Steve's HFoG Blog

Got More Tichu Questions? I Have Answers!

2010-08-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

In addition to the information that I posted earlier, I've compiled a FAQ page which can be found on the Tichu support website. Here's a direct link: http://tichu.housefullofgames.com/faq.html

This should be the first place you go to find answers to your questions about Tichu for the iPhone family of devices.

Some Tichu Answers

2010-08-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

I've seen quite a few questions about Tichu (for the iPhone) lately that I thought would be best answered in a public forum. I posted most of this message elsewhere but I thought I'd also share it here where hopefully more people will see it.

First, performance:

The target platform was the 3G S. It also will run reasonably well on the later generation iPod touch. Older models will, of course, work just fine but be a little slower. There's a lot more going on here than there was in Mü and that takes a LOT more cycles. (You should expect that on a first generation iPod touch this will be VERY slow.)

Network play:

As with Mü, local network over Bluetooth is supported (and it's much more stable than Mü's network play is). When Apple releases their matchmaking service here in a few months I plan to look at supporting it but I can't promise that it will happen.

Finally, about the AI:

With Tichu having so many more plays possible on a given turn, the decision tree is HUGE and as a direct result, the AI is not as strong as Mü's. Also problematic is the fact that I've discovered that people feel VERY strongly about their style of Tichu game and styles vary WIDELY between players. Some folks think that certain play decisions are set in stone. Others feel very differently. The fact that the AI is usually playing as a human's partner doesn't help. :) You'll enjoy my game best if you treat it casually and just try to enjoy the game. Don't think this is going to replace playing a game with four expert players who are familiar with your style of play. I wish it could but it probably won't.

Here's a little bit about the three difficulty levels that matter (the easier ones are not as interesting).

The "Normal" setting plays a reasonably competent game. The AI will ocassionally make a poor decision but it's good enough to enjoy (at least for me). This is the level that will probably feel the most "human-like" to most people. The AI tends to make slightly safer plays at this setting.

The "Better" setting plays slightly stronger. It thinks farther ahead which will cause perf problems for folks with older model devices, but may also cause it to make moves that you might think are a little risky sometimes. The thing to remember is that the AI has a perfect memory of all cards played so if it does something you think is odd, it's probably because it thinks that the odds are high that it will pay off. If you trust your partner a bit then usually it will work out.

The "Best" setting is the one that I fear might throw people off the most. At this level the game is allowed to peek into other players' hands when deciding what to play. (This only applies when the AI is deciding what to play on a trick; never when deciding to call Tichu or deciding what cards to pass.) Because of this, you really need to trust what your partner is doing if it's playing at this setting. For instance, if you gave it the Dog and it leads something else, it's probably because it thinks it's going to be able to set itself up for the double victory by taking a few tricks and then dogging to you later. You may think that's a horrible play but if you could see all the cards then perhaps you might not.

I am continuing to improve the AI so you can expect to see a few updates in the future that (hopefully) improve it some. If you would like to provide me with feedback or (gentle please) criticism then please feel free to send me email. I'd love to hear from you. (I would prefer that bugs or criticism be reported via email rather than in a public forum.)

Hopefully that helped answer some of your questions!

I've had a blast with Tichu so far. It's been wildly successful in the few days since its release and I hope to keep on improving it. This has easily been one of the most challenging pieces of code I've ever worked on. Hopefully you'll enjoy it too.

Steve

email: steve-at-housefullofgames-dot-com

Bringing Tichu to the iPhone Family

2010-08-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

This article describes the creation of Tichu for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Tichu is available right now in the iTunes App Store.

About six months ago I wrote an article about bringing a great card game to the iPhone: Mü. Now, six months later, I'm back only this time I'm writing about another great card game: Tichu.

When I released Mü, I was almost immediately inundated with requests to do Tichu. That didn't surprise me too much, since my two favorite card games are Mü and Tichu and my experience with the hobby gaming community would lead me to believe that I'm in no way unique in that regard. These two games are often mentioned in the same breath. It's not hard to understand why. Mü is one of the best games in the traditional trick-taking genre, and Tichu is the king of the climbing games and the most popular card game of all time on BoardGameGeek.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a climbing game is similar to a trick-taking game but instead of each player playing just a single card to a trick, players take turns playing sets of cards in an effort to be the first to get rid of all of their cards and capture points. In a climbing game, players usually can play multiple times on the same trick so long as they are able to keep playing higher sets of cards. Other games in this genre include The Great Dalmuti, Gang of Four, Frank's Zoo, and a host of traditional Chinese card games from which Tichu was derived.

In my earlier article I discussed securing licensing rights, setting up a development environment, the importance of researching the platform, dealing with the smaller screen size, creating a workable AI and other similar issues. Most of those issues also applied to Tichu but I won't repeat myself by going into them here. Instead I'd like to focus on a couple of ways that I took the things I learned while doing Mü and improved upon them.

Specifically, I want to focus on two areas that I felt were vital to the game's success: network play, and beta testing.

Designing For Networked Play

Let's get this straight right up front. While there are Tichu variants that allow for different numbers of players, anyone who knows the game can attest to the fact that Tichu is really meant to be a four player partnership game. If you play with any other configuration of players, you may be playing a game called Tichu, you may be playing a game that looks like Tichu, you may be playing a game that shares some rules with Tichu, but you aren't really playing Tichu. What you are playing is a far inferior counterfeit of this superb game. No self-respecting Tichu player would ever deign to play Tichu with any number of players other than four.

Accepting that to be gospel, how is a Tichu addict to feed his addiction when there are fewer than four players present? That was one of the primary problems that Tichu for the iPhone was designed to address from the start. Right from the beginning I knew that I wanted to create an excellent way for players to enjoy the game when they were short a player or two (or even three).

When I designed Mü, I had a similar goal but my focus on linked play wasn't quite as strong as it has been on Tichu. Mü suffered from that lack of focus and the linked play experience has never been as glitch free as I would like. From the start, I set out to do Tichu the way that, in hindsight, I wished I had done Mü. I wanted a linked play experience that was bullet-proof from start to finish and I think that I've largely succeeded. Here are some of the ways that I did it.

First, before I ever wrote a line of code, I decided that I wanted to carefully compartmentalize all aspects of the game so that essential information could be shared across all linked devices as a single binary blob of data, identical in every way on each and every device. That way, any change to the game state could be reflected across all connected devices simply by copying that blob of data. With this architecture, it becomes impossible for external influences to put the game in an invalid state. As each device changes its local copy of the state, the state is broadcast as a single atomic unit to all of the other devices. Should two devices try to simultaneously change the same data, the last one wins and the first change may perhaps be lost, but at least the game state is legal and the game can continue uninterrupted.

Here is a diagram showing the high-level structure of Tichu:
You can see that the game is structured around four high-level components, three of which are nested one within the other like the layers of an onion.

The User Interface (UI) is completely divorced from the game state and can only interact with the game through a well defined interface at the Local State level. Any changes in the game state result in a single update method being called on the UI engine and the UI must be prepared to correctly render the game elements regardless of whatever state the game might have been in previously. The idea is that no matter what crazy, unexpected thing might have happened to the game state, the UI should always be able to "just do the right thing". It has no knowledge of how it got into its current state. It only knows what must be shown and how the user is expected to interact with the game at that precise moment in time.

The Common State contains the heart of the game. This state object is replicated across all connected devices. Change this state on one device and bit-for-bit that change is replicated across all of them. This level has no knowledge of where the four players are seated, only that there are four numbered players. This level knows which players are human, it knows what their names are, and it knows how to communicate with them. It knows in which order the players take their turns. It also knows which of the linked devices is responsible for playing for the computer players.

Inside the Common State is a tiny nucleus of data called the Core State. This contains the minimal amount of information necessary to describe the current state of play to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. Whenever the AI explores the possible outcomes of various moves, it makes a copy of this state so that when it's done looking ahead, it can put the state back exactly the way it found it. In fact, whenever the AI engine is run at all, it operates on a copy of this state, so if any of the humans in the game should make a change, it won't immediately affect the AI and vice versa.

The Local State is unique to each connected device. Among other things, it tells the UI which seat each player occupies around the virtual table shown on the screen. This is how the game knows which of the hands belongs to you. Because each human player in the game has their own unique Local State, each player can independently choose if they want play to progress clockwise (common for most card games in the United States) or counterclockwise (the direction officially sanctioned by the rules). This also allows each player to have their own preferences as to which card art to use, which input style to use, and so on.

All of this careful structuring has resulted in a linked play experience far superior to the one I created for Mü. The game plays reliably with any number of players with very minimal chance of state corruption. In fact, I am so happy with the way this turned out that I am seriously considering re-engineering Mü to incorporate elements of this same system.

Building a Solid Beta Program

As soon as I had a playable game it was time to bring in some beta testers. Building on the core group of testers who helped me with Mü, I also reached out to some people in the gaming community at large who I knew might be interested. I was very lucky to get some very dedicated testers who are passionate about their Tichu game. If you're a board game enthusiast, I suspect that there might be a few names listed in the credits that will be familiar to you.

Early on, I set up a private web site dedicated to the beta program. I also set up a private Yahoo group so testers could communicate with one another and receive notifications about beta drops. Having active lines of communications with my beta testers was instrumental in the evolution of the game.

As I had done with Mü, I built in some special functionality that was available only during the beta test but I went far beyond what I had done for Mü. Beta builds kept an internal log of all important events in the game, as well as binary dumps of the core state before every play. If a tester ever encountered a situation that they felt needed to be reported, they could hit a button in the game and email that log to me, along with a short comment describing the issue. I could then take that binary blob and use it to put my game into exactly the same state as theirs for debugging and further testing. The several days I spent writing that debug-only code paid huge dividends as I made use of those features every single day.

The most difficult aspect of the beta program, from my point of view, was insulating myself from all of the well-meaning criticism and suggestions that I received from my testers. Tichu proved to be a very difficult game to program and early iterations of the AI were buggy and truly awful in some respects. My testers were very direct with their criticisms whenever they found something they thought to be wrong. Many times I had to bite my tongue and swallow my pride. Most of the time, after I let my emotions cool down, I had to admit that they were right. Having someone pick apart your work day after day can be very demoralizing but I had to remind myself that this was exactly what they were supposed to be doing. I can't tell you how many aspects of the final game were the direct result of feedback from the testers. They were immensely valuable. The fact that they were all unpaid volunteers who were doing it solely for the sake of their love of the game makes it all that much more impressive.

Conclusion

When I set out to write Tichu for the iPhone I was very nervous. I suspected that coming up with a successful AI for Tichu, particularly on this device, would be far more difficult than anything I had done for Mü. I was right. I'm still not completely satisfied with how well the computer plays the game and I will probably continue to tinker with it for many months to come but, despite that, I am so proud of how it has turned out. I can't tell you what a thrill it is for me to be able to link up with one or two friends and play a good game of Tichu. The computer may not play a perfect game but it can give me a decent run for my money. The interface is clean and well polished. It's attractive to look at and very fun to play. All in all, I couldn't be more pleased.

Tichu Has Been Submitted!

2010-08-16T17:14:00.000-07:00

Tichu for the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch has just been submitted to the App Store. Assuming the approval process goes smoothly, it should be available for purchase in the next few days.

Visit http://tichu.housefullofgames.com for details on the game.

Lightning in a Bottle

2010-08-10T10:14:00.001-07:00

Now, this is how to end a Tichu game! (And no, I didn't cheat to get those cards. They're all natural, baby!)

So the question everyone seems to be asking is, "When? When will Tichu be released to the App Store?"

Patience, Grasshopper. It won't be long now. We're just chasing down the last few AI issues and making sure we've squished all the bugs. Hopefully I'll be able to give you good news in a few days.

Check out the new Tichu promo video.

2010-07-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

Estimated release date: late summer 2010.
http://tichu.housefullofgames.com

Another Tichu Milestone

2010-07-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

No screen shot this time (since it would look just like the ones I posted yesterday) but I thought this was worth mentioning.

Last night at game night, Adam (on his iPad) and Kai (on my iPhone) teamed up against me (on my iPad) and Becky, an AI player. Becky and I won 1075 to 625! Yet another encouraging sign for the AI! Becky still made a few questionable plays but she's getting better. We'll whip her into shape yet.

The three-way link worked flawlessly. No dropped connections. No state corruption. Just perfect! I was very pleased.

Last Night's Tichu Game

2010-07-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

That screen shot up there is the result of a game I played against the AI on my iPad. As you can see, the AI isn't doing all that badly! It still makes some mistakes here and there but on a good day it can play an interesting game, and even occasionally beat me. In this particular game, I only just managed to pull out the win.

And for those of you who wondered if this will also be coming to the iPhone and iPod touch, well here's another screen shot for you:

It's still too early to announce a definite release date yet but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that it's likely to be sometime this fall. But don't hold me to that.

What's This?

2010-06-18T11:03:00.001-07:00

Only the results of a Tichu game that Adam and I played last night.

But what's interesting here isn't the fact that Adam was completely schooled! (Although that was quite fun.) Oh No! What's interesting here is the fact that "Chris" and "Becky" weren't humans, and this wasn't played on a real table!

That's right. I think it's time to finally let slip a glimpse of my next project.

Watch this space for new developments as they unfold.

An Epic Game

2010-04-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

I was at game night last night just long enough to get in an epic game of Tichu with a couple of my old lunch buddies. Jason and I teamed up against Adam, who recruited Mike to complete the quorum. As you can see from the score sheet below, Adam and Mike engineered a mighty comeback which resulted in a mighty close finish. I especially liked how, although Adam made his Tichu call on the last hand, he and Mike still lost the game because Jason and I took 105 points in play! Good times!

Mike	Adam			Steve	Jason
		+85	+115	T
		85	115
T		-80	+80
		5	195
	GT	+240	+60
		245	255
	T	+140	+60
		385	315
		+45	+155		T
		430	470
		+50	+50
		480	520
		+20	+180	T
		500	700
T		-100	+100
		400	800
GT		+265	+35
		665	835
	T	+210	-10
		875	825
		+55	+45
		930	870
		+20	+80
		950	950
	T	+95	+105
		1045	1055

Cancer Sucks and Some People are Idiots

2010-04-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

Warning: this post is going to be a little more personal than you might be used to in this forum. If that upsets you or makes you feel uncomfortable then perhaps that's the point. I promise not to make a habit of it.

My wife has Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It's not been a pleasant experience for anyone but we're coping and we hope to get through this just fine. I'm not looking for sympathy and neither am I looking for advice but I am interested in dispensing just a little.

When some people (and I'm not talking about any of our close friends) find out that she has cancer, it seems like they just can't help but offer unsolicited advice.

One gentlemen, a long-time distant acquaintance of my parents, talked my ear off at my father's funeral (of all places) and actually had the nerve to tell me that before we should settle on a course of treatment, we should FLY ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY to solicit advice from cancer specialists. I'm not quite sure what world he lives in but in our world such things are generally prohibitively expensive, and rather foolish considering that we live next to some of the country's best cancer research centers. People generally come to Seattle seeking cancer treatment; not go looking for it elsewhere. I'm sure he meant well.

But today something happened that nearly sent me through the roof. One of my wife's facebook acquaintances posted a link to an article which said that cancer is caused by "negative emotions". The article even listed a table of which emotions are supposedly linked to which form of cancer. Not only is this bad science (if you can even call it that) but it's downright insulting. This person basically just suggested that my wife has brought her cancer upon herself. I'm sorry but that is probably the worst possible type of wrong. There is absolutely no science behind this idea. Perhaps next this person will be suggesting that space aliens have injected tracking devices in my wife's cancer cells. (I've decided not to post a link to this article because I don't want to give it any more exposure.)

People. If you have a friend who is suffering from cancer (or some other life threatening disease) the best thing you can do is just be their friend, let them know that you are willing to offer help and support if it's requested and then leave it at that. Your friend doesn't want you to offer medical advice. She doesn't want you to suggest a doctor, a cause or a cure. And she sure as hell doesn't want you to suggest that her cancer is her fault!

Thank you for indulging my little detour. I promise to go back to the fun stuff next time.

Realy? Isn't that a little harsh?

2010-04-08T11:50:00.001-07:00

I've got a peeve to pet.

What kind of app justifies a one-star rating in Apple's app store? Apple's guideline text that appears when you hover over the one-star rating is "hate it". Hate is a mighty strong word. For myself, I tend to reserve that for things that are pretty darn awful.

So we come to FireworksToy. FireworksToy is a really simple fireworks application that I threw together in a few hours as a test harness for the victory overlay in Mü. Since I had fun playing around with it, I thought I'd go ahead and release it as a free app. I thought "Hey, this isn't much but it's kinda fun to play with and perhaps someone will enjoy it." I thought I was doing something nice. Did I think that it was a great app? Of course not. But apparently there are some people who enjoy flicking open and closed a virtual Zippo lighter, surely there would be people that would enjoy shooting off virtual fireworks.

I was very careful to make sure that the descriptive text that appears in the app store didn't oversell it. I didn't want people thinking they were getting one thing and then feeling cheated when they got another. THAT might merit a one star rating in my book and I really was just trying to do something nice so I kept the description pretty low key.

So I have to admit that I'm a little hurt by the fact that nearly half the people who have rated it in the US store have given it one star; and even more so by those who posted negative reviews slamming it. I mean really people. Come on. You knew what you were getting when you downloaded the thing. Or at least you should have. Isn't "hate it" a pretty strong reaction? It's not like you were ripped off. It's free!

Oh well, I guess I'll be crying all the way to the bank. After all, the little ad banners that I tossed onto the bottom as an afterthought are making enough money to pay for my lunches these days.

Not bad for a throwaway app that was released as a nice gesture.

Guess I don't care all that much after all.

Musings on the iPad

2010-04-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

So you may have heard that Apple's shiny new toy debuted this weekend. You may also have heard that I have one. I needed it so I could test Mü on it. (Yeah. That's it.)

So now that I've become an expert on all things iPad (one weekend with the device will do that, you know) I thought I'd take a little time to post my feelings on it.

Pros:

* It really is a phenomenal way to browse the web. It's very zippy and multi-touch gestures let you pan and zoom the image to your heart's content. Ever browse to a site with a layout that doesn't quite fit properly on your screen? That problem simply goes away on this device. Put it in landscape mode or portrait mode just by turning the device. It's instant. It's very organic. It's just a joy to browse on this thing.

* Video is buttery smooth and looks awesome.

* There are TONS of great apps for it with more coming every day. Think of all the cool apps on your smart phone (if you have one) and now think "bigger, better, prettier, more powerful" and you have the idea. Most of the best iPhone apps have been re-worked and improved (not just embiggened) to run on the iPad. And although they're on average a little more pricey than their iPod/iPhone counterparts, they're still really cheap compared to software on a PC.

* It's an excellent ebook reader. The Kindle app is nearly perfect and Apple's iBook app is pretty sweet too. It's got enough heft and a large enough screen to have a kind of bookish feel to it and the screen is absolutely wonderful on the eyes. Way better than the laptop screen I'm typing this blog entry on.

* The battery life really is as good as they say. They advertise ten hours of video playback and I totally believe it. I used mine almost all day yesterday for games and browsing the web, all on a single charge.

* It makes a great electronic picture frame too.

Cons:

* 71 ¼ square inches of glass is kind of heavy (compared to the iPod) and fragile. I definitely worry about dropping this thing. This is not something that you can just stuff in your pocket like the iPhone. If you're looking for something to carry with you everywhere, this probably isn't it. On the other hand, it's far more portable than a laptop and does about 90% of what I want a laptop to do. And what it does, it does REALLY well.

* The keyboard, while functional, is not good enough for touch typing. Again, 90% of what I want a portable computing device to do, doesn't require massive typing, so not a big deal for me.

* No USB port. You can buy a dongle for it with a USB port but even that is only really good for downloading pictures from a camera. You're not going to be able to plug in printers or scanners or other heavy-duty peripherals. For me, not a big deal, but for some it might be.

* No camera. I kind of wish there were a front-facing camera so you could use this for video conferencing. I don't know if I would ever use it for that but it would be nice to have the option.

* No Flash. OK. This one kind of hurts. This means that any web site that uses Flash won't work. There aren't many flash sites that I go to on a regular basis but there are some (my wife's http://www.sunshinememories.com for one). I understand why Apple doesn't want to go down that rat hole but I wish they would.

The verdict?

I'm sold. For me, the pros far outweigh the cons, and most of the cons can be rectified over time. Is it for everybody? Of course not. And it's certainly not a laptop replacement. But it's sure going to see a lot of use on my daily commute.

And Mü looks really cool on it too. :)

New Version of Mü Available Now

2010-04-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

The new version of Mü for iPhone, iPod touch, and now iPad is available now in the App Store. Those of you who already purchased Mü for the iPhone will get the update for free.

Want to hear something frustrating? I ordered an accessory for my iPhone from Apple earlier this week. According to tracking emails, both packages left the same warehouse in China on the very same day. The accessory arrived yesterday. If it weren't for the fact that Apple won't let UPS deliver my iPad before Saturday, it would be here now.

I hate waiting.

Mü gets a shout-out from The Dice Tower!

2010-03-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

This one's pretty exciting to me.

In the latest episode of the popular board gaming podcast The Dice Tower, hosts Tom Vasel and Eric Summerer count down their top 10 games from 1995. Guess which game is Eric's number 7! And guess which iPhone app he raves about!

It's nice to be appreciated.

Go listen to episode #168. The magic happens at about the 1 hour 26 minute mark.

If you've never listened to The Dice Tower before, or if you haven't listened to it in years, you really ought to give it a listen. It's really grown from its humble beginnings. Today's episodes are highly polished and professional, almost unrecognizable when compared to the early episodes. It's the one board gaming podcast that I still never miss an episode.

Mü is coming to the iPad

2010-03-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

A few months back I brought Mü to the iPhone and iPod touch. Well just in case you haven't heard, I'm in the process of bringing it to the iPad and it's looking really good.

Rather than just "biggie-size" everything, I put a little bit of extra effort into the port and took advantage of the larger screen size to add a few more bells and whistles to the presentation. It's still the same game underneath but it just looks better on the iPad. In fact, the new version is a Universal binary which means that the same binary will run on both iPad and iPhone platforms. Those who have already purchased the iPhone version will get the iPad version for free once it goes live (and vice versa). I'm hoping to to have everything ready on or near the iPad launch day (April 3).

Here are a couple of pre-release screen shots to help you get as excited about it as I am.

Mü on the iPad in the portrait orientation.

Mü on the iPad in the landscape orientation.

What's this? A new Mü promo video!

2010-02-20T16:40:00.001-08:00

AppSmile Gives Mü Five Smiles!

2010-02-18T16:32:00.001-08:00

This is a very big honor. Popular iPhone application review site AppSmile.com has just posted a review of Mü and they've given it five out of five smiles!

Click here for the full, glowing review.

Mü Gets Another 5-Star Review

2010-02-18T11:23:00.001-08:00

Greg Swarthouth, A.K.A. The App Chap, has reviewed Mü and given it 5 stars!

"If you enjoy trick-taking card games like Hearts, Spades, Bridge, or Wizard, you will be in heaven with Mü."

You can read his full review here.

Follow Mü on Facebook

2010-02-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

Mü now has a Facebook page. If you're a Facebook user, help raise awareness for this great game by becoming a fan and encouraging your friends to do the same!

Mü Version 1.1 Coming Soon

2010-02-08T09:16:00.001-08:00

This morning I submitted an update to Mü that has some great enhancements and some bug fixes.

Most of these changes were the result of some really great user feedback. So thanks!

Here's the laundry list of what's coming in this update:

Improvements to the User Interface

The score sheet is now updated after each trick instead of only at the end of each hand. Check the score sheet to see how many points each player has taken so far.

Turns no longer begin with a card selected unless there is only one legal play. Some people were mistaking this for a hint instead of just a default selection.

Fixed a bug with the "Reset All" button where player skill settings weren't being permanently reset.

Improvements to the Computer Players

Vice is less likely to choose a trump that might help the chief.

Chief avoids choosing a partner if winning the hand would give that partner the game.

Other game balancing improvements.

Now Available in Portuguese

Spanish coming soon.

I should add that, just between you and me, I'm still not entirely confident in my Portuguese translation. If you have a knowledge of Portuguese and you notice something amiss in my translation, PLEASE don't hesitate to email me with corrections to the text!

Bringing Mü to the iPhone

2010-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

This article discusses my version of Mü for the iPhone and iPod Touch which is available right now in the iTunes App Store.

About a year and a half ago I had a Zune. I'd been given one as a gift and my beloved iPod classic was broken. Microsoft had just released a free SDK that let people write code for it. Being the geek I am, I thought it would be a fun project to write a version of Mü that would run on my Zune. My friends all thought I was crazy. Surely it wasn't possible to make a good version of Mü on such a tiny, wimpy device! Nevertheless, I ignorantly forged ahead and a few months later I had a version of Mü that not only worked on the Zune, it worked surprisingly well! What I didn't have was a license to distribute the game. The Zune games market being what it is (non-existent) I didn't see much of a point.

Fast forward a few months. My wife and I had just bought iPhones and suddenly I was looking at some interesting possibilities. Unlike Zune, the iPhone has a very vibrant games market. While I was pretty sure I wouldn't make any serious money doing it (let's face it, the game is a little too complicated to appeal to your average iPhone gamer) I recognized that there just might be a market for an iPhone version of Mü; and besides, I wanted one for myself!

In this article I'll discuss some of the challenges I had to overcome and some of the things that I learned along the way. I hope you find it interesting.

Becoming Legal

The first hurdle that I had to overcome was the fact that Mü is a copyrighted game. I didn't really fancy the idea of stealing Frank Nestel's game and Doris Matthäus' artwork so before I even started writing code I sent email to Dr. Nestel, explained what I wanted to do, and asked if he would be interested in licensing his game. Happily he replied in the affirmative.

I probably don't need to tell you that the internet is a pretty wonderful thing. Thanks to the magic of the internet, finding Frank's contact information was extremely easy and we were able to handle pretty much everything via email. Still, conducting international business is never without its challenges. He's in Germany. I'm in Seattle. Luckily his English is way better than my German. Negotiations went fairly quickly since we were both pretty enthusiastic from the start but it still took quite some time to actually get a contract signed. In the mean time, I had begun development in earnest.

Preparing for Development

When this project started, I hadn't used a personal computer made by Apple since the 1980s. Since iPhone development requires a Mac, I had some shopping to do. I decided that the cheapest and quickest way to get things going would be to buy a used Mac Mini. My wife thought I was nuts when I spent most of a Saturday driving to some stranger's house to buy one that he'd advertised on Craig's List. It turned out to be a pretty good way to go though. I love the portability of the machine and while it's not the fastest Mac out there, it's more than powerful enough for iPhone development.

The other hurdle I had to overcome was that I had to learn the development environment. Luckily that didn't prove to be too difficult. Apple's on-line documentation and videos are surprisingly good. If anything, there was too much information. Objective C isn't my favorite language but it's not too bad. I've never been much of a language bigot. Unfortunately, since Zune development is typically done in C#, virtually none of the code that I'd done for the Zune version could be used unaltered. I had to essentially re-write the entire game from scratch. Still, that was probably a good thing. It forced me to reevaluate most of the decisions that I'd made on the first version and the result was a much stronger game.

I spent several weeks just pouring over Apple's documentation, trying to learn the environment and absorbing as many of Apple's recommended best practices as I could. I installed the SDK, I played around with sample code. I familiarized myself with the environment. I watched scores of video presentations. Looking back, I'm glad I did. All of that initial groundwork would eventually pay off when I submitted Mü to Apple and they approved it in just two days.

Screen Size

One major hurdle that any developer has bringing anything to a portable platform such as the iPhone is the small screen. The iPhone's 320x480 screen is pretty big for a hand-held device (that's twice as many pixels as there were on my Zune) but it's still pretty cramped. Furthermore, those pixels are crammed onto a screen that's only 3 inches high so coming up with cards that are readable becomes a huge challenge.

The cards underwent several design changes. I started with raw scans of the original cards shrunk down to 40x65 pixels. While that had worked OK on the Zune, that turned out to be way too small for the iPhone so I started over, this time with cards that were shrunk down to 44x70. That was still too small but I couldn't really go much bigger and still leave room for bidding areas for each player so I decided that I had to make some subtle changes to the card design.

The first thing I did was get rid of most of the white border around each card. I kept all of Doris' lovely artwork but made all of the elements on each card just a little bit larger. The numbers were pushed a little bit closer to the color bands and the color bands were enlarged so that they more completely filled each card. That left me with virtual cards that looked almost undistinguishable from the original cards but if you look closely, you might notice that the numbers are actually a bit larger.

The next thing that I did was dramatically over-saturate all of the colors on the cards. I found that the original suit colors were far too difficult to distinguish when reduced to those sizes. Over saturating and slightly altering all of the colors made it much easier to tell blue from green from black.

I finally had cards that were readable and still looked like Doris' originals but that still wasn't good enough. The ornate numbers on the cards made them a little difficult to read and one of my testers was really pushing for a solution that was more friendly to the color-blind. I was really reluctant to abandon any elements of Doris' card design but I finally realized that it had to be done. Not wanting to completely abandon the traditional design, I left the traditional cards in the game as an optional setting but the default card set was changed to use the cleanest font I could find and different symbols were used as the pips of each suit.

original colors

traditional cards

final design

Screen Layout

The next difficult decision I had to make was how to arrange all of the game elements. I had originally thought that I would lay out the screen in landscape mode as I had done on the Zune but the more I experimented with my mock-ups the more I began to drift away from that decision. I realized that if I used the standard iPhone OS elements of a navigation bar at the top and a status bar at the bottom, I'd be left with a nearly perfect square in the center of the screen. That would give me a natural place to put menu icons and status text and allow me to follow iPhone conventions as much as possible. Following iPhone conventions would mean that users would feel more at home with the user interface and it would also make it possible for me to use many of the built-in features of the iPhone operating system.

Zune screen layout

I also realized that when I hold my iPhone, it just feels more natural in the portrait orientation. Landscape is fine for two-handed action games like shooters and the like but for a card game, where one hand cradles the device and the other hand is used to interact with the game, portrait mode just feels more natural to me. That's a personal preference of course but hey, it's my game so I get to do what I like.

iPhone screen layout

Early in the development process I realized one other unanticipated benefit of sticking with portrait mode. I could use the iPhone's built-in accelerator functionality to attach subordinate UI screens to the two landscape orientations. I decided to use the left landscape orientation to display the summary cards and the right landscape orientation to display a score sheet.

The game screen can still get quite crowded because I had to make it possible to represent the scenario where the maximum of six players have bid nearly all of their cards, and I needed room for essential scoring information, player names, link status and bidding feedback. Despite being a little crowded, I think it works pretty well.

One request that I've had from time to time is to display points taken during the current hand while the hand is in progress. Early on I decided not to do that for a number of reasons: first, it would be yet another set of numbers on an already crowded screen; second, it's information that you normally would be required to keep in your head during a real game; but third, and more importantly, if you stop to think about it, it's not really very useful information. Think about it. Are you really likely to change the way you play on a trick based on that knowledge? Almost certainly not. You're going to try to give as many points to your team as you can while keeping as many points away from your opponents. It doesn't really matter if the bid is already made or not. The only scenario where it might matter is if you've already got the result you wanted and you're deciding whether to give a point card to a partner or trying to keep it for yourself, and that scenario really isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. If you're the type of player for whom that one or two points really matters, then you can track the points in your head, just as you would have to do in a live game.

UPDATE: After some great customer feedback I changed my mind on this last point. In the current version of the game, you CAN see how many points have been taken so far throughout the hand. Just rotate the device to the right and check the scorecard. Putting that info on the scorecard is a great compromise because it avoids cluttering the main screen (my main objection to it in the first place) and it also keeps it out of sight for players who don't want that level of help from the computer.

Input Method

Another difficult, and perhaps somewhat controversial decision that I had to make was to decide how the user would select, bid, and play cards. I looked at several different methods before finally making a choice.

The most obvious method for playing a card would be simply to allow the player to touch the card he wants to play. On its surface this seems like a good idea but I quickly rejected it. Fat fingers touching tiny cards on a tiny screen are not very precise. The cards are small enough that it is all too easy to accidentally touch the wrong card. There are few things more frustrating than playing a card by mistake. That clearly wasn't going to work.

Tapping a card and dragging or flicking it to the middle of the screen worked a little better but I still found it too easy to accidentally select the wrong card. What I wanted was an input method that was very clear and as error free as I could make it.

Eventually I settled on an input method where the selected card is always shown in front of the rest of the hand, making it very obvious which one is selected. If you've got the wrong card you can tap on a different one or slide your finger to one side or the other until you find the card you want. An arrow icon appears above the selected card, further reinforcing the selection. Only after tapping on that icon is the card actually played to the table. This extra step has seemed a little awkward to some but of all the input methods that I experimented with, this one was by far the most error resistant.

UPDATE: I've slightly changed my opinion on this as well. While working on the new iPad version, I realized that my concerns with tapping and dragging cards didn't really apply to the larger device. With larger cards, it becomes much more natural to tap and drag cards so I decided to go ahead and add multi-touch tap and drag to the possible ways to select and play cards. The older input method still works exactly as before but now you can also slide your finger vertically over a card to pick it up, at which point you can move it over the play area and let it go to play it. You can also double-tap on a card to play it. I also decided to go ahead and add it to the iPhone version since some had asked for it. Still a bit worried about accidental card play, I put an option in the settings to allow users to turn the feature off should they find that they're playing cards by mistake.

Bidding uses exactly the same method except that instead of playing your card to the trick, it pushes your card forward in a "marked for bidding" state. The icon above the card changes to a down arrow. Touch the down arrow and the card will be pulled back into your hand. A second icon, pointing to your opponent, is used to lock in your bid and yield control to the next player. This results in an input method that is consistent across the entire game and very resistant to accidental taps, touches or swipes. It may take a little bit of getting used to at first but I remain convinced that it's the best solution.

From the start, I disallowed selecting illegal cards but one of my testers suggested a wonderful finishing touch: that I grey out or dim illegal cards, making it easy to tell at a glance which cards are legal to play and which ones are not.

Artificial Intelligence

Of all the obstacles that I had to overcome on this project, the AI was certainly the most challenging. Mü is a very complicated game with a rich bidding mechanic. When I was doing the initial Zune version I did a lot of research on the topic and I have to say that what I learned was not very encouraging. After decades of research and development, computers are only just now able to play a decent game of Bridge, and that's on a very powerful computer! Card play isn't too terribly difficult but even that's not easy (witness all of the really crappy Hearts games out there) but bidding! that's another matter entirely. Getting bidding right is a notoriously hard problem.

Step one to creating a good game of Mü is just to get the computer to play a hand correctly. I didn't even think about bidding at the start. Card play is complicated by the fact that trump changes dramatically from hand to hand, as do partnerships, and the cards are not all worth the same amount of points. That meant that a lot of the conventional optimization tricks that are used to speed card play in a Bridge game just don't apply. I had to come up with my own optimization techniques, based on some of what I'd seen in Bridge implementations to be sure, but my own nonetheless.

The card play logic in Mü (like most card games) is handled using something called a Monte Carlo routine. In a Monte Carlo routine you start with all of the cards that you know (because they've already been played or because they've been bid or because they're in your own hand) and you randomly assign all of the others. Then you play a number of tricks and you evaluate the outcome. Repeat that process a number of times and whichever card gives the best results, that is the card you play. It's a brute-force implementation that, given enough random samples, and given that you play enough tricks ahead, will result in optimal play. The problem is that on the iPhone we don't have nearly enough computing power to evaluate enough tricks or samples to arrive at optimal play so on top of this foundation I poured a little bit of secret sauce that allows the computer to make slightly better than average choices despite the very limited thinking time. The computer DOES NOT CHEAT but it does get a little bit of help from my experience as a player. There isn't enough time to really analyze the hand properly so it will occasionally make a blunder or two but most of the time it gets it right and in my opinion, that only serves to make the game a little more interesting and lifelike.

Bidding is a much harder problem. At its core, it still works much the same way: you take a whole bunch of random samples, you analyze them, and you make the choice that seems to yield the best results. Unfortunately, if computing power was scarce during card play, it's REALLY scarce during bidding so I had to take a lot of short cuts. Still, I did manage to leave most of the bidding decisions up to the computer. It analyzes the current bids to determine who it thinks is likely to be chief, who is likely to be partner, who is likely to be vice, and what is likely to be trump. At each stage in the bidding it needs to decide if it should take chief, take vice, put itself on the hook, position itself to be partner, or just pass. Every major decision is made by playing a number of randomized hands to completion and deciding what it thinks the score in a given situation is likely to be. It doesn't take chief or vice unless it thinks there is a material advantage to doing so within a given margin for error. Deciding what that margin for error should be can be tricky. I probably played thousands of hands where the computer played against me or against itself. I analyzed so many hands that I got well and truly sick of looking at them but the results were worth it. It still doesn't play perfectly but given the limitations of the hardware, I'm very satisfied. The fact that I can regularly lose to my own game is quite satisfying.

Linked Play

The final challenge, and certainly a formidable one, was getting linked play to work. I really wanted to be able to play a game with several human players, all linked over the network. Getting there turned out to be a lot of work.

I immediately discarded the idea of linking arbitrary iPhones over the internet. That would require some sort of match-making service or dedicated server to enable players to find one another and that was way beyond the scope of what I was interested in doing. Instead, I focused on linking over Bluetooth. That had some immediate advantages: first, it meant that I didn't also have to implement some sort of chat facility because using Bluetooth implies that all players are within shouting distance of one another; second, the iPhone v3.0 SDK has built in matchmaking facilities for linking players over Bluetooth. The only real drawback there was that I wanted to be able to link more than two players at a time and nowhere could I find any examples of code that did that. I couldn't even find any games in the App Store that did that. (I'm sure they must exist but I couldn't find any in my admittedly short search.)

Once I'd figured out how to link multiple players, I still had other challenges. Even though I had designed the game from the start with the knowledge that I would be adding networked play, and even though I had experience working on other networked games, I still found it more difficult than I had anticipated. When you have two computers linked together, all playing the same game, you need to be very careful that they both stay in sync. Furthermore, because they ARE separate computers, there is a built-in expectation that they should both be able to be doing different things at the same time. For instance, one player could be reviewing the score sheet while another player is bidding. Keeping all of those states synchronized and dealing with the fact that you could be getting messages (or not getting messages) from another player at any time is really challenging. Despite all of my careful planning, I still went through several builds where I was unable to play more than a hand or two without encountering really strange behavior. Players would play cards that had already been played. I'd end up with multiple partners, or sometimes no partner at all. Cards would mysteriously move about the screen. Good times.

That was complicated further by the fact that none of my beta testers seemed to be much help where multi-player games were concerned. Most of my beta testers lived in different cities (or even countries) and therefore they couldn't really test linked play. Luckily my wife and I both have iPhones and my son has an iPod Touch so I was able to test linked play myself. My son and I played a lot of games but I still wish we'd had a lot more time to test. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone won't run into some really hideous bug when playing with six humans all linked over Bluetooth.

There were some other really interesting limitations imposed by the iPhone form factor. The iPhone does not support running more than one application at once and your application can be shut down at any time for any number of reasons. That meant that the game had to be designed from the start to be able to save and resume automatically and with a minimum amount of user interaction.

Furthermore, what do you do if someone gets a phone call or a text message in the middle of your linked game and he has to exit the game to answer it? How do you get that player back into the game? And what if someone has to go home? Do you force everyone to quit the game just because little Bobby's out past his curfew? Clearly I needed to allow players to jump back into the middle of a game in progress and I needed to allow the computer to fill in should someone leave. Making that happen in a way that was as simple as possible for the user was a bit of a challenge.

Localization

Both Frank and I really wanted Mü to be available in more languages than just English. One of the first things that Frank requested was that we do a German version. I was completely on board with that idea, especially knowing that the German board game market is so active, so from the start, I structured the game to allow localization. That turns out to be really easy on the iPhone. The iPhone has built-in facilities for separating localizable resources and bundling multiple languages into the same application package. I also had past experience with localization so I was aware of virtually all of the issues I would come up against. From the start I made sure that any localizable strings used the NSLocalizedString macros. I used icons instead of text whenever it made sense to do so. I was also very careful to avoid writing code that would build sentences from component phrases. That resulted in some redundant strings here and there but it gave me the luxury of rewording longer sentences if they became too long to fit on screen after localization and it meant that localizers were always free to use the proper grammar.

I speak Portuguese so I did a very rough Portuguese translation early on which I used to work out any kinks in the process. Unfortunately, my Portuguese isn't good enough that I could release THAT version of the game. It's currently being proof-read by a native speaker to fix all of my many embarrassing mistakes.

All of the in-game documentation (and there is quite a bit of it) is displayed using the iPhone's wonderful built-in web controls so I was able to put it all in html files which made localizing the rules and credits a breeze.

Conclusion

This was a phenomenally satisfying project. I feel that I've produced a fantastic game and I've learned a lot along the way. I can now play my favorite card game during my commute! Will it prove to be financially profitable? That remains to be seen but either way it was well worth the undertaking. Bringing a game I love to the iPhone has been a reward unto itself.

Thanks for reading. Now go play Mü!

Mü is Not the Only Game In Town

2010-01-24T16:52:00.000-08:00

Hopefully by now all of you who own an iPhone or iPod Touch have already picked up your copy of Mü. (If not, what the heck are you waiting for!? Go! Go now!) But you might also be interested to know that there are several other choices out there for those of you who like board games.

One of those choices is a lovely new implementation of Reiner Knizia's Money by well-known gamer Shannon Appelcline.

Shannon has written a very nice article in his Board Game News column describing some of the process that he went through while making his game. It's a good read for those of you who want an insight into what this process is like.

I can personally recommend both Shannon's article and his game.

Mü Press Release

2010-01-21T12:42:00.000-08:00

House Full of Games in cooperation with Spiele von Doris & Frank (D&F) is pleased to announce the immediate availability on iTunes of one of the world's best card games.

Mü is a phenomenal trick-taking card game that has been delighting gamers the world over for many years. Now that excellent gaming experience is available on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Play Mü with your friends over Bluetooth and with a challenging and life-like Artificial Intelligence that can be tuned to match several different skill levels and bidding styles.

Tired of playing Hearts and Solitaire? Want a superior card playing experience? Get Mü!

To read more about this fine game, please point your browser to http://mu.housefullofgames.com.

Steve Blanding

Owner: House Full of Games

Mü Submitted to iTunes

2010-01-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

I have great news! Mü has been submitted to iTunes for both English and German!

Portuguese and Spanish versions are still in the works but I decided that it wasn't right to hold up German and English any longer on their behalf. I'm sure that German and English will be the primary markets in any case so waiting any longer didn't really make sense.

Now the waiting game begins. Hopefully the folks at Apple will not find anything amiss and approval will be swift.

For those of you who are wondering, Mü was submitted as a tier 3 application which means that it will be priced at $2.99 or 2,39 €, at least initially.

Watch this space for further developments.

Mü Update

2010-01-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

Some of you might be wondering what's up with Mü for the iPhone. Don't despair! It's still coming and it's coming soon. I've been waiting on some translation and doing some last minute testing in an attempt to make it as solid as possible before I submit it.

I have the German translation finished, and of course English was never in question, but I'm also trying to get Portuguese and Spanish ready. I've done a (very) rough Portuguese translation myself but since my Portuguese isn't really very good, I don't really want to release Portuguese until I've had it corrected by a real Brazilian or two (and believe me, it'll need correcting). That's supposedly underway but the guys I have doing that work have been on vacation so I'm still waiting for the final files from them. Spanish is in a simliar predicament except that I don't speak Spanish at all so I didn't even bother trying to do that one myself.

In any case, I promise that at this point we are mere days away from submission. Whether Portuguese and Spanish will be in the initial release depends on what I get from my helpers in the next few days. If I have to, I'll leave them out in order to get the game submitted by the end of the month. That's a promise.

FireworksToy now available from iTunes

2009-12-18T15:33:00.001-08:00

FireworksToy, the little fireworks display ap that I mentioned the other day, has been accepted by Apple and is now live on iTunes!

Follow this link to download it today!

They say that every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings. Well every time you run FireworksToy I get a teeny tiny kick back from the ad revenue so be a sport and run it. Run it often. Get your uncles, aunts, cusins, parents, siblings, and long lost family relations to run it and run it often. :) Heck! Everybody should be running FireworksToy!

FireworksToy submitted to the iTunes App Store

2009-12-14T11:17:00.000-08:00

Consider this something of a trial balloon. While creating Mü for the iPhone, I designed a simple little fireworks display to play as a victory celebration should you manage to win the game. Well, I had so much fun just playing around with the dumb thing that I decided, what the heck, why not release it as a free app! Besides, it gives me a good chance to test the app submission process before going live with Mü (hopefully in a few weeks).

FireworksToy is a very simple one-screen application that presents a randomly generated fireworks display. Tapping on the screen launches more fireworks. Dragging your finger across the screen launches a whole line of fireworks. Tilt the screen and the fireworks seem to obey gravity. It's simple but it's kind of fun to play around with. I'm releasing it as a free app but I also included a tiny AdMob ad at the bottom of the screen so every time you play with it I stand to make a couple of cents here and there.

Watch this space for news on approval and when you can go pick it up. Then go get it and tell all of your friends to get it so I can get rich off the ad revenue! (Ha! As if!) *big grin*

You can read more about it here: http://fireworkstoy.housefullofgames.com/

Perhaps the World's Worst Kept Secret

2009-11-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

The paperwork has been signed and I can finally talk publicly about something that I've been hinting about for months: I'm bringing Mü to the iPhone!

Last year, as you may recall, I did an unauthorized implementation of Mü for the Zune. That was something that I did mostly for my own amusement but seeing as the Zune has virtually no third-party application market to speak of, I never bothered to take it any farther. Well, this summer my wife and I both bought iPhones and naturally that changed things.

Late in August I sent Frank Nestel email asking him if he'd be interested in seeing his game available on the iPhone and his response was swift and encouraging. The following months were spent rewriting the game almost from scratch and ironing out the details of a licensing agreement with Frank. If you like card games, I think you're going to love what we've done. Let me tell you about it.

That's the screen you see when you start Mü for the first time. After a few brief screens designed to get you oriented with the bare essentials, you're taken to a menu where you can start the game. From that point on, whenever you start the game you're taken right back to where you were the last time you played. Saving is automatic so you never need to worry about losing progress.

The game supports 4, 5 or 6 player games against several independently configurable computer opponents. There are three bidding aggression settings and five skill settings to choose from. The game also supports linked play over Bluetooth for up to six human players! What's more, the computer plays even better than it did on the Zune. I promise you that winning will be a satisfying feeling.

Here's a screen shot of a game in progress:

The first thing you might notice is that the iPhone's screen is bigger. A lot bigger. The result is a much richer user interface. The touch screen works wonderfully. To play a card, you tap or slide your finger over the card you want, bringing it to the front of your hand, and then you tap on that little round arrow icon above it to confirm your selection. That extra step avoids accidental card play and it works very well.

The game supports the iPhone's accelerometer. Tilt the phone on its left side and you can browse both sides of the summary card from the original game: the one with the bidding and scoring charts. Tilt the phone on its right side and you get a score sheet for the current game that looks like this:

Other features include detailed statistics tracking, Shake-A-Hint™, auto-play, and full in-game documentation. I expect the game to be available in both German and English and I'm also considering other languages if I can find volunteers willing to provide help with translation. (Send me email or post a comment below if you're a native speaker of a language other than English or German and you're interested in helping out. Sorry, but I can't afford to offer payment other than a pre-release copy of the game.)

The game is in final beta testing and it should be ready for release soon. I won't set a formal release date yet other than to say "I'll release it when it's ready" but it shouldn't be too much longer now.

The one thing that I'm still undecided on is the price point. Do I price it very low in the hopes of attracting people who are unfamiliar with the game or do I price it a little higher on the assumption that most people who are likely to pick it up will already be familiar with the card game and therefore be willing to pay a little more? I have my own strong opinions on that but I'm interested in hearing yours. What do you think? How much would you be willing to pay? Please post your opinions in the comments below.

I'm still here.

2009-11-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

Life has been a little crazy this year and certain things in my life have suffered a bit as a result. This blog is just one of them. My game playing has been another. Now things are starting to calm down a little bit and I finally almost feel like I'm ready to start another holiday season.

So what's been going on? Oh that's a very long list, my friend. Here are just a few of the things that have been conspiring against me recently:

First off, my dad died of a heart attack in September. That took me out of commission for a couple of weeks while I helped my mom and siblings prepare for the funeral. It was sudden. It was horrible. It's in the past and we're (mostly) over it now.

At about the same time, my wife was diagnosed with Non Hodgkin's Lymphoma. We caught it very early and after a round of radiation therapy she's doing well but it's never a fun thing. (Incidentally, she's running in a fundraising half-marathon for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. If you'd like to help, you can go to her fundraising page.)

But not every barrier to my productivity has been such a downer. These days the biggest thing standing in my way of attending our game night (which, by the way, has been moved to Thursday night) is that my 15 year old son is taking driver's ed on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I've needed to help get him to and from (mostly from) class.

And there's one other little project that's been eating up most of the rest of my spare time. I'm not quite ready to talk about that in detail yet but let's just say that it involves the iPhone and a certain popular card game. Papers are being signed. Code is being written. Details will soon be forthcoming.

First impressions of Dominion: Intrigue

2009-07-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Last night I played a couple of games of the new edition of Dominion: Dominion: Intrigue. I hesitate to call it an expansion because it's really a stand-alone game with an all-new set of 25 kingdom cards as well as complete sets of treasure, curse, and victory cards. Still, it's not completely wrong to call it an expansion either, as the new game has the same rules as the first and the 25 new kingdom cards can be mixed with the original 25 kingdom cards to create nearly endless deck-building possibilities.

As I said, I played twice last night and both games were very enjoyable. The new cards are different enough from the original 25 that, while the game still feels very familiar, it played very differently. Some of the new cards are (how shall I put it?) rather wicked. In our first game, everyone loaded up their decks with the Saboteur, who forces your opponents to flip through their decks until they come upon a card with a cost of 3 or more, trash it and then replace it with a card worth 2 less. One of the effects of this was that it was nearly impossible for players to get Province cards. I believe that the winner of that game only had something like 8 victory points, which is a very low amount. Our second game wasn't quite that extreme but it still felt quite different from games we'd played with the original edition.

My initial impression of the new game is very favorable. While the rules are basically identical, the new cards made for a very different experience, which in my opinion is a great thing. I'm really looking forward to mixing the new cards in with the original cards to see what crazy combinations people come up with. By the way, if you're worried about getting cards from the two sets mixed up: don't be. If you'll look closely on the lower-right of all your Dominion cards, you'll see a small symbol. That symbol identifies which box the cards came from so if you've mixed them, it's very easy to separate them out again when you're done.

If you haven't played the original game then I'd still recommend you pick that one up first, as this edition makes for a slightly more brutal experience, but if you've enjoyed the original and are looking to take it to the next level, then you definitely should pick this one up!

Yes. I still go to game night!

2009-07-08T15:33:00.001-07:00

I've been so busy lately that I usually show up late and leave early but I still go. And this week I actually went early and stayed late! The fact that my good friends Joel and Curt, who each moved out of state (and in one case out of country) some time ago, were back in town for a visit might have something to do with that. It was great seeing them again, and getting to play games with them again. Joel brought his two oldest boys along and it was great seeing them too. Good times!

The addition of these four long-lost gamers, coupled with the fortuitous re-emergence of some other wayward gamers, meant that we had one of the largest groups at game night that we've seen for a while. Many a game was played, some new, some old. Good times were had by all.

But the one game that I want to focus on with this post is my old friend: Tichu! Why? Because Cristopher and I teamed up against Curt and Jose for two of the all-time awesomest couple of Tichu games. It was delicious! Let me break it down for you.

Game One:
Hand 1: Christopher Makes a Tichu call and we start the game off right: 180 to 20
Hand 2: I make a Tichu call and set the tone for the rest of the game: 340 to 60
Hand 5: Curt calls a Large Tichu and fails miserably! We take all 100 points in play and they lose 200. The score is now 510 to 90.
Hand 9: Christopher ends the misery with a convincing Tichu where we take all 100 points in addition to the 100 points for the Tichu call.
Final score: 1085 to 215. Ouch! Over the course of the game Christopher made three Tichu calls, I made one, Curt made two and missed one, and Jose missed one.

Well it just wouldn't be right to deny them a rematch so on to

Game Two:
Hand 1: we start strong and go up 80 to 20.
Hand 2: things begin to look bad. Curt and Jose score a double win. Score is now: 80 to 220.
Hand 3: we counter with a double win of our own against Jose's failed Tichu call: 280 to 120.
Hand 9: after Curt and Jose go on a tear of four made Tichu calls to our one the score is now: 620 to 980.
Hand 10: we somehow manage to keep hope alive by taking 90 points in play: 710 to 990.
Hand 11: when it seems certain that we can't possibly salvage this game Christopher catches lightning in a bottle and calls a confident Large Tichu. We play it perfectly and score a double win.
Final score: 1110 to 990!

What a great way to finish the night!

Thanks guys!

Dominion wins 2009's Game of the Year!

2009-06-29T10:12:00.001-07:00

Dominion has just won the Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year)!

Out of all the nominee's, this is the one I was pulling for the most (with Pandemic a close second in my book) so I was very happy to hear the news.

Dominion is an excellent deck-building card game that is very easy to learn, easy to play, and yet offers a lot of strategic possibilities for such a simple game. A worthy choice! My hearty congratulations to Donald X. Vaccarino! Well done!

If you haven't had a chance to play this fine game, or its expansion (which we should have in stock any day now), then what are you waiting for? Get to it!

Yet another game about building a castle?

2009-02-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

I arrived late for game night last Tuesday so it didn't leave time for much gaming beyond the obligatory game of Tichu. I did manage to get in one game that I hadn't played before. That game was A Castle for All Seasons, a new game by Inka and Markus Brand, who also brought us Guatemala Cafe. It's a very pretty game about building a castle. What is it with so many games about building large medieval structures lately? We've got Pillars of the Earth and the two Cayluses just to name a few. Is this theme the new "trading in the Mediterranean"? Oh well, I digress.

Anyway, I don't have time to write a proper review (and I've only played it once so it wouldn't be fair to do so) but my initial impression was rather favorable. There seems to be some depth here and it's certainly a very attractive game. It's also pretty short which is typically a plus in my book. I do like the shorter games. Around an hour seems to be my sweet spot and this fits the bill nicely. I'm looking forward to playing it again.

Game Night and a BDay Greeting

2009-02-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

Last night was another fun game night. My night began with a couple of games of Dominion. I really enjoy this fast-playing card game. For me it strikes just the right balance between complexity and simplicity. The game is very easy to learn but the interactions between the cards (which are different each game) are just deep enough to keep the game fresh for quite some time. And with an expansion on the way, it'll only keep getting better. My only complaint was that someone else had played using my copy sometime earlier and had failed to keep the different mini-decks in alphabetical order, making setting up our game a real pain in the butt. So to whoever you are: please keep the cards sorted!

Next up for me was a rousing game of Tichu. I began the night with a Grand Tichu call on my very first hand. Unfortunately I just missed it, starting our team 200 points in the hole. Ah but don't despair! For we had more than a few successful Tichu calls that game, including another Grand Tichu call where my partner and I scored a double-win! Four hundred points baby! Inspite of that, our opponents gave us a pretty decent run for our money and while we won, it wasn't exactly a blowout.

Finally, I want to wish Happy Birthday once again to my friend Jason who brought his whole family to game night last night. Sorry I wasn't able to get in a game with you but I sure did enjoy sharing your Thin Mint cookies!

2009-01-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's been a while. A long while.

Well, a lot has been going on. Naturally I was pretty busy with the holiday rush. I'm still feeling the effects of that. What's more, I've also changed jobs in the last few weeks. (Yes, the secret is out. HFoG is not my day job.) So that has kept me extremely busy as I get up to speed in a new work environment. Furthermore, the new job is in downtown Seattle so that's added a considerable amount of time to my daily commute. It's time spent on the bus so I can use it productively, but it does lengthen my work day a bit.

But that's not why you're here. You want to hear about games. My Tuesday game night hasn't changed. I still play every Tuesday night in Microsoft's building 50 cafeteria so let's talk about that. (And yes, you're still invited to join us.)

Last night we played Battlestar Galactica again. We had a full compliment of six players and once again, the humans lost. I swear, every time I play this game the Cylons win. And naturally, I have yet to be a Cylon. Bummer. But it was a fun game that came down to the wire. We honestly thought we had a chance at it until about two turns from the end. Then a few basestars appeared, flooded the skies with Cylon Raiders, and overwhelmed our poor fleet before we could make the final jump. Good times.

Next up for me was a game of five player Mü. This continues to be my trick-taking game of choice. I've played hundreds of games and I never grow tired of it. Last night the card gods deserted me. I couldn't get a decent hand to save my life. But at least the company was good!

Last week we played Condottiere for the first time. Condottiere is a card game masquerading as an area control game. There's a small board depicting northern Italy. Players battle over provinces by playing cards. It sounds good on paper but I must admit that we really weren't all that excited with it after playing it. I'm sure there's a good game in there somewhere but for us it seemed way too random. Perhaps that's because we played with four players. Is it better with two? I couldn't say.

We've also been playing a fair amount of a new cooperative game called Red November. This is a rather silly little game where a submarine piloted by gnomes (yes, gnomes) encounters one crisis after another and the players' task is to survive a number of turns before rescue comes. It's not to be taken too seriously and with too many players it can tend to bog down (particularly if they each think they should be the leader) but with a smaller group of players it's pretty fun. One thing that surprised me though is that it comes in such a small box. It comes in one of the small Fantasy Flight boxes (roughly 8x4x2 inches) but it's packed so dense with bits that the box barely closes. There's a surprisingly large fold-out board and dozens of cards, counters, chips, and figures. Once your done playing you may find yourself wondering how you're going to get it all back in the box. Anyway, I liked it quite a bit. Perhaps I'll write a more in-depth review here in a bit.

I'm going to try to recommit to updating this blog again now that things are starting to settle down a bit here. Thanks for still reading in spite of my sketchy update schedule!

Mü on the Zune!

2008-11-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

Dear reader,

I'm afraid that I'm going to be a bit of a tease. You see, what I am about to describe is something that you may never be able to see in person. Read on if you can stand it.

As a computer programmer who also happens to own a Zune, I was pretty excited to learn that Microsoft has just released XNA Game Studio v3.0 which contains support for writing games on the Zune. Naturally I couldn't leave that alone. I just couldn't resist the challenge of implementing one of my favorite card games for the device. What I'm going to describe here is my experience implementing Mü for the Zune. Unfortunately for all of you, Mü is a copyrighted game and my implementation makes liberal use of the original copyrighted artwork and rules, so unless by some generous miracle I am granted license to distribute this little gem (Mr. Nestel? Are you reading?), you'll probably never be able to try it. Sorry. But what I can do is tease you with screen shots, discuss what I've done and talk about how it works.

Let's start with what you'd see if you could start the game. This is the loading screen:

After all of the art assets are loaded you'll find yourself at the main menu:

The How to Play section contains abbreviated rules to the game. The Controls section describes how to interact with this particular implementation. The About Mu section describes what a naughty boy I've been by borrowing Doris Matthäus' lovely artwork and Frank Nestel's lovely game rules without permission. And the Options section lets you configure difficulty settings, AI bidding styles, and so on.

When starting a game, you're given a choice between 4, 5 and 6 players. If you have a game already in progress, you're also given the choice of continuing your game. (Progress is automatically saved after every hand so there's no need to explicitly save your game.)

When the game begins, the cards are shuffled and dealt to each of the players. (Which looks very cool.) Your hand is shown at the bottom of the screen. Then the bidding round begins. After a few rounds of bidding, the screen might look like this:

Note that you're told what the current high bid is, how many points need to be taken to meet the goal, who is currently aligned to be chief and who would be vice. As your opponents bid, their cards appear around the edges of the screen. As you bid, your cards are pushed forward so you can tell which cards you've revealed to the other players. The spotlight tells you whose turn it is (in this case, it's the player to your right). The weird looking line in the middle of the spotlight is a sweeping hand that spins around once per second whenever the computer is thinking. It looks pretty cool in motion.

Eventually the vice and chief select trump and the trick begins. As cards are played the screen looks like this:

After the trick ends, you're given a few seconds to make a mental note of the cards that have been played (you can button mash through it if you like) then the next trick starts. When the hand ends, you'll be shown a screen that looks like this:

The unboxed numbers are the points taken during play. The numbers in the boxes are the current scores, which include points taken this hand and any bonus points or penalties awarded.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the user interface. It's very easy to use and functional. The only downside is that there is no "undo" feature so if you accidentally play the wrong card you just have to live with it so you learn to be careful and think before you play (not a bad thing in my opinion).

When I mentioned to my friend Adam (also a programmer) that I was thinking of embarking on this project he was justifiably skeptical. Bidding card games are notoriously difficult for a computer to play well even under the best of circumstances and the Zune is hardly a processing powerhouse. We were both concerned that the challenge would prove to be too much for such a wimpy computer processor. I also had concerns that it might be impossible to get all of that information crammed onto such a tiny screen (320 x 240 pixels) but, as you can see from the screenshots, I managed to pull that off. But that still left the bigger question: would it play well? I'm happy to say that it does! It plays surprisingly well for such a wimpy computer! To the point that I am now often losing games to the computer. Will it take the place of my human opponents? Naw. I'd still rather play against real people. But it's pretty cool to be able to play a game of Mü whenever I like.

Implementation Details and Lessons Learned

If you're still reading, I'm impressed! If you are interested in learning how the game works and what I've learned then read on. Those of you who aren't interested in the computer programming guts behind my implementation are free to go now. It gets a little technical from this point on.

The heart of most game playing artificial intelligences is something called a decision tree. Basically, each point in the game is represented by a node, with every legal play branching out from that node to other nodes. The result is something that looks like a pyramid as the tree quickly branches out from the current node to the set of nodes n levels (or turns) forward in time. The computer analyzes each node in the decision tree and tries to determine which of the branches will lead to the most advantageous outcome. This approach is often used with two player perfect information games such as chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe, and so on. It's particularly effective in those cases because the computer knows exactly what each player's options are and so it knows that if it makes move X, its opponent will be required to make either moves A, B or C. Unfortunately for card games this isn't possible (without cheating) because you don't know exactly which cards your opponent holds. One possible solution (and the one which I've chosen) is to use what's called a Monte Carlo algorithm. Basically, what that means is that you start with the cards you know (the cards in your hand, the cards the other players have bid, and the cards that have already been played and are therefore out of play) and then you randomly assign the cards you don't know. You create a number of sample hands and then play each of those sample hands as if all the cards were laid face up on the table. Then you can choose whatever move comes up "best" most of the time.

One other problem with using a decision tree is that the farther ahead you look, the more nodes you have to analyze. Looking just one more play ahead could result in having to analyze five or six times as many moves. Now consider that with a trick taking game, it makes no sense to look ahead just a single card play, you really have to analyze all the way to the end of the trick before you can make a determination of who has won the trick. Looking ahead just one trick can require that the computer analyze thousands of potential plays. Looking ahead two tricks can sometimes require that you analyze several million. I suspect you see the problem.

Some of these nodes are automatically ignored by using an alpha-beta pruning algorithm (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know what that is) but on average the AI still examines around 500,000 nodes each play, and early in the hand there are times when it analyzes millions. Since XNA programs are written in C#, this posed its own set of challenges. C# is not the most efficient language and it tends to allocate memory when you least expect it. I had to carefully write my analysis routine to avoid memory allocation as much as possible. I also considered using a dictionary to try to prune the moves even farther but after giving it some thought I discounted that as impractical on the Zune, especially since it's not nearly as likely to be useful as it would be with a game like chess or checkers. I figured that speed lost to complexity would be likely to outweigh any speed gained by scoring the occasional dictionary hit.

My game on the normal setting looks ahead two full tricks during card play. This isn't ideal and it occasionally will result in sub-optimal play but I find it's a pretty good compromise between speed and difficulty. Furthermore, since there is some inherent uncertainty in where the other cards are, I find that most of the time you won't notice the difference between looking two tricks ahead and three.

During play, I also compute only a half-dozen Monte Carlo samples. At first blush, you might think this wouldn't be enough, and for the most part you'd be right. I originally thought so as well. But if you think about it a little more you might realize that much of the time, the winner of a trick is decided by which player holds a single unplayed card. A half-dozen random samples is enough to cover the cases where that card is in each of the other players' hands. Furthermore, I have to admit that I have a little bit of an ace up my sleeve here. The computer sort of cheats. It's not a full blown cheat; it's just an itty bitty cheat. When I compute a Monte Carlo sample, what I do is start with the correct set of hands. Then I randomly choose two unknown cards from two different hands and swap them and I repeat that a set number of times. The result is that I have a hand where most of the unknown cards are scrambled but possibly not all of them. This means that the information isn't quite as random as it might be and that gives the computer just a tiny edge when guessing where the other cards are. But let's not make more of this than it is. For all intents and purposes, any benefit that could be gained this way is so small as to be nearly insignificant.

One other thing that helps the card playing algorithm is how a trick is scored. I had originally thought I would just score the pip values of the cards taken and leave it at that. The problem is that it means that 9s are valued just as poorly as 1s and so if the computer can't see any long-term benefit to keeping the 9 (read: if it isn't likely to be needed on the very next trick) it's likely to toss it off at the next opportunity. The solution is to use a heuristic scoring that puts a premium value on taking tricks, and only a secondary value on taking pips. Furthermore, the heuristic weighs 9s just as strongly as the other one pip cards. This encourages the AI to hold on to 9s even though they aren't worth as many pips because they're so likely to take tricks.

That got me most of the way toward solid card play but there was one more thing that had to be taken into account: Mü's complex overlapping multiple trump suits. Early on I encountered a bug where the algorithm was sometimes throwing off 1s in the upper trump in favor of 1s in the lower trump: clearly a poor choice! The problem was this: the algorithm works by evaluating each player's moves in turn. Each move is given a score and if the score is better than any previous score, that move is considered best. Moves are evaluated through the deck suit by suit and in ascending rank. Because the suit ordering just happened to be red, yellow, green, blue, and black, red cards were being evaluated before the other suits. This meant that if a play of 1 red scored the same as 1 yellow, the 1 red would be chosen, even if red were the upper trump and yellow the lower trump. In a game with only one trump suit this wouldn't matter but in this game it can be very bad. The solution was to change the algorithm so that it first evaluates off-suits, then lower trump, then upper trump, and then übertrump.

Bidding, as I suspected, proved to be much more challenging than card play. Bidding is super important since it's not only how you control trump; it's how you reveal information to the other players in an effort to make yourself a more attractive partner (kind of like dating). I explored several potential methods for bidding, most of which build upon the Monte Carlo algorithm developed for card pay, before settling on the final one. Most of the discarded methods were discarded because they needed to analyze far too many nodes, which slowed the game to an unplayable crawl during bidding.

Bidding in my game uses a combination of expert systems and emergent behavior. This is unlike the card play which is 100% emergent behavior. Emergent behavior simplified is this: you set up the rules of the game and a few heuristics, repeat the algorithm enough times, and the correct behavior emerges. Expert systems relies on an "expert" (in this case me) describing on a case by case basis the possible circumstances and what actions to take in each of them. The benefit of an emergent system is that the computer programmer doesn't have to have expert knowledge of the problem and he doesn't have to account for every single potential situation, the computer solves the problems on its own. The downside is that computers are really bad at distinguishing between a good decision and a poor one unless they follow it all the way to its conclusion, which can be very time consuming.

The bidding system starts by generating heuristic scores for each bidder to determine what the "best" or "most likely" trump call would be. There are actually two different heuristics employed: one for the player who is currently bidding (who therefore knows every card in his hand) and one for players who are not bidding (where the only known cards are the ones that have been bid). From this information, a list of the most likely trump, chief, vice, and partner combinations is generated and a number of Monte Carlo sample hands are played to conclusion. In the interest of time, the AI only thinks ahead to the end of the current trick when playing these hands, which can lead to some bogus results but it's good enough to get a ball park estimate. Each Monte Carlo hand is played and scored and the scores are used to determine the likelihood of a given bid succeeding.

Based on current circumstances, the likelihood of a bid's success is used to determine what action the player should take: should he take vice? should he step up as chief? should he push the chief? should he reveal a card in support of the current chief's most likely bid? and so on. This is where the expert system comes in. Because there isn't time to analyze each and every possibility, the system tries to analyze each specific position on a case by case basis. This leads to some slightly complicated code but it's not too bad and the game bids surprisingly well when everything is tuned just right.

That brings up the subject of tuning. In order to get the game to play competitively, I implemented a debug mode where the computer plays against itself and sends to the debug output complete traces of hands, card plays, and outcomes. By playing hundreds of these games over and over again I can get a feel for how well the game is playing. How high are the bids going? Are they reasonable given the hands? How often does the chief make his bid? How well is the chief doing selecting a partner? The answers to these questions were used to tune the system so that it plays as strong a game as possible.

Summing Up

All in all, this has been an extremely satisfying project. I'm extremely pleased with the outcome. The game looks and plays great, particularly given the device it's playing on. Because some corners needed to be cut, the AI isn't perfect, but it's still strong enough to beat me much of the time, and given how often I've played Mü, I'd like to think that's saying something. My only regret is that, because it's based on a copyrighted card game, I can't share it with all of you. Perhaps at some point that will be possible. I realize that most of you don't have a Zune to play it on anyway but I could just as easily release a Windows version of the game if I had the license rights. Oh well. It'll probably never happen. Still, never say never.

(By the way, I should mention that I am open to exploring employment opportunities. If you think you might be interested in hiring a programmer of my ability, feel free to send me email at steve@housefullofgames.com to request a copy of my resume.)

Farming the Night Fantastic

2008-10-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday was game night (of course) and I'm finally finding the time to do a quick writeup.

Lately I haven't been staying at game night very long. I've got a lot of plates spinning these days so my time is getting more and more limited. Still, I do manage to get to game night every Tuesday even if I don't tend to stay longer than eight or nine or so.

This week was no different. I stayed only long enough to play two games but at least they were very good ones!

My first game of the night was one of my all-time favorites: Tichu. Oren and I teamed up against Kai and Christopher and the result wasn't so much of a game as a lesson. We crushed them. I don't believe they scored more than a couple hundred points. I could be polite and suggest that we just consistently got the better hands but where would be the fun in that? Naw. It was just raw skill baby. *grin*

Next it was my turn to be schooled. My second and last game of the evening was Uwe Rosenberg's latest masterpiece: Agricola. This was the first time I'd actually played a real game of this (yes, I know, I'm very late to the party) and I was up against Christopher and Kai who have each played the game dozens of times. I could use that as an excuse except I was also playing against Jason who had never played it before. Jason won. Pretty handily. I came in last.

Is Agricola as good as they say it is? Yeah, I think it is. But I spent the first half of the game a little overwhelmed and clueless as to what strategy to pursue. I'm looking forward to playing this one again so I can get another crack at it.

And now for something completely different: Zune

2008-09-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

This post is a followup to a post I made way back in March, 2007 about the iPod. Let me warn you that it has (almost) nothing to do with games and it'll probably sound like a paid advertisement. It's not.

First let me give you a little bit of background. I used to use an iPod. My first iPod broke several years ago after being dropped roughly three feet onto a cement stairwell floor. I replaced it with a lovely shiny black iPod with more space and a really nice color screen. I was happy with my iPod. I even occasionally purchased songs through iTunes. Life was good.

Last Christmas I received an 8GB Zune as a Christmas present. I played with the device a bit. I liked it but not enough to want to leave my iPod behind. Still, I kept it around since it was solid state (no hard drive) which makes it a little more resistant to drops than my hard-drive-using iPod classic. I figured it would be a good choice to take skiing or to the gym. I was less afraid to drop the thing you see. But I still much preferred my iPod. See that previous post for some of the reasons.

Then a few months ago a sad thing happened. My iPod broke. Somehow it developed a short circuit in the adapter port that caused it to stop functioning reliably. That left me with a difficult decision. Should I buy a new iPod? Should I upgrade to an iPhone (super cool device but damn that's one pricey toy if you factor in the monthly fees)? Perhaps get a Nano or an iPod Touch?After weighing all of my options, I eventually decided that I'd be better served to just switch to using my Zune. Sure, the software wasn't quite as good and it only had 8GB of storage, but the hardware was very nice and I just couldn't justify spending another $300 or more when I already had a device that, when all was said and done, was probably more than good enough for my needs.

So, I reinstalled the Zune player (the PC software that's Zune's version of iTunes) and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had finally gotten around to putting in an auto playlist feature. It's not as full featured as the iPod's. In fact, it's really limited. But at least it's there. The software has some other annoying limitations as well but then iTunes has its set of limitations too. Neither of them does exactly what I want. I will say this though, the Zune player is very pretty.

Next I went out and got the latest Zune car kit and, while it isn't perfect (no FM system is since the FCC doesn't allow them to broadcast with enough juice to come in perfectly clear) it isn't too bad and it's actually kind of attractive. It's more than adequate for my morning commute.

But things really started getting good when I decided to go ahead and buy into the Zune Passport service. For a reasonable monthly fee, I can download almost any track from the Zune Marketplace, which is a considerable amount of stuff. Now there are subscription services for iTunes too but none of them is as tightly integrated and slick as Zune's. Sure I don't actually own any tracks I download this way but I have the option to buy them if I really feel the need and as long as I keep up my subscription it's just as if I did own them. I've downloaded HUNDREDs of tracks this way; way more than I ever did through iTunes. This is an audiophile's dream. It's like being a kid in a candy store with a blank check.

But wait! There's more! Two days ago Microsoft released their version 3 Zune update. Not only did they add a bunch of cool new features to the Zune player, a pile of new features also got automatically downloaded to my Zune device too. Unlike Apple, each time Microsoft updates the Zune, they update everybody's Zune with all of the new features; not just some of them; all of them. It's as if I had just gone to the store and bought a brand new player. Very cool! And they added some very cool features. For instance, any song that you hear on a radio station (provided the station broadcasts a RDS signal - which almost all do nowadays) can be tagged for download through the Zune service (even wirelessly if you're set up for that). Like what you're hearing on the Zune's built-in FM radio? Just a couple of clicks on the pad and it's yours. And they also added a couple of games, which is cool.

One of the cool new features you may have heard about is called Mixview. Listen to a song in the Zune player on your PC and click on the Mixview button. You'll be presented with a really attractive screen with the album you're listening to in the center and a cluster of squares all around it. Some squares will be other albums from the same artist. Others will be albums by artists who influenced or were influenced by this artist. You'll also get a couple of icons representing other Zune owners who listen to this artist a lot. Click on any of these other icons and that icon will be moved to the middle and other icons will be placed around it. You can explore various relationships like this for hours. It makes it super easy to find new stuff that you might like. I've found all sorts of new songs and artists this way. It's way more attractive than the new iTunes feature that does the similar thing and since Zune has placed an early emphasis on keeping track of what their customers listen to (if they opt-in) they have a huge database they can draw on to help them build these relationships.

And there was one more little surprise which I really didn't expect. When I plugged my Zune into my car kit for the first time after the latest release it upgraded the firmware in the car kit! For instance, now when I play a song with my Zune attached to my car kit, it broadcasts the title information on the RDS sideband! Pretty nifty!

So what about those playlists that I ranted about in that earlier post? Zune's playlists still aren't nearly as full featured as what I had on the iPod. For one thing, they don't update on the device itself. Also, you can't build playlists that use other playlists as input. This still disappoints me a little bit. However, since my Zune is only 8GB I couldn't put my whole music library on it anyway so I've changed my paradigm a bit. Now I use only two auto playlists. The first contains a random selection of 1000 songs from my collection marked "like". The second is a list of the last 2000 minutes worth of songs that I most recently added to my collection. Both of those playlists are set to sync to my Zune so that every time I dock my Zune I get a different mix of songs I like and I'm sure to have all of the stuff that I recently downloaded (and therefore am interested in hearing more often). Putting the Zune on shuffle gives me an experience that's almost as good as that carefully crafted mix I had on the iPod. In fact, it's close enough that I'm quite happy with it. It's enough music that I'll never play it all between docks and it leaves enough room on there for my podcasts and the occasional movie as well. All good.

So there you have it. I've moved to Zune and I've actually learned to enjoy it; perhaps even prefer it! Does this mean that I've been assimilated?

Game Night in Jamaica Mon!

2008-09-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Fore me, last night's games started off with a game of Stone Age. I've only played this game a couple of times now and my results showed that. I came in dead last by a large margin. Still, I enjoyed myself.

Stone Age is a very nice little game. The artwork is great and the game seems pretty well balanced. There is a fair amount of luck involved with the die rolls but there are enough of them that things tend to even out over time and a good strategy should allow you to mitigate the luck quite a bit. I did not have a good strategy this time but I did enjoy myself.

Next I played a couple of games of Jamaica. I'd heard a bit of buzz about this game and it seemed like something I might like so I was pretty interested in giving it a try. I'm glad I did.

Jamaica is a very light and relatively chaotic little race game. Players race their pirate ships around the island, collecting booty, firing canons at one another, and making a general piratey nuisance of themselves. The game reminded me a lot of another light race game I like: Detroit Cleveland Grand Prix. It's a similar experience but with much, much better artwork (this game is really pretty) and a pirate theme.

Now this is definitely not the game for people who want a deep thinking, highly strategic game where they're always in control, there is a LOT of luck in this game; but it plays very quickly and there is enough strategy to provide at least some illusion of control. We had a blast with it and I actually played it three times: once with 6 players, once with 3, and once with 2. I'd happily play it many more times.

The other game I played last night was To Court the King. I've talked about this one before so I won't go into it other than to say that I still enjoy this light dice-fest. It's been called "Yahtzee the Gathering" for it's mix of dice rolling and special abilities granted by the cards you collect each round. I find it to be a very enjoyable filler.

Other games I saw being played last night include Tomb (initial reactions seemed pretty negative), Agricola (comes out every single week now), and Rails of Europe.

Game Night: Let's all go to Kobol!

2008-09-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

Wow. It's been a while. Sorry. I could give some lame (but very true) excuses about how I'm super busy and life is a little stressful at the moment (deaths in the family, vacations, surgeries [not mine], just to name a few) but I won't.

That doesn't mean that I'm not going to game night every week. When I'm in town, it's game night every Tuesday night. And last Tuesday night was no exception.

This time I played only two games all night. I finished with a nice game of Tichu. Christopher and I got off to a fine start against Mike and SCoy but I'm afraid that luck turned against us in the end. Still, I do love me some Tichu.

But the biggie for the night was an early release copy of Battlestar Galactica that someone in our group picked up at Pax the other week.

This game was described to me as "Shadows Over Camelot in Space" and that description isn't far wrong. It's a cooperative game, like Shadows, where (most of) the players play the humans, trying to flee to Kobol. If they get there before the Cylons overwhelm them and before they run out of fuel, food, and morale then they win. We didn't win.

In this game there can be multiple "traitors". In this game the traitors are Cylons disguised as Humans. One thing I liked about this game is that the Cylons seemed to have more to do than the traitor in Shadows Over Camelot.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable experience, despite the long playtime and the cheesy still shots taken from the TV series. I look forward to this game being released in a few weeks. (Fantasy Flight says that it should be in stores in October or November.)

Nefertiti

2008-07-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

Those of you who are married men can probably relate to this. It's the day before your anniversary and you've nearly forgotten to buy a gift! Lucky for you you're the all powerful ruler of Egypt with a legion of flunkies (well, three or four flunkies anyway) at your disposal. Send your flunkies into the market to get as much loot as they can so you can impress your queen before she pulls a freaky and kicks your sorry butt onto the sandstone recliner in the foyer.

That's all you need to know about the theme behind Nefertiti, one of the new releases from Rio Grande Games. The theme may be kind of pasted on to what is otherwise a pretty abstract bidding/set collecting game but it works and it certainly wins high marks for originality! It also means that you get a whole bunch of very cool Egyptian artwork. The board, bits, and cards are all super attractive and reinforce the theme quite nicely. I was very happy with the presentation.

The rules are deceptively simple. It only took me about fifteen minutes to breeze through the four pages of full color rules; well, six if we count the double-sided reference sheet, which we had better do since the information there is essential and isn't found in the main rule sheet. The rules are presented very clearly and organized very well. Score another point.

The basic goal of the game is to collect item cards. Items are worth points based on two factors: the more of a given item are in the deck, the less it's worth; and the more players have a given item, the less it's worth. So you might prefer to have the rarer items, and you'd like to be the only player who has them.

The way you collect items is by bidding in the market. Each player has some coins and four worker pawns. A turn consists of placing a pawn on a tent in one of the three open markets. Each tent has a value. Each market has a condition that will cause it to close. As an example, one of the markets closes when there is a string of four adjacent pawns in it.

When a market closes, it's scored. Whichever player has placed his pawn on the most valuable space in that market must pay that number of coins into the market's reserve (a small pool of coins associated with that market), for which he receives one or two of the item cards that were placed above that market when it opened. Then each other pawn placed in the market (even if belongs to the same player) awards its owner a choice: either pay the value under that pawn and take any of the remaining cards, or take half of the coins (rounded up) in that market's reserve. This seems pretty simple but it can lead to some very clever play. For instance, if you can manage to get two of your pawns on the most and second most valuable market stalls when the market closes, you can have your first pick of the cards in the market and then immediately take back half of the coins in the market, in some cases paying much less than half the value you might otherwise have paid. It makes for some surprisingly difficult choices. Do you take the cards or take the money? You can't take both although you would dearly love to.

Whenever a market closes, a new market opens up. Each market has unique value structures and unique conditions that cause it to close. This, coupled with the fact that you never know which items will become available in a given market when next it opens, creates a lot of replayability. And I haven't even discussed the special advisor cards which you can buy for a special favor on your turn if you're lucky enough to have a seal.

In case it isn't obvious, I really enjoyed this game. I played it twice last night and even though I lost both times (the first time to a ten year old!) I still enjoyed it quite a bit and am eager to play it again.

IF only

2008-06-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

So you may have noticed that a few weeks ago I seemed to drop off the map for a few weeks. There are many reasons for that but here for your amusement I present one of them to you.

When I was a much younger man and computers were still in training pants there was a very popular genre of computer games called "Interactive Fiction". (You may be more familiar with the term "text adventure".) Well IF is still very much alive and well in this modern age; only it's not nearly as lucrative. In fact, it hasn't been commercially viable for more than two decades now. Still, that hasn't stopped people from doing some incredible things in this space.

Well back in the day I used to write this stuff and every so often I get the urge to return to my roots and see what new things are happening in the world of IF. A few months back one of those urges hit me and I stumbled upon a particularly cool IF authoring environment called Inform 7. That got my creative juices flowing and the end result was this game:

The Abbey is an interactive murder mystery set in an English Benedictine Abbey. It's very loosely based on the board game: The Mystery of the Abbey which in turn was inspired by The Name of the Rose, a book by Umberto Eco.

If you feel like stepping back to yesteryear, I'd love to have you play it. First you'll need to install a program that's capable of running the game. You'll need a Glulx interpreter which you can download from here. (There are versions for just about every computer type. In case you're having trouble finding it on that page, a direct link to the Windows version is here.) Next you can click here to download the game. Now you should be in business. Feel free to send me feedback. I know it's no masterpiece but it sure was fun to write another one of these after so long.

Two Weeks in a Row!

2008-06-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

The world must be coming to an end.

Last night was Tuesday night and that means I went to game night. We had a rather small turnout last night because the Seattle contingent was absent but we also had a few newcomers and there were more than enough people there to keep everybody playing and happy.

I played Metropolys and Tichu last night, which was fun. I also played a little Richocet Robot, which I always enjoy. But there were two games that were new to me which I want to talk about.

The first one I want to talk about is Toledo. This is a new game by Martin Wallace, who is known for making some of the best deep thinking Euro-games out there. This is not one of those games. But don't get the wrong idea! It's still a very good game. Toledo is a nice light-to-middle-weight family game where players compete to acquire resources which they use to make swords which they then deliver to the Spanish emperor's palace for victory points. The mechanics are very simple (which is unusual for a Wallace game) and the game plays relatively quickly. This is not likely to ever become a true classic like Age of Steam, but it's a very nice game and I really enjoyed playing it.

The last game I want to talk about is a light dice game called Airships. I really enjoyed it but that's not why I want to talk about it. I want to talk about this game because it's one of those times where I think I really messed up. House Full of Games is still a smallish store and I don't always choose to stock every single game that comes out. Airships is one of those games that for some reason managed to float (pun intended) under my radar. That's a mistake that I plan to rectify as soon as I can because I thought it was a pretty darn good game (better than its 6.5 BGG rating would indicate).

So my message to you is this: if there is a game coming out that you are excited about (particularly if it's not one of the obvious blockbusters like, say, Agricola) and you think that I should know about it, please send me an email (steve@housefullofgames.com) and let me know! Every now and then I miss a game that I really wish I'd paid attention to and this was definitely one of those times.

Update: Airships should be listed on HFoG by tomorrow morning (June 28).

Metropolys - A First Impression

2008-06-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

One of the new games that I played last night is Metropolys, a new release from Ystari Games, the company that also gave us two of my favorite games: Caylus and Mykerinos.

Metropolys is relatively light-weight strategy game for two to four players. It plays in about 45 minutes and it's for ages eight and up.

The game is played on a very colorful board depicting a city that's divided up into five regions or districts by a series of canals. Each region is in turn divided up into a number of colored building spaces. The board is not only colorful and chock full of artwork, it is perhaps too colorful and too chock full of artwork. I found the board to be incredibly busy and a little bit too hard on the eyes. Still, I enjoyed the game and I thought the other bits were very nice. I particularly appreciated the really nice wooden building tokens and the plethora of plastic zip bags that were included in the box.

The core game mechanic works like this: each player has thirteen wooden buildings, each numbered from one to thirteen. Each round of the game, players will bid for the right to construct one of their buildings somewhere on the map. The player starting the bidding puts one of their buildings on an empty space. Each subsequent player can then outbid the previous player by putting one of his higher numbered buildings on an empty space next to the previous bidder's building. Bidding continues around the table until all players have passed or until there is nowhere else to bid. The winner then turns his building over (number side down) to claim his space and all the losing bids are removed from the map. Then the winner starts the next round of bidding.

In this way, the map is slowly populated with buildings. Along the way, players try to achieve various goals by trying to place their buildings in the spaces that will net them the most points. Each player has a couple of unique, secret goals and there are also a few goals that everyone knows about. Once a player has placed his last building, the game is over and scores are calculated.

I really enjoyed the unique bidding mechanic. With this system, where you bid can be just as important as what you bid. It's possible to force a bid to go a certain way by placing your bid in a particular location and a big part of the game is paying attention to which buildings the other players have left and using that to your advantage.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit. My only complaint is that the artwork is just too busy. There were a couple of times where we missed some important plays because the busy artwork made them difficult to spot. I imagine that problem will get better as players become more familiar with the game and it's not enough of a problem to seriously hurt my opinion of the game.

I look forward to playing this one again.

Let's Catch Up

2008-06-17T23:18:00.001-07:00

Wow. Where has the time gone? I had no intention of going this long between posts but life got very busy and one week follows another and before you know it, over a month has gone by without a post! Ack!

So for the next few days I'm going to try to make a few quick posts here to try to get things going again.

First off, tonight was game night and I played a couple of new games and a few old ones too. Rather than try to tell you all about them tonight, I'll just talk about one of them now and then I'll pick up where I left off tomorrow (I hope).

So in this post I'm going to mention just one of the games I played tonight: Tichu! Mike and I teamed up against Kai and Adam. It was a pretty interesting game too. It started out with Mike and I having a fantastic run of luck. It appeared that we could do no wrong. In fact at one point, I was left with the following hand after the pass:

For those of you who aren't Tichu players, that's a 14 card straight which is the perfect Tichu hand. That's like catching lighting in a bottle. It only happens once in a very, very long time. In fact, it's the only time I've ever had a natural 14 card straight. (There's even a bomb in there but when you've got a 14 card straight a bomb becomes unnecessary.)

After that hand, Mike and I were up by about 530 points or so. Unfortunately, that must have used up all of our Karma or something because from that point on it was all downhill. Adam and Kai managed to engineer an incredible comeback and they beat us by about 200 points. It just goes to show that no matter how badly you're behind, you don't give up. Fortunes can change just that quickly.

Oh well, at least I can take satisfaction in knowing that I scored a perfect hand!

History Repeats Itself

2008-04-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

That title could apply in oh so many ways.

For the last two weeks, my game night experiences have been remarkably similar. Two Tuesdays ago I started the evening by playing a three player game of Container, the last game made by Franz-Benno Delonge before he finished his final turn. It was my first playing and I enjoyed it well enough but I suspect that one playing isn't really enough to "get it" and three players seemed like too few.

But the majority of that night was spent playing a game that's rather out of character for me. I'm talking about Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, originally one of the classic Avalon Hill war games and now re-released by Valley Games. This game uses a card driven system which originally appeared in We the People and most recently inspired the system used in 1960: The Making of the President.

Jason played Carthage and I played Rome. This is a long game anyway but we got off to a little bit of a late start and that, combined with our lack of familiarity with the game, resulted in a very long playing time. I didn't get home until after 2:00 AM. But at least I went home with a victory. Rome soundly thrashed Carthage, denying them of nearly all of their territory by the end of the game. The death-blow came about half way through the game when Rome managed to corner Hannibal in northern Italy and give him a thrashing that he would never forget. With Hannibal out of the game, Carthage never really had a chance and although they continued to be a thorn in Rome's side, they were never more than a nuisance from that point on.

I enjoyed that game enough to want to play it again so this Tuesday, Adam and I planned to play. I loaned Adam the rules beforehand so that by the time he showed up, I had the board all set up and ready for him. There were still some rules issues that we needed to clarify before we could start playing but we still managed to get going at a reasonable hour. This time I played Carthage and Adam played Rome.

Early on we accidentally ignored some rules which gave Rome a bit of an unfair advantage. Adam was able to cross back and forth between Italy and Hispania a few more times than he should have been if we had both been more familiar with the rules and had I been paying closer attention to the cards he was playing. That left me at a bit of a disadvantage in the early game, something that can be disastrous for Carthage since, true to history, in the early game Carthage has by far the strongest general in Hannibal and it's very important for Carthage to do as much damage as possible early in the game before Scipio Africanus (Rome's historical savior) comes on the scene.

During the early game, he tore Hispania apart and was gobbling up most of North Africa while I ravaged Italy. Then Scipio Africanus came on the scene. By then he securely held Hispania (denying me two of my meagre four reinforcements each turn) and was on his way to controlling much of North Africa but he had left Rome largely undefended. I decided that my only chance (since he would continue to get five reinforcements each turn to my two) was to lay siege to Rome itself. Scipio immediately reacted but instead of rushing to Rome's defense, he chose to lay siege to Carthage. So both of our huge armies were encamped outside the other's capitol. The race was on. Which city would fall first?

Soon both cities were on the brink of collapse. Two siege points were on each. Just one more successful siege roll from either army would end the game. Finally Scipio succeeded. Carthage fell. And on the very next die roll (which we rolled just to see what would have happened) Rome would have fallen. What a finish!

Having a long drawn out war game like that decided by the result of just a single die roll seems a little strange but it sure was fun.

So why have I been playing a long two-player war game? I usually prefer much shorter and much lighter fare. My favorite games usually last around an hour and involve at least three players. So why play this one? Well, first of all, it's been very highly recommended. The card driven system used by this game was a significant influence on many other games. Second, my son has been begging me to play a war game with him for a while so I'm planning to play this with him too and wanted to learn how to play it. Third, the Second Punic War is actually something I know a little bit about since I've been listening to Mike Duncan's excellent podcast: The History of Rome. This seemed like a nice tie-in to what I've been hearing in the podcast.

Finally, what are my thoughts about the game? It's a great game. It's not one that I'll want to play too often due to its length but it's certainly a game that I'll be wanting to play every now and then. If you feel up to a four hour (or longer) two player game then this is an excellent choice.

Busy Busy Busy

2008-04-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

I have been so busy lately that, once again, I haven't had time to do my weekly blog posts. In fact, I've barely had time to even do any of my regular gaming. The last several game nights have been a little on the short side for me but this last Tuesday I did manage to stay and get some good gaming in.

One of the games that I've had the pleasure of playing recently was Martin Wallace's Brass. This is a game about building industry in England over the transition from a canal economy to a rail economy. In some ways it feels a little bit like an Age of Steam light. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I look forward to playing this one again.

Another game that I managed to play recently is Cuba by Michael Reineck and Stefan Stadler. This is a very nice production style game that, for me, seemed a little reminiscent of Puerto Rico. The artwork is lovely and the gameplay is pretty deep, with lots of different viable choices. So far, I've only been able to play a two player game and I suspect that this game would be significantly different with three or four players. I found it a little difficult to figure out how to put together a good victory point engine and that's a good thing. Also, the artwork is fantastic. I'm looking forward to playing it again.

Another game that I've been playing a lot is Kingsburg which I've already mentioned recently. I still find that I enjoy the light production tree combined with the dice placement. I can definitely recommend this one quite highly.

And of course, Pandemic comes out every game night now. It's just so quick and easy to start up and there are several of us who enjoy the game so it's always easy to find someone who wants to play it.

Review: Pandemic

2008-03-05T15:48:00.000-08:00

Pandemic is a game designed by Matt Leacock and published by Z-Man Games. The game is officially for 2-4 players (although it could also be played solitaire) and it typically takes less than 45 minutes to play.

Pandemic is a cooperative game, which means that all players play together as a team in an effort to beat the game. Either everyone wins or everyone loses. Other examples of cooperative games include Shadows Over Camelot, Arkham Horror, and Lord of the Rings. This is one of those game styles that people either love or hate. If you're the type of person who enjoys solving problems as a group and who plays games typically for the fun of being with other people than you may love this sort of game; but if you're the type who plays games more for the competitive aspect, who expects a game to have a winner or at least a score, then this is probably not your cup of tea. As for me, I love a good cooperative game so I was excited at the prospect of trying a new one.

In Pandemic, players take on the role of a team of professionals who are trying to stop the spread of four highly infectious diseases. The diseases are not named but are referred to by color: red, blue, yellow and black. The game is played on a map of the world that shows a network of 48 cities. At the start of the game, nine cities on the map will have varying levels of infection. Players set out from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA and travel the globe to attempt to contain the epidemics and discover cures. If the players can discover cures for each of the four diseases before they overrun the globe then they win the game.

Components

Pandemic comes in a very sturdy, medium sized box. Inside the box are two decks of cards, numerous colored cubes, five large pawns, an instruction booklet and a board. The board is made of very sturdy stock and is very attractive but it has a glossy finish which means that fingerprints and other marks show up pretty easily. One other valid complaint with the board is that it is perhaps a little bit too small for the game pieces. The large pawns and various cubes don't really fit very well on the city spaces. This is mostly a nit-pick though and during the many games I've played it hasn't really been a problem.

The cards are very attractive and contain a little bit of flavor text about each city. The important elements are all large, clearly written and very easy to read.

One thing to watch out for is that apparently there have been a number of copies where the game components weren't collated properly. Indeed, in my copy of the game, I had an extra red cube and both of my decks had a duplicate city card. Worse, one of my decks was actually missing another city card. It was a trivial thing for me to re-mark one of the extra cards with the missing city name so I was still able to play the game properly right from the start. Just make sure that you count your cubes and cards before you play for the first time and you'll be fine. Z-Man Games is very quick to replace missing components so if you should be unfortunate enough to be missing something, email the company and they'll rush you a replacement.

The rulebook consists of a few full-color glossy pages which clearly explain the rules of the game and give several examples. This is not a terribly difficult game to learn and the rules do a fine job of teaching the game. It only took a few minutes to read through the rules before we were ready to start playing.

Gameplay

At the start of the game each player is dealt one of five Role Cards at random and a hand of cards from the Player Deck. The Player Deck is made up of 48 City Cards (one for each city on the board) and five Special Action cards. Then the Player Deck is separated into four, five or six even piles (depending on the difficulty desired). Into each of these piles is shuffled an Epidemic Card and then the piles are stacked to form a single draw deck.

The Infection Deck, another deck of 48 city cards, is then shuffled, nine cards are drawn and those cities are seeded with Infection Cubes to start the game. The first three cities drawn each get three cubes, the next three get two cubes, and the last three get one cube each. The cards are then put in the discard pile and the game is ready to begin.

The goal of the players is to discover cures to all four diseases before time runs out. If they can do this then they win the game. The players lose if they exhaust the player deck, if diseases outbreak too many times (more on that in a bit), or if they ever run short on Infection Cubes for one of the diseases.

A player turn consists of the player taking up to four actions which include: moving from one city to another, exchanging cards with another player, treating an infection (removing one or more infection cubes from a city), curing a disease, or building a research station. Players can cure a disease by going to a city that has a research station (initially only Atlanta) and discarding five city cards of the appropriate color. City cards can also be discarded to move to or from the city shown on the card. Of course the drawback to doing this is that any card you discard is forever gone from the game, so you must be careful not to use too many cards of the same color or you may find that it's impossible to cure one of the diseases.

After taking his four actions, the player then draws two cards from the Player Deck, discarding his hand back down to seven cards if necessary. Next, a number of cards, from two to four, indicated by the position of the Infection Counter, is drawn and an additional Infection Cube is placed in each of those cities. However, if any of those cities already has three Infection Cubes of that color on it then, instead of gaining another cube, that city has an "outbreak". Each neighboring city gets a cube and the Outbreak Counter is advanced. Too many outbreaks and you lose the game so it's very important to make sure that there aren't too many cities on the board with three cubes on them. What's worse, outbreaks in one city can cause outbreaks in neighboring cities so if two or more adjacent cities ever have three cubes in them, you had best act quickly to prevent a massive chained outbreak.

One of the more clever mechanisms in the game involves the Epidemic Cards that are distributed throughout the Player Deck. When one of the Epidemic Cards is drawn, the Infection Counter is advanced and a new Infection Card is drawn from the bottom of the Infection Deck (which ensures that you won't have seen this city's card before). That city gains three Infection Cubes and then all of the Infection Cards in the discard pile, including the new one that was just drawn, are shuffled and placed back on top of the Infection Deck. The effect of this is that the same cities keep getting re-infected over and over again throughout the game, which is what creates the threat of repeated outbreaks. It's a wonderful mechanism which does a great job of increasing the tension in the game and makes it so that certain parts of the globe are prone to keep reinfecting their neighbors. It also ensures that each game will play a little differently since it means that most of the cities in the deck will never come up.

Each player is assigned one of the five available roles at the start of the game. The roles indicate what color pawn the player will use but, more importantly, they also each bestow some unique special ability on each of the players. The Scientist can cure diseases with only four cards instead of the normal five, the Researcher can pass cards to the other players more easily, the Operations Expert can build research stations without having to discard a card, the Dispatcher can move other player's pawns on his turn, and the Medic treats infected cities at a reduced cost. Each of the roles can be instrumental to winning the game if played correctly and since each game involves a different combination of roles, each game plays differently. Used together, they can lead to some dramatic effects. For example, once you've cured a disease, the Medic only needs to be in a city to remove all of the infection cubes. If there is also a Dispatcher in the game, then the Dispatcher can use his four actions to sweep the Medic through an infected part of the globe like a huge germ eraser, eradicating the disease as he goes.

Comments

If you like cooperative games, then the odds are pretty good that you're going to like Pandemic. It's a very clever game that does a good job of evoking the theme of a team combating a major medical disaster of biblical proportions. The tension is high from the start and the pace is very quick. Most of the games I've played have lasted much less than the 45 minutes advertised on the box. This is the kind of game that you're likely to play once and then want to immediately play again. In fact, the first night we played this game, we played it at least seven times.

The game plays very well across the range from 2 to 4 players. It's probably slightly easiest with two players and slightly hardest with four because it's easiest to cooperate when there are only two players and the player's starting hands are larger, meaning that the players are likely to be able to cure their first disease several turns earlier than if they had the full compliment of four players. The higher concentration of cards is, of course, offset by the fact that there are fewer special abilities in the game so the players have fewer tools at their disposal.

Of course, since this is a purely cooperative game, it's quite possible to play the game solitaire, with one player taking on two, three, or four roles. For me, part of the enjoyment lies in the social interaction with the other players so that isn't quite as appealing to me, but it's still nice to know that it could be played that way if I felt like it.

One thing to be careful of with this type of game is that often one strong personality can dominate the game, telling other players exactly what to do on their turns. If you find that to be a problem with your group then you'll probably want to play the game with closed hands, as the rules suggest, and emphasize the idea that each player is ultimately responsible for their own actions. Hand contents can be freely discussed, suggestions are expected and cooperation is necessary but ultimately, each player should feel like they're a vital member of the team and not just a resource that's being controlled by another. The alternative is to play with all hands open which eliminates any memory element but may make it too easy for one player to dominate the game.

This is a pretty difficult game. So far I've played dozens of games, most with the medium difficulty configuration of five Epidemic Cards, and I believe that I've lost more often than I've won. It's not so hard that I've wanted to give up in frustration, but neither is it so easy that winning is a sure thing. In order to win the game you need to take maximum advantage of each player's role and work together to come up with a plan for holding back the infections. You also need a certain amount of luck.

If you're looking for a difficult cooperative game that plays in about a half hour to 45 minutes, then you need look no further than Pandemic. This is a great game that should keep you entertained over and over again. It's a game that I expect to be enjoying for many years to come.

Don't panic! It's only game night.

2008-02-26T23:44:00.000-08:00

Last week I took some kids up skiing at Crystal Mountain so I missed game night. The week before that I slacked off and didn't post. I figure I'm pretty overdue.

Tonight's game night was all about one game for me: Pandemic. I played this new game for the first time tonight and we all liked it so much that we played it something like seven more times before the night was over. In fact, I only played one other game: To Court the King, wedged in between games of Pandemic. Obviously there were other games played as well by other players. But for me it was all about Pandemic.

Look for a proper review here soon but for now let me give you a quick rundown of what it's all about.

Pandemic is a cooperative game. All players cooperate in an effort to win the game together as a team. That means that either everyone wins together or they all lose together. It's a little like group solitaire. Now that could be really boring but in this case we thought it worked wonderfully. Each game played just a little differently and we always felt challenged to figure out the best way to deal with what was going on.

The game is about stopping four diseases that are spreading throughout the globe before they get out of control. The tension in the game starts high and with each turn it gets higher. It's a pretty challenging game. And we didn't even play it in its hardest configuration.

Each player plays a slightly different role with unique abilities and a big part of the game involves trying to use each character's ability to maximum effect.

In short: this game is a keeper. It's challenging, the theme really works, and it plays very quickly (under 45 minutes). It's definitely one of the best cooperative games I've ever played. I highly recommend it.

This thing all things devours:

2008-01-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

Birds, beasts, trees flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Last night was game night and I played not one, but two games which directly relate to Gollum's riddle.

But not the first one. My first game of the night was Kingsburg. I played this a couple of weeks ago and was glad to play it again. It's definitely got a random element, what with all of those dice, but everybody gets enough rolls to mostly balance things out and I really like how those who roll the worst on a turn get to go first. That mechanism alone takes a lot of the sting out of a bad roll. But still, don't play if you don't like dice. We played with four last night and I think that's about right. It does seem to be a little long for what it is though. Still, I enjoyed it and I'll be happy to play it again. Oh. And I won. That was nice too.

Next I played Khronos. Now this one definitely fits the riddle. It had been a while since I'd brought this one in so I was happy to get it to the table again. I think the idea of having actions rippling through the time-line is extremely clever and makes for a very interesting game. It's not without its flaws though. For one thing, it tends to encourage analysis paralysis. Also, a player who manages to get a large building and then parlay that into a large domain early in the game can become nearly unstoppable. Last night Jason and I were battling over early control of the Age of Might when Adam (may his name ever be cursed) decided that he didn't have anything better to do on his turn but to tip the scale in Jason's favor just before I could seize control. I never completely recovered from the setback and had to settle for second place in a four player game. I'm just happy that I was able to switch gears and gain supremacy in the Age of Faith to partially make up for it. I'm still not sure how I managed to pull that off.

My final game of the night was a new one for me. Chrononauts is a light card game by the folks at Looney Labs. It's been around for quite a while but I'd never played it before tonight. If you've played Fluxx before, then you will have some idea of what Chrononauts is like. It's got a similar draw one, play one mechanic and, like Fluxx, there are cards you play in front of you and other cards which can have some pretty crazy (unbalancing) effects. It's extremely random but there are times when that's not so bad. Here's how the game works. There is a time-line made up of cards which list pivotal historical events that occurred over the last century or so. Playing certain cards can make it so that some of the events on the time-line never occurred (flip cards in the time-line) which in turn creates paradoxes later in the time-line. For example, if the Archduke Ferdinand is never assassinated then World War I wouldn't have happened and that will create paradoxes in the time-line. Players then can play cards that patch the paradoxes. Each player has a pair of goal cards. One lists a set of items, the other lists a set of events on the time-line. If you manage to configure the time-line to match your events or if you manage to collect the right set of items then you win the game. Did I mention that it's very random? Its major redeeming qualities are that it's very easy to teach and easy to play, it comes in a small, portable package (a large deck of cards) and the flavor text on the cards can be very entertaining. It's a fine game for what it is. But don't expect a strategic masterpiece here. We enjoyed it but I can't see us playing it frequently.

Other games played included Imperial and Cold War: CIA vs. KGB.

What do you like on your Hamburgum?

2008-01-23T16:01:00.000-08:00

Last night was game night and I finally got to play Hamburgum, the latest Mac Gerdis game. I've been looking forward to trying this one for a few weeks now and I finally got the chance. I'm glad I did. I really liked it. The rules aren't complicated but there are a lot of different things going on. This is one of those games where you always feel like there are tons of things you would like to do on your turn but you can only pick one. The goal of the game is to contribute to the church and help improve the city to acquire prestige. In order to do that you need to produce goods and ship them overseas so that you can purchase the raw materials necessary to contribute to various construction projects. There are many potential avenues to victory and depending on what the other players do, any of them could be good. Somehow I managed to luck into the winning strategy this game by quietly trying to maximize each turn and trying to watch what the others were doing. I say "luck" because I never really did feel like I had a good handle on what was going on but I still managed to pull out a win. I'm sure that if we had played again I'd have not been nearly so lucky. Anyway, it's a great game and I look forward to playing it again.

Meanwhile we had others playing Die Macher and In the Year of the Dragon. (Two games of Dragon were played back to back even!) I didn't pay attention to who won and I've talked about both many times recently so I'll just move on.

My next game was half a game of Njet. We played five hands with five players (instead of the full ten rounds); mostly because there were a couple of folks who were interested in trying it. I've talked about this game recently too. It's a trick taking game with a few twists but the most important twist is that before a hand starts there's a "Njet" round where each player gets to eliminate a suit or an option from consideration in one of five categories: start player, cards to discard before play, trump, super-trump, and point multiplier. The start player then chooses the teams for that hand and the hand is played much like any other trump game. There are a couple of other wrinkles of course, but that description's close enough for my purposes. Now that I've played several times, I think that the card play is most interesting with five players but the "Njet" round is most frustrating with five. This is a good game but it falls short of greatness for me. If you're unfortunate to have a really long suit then you can bet that suit will not be trump. The game really seems to favor mediocre hands. You can mitigate that by picking the right partner(s) but the "Njet" round is just too short to get any real indication of the strength of each player's hand so you don't really have enough information to go on. I won this one too though *chuckle* so I guess I shouldn't complain.

My last game of the evening was Detroit Cleveland Grand Prix. This is a fun, light racing game that I think works really well as a closer. It's pretty luck heavy but it's a lot of fun because on each turn you get to really mess with everybody else's car. I had some pretty rotten luck this time and did horribly but I still had a great time. If you're the type who wants to always be in control then this isn't the game for you; but if you enjoy a game with a high screwage component that doesn't ever really feel mean then this is a great choice.

More New Games!

2008-01-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

Last night's game night was a good one. Plenty of people. Lots of good games.

My first game of the night was the new Alea title: In the Year of the Dragon. This is a game by Stefan Feld, who is the same guy who did Notre Dame. That doesn't surprise me because In the Year of the Dragon, in a way, seems kind of similar to Notre Dame ... in a "ratty" sort of way. In Notre Dame you're constantly beating back the rats. In this game you're constantly beating back all sorts of different kinds of bad things. At the beginning of the game I felt like I had no idea what I was doing but after a couple of rounds I felt like I kind of got the hang of it and at the end of the game I came in third (out of five) but I was only one point behind the player in second, who was only one point behind the leader! All three of those scores were in the 90s so that's a pretty tight grouping! I have to say that this is a very good game. I liked it very, very much.

Next up for me was Kingsburg. This is a fun little dice rolling/production game. On each turn, each player rolls three (sometimes more) dice to determine turn order (lowest roll goes first). Then in turn order they take turns using combinations of the dice they rolled to claim spaces on the board. For instance, if you've rolled a 2-4-5 then you could claim the 2 space and the 9 space, or the 6 and the 5, or the 11, or ... well you get the idea. Spaces then produce resources or some other player benefit. Resources are used to build buildings which in turn may offer other benefits or victory points or some combination of the two. While the game is perhaps a little luck heavy, it's simple to learn and it's pretty fun. I particularly liked how players who roll poorly get to go first so they get first crack at what they want each round. It's not a perfect game but it's surprisingly fun!

Next we played an aborted game of Tichu. We only got a few hands in before one of our players had to leave so we replaced him with another player. Then we played a couple more hands and another player had to leave so we gave it up and moved on to...

Was Sticht, one of the games in Mü and Lots More. This is a very unique trick taking game and I'd have to say right up front that this is not suitable for inexperienced card players. There are a couple of things which set this game apart. First, each player has a number of goals that they are trying to achieve with each hand; things like "take exactly three tricks", or "take the fewest tricks", or "don't take any red cards". Second, cards aren't dealt, they're drafted. The 36 cards (9 cards in four suits) are shuffled and then laid face up in a 9x4 grid. The start player secretly discovers trump for that hand and then each player takes turn drafting a card from one of the four in the first row. The start player then tells the others which player would have won if those four cards had been played as a trick. In this way the other players can deduce what trump is by the time a few rows have been taken. My initial reaction to this game was that while I thought it was a good game, I didn't care for it. I have a hard enough time counting cards in a regular trick taking game; but this game, with it's varied goals and visible drafting, demands that players count almost each and every card. That's way beyond the ability of my feeble brain. I will admit though that I started to warm to it by the end of the game and now I find myself wanting to try it again. Perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment.

Other games that were played last night include Hamburgum (which I REALLY want to play soon), Vinci (one of my favorite civilization conquest games), and War of the Ring.

War of the Ring came out a few years back and I really enjoyed it the couple of times I played it. There are two things that have kept it off my table since then: it's a two player game, and it takes FOREVER to play. It's a very long game but if you have the time then it's very worth the investment. The pieces are lovely and the theme is really strong.

New Year - New Games

2008-01-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

Finally! Another post! I'll bet you were beginning to worry.

Last night was my first game night of 2008. It was a good one. I stayed way too late and we had a ton of new games to play this time.

When I arrived, Kai and the Seattle crew were halfway through a game of Martin Wallace's Brass (they came early to get a jump on it). Not surprisingly, we haven't got this game in the store just yet (it's not widely available in the states) but it's coming soon. I haven't played it myself but everyone in our group who has played it loves it.

My first game of the night was Felix: Cat in the Sack. I've played it several times now and it's a fantastic little filler. I've talked about this enough recently so I think I'll just leave it at that for now.

Next I played an old classic: Modern Art. This is the auction game to beat all auction games. In this game players put paintings up for auction using just about every form of auction known to man. There are four rounds and at the end of each round the paintings are ranked based upon how many of each type were auctioned off that round and their ranking determines how much they are worth at the end of the round. The more paintings of a given type are auctioned off, the more those paintings will be worth at the end of the round. This makes for a fantastic game where players can be just as successful by running auctions as they can for buying paintings. In fact, I came in second and hardly bought any paintings at all; rather I was consistently able to auction off paintings that I knew would go for a lot of money. If you've never played this game you really should. It's one of the best. Be warned though, the component quality is rather chincey. Don't let that turn you off though. The components are plenty good enough to enjoy the game.

Next up for me: Richard Breese's new game Key Harvest. Richard Breese is one of my very favorite game designers. He's done some of my favorite games such as Reef Encounter and Keythedral. One of the things that impresses me the most about Richard is that he's a self-made successful game designer. His early games were all self published and he's managed to make that work for him. That's very unusual for this business. It helps that all of his games are consistently excellent. This was the first time I'd played Key Harvest and I got creamed. I was particularly worried when after more than an hour I clearly had no hope of catching the leader and it looked as if the game wasn't even close to finishing. That was due to the fact that we had drawn an unusually low number of event tiles up to that point. Thankfully, it didn't take long for that anomaly to correct itself and we drew several event tiles in quick succession to finally end the game. My first impressions of this game are favorable but I didn't care for it as much as some of his other games. I suspect that getting my butt kicked had something to do with that. *grin* The artwork is (as usual for his games) wonderful and the mechanics are sound but I think the game went a little long. Now that I know how to play, I'll have to play it again once or twice before forming a real opinion.

Meanwhile, the Brass players moved on to play Hamburgum. This is another game by Mac Gerids, who I like to refer to as "that rondel guy" because all of his games feature a rondel mechanism. A rondel is a circular action chart. Each player has a marker on the rondel and they are allowed to move that marker up to a certain number of spaces clockwise around the rondel. Whatever space they choose to land on dictates the action they can take on their turn. In this way, you get some control over which actions you take but your choices are limited based upon your previous action. You may skip over action A to race to action B but that means that you won't be able to take action A until you've first done a few other things. It's a great mechanic which has been a wonderful success in Mac's other games: Antike and Imperial. Our guys liked Hamburgum enough that they played it twice in a row last night so that says something.

Another new game that I didn't get to play last night is Kingsburg. I didn't get a chance to get a good look at this one but I did walk over and take a brief look at the bits which were very attractive. Lots of dice are involved which might be a turnoff for some but the guys on the Geek seem to think pretty highly of it as it currently has a 7.6 rating. I didn't get a chance to learn what our guys thought of it but it looked pretty good to me. I'm looking forward to giving this one a try.

My next game was a quick game of Chateau Roquefort. This is technically a kids' game from the wonderful folks at Zoch. In this game, players control a set of four mice who scurry across the roof of a castle looking for cheese. The danger is that the castle is a little rickety and there's a very good chance that one of your mice just might fall through the roof into the dungeons below, never to be seen again. The game is played on a wonderful 3D playing area that uses the bottom of the box to represent the castle and the dungeons beneath. The playing surface is made up of a layer of sliding cardboard tiles (very much like the tiles in aMAZEing Labyrinth if you're familiar with that game) overlaid with a cardboard grille that has holes in it which reveal only some of the tiles beneath. On top of that is a layer of cardboard rectangles which represent the roof of the chateau and cover up the playing surface. Players have four actions on each turn with which they can uncover sections of the roof, move their mice onto one space or another, and/or shift the tiles under the grid. If they manage to get two of their mice onto spaces that show the same type of cheese (there are seven) then they collect a cheese in that type. Be the first to collect four different types of cheese and you win the game. But some of the tiles have holes in them and if you're unlucky enough to have a hole slide under one of your mice then that mouse is out of the game. It's a very fun game that appeals to both kids and adults. And the bits are to die for.

My closer for the evening was one of the games in the new collection: Mü and Lots More. Mü is my very favorite trick-taking card game and I was pretty excited when I heard that Amigo and Rio Grande Games were putting out a brand new compilation of trick taking games centered around Mü. We played Njet, which is a rather unique changing partnership trick-taking game where players first determine trump, supertrump, teams and so on via a process of elimination. The way that works is there is a chart listing all of the different possibilities and players take turns covering up (and thereby eliminating) options until only one option in each category remains. The remaining options are the trump, starting player, etc. for that hand. I thought it was a very good game and it played very well with three players. It's not as good as Mü but then that shouldn't surprise anybody since I have yet to find another trick taking game that is. (Yes, I think it's better than Bridge, and yes, I know that many will disagree with me but I'm entitled to my opinion.) My hope for Mü and Lots More was that at least one of the other three games included in the box would be good enough to justify buying this larger, more expensive version of Mü in preference to the older collection: Mü & More. I think Njet is good enough to justify the extra cost, but perhaps only just barely. I haven't played the other two games (Was Sticht and Meinz) yet but I'm looking forward to trying them. I'll post a full review once I've tried them all.

Well I think I've gone on long enough for today. We've got lots of new games to try over the next few weeks so I'm looking forward to giving them all a try. If you're in the neighborhood, come try them with us! We meet in the Microsoft building 50 cafeteria every Tuesday night at 5pm.

Twas the Night Before Christmas

2007-12-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the... Naw! I'm just kidding. I'm not going to fill this post with verse.

Wow! What an incredibly busy couple of weeks. House Full of Games has done more business than ever this year and unfortunately I have to admit that we weren't quite prepared to be this busy. I've been working from dawn 'till dusk to try to get all the orders fulfilled and on their way and for the most part things went pretty well. Unfortunately, one or two orders ran into a snag here and there. I suppose that's inevitable when you're processing this many orders but I hate to screw up even one. We've taken a few steps to ensure that next year's holiday rush will run more smoothly than this year's did so we're getting better all the time.

If you were one of our customers this year then let me say a really big "THANK YOU!" for making this our best holiday season ever. Hopefully the games you ordered will give you as much enjoyment as they give us.

So let's talk about some of the games that we've been getting enjoyment from lately. In spite of all the crazyness around here I did manage to squeeze some time in for some game playing. Tuesday night was game night and Saturday night we played some games at a friend's house too.

This Tuesday we played Felix: The Cat in the Sack, Friedeman Friese's new filler game, for the first time. I've played it several more times since then and I really like it. I think this might be our new go-to filler game. It's an auction game which feels a lot like For Sale but it also has some really nice bluffing elements to it. If you haven't played it yet then I encourage you to give it a try.

Another game that I've played several times recently is El Capitán. I first played this two Tuesday's ago. I played it again the Sunday after that. Then again last Tuesday, and finally Saturday night. This is a remake of Wolfgang Kramer's classic game Tycoon. Mike Doyle did the artwork and it's absolutely gorgeous. There are a few places where the artwork might be just a little too ornate, making it a tad hard to tell one card from another, but the artwork is so pretty that I don't really mind and it's not really that much of an issue anyway. The game is slightly changed from the original (and I'm not just talking about the theme) but I think that the changes are for the better and I've really enjoyed playing it.

There are a few other new things that have hit the table but frankly, it's Christmas Eve and I really don't have any time to go into them right now. I've got kids upstairs waiting for me to read How the Grinch Stole Christmas so I suppose I better wrap this up.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

Catching Up

2007-12-01T10:23:00.000-08:00

What a busy week! The week around Thanksgiving is always a little crazy. First we drove down to my parents' house to spend a couple of days with them and the extended family. Then that was immediately followed by the busiest week of the year. We're selling a lot of games this year and that's a good thing. Unfortunately, we're selling them for crazy low prices so our margins are razor thin. Bad for us but good for you so take advantage of it!

I played a lot of games over the last week and a half. On turkey day we played several games with the family. There was the obligatory game of Hearts of course (it's my extended family's traditional game) but I also managed to sneak in a couple of better games too.

One of the better successes of the weekend was Circus Flohcati, a super-light card game by Reiner Knizia. This one's been around for a while but it was new to my family. It's a very simple push-your-luck game of collecting cards. On your turn you may turn over as many new cards as you wish so long as one of the cards you turn over doesn't match the color of any of the other cards already showing. If you stop before turning over that matching card then you may pick any one of the visible cards and add it to your hand; but if you turn over a matching card then you lose your turn. It's a simple game that can be played by kids of all ages. My parents loved it, mostly because it's so simple and it plays so quickly (easily under 15 minutes) that you can play several games in a row, giving more people a chance to win.

Another simple Knizia game we played over the weekend is Penguin. This is another kid's game with Knizia's trademark simplicity. Each player has a number of colored plastic penguins and on your turn you need to place a penguin on a pyramid. The rule is very simple, if you put a penguin on the pyramid, it must either be on the ground level or its color has to be the same as one of the two penguins beneath it. Naturally, there can be only so many penguins on the ground level so sooner or later you're going to need to place on a higher level. The object is to place as many penguins as you can. I was impressed with the simplicity of the game and the younger kids liked it a lot but I must say that I was a little disappointed with the penguins themselves. It looks like Fantasy Flight tried to be a little too clever with the piece design. The plastic penguins have little slots above their wings, into which the next row of penguins fit. Unfortunately, the slots are a little too snug and it can be physically difficult to attach the next higher row of penguins. I imagine that the game would work much better if the penguins were simply painted on colored wooden blocks. There's even mention in the rules of a penalty for knocking over the pyramid but given how snugly the penguins fit together I can't imagine that ever happening; now if they were wooden blocks then the rule would make sense.

At game night on Tuesday we had a bit of a light turnout but we did play several games. Some of the group played Penguin (because it was still in my game box from Thanksgiving) while others played To Court the King. We've talked about those games enough though so I won't say anything more about them now.

While the others were playing those games, Chris and I played a relatively new two player game: Cold War: CIA vs. KGB. I like this game despite the fact that I seem to get crushed every time I play it. This game plays a lot like Black Jack but the cards also have special abilities, each of which can be used one time to affect the play. Some cards let you peek at the next card on the stack, some cards let you discard cards in play (potentially bringing you back under the target amount), others let you pass cards between you and your opponent. The theme is well done and it's simple enough to learn in just a few minutes. I like it.

Eventually we all got around to playing a meatier game and we chose a game that we hadn't played in a very long time: Fury of Dracula. This is one of those games that I originally thought I wouldn't care for. The theme didn't really appeal to me all that much and it's a relatively long game. But after having played it a few times I must say that I really like it. The theme is very well done and it does an excellent job of conveying the feel of the second half of the Dracula novel (when Van Helsing and the others are hunting the count). It plays an awful lot like Scotland Yard with combat and events. One player takes the roll of Dracula and he secretly moves from city to city across Europe trying to escape from the other players who play the hunters. Along the way he leaves encounters and meddles with the hunters in any way he can. If the hunters stumble across his trail they may be able to deduce where he has gone and head him off, but they may also have to deal with whatever nasty thing he might have left behind. If the hunters are fortunate enough to catch up with him then they will need to do battle with the count before they can claim victory.

We did something unusual for us: we played this game twice in a row. The first time we played, we had forgotten about a very important rule which allowed Dracula to win in only a few short turns. We were all scratching our heads wondering how the game could be so incredibly unbalanced for a minute or two before someone who had more experience with the game said "aha!" and remembered that whenever one of Dracula's vampires matures his trail is cleared, which helps to hide Dracula's trail but also has the necessary side effect of removing any encounters from his trail, which in turn makes it impossible for Dracula to mature more than one vampire every seven turns or so. We had forgotten that rule and a lucky event tile draw had allowed Dracula to mature several vampires in a row, quickly ending the game. Realizing how dramatic that mistake was, we decided to play again and this time the game was much more balanced. After a rather lengthy game the hunters were eventually able to catch and defeat the count, but not without some rather difficult moments along the way. Now I'm eager to play the game again.

The other game that I've been playing a lot of these days is Mü. I've written at length about this game before but let me just repeat that this is easily the best trick taking game I have ever played. Now before you Bridge fanatics get your panties all tied in knots, let me just say that I think Bridge is a great game but, for my money, the difficulty of learning complicated bidding conventions coupled with the moderately difficult and arcane scoring rules make it a game that I'm just not all that interested in playing. Mü on the other hand, combines incredibly engaging play, shifting partnerships and an ever-changing trump suit with a nearly perfect bidding system. It's fantastic.

These days, this is our lunch game of choice. And this week I had some very interesting experiences with the game. A couple of days ago I managed to score a hand with enough 7s to call 7s trump over any other trump suit and nearly run the table. Yesterday I found myself sitting with a hand that was almost all blue and green. My friend Steve, sitting to my right, began with an opening bid of green which I followed by bidding blue. As the bidding evolved, it very quickly became apparent that I was his ideal partner, meaning that if I bid too high and let him take chief, leaving me with vice, he would not be able to call me and he would almost surely fail to make his bid. Since I had opened with a 9, 8 blue, (to which I later added another blue) it was pretty clear that there was almost no way that I could position myself in such a way as to be his partner so later in the bidding I decided to see if I could push up his bid and took chief from him by playing a fourth card: a green 0, showing that I might have some strength in green and forcing him to step over me if he still wanted to win the bid himself. Then the unimaginable happened, Mike, the player to my left played another card, positioning himself as vice instead of Steve. But that wasn't all, Jason, the player across from me next surprised everyone by tying Mike's bid, removing vice from the play entirely. "Great!" I thought. "Now if Steve will just pass, I will almost certainly win chief with no vice. I can call no trump and Steve as my partner and between us we will own blue and green and nearly run the table." But Steve somehow didn't see the possibilities and he stepped up to take chief from me and leave me vice. Shaking my head in disbelief, I was forced to pass, knowing that this time I would have to settle for spoiling his bid. I still won the hand but if he'd only noticed what was developing it would have been glorious. What a great game!

Game Night

2007-11-16T05:21:00.000-08:00

Insert witty opening comments here.

The first (and only) game of the night for many of our group was Die Macher. Kai is always surprised when this game takes over four hours. I'm not sure why. My experience is that four hours is about par for the course. Kai insists that experienced players will play the game in under three and a half and I don't doubt it's possible but that never seems to be how it goes for our group. And that's why whenever Kai asks if I want to play it I say no. It really is an awesome game but I don't want to devote my entire game night to just one game so I always pass. But if you don't mind spending four hours on one game then definitely pick it up. It truly is a classic.

When I arrived there were a bunch of people playing Fantasy Pub, a silly little card game about fantasy adventurers getting drunk in the cliched tavern after a cliched adventure. Orcs, dwarves, elves, and so on all moving from table to table buying each other drinks. The object is to get as many of your guys drunk without getting them so drunk that they can't leave the pub under their own power (getting thrown out is bad, walking out so drunk you can barely move is good). Naturally, the theme is all tongue in cheek and nobody is really advocating this behavior.

While we waited for that game to break up, Adam and I played a quick game of Ricochet Robots. This has long been one of my favorite gathering games. It's almost more of a puzzle than a game and I don't really think there is a better game to play while waiting for people to gather. That's because it's one of those games that's always fun to play no matter what your score happens to be (in fact I really never pay much attention to the score). Anyone can join in at a moment's notice. Each round plays like it's own little self contained puzzle and it's the kind of thing you can explain to a newcomer in just a few seconds. In fact, my favorite way to teach it is to set it up and just start playing. After a round or two, new players quickly catch on and soon everybody's having fun. Some people find the cerebral nature of the game a little too taxing but I just love it.

My first meatier game of the evening was a three player game of Space Dealer. Unfortunately, nobody had a CD player so we had to use the alarm on my cell phone to time the game, which is really not nearly as fun as using the thirty minute count-down soundtrack which comes with the game. But it was a fun game nonetheless. I'm really impressed with this game (as you might have guessed if you've read my review from a few weeks back) despite its slightly gimmicky nature. The simultaneous play mechanic is really clever and very well done.

Next up for me was one of Richard Breese's classic games: Keythedral. This is a wonderful game where players first take turns placing hexagonal tiles to build up the playing area and then over several rounds players send workers into the hexagonal fields to gather resources to be used in building a cathedral. I really enjoy this game. There is a lot of opportunity for really clever play, particularly when deciding the order in which the workers will be sent into the fields. A big part of this game is figuring out ways to maximize your own production while interfering with that of your opponents. It's very clever and very well done. It's one of my favorites.

My final game of the evening was a game of To Court the King. This game feels a lot like a cross between Magic the Gathering and Yahtzee. It's a light dice fest where players are eventually rolling as many as ten dice on a turn in order to form Yahtzee-like combinations which earn the players courtiers (cards). Each courtier has a special ability which can be used to bring in more dice or adjust the values on the dice after they're rolled. The cards' abilities make it much less of a luck-fest than you might expect from a game that relies so heavily on dice and that makes it a much more enjoyable game for me than Yahtzee ever was. Of course at the end of the day, it's still dice and it's still pretty luck heavy but I enjoy it and I'll seldom turn down a game.

Game Night

2007-11-10T00:53:00.000-08:00

Better late than never with the game night posts, eh? And it's certainly late.

Game night for me this week started with Zooloretto, the latest Spiel des Jahres winner. This is the board game version of Coloretto (which I like very much). The board game adds a little bit of complexity (although not much) and it changes the scoring slightly. I like it but I don't think it will ever become one of my favorites. It's basically light family friendly gaming with lovely bits. Well worth playing with the family but a deep strategy game it's not.

Another game I played last Tuesday night was a really fun game of Ca$h 'n Gun$. This is a very light game where up to six players (the more the merrier) point foam guns at one another. Each player has a small deck of cards. Most of them say "click" but two say "bang" and one says "bang bang bang". On each round, each player places one card face down in front of them and then simultaneously point their gun at one other player. Next, on the count of three, each player may decide to hide. If you hide you don't get shot but you also don't get to help divide that round's loot. If you don't hide an someone points a gun at you which goes "bang" then you're shot. You take a wound and you don't get any loot that round. Too many wounds and you're out of the game. Naturally, each card can only be played once so part of the game is deciding when to bluff, when to shoot, when to hide, and when to stand brave in the face of four other muzzles. It's simple and fast and I really like it.

Next up for me was Notre Dame. This is a very cool strategy game that takes place in the neighborhoods of Paris near Notre Dame cathedral in the 14th century. I decided to pursue a vastly different strategy this time around and to say that it failed would be an understatement. I was clobbered. Still, I love the game and I'll be glad to play it again. Although this time I don't think I'll pursue that strategy again.

And wrapping up the night for me was a game of Tichu. Adam and I teamed up against Mike and Wade and we came out charging right out of the gate. Within a few hands the score was something like 865 to 35. At that point their luck began to turn and they staged a pretty good run but by then it was really much too late and we still cruised to a relatively easy victory.

I can't remember what other games were played last night but one I know for sure was Railroad Tycoon. This was one of the last and best from Eagle Games before they closed their doors. Personally, I prefer Age of Steam (upon which it's based) but there are a lot of people (some of them in our game group) who prefer this one. I can understand why, it's big, pretty, and it plays very well. Also, it's much more forgiving than Age of Steam, which has a reputation for sometimes knocking newbies out of the game before the first round is even over. It's a pity that it's out of print.

Tuesday Night is Game Night!

2007-11-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday I had a conflict and wasn't able to attend game night, which explains the lack of a game night post. But this Tuesday I'll be there. Will you?

If you are near Redmond, WA then come join us. We'll be in Microsoft's building 50 cafeteria starting at about 5pm. Feel free to come late. If you don't have access to the cafeteria, just walk around back and knock on the glass door. Someone will let you in. Here's a map in case you need it.

Review: Space Dealer

2007-10-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

Space Dealer is a new game by Tobias Stapelfeldt, published by Eggertspiele. The game is for three or four players (up to eight if you combine two copies) and it plays in EXACTLY thirty minutes. Using what is surely one of the most clever mechanics I've ever seen in a boardgame, all players play the game simultaneously. I've seen some real-time simultaneous action boardgames before but this is the first one I've ever played that actually gets it right. How do they do it? Read on!

Components

First let's talk a little bit about what comes in the box. Space Dealer comes in that ubiquitous square box that has become nearly an industry standard. Inside the box, you will find all sorts of goodies. There are numerous wooden cubes and cylinders, lots of sturdy cardboard and ten one-minute sand timers. The artwork on all of the cardboard is quite well done and very appropriate to the science-fiction/space theme.

One thing that you won't find inside the box is a game board. Instead, there are several cardboard pieces which fit together like puzzle pieces. Some fit together to make rocket ships which the players will use to transport goods. Some make up a round track with planets on it which does double duty as both a scoring track and a game board. Some fit together to make representation of the players' home planets with spaces to place the cards which are used to represent the various characteristics and state of each world.

All of these components are pretty neat but the most unique game component is a CD which has a thirty minute soundtrack which serves as the game's timer. It's filled with theme-appropriate techno background music and the occasional robotic voice which announces how much time is left before the end of the game. I'm sure there will be those who prefer to play the game to a timer (especially after they've heard the soundtrack for the fifth or sixth time) but I thought that the soundtrack was a pretty cool idea and that it really added something to the game.

If there is one criticism that can be levied at the game components, it's that the sand timers are really not of the very best quality and it's common for them to be off by as much as a couple of seconds. Thankfully, this really isn't too much of a problem. I recommend that before your first play you time all of the timers and make sure that each player gets assigned one of the faster ones and one of the slower ones (and it's probably best not to mark which is which). A little variation in the timers isn't really going to affect the outcome of the game very much (if at all) so long as the average time of each player's timers is roughly the same.

Gameplay

As I mentioned earlier, Space Dealer is very unique in that it is a real-time strategy boardgame. There are no turns. Instead, all players play at the same time. It would be natural to assume that this would create chaos and pandemonium, or at least an awful lot of pressure, as players raced to do as much as possible before their opponents. Thankfully, this really isn't the case. The way this is accomplished is that every player is given two sand timers (which the game calls robots). In order to do almost anything in the game, you must first put a timer on that action. Only when the sand runs out will you be able to actually execute that action. This serves to slow down the game's pacing enough that players actually have some time to consider their actions before taking them. While the time pressure is certainly an element in the game, I never felt overly rushed.

At the start of the game, every player is given a home planet, a space ship, two sand timers, ten round cylinders (used for scoring) and a small set of cards. The cards contain upgrades and technologies which can be developed and added to your home world. Some of the upgrades are mines which generate colored cubes. Some represent generators which are used to power up the other upgrades (if you can't supply power to it, you aren't allowed to build it). Most cards also have an area which lists a demand which consists of a set of resources and an associated amount of victory points. If you deliver the correct set of colored cubes to someone else's planet and fulfil one of their demands, you get to put one of your cylinders on the demand space, scoring victory points for yourself and a smaller amount of victory points for the owner.

There are also decks of cards which contain more powerful upgrade cards. In order to get at those cards, you need to invest some time towards advancing your planet's technology level. Since that investment requires waiting for one of your precious sand timers, that's going to require that you put off doing something else that you might otherwise have been doing.

This game is basically a produce and deliver game. You work the mines on your world to produce colored cubes which you then deliver to other worlds in order to score points for yourself and to a lesser extent the other player. The game is balanced well enough that success can be achieved either by delivering lots of orders to other players, or by making your own planet attractive enough that others will want to deliver to you. A successful strategy will typically contain elements of both.

Conclusion

There are many games which have tried to allow for simultaneous play but this is the first game that I've seen which actually delivers. It helps that Space Dealer's game mechanics would probably work well enough on their own, even without the real-time element. It also helps that the timers are slow enough to give players time to plan ahead and react to what others are doing, yet fast enough that players are going to feel just a little bit pressed for time. Successful players will be those who can force themselves to think about a problem, formulate a plan and execute on that plan without too much hesitation.

This kind of thing has been done successfully in the computer gaming world for quite some time. When you stop to think about it, most real-time simulation games (such as Age of Empires or Starcraft) have similar gating mechanisms that serve to slow the game down to a manageable pace. In Age of Empires for example, you have to wait for a building to be built before you can use it, then you have to wait for it to produce units, and finally you have to wait for those units to get to the battle field. The sand timers in Space Dealer, while simple by comparison, really serve much the same purpose. What's most impressive to me is how very well this works.

Space Dealer is one of those games that I hope to be playing for a long time to come. It's unique and it's fun. It's also surprisingly easy to play, given the nature of the game. This is a special game and I highly encourage you to pick up a copy while they're still available. Games like this don't come along very often.

Zoo Who?

2007-10-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

Last night was game night and we had a very good turnout with several newcomers and lots of old timers.

Some of the games that I didn't play last night included: Khronos, Boomtown, Scepter of Zavandor and Space Dealer. All very fine games in their own right. In fact, you'll be hearing about Space Dealer from me very soon. But first, let's discuss what I played last night.

The opening game for me was Elasund. A friend of mine had been wanting to play this game with me for months but our schedules never seemed to match up. Well he finally got some time to join us on a Tuesday night and since this was the one game he'd requested to play, we played it. Elasund is one of the Catan Adventure games based on Klaus Teuber's monster hit Settlers of Catan. It has some Catan-like elements but it really is very different from Settlers of Catan and in my opinion, that's a very good thing. Now don't get me wrong, I like me some Settlers, but the last thing this world needs is yet another Settlers expansion. This stand-alone game is refreshingly different with just enough familiar elements to give it that Settlers flavor. I've got a full review of this game elsewhere but in a nutshell: it's got a lot of player interaction with a tiny bit of nastiness and I like it a lot.

Next up for me was this year's Spiel des Jahres winner: Zooloretto. I really like Coloretto, the card game that served as the inspiration to Zooloretto, so I expected to like Zooloretto as well; especially now that it's a Spiel des Jahres winner. I do like it but perhaps not quite as much as I had hoped to. It's very luck heavy, chaotic and light (which is expected given its pedigree and since that's often what the SdJ committee goes for) and it retains all of the elements that I like about Coloretto, but for me the added complexity didn't really result in a significantly better game. The production is first rate and I'm sure that most families will love it. I like it very much but there are plenty of games which I like more.

The last game of the evening for me was an unreleased prototype by my friend Christopher Rao, author of Pink Godzilla Dev Kit (which you really ought to check out). I probably shouldn't say much about this new game. I'll say this though: it's a card game, it's in the final stages of refinement and Christopher tells me it's about to be published. It's a lighter game aimed at the 8 and older crowd. It's not nearly as strategic as Dev Kit (and it plays nothing like it) but it's pretty darn fun to play and in fact it was fun enough that we played it twice. I think that as a kid's game it's great and I think plenty of adults will like it too although I don't see it becoming a monster hit with die-hard gamers. It's short enough to work as a filler game and I think it fits that niche well. Perhaps someday soon I'll be able to tell you more about it.

Come join us next week and bring your friends!

Review: Khronos

2007-10-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

One of the games that made a big splash at last year's Essen fair was Khronos. Khronos is a rather unique game for two to five players by Arnaud Urbon and Ludovic Vialla. It's played on three identical maps, each of which represents the same countryside during a different epoch (or age) in time. What makes this most interesting is that actions that are taken in earlier ages can ripple forward into later ages, altering the game balance and introducing additional scoring opportunities.

Components:

Khronos comes in a large box that is stuffed full of colorful playing tiles printed on heavy linen-finished card stock. There is also a large and very attractive tri-fold game board, several cardboard coins, a deck of special cards, and ten molded plastic figures (all unique!) in five colors, two for each player. The box itself is divided into four large compartments that are more than large enough to hold all of the many pieces.

The only complaint I had with my copy was that some of my plastic figures came slightly bent, but a short soak in very hot water softened them up enough to correct that.

All in all, it's a first-class production that should satisfy even the most picky gamer.

Gameplay:

Gameplay involves playing cards from a hand of four in order to carry out a number of actions that allow the player to construct buildings, control areas on the three maps, and improve opportunities for scoring.

The deck is made up of an equal number of orange, purple, and blue cards. The colors correspond to the three types of buildings which can be built by playing the cards: orange military buildings, purple religious buildings, and blue civic buildings. Each building type is made up of three different sizes of building tiles: small 1x1 tiles, medium 2x2 tiles, and large 3×3 tiles. Naturally, the larger buildings are more powerful and require more cards to build.

Each player controls two pawns. Each pawn may be used to play two cards during a turn which can only be used to carry out actions in the age where that pawn is located. Pawns may be moved from age to age as often as a player likes (even in the Middle of a turn) but each time a pawn is moved the player must pay one coin. Coins are victory points so players have a strong incentive to be as efficient as possible.

Victory points (coins) may be earned throughout the game by building large buildings or upgrading to them, but the primary way that they are earned comes at the end of each player's turn in each of two scoring rounds. The game lasts for seven turns. Scoring occurs after turns four and seven. Each of the three ages is scored using a different method. What's more, each player only gets to score two of the three ages, the ones that currently host his pawns.

On the first map, representing the Age of Might, players score points for each domain (connected group of building tiles) that they control through military strength. On the second map, which represents the Age of Faith, players score points for each domain that they control through religious strength. And on the last map, representing the Age of Reason, points are awarded to players who have majority control over civil buildings.

On the first two maps, domains are controlled by the player who controls the single largest building of the appropriate type. All domains must follow a set of rules, one of which is that the largest orange and the largest purple building must each be unique within their domain. The only way to take control of another player's domain is either to build a larger building in the domain or to use blue buildings to merge his domain with a stronger one of yours (similar to an external conflict in Tigris & Euphrates, for those of you who may be familiar with that game). When that happens, one of the two largest buildings will need to be downsized.

Perhaps the most clever, and most difficult to master feature of the game is that all medium and large buildings ripple into later ages. Build a large orange building in the Age of Might and you will also be building a large orange building in the Ages of Faith and Reason. In fact, the only way to build in the Age of Reason at all is to build in an earlier age and to have it ripple through time into the Age of Reason. This rippling can be very cool and it's the defining feature of the game but it also creates enough difficult situations that the rules need to very carefully address them all. This leads to some rather complicated and, dare I say, fiddly rules. The good news is that the rulebook does a reasonably good job of explaining those rules and has plenty of clear examples. Also, all of the rules are logical and necessary so it doesn't take very long for them to become second nature.

Conclusions:

Khronos is a unique and fascinating game. The time-altering aspect of the game makes this one that every serious gamer should want to try. Still, it's not without its flaws. I've already mentioned that the rules can be a little daunting. What's more concerning to me is that this is the type of game that encourages some players to take a very long time to consider their optimal move, particularly on turns four and seven since scoring will take place as soon as they are finished with their turn. This can become a real problem with a large group of players and, coupled with the fact that the board can change so much between turns, it's the main reason that I really don't recommend that this game be played with more than three players. However, with three players, this is a truly fantastic game, one that I am always happy to play and one that I will often suggest.

One other thing to consider is that, while this is definitely a moderately heavy strategy game, actions are strongly governed by the makeup of the cards in your hand. No matter how good your strategy may be, it can all come undone with a poor card draw. For this reason, I highly recommend that the game be played with the ''Hold-em" variant described at the end of the rules, which gives players a little more direct control over the makeup of the cards in their hand.

If you are looking for a solid medium-weight strategy game with a smattering of luck, a unique theme, and some truly original mechanics, then you really should give serious consideration to Khronos. This is one game that should stand the test of time and is sure to be played throughout the ages.

Time Warp!

2007-10-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

Game night this Tuesday (for me at least) was almost identical to last week's. I played almost exactly the same games: Richochet Robots, Khronos, and Evo. This time we only played a three player game of Khronos though and let me say that my initial impressions were born out: this game is much better with three players. Don't get me wrong. It's still good with four or five but it's much better with three.

Rather than say the same things about the same three games I think I'll just leave it at that. Perhaps I'll use the extra time to begin writing another review. I'll have to think about it.

If you're anywhere near Redmond next Tuesday after 5 pm, come join us. We meet in Microsoft's building 50 cafeteria. If you don't have access to the building then just walk around to the back and knock on the glass door. Someone will let you in.

Oh, and if you've been waiting on the Zooloretto restock, your ship may have just come in. I'm told we should be getting some in stock within a day or two.

Time Keeps on Slippin' Slippin' Slippin' Into the Future

2007-10-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

Another Tuesday, another Game Night! Why weren't you there? Surely you want to join us! Oh well, we made do without you just fine. And there's always next week.

Our opener was a fine game of Ricochet Robots. What a great opener. Any number of people can play and there's really no penalty to having folks join up in the middle of the game. It's a total learn as you go kind of game too. Watch someone play one round and you'll be ready to play the next. We started with three players and by the time we put it away perhaps thirty minutes later we had enough people to split into two games.

The first meaty game of the night for me was Khronos. This is a new game by Arnaud Urbon and Ludovic Vialla. It's a very unique game that's played on three identical boards, each one representing the same landscape over three different ages: the Age of Might, the Age of Faith, and the Age of Reason. Things you build in earlier ages ripple forward in time and appear in later ages as well. There are all sorts of cool things you can do such as creating a castle in the Age of Might that suddenly appears in the Age of Faith and Age of Reason, destroying buildings on that plot of land in those ages as if they never had existed. The game bears a very slight resemblance to Tigris and Euphrates in that you're building domains made up of sets of contiguous buildings (similar to kingdoms in T&E) which may conflict when they are joined, resulting in a reduction of buildings in one of the two domains. I really like the game but I have to say that the rules are a bit complex and it tends to encourage "analysis paralysis" which means that with five players the game is just a bit too long. What's more, with five players the board can change an awful lot between turns. I think the sweet spot for this game is probably three players.

Next up for me was a game of Evo. This is a delightful game which I haven't played in ages. It's a very whimsical strategy game where players control herds of dinosaurs which evolve, multiply, and jockey for supremacy on a deserted island. This game has several cool mechanisms, one of which is a very cool climate track where the climate on the island cycles over time between hot and cold. Each turn dinos that occupy spaces that are too far removed from the current comfortable climate zone die off so a big part of every turn is trying to move your dinos onto the new safe spaces to keep them around, especially since the more living dinos you have each turn, the better your score. Another cool mechanic in this game is the mutation auction. Each turn a number of mutations become available which boost your herd's abilities. Players bid on these mutations using a really elegant system. Each mutation is placed on a bidding track with numbers that range from 0 to 6. Players bid by putting their marker on one of the numbers on a bidding track. If anyone outbids you by placing their marker farther down the track, you pick up your marker and either outbid them or put it on an available space on another bidding track. Eventually all the markers are each placed on a different track at which time the auction is over. Everyone pays their bid and collects the mutation associated with the track they've chosen. It's a great game. It's just too bad that it's out of print.

The final game of the night for me was Tichu (of course). We lost. It was sad.

Other games played last night included Railroad Tycoon, Vinci and Leonardo Da Vinci.

What's that? It's a Game Night post!

2007-10-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. I've been really slacking on the blogging lately. Life has a way of getting busy this time of year and it's only going to get busier through the holidays but I'll try not to slack off quite so much for a while.

There was a game night and I was there. So were many other familiar faces and even a couple faces we haven't seen in a while! Nice to see you again! Hope to see more of you!

I arrived just in time to watch Adam and Chris play a game of Duel in the Dark. This is a new game just arriving on our shores courtesy of Z-Man games. It's a two player game set in World War II where one player plays the British and the other plays the Germans. The Brits go on a bombing run over Germany and the Germans try to ensure that the run fails. I was thoroughly impressed with the production values and the game seemed very interesting too. It's basically a "programming" style game with elements of misdirection and hunting. The British player pre-programs his bombing run by building a deck where each card in the deck indicates his bomber's next move. On each turn, the top card is revealed and the bomber is moved accordingly. In addition, the British player controls one plane over which he has complete control. That plane can zoom about ahead of the bomber to take out various ground targets and obstacles to clear a path for the bomber, or to deliberately mislead the German player and draw away the German fighters. The German player controls a squadron of four fighter planes which he tries to maneuver into the path of the British bomber. The bomber can't really be stopped but each player earns points for things that happen in their favor. For instance, the German player earns points by having the bomber fly into a hex that contains one or more of his planes. It's a pretty cool game and I look forward to playing it myself one day.

When I arrived, another group of players was a third of the way through with Franz-Bello Delonge's most famous game: TransAmerica. Let's all have a moment of silence for Mr. Delonge who passed away just the other week... *shhh* ... OK. Now back to the game. TransAmerica is a very nice, light gateway game that's about building railroad's across America. Sound familiar? Yes, there are definite superficial similarities to Ticket to Ride but this really is a very different game. I enjoy it but I think that it's pretty light.

Several others settled in for a long night of Die Macher, everyone's favorite super-long game of German electioneering. It's a great game and I will play again some day. I just hate giving up my entire game night to play such a long game.

And yet, what did I play next? A long game. Go figure.

I had just received a box-dented copy of Glenn Drover's new game Age of Empires III. Can't sell it. Might as well open it and play it. So what's it like? Well first off, let me say that I have never been a fan of Glenn Drover's games. He tends to produce stuff that's over-produced and under-developed if you know what I mean. Most of his games don't really feel finished to me. But I must in all fairness say that this is easily his best game yet. The rules weren't overly-complicated and the game seems to be pretty solid. It runs a little long for what it is (around 120 minutes) and the theme is largely pasted on. Underneath all the chrome (more on that in a minute) is a pretty solid Euro-style game of investment, development, and area control. I enjoyed it. But there were two things that really annoyed me about the game. First, for a game that is obviously trying to be so deeply strategic, there is just a little too much luck. The discovery tiles in particular can be either really, really good or really, really bad and there's no way of knowing which you'll get until you go for one. But I can live with that. What really bothered me was (and this is typical of Drover's games) the production. The board is HUGE and very ornate. It's very pretty but it isn't all that functional (although it's a lot better than some of the old Eagle Games stuff he did). The scoring track is particularly bad. And then there are the figures. The game comes with dozens of really cool looking plastic figures. They look fabulous. Unfortunately, they're too large even for this over-sized board, they tend to fall over when bumped, and what's worse, the different figure types (particularly the captains and settlers) are difficult to distinguish from one another. I would have much preferred they use simple wooden shapes such as the ones used in Game of Thrones. It would have made playing the game a much more pleasant experience. Still, I have to give kudos to Drover for coming out with a very nice game that was quite fun to play. And given his recent experiences with Eagle Games (which just folded last year) just getting this game to market at all was a huge achievement.

Next up we played a quick six player game of Ca$h 'n Gun$. This is a silly light filler game where everyone has a foam pistol and a deck of twelve cards that say either "click" or "bang". On your turn you choose a card from you deck and put it face down in front of you. Then on the count of three you point your gun at another player. After a brief time to asses who is threatening to shoot who, there is another count of three and those who are too chicken can "hide" by putting down their weapon. If you hide then you can't be shot but you have to take a "shame" marker which costs you points at the end of the game and you don't get to help divide the pot of loot. Those who are still pointing at brave players reveal their cards. If the card says "click" then the player isn't shot. If the card says "bang" then the player is shot, draws a wound token (3 and you're out of the game) and isn't available to collect money from the pot in the middle of the table. All surviving players who aren't hidden get to divide up the pot and everyone gets ready for the next round. 12 cards per deck means that the game lasts for 12 rounds and as you can guess, they go pretty quickly. It's chaotic, simple, sometimes a little mean, and a whole lot of fun. If it were any longer it might get old real quick but it's so fast that the simplicity works in its favor. I enjoyed it very much.

My last game of the night was Tichu (as usual) and it was a wild game. There were some crazy hands including three dueling Tichu calls. I was involved in all three of those and I won two of them. I should have won all three but on one of them, the player to my right led the ONLY combination of cards (a pair of threes) that could possibly have allowed his partner to go out before me (since I'd already played a bomb of twos, his partner held only a pair of fours, I controlled any singles, and my partner had the dog). Dumb luck wasn't enough to carry the game for them though and the good guys won!

Review: Thebes

2007-09-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

It's the early 20th century and all of Europe is fascinated with the wonders of the ancient world that have been brought to light by the nascent science of archeology. As an archaeologist, your job is to comb the libraries and museums of the world in search of clues to the whereabouts of fabulous artifacts from civilizations gone by. Once your research is complete, it's time to hop a steamer bound for the sands of Egypt, oversee the dig and hope that your weeks of excavation turn up enough valuable artifacts to make a good showing on the European exhibition circuit.

If this sounds interesting to you then you might want to take a look at Thebes. Initially released in Germany under the title Jenseits von Theben, Thebes is a game for two to four players, ages ten and up published by Rio Grande Games and Queen. Designed by Peter Prinz, the game lasts roughly 60 to 90 minutes with the length largely depending on the number of players.

Components

Inside the standard sized Queen box you'll find some pretty lovely components. There are five cloth bags in different colors, each one with a different image silk screened on the front. The bags represent different archaeological dig sites and each is filled with roughly 30 sturdy cardboard tokens, roughly half of which which represent valuable artifacts that may be uncovered (the rest are blank and represent junk). You'll also find a large deck of cards, several wooden tokens and a very nice board. Finally, from the superfluous nifty bits department, we have four cardboard gear-shaped wheels. The wheels are really just glorified charts. As you turn a wheel a set of numbers is revealed through a window in the cardboard. A simple chart would have worked just as well but these are a heck of a lot more fun to use. They also come color coded which makes it just that much easier to remember which color is yours.

So to sum it up, the components are first rate and definitely add to the overall experience. There's no question about getting your money's worth of pretty cardboard, cloth, and wood when you buy this game.

Gameplay

Each player assumes the role of a famous archaeologist knocking around early 20th century Europe, researching and then recovering artifacts from ancient civilizations. Points are scored mainly by recovering valuable artifacts. Each artifact is worth a number of victory points ranging from 1 to 7. There are also bonuses available for showing your artifacts at exhibitions back on the continent and for collecting Congress cards. Furthermore, each player who collects a majority of "knowledge" for one of the dig site receives bonus points.

Around the board are 52 week spaces. Each player's turn takes a varying amount of weeks depending on what the player chooses to do. The game is played on a map which is a network of interconnected cities in Europe, Egypt and the Middle East. Most turns consist of moving to another city and collecting a card that's available at that city, for which the player would be charged one week's travel time for each leg of his journey plus a number of weeks printed on the card. Better cards naturally cost more weeks. After he takes his card, the player moves his marker the required number of weeks around the calendar track and his turn is finished. One of the more clever elements of the game is that whoever's token is the farthest back on the calendar track is the one who gets to take his turn. If you're far enough back on the track and you take a cheap action then you may get to take more than one turn in a row.

Most of the cards that are available are cards with one or more colored books on them. These are "specialized knowledge" cards which give you a number of "knowledge points" for the dig site indicated by the color. Before you can dig for artifacts, you need to have at least one of these specialized knowledge cards for that site. The more knowledge you have about a given site, the better your odds of finding something when you finally decide to dig there.

So let's say you've gathered several knowledge cards for one of the sites. How do you go about digging there? First you move your token to the dig site, at a travel cost of one week for each leg of your journey getting there. Then you turn your wheel until the number in the top of the window matches the number of knowledge points you have pertaining to that particular site. The numbers that show up in the window tell you how many discs you may draw from that site's bag if you stay a given number of weeks. The longer you decide to stay, the more discs you'll get to draw. The odds of getting something other than a blank "worthless junk" disc when you draw start out at just under 50% and, if other players have already extracted artifacts from that site, they may be quite a bit worse. So you need to determine how many weeks you're willing to dig, taking into account the level of risk you're willing to accept that you may pull nothing but junk out of the bag and weighing that against the value of those weeks if you had spent them doing other things such as collecting more knowledge to be used in future digs.

Another element to consider is that players are only allowed to dig at each site once per year (a four player game lasts two years). Players will want to be sure that they are sufficiently prepared before digging so as not to waste their one and only chance to dig at that site this year.

In addition to specialized knowledge cards, there are also general knowledge cards which give knowledge points for ALL of the dig sites, and other special cards which give temporary knowledge bonuses or the opportunity to draw extra discs when digging.

And there are the exhibitions. Towards the latter part of the game, exhibition cards may be drawn. Exhibition cards are printed with a city and a week cost (just like the other cards), but they also offer a victory point bonus. In order to collect an exhibition card, in addition to the travel time and the collection time, a player must also possess the proper number of artifacts in the colors indicated on the card. In this way, players who plan ahead and collect the correct colored artifacts can gain a moderate reward for their efforts.

The game ends when the last player uses up his last week. At that point players total up all their loot, add any bonus points for exhibition cards, congress cards, and majority knowledge points, and whoever scores the most wins the game.

Conclusions

Thebes is a beautifully produced family game that should appeal to gamers who don't mind a little bit of randomness in their games. The pieces are wonderful, the theme is interesting, and the length is just about right for this type of game, but serious strategy gamers should beware. This game has luck, and a pretty hefty dose of it too.

First, there's the matter of the cards. Which cards you can collect depends on which cards happen to be available when it's your turn. Sure, there are always four to choose from, but because you also have to pay travel time to get to a card's city, you may often find that one or two of them are too expensive to be under serious consideration. And of course which cards are attractive to you also depends a lot on which other cards you've already collected. When I've played this game, I've often felt as if my turn was really decided for me more by fortune and circumstance than by strategy.

Next there's the fact that most of your points come from artifacts and which artifacts you recover is almost entirely decided by the whims of fate. Oh sure, you have some control over how many discs you pull from a bag and how many digs you choose to make each year, but all the same, if your opponent lucks into two or three high value artifacts and you pull blank after blank you may find yourself a little frustrated.

Still, as long as you don't mind subjecting yourself to the whims of fate, Thebes is a great game. Much of the time good strategy will overcome bad fortune and, in my opinion, the cool theme and the engaging play more than make up for the heavy luck. So as long as you don't mind losing the occasional game you felt you deserved to win, you might want to give Thebes a try.

Game Night 9/11

2007-09-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Another game night last night.

Christopher and most of the rest of the Seattle group played one of his prototypes... all... night... long. It looked pretty good and I think he got some good feedback but it sure didn't leave much time for them to play much else. Luckily, there were plenty of other gamers so there were other games going on too.

Four of our gamers sat down to a game of Power Grid using the Italy expansion board. It's been a while since I've played Friedemann Friese's masterpiece about bringing electrical power to the masses. Power Grid's a fantastic game. I love the way scarcity is modeled in the commodities market. From what I hear, the market in the Italy map is set up in such a way that money is even tighter than usual on that map.

As for me, my first game of the night was a brand new game called Portobello Market. A very quick look at the back of the box might give the impression that this game is similar to Ticket to Ride. Players place market stalls on a network of alleys that makes the board look pretty similar to T2R but really, that's where the similarity ends. They're totally different games. I really enjoyed the game but I was surprised by how quickly it ended. I felt like I just barely started to figure out how to play the game and then I realized that we were on the last turn. There's a lot of good potential in this game. I'm going to definitely need to play it more to see what I can find in there.

Next up for me was The Thief of Baghdad, Thorsten Gimmler's latest game. This was the second time I'd played the game and I did much better this time around. In fact, I surpised myself and I won. This is a really good game in terms of mechanics. It's simple, elegant, and all of the mechanisms work very well. But I have to concede that the game itself is rather dry. The theme is pretty thin and the game could just as well have been produced as a pure abstract. It's a good one though.

And my final game of the evening was (can you guess?) Tichu! Yeah, big surprise right? My partnership won. Comfortably. But in fairness, we got really lucky more than a few times. We definitely got the right cards and we made a few Tichu calls which we probably should have lost.

Come join us next Tuesday! 5:00pm in the Microsoft building 50 cafeteria.

Back to Game Night

2007-09-05T18:05:00.001-07:00

Labor Day has come and gone. School has returned to the Puget Sound. Game Night continues.

Once again a large number of our group devoted pretty much their entire evening to Fantasy Flight's new game Star Craft. We're still anticipating this game's arrival in the store soon. The copy that our guys are playing is a pre-release copy that one of them picked up at the PAX game convention the other weekend. Fantasy Flight has yet to officially release the game. Several of our guys have played it two weeks in a row now so I'd say it's a good'n. Still too long for my tastes but I can't deny the appeal of those gorgeous bits. Super cool.

My first game was a lighter affair: If Wishes Were Fishes. I like it. But I will say that I can't help feeling that the game played me rather than the other way around. It seemed like each turn there was an obvious best choice which I felt more or less compelled to take. I lost again but on my last turn I had the option of either ending the game and settling for second place or prolonging the game in the hope against hope that the right fish would flop into the shallows. I chose the latter option and it seriously damaged my score, but had luck favored me then things might have turned out very differently. It's fun. I love the worms. But I can't help thinking that the winner is more or less decided by a crap shoot.

Not so for my next game. We played Arkadia with the full compliment of four gamers. This time I did much better than the last time I played. In point of fact, I won. The game is quite abstract and perhaps a tad cerebral but I really like it. It's just long enough to allow for some long term strategizing and yet not so long that it goes on much past the point where a clear winner emerges. That's a good thing because it seems that there are too many games where the leader is determined fairly early on and then the rest of the game, players find themselves playing a hopeless game of catchup. That doesn't happen in this game. By the time you realize the situation is hopeless (or in the bag) the game is nearly over. I also really like the simplicity of the game mechanics. It works very well.

Meanwhile four others played a game of Notre Dame. I'm hearing more and more comparisons with Puerto Rico and I think that's a good thing. It's really a very good game. Simple rules, deep strategy, right length. One of our players mentioned that it seems like a lot of players are putting forward what they think are unbeatable strategies on the Geek only to have others put forward effective counters to the strategies. I agree that this always bodes well for a game. It means that the game has depth. Not only because there are so many supposed "winning" strategies; but also because there are people out there who consider the game worthy of such in-depth analysis.

My final game of the evening was actually two games of Tichu. The first game was notable in that my partner and I won the game in a mere six hands. Almost every hand was a double win and there were a couple of Tichu calls superimposed on those double wins as well. To call it a rout would be understating things. The second game was a little more normal. We lost that one but it wasn't nearly as lopsided and it took a much more normal number of hands to reach 1000 points.

Something Old; Something New

2007-08-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

Last night was game night and so here I am again to talk about what we played.

Turnout was good. There were a few people who we hadn't seen for a while and there were a few who have just started coming. We could always use more though so feel free to drop by if you're in the neighborhood next Tuesday.

When I arrived, a furious game of Bluff was just wrapping up. At least I assume it was furious. Perhaps it was just mildly annoyed. Either way, it was Bluff and it was ending.

Once that game ended the players extricated themselves from the wreckage and dispersed to form other congregations of gamers.

My personal band of four gamers gathered together for a game that was brand new to us: Arkadia, by Rüdiger Dorn. This game takes as its (rather unimaginative) theme the building of a castle. Supposedly players are placing outbuildings which contribute to the construction of a castle. (Now where have I heard that before?) In reality, the theme has almost no relationship to the game. It's completely pasted on to what is actually a very abstract game. Players place Tetris-like building tiles, and worker pawns on a grid. Whenever a building is surrounded, either by other buildings or by workers, it is scored and the player who triggered the scoring, along with all other players who own immediately adjacent pawns, receive a number of colored seals. At several points in the game, which can be determined by the players, these seals may be exchanged for victory points. The exchange rate is determined by the current configuration of the castle pieces (which incidentally, are exactly the same pieces used in Torres), over which players also have some control. It's very abstract and almost completely divorced from the theme but the pieces are lovely and the game works quite well. It's a very fast game (45 minutes) and I enjoyed it although I was quite soundly thrashed.

Meanwhile, another large congregation of gamers gathered for the new Fantasy Flight monster game: Star Craft. (Soon to be available at HFoG but as of this moment we haven't any in stock.) This group played this game for nigh on to five hours. Too long for my tastes but by all accounts it's a terrific game and well worth the time investment. I can say one thing unequivocally: the bits are to die for. The dozens of plastic miniatures that players spend all those hours pushing around the board are absolutely fantastic. Well worth the price of admission.

Next up for yours truly was a two player game of Tikal. Now compared to most of the other games our group plays, this is a pretty old game (1999). It's one of the famous Kiesling/Kramer "Mask Trilogy" of games which also includes Java and Mexica. I've played both Java and Mexica before. I had not played Tikal. I liked it. We had intended to play with three players but one of our number was called away for a minor emergency. I'm happy to report that the game works very well with two. In fact, I suspect that I might actually prefer to play it that way. This is middle-weight strategy game where players use a limited number of action points to maneuver a limited number of pieces around on a hex-grid board in an attempt to score points via majority control. There is just a little bit of luck provided by the draw of hex tiles which gradually form the board as each turn progresses. But mostly this game is all about carefully planning how best to use the limited resources that are available to you on each turn. It's quite tactical with a fairly strong element of strategy as well. I highly enjoyed it. It didn't hurt that I finished well ahead of my opponent.

Meanwhile, there was a game of Shadow of the Emperor underway on another table. This is a game that I haven't played in a while. It's a fairly standard majority control game but with one really cool twist: the pieces age. After each turn, the pieces (which represent barons) are rotated a quarter turn, representing an increase in age of five years. Eventually, the barons die off and are removed from the board. This game is listed as a 90 minute game but this group of four players took a full three hours to play this one. Part of the problem was that the game had to be explained to a couple of players, but I think a big part of the problem was that certain players seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to calculate the best move. In fact, this game took SO long that I was able to get in another game while I waited for it to finish...

While we waited for the Analysis Paralysis Players to finish their game, we two Tikal players began and finished a game of To Court the King. This is a super-cool dice game that many (including myself) have described as Yahtzee for gamers. Reminiscent of that other dice game, players roll dice in an effort to achieve certain combinations (full houses, three of a kind, and so on). But in this game, your dice combinations earn you courtiers. Each courtier has a special ability which helps you out in subsequent turns, such as bringing in additional dice or allowing you to change the numbers on the dice you rolled. The goal of all of this is to build up to the point where you can roll seven of a kind and claim the king. Once that occurs, the end game is triggered where each player competes in a roll-off where they try to achieve the largest number and highest ranked set of matching dice. Whoever achieves this wins the game. Naturally, whoever claims the king has an advantage in this final roll-off. It's luck heavy, as most dice games are, but there is also a surprising amount of room for strategic and tactical play. The special abilities of each of the courtiers heavily compensate for the whims of the dice. This is a great little game.

With that game over, we had to wait just a bit longer for Shadow of the Emperor to break up. Once it finally did, four of us ended our night with a lovely game of Tichu. I'd love to report that I soundly won this game but that would be a lie. In fact, I martyred myself on the gaming table by partnering with one of our newest gamers who had never played the game before. After a brief introduction to the rules and one quick practice hand, we dove right in to the game. Let's just say that things didn't go well for our newbie and me. There was a little confusion about the rules and a lot of confusion about the strategy. All of this and a couple of close (but failed) Tichu calls conspired to put us soundly in the cellar while our two experienced opponents charged over the finish line. It was a dismal showing but, despite the carnage, our newbie has decided that he likes the game (as well he should) and is eager to come back for more. Hopefully by then he'll have given some more thought to the strategy of the game but either way I have to say that being thrashed in Tichu is much more enjoyable than not playing Tichu at all.

My Wish: Have a Wormy Game Night

2007-08-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

I did play games last Tuesday night. There were people there with me. I remember vaguely such games as Detroit Cleveland Grand Prix, Notre Dame, and I know there were others. I should have found the time to write about them right away but life got busy. You know how that goes.

One game I do remember very well: If Wishes Were Fishes. I remember it for a couple of reasons. For one, it was the first time any of us had ever played it. But more than any other reason, I remember it for the worms. That's right. Worms. You see, the most interesting components that you'll find in this game are 30 bright purple squishy plastic worms. Oh, sure, there's also a nice big deck of cards, and a pretty tri-fold board, and some brightly colored wooden fish meeples; but the things that really grab your attention are the worms.

I'll probably try to do a real review of this game soon (one play does not a review make) but for now you'll have to be satisfied with my quick impressions. I liked it. It's not great but it's pretty fun. And I really liked the worms. I didn't do well and I kind of felt like my options were pretty limited by my circumstances but I suspect that with repeated plays I'll see more opportunities to employ strategy as opposed to just hanging on wherever the game takes me. But even if I don't, I still think it was a pretty fun ride and I really like the whimsical theme and the lovely bits.

Tuesday's Gaming

2007-08-16T22:24:00.001-07:00

I'm late with this post but I have a good excuse. First of all, I've been working overtime (which can be a good thing). Second of all, we have a house guest this week (definitely a good thing 'cause he's a nice guy and he likes games). And finally, my sister-in-law passed away this week after a long fight with a brain tumor (not such a good thing but at least her ordeal is now over). That last one has proved a bit of a distraction as we deal with the fallout and get ready for the funeral this weekend.

Our house guest Greg is staying with us while he gets settled in his new job and finds a place for his family to live. We were happy to have him join us for game night this Tuesday. Hopefully that will become a regular thing.

Lots of games were played but the big long one was Britannia. Four of our group started this up almost immediately and didn't finish until game night was over. It's a long game. I like it but it's too long for my tastes. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Our kids are going to be studying British history this year and we'll likely pull out this game after that unit since the whole game is played over a historically accurate time line.

Meanwhile, those of us who wanted to actually play more than one game kept busy with other games. First up for me was Pillars of the Earth. I just recently started reading the novel upon which this game is based and this was the first time I'd played the game since I started reading the novel. It's even more interesting now that I recognize who the characters mentioned in the game actually are. You don't need to have ever heard of the novel to appreciate the game but it does add just a teensy bit of flavor which is kind of fun.

Next I played a game of Tichu with Adam, and two of my sons. This was a little bit frustrating for Adam and I since we've played so many games and my sons are just learning. But they're getting better and I'll have them whipped into shape in no time. Everybody's got to start somewhere. I'm glad they're learning young.

The final game of the evening for me was Thebes. And (as is often the case) I discovered that we had missed one teensy little rule the last time we played it which made quite a bit of difference. This time we got it right and I must say that the game was better for it. Somehow we missed that wiping cards in Warsaw costs one week in addition to travel time. (We did not miss the rule about costing additional weeks for subsequent wipes.) Without that rule, it's way too easy to wipe the cards and then pick up the best of whatever comes up before someone else gets a turn, which leads to players getting too many good cards, which leads to too much success at the digs, which leads to later digs being worthless. This time the digs were still somewhat valuable right up to the end. I still think the game is pretty luck heavy but I really don't mind the luck so much since it fits the theme so well.

Last Night's Gaming

2007-08-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

We had a great turnout last night. It was good to see Christopher and his new son pop by for the first half of the evening. Since the little nipper's sprung to life a few weeks back, Christopher's been notably absent from our little gatherings.

I thought it would be fun to bring an older classic for our opener so I brought Ricochet Robots which is one of my all-time favorite games. This is one of those games that people either love or hate. I love it. Five robots are scattered about a grid-like factory floor. Robots can move in a straight line either horizontally or vertically but they can't stop on the slippery floor unless they bump into something like a wall or another robot. Each round someone turns over a goal disk and players have to find a way to move one of the robots to the matching goal space (marked on the floor) in as few moves as possible. Once one player finds a solution he calls out the number of moves and turns the timer. Now everyone has until the timer runs out to find a shorter path. Whoever finds the shortest path keeps the goal disk as a point.

One of the reasons I really love this game is because any number of people can play it and it's very easy for people to join or leave the game in the middle. Because each goal is like solving its own puzzle, I never really pay any attention to the score. The fun is in solving the puzzles quickly. It's the perfect opener.

Christopher had been dying to play Notre Dame so he and four others sat down to play a game of that. I've written enough about this game recently and I wasn't a part of this group so I'll leave it at that.

Meanwhile, four of us sat down for a game of Thebes (also known as Jenseits von Theben). In this game, players are archaeologists who try to gather knowledge about various ancient cultures which they then hope to transfer into success at the digs. This game was a Spiel des Jahres nominee and I had heard good things about it. My initial reaction is favorable but with some reservations. First of all, the components are excellent. The game comes with dozens of artifact discs which go in five colored cloth bags that represent each of the five dig sites. Digging is simulated by drawing a disk from the appropriate bag. Each player also has a really cool wheel which is really just a glorified chart but it's a heck of a lot more fun that a boring chart would have been. My only complaint with the game is that it is VERY luck heavy. I think that the luck can be somewhat moderated but even with really good play there is still an awful lot of luck that is simply beyond the player's control. Still, I enjoyed playing and I'm sure I'll play it again.

As a filler, we played a few hands of Mü while we waited for one of the other games to break up so we could mix up the players a bit.

When everyone was free again we mixed up the players and one group went off to play The Thief of Baghdad. I played this a couple of weeks ago and while I enjoyed it, it's probably not going to become one of my favorites. I felt it was a little on the dry side. I'll have to play it again though and see if my initial impression stands up.

The rest of us played a game of Aladdin's Dragons. This is a classic blind bidding game by Richard Breese, who happens to be one of my favorite game designers. In this game, players collect treasures from dragons' lairs beneath the city which they then bring up to the caliph's palace to exchange for magic artifacts. We played with the advanced rules which allow players to use the magic artifacts they collect as well as spell cards to influence the game. I enjoy playing that way but it does add a certain level of both complexity and chaos to the game. The game is much more predictable if you play with the basic rules. I think both ways have their merits.

When that game broke up, some of our group headed home and four of our number started up a game of Tichu. That left just three of us and so we decided to play a game of Colosseum, the latest game from Days of Wonder. As usual, I got my butt whooped. I enjoyed the game though. This time we played with the auction variant that allows players to bid in more auctions than the basic rules allow. The result of this is that money becomes a little more valuable. One of our complaints about the basic rules is that money becomes almost worthless at the end of the game. This variant seems to fix that problem. I enjoyed the game but I still think that it's missing something to push it up into the realm of greatness. I don't know exactly what it is. Perhaps it's just sour grapes from having lost the game so many times now. *grin*

By the way, here's the variant rule we used. When auctioning off market tiles, every time the auctioneer wins an auction, the markets are replenished as normal but now all players may bid in the next auction even if they've won an auction already this round. So say we have three players: A, B and C. A starts the first auction. B wins. B is now out and may not bid on subsequent auctions. A starts another auction and this time C wins. Now C is out. A starts another auction which he wins for the minimum bid because he has no competition. Now all markets are replenished, B is the next auctioneer and all players may bid again. The process repeats until C is the auctioneer and either wins or passes on an auction.

Happiness is...

2007-08-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

...the vice calling 9s when you hold four 7s and three 8s, one of which is over five or six yellows.

Net result: taking all but one trick on a five bid of 7s over 9s for 115 points.

Wheeee!

Review: Notre Dame

2007-08-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

One of the games that has recently made a big impression is Notre Dame by Stefan Feld. Notre Dame is for 3-5 players and games last about an hour. It's also the latest in the prestigious line of Alea big-box games. This line includes such classics as Puerto Rico, Ra and Taj Mahal so it's not surprising that there would be high expectations for this game.

In Notre Dame, players assume the role of influential Parisian families who each control one of the boroughs near the cathedral of Notre Dame in the 14th century. Each player attempts to use his family's influence to increase his power and prestige in the borough. It's an interesting theme that is well supported with the components and artwork but it's almost completely unsupported by the mechanics. The mechanics of the game really have almost nothing to do with the theme and, like many European games, the game is actually rather abstract and could just as well have been assigned almost any other theme. Of course if the game is a good one then that's not really all that important. Is it?

Components

As is to be expected with an Alea game, the game components are first rate. Inside the box you will find dozens of brightly colored wooden cubes, pawns and markers; several sheets of sturdy cardboard tokens, coins, and influence (victory point) counters; a pack of beautifully illustrated cards; three Notre Dame tiles; and five game board sections.

The game board sections are very clever. There is one for each player in the game. Together they form the game board. In the center of the table is placed one of the Notre Dame tiles. For a three player game, the triangular Notre Dame tile is used. For four players it's a square and for five it's a pentagon. The game board sections, which represent the various boroughs are placed around the Notre Dame tile. The borough tiles are all shaped in such a way that they will always fit together perfectly no matter how many players are participating. It's a clever mechanism that adds a nice finished touch to the game.

Game Play

Notre Dame is a progressive influence game with a card-driven action mechanic. Players play a card, and take the appropriate action. Each action typically results in an influence cube being placed in one of the seven sections of a player's borough. Each section offers a different escalating reward. The more cubes that are present in a section when a new cube is placed there, the better the reward. This game rewards committing to improve a few sections a lot rather than trying to improve each of them a little.

The game is played over three periods, each of which has three rounds. Each player has their own deck of nine action cards. At the beginning of each round, each player draws three cards from their action deck. One of those cards is chosen to remain in the player's hand and the other two are passed to the player's left. Then one card is chosen from the two cards received from the player to the right and the remaining card is again passed to the left. This drafting mechanism results in each player holding three cards at the start of each round, one of his own, one from the player to the right, and one from the player sitting two seats to the right.

After the hands are drafted, there is a round of actions during which each player will play two of their three action cards and discard the third. These actions are played in turn order (twice around the table).

7 of the 9 action cards show one of the sections in a player's borough: the cloister, the bank, the residence, the carriage house, the park, the hospital, and the hotel. When a player plays one of these cards he takes an influence cube from his supply, places it in the appropriate section and takes the associated action. The sections give escalating rewards based on the number of cubes already in them. They include things such as getting more coins (used to buy the services of influential persons and contribute to the church), getting more influence cubes (if you ever run out you have to start pulling them from other sections), getting victory points, pest control (more on that later), and so on.

One card shows a trusted friend and allows the player to move his trusted friend marker (a pawn) into any of his seven sections and take the associated action as if he had just placed a cube; it behaves more or less like a wild card.

One of the action cards shows Notre Dame. When a player plays that card he places an influence cube on the Notre Dame tile and he must pay a donation to the church. Depending on how much he donates, he is rewarded with a number of influence points. Furthermore, at the end of each three round period, there are a number of influence points which will be divided among the cubes placed on the tile. If you're cube is the only cube in Notre Dame at the end of the period you stand to score big but if everyone has decided to contribute to Notre Dame during that period then you aren't going to score very many points.

Also on the table are three randomly selected person cards. After the action rounds, players may each buy the services of one of the three persons shown. Each one offers some special ability such as the ability to score based on the configuration of cubes on the board or perhaps the ability to take some bonus action in addition to the normal two.

The final thing that players must deal with at the end of each round is the plague. Each player has a small track in their borough with a black cube on it that represents the threat from the plague. At the end of each round, this cube will be advanced a number of spaces equal to the number of rats shown at the bottom of the three person cards, subtracted by the number of cubes the player has in his hospital section. If the plague marker ever goes past the ninth space the player is penalized two influence points and he also must remove an influence cube from his section with the most cubes. This is a pretty nasty penalty and players who neglect to pay attention to pest control may find that they are paying it repeatedly.

Conclusions

While the rules are fairly simple, Notre Dame is a relatively complex game with many different ways to score points, many potential avenues to victory. One of the hallmarks of a good game is that players are faced with many desirable options between which they are forced to choose. When I play Notre Dame, I always wish that I had more actions than I do and I always find myself wondering if perhaps I should have made a different choice than the one I just made. There is no question in my mind that this is a relatively deep game that holds up well over repeated playings.

This is also a very balanced game. There does not appear to be any one strategy that is obviously superior to another. They all have merits and in certain circumstances I could see any of them being successful. This seems to be supported by the fact that over several playings, all of our scores have tended to be relatively even and no single superior strategy has emerged.

If there is one aspect of the game that I could complain of it's the drafting mechanism. This is clearly designed to provide some much welcome player interaction and it mostly works very well. My only problem with it is that since cards are always passed to the left, players spend the entire game at the mercy of the player to their right. If the player to your immediate right notices that you are pursuing a particular strategy, she can refuse to pass you the cards you need in order to execute your strategy. And if she happens to be pursuing the exact same strategy, then you had better change strategies quickly because you can bet that she'll have far more success at it than you will. Nevertheless, this is a relatively minor problem and if players are flexible enough in their strategies they should be able to overcome it.

All in all, I think that this one shortcoming and the thin theme are more than outweighed by the wonderful, rich game play. This is a beautiful and elegant game that is well worthy of joining the other games in the prestigious Alea line. I definitely recommend it.

Glossary of Basic Card Game Terms

2007-08-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised by how often I sit down to play a card game with someone only to find that they have little or no experience playing card games and therefore have little or no knowledge of some of the most basic terms and tactics. Furthermore, as my young sons are growing up they are learning to play cards with me. For both of these reasons, I figured that it probably wouldn't hurt to compile a simple glossary. Hopefully you'll find this helpful.

This glossary focuses mainly on terms which I have used or heard used in trick taking games such as Bridge, Hearts, Pinochle, Mü etc. I don't pretend that it's a comprehensive list. I start with the most basic terms and work up from there so if it seems really basic then don't worry, just keep reading. I also touch briefly on etiquette in some places.

Card
A flat rectangular object (typically made of sturdy paper and/or plastic) which has a face and a back. The backs are generally all the same making it impossible to tell one card from another by looking at the backs. The face (or front) is typically marked with a Rank and Suit.

Pack or Deck
A collection of cards. A standard Bridge deck has 52 cards. Decks also often contain two additional cards called Jokers which are used in some games.

Rank
The number of a card which typically indicates its value or strength. A standard Bridge deck of playing cards is ranked (in descending order) A K Q J 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. In some games As are 1s and rank low. In some games 10 ranks above K (A 10 K Q J 9 …). A stands for Ace, K for King, Q for Queen, J for Jack. 2 is often pronounced Deuce. The King, Queen and Jack are often called "face cards" because they historically represented ranks of royalty and often bear an appropriate image. Aces are sometimes also considered face cards.

Suit
The symbol (and/or color) on a card. A standard Western Bridge deck is divided equally into four suits: ♠Spades, ♥Hearts, ♦Diamonds, and ♣Clubs with one card of each rank making up the thirteen cards in each suit. Hearts and Diamonds are typically red; Spades and Clubs are black.

Shuffle
The act of randomizing the order of cards in a deck. The most common is a riffle shuffle where the deck is divided into two halves which are then interleaved back together by allowing cards to fall from both halves at the same time into a single pile.

Cut
The act of choosing a new top card by randomly dividing a deck in half and placing the lower half on top of the upper half. It is generally considered good form for the dealer to allow the player to his right to cut the deck after it is shuffled but before it is dealt. Typically the player to the dealer's right pulls off the top half of the deck and the dealer places the bottom half on the top to complete the cut. The player to the dealer's right may opt to simply tap the deck, indicating that he doesn't wish to cut. Cutting ensures that the dealer can't cheat by forcing a card to remain on the top or the bottom of the deck during the shuffle. It also ensures that if the bottom card has been spotted during the shuffle, no one will know whose hand receives that card.

Deal
The act of dividing the deck into hands for each of the players. Usually done by giving the top card from the deck to each player in turn until all cards have been dealt or until each player has a proscribed number of cards (depending upon the game being played). Dealing is typically done clockwise. The player to the left of the dealer traditionally receives the first card. It is generally considered bad form to pick up your hand until it is completely dealt.

Hand
A set of cards delt to a player forms that player's hand. A standard Bridge hand is made up of 13 randomly chosen cards. The term can also refer to a complete set of tricks. In many trick taking games, scoring takes place after the entire hand (or set of tricks) has been played.

Trick
A trick is the basic unit of play in trick taking games. Each player in turn plays a single card, face up to the center of the table. The player who played the highest ranking card then "wins the trick" and all cards that were played are captured and usually placed face down in front of the victor. In most games, the number of tricks taken (and often the rank of the cards won) is used to determine the player's score. In many games, (such as Bridge) players play as teams or partnerships, with the captured tricks collected by only one partner.

Lead
The first card played to start a trick. Usually the player who won the previous trick earns the right to lead for the next trick.

Follow Suit
Playing a card belonging to the same suit as the card that was lead. Most trick taking games require that each player follow suit whenever possible.

Trump (n)
In most trick taking games, one suit is declared as trump. This suit is more powerful than the other suits.

Fail Suit/Outside Suit
A suit that has not been named trump.

Ruff/Trump (v)
Playing a trump card that does not follow suit. This typically wins the trick unless a subsequent player can "overruff" or, in other words, play a higher ranking trump card.

Throw Off
Playing a card that does not follow suit but isn't trump.

Duck
Voluntarily playing a card that is ranked lower than the card which is currently winning the trick. Usually done in an effort to save a higher card for subsequent tricks.

No Trump
In some games, "no trump" may be declared for the hand in which case there is no trump suit. In a no trump hand it is impossible to ruff since there is no trump suit.

Void
A player is said to be "void in a suit" if he has no cards in that particular suit. If a player holds trump cards then he will often wish to be void in one or more fail suits.

Long
A suit is "long" if a player has more than the average cards in a given suit.

Short
A suit is "short" if a player has fewer than the average cards in a given suit.

Singleton
A player has a singleton if he has only a single card in a suit.

Stopper
A card that is guaranteed to win a trick in its suit (unless someone can trump).

Contract
The contract indicates the goal that a player (or partnership) must achieve in order to win the hand. It's typically measured by either points or cards taken in play. If the player makes his contract then he is usually awarded some bonus. If he fails, he is usually penalized.

Bid (or Auction)
In many games, before the first trick in a hand is played there is a bidding round. Bidding serves two purposes: (1) to reveal something of each player's hand; and (2) to set a contract (or goal) for the hand. In most bidding games, one player will open with a bid and each player in turn will be given the opportunity to pass or make a counter bid (which often must be higher than the previous bid). The winner of the bid typically gets to name a trump suit and often will have won the right to make the first lead. Bidding is very important because it serves to counteract much of the luck inherent in a card game. Strong hands will tend to result in higher bids and therefore more risk for the bidder. Bidding and contracts take what otherwise would be a game of immense luck and turn it into a game of skill. For this reason, most serious card players prefer to play games such as Bridge, and Mü which have intense bidding rounds over games like Hearts and Whist which do not.

Lead Back
A lead back is a signal (or tell) between two partners. The partner will deliberately lead (or sometimes throw off) a losing fail card as a signal to his partner that he is now void in that suit and wishes that suit to be lead again so he may ruff. It's important to know if the other players are familiar with this tactic and to watch for it.

Running Trump
When a player deliberately leads trump in order to draw trump cards from the other hands. In games where players must follow suit, leading trump forces all other players to also play trump. If a player has been keeping track of how many trump cards have already been played (which he should) he may be able to drain all the trump cards from the hand, thus making his high fail suit cards good.

Finesse
A technique that allows a player to win a trick with a card that isn't the highest ranking card left in a suit. A finesse takes advantage of the position of the cards. For instance, if I know that my partner holds the Ace and the Queen, and the player to my left holds the King then I will lead a card in that suit. If the player to my left plays his King then my partner plays the Ace, making his Queen good. Otherwise he plays the Queen. Either way we take two tricks. Obviously this requires some knowledge of where the cards are. Generally the location of some cards will be revealed during bidding and the location of others can be deduced during play.

Card Counting
The act of remembering which cards have been played and who has played them. Optimal play requires that players deduce who might hold which cards. It is particularly important to note when a player throws off or ruffs because it indicates that he's void in that suit. It's equally important to keep track of the highest ranked cards remaining in each suit so that you know when the cards you hold may become good. Keeping track of the number of trump cards left in play is also very important.

The Night of Games

2007-08-02T15:25:00.001-07:00

Another Tuesday, another Game Night. My oldest son accompanied me this Tuesday night and we were joined by a little fewer than our normal compliment of gamers. Summer being in full swing, it's clear that many of our regulars are out enjoying themselves in various other places. Still, there were more than enough of us to get some good gaming in.

The first big game of the night for me was Notre Dame. After several playings I still think this is a very good, well-balanced game with deep strategies. I like it. However, there is one thing that really bugs me about it and that is that your options are so strongly governed by the player sitting to your right. If he has the same strategy as you, or if he just feels like it, he can very easily prevent you from getting the cards you need to execute your strategy, which is exactly what happened to me. I'll be writing a review soon. No really, I swear.

Meanwhile, others played a game of Atlantic Star. This is a very nice card game where players try to collect sets of cards which represent ocean liner routes. I've played it numerous times but I'm starting to tire of it a little and so I didn't really mind not being part of this one.

After our Notre Dame game broke up I got involved in a three-player game of Shear Panic! I recently reviewed this game so scroll down a bit if you're curious. The short of it is that it's a great game with even better bits. It's not perfect (it's quite chaotic) but I love it. I won this one but I could very easily have lost both of my sheep in the last field if I hadn't lucked into rolling a Ewe Turn just before shearing time which really saved my mutton.

Next up for some of our group (not me) was Pillars of the Earth. I've written about this game several times recently. I like it. Just enough luck to make it family friendly coupled with just enough strategy to make it suitable for the more serious gamers in your group. It's a delicious blend that goes down nice and easy. Tasty.

Four of our more die hard card players struck up a game of Pinochle. This classic trick taker with it's slightly strange deck formed of duplicated standard cards ranked A 10 K Q J (and sometimes 9) is a staple in the American Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.) but you don't see it played much around this neck of the woods. Most of us (myself included) have never played. I'd like to learn but this wasn't the night for it. I was needed elsewhere.

The last game of the evening for me was Mü. My son, who's still just learning to play trick taking games well was in on this one and he did pretty well for a novice. This can be a pretty tough game if you're just learning the subtleties of card play but it's worth the effort and he did just fine.

At some point during the evening a Tichu game was played but I wasn't part of it.

Review: Shear Panic!

2007-07-26T01:20:00.000-07:00

Imagine if you will that you are a sheep in a small flock. You spend your days staying as close as you can manage to the other members of your flock because that's what sheep do: they stay with the flock. Every once in a while a sheep might stray from the flock but that seldom lasts long. Every so often a handsome ram might show up in which case you rush to the front of the flock to get as close to him as you can. And when it comes time to be shorn, you rush to the back of the flock to retain your lovely fleece for as long as possible. All that rushing from front to back can be rather chaotic. In fact, ewe might say it's Shear Panic!

Shear Panic is a strategy game for two to four players. It's published in this country by Mayfair Games and designed by the Lamont Brothers. Typical playing time is around 45 minutes.

Components

I'd almost be satisfied to write this section of the review and leave it at that. The components are that good. The caption on the box should give you some idea of what to expect: "The Best Game Ewe Ever Herd!" Inside you will find a sturdy score board, four player boards, four scoring markers, four sets of "mutton buttons" (wooden disks), and a very well made full-color rule book stuffed with corny sheep puns and silly illustrations.

All of that is nice enough but what is most impressive is that you also get a complete flock of nine hand-painted ceramic sheep, plus one hand-painted ceramic ram (his name is Roger), and one hand-painted ceramic shearer figure. The ceramic figures in this game are absolutely adorable. The sheep each sit on a square base that's roughly two inches square. They look like they could have been designed by Aardman Studios (Wallace & Gromit). They have that same whimsical feel: big eyes, vapid stare, dopey smiles. The game is worth its price for the figures alone. In fact, all of the artwork in the game is simply wonderful.

Game Play

This is a "perfect information" game. That means that players always know all available information. Nothing is hidden and almost nothing is random.

Each player has two of the eight white ceramic sheep (marked with a splash of color on their backs). There is also a ninth black sheep which starts in the center of the flock. The game begins with the nine sheep arranged in a square so that no player's sheep are next to one another. Players place their scoring markers and the white flock marker on the first space of the scoring track (which looks like a path winding its way through four fields). Each player's "mutton buttons" are placed near his player board which is placed in front of him.

Before the game begins in earnest, each player rolls the colored die and performs a "lamb slam" on one of the sheep whose color comes up. A lamb slam is one of the many moves that a player could execute on his turn. It means pushing a sheep of the appropriate color one space in any direction, also pushing any other sheep that might have been in her way. This serves to randomize the starting configuration of the flock a little bit but it also pays to think carefully during this phase because otherwise you could find yourself in a real disadvantage right from the start.

A player's turn consists of choosing one of the available actions listed on their player card, covering it up with one of their "mutton buttons" and then performing that action. This means that each action can be chosen only once during the entire game. Since the actions have the potential to affect the entire flock, a big part of this game is deciding when to execute which action and watching your opponents to see what actions remain available to them.

All of the actions involve shifting the flock in some way or another: sliding rows, rotating the entire flock 90 degrees (thereby changing who is in front and who is in back), hopping one sheep over another, things like that. Occasionally the flock will become disconnected and when that happens the flock must be regrouped. Usually the active player has some control over how the regrouping is done and in fact, players often will take that into account when they decide which action to choose.

Another effect of choosing an action is that it determines how far the flock marker moves along the scoring track. The scoring track doubles as a timer. As the flock marker progresses through the four different fields the game progresses toward its conclusion. Furthermore, the field that the flock marker is in determines how players score points on that turn. When choosing an action, it's a good idea to consider how far the flock marker will move since that will probably affect how and when points are scored.

When the flock is in the first field, players score points by having their two sheep near each another at the end of their turn. Roger Ram is in the second field and when the flock is in the second field, players score more points by having their ewes near the front of the flock. During the third field, players want their sheep to be as close to the black sheep as possible. Finally, in the last field, the flock is shorn and players score points by keeping their lambs as far back in the flock (and thus away from the shearer) as possible.

Conclusions

On the surface, this is a light and whimsical game, suitable for kids and adults alike; but scratch beneath the surface and you'll find a deceptively tricky game of analysis and careful planning. In fact, it seems that the more experienced and serious the game players, the longer this game will take to play because, like all perfect information games, it is definitely susceptible to in depth analysis and (dare I say) even analysis paralysis. This game rewards careful thinkers but at the same time, it's whimsical enough to be enjoyable by all. The sheep are so cute and cuddly that the game is nearly irresistible and the fact that it's also a solid game clinches the deal. This truly is one of "the best games ewe ever herd". I highly recommend it.

Another Good Game Night

2007-07-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

We had a good turnout for last night's game night and there were several good games that hit the table.

When I arrived, folks were playing For Sale. For Sale is a fabulous short filler game by Stefan Dorra. It's played in two rounds: during the first round players bid on numbered property cards (the higher the number, the better the properties). In the second round, players simultaneously choose one of the property cards they bought in the first round and, in order of the number on the property cards selected, they trade their cards in for numbered checks. It's very easy to play but there are some really great subtleties to the game. It also plays in around fifteen minutes which makes it an ideal gathering game.

Next was a game that was new to me: The Thief of Baghdad by Thorsten Gimmler. This is a very nice family strategy game that was one of this year's Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year) nominees. In this game, players try to put their thief tokens into the six palaces on the board so they can collect the treasure chests held within each. You need to have a certain number of your thieves in a palace before you can claim the treasure. I enjoyed the game very much and I'll probably try to play it again soon. My only complaint is that the English rules were rather poorly translated. This seems to be a periodically recurring malady with rules from Queen Games. I really like that their games are all multi-lingual but they REALLY need to find someone better to do their English translation. There were a few sections that were worded poorly enough that I actually resorted to looking at the Spanish rules for clarification. (Luckily I speak Portuguese which is close enough to Spanish that I was able to decipher it and get the clarification I was looking for.) Aqua Romana (another Queen game) had a similar issue with its English rules but they were even worse. The rules in The Thief of Baghdad are simple enough that the confusion in the rules wasn't a game breaker.

While three of us were playing The Thief of Baghdad, four others started a game of Britannia. This is a very rich old-school style history game that takes players through most of the ancient history of the British isles. It starts with the Roman occupation and ends with the Norman Invasion (if I remember correctly). Over the course of this long game (our guys played for at least four hours) players control numerous civilizations, each with their own distinct characteristics and objectives. One of the best aspects of this game is that the civilizations controlled by the four players become strongest (and therefore stand to score the most points) at different times in the game. For instance, the player who controls the Romans scores big early in the game whereas the player who controls the Celts stands to score big much later. The box says it plays 3-5 players but it's really designed to play properly with exactly four. I liked it very much when I played it but the long length keeps it from becoming one of my favorites.

My next game of the evening was Shear Panic by the Lamont Brothers. This is a really cute perfect information game where players manipulate a small flock of adorable ceramic sheep in order to score points based upon their configuration. There are four phases to the game, each of which rewards different configurations. In the first phase you want to get your two sheep as close to each other as possible. In the second phase you want to get your sheep as close to the front of the flock as you can. In the third phase you want your sheep to be close to the black sheep in the flock. And in the fourth phase you want your sheep to be as far back in the flock as possible. It's whimsical and short and very cute and it would be a light game if not for the fact that it's also a perfect information game which means that gamers like us tend to analyze more deeply than I think was intended. The little hand-painted ceramic sheep are so adorable that even if the game weren't a good one (and it is) I'd want a copy.

Meanwhile another group played a game of Bohnanza with the Bohnaparte expansion. I've played Bohnanza plenty of times and I've played the High Bohn expansion once or twice but I've never played Bohnaparte before. It looked quite good and that seemed to be the consensus of those playing.

While we were waiting for that game to break up so we could mix players up a bit, we played a single hand of three player Mü. Mü is intended to be played with 4-6 players but I think that our three player variant works quite well. It'd be a particularly effective way to teach the game I would think since the new player can learn from the way people play the dummy hand.

The final game of the evening for me was Alan Moon's wonderful game Elfenland. Five of us played using the "home city" variant. I did quite well, managing to tie for the lead. I was able to visit all but one city and I ended on my home city, meaning that I was one point short of a perfect score. I'd have had a perfect score if not for one road block that was placed in just the wrong spot. I really like this game but when I play with my kids we have to leave the road block tiles out. They can't handle the screwage factor that the road blocks inject into the game. I have to say that I kind of prefer it that way too. One road block can really screw up your turn. We were thinking that the road block rule might be gentler if, instead of requiring you to play an extra card of the specific type needed for that route, a roadblock merely required that you play one extra card of any type. I'll have to try it that way and see if that softens up the road block rule enough for my kids.

Well, that was my night. I had a ton of fun. Can't wait for next Tuesday!

Game Night: The Rerun

2007-07-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

This week's game night writeup could have been a cut and paste job from last week's. I played almost eactly the same set of games: Notre Dame, Caylus Magna Carta, and Mü. In fact, I think I'll refrain from commenting on those three too much except to say that I still like all three, I still suck at Notre Dame, and Caylus Magna Carta is just different enough from the original game that the formula for success continues to elude me.

Once again I brought my three oldest sons and once again they had a good time. While I way playing my first two games (see above) my boys played the Well of Darkness Expansion for Descent. Now Descent is a gorgeous game and I can totally understand why so many folks like it but it's a little too long for my tastes so I was only too happy to let others play the game with my boys. It's a dungeon crawler where one player runs a dungeon and the other players try to raid the place, kill all the nasty beasties and take their stuff. This time the players lost. Badly. But they all had a good time. At one point, if I understand correctly, the players' desperate strategy was to kill one of their own players because he had some artifact on him that would have caused him to explode and take with him all surrounding critters. They couldn't even manage to do that though. Ha! Good times.

Also hitting the table last night was Reiner Knizia's masterpiece: Tigris & Euphrates. This is one of the best euro-games ever made. It's highly strategic with a very strong tactical element. The abstract concepts fit well with the theme. (Yes, I'm aware that some would disagree with me on that but they're wrong, and this is my blog so I get to say so!) The pieces are beautiful. The whole package is very satisfying. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

If you're in the neighborhood, come join us next week!

Three Player Mü

2007-07-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

Lately we've been playing an awful lot of Mü at lunch. I recently reviewed this game so go give that a read if you've never heard of it and then come back here. I'll wait.

Back yet? Good.

Today at lunch there were only three of us, which is pretty rare. Usually when that happens we play three player Tichu, which is somewhat less than satisfying but better than playing nothing at all. Today we didn't have a Tichu deck with us. We had been planning on playing a four player game of Mü but our fourth player had to cancel at the last minute and we didn't get the message.

So what to do when you have only three players and a Mü deck? (We didn't have the rule book with us so we couldn't try any of the three player games described in the Mü & More rules.) Why not try to come up with a good three player variant? Well that's exactly what we did and I think it worked really well. In fact, the common consensus is that it's just as good as (if not better than) three player Tichu.

So, in the interest of continuing to promote this excellent game, I hereby present our rules for...

Three Player Mü

This game plays almost identically to the four player game. Four hands are dealt as normal. The major difference is that one hand is played by a dummy player. Let's call him Fred.

Fred's position rotates with the deal. He always sits opposite the dealer. The "real" players remain in their same positions throughout the game. So the second pile of cards dealt always belongs to Fred no matter who dealt them.

Bidding progresses exactly as in a four player game. Fred does not bid and no one gets to see Fred's cards during bidding. This means that Fred can never be chief, nor can he ever be vice.

Once bidding has concluded, the vice (if there is one) chooses under-trump as normal and the chief chooses over-trump as normal. The chief then chooses a partner as normal. That means the chief can either choose Fred or the remaining player as partner.

Once the partner has been chosen, Fred's hand is revealed to all players. Fred's hand is played exactly like any other player's and his play is controlled by whichever player is on his team. So if the chief chooses to partner with Fred then the chief will play Fred's hand, otherwise the vice will play Fred's hand.

Fred takes tricks just like any other player and his tricks are kept and scored separately, just as if Fred were a real player. All bonuses and penalties apply as normal but since Fred can never be chief or vice, he will never lose points due to a failed bid.

And that's how to play three player Mü. We found that it played very well. Having only three players participate in the bidding definitely alters the feel of the bidding a bit from the four player game but it didn't really seem to be an overwhelming change. The fact that all players get to see Fred's hand is definitely a huge advantage to whomever is leading but it doesn't ruin the game. Especially since all players have exactly the same knowledge. I'd definitely prefer to play with four flesh-and-blood players but as three player games go, this is definitely well worth playing.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Game Night! Woot!

2007-07-11T08:41:00.001-07:00

Last night was our weekly game night. We had a good turnout. In addition to most of our regulars, I brought my oldest three sons. Here are some of the night's highlights.

I arrived just as people were starting to divide up for games and five of us jumped right in to a game of Notre Dame. This is the latest Alea game and it definitely lives up to the standards of the line (one of gaming's finest). The game is a card driven strategy board game with some production elements, some area control elements, some drafting elements (think of the card drafting in Fairy Tale) and turn after turn of extremely difficult decisions. I don't mean difficult as in the game is hard to learn; I mean difficult as in "Drat! I want to do ALL of these things but I can only do one of them!" I really enjoy it. I'll try to write up a proper review soon.

Next up for me was a four player game of Caylus Magna Carta. I just reviewed this game so I won't go into too much detail about it here except to say that it does a superb job of shortening Caylus and making it more accessible to casual gamers. The only negative thing I can say about Caylus Magna Carta is that it does introduce a certain measure of luck and that certainly didn't work in my favor this game. But what really made this game odd was that for some reason, on both of the first two turns someone pushed the provost all the way back to the very first card on the road, meaning that only one player got any resources and the rest of us just wasted coins putting workers on the road. It was a truly strange beginning but the game was still fun.

Rounding out the night for me was a four player game of Mü with the guys I regularly play with at lunch. Mü really shines when it's played with a bunch of people who are all pretty experienced at the game. Card play is still important, but the bidding rounds become crucial. The game is won or lost on the bids. This game saw some particularly heated bidding. One hand in particular stands out. The bidding went on forever with Jason and Mike continually jockeying for chief and Adam and I revealing card after card strengthening our candidacy for partner and encouraging Mike and Jason to continue bidding. By the time the dust settled, Jason's bid of 11 (yes, you read that right) won him chief. Making a bid that high requires taking all but ten points in play, perhaps two tricks if the points fall just right. Mike called ones as under-trump, since Jason and Adam had pretty much every yellow between them and Mike had the yellow one. Jason then called no-trump (even though a color is typically a safer bid and the bonus points for making a bid top out at 100, meaning that the extra risk wasn't worth extra points to him with a bid that high) and chose Adam as partner. (The no-trump call was a bit of a surprise but the partner wasn't.) By now, all the other guys at game night had gathered around to watch the carnage. We had to keep reminding people not to comment on the play. *grin* Play then began with Jason and Adam carefully splitting the tricks (most going to Jason). Mike an I were carefully protecting the cards that we hoped would take us just two or three tricks. Would it be enough to ruin Jason's bid? As the game wound down, I was left with two high cards in suits that I knew Jason would eventually have to lead. Sure enough, I took the last two tricks. Unfortunately they were worth only 9 points. Jason had made his bid with only one point to spare. If Mike or I had taken just two more points we'd have set them. It was a great moment.

Other games played last night included RoboRally, Augsburg 1520, and Tichu.

If you're anywhere near Redmond, come join us next week! Look for us in the Microsoft building 50 café every Tuesday night after 5.

Review: Caylus Magna Carta

2007-07-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

One of last year's biggest games was Caylus from Ystari games so when I heard they were coming out with a card game version called Caylus Magna Carta I was very interested. Caylus Magna Carta is also by William Attia. It plays in about an hour and it supports 2-4 players. Like its big brother, Caylus Magna Carta is a deep strategy game where players take on the role of master builders building a castle but this time things have been simplified a little, shortened up a bit, and just a smidgeon of luck has been tossed in the mix for good measure. The results are… well read on.

Components

Caylus Magna Carta comes in the Ystari small box format, which means it comes in a box that's similar in size to Mykerinos: about 11 by 7 by 2 inches. Inside the box you'll find 100 wooden resource cubes (representing food, wood, stone and gold) a wooden provost disc, a deck of cards, wooden workers, assorted coins, and prestige tokens. Each player gets a passing marker, four workers, and their own set of 12 building cards in their own color. There are also 12 common building cards (5 pink neutral buildings and 7 blue prestige buildings), a bridge card and a castle card. In the Rio Grande Games (English market) edition you'll also find one bonus prestige building: the Library, which wasn't available in the original version.

As with the original game, all of the artwork is superb and the iconography is quite good. The rule book is beautifully illustrated and well organized. In fact, the rule book is actually double-sided. Reading from one side you'll learn the "Beginner rules". Reading from the other side you'll learn the "Standard rules". The major difference between the two is that the beginner rules leave out rules relating to residences and the provost. I would imagine that most seasoned gamers will want to go straight to the standard rules but the beginner rules are a little simpler and lead to a gentler and faster game.

Rules

Each player starts with 2 food cubes (pink), 2 wood cubes (brown), 4 denier (coins) and their 4 worker pawns. Each player's deck of 12 building cards is shuffled and the top three cards are drawn to make up that player's starting hand. A number of pink cards (which depends on the number of players), the castle card and the bridge card are laid out on the table so that the pink cards form a road leading from the castle and the bridge. The blue prestige buildings are laid out face up on the table, along with the piles of resource cubes, coins, and castle tokens, where all players can have access to them.

At the start of most turns, each player collects two coins as income and then players take turns executing actions until all players pass. An action consists of either paying a coin to take a new building card into your hand, paying a coin to refresh your hand (discard all your cards and draw the same number from your deck), paying a coin to put a worker token somewhere on the road, or erecting a building by paying its construction cost and placing it at the end of the road, thereby extending the length of the road by one card.

Once all players have passed, each building in the road that has a worker token on it is executed in turn. Most buildings produce resource cubes. Some buildings produce coins. Some let you exchange cubes or coins for different cubes or coins. Many buildings offer a primary effect for the person who put their token on the building and a secondary effect for the player who built the building. All buildings are worth a certain amount of victory points at the end of the game for whichever player built the building.

After all of the building effects are executed players may choose to contribute batches of cubes toward the construction of the castle. Each batch of three cubes (1 food, 1 wood, 1 stone, with gold acting as a wild card) contributed to the castle earns a castle token. Castle tokens are divided into Dungeon tokens (worth 4 prestige points), Wall tokens (worth 3), and Tower tokens (worth 2). Since the Dungeon tokens are taken first, contributing to the castle early is more valuable than contributing late. In each round, whoever offers the most batches to the castle (ties broken by passing order) earns a bonus of one gold cube.

Finally, the start player rotates clockwise and the next turn begins.

The game ends when all of the building tokens have been claimed.

Differences From Caylus

Caylus Magna Carta does a fantastic job of distilling the essence of its big brother into a shorter game but naturally you can't simplify and shorten the game without changing it. Here are some of the more important changes.

The most obvious change is that there is no board. Instead, building cards are played directly to the table and the road leading to the castle is built from those cards. One side effect of this is that there is no scoring track. This really isn't a problem since the score is easy to calculate from the collected tokens and points listed on the cards. In fact, it's something of an improvement since it's no longer possible to tell at a glance who is leading and who is trailing.

Another, more subtle change is that there is no bailiff. Instead, the provost simply marches two cards down the track each turn. That means that it's common for the provost to be at the end of the road after every turn. Of course, by using your turn at the bridge you can move the provost forward and back just as in the original game. (For those unfamiliar with Caylus, the provost marks the last active building on the road. If there are buildings with worker markers beyond the provost, they won't take effect. You have to move the provost out far enough for them to activate.)

Another major change is that there is no concept of "favor" in Caylus Magna Carta. The favor tracks and their special privileges are gone.

But perhaps the biggest change of all is that there are no carpenters or stone quarries. If you want to construct a building, you simply pay the cost and build it. This streamlines the play significantly but it also eliminates some of the cutthroat strategy from the original game where it was possible to prevent players from constructing new buildings by denying them access to the appropriate building. Instead, construction is limited to the buildings players have in their hands and the blue prestige buildings. Furthermore, since buildings on the road come from the players' individual decks, which are color coded, there is no need for house tokens (which in Caylus identify which player constructed the building).

The hand management aspect has got to be one of the more controversial changes because it introduces luck and hidden information into what was originally a perfect information game. In Caylus, the only luck in the game was in the initial setup and it affected all players equally. In Caylus Magna Carta, each player is subject to the luck of the cards drawn into the various players' hands. It's not an overwhelming factor and for many it will add enjoyment to the game but it is still a pretty big change.

Summary

I was very impressed with Caylus Magna Carta. I really loved Caylus but its length (often two or three hours) was sometimes a barrier to getting it to the table. Also, Caylus is a relatively complicated game and therefore it's not something that I'm likely to introduce to my more casual game playing friends. Caylus Magna Carta on the other hand, is much simpler and therefore much more approachable. Its shorter length (about an hour) makes it much easier to get to the table. And as a bonus, its smaller box makes it easier to lug around. Caylus Magna Carta does a brilliant job of capturing the essence of its bigger brother and distilling it into something that's much more palatable for the casual game player. I still prefer Caylus because I love the challenge of a deep, perfect information game; but I can see myself playing Caylus Magna Carta more often because it's nearly as good and it's much easier to bring to the table. I'm quite happy to own both and, in my opinion, everyone should own at least one or the other. If you happen to own neither of them, then Caylus Magna Carta would be a wonderful place to start.

Fireworks for Game Night? You shouldn't have!

2007-07-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Game night this Tuesday went on as scheduled. Since Tuesday was the 3rd of July and since fireworks go on sale in this county a few days before the 4th, I'm sure there were plenty of people firing off fireworks in honor of our game night. I mean what better reason could they have?

My two oldest sons went to game night with me and when we arrived there was already a game of No Thanks! in progress. Now I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again, there is really no better ultra-light filler game than No Thanks! It can be taught in 30 seconds and played in about five minutes. It can be played on even the smallest of tables. The game comes in a sturdy cardboard box just big enough for a deck of cards and a small zip bag of mini chips. The whole thing can be tossed in a purse or a coat pocket and brought out whenever the mood strikes. Waiting for a meal at a restaurant? Play No Thanks! Riding in an airplane? Play No Thanks! It works just about anywhere.

My first game of the evening was a game of Colosseum. It's a Days of Wonder game so of course the bits are first rate. I really love the emperor and console pawns which look like over-sized pawns dressed in costumes. The game has some very unique qualities such as the high-water-mark scoring system (your highest score on any of the five rounds is your final score). It has some production elements and some bidding elements and enough luck of the draw that my second eldest son was able to kick butt even though he'd never played it before. (I refuse to admit that he might be good at the game. That couldn't be it.) I like the game quite a bit and I'm eager to play again.

My oldest son spent most of his evening playing a two player game of Tide of Iron. This game could be described as either a deeper Memoir '44 or a simpler and prettier Advanced Squad Leader. It's a squad level World War II game with gorgeous miniatures and a very versatile modular board system. The board is made up of reversible heavy press-board (hard as wood) panels which can be configured in any number of different ways to make nearly an infinite number of scenarios. There are also hexagonal overlays that let you configure the maps even further. He loved it and has been trying to play it again ever since.

After our Colosseum game we played a game of The Downfall of Pompeii. I've mentioned this game several times recently. I like it enough that it seems I play it every other week. It's not a deep game and it's not a difficult game. Heck, it's not even a truly great game. But I really enjoy it anyway. What can I say? I just love chucking pieces into that volcano. I suppose it helps that I usually win.

We wrapped up with a game of five player Mü which both of my oldest boys played in. Neither of them had played the game before and I was worried that it might be too difficult for them, since they really haven't played any true trick taking games before other than Hearts (which really shouldn't count). As expected, the bidding was a bit too hard for them to get a feel for at first. But much to my pleasure, they had no difficulty at all grasping the rules. Their trouble was just that they didn't know how to evaluate how good their hands were and how high they should bid them. That's the same trouble that everyone has when they're learning this game so I don't think their ages (13 and 15) were a factor at all. My oldest over bid a couple of times and that hurt his score but he still played very well and there was really only one hand where he bid too high. The other bids he missed, he missed only by one so there is certainly no shame in that; in fact most of the time you'd rather miss a bid by one than allow your opponent to get away with a bid that he can make. We'll have to play this again soon so they can get some practice in. I'm sure with practice and a little more coaching they'll both be very good.

Finally, I want to drop a little hint that there are some changes in the works at House Full of Games. We're in the final stages of bringing on a new, larger distributor which will mean better access to new releases, an expanded product line, and a lot of great deals for you. Those of you on our store's RSS feed should see some new titles posted very soon. There may be some other surprises in the works too. We hope this is the beginning of great things. Keep your eyes open.

Whee!!! It's Game Night!

2007-06-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

We had a very nice turnout for last night's game night, although most people were at least a half hour late. For the first twenty or thirty minutes I was beginning to wonder if my watch were still on Chicago time or something. (I was in Chicago for my brother's wedding the weekend before last.)

My first game of the evening was a quick six player hand of Sticheln which we played while waiting for others to arrive. Sticheln is a fun game but it gets very chaotic with six or more players and you really need to play more than one hand.

Once we achieved critical mass, we divided up into groups and my group played a few hands of four player Mü. I still think that five is the sweet spot for this game but four is pretty close. We had some rather unusual card distributions this time around and that led to a couple of hands in a row that nearly ran the table. I'm happy to say that I was the beneficiary of most of those miracle hands. I don't remember all of the details but I do remember several hands in a row where the under-trump was a bit of a surprise and turned out to be exactly what the chief was looking for. At least two hands went like this: vice chooses number (usually 1s) with the thought of removing points from trump, chief has plenty of that number and also happens to have a pile of 9s and 7s in his hand (and usually unbeknownst to him, in his partner's hand as well) so he calls 7s and proceeds to run the table taking all but two or three tricks. That scenario repeated itself two or three times. The phrase of the night was "Whee!!!!!" and it was repeated many times. *grin*

Meanwhile the other group played Lenoardo Da Vinci. Leonardo is a very good production engine style game where players bid for resources that are used to produce inventions. As the game progresses, laboratories get progressively more powerful, enabling players to complete more valuable inventions. Our group really likes Leonardo and it seems to come out every other week. I'm not quite as hot on it as the rest of the group. I suspect that has something to do with the fact that I always seem to lose badly. One of these days I need to get back up on that horse but I didn't feel up to it last night.

After our Mü game finished, four of us sat down for a friendly game of Shogun. Well, the players may have been friendly but the competition was actually quite fierce. This was a very close game. I was in second after the first year and I was quite afraid that I wasn't going to be able to turn the game around in the second year. I was especially worried when Adam decided to break our truce and took two of my provinces in the very same season that I had built buildings on them. Well, in all honesty I rather expected it would happen but I still had hoped to have time to hold him off. Fortunately I was able to recapture one of them and capture a different key province from him in the next season. But the most curious aspect of this particular game was that we seemed to have a whole rash of big conflicts that ended with neither party controlling the contested provinces. Ben and Jason had something like four conflicts in a row (some of which looked decidedly one-sided going in) that resulted in ties and then in the final season, Adam and I lost a province in the same way. I was particularly worried in the last season when I lost both my rice production province and my gold production province before they could produce. I was sure to have a revolt and I was really counting on the gold to enable me to build a couple more buildings during that final season. Without the gold I was only able to build one theater instead of a castle, a temple and a theater. Without the rice I did indeed have a province revolt. Luckily I was able to suppress the revolt and my theater gave me the one point I needed to edge Adam out for the win by a single point. Talk about your close games! Good times.

Other games played tonight included Go, Tichu, and Nexus Ops. I'm sure there were others as well but I don't remember what they were.

Come join us next Tuesday! We meet at 5:00 in the Microsoft building 50 cafeteria. Just walk around the back and knock on the door if you need access. Someone will be happy to let you in.

Game Night's Game: Mykerinos

2007-06-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Tuesday's game night was very short for me. I had to go home early to help my wife paint the kitchen. We're nearing the end of a kitchen remodel and she had a party on Thursday and wanted things to look a little closer to done for her friends. Anyway, that meant that I only had time for one short game and Mykerinos got the nod.

Mykerinos is one of my very favorite light-weight area control games. It plays wonderfully with 2-4 players and it's very quick. Usually I can play this game in well under an hour and sometimes as little as 30 minutes if everybody knows what they're doing and plays quickly. This time took a little longer than that since one of the players hadn't played before and needed to be taught the rules. It still went very quickly though.

I didn't manage to get into the museum as early as I would have liked and I also had a minor miscalculation on the last turn. It ended a little sooner than I was prepared and I didn't have time to get all the cubes onto the board that I wanted to. Those two things cost me the win; but only just. I still came in a very close second.

I need to play this game more often. It really hits the sweet spot for me on so many levels: short, strategic, elegant, attractive. Gotta love it.

Hopefully next Tuesday I'll be able to stay for the whole evening.

Game Night

2007-06-15T07:04:00.001-07:00

Tuesday night was game night and I did play a couple of games; only a couple though because I arrived late.

My first game of the evening was a game of Tempus. This is a very light Civilization style game by Martin Wallace. It's heavily abstracted and feels very Euro-Gamery but I like it. It had been a while since we'd last played and it took us a little while to refresh our memory on the rules but it went pretty smoothly afterward. Unfortunately, our minds were also a little fuzzy on the strategy and so we let Adam get a really good starting position all to himself. There was really little question as to who would win after the first few turns. Hopefully we can play this one again soon and give Adam some real competition.

Next up was a game of Tichu. Mike and I teamed up against Adam and Kai. Mike and I got out to an early lead. We teased Kai and Adam by allowing them to nearly catch up just before the last hand. The final hand was a doozy though. Kai was holding a very strong hand. He had something like three aces and the dragon and he had passed the dog to Adam. What's more, although Kai didn't know it, Adam was holding a bomb so that only made Kai's hand even stronger. Naturally, Kai called "Tichu". What he didn't know was that Mike also had a bomb and I was holding not one but two bombs! As it was, Kai still almost made his Tichu call. It took all three of our bombs to stop him but three bombs proved just enough for Mike and I not only to stop Kai but also to go out one-two for the double win. What a satisfying way to end a Tichu game.

Speaking of great card games, we've been playing a lot of Mü at lunch lately and while this particular game didn't take place at game-night I still want to mention it. Thursday's Mü game went pretty well for me. We've been playing four handed Mü to 500 points over a couple of lunch hours. I started the day yesterday (Thursday) with something like six points. The leaders were in the early three hundreds. Needless to say, I had some catching up to do and catch up I did. By the end of the game I was up over 500 points. I didn't win the game but I certainly won the day and I came in a very close second. I was blessed with several good hands but the one which really satisfied was when the leader had a large bid with something like six yellow cards showing. What he didn't know was that I held all but one of the remaining yellow cards in my hand: cards which I refused to bid; preferring to hide them. Instead, I made sure that I bid enough to secure "vice" so that when he won his bid I would be unavailable to him as a partner. I then called ones as the lower trump, since I was holding one of the two yellow ones. He called yellow (with a bid that high, what choice did he have?) and then I proceeded to split most of the points with him: more than enough to set him and earn a hefty bonus for myself in addition to the points I took in play. How sweet! I love this game.

I'm Back!

2007-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we returned from a nine day trip to Yellowstone National Park. We saw wolves, bears, pronghorn, elk, mule deer, moose, osprey, bald eagles, coyotes, geysers, hot springs, fumaroles, mud pots, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, lodge pole pine, and so many bison that we nearly got bored of them. It was fantastic. Anyone who thinks that the fires of 1988 ruined Yellowstone hasn't been there recently. Below are just a couple of the hundreds of pictures we took. I'm still sifting through all of the pictures. Sorting them all out is likely to take days.

We were kept so busy seeing the sights that we only managed to play a single game in the entire time we were there: Loopin' Louie. I brought along a whole pile of games but we never had the inclination to bring any of them out. That and I didn't really want to get them dirty. *grin*

Tuesday's Games

2007-05-30T18:13:00.001-07:00

It got off to a little bit of a slow start since most people arrived late but it turned out to be a fine, well attended game night.

My first game of the evening was a three-player game of Pillars of the Earth. I've been asserting for weeks now that the game would be best with three players and this playing did nothing to discourage that opinion. With three there is still stiff competition for the best craftsmen and resources but it isn't nearly as tight as it is with four. Once again the master builder draw proved painful but I still managed a respectable finish, coming in second by a single victory point.

The new Days of Wonder game: Colosseum is finally here and I played for the first time last night. We played a three player game and it went reasonably well. This game is about putting on the best events at the Roman Colosseum. Players secure the rights to produce specific events and then must bid and trade in order to secure the correct resources to produce the events. If you don't have all the necessary resources, you can still produce the event but it won't be worth as much points. None of us had played before so we all made plenty of strategic mistakes. My biggest mistake was not realizing until it was too late how important it would be to make sure that I stayed focused on the last turn's event. The game lasts for five turns and during each turn you may produce an event. The thing is, unless you screw up, only the fifth event really matters because your score is a high-water mark of your scores from each event. Since each completed event contributes a fixed amount of points towards the next, the only reason to worry about maximizing the earlier events is to get more money (you get payed based on how they score) and that's often not a good enough reason to worry about maximizing the event. It's better to focus on maximizing whatever event you plan to produce last. I think I'm going to really like this game but after one play I'm not completely sure. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this one. Oh, and if you're wondering, I lost. Pretty badly.

My last game of the evening was (yet another three player) game of Elasund - The First City. In my opinion, this is the best game that Klaus (Settlers of Catan) Teuber has produced in years. It had been months and months since I last played this game and I'm afraid to say that we started playing with one incorrect rule as a result. Furthermore we discovered that there was a second minor rule detail that I had actually never played correctly at all! I blame the rule book which is not quite as clear as it could be. I blame the rule book because clearly I can't possibly blame myself. That would be unheard of. We switched to the correct rules mid game once our mistakes were discovered by a third party. I maintain that neither rule change significantly affected the outcome of the game (I won by a comfortable margin) and I think that either of my mistakes would make fine variants. FYI, the rule I had forgotten was that when the pirates take a resource, the victim gets to choose which card(s) to give up; we began by playing that looted cards were chosen at random. The rule that I had never played correctly was that when placing a permit token you must give up gold cards equal to the number on the token; I've always played that permit placement doesn't cost gold. The way that I've always played leads to a slightly faster game (due to more gold in the economy) and slightly stronger defensive positions (it's always advantageous to play the larger permits), but it doesn't really significantly alter the strategy or feel of the game. Sure it costs more to use some one's permits since they're more likely to be 4s and 3s but you've probably got more money to do it so it kind of all comes out in the wash.

The big "other" game of the night was a five player game of Die Macher. I like Die Macher. I really do. But I just can't see myself devoting five hours to it very often. In the time they played their one game of Die Macher, I played three games.

Also played was Nexus Ops, and I'm sure there were other games as well but as I wasn't involved, I can't really remember what they all were. (No Thanks! was one.)

I'm going to be out of town next week (and consequently, House Full of Games will not be processing orders for the week of June 4-8) but game night will still be on as usual. Have fun without me. I'm sure I'll be playing plenty of games with the family while I'm away. Perhaps I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

Game Night

2007-05-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

I'm gonna try and get this out of the way first thing this morning because I know I won't have time to do it later.

We had a few newcomers at our game night this week. That's always good to see! Hope they enjoyed themselves and will come back again!

My first game of the night was a brief game of Sticheln. We played one hand where I did tolerably well and then we were nearly done with another hand where I ate a ton of negative points before we realized that there had been a misdeal! Whew! By then enough others had arrived that we were ready to break out into groups and play some meatier games so we never did bother finish the Sticheln game after that.

My first full game of the night was a four player game of Pillars of the Earth. I do like this game very much but once again the master builder draw proved to be decisive. I got out to an early lead but in at least three key rounds, by the time I was given a chance to place any of my master builders all of the spots I wanted were already taken. I was never able to upgrade to the craftsmen I wanted and, while the results among the top three finishers were relatively tight, I came in third. I really like the game but I also realize that I just have to live with a certain amount of randomness whenever I play. I still think that three players is probably the best number for this game.

While that was going on the others were playing a game of Alhambra which finished at about the same time as our Pillars of the Earth game. Since we all finished at about the same time we mixed up the groups a bit.

One group played Elfenland. I really like Elfenland, which is essentially a non-linear race game across a road network. Players attempt to visit as many cities in Elfenland as possible by playing cards that allow them to travel over certain roads in the network. It's a very clever game and it's pretty easy to teach so it's very family friendly.

I like Elfenland but I didn't play it. Instead, I was begged to make up a fourth for a game of Tichu. Kai and I squared off against Greg and Mike. It was a tight game with an unusually large number of Tichu calls: all of them made. At the end of the game we were tied at exactly 1000 points apiece. Mike and Greg won the tie breaker. There was one hand early in the game where Kai probably should have called large Tichu and if he had, we'd have won the game. But hind sight is 20-20 and he didn't have the confidence to do it.

That's all for this week. Come join us next week. 5:00 on Tuesday night in the Microsoft building 50 cafeteria. If you don't have a badge, knock on the cafeteria door and someone will let you in.

Review: Mü

2007-05-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Lately I find myself playing an awful lot of Mü, a trick taking card game for 4-6 players by Doris and Frank. The box also contains rules for four other card games that can all be played with the same special deck but none of the other games is even remotely as compelling as Mü. Of all traditional style trick taking games, Mü is easily my favorite. Let me try to explain why.

Components

Mü comes in a very nice box which is officially labeled Mü & More. (The "& More" part refers to those four other games.) The box is far better than the standard tuck box that normal playing cards are generally sold in. This is a hard cardboard box with a nesting lid, similar to boxes used by many other European card games. It's very durable and under normal use it will typically outlast the cards themselves. Inside you'll find a very nice, and complete rule booklet, and a deck of cards. The cards themselves are quite nice with a luxurious linen finish. They are sturdy and should last for many, many games.

The deck itself is composed of sixty cards divided into five colored suits. The twelve cards in each suit are ranked from 0 to 9 with two 1s and two 7s. Each card also has a number of chevrons (or pips) printed under the rank. Most cards have one pip but 1s and 9s have none and 7s and 6s have two. Each pip is worth one point so there are sixty points distributed throughout the deck.

Gameplay

Mü, like most trick taking games, is played over a number of hands, usually until one player reaches a predetermined amount of points. Our lunch group typically plays to 1000 points and our games span several lunch hours but it's more common, and still quite fun, to play to a smaller score or play a predetermined number of hands, perhaps ensuring that each player deals the same number of hands. The rules state that playing to 200 points will take about an hour and my experience would say that estimate is perhaps a little bit optimistic.

A hand begins when one player shuffles the cards and deals all sixty cards to all players. Since there are sixty cards in the deck, each player will have an even number of cards whether there be four, five or six players.

After the cards are dealt, a bidding round begins. The really clever thing about Mü is that the bidding is done silently by revealing cards from your hand and placing them face up in front of you. Cards that are bid remain part of your hand and are played just like any other card but they must remain face up in front of you until they are played. The genius of this bidding mechanism is that as you bid you are also revealing information about your hand. This is especially true since if you win the bid, you will be required to name a trump suit from the cards you revealed. If you haven't revealed a blue card then you may not name blue as the trump suit.

This bidding round is really the heart of Mü and a huge part of what makes this such a brilliant game. Unlike Bridge, where hand strength is revealed through complex bidding conventions which must be learned and practiced over dozens, perhaps hundreds, of games; there are no complex bidding conventions in Mü. They aren't needed. The bidding in Mü just naturally seems to do what it should: reveal something about the players' hands, form a contract for the hand (called a goal in the rules), and select trump.

Once all players have passed, the bidding round ends and whoever has won the bid is named the "chief" of the hand. Whoever comes in second is named the "vice". In the relatively rare case where no one comes in second, there is no vice. The vice's job is to name a lesser trump suit and thwart the chief. The chief's job is to name a greater trump suit, choose a partner from the remaining players, lead the first trick, and, as a partnership, try to capture enough points to fulfill the contract based on the number of cards in the bid. Naturally, the more cards that were bid, the more points the chief and his partner are required to take and the more difficult it will be to win the hand.

Since both the vice and chief call trump, there are (usually) two trump suits in a hand. The vice chooses a trump and the chief must either choose a different trump or choose "no trump" in which case only the suit named by the vice is trump. These two trump suits then merge to become a single trump suit. What's more, either colors or numbers can be declared trump. For instance, the vice could declare that 1s are trump and the chief could declare that blacks are trump. In this case, the two black 1s would be the highest trump cards (since they are doubly trump by virtue of both their rank and color), followed by the black 9, 8, 7s, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 0 (the chief's trump), with the eight other 1s (the vice's trump) tied as the lowest trump cards. Note that the 1s would be in the trump suit; and thus not considered red, blue, green or yellow cards. This can lead to some confusion (many is the time I've accidentally played a trump number card when I thought I was following suit) but it also leads to some very intriguing play possibilities.

Tricks are played as in most traditional trick taking games. A card is lead and each subsequent player must follow the lead suit if they can. The highest card in the lead suit takes the trick unless one or more players was void in that suit and chose to play a trump card, in which case the highest trump card takes the trick. If two identical cards are winning the trick (possible since there are two 7s and two 1s in each suit and also since numbers can be declared trump) the first of the tied cards wins. The winner of the trick takes the cards played in the trick and earns the right to lead the next trick.

Once all cards have been played, the hand ends. Each player counts the number of pips on the cards they've captured and earns that number of points. The chief and his partner add their pips together to determine if the chief has fulfilled his bidding contract and won the hand. If the chief has won the hand then both the chief and his partner are awarded bonus points based upon the difficulty of the contract. If they fail, the chief is docked points and each of the players on the vice's team for that hand are awarded a bonus.

Comments

The doubled 7s and 1s, the uneven distribution of pips, the ever-changing partnerships, the double trump suits, and the ability to name numbers as well as suits trump all make for a very strategic and relatively complex game. While the rules themselves are not that complex, the ramifications of those rules can be. This is probably not the best game for trick taking novices; yet it is far easier to learn than Bridge and much richer and more elegant than any other trick taking game I've played.

Probably the most common mistake newcomers make is forgetting that all trump cards (numbers or colors) become part of the same suit during play. If the trump is black over 1s (to use our earlier example) and a black card is lead, then the 1s are all in suit and may be played without breaking suit. Conversely, if someone leads a yellow card then your yellow 1 is trump and may not be played unless you have no other yellow cards. It takes some getting used to but once everyone gets the hang of it, it's brilliant.

The play of the hand makes use of skills that will be familiar to seasoned card players. Players who understand the value of roughing, draining trump, and especially card counting, will benefit. The uneven pip distribution and the fact that the length of the trump suit changes from hand to hand (depending on what was called) make the play even more exciting and challenging. For instance, 9s are powerful but they are worth no points. 1s can be thrown on hands you know you're losing to avoid giving away points. 6s can be thrown on hands you know your partner is winning.

But where the game really shines is in the bidding. The simple bidding system offers so many possibilities. As the bidding unfolds it's typical for two players with strong hands to battle back and forth for chief while the other players lay down just enough cards in an attempt to be chosen as the chief's partner. Bidding can get brutal when one player indicates he might be a good partner only to get cold feet as the chief's bid rises too high for comfort. So he lays down a high enough bid to secure the vice position, thus forcing the chief to partner with one of the weaker players instead. Bidding is always tense and good bidding is what sets a good Mü player apart from the rest.

Mü is for four to six players but I think it plays best with five and it's almost as good with four. With six players your hand is very small and the chief's team is outnumbered two to one. This makes the deal a little more fickle and it makes it more difficult to bid with confidence. But don't let that deter you from playing with six! It's still quite enjoyable. With four players you have more information but the chief's team seems to be just a little more powerful. Five is the sweet spot.

If Mü has one flaw (other than its complexity which, with practice, becomes a virtue) it is that, like most card games, it can be very susceptible to the whims of fate. Even the best Mü player in the world can lose by being dealt several bad hands in a row. As players become more comfortable with bidding this becomes less of a problem but it will never go away completely. If you want a fair game then you really need to play dozens of hands to allow the luck to even out.

So if you are looking for a rich trick taking game that will provide experienced card players with a lifetime of enjoyment then you need look no further than Mü. I really can't recommend it highly enough.