Farming with my spouse

Friday evening, home from work.  Time to settle down with a martini out on the deck for a game of Agricola with my wife. 

(c) Z-man Games
Used by permission

Agricola (designed by Uwe Rosenberg, published in the USA by Z-Man games) is one of the few games I bought without ever having played.  The acclaim surrounding this game has been so universal in the community that I figured I just had to have it, just to see what all the fuss was about.  At this point, I need to give proper credit to my friend Doug M., an annual pilgrim to Origins, who picked up a copy there for me at a very reasonable price.  (I have yet to attend Origins, notwithstanding Doug's perpetual campaign to get us there.) 

Although overwhelmed the first time we played with our friends Theresa and Brion, I have since come to appreciate Agricola (Latin for "farmer") as a work of genius.  It plays equally well for two, three, four, or five players, which in its own right is rather astounding.  So few multi-player games stand up well when played with just two players.  (It serves also as a solitaire game, which I haven't tried.)  Even more surprising is that the game's simpler version - the "family game," which is played without most of the cards - is in my mind every bit as fun and challenging as the normal, full deck version, though for different reasons.

Outside on the deck, we prefer the "family game," so that we take up a little less space on the table and don't have to manage hands of cards along with everything else.  There is remarkably little luck in the family game; the only random element is the order in which certain actions become available in each stage of the game.  One might reasonably expect that a worker-placement game with very little randomness would fall into a fixed pattern, but we continually surprise each other with tactical shifts and nuanced approaches to building our farms and trying to out-maneuver each other for critical resources. 

To me, the end-game really demonstrates the thought and rigor of development that must have gone into the refinement of Agricola.  It seems as though there are always several different, nearly equivalent paths toward maximizing the final score; there is seldom one single, obvious course of action to run out the end of the game.  I am almost always faced with a decision among three or four options, all valid, none self-evidently the "best" option, each with its own risk.  Some real analysis went into the elements of this game to be able to preserve that "exquisite choice" conundrum right down to the last stage.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it's important that our "cocktail hour" game be fun, challenging, and a good match between us.  Fortunately, we both enjoy playing Agricola, and we've each had our share of close victories and crushing defeats - er, that is, I mean to say, she wins some, I win some, but we always have fun together in the process.

Games with my spouse

My wife Kathy and I have adopted the practice of setting aside everything else at 5:00 p.m. or so to sit down before dinner and play a game like two civilized people.  We have a few favorites that seem to work out nicely as "lightly competitive diversions."  They serve us well, because really, on any given afternoon, either of us could win, but both of us will have fun.

It has been tricky, though, to identify the games that work in this role.  We'd never play chess, for example, because we would be somewhat mismatched, and it wouldn't necessarily be fun.  We don't necessarily want to play a game that brings out the worst of our competitiveness; we would like to have a pleasant dinner together after the game is over.  Also, many of our favorites work well when played among a group of friends but fail as two-player games.  When we sit outside on a nice day, too, we have only small tables in the back yard, so sometimes there is the additional structural consideration of a game that doesn't take a lot of table space and doesn't have a lot of small pieces to drop or papers to lose in the breeze.

In future entries, I'll discuss some of our favorite games that we've found work well for our afternoon session.  Today we played cribbage, of all things.  This was a big favorite aboard ship when I was in the Navy some years ago, and it has been fun to resurrect at home.  Although card luck plays its role, the skill comes (as in most card games) in making the most of the hand that is dealt.  Kathy has, to my chagrin, learned to do that rather handily.   

BoardGameGeek has a fascinating list of board games for this context, a "geeklist" entitled, "How Gaming Saved Our Marriage."  We are already familiar with a number of games on this list, and I'm eager to try others.  I'll be curious to know what two-player games others have found are "couple-friendly" rather than "relationship-straining."

Map Time

Yesterday my publisher sent me the game board currently under development, and I have to say, I really like the artwork.  It's a great-looking map.  We had agreed on a vague mid-20th-century setting for the time period of the game, and the board captures that essence very nicely.  They made a few adjustments and added a few features that enhance but don't substantively modify the structure of the game, and I think the result is going to be fun to play. 

There is something exciting about the introduction of someone else's creativity into one's own original design.  I had originally some pre-conceived ideas on how things would look and feel, but once I'd turned over the prototype drawings to the developer, I really didn't know what to expect (and I was a little afraid to find out).  But when I looked at this new map, I found that this game had taken on a new character, a whole new dimension in its style and flavor - all the product of someone else's talent, someone who perhaps had never imagined the game I'd conceived until they'd seen my draft.  It's a lesson, I suppose, in collaborative creativity.

I can't wait to see the cards.   

I can't wait to show off this game.

Don't get me started...

My friends are good sports.  They're the kind of people who are willing to spend an afternoon playing a game that nobody else has ever played before, a game that may or may not be any fun.  A game made of marker-scrawled butcher paper, cheap pawns, and misaligned printed cards with obscure, tiny instructions on them.  A game where the rules change over the course of the afternoon depending on how well I remember the instructions I re-wrote several times the night before.

I have really good friends.  They're the kind of people who can spend a couple of hours stumbling around my hand-drawn map in a confused effort to make sense of how to win a game whose fundamental flaws became evident only thirty minutes after the first card draw.  The kind of people who don't say, "will this game ever end?"  Friends who can make constructive criticism sound excited, supportive, and ready to buy, while I'm ready to go back to the drawing board.

Although I've designed many games in the privacy of my own little world, only two have seen the light of day outside my own family.  One of those quietly sits on a shelf, politely declined by one publisher, a game that just doesn't seem ready for prime time yet, a game that I like to think is in hibernation.

My second game is my pleasant surprise.  Demonstrated to the owners of a game company during PrezCon in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this year, it drew the perfect comment during a play-through:  "Hey, this game is fun!"  Before the afternoon was out, we had a handshake agreement to produce the game.  The last of the updates went out to them over Labor Day, and they expressed their intent to get it to the printers by October.  I'll pass along the details once the company formally announces the release.  For now, call it "Paul D. Owen's Eagerly Awaited Game."

My good friends await eagerly with me.