This is the May and June entry for my series where I post five games I enjoyed playing in the past month that I didn’t have time to do full reviews of. As always, I limit it to five titles, of which there’s a combination of old and new games. I didn’t get the chance to write the May entry, so I’ve combined the months.
Overall, May and June were down in terms of number of plays for me. Whereas April broke my personal record for most plays in a month (165), May and June have both been on the low end (89 and 64, respectively), in part because I’ve been playing longer games, but also because there hasn’t been as much time for gaming as there should be.
[Ed Note – this was supposed to go out two weeks ago, but got lost in Draft-limbo somewhere along the way. So, now you get to read Part 10 after Part 11]
This was supposed to run while the Australian women were still in the World Cup…
One of the reasons I starting keeping stats was that I was curious about whether the games I thought would stand the test of time (after a few plays) objectively did or did not. It turns out that the games you play the most are the games that your family and gaming buddies like the most. Either that or you keep searching for gaming buddies who love the same stuff you do (which we all do to some degree as well). Anyway, the games I’ve played 100+ times over the last 20 years:
Co-op: Hanabi (2010), Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (2011), Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)
I wasn’t sure Hanabi would, but it grew on us once we started down the path of protocol development. LotR was also a slow starter, only becoming likely once the scenarios and cards started flowing and fleshed it out. Sentinels provided so much variety from the start that it was always an option.
The voting for the Meeples Choice Awards has ended and the following three games were chosen by the Spielfrieks user group:
THE QUACKS OF QUEDLINBURG TEOTIHUACAN BRASS: BIRMINGHAM
Root, which figured to be one of the favorites prior to the voting, fell one vote short. Just one further vote back were Decrypto, New Frontiers, Newton, and The Mind, while Underwater Cities and Space Base rounded out the top 10.
Congratulations to designers Wolfgang Warsch (Quacks), Danielle Tascini (with a tip of the hat to David Turczi, who designed Teotihuacan’s solo game), and the team of Martin Wallace, Gavan Brown, and Matt Tolman, who successfully redesigned Brass: Birmingham from Wallace’s earlier Brass (which also won an MCA, back in 2007). Warsch’s victory merely adds to the luster of his magical 2018. It’s Wallace’s fifth MCA award, and the first he’s had in 8 years. It breaks a tie he had with Alan Moon and Uwe Rosenberg for second most MCA’s; only Knizia (with 10!) has more. Teotihuacan is Tascini’s third MCA nominated game and all of them have won! That ties him with Wolfgang Kramer for fifth place all-time in MCA victories, which is some mighty fine company. It’s the first win for all the other designers. Finally, congratulations as well to the publishers, Schmidt Spiele, NSKN, and Roxley, each of whom earns their first MCA award.
Here are the vote totals for all the nominated games. The first figure is the votes received during the final round, while the second figure (in parentheses) is the vote total during the preliminary round, which determined the nominations.
1. The Quacks of Quedlinburg – 21 (30) 2. Teotihuacan – 13 (20) 3. Brass: Birmingham – 12 (19 ) 4. Root – 11 (19) 5. Decrypto – 10 (20) 5. New Frontiers – 10 (14) 5. Newton – 10 (14)
5. The Mind – 10 (14)
9. Underwater Cities – 9 (16)
9. Space Base – 9 (12)
11. Endeavor: Age of Sail – 8 (17)
11. Just One – 8 (16) 11. Blackout: Hong Kong – 8 (10) 14. Gizmos – 7 (16) 14. Welcome To… – 7 (11) 16. 8Lilliput – 6 (8) 17. Coimbra – 5 (17) 17. Key Flow – 5 (10) 17. Architects of the West Kingdom – 5 (9) 20. That’s Pretty Clever – 4 (11) 20. Forum Trajanum – 4 (8) 22. Carpe Diem – 3 (12) 22. Concordia Venus – 3 (9) 22. Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra – 3 (8) 22. Yellow & Yangtze – 3 (8) 26. Drop It – 1 (8)
June 28, 2005 was a fateful day. I played Balloon Cup and the Settlers of Catan Card Game, which was nothing new. But then something unprecedented happened. I logged onto a website that I had discovered a few months earlier, BoardGameGeek, and I logged my plays. I recorded the fact that I had just finished playing Balloon Cup and the Settlers of Catan Card Game, and my weird animal brain got a strange sort of satisfaction out of this bizarre recordkeeping exercise. Two days later, I played Alhambra… and I did it again. I recorded my play of Alhambra in the BoardGameGeek database. And then a funny thing happened — I didn’t stop. I kept doing that month after month, year after year.
Today, 14 years have passed since I started this strange and wonderful habit. Perplexing to many, I have gotten great joy over the years in looking back at this archival record of my experience in the hobby. I’ve written about “Quantifying your Fun” and “Falling Stars and Evergreens” before, but something remarkable happened recently. I surpassed 10,000 recorded plays! Ten thousand? That’s mind boggling. My 10,000th play was a fantastic game of Splotter’s Antiquity by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga, one of my all-time favorites. Such a long and winding road it’s been from that first game of Balloon Cup… although of course that was far from my true first. As I told Chris Wray last year, I started fairly young with Diplomacy and Fireball Island, before diving headfirst into Settlers of Catan in the mid-1990s (which I played countless times throughout high school and college).
As a lover of data, and an amateur statistician — emphasis on the amateur — I’m excited to dive into the numbers that make up my last 14 years of gaming.
It’s one of life’s great smacks: you’re either working to get the money to pay for new games so you don’t have enough time to play, or you’re not working and you’ve got all the time in the world to play but you can’t pay for new games. Working on the last federal election was time-intensive so there was a stretch of 6 weeks without playing any games, let alone any new games, but contracting on and off as elections come and go at least allows me to rotate between time-poor and time-rich on a semi-regular basis. Right now I’m time-rich, and a couple of gaming weekends catching up with gaming buddies has filled the new-game coffers to overflowing once more.
THE 7th CONTINENT (2017): Rank 17
An exploration played out entirely with cards, and there are many, many cards. The management of which is the tedious part; you’re forever delving into the box for the next card to resolve. It’s clever though. Place a challenge card on each side of a map card, and resolve the challenge to replace it with the next piece of map, to which you can move and explore further. You have one life-deck, and every move and challenge drains the deck. Which sounds simple, but the cards drained from the deck can then be used as items or effects to reduce future life-drain and the difficulty of future challenges. There’s huge resolution luck, but also lots of good decisions on what to invest in so as to minimise that luck. Flip side: these are also somewhat luck-prone as you mostly can only guess at the types of challenge to come. Success (meeting the scenario’s goal before your life-deck drains) depends on not missing the tiniest of clues, and making the right decisions over the paths to take and guessing well on what challenges to undertake. Take a wrong path on any of these and the frustration ratchets up with each passing hour. It really is a solo game … I wouldn’t enjoy watching frustration leak into a blame-game between gaming buddies re decisions made. For me, that frustration overrode any sense of satisfaction in progress made. I enjoyed exploring the system and can admire it, but there’s not a lot of interest in exploring further scenarios. I could play again, but it seems to be for those who like long time-killers and replaying long sequences to get the scenario right next time.
(in which I mostly talk about what I do to cobble together English language translations for Japanese games when I don’t speak, read, or write any Japanese and where I also hope that some folks will chime in with what they used to do to play the German imports.)
This portrait of Yayoi Kusama hangs in the stairwell at my house. It’s a cheaply framed page ripped from a magazine, and the only photo in my house that’s not of a friend or a family member. (That seems like a weird thing to say, but I never understood that schtick of having pictures of Elvis or Rod Stewart above the fireplace, so it seemed like maybe I should explain. She’s my Elvis.)
It’s there because of those polka dots in the background. Her shawl too. It’s the repetitive action of creating those dots. Of making those…tassels. There was a time when I made a lot of pottery and I had become infested with the same polka dot virus that got to Yayoi.
I don’t do well attempting to meditate or staying focused in yoga, but there was a time when I had polka dots. I’d spend my afternoons and my evenings and sometimes my mornings or my late nights with an eye dropper in one hand and a pot in the other. Dip, squeeze, squeeze, rotate, squeeze, dip.
There was an intoxicating meditative solace to be found in the mindless repetition.
I worked at five or so different studios and when switching one time, I gave myself a variation of an assignment my mentor at a previous studio had done: make 200 tea bowls. Don’t make anything else. Don’t get distracted. Me being me, I also didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, so I also had to brush off their encouragement that I could…do something else. It was a time of growth: doing away with inefficiencies in my processes and techniques; gaining flexibility in what I was working with.
There was an intoxicating meditative solace to be found in the mindless repetition.
In the first half below, I’m going to talk about ways for someone else to do, or have done, the translation you’re looking for. In the second, I’m going to discuss what happens when it falls to you, and the answer for me is going to involve something something solace in the process.
Chris Wray: What I Enjoyed Playing in May and June 2019
This is the May and June entry for my series where I post five games I enjoyed playing in the past month that I didn’t have time to do full reviews of. As always, I limit it to five titles, of which there’s a combination of old and new games. I didn’t get the chance to write the May entry, so I’ve combined the months.
Overall, May and June were down in terms of number of plays for me. Whereas April broke my personal record for most plays in a month (165), May and June have both been on the low end (89 and 64, respectively), in part because I’ve been playing longer games, but also because there hasn’t been as much time for gaming as there should be.
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