You can read FFG’s official FAQ about this new game for yourself, and for good measure, chase it with Mark Jackson’s excellently worded (and at times feisty) rebuke.

Photo courtesy Paul Vogt

Like Mark and Chris, I was originally miffed that FFG evidently wouldn’t be “saving” what we now know as BattleLore, but given what has been revealed thus far about the new system in Battles of Westeros, I’m willing to at least give the publisher the benefit of the doubt and wait to hear more. In fact, I am actually excited by the mechanical and gameplay changes I’ve read about to this point.

At least 4 published board games have now featured Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors system, and while I’m as big a fan of that system as anyone, I am glad to hear that FFG is remolding the mechanics and building the BattleLore name their own way, even if that requires a departure from the familiar C&C. As Christian Peterson said in the FAQ:

The BattleLore name is not necessarily tied to Richard’s “Command and Colors” system.

I agree with Peterson’s assertion. BattleLore is ripe for a huge shakeup on the basis of its mechanical similarity to GMT’s superior C&C: Ancients series, and if any game publisher can rise to meet such a challenge, it’s Fantasy Flight. Perhaps a bit fanboy-ish of me to say, but there it is.

FFG houses an excellent staff of game developers, so I would be underwhelmed if they simply polished up the original game and tried to sell it as something new. C&C is a fantastic system upon which I’ve spent many fun hours, but I think I’m ready to move on to the next step in its evolution, at least in the case of BattleLore.

Still, given the growing outcry from fans of the original game, perhaps we haven’t seen the last of what FFG calls “classic BattleLore.” Only time will tell.

Looking back at 2009, I’d like to present (in no particular order) the board games and card games that were part of my most positive and/or memorable gaming experiences of the year. Of course, my listing each of these games says just as much about the games themselves as about the wonderful people they were played with, so your mileage may vary depending upon the company you keep.

Battle Line

A two-player card game, pitting one army against another. There are 60 cards, numbered 1–10 in six different colors. The object is to capture a flag by playing the best sequence of cards next to it. There are 9 flags in all, and the winner of the game is the player who manages to either take 3 flags in a row, or 5 total flags. My wife and I enjoy playing this one together, which says a lot because she’s not as big a fan of games as I am. It’s a short game, usually taking 15–20 minutes to complete, and almost always below 30.

Tichu

Tichu is a trick-taking partnership card game that is best played with 4 players. Other games in this genre are Euchre, Spades, Hearts, Bridge, and Rook. The most apt comparison to Tichu would be Rook on a cocktail of E, acid, steroids, and mescaline. Like Rook, Tichu requires a specialized deck of cards rather than traditional playing cards. It’s very challenging, yet not overly complicated or hard to learn, and an awful lot of fun. It’s an absolutely brilliant game. Near perfect.

Race for the Galaxy (w/ expansions)

My nerdiest friends love Race for the Galaxy. Why? Well, it’s San Juan with frickin’ laser beams. It’s got an economic system, a victory points engine, a set collection mechanic, and a double-think dynamic all in one neat package. And it’s just a card game, no fiddly bits required. I’ve played it nearly 100 times, thanks in part to the expansions and the excellent (and free) computer version I downloaded, and it never gets old. Race achieves a depth of play and a level of replayability seldom seen in the game world.

Le Havre

Grabbing my attention early due to Agricola, its highly touted predecessor, Le Havre turned out to be a slow-churning, brain-burning, efficiency engine of a game. And I love it. There is so much to think about in this game, so many interesting decisions, dilemmas, and problems to solve. Although Le Havre is a longer game, the length seems appropriate given the complexity. With experienced players jockeying for the best actions, there can be some punishing screwage, which makes for a tense and wonderfully angst-filled gaming experience.

Chicago Express

This is the lavishly produced Queen Games version of Wabash Cannonball, a railroad-themed stock market game, and it completely caught me by surprise. I bought a copy of it purely because of word of mouth reviews. It’s short, tense, and satisfying from beginning to end. There is barely any downtime. The components and board are beautiful. There is no randomness at all — only player-generated chaos. For a game to be this good and yet be playable in 60 minutes is simply phenomenal.

Power Grid

I’d never played Power Grid before this past year, but I managed to get several plays of it in. The verdict: It stacks up, and is well-deserving of its lofty reputation. Your goal, as an electric utility company, is to power the most cities at the end of the game. You have to build power plants, buy fuel to power your plants, and expand your network of cities on the map. Power Grid can be a little mathy and prone to induce analysis paralysis, but I’ve been won over. I’m a big fan of its turn-order balancing mechanic.

Steam

Steam is a variant of the Age of Steam system. I’m not going to get into a long Steam vs. Age of Steam discussion here, but I’m extremely happy that I opted for the former. I personally don’t have the wherewithal or the patience for the brutal and unforgiving AoS. The “Base Game” of Steam is quite excellent in its own right, and fills the “awesome train game” void in my collection nicely. As the owner of a railroad company, you spend the game building track and delivering goods to cities. It’s a top-tier game, and certainly a brain-burner.

Brass

I’ve already written a review of Brass here, and from reading it, you are likely to conclude that I am obviously infatuated with it and will play it any chance I get. And you would be 100% correct. Brass is easily in my all-time top 5. The gameplay successfully evokes the 19th-century English industrial revolution, and the real, working economy is tight as a drum. The turn-order balancing mechanism (he who spent the most goes last) is simple, but effective. Sorry, but I just love this game.

Starcraft: The Board Game (w/ expansion)

My goodness, this thing is a beast. It’s by far the most monstrous game in my entire collection. I don’t often stray to the Ameritrash side of the gaming spectrum, but I’m happy to own this one. Tons of bits, lots of rules, and plenty of strategy. The expansion adds a lot more depth and polish to the system. The game can be on the long side, but time just flies while you’re playing. Starcraft: The Board Game, like its video game counterpart, is like a knife fight. In a telephone booth. In space.

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization

I have a self-confessed weakness for civilization-building games. My favorite computer game, even after all this time, is Sid Meier’s Civilization II. Through the Ages is based on that computer game, which in turn was based on Francis Tresham’s Civilization board game from the ‘80s. So it appears we have come full circle, except that TtA is a much shorter game that doesn’t include a map at all. Instead, it focuses on the core mechanics of Civ II: the tech tree, science, food, production, and military. Stripped down and abstracted in this way, it doesn’t make me miss the map one bit, and it’s one of my absolute favorites.

Middle Earth Quest

Here we have a semi-cooperative game that pits several players, representing the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, against one player, playing the role of Sauron the Great. It’s unlike any other game I’ve ever played. It’s an immersive, experiential game akin to (what I imagine might be) a really lightweight role-playing game. You roam Middle Earth, embarking on quests and fighting the orc, while Sauron hatches plot after evil plot in his attempt to spread his influence and cover the world in shadow.

Cribbage

2009 was the year I was first introduced to Cribbage, a card game which was created in the 1600’s. It’s rare for a traditional card game to play just as well with 2 as it does 3 or 4, but Cribbage pulls it off well. It’s amazing how tough the decision-making can be in this game, and trying to foil your opponents’ plans weighs just as heavily as maximizing your own gains. Cribbage is apparently quite a popular card game in the English-speaking world, but I haven’t personally met many people who know it.

Endeavor

The shining new star for 2009 is Endeavor, a game I anxiously anticipated for about a year prior to its eventual release. It didn’t disappoint, and it plays in about an hour. As competing European powers in the 18th century, players must balance their progress in building, culture, finance, and politics as they attempt to colonize the four corners of the Earth. The colonial theme is quite abstracted, but it manages to shine through, and there is a healthy dose of player interaction to keep everyone engaged for the duration.

Winner’s Circle

The “dark horse” game of the year for me, if you’ll excuse the terrible pun, was definitely Winner’s Circle. A guy in my game group happened to own a copy, and we had a total blast playing it. The basic gist of it is placing bets on horses, then trying to influence the race to the extent that your horse wins, places, or shows. On your turn, you roll a die, and you get to choose which horse moves. Each horse has particular strengths and weaknesses, depending on what gets rolled. Opportunities abound for bluffing and screwage.

Modern Art: The Card Game

My wife and I enjoy Modern Art: The Card Game (or Modern Art, sans auctions). I was very surprised to see how well the game worked without auctions, even to the point where I’m now unsure if I’d want to play the original rather than this version. The core of the game remains: collect as many paintings of the most valuable artists as you can. Of course, the crux of the matter is that you don’t know which artists will end up being valuable, but you can attempt to influence the balance in your favor as you play.

The BPA site is clumsily designed and not very newbie-friendly, and it unfortunately mirrors some of the WBC convention experience itself (you are initially confused and disoriented, but gradually learn to navigate the landscape in spite of the many quirks). I joked about attending mainly to “watch the old guys play wargames,” but it’s undeniable that grognards are the WBC’s primary demographic. One look at the BPA logo might give you a hint in that direction, but any dyed-in-the-wool boardgamer would also recognize the name of the BPA’s president, Don Greenwood: Mr. Avalon Hill himself, designer of seemingly a thousand titles, among which resides Advanced Squad Leader, one of the most renowned wargame franchises ever published.

So, “Wargamers’ Mecca” is the most apt 2-word description I can muster for the WBC — those guys were everywhere! Thankfully, there were plenty of other options available for the less-hardcore among us. As I mentioned, I mainly concentrated on (casual) open gaming, and there was ample time and space allotted for that.

Day 1

I drove out to Lancaster with fralim on Friday morning. Upon arriving, I met my pal Severus, and we immediately launched into a game of Race for the Galaxy with the new Rebels vs. Imperium expansion. Severus is quite the gaming savant who routinely beats the pants off of everyone, and he won effortlessly. We both went for military, but he pulled it off much better than I.

Upon exploring the open gaming library for a short game, we were dismayed at how generic the selection was. As Severus was off to see a game demo, fralim and I eventually decided to play a teaching game of Notre Dame since fralim hadn’t played it before. He seemed to enjoy it, despite being strapped for cash and nearly overwhelmed by the rats several times.

I went to check out the vendors’ area, where I immediately snapped up a copy of Conflict of Heroes: Storm of Steel from the Academy Games table. fralim showed me a few of the finer points of the rules and strategy. This looks like a really cool game, and I’m not sorry to own both it and Combat Commander: Europe. Same genre, but wholly different approaches to gameplay.

After putting SoS back in its box, fralim realized we had about an hour before the Chicago Express tournament. He’d heard that the new Narrow Guage & Erie Railroad Company expansion would be given away to all heat winners, so that was on his list of things to do. Our friend PrinceHamlet arrived, and we tried out Fire & Axe, a very attractive light strategy game about Vikings that was surprisingly civil (and also had very little to do with either fire or axes).

The Chicago Express heat was kind of surreal. I had never played a board game competitively before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We were seated randomly, 4 to a table. My grouping was pretty polite and well-mannered. The B&O company launched out of the gates pretty early and was clearly going to beat the other lines to Chicago, so I sprung for a couple shares of it. The next-highest line on the income track was Pennsylvania, which I also won a share in. That would have been enough to win me the game, but I wasted some precious cash a share of Central, which resulted in a tie for first place between another player and myself. The tiebreaker to decide the winner? A die roll, which I won. Put an asterisk next to my win if you must — the other guy definitely deserved it.

fralim, PrinceHamlet, and I sat down to play our first-ever game of Starcraft: the Board Game with the Brood War expansion. Mercifully, one of the guys from Fortress Ameritrash swung by and helped us to grasp some of the rules. I played as the Arcturus faction of the Terran race, fralim was Aldaris of the Protoss, and PrinceHamlet chose to be the Zerg Overmind. The game moved surprisingly fast despite its considerable weight. Since attackers have a huge advantage over defenders, the game definitely provides an incentive not to turtle. Despite this, PrinceHamlet built up and built up, readying his forces for the inevitable invasion as fralim and I rattled our sabres nervously. John had the special victory condition that gave him victory if he had 3 bases, but he only had 2, and his turtling Zerglings were no match for the Battle Cruiser and Wraiths I sent in to raze one of his bases. I ended up winning on victory points, but mainly because we all played overly tentatively and defensively. We’ll get it right next time.

Severus and PrinceHamlet went home for the night, and fralim and I were pretty fried, but we just had to play one more game: Thebes. He pretty much destroyed me.

Day 2

Saturday morning began very ambitiously with fralim and I breaking out Through the Ages. I began the game with Julius Caesar, while fralim took Homer as his leader. He took a sizable lead in culture during the first half of the game. After a while, though, my military started to push around his poets and artists, and ultimately just sat on them. I ended up drawing 3 War on Culture cards when I had a strength advantage of 47 points. It definitely reinforced the notion that you can’t afford to ignore military in this game.

fralim then taught me how to play Finca, a light set-collection game with an ingenious little rondel mechanic. I enjoy rondel games, so that was a win. I may pick this one up at some point.

I had recently acquired a copy of Stephenson’s Rocket, and managed to get it to the table with Severus and fralim. Severus totally ran away with the game, owing mostly to the shrewd placement of his stations. It’s definitely a game that I’ll have to play a few more times before I grok it. Only Knizia can make a set-collection game out of a train game. fralim called it “opaque,” not unlike Tigris & Euphrates, a game by the same designer which we later went to see demoed.

fralim had to leave, so Severus and I played his newly purchased special edition of Caylus. The artwork and the metal coins are fantastic, but I have no problem with the plain old regular edition. The battle for control of the provost is especially tight in 2-player Caylus, and at one point, it was all the way back at the bridge! Amazingly, I won the game by a single point, though I’m sure there’s a margin of error considering that it was Severus’ first play, and it had been a long time since my last Caylus game. We were unsure of whether a player’s supply of houses is limited, but lucky for me, it turns out that houses are unlimited. I built a prestige building with my royal favor at game end.

I left to go home at that point, but Severus stayed to play in the semi-finals of the Race for the Galaxy tournament. He’d spent the whole weekend playing heats in order to qualify, and he ended up making it into the pool. Later that night he texted me to let me know he got 4th in the Final. Not too shabby!

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<html>
<head><title>My Site</title></head>
<body>
  <div id="container">
  ...
  </div>
</body>
</html>

This basic structure makes it easier to control the page’s layout. By far, the most prevalent method for styling the container looks a bit like the following:

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body {
  text-align: center;
}
 
#container {
  margin: 0 auto;
  text-align: left;
  width: 960px;
}

In line 6, the container div’s left and right margins are set to auto and its width set to 960 pixels. This is the basis for centering the div on the page. There is another approach, which I found a bit cooler until just recently.

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#container {
  left: 50%;
  margin-left: -480px;
  position: absolute;
  width: 960px;
}

This method doesn’t require giving text-align:center to body and then overriding it immediately in the container div. I like that.

However, a complication arrises when you want to put a background image at the bottom of body; for example, a horizontal gradient. In this case, the best cross-browser way I’ve found to work is the first container centering method (using margin:0 auto). In addition, the html and body tags will require some additional styling to make it happen:

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html {
  height: auto !important;
  min-height: 100%;
}
* html {height:100%} /* IE6 */
 
body {
  background: url(/images/bg-footer.png) repeat-x bottom;
}

The body style is obvious, but it’s important to manage the height of the parent html element as well, remembering of course that IE6 does not support min-height. Incidentally, it’s also IE6 that is responsible for the text-align:center that we applied to body.

In conclusion, don’t use the absolutely-positioned approach for styling your container. It’s cooler, but it just isn’t as robust as the standard auto-margin method because it breaks out of the page layout (specifically, its html parent). For adding any background image to the bottom, now or in the future, that is bad behavior. Stick margin:0 auto on your container and be done with it.

Brass is a medium-weight strategy board game for 3 to 4 players. It was designed by Martin Wallace, and was first published in 2007 by Warfrog Games in the UK. Since then, it has been distributed in US, and to date, has enjoyed two successful reprints. The copy of the game used in this review is the first US edition.

Please note: This is just a general overview and review of the game, not a careful walk-through of the rules. There is plenty of in-depth discussion of Brass in the forums at BoardGameGeek, if that’s what you’re after.

A brief rundown

In the game of Brass, you are an industrialist entrepreneur in 19th-century Lancashire, England. Your goal is to build cotton mills, coal mines, iron works, ports, shipyards, canals, and railways, each of which can be used by you (and the other players) in some fashion to earn money and score points. Meanwhile, the other players are trying to do the same thing – it’s a race to see who can best take advantage of the economy.

Brass is one of those games that encourages you to plan out your actions ahead of time. In order to score, you have to build. In order to build, for example, not only must you have enough pounds to pay for the building, but you often must have coal as well, and you’ll be presented the choice of developing your own coal mines, using someone else’s mines (which gives them victory points), or buying coal at the market price.

One extremely cool aspect of the economy in Brass is that players influence both demand and supply. If there is a glut of coal on the board, then it can be had very cheaply. In a coal shortage, you’ll pay dearly for it (as well as raise the price for players who buy after you). Of course, you can always build a coal mine to increase the supply, thereby driving the price down and earning you income at the same time.

That was just one example. There is far more to Brass than I’m describing here, but suffice it to say that it’s a deep, tense, satisfying experience to play. More on that later.

Photo by Geo

What’s in the box?

The physical components of Brass are amazingly good, with one exception which I’ll mention now: the coins. The coins are categorically awful, nothing more than plastic tiddly-winks that are difficult to stack, and have a propensity for slipping (and even flying) all over the place. Throw them away, and use poker chips instead.

Now that the one truly negative bit has been outed, I’ll focus on the overwhelmingly positive. First, the artwork is absolutely fantastic, very thematic and evocative of the period. The game board presents the rough geographical location of each town featured in the game, as well as several flavor illustrations. The cards are attractive and quite useable.

Photo by Henk Rolleman

The player colors (red, yellow, green, purple) are well chosen, and easily distinguishable. Each player receives his/her own set of hefty and well-printed building tiles in his/her color. The wooden bits are quite adequate, as one might expect of any serious Eurogame: black and orange cubes to represent coal and iron, respectively.

Photo by Geo

Lastly, I must admit that the rulebook, although well-set typographically and attractive graphically, is horribly organized. The rules aren’t simple as it is, and the way the rules are organized certainly doesn’t make them any easier. Thankfully, there are resources available on BoardGameGeek to help clarify the rulebook’s shortcomings.

How to play (in a nutshell)

Player order is not seating order, as it is with most games. In Brass, the money players spend is tracked, and the player that spent the least in the previous round is first player in the next round, second-lowest spender = 2nd player, and so on. Thus, the player order will most likely change from round to round. This is a really cool balancing mechanism that I wish more games had. You have to watch your spending, because this will affect your order in the next round, and therefore your choices of which spaces are left available on the board (the early players get first choice of the prime locations).

Another trick is that only the top tile on each of your personal industry stacks is available to be built. Typically (but not always), the more rewarding tiles are towards the bottom of each stack, so each player has to choose whether to build down through a particular industry, or develop the industry (remove tiles off the top).

Photo by Henk Rolleman

The game takes place over two Eras: the Canal Era and the Rail Era, respectively. You start with a hand of 8 cards, each of which contains either a location on the board (for example, the city of Manchester) or a type of industry (cotton, coal, iron, port, or shipyard). Each turn, you will take 2 actions, discard a card for each action. At the end of your turn, you draw back up to 8 cards. An Era ends when all players run out of cards (not when the deck is depleted).

As what to do for an action, you may do any of the following five things:

• Take a loan (cash infusion)
• Build a link between cities (canal or rail)
• Build an industry in a city (cotton/coal/iron/port/shipyard)
• Develop an industry (remove 1–2 tiles from the top of your stack(s))
• Sell cotton (increase per-round income)

Photo by Henk Rolleman

Here’s the rub: For an industry tile you’ve played to be any good, it needs to be used, or flipped. Cotton mills and ports can be flipped when a player sells cotton. Coal mine and iron works tiles are built with a certain amount of coal or iron sitting on them, and get flipped when their respective resources are depleted. When a tile is flipped, it is literally turned upside down to reveal the per-round income it will earn you, and how many points it’s worth at scoring. You won’t get any income or points for your unflipped (unused) industries, so only build what you think has a chance be used before the end of an Era.

A good rule of thumb is to try to build more of what other players are building less of. The demand will come, and the fewer players you have to share that demand with, all the better for you!

Scoring points

At the end of each Era, there is a round of scoring. Players get points for their flipped industry tiles and for their links to industrialized cities. After scoring the Canal (first) Era, all canal links and level 1 industry tiles are removed from the board, leaving a partially clean board for the beginning of the Rail Era.

Elsewhere

In the interest of (relative) brevity, I won’t get into any more specifics about the rules here, but Warfrog has a downloadable PDF of the rules, as well as a FAQ page for those that are interested in learning more about how the game works. You’ll also want to check out the rewritten rules on BoardGameGeek after seeing the official ones! The BGG forums for Brass are another great resource if you have rules questions, or just want to read what other people have to say about the game. Finally, BGG has a wonderful image gallery of people playing Brass, some of the playing pieces, etc. All of the images used in this review are courtesy of BGG users.

Photo by Henk Rolleman

The Review

Brass is an absolutely brilliant game, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to share my thoughts on it. It’s certainly not a simple game, and you’ll probably play it wrong on your first attempt (as I did), but I’ve found it to be a true gem after several plays, and I don’t expect my opinion to change anytime soon. Brass shares much in common with old-school railroad games, but emerges as its own unique experience.

Playing Brass actually makes me feel a bit like a 19th-century English businessman. Wallace has clearly designed the game to be thematic. Yes, there are some niggly rules exceptions, but the mechanics of Brass are largely refined abstractions of business processes from the period. Taking into account the geographical element, it’s amazing how much complexity Wallace was able to distill into a really fun, and relatively simple game. The game’s soul draws me in.

Brass can be quite contentious and cutthroat with 4 players, and slightly less so with 3. With either number, there will always be that delicious tension between wanting to increase your income, score more points, and position yourself to grab the prime locations on the board, whilst trying not to run out of money or have your plans foiled by the other players, all of whom are trying to do the same thing. There is a lot going on, and there will always be more you want to do than you are able to do – a sign of a solid and worthy game. I highly recommend Brass to those who like their games meaty and strategic, and who don’t mind using their first play or two of Brass to learn how to play it.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more of them from me, please let me know in the comments.

Assuming your basic HTML layout markup looks like below:

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<div id="container">
  <div id="content"></div>
  <div id="footer"></div>
</div>

… you can use the following CSS example to pin your footer:

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#container {
  position:absolute;
  min-height:100%;
}
 
#content {
  margin-bottom:100px; /* same as footer height */
}
 
#footer {
  position:absolute;
  bottom:0;
  height:100px; /* same as content margin-bottom */
}

So, hack away. It’s not suitable for every design, of course, but it just might help you get rid of that annoying whitespace below your footer, for instance on a content-starved page which ends up far short of the window height.

For my first review of a board game, I’d like to feature a true classic: Ra, by prolific game designer Reiner Knizia. Knizia has designed hundreds of board and card games, but among gamers, Ra is widely considered to be one of his finest creations.

Ra is a Eurogame with a pasted-on Egyptian theme. What I mean by this is that, in the end, it’s really an auction game that could just as easily have been about space ships, dinosaurs, or fine art. It could have been about anything else, and it would play exactly the same way. The gameplay has little to do with Egypt, and the theme has little to do with what makes Ra a great game. The credit for that goes to the game’s core mechanics, and that is what places Ra squarely in the Eurogame camp: Its main focus is on the gameplay itself, rather than the theme.

I’m reviewing the Überplay edition of Ra, which I own. I understand that Überplay is now defunct, but Rio Grande Games has picked up the rights to publish the next edition Ra, and that printing will probably hit shelves in 2009.

What’s in the box?

In addition to the nicely printed (and short) rules booklet, there is a board, a canvas bag, “sun” auction markers, scoring counters, a Ra figurine, and a bunch of cardboard tiles (and by a bunch of tiles, I mean a whole lot of tiles).

As it turns out, the board is little more than a pair of “tracks” for auction tiles to sit on. Fortunately, it’s not entirely pointless, as it also contains a simple reference that reminds how the different types of tiles are scored. I suppose the only other justification for the board is its Egyptian-themed artwork, which can help reinforce an otherwise weak theme. As I’ve already pointed out, though, the theme is of no real importance to this game.

When you score points in Ra, you receive little “tablets” with quasi-Egyptian numerals on them. They come in denominations of 1, 2, 5, and 10. A cool way to keep track of how many points you have throughout the game.

The auction markers are wooden “sun” pieces, numbered 1–16. In an auction, players bid with these suns, and ties don’t happen because there are no duplicate numbers. The heart of the game, however, is the enormous complement of auction tiles, and as I mentioned above, there are quite a few of those. The different types of auction tiles you’ll come across are:

Pharaoh tiles

Nile tiles

Flood tiles

Civilization tiles

Monument tiles

Disaster tiles

God tiles

Gold tiles

Epoch tiles

How to play (in a nutshell)

Ra is all about auctions. Every auction gives players a chance to win a set of tiles. The basic gist is that you can choose to do one of three possible things on your turn:

1. Draw a tile from the bag and place it on the board.
2. Call for an auction to begin.
3. Discard one of your god tiles and claim a single tile of your choice on the board.

Scoring points

Ra is played in three rounds, or Epochs. An Epoch comes to an end when the Ra tile track fills up, or when everyone has played all their suns. At the end of each Epoch, players score points for the tiles they own. The goal is to have the most points at the end of the game.

Elsewhere…

In the interest of (relative) brevity, I won’t get into the details of the rules any further here, but BoardGameGeek has a downloadable PDF of the rules for those that are interested in learning more about how the game works. The BGG forums for Ra are also a great resource to check out if you have rules questions, or just want to read what other people have to say about the game. BGG also has a wonderful image gallery of people playing Ra, some of the playing pieces, etc.

The Review

Ra is such a simple, smart, easy-to-teach game. It’s just plain fun, and I’d recommend it to almost anybody, even many non-gamers. It plays pretty quickly, and the press-your-luck element is fantastic. Everyone I’ve introduced to Ra has loved it, too. Despite the loose-fitting theme, the game is still visually rich. Yelling “RA!” when you want to start an auction is a blast as well. I very highly recommend Ra.

I would say that the biggest hurdle for newcomers to Ra would be picking up on how some of the scoring works, but even that isn’t too cumbersome. There’s a cheat sheet on the game board that summarizes the scoring very nicely, and it’s not too hard to get used to. Like most games, the best way to learn how to play it is to play it.

The bidding is streamlined, and the other players’ suns are easy to read across the table, so you will always have an idea of how likely you are to win those tiles you want. There are often plenty of opportunities to bluff or force someone else to play their high sun too early, setting you up to win a bigger auction later. That is, if the Epoch doesn’t end first!

There is wonderful tension in Ra. Players are constantly balancing the desire to wait and get the best value for their suns with the knowledge that they need to get what tiles they can before the end of the round arrives. The game is a ticking clock, and everyone feels it.

In conclusion, Ra is one of my favorite games. It’s not a terribly heavy or complex strategy game, and there is a bit of luck/chaos due to the draw bag, but it still rewards smart play most of the time. Most importantly, it’s ridiculously fun, and doesn’t take all night to play. In the end, those two things are what makes it so much more likely to hit the table than some other really good games. Even if the Egyptian thing was just tacked on at the last minute.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more of them from me, please let me know in the comments.

Photos by Kurt Keckley and Stan Mamula on BoardGameGeek. Many thanks, guys!

Bass players are often maligned. Many assume a bassist is probably the least talented player in a band. That may be true sometimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that bass is just as vital to a band’s sound as drums, guitars, or any other instrument.

Bass is about keeping the bottom end moving. It’s about paving a musical roadway for the other instruments to travel on. As a guitarist, I have another reason to appreciate bass: without it, guitars sound weak and tinny. Bass epitomizes unselfish musicianship on the surface, but underneath, it is perhaps the most important instrument on stage. It’s subtle and subliminal, and enhances everything around it.

I find myself following the bass line more often than guitar parts when listening to music.

When I mix a live band, I usually try to bump up the bass as much as possible. Everything else sounds better with a good dose of bass. Like anything else, there can be too much of a good thing, but don’t be afraid to be generous when doling out bass. Your ears will thank you later.

Years ago, I sold my monster bass rig. I used to own a 800W amp and an Aguilar 410 cab. I still have my funky Reverend Rumblefish bass, though. It hasn’t been touched in I don’t know how long, and I anticipate some cleaning, re-stringing, and action adjustments!

For gridtastic designs, this new technique appears to be the best answer CSS has to offer yet. The benefits of absolute positioning, but using relative positioning + negative margins so as not to break the layout. I plan to try this out on future sites I work on, so I withhold final judgment, but as things look right now, Eric Sol will end up as my new CSS rockstar hero.

Criticizing Twitter and crucifying a departing Twitter engineer are two entirely different things. Taking one of his presentation slides out of context, conjecture, supposition, lack of any credible witnesses or evidence… This isn’t news, it’s a snipe at a guy who knows a hell of a lot more about his job than you and your 2 Rails buddies. What do you have to gain from attempting to soil Blaine’s reputation?

“Sitting next to” Rails developers does not equate to knowledge about scaling the highest-traffic Rails app there has ever been, any more than my having John Resig’s JavaScript book sitting on my shelf makes me a JS ninja.

This story is a blatant smear job, nothing more. We’ll see who looks a little dumb when Twitter’s problems — which you don’t understand — continue long after Blaine’s departure.

I particularly liked Jeremy McAnally’s well-worded responses in the comments. They sum up everything that is wrong with Arrington’s post:

Wow, this is the most unnecessarily vitriolic articles I’ve ever seen. Twitter and Blaine took Rails to places it hadn’t been before in terms of scale and traffic (just as other sites did with PHP, Java, ColdFusion, and so on), and so acting as if he’s some unskilled hippie that didn’t know what he was doing just makes you look like an idiot. Sure, they had some bumps along the way, but no one else had even gotten on the same road as them to encounter the bumps. Being forced to figure out things along the way because no one has done them before doesn’t make you an “amateur.”

Even further, what the heck qualifies you to criticize someone’s ability to scale a website or doing anything remotely technical for that matter? You’re out of your league. Please stick to talking about business or whining about someone not giving you ad money.

and later:

If you think your Rails guys or gals have their “fingers on the pulse of the Rails community” and they think that Blaine is Twitter’s problem, then they’re lying to you. People who, like, actually know Blaine and other Twitterers can offer you much better information rather than baseless, ad money driven drivel. I can put you in contact with them if you drop me an e-mail (or I’m sure that Coda would be very happy to offer you any details you want).

Of course, investigation probably isn’t your thing since you don’t know much about journalism.

Indeed, it’s totally unacceptable that this kind of tripe passes for responsible journalism. Oh wait – it doesn’t. Perhaps people like Michael Arrington are part of the reason more legitimate blogs don’t get their journalistic kudos.

I don’t subscribe to TechCrunch, and frankly, after this display, I’m not about to. There are plenty of people Arrington could have asked to get the straight scoop, like, you know, a real journalist would have.

Some would say that exaggeration and overstatement is necessary to make an impact. Perhaps, but at what cost? A person’s reputation? For what purpose? To infuriate conscientious geeks? To generate a few hundred extra click-throughs? To wield power great and terrible?

Do your homework, don’t stomp on people who don’t deserve it, and the blogosphere will be a much more civil and harmonious place.