100+ plays

Saw a geeklist that got me thinking about games that I have played over 100 times. Here's what I came up with...

Chess
Canasta
Acquire
Battleship
Carcassone
Risk
Don't Break The Ice
Euchre
Settlers of Catan
Star Fleet Battles
Monopoly

Chess: Probably my number one game all-time. It has to be one of the first games I ever learned. It was certainly the one I took seriously - I bought a couple of books on the game before I was in my teens, and was able to beat all-comers in grade school.

Star Fleet Battles: Devoted several years to this one game, back from 1985 to about 1991 it was the game I played the most. My dear friend Mark Hamilton (who passed away in 1999) and my brother Tab played this one extensively. Our greatest battle was a 12 hour slugfest against a B10. I'll have to tell this story sometime.

Canasta: 90% of my games were against my grandfather, David Barlowe who passed away in 1985. We Tab and I visited him in Florida, grandpa and I played hour after hour of two-handed. I remember two trips where 50% of our time there was spent on Canasta. Solid way to spend time with a friend. Mom and Dad used to play Dave and Opal 4-player, and usually the girls won. Grayson and I recently began playing Canasta Caliente, introducing the game to the next generation...

Acquire: Sid Sackson classic. I've played easily over 50 games face to face, against a variety of people. Was my second German game (although I didn't know it at the time), the first being Kremlin. Bob Oberheu introduced my brother and I to this one, our cousins had been playing it for years before our first game in 1985(?). Online I've played over 100 games easily during the summer of 2004. Haven't played much since, a little dry compared to the new German games out there today.

Carcassone: Mostly have played this with Grayson. We have tried most of the expansions, he enjoys the first (Inns and Cathedrals) due to the "triple effect" of two of the tiles in that set. He's always trying to break the record on points scored on the triple, which is easily over 100 (although I think he still lost that game to me, he didn't care, because he got his name written in the back of the box!).

Risk: I remember breaking this out after we had moved to Toledo from Temperance, Michigan in about 1978. My dad had owned in since probably before I was born (1960's). I think it was Tab, Dad and myself. I remember being fixiated on the black colors. Before Risk all we had ever played was "Go Fish", "Crazy 8's", Chess, Break the Ice, possibly Life and Monopoly. Perhaps Feudal and Jumpin' (3m, later Avalon Hill games). Risk was so totally unlike any of those games, it was a bridge game that I would attempt to jump Starship Troopers (AH) and UFO shortly after. Risk was the game that I usually used to break in a new group of friends. For a while Acquire took on that role, nowadays it's usually Settlers of Catan.

Don't Break The Ice: this cute little game I had as a small boy, and I purchased a copy for Grayson a few years ago. Gabriel now gets a kick out of it. My only caveat is that it is a pain to set up, and the dexterity required from a child to set it up usually means that the child is too old to play the game.

Euchre: Played this 4-player 5 card game almost exclusively during school hours at study hall and the independant study group I was in during my Junior and Senior years (1985-86). The jacks are the high cards, called bowers. Played hundreds and hundreds of games, and eventually taught it to my parents and grandparents. I've never really played it much since the late 1980's. Noone at Watchtower Farms had heard of the game when I was there from 1992-94, the game there was the very similar (and superior) Spades, and I've rarely met someone since who's even heard for Euchre. According to some reviews on the web, the game orignated on ships that sailed the great lakes, and it's a midwestern game, which would explain this. In Northeast PA the big game is Pinochle. Part of the appeal of Euchre played in school was how loud it was played, banging on the table when tricks were taken, or game was made. Sometimes cheating was encouraged, and it was part of the game to steal the deal from the opponents, and attempt to ignore the suit played to dump losing cards, etc.

Settlers: I first remember seeing this game at Mind Games in Toledo, late 2000. If I remember, I searched online for a review before I bought it, and may have stumbled upon the 'Geek at that time. I purchased a copy shortly after seeing the favorable reviews, and this single purchased has caused what you are reading here. I have since purchased probably over 100 different games, mostly German. I've played Settlers face to face probably close to 50 times, which is certainly more than any game I've played since. If you count online, it's the most I've played anything since the 2-3 period I was playing Star Fleet Battles very heavily. I've played around 30 tmes on Brettspeilwelt.de, and over 150 on Microsoft's Zone.com. Settlers is usually the game I use to introduce new people to the boardgaming hobby.

I have kind of burned out on Settlers. I own most of the expansions, including the book. After so many plays it has little mystery left, and I can do very well even in 4-player games unless the opponents are very experienced. Online has kept the game alive to a degree, as with enough games you can get some unusually patterns, and the games go quickly. I can usually play while surfing the web inside another window and still do well.

(What games have YOU played over 100 times? Post comments below!)

Reiner Knizia controversy over Spiel des Jahres?

Thurn Und Taxis, the new hit from Andreas Seyfarth (Puerto Rico, #1 ranked game in the world), has received the award of Spiel des Jahres, the German game scene's most prestigous "family gaming award".

Greg Schloesser has written a fine review of TUT, if you want to check it out - and it's only $22 at Thoughthammer, so I would think many of us should own this one based on the author alone.

There's a bit of a controversy, as there often is, about who was passed up for the award, again after his 16 years of releases and 15 games: Reiner Knizia.

Considered perhaps one of the best ever game designers, Knizia is know for some of these incredible titles: Tigris and Euphrates (#2 in the world), Lost Cities, Medici, Merchants of Amersterdam, Modern Art, Palazzo, Rome, Royal Turf, Samurai, Taj Mahal, Through the Desert, to name just a few of his 202 titles). He had a few games nominated for the Game of the Year award, but never won.

Larry Levy of www.boardgamenews.com explores whether there is a conspiracy to exclude Herr Doctor of the international fame and sales that comes with winning the award in an article he calls The Truth is Out There. Here's an excerpt from the discussion on Tigris and Euphrates that gives you a taste.

1998
More outrage from the Knizia fans, as his insanely great design Euphrat & Tigris loses out to Elfenland. I could make the same speech about family friendly games that I made for Modern Art, but there’s more to consider this time. The SdJ’s were in the midst of a six-year period where they seemed much more receptive to gamer’s games. The conspiracy theorists ask, with some justification, if Torres could win an SdJ, why not E&T?

This is a reasonable question and deserves consideration. First of all, the Jury was not handing out awards to heavy designs left and right. The only real aberrations during the period were El Grande and Torres. True, Settlers was a little more complex than the previous winners, but it was also a once-in-a-lifetime gaming phenomenon, played and enjoyed by countless families in spite of its complexity. It didn’t belong to gamers—it belonged to the world. Mississippi Queen and Elfenland were standard SdJ-type games, the latter perhaps on the heavier side, but really not much more complex than Thurn und Taxis. Tikal is indeed a gamer’s game, but in 1999 it was also very popular with families. The game is very easy to learn—just follow the player aid cards—and can be successfully played at whatever level the participants desire. El Grande, on the other hand, was a somewhat surprising pick in ’96, as many thought it too heavy for an SdJ award. And Torres is probably the least family friendly game to win the prize.

Okay, so gamer’s games were the exception rather than the rule. Still, why couldn’t the exception also extend to 1998? Was Euphrat & Tigris that much more of an unreasonable pick than El Grande or Torres?

Good stuff. Check it out.

Masons

Just picked up Masons (Rio Grande), new game by Leo Colovini (Alexabros, Cartagena, Inkognito). A 2-4 player game with a medieval theme, of city building. Like a rat attracted to a shiny coin, I was drawn to the box art, and colorful pieces shown on the back. I paid full retail ($42.40 w/tax), and clutching it desperately to my chest, raced home to play it over the long weekend of my 12th wedding anniversary.
Grayson and I have played it twice now, and it is a clever spin on building cities by creating walled areas, and scoring towns and "palaces" inside. It reminds me a lot of Carcassone, and has kind of a "reverse-area-control" thing going on with the cards. Rather than control the pieces on the board, they are open for any player to use if he has the right cards to play. It's one or two of your cards played during the scoring phase that determine how many points you make. You set up your cards ostensibly by placing walls, and having a limited choice over what color village (town?) piece to play. These are determine by die rolls, with three dice being thrown after placing the wall, and the colors representing what gets put on the board.

It was perhaps this mechanism that intrigued me most when considering the purchase of the game, as most German games do not use dice, although they often have random elements (typically cards or tile-pulls).

Like many other games, it will probably play best with folks who don't mind having only some control of the outcome. There is almost no way (that I can see) to interfere with the plans of your neighbor very much, although you can close cities down, or build in open areas, there are generally multiple plays for each player each turn - so it becomes a game of personal optimization on an open board, like a lot of Euros (German games).

It will probably only come out as a rare "desert" game, or such - I typically see it taking the space of a game of San Juan, Through the Desert (I've bought three copies of this one), St. Petersburg, etc. Since I love those games so much (especially the first two), not sure if this will get a lot of play.

Heading to visit Tab for the weekend, and we will probably play TtD and or Capitol if we play anything.

MLB Sportclix

Picked up 30 (2 starter sets and 4 boosters) figures on ebay for $16. Figures are attractive, and I liked the stages of rules (preseason, regular season, playoffs, etc.). This allows for scaling the complexity level if you find the game engaging, allows you to taylor to your opponent (often likely to be kids), and time available to play.

Both games I played with my son were very low scoring affairs, and this seems likely to continue (and reports here confirm this is an issue with others). Rules could be easily modified to allow more scoring, I would think by changing picture fatigue, increasing fielding difficulty, etc.

My biggest problem after two plays is the lack of decisions, for all the activity invested. Moving your lineup back and forth on the board between innings, fiddling with the bases of the players as they get hot or cold, etc. This fiddling takes up tremendous time, pushing the game to the 90 minute time frame. That isn't necessarily bad all by itself, but the lack of decisions made me feel like I was "playing a spreadsheet" over and over. Granted a lot of the tension in baseball (and other sports) is by those one or two key plays in the game, but this is a matter of taste in a boardgame.

For under $20, it's worth the time invested, but the full retail experience would have cost over $70 - definately not worth it in my mind. Probably not a bad price for a collectible series I suppose.

Alhambra: missing piece

During Gathering of Friends 4 back in March, I appear to have lost one of the White buildings from my set.

Anyone have an extra piece in their set?

(Shelby uncovered this loss in a recent game at our home. Alhambra is a big hit with the ladies.)

Location for GOF 5?

Our next gaming area...?



Have we found a possible location for Gathering of Friends 5?

Tammy and I were able to spend a weekend away (sans kinds) for the first time in... many years. We stayed at Eagle Rock Resort near Hazleton, PA. The resort is a beautiful place, with a "championship style" 18-hole golf course, ski and tubing area, horseback riding, a spa, and over 4,000 acres of mountainous Pennsylvania terrain.

We stayed in a small room at the Inn for $90/night, but would love to go back and stay at the Lodge (at $125-150), with it's incredible views and cozy/warm cottage feel. There is a large area overlooking a cliff with a fantastic view that would be perfect for a day/night of gaming with friends.

Hazleton is only one hour from Scranton and Allentown, and I would love your thoughts on possible dates for GOF5...!

Solving Rubik

Did you have a Rubik's Cube as a kid? Yes, I know I am a child of the 80's (I was born in 1968). I did manage to solve it once or twice, but of course had to cheat. I remember buying a guide from Kiddie City on Alexis Road in Sylvania, Ohio back in the day.

Here's a great site to teach yourself how to solve that cube you have in your basement.

Race Day/Tamsk

Have an order in to Boulder Games, my first time with them. What inspired this purchase was a little game called: Race Day.

Wizkids (the makers of several "collectable card games" and some boardgames), knowing that something like 1/2 the country calls themselves Nascar fans, built a neat little car racing game that is quite fun. The cards are made of a foam-board, and are popped out of baseball-card sized holders and constructed into attractive Nascar cars.

Each car has a special ability, and they race around a short track or superspeedway. A starter pack for $10 gets you 5 cards, and the Daytona speedway on two large foldable sheets. Sixteen cards can be lined up on the track, but we've raced it with 4-8 and it seems the more the merrier.

Decisons revolve around choice of speed, two dice being rolled to determine it. Cars move along a track the number rolled, with a bonus for "high speed" of 2, and subtaction of 2 for a car at lower speed, used when forced to by engine damage or heavy traffic.

Cards have 10 damage points, 4 in tires, 4 in bodywork, and 2 for the engine. There is risk in moving next to other cars or in overheating the engine. A player rolls dice against the driver's skill points, which are modified by time out on the track - each lap a player takes one point of tire damage which is used to modify other die rolls.

I used spare pieces from another game to mark damage during a race on the player card, but the game includes damage markers which can be slipped over tires or popped into the top of the cars.

The track has natural choke points on the track which cause players to have to make difficult decisions - should the draft a lead car, negating overtaking possibilities, but insuring forward progress? Or take a chance and try to roll a high number a pass, risking a crash? Play it safe a slow early in the race, and attempt to overtake cars entering an early pit-stop? Or use a special ability bonus to push the car into dangerous situations that others might avoid, so as to create a shorter path to the finish line?

Cars can spin out if agressive driving forces difficult "collision check" die rolls, especially as tire wear makes them harder to manuever. But a quick pit stop can repair damage and get a player back in the race and in "clean air".

A game with 8 cars took Grayson and I probably about 40 minutes, each playing 4 cars each.

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The second game I ordered was Tamsk, part of the Gipf project. More on this one later.

Roads and Boats being reprinted

I am a fan of economic games, delivery games, tradings games, and their ilk. Acquire, Die Handler, Hansa, Motley Fool Buy Low Sell High, Traders of Genoa are all in my collection, and although rarely played, I will break them out whenever I have a chance.

One of the kings of this genre, and also of the "monster game" category, is Roats and Boats, by Splotter Spellen.

Out of print for some time, this game is going for $285 on eBay as we speak, and I've heard of it being sold for more. Rated 58 right now on the 'Geek, it is a 1-4 player, 4 hour economic beast that I would love to get my hands on!

Word is, it's finally being reprinted - check out this article on Boardgamenews. Supposedly to be shipped in June, no word on pricing yet - I will post when I hear anything. Check out the Boardgamegeek review of this bad boy, it looks awesome.

New players, fresh perspectives

My wife's nephew and niece stayed with us last week for a few days. Nicholas is 15, and Shelby 13(?), and of course I had to introduce them to some new games...

We played Alhamra, Railroad Tycoon, and Tigris and Euphrates card game once. Starfarers of Catan, we played three times.

Alhambra was excellent, I wish we had more time for it. A close game, we played with Grayson and everyone was riveted to each play. They took it really serious, and it showed in a tight game.

Railrooad Tycoon I played with Nick. and it was a blast. I lost by a single point, chosing the Northeast and building South and the West across the mountains to Pittsburgh, then Toledo and Chicago. Nick won in the SE and then out of Chicago and some key links in the South. He did a much better job claiming special victory point cards than I, and limited his borrowing to only one share to my three. Really enjoyed this one, looking forward to playing it with Kevin and our Northampton group.

Tigris and Euphrates was a bust I'd say, Nick was not to interested in the theme, we played it out but he didn't enjoy it and because of that neither did I. One problem with it that I see, is the space required equals that of the regular game! One of the advantages of any card game should be space reduction, this one requires a full table to set up 8 long columns of cards.

Starfarers was a bit of a surprise, as neither Nick or Shelby seem to have any love of sci-fi in their background - I thought the "garrish" bits and tacky theme would be a turn off. As it turns out, they went each of three different nights, Nick winning twice, and myself once. Grayson had a blast (so to speak) building maximum cannons on his ships, and Shelby and I generally raced to the different trade spots, and attempted to corner the market on the aliens. Nick cleverly snatched one from me to win the first game, and conquered the pirates and ice planets in the second (the first time I've seen anyone bother with these) for the extra VP's needed to win.

In third game, I finally figured out the necessity of getting to the aliens first, and then stealing one or two away from other players to come from behind. A balanced strategy, and playing for second place most of the game are strategies to often work in regular Settlers, and was the same here.

My big complaint with Starfarers are the pieces - I believe 3 of the 4 spaceship models all have their clips broken, so no boosters can be added. A fourth ship has it's top snapped off. For someone who takes good care of his games, this can be maddening!

While I am at it, it looks like I a missing a white building tile from Alhambra after our last Gathering (large groups are always hard on your games), and this will probably ruin it for me. :)