10,000 Plays and Counting

Posted on June 28, 2019 by Talia Rosen

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.

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Posted in Reviews | 13 Comments

Patrick Brennan: Game Snapshots –2019 (Part 11)

Posted on June 28, 2019 by pfbrennan

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.

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Posted in Commentary, Sessions | 4 Comments

Creating Translations for Imported Games

Posted on June 27, 2019 by xitoliv

(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.

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Kingdomino & Kingdomino Age of Giants (Game Review by Brandon Kempf)

Posted on June 26, 2019 by Brandon Kempf
  • Designer: Bruno Cathala
  • Artist: Cyril Bouquet
  • Publisher: Blue Orange Games
  • Players: 2-4
  • Time: 15-30
  • Times Played: 18 base, 6 more with expansion

I sat here curious. Wondering why I had never reviewed Kingdomino, the Spiel des Jahres winning game that topped my Top 25 Games of 2016 List. I think at the time, my mind just told me that I didn’t need to, it had won the most prestigious award in gaming and had reviews everywhere, from the most niche of channels to mentions in every Top 10 list of the year. But a funny thing happened, even with all that love from both me and from all around me, we kind of forgot about Kingdomino, we moved on to the next 15 minute game that packs a lot of punch. Then we all got really excited about Kingdomino again because of Queendomino, but were a bit disappointed it came and it didn’t quite live up to its predecessor. It was a fine game, it just tried to be too much. Then, along came an expansion, a true expansion for Kingdomino, and we got excited again, but with a bit more apprehension.

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Dale Yu: Palm Trees

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Dale Yu

Palm Trees

  • Designer: Andrew J. Smith
  • Publisher: Wizkids
  • Players: 2-6
  • Ages: 14+
  • Time: 15 minutes

Palm Trees was one of the small box games that I received at Origins 2019.  This year, there have been a number of games in this small box format.  In this game, players try to grow a Palm tree in their hand.  In order to make the game seem more realistic, there are palm tree trunk “tattoo sleeves” which are included in the box.

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Posted in First Impressions | 2 Comments

UK Games Expo Report from Alan How

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Dale Yu

UKGE

The 2019 UK Games Expo was the best one so far. Easily. It was extremely well organised, had a wide variety of events and larger than ever games halls. There were 97 new games launched and you can check the list. Many of them are from new companies, but there were a few larger companies releasing games at this show. Perhaps the best known was Star Wars Outer Rim, from Fantasy Flight but many other games were close to release Kickstarters, recently released Kickstarters or Kickstarters that will be coming in the next few months.

I’ve played Outer Rim a few times now and it is a pick up and deliver style game in the Star Wars universe. Similar to Xia and Firefly in many respects and works pretty well.

The show is expanding and so are the size of the exhibitors. This was the first show for Ravensberger, Quined Games and a few other well known board game companies though there were no new releases from them. When I spoke to them I think that this might well change. Portal Games had their largest ever booth and released their roll and write in the Imperial Settlers universe called Imperial Settlers Roll & Write, adding to the Imperial Settlers branding.

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