FreeStarter designer giveaway contest and interviews

Four game designers I follow on Twitter have banded together and are giving away two sets of four games  (one more casual set, one more serious set), as a promotion for their design interviews and as a neat way to drive traffic. Contest entries due by Friday, so get crackin'.

I don't usually link to contests, but I wanted to point out these folks because I read their insights and struggles in game design on Twitter and think they're definitely people to watch in game design. As a group, they've done a lot of the goals I'd like to do, with an emphasis on taking lots of different ways to succeed in getting games published.

Of the four's games, I've played Grant Rodiek's Farmageddon, which passed the Mom test and proved to be a decent take-that game with more depth than expected, at a very reasonable price.

Group Interview with AJ Porfirio (VanRyder Games)-great teaser on Tessen, which sounds like it's right up my alley.
Group Interview with Cheevee Dodd - Cheevee's posted a lot of good game design angst about Tuesday Night Tanks in his twitter feed, and I'm interested to try it.
Group Interview with Matt Worden ooh, good intro shot of Space Mission. On my radar as a pnp game gone pro, something that is tough to do without standing out as a gem.

(Watch this space for the last interview link with Grant Rodiek.)

For the contest entry, they do ask you to follow all the designers on twitter (@VanRyderGames, @cheeveedodd, @MattWordenGames, @herrohgrant), but honestly, if you care about indie card and board gaming, you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

A quick note to my search query folks

I love looking at the Google searches that people are using to get to my blog!

"does half price books have board games"

Qualified yes.  If the games are still in shrink, typically they'll be shelved in the game books section, between  Dungeons & Dragons and chess books.  Since the staff don't want to inventory open games, any game out of shrink will be marked at a couple of dollars and put in the Clearance section.  I've gotten two copies of Travel Blokus this way.

"Expedit board games"

I love our Expedit shelves for board game storage, and it's nearly perfect.  Two minor points: if you push the shelves all the way to the wall, you won't lose Travel Blokus pieces down behind the shelving, but if you do that, some games will stick out farther than others.  My thrifted copies of Mouse Trap stick out about 4" from the Expedit shelf itself.

"board games like High Frontier"

It depends on which axis you want to progress along.  If you like "pick up and deliver," then Lunar Rails or Merchant of Venus might be next logical steps.  If you like complex simulations, the other Sierra Madre games like American Megafauna or Origins: How We Became Human are hugely-complex affairs.  You should also check out Dominant Species (mix of mechanisms, similar competition for sites), and Here I Stand (all-day game, depth of study in the subject area).

"mike doyle game art"

Yes, Mike Doyle's game art is fantastic.

In other news, I need to do a wrap-up post on OwlCon.  Spoiler: it was fun!

The Houston Gamers have lost a friend

One of our friends, Doug Curry, passed away Thursday morning.

He is survived by his wife and adult children.  Doug was a gamer, but more importantly, he was a great human being who was an all-around good guy.  My memories of Doug are all happy ones.

Please, tell your friends and family you love them, because you never know how much time any one of us has.

As I head off to Owlcon today, there's a lump in my throat because I never told Doug how much his presence at the game table was appreciated.  Seeing the folks I see rarely will be bittersweet with the knowledge of Doug's passing, and I'm going to do my best to thank those people for the joy they bring to the world.

Everyone who's participated in my gaming experiences, I appreciate you!  Take good care of yourselves.

Houston game stores

I was reviewing my blog's hits and saw people searching for Houston board game stores... For those of you on the west side of Houston or the east side of Katy, I continue to recommend 8th Dimension Comics & Games highly. Their location at Highway 6 and West Road is easy to find, the store has a great, kid-friendly ambiance, and the service is excellent.

Their board game stocks are a good mix of the last few years' Eurogames and LCGs, with plenty of excellent card games as well.  They use Alliance and have been great about ordering what I don't see on the shelves.

Oreobytes: Sketches for $10

One of my artist friends is offering $10 sketches - I've enjoyed a lot of her art and now you can get some of her work, basically to order!

Blogroll trimmed

I trimmed a few items from my blogroll and added one. Whoo, regularly-updated sites!

More Game Assembly

I've been trying out my new-to-me paper cutter and the results are phenomenal.  The track tiles for 18AL are coming out so well, I may be satisfied with the results, at long last.  For those of you keeping track, I'm on my third or fourth round for components.

If my replacement phone arrives, I should be able to post pictures.

James Ernest: one of my personal heroes

This was a pretty good anecdote by Lewis Pulsipher over on BGG.

James Ernest is one of my game design heroes, with a large back catalog that is slowly being revived as print and play over at Cheapass Games' website.

I follow him on Twitter, and have enjoyed catching snippets of the Kickstarter campaign for Unexploded Cow.  (No, I didn't back it.  It's a good deal, but I'm Kickstarted-out for a while.)

Yucata, moving ahead

At the end of June, this cryptic message was posted for everyone on Yucata.de:

DOOM
The Wrath of the Gods cannot be stopped. The Omen, the gods’ warning sign, was to no avail. Rather than guide us, our priests protested that they were being condemned unjustly. But now we know that when they asked us to make sacrifices to the gods, our food offerings went into the bellies of the priests instead. Our high priests are supposed to be the best of the best, but reality has shown them to be sorely lacking. 

Until today, at the completion of a game, the reputation (ranks) of the players, rather than their true skill levels, were compared to determine the points gained or lost for winning or losing the game. As a result, some of the priests shied away from real challenges, hoping to hide their lack of skills. They were gaming the system and using tricks and monotonous work to keep and gain undeserved ranks, seeking reputation for reputation’s sake, rather than perfecting their playing skills.

This all will change as of today. The existing temples, rules, ranks, cities - the entirety of civilization - will cease to exist. The new rules for promotion and demotion will start as a mystery to everyone, ready to be explored and discovered. The goal is to build a new civilization.

I'm loving the new changes.  It seems to have revitalized the meta-game, and encourages more players to play both the games they know well, and to learn new games.


Good stuff..

Boardgamely shows promise

As my board game collection expanded, I began trading on BoardGameGeek.  Trading games is great, except when it's not:
1. People care a lot about game condition, perhaps too much. It's common on BGG for people to post pictures of the slightest flaws.
2. You need an exact match of your stuff vs. their stuff.  Getting an exact value can be frustrating and subjective.
3. Even if your mutual trade lists overlap, they may not feel like trading... or may not feel like trading with you!  Earlier this week, I deeply regretted sending a game to Canada, to the tune of $32 in postage.
4. Until you make a trade, your game sits on the shelf, taking up space. Unless you trade 2-for-1, you'll never get to reduce your collection or upgrade much at a time.

Boardgamely is a newer board game site that adds much-needed liquidity to the trading scene.  In essence, you're converting your games to a token economy in "silvers", then trading silvers (and $3) for new games.  It's a really neat idea, and one I hope gains traction.  While it won't solve the cost of shipping to Canada (which for now, isn't available for the US-only site), Boardgamely does approximately solve all four problems.  There are only three condition categories, for which you receive tiered levels of silver trade tokens. If a game's in excellent condition, you might get 10 silvers, while a slightly-used copy earns you 8, and a very-used copy 6. The game must be in playable condition. Smaller, cheaper games are worth fewer tokens, and there's also an "Elite" class of games that tries to account for the most desirable games, to keep people from raiding all the copies of the New Hotness.

As of this writing, I've earned a few silvers by listing several games, and earned a few silvers by having one of the games I listed be requested. I shipped it out to the recipient, and I now have 20 silvers, enough for most likely 2 good games, maybe 3 or even 4 if I choose smaller games that are well-used.  The list of games is now fairly decent, and I look forward to seeing even more titles make an appearance briefly, before being snapped up. Twitter followers rejoice, as new Boardgamely acquisitions are announced there as well. I have a second round of games to post, and see if they get requested soon.

The UI is still in active development, and Adam Thorsen, the maintainer, has promised a new appearance and more sorting soon.  Adam is responsive to questions, and overall, I have a good feeling about Boardgamely.  While not all the games I'm looking to send out are yet available with full listings, I'm looking forward to sending and receiving more games from Boardgamely.

Damn you, Expedit shelves! July challenges!

"Reading debt" is the stack of books (or directory of e-books) you're intending to read "someday."

I recently finished Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which was excellent. Deliberate slowing of my pace helped me savor the tone of one of the most famous noir novels of all time. As I read, I could also feel myself becoming anxious: what do I read next? Were it not for the stacks of unread books I've thrifted or bought at Half-Price Books, I'd read Poke The Box or Ready Player One. Sadly, I "must" read some William Gibson novels instead.

Recently, we acquired some more of IKEA's fine Expedit shelves, and my wife cautioned me not to buy any more games without reducing my collection. For her, at least, equilibrium has been reached. Since then, 6 games have entered the house, mostly Kickstarter purchases that had been in the pipeline for several months.

#1 goal for July: reduce my total game collection inventory by 20 games, or roughly 10%.  As many of them are thrift-store finds, that should be relatively painless. I'm taking inspiration from my Twitter friend (and fellow Cougar) "OfficeBoundTraveler" @3wks, whose posts on the Discardia movement have been an eye-opener into a source of the discontent in my life: I have too many unplayed games, especially games I'll never play. Regardless of what I've been playing lately, I feel the weight of the unplayed games.

To assist in the effort, I'm enlisting a friend to do some of the off-loading. That'll keep me from weaseling out halfway through, too!

#2 goal for July: play 5 unplayed games from my collection. I have done similar challenges in prior years, and it got games out of shrink and on the table. Five is a nice goal without requiring extreme effort.  Good candidates: Rolling Freight, 1955: The War Of Espionage, 1960, Nile Deluxor, For The Win!, and Onirim. They're all games with a "hook" I'm interested in, from a board game design perspective, and all ones that I acquired intentionally (rather than being fill-the-cart impulse buys). Onirim is a solo game, so that's likely to be first.

#3 goal for July: write 5 gaming blog posts in July. I like writing them, I like the feedback I get, and it's good for my craft. 'Nuff said.

#4 goal for July: play Magic, or get rid of some cards. I have so many decks assembled and unplayed, it's ridiculous.  At my current rate of getting Magic to the table, I no longer need any Magic cards for at least the next 8 years... minimum.

As part of a recent Math Trade, I looked up the values for some Magic cards, and was surprised a bit. Cards I priced a year ago had almost uniformly dropped, some precipitously. There are a few "evergreen" cards, but for most of them, well, they aren't getting any more collectible.

July challenge for you: What nagging dread are you experiencing?  What is something you have needed to do for a while?

Firenze: 267 games on Yucata later

A recent BoardGameGeek thread solicited game reviews on games that you played at least 11 times. As the title of this post indicates, I have met that and much, much more for Firenze (German for Florence, since Germans don't speak Italian very well, evidently) over on Yucata. Florence needs more towers, and 2,3, or 4 players take up the challenge of building the best towers. Usually, that means the tallest, but not always.

Boring rules rehash:
On your turn, you must select an action card out of six available, all of which will have 4 blocks selected from a bag filled with 6 colors of blocks of varying rarity.  Good cards goes to your hand, bad stuff plays on you and possibly others immediately. The hook: if you don't select the first card in the row, you must put a block from your supply on each card you don't select that came out before it, similar to Small World's race selection.  You can then optionally trade three blocks of any colors for one block still out on the action cards, and move into the fun phase: building two bricks onto towers for free, and possibly paying more bricks to the bag to build more.  See, Euro-games are exciting!

Tricky point:  the "Glengarry Glen Ross" ABC formula: always be completing. Any tower not increased in height on your turn falls down, losing half the bricks in it to the bag. Yes, rounding losses up!

Once you've built, you can choose to score any or all of your towers, but once someone's built a tower of a brick color to a specific height, no one can build that height in that color again as the fickle folk of Florence frown fearfully at frivolity, etc.

Actual analysis:
The tension in the game comes from several goals.  You can build two blocks a round for free, but building more cost triangular penalties. If you build too slowly, another player will get the 5 point bonus for completing a certain number of towers first.  If you build too hastily, you'll either not have enough blocks to build, not claim the best cards when they come out, or not get the bonus for the most/best tower of each color. On the other hand, if you have plenty of blocks and trade them in for the right color, you're putting them on action cards which others can claim.  There are also cards in the deck you really want to take, and cards you really don't, cards that punish moving slowly, cards that punish moving quickly, and just a lot of tricky evaluation to make, overall.

So, Firenze is, for me, a sleeper hit. The first time I screwed someone over by playing Smuggler to trade them a white block for their last purple block, then selected a Tribute card to demand they pay a purple block they no longer had, causing their 6-block-high purple tower to fall down, I knew, "This is my game."  The simple rules have complex implications, and players with an understanding of the deck's composition and how probability works will have a good edge.

Complaint: Racing often isn't fast enough by itself to matter.
Whoever gets rid of all their seals (by completing a number of towers that vary by player count) will get a 5-point bonus at game end.  That's big, but frequently not game-breaking, since completing even the white tower with 8 blocks will net you 7 points instead of using 3 blocks to get 2 points.  However, when you factor in that your opponents only get one more turn to try and complete their towers, controlling the game and not letting your opponents rack up more towers is useful.

Complaint: The Recognition card is pretty powerful, and can win games by itself.
As it gives the owning player a point for each 2- and 3-point tower built, it frequently is worth at least as much as the bonus for racing to finish first, and is infrequently worth even twice as much.  I value it very highly, and try to get at least one, or both of them.  The second one does nothing for me directly, but does keep my opponent(s) from scoring it, which is probably still worth 5 blocks to me. However, I often give up many blocks to my opponents, hampering my short-term abilities.  If your opponents get Recognition, then you need to focus on playing taller towers, to extend the power of triangular scoring against them, and play to claim the bonus for blue and purple towers, hopefully.

Complaint: Playing with opponents of unequal skill could favor one player over another.
Most likely.  However, since there is randomness both in the action cards coming off the deck, and blocks coming from the bag, it's hard to construct a can't-miss scenario that's also both block- and card-efficient. When you do, it's terribly satisfying, which I think is a feature, not a bug.

Complaint: Playing with different number of players feels different.
Another feature, not bug, in my opinion. Firenze feels a lot like poker, to be honest.  You're making some judgement calls to improve your odds, and then hoping they work out.  With more players in the mix, randomness is increased, which keeps the game from being too calculable and stale, as Puerto Rico would.  That said, I've found 4 player games on Yucata to be too unpredictable to be fun.

Complaint: Some of the cards are better than others.
Absolutely.  A third feature, not a bug, or players would always take the first card in line except negative ones.  Princess and Patrician are much better, while Wholesaler is mediocre in most scenarios.

Complaint: It's not in English yet.
Fair enough, but you can play it at Yucata for free, and paste-ups are available over at the BGG page, presuming you've already ordered a foreign-language version... and if you have, it's not like you stumbled into the purchase accidentally, so you have no one to blame, except yourself.

Complaint: Yucata, aaargh
It's actually pretty good.  It's free, and has a large number of games to play.  Their meta-game can (and should) also safely be ignored.