August 2005 Archives

I was thinking about getting Architekton (as a companion to another small-box Queen game, Turbo Taxi, which is a must-buy for me), but after I read Mary (sodaklady) write about in
Gone Gaming: Techniques to Recruit The Non-gamer in Your Home, I've changed my mind. Mary's entry hit my doubts fairly well - I'll skip Architekton, even though it seems like an interesting game at some level.

Gathering of Engineers is another group blog, started by the members of Rip City Gamers group. That includes Chris Brooks, Dave Eggleston (Death Metal Cafe), Eric Landes (Incunabula), KC Humphrey (game design guru) and others. The start seems promising.

Shannon Appelcline wrote a good article on game boxes in the Gone Gaming blog.

The Problem with Game Boxes is a lament for the variety of different box sizes these games of ours come in:

This might seem a pretty minor issue to kibitz about, but I suspect that storage issues affect just about anyone who has any size of game collection. And it's because, for all that we might belly ache about old American game design now, there's one thing they definitely got right, at least in the hobby industry: the boxes. They were relatively small, they were relatively consistent even when published by different companies and with different printers, and they were easy to store.

Woe is us that the same isn't true for the German invasion.

Amen, brother. When we moved, I got a chance to organise my games on some shelves in one of our closets (benefits of moving: two large step-in closets instead of none in our previous place). I have to say I got it pretty well done, but it was thanks to the shelves, not the games.

My favourite boxes are probably the Avalon Hill bookcase boxes and similar. Alea boxes in German games are good. Those stand up nicely and have a vertical picture or text on the side so it looks good without bending your head 90 degrees - I now store my games on their sides, you see.

My least favourites are generally the huge boxes. El Grande, Die Macher, Antiquity... Sometimes it can't be helped, but putting a game in a huge box just to make it look epic in scale is a crime. Goldsieber does this; their big box line (Africa and Goldland in my collection) is just too big.

Then there are odd boxes. I'm thinking of Queen games here... Those midsize boxes are inconvenient to put on a shelf and too big to put in cardboard boxes (which is the fate for smaller card game boxes around here).

I really love series of games in similar boxes. Alea series (though I only have Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico and Fifth Avenue of the main series) are the best of the best here. More publishers should do the same, make their games look similar so they look extra pretty when you have many of them lined up next to each other.

What else... I like Amigo card game boxes, except for the fact that they need rubber bands to keep them close. Still, they look and especially feel much better than their rivals, the Abacus boxes. I don't like the thin Amigo board game boxes, they should be deeper and smaller.

I suppose there's little incentive for publishers to use standard box sizes. It's a pity, I wouldn't mind a neater game collection. Publishers could spend a thought, though, on making at least their own games line up nicely. Games need to look good and stand out on a store shelf, but also on the shelfs of gamers - the situation there is no less competitive!

I think board game bloggers could link to each other a bit more. Most blogs have a blogroll, that's good (and quite a few link to me, that's always nice!). Still, maybe few more entries with links to other board game blogs wouldn't be bad? Pointing out the best stuff in other blogs, you know.

I noticed Yehuda had a something of a negative attitude for blogs that link to other blogs instead of creating their own content (see Linkposts), but I think maintaining the network with new links every now and then is a good thing for everyone involved.

It's a win-win thing in my opinion. If I reference your blog, I get a kick of new material, while you get a link from me and some Google power. The extra Google value you get from my link seeps to the blogs you link to and so on - the more we link to each other, the stronger we get.

Of course, producing new content and being creative is still important and that's what ultimately draws in readers. However, everybody doesn't read the same blogs so links to good content elsewhere are useful. I certainly would welcome a digest blog that would collect all the best stuff in the board game blogs of the world.

And now to the main point of this entry: a review of blogs new and old. Let's start with some blogs we have lost:

Boardgameplayer.com hasn't updated since February, so it's off the list. He's using the Geek, it seems, but hasn't been writing to his blog.

Chris Lohroff has been quiet since December. That's a shame. Gameblogger has also disappeared entirely. She went quiet a long time ago, but now the whole blog is gone. It's a pity; I enjoyed her writing.

Ron's Info-Closet Annex has been silent since April. Settling Catan stopped last September; I suppose Catan is still unsettled.

Fortunately, there are new-comers, as well:

A new one for me is Rick's Boardgame Blog. If I'm not completely wrong, Rick is Fawkes from BoardGameGeek. I sure like his writing there, so his blog can't be bad.

Gone Gaming is a brilliant new-comer, a group blog with interesting writers. There's already several good entries.

Joe Steadman's blog Stuck in Korea by Joe Steadman is also worth checking out.

Weekly Amateur Gaming Society blog is good pick for those who enjoy reading session reports.

Aka Pastor Guy is Mark Jackson's blog, a mixture of board games and religion. It's an interesting mix. Mark seems like a pretty sensible guy even to an atheist like yours truly and his blog is an interesting insight to a different world - with board games in it!

Incunabula lives in a different, murky corner of the board game world. Maybe that's why the blog's on my list?

Dallas Lumbersmiths have probably the best blog tagline in the board game blog world: "We've Got Wood For Your Sheep". You dirty, dirty people!

Koldfoot of Gone Gaming fame has his own blog, too, &games. It's worth checking out. I can certainly sympathize with all the cold Alaska stuff.

We were in Italy last week. Two years ago we checked the jesters in Florence, this time I checked the background on San Marco. Well, actually we resided in Bardolino on the Lake Garda, but we made a day-trip to Venice (by the way: the anglicized names of the Italian cities really bug me... It's Firenze, not Florence! Venezia sounds so much better than Venice, too.)

Venice is certainly worth visiting; it's such a curious city. Obviously we took a gondola ride down the Canal Grande to the Rialto bridge; that or a waterbus is must, because you can't get Venice unless you travel their streets.

The visit left me wanting to play Serenissima, Doge, Machiavelli or something about Venice... You see, Venice wasn't just a city - it was a Mediterranean superpower, a republic that ruled the region for thousand years. Not a bad feat.

We also visited Verona twice; first for opera, then for shopping. Puccini's Turandot on the huge Roman amphitheatre was a spectacular experience. Definitely worth checking out, even if the stone benches are rather uncomfortable.

What comes to games, Italy isn't the hottest destination. Few stores had games; I saw some Italian mass-market card games, but nothing really interesting.

I did saw games played, though. On the first night, we went to the hotel pool bar only to see tables full of people playing cards. An elderly couple had a Travel Scrabble that looked a bit older than the one we have. Another couple played something that looked like Tri-Ominos.

Last day I saw a bunch of local men playing cards at a cafe. I picked up few things during the fifteen minutes or so I watched them play while we ate ice-cream. They were playing a trick-taking game and had played it before: their play was lightning-fast at times. Another, more interesting fact was the deck they used: it had latin suits and I think it might've been a Tarot deck. That's something I'd like to have, by the way: a decent Tarot deck. Not one of those fortune-telling decks with extra-large cards, but one that's good for playing.

We too spent some time playing games at the hotel. We played Mhing, which is just about the best two-player card game there is. At least with Johanna, that is. She loves the game and beats me most of the time (we played a quick match yesterday; she smoked me 400-0 and then proceeded to kick my butt in Trivial Pursuit).

The hotel had nice card game tables, too. The tables had green felt with black wooden outsides and pull drawers with space for chips and drinks. Very nice, though they didn't have proper chairs to go with them. We tried them anyway and I sure wouldn't mind having a felt-covered table for playing cards.

Oops, almost missed the anniversary (actually, I thought it was the 22nd). I do remember our wedding anniversary (which is day after tomorrow), so perhaps I'll just try to remember that this blog's anniversary is two days before that.

Which makes it today. Gameblog has been up three years now. I don't know about the other board game blogs, but I'm fairly sure mine was one of the earliest. It's still going on strong, so far I've written an average of about 230 entries each year. I'm happy with that pace; I don't have a need to post every day, but that's fast enough to keep people interested.

Based on occasional comments, I'd guess somebody even reads this blog. Well, I do have 70 subscribers in Bloglines; I do feel happy and warm whenever I see that number. Thanks are certainly due to everyone who's linked to me (Rick Thornquist in Gamewire was kind of a highlight), thus giving me welcome visibility.

If anybody has suggestions to add to the Best of the two years list (thus making it "Best of three years"), comments are open.

A small suggestion to wrap this entry up: what if we had a board game blogger dinner in Essen? I'm certain I'm not the only blogger there. It would be nice to meet and discuss the fine art of board game blogging. Think about it and drop me an e-mail or comment, if you're interested. Readers are welcome, too, of course!

Metro is of suitable weight and length to be played over a cup of tea, it seems. However, I'm afraid we're not going to play the game again. Even though Johanna won the game hands down, she thought it was somewhat ho-hum. I agree - it can feel a bit pointless. It's kind of fun to plonk down the tiles, but that's it.

Also, she had some problems visualising the routes. Can't blame her for that, because the tracks are a mess. Of course, that's one of attractions of the game for some, but can also make it pretty annoying to play. Anyway, Metro is a decent two-player game, but I'd like to try it with four or so at some point.

Anyway, it's a neat Scandinavian edition I got as a review copy from Tactic. I also got Alhambra. Alhambra is up for Finnish Game of the Year award and a likely winner in my opinion. Haven't really had time to check the Finnish edition, but it looks ok - of course, only the rules are in Finnish (and in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish), everything else is language-independent.

Finalists for the Finnish Game of the Year awards are out.

Children's games:
Mighty Magpies (Harakkavarkaat) - Tactic
Geistertreppe (Kummitusportaat) - Marektoy / Drei Magier
Schatz der Drachen (Lohikäärmeen aarre) - Marektoy / Winning Moves

Family games:
Cranium CADOO - Danspil
Ticket to Ride (Menolippu) - Lautapelit.fi / Days of Wonder
Verflixxt (Sellaista sattuu) - Amo / Ravensburger

Adult games:
Alhambra - Tactic / Queen Games
Bohnanza - Lautapelit.fi / Amigo
Karibik (Karibia) - Marektoy / Winning Moves

Da Vinci Code got a special mention for being a particularly good one amongs the non-finalists.

My favourites: Geistertreppe, Ticket to Ride and Bohnanza. It should make an interesting competition this year!

I played a game of Antiquity with Johanna today. This time I chose to play the easier introductory game, without pollution and famine.

The game was much easier, but still interesting to play. Johanna picked up the game quite well and we soon got off to a good start. When it was time to build the cathedrals, she chose San Nicolo, while I took Santa Maria; after all, I'm not too modest.

Well, Johanna won the game, before I even got my first win condition done. I was pretty close to fulfilling San Giorgio victory condition, but far from anything else. I did help her a bit, sure, but it was her first game and it's a tough game to play well.

She enjoyed the game: she doesn't mind fiddling with cardboard bits and quite likes the solitaire play. She's interested to try again, which is always nice. We'll be playing the introductory game; I think it'll take a while before we migrate to the full game.

And don't worry: I'll let my gamer buddies suffer. They're that sort of masochists who'll probably enjoy being humbled by a game mechanic...

Yesterday we played the first game of the much-expected Antiquity. Teaching the rules was fairly straightforward, but I didn't stress quite enough that Cart Shops were needed to build inns and cities, too, because I think everybody but me fumbled with that at some point.

The game progressed slowly. It took four hours, before Robert and Olli H. finally managed to reach their winning conditions (San Christofori) at the same turn, so it went down to tie-breaker, which is the amount of unpolluted land in their zones of control. Olli H. hadn't built inns, which was what Robert had been doing a lot lately, so Robert won with a huge margin.

Meanwhile, Olli M. was struggling somewhat. He had run out of wood at one point, but was still doing ok. I was building cities for the dead, it seems: I counted my graves in the end and reached 69 graves in my three cities. But hey, what can you do - the famine level was up in 18 or so, I had maximum storage capacity of four, little space to farm in and thus I collected about 10 graves each turn (and then couple from pollution, too!) - a hospital doesn't do much at that point, believe me.

My situation was totally hopeless and it sure left us wondering. Of course the San Christofori guys can survive the famine. They have loads of food in their cathedrals. Robert did the math at one point, trying to decide whether to take San Christofori or San Nicolo. He counted that he needed approximately the same amount of resources to achieve either, but with S. Christofori he could keep the resources to feed his people with, while with S. Nicolo he would have to spend them.

Perhaps we were just very slow. We did hit the top of the famine level and had a famine level of 19, before we started building some fountains. Maybe we should've built many more fountains a lot earlier? The rules say nothing about what happens when the famine level reaches 18 which is where the indicator track ends. Perhaps it's not supposed to get that high, because when the famine level is that high, you can do nothing but fight to get food in a very anxious and highly-polluted environment, unless you have a cathedral full of food.

Anyway, I enjoyed the process even though the result wasn't much to my liking. Maybe next time it'll go better for me. I sure know now expansion is vital, building inns so you have a wider sphere of influence and more resources to use. It's better to go far and keep lands close to you (and only you) unused.

I also got to try Shadows over Camelot. It's a gorgeous game! The co-operative mechanism is more interesting than in Knizia's Lord of the Rings, I think. Each player must do something evil (draw a bad card, typically) and something heroic (further a Quest) every turn. One of the players may be a traitor, who plots for the Camelot's downfall.

It's all quite fun, even though the game seemed awfully hard. Each turn something bad happens, but the heroic action may be wasted for drawing cards or moving from place to place... I think it'll take some practise to actually win the game. I don't know what happened in our game. My valiant Sir Percival fought for the Holy Grail, but died (I had to leave early) while on the Quest. I was no traitor and before I died, I managed to get rid of my resources pretty well for the Camelot's good. I hope we prevailed.

I'd certainly like to play the game again. Maybe the rules would be less fuzzy, too, because we had some issues with them... I think that might be poor preparations from our rules teachers, but the rulebooks seemed a bit confusing.

Joe Gola recounts his Silverton experiences in There's Gold in Them Thar Cards. Suddenly I feel a rush to try to game! Man, that's some well-written and attractive stuff about a five-hour juggernaut game!

The new Gone Gaming blog where that entry appears looks promising, by the way. I should fix my blog roll on the sidebar, as there are some new and interesting blogs. Meanwhile, check out Gone Gaming!

We played Lost Valley after a while. This time we both explored the same side of the river, which made things a bit more interesting. Johanna's fear of getting locked in the same two strategies was reduced, as she had a good time hunting animals and stealing gold from my mines.

I played real idiot moves and the first mine I opened got three gold for Johanna and just one gold for me. That was quite stupid. It didn't improve much. I went and bought a horse and a cart and went digging gold. Johanna followed me and stole from my mines some more.

She never bought anything; she even forgot to use her whisky. She just collected ten gold counters and headed straight to the shop to end the game. Final score: 24-10. That was something quite unusual. Then again, I certainly didn't use my gear to my best advantage.

I feel a review bubbling on. I could write it tomorrow, but I've already started it, the stub is on web and I'm still without an Internet connection (I've been bluffing well, I hope, by posting these blog entries whenever I've been able). So, I'll probably put that energy for something else; perhaps another review. We'll see.

Antiquity arrived, finally! It had taken a detour, visiting three Tampere post offices when it should've come through just two. That's why I didn't get it last week... Well, that's all behind, now I can enjoy having the game around and that's all that matters.

First thoughts: oh, it's huge! Oh, it's full of counters! Oh, it looks pretty! The box art is very clever and well worth the praise it has received; it's certainly one of the best ideas I've seen. The box was full of loose counters, as many of them had fallen of the sheets; I doubt you can find a literally unpunched copy of Antiquity.

Sorting out the counters took something like 30-45 minutes. The game comes with plenty of ziploc bags (about 15), but I still had to add few more to make everything fit together nicely. It was far from Home Before the Leaves Fall, but Antiquity has definitely the biggest number of counters in my collection.

The counters are simple and elegant and should be fairly easy to tell apart, mostly. Figuring out what was what wasn't that simple, until I noticed a helpful chart in the player aids. I would've appreciated a packing guide in the rules, but I think I have pretty much the optimal packaging system right now (a bag for each player, a bag for each type of good, mostly).

I also took the time to try the game out while Johanna was sleeping. It took me about 90 minutes to "win" (I'm proud I could overcome pollution and famine). Antiquity isn't really solitaire-capable, like Roads & Boats is, but I tried it anyway to see how it works.

It's cool. Really, it's a marvellous piece of game design. It's somewhat like Roads & Boats, there's similar stuff going on, but there are also obvious features from Princes of Florence and Puerto Rico. City building looks a lot like Princes of Florence, but actually works more like Puerto Rico; it's about getting the resources and choosing which buildings offer you the best benefits. Also from Puerto Rico comes the manpower management. The amount of workers is more limited than in Puerto Rico, making the decisions much tougher.

Roads & Boats has a strong logistics element, which doesn't appear in Antiquity. If you have a Cart Shop (and you will have, several), that's all the logistics you need. The rest is just about producing the right stuff at the right time. There's a ton of resource management in general to worry about.

The pollution is brutal. Every hex of land can be used once, usually, before it's polluted. Only exception is forests: you can hack forests down to grass, farm the grass and then it's depleted. What's worse, you must dump three pollution tokens for each city in the landscape near your cities, making the scarce resource of farming land even more scarce.

A garbage dump is a necessary, I think, as soon as you build your second city. Dump reduces the pollution produced by four tokens. Another option is to expand your zone of control (two hexes from your cities and inns) by building new inns and make the pollution someone else's problem. Then you don't need a dump, but having one makes the strategy even more evil: if you have a dump, nobody can drop pollution on your zone of control, and if your zone of control extends all the way to their territory... They're in trouble. Evil.

That's the sort of thing you worry about in the game. Nearly half of the counters are pollution tokens, it's that big a deal. The other problem is famine; if you can't produce enough food you must fill your cities with graves (morbid detail: the grave counters features names of the designers, testers and other people behind the game). That's trouble, too, unless your production is very effective.

I think playing Antiquity is a pretty good lesson in the significance of environment management and waste reduction. That is how the socities have collapsed in the past and will collapse in the future, as well: there are no more resources to exploit. In comes a death spiral of pollution and famine and then it's just a downward slope. Jared Diamond's book Collapse is a good read on this subject.

Antiquity is a fairly complicated game and playing it well takes a lot of practise. The board configuration is highly variable, which increases replayability. On the negative side Antiquity is very hard to play the first time, which can lead to frustration as cities fail miserably. Of course you can play without pollution or famine, but it's not the same...

There's also a ton of book-keeping in the form of pushing counters around, which is takes some manual dexterity. People with long sleeves shouldn't probably be permitted to play the game and a bump on the table is going to be a disaster. There's lots of stuff computer could do a lot faster, that's for sure. It certainly isn't a game for everybody. I'm, however, really looking forward to playing the game for real. I'm already thinking about strategies and different approaches to the game... that's a very good sign.