PrezCon: The first casualty of battle is the plan

PrezCon!  I get excited just thinking about the name.  My favorite convention.  So convenient to northern Virginia, such a friendly and yet competitive gaming community.

I felt a little burnt out after five solid days of PrezCon last year, so this day I'm going for just four days; I'll arrive on Thursday and go through Sunday.  My gaming friends Keith F., Brian G., and Tom S. will arrive a day ahead of me, on Wednesday.  My buddy Grant plans to arrive in time for the first events on Monday evening and stay the entire seven days.  Hard core, baby.  I don't know how people do a solid week of intense boardgaming.  People like that must pace themselves better than I do.

Excerpt of my PrezCon
schedule ... for now ...

Every year I go to the PrezCon website and agonize over the schedule.  Every year I carefully prioritize my gaming preferences and put together a perfectly-crafted sequence of events that will take me from breakfast to midnight of solid gaming for the duration of my stay.  And it seems that every year my plan flies out the window within two hours of arrival.  I always seem to get re-directed to some new discovery and find myself playing something I never thought I'd try.  I think that's the magic of a game convention - the impetuous spontaneity of pick-up games and demos and vendors and auctions.  Grant said he's given up on even trying to make a plan.  He just plays as the spirit moves him.  All the world is his gaming table, and all of us merely opponents...

I've written this before, but I'm not afraid to repeat myself.  The best advice I ever got when approaching PrezCon came from Convention Director Justin Thompson:  "Learn at least one new game; buy at least one new game."  I have three demos in mind for games that I want to learn this year:

• Acquire
• Small World
• Command and Colors: Napoleonics

1976 3M Edition

I'd actually seen a demo of Acquire (designer Sid Sackson, artist Kurt Miller, publisher Wizards of the Coast) once before, at my very first PrezCon, and bought a copy on eBay shortly thereafter, but never got a chance to bring it to the table.  But when Little Metal Dog Show explained why Acquire deserves the title of a "stone cold classic," he reminded me of how much I liked what I saw in that game years ago.  So now I'm going to blow the dust off the box and get reacquainted with this Sid Sackson masterpiece.

Grant is running Small World (designer Philippe Keyaerts, artist Miguel Coimbra, publisher Days of Wonder) at PrezCon, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never actually sat down and played the game before.  So I'm setting SW as a specific "learning goal" for PrezCon this year.

Cover Design by
Rodger B. MacGowan
Copyright ©2010

I also want to get my hand back into wargaming.  Now, the Richard Borg series of historical strategy games (Battle Cry, Memoir '44, Command and Colors: Ancients, Battle Lore) aren't exactly the kind of hard core Avalon Hill / SPI wargames I grew up on, but they will scratch the itch for now.  And I haven't done Napoleonics in a very long time, so Command and Colors: Napoleonics (designer Richard Borg, artist Rodger MacGowan, publisher GMT) seems like a good new title to learn.

As for buying at least one new game, well, I'll bring my wishlist, but there's no telling what I'll come home with.  Here's my top seven, in no particular order:

• Fairy Tale
• Le Havre
• Chicago Express
• Traders of Carthage
• Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War
• High Frontier
• Saint Petersburg

Finally, of course, I'll be demonstrating Trains Planes and Automobiles three times at PrezCon.  I've mentioned before that PrezCon has a special place in my heart as the place I sold TPA two years ago, so it's nice to come back and show it off as a finished product.  The family game format is a little off the conventional PrezCon path, but I'm hopeful that for a few people, it will be the new game they learned at PrezCon, and maybe one or two will even pick up a copy.  I just want people to have fun playing it.

The game of marriage ...

... or (to paraphrase the immortal question posed in the introduction to The Odd Couple) "Can two people live together without driving each other crazy?"

Today I direct you to the blog of my lovely wife, K.B.Owen Mysteries, where she and I exchanged, you know, "observations" on each other's behaviors, those little things that make life together, well, interesting.  I hope you get a chuckle out of it.

As you read it, bear in mind that this is the lovely face that gazes at me from across the dining table and smiles sweetly just before she crushes me to fine grains of dust in Agricola, or Jaipur, or Citadels...

Gold on Mars: It's been done

The game that burst
my bubble

I was doing some market research today for my "Gold on Mars" game concept, and I've made that heart-sinking discovery that somebody has already done what I had in mind, better than I could have done it myself.  High Frontier (designer and artist Phil Eklund, publisher Sierra Madre) seems to have all the elements I wanted to manifest in "Gold on Mars," but (based on reviews) better than the prototype I've been crafting.

So, bottom line, I'll have to get a copy of HF.  It looks like fun.

*Heavy sigh*  Meanwhile, back to the drawing board.

Discovering Bohnanza

On business travel, I had the opportunity to visit long-time friend Stephen Craig and his wife Shelly.  Stephen had recently brought his prototypes of "Off to College" and "Staples" to UnPub2 and come back with a number of suggestions and ideas to work on.  But after a nice spaghetti dinner, the game that Stephen and Shelly really wanted to bring to the table was a card game I'd read many good things about but never played - Bohnanza (designer Uwe Rosenberg, artist Bjorn Pertoft, publisher Rio Grande).

I'm a big fan of Uwe R. because of Agricola, and I look forward to trying Le Havre sometime soon when I have the opportunity.  Bohnanza is in a completely different category, though, and I was surprised to see that Uwe R. had designed it.  At first glance, I was reminded more of Empyrean Inc. than anything else, but even that comparison is weak.  I'd read a number of reviews of Bohnanza, and while they were largely enthusiastic, none was particularly positive on it as a two-player game, so I hadn't really given it much thought.

Based on our session this evening, though, I've bumped it up on my wish list.  Bohnanza is a clever little game of shifting relative values among cards and tight decision constraints.  A lot of the fun is in the wheeling and dealing to trade off unwanted bean types for better prospects.  Whereas we tended to play a semi-cooperative, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" approach, I can see how this game could be very cut-throat in a competitive environment (like a tournament).  As a social gamer, I appreciated the "benevolent negotiator" approach that we took at the table this evening.

I would imagine that a lot of the fun elements would be muted in a two-player game, which has no trading, but Stephen and Shelly insist that they have a lot of fun just playing the two of them.  Their copy of the game is "well-loved," which shows that it has had a lot of play.  So I think Kathy and I will have to give this a look.  Many thanks for Stephen and Shelly for turning us on to this new discovery!

Chicago Express: Where has this game been all my life?

I gave our good friends Sheila and Keith a copy of Chicago Express (designer Harry Wu, artist Michael Menzel, publisher Queen Games) for a wedding gift.  I had never played before, but I was looking for something suitable for two to six players - something they could play together as a couple but that our occasional "game night" group of friends could play as well.  CE came up pretty high on the boardgamegeek rankings, and the reviews looked promising, so it felt safe as a gift choice.

Sheila and Keith hosted a dinner party last night, and we got to play a six-player session.  None of us had ever played before, so I read the rules beforehand.  The game struck me as the perfect implementation of capitalism in game form.  Railroad company shares are sold at auction.  Company dividends are distributed among shareholders based on earnings.  Stockholders - or board members, if you like - direct the investment of capital raised from the sale of shares to invest in railroad expansion and development to improve the company's earnings.  I have never played an 18xx railroad game, but I have the impression that CE is a kind of "18xx light."

We had a really great time with this game.  I was very pleased that it was a relatively easy game for all of us to learn even though we had no one at the table who had played before.  (The only open rules question for us was whether money is "hidden" or "open"; the boardgamegeek consensus seems to be that money in any game is open unless the rules specifically provide for hiding it, as in St. Petersburg.)  I think as we played, we all overbid pretty heavily for stock certificates.  More players chasing a fixed number of shares, which were the only source of income - supply and demand at its finest.  We had so many auctions that three railroads had only just reached Pittsburgh when Rebecca triggered game end with an auction of the last share of the New York Central after the Pennsylvania and B&O had already sold out.

Part of what struck me about this game is a complete absence of luck.  I didn't really think about it until the game was over, but there is not a single card draw, dice roll, or bag pull in the entire game.  As one reviewer mentions, the only "random" element (if you can call it that) is the seating order around the table and determination of starting player.  The rest of the game is determined entirely by the decisions of the players at the table.  Even more than Puerto Rico (which I consider a brilliant design), CE is entirely in the hands of the players.

The more I think about CE, the more excited I am about it.  I've put it on my "must have" short list.

1962 3M edition

Rebecca mentioned that CE reminded her of Acquire.  I have only played Acquire once, at PrezCon, and I loved it enough to buy it on eBay, but haven't had the opportunity to play since.  I had recently read mention of Acquire when Little Metal Dog Show called it "a stone-cold classic" in a post about ten days ago.  Rebecca and I agreed that we should bring it to the table at our next opportunity.  Since that conversation, I ran across an interesting boardgamegeek thread comparing the two games.  This is another game that I need to bring out soon.

So many games, so little time.

Games for four-year-olds

[This is a re-post of an entry originally published on 2 February 2012. The post was somehow corrupted, so I am restoring it for accessibility.] 

I was recently asked about games for very young kids.  I haven't looked at games in this age range in a while (since our youngest is eleven), so it was interesting to revisit the gamescape for the booster-seat set.

We still have two in our house that our kids enjoyed back before kindergarten:

Husker Du is essentially Concentration in a kid-friendly format.  The board consists of a number of small round "windows" through which symbols on a single rotating disc are visible.  Game set-up consists of covering the windows with checkers, then rotating the disc so that new symbols are lined up in the windows under the checkers.  Players remove checkers two at a time looking for matching symbols.  If they match, they keep the checkers; if not, the checkers cover the symbols again.  An old standard memory game, always a good parent-child past-time.

Launch Across is a cross between table-top basketball and Connect Four.  Each player has a launcher that propels colored balls against a backboard and down into one of several stacking columns.  The first to get four in a straight line row (horizontal, diagonal, or vertical) wins.  I'm not usually a fan of dexterity games, but this one is entertaining.

A search of the boardgamegeek.com database turned up a number of good options that are still available on the market:

• "Animal Upon Animal is a simple stacking game, listed for ages 4-99, with 29 cute wooden animals."
  
• Kids of Carcassone is a tile-laying game patterned after the phenomenally popular Carcassonne with simpler dynamics but, according to some parent reviews, engaging gameplay.
  
• "Viva Topo! is a [roll-and-move] family game that has players balancing risk and rewards as they attempt to outrun the cat and score for cheese. Players attempt to advance their mice to various goals. The further the goal, the more cheese it is worth. Pursuing the mice is the cat that removes the mice from the game should it catch the mice.  Movement is regulated by a die that also moves the cat. Initial cat moves are only 1 space, but become 2 spaces after once around the track, so when the cat speeds up, it's almost all over!"
  
  
  
• Boo Who? (originally Geistertreppe, now available as Spooky Stairs) has a clever feature in which players' pieces are magnetic and become hidden by "ghost" pieces over the course of the game.  Players try to remember where their pieces are and get them to the top of the castle stairs to win.
  
• "Being afraid of monsters is a normal part of growing up.  Go Away Monster! encourages kids to conquer that fear by acting it out and taking control.  It also lets them experience some of the apprehension and excitement in deciding what is real and what is imaginary.  Reach in the bag to find the puzzle pieces that fit your bedroom game board. Try to distinguish between the different puzzle pieces and decide which one feels like the size and shape of a piece you need. If you pull out a monster, don't be scared... You take charge, and the monsters will take off!"

I'd be curious to know what other games have become family favorites among parents of the pre-school generation.

A couple of funny little card games

As a get-well gift, a friend gave our convalescing family member the card game Angry Birds (Mattel), based rather tangentially on the popular app.  As games go, it's largely a function of dice and card luck, but it's a fun diversion with young kids.  We played a three-player round this evening, and we got some good laughs out of it.

Kathy's winning manipulation of the
time continuum in Chrononauts

Because Angry Birds went so quickly, Kathy and I then turned to another card game with a different bent of humor, Chrononauts (designer Andrew Looney, artist Alison Frane, publisher Looney Labs).  We like this game as an interesting twist on the Fluxx line of shifting victory condition card games that Looney Labs has put out.  As time travellers, we saved the lives of Abraham Lincoln, the Archduke Ferdinand, and John Lennon.  Kathy (as "Timmy") managed to travel back to 1918 when, thanks to the Archduke Ferdinand's narrow escape, Europe had avoided a destructive war, enabling her to "patch" the timeline with a European economic boom.  Then she traveled ahead to 1980 and saved the life of John Lennon from his would-be assassin.  She then traveled on to 1999 and engineered Senator Lennon's success in passing a Constitutional Amendment to repeal the Second Amendment and institute a nationwide gun ban.

Although some of the alternate timelines in Chrononauts are a bit tortured, the game itself is fun.  Besides manipulating history, the game can be won by collecting artifacts from history (or the future), some of which make me laugh every time I see them (such as the "Obvious Forgery of the Mona Lisa," depicted with a mustache).  The fairly simple gameplay features some tricky decision-making and risk-taking, which makes for a good overall card game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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 Daujean, Julien Delval, Jesper Ejsing, Bruno Faidutti, Didier Graffet, Bjarne Hansen, Darrell Hardy, Florence Magnin, Jean-Louis Mourier, Scott Nicely, Christian T. Petersen, Brian Schomburg, Richard Spicer

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.

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.