cellio | Entries tagged with games

Both last year and this year at Origins we played True Dungeon adventures (one each year). I don't want to spoil either of the adventures we played (which they continue to offer), so I'll speak here in generalities.

True Dungeon is something like D&D adapted for physical sets. An adventure consists of a story played out in a series of seven rooms. You play one of a dozen or so character classes and each has some special rules and abilities. Spellcasters usually have to memorize things (cleric: identify this prayer bead to successfully cast your spell, etc). To disarm traps, rogues have to manipulate a gadget that is akin to playing the old board game Operation (move a pointer through a maze without touching any walls). Combat is done on shuffleboards; monster hit areas, including vulnerabilities, are drawn on one end, and you slide disks from the other to attack. (I'm not sure if monster damage is pre-determined or randomized; I didn't get a good look at what the GMs were doing.)

Before the session starts, the players get together to choose classes (no duplication allowed) and equip characters. Equipment comes in the form of tokens; each time you play you get a bag of ten (most common, a couple uncommon, one rare -- this should sound familiar to anyone who's played collectible card games like Magic). Naturally, you can buy specific tokens from them. Both times we played, the assortment we got for that session was not, by itself, particularly useful (I don't think my bag included a weapon, for instance), so you're relying on the experienced players who show up with their vast collections who can say "sure, you can borrow this sword" or "hey cleric, here are some healing scrolls, just in case". At the end of an adventure you get a few more random tokens. "Equipping" consists of laying out the tokens you're going to use (armor, weapons, cloaks, rings, etc) for a GM who records your final stats on a sheet that is carried through the adventure and given to each GM. You can then put most of them away, aside from weapons and any expendables you want to have on hand.

The game can accommodate up to ten players in a group. Last year we had only three, which did not work well. In retrospect we should have asked if the next timeslot's group was also light and, if so, could we combine. This year when we signed up we looked for a timeslot that already had some people and ended up with eight, which worked much better.

An example of "worked better": some rooms have a subtle clue that, once you notice it, helps you in solving whatever that room's problem is. With more people there's more likely to be someone who notices subtle clues. Of course, the flip side is that with more players you can end up in "too many cooks" territory when solving puzzles, but our eight-person group worked pretty well together.

They bill this as a two-hour game, but it's actually both more and less. Each room has a time limit of 12 minutes, so the worst-case scenario for the actual playing is 84 minutes. (That might even be typical, as even if you finish quickly, you've got to wait for the group ahead of you to clear the next room.) But then there's the time you spend equipping; I didn't notice last year, but this year we entered our dungeon at least 45 minutes after our nominal start time. And they ask you to show up 20 minutes early. So while it's listed as a two-hour game, when scheduling at a convention, use a three-hour timeslot.

The game is dark. Rooms are generally lit in green, and when you've used half your time it switches to red. (That warning is a nice touch.) Players are issued small flashlights; I think they intend for you to clip them onto your character card (which is hanging around your neck), but since I needed to be able to read part of my card (the spell list) I ended up tying the flashlight around my wrist. I had a pile of one-use magic items in my pockets that I could in principle use in combat when needed, but as a practical matter, there was no real way to dig through them in that lighting. Anticipating that, I distributed tokens among different pockets in my jeans, but even so, I mostly couldn't use them. I've seen pictures of players with sashes full of tokens (not sure how they're attached), presumably to solve that problem. Last year our third player, who came in costume, had a big shield full of tokens. I've been thinking that something like a triptych might work better for me -- easier to use than a sash and easier to pack than a shield.

Last year I played a monk. The monk doesn't use much equipment but fights two-handed. Well, sort of: you get two disks in each round of combat instead of one, but you launch both with the same hand, one immediately after the other. (The second one has to be underway before the first one stops moving.) That was...ok, but I don't think I did a lot of damage, and actual two-handed combat (with weapons) sounds like a better idea to me (I'm probably about as good with either hand). That's the ranger's ability, and ranger was my second choice for this year.

This year I played a bard. I wrote about that a little before the convention, in particular the "bardsong" ability. They describe bards as jacks of all trades; a bard can fight, has some spells (D&D: like sorcerors, not like wizards), can use lore knowledge to get hints, and can sing during combat to give bonuses to other players. It turns out a bard cannot sing while fighting, even if a bard player can demonstrate the ability to do just that, absent a magic item that enables it. So I had weapons in my pocket but I ended up giving bonuses (and casting some spells) instead of fighting myself. I ended up feeling a little too much like a back-end support character without primary contributions, so next time I'll try something else.

We had, I think, three combats (maybe four? I think three). I sang a variety of medieval and renaissance songs not in English, to minimize distraction. (In one fight with a sort of demonic character, I switched to singing psalms. I don't think anyone noticed.) But because the other players and GM needed to communicate about hits and damage, I ended up standing back and singing quietly. Meh on the bardsong ability; I wasn't able to make it sufficiently fun.

I invoked "lore" two or three times. The way this is implemented is that, before the game starts, you're given a set of labeled glyphs to memorize. When you use the ability, the GM shows you a glyph and if you can name it, you get the clue. I thought there would be a lot fewer of these! For some reason, in advance I thought there were 14; there were actually 24 and many of them were not at all intuitive. (I wonder if they randomize the labels for each adventure, or if playing the same class repeatedly lets you build up knowledge.) Nonetheless, I got one or two right immediately, and in one room I initially said I didn't know and then 30 seconds later said "wait, that's X" and the GM gave it to me.

The spells I had were interesting but not optimal for this adventure. In particular, the bard's highest-level spell does mass damage, and we never faced groups of opponents. Last year there was one group.

Half or more of the adventure was puzzles. This year's puzzles were well-done. (Last year's were a mixed bag, though we also had fewer players and thus fewer brains to tap into.) Two of this year's were especially fun to solve and made good use of props and actors. (I think those facts are related.) In one room, the GM said that since we didn't have a rogue, our bard could try the rogue gadget to get a clue. This confirmed my initial impression of the rogue gadget. :-) I gave it a good try, but...not my strong suit. Also, it takes enough time and focus that you miss out on what else is going on in the room at the time, so I suspect playing a rogue would feel somewhat isolating.

The sets were well-done, including the animated big-ass monster in our last room. Another monster was represented by an actor. Last year I think the GMs (each room has one) were also actors; this year there were GMs who were not actors (and not in costume). Of course most of the players aren't in costume either (some are), but it's something I noticed anyway.

I think the GMs had some latitude to make tweaks on the fly. This makes sense; nobody enjoys an adventure where half the party gets killed before the end, after all, and people are paying (substantially) to play. Keeping it challenging but achievable with highly varied player abilities and group sizes seems hard, especially when each GM only sees a group in one room. I wonder if they're issued any heuristics or if it comes down to individual GMs winging it. (An example: in one of our rooms I bumped into a bucket on the floor and looked inside. It seemed empty, but the GM told me it contained holy water and the person who'd been lobbing flasks of same at an undead monster could refill them instead of turning in the tokens. Actually, the GM told me, there was a leak in the ceiling and that's why the bucket was there.)

I had fun. I'm still looking for the character class(es) that will be the most fun for me, but I have ideas. It's expensive enough that I'm not going to play a lot, so equipping is likely to continue to depend on teammate bounty. Which is fine; the hard-core players seemed ready to equip others. If our tokens were organized we might have been able to make some trades, but when what you've got is a bag of misc, it doesn't seem practical.

These all came today. I think we need to tip our mail carrier. (I never expected some of these to be as heavy as they are!)

We played a bunch of games at Origins Game Fair, most of which we liked. Here's my summary of them, in order of play:

Oceans (sequel to Evolution): This game fixes the biggest issues I have with Evolution. You are playing one or more species of creatures (ocean-dwelling this time), evolving them to add useful traits like the ability to gather more food or protection against predators. Some traits are symbiotic in various ways, so you interact with your neighbors. And everything's a carnivore, so anything can attack anything else for food (modulo those defenses I mentioned). The separate tracking for size and population is gone (it's just one stat now), and the traits seem more coherent and not as numerous. With some actions you can adjust the food supply to your creatures' liking. Oceans is a Kickstarter slated for publication later this year.
Spirit Island: You are playing the spirits native to an island that is being invaded by colonists. They keep coming (and building towns and cities); your goal is to drive them off the island before they taint too much of it. It's a cooperative game, with each spirit having some different abilities and some different action cards. We had four players and that worked well; I'm guessing that you remove map segments with fewer players so the balance should stay about the same, but I think it would play differently on a smaller map.
Albion's Legacy: Another cooperative game. You're playing one of the major characters from the Arthurian legends (there were seven or eight to choose from), each of which has different abilities, and you have a common quest on a map that is progressively revealed as you explore the lands around Camelot. (Don't think too hard about why Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, and others don't already know the lands around Camelot...). The play mechanics were fairly straightforward but the board is busy and hard to see, you depend a lot on the right map tiles coming out (and they're random), and we spent a lot of the game not knowing what to do. Unnecessarily complex; thumbs down.
Arkadia: I liked this one more than Dani did. It's a worker-placement game where you're (collectively) building buildings and ultimately a castle. Buildings are commissioned by one of four guilds and workers are paid in guild tokens when buildings are finished (usually from a mix of players). The player who completes the building also collects another guild token and the right to place a castle piece. Each castle piece contains a guild symbol, pieces can cover other pieces, and the current number of a particular guild showing is what those guild tokens are worth should you choose to sell. You can sell during the game (a limited number of times but you decide when), so you're trying to manipulate prices to your own benefit. This game is probably under an hour without teaching.
True Dungeon Adventures: This is that LARP-style game I've mentioned before, where a team of players go through a series of rooms with puzzles and/or combats. This scenario was called Vault of the All-Father and involved cleaning up a trashed temple to the Norse gods. This year's puzzles were better than last year's: they were all solvable with enough time (which is limited) and cleverness, but they weren't too easy. (Last year one was definitely too hard.) I played the bard, which turned out to be underwhelming so next time I'll try something different. (I hope to write more about this separately. I know I said that last year too.) Followup here.
Dwarven Smithy: This was a nice game. Each player (max four I think?) is playing a dwarven smith (funny thing), who refines raw materials (like silver and gems), uses those materials to craft items either as tools (to improve future builds) or for sale, and is competing to build special secret items for the king. You only have so much room in your workshop for materials and the things you're making, though, so sometimes you have to push things out to your market where other players might buy them to use for their projects. Raw materials and things to build come from two different decks, and you decide how to allocate your card draws each turn. All four players were very close at the end, much closer than the person teaching us said is typical for beginners.
Endeavor: Age of Sail: You're playing European explorers out to explore and reap profits from foreign lands. The mechanic here is nice: each turn you gain some workers, build a new building, collect some previously-allocated workers (not necessarily all of them), and then use your buildings to take actions on the board. Common actions are to plant your flag (claim a land territory) or sail (gain presence overseas somewhere). Each foreign land requires several (I think five?) ships present there to open it up, at which point the majority player gains a bonus and anybody with sea presence can start claiming land. Another action is to take goods (in the form of cards) from foreign lands where you have presence; the cards usually let you advance on the tracks that control how many workers you get, how good a building you can build, or plain old victory points. The game felt well-balanced and, as is typical for worker-placement games, there's always more that you want to do than you have people for. All of the players (we had four; don't know if it can take more) liked this a lot.
Railways of the World: We played this last year too but haven't found it for sale at a reasonable price. This year we had five players (at least one of whom was hardcore) playing on a map of the eastern US. The map is large and we were playing on a large round table, which meant there was no place I could sit and be able to see much, which sucked. The game itself is fun but that session was not fun.
Get Off My Land: Meh. Four players are farmers on a 5x5 board, competing to clear forests, plant crops (or raise animals), harvest stuff at the right time, and defend your holdings. A few tiles have oil for extra bounty (not enough to go around of course).
Power Grid: We bought this game after playing it last year, so we already knew we like it. We had a four-player game this time, playing on the German map. One player was hardcore and it looked like he was going to win, but he didn't. The end felt rushed this time; the game wasn't rushed overall, but the pacing felt weird. Maybe that's the effect of having one player who knows the game inside and out and three more who don't. Still fun, just different.
AuZtralia: On a stylized map of (part of) Australia in the 1930s, up to four players build rail, establish farms, mine raw materials, build defenses, and fight Cthulhu, as one does. This was a lot of fun! On your turn you can take your choice of several actions; each action costs time, and you advance your marker on the time track to reflect that. Play proceeds from the earliest time on the track, so this means a player might go twice in a row, order tends to vary, and you can do that expensive thing but then you'll have to wait. The game starts with an additional marker already on the time track (maybe around a third of the way in?), and when the first player passes it it starts to move too, one space per move. That marker represents the monsters, who are progressively revealed (or occasionally spawned) and move to blight your farms and attack your ports. If any player's port (starting space) is lost then everybody loses; otherwise, players and the monsters score after every player crosses the finish line. We lost, so I haven't seen that part yet.
878 Vikings - Invasions of England: This is a miniatures/military game. Four players play on two sides, English and Vikings; on each side one player's people are weaker but more numerous and the other's are stronger but less numerous. The English get some additional grunt labor when their towns are attacked. The Vikings keep coming, wave after wave. Order of play is randomized each turn (and not known in advance). When it's your turn you're playing your whole side, not just your pieces (in collaboration). This felt pretty brutal and we ran out of time before finishing. Neither of us enjoyed this.
Railroad Rivals: We had signed up for a different game in this slot, but there were two games with insufficient players so we joined this one instead. On each turn you take a city tile and a railroad stock tile (in turn order, which is bid each round). Each city tile has connections on its sides (not necessarily all four) that are the names of railroads. You play a city tile (not necessarily the one you just drew; you have a hand) next to another city such that the railroad names match, mark the connection as yours, and place a specified number of goods on the new city. After everyone has done this you each deliver one good from one city to its neighbor; the owner of the connection gets a point, and the railroad involved has its stock price go up one. Final score is based on the value of the stocks you hold. I think I've played this game once locally but don't know who owns it. We both liked this.
Mare Nostrum - Empires: This is an ancient-Mediterranean civilization-building game. Players claim territories that produce goods, improve them so they produce more goods, build military units to defend them, and sometimes attack because your own lands never seem to produce quite enough. There's a novel trading mechanic and then you use the goods you have (each turn) to build stuff -- those improvements or units, or maybe a wonder or leader that grants special powers. This isn't quite the ancient history we know; while the usual suspects are there, when we showed up I was assigned Atlantis. Atlantis, in case you're wondering, is just through the strait of Gibralter to the west, near both Spain and north Africa. Each position has a special ability; Atlantis's is building triremes for cheap. Rome has a different military advantage, someone else is good at trade, and I don't know what the others are. The game was interesting but the end-game was rushed; in the first turn after the first significant military action, Egypt built the pyramids and won. I expected there to be more of a middle game between initial expansion and the end. (I don't know if our game was typical in that regard.) Putting this in a three-hour slot (especially with having to teach it) was optimistic, I thought; we were out of time when Egypt won.
Railroad Revolution: Another worker-placement game, and fun. You're building the American rail and telegraph network. On your turn you can build rail, build a station in a city that your rail connects to, build part of the telegraph network, or use certain special abilities. Builds other than rail produce various benefits, an important one of which is giving you specialist workers. There are four types of workers plus the generics, and the actions I just listed are modified if you use a specialist (depending on which one). One of them tends to make things less expensive, one tends to give you some additional benefit (like building an extra track segment when you build rail), and so on. This is probably a 90-minute game if you already know how to play. It worked well for three players.
Skylands: Each player has a mat with place to put tiles; each tile has (usually) a piece of (usually) two city types, and you place them to complete cities (Carcassonne-style). Complete cities can be populated and you can then use the people to build other tiles. One type doesn't get population directly; instead you move people there from elsewhere, which generates victory points. On your turn you can choose to draw and place a random tile, buy a tile from a limited set, populate a city, or move people to the special cities for points. You can't keep choosing the same thing; you have to vary your actions each turn. Like in Puerto Rico, when you choose an action everybody gets to do it but you get something extra (like a second random tile). The game is very pretty in a way that doesn't interfere, which is a rare compliment from me. We liked this a lot. (I recognized this when I saw the game but don't know where I've seen it.)
CATS: a sad but necessary cycle of violent predatory behavior: The title is funny and appealing; the game wasn't. It's a simple-minded card game where you compete to catch and eat birds (optionally playing with them first for extra points). Other cats might try to steal your prey. Each round you secretly choose a target location and a target opponent and then choose two actions to be taken in sequence; everything is revealed and resolved simultaneously.
Unearth: Players compete to collect cards (sets are worth more) and harvest resources from those cards that let you build wonders (for points or game benefits). Two mechanics are interesting here. First, the way you claim a card is to keep rolling dice (and placing them on cards) until the value of the card is reached. You have one d8, one d4, and three d6 available; on your turn you roll and place one die. Cards have values ranging from 11 to 17, so it's always going to take multiple dice and sometimes several. If you roll 1 through 3 (on any size die), you collect a resource from the card (or a random one if the card has been emptied). When the total card value is reached, the player with the highest value on a single die gets the card. You can have dice on several cards; each action is independent. (If you run out of dice you reclaim one from a card.) The second mechanic is with the resources and what they can buy: the resources are hexes and you play them in (interlocking) rings; when you complete a ring of six you can build any wonder for which that ring meets the build costs. (There are some generic "any six resources" options so you're never completely screwed.) I would play again.
Call to Adventure: This was a "learn to play" session and we didn't finish. You're playing fantasy characters and trying to accumulate traits like strength and wisdom, which you do by using the traits you already have to complete challenges. There's a "light side/dark side" aspect to the game, and if you're too good or too evil some options become unavailable to you. It seemed ok but nothing special.

That's a lot of games. They were fun but our pace was too aggressive for me. We need to adjust something next time; I think I want shorter days rather than fewer of them but I'm not sure. We did have some gaps during which we sat and read, but I was still tired -- too many people, too-harsh lighting, general wear and tear, maybe other things.

There's a club that runs most or all of the train games, and unlike with all the other games we played, they don't necessarily teach or, IMO, do even the basic level of support that you expect from a program slot with an admission fee. Some people acted like it was an imposition that we didn't already know games. In the case of Railroad Revolution, we were told that nobody was available to help us because they were having a tournament, but the game's over there and feel free to figure it out yourselves, so we lost the first hour to figuring out rules and setup. Now this would be fine if they were doing their own thing (and notified people), but these games are part of the general list of games you can play and must pay for at Origins, and the baseline expectation of Origins slots is that games will be taught if necessary unless stated otherwise. And the club chose what games to offer when, so it's not like their own tournament was a surprise. I'd like to either see the club change their approach (in any of several ways, their choice) or see Origins break their lock on this class of games. Since I doubt either will happen, I need to remember how this works for the future.

At an upcoming gaming convention we'll be playing in a session of True Dungeons. This is, sort of, RPGs meet LARP -- you go through a series of (actual, physical) rooms and face challenges (monsters and puzzles). But instead of actually fighting with weapons like in LARP or rolling dice like in RPGs, the combat system uses something like shuffleboards, and each round you slide a disk (representing your weapon) down the board and where it lands determines what happens. One of the advantages of taking a fighter class is that you get to practice with this shuffleboard first. Mental abilities including spellcasting are implemented through a system of symbols that you have to memorize -- to successfully cast this spell, tell us the name of this rune (or whatever). I've only played once and we didn't have a spellcaster in our small group, so I haven't seen that part in action. In each room, there is a (human) GM who manages the events in the room and adjudicates as needed.

One of the classes you can play is bard. One of the bard's abilities is "bard-song": everybody else gets a combat advantage while you're singing.

I have questions. :-)

Does the song need to be topical -- for example, do you get better bonuses if you sing a song about fighting a dragon while fighting a dragon? Does the song need to be of a particular type, like inspirational battle songs or ballads about heroes? Does the song need to be in English? Does the song need to have actual words or do fa-la-las and niggunim count? The character description is silent on these important matters. (In the back of my mind I wondered if I could just prepare "Horsetamer's Daughter" or "Maddy Groves" and be good for the whole two-hour game -- just pick up where I left off in the previous battle. :-) )

Last night I found the detailed rules and looked it up. Most bards sing, they say, but you can play an instrument (not a loud one!), recite poetry, or even dance. And then, it says, there is no actual requirement that the player really perform; you can just say you're invoking bard-song.

How disappointing. Fighters need to actually aim. Spellcasters need to actually remember stuff. Rogues (I didn't mention this before) need real dexterity to manipulate certain puzzles. But bards don't need to sing, even if they accept any song at all? Huh. Perhaps this is defense against people who sing badly off-key -- "no no it's ok, we believe you, here's your bonus"?

I won't know what class I'm playing until I get there; it depends on available equipment (each player gets a bag of tokens) and party balance (each class can only be represented once). But bard is on my short list because it sounds like fun, and I will ignore the nerfing and sing actual songs if I do it. They might be 13th-century French songs or 15th-century Italian songs because, hey, why not? But there will be actual singing.

As we did last year, Dani dug through the vast list of games that are being offered for playing and extracted a much shorter list of games that sounded interesting to him and that he thought I'd like. I then sorted that list into four piles: really want to play, want to play, would play, and would rather not. He will put this together with his own preferences, work the jigsaw magic of the schedule, and come up with something that works.

Fairly often, games we want to play aren't available in timeslots that work, or sell out before we can register (more a problem with GenCon, I understand). So you need to go in with more options than you'll need, so there's wiggle room. That all makes sense.

After I gave him my list, I noticed that I had 27 hours of "really want", 47 hours of "want", and 67 hours (what's with the 7s?) of "would play". The convention is (effectively) four days long. I do insist on sleeping.

So, yeah. I'll be interested in seeing what subset actually works. :-)

(This was out of a list of about 60 games. We mostly aim for shorter games -- for me it's damage-mitigation, in case something turns out to suck -- but our list did include both Advanced Civilization and History of the World.)

My congregation is trying to increase community-building activities beyond conventional religious activities like services. For example, we're¹ going to start a vegetable garden and use the produce in cooking get-togethers. (We already organize meals for people in mourning, with a new baby, dealing with illness, etc; we're now planning to do more joint cooking alongside the individual cooking that already happens.) A few other plans have been announced recently.

Noticably absent from these plans so far is gaming. I've already talked with the other boardgamers I know in the congregation and we all agree this would be a good thing to try. So now I need to pitch it to the powers that be and, if successful, the congregation. That is, I need a brief and catchy way describe the class of games that are popular at BoardGameGeek and Origins and GenCon, the EuroGames and rail games and worker-placement games and card-drafting games and so on, without implying "classic family games of yore" like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.²

Even if most of the actual "recruiting" ends up being one on one -- if we decide to start with "those who know" and expand gradually -- we'll still need to describe what we're doing in internal communications so that anybody who wants to can show up. Any suggestions for how to characterize these types of games when talking to people who don't know about them already?

(Yes, when it comes time to actually do it we'll lead with the gateway games, things like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico and Pandemic, and are prepared to teach and facilitate even if it means we don't get to play as much at first.)

¹ Exclusive "we"; gardening and I do not get along.

² Many years ago (before the other gamers I know were part of the congregation) there was an attempt at an afternoon of board games. I was one of four people who showed up; the organizer and the other two people (of my parents' generation), it turned out, really just wanted to socialize and didn't want to play anything outside of their (fairly narrow) comfort zone. I don't want to repeat that, so I'll need to somehow indicate (a) we're actually gonna play some games, and (b) you might not have played them, but (c) that's totally ok and we're not going to make you struggle.

A couple months ago I listed some games we played at Origins. We've now played a few more new-to-us games, some that a friend brought back from GenCon and some that coworkers introduced me to.

Orleans is is a worker-placement game with decent interaction. A novel feature is that workers are not generic; there are seven different types, and at the start of your turn you draw a designated number of workers from your bag. What shows up is what you have to work with that turn. Different assignments require different combinations of workers. As with games of this type, there is always more to do than you have time and resources to do. You can recruit workers, and each type of recruitment has a beneficial game effect like giving you resources (farmer) or advancing you on the knowledge (scoring) track (scholars) or increasing the number of workers you draw (knights). You can travel from town to town, building guild halls, which act as score multipliers. You can go after "citizen" tokens on various tracks, which are also score multipliers. You can focus on income or goods production, which add to victory points. You can permanently send some of your workers away to work on communal projects for various dividends. Every turn an event is announced at the beginning and enacted at the end -- taxes, plague, income, and more. When you've enacted the last of the 14 events, the game ends. I think a four-player game works best, though a two-player game is possible.

Istanbul (the dice game, not the card game) is a dice-allocation game. The goal is to collect six rubies. Rubies are available on several tracks; on each track the price increases with each one taken. On four tracks you buy rubies with resources of one of four types; on one track you buy them with combinations of resources; on one you buy them with coins; and on one you get them (for free) when you build five mosques. On your turn you roll a set of customized dice that give you resources, coins, or card draws. (Cards usually give you either resources or money, but not always.) After you roll you can take two actions based on the die rolls (take resources, take money, etc). After that you can buy rubies (as I described) or mosques, tiles that have prices and game effects. For example, one mosque might cost one resource of each color and give you an extra die. Another might cost three red resources and give you a red resource whenever you use the "take coins" action. One might cost three green and give you an extra action. You can also buy re-roll tokens to use when you really don't like some or all of your dice. A friend brought this over and said it works well for two players.

Trainmaker is a quick "push your luck" dice game. There are city cards; each city produces one of six types of goods and requires some combination of railroad cars to get there and get the goods. You are trying to collect cities, and win if either you collect all the goods types or you satisfy a secret victory condition. (Mine, for example, was to collect three corn or three coal.) On your turn you roll a bunch of dice that have, on their faces: locomotive x2, the three car types, and a caboose. (I didn't notice how many dice there are -- 7 or 8?) To start you must play a locomotive and at least one car; you then reroll the remaining dice and must play another car. Iterate until you play a caboose to end your train or run out of dice/rolls without doing so and derail. If you don't derail and the cars you played match one of the three visible cities, take it. If you're feeling lucky, you can start all that by playing two locomotives, which means that after you finish your first train, you get to go again -- but, of course, this means you took a die out of circulation for that first train. With learning, this was maybe 20 minutes -- a good filler game when one group has finished a game and is waiting for another group to finish theirs so we can shuffle players around.

I described First Class in my Origins post. We've played it a few times with two and three players and like it. Thus far we have only played modules A and B, the ones they recommend for new players. We'll explore some of the other three, though one of them sounds wholly uninteresting to me so maybe not that one.

Magical Treehouse is a card-drafting, engine-building game with a speed element. In each of four rounds you draft five cards, one of which you will use to bid for turn order and four of which you can play in ascending order within "suits" to build one or more treehouses. Some cards let you place "familiars" on a board to collect resources; some levels of your treehouses require resources as inputs. There's an extra score-influencing reward for finishing quickly. After four rounds of this you score -- visible cards have points, plus things you can actually make based on the resources you've claimed score points, plus there are some "have the most of resource X" points. Meh; I don't expect to play again.

Shards of Infinity is a deck-building slugathon for up to four players. The mechanic is similar to Dominion: draw cards from your deck, optionally buy cards that are for sale, play cards from your hand, deal damage to other players or their champions (cards) based on the cards you played, discard and draw a new hand. One thing I like about this game over Dominion is that card "affinities" are easier to see; there are four colors of cards and many of them give enhancements within color -- e.g. playing two green cards gets you something that playing one doesn't. (For one color, there are some enhancements if you play all three other colors.) I suspect that, like Dominion, this game will generate gazillions of expansions, none of which we'll buy.

I went to the Origins gaming convention for the first time this year. (Dani's been before and asked me to try it with him.) We chose games we've never played before that sounded interesting from their blurbs and BoardGameGeek pages. Here's a rundown on games we played:

Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild: Season of Factions' Favor: cooperative card-based adventure game. We've never played the Pathfinder RPG on which it's based. Solid meh.
Lancaster (Queen Games); worker-placement game with competition (your workers can kick others' weaker workers out). Shorter and less complex than Caylus, a game we want to like and usually like when we actually play it but we often resist playing it because of those factors. We bought a copy of Lancaster after playing once.
First Class: card-based train game that initially looked simple-minded but has some nuance to it. We enjoyed it and plan to buy it (didn't find it for sale there). The actual running of this game at the con was poor, but the game itself is good.
Aventuria Adventure Card Game: another cooperative card-based fantasy game. Ok but not novel; probably would have felt better a few years ago. I don't have strong memories from this now and might edit this entry after I refresh my memory at BoardGameGeek later.
Too Many Bones (Undertow): also a cooperative adventure game, futuristic this time and not card-based. You use dice to attack and defend against the monsters, and each character has specific skills which are also dice-based. We played through a scenario where the group had to make decisions along the way to fighting the big boss-monster. We ran out of time before the boss fight but had several others. The GM/teacher here was very active, treating it as more of a demo than an actual game session, which made it hard to evaluate. So dunno, maybe? Not a priority, but I'd play again. Also, the company has a very nice solution to the problem of needing to roll lots of dice without disrupting stuff on the table; this is way better than box lids. They're supposed to have their gizmo available for purchase in a couple weeks.
Mare Nostrum: Empires: we played Mare Nostrum once years ago and it didn't work well for us, but it's been redesigned since then so we signed up. Two things then happened: (1) we needed to resolve a scheduling conflict elsewhere, and (2) we saw the dread phrase "all expansions available" in the updated description. Piles of expansions tend to weaken games in both of our opinions, so we punted.
True Dungeon Adventures: this is sort of "live RPG" with abstracted mechanics and a lot of scenery and props. This deserves an entry of its own.
Sword & Sorcery (Ares Games): yet another cooperative fantasy game, this time with cards, miniatures, and a dungeon layout. They were apparently running a campaign (or at least a series of games) over several sessions, so we played "part 3" but it didn't matter that we didn't have the prior context. The characters (I played a dwarven cleric with a big-ass hammer) were well-balanced and play was not too complex. My character had a couple pieces of equipment and a healing spell, each of which was tracked with a card, which wasn't bad at all. Others were similar. I would play this again.
Railways of the World: tile-based train game where you build a network of tracks to move goods around the board. You start with no money and take out bonds as needed to build track and upgrade your engine. You pay interest on those bonds every turn, so you have to balance investment (at 20% interest per turn) against getting left behind while others build the stuff you wanted. Both Dani and I collected more bonds than the experienced player who was teaching us; that player interpreted the style as aggressive (it might have been more of "we don't know what we're doing") and said "I like the way you guys play". He won anyway, but not by a lot. We played on a map of Mexico. This game is more forgiving than Age of Steam and less complex than the 18xx games, which puts it right in our sweet spot. I want to get this.
Quest for the Antidote: the king and all of the players have been poisoned, and the goal is to be the first one to collect the ingredients needed for a cure and deliver them to the palace before you expire. The score counts down and is measured in "breaths". This sounded cute but turned out to be overly simplistic; probably good for families but it didn't do much for us.
Power Grid: yeah yeah, I know -- how have we gotten this far without ever having played Power Grid? We keep hearing good things about it but as far as I know nobody in our gaming group owns it. That will change as soon as we can order it (sold out at the con). Players are competing to power cities on a map (we played on a map of Germany). To do this you need power plants (which are auctioned), fuel unless you manage to get wind or hydro plants, and connected cities (which cost money). Each turn you get income based on how many cities you can power. We both enjoyed this game a lot, and I came within a few dollars of winning (which apparently impressed the GM). There are lots of maps available.
Evolution: you are playing and developing one or more species of animal. Everybody needs to eat, food is limited, and some species are carnivores which isn't much fun for the prey. Cards each have a numeric value and a trait; traits are things like "long-necked" (gets first shot at food others can't reach), "climbing" (protection from non-climbing carnivores), "body fat" (can store food), and, perhaps most important and fairly elusive, "intelligence" (which lets you get food in other ways). You use these cards either as their traits, as discards to improve your population or body size, as discards to start a new species, or -- one card per turn -- as your contribution to the watering hole (food), which is where the numbers matter. You can replace traits. I liked this game and felt it was what American Megafauna should have been; Dani was more lukewarm on it. This must be played on a table where everybody can easily see everybody ele's cards, which was not true of the large round table we played on.
Pulsar 2849: space exploration/colonization game with dice drafting. You have competing needs -- improve your technology, claim new galaxies, claim pulsars and use them to get power. When you choose dice that are either above or below the median roll for that round, you pay (or gain) position on your choice of two tracks, one that helps with technology and one that establishes turn order. This seemed like a well-balanced game; we ran out of time before finishing so we jumped to final scoring but missed some of the late-game stuff. I would play this again.
Freedom - the Underground Railroad (Academy Games): cooperative game set in 19th-century America. You are trying to move slaves from the plantations to the north and ultimately to Canada, but (almost) every time you move a slave, one of the slave-catchers moves in that direction. A new ship arrives every turn, and if there aren't enough open spaces in the plantation those slaves are lost. Your goal is to get a certain number to Canada before you lose a threshold number. (Or run out of cards, or some other losing conditions.) To move you need to buy "conductor" tokens, and to get money you need to do fundraising. You also need to pay support costs. There are also event cards. Each player has a (different) special ability. The game felt well-balanced (we barely won a beginner-calibrated game). We both liked it (Dani more so). I felt a little weird about the setting in a way that's hard to explain; it felt wrong to be playing a fantasy-hero game for recent horrific history that still affects people.
Flow of History (Grand Gaming Academy): card-based civilization-building game. Fairly light and quick. Acquiring improvements is a two-step process that other players can interrupt, so it's decently interactive. The ending felt rushed.
Dungeon Draft: punted so we could sleep in a little on Sunday. I guess it sounded good at the time we signed up, but last night we decided we didn't need yet another card-based dungeon game.
Atlantis Rising: the residents of Atlantis have angered the gods, who are responding by flooding the island. The players win if they can build a portal and escape before the whole island is gone. To build it, you need to gather resources from the tiles on the island. If the tile you're on floods, no resource for you (but you don't drown). The rate of flooding increases as the game goes on. Each player has some special ability. We won but not easily. I enjoyed it.

madfilkentist recently pointed me to this article about writing characters with disabilities by Kari Maaren. It's a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. Here's a taste:

So when I see fictional disability, I recognise the tropes. I’ve heard Matt Murdock described as “a blind man whose power is that he can see,” and yeah, that’s a common one. The “blind seer” is a particularly frustrating trope because its purpose is so dazzlingly clear: you want a blind person in your story because that’s so tragic, but you also don’t want the inconvenience of, well, having a blind person in your story. So he’s blind, but it’s okay! He can really see through his magical powers! He’s been compensated for his disability! Yay!

I tweeted a link, and somebody replied there asking for tips on including disabilities in role-playing-game systems without being disrespectful or creating broken player incentives. I said a few things there, but I think my readers are likely to have useful thoughts on this and why should we do it in ~~140~~ 280-character chunks? So please comment, share useful links, etc. I'm going to share a link to this post.

Game (or other fictional) characters have a variety of traits. We gamers sometimes over-focus on a few stats, but a real, rich character is much more than ratings for strength, intelligence, endurance, dexterity, and so on. That's true whether the extra richness comes from the character's family background, formative experiences in wizard school, handicaps, affinity for fire, compassion for small furry animals, or whatever. So to me, three-dimensional characters depend on the players wanting to play that kind of game. I think these tend to be the same players who are interested in story-based games.

That's not all players. That's ok. You can't, and shouldn't, force richer characters where they're not wanted.

Regardless of game mechanics, players who want to play characters who are disabled in some way -- really play them, I mean, not use them as jokes or sources of offsets for abilities -- will do so. I had a player once who played, well, a vision-challenged character -- a challenge that the player proposed as a logical consequence of the character backstory he'd invented. He wasn't looking for any offsetting benefits.

Now, the game system can help or hinder this, and the person I'm talking with is interested in developing game systems that support disabled characters in a meaningful way. Game systems, like players, come on a spectrum. At one end it's all about optimization; at the other end it's all about good story. At the optimization end, you get players saying things like "I'll take the blindness penalty in order to get extra points for spellcraft". Champions was like this. I never actually played; I went through character creation once and decided it wasn't my style of game. But people did (and I assume do) play, and not all of them are only focused on points optimization, so I'm interested in hearing how they roleplay rich, sometimes-disabled characters in that kind of game system.

At the other, story, end of the spectrum you get games like Dogs in the Vineyard, where characters are nothing but collections of interesting backstory, traits, and growth. I only played a few times and not recently so I might have this wrong, but I don't think there even are stats for things like strength. What you have is things like "I had this formative childhood experience that made me really afraid of guns" (minuses to shooting, panicking under fire, etc), and during the campaign as you have to interact with guns that characteristic might gradually change. You know, just like people often do. Meanwhile, during the game you have other experiences, which might be character-affecting too... There's not a lot of bean-counting, of tit-for-tat -- I took fear of guns, so I'm allowed to be extra-good at riding. It works if the group wants it to work. Dogs has a system (and I'm told there's a broader "Fate" system that uses the same mechanic, if you're not into the setting built into Dogs), but it's not a very pushy system. When we played Dogs, we were mostly telling a collaborative story with occasional dice-rolling.

A story-oriented game system can support character disabilities well. Willing players can support disabilities in any system. What I don't know is how game systems not already at the story-oriented end of the spectrum can facilitate good treatment of character disabilities. Or is this something that is best left out of rules systems and placed in the hands of players?

Thoughts? (If my Twitter correspondent is reading, you can log in using any OpenID credential, create a Dreamwidth account (easy, no spam), or comment anonymously.)

Dani has gone to GenCon, a huge gaming con, a few times and enjoyed it. (He started going after Origins, a large gaming con, took a quality dive some years ago.) He asked me to go with him this year and I agreed despite its size. (It is, literally, an order of magnitude bigger than any SF con I've been to.) We talked about things I would need from him to help me not be overwhelmed by it, and he was fine with making those accommodations.

Then the schedule of events came out at the end of May and I realized that a convention an order of magnitude bigger than any I've been to also has a program an order of magnitude bigger than any I've seen. Even after Dani sorted the spreadsheet into categories and suggested some pruning mechanisms, I stared at that "board games" tab and kind of wilted.

But I don't need to find All The Best Games; I just need to find enjoyable games. So Dani made a pass through it for things he thought were interesting, and I reviewed his picks and gave him a short "no" list and a short "meh" list and said everything else was fine. (I'd already reviewed some other categories, including "spouse activities" (yes they have "spouse activities"), for things I could do while he was doing things I didn't want to do.) The general plan was to attend most things together, splitting only on these differences of interests. This is all very kind of him. We were going to mostly attend this con as a couple, which is cool.

Then he took all that data and went to sign us up for things, and... almost everything on the "A" list, both games and other things (seminars, concerts, brewery tour (ok that one was for me), etc) were booked already. He started to assemble a schedule based on the "B" list but it was hard and, anyway, it was the "B" list. He said this has not been a problem in the past, but this year is GenCon 50 and that probably has something to do with it. So we bailed. We'll try this another year, when he can show me his con in a better light and not be feeling "meh" already before even getting there.

A friend brought some new games home from GenCon and brought them over this past weekend. We played each of these games once, for three players.

Mystic Vale is a deck-building game (like Dominion, for example), but instead of adding cards to your deck you augment cards. Your deck always has 20 cards, each of which has three "slots". Some are blank and some start with one slot filled. Slots produce resources, which you can use to buy overlays. Each card is in a plastic sleeve and each overlay is a transparent sheet of clear plastic with one of the three regions filled in; you slide the overlay into the sleeve to use it. On your turn you deal out some cards (the exact number varies), use the resources to buy overlays (or some other special cards), and then discard all those cards. You go through the deck a lot, gradually building up resources so you can buy better stuff. Some of the cards grant victory points, which is ultimately what matters.

The game is very pretty, and it's pretty in a non-invasive way. (I often find pretty games to be hard to play, because the art overruns the function.) I think our game was about an hour, though the next one would be faster because we were learning. I liked this game a lot and would gladly play it in preference to Dominion; Dani thought it was ok and much prefers Dominion.

Next up were two quick games from Perplext. These are tiny games with few moving parts; they're designed to fit in a pocket and be playable, for example, on a table at a restaurant while you're waiting for your food. In one game, Gem, you bid to buy cards with gems on them, which you can use to buy more cards; goal is to corner the market on particular gem types. There are six gem types in the game; you get points for having the most of any type, and one point for each gem you have at all. It's a lightweight auction game that calls for some planning and strategizing. I'd like to play this one again, too.

The other Perplext game was Bus. You lay out a (randomized) grid of city streets with some bus stops and some destinations (color-coded). At bus stops you can pick up fares, which you score when you deliver them. A fare card has a point value and a speed limit and they tend to add up to the same number -- so the more benefit you get from a delivery, the slower you'll move to do it. There was one usability problem with this game: the red and pink passengers/destinations were quite difficult to distinguish from each other. It was a cute game but not one I'd seek out again.

Somewhere in there we also introduced our friend to Roll Through the Ages: think Advanced Civilization distilled down to a dice game and abstract commodities and improvements, playable in about 20 minutes.

The last game we played, and a clear winner for all of us, was Fantahzee. The similarity of that name to "Yahtzee" is quite intentional. Players are defending a town that's under attack by an army of monsters; on your turn you can play heroes from your hand, then (try to) activate them this round, then attack monsters. If you don't kill the lead monster you lose part of the town (negative points to you). You get victory points for killed monsters.

The activation is dice-based. Each hero has an activation cost represented in die rolls -- "4", or "2 of a kind", or "1 2 3", and so on. The powerful ones are harder to get. You start with five dice and get up to three rolls; after each roll you can allocate any dice you want to activate heroes and then reroll the rest. Some of the heros, once activated, grant you extra dice or extra rolls, which is essential. Many of them have other special abilities, like extra defense. There's a lot of randomness, but you also need to plan your party of adventurer heros to balance between power and ability to actually activate. I think this one took about an hour.

Last Shabbat, friends introduced us to a new-ish board game, Splendor. Here's how Board Game Geek describes it:

Splendor is a game of chip-collecting and card development. Players are merchants of the Renaissance trying to buy gem mines, means of transportation, shops — all in order to acquire the most prestige points. If you're wealthy enough, you might even receive a visit from a noble at some point, which of course will further increase your prestige.

The game setup includes chips for each of the five gem types, cards in three levels of value that you can buy, and a small number of patrons who becomes yours if you satisfy their individual conditions. Every card counts as producing one gem of its color, and cards cost varying numbers of gems in different combinations. So, for example, if a card requires one red, one blue, and one black, and you have a black card, then you can buy the card for one red chip and one blue one. If that card produces blue, then the next time you can automatically pay black and/or blue without expending chips. So, the more cards you acquire the fewer chips you need... except that higher-level cards have higher costs, so you still need chips throughout the game.

Victory points come from higher-end cards (the lowest-level cards confer no points, only gem production) and from patrons. Patron conditions are based on cards, for example if you have four red and four green cards.

On your turn you can take chips, buy cards, or reserve cards (set a card aside that you will buy later, so someone else doesn't beat you to it). There are several cards available for purchase at any given time, so you're trying to balance costs (what can you afford), card type (you might want particular colors either to help with future purchases or for patrons), and what other players might do (if you spend this turn getting the chips to buy that card you want, will the card still be there next turn?). It's a well-balanced game, allowing for future planning without bogging down in it. We played several four-player and three-player games, and each took about half an hour.

The game is well-made; the plastic chips are hefty enough to saty where you put them on the table, the cards are sturdy, and -- rare for board games these days -- the molded compartments in the game box actually match up with the pieces. The game is pretty without the art impeding function.

The gem theme is just a theme; it's not intrinsic to the game the way, say, trains are intrinsic to Eurorails or building settlements is intrinsic to Settlers of Catan. The game would not play differently if rubies, emeralds, sapphires, onxy, and diamonds were replaced with wood, brick, stone, grain, and sheep. But the theme also doesn't get in the way, and even if we called the elements "red", "green", etc, there's no reason you couldn't treat them as gems.

Forwarded by

siderea: How to win at Monopoly and lose all your friends.

Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you're playing to win, and that it wasn't your idea to play Monopoly in the first place.

Do some research on BoardGameGeek.com, and head down to your local gaming shop, where more often than not, you'll find knowledgeable staff and even demo sets for you to try before you buy. It shouldn't be too hard to convince your friends to try something new, especially if you offer to play another round of Monopoly.

For his birthday Dani received a copy of Caverna, a worker-placement game in the style of Agricola. We quite enjoy Agricola but hadn't heard of Caverna before.

This was pretty serendipitous; his family knows we like board games, doesn't know very much about the games we like, but found their way to this. They got advice at Snakes and Lattes, which sounds like an interesting place. As a nice coincidence (I don't think they knew to look for this), this game supports seven players, which is unusual in the games we enjoy. (Yes yes, of course Seven Wonders, and if you've got 8-12 hours there are other options.)

Like in Agricola, each player plays a family of workers trying to grow a farm and family. In Caverna you're playing a family of dwarves, and you have both cavern spaces (living quarters, mines, special rooms) and forest (that you clear for crops and pastures). Agricola's occupations and improvements have been replaced by (a smaller number of) special rooms that you can build. Some aspects of production have been expedited; for example, a single action can get you a double tile (field and meadow) and grain that you can later plant in that field. The game has ten turns, a few fewer than Agricola. It's easier to get food to feed your family, but harvests are more frequent so you need more. Harvests occasionally go...wrong.

There are two "wildcard" aspects to the game, rubies and expeditions. Rubies come from one of the possible actions each turn, and you can also dig ruby mines in your cave. Rubies, in turn, can be spent to get one of, well, pretty much anything -- a building resource, a crop to plant, food, an animal, and some special tiles. If you have some rubies, it's much easier to get out of a bind than it is in Agricola -- you can get that last bit of wood to add to your house, or that grain or vegetable to plant, or one more animal to eat.

The other "wildcard" is expeditions. You can spend ore (which you get from actions or from your ore mines) to give a dwarf a weapon, and armed dwarves can take expedition actions. An expedition lets you choose 1-3 items (depending on the type of expedition); how good those items are depend on the quality of the weapon (more ore = better weapon, plus they get better with use). As with rubies, most things in the game are available this way.

We've played two (two-player) games so far and enjoyed them. We'll definitely be pulling this out at the next games day (whenever that is), in addition to playing more games ourselves. The instructions claim the game is 30 minutes per player, but so far we're coming in around 45 minutes per, plus setup and cleanup. I assume we'll get faster as we learn the game better.

There's just one down-side, which we're trying to rectify: the game has a lot of pieces, many of which look similar enough at first glance that you do want to separate them. But they get mixed up in play, so setup and cleanup take a lot of time.

No, really, a lot:

Caverna

That box is 5-6 inches deep.

Dani ordered some sectioned boxes that, with luck, will let us play right out of the trays, instead of having to dump pieces out on the table and try to keep them vaguely sorted.

Fun game, and a nice gift!

We went to

alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (

blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

Friends invited some people over for gaming yesterday. I played one new game and two new variants of games I already knew.

We usually play Carcassonne with the river and cathedral expansions. This was my first time playing with whatever expansion introduces the dragon and princess. This adds chaos to the game: there are six volcano tiles, and when one of those comes out you place the dragon on it. Twelve other tiles are regular tiles but also have a dragon mark on them; after you play the tile the dragon is moved (six spaces total; players take turns directing the move). If the dragon lands on a player marker it eats it. Losing farmers in fields you can no longer get into is especially irritating, though losing guys in nearly-finished cities and cloisters hurts too. There is also a fairy token, which protects one tile against the dragon; if you don't play a token on your turn you can claim the fairy, so it moves around a lot. There are also "princess" and "portal" tiles that, in our game, had a less-pronounced effect on the game. Overall, I found that this expansion disrupted the game and also lengthened it, and while I'm glad to have played it once, it's not on my must-do-again list.

(In general, every Carcassonne expansion adds tiles without taking any away, so the game keeps getting longer. I seem to recall 30-minute games early on, but none recently.)

We played a couple games of Seven Wonders, one with the "leaders" expansion. (I hadn't been aware that Seven Wonders had expansions, but it has more than one.) With this expansion you draft four leader cards and can play one at the beginning of each age (so up to three of them). Leaders cost money to play and give a wide range of advantages; I had one that gave me a victory point for each gold card, one that gave me a one-coin rebate on purchases from neighbors, and I forget what my others were. One of my neighbors had one that conferred a military advantage, and she was already playing the military-minded city (so well-played). There was one that gave a victory point for each color of card you had in play. This expansion also adds two more cities, one of which gives discounts on buying leaders (in place of giving a resource). The leaders did help to channel one's strategy; I wasn't really feeling the lack of variety in the base game that leads to expansions, but maybe when I've played more I will.

This was also the first game in which the "card trees" really worked for me: I think I played four cards for free because I had the prerequisite cards, and previously I'd never played a game where I got more than one that way. Most of our games aren't seven-player like this one was, and with fewer players not all cards are in play, so that makes a difference. On the other hand, there's more competition for the cards; each of these free plays was a decision made in the moment, not part of a larger strategy.

This was my first time playing with sleeved cards. I understand the desire to protect one's cards, but I won't be in a hurry to sleeve ours -- the combination of the reflective surface and the lights in the room wasn't a good one for me.

The new-to-me game was Dixit, which is a short social game in the same vein as Apples to Apples. You have a hand of cards with art on them; the active player chooses a card from his hand and provides a clue of some sort (description, phrase, song lyric, noise, whatever); each other player selects a card that also matches that clue. Cards are shuffled and revealed and players vote on which card was the active player's. Having either everybody or nobody guess correctly is bad for the active player; otherwise, points are given based on correct guesses and playing cards that fooled people. We only played for about 20 minutes before breaking for dinner. I wasn't very good at it (especially in the active-player role), but I would enjoy playing more to see if I can do better. Presumably part of the key to this one is to play with different people; otherwise as you learn the cards a group might fall into ruts.

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to

siderea.

I don't think I've ever seen mammatus clouds before. They sure are pretty.

This information visualization on population per land area surprised me at the extremes (Bangladesh and UAE).

Avram's letter to his parents on leaving home, an interesting little d'var torah for Lech L'cha (starts with Genesis 12).

A few weeks ago I played Quack in the Box for the first time. It's a fun, cynical little game about health care, and now that I've linked it here, with luck I won't forget its name. :-)

Not a link, but is anybody else suddenly seeing a lot of LJ spam?

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

A few years ago Dani bought a copy of American Megafauna, which I have written about before. The idea is that it's 250 million years ago and the players are playing proto-lizards and proto-mammals competing for viability in a world that's still changing due to things like ice ages and continental drift. The game concept is interesting but overall I found the game mechanics and physical set-up too challenging for the amount of enjoyment the game provided, so I stopped playing. Dani wasn't as frustrated as I was, but he did agree that the game was broken in some ways. So we ended up not playing it much, even at larger game days where it seemed possible to find four people interested in playing it.

There had been rumors of an impending new edition for a while, and when it opened for pre-order Dani went ahead and did so despite the early reports from play-testing. Basically, as I understand it, the play-testers were saying that some things needed to be changed, but the publisher really wanted to hit a deadline (a particular gaming convention) so he went ahead anyway, apparently with the idea that he could publish rules updates. Not auspicious, but Dani is more willing to invest the effort to figure these things out, so more power to him.

Meanwhile, at Origins this year Dani saw or heard about another game by this designer: in this one the players are various hominids competing to see who gets to be homo sapiens. Do you detect a theme? :-) Origins: How We Became Human was published a few years ago, and Dani ordered a copy.

We've played each game once, so it's too early to draw conclusions, but some notes:

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This weekend

alaricmacconnal and Kathy hosted a day of gaming. I got to play two new-to-me games (along with others), Through the Ages (board game) and Innovation (card game).

( Read more... )

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from

filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

I came out of my previous encounters with Defenders of the Realm, a cooperative board game, with one big question: is it possible for the players to win? Others in our gaming group shared this question, so this weekend four of us assembled to test the hypothesis. We theorized that having the cleric in the game is a huge factor, so we played two games with and two without. There are eight characters total, so we chose the cleric and three random ones, played two games, and then played with the remaining four. Exhaustive trials would have taken longer; the experiment doesn't have to be completed in one day.

( so what happened? )

Dani played Defenders of the Realm at Origins and found it promising despite its high similarity to another game we enjoy, so he ordered a copy. We've now played a few games.

This is a cooperative game where the players are trying to prevent the spread of four strains of monsters before they overwhelm the map. The map consists of a bunch of interconnected sites, each color-coded to one of the four types of monster. On each turn new monsters appear in designated locations (dictated by cards), and if you get more than three monsters in a particular location that spot becomes tainted. Each type of monster also has a general; the generals might move during the "darkness spreads" stage (also when new monsters come out), and if any of them reach the capital you lose. Other ways to lose are to run out of taint markers and to run out of monsters of any given color. You attack monsters by going to their locations and rolling combat dice; you attack generals by accumulating cards of the right colors, which you draw each turn. Each player has a unique role with associated special abilities. You win by killing all four generals.

But wait; this isn't at all like Pandemic. Why, this is non-deterministic! You have to roll dice to attack infections, er, monsters. And the infection, err, darkness-spreads, cards don't get reshuffled and put back on top. And taint is completely different from outbreaks. Um, yeah.

But all that said, it's an enjoyable game; while it blatantly rips off most of the Pandemic mechanics, it doesn't feel like a complete knock-off. This is its own game, though I do wonder how the publisher has stayed out of trouble.

( more details )

At Origins Dani played Agricola and found it worthy of more exploration, so he bought a copy. We've played several two-player games and yesterday we played a four-player game. The game is evocative of Puerto Rico and Caylus and plays in about half an hour per player. I've found it a lot of fun so far.

The description from BoardGameGeek starts:

In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?

In each turn you can take one action per person in your family. Each action can only be taken once per turn, so there is competition for certain spaces (not always the same ones). A new action becomes available each turn. Some actions provide resources, some allow you to plow and sow fields, some let you build things (which consume resources), and some let you acquire skills, and, later, some let you expand your house and then grow your family. You start the game with a hand of two types of cards, minor improvements (these are things you can build) and occupations (skills). Both give you some sort of advantage and there's a great variety. For example, the fishing pole (cost one wood) lets you take extra food from the "fish pond" action. The woodworker (occupation) lowers the cost of building wood improvements. The oven (costs three clay and a stone) lets you bake bread (one grain becomes five food).

At set points during the game there are harvests: you take grain or vegetables from your sown fields, must feed your family (if you have a fireplace you can cook animals or vegetables for this), and then can increase your flocks/herds (if you have enough fenced pastures to hold them). As you increase your family you need more food and as the game goes on the harvests get closer together.

Scoring is based on how well you did in several factors, and, like all optimization games, you have to choose which ones to pursue and which ones to accept lower scores for. You lose points if you didn't touch a category at all (for example if you had no plowed fields or no grain). Points are given for plowed fields, fenced pastures, three different types of livestock, two different crops, upgrades to your house, and number of family members, and some improvements also give points. So you'll find yourself facing quandries like "if I don't get a vegetable to sow I'll lose points for that, but if I blow that off I could build this improvement that'll be worth points, but it requires materials I might not be able to get in time".

I find that the cards add a lot of variety to the game without adding a lot of complexity. When I play Puerto Rico I'll probably settle into one of the established strategies (corn king, builder, variety, etc), depending on what the other players are doing. In Caylus (which I have not played as much) there also seem to be some basic strategies that players fall into, again depending on what others are doing. All of that is true of Agricola too, but the occupations and improvements in your hand can play a big role in this, so, at least so far, it feels like there are more strategies available. Or maybe it's just that the tactics are more varied. Either way, I'd like to play more.

Monica

True Dungeon

new games

Origins game con

bards, simplified

Origins game con

gaming outreach?

more new games

Origins games rundown

disabilities in RPGs and other fiction

no GenCon

new games

Splendor

Link: how to win at Monopoly and lose all your friends

first look: Caverna

random bits

some gaming notes

misc updates

a few links

"7 things" #2

[games] first look: Origins, Bios Megafauna

gaming day

link round-up (mostly)

game report: Defenders of the Realm

new game: Defenders of the Realm

new game: Agricola

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