Session Report, and a Puerto Rico Report

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up here. Games played: Saboteur, Magic: The Gathering, Cities and Knights of Catan, Netrunner, Zertz, Princes of Florence, Tichu.

Puerto Rico Playtest with Rachel

Which reminds me that I plum forgot about the two-player game of Puerto Rico that I played on Tuesday evening.

For newcomers to this blog, Puerto Rico is the best multi-player board game in the world. If you think otherwise, you're judging on ignorance or nostalgia. Or you think differently than I do. Which I don't allow here.

I play-tested three of the buildings from my eighth expansion to the game. The new buildings we tried were:

• Poorhouse (2/1/Builder): +1 GP if you have 0 or 1 GP after building
• Commodity Exporters (5/2/Captain): +1 VP when shipping indigo or sugar
• Mercantile District (5/2/Trader): +1 VP per trade

These replaced Hacienda, Office, and Large Market. Rachel noted that this would slant the game to a high victory point earning game.

The results were pretty positive. I initially thought that Commodity Exporters was going to prove to be under-priced, but even in a two-player game with three ships and potentially two wharves, Rachel managed to block the ships I needed so that I was only able to take advantage of one bonus point per Captain phase.

Meanwhile, she took Poorhouse and also only managed to successfully use it about two or three times. It creates an incentive to waste money on bigger buildings than you need. Bigger buildings are better in general, anyway, but sometimes not what you need.

All in all, they served well. Although no one took Mercantile District, these two choices look like my best buildings yet for those difficult to fill five-cost slots, something I have not been too successful with until now.

Neither of us got coffee going. I was concentrating on Indigo and Sugar, but both of us had corn and tobacco, as well, Rachel more successfully. Once again, she also had a masterful Hospice working. In fact, she plays it so well, I'm starting to reconsider playing Hospice in regular games, as I feel it is more powerful and not as debilitating cash-wise as most people believe.

Rachel won 45 to 42. She ended the game without filling her big building, in order to prevent me from buying another one of my own in the next round. But she was ahead ten points in shipping.

Game News

The NY Times has a neat little review of the video game Hotel Dusk: Room 215, emphasizing its artistic qualities. I'm actually rather pleased to see the industry focusing more on the artistic qualities of their games.

Yehuda

Miss Manners

Seth Godin was kind enough to link to me as a source for providing him with some thoughts I had on apologies, which were originally published in my sixth article on Ethics in Gaming.

Oddly, while some people linked to his post and also to my site, a larger number simply linked to his site. Even odder, many of these simply referred to the post as "Seth's" or "Seth's thoughts on apologies".

I put it down to laziness.

After all, I didn't actually give Seth the original source; since Seth wasn't linking to the original source post, only the source person, it probably takes a few extra moments to figure out how to properly phrase the attribution. "I saw on Seth's blog a post about apologies that was originally provided to him by a blogger named Yehuda." That's certainly much longer than simply writing "Seth gives us a post about apologies."

Miss Manners

Anyway, my ideas about apologies are certainly my own, but I am indebted to Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, for the inspiration. While she never wrote any specific comparisons of types of apologies, to the best of my knowledge, the phrasing I used for my "best" apology strongly matches the type of apologizing she has suggested in her weekly columns.

If you want my idea of what is the number one textbook on best business practices, pick up any Miss Manners book.

What Manners Isn't

Many people have the same reaction to the word "manners" that they do to words like "board games" or "fairy tale", as if they somehow know what it is and have already dismissed it as old-fashioned.

As I noted for both fairy tales and games, if you have been exposed to a sham of what pretends to be good manners and dismissed it on this account, more's the pity, because real manners are not only delightful and traditional, but powerful, persuasive, and essential.

Manners is not about scolding other people for making mistakes with cutlery, showing off to put others down, or excluding others from being in the know.

What Manners Is

Manners is simply, and always, about making others feel comfortable, and, by so doing, making yourself accepted. It is neither insincere, nor old-fashioned.

You know it through your dealings with customer service, whether you are the dealer or the dealee. The person who yells the most, or is the rudest, is the one that loses.

You know it if you have to convince someone to judge you favorably. The most gracious one wins. Always.

Sure, in the short run, a yeller or a rude person might get served first. But in the long run, the yeller isn't going to be invited back. And rudeness just proves that the person being rude is less deserving of the service he is so rudely calling for.

Miss Manner's gives an example of a jilted lover. Do you want to be rude and vindictive, thereby proving that the jilter made the right choice? Or do you want to be gracious and polite, thereby causing him to realize what a mistake he or she made? And the best part of that is, is that by contrast you do much more to lower his or her opinion of the new choice than you could have by being rude.

Assertiveness

Manners is also not about lacking assertiveness, just rudeness. When something is wrong, you must speak up, and strongly. Even insofar as bringing the law into play, if such is truly warranted.

The truly best advice I ever learned from Miss Manners is how to politely refuse requests. Most people try to dream up stories and so on in order to wrangle their way out of another solicitation for money or another "could you please handle the school play?"

The correct response to things that are truly not your responsibility is simply "No, I'm terribly sorry, but I can't." When pressed as to why, repeat as often as necessary. "I'm sorry, but I simply can't." No further explanations are offered, and therefore no handle is given to start an argument about the patheticness of your excuse, the pressingness of the need, or the eventual falsehood at which you may be caught.

Etiquette

As far as the cutlery is concerned, Miss Manners admits that there is no sensible reason as to what our conventions are (aside from those that prevent public displays of disgusting activity), but that any convention is better than no convention, or else no one knows what to do.

Whatever your society holds as conventions, these are to be gently taught to outsiders so that everyone can sit comfortably at the same table and concentrate more on the table talk than in where to find the utensil they desperately need for the next course, or how to excuse themselves without being vulgar (say "Excuse me" - nothing else is required, including an answer to the inevitable rude question that follows as to where you are going.)

Civilization

Miss Manner's philosophy is quite extensive, in fact, and she addresses correct manners from the simplest of modern activities to the most complex workings of international relations. She proposes, and I fully agree, that a more thorough teaching of manners, and not simply law, to a generation would do far more to solve the world's real problems than any other political or diplomatic process.

Writings

Aside from the correctness of Miss Manners' philosophies, she is also an excellent writer and an amazing wit, responding to questions with humor and flourish. She is a great delight to read, again and again.

Reading her books, and absorbing the lessons therein, is probably the easiest and best way to truly become a more pleasant person, and an enjoyable one at that.

Some books of hers on Amazon:



Yehuda

Blogger 2.0: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

My blog is now, apparently, stable on Blogger 2.0, and you may be wondering if it's worth the move, or whether you should just abandon Blogger altogether and move to Wordpress.

I can't speak for the latter, but I can tell you about my impressions of the new Blogger, so far.

The Good

• Labels, finally, are a much needed and critical feature. This doesn't really warrant much praise for Blogger, however, as most other sites had this for quite some time. Still.
• Layout. If you allow your template to use the new Blogger Layout markups, dragging and dropping elements around your blog can be much easier. And if you bother to learn the attributes and language of this markup, you can actually do useful things with it. Kudos for allowing people to also directly manipulate their HTML, and for providing good information about the elements and attributes.
• Publishing is by far the best reason to switch to Blogger 2.0. It used to be that every time I made a change in my template, I had to wait about ten minutes or more for the update to publish to all of my pages. As often as not, this would fail and I'd have to do it again.
  Because of this, I would try to save many changes to my template so that I could update all of them at once. Now a template change is quick and painless, which makes me freer to change the template more regularly. Big plus.
• Owing to the quickness of the changes, any small, incidental outages that Blogger may experience no longer affect my ability to publish. This makes even the posting experience better.
• The layout elements also allow you to easily add feeds to your sidebar, as well as allow third parties to create their own sidebar elements which you can them add to your template. Nice.

The Bad

• Labels: I don't know if other tagging software pick them up, such as Technorati. Hopefully they do.
  The labeling is screwed up in dozens of ways; my biggest problem is the label counts that keep old labels at a count of 1 even when they no longer exist, needlessly cluttering my label lists.
• Layouts could include more trivial features, some of which appear to be quite obvious, such as an easy way to limit the length of the label list on a sidebar. I could do it, but I had to go figure out how using the Javascript. There are still too many things that require me to figure out the Javascript.
• There is no easy way to insert text/code between each blog post.
• They still have outages.
• Lots of little bugs in the editing features. For instance, when you try to edit a single item in a list element, the window jumps to the top of the screen. When you mass edit posts, the posts are redisplayed beginning from the first post again, instead of posts 820 to 840 which you were editing. And so on.

The Ugly

• Google makes Picasa, so you would think that they could provide a way for you to manage your pictures on your blog, such as list them, edit them, remove them, etc. No. Pictures in blogger are still a huge black hole. You can upload them in only one of three sizes, and then you can't do anything with them. And when you upload a picture, the link to the picture is inserted at the top of your post, instead of at the cursor, which is where you would expect.
• There's no easy way to review and edit comments around your site.
• There are no stats.
• There is no way to backup your blog.
• Changing templates destroys the old one.
• Captchas are not the best or only solution to comment moderation.
• Plenty of advertisers and plugins don't work on Blogger.

Anyhoo...

Game News

Destructoid talks about juggling gaming and marriage.

The new Here and Now Australian edition of Monopoly is failing to capture interest from the main Australian cities, the result of which is that most of the properties may end up being places nobody has ever heard of.

Volokh reports on a failed attempt to convince a judge that denying him roleplaying material constitutes a repression of his religious freedoms. (Thanks, Shlomo)

The Institute of Civil Engineers is giving away 10,000 copies of their board game Flushed Away to UK primary school teachers. Just write them and ask for one.

And here's a pretty cake make out to look like a Puerto Rico board.

Yehuda

Board and Card Game Patents, January 2007

Welcome to a new year of board and card game patents.

Patents are government-granted, internationally-recognized monopolies on an invented process, mechanism, or design/theme combination. They cost several thousand dollars and about two years to obtain, and last for only ten or twenty years or so, although they can be renewed.

For this reason, most game inventors don't bother with them, instead relying on the cheaper and easier alternatives of copyrights and trademarks, which protect only the execution of the game, but not the idea. Most games are stupid anyway, so this is not a problem.

Spurious Patents

Patents are only supposed to be granted when the submitted item is original, non-obvious, and non-trivial. Unfortunately, patent examiners have been sorely lax in their duties over the last several years, accepting all types of frivolous patents by lazily assuming that corrections can be made if someone bothers to challenge them.

Unfortunately, this means that the party with the most money and the fanciest lawyer wins, since smaller and less wealthy companies or individuals can't compete. And unfortunately, even the threat of a lawsuit over a patent, existing or non-existing, can scare people enough to make them drop any association with something that should not have been subject to legal threat to begin with.

Obfuscated Language

In order to cause the most damage, patents are deliberately worded as vaguely as possible so that any possible present or future process or implementation that sounds even vaguely like what is being submitted will fall under the patent, should the patent be accepted.

The simplest of ideas are worded with strange and arcane legal terminology so as to make it all sound official and complex, running on for ten, twenty, or more pages, picture after diagram after drawing, when all that is actually being claimed is something like "the game of Blackjack where each player plays three hands, and wins if two out of three of his hands do", or something similar.

Board and Card Game Patents

The vast majority of board and card game patents granted cover casino game mechanisms or variations on poker games. I don't bother describing most of the former. Most of the latter are so obvious and trivial as to surely deserve no patent protection. That's a major source of my amusement.

Following at a distant second are game designs or themes, usually educational or occupational, where those who believe that they are the first person in the world to create a game that teaches children about toilet cleaning spend hard earned cash to protect an idea that will never sell enough to make up the money spent on the patent, let alone the production, marketing, and distribution of the game itself.

I know you feel the same eager anticipation that I do to know what brilliant mechanisms, processes, ideas, and designs are in store for us in the coming year, so let's get started.

Board and Card Game Patents for January, 2007

Method and system for weighting odds to specific gaming entities in a shared bonus event: Essentially, (yet another) system of changing the odds of one game based on the outcome of a previous game. I think it's limited to casino games, in some fashion.

Mediacube : This patent looks like its for those little glass cubes we saw on the picture of the long-awaited Phillips Entertaible. In other words, something, that when placed on a surface, refracts something from the surface for some purpose.

System and method for playing a table and electronic card game: Appears to be a simple poker game. You flip a card. High card wins. Duh. A 2 always loses and an Ace always wins 3:2. Exactly how this is an "electronic card game" is greatly obfuscated, but basically it implies the same game, when done electronically.

Interactive game: A strange abstract board game played on a 12x12 board, where each player puts down 6 contiguous pieces on each turn, and your score at the end is the square of the sizes of your spaces. A little more complicates than that, but there you go. Much is also made of the numbers printed on the board, for reasons that I couldn't fathom.

Puzzle game incorporating a rotational element and methods of playing thereof: A puzzle game where you have to rotate and slide the pieces to match a design.

Poker game with dealer disqualifying hand: Poker, where the dealer gets a second hand if the first goes over, and where you can also win if a specific type of hand appears.

Systems and methods for card games that simulate non-card casino table games: A card game that simulates a roulette wheel, and a roulette wheel that simulates a card game.

Game for stimulating reading interest: A game board where each part of the board has a piece of story which must be read aloud. Furthermore, players essentially bet what part of the story the next die roll will indicate, winning or losing points as a result of their bet. This is supposed to "stimulate reading interest".

Five card high-low wagering games and methods thereof: A variant of Acey-Deucey.

Sports related board game: A basketball board game that allows a player to act as the owner of a basketball franchise, where the object is to become the wealthiest owner at the end of the game (as opposed to scoring the most points).

Combination pool table/ping pong table: I could swear I've seen these before, like say here, among others. Apparently the patent is on parts of the mechanism that lower and raise the playing surface to regulation height.

Systems and methods for resolving a hand of blackjack that results in a push: Laura Mercy, this is unbelievable. Essentially, it's rolling a die to resolve ties in Blackjack.

Card game and deck for use therewith: Bridge, played with twenty-four cards of values 9 through A, where each card can function as one of two cards, and a strange card ranking system is introduced.

Bonus feature on starting hands: Poker, where you can get an additional hand to play if your first hand is already a good poker draw.

Table game: Mancala, with colored pieces and multiple players, where placing certain color combinations requires you to reverse direction.

Truth be told, variants on Mancala using stones with different abilites sounds rather cool, and could make an excellent Eurogame.

Fishing board game: A roll-and-move set-collection "educational" board game about fish in Australia.

That's all, folks.
Yehuda

Look at my new duds!

Comments on my new site design are welcome. Especially regarding the decision to fix the background image rather than have it scroll with the contents. On the minus side, text at the top of the page is slightly harder to read. On the plus side, it sure looks cool. Update: I decided to go with readability and scroll the image.

I'm having trouble with the ad placement. On the one hand, I would be thrilled to earn money as a blogger; that would let me devote more time to blogging. On the other hand, I want my site to be about content, and I want it to look clean. Ads really clutter up the landscape.

Also, Ad-sense is doing a particularly sucky job of matching to my content, right now.

Links:

Wired notes the well-known issue about laws against violence in Germany as a hindrance to video game acceptance.

New Zealand and Australia are going through the same hooplahs that the U.S. did last year regarding new and updated Monopoly versions. I mostly ignore all the local newspapers article urging their citizens to go out and vote for such-and-such to be included on the mew board. In this case, however, it is at least worth mentioning that Palmerson North's idea was to set the world record for simultaneous games of Monopoly as a media boost to their voting campaign.

Gamer Hotsheet notes that Steve Jackson has slashed prices on a number of downloadable GURPS books, some at now very low prices.

Games: A Tale of Two Bullies is a new book by Carol Gorman about a principal who takes two fighting kids in school and forces them to sit down and play board games to work out their differences.

My Rewards Game is a "new game" that encourages "good" behavior in children. Basically, it's a track, and each day you move your child's pawn forward a space if they do something "good" and back if they do something "bad".

Moving on to an actual "game", Disqualified is a board game with some cool car minis, whose theme is to "Elude that police car on your tail. Dodge those tiresome speed cameras and compete with your opponents using strategy, vehicle upgrades and your sheer driving expertise to be the the 1st player to drive 500 miles without getting DISQUALIFIED!. How fast do you dare to go?"

Yehuda

As Long As We're Linking 18

This post is to catch you up on what's new in the world of online board game blogging. I try to list what's new and what's lost, as well as what's changed.

Blogs without RSS feeds tend to be ignored until they get one. Also, blogs with very little updating, very little gaming content, or primarily commercial are also ignored.

What's New:

As I posted last month, everyone should check their feeds once in a while. Perfectly good blogs that continue to post sometimes experience blips in their feeds, either because your feed manager loses them or because they move to a new hosting service, such as the new Blogger.

This is a good time to take a visit to the actual web site of a blog you follow and check the last posting date against the last posting date you have in your feed manager. In fact, check to see if your feed manager didn't just silently drop a favorite feed, altogether. That's been happening to me recently.

Some feed anomalies included imosse.net, 6 MM Gaming, Another Point of Singularity, Garret's Games and Geekiness, and others.

Games Utah - Session reports.

Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club - I have moved the session reports from the freewebs site to this blog. Posts are once a week.

meeplespeak - Scott Slomiany. Free downloadable games, and some game design.

Roll 2d6 - A podcast on games. Lately they've covered some board games.

Stone of Remembrance - Walter Hunt, a sci-fi writer who games.

Two Sides to the Coin - Two members of the old Gathering of Engineers, Tim and Eric, recently got inspired to begin blogging again.

Gone:

Chris Farrell
The Games Journal

Yehuda

How Blogger's Labeling Works

It took some many days and hours, but I finally added labels (tags) to my 970 posts (971 including this one). While I may change some of the labels en mass if I discover a better way to organize them, for the moment people who feed this blog are now safe from any more mass updates.

Labeling is not for me, it's for you. I have tried to organize the labels into topics that suit you as the reader. If you don't like the way I've done them, or you want another more general category, or some other more specific ones, shout out.

For what it's worth, the main label is gaming. That encompasses all game posts of any type.

There are also labels for those of you only interested in board games, computer games, online gaming, or war games. Mind you, since many of my posts cover more than one topic, you may still have to skip the irrelevant parts of the post.

I have labels for every board game I've played or commented on on this blog, with a few exceptions. So if you're only interested in the news about chess or puerto rico, feel free to follow the appropriate labels.

Other game labels include gamers (includes people who play, and articles about play), game design, game news, and game industry (includes information about the industry and/or my purchases).

For those of you who follow the non-gaming material, I have labels for philosophy, music, cartoons, humor, movies, personal, israel, judaism, technology, politics, and so on. One more important one is blogging, which covers thoughts on blogging, web sites, and news about this blog. The above labels should cover 99% of the material, I believe, and, of course, there is a lot of overlap between them.

I currently do not have a "non-gaming" label for everything except gaming, but I can add it if you like.

All of these labels are also available as feeds. For instance, the gaming label is available as the gaming feed. Please note the rather strange URL for this feed: "http://jergames.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/gaming" (don't forget the hyphen). If a label has spaces, spaces are represented with a "%20", e.g. "puerto%20rico".


Next up: I will be experimenting with getting labels on the sidebar of the blog (if someone already knows how to do that, please let me know). Done, but now I want to figure out how to limit the list to only display N labels. Done. Google found the solution.

I will then do some redesigning. In process. Note that Blogger does not provide a default template with two sidebars, so I had to create my own. Note also that this sidebar is fully compatible with Blogger's new "sections", so I can drag and drop items between sidebars, etc. Update: I figured it out myself, but here is a good howto.

I will begin a bunch of new ad programs. I especially don't want to annoy anyone with the ad programs, so if they annoy you, say so! I'll work at fixing or replacing them with something better.


Link:

France's government is offering tax credit to companies developing video games, another step in acknowledging video games as potential art forms.

Yehuda