Author: matt

My second successful BGG trade arrived today. Last week Sophie mentioned that she wished we had a copy of Dos Rios so I began my quest for a copy via trade. Before my membership had expired, we’d played a borrowed copy from the CABS library and enjoyed it quite a bit. In fact, an image I took of us playing is one of my highest thumbs uploads and is the highest thumbed image for the game.

My game group also played the game one year ago this month. I called it a keeper back then and I’m hoping that now that I own it, I’ll still feel the same about it.

The game does have paper money which I detest. You can see in the image above, that I’m going to try using extra acrylic nuggets from my Nexus Ops “rubium” order as replacement money. The two sizes of rubium should work out pretty well as a direct replacement since Dos Rios has only two denominations of bills ($100s and $500s).

My thumb count for my uploaded images to BGG reached high enough this morning for me to be awarded a Golden Image Uploader microbadge. The badge is the little golden picture frame-like thingy below the word “PATRON”.

To be in the company of 36 other nerds that take artsy photographs of boardgames…it just brings a tear to the eye. Well, not specifically my eye but my wife’s eye. She’s just wondering, even more than usual, why she married me.

My official BGG registration date is listed as 2002-12-26. Like most afflicted members, my single game shelf morphed into multiple game shelves on its way to a free standing wooden shelving unit. To think that my collection of 80+ games is puny compared to most reminds me just how pathological this can become. I have several games I’ve never played and in the interest of keeping my collection relevant, I’ve decided to take the plunge into the world of BGG game trading.

BGG supports an active community for traders. BGG software provides the ‘matchmaking’ service allowing me to easily find members that have listed games they want in trade as they relate to games I’ve listed that I wish to trade. Once you find a mutual pair of games to trade, you can send an official trade proposal and if accepted, you each mail the games using the exchanged addresses and that’s that. Like e-Bay, members can leave trader feedback. Since I’ve not traded before and have zero feedback ratings, I thought it would be harder to find a potential trader. While excited about my first trade I am a little nervous. You see, I’m sending one of my precious games off into the void with only trust that the recipient will do the same.

After two rejected proposals and one ‘no response’, I received my first acceptance. My offered title is Hammer of the Scots. At one point, I thought I’d try a block game just to see how they worked. Realistically speaking though, my two-player war gaming opportunities are highly limited and it just wasn’t going to happen. In return, I hope to be receiving a copy of Medina. This out of print title caught my eye years ago but I’ve never had the opportunity to pick up a copy. Medina is a city construction game with tons of wooden bits. By game end, you and your opponents have created a three dimensional city that looks gorgeous. I’ll be sending out my copy of Hammer of the Scots in the mail today and hope to have a successful experience.

It was an extremely light night given the labor day holiday. We lost our host at the last minute but Rich stepped up to the plate and we were able to meet at his house for a couple three player games.

I brought Thebes that Noah and I had played earlier in the day. I set up the board and ran through the rules and Tim, Rich, I got to digging. Overall the game is pretty light and plays really quickly. There are a surprising number of decisions to make but none seem particularly devastating if you make a poor move. Both Tim and Rich liked the game and I’m hoping to bring it back to the table for more plays very soon.

With only three of us, I thought it a good time for Rich to bring out his copy of Nexus Ops. It’s a completely different style of game than we normally play and since we usually have more than three or four, it was going to be now or never.

Tim wasn’t fond of the random nature of battles preferring a more cerebral reason for losing position rather than the luck of the die. I enjoy the randomness of the battle and get a kick out of the gummi-style bits and the light play. It’s not something I’d like to play all of the time but when you’re in the mood, not much scratches the itch like Nexus Ops.

Thanks Rich for hosting on quick notice.

Noah and I tried out Thebes this afternoon. It was my first playing of the game so I’ll hold back any sort of review until I have a few more plays under my belt. I can, however, comment on the confusing rules:

• No mention of paying weeks for the cards you draw
• One part of the rules describe moving before you draw and another describes the movement as being taken after.
• Confusing end-game limitations on the number of weeks you are allowed to dig
• Multiple terms for the same cards (notes, legends, rumors, etc.)

Noah and I enjoyed our playing of the game, although we did play it incorrectly in a few places. He managed to totally destroy me with exhibition points and his ability to maximize the number of turns he would take in a row to catch up to my position. I felt I only had one lucky dig. Imagine my dismay being the first to dig in the ‘purple’ bag for six tokens to come up completely empty handed! We forgot to score the maximum knowledge in each color but I cannot imagine that it would have made a difference. As it was, Noah was out in front by about 20 points. Although I may sound a little harsh, I’m still looking forward my next play.

Lisa and I played a two-player game of Thurn and Taxis: Power and Glory last night and I got whipped but good. Power and Glory is an expansion to the base game Thurn and Taxis. However, to call it an expansion is somewhat of a misnomer. Power and Glory is to Thurn and Taxis as Ticket to Ride Europe is to Ticket to Ride.

The game comes with a different map, new cards, and some differences in the rules. The only caveat is that you need the base game to use the wooden post offices. There are two major differences in the game:

• No stagecoachesIn Power and glory you aren’t attempting to build routes in ever increasing lengths to efficiently pick up stagecoach cards. Power and Glory imposes no rule that encourages (directly or indirectly) players to build routes in any particular lengths throughout the game. Because there are no stagecoach cards, the cartwright’s special powers aren’t used in the game.
• Building your coachPower and Glory adds a route limiting feature by requiring players to play cards from their hand in one of two places: 1) your route or 2) as a set of horses pulling a carriage. When players cash in a route, the route cannot exceed the number of horses pulling their carriage. Cashing in a route causes not only the route cards to be discarded but also the horse cards pulling your carriage.

  A side effect of the carriage limiting feature is that it allows players to discard bad cards on their turn rather than being forced to play a card on their route. The base game was rather brutal if you were left stuck without a route card play by forcing you to throw away your route without cashing it in. This ‘discarding’ ability is a welcome change.

There are minor changes to the map with the addition of a single province that has two separated lobes. There are also some ‘free’ cities that are not part of any province that grant the first office a 1-point token.

Power and Glory is a strong game on its own without the base game. I like both games but I might give Power and Glory the nod given the addition of the ‘discarding’ ability.

I hosted August 2007’s Game Night at my house tonight. Jason was new to the group but I’d convinced him to give us a try. He’s played Settler’s of Catan many, many times as well as Railroad Tycoon so I didn’t suspect he’d have any problem at all picking up the rules to some other games.

We started off with Ra by Reiner Knizia. This game has had an on-again/off-again lifetime in my group but tonight I think everyone would agree that it was pretty fun. I like how the game is very easy to teach and it moves very quickly. It’s a little tough for new players to understand what’s worth bidding for and for how much but at least there isn’t a steep learning curve for the game.

We almost played another game of Ra as our second title but we ended up playing Himalaya for 5. I like this game but it tends to be quite cerebral but I’m not sure if all the effort is worth what at times feels like agony. The decisions can sometimes be tough but in many cases, it might as well be a coin toss which one turns up being the more correct one.

The end-game scoring is a quite strange and can be quite eye-opening if you don’t plan (or misread someone’s position) for delegates being removed from the board when a player doesn’t make it through the scoring of religious influence.

In my next attempt at this game, I’d like to play with the religious influence points inverted from the written rules so that small villages score 3 rather than 1 and large temples score 1 rather than 3. The number of delegates you’re allowed to place would remain, however, the same as the written rules. With this variant, the entire board becomes valuable (for differing reasons) rather than forcing contention into just the larger sites.

BGG user gollum‘s great geeklist holding “coffee-table-book-images” got me thinking about creating a real tangible book. So, I gathered 55 of my favorite images from BGG, added borders to provide a common theme to them all, and uploaded them to MyPublisher.com. The end result arrived today and I have to say I’m very happy with the results. Okay, I’m not just very happy…I’m ecstatic. I know I’m strange but man this thing is so cool!

The leather cover is very nice and the binding appears strong. The print quality is better than I expected with the image resolutions I had to work exhibiting little to no pixelation that I can detect. I chose the middle size at MyPublisher (mainly due to cost and the resolution of the images I was working with) resulting in an overall cover dimension of 8 3/4″ x 11 1/4″ x 1/2″.

The first page includes the following text:

I am a great fan of board games and of the online community that has developed around them at BoardGameGeek.com (BGG). In this book, I’ve selected approximately fifty images, submitted by myself and the community, that I wanted to preserve in a tangible form.

There are thousands of games, thousands of images, and thousands of community members supplying content to BoardGameGeek and selecting these images was a difficult task. Many of the images have had a border added to provide continuity to the book as a whole. However, the base image remains consistent with that uploaded to BGG. With each image I have supplied the name of the game, the name of the designer, and the BGG user name of the image submitter.

I hope you enjoy this collection of board game art and most of all, I hope it encourages you to find out more about these games.

Matthew D. Marquand
BGG: matthew.marquand
http://www.marquand.net

I’m extremely happy that I took the time and effort to organize the book and now I have something that I can set out on the coffee table and take with me to show off this great hobby.

Please visit My Coffee Table Book Geeklist on BGG to see some of the individual images.

The Lexio Cloud #2 on copper. I’m shamelessly looking for thumbs so if you think it deserves one, then knock yourself out.

A few items I’ve pulled from browsing BGG:

• Hasbro Dumping Avalon Hill Titles and InventoryAlthough there doesn’t seem to be an official word about the move, it’s the general consensus that Hasbro is dumping the Euro-ish line of games produced under the Avalon Hill umbrella. This includes Betrayal at House on the Hill,Monsters Menace America,Nexus Ops,Rocketville,Sword and Skull,Vegas Showdown. Because of this, several vendors have scooped up inventory and are offering the titles at extreme discounts (75% off). There is a lot of speculation about the reasons for the move but in general, it appears that Hasbro is getting out of the higher-profit/lower-volume Eurogame business since they can make more money on lower-cost/higher-volume runs that sell well in the large chains like Target, Walmart, etc.

  Several of the titles are supposedly complete garbage but others have had high to mixed reviews from those on BGG (e.g. Nexus Ops). It’s unfortunate for gamers that Hasbro has made the move but more unfortunate is that they don’t sell off the Avalon Hill line to smaller production companies who might be able to reprint and/or produce quality games for those in the hobby. Instead, Hasbro appears to want to gobble up and horde the goods.

• Hive gets a new bugHive has a new bug on the street with the addition of the Mosquito. This two-piece expansion grants each player an additional piece that is played like all other tiles. Like other creatures it has specific movement characteristics but unlike others, it takes on the movement options of any of the pieces it is currently touching. What an interesting addition!

  I posed a question to the designer concerning the movement options when a mosquito is used to trap your opponent’s mosquito. The response was that the mosquito cannot move until another tile comes in contact with the trapping mosquito. Although I haven’t played with the new tiles I can already feel my mind churning a little bit (in a good way) about how one would use and/or abuse a piece like that. It sounds like a great addition to an already great game.

• Himalaya VariantsI ran across some variants of Himalaya that sound like they’d be worth trying. In the standard rules, stupa/religious-influence points are awarded in the same manner as delegate/political-influence points. The large cities award three points, the mid-sized cities two points, and the small villages one point. In one variant you award stupa points using the inverse. With this approach, there is not an all out rush for the big cities when delivering goods. Instead, players must drive towards small villages for religious influence and the large temples for political influence.

  The second variant applies to the midgame evaluations for the most of each good that occurs on the 4th, 8th, and 12th rounds. The standard rules grants the player with the most of each good (salt, barley, tea, jade, gold) a 3-yak token. The variant grants the player with a choice from three options 1) a 3-yak token, 2) two delegates placed in any region of their choice, 3) one stupa placed in any region of their choice.

  I have more concern about playing the game with this variant because it might encourage cube hording during the first half of the game. With the standard game, players are encouraged not to horde if the opportunities for playing stupas are dwindling. With this variant, players can horde cubes and use them to place stupas in locations completely independent of their yak placement. In my opinion, the ability to place stupas and delegates in any location you wish may break the spirit of the game.