3/21 - War of the Ring, Collector's Edition with Ian

So Ian contacted me towards the beginning of the week and proposed getting together to play some games on Sunday. Now, Ian rarely takes the initiative in organizing gaming, and he rarely plans anything that far in advance, but I didn't think much of it. He mentioned playing War of the Ring, which is a game we'd played once before and quite liked. We arranged to play on Sunday and I didn't think much of it.

However, when I saw him coming up the stairs lugging an enormous duffel bag, I recalled that he had mentioned wanting to get the Collector's Edition of the game. Now at the time, I took this the way I would Rush Limbaugh's promise to leave the country if health care reform passed - sure it would be great, but I didn't seriously think it was going to happen - Fantasy Flight was selling the collector's edition for $450, and that's if you could get your hands on one of the 2000 copies that were made. Nonetheless, there was Ian, hauling it up the stairs.

OK, yes, $450 is a lot, but damn, this thing is pretty. I took the picture on this page while we set up, but you might want to take a look at the pictures taken by way better photographers with way better cameras or pictures of how much larger the game is than a child. The wooden box weighs over 30 pounds and contains over 200 hand-painted figures.

After unpacking setting up, and refreshing ourselves on the rules (which are substantial), we...took a 2-hour break to watch Duke throttle Cal. As I was going to play Sauron, I was hoping that evil triumphing over good (because good...is dumb! - or at any rate lacking a serious inside presence) was a good omen for me.

To the game itself: War of the Ring does probably as good a job as any game I have ever played of staying true to its source material. It's just a brilliant design, and the path the game takes is almost always some kind of alternative universe version of the books. The Fellowship races towards Mordor, shedding companions one by one, as the forces of evil march inexorably towards the strongholds of good, threatening to overwhelm them before the ring can be cast into Mount Doom.

Unfortunately, in this particular alternate universe, while Frodo was teetering on the edge of losing the last trace of his humanity (hobbitanity?) to the ring, evil managed to take a page from good's "dumb" book and leave Dol Guldur completely undefended after crushing Lothlorien and Rivendell, allowing the forces of good to just waltz in and set up fortifications. And then, just as Sauron's forces were about to overwhelm Minas Tirith and Frodo was about to let the ring overwhelm him as he stood on the footsteps of Mount Doom, Galdalf led a final, desperate assault of Orthanc (with no help from the Ents who apparently couldn't be bothered), and after holding off the first couple assaults, Sauroman, several Ring Wraiths, and a handful of other defenders were unable to hold them off, and when that tower fell, so did Sauron's hope of conquering Middle Earth and buying everyone puppies. Stupid fat hobbits.

3/15 - Some new purchases with Hilary

So as you may have read elsewhere, Just Awesome Board Games is basically my favorite new place in the world, to the point where I have decided to buy games there instead of online despite the price difference. To that end, Hilary and I ordered a copy of Campaign Manager 2008 there for Marissa and Justin. When we went in to pick it up, they were having a "buy-2-get-1-50%-off" sale, so we kinda accidentally bought Word on the Street, Cardcassonne, and for good measure we put in our pre-order for the new Dominion expansion. The more we buy, the more we save! A couple days later, we sat down to try a couple of them out.

Word on the Street

Pulled this one out first. It's a game that is designed to be played by 2 teams, but can just as easily be played by 2 players. I enjoy word games, but I feel like they need a speed and/or simultaneous play element to be fun, especially with more than 2 players. Boggle and Bananagrams are both great in this regard, but Word on the Street is different enough from either of those that I don't mind owning it as well.

The board is a street with most of the letters of the alphabet (sans vowels and X/J/Z) represented as tiles. Players/teams take 30-second turns drawing a category card ("Things that you push", "Makes/models of cars", etc.), spelling a word that fits the category, and pulling the letters still on the board that are contained in that word towards them. If a letter is moved three spaces towards one team or the other, it is pulled off the board and that team claims it. First team to claim 8 letters (of 17) wins.

Unfortunately, the sand timer included in the game either came broken or broke the first time I flipped it over, but our kitchen timer was quickly drafted as a replacement. With 2 players, the game was quite a bit quieter and more thoughtful than I imagine it would be with more, but I feel like it will work either way (in fact at the last Just Awesome adult game night there had been a group of 10-12 playing it very loudly and having a great time). The game takes maybe 15 minutes, and Hilary liked it so much that she wanted to play it again immediately.

Cardcassonne

Chris 437, Hilary 378
This one we actually played with Erik (one of the Just Awesome owners) at their previous adult game night, and Hilary won it, so she was already predisposed to like it (and in fact it had been her suggestion to get it when we went on our mini shopping spree). It's a set-collection game where you are often playing things that other people are going to end with, so you need to be circumspect about what you play when.

With 3 I thought it was interesting, and I think I'll like it with 4-5 as well, but with 2 I found it just a little static and flat, which is too bad because I was hopeful it would work well. I'll try to play it a couple more times with more players, but I already begin suspect that Ra does everything Cardcassonne does but better (which is no slight on Cardcassonne as Ra is one of my favorites). Also the scores with 2 are kind of stupid-high, and for some reason I find that aesthetically off-putting. Must be why I like baseball and soccer too.

12/27 - Ferecon, Day 2

At long last, it's Ferecon day 2! Another full day of gaming, this one occupied mostly by party games. Weird.

Steam

Jim 43, Trevor 42, Chris 37, Bertram 35, Heather 31
Jim and Karen arrived first this morning with their twin boys Jeremy and Ethan. After trying out Steam the previous day, I was eager to try it again, and it seemed like the kind of thing Jim would like. We had fun playing it, but it did go a little longer than I'd anticipated/hoped, which meant that Karen got stuck watching the boys for most of their visit, which I felt bad about. At least Jim won, so there's that. Really need to play this again.

Wits and Wagers

Before Jim and Karen left, I managed to drag them into a game of Wits and Wagers, the trivia game for people who hate trivia games. At least when I say this game will take 15 minutes, I mean it. Players make Price-is-Right closest-without-going-over guesses on questions with large numerical answers, then bet on who gave the right answer. The further from the median the correct answer is, the higher odds you get for picking it, but that whole wisdom of crowds thing means that answers will tend to be towards the middle. I think it would be neat to try this with 15-20 players all guessing and see how close to correct the median (and/or mean) answer is. But I guess I'm just some kind of social statistics nerd.

Battlestar Galactica

Ted (Balthar) and Chris (Tyroll) (Cylons) lose to Grey (Tygh), John (Starbuck), Eric (Zarik), and Trevor (Adama)
At long last (OK, fine, after like 3 games), I got to be a Cylon! Yay! A number of new players and a lot of distraction meant a somewhat sloggy game of Battlestar Galactica, but the humans ended up coming through after being on the ropes for quite some time.

The Name in the Hat Game

Round 2 of our traditional name-in-the-hat game saw a return to usual form as Ted ran away with it - he just seems to be preternaturally good at this game. Must have to do with being Swedish or something.

Say Anything

It was getting too late for anything other than party games, so we took another spin at this Apples-to-Apples spin-off. I think we ended up in a multi-way tie for first, but we also learned that Aaron would write a book about computer graphics, and that Leslie's idea of a strange new year's resolution is -6 dpi. Right now, some of you are laughing, some of you are looking up 'dpi' in Wikipedia, and some of you think I accidentally put HTML in my text.

Telephone Pictionary

Soapbox time. Telephone Pictionary is the perfect name for this game. It describes it perfectly - it combines the "whisper something to the person next to you and see what comes out a the end of the line" of Telephone, and the "baby fish mouth/it's dignity Luann!" hilarity of Pictionary. I actually submitted it to the board game geek database with that name, and it was accepted. But now a couple years down the road *someone* had the clever idea to retitle it Eat Poop You Cat, which is non-descriptive and occasionally embarrassing to say. Boo. OK end soapbox.

Irregardless (take *that* lovers of the English language), Telephone Pictionary almost always ends with a lot of laughs, and this one was no exception. Somewhat bogglingly, I didn't take any pictures of the resulting game (which involves sentences and funny/terrible drawings thereof), so you'll just have to take my word for it.

12/26 - Ferecon 3.0, Day 1

Once a year Hilary and I host a 2-day gaming extravaganza on the weekend between Christmas and New Years. We cook a bunch of food, put out a bunch of tables and chairs, invite folks over and game away for ~12 hours each day. Usually peak at around 15-20 people each day. Here's what we played on the first day this year.

Elementeo

Trevor def. Chris 2-1
Elementeo is a tactical card game with the unlikely theme of the periodic table. Players take turns placing cards into a grid and then moving, attacking and using special abilities that are kinda-sorta related to the elements in question, with the goal of getting across to the other side of the board to inflict damage on the other player.

Trevor got this to play with his mom (who is a chemist), but he was the first one there so we decided to try a few games of it ourself. It was quick and light, kind of a not-quite-finished attempt to create a Magic: The Gathering style game with a tactical element (which I hear that Summoner Wars has done quite a bit better). It had a couple somewhat interesting strategic wrinkles, and a lot more game design polish probably could uncover a really good game, but it isn't quite there.

Kind of a shame because the art for this game is really quite nice and professional. I saw Matt Leacock (designer of Pandemic) give a talk where he talked about the importance of keeping your prototypes (both in board games and software) aligned with your design stage - you don't want to sink a bunch of money and time into making super nice components when you might decide you want to change something dramatically and half to scrap them - you get married to poor design choices because you don't want to have to start over. This game seemed to demonstrate that principal well.

Steam

Chris 44, Bertram 41, Grey 32, Trevor 26
I'd acquired Steam several months ago, but hadn't gotten a chance to play it. This was my first play for the weekend, and the first play for all of us. I had set the game up to solo a couple of turns so I could teach it, and I'm glad I did because it went pretty smoothly. I think with teaching we were right about 2-1/2 hours. Neat game. Will have to play more and with more experienced people to get a better handle on it.

Small World

Bertram 84, Max 78, Chris 69, Grey 62, Trevor 67
Ferecon was in full swing now with 3 tables starting new games. I pulled out Small World, which I think was new only to Max. I had recently acquired the two small expansions for this game, which add a few new races and powers, but don't radically change gameplay. The most interesting new race was probably the Gypsies, who got points for abandoning regions at the beginning of a turn.

Red November

Another game I'd picked up at the Black Diamond Games auction ($7 for this one), Red November is a co-op where gnomes are stuck in a failing submarine and trying to keep the thing from breaking up, launching nuclear missiles, running out of air, or flooding for long enough for help to arrive.

It says something about the amount of the Warhammer and Warcraft mythos I've been exposed to that I don't find the idea of gnomes running a submarine strange in the least. It can be quite confusing to people whose picture of "gnome" is limited to the Travelocity mascot and fake ethnographic studies.

We played 2 games of this because we died so fast the first time. A pretty neat game, hampered by a somewhat disorganized rulebook and overall tinyness (it is designed to fit in a very small box which is either a clever nod to the cramped quarters on a submarine or a little cost-cutting on the part of Fantasy Flight). We lost the second game too, but I do want to try this some more now that I get the idea.

The Name in the Hat Game

The Name in the Hat Game is my high-school friend's name for the party game where a bunch of names are put in a hat, one person draws one out, and gives clues to try to get the other person to guess it. It's been sold under a bunch of names, most recently as Time's Up, and it is the basis for gameshows like $25,000 Pyramid and Password.

It is our traditional "getting towards the end of the evening, let's play a game with all 10-15 people who are left" game. We played. I kept score. I was kind of drunk, so odds are good I screwed up the score a few times, but according to what I had, Aaron beat me on a tiebreaker (I'd had one more turn than him).

Say Anything

A few people left, and those of us that were left played a 9-player game of Say Anything, basically a more free-form and slightly more personal version of Apples to Apples. When the score is fun to fun, everyone is a winner.

12/19 - D&D FAIL

Went over to John's on the 19th to play in the D&D game he runs. Unfortunately, Ian ending up having to work due to a work crisis, we didn't have enough to play, so we hauled out a few games to play instead.

Monsters Menace America

Jake is not generally a board game fan, find them a bit dry, so we wanted to find something with an interesting theme. Monsters Menace America, in which players take control of a sci-fi movie style monster and basically try to destroy as much stuff as they can. Each player also takes control of a branch of the military to try to put up some resistance against the other player's monsters (they are roughly as effective as the military is in most monster movies).

The game is not without its problems - the entire "run around the board smashing stuff" part of the game is rendered somewhat moot by the "battle royale" at the end of the game where the monsters duke it out for supremacy, but it is reasonably light on rules, not too long, and it looks fantastic. We played two games, of which I won the first and Grey the second.

Race for the Galaxy

After the second game of Monsters Menace America, Grey and Jake went home, but John and I played a few more games. We started with Race for the Galaxy, which I brought over. One problem with having played this game 100+ time is that the games tend to run together, so I don't know what happened in this game, but John won 37-34.

Attika

Not a prison-riot simulation, but a game where players are building Greek city-states by gathering resources and placing tiles. With more players Attika suffers from a bit of kingmaking - often one player will be in a position where they are forced to stop another player from winning, but in so doing they slow themselves down enough that they take themselves out of the game as well. No such problem with 2 though, where the game is probably best. I edged John out in this one.

Elfenland

Older Speil des Jahres winners are sometimes a mixed bag as they tended to be directed even more so than now towards "games that a German family might want to play with their kids" rather than "gamers" per se. That shows up in the art for Elfenland, which is not quite as saccharine as My Little Pony, but it definitely has leanings in that direction.

It was designed by Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon, and like that game it centers around building routes. There's a lot more going on here though than in the simple rummy-mechanic of TTR. However, as a 2-player game it felt a little empty, but John and I both thought that our wives might like it and decided we'd pull it out the next time the 4 of us got together.

12/7 - A few games with Trevor and Eric

Trevor had surgery on his ankle to try to stop his hip from hurting. Next week he'll be getting a haircut because he is hungry. In the meantime, Eric and I came over to keep him company and play some games with him in his convalescence.

---

Hey! That's My Fish!

Trevor 51, Chris 48
While the title may suggest a light-hearted luckfest, Hey! That's My Fish! is in fact a combinatorial (that's fancy gamer talk for a game with no luck and no hidden information) in disguise. The board is set up randomly and players take turns moving their penguin pieces around the board and claiming fish tiles. Like Shear Panic, the theme and pieces are so cute that many players who might balk at such a dry game will dive right in.

Hive

Chris def. Trevor
Another combinatorial with a theme to make it more palatable, Hive isn't so much cute as creepy.

Pandemic

Chris (Researcher), Eric (Dispatcher), and Trevor (Medic) win on normal difficulty
What happens when GUI designers tackle board game design. Incredibly clean looking game, to the point of sterility for some, but I think it is quite cool. Most cooperative games have started adding some kind of traitor element, but Pandemic is unapologetically an exercise in group-think.

Zendo

Trevor defeats Chris (Master: Eric)
Basically a completely open ended version of Mastermind, Zendo has one player arrange some colored pyramids in a configuration that abides by a rule that he has chosen, and then the other players submit arrangements to him and he tells them whether they fit his rule or not. It is played with the candy-colored translucent pyramids produced by Looney Labs for the Icehouse series of games, but there is really no reason that one couldn't play it with 5 paper-clips, 5 mismatched shoes, and a Wankel Rotary Engine.

12/5 - Can't Stop and Hive

Can't Stop

Won't somebody please help us stop? We Can't Stop! Seriously, I'm trapped in the internet. OK, actually, this was our last game of this for a while, but we've already gotten more than 50 cents of gameplay I'd say.

Hive

This evening, we went and visited my mom. I brought along Hive, a recent acquisition courtesy of the Black Diamond Games auction. My mom has a huge bee fetish - well, enthusiasm at any rate: she was a second grade teacher and teaching kids about bees was one of her favorite parts of the year. No surprise then that she really liked the theme of this game. She has asked me about "the bee game" a number of times since, but it's been hard to find time to play with her juggling 4 grandbabies and chasing/following my dad all around the globe in her retirement.

12/4 - Can't Stop

In an unsurprising development, we couldn't stop playing can't stop, so we played it again.

12/3 - Can't Stop with Hilary

I managed to pick up the Sid Sackson push-your-luck classic Can't Stop at a thrift store in Mammoth for 50 cents. All it was missing were a couple of dice, which I replaced easily enough. Hilary and I broke it out for the first time this evening. Players take turn rolling dice to move their pawns up a stop-sign shaped board - you can stop at any time, end your turn, and "bank" your progress, but if you elect to keep going and make a roll that for which you can't score anything, you lose all your progress from that turn. Players race to get three of their pawns up the track.

It's an extremely pure expression of the push-your-luck genre. It's only drawbacks are limited player range (2-4) and a bit of player downtime, which push it down a little below Incan Gold, but still one I'm glad to have picked up, particularly at the price.

November 15th: Quirkle and Hive

Hilary and I tried out a couple of the games I picked up at the Black Diamond Games ding and dent sale tonight.

Quirkle

First game we tried out was Quirkle. First impression is that it is a really nice looking and feeling game, with big chunky wooden pieces. The gameplay is rather like Scrabble with colors and shapes. Each row must be composed of a single color or shape (but no exact duplicates), and you can score bonus points by adding tiles that fit into multiple rows at once or by completing a row of 6 of one color or shape (there are 6 colors and 6 shapes, 3 tiles of each).

What I really like about the game is that it is incredibly easy to teach and learn. Anyone familiar with Scrabble can pick it up in about 2 minutes (if not it might take them as many as 3). What I'm not sure about is if there is any real depth here. While in Scrabble you are rewarded for being able to rearrange letters in your mind, most of the possibilities on a given turn of Quirkle will be obvious fairly immediately. There may be some further level of strategy (being able to set up plays for yourself or block your opponents), but it was not obvious to me on my first play.

And I'm not just bitter because Hilary beat me 230 to 200.

Lost Cities: The Board Game - July 18th, 2009

Lost Cities: The Board Game
Reiner Knizia's adaptation of his popular 2-player card game into a 4-player board game. In Europe, this game was released as Keltis with a different board but nearly identical rules. He has also designed Keltis: The Cardgame, which means it is Lost Cities: The Board Game: The Card game. Sort of.

Our friends Jim and Karen showed up with their twin 5-year old boys, Jeremy and Ethan. Hilary and I began to play a 4-person game of this with Jim and Karen, but as more people arrived, Hilary attended to hosting and was replaced by Aaron and we only ended up playing 2/3s of a game. In those 2 rounds Jim was dominant. We ended up loaning this to Jim and Karen as it seemed like it would be something they could teach to their kids.

I'm still not sure there is too much of a game here. Most of the decisions feel like they are pretty obvious and the winner is just who happens to draw the best cards at the right time. This is in stark contrast to the original Lost Cities - there is still no small amount of luck but most decisions feel interesting and meaningful.

Jim: 350ish
Hilary/Aaron: 200ish
Karen: 200ish
Chris: 150ish

Game Time: 1 hour (amidst many distractions and interruptions).

Tongiaki - July 18th, 2009

Tongiaki
A tile-laying game in which players send polynesians off to explore uncharted islands or get lost at sea.

John, Carissa, and I played this to kick off Ferecon 2.5, a day-long gaming event that Hilary and I hosted at our apartment. John and Carissa were playing for the first time, but John still managed to edge me out right at the end, grabbing a few high value islands on his last turn.

John: 29
Chris: 26
Carissa: 11

Game Time: 45 minutes