Memoirs of a Board Gamer

Following in the footsteps of the successful deployment of a multi-language and sanctioned implementation of Ingenious, I've recently been in a dialog with the marketing department at Sophisticated Games concerning an online implementation of Reiner Knizia's Callisto. I've recently finalized the details of the commissioned work and would like to announce the effort. I'm excited to bring this game to the online "try before you buy" community and hope you enjoy the game as much as I do.

I'll be posting updates over the course of the next several weeks and as the design and implementation progresses I encourage your feedback. Also, if you're interested in being a playtester for the online game, please feel free to drop me an email and maybe we can work something out.

I've wanted a copy of Big City for years but was not willing to pay the premium prices for the out of print (OOP) game. Valley Games announced that they were printing another version but that was well over a year ago and I was getting tired of waiting. As luck would have it, I saw a "Like New" copy go up in the BGG marketplace for only $30 so after exchanging some emails with the owner I jumped at the chance.

The copy arrived today and it looks freshly punched and the rules feel like they've never been opened. I inventoried the bits tonight and got started on learning the rules. This time, at least, it paid off to wait for the right moment to jump.

Whipped up a homemade wooden (white oak) copy of Micropul today. It didn't turn out as nice as I'd hoped (I rushed) but it is playable. I think I'll take another shot at using some of the print and play designs for another attempt.

Sophie, Noah, and I played Long Shot this morning. From the image, it looks like my 3 horse was doing pretty well but unfortunately we were battling for third place. Sophie cleaned our clocks by owning the 1 horse; it came in first, and she had $20 bet on it. My 9 horse came in second and Noah's 6 horse third.

We had a good time playing. Lots of laughs and grumbles at the good and the bad dice rolls. Long Shot is a relatively chaotic experience but it's still proving to be lots of fun for us.

Got in a quick game of The Climbers with the whole family after dinner tonight.

I got a couple of close gamer friends together for an impromptu game day at my house. We warmed up with Die Aufsteiger/The Climbers.

We quickly moved on to Power Grid. Power Grid is an economic, route building game of supplying power through a network of cities on a map. Players bid money for auctioned power plants that require different types and numbers of resources to operate (coal, oil. trash, nuclear, wind). After acquiring power plants, players must purchase the necessary resources to operate them from the market. As resources are purchased, they become scarcer and therefore more expensive. Additionally players build upon a network of cities that their power plants supply. The only way to obtain more money, is to power the cities in your network at the end of each turn. When the game ends, the player that can power the most cities on the final turn is the winner.

I'm not a big Power Grid fan though. I owned a copy and we'd tried to play it numerous times but could never make it through the entire game in one sitting. The first step of the game (up to 7 cities) is relatively straightforward, but the second and third steps get a bit fiddly with the power plan auction market. There isn't quite enough meat in the first step to make it a "real" game but I don't enjoy the last two steps so I'm in a quandary. I enjoyed playing it more with only three players rather than the full complement of players. It moved along at a faster pace but I'm still glad I traded my copy away.

Next up was Chinatown. The game was new to all of us so it was a learning game. I'm not fond of negotiating games and to do well you have to be able to see what's worth negotiating for and how best to value that position on the board. I ended up winning but I don't think that had much to do with my skill at the game.

Players draw cards and from that set keep a few and discard a few. The cards depict numbers that indicate where on the grid (Chinatown) you can place a "control" stone. Players place their stones on the numbered squares for the cards they keep and then everyone draws tiles blindly from a bag. You job is to try to collect and or negotiate for trades and/or controlled positions on the board such that you can lay identical tiles in groups. The tiles represent types of businesses being built in Chinatown (e.g. Laundry, Restaurant, Fish Market, Tea House, ...) The larger your establishment gets, the more points it's worth at the end of the round.

I enjoyed playing the game well enough but not enough to seek out a copy for my collection.

I can't believe it but I forgot to take a picture of our game of Cavum so all you get is a bogus box shot I took a few days ago. Cavum is a brand new (thanks BGG Secret Santa!) title from my collection and I'd only played through a sample solo game. In Cavum, players did tunnels into a central mountain looking to "uncover" loads of gems. Players place tunnel tiles deeper and deeper into the mine and build stations that block travel through the tunnels for other players. The goal is to collect the right kinds of gems during a traversal of tunnels between two stations. Tactical placement of stations, blocking players, destroying tunnels, and connecting to the cities that surround the mountain are critical.

The game can be rather cut throat since players can place dynamite tiles that blow up tunnels and they can place tiles on top of existing tile to reroute the tunnels for offensive and defensive purposes. I liked the game but there are a lot of moving parts and things to think about.

Our final game was Notre Dame. October 2007 was the last (and only!) time I'd played. It's been to the table a few times in game nights where we've split into two tables but I've always been at another table. I was happy to play it and really enjoyed it. I really need to get this game to the table more. Notre Dame is somewhat of a solitary endeavor. Each player is assigned a lobe of the city with Notre Dame in the middle. With one exception, your play is limited to placing cubes into boroughs of your section of the city. You place cubes and a pawn (your trusted friend) into individual boroughs pay playing cards from your hand. Each borough affords you different actions to perform and the more items you have in the borough the more powerful that action gets.

Players interact in a few ways passing cards to each other, vying for dominance in Notre Dame, and moving a carriage around the city. You're all trying to earn victory points but you've got to deal with the plague-ridden rats that attack at the end of every turn. I really enjoy Notre Dame and it's a shame it's been so long since I've played.

Thanks for coming over for the impromptu session and I hope to do it again soon.

Okay, it was an impulse buy but my copy of Die Aufsteiger, a.k.a. The Climbers, arrived today. I was surprised that it came so quickly given that I'd only ordered it on Friday morning but by Monday afternoon it was sitting on my porch, packed well in a USPS Priority Mail box.

The game is heavy, weighing in at 4 pounds 6 ounces; you don't want to drop that on your foot! The shoe-boxed sized box, shown next to my phone for scale contains chunky wooden blocks, five wooden "climbers", five blocking "stones", and ten ladders (in two sizes).

You begin the game by placing two large gray blocks vertically and then everyone simultaneously places blocks around them following a few simple rules. When all the blocks have been placed, the two gray starter blocks must be completely hidden. The image above was the arrangement Noah and I arrived at for our first game.

Players take turns optionally moving a block and then attempting to climb their "climber" up the block mountain following a few relatively simple rules concerning what colors you can climb on, how many climbers can stand on each block, and limitations on how high of a block you can climb upon without using a ladder. Ladders are only good for one use and are removed from the game. Each player gets a single small and a single large ladder so use them wisely.

The game ends when during a turn nobody moves to a higher level. The player at the highest level wins or in the case of a tie, the first player to reach the tied level wins. There are optional minor modifications to the end game rules when playing with two.

Since the set up is random but still carried out by humans, you might think there would be cause for making sure nobody is stacking the deck, pardon the play on words, by placing blocks in a fashion to make it easier for their color. However, that's taken care of by the fact that you don't know what color of player you're going to be until after the initial set up.

Noah and I had fun. It's a light but interesting mental puzzle, good for an opener or closer or with light gaming company. I'm interested to play it with more to see how that plays out. It's a very photogenic game and I hope to try to get some artsy-fartsy shots in the coming weeks.

I honestly can't believe it but my image above won the BGG contest for the 2009 Picture of the Year. Last year there were 195,895 new images uploaded, 1.3 million new forum posts, 11 million unique visitors, and 291 million page views. Board gaming is a relatively niche hobby but with numbers like that I feel like a small fish in a big pond.

Having no training in photography, if I can win, anyone can win. Thank you for all the votes, good luck to all of you in the ongoing monthly contests, and in the year end contest for 2010.

Rarely do we plan ahead of time what we're going to play on any given game night but this night was different. Jared had checked out a copy of Battlestar Galactica from the CABS library and we knew a week in advance what was coming. I never followed the BG television program and have seen no episodes of BG - The Next Generation (tm) but I'd heard that it was not necessary to play the game. However, I did watch a short boardgameswithscott video on playing the game and felt I was up to the task.

For my group, BG is a long game. Epic long. We just don't play games like it but we wanted to play it at least once. We routinely overshoot the listed times on the boxes by 50%-75% and BG lists at 3 hours. Yeah...epic long. So, add in a lengthy rule reading and we were in for a long night. A "school" night mind you.

As luck would have it, the weather turned bad and the snow and ice-bound traffic snarled up most everyone by 15-20 minutes. I'd wanted to get in one playing of my rethemed DYI copy of Scripts and Scribes and although we had 5 I taught the game to the other four and sat out while they played.

So, by 8pm we were ready to start in on BG. When the initial round of loyalty cards got passed out, I found it difficult to contain my elation at receiving a Cylon card but I did my best to act human (I don't think Cylons make giddy noises like a little girl.) We made our way through numerous failed skill checks and I only poisoned the deck with one card a couple of times. On my turn I attempted to help soliciting input from everybody, grumbled when my attempts at helping would fail, acted suspiciously towards others as if they were Cylons, and in general not trying too hard to sabotage anything.

We came out of the first jump relatively unscathed but the Admiral selected only a distance 1 planet and that looked a bit suspicious to me. I started to think that maybe I'd found an ally but then realized that a recent failed skill check appeared to be ruined by some card play that wasn't mine and the Admiral didn't contribute. Bob, on my left and President had narrowed down the reason for the failed skill check to be between me and another player. I also began to suspect the other player so I poured on human schtick and overtly tried to help. The other suspicious player cranked up his attempts at sabotaging the skill checks and the gig was up. He outed himself and the focus of all the other humans were aimed solely on the known Cylon. They expected only one...

I sat back and bided my time. I was the engineer and I wanted badly to use my one time game power of choosing one color during a skill check to ruin its value but the opportunity wasn't presenting itself. The known Cyclon placed the Admiral in the brig and on the Admiral's turn he, with a skill card, granted me (on his left and with complete confidence in me as a human) the ability to take a turn. This was the perfect time for me to out myself as a Cyclon since I'd get two back to back turns with Cylon capabilities. To make matters worse, the player to the Admiral's right was the other Cylon so we'd effectively have three Cylon turns in a row.

But, I was blinded by my desire to sully a skill check with my engineer's power and I again didn't grab the brass ring and took a turn that ended innocuously. I was about to take my regular turn and out myself when the question came up about terminating the game. The humans had only 1 distance point under their belts, the outed Cylon had done a good job of pulling down the population value, there were lots of ships ready to do some damage, they weren't close to jumping, and we were roughly 3 hours into the game. So we decided to fold up shop. Jared picked up the loyalty deck was about to pass out the rest of the cards to see who "would have been" the other Cylon and I announced that it wasn't necessary since I was the other Cylon from the beginning! A huge groan arose from my living room...a complete surprise. Man, I wish I would have outed myself when the Admiral let me take that turn.

BG is a fun enough game but the fun was really being generated from the camaraderie among my gaming friends. Sure, the game established the scaffolding for it to take place but in retrospect, the mechanics of the game are not all that interesting. Since I'm not a fan of the show I miss out on the subtle (and even overt) ties back to the theme and the game itself boiled down to card play and plastic ships.

I'm glad I got a chance to play. I had fun but I don't see a need to play another game to the finish to feel complete. I'm happy with what I got out of it and I feel comfortable moving on. We lost a player to the ice and snow and finished up the night with a round of Scripts and Scribes for four.

Thanks guys for coming over. I had a lot of fun being a toaster.