I like looking into which boardgames work for taking on family summer vacations. The last time I looked at this question was July 2012. This year we have plans to visit points of interest in southwest Virginia - the Skyline Drive, Lexington, the Natural Bridge, and Monticello. We specifically will be leaving laptops at home. Anticipating some quality family downtime, of course that means boardgames.
Showing posts with label Martian Fluxx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martian Fluxx. Show all posts
Friday, August 22, 2014
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
What to pack for a vacation
[While on vacation in North Carolina, I scheduled this re-post of my vacation boardgaming selections from last summer. Originally appeared 29 July 2011]
We recently went on a vacation in the West Virginia mountains for some white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and a zip line canopy tour. (ACE Adventures, if you're interested.) In the absence of internet and video games, we anticipated the need for some quality family downtime in the cabin. So of course that means boardgames!
Last time we went, three years ago, we brought Uno and Guillotine, both of which were successful choices. This time we wanted more options without having to bring the entire game closet. So we put together a packing list of games that most of us like. Everybody got to pick at least one game. We wanted to have at least three options each for two, three, four, or five players. At least three of the games had to be accessible to the youngest of us (ten years old). We were mindful of space limitations, but we didn't necessarily cramp our style if there was something we really wanted to bring. Here's the list we came up with:
- Chicago Cribbage
- Incan Gold
- Citadels (note - this link plays music)
- Ace of Aces
- Catch Phrase
- Martian Fluxx
- Travel Scrabble
- Trains Planes and Automobiles
- Empyrean Inc
- Forbidden Island
- Car-Go Othello
- Pirateer
- Uno H2O Splash
 |
| Whirlpool randomizer from Uno H2O Splash |
 |
| Sample page from Ace of Aces |
We did play a few conventional games during our down-time in the cabin. Incan Gold played out to an exciting finish, when our ten-year-old left the ruins with the artifact and the lead on the final mission, forcing the rest of us to play out the round until scared away by monsters and leaving him with the win. Our Pirateer session saw a crazy round in which every player touched the treasure at least once before our ten-year-old stole the treasure on a perfect snake-eyes die roll and brought it home to his harbor just a few turns later. My wife beat my 18-year-old son and me in Black Jack (using cards from Chicago Cribbage and money from Incan Gold) when she kept betting all her money to get out of the game but kept winning hand after hand. My wife just destroyed me in a two-player session of Citadels, which is nevertheless still my favorite game right now.
And, oh yes, we were in the mountains of West Virginia, so we did plenty of white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and zip-line canopy touring during the gaps between boardgames.
Six days until I go to World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Friday, July 29, 2011
What to pack for a vacation
We recently went on a vacation in the West Virginia mountains for some white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and a zip line canopy tour. (ACE Adventures, if you're interested.) In the absence of internet and video games, we anticipated the need for some quality family downtime in the cabin. So of course that means boardgames!
Last time we went, three years ago, we brought Uno and Guillotine, both of which were successful choices. This time we wanted more options without having to bring the entire game closet. So we put together a packing list of games that most of us like. Everybody got to pick at least one game. We wanted to have at least three options each for two, three, four, or five players. At least three of the games had to be accessible to the youngest of us (ten years old). We were mindful of space limitations, but we didn't necessarily cramp our style if there was something we really wanted to bring. Here's the list we came up with:
So what did we actually play? Well, Car-Go Othello got a lot of action during the six-hour drive to West Virginia. The brilliance in the design of this game is that there are no separate parts. The board (a six-by-six simplification of the eight-by-eight original Othello) has an integrated rotating piece for each space on the board. Each space can be rotated to show a green blank, a white piece, or a black piece. The game can be passed back and forth without risk of something falling on the floor of the car and getting lost under the seat (as happened with Travel Scrabble).
In the hot tub at our cabin, Uno H2O Splash got a lot of action. Here is another clever production idea to solve the problem of a challenging game-playing venue. The cards are clear plastic, printed in such a way that one side shows only the card face, the other only the card back. The game plays like the familiar Uno with a water-themed twist: Certain cards have a "splash" icon that, when played, require the next player to take a spin on the "whirlpool," a device rather like a small "Magic 8-ball" with an eight-sided die inside to yield a random outcome that the player must perform.
Another brilliant game design that got some action was the old classic World War I dogfight game Ace of Aces. This game requires neither board nor cards but is played with just a pair of books through which players flip from one cockpit view to another as they try to outmaneuver one another and get into firing position to inflict damage on each other's aircraft. While I was in the Navy, I played this game many times with my chief engineer because it was so well suited to the tight confines of a submarine wardroom. My sons each successfully chased me out of the skies, but in both cases I was able to escape with my badly damaged plane before being shot down.
We did play a few conventional games during our down-time in the cabin. Incan Gold played out to an exciting finish, when our ten-year-old left the ruins with the artifact and the lead on the final mission, forcing the rest of us to play out the round until scared away by monsters and leaving him with the win. Our Pirateer session saw a crazy round in which every player touched the treasure at least once before our ten-year-old stole the treasure on a perfect snake-eyes die roll and brought it home to his harbor just a few turns later. My wife beat my 18-year-old son and me in Black Jack (using cards from Chicago Cribbage and money from Incan Gold) when she kept betting all her money to get out of the game but kept winning hand after hand. My wife just destroyed me in a two-player session of Citadels, which is nevertheless still my favorite game right now.
And, oh yes, we were in the mountains of West Virginia, so we did plenty of white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and zip-line canopy touring during the gaps between boardgames.
Six days until I go to World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Last time we went, three years ago, we brought Uno and Guillotine, both of which were successful choices. This time we wanted more options without having to bring the entire game closet. So we put together a packing list of games that most of us like. Everybody got to pick at least one game. We wanted to have at least three options each for two, three, four, or five players. At least three of the games had to be accessible to the youngest of us (ten years old). We were mindful of space limitations, but we didn't necessarily cramp our style if there was something we really wanted to bring. Here's the list we came up with:
- Chicago Cribbage
- Incan Gold
- Citadels (note - this link plays music)
- Ace of Aces
- Catch Phrase
- Martian Fluxx
- Travel Scrabble
- Trains Planes and Automobiles
- Empyrean Inc
- Forbidden Island
- Car-Go Othello
- Pirateer
- Uno H2O Splash
|
| Whirlpool randomizer from Uno H2O Splash |
|
| Sample page from Ace of Aces |
We did play a few conventional games during our down-time in the cabin. Incan Gold played out to an exciting finish, when our ten-year-old left the ruins with the artifact and the lead on the final mission, forcing the rest of us to play out the round until scared away by monsters and leaving him with the win. Our Pirateer session saw a crazy round in which every player touched the treasure at least once before our ten-year-old stole the treasure on a perfect snake-eyes die roll and brought it home to his harbor just a few turns later. My wife beat my 18-year-old son and me in Black Jack (using cards from Chicago Cribbage and money from Incan Gold) when she kept betting all her money to get out of the game but kept winning hand after hand. My wife just destroyed me in a two-player session of Citadels, which is nevertheless still my favorite game right now.
And, oh yes, we were in the mountains of West Virginia, so we did plenty of white-water rafting, horseback riding, paintball, and zip-line canopy touring during the gaps between boardgames.
Six days until I go to World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Thoughts on approachability
[I'm still on vacation away from the internet, so today's is a re-post of an excerpt from an article from last October.]
This week our friendly neighborhood Game Parlor in Woodbridge is having a 20%-off moving sale on nearly everything that's in stock, so the other day I picked up Race for the Galaxy (designed by Thomas Lehmann, published in the U.S. by Rio Grande). I'd had this on my list since I'd solicited my friends for two-player game ideas to add to our afternoon game session library. I'd had a lukewarm experience with it at Congress of Gamers a year or two ago, largely because the people I played with were very experienced players and not altogether patient or thorough in explaining the rules. But I read so many good things on boardgamegeek about it - especially in light of our fondness for Puerto Rico (designed by Andreas Seyfarth, also Rio Grande), with which a number of reviewers compared it - that I thought it was worth a try.
I was very methodical in going through the rules myself and then reviewing them with Kathy. I think as we played the first time through, we agreed that we understood the mechanics of the game, and the goals, and even how to devise a strategy. The thing we found frustrating in our first play-through was the abundance and density of symbols on the cards and their varied significance. I think we went around two or three times on how the "Contact Specialist" worked. I'm sure veterans of this game are used to the conventions and know what to look for and how to apply the symbols to the game mechanics, but we were each struggling to understand what we were looking at as we played along. Both of us are confident, though, that's a game that we can learn and come to appreciate. I'm looking forward to trying again.
There's a lesson here somewhere for me as a game designer, I think. It's one thing to have a game that is complete in its rules integrity and components, that is a beautiful construct in both form and function, that aficionados come to appreciate for subtlety, nuance, and replayability. But what about a game's approachability to the novice? The analogy I think of is a mansion on a mountaintop. It can be a marvelous engineering construction, stunning in appearance, awe-inspiring in surroundings, luxurious in furnishings ... but if visitors have to climb a rock face to get there and appreciate it, not many people will try. So I'm coming to appreciate that even an intriciate, complex game needs to have a welcome mat, an entrance ramp, some way of introducing the novice to the game.
RftG does this to a certain degree, with pre-selected starting hands for the players. Settlers of Catan has its beginner's board layout; Agricola has its family game. I remember Avalon Hill developed a rules construct called "Programmed Instruction," in which rules were divided into sections that built on one another. The new player could read the first section, then play a scenario that depended only on the rules in that first section. A second section would introduce more rules, components, and options and would be followed in turn by more scenarios. Starship Troopers and Tobruk, among others, had this kind of graduated rules approach.
I don't know; am I asking too much? Is it reasonable that a gamer should struggle with a game the first time through, until they say, "oh, that's how that rule works," or "that's what that card does"? Every first-time player of Agricola goes through this, surely. It's not that I want to play simple games; I just don't want learning a new game to be a struggle.
 |
| Image courtesy of Rio Grande Games |
I was very methodical in going through the rules myself and then reviewing them with Kathy. I think as we played the first time through, we agreed that we understood the mechanics of the game, and the goals, and even how to devise a strategy. The thing we found frustrating in our first play-through was the abundance and density of symbols on the cards and their varied significance. I think we went around two or three times on how the "Contact Specialist" worked. I'm sure veterans of this game are used to the conventions and know what to look for and how to apply the symbols to the game mechanics, but we were each struggling to understand what we were looking at as we played along. Both of us are confident, though, that's a game that we can learn and come to appreciate. I'm looking forward to trying again.
There's a lesson here somewhere for me as a game designer, I think. It's one thing to have a game that is complete in its rules integrity and components, that is a beautiful construct in both form and function, that aficionados come to appreciate for subtlety, nuance, and replayability. But what about a game's approachability to the novice? The analogy I think of is a mansion on a mountaintop. It can be a marvelous engineering construction, stunning in appearance, awe-inspiring in surroundings, luxurious in furnishings ... but if visitors have to climb a rock face to get there and appreciate it, not many people will try. So I'm coming to appreciate that even an intriciate, complex game needs to have a welcome mat, an entrance ramp, some way of introducing the novice to the game.
 |
| Agricola family board |
I don't know; am I asking too much? Is it reasonable that a gamer should struggle with a game the first time through, until they say, "oh, that's how that rule works," or "that's what that card does"? Every first-time player of Agricola goes through this, surely. It's not that I want to play simple games; I just don't want learning a new game to be a struggle.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
My top ten card games
Inspired by Dice Tower Episode 206, Chris Norwood (GamerChris) recently posted his favorite card games. Since inspiration begets inspiration, I thought I'd explore the topic myself.
Before I get into my top ten list, I'll mention that the definition of a "card game" might be ambiguous. I think Alhambra qualifies, for example, because the card play (among four suits or "currencies" of a range of values) drives the purchase of the tiles that are placed for scoring. But I wouldn't include games that just "have cards in them," like Agricola or Clue, because card play isn't the primary aspect of the game (even if they are essential to the mechanics). I'm not sure how to write the definition of a "card game," but I'd be curious to know people's thoughts on which games are close to the frontier between card games and "other games" and how you decide on which side of the boundary a game falls.
My honorable mentions would include:
Chrononauts: A goofy title from Loony Labs that my wife really seems to like. I prefer Martian Fluxx, but this one is also a likeable game.
Incan Gold: I'm always fascinated by the way teenagers play push-your-luck games, so this is a fun one to play with my kids. I never know what they're going to do.
Guillotine: The artwork in this Wizards of the Coast title still makes me chuckle.
Triumvirate: A recent discovery that I am only beginning to appreciate
Mille Bornes is a nostalgic favorite that has fond memories going way back to when I was growing up. It was a family favorite then and still sees the light of day from time to time even now.
So, my top ten card games:
10. Alhambra: I used to dislike this game because I thought it had a "run-away" aspect to it, in which an early leader was hard to catch. That is, until I thought I'd run away with a game in the PrezCon semifinals and then lost somehow in the final scoring. Perhaps I completely misplayed near the end, but I prefer to think that my worthy opponent had a more subtle appreciation for the game and how to score big without leading in many categories.
9. Munchkin: My kids have taken a sudden recent liking to this game, and I like anything I can get my kids to play. Another good one for laughs.
8. Empyrean, Inc. This is a regular go-to game for my wife and me, a surprise hit we received as a gift. We love this game so much that we started to wear the cards out, so I bought a backup copy.
7. Martian Fluxx: A genius little game from Loony Labs. What a crack-up.
6. Down in Flames III: Zero!: A very clever card-play mechanism for air combat
5. Race for the Galaxy: This is a game I want to like more than I do. My wife and I found all the symbols confusing and frustrating, and we haven't played it since. Having said that, I'd still like to try it with a fresh (patient) group and find out why people rave about it. (San Juan is worth mentioning here as something we explored as an alternative to RftG, but I think we found it a little simplistic and perhaps disappointing. We kept thinking, "Why don't we just play Puerto Rico instead?")
4. Battle Line: Great mind-bending game with my wife, except that she always wins. What is up with that?
3. Condottiere: I haven't had a chance to play this nearly as much as I'd like. I fell in love with it in just one session. I wish I could play it a lot more to fully appreciate it.
2. Pacific Typhoon: Very fond of this game with a bigger group of people. I love the historical photographs. Very clever game-play structure that motivates some pretty lively negotiation.
1. 7 Wonders: Currently my favorite game of all. I will play this at the drop of a hat. Will Wonders never cease?
Before I get into my top ten list, I'll mention that the definition of a "card game" might be ambiguous. I think Alhambra qualifies, for example, because the card play (among four suits or "currencies" of a range of values) drives the purchase of the tiles that are placed for scoring. But I wouldn't include games that just "have cards in them," like Agricola or Clue, because card play isn't the primary aspect of the game (even if they are essential to the mechanics). I'm not sure how to write the definition of a "card game," but I'd be curious to know people's thoughts on which games are close to the frontier between card games and "other games" and how you decide on which side of the boundary a game falls.
My honorable mentions would include:
Chrononauts: A goofy title from Loony Labs that my wife really seems to like. I prefer Martian Fluxx, but this one is also a likeable game.
Incan Gold: I'm always fascinated by the way teenagers play push-your-luck games, so this is a fun one to play with my kids. I never know what they're going to do.
Guillotine: The artwork in this Wizards of the Coast title still makes me chuckle.
Triumvirate: A recent discovery that I am only beginning to appreciate
Mille Bornes is a nostalgic favorite that has fond memories going way back to when I was growing up. It was a family favorite then and still sees the light of day from time to time even now.
So, my top ten card games:
10. Alhambra: I used to dislike this game because I thought it had a "run-away" aspect to it, in which an early leader was hard to catch. That is, until I thought I'd run away with a game in the PrezCon semifinals and then lost somehow in the final scoring. Perhaps I completely misplayed near the end, but I prefer to think that my worthy opponent had a more subtle appreciation for the game and how to score big without leading in many categories.
9. Munchkin: My kids have taken a sudden recent liking to this game, and I like anything I can get my kids to play. Another good one for laughs.
8. Empyrean, Inc. This is a regular go-to game for my wife and me, a surprise hit we received as a gift. We love this game so much that we started to wear the cards out, so I bought a backup copy.
7. Martian Fluxx: A genius little game from Loony Labs. What a crack-up.
6. Down in Flames III: Zero!: A very clever card-play mechanism for air combat
|
| Image courtesy of Rio Grande Games |
4. Battle Line: Great mind-bending game with my wife, except that she always wins. What is up with that?
3. Condottiere: I haven't had a chance to play this nearly as much as I'd like. I fell in love with it in just one session. I wish I could play it a lot more to fully appreciate it.
2. Pacific Typhoon: Very fond of this game with a bigger group of people. I love the historical photographs. Very clever game-play structure that motivates some pretty lively negotiation.
1. 7 Wonders: Currently my favorite game of all. I will play this at the drop of a hat. Will Wonders never cease?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)