Weekend Gaming

Tal, my 13 yo daughter, likes to play with me, when her friends aren't around. Usually, she likes to play the same simple games that she can play with her friends at school.

For instance, Fri night we played Oh Hell. I suggested that, as we were playing two player, we dispense with the rule about the dealer not being able to bid an amount that would make the total bid equal to the number of the cards for the last two rounds. She said that that was the fun part. We stayed even until round four or so, after which she fell behind and never recovered.

On Saturday morning, however, while waiting for lunch to start, she came to me with Torres. Torres is a lovely abstract game about building towers and moving knights, but usually I would play it with adults. Usually, one player gets the idea of the game very well, and the other struggles to keep up.

In our game, it played out very differently. Tal and I matched moves and strategies throughout the whole game. It's not that we shared the exact same level in each tower, but for every tower that I was on third level and she was on fourth, there was another one with the reverse happening. I let Tal get a slight lead for round 1, and I wasn't able to catch her after that. We scored identically for each of rounds 2 and 3. She won by 6 points. And it was only her 2nd game, and only her first one in about a year.

Later in the afternoon she played cards with her friends, something involving flipping over four cards, collecting sets, and slapping the table. Afterwards, they played The Menorah Game.

Links:

Maksim has tagged me with a meme. I'll get to that shortly.

Craig Perko explains how looking at the rules of a game might make you miss the point.

No one knows what Tanga is yet, but prior to their launch, they are giving away board games to people who participate in a month long series of puzzles on their web site. (Wikipedia says that Tanga is a type of G-string.)

Extras:

The board game Dragon Strike from TSR originally came with a hokey video. See it on Google video.

And Hugh of Gaping Void draws about anti-semitism:

Shamelessly Tooting My Horn

(Written in order to cheer myself up)

My brother called me with his and his children's assessment of last Saturday night's gaming.

They thought St Pete was deeply flawed. The mechanics seemed ok, but the blue cards were not worth anything, the luck of the draw and too powerful cards swung the game, and the game was too short. They suggested doubling the value of blue buildings, eliminating some cards, and finding a way to make the game longer.

They thought Torres was ok and would like to try again, but they suspected that the game will tend to drag as people think about what to do (this was their first experience with an "action point" game).

The game they liked most was my Menorah game; they said it was short, easy to teach, but still involved some nice thought. However, they had some suggestions: the person who ends up getting a lot of low cards has a strong chance of winning, which is too luck driven - maybe I can change the card distribution to a bell curve? Also that they don't see that people will buy cards from the discard pile often. Also that maybe the soldiers could all be valued 6 but can be used to draw any card from a discard pile (i.e. even a higher valued one). And wouldn't it be nice to combine cards so that you don't end up buying useless cards.

As for his first complaint, the simple answer is to play with the advanced scoring rules. As for the last complaint, I pointed out that the possibility of useless cards is one of the central mechanisms to the decision making process in a good auction and changing that would wreck the game. As for the others, I'm willing to let him try them out and report back to me ;-) .

----

FWIW, I'm still number one on PR game.com (formerly www.puertoricogame.net). If I don't play any more games, I may stay there for a while, but others are creeping up in ratings and likely to overtake me soon enough.

----

Hey, you! I would be much obliged if all those of you to whom I link would be kind enough to link back to me, assuming you like my blog. We love eyeballs.

----

"Hey, Jon. Let's watch a movie."

Time to go ...

Yehuda

Saturday: Torres x 2 and Puerto Rico

My friend Shlomo came to visit Israel briefly and stopped by for shabbat. I taught him Torres, and he was happy, so we played again. I told his that since he is returning to America via Germany, he should try to pick it up on the way back. Actually, he should have picked up some games on the way over, tsk tsk.)

Torres is just one of those games I get pretty well. Not too challenging. Since most of the people I play with also get it, the game comes down to fighting over a few points, and most of the moves play themselves (or some equal alternative). Still willing to play to see if I'm missing something deeper.

Puerto Rico was two player with my wife, as usual.

Yehuda

Must ... write

I'll never get a regular blog going if I don't write regularly. So expect a lot of garbage for a while.

I got five games in the last month: Tikal, Torres, Traumfabrik (bought before I realized that I had no more money), Battle Cry (gift for son), and Abalone (gift from parents.

So far I've played Torres and Abalone.

Torres is a nice game, but definitely more on the Chess side of the spectrum. The point gain for each move is very clear: height of knight for placing a base piece, base of castle for moving a knight up one step. Also, whenever moving, you try to create dual steps for yourself, and deny them for your opponents. Lastly, you have to ensure that there are no N-1 levels available in your castle for knights to sneak into.

So the joy of the game isn't in the wildly unexpected, but in the careful planning, like PoF, Goa, Chess. Careful planning games are what some people call "dry". So be it. There is plenty of roon in the game for fun and, often enough, the unexpected. Plenty of interaction, too.

Abalone is a simple abstract. Hard to decide how deep it is, as it seems that your object is to stay in the middle while trapping opponent's pieces in a corner. Not that hard if your opponent is careless. I will need to play against some careful opponents to see how it goes.

I also received two excellent books: A Gamut of Games by Sid Sackson, which I haven't read yet. And New Rules for Classic Games by R Wayne Schmittberger. The latter book is all about taking the boring games that were around until 1990 (it was written shortly thereafter) and adding new rules, fixes, variants, and even new games from the components. Anyone who knows me knows that this is so perfectly up my alley that I am in love. Wow, is all I can say. Maybe I can write the sequel for German games.

Yehuda