Summer is upon us and gaming attendance gets low as most of Israel goes on vacation. We still had good nights during July. August is going to be a difficult month for us in Israel, so I hope we can keep the game nights going.
The following are games played at the group, and does not include games I played outside of the group:
Amun Re x 2 - As I mentioned in my session report, Amun Re seems to be the game about which none of us have anything negative to say. I don't mean to damn it with faint praise; it is a very good game. Most of us have a few games we like better, but each of those games has people who don't like it at all.
Dvonn - I finally reached a first level of understanding of this game and published some strategy notes on the Geek.
For Sale - Sorry to say, a big 'eh' from most of us. The mechanics are fine, but the game is just too slight. And I like blind bidding, but not when the entire game is determined because of it. Blind bidding in Amun Re is a small part of the game; you end up a few dollars short or something. In For Sale, blind bidding directly determines if you win, and that's pretty much it. Too much luck, too slight. I'll play it, but 'eh'.
Geschenkt x 4 - Still good, but I think most of us prefer to play My Game Prototype #1 as a filler, instead. We'll play this if we have more than 4 and not much time. I'll also play this with other types of cards at other peoples house when I want to show them other things you can do with cards.
Louis XIV - Best new game in my collection. Seems to work well with two, three, or four. Much less problems for us than Goa.
My Game Prototype #1 x 6 - Still haven't heard from publishers, yet. They don't know what they are missing.
Puerto Rico + expansions x 2 - My expansion buildings, of course. Although I have a default set of expansion buildings that I usually play with, we still like to vary them once in a while.
San Juan - Still remains another good choice for a filler game up to 4 people.
Settlers of Catan x 2 - Still fun to play. I have been keeping track of all die rolls over the last few sessions, for those that are interested.
Starfarers of Catan - Ok, ok, yes this does go on too long. I admit it. It is still good if you're playing with reasonably quick players.
Taj Mahal - Great game, but the player we introduced this to HATED it. See my comments about Amun Re.
Yehuda
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Weekend Gaming
With Rachel away, I am out my weekly 2 player PR game, although I'm still in the middle of several slow PR games on PRG.net . And with my kids in and out, I don't get much time for games during the week. Only the weekly game JSGC sessions.
This shabbat I managed to get in a few games, however. For lunch I was invited to a family with a fistful (pun intended) of boys and one girl. Left to their own devices, they sat on the couch and punched each other. I figured that rather than helping set the table I could make myself more useful. I asked for a deck of cards.
A few seconds into my explanation of "I Doubt It" they told me they know the game under another, uh, less pretty name (you all know it by that name, too). We played a round of that for a good while. I had lots of fun whistling innocently when I wanted them not to doubt me (reverse psychology), fanning my hand and letting them pick one of my cards to play at random into the pile, etc...
Eventually, I organized my hand into the cards I needed for the last few turns, made sure I got rid of all the junk earlier, and then had nothing but what I needed until I went out three turns later.
I left them to their own devices and they continued playing as I went outside to talk to the father. After about fifteen minutes, I came back in and they were sitting on the couch punching each other.
So I got another deck of cards and taught them Pit. Many mothers now curse me for teaching their children Pit. The kids love it, but it sure is loud. I tried to introduce the silent finger-holding version halfway through, but it didn't work too well. I played two hands (lost both), and then left them to that one too until lunch got underway.
Nice conversation at lunch. Halfway through, I turned around and all of the kids were sitting on the couch punching each other. "Play a game", I told them. So they did. They played Pig.
Pig is a card game where each player has 4 cards and the object is to get 4 of a kind. One player is always the start player. He or she picks a card and adds it to his or her hand. Then he or she passes one to the next player and so on until the last player throws one card out. This continues until one player has a complete set, at which point he or she sticks his or her tongue out. Each player has to notice this. The last one to stick his or her tongue out loses and the game continues with one less player on the next round.
I also ran into Nadine at shul, and she was amenable to playing in the afternoon or evening. I decided to try out 2 player Louis XIV with her. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since I like Goa 2 player better than 3 or 4 player (especially 3 player). I liked it just fine 2 player. I guess the only thing is, is that you really get a feeling of who is winning pretty early on, and it is probably hard to catch up for the losing player.
I wouldn't know, as we had to stop halfway through. I still haven't managed to complete a full game. I was up one mission over her, and she had one extra shield. My missions were better quality. It looked like I had a solid lead and was likely to keep it.
While the rules for the dummy were fairly clear, I decided immediately that the four sets of tokens the dummy placed had to be on four separate boards, and not doubled up if we pick two of the same board, or the board with Louis on it. We discarded those and flipped again.
Half a game took us about an hour. My game group tends to play slower than others, so keep that in mind. In any case, Louis XIV, 2 player - recommended.
Yehuda
This shabbat I managed to get in a few games, however. For lunch I was invited to a family with a fistful (pun intended) of boys and one girl. Left to their own devices, they sat on the couch and punched each other. I figured that rather than helping set the table I could make myself more useful. I asked for a deck of cards.
A few seconds into my explanation of "I Doubt It" they told me they know the game under another, uh, less pretty name (you all know it by that name, too). We played a round of that for a good while. I had lots of fun whistling innocently when I wanted them not to doubt me (reverse psychology), fanning my hand and letting them pick one of my cards to play at random into the pile, etc...
Eventually, I organized my hand into the cards I needed for the last few turns, made sure I got rid of all the junk earlier, and then had nothing but what I needed until I went out three turns later.
I left them to their own devices and they continued playing as I went outside to talk to the father. After about fifteen minutes, I came back in and they were sitting on the couch punching each other.
So I got another deck of cards and taught them Pit. Many mothers now curse me for teaching their children Pit. The kids love it, but it sure is loud. I tried to introduce the silent finger-holding version halfway through, but it didn't work too well. I played two hands (lost both), and then left them to that one too until lunch got underway.
Nice conversation at lunch. Halfway through, I turned around and all of the kids were sitting on the couch punching each other. "Play a game", I told them. So they did. They played Pig.
Pig is a card game where each player has 4 cards and the object is to get 4 of a kind. One player is always the start player. He or she picks a card and adds it to his or her hand. Then he or she passes one to the next player and so on until the last player throws one card out. This continues until one player has a complete set, at which point he or she sticks his or her tongue out. Each player has to notice this. The last one to stick his or her tongue out loses and the game continues with one less player on the next round.
I also ran into Nadine at shul, and she was amenable to playing in the afternoon or evening. I decided to try out 2 player Louis XIV with her. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since I like Goa 2 player better than 3 or 4 player (especially 3 player). I liked it just fine 2 player. I guess the only thing is, is that you really get a feeling of who is winning pretty early on, and it is probably hard to catch up for the losing player.
I wouldn't know, as we had to stop halfway through. I still haven't managed to complete a full game. I was up one mission over her, and she had one extra shield. My missions were better quality. It looked like I had a solid lead and was likely to keep it.
While the rules for the dummy were fairly clear, I decided immediately that the four sets of tokens the dummy placed had to be on four separate boards, and not doubled up if we pick two of the same board, or the board with Louis on it. We discarded those and flipped again.
Half a game took us about an hour. My game group tends to play slower than others, so keep that in mind. In any case, Louis XIV, 2 player - recommended.
Yehuda
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Pieces of Games
Pieces of games never went to waste in my house.
I have two brothers. My father has one sister, who also has three children. I used to live in West Hempstead, NY, and my aunt and uncle lived in Manhattan. Until they made aliyah - moved to Israel - when I was seven, the six of us would get together and play games during family visits. At least, when one of us wasn't crying or fighting.
We played Pit, Flinch, rummy and other six player card games, poker using fruit loops as chips (we all lost). Lots of card games meant a lot of decks with missing cards. And what do you do with piles of almost complete decks of cards?
We were the card house building champs. Even today I can still build an eight level card house and card houses that can withstand books being dropped onto them. We would cover half a room with castles and houses.
Then we took rubber bands and marbles that were left over from chinese checkers sets and marble runs. Houston, we are experiencing incoming meteors.
How about scaling cards? I never owned much in the way of baseball cards, not being a sports fan. But I spent hours practicing scaling cards against walls. I got pretty good at getting the card to lean against the far wall from one side of the room. Then I got pretty good at knocking over cards that were leaning against the wall. Pretty soon there were piles of cards littering the far wall.
We also scaled cards to knock down the card houses. This took a lot longer, but I also got pretty good at the powerhouse scaling throw. Wham.
Plastic pawns were used to populate the card houses. Money could always be cannibalized into some other game that was a few dollars short. Risk armies - well we just bought another game of Risk and had some armies to spare. Except that once, instead of the wooden pieces we got a set with awful plastic triangular spoke pieces and hexagonal spoke pieces. We hated it.
Boards that we didn't need we used for a hamster run - we only had hamsters for a short while. We also used them for obstacle courses for our car races.
We had Mattel and Hot Wheel cars. We used to have favorites. They were either the fastest, the neatest looking, the newest, or had some sort of legend build around them. I had one car "Mazda" that I always took with us when we went on trips with my parents. My brother and I would sit in the back seat, and the car would go on the ledge behind the seat. It started in the center, and would roll back and forth as the car turned. When it hit one side, that person won a point and the car got put back in the middle again. Mazda was tough. Even though the paint had almost all been scraped off, it still rolled great, unlike a lot of junky cars whose wheels broke off without much pressure.[1]
I had one of those Fisher price parking garages, the one with three levels, an elevator ,and a ramp. When a car was put into the elevator, you cranked it up to the top level where it automatically rolled out because the floor of the elevator tipped it out. With the right cranking, it tipped the car out right onto the ramp. The car then rolled down the ramp, which did a 180, and continued rolling across a few floor tiles. If you placed a game board right after the exit to the ramp, upside down with a slight fold in it (say a 170 degree angle, held there by books), most of the cars had enough roll to jump over the bump and keep going. We would measure the distance, and whosever car had rolled the furthest won.
Other times, we would simply line up a few cars and alternate rolling dice (from defunct games, of course) for each car, moving the car a number of tiles forward according to the die roll. First to make it to the other side of the room and back was the winner. Sounds dumb now, but we did this over and over again.
We used old game boards to create walls in the course that the cars had to go around or over.
And don't get me started on Lego.
By the time I was nine, my cousins were long in Israel and I had discovered D&D.
Yehuda
[1] My own kids managed to destroy all of the cars in about a month.
I have two brothers. My father has one sister, who also has three children. I used to live in West Hempstead, NY, and my aunt and uncle lived in Manhattan. Until they made aliyah - moved to Israel - when I was seven, the six of us would get together and play games during family visits. At least, when one of us wasn't crying or fighting.
We played Pit, Flinch, rummy and other six player card games, poker using fruit loops as chips (we all lost). Lots of card games meant a lot of decks with missing cards. And what do you do with piles of almost complete decks of cards?
We were the card house building champs. Even today I can still build an eight level card house and card houses that can withstand books being dropped onto them. We would cover half a room with castles and houses.
Then we took rubber bands and marbles that were left over from chinese checkers sets and marble runs. Houston, we are experiencing incoming meteors.
How about scaling cards? I never owned much in the way of baseball cards, not being a sports fan. But I spent hours practicing scaling cards against walls. I got pretty good at getting the card to lean against the far wall from one side of the room. Then I got pretty good at knocking over cards that were leaning against the wall. Pretty soon there were piles of cards littering the far wall.
We also scaled cards to knock down the card houses. This took a lot longer, but I also got pretty good at the powerhouse scaling throw. Wham.
Plastic pawns were used to populate the card houses. Money could always be cannibalized into some other game that was a few dollars short. Risk armies - well we just bought another game of Risk and had some armies to spare. Except that once, instead of the wooden pieces we got a set with awful plastic triangular spoke pieces and hexagonal spoke pieces. We hated it.
Boards that we didn't need we used for a hamster run - we only had hamsters for a short while. We also used them for obstacle courses for our car races.
We had Mattel and Hot Wheel cars. We used to have favorites. They were either the fastest, the neatest looking, the newest, or had some sort of legend build around them. I had one car "Mazda" that I always took with us when we went on trips with my parents. My brother and I would sit in the back seat, and the car would go on the ledge behind the seat. It started in the center, and would roll back and forth as the car turned. When it hit one side, that person won a point and the car got put back in the middle again. Mazda was tough. Even though the paint had almost all been scraped off, it still rolled great, unlike a lot of junky cars whose wheels broke off without much pressure.[1]
I had one of those Fisher price parking garages, the one with three levels, an elevator ,and a ramp. When a car was put into the elevator, you cranked it up to the top level where it automatically rolled out because the floor of the elevator tipped it out. With the right cranking, it tipped the car out right onto the ramp. The car then rolled down the ramp, which did a 180, and continued rolling across a few floor tiles. If you placed a game board right after the exit to the ramp, upside down with a slight fold in it (say a 170 degree angle, held there by books), most of the cars had enough roll to jump over the bump and keep going. We would measure the distance, and whosever car had rolled the furthest won.
Other times, we would simply line up a few cars and alternate rolling dice (from defunct games, of course) for each car, moving the car a number of tiles forward according to the die roll. First to make it to the other side of the room and back was the winner. Sounds dumb now, but we did this over and over again.
We used old game boards to create walls in the course that the cars had to go around or over.
And don't get me started on Lego.
By the time I was nine, my cousins were long in Israel and I had discovered D&D.
Yehuda
[1] My own kids managed to destroy all of the cars in about a month.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
The Big Old Net
Yesterday I wrote a piece about comparing playing lots of games a few times versus playing less games deeply. Then I posted it.
Later on I thought about it and decided that I sounded like a stick in the mud, that my post was patronizing, and that I had no right to tell people the "right" way to play games.
It used to be that the only thing I had to worry about was email. I know that when you send an email, you have to consider it permanent. I didn't think about that with my blog. I have been treating it like an Etch-a-Sketch. I figure if I post something that I don't like, I can just edit it later.
I realize in retrospect that this doesn't work. Aside from the small chance I might get robotted by a search engine, everything I post to a blog gets RSS'd to a whole bunch of feeds and probably to emails. That means, everything I post is now permanent. Yeeks.
I still have the core of what I wrote in my previous post to think about, and eventually I'll post it again. But ... yeeks!
In the meantime, I wonder how many people saw yesterday's post and shook their heads at me.
While waiting for Ethics and Gaming 3.0 to come out on TGJ (now I'm wondering if it also is too patronizing), I'm thinking about Ethics and Gaming 4.0 . I have a skeleton of an idea, and it will probably be about gaming in general: Gaming as it teaches ethics, and gaming as it is a worthwhile use of your time.
I have what to say about some other topics: producing games (issues regarding copying designs, components, and game themes) and the games marketplace (issues about marketing, buying, selling, and trading), but my first hand experience on some of these issues is rather limited, so I'm not sure if I am qualified to write about them.
Does that about cover all topics regarding games and ethics? Am I missing anything?
Yehuda
Later on I thought about it and decided that I sounded like a stick in the mud, that my post was patronizing, and that I had no right to tell people the "right" way to play games.
It used to be that the only thing I had to worry about was email. I know that when you send an email, you have to consider it permanent. I didn't think about that with my blog. I have been treating it like an Etch-a-Sketch. I figure if I post something that I don't like, I can just edit it later.
I realize in retrospect that this doesn't work. Aside from the small chance I might get robotted by a search engine, everything I post to a blog gets RSS'd to a whole bunch of feeds and probably to emails. That means, everything I post is now permanent. Yeeks.
I still have the core of what I wrote in my previous post to think about, and eventually I'll post it again. But ... yeeks!
In the meantime, I wonder how many people saw yesterday's post and shook their heads at me.
While waiting for Ethics and Gaming 3.0 to come out on TGJ (now I'm wondering if it also is too patronizing), I'm thinking about Ethics and Gaming 4.0 . I have a skeleton of an idea, and it will probably be about gaming in general: Gaming as it teaches ethics, and gaming as it is a worthwhile use of your time.
I have what to say about some other topics: producing games (issues regarding copying designs, components, and game themes) and the games marketplace (issues about marketing, buying, selling, and trading), but my first hand experience on some of these issues is rather limited, so I'm not sure if I am qualified to write about them.
Does that about cover all topics regarding games and ethics? Am I missing anything?
Yehuda
Monday, July 25, 2005
Summertime, and the Living is Complicated
I am renting out my apt for a few weeks while Rachel is away in order to pay some bills. That means that the JSGC will be itinerant for a while. This week it is still at my house. Next week I'm not sure.
It's a little weird. Since I'm renting the bedrooms each to different people, I don't know if that stops me from having game nights in the living room, anyway. I'm not renting the apt whole to any one person or family. Maybe my tenants are interested in games. Doesn't matter; I'll have enough place at the house I'm staying in, anyway.
Yehuda
It's a little weird. Since I'm renting the bedrooms each to different people, I don't know if that stops me from having game nights in the living room, anyway. I'm not renting the apt whole to any one person or family. Maybe my tenants are interested in games. Doesn't matter; I'll have enough place at the house I'm staying in, anyway.
Yehuda
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Weekend Gaming
My father is weak, which was expected, but he is also losing weight, which is bad. Unless something changes, back to the emergency room on Sunday.
Gaming over the weekend with David, Sharon, and kids went well. Their house is the local teen hangout. Most of the teens who hang out also know me and know I'm the game man. So a few of them joined in the games.
Before I forget, David and Sharon had dinner guests on Friday night who don't know any of the new games. They were describing the problems they had while playing Monopoly. Apparently, the husband always plays viciously. He believes that alliances, promises, and deals which are not part of the game rules can be broken at will. For instance, the "we won't attack each other for three turns" rule in Risk is something that he will make with another player and then break at his own convenience, not waiting three rounds. His defense of this horrific breach of etiquette is a) his opponents should figure it out, and if not, they will learn fast, and b) people shouldn't take games too seriously.
I argued that he should at least tell people before the game begins that this is the way that he plays, to no avail. My arguments that his style of play is a effectively a set of rules, and that others may want to play by different rules, didn't help. As far as he is concerned, if they don't like the way he plays, they shouldn't play! And stop taking games too seriously! I suggested to them to try Settlers of Catan, which they might.
After dinner, I started out with a game of Dvonn with one of the teenage guests, while we waited for the rest of the players to coalesce (they were walking the dog). Ari has been to my game group once before; he is a sharp kid, but not too happy with being in the army. I am happy to give him some opportunity to get his mind off of it.
Unfortunately, although he picked up the rules, I happened to win with a wipeout. I reminded him that my understanding of the game's tactics is still so infantile that this is more likely the result of chance than any skill on my part.
The party returned and I brought out my game prototype #1. It was a hit - we played four-player four times in a row. The next day, Galit (their daughter) played with Tal (my daughter) two-player two times, and then we played two more four-player games. Eight plays in one weekend.
The family/friends all thought that one small part of my game was not to their liking, so we tried changing it a bit. I have to say that I still like the current design best. They also managed to play the auction in the game in a way I had not at all expected nor experienced in my previous plays. It still played great; it was amusing to see this after I had already played the game about fifty times.
I also introduced to them For Sale, one of the games which Chris Brooks brought me. They enjoyed it, and we played four times. I never won once, nor came close. I'm still not sure why. After that I taught them how to play Geschenkt using the For Sale houses as cards (1-30), six players, and eight tokens each. We played four games of this, too. Geschenkt has a great little mechanic that can be played with almost any set of cards and tokens, anywhere. It is very adaptable.
I was actually played out with all of these short games. I said my goodbyes, and went back to my parents to rest.
Yehuda
Gaming over the weekend with David, Sharon, and kids went well. Their house is the local teen hangout. Most of the teens who hang out also know me and know I'm the game man. So a few of them joined in the games.
Before I forget, David and Sharon had dinner guests on Friday night who don't know any of the new games. They were describing the problems they had while playing Monopoly. Apparently, the husband always plays viciously. He believes that alliances, promises, and deals which are not part of the game rules can be broken at will. For instance, the "we won't attack each other for three turns" rule in Risk is something that he will make with another player and then break at his own convenience, not waiting three rounds. His defense of this horrific breach of etiquette is a) his opponents should figure it out, and if not, they will learn fast, and b) people shouldn't take games too seriously.
I argued that he should at least tell people before the game begins that this is the way that he plays, to no avail. My arguments that his style of play is a effectively a set of rules, and that others may want to play by different rules, didn't help. As far as he is concerned, if they don't like the way he plays, they shouldn't play! And stop taking games too seriously! I suggested to them to try Settlers of Catan, which they might.
After dinner, I started out with a game of Dvonn with one of the teenage guests, while we waited for the rest of the players to coalesce (they were walking the dog). Ari has been to my game group once before; he is a sharp kid, but not too happy with being in the army. I am happy to give him some opportunity to get his mind off of it.
Unfortunately, although he picked up the rules, I happened to win with a wipeout. I reminded him that my understanding of the game's tactics is still so infantile that this is more likely the result of chance than any skill on my part.
The party returned and I brought out my game prototype #1. It was a hit - we played four-player four times in a row. The next day, Galit (their daughter) played with Tal (my daughter) two-player two times, and then we played two more four-player games. Eight plays in one weekend.
The family/friends all thought that one small part of my game was not to their liking, so we tried changing it a bit. I have to say that I still like the current design best. They also managed to play the auction in the game in a way I had not at all expected nor experienced in my previous plays. It still played great; it was amusing to see this after I had already played the game about fifty times.
I also introduced to them For Sale, one of the games which Chris Brooks brought me. They enjoyed it, and we played four times. I never won once, nor came close. I'm still not sure why. After that I taught them how to play Geschenkt using the For Sale houses as cards (1-30), six players, and eight tokens each. We played four games of this, too. Geschenkt has a great little mechanic that can be played with almost any set of cards and tokens, anywhere. It is very adaptable.
I was actually played out with all of these short games. I said my goodbyes, and went back to my parents to rest.
Yehuda
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