PBEM Olympics - Fearsome Floors Game 1

The first heat of Fearsome Floors was completed on March 11th. Chester (as the first non-medal-ing kid) got to pick the next event and went with something lighter. We tried for one site, but I couldn't ever get registered. We ended up trying yucata.de and after a little hiccup, got started. We played the basic game with the default setup for this first round. Nathan and Justin were new to the game and didn't quite know what was in store for them. Normally this game is middle of the road for me, but for whatever reason, this game was a lot of fun this time. There was A LOT of carnage and chaos. I was channeling my inner-Sato and sacrificed a number of guys just to see a rampage by the monster. well worth coming in last. Nathan won the first round, with Justin in second. Chester had an early guy out, but lost all his guys right at the exit. It was a beautiful sight watching the monster rampage his way through the people. And for the record, Daniel Karp was the first guy to exit.

PBEM Olympics - Mykerinos Game 3

Our third round of Mykerinos for the PBEM Olympics finished with a less than interesting (to me) result. Chester got the first (early) brown which he felt gave him a leg up. He finished second with 43 points. The winner? The same game that said this on March 3rd, "i think i'm going to take last in this game..." That would of course be Justin, who clocked in with 48 points. Apparently, my hoarding of the yellows so that I wasn't getting screwed on pyramids wasn't much help. To be fair, my wimpy 36 points was also due to my having 4 less tiles than Justin (5 including his 5pt tile). Gah, looks like Justin will likely win the second gold of this competition without a whole lot of effort. After a good finish last game, Nathan came in with only 31 points this time. I don't know. This game is ok, but I just don't grok it. I'm dropping its rating as I just don't think I'll get it played too much after this event.

PBEM Olympics - Puerto Rico Game 2

Well, Chester is definitely making up for any ass kicking he took in Samurai. Another game in the books. The second game of Puerto Rico went pretty quickly this time around. As in the first game, I struggled to make any money and it hurt a lot. Chester didn't just beat us, he spit on us as he lapped us. He scored a mighty 76 while Nathan and I each had a respectable 48 (I won the tie there). Justin brought up the rear with 40. There doesn't seem to be much chance at overtaking Chester here, so I think the three of us (tied at 2 pts each so far) are playing a two-game race for silver and bronze.

Game Night

Friday March 5, 2010 - Gamer's Inn.
Time to do a little catching up. This evening started out with my teaching Nathan Winchester how to play Hey! That's My Fish!. This isn't the greatest game in the world, but it is fast and more importantly, it is a game we'll likely get to eventually in our PBEM Olympics. I just wasn't seeing the game very well and it really didn't take very long to see that I was making a lot of mistakes and Nathan was going to clean up on me. At any rate, it was a good starter and while we finished, a number of other players arrived.
We were expecting Liz and Matt Longieliere anytime and we had a good number of folks, so I suggested another quick and light game - Incan Gold (which the Gamer's Inn has a player's copy of. Joining Nathan and I were: Matthew Frederick, Amelia Boli, Dion Garner, Robert Bolan, Noah Antwiller, and newcomber Mike McCarthy. The first round saw Robert and Dion bail out early. A couple of us bolted later and left Noah to gather a huge windfall. The next round Noah was able to bolt with an artifact and some gems and somehow, the next two turns had nearly immediate ends with disaster cards coming fast and furious. It was no surprise Noah won this game (and yet I missed recording his score). The final scores - Mike McCarthy: 8, Nathan: 11, Robert: 8, me: 14, Dion: 22, Matthew: 7, Amelia: 11, Noah ?
After our adventures in pyramids, Nathan, Noah, Mike and I settled down into a game of Steam (basic rules). I wasn't excited about trying to teach Steam from scratch, but it turned out Mike had played Railroad Tycoon, so teaching this to Nathan (Age of Steam player) and Mike was easy. As we started the game, I felt like I was half asleep - I made at least two or three HUGE mistakes. If we had been playing Age of Steam I'm sure I'd have gone belly up. In some ways it is disappointing that this version of the game allowed me to stay in the game. That I was not in dire straights and in fact made a run to the win at the end of the game says something about the overly forgiving nature of Steam. Despite making some large end game deliveries, Noah had an abundance of short routes on the board and I couldn't quite catch him. Final scores - Noah: 50, me: 48 , Mike: 47, Nathan: 42. Now, I still think there are good things about Steam, but the money is just too easy. If I had made one less mistake, I'd have easily won a game where I was sure I was dead. Again, if this had been AoS, I would have been. I know not everyone appreciates the brutality of the game, but I really do. I appreciate the action tiles (taking out the need for the auction) and the goods for production and urbanization, but I think the split VPs and income track make things way too easy on you for cash.
After Steam, things mixed up a bit and Matthew joined Nathan, Robert and I for a game of Bus. We went through the rules and settled in for a playing that was simply brutal. I had brought this out to get a handle on playing this with Nathan. This is a game that has an online implementation that both of our PBEM Olympic opponents are familiar with and we wanted to familiarize ourselves with the game. As I said already, the game was brutal. We found ourselves playing a cutthroat game of chicken and decimated each other's stockpile of actions. If you have no clue what I refer to, then you probably haven't read the rules. At least, you didn't MIS-READ them like I did. Really, the rules are pretty simple. The complicated part of the rules are in laying the lines, and we got that part. But we mis-understood that the person(s) choosing the lines actions and new building actions first get the good number of actions - they just do them in reverse order. We thought that you placed in reverse order and GOT THE BENEFIT in reverse. Thus we figured that the first person to take place lines would get screwed by people placing after them. We also didn't realize that the board starts with 4 passengers sitting in the middle of the streets (probably since that rule isn't in the setup - its in the middle of the rules). Combine those small gaffs with a group that had no clue on building placement and you ended up with a game where passengers weren't going anywhere and a group of players running out of actions from being screwed by the other players. At any rate, the game came to a close with Nathan scoring late in the game to win the tie breaker over Robert. Now that we have it figured out, I'm interested to see how the game actually plays!
The four of us finished the night by playing a quick game of Undercut. Robert grabbed a couple of quick scores, followed by Matthew. Nathan and I scored once each for a couple of low scores, then held out for the rest of the game until Robert imploded. Nathan's lone 2pts made for an easy win for him.

Bye Samurai

Yesterday, MaBiWeb had to say goodbye to Samurai. Knizia pulled the plug on playing for free (apparently he has licensed the game to an iPhone/iPad development team). That sucks as I really REALLY like this game, but I certainly understand - no point in making an application to play on the phone and expect folks to pay you for it when you can play for free on the same device you are targeting. That still sucks. I'm glad our olympics did Samurai first (we had no clue this was coming). Hopefully the plug won't be getting pulled on any more Knizia games in the near future. At any rate, here are my Samurai stats from my games played on MaBi.

Game	2 players		3 players		4 players		5 players		Total
	played	wins	played	wins	played	wins	played	wins	played	wins
Samurai	29	21 (72%)	21	12 (57%)	19	5 (26%)	-	-	69	38 (55%)

PBEM Olympics - Mykerinos Game 2

The second game of Mykerinos for the PBEM Olympics is in the bag and the results? Much closer. Justin: 41, Nathan: 41, Charles: 40, Chester: 38. I think Chester has about given up on this one having posted two losses now. Of course, he's getting better and I suspect this one will be close unless the third game is Justin's. The points work out that the gold is still up for grabs between Nathan, Justin and I (though I suspect any gold I get here will be luck more than anything). This was something of an odd game in that there was one Mr. Brown in the first round, and one in the second. The absence of his power in the early game spread out the points I think. Chester had a lot of cubes each round, but he didn't nab a bunch of old ladies nor red guys with which to use all his cubes. in the first couple of rounds. He made a valiant attempt, but Justin's DOUBLE RAINBOW was too much. Nathan made a huge point swing at the end of the game and the two of them tied for the game.

Game Night

This evening's game plan didn't quite go as expected. The original plan was to play a quick two player game of Starcraft: The Board Game at my place with Robert Bolan and I. Robert ended up having to move some stuff, and unexpectedly, Nathan Winchester and Matt Longieliere were available, so they popped in and we played 3-players. We random picked factions with Matt as the Protos (yellow), Nathan the Terrans (red), and myself as the Zerg (green). It has been a while since I've played and so of course I had at least one turn where I did my orders backwards. Not only that, I forgot what color I was when looking at the scoring track, so I thought i was winning. As it turned out, the end game came on pretty quickly and I was not in position to win like I hoped. Both Nathan and I had our sudden death victory conditions, but he was leading in the point standing. Oh well - next time.
After we finished, we waffled about trying to decide what to do. It was getting late and sounded like there were a load of folks at the Gamer's Inn, but I just wasn't up for heading over there and waiting forever to start playing something, so Matt Nathan and I mulled over my collection a bit and eventually settled on Java. I really enjoy this game from the Mask Trilogy - the spatial game and the puzzle solving aspects are really fun to me. I jumped out to a big early lead with the water (which Nathan and Matt overlooked as being huge point opportunities until I scored a bunch) but Matt and Nathan made up for that with private palace festivals. I saw my chance near the end of the game to end the game and score first, so I took advantage of that, but didn't get out far enough in front - Nathan and I end up tied.
So, I got to play two good games I haven't seen in a while, but I didn't get to head to the Inn to catch up with some old friends who were in town. Luckily for me, they will be moving to Mesa soon enough.

PBEM Olympics - Puerto Rico Game 1

Another game in the books. Yes, we finally finished the first heat of Puerto Rico. For the record - I suck at this game. I finished dead last, in large part from a failure to generate any kind of income to start the game. I had far too many rounds where I passed builds from lack of funds. Chester won with a massive 65 pts. He shipped early and often. Justin was in second with his 54 pts. Justin thought he had no chance, but his 24 pts in buildings + 14 bonus brought him up a lot. Nathan was in third at 49 points and I was no where in the building with 39 pts (no bonus pts). Even if I had got my bonus building set with a worker, I was only going to nab another 7 points. I need a serious comeback in game two to even have a chance at a medal.

Uchinoke Islands

After all my recent games of Samurai, I found some of the alternate maps that I had looked at at one time or another and finally spent a little bit finishing one. This map is one of the alternate maps that came with the Klear games version of Samurai. I had to add in the markers for 1-2-3 cities on the map and add a title, but otherwise pretty much just re-sized the images and put them all together. The map, once correctly scaled to the normal playing pieces comes out around 20"x24". Now I'll just have to get this printed. The internet printer I've used before requires that you purchase 2 prints, so I'll probably have to work up another one of the alternate maps as well. Then I'll just need to find something appropriate to mount them on.

PBEM Olypic Standings

Medal count after 1 event
Player	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Justin	1
Charles		1
Nathan			1
Chester

PBEM Olympics - Samurai Game 4

The last of four games of Samurai on MaBiWeb finished today. In this game, Nathan (green) needed to win and have Chester finish last in order for him to medal at all. Justin (blue) and I needed to ensure Chester (yellow) didn't win while beating each other out to get gold. Nathan and I began with pieces on Edo (3-spot) while Justin went to the southern island and Chester a bit to the northern island. I used a lot of power pieces early in an attempt to try and limit Justin to almost only rice pieces. Nathan was kicking ass, while the rest of us looked to be pushing equally forward. In fact, it was my concern that Chester was going to storm back at the end that was my own undoing. I counted up the pieces and setup the board such that Nathan would have to end the game (he'd win, Chester would be last). Unfortunately, I made a major mistake and Justin beat me out for second place. By no means will I claim that Justin's Gold Medal for the Samurai event was due to my poor play - he played really well the whole set of games. I looked back later and I'm pretty sure now that I couldn't have prevented Justin beating me. I just didn't have the right pieces I needed at the end of the game. Congratulations to Justin for the gold medal.

PBEM Olympics - Mykerinos Game 1

After finishing our first game of Mykerinos for the PBEM Olympics, a couple of things became apparent:

• Justin is going to kick our asses
• I don't really care for the game. I don't hate it, but I struggle to wrap my head around it or something. I seem to do ok at times, and other times, I really suck.
• Chester doesn't seem to care for the game.

I looked at the 4-player records for the players. Justin (including this game) has won 6 of 8 games on MaBiWeb. I don't think any of us have a load of experience with this game except Justin. Maybe we're pouring our energy into Samurai, but this one lacks the same tension that our other series has acquired.
At any rate, Justin did indeed win the game with a final score of - Justin: 48, Charles: 46, Nathan: 34, Chester: 31. Going into the last round, it was apparent to me that I had no ability to keep Justin from scoring points, nor any ability to collect more than he was going to be able to. In my head, I think I had him scoring more than he actually finished with, but it doesn't matter - a win is a win.

LotR - TC:DE

After finishing his homework the other day, my son asked me to teach him a new game. I looked around and realized I had just the thing. Lord of the Rings - The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition. This is one I managed to finally snag in a trade a little while back, but hadn't even gone so far as to read the rules on. At any rate, I pulled it out, scanned the rules and set about explaining how to play. Luckily, the rules are pretty straight forward - move forward. Attacks are like Stratego, but with a twist - you also play a card from your hand. Most have more numbers, but some let you play a card you've already played or some such. In addition, each piece has text that allows you to win over another or break a rule. Ashton took the forces of Sauron, whilst I took on the Fellowship and attempted to return the One Ring to Mt. Doom. I apparently make a bad Frodo, as Ashton came out with the victory. This is a Knizia game and after playing, I can see where a few plays to get a feel for all the pieces will not make the game stale, but rather will bring the game to life. My son has apparently taken a shine to the game as well, as he has already asked for us to play again after school tomorrow.

PBEM Olympics - Samurai Game 3

The third game (of four) of Samurai on MaBiWeb finished today. This game saw Nathan (green) take his turn getting abused. With Chester (yellow) in the back of the standings and following me in the turn order, I did what I could to feed ideal setups for stealing pieces from Justin (blue). I also managed to really hurt Nathan three turns in a row and he only squeaked out four pieces by the end of the game. We had a situation near the start of the game where it looked like Chester and I might tie all three of the pieces in Edo, which would have made for a very tense sudden-death game. It didn't come to pass though. So now we are on to the final game and things should really heat up. This game saw us finish - 1st: Chester, 2nd: Charles, 3rd: Justin, 4th: Nathan. With this, the standing through 3 games are: 6pts: Charles and Justin, 4pts: Chester, 2pt: Nathan. This means that Nathan needs to outright win the last game while putting Chester into 4th for Nathan to medal at all. Justin and I will be battling for position, as the one that finishes ahead of the other should win the gold - unless Chester wins the game and Justin and I finish 3rd and 4th, since he wins the tie breaker. So basically, we all have a pretty vested interest in beating up on Chester.

Oh the Horror

I was reading about Jason Maxwell's adventures in solo Arkham Horror, so I had some time today and thought I'd give it another solo whirl. I went with three investigators (at random): Monterey Jack (aka The Archaeologist), Vincent Lee (aka The Doctor), and Gloria Goldberg (aka The Author). The town of Arkham and was pitted against Ithaqua. Well, with an inexperienced player, some bad dice, and a bad card draw, the town and its inhabitants never had a chance. Five rounds in and I hadn't closed a gate, hadn't had a gate collision (so the doom track and gates were at 5), and my best shot at closing a gate had gone up in flames when Gloria tried and tried to kill a horror in another dimension and couldn't roll 3 passes on 8 dice. My 6th round card was one that put 5 monster on the card and one new one each round. When it got to 8, the terror track shot to 10 and I just never had a chance after that. Now, I've never played this with a group, but the thing that seems to take the longest to me is simply the setup of the game. I can get through monster movement and such pretty quickly, I'm not sure what all the fuss is. Even if I was doing it for the group, it isn't a big deal. No, the real problem with this game is that it gives me a similar feel to Pandemic while being 8x more fiddly. In all fairness, AH oozes with theme. Ah well. I'll probably keep pulling it out on occasion, but it still is just so-so.

PBEM Olympics - Samurai Game 2

The second game of Samurai on MaBiWeb finished today. This game saw Chester (yellow) get brutalized. It always feels like one person gets the short end of the stick and it was Chester this time around. Nathan (green) and Justin (blue) took a couple of turns in the mid-game stealing everything in sight. I was positioned slightly out of the path of the storm and was just trying not to get screwed like in the first game. As the game winded down, I was worried that I was not going to be able to secure a majority - it looked a lot like Justin or Nathan were going to tie my two strong suits - hats and rice. Fortunately for me, Justin never got his swap tile until it was too late (ie - it was his last tile drawn). Nathan was able to end the game, choosing to let me win rather than give Justin a huge two-firsts in two games. I somehow ended up with 12 totems (two majorities no less). 1st: Charles, 2nd: Justin, 3rd: Chester, 4th: Nathan.

Airships

My son asked to play something today and opted for a game we've tried before - Airships. This little dice game works well for the two of us - he can handled the limited math and seems to understand the scoring system surprisingly well. I had to glance through the rules to get myself back to understanding the system again, but once that was in place, we were racing to improve our Zeppelin building empire. Ashton managed to get a couple of good cards with victory points on them early on. I pointed out that he had only a single red dice to use most of the game, but despite that, he was doing well and kept scoring Zeppelin cards. I was trying to keep up, but in the end, he won by a good margin 21-15. This is another game that I may have to tote along to the Geekway - I think we'll have a couple of games we play that need a side game ;)

Game Night

I had some friends over to my place to play a few games on Friday night. Nathan Winchester, Matt Longiliere, and Robert Bolan were the first to arrive, and so I pulled out Buried Treasure for us to play while we waited for the rest of the players to arrive. Buried Treasure is a little Sid Sackson card game. Where each round the person with the most (and second most) cards in each of the four colors scores points. The amount of points are randomly determined each round, making some colors vastly more valuable than others. One twist - if you tie for the lead, neither you nor your other tie-er can vie for points, thus making the next person in line the winner of the points. In the basics game, you simply take turns taking cards from the various piles and then add up the points. In the advanced version, each person has a small set of cards they can play rather than drawing. We played two games - one basic and one advanced and I managed to sneak out wins in both!
By the time we finished, Liz Longiliere, Matthew Frederick and Amelia Boli had arrived. Matt L joined the newcombers to teach/play Dungeon Lords. Nathan Robert and I pulled out Khronos to give it a go (hopefully by playing the rules correctly). I continued my winning streak with a hugely lucky streak of cards - every single hand of cards I had was awesome. I won 53 to 30 (Nathan) to 14 (Robert) thanks to the great cards. I still like this game and am starting to see how to play it. With three players, most of the action takes place in the first two boards. With four players I can see where the action moves to the later stages. Though I don't know that this will see a ton of continued play, it is still a decent game and not a terribly long one - and still has interesting decisions and play.
Next up, Nathan wanted to play a little Samurai (which Robert really wanted to learn), so I pulled this and Sushizock im Gockelwok for us to play. Yes, two games. Sushizock is fairly light and good filler while the other players take their turns in other games. Robert being new to Samurai meant he had no chance at all against Nathan and I (this is the most played game I tracked on the BGG). This also meant that when Robert attacked the pieces I was going after and not so much on Nathan, that I was going to have a hard time beating Nathan. In the end, Nathan and I each had a majority, and the same number of other pieces - however, Nathan had a single piece more than I did overall, and thus got the win. As consolation, Robert won two games of Sushizock while learning Samurai.
We finished the night by playing a game of Thunderstone. Our setup had us with the Thief, Fighter-Thief, Fighter-Cleric, and Fighter (outland guys). The monsters were Humanoid, Undead-Doom, and Doomknights. In our village, we had only one weapon and one major spell - fireball. The rest of the deck was pretty meh. Though we seemed to be fighting against the fact that none of us could see (ie we had very little to no light in our decks), we had a load of attacks that pretty much let us past this obstacle. When we finished, Nathan had slain the most and most worthwhile monsters (38 points), I was nearby with 33, and Robert at the back with 13. Though a pain (the same as Dominion) to setup and put away, I still like this a little better. The theme just seems better to me. Even with an uninteresting setup like we had, it was no worse than Dominion. When you get a fun or interesting set of cards, the game gets even better. In our case, the monsters were of a similar type and taken out with the fighter types and cleric-fighter easily enough. If there had been some magic types, it might have changed the dynamic a lot as you'd have to ready your deck for either.

PBEM Olympics - Samurai Game 1

The first event to get started this year was Samurai on MaBiWeb. This was a really interesting game - not in the general play of it, but in the way the game finished. Typically in a 4-player game, one of the players gets screwed the whole time. Apparently, this was my game to be the guy being bent over. As the game neared the end, I realized I had ZERO chance of being anything but the biggest loser. Thus, I positioned the game such that Justin (blue) would win the game (I was going with the assumption that Chester (yellow) was going to be the harder player to beat of the two of them and didn't want to give him a leg up in the points). What happened next, I hadn't planned at all. We decided that the positioning for the game would be based on: After determining the winner, the next place would be determined using the normal scoring rules for Samurai, but simply taking the winner and their pieces out of consideration. Thus, after awarding first place to Justin - Nathan (green), who didn't originally have a majority, suddenly had a majority and beat Chester out for second place. When it came down to Chester and I - I suddenly had a majority in rice. When the other pieces were counted, I had more and thus placed third. Chester, who had played a good game and looked likely to win a turn or two earlier, suddenly found himself in forth place. An odd twist of events. Now, I'm not smart enough to play this game for that kind of positioning, but I'm guessing the next couple of games should be pretty interesting.

PBEM Olympics

After a recent online game of Samurai, Chester Ogborn had an idea for a PBEM Olympics. Together with Nathan Winchester, and Justin Easley we are going to play a series of different PBEM games. Chester compiled quite the list of games from various sites (a good number of which none of us have ever tried). The plan is to play 4 games of each game, awarding points and then a medal after each game series. The Olympics then start to take on something of its own meta game, since if one person starts to pull away in any one event/game, the other players are likely to make choices in other games to simply hurt their overall standing. I imagine this will be going on for a long time :)

Game Night

Friday Jan 29, 2010 - Gamer's Inn
This particular game night at the Gamer's Inn was Robert Bolan's first night sitting down with us. Robert is one of my co-workers who I convinced to come out to join us. In addition, Nathan Winchester and Matt Longieliere and his wife Liz Longieliere were present. We started the night out with a little Ticket to Ride. We simply played the base game, as I realized my 1910 cards were at home. However I did bring my Mayday Deluxe Train set, so we all played with the wooden trains in stead of plastic. Whooooo whooooo! The game chugged along at a steady pace, with the only thing of note was Matt taking tickets early and often. Myself, I ended up connecting San Francisco to LA to New york and Atlanta. I took a couple more tickets, but mostly started throwing out sets of cards to extend the length of my line. When we finally added it all up, I felt like I was in pretty good shape - all my tickets were done (and I had some good ones), I beat out Nathan by a couple of trains for the longest line, but ended up in a tie with Matt. As it turns out, the tiebreaker is number of tickets. It looked like Matt had about half the deck of tickets, so he easily won that tie breaker.
Next up I pulled out Age of Empires III.This is a game I always really enjoy, but don't play half as much as I should. I ended up last in the turn order to start the game and didn't have much in the way of options, so I grabbed a number of specialists and loaded up the discovery section. I also purchased a capital building to give me an extra colonist a turn. In the next round I sent a number of guys to the new world and did a discovery. By this time, Matt had cornered the ships and goods (he had a merchant or captain each turn) and was not letting anyone else in on his action. Liz had a captain in the discovery box each round and thus it looked like she'd be my main competition for discoveries. Nathan didn't seem to settle on a particular strategy and when he committed to making some discoveries, had a run of bad luck losing to the natives three times. Robert also didn't quite settle on a strategy until the end of the game when it was to little too late. I dove head first into sending a bazillion folks over to the new world using the missionaries and the Cathedral (making each missionary worth three colonists). I was a bit worried about Matt and all the goods and ships he had, but his devotion to that as nearly his only victory point engine was his undoing. Robert sent soldiers over to the new world to thin me out, but it wasn't until the last two rounds he was able to start his ethnic cleansing. By that time, I had a good lead in points and enough people that I was able to weather most of his efforts. I was fairly certain that I had screwed myself in round three of the game, so was surprised I won. In the third round I had the chance to buy the capital giving me an immediate $20 - I also had a chance to place a guy to give me two buildings. Instead, I placed my last worker in discoveries and built a different building. What I realized right after I did it was that I needed to go with my original plan so that I'd have the extra cash to purchase a capital right away at the start of the second age. Instead, I headed into round four with $4 (not the $14 I needed). I was so frustrated that I was playing so poorly, but stuck with it and did well enough to win. Sometimes you just need a little stick-with-it-ness. Final scores were: me 87, Matt 72, Liz 71, Nathan 68, Robert 42
We ended the night by playing a little Frank's Zoo. It has been forever since I've played this (I looked it up and it has been nearly three years since I've played this little gem). Everyone else was new to the game, so I went over how the game works and we began. For the entire game, Matt was able to always be in the right place at the right time - not only going out first, but grabbing those stacks of cards loaded with lions and hedgehogs. It took about 4 hands for Matt to win the game and nobody else was even close.

Blah Blah Blah

Hola! Time again for another installment of "Things of No Interest". Now that I've had a chance to play Through the Ages (albeit the neutered version), I noticed that I've played 9 of the top 10 games on the BGG. The lone missing game? #10 - Caylus. I have not played #11 either (Brass), but I just traded Atlantic Star for a copy of Brass. Here's the thing about Caylus - I don't care. I've played Caylus Magna Carta (which is Caylus lite) and it was fine, but not interesting enough that I need to play Caylus. It is just another worker placement game, which is again - ok, but do I really need to play it?
Speaking of trades, I managed to move a bit of the cruft from my collection in the recent math trade - lots of card games, for another core set of A Game of Thrones LCG (despite never getting to play it, I somehow feel compelled to collect the cards and build decks) and Burp. Burp is an interesting looking little dexterity game that should go over well with my wife and kids. Five unplayed (and never will play) card games for one doofy game I'll play with my family? Good trade!
Going back to Through the Ages - one thing we didn't like was the teeny tiny little round wooden bits. I thought that perhaps the game would be better served with some glass bits (and as it turns out, the original used glass). The game comes with something like 190 yellow pieces (which is 48 a person). I'm not ever playing this four players, so I think I can get away with just getting 120ish. Time to hit Hobby Lobby.
Also on the "upgrading" front - I recently grabbed a set of the Mayday Euro Trains from Tanga. I ended up getting 8 colors (if natural is a color). The trains are different shapes (as if that makes them more interesting), but the are lighter and thinner than the ones from Mayfair. That doesn't mean they suck, I'm just pointing out the difference. We'll probably use them for Ticket to Ride. Maybe UP.
At the start of the year, I created a list of games to get rid of. So far so good and my list is down to 13 (14, but technically I've committed to riding myself of one of those already). The urge to own every game has gone away, though I still have a chunk of games I have no urge to get rid of, yet never get played. If my collection burned down in a fire, I probably wouldn't replace a bunch of them. I should probably figure out how to rid myself of them someday. Someday.

Online Games

Had a chance to get in a couple of online games versus Nathan Winchester the other day. We started with a game of GIPF. Nathan managed to beat me pretty easily. Between not paying enough attention and just not seeing the board, I think I took all of four of his pieces before losing. We then moved onto Hive. Here things got more interesting. I (white) started out wanting to hold his queen down so he couldn't move it but I didn't want a repeat of our last game where we were stuck next to each other, so I didn't place my queen right after Nathan (black). Well, Nathan jumped on that and pinned my second piece (spider) down. It was looking a lot like Nathan was going to thrash me again, and I was simply doing everything I could to try and keep him from pinning me. The screen shot is a picture of our game at the critical point. It was Nathan's move, and he should have been two moves from winning, with there being nothing I could do to stop him. And then he goofed. For no reason that we can figure, he placed his beetle in the only spot that could help me. I jumped on that chance to move my spider and consequently, pinned four of his pieces. Suddenly, I went from being dead, to being in the winning position. Nathan tried to pin my pieces down, but he had limited options and I only need a couple of moves to finish the turn around. Nathan doesn't usually make mistakes like that, so I count myself lucky to have stolen this win.

Through the Ages

Well, I saw a post about Through the Ages being on sale a couple weeks ago, so I finally pulled the trigger. This is one of those games that has all the potential to be a hit with me - good word of mouth, good rankings from the BGG community, a following that loved it despite all the early quality issues and a designer that has shown repeated excellence. To top it off, it might as well have been called "Civ The Boardgame" (except that a huge suck ass POS already exists with that name) as it basically recreates the PC game experience. I have held off on acquiring this one for some time, as I wanted to wait for a "good" printing of the game. I've been reluctant to try and trade for it for exactly this reason. Early English versions of the game had numerous printing errors and poor quality components which were corrected both in fix packs and in later printings. However, the cost for the game was still ridiculous ($80) for what was mostly a bunch of cards. However, I was able to pick up the newest edition for $37-ish, so it was time to play. Luckily for me, Nathan Winchester is/was also a Civ addict and was willing to drop in to play it. Got out the game and since it was the middle of the week, we simply played the basic game to get a handle on the mechanics and since we didn't really know how long it'd take. The basic game was perfect - just the right introduction and length. Lot of feel for the game, interesting decisions, but didn't throw too much at us to induce AP. Nathan built himself something of a points engine with a couple of wonders, but never changed/upgraded his government, so didn't try for another building. I went towards a bit more infrastructure and was making lots of food and resources, but my few actions each turn limited what I could do. In the end, I banged out a couple of upgrades to help my score. Nathan had a pretty big lead, but I made up a lot of that in happiness score and strength scores. Ultimately, I came up two points shy of Nathan's 50 points. Today, I read through some of the advanced rules and now I'm really eager to try the advanced or full games. The corruption and happiness pieces are interesting additions to the already fine juggling acts you have to do, and the military cards sound like icing on the cake. I'm sure the next game I play will be really long, but I can also see where once you have a better feeling for it, the game speeds up dramatically.

Union vs Central

Nathan Winchester stopped by on Saturday night so that we could finally play Union vs Central (a winsome 2-player game). We actually started the night with me teaching him to play Thunderstone. I had just sleeved the majority of the cards and wanted to give it another go. We used the base set of village cards, but randomized the heroes and monsters. With two players, it was a bit different than 5-players - mostly because our decks got fairly large. We also ended up having the Thunderstone as the second to last card in the deck. This meant we faced and killed 28 monsters between the two of us (compared to the say 4 or so I killed the previous night). Still, it isn't bad as a two player, just longer than I expected.
After we sorted out and picked up Thunderstone, it was on to the main event of the night (and early morning) - Union vs Central. Union vs Central is basically a card game about building rail lines. Each player plays the cards in front of them as they build things from their deck of cards (each has the same 90 card deck). Like a lot of CDGs, the cards are used for multiple things. Cards come in multiple types - land (clear, rough, desert, hills, and mountains), land features (rivers and forests), trains, settlements (depots, town, and cities), and events. Also on the cards are the number and types of goods the cards can be used for when producing goods. Finally, you must use a card to lay track - the backs of the cards have a track on them. There are 6 types of goods in the game (iron, coal, wood, food, water, workers) and pretty much everything but certain event types cost you some amount of goods if you want to play the card. On your turn you can do one of 4 actions:

1. Dump your hand for a new hand (useful when you need to cycle through cards trying to find a certain type of card)
2. Produce - you gain the goods listed on a card as well as produce goods on any cards already in play that produce something.
3. Move - pay to move each train you wish to move. This action lets you maneuver your goods from place to place. Each train can move once a turn (if you can pay to move it)
4. Play a card - paying if required.

So the game is pretty straight forward. You need tons of goods because nearly everything costs some amount of goods to build - most things cost at least one of each type of good. Movement costs one coal and one worker and trains can only carry a load of six goods - this is critical, as you typically have to take along a worker and coal lest you strand your train once it finishes moving. So moving goods to the end of your line so that you can extend your track on future turns is basically what you are doing. If you can, you enhance the territory so that you are producing extra goods and making life easier on yourself. Of course, if that's all there was to the game, it'd be boring as hell. Oh no - about 1/3 - 1/2 your cards are SERIOUS "take that!" cards. And when I say SERIOUS, I mean the kind of card that make you want to punch the other player in the jimmies kind of card. Because it is such an arduous task to get the goods you need and move them about, and since train cards are in limited supply in your deck, losing the ability to move your train, or worse - losing your train makes your life pure hell. It also makes the game really long. The "short" game is played to 8 rail. After 4.5 hours of playing, I had 6 rail and Nathan had just finished his 6th (well, he finished his 2nd 6th, since I wiped out the middle of his track in a mudslide about 30 minutes before that). It was 1:30 in the morning, so I called the game a draw as I was dead tired.
So what did I think? There are one or two cards that are flat out unfair (worse than the dreaded Bear Trap in Twilight Struggle). The best way to describe the feeling of playing the game would be like playing Agricola. Your goal is to get through the 14 turns (at which point your farm should be filled out). However, the other players can do things to you, which cause the game to reset 6 turns. So, there would be a flood card that would kill all but two family members, take any goods you had, and destroy all but the first column of stuff on your farm board (BTW - that is no exaggeration on the severity of a couple of cards in UvsC). So, imagine trying to finish Agricola when someone can do that to you every couple of turns. And while it is kind of funny to do, it sucks knowing that is going to happen to you too. There was a one hour stretch where I frustrated Nathan to no end - everytime he moved a train, I killed his goods and left him without the ability to move any train he had. That or I just killed his trains. He had to cycle his entire deck just so he could get back to his train cards. On the flip side of that, I ended up cycling my deck to get the one card that could get rid of the bandits he played on me. The bandits were stealing my goods each turn and I couldn't ever get to a point where I could do anything. Once Nathan got his trains back and was ready to move the 8 billion goods he had stockpiled, I played the war card which destroyed all the goods on both player's boards (I didn't care as the bandits had taken all of mine). Not only did that set him back a bit, it re-stranded all his trains again. And so on and so forth - that's how the game is.
I won't say the game wasn't interesting or fun - it was both of those. However, after 4 hours, we each were only halfway to the goal. Whether we got tired of bashing each other or got focused on our own stuff I don't know, but we both knocked out the next two pieces of track pretty quickly. The economies of the game made it look like the last two track (to get to 8) were going to take a VERY long time to get out. Given the nature of the game and the length of time it takes, I'm doubtful whether or not this will get played more than once a year. A couple of other knocks on the game: it is a Winsome game, so of course the quality is a bit low. The card decks are nothing more than cardstock with black ink printing. You have to wonder how long they would stand up. The edition I got came with a set of 90 micro dice for the goods. If I had tried to play with those, I'd have killed myself or quit playing in 15 minutes. As it was, I had upgraded the dice to 12mm and it was still a bit fiddly. With six types of goods, I'm not sure chips or wood bits would have been any better. We got a lot better with them after 3 hours of practice, but it was a little annoying. I'm not sure I want to keep this one in the collection. I don't play a ton of two player games, and this one is long and vicious. I'm not sure I'd pick this over Twilight Struggle or Hannibal if I was going to play a really long two-player game. I'd have to really be in a patient mood to handle all the crap this game throws at you.

Game Night

Friday Jan. 15, 2010 - Gamer's Inn
The day started with the ending of an online game of Tikal between Nathan Winchester, Chester Ogborn and myself. Tikal is one that I haven't played in a while and it showed. Chester and I both missed a play one round and "gave" Nathan a very easy 9-temple early in the game. We were playing with the random draws and Chester seemed to get a large majority of the artifact tiles which I think helped him seal the game up. In the second to last scoring, he was scoring at least 15 more points from just the artifacts than I was.
The actual game night started out with me seeing and purchasing a game that had just caught my attention a couple of days ago - Thunderstone. Thunderstone is best described as a dungeon crawl / fantasy themed Dominion. Now I liked Dominion, but not nearly as much as other folks. It felt very much the same each time I played despite the various combinations of cards. In fact, the cards just seemed to make a game longer or slower rather than fresh and new. I have not tried any of the Dominion expansions, but neither did I ever want to. Thunderstone caught my eye and after reading about it and seeing the video review, I was intrigued. Much like Dominion, you build a deck from a common pool of cards. However, you build the card deck to fight the monsters coming up out of the dungeon. There are always three monsters (at different depths) coming out and if your hand allows you to beat one of the monsters, you can fight it and gain XPs (which are currency for upgrading your Heroes) and the monster card which then gives you cash and in some cases a bonus ability (like more attack). You also score VPs from the monster cards - at least they are often useful, unlike Dominion where the VP cards just clog your deck. The monster decks are randomly chosen, as are the hero decks. Then an additional 8 village card types (equipment and such) are chosen. I unwrapped the game and Steve Bauer, James Smyth, Noah Antwiller and Matt Cullinan (yes, it plays 5-players in the base set) joined me to try it out. The rules are pretty straight forward (especially since all of us except James have played Dominion) and we got down to the basics pretty quickly. If you hate Dominion, you will likely hate Thunderstone. I prefer it given the theme and slightly more interesting play. The game ends when you burn through the monster deck - you place a Thunderstone card in the bottom third of the monster deck which signals the end game. This means the more players there are, the faster you will get through the monsters. Noah wacked a large number of the early monsters, but Steve hit upon the right combination with his deck and ended up winning by about 6 points.
After we cleaned that up, Steve and Noah explained Hermagor to us. This was one that kept showing up in the AZ Gamer's top 3 ratings, which meant I needed to try it - so much so that I used it as the "base game" in a purchase I made with an online shop to qualify for a couple other discounted purchases. So what is Hermagor? There are two parts to the game: a somewhat complex auction/bidding round followed by a marker-placement-type round. While it isn't a bad game, it reminded me a lot of Thurn and Taxis. I'm a little surprised that this has such exceedingly high marks from the local group. Again, not a bad game, but I guess I had much higher expectations going in.
Nathan Winchester and Matt Longiliere stopped in and Steve and Matt C took off. Brendan Coffee also decided to join us, so Noah pulled out his copy of the Ave Caesar reprint. We ended up playing 4 races because apparently we couldn't get enough of screwing with each other - I swear a couple of fights were going to break out. What was readily apparent to Noah and I was the fact that this new version sucks. It is waaaaay too easy to finish. In fact, in a 6 person game, we never had someone run out of points. What fun is that. Well, it still is a laugh to clog up the track and make folks run to the outside, but there was no tension. I'll stick to Q-Jet thank you.

Battleball

Sunday Jan. 9, 2010
Ashton wanted to play something and suggested Battleball, which we hadn't tried in a while. He has been watching football a little this last fall, and asked about throwing the ball. I took a look at the rules and turns out that throwing the ball is pretty simple, so we decided to include that in the rules. I had a good run of luck with the dice and managed a total knockout of three of Ashton's men in the first half of the game which led to my scoring two easy touchdowns. He was a bit sad, but he didn't really play poorly - it was just one of those days for the poor guy. It is too bad this game is out of print. It is a good bit of fun for a simple roll and move football game.

Game Night

Friday Jan. 8, 2010 - Gamer's Inn
This evening started out with Nathan Winchester and I grabbing a bit of Indian for diner before heading to the Inn. There were not a lot of folks when we arrived, but shortly after that there were 5 of us, so Noah Antwiller pulled out Power Grid and one of the new maps. Two of the guys hadn't played before, so Noah started to explain. While he was in the midst of that, we had two more folks show up. Matthew and Amelia were also supposed to be arriving shortly, so Nathan and I bowed out of the Power Grid game and settled down to play Hive. Things were going fairly well, until we discovered that the game was going to be a draw. The last piece played would end up with us both being surrounded. I suppose it is fitting we played to a draw and now I wonder - if you can't play the queen first, and playing it second (as we both did) results in an easy tie condition, what do you play for the first couple of pieces? I still enjoy this simple and yet intriguing game.
We finished and were then joined by James Smyth and Doug Oppedahl. I pulled out Khronos for us as I wanted to try this again and Nathan had wanted to try this. I explained the rules (very poorly - besides being tired, I just confused a lot of things). The game was entertaining, but by the sixth (of seven) rounds, we realized how muddled I had done the rules. We forged ahead (playing wrong) and we all want to revisit the game, next time playing it correctly. I'm not even sure who won the game - Nathan or James. I still enjoy the concept of this game and really want to play again. Also, despite playing it incorrectly, the game played pretty quickly with four players - faster than I thought it would.
We finished about the same time as the Power Grid game wrapped up, so Noah and his brother Miles Antwiller joined Nathan and I to play Chaos in the Old World. Nathan played Khorne and had no trouble at all beating us up round after round. Despite our best efforts to block him with our Chaos cards, his were highly effective and he won easily with a dial victory. Miles played Slaanesh and must have been tired, because he kept missing Noah and I's hints about how to kick ass (if he had scored more threat, he might have kept Khorne in check. I was Tzeentch again, but couldn't get anything going as everyone seemed to make a point of bashing my cultists. Noah was Nurgle, but couldn't come close to matching Khorne's threat tokens each round.

Samurai on MaBiWeb

I fired up a game of Samurai on MaBiWeb (as it seems I do at the start of each year). Eventually joining me were Chester Ogborn, Mike Garrett, and Mike Gingold - all skilled opponents. I ended up being first and with my initial hand went for Kyoto (the double area just West of Edo, the triple). I played fairly aggressively and started winning a good amount and variety of pieces. As the game wound down, I had the lead in hats and other pieces. Chester held the lead with Rice and the Buddhas being fairly evenly distributed (in fact we all finished with three of them). Unfortunately, the game came down to the very end of the board and neither Chester nor I could end the game on our own. The end game came down to Mike Garrett, who could win one of two pieces - a hat or a buddha. If he takes the hat piece, he and I tie for majority (ie nobody has a hat majority) and Chester wins as the only player with a majority. If he takes the buddha, Chester and I tie with one majority each and I win by virtue of more other pieces taken (6-4). So, Mike was put into the unfortunate position of kingmaker. He took the buddha and gave me the official victory. Despite that, I think this was more of a tie. Had we played face to face, Mike's choice would have felt less kingmaker-like (or I think we could have agreed to call it a tie).

Games 2010

Well, 2010 got started when I invited a few friends over to get in a couple of games on the second. To start the new year I suggested we play Die Macher the "Daddy" of German board games (the first game in the BGG database). Joining me were Nathan Winchester, Amelia Boli and Matthew Frederick. Nathan arrived first and Matthew sent me a note that he and Amelia were running late, so Nathan and I pulled out GIPF. I have only played this little abstract game once previously against Nathan and apparently we played the simple rules. This time, we played the normal rules (which it appears just adds the double pieces to the simple game). Though I seemed to position myself well a couple of times, Nathan smoked me in short order.
Once Matthew and Amelia arrived, we setup Die Macher and Matthew started going through the rules. Having been through them now, I can see that the rules themselves aren't terribly complicated - there are just a lot of moving parts and steps to be taken each round. About halfway through the explanation I needed to see a turn being played and wanted to just jump in. We started the game and about halfway through the first election we all decided it would be a sample round and we'd reset the game to play. This was the best thing we could have done - if you have never played before, it is probably the easiest thing you can do to learn the game. In fact, if I had to teach this, I'd just setup the game and start playing, explaining the process and the possible impacts and choices you have. However, this is a deep game and just grasping the mechanics isn't enough - it is hard to understand the impact of each choice until you feel the flow of the entire game. We started slowly (with the rules and playing a whole turn for example), had some dinner and it ended up being most of the day before we finished our full 7 election game. Matthew and Nathan won the first election (something in the low-mid-twenties) and we over paid them for their victory. I was a bit surprised at how big an advantage that was (it was big seeing as how they earned much more money than they should have) and set my sights on the next election which was in the 50s and right before the biggest possible area (80). I reasoned I needed to win big to capitalize and position for the 80 in the third round. I did well and helped myself recover, but Matthew and Nathan ended up winning the 80 together. Amelia caught back up in the 5th election and I played really poorly in the 6th. I targeted the last election to keep everyone else from killing me in the National Issue bonus points, but nobody was going to catch Matthew. He won by close to 100 points. I was behind Amelia by 3 pts and Nathan was behind us by around 15-20. This was a fascinating game (which is hard to understand - "you liked a game about trying to win German Elections?") that is deep and each move impacts your game. Though it is a euro-game (lots of wooden bits and mechanics out the wazoo) the theme is not tacked on by any means. Everything feels like you are running an election campaign and it is really interesting. Unfortunately, it is also really long and not easy to teach. The Valley Games edition I have has an option for playing a 5 round (rather than 7 round) game, which I'd guess could be played in about 3 hours with players that knew the game. The full game probably runs 4-5 with 4 players. Definitely 5 hours with 5 players (unless everyone plays fast as hell, which I don't). Also, though the game is great, Valley made some bad choices in the art when they re-printed the game and it was hard to tell a couple of the cards apart (especially in the light I have in my dinning room). Those gripes aside, I'd like to play again, but I have doubts whether this will see me playing it again this year. Possibly.
We finished pretty late, but had time for something else so I pulled out my Treehouse pieces so we could try a game I've been wanting to play - Undercut. Undercut is a pure auction game where you bid your pieces (5 colors in three sizes) for more pieces. Each round, there are sets of pieces (each set being a randomly chosen small, medium, and large piece) and each player bids on one of the sets. Bids that are LOWER than other bids will win. The trick is - after you get pieces, if you have matching sets (same color one of each size - a tree, three of the same size and color - a triplet, or four of the same size different color - a quad), you must turn them in and score points. You don't want points and the values of the sets go up as each set is turned in. The game hinges on deciding when you can take pieces and when you can force someone else into taking something they don't want (just like any good auction game). The fact that the bidding is in reverse (lower is better) makes things interesting. It took us about half the game to grok, but it was really pretty fun (and short). Nathan managed to hang for the win while we all screwed each other (Matthew screwed himself).
On Monday, I managed to get a couple games in (sort of). I finished a game of In The Year of The Dragon online (MaBiWeb) with Chester Ogborn and Mike Garrett. Mike started the game going after the double dragon strategy. I went for the double dragon in the second round, but wanted to get the builder and some houses/levels going. Chester loaded up on the scholars and scored something like 9 points on them more than a couple times. I somehow managed 5 houses and 4 monks which gave me a huge number of bonus points at the end of game. Mike and Chester were close, but Chester finished by having to lose ALL of his people and he hadn't built up enough points to win before that. We were talking about the game a bit as we played (we had started this to see if I could get in a 5th playing before the end of last year) and I've decided to drop my rating on the game. I just don't enjoy it and there doesn't really seem to be a ton of different approaches to the game. After a dozen playings, I don't really care to play it much anymore - even online. I'd much rather play Notre Dame.
I also got to play a game of Pokémon with my son. This was my most played game last year and it is still quick fun. He started with no cards at all last year and now has close to a dozen decks which allows us a good amount of choices. I suspect this will quickly end up as the most played game of 2010 for me as well.