always seems to end too quickly for me.  I'm sure this is partly because each game has been played with 1 or 2 first timers.  Players play cards to participate in an auction for provinces with a goal of owning three contiguous.  Most of the cards have face values, while a some can be played to double a player's bid, force each of the facecards to be worth only 1, or force an auction to end early.  Jacob set up the winning play this game by contesting a province adjacent to his that would give Kevin enough contiguous provinces to win the game.

Unfortunately not enough strength stayed in the hand, and I wound up 1 or 2 points short of Kevin's total (he had few but sufficient cards) and he won the game.

Medina

Domaine

Ahhh, Domaine... this one I've been wanting to try for some time.  Jacob and I saw a large format version of this at GenCon last summer, and since that time it has been on our short list of games to try.  So when the opportunity to play it came up, Jacob and I snatched the box and Sabrina joined us.

Domaine is a very spatial game (you can read an online tutorial).  There is a random layout in each game with the 9 land tiles (a fixed center), and players alternate placing each of their four castles on the board with an adjacent knight.  There are some special squares on the board - some help produce victory points (villages and forests), others produce income (mines), and then there are the meadows which are essentially empty space.  The goal of the game is to segment off chunks of the game board with borders, creating domains around your castles.

If you try and get too greedy and build a huge domain, it will either take too long or your opponent will just disrupt your plans.  Economy enters the game as players must pay gold to perform actions, which include training knights, building borders, or expanding an existing domain into an opponent's.  The card deck composition is creative - cards are labeled A, B, C, and D, and all of the “A” cards are shuffled together, then the B's, etc.  The A's are placed on top of the B's, B's on the C's, and the C's on the D's.  This creates a changing economic environment in the game.  For example, action cards to build borders are more common early in the game and often cost less than later in the game. The easiest way of getting money is selling your action cards - they have a sale price as well as an action cost (the selling price is always less than the cost).  Cards that you sell back to the bank go face up in a pool of cards that your opponents can then purchase back.

We made a few serious rules blunders during play (I was teaching Sabrina and Jacob how to play while I taught myself), the most serious being how knights are handled.  Nobody was building knights early on because we missed the rule that said you can only expand into someone else's domain if you have more knights in the expanding domain than in the opponent's.  This is obviously a critical reason to recruit knights, and without this understanding it doesn't make much sense to ever hire a new one.  We pointed out to Kevin how worthless the knights seemed, and he quickly corrected us.  This came just as the domains were getting completed, so there ensued a rush to build knights.  We also missed the rule that you can't steal a knight adjacent to a castle (hence the configuration you'll see below in the end game).

I held a fairly healthy lead for a while, but Jacob and Sabrina came on strong as they began to complete their domains.  I pulled out the victory by expanding a domain and grabbing a resource monopoly at the end which pushed me slightly ahead in victory points (I was orange, Jacob blue, and Sabrina red).  This game is on my short to-buy list - after the holidays though (hey, it's Christmas - we shouldn't be buying stuff for ourselves!).

Clans

Kevin, Jim, Jeff, and Sabrina then played a game of Clans.  This is most definitely not on my to-buy list.  This is an abstract game with a fairly weak theme, and my one playing with Angela wasn't very enjoyable.  Maybe I should give it another try... but really, why, when there are some many games I like out there?

Aladdin's Dragons

A new guest arrived that I hadn't met before - welcome Greg!  Greg is an experienced gamer but hadn't tried Aladdin's Dragons yet, so I offered to teach it to Greg and Jacob.  I enjoy this game and will rarely turn down an opportunity to play it.  This game is an auction game with a few magical twists (artifacts and spell cards that can be used to disrupt auctions or alter the game mechanics).  Each player has a series of tokens numbered from 1 to 9 (minus the 3), and players take turns bidding face down with the tokens on a number of spaces (caverns where you can get gems, the town where you can get cards and other advantages, and the palace where you can get artifacts).  The player with the most artifacts wins the game.  The basic strategy is to acquire gems early on so that you can by artifacts as the game progresses.  This game is always pretty close when I play it, and this was no exception.  I managed to pull out the victory with one more tile than Greg, and two more than Jacob.

Time to flush the backlog of photos and other content.  As I mentioned before, Julie, Jacob, Matthew and I took the train to Seattle over Thanksgiving weekend.  We stayed at a hotel downtown and explored the area.  We did this 4 years ago and had a great time.  I was determined though to plan just a tiny bit more - we ended up having donuts for Thanksgiving dinner last time for want of an open restaurant.  This time we had a reservation at the Hunt Club restaurant and had a fine 5-course meal.  Julie and I opted out of the turkey for some finer offerings (prime rib and lamb).

On Friday we walked a couple of blocks over to watch the annual holiday parade.  The rain wasn't too bad and it was a fun diversion.  One interesting tidbit: I've been pretty critical of the Segway in the past, but I was proven wrong at the parade.  Look below for the perfect application of this amazing (?) technology.

Much of the time we just spent wandering around.  Seattle downtown is nicely sized.  We were able to roam from Pioneer Square to the piers to Pike Place to the shopping districts with no troubles.  Friday afternoon we did the Seattle Underground tour - highly recommded.

Saturday we played tourist and took a boat over to Tillicum Village.  We walked down to the piers from the hotel and hung out for a while until the boat left.

The village trip was a bit of a disappointment.  I should have expected as much, but for $65 for an adult, the food (salmon) should have been a bit better.  We did enjoy a short hike on the island, and the boat ride was a blast.  Matthew did like the somewhat hokey native American show after dinner.

One highlight of the weekend was a chance dinner at Fadó, an Irish pub.  A great menu, even for kids, and of course some tasty Guiness.  I had the fish and chips.

Thanks to my pack-rat friend Greg, I'm in the process of restoring most of my content.  Things will still be shakey for a while as my ISP stabilizes the environment.  I have a backlog of content to publish as well, including a glorious day of gaming yesterday where we had about 19 people at our home.

I'm still sorting through some configuration challenges on the host machine, so if you aggregate the site with an RSS reader, it will be broken for a while.  Hopefully we'll get this resolved tonight.

My ISP crashed the box where my weblog was hosted.  I may have lost quite a bit of content as well.  My own fault for not having a better backup strategy.

I'll be gradually replacing content as I recover it from various sources, so please be patient.  If you happen to use a news aggregator and have an archive of my postings, please let me know!  You might be able to help me out.

I read in the nimrods blog about this article by Jacob Davenport, designer (or co-designer) of some great Icehouse games like Pikemen and Gnostica.

Few topics have garnered such praise and criticism as Agile / Extreme programming (XP) over the past 4 years.  Its proponents argue that XP is a deliberate and disciplined approach to software development, while its opponents often claim that it is nothing more than a chaotic, shoot-from-the-hip approach that eschews formal requirements analysis and design.  The Truth is, when applied to certain classes of projects, XP is a very attractive, effective approach that can be very successful.

Jacob's juxtaposition of XP on top of game design is interesting, though I wonder what point he is trying to make.  I'm not a game designer, but the two seem so very different to me. Software methodologies exist for one primary reason - to reduce the defects (or, to put it a different way, increase the quality) of a software product.  Usually this means bringing some formality to how we figure out what the problem is (requirements), how we plan to solve the problem (design), solving the problem (programming), and verifying that we solved it (testing).

Game design isn't so much about solving a problem as it is producing a system for entertainment - an act of creativity.  I'm not sure that any sort of methodology would help me become a game designer.  But I will concede that Jacob's ideas make a lot of sense around the area of game and rule refinement.  He has some nice things to say about refactoring and testing that sound applicable to game design.

Mark Jackson took some time to summarize what are called “5 and 10” or “five and dime” reports culled from spielfrieks early this year.  This was a bit late in coming, but better late than never. The results were taken from 64 different gamers, with 5 points awarded if the gameshowed up on their five list (played 5-9 times) and 10 points if the game showed upon their dime list (played 10+ times).  Here is a list of the top 10:

The games on the list clearly fall into a few distinct categories: light filler games that people tend to play frequently (Liar's Dice, Can't Stop, Transamerica, Lost Cities, Take 6) and deeper strategic games that are hugely popular (Puerto Rico, Settlers).  The game in a category by itself, dexterity games, is Crokinole.  You can put Carcassonne in either the light filler category or deeper game depending on your preference .

I've played all of these games except for Lost Cities and Take 6.  Actually I've played Lost Cities online against an AI, but never in real life.

Judging from the session reports I've been reading so far this year, it looks like Puerto Rico will again be at the top of the list for 2003.  A few predictions for new games that we might see in the top 10 for 2003:

• Age of Steam - the only thing that could keep this off the list is its length, which can lower the number of plays.
• Pirate's Cove / Piratenbucht - the Days of Wonder release of the English version of this great game might push it into the top 10.
• Amun Re - a long shot.

Likely it will be tough to displace some of the tried-and-true fillers (like Can't Stop and Liar's Dice) and classics.