Board Game Madness

FreeStarter designer giveaway contest and interviews

2013-05-23T05:26:00.003-05:00

Four game designers I follow on Twitter have banded together and are giving away two sets of four games (one more casual set, one more serious set), as a promotion for their design interviews and as a neat way to drive traffic. Contest entries due by Friday, so get crackin'.

I don't usually link to contests, but I wanted to point out these folks because I read their insights and struggles in game design on Twitter and think they're definitely people to watch in game design. As a group, they've done a lot of the goals I'd like to do, with an emphasis on taking lots of different ways to succeed in getting games published.

Of the four's games, I've played Grant Rodiek's Farmageddon, which passed the Mom test and proved to be a decent take-that game with more depth than expected, at a very reasonable price.

Group Interview with AJ Porfirio (VanRyder Games)-great teaser on Tessen, which sounds like it's right up my alley.
Group Interview with Cheevee Dodd - Cheevee's posted a lot of good game design angst about Tuesday Night Tanks in his twitter feed, and I'm interested to try it.
Group Interview with Matt Worden ooh, good intro shot of Space Mission. On my radar as a pnp game gone pro, something that is tough to do without standing out as a gem.

(Watch this space for the last interview link with Grant Rodiek.)

For the contest entry, they do ask you to follow all the designers on twitter (@VanRyderGames, @cheeveedodd, @MattWordenGames, @herrohgrant), but honestly, if you care about indie card and board gaming, you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

A quick note to my search query folks

2013-02-22T05:12:00.000-06:00

I love looking at the Google searches that people are using to get to my blog!

"does half price books have board games"

Qualified yes. If the games are still in shrink, typically they'll be shelved in the game books section, between Dungeons & Dragons and chess books. Since the staff don't want to inventory open games, any game out of shrink will be marked at a couple of dollars and put in the Clearance section. I've gotten two copies of Travel Blokus this way.

"Expedit board games"

I love our Expedit shelves for board game storage, and it's nearly perfect. Two minor points: if you push the shelves all the way to the wall, you won't lose Travel Blokus pieces down behind the shelving, but if you do that, some games will stick out farther than others. My thrifted copies of Mouse Trap stick out about 4" from the Expedit shelf itself.

"board games like High Frontier"

It depends on which axis you want to progress along. If you like "pick up and deliver," then Lunar Rails or Merchant of Venus might be next logical steps. If you like complex simulations, the other Sierra Madre games like American Megafauna or Origins: How We Became Human are hugely-complex affairs. You should also check out Dominant Species (mix of mechanisms, similar competition for sites), and Here I Stand (all-day game, depth of study in the subject area).

"mike doyle game art"

Yes, Mike Doyle's game art is fantastic.

In other news, I need to do a wrap-up post on OwlCon. Spoiler: it was fun!

The Houston Gamers have lost a friend

2013-02-15T17:58:00.000-06:00

One of our friends, Doug Curry, passed away Thursday morning.

He is survived by his wife and adult children. Doug was a gamer, but more importantly, he was a great human being who was an all-around good guy. My memories of Doug are all happy ones.

Please, tell your friends and family you love them, because you never know how much time any one of us has.

As I head off to Owlcon today, there's a lump in my throat because I never told Doug how much his presence at the game table was appreciated. Seeing the folks I see rarely will be bittersweet with the knowledge of Doug's passing, and I'm going to do my best to thank those people for the joy they bring to the world.

Everyone who's participated in my gaming experiences, I appreciate you! Take good care of yourselves.

Houston game stores

2012-12-26T19:08:00.000-06:00

I was reviewing my blog's hits and saw people searching for Houston board game stores... For those of you on the west side of Houston or the east side of Katy, I continue to recommend 8th Dimension Comics & Games highly. Their location at Highway 6 and West Road is easy to find, the store has a great, kid-friendly ambiance, and the service is excellent.

Their board game stocks are a good mix of the last few years' Eurogames and LCGs, with plenty of excellent card games as well. They use Alliance and have been great about ordering what I don't see on the shelves.

Oreobytes: Sketches for $10

2012-12-06T12:37:00.001-06:00

One of my artist friends is offering $10 sketches - I've enjoyed a lot of her art and now you can get some of her work, basically to order!

More Game Assembly

2012-10-07T19:33:00.003-05:00

I've been trying out my new-to-me paper cutter and the results are phenomenal. The track tiles for 18AL are coming out so well, I may be satisfied with the results, at long last. For those of you keeping track, I'm on my third or fourth round for components.

If my replacement phone arrives, I should be able to post pictures.

James Ernest: one of my personal heroes

2012-09-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

This was a pretty good anecdote by Lewis Pulsipher over on BGG.

James Ernest is one of my game design heroes, with a large back catalog that is slowly being revived as print and play over at Cheapass Games' website.

I follow him on Twitter, and have enjoyed catching snippets of the Kickstarter campaign for Unexploded Cow. (No, I didn't back it. It's a good deal, but I'm Kickstarted-out for a while.)

Yucata, moving ahead

2012-07-29T23:11:00.001-05:00

At the end of June, this cryptic message was posted for everyone on Yucata.de:

DOOM
The Wrath of the Gods cannot be stopped. The Omen, the gods’ warning sign, was to no avail. Rather than guide us, our priests protested that they were being condemned unjustly. But now we know that when they asked us to make sacrifices to the gods, our food offerings went into the bellies of the priests instead. Our high priests are supposed to be the best of the best, but reality has shown them to be sorely lacking.

Until today, at the completion of a game, the reputation (ranks) of the players, rather than their true skill levels, were compared to determine the points gained or lost for winning or losing the game. As a result, some of the priests shied away from real challenges, hoping to hide their lack of skills. They were gaming the system and using tricks and monotonous work to keep and gain undeserved ranks, seeking reputation for reputation’s sake, rather than perfecting their playing skills.

This all will change as of today. The existing temples, rules, ranks, cities - the entirety of civilization - will cease to exist. The new rules for promotion and demotion will start as a mystery to everyone, ready to be explored and discovered. The goal is to build a new civilization.

I'm loving the new changes. It seems to have revitalized the meta-game, and encourages more players to play both the games they know well, and to learn new games.

Good stuff..

Boardgamely shows promise

2012-07-29T22:34:00.001-05:00

As my board game collection expanded, I began trading on BoardGameGeek. Trading games is great, except when it's not:
1. People care a lot about game condition, perhaps too much. It's common on BGG for people to post pictures of the slightest flaws.
2. You need an exact match of your stuff vs. their stuff. Getting an exact value can be frustrating and subjective.
3. Even if your mutual trade lists overlap, they may not feel like trading... or may not feel like trading with you! Earlier this week, I deeply regretted sending a game to Canada, to the tune of $32 in postage.
4. Until you make a trade, your game sits on the shelf, taking up space. Unless you trade 2-for-1, you'll never get to reduce your collection or upgrade much at a time.

Boardgamely is a newer board game site that adds much-needed liquidity to the trading scene. In essence, you're converting your games to a token economy in "silvers", then trading silvers (and $3) for new games. It's a really neat idea, and one I hope gains traction. While it won't solve the cost of shipping to Canada (which for now, isn't available for the US-only site), Boardgamely does approximately solve all four problems. There are only three condition categories, for which you receive tiered levels of silver trade tokens. If a game's in excellent condition, you might get 10 silvers, while a slightly-used copy earns you 8, and a very-used copy 6. The game must be in playable condition. Smaller, cheaper games are worth fewer tokens, and there's also an "Elite" class of games that tries to account for the most desirable games, to keep people from raiding all the copies of the New Hotness.

As of this writing, I've earned a few silvers by listing several games, and earned a few silvers by having one of the games I listed be requested. I shipped it out to the recipient, and I now have 20 silvers, enough for most likely 2 good games, maybe 3 or even 4 if I choose smaller games that are well-used. The list of games is now fairly decent, and I look forward to seeing even more titles make an appearance briefly, before being snapped up. Twitter followers rejoice, as new Boardgamely acquisitions are announced there as well. I have a second round of games to post, and see if they get requested soon.

The UI is still in active development, and Adam Thorsen, the maintainer, has promised a new appearance and more sorting soon. Adam is responsive to questions, and overall, I have a good feeling about Boardgamely. While not all the games I'm looking to send out are yet available with full listings, I'm looking forward to sending and receiving more games from Boardgamely.

Damn you, Expedit shelves! July challenges!

2012-07-02T19:11:00.001-05:00

"Reading debt" is the stack of books (or directory of e-books) you're intending to read "someday."

I recently finished Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which was excellent. Deliberate slowing of my pace helped me savor the tone of one of the most famous noir novels of all time. As I read, I could also feel myself becoming anxious: what do I read next? Were it not for the stacks of unread books I've thrifted or bought at Half-Price Books, I'd read Poke The Box or Ready Player One. Sadly, I "must" read some William Gibson novels instead.

Recently, we acquired some more of IKEA's fine Expedit shelves, and my wife cautioned me not to buy any more games without reducing my collection. For her, at least, equilibrium has been reached. Since then, 6 games have entered the house, mostly Kickstarter purchases that had been in the pipeline for several months.

#1 goal for July: reduce my total game collection inventory by 20 games, or roughly 10%. As many of them are thrift-store finds, that should be relatively painless. I'm taking inspiration from my Twitter friend (and fellow Cougar) "OfficeBoundTraveler" @3wks, whose posts on the Discardia movement have been an eye-opener into a source of the discontent in my life: I have too many unplayed games, especially games I'll never play. Regardless of what I've been playing lately, I feel the weight of the unplayed games.

To assist in the effort, I'm enlisting a friend to do some of the off-loading. That'll keep me from weaseling out halfway through, too!

#2 goal for July: play 5 unplayed games from my collection. I have done similar challenges in prior years, and it got games out of shrink and on the table. Five is a nice goal without requiring extreme effort. Good candidates: Rolling Freight, 1955: The War Of Espionage, 1960, Nile Deluxor, For The Win!, and Onirim. They're all games with a "hook" I'm interested in, from a board game design perspective, and all ones that I acquired intentionally (rather than being fill-the-cart impulse buys). Onirim is a solo game, so that's likely to be first.

#3 goal for July: write 5 gaming blog posts in July. I like writing them, I like the feedback I get, and it's good for my craft. 'Nuff said.

#4 goal for July: play Magic, or get rid of some cards. I have so many decks assembled and unplayed, it's ridiculous. At my current rate of getting Magic to the table, I no longer need any Magic cards for at least the next 8 years... minimum.

As part of a recent Math Trade, I looked up the values for some Magic cards, and was surprised a bit. Cards I priced a year ago had almost uniformly dropped, some precipitously. There are a few "evergreen" cards, but for most of them, well, they aren't getting any more collectible.

July challenge for you: What nagging dread are you experiencing? What is something you have needed to do for a while?

Firenze: 267 games on Yucata later

2012-05-17T00:00:00.003-05:00

A recent BoardGameGeek thread solicited game reviews on games that you played at least 11 times. As the title of this post indicates, I have met that and much, much more for Firenze (German for Florence, since Germans don't speak Italian very well, evidently) over on Yucata. Florence needs more towers, and 2,3, or 4 players take up the challenge of building the best towers. Usually, that means the tallest, but not always.

Boring rules rehash:
On your turn, you must select an action card out of six available, all of which will have 4 blocks selected from a bag filled with 6 colors of blocks of varying rarity. Good cards goes to your hand, bad stuff plays on you and possibly others immediately. The hook: if you don't select the first card in the row, you must put a block from your supply on each card you don't select that came out before it, similar to Small World's race selection. You can then optionally trade three blocks of any colors for one block still out on the action cards, and move into the fun phase: building two bricks onto towers for free, and possibly paying more bricks to the bag to build more. See, Euro-games are exciting!

Tricky point: the "Glengarry Glen Ross" ABC formula: always be completing. Any tower not increased in height on your turn falls down, losing half the bricks in it to the bag. Yes, rounding losses up!

Once you've built, you can choose to score any or all of your towers, but once someone's built a tower of a brick color to a specific height, no one can build that height in that color again as the fickle folk of Florence frown fearfully at frivolity, etc.

Actual analysis:
The tension in the game comes from several goals. You can build two blocks a round for free, but building more cost triangular penalties. If you build too slowly, another player will get the 5 point bonus for completing a certain number of towers first. If you build too hastily, you'll either not have enough blocks to build, not claim the best cards when they come out, or not get the bonus for the most/best tower of each color. On the other hand, if you have plenty of blocks and trade them in for the right color, you're putting them on action cards which others can claim. There are also cards in the deck you really want to take, and cards you really don't, cards that punish moving slowly, cards that punish moving quickly, and just a lot of tricky evaluation to make, overall.

So, Firenze is, for me, a sleeper hit. The first time I screwed someone over by playing Smuggler to trade them a white block for their last purple block, then selected a Tribute card to demand they pay a purple block they no longer had, causing their 6-block-high purple tower to fall down, I knew, "This is my game." The simple rules have complex implications, and players with an understanding of the deck's composition and how probability works will have a good edge.

Complaint: Racing often isn't fast enough by itself to matter.
Whoever gets rid of all their seals (by completing a number of towers that vary by player count) will get a 5-point bonus at game end. That's big, but frequently not game-breaking, since completing even the white tower with 8 blocks will net you 7 points instead of using 3 blocks to get 2 points. However, when you factor in that your opponents only get one more turn to try and complete their towers, controlling the game and not letting your opponents rack up more towers is useful.

Complaint: The Recognition card is pretty powerful, and can win games by itself.
As it gives the owning player a point for each 2- and 3-point tower built, it frequently is worth at least as much as the bonus for racing to finish first, and is infrequently worth even twice as much. I value it very highly, and try to get at least one, or both of them. The second one does nothing for me directly, but does keep my opponent(s) from scoring it, which is probably still worth 5 blocks to me. However, I often give up many blocks to my opponents, hampering my short-term abilities. If your opponents get Recognition, then you need to focus on playing taller towers, to extend the power of triangular scoring against them, and play to claim the bonus for blue and purple towers, hopefully.

Complaint: Playing with opponents of unequal skill could favor one player over another.
Most likely. However, since there is randomness both in the action cards coming off the deck, and blocks coming from the bag, it's hard to construct a can't-miss scenario that's also both block- and card-efficient. When you do, it's terribly satisfying, which I think is a feature, not a bug.

Complaint: Playing with different number of players feels different.
Another feature, not bug, in my opinion. Firenze feels a lot like poker, to be honest. You're making some judgement calls to improve your odds, and then hoping they work out. With more players in the mix, randomness is increased, which keeps the game from being too calculable and stale, as Puerto Rico would. That said, I've found 4 player games on Yucata to be too unpredictable to be fun.

Complaint: Some of the cards are better than others.
Absolutely. A third feature, not a bug, or players would always take the first card in line except negative ones. Princess and Patrician are much better, while Wholesaler is mediocre in most scenarios.

Complaint: It's not in English yet.
Fair enough, but you can play it at Yucata for free, and paste-ups are available over at the BGG page, presuming you've already ordered a foreign-language version... and if you have, it's not like you stumbled into the purchase accidentally, so you have no one to blame, except yourself.

Complaint: Yucata, aaargh
It's actually pretty good. It's free, and has a large number of games to play. Their meta-game can (and should) also safely be ignored.

Pimp my boardgames: 18AL, looking sharp!

2012-05-16T22:22:00.002-05:00

I've become a fan of the 18xx rail games in recent years, including building some of the games from scratch.
My interest in the series began with Mark Derrick's 18AL, which is available as a print-and-play game from his original publisher John David Galt. I constructed the components two, and in some cases, three times. 18AL and sister-single-state-game 18GA, also by Derrick, are widely accepted to be good introductions to the series, with most of the same opportunities for devious stock manipulation as longer predecessors 1830 et al.. When I originally constructed my copy, 1830 was out of print and regularly sold for $100 or more. Mayfair reprinted 1830 with some additional material this spring, other evergreen favorites like 1870 are still available, and a wild cacophony of variety is available to be custom-ordered from John Tamplin's Deep Thought Games (with a several-month backlog that represents the labor-intensive and high-quality nature of the construction).
Here are a couple shots, showing the fronts and backs of the 18AL company charters, trains, stock certificates, and uncut tiles. The cereal-box origins actually produce a pleasing heft:

In the shot above, in the left corner, you can see the front and back of a train tile, with the special rules for it shown on the back, so no table need be consulted during play. The private companies have been assembled in the same way.

My latest incarnation of the tiles uses Cory Williamson, a.k.a. "Koryo,"'s redone graphics. These were color laser-printed, glue-sticked to dollar-store foamboard, cut out with a utility knife, then trimmed with scissors. They're much thicker and heavier than the usual 18xx tiles, and fun to place on the map... though my map is definitely the weakest part of my copy. We owe Mr. Derrick much appreciation in allowing Cory Williamson to try his hand at re-drawing the 18AL tiles, and Mr. Williamson much for making the attempt.

Of course, what would crafting be without a specialized tool recommendation? There's a lot to be said for the orange half-inch circular metal punch in the picture above. Definitely one of my better purchases, it lets you get a near-perfect paper circle almost every time! It was under $5, and allows me to create sharp-looking company tokens quickly by pasting the cut-outs to 1/2" wooden plugs. I once nearly ordered 100,000 of those plugs for mass-producing my own 18IA, before doing the math and asking myself where the many, many unsold copies would go.
To learn more about 18AL, check out the BGG page.

Pimp my boardgames: Wine Box Card Case

2012-05-11T16:04:00.001-05:00

1. Give your special someone a fancy wooden wine box:

2. Open it to reveal Magic cards!

3. Run away, as fast as you can!

High Frontier: an exhaustive (and exhausting) space sim game, or "In space, no one can hear you scream because you screwed yourself and are out of fuel"

2012-04-03T07:23:00.001-05:00

Recently Nich Vitek (of Indented Blank Dice and Living Worlds Games, publisher of 1955: War of Espionage and upcoming Schlock Mercenary-which you can preorder with a discount) and I, along with some other folks, have managed to get in games of High Frontier, an extensively-researched simulation about space exploration. The designer, Phil Eklund, worked at NASA for many years, and has been working on High Frontier for the last 3 decades or so. The final result is impressive, but is it fun? (Spoiler: it depends!)

Oh look, I've got a bunch of cards!

There are rules for aero-braking, space piracy, regolith thrusters (conversion of Moon/Mars dust into fuel), how the distance from the sun affects the thrust you get from solar sails, how afterburners cost differing amounts of fuel, which generators one needs for powering things, sizing radiators with mass differences based on cooling needs etc., etc. If you like lots and lots of tiny, fiddly details, this is your game.

Yet, there's a certain elegance to it. Once you get the details down, High Frontier turns are basically 20 seconds of "move a rocket, based on your prior planning, then buy one thing/sell one thing/take a buck." Okay, it's a water tank (water is propellant is currency), but it's also a clear plastic disc. Nich, being Nich, used his industrial acrylic laser cutter to make totally sweet acrylic markers for the claim sites, with little flags and factory cut-outs that fit into the site bases (see picture of the universe).

The technologies available are frustratingly random. Some are Just Plain Better Than Others (see Magic: The Gathering for why this is bad) which you won't understand the first game (see Power Grid or Greg Costikyan's fine game design essays for why this is bad). Eklund has more pages of notes on the technologies presented than rules... and there are a lot of rules. The balancing for the different technologies comes from two things, neither of which work perfectly. First, auctions! The technologies come in either 3 stacks, or 6 stacks, depending on if playing the base or expanded game. Almost everything has a significant amount of mass, so over-equipping a rocket is almost worse than under-equipping it. That would be elegant, were it not for the squirrely movement rules about when you burn fuel and how much... which are based in physics. Rockets with fuel can drift in space or hang out in Lagrange points, hopping from orbit to orbit. But burning fuel is necessary in a lot of spots, so careful planning is essential. In every game, I think every player announced, "Crap, I don't have enough fuel to get there and back!" at least once. All this really costs you is calculation time unless there's really nowhere in space you can go... in which case, you're screwed, freighter the crew home (more on this in a moment).

The coolest part of High Frontier is in solving the challenges of getting a robonaut and refinery, along with assorted reactors, radiators, whiskey bottles, makeup cases, handbags, and other accessories, to a site you can then prospect and claim. Prospect? Yes, after all this time and effort, winning a claim, and potentially winning the game, may be based on the results of a single d6 roll. After that, you dump some junk out of your rocket and make it into a factory. This lets you flip a card in your inventory to the other side, upgrading it to (usually) a much better and lighter version, then build the tech and put it in your rocket. Or, if you failed the roll, pack yourself and all your junk back in the rocket and get back on the road to the next die roll. The die roll always succeeds at large sites, which require a bigger rocket to leave. It'd be nice to have more than one rocket... but you can't. (You CAN pack multiple thrusters, including a solar sail, which, yes, Virginia, can be fed into a regolith converter to yield fuel. Heck yeah.)

OH YEAH. Everyone only has one rocket. Just like in real life, each space agency has a monomaniacal focus on only a single moving stack of junk in space. Screw it up and strand your folks around Jupiter? Ship them back home in a freighter cube that only moves one space per turn... which could be 30 minutes of game time where you do little but relaunch some parts.

There are three ways the game ends: a set number of factories are built in total, two totally sweet Space Ventures are claimed by the same person (I got one in two games), or someone builds 3 factories and spends 5 bucks to end the game. The problem is this: all of these are based on die rolls, unless you're going to the very largest of sites where there are tons of exploitable resources about. We ended one basic game about 2/3 of the way through... which is a segue into another point. Even in the base set, there are two ways to play, basic and advanced. Advanced offers many, many more ways to die, including radiation attrition. You can build the perfect rocket, then roll a 6 and lose parts to radiation, and be stranded/screwed. Whoo! Realism!

The auction rules are also limiting in that if parts fall off your rocket or it blows up, you may be at your hand maximum number of cards, and be unable to bid in auctions. When this happens, other players get fantastic bargains. One faction, the Shizumi, can always buy patent cards and indeed, I locked the expanded game by doing so and rendering two other players unable to progress. We paused the game, argued tensely, and resumed after house-ruling me to a hand limit of 10 cards. Since Eklund is a regular participant of two lively Yahoo groups devoted to High Frontier, I can't wait to see his reaction to our dilemma and resolution thereof.

There are also combat and piracy rules, and one of the special powers of the Chinese space agency is being extra-heartless about voluntarily killing your crew. We never tested the missile/ray gun rules, nor the kamikaze space buggy rules. One oddity/oversight is that there are only 5 space agencies, so in a 5-player game, you'll have the same set of special powers to haggle over. It seems strange, and I wait eagerly for an expansion with new agencies/powers. ("The Canadian Space Ministry is used to dealing with moose. Any component with a mass of 4 or more is reduced by 1 mass." "The Brazilian Agency has Samba powers, and can do a dance that shuffles one patent stack at the start of any player's turn.")

Another odd non-oversight is that, other than patents flipping to their extra-terrestrial improved side, which you'll do at most perhaps 3 times per game, there's very little you can do to improve your overall lot in life. It's your brain, your crews, some water, and whichever patents you win in auctions, versus the board, and expansion board if you buy that as well. I longed for the ability to do research on general improvements, but that would probably make it too easy.*

In conclusion, High Frontier is brilliant, and also has a lot of depth for those willing to play a few times and get the hang of it, yet there are many groups for whom it won't work. Even one or two players who have a low tolerance for failure or are prone to analysis-paralysis will wreck the experience (we had none of these). Also, it's entirely possible that some approaches will pay off much more handsomely, based entirely on 10 rolls of a single d6... and if the first 5 rolls are fives or sixes instead of ones or twos, that could be the difference between last place and first place.

We managed to play out the Expanded game in about 2.5 hours, which is much less than I expected, and our game finished with scores of 21(me), 20, 19, 18, and 11 (that player got irradiated and/or hit by space junk in Low Earth Orbit more than anyone else combined). Nich's preparation for the second game and willingness to speed us through auctions definitely eliminated at least 20 minutes of mostly-dead time. Even on the second play and being tired as hell, most of the mechanics were second nature to me, and it's gratifying to be able to look at a stack of patents and work out where in space you can head profitably.

Do I recommend High Frontier? Fans of Eklund's earlier American Megafauna, or other longer high-learning-curve games like Outpost, 18xx, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Arkham Horror, Up Front, or Star Fleet Battles will be intrigued. Standard/new-school/young gamers are going to frustrated by the high learning curve and slow pace, and should stay away. We had a hearty debate about whether or not High Frontier is a outlier Euro-game, or a category-transcending unique beast. To be perfectly frank, I don't know if I'm up to playing again soon; I had originally finished the session declaring in frustration, "I'll never play this again, even winnin' ain't fun!" but in writing this review, I had time to reflect on the nature of the game. I am glad I got to play the 2 High Frontier games in short succession, as it was helpful on bringing more game ideas forward and required all (or more!) of my concentration. You don't get that from Dominion or Carcassonne.

I'll also add that the expansion makes the game better. More tech means more options, and the reduced masses on each patent makes them easier to mix 'n' match. Play a game or two only with the basic set, then jump into the mix!
___________
* "Too easy," of course, meaning "easy at all, in any way, shape, or form." Space exploration is dangerous and difficult, and every turn of High Frontier is a reminder of this.

2011 Game of the Year: Parade

2012-02-23T20:30:00.000-06:00

I have been mulling over the many games played in 2011, and it's past time to say it: Parade is my game of the year.

If this doesn't make you happy, you're a bitter person who hates joy.

List of Parade's awesome features:

Voluntarily played many times by me
Requested by people other than me
Taught to multiple people, all of whom had a good time, some of whom requested to play a second time
it's got gorgeous art
passed the "wife test," "the Alex test," and the "Mom test"
it's in print and readily available, so I don't feel like a pretentious jerk for recommending it
it's small, and it's already become one of my go-to traveling games
it's from a game publisher who I like, trust, and want to support
play is quick: play a card, draw a card
it has some strategic depth and replayability
it's got enough luck that it doesn't promote degenerate strategies that are no fun for newer players
it's not steeped in a rehashed or offensive theme
it's a great gateway game

There ya go, buy it at your favorite friendly local game store, or friendly online game store.

My FLGS of choice is 8th Dimension Comics & Games, a clean, well-lit store with helpful employees, and a rack of children's comics for my kiddos. Easy to find at Highway 6 and West Road, I've always walked out thinking, "Man, I feel good about giving them money in exchange for nerd stuff." Jeremy and the other employees have been friendly and sincerely helpful. I wish them the best of luck in a tough business.

A long rant about publishing boardgames, and why you need to know the supply chain

2011-12-21T06:30:00.000-06:00

"It's like every game on Kickstarter is AWESOME!" I thought.
I was wrong: Lunch Box Board Game looks terrible. They are shooting for a $130,000 target, more than any game has EVER gotten from Kickstarter funding. The biggest one, D-Day Dice, had a crap-ton of good buzz going, a print-and-play demo, tons of sweet overfunding goals, and is apparently an awesome game lots of people want to play repeatedly. The second biggest one, based on long-running webcomic Schlock Mercenary, is by noted game designer (and, full disclosure, buddy of mine) Kevin Nunn, and is being published by designer/publisher (and, full disclosure, buddy of mine) Nicholas Vitek, who has had prior Kickstarter success with 1955: War of Espionage.

Seriously, go look at those three links. You need to see them, side by side by side, to appreciate how terrible in comparision the Lunch Box Board Game looks.
The Lunch Box Board Game folks' stated business plan is to print up 3,000 copies of a roll & move trivia board game. A little math tells us that they believe they'll spend $43 per copy.

From all my separate conversations with current and former Houston Gamers designers, as well as other small designer/publishers at Texas conventions over the years, almost all of them held to one basic math-based rule of thumb: to make any sort of money on a game, you need to print it for 1/10th the SRP (that's "suggested retail price," for you Elementary Education majors out there) you choose, based on your target market.
Mathematical proof follows:
You, the badass game designer, make the games for 10% of SRP, sell them for 18-20% of SRP to Fulfillment House Francine, who sells them to Debbie Distributor for 26-32% of SRP, which sells them to Roberta Retailer for 45-55% of SRP, who sells them to Cordelia the Casual Consumer for 100% of your SRP (or whatever the market will bear). Cordelia then plays the hell out of the game, and preorders a case of everything you ever design, forever, and also spends a ton of money on other games, funding everyone throughout the chain. The end, everyone involved is a winner.

If you print a game for $5, it better goddamn sell for $50 or less, or your entire business plan is SKY HIGH. You can make little burbling noises about direct sales through your website, and so on. Doesn't matter, it's not how gamers or game stores buy games, for the most part. Also, always keep in mind the key rule of board game fulfillment: "Shipping any product to anyone sucks, more than you can ever imagine."
When Cordelia the Casual Consumer goes to buy a game, she goes basically two places: her Friendly Local Game Store, and her 2-5 Friendly Online Game Stores That She's Willing To Support In The Sense That She Will Always Order The Cheapest Deal She Can Find, Give Or Take A Couple Of Bucks. She doesn't go to the manufacturer's website, because if she's buying online, she believes firmly that she deserves at least a 30% discount and/or free shipping, from the very first click. Hell, why should she? By and large, the websites are terrible and updated infrequently, and all the best information and discussion is probably over at BoardGameGeek, except when it's not [Q: Judge, can we do that sidebar that another day? A: You bet your tin star, Marshall].

Both those retail outlets typically buy from the distributors who buy from fulfillment houses, because no retailer wants to deal with 10,000 individual publishers' invoices, shipping policies, etc. It'd be like a bookstore trying to buy books from authors, one at a time, as they sold out. Likewise, the distributors deal with fulfillment houses, because they don't want to deal with 10,000 individual publishers. So you find a middleman who deals with the other middlemen, who ends up probably being Alliance. Go ahead, call up your FLGS and ask "Which distributors can you order from?" They'll be astonished that you don't think the games magically congealed on the shelf, fresh for your purchase.
Now, some printers do direct fulfillment as well... which means they'll charge you to print the game, charge you storage until your game sells, and then charge you shipping fees and fulfillment fees. The upside is they're probably much more likely to have usable warehouse space and a pallet jack-accessible ramp than your back bedroom (which is where all your printed-but-not-yet-sold copies would otherwise go).

Big whoop, you're just some dude theorycrafting
I've worked in a TOP SECRET game website warehouse, pulling, packing, and shipping orders. Endless details, endless headaches, endless parade of bullshit. The boxes are always either too small, or too large, and then you don't have the right size label, and then people in Forn Parts want to buy things in baht and rupees, you wake up in the middle of the night screaming, etc. Everything takes longer than you'll think.
Capitalism and the implications thereof
Once a fulfillment house or distributor gets bigger, they start offering bigger discounts on bigger shipping amounts, which means that our FLGS/FOGS could buy $500 of product from Distributor A, or $500 of product from Distributor B, and get a discount and probably "free" shipping out of the deal. If the Friendly Game Store of Either Type splits their order up into $250 to each distributor, oh, dang, no more discount/no more free shipping from one or both of the distributors. Again, dealing with multiple shippers sucks, so stores do their best to have one major distributor (usually Alliance) and a few minor ones as backup for what Alliance can't get.

The store is free to switch to another set of distributors, but realistically, they're all going to offer volume discounts because they, too, want to lump big pallets together and drop ship them, not break pallets down and goof with little 6-pack cases of games, etc.; If the FLGS/FOGS picks a good selection of merchandise and doesn't irritate customers, they'll make money and all is good. Also, for fun, figure out how big a case of 6 of your games would be, and then multiply that cubic yardage by, say, 250. The fulfillment house and distributors may not even want a bunch of copies of your game up front, so you may need to ship games a few cases or a half-pallet at a time.

What about Amazon, smart guy?
Maybe you can sell directly through Amazon and actually make money... reviewing the guidelines makes me think, "hmm, $40 per month fees, plus 15% of sales, that's not bad..." then I remembered that it sucks to have recurring fees. If you consider $480 a year plus a dime-and-a-half rake, forever, to be an unacceptable cost of doing business, you can also ship your stuff to Amazon and let them worry about it, with Fulfillment By Amazon (oh, look, a fee schedule!). Will you make money this way? Beats me. Hey, if you can't sell your stuff, Amazon will throw it in the trash! For free! If I'm reading this right! Which I may not be! Thank you, Dave Barry! For creating exclamatory sentence fragments!
So I'll do Kickstarter right, and rake in the bucks!
Mmmmmaaybe... you can pre-sell games via Kickstarter and actually make money. Some people definitely are. Presuming it funds and your printer doesn't screw you, you'll get to ship a lot of games quickly (once you get them from your overseas printer of choice), and your life will suck for a while as you deal with that, but then for the most part, you'll have time to breathe. You know up-front whether you're likely to break even, and you're avoiding a lot of fulfillment-house and warehousing charges. You also get to meet the public, just like in this thread where the Lunchbox Game publisher gets to hear why their plan is terrible, and dismisses all criticisms.

I think that Kickstarter has the potential to be good for the industry, because it's attacking a direly wasteful supply chain. Go back and look at that model. People print a ton of copies of a game, and they sit around, and then periodically ship them to Debbie, on to Francine, on to Roberta, and finally maybe Cordelia buys one.

It also has the potential to be very bad for the industry. When everything is being sold to the consumer "on spec," the potential to burn out customers is there. The Kickstarter limited-availability model aggravates certain types of completists, and frustrates others. Of all the products I've ordered via Kickstarter, fully half have been delayed by problems in the publishing supply chain (Alien Frontiers being the most notable). Sure, I'm supporting creators directly, but that just makes me more acutely aware of the slowdowns and disappointments involved (that card I supported for Eminent Domain is less cool than I thought it'd be. Good game, though.). At some level, I'm simultaneously kicking myself for supporting some things, while missing projects like the adorable Creatures card game, which was/is a great gaming value in a small package.

If you think to yourself, "Todd, this entire system sucks, I just want to make awesome board games and make a lot of money..." well, yeah. You need a hit, and probably two or three of them a year. Get playing, get designing, get playtesting. Cordelia is waiting; go make her some great games!

Bug in Firenze on Yucata

2011-12-21T01:04:00.001-06:00

Here's a screenshot. Guy had four one-brick towers, with no matching blocks in his reserve (not sure why one would do this) and I destroyed them all with a Tribute.

I am really enjoying Firenze, having played quite a few games of it since it was implemented recently.

The weekend: old and new

2011-11-21T18:30:00.000-06:00

Played two games of Puerto Rico on Saturday, winning one and narrowly losing the second (my own fault, even!). It was great to see all the High Altitude guys, have pizza, and hang out. I was a little late due to hitting Logan's 10th birthday party, but other than that, it was all good.

Taught and lost two games of Innovation on Sunday at the Cafe Express-Uptown Park Meetup. I'm not very good at Innovation, obviously. It's almost purely tactical, and there's a large random element. David, the other player, is an experienced gamer and caught on quickly.

I also cleaned the house quite a bit, moving a few games around on the shelves.

This weekend, next weekend (point-counterpoint edition)

2011-11-14T18:30:00.000-06:00

This weekend, I didn't play any face-to-face boardgames. I did:

clean the downstairs
eat pizza
Take 5 children between the ages of 2 and 7 to the Lego store at the Galleria
Successfully get family photos taken with great results (Jack Potts is the man, post should probably follow to that effect).
enable my wife to go to a girls' night out (ha ha, they did crafts).

Next weekend:

Guys' night out on Saturday. Boardgaming, natch.

What not to give on Halloween: Valentine's Day and Easter candy

2011-10-31T20:18:00.001-05:00

Actual candy my kids got from somewhere in walking distance from our front door:

Turning 37: Birthday Request: Go get on the National Bone Marrow Registry

2011-10-16T08:14:00.001-05:00

Yes, there's been a bit of a posting drought lately.

I've played Parade, lots of 7Ate9, the terrible and pointless Eaten By Zombies, an excellent game of Goa, Animal Upon Animal, learned Neuroshima Hex, taught Twitch, Forbidden Island, and 10 Days in Europe, so my time hasn't been completely wasted.

I also registered for the National Bone Marrow Registry yesterday. I've been an intermittent blood donor over the years, and recently moved up into donating double red cells (apheresis) which is the preferred method for my B-negative self to be doing.

A website I've followed for years, ChangeThis.Org, sent out an impassioned plea on behalf of Amit Gupta, one of their founders. Amit went to his doctor feeling a little run-down, and learned he has acute leukemia. Amit's a great guy, and he's made a lot of cool contributions to the world. I want him to live. Key is, he's gonna be tough to match.

Please, for my birthday present this year, if you're between 18 and 60 years old, go read Amit's story, and get on the registry. Every day counts. We can save lives, Amit's life among them.

The entire cheek swab paperwork and swabbing (4 long cotton swabs at the corners of my mouth, which you are handed and apply yourself) took 20 minutes from opening the door to heading out into the world. Make a contribution that could be life or death for someone in the future.

Labor Day Weekend Saturday gaming: a noble effort embiggens the smallest room

2011-09-27T16:04:00.001-05:00

After much effort and watching of music videos, I disassembled my downstairs pseudo-office to expand the front room's gaming space.
We had several couples join us and much gaming was had.

Late Saturday Gaming: Through the Ages Severe Beating

2011-08-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

After getting the kids to bed and the dinner dishes cleared, I headed over to Nick's. I ended up assuming Ed's position in a Through The Ages game. He had gotten amazingly shafted on resources; I ended the game in 3rd place (of 4), about 80 points behind the leaders.

After that, I barely lost a game of Glory To Rome to Nick and John E. - Glory To Rome is an outstanding game, and I'm always happy to play it.

Nick and I talked about dice, the high costs of specialty magazines, what's on his to-be-played shelf, and laser etching.

I dropped off one of the two loaner copies of The Magicians and picked up a stack of books to read.

Close-to-home Saturday

2011-08-27T19:14:00.001-05:00

Got in a game of 10 Days in Europe with Alex. Hopefully later on tonight, I can get some more gaming in. The 8th Dimension Opening Party is going on out at West Road and Highway 6, which isn't far.