Ridere, ludere, hoc est vivere.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Gaming in a hospital room - Monopoly Express

Some months ago I wrote a post on what kinds of games work when keeping someone company in a hospital room, and what kinds of games don't.  I had the occasion this week to while away time in similar circumstances, and we settled on Monopoly Express (designers Garrett Donner and Michael S. Steer, publisher Hasbro) as a not-bad alternative when conditions don't allow the kind of space that board and card games typically require.

Monopoly Express
photo Hasbro 2007
First published in 1991 as Don't Go to Jail, the dice game Monopoly Express was re-released in 2007 in a round plastic container that is rather difficult to open.  This inconvenience is a blessing in disguise, because it allows ME to be thrown into a bag and taken anywhere without concern for lost pieces.  The container also serves as a dice tray, and it was this feature that made the game work so well in a surgery waiting room.  My wife and I were able to play this game on the seat between us without worrying about pieces rolling onto the floor.

Monopoly Express board
photo posted to boardgamegeek.com
by Chris Blakely
The "board" is a round plastic disc with recesses for placing dice to score points.  The game itself is a "push your luck" game along the lines of Pass the Pigs, $GREED, or Can't Stop.  Three dice have only "Go to Jail" policemen, "Go" green arrows, or blank faces.  Seven other dice have colors and denominations on each face that correspond roughly to familiar properties on a Monopoly board.  A player's turn consists of rolling the dice, putting any policemen on the board, and then also placing on the board a combination of colored denominations that offers the best prospects for scoring points.  Completed sets are worth more points than the sum of individual dice and also offer the opportunity to add the "house/hotel" die to the mix on the next roll; houses and hotels add greatly to the score.  A player can re-roll remaining dice or stop at any time and score the results of the turn, but if a roll turns up the third policeman, then the player scores nothing that turn (like a "pig out" in PtP).

The value in this game isn't the twist on the push-your-luck format, and certainly not its very small addition to the deluge of Monopoly titles in the world.  Its real value is its extreme portability and quick play.  This week it got more action than PtP because it doesn't even need a flat playing surface.  At a time when we all needed a little cheering up, ME helped pass the time in a pleasant, undemanding way.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Agricola close-up

Spanish boardgame geek Roberto Méndez has started a game photography project he calls, "52 Weeks 52 Photos."  This week's photo of Agricola reminded me that I'd taken a few photos of a game Kathy and I had played recently but never posted.
Kathy's very successful wild boar farm in our Agricola game two weeks ago 

So here's today's Agricola close-up, inspired by Roberto Méndez.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Tsuro close-up

I've been trying my hand at some boardgame photography, so tonight I thought I'd post a shot I took at the end of our game of Tsuro (designer Tom McMurchie; artists* Shane Small, Cathy Brigg, and Sarah Phelps; publisher Calliope Games).
Kathy's winning position at the end of Tsuro.  My just-eliminated black stone languishes on the board edge in the background.  Had I been able to last one more turn, she would have been eliminated on her next tile play.

I have to say that this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games we own, and I'm very fond of it.  As a game, it is a very quick play with only a few decision options each turn, but it certainly requires some thought and planning ahead.

Tonight I gambled on having the right tile come up to extricate my piece from a bind into which I'd put myself, trying to corner my wife's piece and lock her out of the more open side of the board.  My gamble didn't pan out, and she ended up beating me with just one open space left.

Since Tsuro ostensibly accommodates up to eight, I'd love to play this game with a bigger group, but seldom do we get more than three to the table for it.

*Boardgamegeek.com entry gives artist credits to Franz and Imelda Vohwinkel.  I can't figure out why.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Design inspiration

Working trademark for
"Gold on Mars"
Missing Unpub2 on Saturday inspired me to set aside a "designer day" of my own.  Since I had today off from work, I decided to sit down with "Gold on Mars" and nail down all the loose ends in my design.  My goal was to have a playable prototype by the end of the day.  I didn't quite get there, but I did get a good draft of rules for the commodities market written up and settled on the actual commodities and price structure that I think will work.  Everything will change with playtesting, of course, but I like my first cut to represent enough thought and planning that when it goes to table for the first time, it plays at least roughly well.

Space travel is still my major sticking point, and I wish I'd spent more time on it.  I think I finally settled on some rules for how much fuel is required to get to each planet, and how much fuel must be carried (or produced in situ) for the return trip.  I just don't want to get hung up on making players do too much math, or end up with such widely disparate transit costs among planets that a degenerate strategy develops to ignore distant mining sites in favor of those closer to Earth.

Another concern I have is the risk of a jackpot mining operation resulting in a runaway leader.  Mining is necessarily speculative, and has to have a major upside potential to justify the expense and risk of space travel, but if one player hits it big and others have mines that run dry, then the game simply ends up being an exercise in dice and card luck.  So once I do have a prototype, the first few playtests will have to expose the luck factors and point me in the direction of redesigning and reworking game elements to make it a contest of thoughtful risk management, more than just luck or puzzle-solving.

I do love a challenge.

***

Beer, wine, and Citadels
We did a fair amount of family gaming over the long weekend.  Saturday night saw us break in my dad's copy of Trains Planes and Automobiles.  We had a fun five-player session that saw the lead change hands several times before I finally won - almost entirely with railroad cities and without a single airport.  Sunday night we played a seven-player Sour Apples to Apples (publisher Mattel, strangely missing from mattel.com).   A Christmas gift from our oldest son, SAtA, like the original AtA, is a fun game for a big group.  (Lesson learned:  There's a big difference between the adjectives "immoral" and "immortal.")  And this evening, Kathy and I played another two-player session of Citadels in which she proved once more that she is living rent-free inside my head - and sometimes she even pulls the levers, tugs the strings, and pushes the buttons in there.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Risk management and pigs: Running the numbers

Pig on left demonstrates the very
difficult "leaning jowler" while pig on
right wallows on table, unimpressed
In my last post I discussed the personal thresholds that my wife and I have when playing the push-your-luck game Pass the Pigs.  For those not familiar with the game, it consists simply of two little rubber pigs that can be rolled like dice.  Each will come to rest in one of six positions, and the resulting score depends on the combination of the two resulting positions from one throw.  A player can elect to keep rolling the pigs and racking up the score, but if on any throw one pig lands on its left side and the other on its right, the result is a "pig out" and no points are scored on that turn.  So the push-your-luck aspect comes in deciding how far to go before stopping to keep the points scored on that turn rather than risk pigging out on the next throw.

My habit has been to stop rolling when I've reached a score of 11 or higher (unless I'm behind, in which case I'll take a chance on catching up).  Kathy's personal threshold is a score of 15.  Our friend "SPC" commented back to say that his threshold is 18.  But all of that was pretty much based on a qualitative sense of risk tolerance, not any real actuarial analysis.

As it happened, back in October, the intrepid boardgame geek Mike W. actually kept track of 895 rolls of two pigs over ten games and posted the resulting statistics.  These data provided a golden opportunity to do some real optimization analysis.  Release the spreadsheets!

I started with Mike's breakdown of 1790 individual pig results:

Result, Number of Occurrences, Percentage

On Side, 1243, 69.4%
Razorback, 388, 21.7%
Hoofer, 112, 6.3%
Snouter, 30, 1.7%
Leaning Jowler, 17, 0.9%

I broke out the "On Side" results and assumed half were on the left, half on the right, then made a matrix of all possible combinations of two pigs:


Probability Left side Right side Razorback Hoofer Snouter Leaning jowler
Left side 0.120409 0.120409 0.075299 0.021861 0.005899 0.003123
Right side 0.120409 0.120409 0.075299 0.021861 0.005899 0.003123
Razorback 0.075299 0.075299 0.047089 0.013671 0.003689 0.001953
Hoofer 0.021861 0.021861 0.013671 0.003969 0.001071 0.000567
Snouter 0.005899 0.005899 0.003689 0.001071 0.000289 0.000153
Leaning jowler 0.003123 0.003123 0.001953 0.000567 0.000153 0.000081



Now, given a starting score s, I treated a result of one left-side pig and one right-side pig as have a value of -s, and all other results having the positive score value in the game (five points for a razorback, 20 points for a double hoofer, etc).  The expected value of a roll of two pigs is the linear combination of probabilities and corresponding scores, where the "pig outs" have a value of -s for a given starting score s.

For the first roll of the turn, s = 0, and the expected value turns out to be +4.17.  For every point of s at risk, the expected value goes down by 0.24 (the probability of a "pig out").  So for any initial score s, the expected value of the next roll is


s
Expected value
0
4.17
1
3.93
2
3.69
3
3.45
4
3.21
5
2.97
6
2.72
7
2.48
8
2.24
9
2.00
10
1.76
11
1.52
12
1.28
13
1.04
14
0.80
15
0.56
16
0.32
17
0.08
18
-0.17


These results really surprised me.  They indicate pretty clearly that my instinct for stopping at 11 points is way too conservative.  With only 11 points at stake, the next roll still has an expected value of 1.52 - better than a sider.  Even my wife's threshold of 15 is a bit safe, since the subsequent roll would still have an expected value of 0.56.  But most amazing is that "SPC's" risk tolerance is perfect (according to these data).  If he rolls on 17 but stops on 18, he is playing PtP right down to the tip of the snout.  On scores of 18 or higher, the downside risk outweighs the upside, and it's time to stop (unless the opponent has a significant lead and the game is in jeopardy).

This revelation of my own conservative play reminds me again of my poor showing in Can't Stop at Congress of Gamers (and before that at PrezCon).  I think I'm going to have to run the numbers on CS some time and see what I can discover about my risk threshold there.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Luck, risk management, and pigs

Beer, wine, pretzels, and pigs -
my final losing "pig out"
My wife and I were playing Pass the Pigs (designer David Moffatt, publisher Winning Moves) this evening before dinner, and my son happened by and said, "I thought you didn't like games based on luck."

What a great question.  I don't like games based on luck - games like Life, Sorry, War, and any other game in which luck renders decision-making moot.  But I certainly do like risk management games, and PtP is squarely in that category.  I've posted before about my early observations on how the teenage brain works in assessing risk.  In our first family game of Incan Gold,
[My son] bolstered my working hypothesis on teenagers and risk assessment.  He was always still in the expedition when the second monster of a suit came up, so he ended up with no treasure after five rounds.
On the other hand, I remember getting my butt kicked in Can't Stop at Congress of Gamers last fall because of that very phenomenon.

One brilliant element of PtP is that since the pigs aren't really dice, it's very difficult to calculate probability in the conventional sense.  The pigs are oddly shaped, and because I'm too lazy to run 1000 trials of pigs to estimate the expected value of a roll (although somebody else wasn't), well, I just wing it on the risk assessment.  My "wing it" threshold for PtP is typically eleven points.  (Actually, maybe I shouldn't post that number online.)  If I'm significantly behind, I'll take bigger chances, but overall, I'm still pretty conservative.  My wife said her threshold was 15 points, but after I told her mine was eleven, she started stopping at eleven, too.  And she won.  So what does that tell you?

***

So now that I've been thinking about the fact that somebody else actually did run the numbers on the pigs, my inner mathematician compels me to calculate the optimal threshold for rolling again vs. not rolling again.  I think that will be a topic for a future post...

Friday, January 6, 2012

Playing with Christmas toys

This evening, Kathy and I played two games that we received as Christmas presents this year.  First was a gift from our gaming buddy Glenn called Ingenious Challenges (designer Reiner Knizia, publisher Fantasy Flight Games).  This little box actually contains three games - "Card Challenge," "Dice Challenge," and "Tile Challenge" - that are based on Knizia's clever board game Ingenious.  We tried the Dice Challenge, whose scoring is based on the same "advance all six colors" principle of Ingenious but by rolling dice to match those of the opponent.  Right away, we began to appreciate that this is more than just "Yahtzee with colors and shapes."  The roll you decide to use for your score is also the roll that your opponent(s) will try to match and use to score as well.  So like the board game, it is as important to keep an eye on your opponents' scoring needs as it is your own when deciding the position you want to leave at the end of your turn.  In this case, each of us tried to avoid leaving dice that the other needed to score.  It turned out to be a very close game that Kathy won with some judicious re-rolls.

24/7: The Game - near the end of this evening's session

Our second game was a gift that I picked up for Kathy based on a recommendation (I wish I could remember from whom) as a "spouse" game - 24/7: The Game (designer Carey Grayson, publisher Sunriver Games).  This game for two to four players appeals to me in two respects - the gameplay challenge and the physical quality, much as do the two-player games Quarto and Hive.  In 24/7, players take turns laying tiles onto a board in a kind of crossword fashion, similar to Scrabble, except that the tiles are numbered from one to ten, only one tile is laid in a turn, and scoring comes from completing runs, matching sets, or sums adding to seven or 24.  In our game this evening, again, the importance of not leaving the opponent an opportunity to score became evident.  I had one big bonus score - completing both a seven and a 24 on a double-score space - that turned out to be the game-winner.  (In the photo, that was the '6' tile in the upper left corner of the picture.*)  I have been pleasantly surprised that my right-brained mystery-writer wife likes this arithmetic-dependent game as much as I do.

Incidentally, I'm inspired by GamerChris's new Picture of the Week series and Roberto Mendez's 52-weeks-52-photos geeklist to renew my amateur interest in boardgame photography.  So I hope to have the camera out more often and resort less frequently to stock box art images in the future.

*The astute observer and aficionado of 24/7 will observe that one of us made an illegal tile placement at some point during the game.  I will leave it to the reader to find the error.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Family games - what works for both adults and kids?

As parents of boys spanning eight years in age difference, we've struggled to find family activities that work for all of us.  Naturally, my first choice for an indoor occasion is to play a boardgame - anything we can all agree on and enjoy.  In my experience, a game that appeals to kids as well as the adults in the family does not come along often.

The other day we tried a little game that my son got for his birthday called Pictionary Card Game (designer Brian Yu, publisher Mattel).  Unlike the original Pictionary, which requires players to draw diagrams and pictures, the card game has a set of pictographs - little cards with icons, sketches, and other abstract or symbolic drawings that can be combined or manipulated to prompt teammates to come up with the intended answer.  There are two levels of play - adult level, where the answers that teammates need to guess require a certain familiarity with culture and turns of phrase (like "Yellow Submarine"), and kid level, where the answers are more generic (like "ruler").  Each answer has an associated category (like "school supplies" for "ruler") so that players have a general idea of what they're trying to guess.

Sample pictograph cards used
in Pictionary Card Game
What we found was that when adults play with kids at the kids level, the adults will start shouting a range of generic answers to the category before the "clue-giver" has much chance to assemble the pictographs into any kind of clue.  For example, when "school supplies" was announced, people started calling out "paper," "pencil," "eraser," "chalk," etc.  In several cases, the right answer was stumbled on in a matter of seconds.  So the conclusion I reached is that PCG probably works well for kids among kids, and for adults among adults, but not in a mixed setting of adults and kids.  Other word-association games that have not always succeeded to bridge the adult-kid gap include Catch Phrase (which the kids love but which the adults tend to dominate) and Taboo.

Games that have worked well for us in a broad age range setting include Clue, Apples to Apples Junior (though not the original Apples to Apples), Pirateer, and Guillotine.  In larger groups, we've had success with Are You a Werewolf? as long as the participants are comfortable in a player-elimination game.  (If the group includes kids who are sensitive about getting "voted out," then Werewolf won't work.)

Trains Planes and Automobiles fits the bill as a family past-time in a group spanning a broad mix of ages - even more successfully than I expected when I first conceived and developed the game.  I am frequently and pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions I get from both children and adults when I demonstrate it at conventions or hear from people who have played it at home.  I mentioned in my last post that it had become a favorite of our friends' son and that they love the fact that they can get together and play it as a family without having to drag people to the table.  I think the principle reason is that TPA rewards good decision-making enough to keep grown-ups engaged but also has enough luck and balancing elements to keep everybody in contention for the whole game.  Kids feel as though they have a good chance to win, while adults enjoy playing a real game that is more than just a roll-and-move luck exercise.

Familia quod ludit una manet una.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

New year of boardgame socializing

To me, boardgaming is primarily a social experience, and our new year celebrations this weekend have been no exception.

Last night, on the occasion of celebrating the new year, we visited our friends Brion and Theresa H. for dinner, drinks, and several games.  We opened with Citadels, the card game that has emerged as my very favorite discovery of 2011.  Theresa won handily with something like 27 points scored in an eight-district citadel that included all five colors.  Next we played Trains Planes and Automobiles, which I was pleased to learn had become a favorite among Brion and Theresa's family.  Yours truly managed to stay just ahead of Theresa for the win, helped by four consecutive air travel assignments facilitated with a frequent flyer and clear skies.  We wrapped up the New Years Eve gaming with Storming the Castle (designer Aaron Watson, publisher Toy Vault), a light-hearted card-driven race game based on the 1987 film Princess Bride.  My wife Kathy won as the giant Fezzek taking advantage of "four white horses" to beat us all to the castle.

Today I invited several friends over to play a couple of games and share some good company.  Grant G., his brother W.J., and Glenn W. joined me in rewriting the History of the World (designers Gary Dicken, Steve Kendall, and Phil Kendall - artists Charles S. Jarboe Jr, Steve Kendall, and Jason Spiller - publisher Avalon Hill), an old favorite that never seems to get enough play time.  Grant achieved a fairly commanding victory, in no small part to his success in holding on to his acquisitions and generating victory points for multiple epochs, particularly with the Romans in southern Europe and several Asian civilizations and a big scoring turn with the Arabs.  I had a strong early game with the Assyrians and a strong finish with the Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and Britain, but was nearly wiped off the map in the middle of the game around Epoch IV from which I never fully recovered.  I finished third behind Glenn.

If HotW can be subject to the vagaries of card luck, not so the brilliantly-designed Puerto Rico.  We invited my wife Kathy to join us for a five-player session.  PR has become one of my favorite games for its nearly pure dependence on player decisions for the course of the game.  I managed to pull out a win with some very heavy shipments of corn, tobacco, and sugar, just two points ahead of Kathy's dominant building performance.

This kick-off to the new year inspires me to revitalize my focus on boardgames and design.  Although I will miss Car Trunk Entertainment's Unpublished Games Festival "UnPub II" in Dover, Delaware later this month, I look forward to PrezCon in Charlottesville, Virginia in late February.

Here's to a whole new year of gaming developments and discoveries.

Ludero ergo sum.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

PrezCon Demos - 23, 24, 25 Feb 2012


I am elated to report that I will be demonstrating Trains Planes and Automobiles at PrezCon at the DoubleTree Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia on Thursday 23, Friday 24, and Saturday 25 February 2012.  PrezCon has a special place in my heart, because that's where I first demonstrated the game in 2010 to Worthington Games and we sealed the deal with a handshake on the spot.  Before long, Worthington's new BlueSquare Board Games had released TPA as the first in its line of family games.  Seeing it on the PrezCon schedule has got me all juiced about game design again.

It's time to get back to work and turn some digested ideas into real playable prototypes.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Reactor Scram

My latest design inspiration is a co-op game idea I've had for a while.  The setting is a nuclear reactor plant that has gone horribly wrong.  Players try to operate various controls to keep the reactor (or perhaps multiple reactors in a single plant) from melting down.  Problems can accelerate rapidly; players can quiesce one issue only to have another pop up elsewhere.  Players win if they can stabilize the entire reactor plant; players lose if any core gets hot enough to start a meltdown.

Existing co-op games like Pandemic and Forbidden Island are obvious models.  I have a couple of specific innovations to try to induce a strong sense of urgency (and perhaps panic) in the players.  I've realized that in general, a co-op game (one that does not have traitors) is rather like team solitaire.  That means that the game boils down to card luck and problem optimization.  The tricky part about making a game like this fun is ensuring that players' decisions are not obvious but do affect the progress of the game.  I want to make sure that mistakes cause setbacks but don't render the problem unsolvable.  So there has to be a pretty broad decision space, with multiple variables in play and multiple "knobs" for the players to manipulate in an effort to control the game state and get to a solution.

I recognize that in any players-vs-game, luck has to be a factor.  In fact, I think uncertainty and variability contribute to the fun and excitement of the game.  But I'd hate for the game to devolve into a question of what order the cards came up or how the dice rolled.
 
I had some thoughts regarding card luck in general.  In an upcoming post, I'll discuss a game design idea that came out of the question, "can I make a card game that minimizes card luck?"

Thursday, October 20, 2011

After School Special: Three Games at Game Parlor

Most of my gaming experience on a week to week basis comes at home with my wife over cocktails - this time of year, out in the back yard next to the fire bowl.  But on occasion I will get together with friends after work at Game Parlor Chantilly, which is not far from where most of us work and therefore a convenient stopping place in the middle of the week for a game session.  We call it an After School Special, and sometimes even call it by its acronym...

This evening my buddies Grant, Keith, Brian, and I got together and started off with Tannhauser (designers William Grosselin and Didier Poli, artist Didier Poli, publisher Fantasy Flight Games).  I had first seen this game demonstrated at PrezCon a few years ago, and I have to say that I was mildly intrigued but also a little put off.  The demo was a little rushed, not well explained, and played through haphazardly, so I walked away thinking not much of the gameplay.  I have a very different impression of it now - a fun shoot 'em up skirmish game with a few neat special-ability twists.  In this evening's game, we paired off two players against two, each team controlling three heroes and two troopers.  Grant and Keith seized control of the center hallway of the house, but Brian and I managed to do some serious damage with a couple of hand grenades and some ridiculous dice luck.  We ended up winning in a game that probably shouldn't have been so lopsided.

(c) Z-man Games
Used by permission
Grant had to leave, so Keith, Brian, and I broke out my very favorite three-player game, The End of the Triumvirate (designers Johannes Ackva and Max Gabrian, artist Andrea Boekhoff, publisher Z-Man Games).  This was a very close game all the way through.  There were times when I really thought I was going to pull off a second election as consul and win the game, but instead Keith couldn't be stopped in achieving a competency victory despite best efforts from Brian and me to hold him back.  I am continually amazed at the knife-edge balance of this game.  It is not a symmetric game like many Euros, where play balance is a foregone conclusion because each player starts in an identical situation.  Yet there is no position in Triumvirate that has any kind of presumed advantage, or can be knocked out easily.  I've played three times now, and every time I'm left awestruck at how tight this game is.

(c) Fantasy Flight
Used by permission
With a little time left to kill, we decided to play Citadels (designer Bruno Faidetti, numerous artists*, publisher Fantasy Flight Games), which is right now my favorite game of all.  This was the game that kept us up until 2:00 in the morning at World Boardgaming Championships, after we'd each already had a full day of tournament gaming.  This time it was my turn to pull out the victory.  As always, it was a game full of second-guessing and back-stabbing.

Next post:  My latest design inspiration

* Artists for Citadels as listed on Boardgamegeek:
Cyrille DaujeanJulien DelvalJesper EjsingBruno FaiduttiDidier GraffetBjarne HansenDarrell HardyFlorence MagninJean-Louis MourierScott NicelyChristian T. PetersenBrian SchomburgRichard Spicer

Friday, October 14, 2011

Congress of Gamers: Acquisitions

Okay, after this, I'm done posting about Congress of Gamers (for now).

I still remember the best advice anybody ever gave me about a gaming convention.  It came from Justin Thompson as a recommended goal when attending PrezCon:  "Learn at least one new game; buy at least one new game."  Over the last few days, I've posted about the games I learned in the game design room at CoG.  But the convention experience wouldn't be complete if I didn't fork over a little cash to bring something home to play.

For my 15-year-old, I picked up two Steve Jackson titles.  The first was Zombie Dice from Our Game Table.  I'm not a fan of zombies (in fact, I despise zombie games), but heck, he likes zombies, and he likes dice.  It's a no-brainer.  (Sorry.)  Also, literally at the eleventh hour, Vince Lupo was packing up his stuff in the designers room when he held up a box and said, "Anybody want to buy Frag?"  It took maybe one round of haggling for me to take it off his hands.  The cover says, "If it moves, shoot it."  So that's another game that my 15-year-old seems likely to enjoy.  Vince also threw in a set of hand-made maps to augment the game, which I think is pretty cool.

For my ten-year-old, I picked up a clever little tile-placement game called Continuo (designer Maureen Hiron, publisher U.S. Game Systems) at the Bring-and-buy flea market.  Its designer touts Continuo as a "one-rule game for the whole family."  I look forward to trying it out with my son.  (I also got him four alien dice at Our Game Table, because, you know, he likes UFOs, and he likes dice.  It's not rocket science.) (Sorry again.)

(c) Queen Games
Used by permission
For my wife Kathy and me, I bought Roma (designer Stefan Feld, artist Michael Menzel, publisher Queen Games) for a very reasonable price at the Bring-and-buy.  I'd read at least one positive review of this as a good game between spouses.  We've played through it once on a "we're not playing to win, we're helping each other learn the game" basis, and I think we're going to like it.  I can't wait to play it again on a "now that we know the game, we're out for blood" basis.

Meanwhile, I dropped off five games at the Bring-and-buy flea market to sell.  Of those, it was the two role-playing games that attracted buyers - En Garde! (the TSR role-playing rules set for 17th century rapier-dueling and derring-do) and James Bond 007: Goldfinger (a scenario module for the Victory Games RPG based on the Ian Fleming series).  I don't think I'll miss them, and I hope somebody out there gives them a new lease on life.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Congress of Gamers digression: Notes from a conversation with John Moller

I met John Moller of Car Trunk Entertainment in the game design contest room at Congress of Gamers the other day.  We started getting a little philosophical about game design - what we like in a game, what leaves us flat.  I like his perspective, and one observation he made stuck with me enough that I thought I'd expound on it here a little.

It's probably "card-driven" when the
printer resorts to 4-point font to fit the
special instructions on the card.
John described an interesting distinction he makes among card games into two general categories - card-driven games and player-driven games.  (I might not quite have his terminology right.)  The distinguishing concept is the nature of the cards in the game.  In a "card-driven game," most of the behavior of the game is governed by the text on the card - i.e. every card has its own rules or unique icons printed on it to describe its function and effects.  In a "player-driven game," the cards are relatively abstract, having only rank, suit, and/or perhaps a few other general categories, and the rules generalize across the deck.  In the extremes, a collectible card game would be "card-driven" and cribbage would be "player-driven."

One or two words on the "special" cards -
still in the spirit of a "player-driven" game
Of course, these are two general categories and not a strict taxonomy of card games.  Still, to refine definitions like these, I have a tendency to want to find exceptions, or ambiguities at the boundary between categories.  For example, Uno (designer Merle Robbins, artists Kinetic and Jeff Kinney, publisher Mattel) has mostly rank-suit cards, but there are a few special cards that change the play of the game - "Reverse," "Skip," "Draw two."   But really, I think Uno keeps to the spirit of what John describes as a "player-driven game," in which the card that you play depends on the tactical situation at the time and not so much whether you got a special card that drives a special effect under the circumstances.

I think Fluxx (designers Andrew and Kristin Looney, publisher Looney Labs) and its variations, by contrast, fall into the "card-driven" category.  Although some cards are simply objects ("Keepers") and objectives ("Goals"), many are unique rules and special effects.  I don't necessarily mean the simple cases of "Draw Two" or "Hand Limit Three."  The particularly unique cases of cards that interact with other cards - you can do this unless your opponent has that Keeper, etc - make Fluxx more of a card-driven game.  The point is that you can add or delete or modify the specific rules or effects on the individual cards in a card-driven game, and all you've done is change the game in some lateral way; instead of Martian Fluxx, it's Pirate Fluxx.

I think John's point about "card-driven" games is that they play themselves to a certain degree.  The course of the game is governed by the shuffle and who gets which card when, more than by the tactics that the different players choose to take.  I might not be explaining John's thesis very well, and perhaps it deserves a little more thought for me to appreciate and articulate it.  I was hoping - but failed - to find a write-up on the concept in his Car Trunk Entertainment blog, so perhaps I can persuade him to spend a few words on it some time soon.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Congress of Gamers Part II: Flummoxed Families and Punchin' Planes


I spent the latter half of my day at Congress of Gamers entirely in the game design room.  There I met John Moller of Car Trunk Entertainment.  He and I talked quite a bit about our philosophies on game design.  Rather than go into details on some of John's thoughts, I'll hold them for a subsequent post.

On to the games then:  John first showed me his game Flummox (artists Bill Bricker and Darrell Louder, publisher Clever Mojo, planned release March 2012), which involves taking actions and activating cards to move a marker (the "Flummox") among the players' arrays of cards in an effort to score points by having the Flummox end up on one's own array - or cause an opponent to lose points by putting the Flummox on his or her array, depending on whether the Flummox is "good" or "bad" in that turn.  I found this game to be a fun exercise in logic and tactics, vaguely along the lines of Guillotine from the standpoint of manipulating the arrangements of cards to gain points and thwart opponents  I think John's action-driven mechanism is a little more elegant than Guillotine, which depends on a separate action card deck to manipulate a line of nobles.  In Flummox, a player may exercise only one of four actions and then activate only one of two cards on the ends of his or her array in order to move the Flummox or modify the players' arrays on the table.  The cards themselves have only a few different characteristics and types, but they combine in a way that makes for some fascinating conundrums.  I really look forward to trying this game again.

John also showed me his design contest entry Family Reunion, a rather bizarre little game that I came to think of as a cross between Concentration and a kind of two-dimensional Guillotine.  (Maybe I just have Guillotine on the brain today.)  Again, this one provides a neat logical challenge, but I found the unique behavior of each family member's card to be a little overwhelming, at least in a first playing.  I imagine I would get the hang of it before too long.  I like the game, and I want to try it again as John refines it, but I can't decide whether I like it as much as Flummox.

John was good enough to try Trains Planes and Automobiles with me, along with Tim, who'd played it once already.  This would be my third demo of the day.  I think I was tickled just that Tim wanted to play it again.  For the second time that afternoon, I had ridiculous card luck with airline tickets.  Usually, games I've played have all been close, and I always lose.  At Congress of Gamers, I was winning by substantial margins.  I think I'm going to pay close attention to the course of the games I play to see whether card luck is too strong a factor.  Right now I still think that card luck can be mitigated with good flexibility and use of the discard-replace rule (or even the trading rule, which no one seems to use).

(c) Z-man Games
Used by permission
After dinner, Tim Hing, T.C. Petty, and I got The Speicherstadt out of the game library.  Tim had played before, but T.C. had not.  I had only played in two-player sessions with my wife Kathy at home, so I was looking forward to playing a three-player game.  The Speicherstadt has a nice bidding mechanic in which demand for available cards determines their prices.  The first bidder for a given card has the first opportunity to buy, but at the highest price.  If he elects to pass, the next bidder in line has an opportunity to buy the same card for one coin less, and so on until a bidder decides to buy the card for the available price (or the last bidder passes, in which case the card is discarded).  Money is very tight in this game, and bidding from a strong position can count for a lot if the right cards come up for sale.  I did very well in this game with a dominating position in firemen and the completion of some pretty hefty contracts.

T.C. then demonstrated Good Ol' Punchin' Planes, a prototype two-player game on the hilarious premise of pre-World-War-I airplanes that race alongside one another while pugilists stand on the wings and engage in fisticuffs.  Simultaneous card play determines both the relative motion of the two aircraft and the trading of blows between the two fighters.  Terrain obstacles over the race course (yes, these airplanes fly very low) present additional hazards to the pugilists, such as bridges, telegraph wires, and a barn.  I played against Josh Tempkin, moderator of the design contest, who managed to achieve a more crowd-pleasing performance than I did and therefore won the event.  Afterward, Josh and I had some ideas for TC to give a little more depth to the "combat" part of the game, but I have to say that it was good for a hearty laugh more than once during the race.

Upcoming posts:  What I bought and sold at CoG, and notes from a conversation with designer John Moller

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Congress of Gamers Part I: Best laid designs

My plan for Congress of Gamers was to demonstrate Trains Planes and Automobiles once and then move on to the usual Eurogaming fare (Carcassone, 7 Wonders, Agricola, Settlers of Catan) for the rest of the day.  Strangely, it didn't work out that way.

Parker Brothers
1971 edition
Waiting for the main events to get started, I played a pick-up game of Mille Bornes (designer Arthur "Edmond" Dujardin, artist Joseph le Callennac, publisher Winning Moves) with young Josh and his father John.  I've always liked MB for sentimental reasons.  My family played it when I was growing up, and it brings back fond memories of my Mom (almost as much as Clue does).  Those memories were even stronger yesterday, because John and Josh had the same 1971 edition MB that was our first family copy of the game, with a chartreuse plastic card tray.  Theirs was an obviously well-loved copy, because the cards showed the wear of many, many plays.  It is especially appropriate that MB should be the first game I played yesterday, because its card-play mechanic provided the inspiration for the Travel deck in TPA.

I had time to play Can't Stop, the first entry in Mark Love's "America First" tournament series at CoG.  Clearly, I am way too conservative in my dice rolling in this terrific push-your-luck game.  I came in last place at a table of four players (with Phil and two more Joshes) because I just couldn't bring myself to be as aggressive as they were in the dice rolling.  The three central columns - sixes, sevens, and eights, were finished early, which made all subsequent dice-rolling risky.

I set up for my TPA demo later that morning in the same gaming room where the Stone Age / Ticket to Ride / Vegas Showdown Eurocaucus event was going on.  I had only one taker - young Josh from our earlier MB game.  (I didn't see as many kids at CoG yesterday as I thought I'd remembered seeing in earlier years, but perhaps I'm mistaken.)  Josh enjoyed playing, and the game attracted some attention from a few others in the room.

After lunch, I hooked up with TC Petty (designer of Viva Java, which I'd playtested at WBC last summer) and his friend Tim.  We had some time to kill, so I introduced them to TPA.  They seemed to like it, despite my ridiculous card luck with unlimited mileage airline tickets.

At this point, I made a pretty fundamental change in plans for the day.  Instead of playing Carcassonne or De Bellis Antiquitatis, I decided to head to the game design contest hosted by Josh Tempkin.  There I met Darrell Louder, whose unpublished prototype Compounded was ready for a run-through.  I sat down at what turned out to be a six-player game, the first time Compounded would ever have been played with that many people.

I have to say that I really like what I saw in Darrell's design.  As chemists, players accumulate crystals that represent elements (hydrogen, oxygen, etc), claim eligible compounds (hydrogen peroxide, sulfur dioxide, etc), and then allocate elements to those compounds to complete them for points, increased abilities, and new functions.  Compounds in progress can be undone by lab fires or an excess of oxygen.  What really impressed me was the way that the end-game conditions came together.  Game end is triggered by any of three conditions - running through the deck of compounds twice, scoring at least 50 points, or completing three of four experiments (solid, liquid, gas, or "wildcard").  In our session, all three conditions were met almost simultaneously.  Although the game was a bit lengthy for six players (five of whom were new to the game), I was hard-pressed to suggest any tweak to shorten the game duration that wouldn't disrupt the balance among the game elements.

Next post:  CoG Part II - More adventures in the game design contest room

Friday, October 7, 2011

Packed up for Congress of Gamers

Just a quick post in preparation for Congress of Gamers tomorrow in Rockville.  I get to demonstrate Trains Planes and Automobiles at 11:00 a.m.  Otherwise, there's pretty much at least two things going on at any given time that I want to do, every hour of the day.  Usually for a convention I'll plan out an itinerary, but I think this time I'm going to "improvise" from one hour to the next.  Maybe I'll play in the De Bellis Antiquitatis tournament, so I'm bringing my 15mm later hoplite Greek army.  Maybe I'll play in the Eurocaucus series of Euro games, or maybe I'll check in with the game design contest.  I'd really like to learn Go, finally, after all these years.  And there's a series of race games, including McGartlin Motor Racing, which I first learned at CoG a couple of years ago.  And Mark Love is running a series of American-designed games.

I'm also bringing a few games to sell at the bring-and-buy, games that have some degree of sentimental value but that just aren't going to get played again in my house and deserve a new home with a new opportunity to entertain:

  • Foxbat and Phantom, an SPI flat-box game of tactical jet combat in the 1970s
  • Gulf Strike, a Victory Games heavy-duty modern-day operational warfare game in the Persian Gulf
  • Wiz Kids, a simple little word game for kids
  • En Garde!, a TSR role-playing rules set for 17th century rapier-dueling and derring-do
  • James Bond 007: Goldfinger, a scenario module for the Victory Games role-playing game based on the Ian Fleming series.  (Somehow I managed to sell the core game JB007 at a yard sale but ended up with this module - how did that happen?)
I'll follow up with a post on Monday with feedback from CoG.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Wits and Wagers at work

Today we had a pot luck luncheon at work, a sort of celebration of the end of the fiscal year - or at least, just an excuse to blow off some steam on a Friday.  My team lead asked for game ideas, and I volunteered to be the game host for the event.  With a group of twenty generally smart but not avid game-playing people, my immediate thought was to run Wits and Wagers (designer Dominic Crapuchettes, publisher North Star Games).

W&W is a terrific party game for a large group.  In our case, we had twenty people, who divided themselves into five teams of four.  (The rules suggest seven smaller teams, but our game worked out fine with five.) The great thing about the game is that you don't have to know trivia; you just need to recognize the right answer when you see it.  We had a pretty good age range in our group, so questions about the Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly actually got some nods of recognition.

The premise of the game is that there are seven rounds.  In each round, a trivia question is asked whose answer is a number (such as a year, a measurement, or an amount of money).  For example, one question asked, "In what year were women first admitted to the United States service academies?"  Each team writes down an answer.  The answers are arranged from least to greatest on a betting mat.  Teams bet poker chips on the answer they believe is closest without going over.  The payout depends on how much of an outlier the right answer is.  If the median answer among the guesses turned out to be correct, then it pays 2:1.  If the smallest of all five guesses is correct, then it pays 4:1.

I should mention that one of the guiding principles of North Star Games is that they try to design games so that everybody is playing all the time.  There are no turn-based mechanics in W&W, and there should be very little down-time for anyone in the course of a game.  Everybody is working on an answer at the same time, and everybody is deciding what to bet on and how much at the same time.  That principle seemed to play out well in our session, and I didn't have to use the egg timer to keep things moving.

Usually when I play this game, people bet aggressively, and I have a problem with running out of poker chips when people win big.  That wasn't the case in this game at all.  Teams bet very conservatively (or very poorly), so there was never a team that bet a giant stack of chips and won a payout of an even bigger stack of chips. In fact, three of the five teams lost everything they had on the last question.  ("In what year was the novel Frankenstein first published?")  The winning team won with 59 points in poker chips - a remarkably low winning score in my experience.

But of course the real pay-off was how much fun everybody had playing this game.  I got a lot of positive feedback from co-workers who had a great time and really enjoyed themselves.  And of course that's what it's all about.

I should add that my team lead was very gracious to announce, before the game started, that I had a new game of my own published, and then showed everybody her copy of Trains Planes and Automobiles.  Needless to say I was surprised and very appreciative of her support.  I got a few questions about TPA afterward as well, which was really nice.

Frontispiece, Frankenstein,
1831 edition
Oh, and in case you were wondering:  Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was first published in 1818.  She wrote it while in Geneva one summer with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelly and Lord Byron, who had proposed that they each try a hand at writing a supernatural tale.  As for the service academies, the four major academies (West Point, Annapolis, Air Force, and Coast Guard) first admitted women in 1976.  As a member of the Naval Academy class of 1982, I was quite aware of this transition period.  What few people realize is that the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy admitted women in 1974, two years before the other academies.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

A new dimension to Qwirkle

I was amused to see that Mensa-select game Qwirkle (designer Susan McKinley Ross, publisher MindWare) had won this year's Spiel des Jahres, the German annual award for best new game of the year.  Amused because my family (and many Americans, I expect) have been playing Qwirkle for quite some time.  But I guess if it's new in Germany, it's new, and that makes it eligible for the SdJ award.  Of course, Qwirkle is a brilliant game - easy to learn, fun to play, while aesthetically pleasing at the same time.  So the award is well-deserved, if a little overdue.

So the other day, I happened to have some rare time on my hands and wandered into Game Parlor Chantilly, my favorite local game store.  I really didn't expect to buy anything but had my eyes open - and spotted Qwirkle Cubes, a game by the same designer and publisher that I'd heard of but never thought to look for.  I snatched it up, secured my purchase, and whisked it home to try it out.

Kathy and I played it last night, and tonight our ten-year-old joined us for a game.  Qwirkle Cubes adds a nice Yahtzee-like dice rolling element in which tiles are replaced with dice, and the pattern you seek to obtain from your roll depends on the board configuration at the time.  Also important is that in Qwirkle Cubes, your "hand" of cubes is visible to your opponents (and vice versa), so that the risk of leaving an opening for an opponent to accomplish a high-scoring qwirkle is easier to evaluate.

The scoring in Qwirkle reminds me of basketball from the standpoint that the final scores are very high and usually close.  Tonight was no exception:  I won with 125 points, followed by Kathy with 122 and our son scoring a respectable 116 in his first game.

I can see Qwirkle Cubes quickly becoming a family favorite, perhaps even retiring the original SdJ-winning Qwirkle to the shelf for a while.