Card Games From India

I was contacted out of the blue by a businessman from India who markets for a customized playing card company looking for my business address. He also wanted the addresses of some Israeli distributors I know.

Apparently, he wants to make a trip to Israel in order to show his wares/form contacts. Or so he said. When I agreed to meet him if he came, there ensued a large number of emails passed back and forth, with him in his broken English trying to get me to fax a letter to the Israeli consulate in India indicating that he will be meeting me in Israel at my address for business purposes on such and such a date.

Since he will be, I decided it was ok to fax such a letter. He also tried to get me to fax it to his business' fax (tried, but it didn't work), scan him the signed fax and send it to him via email (I don't have a scanner), and send it to him by post (I will tomorrow; the post office was closed by the time the fax was done).

I'm guessing that travel to Israel from India for an Indian is a rather complicated bureaucratic ordeal.

Yehuda

The Story of Griddly Games

Griddly Games is a Canadian board game company run by two mom's, Reisa Schwartzman and Penny Osborn.

Their products include a line of sports games called "Griddly Gamez" which they bought from the bankrupt company Head Gamez, as well as a new catalog of games starting with the trivia game Wise Alec.

The Disaster That Was Head Gamez

I covered the news of the disaster that was Head Gamez as it happened throughout 2006. Head Gamez CEO Kerry Martens launched an ambitious project to start a 1,500 employee games production facility outside the small town of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia (pop: 900). He secured investments and acquired licenses for FIFA and NASCAR.

Good intentions were apprently not enough. Within a few months of the opening hoopla, Kerry abandoned ship and the company went bankrupt, with over $6 million in debt. The only surviving asset was the IP for the Griddly Gamez line, which Reisa acquired. Penny was director of operations at HG, and now fills the same role at GG.

Griddly Games is now trying to sell - more conservatively - what remains a viable product (according to them), as well as branching out into new territory.

They're taking the games to various events, getting the games to retailers, acquiring awards, and building up word of mouth.

Griddly Sports Games

The Griddly Games line of sports games is an elaborately produced series of games covering baseball, American football, hockey, and car racing (it was going to be NASCAR, but the license fee is too high).

They come in a 3D version, which contains a recessed dice pit for rolling dice combat, a family version with the same graphics but on a flat board, and a mini game which I don't know too much about. I received the family baseball game as a complimentary game to review.

The basic idea: You have 6 player pawns (two have special rules). Roll the dice, move around the track, and do what the cards say. You win if you get ten runs, lose if you lose twelve pieces of equipment, or lose if four of your players are ejected from the game.

Pros

There are a few twists to interest a mainstream (non-gamer) audience:

- The graphics are funny and elaborate.

- It's not often that you have a mainstream game where everyone can lose.

- You often have a choice of four players to move (like Sorry!), you can split the movement, some move backwards or forwards, and some do diferent things when they land on a square. While deciding what to do after the dice have been rolld extends the game a bit, it's nice to have options and decisions to make.

- There's a lot of player to player combat. When you land on certain squares, or pick certain cards, or land on another player, you roll a series of dice. Loser typically loses a piece of equipment, or the winner picks up a run.

- Another mechanic has you roll your die as fast as possible, and the first to get a 1 wins.

- Another mechanic has you knock something with a stick towards the center of the board, and the closest to the center wins.

- Some people will probably be attracted to the sports theme.

Cons

The games also have their drawbacks:

- These are not gamer's games, no sir. If you love rolling dice in head to head combat, you'll love this game. I hate dice (Settlers of Catan being the exception). Rolling to move is bad enough, but having to roll a few dozen times on every turn is unedurable for me. Similarly, the random card drawing effects didn't appeal to me.

- Some of the mechanics are fun, but they are not utilized as well as I would have liked. For instance, the ball batting was fun, but the person who chooses to enact the event is at a slight disadvantage, thereby making it less likely to happen. The game should encourage, rather than discourage, people to choose this option when it's available.

- The rules are pretty comprehensive, but are unclear on (at least) two points. First of all, they don't say how to play the game! They tell you all about specific squares, how the pieces work, and so on, but neglect to say something like "players take turns; on your turn roll the die, move your pieces, and do what the board says; then the turn passes to the player on the left." They forgot to include any sort of instructions for that, so we simply had to assume it.

In the case of the quick dice rolling mechanic, it was unclear if someone was suppose to shout out "Go!" before the players began rolling dice, or if the players were just suppose to reach for the dice as quickly as possible and begin rolling.

These are not games for me, or for my gamer readers unless they like souped up versions of roll and move games. But for those of you who still play games like Monopoly and Sorry!, and who also like sports, you will probably enjoy these games. They are fairly easy to learn.

Video Atrocity, or Media Manipulation?

This morning an article ran in Haaretz with a pic from a video of four masked men coming towards and then beginning to strike an unresisting man. The article connects the victim in the footage with a Palestinian man who was injured and is in the hospital. The BBC has the video and article, as does Reuters and a lot of Arab news sites (and no one else).

The story that goes along with the article and video is that a bunch of settlers came up to this Arab guy near their settlement, and told him to leave the area within ten minutes. They then went back to their settlement, put on masks, came back out, and began beating him up. The victim's wife was holding a video camera, and captured the sight of four ominous looking masked men approaching, and then stopped recording as soon as the first blow fell.

The Israeli police are investigating.

The special item here is that there is a video of the beating, using a camera supplied by the "human rights" group B'tzelem. The story put out by B'tzelem is that this is a typical occurrence, only now they have it on video.

My father-in-law saw the article this morning and said that it's shocking. I took a glance and said that I find it very hard to believe. Considering the history of faking videos and news over the last several years that I've been watching, we have to wait and see.

Now it's the afternoon, and I'd like to point out a few things:

Most articles about the video now note that the attackers are "claimed" to be settlers, when earlier in the day the articles simply called them settlers.

These so-called settlers acted rather strangely. They warned some guy while wearing normal clothes, went back to their yishuv, dressed up in Arab scarves tied around their faces without any signs of Jewish identity (no tzitzit hanging out of their shirts, no yarmulkahs, etc...), and then went back to beat this guy up in full view of a camera. Right.

How about the following possible scenarios: a bunch of Palestinian guys beat up some other Palestinian guy for some reason? Or, the entire thing was staged, as have so many other videos and pictures depicting so-called Israeli violence?

Without hearing from the so-called attackers, all we have to go on is a video camera from a pro-Palestinian rights movement, the word of someone who is hardly objective, a video depicting something ominous, and the loving word of Israel's friend, the BBC.

Settlers have beaten up Palestinians before (about once for every thousand deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians). It could be that this is what it's said to be. But just two days ago, Hamas claimed that Israel blew up a Palestinian baby, and forty-eight hours later even they are admitting that they did it - by accident, as Hamas agents were putting together bombs to blow up Israel babies (yet they still used it as pretext to launch rocket attacks against Israeli civilians). I think a wait and see approach is called for in this case.

Mon, 6/16 Update: This video has been around for a week, apparently, and the story keeps changing. First it was six settlers with guns, then four with baseball bats (except those are not bats in the videos, they're sticks). The only media sites carrying it are the BBC, Haaretz, and Arab media such as Iran and pro-Palestinian sites.

Tue, 6/17 Update: A father and son in the nearby settlement have been arrested, and international and non-left media are beginning to pick up the story. Most media sources are now being careful to refer to the hooded men as just that, instead of unequivocally referring to them as "settlers", until proven as such. Police are looking into whether the video was fabricated, who the Arabs in the area were, and what provocation or other events might have occurred beforehand. Looks like the story might be (more or less) accurate, after all.

Wed 6/18 Update: A nice point of view with more info.

Yehuda

Shabbat Gaming

Nadine and another friend were over for lunch. Eliezer is not a gamer, exactly, but he's been turned on to the likes of Settlers, Havoc, and Blokus. The latter is his current addiction.

So I brought out Blokus Trigon after lunch. The beginning and middle of Trigon don't matter much, so long as a) you put out your larger pieces and b) you keep tendrils out to most areas of the board. The end game - when you have run out of your largest pieces, then becomes a matter of planning and blocking.

Fun game. I won 5 to 9 to 9. It's not Nadine's cup of tea.

Next I decided to try him on Mississippi Queen. The first time I played this, I liked it and wanted to try again. Everyone else liked it, too, but not enough to want to play it again immediately. After that, they always found some other game to play instead.

I managed to get it back onto the table again a few weeks ago, and I really enjoyed it, even more than the first play. I was eager to try again, and I decided to slake my thirst with these guys.

It ended up being more like the first play; fun, but not exceptional enough to make them want to play again any time soon. It might be because we all ended up within one round of finishing without too much difficulty, and that's even after stopping to pick up two passengers each.

Actually, the two of them tied, and I crashed in the same round, only able to slow down to 2, instead of the 1 I needed.

Last up was Settlers of Catan, to make up for MQ. Our board layout was very clumped, region-wise, which made starting with all the resources somewhat difficult. I managed to do it by placing one of my settlements onto a 3:1 port and the other on an 11 wood. I needed to trade for wood at the beginning.

Two reasons I ran away with the game: Early on, Eliezer opted to pass with 8 cards in his hand rather than buy two development cards, as he was saving for a city. I rolled a 7 and he lost the bundle. Then I placed the robber on his 8, and he lost about 4 or 5 ores in a row.

I began progressing a few rounds earlier than either of them, and stayed that way for most of the game. Nadine actually passed me in points at one point, but it was five settlements, Longest Road, and no ore production. I stole the Longest Road, and that was basically that. Final scores were 10 to 6 to 4.

Linkety Link

It's been a long time since I did a linkety post, since I now post most news onto Purple Pawn.

Purple Pawn is looking for more contributors! Please email me is you want to get involved. Let's build the best generic game news site on the planet.

Links

Presh does a great article and analysis of game theory in the Talmud on his blog Mind Your Decisions.

Paul Mackie's mother-in-law quilts an awesome Settlers of Catan quilt; picture on his blog the Mind Shaft Gap.

Yehuda

Roundup: Three Years of Twenty Fourth Week Posts

Web 3.0: The Future of the Web

Ethics in Gaming 6.0 - unasked for advice to game publishers and designers

What makes something "revolutionary"?

I set out to learn about computer gaming, having little experience with the topic, and here is what I came up with.

The two things you should never argue about

Tips to avoid playing games you hate

My genealogy

It's Alive to be Re-printed

My first board game, It's Alive, is going back to the printers for a second edition.

Not much will change in this edition. The artwork will be tweaked, and some commonly requested rules changes will be changed.

You can pre-order a copy at 30% off at the publisher, or pester your local or online game store to pre-order copies.

Yehuda