BGG.con 2007

Well, here we are back and trying to recover from a busy weekend in Dallas in which we tried to cram in BGG.con, a soccer tournament and time with Ed's family. Overall, the weekend went pretty well considering how much we had to do. I won't bore you with the non-gaming details of the weekend, other to say that the weather was gorgeous and very pleasant for spending all day outside Saturday at Kevin's soccer tournament. Unfortunately, that kept us away from the gaming all day and evening Saturday, but we did manage to play a few games over the course of the weekend.

Thoughts on the games I played:

After entering the enormous main gaming room for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the shear number of people and tables. After wandering around a few minutes and finding hardly anyone I know, I fled to find the gaming library. I found Giganten der Lüfte, a new Essen release that had piqued my interest with early positive reports and I retreated to a quiet corner of the lobby to read the rules. I then braved the gaming room again and actually managed to collect a few folks I knew to sit down and learn it with me.

Giganten der Lüfte

I really thought that this game would be a big hit with me. I love dice games and this one is being compared to a favorite of mine, To Court the King. Alas, Giganten did not live up to such high praise although it does get points for the unique theme of building zeppelins.

The game involves rolling dice to be able to claim cards that add more and/or better dice to your pool or adjust your rolls. This hopefully leads to better rolls to get better cards, many of which have victory points. Eventually, you want to be able to contribute to the building of the Hindenburg to get even more VPs. It sounded good on paper, but the reality was it started to get rather boring about mid-game. Instead of trying to tweak dice combinations by cleverly using your characters as well as having to decide which dice to lock and which to re-roll as in To Court the King, here you mostly roll once and add bonuses to reach a total that wins you the card. There just wasn't that much excitement.

I did like how you could only keep one card of each type as it was often painful to discard a good card to make room for a new one. But overall, I thought that the interesting bits of To Court the King were missing from this game and there wasn't anything new or innovative to replace them. Since To Court the King has been criticized by some for being too fiddly and complicated, Giganten's simplicity might be just the fix they need. It wasn't a bad game and I'd play it again, but all the while I'd be wondering why we just didn't pull out To Court the King instead.

Kevin Nunn gives Giganten der Lüfte a big thumbs up while Susan takes her turn. Mark Hamzy looks on in surprise.

Cheeky Monkey

While returning Giganten der Lüfte to the game library, I spied this new game and decided to look it over next. This is a push-your-luck game, another favorite genre of mine. The rules were so short and simple we (or should I say Greg) were able to read them aloud at the table and we were playing within minutes. In this game, you are pulling nice, heavy poker chips depicting animals out of a bag and collecting them in a stack in front of you. You can keep pulling animals out of the bag for as long as you like unless you pull out an animal that you have already drawn that turn. If you do, you go "bust" and have to return all the animals to the bag that you've collected that turn. At any time, you can stop and add the animals you've drawn to your stack to end your turn. In this way, the game is a little similar to another game, Zirkus Flohcati.

A fun part of this game is if you draw an animal that is showing on the top of another player's stack, you can steal theirs and add it to your own. There is also the Cheeky Monkey which can be swapped for the top animal in another player's stack. Once the bag is empty of tiles, players add up the number of chips they've collected. Chips are worth one point each and there are bonus points for having the most of the different types of animals. The game is simple and cute, enough so that I definitely want a copy. Besides, I'm a sucker for any game with cute animals.

Greg Schloesser teaches Cheeky Monkey to Kevin, Susan and Jeff.

Gangster

We moved on to Greg's copy of Gangster, a new game being published by Mayfair. I had skimmed the rules to this already and was afraid that it was going to be yet another in a long line of boring area majority games. I was happy to find out that this was not the case. This game is actually very thematic and has a couple of neat twists. Also, it's mean. VERY mean. What else would you expect in a game about gangsters?

Players are gangsters, driving around Chicago and dropping off thugs to take control of the various regions while taking out rival thugs, throwing them in the trunk and dumping their bodies in Lake Michigan. Did I mention this game was mean? On your turn, you either move your car or you place or remove a gangster (yours or a rival) at your current location. Movement is from region to region via roads and must be accomplished by exact count without backtracking. Players each have a set of three movement cards numbered from 1 to 3. They must play each one before they get them all back again so careful planning to get to desired locations is necessary. The game is driven along in a rather neat fashion. Each time a player uses his third and last movement card a doubling chip is placed randomly in a region. When all the chips have been placed, the round ends and the regions are scored. Two regions will not get doubling chips so you can't be certain which regions will be the most valuable. Another cool twist is that in some regions, first place does not yield the most points. There are also unknown values in some regions that are determined randomly at the end of the round. While these random factors add some luck, they aren't overwhelming and they add uncertainty and excitement to the game.

Of course, any good theme-heavy game has to have special powers and in Gangster they include a better engine for extra movement, extra trunk space for another body, and Tommy guns to take out rivals in adjacent regions just to name a few. You can only have two of these upgrades at any time so they don't overwhelm the game or make it fiddly at all.

I have to admit, I was surprised at how much fun I had playing this game. It manages to capture the feel of the theme while retaining much of the elegance of a typical eurogame. It also helped that I was playing with a fun group of players. The jokes were flying and there was constant whining. ;-)

Gangster game in progress

Kingsburg

On Saturday night I didn't make it down to the game room until 10 pm after a long day of watching soccer games and trooping around Dallas. I planned to play something familiar and fluffy as I felt too tired for anything else. But Greg enticed me with a new dice game, Kingsburg, and I was powerless to resist his charms. This game had been on my watch list for been rather unique-sounding and fortunately the rules are rather straightforward.

Like Yspahan, this is a game that uses dice in a different and clever way. The idea is to influence the king's advisors to get victory points, resources or soldiers from them. To do this you roll dice. Each advisor has a value and you must place one or more of your rolled dice with the exact number of pips on the advisor's space to claim his advantages for that round. Only one player (usually) can claim a particular advisor in a given round. The resources are used to build various building s that give special powers or victory points. At the end of each of the five years of the game, players must fight invading creatures with the army they have hopefully built up. There are severe penalties for losing and rewards for winning. Unless you choose a particular advisor that allows you to peek, you only have an idea of the strength of the upcoming monster.

There are a lot of clever things in this game that I'm not bothering to explain, including some nice mechanisms to help bolster the player currently in last place. There always seemed to be clever things to do, even when you rolled poorly. I really enjoyed this game a lot.

Greg Schloesser, Chris and Susan play Kingsburg.

Vendors:

Between saying goodbyes to various people on Sunday morning, I finally managed to browse the various vendors. This is one area of the convention that I hope grows in the future. I am well over my younger years of being a shopaholic except when the shopping involves games and then I can't get enough.

Even with our tight budget, we managed to do a hefty amount of damage at the Z-Man booth. Zev had nice discounts on many (all?) of his games. Despite the fact that I have the older English copy of Prophecy and haven't even played it, I couldn't resist the even flashier new version. The box felt like it was full of rocks so I'm sure we saved a bunch by not paying for shipping. Of course, we could have saved even more by not getting it at all. Ed wanted Chang Cheng and we also bought some silly looking card game called Escalation just because I liked the art and theme.

A game store called Troll & Toad had several of the new Essen releases for the "gotta have it now" crowd but for quite a pretty penny. Antler Island for $90? Yikes! I guess they probably went to lots of trouble and expense to get these games but they were too rich for my blood.

Another game I purchased was Geominos. Greg was quite enthusiastic about it and it looked like a good bet for the Blokus/Qwirkle/Ingenious crowd which would include me. The plastic pieces are nice, but it has a laminated board with a rather homemade look, poor quality cards and it's packaged in a ghastly pizza box that is not going to fit on my shelves. Still, the designer was very nice and his game does sound pretty good. Hopefully, I'll be posting about it soon.

I stopped by twice to admire some really cool dice bags and dice towers but by this time we had already gone way over budget. I did get the vendor's card, however, with his web address.

Finally, I bought the new fan edition of Bohnanza from the Rio Grande booth after Mike Chapel pointed out some humorous, politically incorrect cards. Our old Bohnanza deck is quite worn so I thought, why not?

Overall thoughts about the convention:

Aldie & Co. are doing a superb job growing this into something really special and different from any other public gaming convention as its focus is open gaming. It definitely fills a void for the many, many people that do not have access to the private gatherings or don't want to start one themselves. If your idea of gaming nirvana is having access to all the latest and greatest Essen releases as well as older games and hundreds of gamers to play them with, then BGG.con is the event for you. The library of games was fabulous! Even though I didn't get around to trying many of them, I enjoyed just pawing through the new Essen releases.

For me personally though, it is just too big. I like the intimacy of smaller gatherings. There were many people that I knew were attending BGG.con that I wanted to meet and friends that I wanted see again but there were so many people there that I never even ran into some of them. The main room was so very big and crowded that I once even had to resort to calling Ed on his cell phone to find him! I also missed the impromptu excursions out to lunch and dinner that naturally occur at smaller events where I know more people. It's hard to get to know folks better in a noisy, crowded game room. There were some smaller, quieter rooms available, but that also made it hard to find the people hiding in them.

I almost hesitant to write this next bit but I've read comments by people reluctant to attend a public gaming convention for fear of running into the Dreaded Gamer Stereotype. I guess I've been lucky and have yet to have to deal with a person fitting the full blown stereotype. My luck held at BGG.con and while spending hours in huge room packed with gamers, I never even once caught a whiff of "gamer funk," thank goodness. Also, I didn't see a single person dressed in a weird costume. Well, unless you count Friedemann Friese's green hair! :-) And yes, there were a decent number of women present.

My kids did fine at the con, but there didn't seem to be many other kids/teenagers there and they would have enjoyed it more if there had been. They spent a lot of time in the dexterity games area. Despite all the uproar about the subject on the 'Geek, I did not observe any "adult" behavior there that might have damaged their fragile innocence. I saw them playing dexterity games a few times with adults (thank you, whoever you were) but as far as I know, they didn't push themselves on anybody who didn't want to play with them. However, I don't think many (any?) people asked them to play, either. I have no problem with BGG.con being an event for adults, but I thought I should point this out for parents considering bringing their kids. It's definitely more geared toward adults.

Hopefully, I'm not sounding too negative. My criticism is of a personal nature and I did enjoy myself during the little time that I was there. It's amazing how much BGG.con has grown in just three years and yet has remained, to all outside appearances, so well-organized. You could just look around and see multitudes of people enjoying themselves. If we can make it, we certainly plan to go again. It's just that the size and crowds were overwhelming and I think I'll always prefer the smaller, more intimate gatherings.

Check out more pictures starting here.

Patrician review posted

I have finally finished a review of Patrician, which can be found here. Actually it's been mostly finished for a while but I haven't been very satisfied with it and kept tweaking it. For some reason, I've been having trouble writing my usual serious, formal reviews. It's been easier just to spit out my informal observations on games in this blog but I feel like I should do something more for games received as review copies.

Gaming snippets:

Ed and I did get to play our first game of 1960: The Making of the President. Wow, what a struggle! The whole game felt like we were both trying to scale a mountain and kept getting knocked back. I was Kennedy and Ed was Nixon. I was very surprised at how wide open the game seemed. I thought the cards would really limit you as to what you could do on a given turn but I found myself with so many choices that it was mind boggling. I can see now that you need to be familiar with the total number of electoral votes in each region and really map out a strategy. I was just trying to hang onto the big states and react to what Ed was doing. We fought a lot over New York and the south near the end. If he hadn't challenged me in New York, I had plans to attack the west. I let Ed control the media and issues too much. I lost by a wide margin but it could have been worse. I can say without a doubt that nobody is going to be hiring me as a campaign manager anytime soon! This game takes me out of my comfort zone as it is so very confrontational, but I can hardly wait to play it again. It was so engrossing that I had a throbbing headache afterwards.

We leave tomorrow for BGG.con. Or should I say, for BGG.con and our son's soccer tournament in north Dallas. We should be able to play board games all afternoon and evening on Friday, but all day and early evening on Saturday will be spent at the soccer fields. If his team advances to the semi-finals, we'll miss gaming on Sunday as well. Talk about a parent's dilemma - I want his team to do well, but............

Arkham Village Idiots

I almost decided to let this game of Arkham Horror with the family slide by without a report but I decided I needed to make a confession of sorts. Wow, did we ever botch this one! We were hoping to repeat our exciting game of last year when our younger son, Shea, was the last man standing and defeated the Old One on his last dice roll. Of course, it had been so long since we had played the game that we'd forgotten the rules and more importantly, the strategy. Arkham Horror is a wicked, wicked, unforgiving game. You don't mess around with the Old Ones. Rather than actually THINK about how we should proceed, we chose to run around willy-nilly first to remind ourselves what is at the various locations. Could we have been more stupid? We were soon running out of health, stamina and money for starters. There are just places in Arkham that you don't go near until you've buffed yourself up. That would actually be most places, in fact. We should have taken our starting cash and made a beeline to the stores for a little shopping excursion first.

It didn't help that the first card was a rumor that had an ally removed from the game at the start of every turn. According to the card, they were fleeing in fear from the Southside Strangler but I personally think it was because they had heard about the four bumbling investigators responsible for ridding the town of evil. Actually, we found out later that according to the corrected rules, we should have discarded this card and drawn a new one because it was a rumor card. I doubt it would have changed our fate.

Anyway, gates were soon opening everywhere, the streets were overrun with monsters, more people were fleeing in terror, and Yog-Sothoth was stirring in his sleep. We decided to stick with our lost cause and make it our goal to close a single gate. Yes, a single gate. Sheesh. Has any group ever done this poorly with this game! The person who ended up achieving this lofty goal was me. Since the others did not have a gate trophy when Yog-Sothoth awoke, they were all instantly devoured, leaving poor little me to face him alone. Bad choice, as my character, Marie Lambeau, was strong in the mystical arts and old Yog is immune to magic. I could not even manage a single attack and I lasted about 3 rounds before my mind cracked and I was put out of my misery. Sorry, citizens of Arkham!

All four of us are experienced gamers so the whole ordeal was quite embarrassing. We really need to pull it out again soon and redeem ourselves.

A winged denizen of evil prepares to swoop down on the brave investigators.

More gaming stuff:

I punched our new copy of 1960: The Making of the President and was very impressed with the component quality - big board, thick tiles and a linen finish on the cards. I read the rules, which are laid out very well, and I'm quite looking forward to spending a leisurely afternoon tomorrow playing it while watching NFL games. The Cowboys are playing the Giants which should be a good game.

I got several Mayfair games last week in the mail to review. My quick takes so far:
Market of Alturien - despite a big box of lavish components, they seem to have forgotten to include much of a game.
Chicago Poker - this is a very fun multi-player Schotten-Totten with some bluffing and special cards. I enjoyed it a lot.
Gangster - I haven't played it yet but I've read the rules. It's either going to be yet another area majority control game (yawn) or great fun because of the theme. We'll see.

I paid a visit to Great Hall Games in Austin and came away with a copy of Tantrix. I haven't played the game yet but the puzzles alone make it worth the purchase. Hopefully this will make another great travel game as it consists of 52 bakelite tiles with a bag to hold them.

Halloween Games

Zombie Fluxx

Just about any game can be made better by adding zombies and many people seem to think Fluxx is desperately in need of improvement. So, here you go. Now we not only have Keepers to collect to achieve a winning goal, but we have Creepers (zombies) as well. Zombies get played automatically in front of you when you draw them and can be killed with weapons or sometimes passed on to other players. Usually, having a bunch of zombies is a bad thing (duh!). Of course, if you get together nine zombies and have a baseball bat, you'll have your very own zombie baseball team! (Yes, that is actually one of the goals.) There is also an Ungoal in the game. If these conditions are met, the zombies win and all the players lose. Some gamers would say that if you are playing Fluxx in the first place, you lose. I don't mind the game though, and this new version is definitely more fun than the original.

The Gothic Game

It just wouldn't be Halloween if this cheesy game didn't hit the table. I managed to be the second one killed. Note to self - going into and out of the Trophy Room on the heels of another player usually means that one of you will kill the other with a nice, newly found weapon. Lowell, my only victim and the first to be killed, did not have any sympathy for my fate. This game was notable by having a very active Dracula and the first escape that we've ever seen from the dreaded Spiral Staircase. As a matter-of-fact, struggling on the stairs in this normally lethal location kept Wendy safe and out of the way while several people met their demise elsewhere in the castle. Too bad she fell into the moat right after she escaped. Paul was waiting atop the tower when she finally was able to crawl out and he finished her off with a well-aimed shot from a blowpipe stolen off her husband Scott's corpse. Well done, Paul!

We abandoned the spooky games to return to some more normal fare. This was the time to pull out some oldies as they have no chance of hitting the table once the new Essen goodies start rolling in. Of the two games we played, one still felt fresh and the other one definitely felt very outdated.

Atlantic Star

This game is still as enjoyable as the first time I played its predecessor, Showmanager, as an easily impressed gaming neophyte. While I've seen a few of its mechanisms in other games since then, there is still not another game quite like it. The game plays so very smoothly and the way the hand limit drives the set collecting is brilliant, forcing tough choices. Permanently decreasing the value of your completed sets as the only way to get more money is tricky as well. What a great game that packs a lot into under an hour. It also plays well all the way up to six players. I only wish I could find the original game as the ocean liner theme works but is boring. Yes, I am compelled to say that every time I write about this game.

Auf Achse

This game, on the other hand, feels pretty clunky and dated with its roll-and-move mechanism and its straightforward pick-up-and-delivery. Still, it is a sentimental favorite with our group and will always be popular. We used to play it often when we had six players as our meager collection at that time provided few options for that many. When I read that it was going to be republished with a few rules tweaks, I wanted to try them out. The new version isn't available yet but I found a sketchy summary of some of the changes. They included rolling two dice instead of one and picking which to use for movement. You also get to move up to the number of pips instead of having to move the full movement. While this gives you a whole lot of flexibility, it also made it very easy to avoid stopping on the spots that force you to draw an event card. Since many of these are bad, the event cards were not a factor in our game. Without them, I thought the game was lacking in flavor. I did some research later and found a better explanation of the rule changes on the designer's website. Apparently the event deck is being tweaked as well, making more of the events positive and thus encouraging players to draw them. The one rules change I did like was allowing more than one truck in a city. This took a little frustration out of the game and makes more sense thematically. Overall though, the changes made for less of a "mean" game and I'm not sure I liked them. Maybe this new kinder and gentler version is an attempt to improve it as a family game.

As much as I like the game, it's a surprising choice to republish. There have been so many great, innovative family games since then that I don't see how it can compete.
Then again, what do I know about the tastes of German families. Shoot, if you re-themed this to appeal to the American public, it would be better than a lot of the dreck on store shelves here and might do quite well.

Random gaming thoughts:

I decided to drop my Scrooge attitude and sign up for BGG's Secret Santa. This seems to me to be a little similar to prize tables at game conventions. You buy a game to put on it and take away a different game. Tit for tat - what's the big deal? Oddly enough though, prize tables are fun with an exciting, lottery feel to them and I expect Secret Santa to be the same. Besides, getting things in the mail is addicting as can be attested by my eBay activity lately. I hope I get somebody from another country as I'd like to add some local flair to my gift. I need to perpetuate all those Texas stereotypes! I guess I better start a wishlist soon.

Speaking of stereotypes, deer hunting season has opened around here and I only wish I could find locals as obsessed with playing games as they are about guns, "points" and sitting in dark, cold fields in the wee hours of the morning. What is amusing is that my neighborhood is overrun with the darn critters. I could probably go out in my backyard and pick off a few right now; I wouldn't have to hunt for them. Then again, I'm glad it's illegal to discharge a gun in my neighborhood. Let the crazy hunters stay on their hunting leases. The little local paper always publishes pictures of cute kids in camouflage kneeling on the ground and struggling to proudly hold up the head of their first kill. How sweet. NOT. Today's deer carcass picture was of a little 9 year old girl. I'm surprised that she is even strong enough to hold a rifle steady. I used to be a decent shot as a kid but the only things I ever felled were aluminum beer cans off a fence post! Kill Bambi? Never! Looking at our game collection, the only game that I see that focuses on hunting is Tally-ho. Are there any others?

Overzealous Spam Filters

We use to have a terrible problem with spam on this blog. Ed installed some software that has completely taken care of all those ads offering to enhance anatomical parts that I don't seem to have and links to pictures of people doing, um, interesting things together. Unfortunately, it also seems to have culled some legitimate and interesting comments dating all the way back to August! They have now finally been posted and I apologize and thank those who posted them. We will be more vigilant about this in the future.

OT: Music meme

Yes, this is a gaming blog, but Mark Jackson has tagged me with a meme about music and I've decided to play along for grins. Maybe more like laughs because he's asked a person whose shallow music tastes have been shaped entirely by what she has heard flipping around local radio stations all her life. In fact, there are Backstreet Boys and BeeGees CDs on our shelf and I still listen to them. Just the other day I was listening to The Best of Def Leppard. Took me right back to my college days.

This is actually a hard task as I like everything from rock, country to classical. How can I not include The Beatles, Willie Nelson, or Elton John? And yes Mark, I do like the Eagles. Good guess! So, what I've decided to list are three albums of more recent stuff that I've been enjoying. So, here you go:

The questions:

Three albums that I recommend you buy if you don't already have them and

Three bloggers I'm tagging so that they'll blog what three albums they recommend and the three bloggers they'll tag and so forth...

My answers:

Three albums:

Chris Daughtry: Daughtry. It's hard to believe that this guy didn't take top honors on American Idol. It's even harder to believe that he hadn't been discovered already.

Five for Fighting: The Battle for Everything. I never get tired of the lead singer's beautiful voice nor the song 100 Years. (No matter how many times it's played on the radio.)

Enya: Watermark. Okay, so this album isn't so very new. I love the ethereal melodies in Enya's music. This makes the perfect background music for any restful activities like reading. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

The three bloggers part of this is a little hard for me. I read a lot of gaming blogs and a smattering of others, but I don't know many of the bloggers personally. The ones I do know probably wouldn't participate. So, if anyone reading this decides to particiapate, drop a line in the comments and I'll put the link to your blog here.