The AGoTOnline team and Fantasy Flight Games reached an agreement this week that will allow the online site to continue operations.  Games already in progress will continue, but no new games will be created until some changes to the implementation are made.

I'm thrilled that FFG worked constructively with the site maintainers to work out a reasonable solution for both parties.

The American International Toy Fair was held last weekend in New York City.  There are a few worthwhile reports to read on this event:

• Gamers Alliance
• GameFest

Mayfair Games issued a press release today announcing that Microsoft will publish an online version of Settlers of Catan as a premium game service at MSN Zone.  Overall I think this is a positive thing - more exposure means more publishers and potentially more (and better games).  I do worry about what this will do to some of the free online version such as Settlers 3D and BSW.

Update: Matthew Baldwin just posted a screenshot.

We welcomed a small crowd into our home again this weekend for some gaming on Sunday.  Gameplay lasted from about noon until 8:30pm, and we were fortunate to once again host David Chapelle from Atlanta.

Checkers 2000

George was nice enough to bring by his copy of Checkers 2000, an interesting checkers variant that Julie and Matthew tried while the rest of us played Domaine.  Feedback was favorable on this game, and George is letting us borrow it for a while so I can play with each of the boys.  Matthew beat Julie, with the fatal blow being a late game triple jump.

Domaine

DavidE, George, Jacob, and I quickly jumped into a game of Domaine.  This was the first four-player game for me (I think any of us), and while George was familiar with Lowenherz (Domaine's ancestor) he had not yet tried Domaine.  So David and I quickly explained the rules while we setup and we launched into the game.

Play proceeded quickly - we finished the game in about exactly an hour.  George was a bit too slow in getting his first domain (and therefore any income source), and Jacob was immediately put into a defensive position with his valuable domain which caused him to neglect his other castles.  So it was mostly a raise between David and me.  As the game drew to an end, David pulled ahead with some strong expansions into my territory (pulling me down and pushing him up).  He got too far ahead for me to catch him though it was a fairly close finish.

Royal Turf

As the others arrived, KC put together a game of Royal Turf, joined by Chuck, Matthew, Julie, Mike, and DavidC.  Julie was the big winner.

Coloretto

DavidE, Jacob, DavidC, and Mike played Coloretto. I'm fairly certain DavidE won (since he has something like a 15 game winning streak in multi-player games!).  His feedback on the game itself isn't too favorable though:

I think there are other quick & light fillers that are more intellectually rewarding: Zircus Floheati (or whatever it's called); Money; Loco!; Katzenjammer Blues. Oh yeah, those are all by Knizia... Still, if others wanted to play this while waiting for other gamers to arrive, I wouldn't outright protest.

Attika

DavidE, DavidC, and Mike then squared off for a game of Attika.  This is one of my favorite newer games so I'm sorry I missed out on this one.  From what I saw, the game ended pretty quickly with a temple-to-temple victory.  It will be interesting to see how this game changes as players get more experienced in blocking this sort of victory.

New Eden 2

DavidE requested to play another game of New Eden 2, the wonderful new prototype from KC Humphrey.  I'm sure KC loves hearing someone ask for his game by name, but he deserves the recognition for the good work he is doing.

Princes of the Renaissance

A few folks were interested in trying out this Martin Wallace game, and since I had played once I offered to teach it.  Chuck had also played this once.

In this case, we had a serious problem with a runaway leader (George).  George accumulated a combination of tiles that gave him a 3-point discount when bidding on the condotierrie role.  This meant that he was able to fight in nearly every battle, often winning because of his troop strength.  He accumulated 6 (!) laurels by the end of the game, netting him an extra 20 victory points.  This was more than enough to secure his victory - a well played game by George.  I suspect if the rest of us had been a bit more alert we could have prevented it, but by the end of the 1st age most of us were predicting him as the winner.

El Grande

I was disappointed to miss this game, but I offered to teach Volldampf instead (I love that game too).  Apparently, via some skillful negotiation, DavidE was able to pull out the victory.

Volldampf

I taught George, Julie, Matthew, and Chuck the train transportation game of Volldampf, another Martin Wallace classic.  This game is similar in many ways to its descendent Age of Steam, but offers simpler mechanics and shorter gameplay.

Matthew had a challenging time understanding the mechanics - this is probably too much game for him.  It also made him very susceptible to coaching, and since he took such a liking to Chuck he started working to find routes that benefitted Chuck as well as himself.

With five players, each player will place a maximum of only 8 tracks, and during each turn only two can be placed.  I'm not wild about the game with this many people - the two-track limitation slows down income production and reduces the number of options.

I was way behind for the first few turns, but staged a strong comeback.  My debt situation prevented me from being a serious contender though, and Julie pulled out a 1 point victory over Chuck.

Crokinole

We pulled out our $10 Amazon special crokinole board for some finger-flicking fun.

Vector Prime

Jacob taught George and DavidE his Star Wars themed prototype named Vector Prime.  This game is similar to Star Wars: Epic Duels, with some card and dice-driven combat.  Jacob hand-made the components and is a great first attempt for him.  I appreciate the attention David and George gave to his game, including some valuable feedback.

Ark of the Covenant

We had a hard time settling on a game to play, and a couple of folks wanted to see Ark of the Covenant, the Inspiration Games release in the Carcassonne family.  This is just Carcassonne with a few twists thrown in, not unlike the various expansions released over the past few years.  Carcassonne is a great game with 2-3 players, but with 5 there is way too much downtime and chaos for my liking.  Oh, and DavidE won (again!) with me about 5 points behind in second place.

Titan: the Arena

I asked to play this game, having heard so much praise and knowing that there is a re-release coming from Fantasy Flight Games.  These guys were obviously pros, but were fairly kind during this learning game.  This is a very enjoyable game and I look forward to seeing the new release. 

Pizzza

The evening ended with KC teaching my family another of his recent prototypes.  Pizzza (I hope I included the correct number of Zs) is an easy to learn family game with simple mechanics.  Everybody enjoyed it - Matthew even gave it a '9'!  There is a tile laying and connection mechanic similar to New Eden 2.  My only suggestion is to improve the artwork a bit to make it easier to distinguish the different ingredients, and to make scoring markers that better align with the ingredients.  Another winner from KC!

After spending 4 hours this morning at Beaverton Toyota getting my car worked on (regular maintenance plus some repairs from vandalism at the Portland airport), I joined Jacob and Matthew at the Rude household for Brandon's birthday.  No photos from that event, though I do have one from our evening play of Vanished Planet.

Trias

Ken and I played the two-player variant of Trias, the game of plate tectonics and dinosaur migration.  There have been some complaints about the theme of this game, claiming that it is too dry or abstract.  I love the theme!  I can visualize the continents forming and the dinosaurs migrating (and swimming).  This game plays better with more than two, but we had a good time and a very close finish with my just edging Ken out.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers

This is now my favorite version of Carcassonne.  I like the scoring in this as there appears to be more equity between the rivers and forests (as opposed to the roads and castles in the original).  The addition of the bonus tiles adds a fun dynamic.  This was a close game as well, with me beating Ken by less than 10 points in a 120+ point game.

Coloretto

Ken, Tracey, and I played a single hand of Coloretto, with Ken winning the hand with 37 points.

Vanished Planet

Jacob, Matthew, and I broke out my new copy of Vanished Planet.  Feedback on this cooperative game has been very mixed, but it is a winner in our house.  The boys absolutely love the theme, and cooperative games are a great family activity (especially in a competitive household like ours).

Ok, round 2 of trying to make this post.  As much as I like dasBlog, the browser based editor can drive me nuts.  I was 90% through this session report when I accidently clicked the back button, losing all of the content.  I'm sure I'll write this much more eloquently the second time around.  Greg Hughes gave me some good tips on using Outlook to compose and post directly into dasBlog, so maybe I'll start using that.

Last Thursday I joined the RipCityGamers for Die Hard Thursday - so named because it is usually a smaller turnout.  Not so this week - there were 8 of us, including our guest David Chapelle from Atlanta.

New England

Half of us split out for a game of New England, one of my favorites.  David, Doug, George and I tried to be the most successful pilgrim on Plymouth Rock. David had never played it but picked up the mechanics quick enough to make a very decent showing. With four players things are pretty tight - many more opportunities to conflict with other players than in the three player game. It was a balanced game that came down to the last round.  Three of us were tied for the barn majority (I already had the most pilgrims), and turn order played to my favor as I was able to grab the 10 spot and go first, grabbing the last available barn.  This was a substantial point swing and allowed me to the game with 31 points. David came in second with 28 points and Doug edged George out in the tie breaker at 26 points. If the turn order had been different, or if George was able to take the 10 spot (he had only 8 shillings), it would have been even closer.

Maya

I still haven't played this game, but DavidE gave a brief report:

The buzz on Maya is that it's a blend of familiar mechanisms with a fairly pleasant outcome. As blind bidding was one of those mechanisms, it probably will never make it into the common rotation, but it was definitely decent.

Cronberg

This is a game I had never seen nor even heard of.  Feedback was favorable though, with George reporting:

Peter taught this little game to Doug and I. Simple rules, simple concept, but not so simple to master. doug and I made the rookie mistake of placing lots of tiles early in the game only to give Peter good spots to put his men down. Very lopsided scoring was the result.

Luckily this game plays very quickly. Including teaching it took us 15 minutes to complete our first game so we gave it another go. This time Doug and I knew better than to place tiles early on which resulted in a final score of 44, 45, 56.

New Eden 2

Next was an opportunity for a few of us to play KC's latest prototype New Eden 2, the successor to the game New Eden (mentioned before right here). New Eden 2 is a very different game, with only the theme in common with its predecessor.  Think of this game as a zoom-in on one the hexes in New Eden.

New Eden 2 is essentially a tile laying game where players are trying to build roads of a sufficient length to allow them to build buildings.  Each building consists of two colors, and each player has a hidden goal of two colors that he is trying to build (important but not critical - it just gives bonus points for each building containing those special colors). This game borrows from mechanics in a number of games I've played, including Carcassonne, Attika, and TransAmerica.  But don't get me wrong - this is a very unique, fun game to play.  It certainly doesn't feel like a prototype since the bits were all very high quality.

DavidE and I were in the lead most of the game, partly because we joined roads early on and were able to build off of each other fairly regularly. DavidE pulled out the victory in the end, with me a close second.

DavidE had some high praise of the game (including some valuable feedback for KC):

...it is definitely Thumbs Up, and, in my opinion, perfectly publishable as it is, and as good as any mid-weight game released in the past year. Sure, you could tweak a subsystem here or there just for kicks, but dammit this game should be in print!

I tend to agree with David on this point - this game doesn't need much more work and it is certainly better than a number of games I played over the past six months.  Nice work KC!

Just an FYI - my MSN handle is brookscl_97140 at hotmail.com.

You can register online here.  We plan to go this year, with Jacob and I probably attending for three of the days.  Perhaps Matthew will be ready as well.

I played a quick solitaire game of Vanished Planet tonight to acquaint myself with the rules and get a feel for the game play.  Maybe I'll write a review after I get a chance to play it with the boys this weekend, but for now I'll share a few first impressions:

• This game is difficult.  I played on the easiest setting and lost, though I was close.  There is a countdown effect similar to Sauron approaching the fellowship in the Lord of the Rings Boardgame.
• There are some human factors issues with the game.  I found it very difficult to read the symbols for the different resource and personnel types.  There is too much use of dark colors like black and purple with too little contrast.
• The quick reference on the back of the rules could use some work.  For example, the symbols for the professions should be shown next to each profession since they are referred to in the purchase cost for some of the technologies.
• There are too many levels of indirection in the game, which leads to a certain fiddlyness.  I'm sure this will become more natural over time, but simple things like distinguishing between a trade station or research station can be tough. Why not just use the resource symbols for these locations on the game board?  Or use an iconic representation that would look good on the map but still be appropriate for use on the cards.
• I didn't realize until too late that the creature will eat the satellites fairly early in the game, which put me in a bind.  I only had one goal by the time they were consumed, which made it nearly impossible to win.  I had to spend too many resources to build a Communications Relay so that I could retrieve goals from my home planet.  Had I been able to save those resources for the actual goals I would have won the game.
• The rules could use some work - the specifics seem to be bit scattered around the main rules, the tutorial, and the quick reference.

These notes are mostly negative, but I did enjoy the solitaire play and look forward to trying it with a group.

Bowing to pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, the great folks that built A Game of Thrones Online have taken the game down.  Apparently one of the concerns is physical game ownership of the players that are playing online:

They did have one interesting requirement, however, which has compelled me to launch a question on the forum (http://www.agotonline.com/forum/):

All judges and PBeM games 'must be structured in such a way that it is impossible to play without owning a copy of the game.'

I am not sure how we can comply with this request.  In reality, there is no way to determine whether a human judge needs a copy of the game since the rules are published on their Web site.  Though we heavily encourage ownership of the game and very much want everyone to own a copy, I can't know for sure that every player owns a copy.  (Or do we just need one of the five players to own a copy?)

I think this is a bad move by the Fantasy Flight.  They run the risk of alienating the very individuals most likely to evangelize their games.

I took a bit of a chance and ordered the game Vanished Planet, a cooperative game published independently.  I've heard it is insanely difficult to win, but the mechanics and theme looked interesting enough to give it a try.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to try it this weekend, and I'll certainly report back when I do.

Julie and I have recently converted to nearly all digital photos, and while I like my Nikon Coolpix 2500 it is pretty challenging getting photos to turn out the way I'd like.  About 10 years ago I bought a Canon Eos Elan for Julie on her birthday, and that has been our workhouse for 35mm ever since.  We didn't go nuts on lenses, adding only a zoom lens to the lens that came with the camera.

I've always thought that some day we would get a digital body for those lenses, but $1500+ is just too much to justify.  When Canon announced their Digital Rebel last year, my ears perked up and I started to seriously consider it.

We also discovered that our local Walgreens will do 4x6 printing of our digital photos for only $0.29, so there's some potential savings in development costs (i.e., only print the photos you like).

My only hesitation right now is an ignorance of the quality of the Digital Rebel body vs. some of the other options.  Since my price point is certainly below $1000, there really aren't any other options (other than wait).  Any commentary or feedback would be appreciated.

After a long week of travel to the east coast, and a busy week of activities for the kids, we were all content to lay low and take it easy this weekend.  On Saturday, we did a bit of shopping and saw the movie Miracle, a great flick about the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team.  I'm thrilled that Jacob and Matthew can get a taste of how momentous this event was; for those of us who lived through it stands as one of the most memorable events in our lifetime.  For me, only the Challenger explosion, the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the Sept 11 disaster stand out as much.  The movie was fantastic - a great script in the same league as The Rookie and other Mike Rich classics, though he didn't get writing credit for this one due to some weird writer's guild ruling.

After the movie we just had to stop in at Fry's, and we picked up the PC game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This game is amazing and kept the men of the house engaged for the better part of Sunday.  If you like role-playing computer games and are a Star Wars fan, you must get this game.

Come join the clash of kings at A Game of Thrones Online.

Check out Chris Farrell's article on ASL pros and cons. My favorite quote:

...I think an unhealthy percentage of the skill involved in playing ASL is in simply knowing the rules. Is this really what you got into gaming for? Every time you play, you're likely to discover a rule you've never seen before, or at least can't remember ever seeing before.

Ken and I gave ASL another shot last year and I finally decided to let go and stick to lighter wargames and German style games.

My friend Mike Deans was kind enough to open his household for a day of gaming with a rather large crowd.  All four us joined the crew from Rip City Gamers.  Oh yeah, I heard there was a football game on two.

Since it is late Sunday and I'm traveling all week, I will post the report with less than my usual game commentary - mostly photos with a few editorial comments.