We met Monday night at Keith's house for the May 2008 installment of AGN. Thanks for hosting Keith.

We only had four so I was really wanting to break open my copy of the card/trick-taking game Tichu. I've owned this game for years and could never quite get it to the table. I've tried numerous times with my family with no success and they're even euchre players!

The game is best played with four playing across the table from your partner. You can play in the same type of setting at euchre and talk over the game play which I appreciate for casual non-gamer friends and family.

We only played four hands to get a feel for the game but I think I made some converts. If you haven't tried Tichu...grab a copy. You won't regret it.

The rest of the evening was taken up by Nautilus, the submarine/exploration game I've blogged about in the past. It only gets a 6.55 average rating on BGG which is respectable but, for me, it rates higher. I really enjoy the mechanics of buying and placing the research and habitation modules, moving researchers, activating modules, and building up your activation chart enabling you to be more effective in subsequent rounds.

The game does exhibit a fair amount of luck since the position of the good treasures is not known and it takes submarine exploration to recover them. However, the use of your sonar can help mitigate that. In any case, I enjoyed myself as did Rich and Keith. I'm not sure Jason liked it all that much. He tends to not be fond of luck-based games. Or maybe it was the down time between turns which can be large at times.

Note: I replaced the paper money with two sizes of plastic 'Rubium' nuggets I bought for my copies of Nexus Ops. Paper money is a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand the stuff.

Mr. Jack is a two-player game designed by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc. The artwork was designed by BGG member Piero Lalune (pierolalune).

The game casts a player in the role of a detective and the other player in the role of Jack the Ripper. The game ends in eight rounds or earlier if Jack escapes the confines of the neighborhood depicted by the board or the detective manages to capture Jack.

The detective has no physical manifestation on the board but instead directs the round characters markers in their movements towards capturing Jack. Jack, on the other hand, does have a physical presence and is represented by one of the characters on the board. Which physical token represents Jack is chosen at the beginning of the game by drawing a card from the Alibi deck (described later) and kept secret by the player playing Jack. It's the job of the detective to deduce which character is Jack and it's the job of Jack to escape capture by surviving all eight rounds without being captured or to escape into one of the alleys at the four corners of the board (two of which will always be blocked by police cordons).

The game hinges on a single core feature called witness/no-witness. At the end of each round, the character token representing Jack (known only to the Jack player) is either "in the light or next to another character" or not and the Jack player must announce whether it's possible for Jack to have been witnessed/seen by another token during that round. The image above shows to characters standing in the hexes adjacent to a lit streetlight and so therefore are visible (in the light). In the upper left hand corner is another unlit streetlight with a purple character token next to it. This character cannot be witnessed since he's 'in the dark'. A witness card is turned to the appropriate side (seen/not-seen) depending on whether Jack was witnessed or not during the round. Since the detective is trying to determine which character is Jack, the detective can then eliminate all of the characters that are in the opposite position on the board. Those characters that have been eliminated, have their wooden disks turned over to a less colorful side indicating that these characters are guaranteed not to be Jack.

Each round plays out in the same manner with the exception of the first four rounds where a single lit streetlight is extinguished leaving Jack more and more in the dark. The detective must work quickly in the first four rounds to narrow down his choices since it gets harder and harder to determine as the game progresses.

The game comes with two stacks of sturdy placards. The green stack holds a card for each character (8 cards total). The red stack holds an alibi for each player. As mentioned before, the Jack player draws and secretly holds the identity of the Jack character at the beginning of the game leaving an alibi card for all the remaining players.

At the beginning of each round, four character cards are drawn and turned face up (as depicted in the iconography below the clock tower in the image above). In the order depicted (the overlapping cards - gray is Jack, yellow is the detective), players choose a face up character card and take the action allowed by that character. Each round, one of the players will be able to perform two actions in a row. The character cards allow you to move the character token depicted on the card (at least one space and up to the number of spaces depicted on the card) and in most cases perform a special action. It's by moving character tokens, using the sewer system to move to other areas of the board quickly, blocking the sewer systems, moving lights, moving police cordons from one alley to another, etc. that allow the detective to force characters into the light or out of the light and for Jack to hide. At the end of each turn there is a call for witnesses and then a light is removed (only the first four turns).

One of the character cards, Sherlock Holmes, allows the player to draw the top alibi card. The alibi card allows the detective to immediately discount one of the characters further whittling away the list of suspects.

In general, the Jack player attempts to group as many characters as possible into either camp (witnessed or not witnessed) in hopes of keeping the detective from being able to discount large groups of suspects each round. Jack cannot escape into a side alley if was witnessed so Jack is always trying to not be witnessed to leave his options open for escape the following round. Sometimes, however, he's better off staying with a larger group to be witnessed and then making his move in the following round.

With a few games under my belt, it does have it's moments. However, I doubt I'll order a copy. One has to be very careful about deciding who and who isn't witnessed each round. If you make a mistake, it can blow the game making it immediately obvious who Jack is. The rules surrounding Dr. Watson's light, the lamp post light and being adjacent to another character are straightforward. However, in play it's easy to call witnessed when you meant not witnessed, and vice versa. Lisa found it difficult to not think of herself as the inspector rather than the detective so she kept discounting his character. In her mind, since she was not playing Jack how could she (thinking of herself as the inspector) be Jack on the board. All of the characters on the board can be Jack and the detective does not have a character on the board.

I've found it very difficult to escape so I'm curious if that rarely happens. A situation arose in my last game that illuminated a tactical move for future games. We were in the 6th round and there were two characters left and Jack had not been witnessed in the previous round. I made a run for it using the Jack character leaving him not witnessed but weakening my position in the final round (I was eventually captured). However, the other character was positioned well for making an escape through the sewer.

The game is solid, and does provide a quick 2-player experience that feels a little bit like an adult version of Guess Who. The play feels somewhat repetitive and at times it's difficult to understand what makes a good move given unknowns in the following round. Solid but not something I would add to my collection.

However, this is the front of the lady's van that hit the Mini. Noah and I had just pulled into a spot at Sophie's school and I had just got out and was closing the door. Noah began opening his door when a lady swung into the spot next to us and ran into the end of Noah's door.

Then...she had the nerve to give me a stern talking to about it being my fault and how my tinted windows were obscuring the passenger. Ridiculous! My car was stationary and I was standing beside it. Her car was moving into the spot next to mine when she hit my door and could have injured Noah. What a knucklehead!

Luckily, I'm not sure the Mini sustained anything but some scuffed paint on the edge of the door. I looked it over very thoroughly and can't see anything wrong with it mechanically or cosmetically. I'm still going to take it to the dealer to see if anything internally is messed up.

Mean people do suck.

Uberplay Entertainment announced today that they are ceasing operation effective immediately.

I'm bummed. I've been part of a small company that has folded and I know that it's depressing after putting your heart and soul into something like that. I wish them well in any future endeavors and I'm sad it didn't work out for them.

The Uberplay titles in my collection are:

• Alhambra
• China
• For Sale
• Hansa
• Metro
• Ra

Each year, I gather 30-50 photos of Sophie and 30-50 photos of Noah taken in the previous year, organize them, upload them to MyPublisher.com, and print "pocket book style" books (one image per page). This year I was slow to get them ordered but I finally finished them and they arrived a couple of days ago. As usual, MyPublisher does a great job. If you've never used a service like this, I highly recommend it. Their pocket books are very inexpensive ($30 each) and they make great memory books for your kids to keep forever.

I need some soothing music today. The muscles in my genetically bad back decided that yesterday was a good time to rip and tear while going for a thrown softball. I almost went down on my hands and knees in the field and barely made it back home. I immediately got ice on it and writhed on the floor in my family room. After laying down, I couldn't get back up without rolling to the side and with excruciating pain. Lisa managed to get me a Sunday appointment with her specialist who does electro-stimulation treatments on her chronic neck problems.

After the treatement I was better but after a restless night of staying in one position for too long my back is very painful and stiffer than stiff. I'm off work today trying to recoup as much as possible and I have another treatment this afternoon.

If you've never had acute back pain...may you never experience it. It's like no other pain I can describe.

The hardware environment to run BGG consists of the following items:

32GB RAM Database server 1TB Disk
2-3 TB File server. I have 1 TB now but we're growing like a sprout.
5 application web servers - 8 GB RAM each (memory used for memcached)
Load balancer
Gigabit Ethernet switch
10 MBps uplink (prolly could use more than that though)

Desires:
Replicated database server - 16GB RAM
spare app servers in case of failures.
dedicated dev server
KVM over IP

Site stats from January 2008:

Pages & Visits
-----------
849,620 Unique Visitors
2,028,322 Visits
20,003,356 Page Views
9.86 Pages/Visit
Time on Site: 00:09:39

User Loyalty
-----------
1 times 745,984 36.78%
2 times 115,684 5.70%
3 times 57,823 2.85%
4 times 39,059 1.93%
5 times 30,152 1.49%
6 times 24,770 1.22%
7 times 20,942 1.03%
8 times 18,450 0.91%
9-14 times 79,775 3.93%
15-25 times 90,488 4.46%
26-50 times 119,737 5.90%
51-100 times 133,819 6.60%
101-200 times 141,675 6.98%
201+ times 409,964 20.21%

New Content
-----------
79861 New Posts
9059 Images Uploaded
1078 Files Uploaded

I'd like to introduce two affiliate sites managed by Bradley W. Schenck. The Retrovert features vintage artwork from the 20s, 30s, and 40s applied in novel ways to modern day merchandise. There are some really neat items in Bradley's store.

I'm most excited about Bradley's second site featuring, in his words, Celtic Art and Retro-Futuristic Designs. To me, it's steam-punk and I love it. There are all kinds of products featuring depression-era artwork spun in a Flash-Gordon/Buck Rogers style. The metropolis that never existed. Very cool stuff and I encourage you to check it out.

On the right you'll see two icons depicting the stores (duplicated below in this post as well). These will take you to Bradley's sites where you can browse and purchase his products. Any time you wish to return to his stores there's no need to remember what they are. I'll host a permanent banner so you can always jump directly to them.

Give Bradley's stores a once over and I hope you like what you find. I sure did.

Looks like another awesome haul David. Rails of Europe is on my short list. My son loves Rumis and is quite adept at kicking our collective family butts. I'm waiting a bit on Mr. Jack. I've found I don't get to play strictly 2-player games all that much so I think I'll just wait and see if it can sustain it's currently high ranking. I've only heard good things about it though. And finally Mission: Red Planet. My group has played it a few times and I've had fun every time. I'd be interested in hearing how all of these turn out for you. Thanks for sharing!

Matthew,

No real gimmick behind this ThoughtHammer order, other than 
1) Ticket to Ride: Switzerland "won" the TH "March Madness" 
    Tournament and was available for $10.50 (I got a copy for a friend, 
    not shown) and 
2) I had recently sold my Mayfair Cosmic Encounter (redundant 
    w/the completion of my Eon set) and 3) I had some 'mad 
    money' lying around.

the details:

2 x Ticket to Ride: Switzerland (Swiss Map Expansion) $21.00
1 x (Ding & Dent) Mission: Red Planet  $26.99
1 x (Ding & Dent) Mr. Jack  $22.19
1 x (Ding & Dent) Rumis  $20.09
1 x (Ding & Dent) Poison (Reiner Knizia)  $9.00
1 x Rails of Europe: A Railroad Tycoon Expansion
$29.99
1 x Boomtown  $16.25
1 x Incan Gold (a.k.a. Diamant)  $19.99 

Total (w/ the obligatory Free Shipping): $165.50

Latent 'themes': railroad expansions, ding & dent, fun, family games etc. 
should keep me, my family, and my game group busy for a while. At least until the 
next order.

Regards,

DavidO

The print for the board of the 'Nile' 2-player variant of Tigris & Euphrates arrived today from CafePress. The custom large poster comes 23" x 35" but the board artwork prints only 17" x 20" centered. I trimmed the white border off the poster and I'd like to mount it but I think I'll wait. I'm not satisfied with the color scheme.

The biggest change that I think I need to make is to adjust the hue of the river. I think it's too green given the color of the blue tiles. Also, the board is relatively dark so I may make some minor adjustments to that as well. I must say, though, that the tiles do have a certain degree of visual pop making it easy to detect patterns without being hindered by the artwork.