Fraser McHarg

Headlines May 13, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Britannia and The End of the Triumverate April 15, 2008 - Fraser_McHarg: Mystery Rummy 3 - Players 0 April 1, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Some Games Click, Some Don’t March 18, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Losses and wins with Daughter the Elder March 4, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: It has been a busy busy year and it is only March February 19, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Tales of my FLGS February 5, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Do I Have Rule Apathy or Ruleophobia? January 22, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Two weeks at the beach, part of the way through January 8, 2008 - Fraser McHarg: Innovation and Creative Thinking December 22, 2007 - Fraser McHarg: November 17, 2007 - Fraser McHarg: After Being Defeated by the Rules, the Play Made It Clear… November 3, 2007 - Fraser McHarg: Working Through the Pile

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Articles

Fraser McHarg: Britannia and The End of the Triumverate

I finally got around to playing both The End of the Triumvirate and Britannia over the weekend.  Vince was our only guest on Friday night and since we had three it seemed like a good time to break out The End of Triumvirate and he came back the next day with Richard to play Britannia.  Melissa used to play Britannia a lot during her uni days, but I had never played it before.

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Fraser_McHarg: Mystery Rummy 3 - Players 0

I have mentioned before that I was defeated by the Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper rules.  I read them twice and after the experience felt that I actually knew less about the universe than I had before.  I then shelved the game until someone could teach me.

Some time later that day came and within a hand or two it clicked.  Fast forward a while and someone pointed out that we had been scoring incorrectly.

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Fraser McHarg: Some Games Click, Some Don’t

As a general rule I don’t expect to be able to master a game in one play (or less).  However, I do usually expect to have a reasonable idea of what is going on and thus to be able to put in a mediocre to credible performance in the first play or so.

In many games I expect to be learning or seeing new things for many plays.  As an example, I have over 150 plays of BGG’s implementation of Tigris & Euphrates and I think I am still learning, especially with two players.

The reason I bring this up is that I played a couple of new, to me, games over Easter.  One clicked, the other didn’t.

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Fraser McHarg: Losses and wins with Daughter the Elder

Yesterday Daughter the Elder told Melissa “Mum, I win the grown-up games against Dad, but lose the kids games”.

Thinking about recent games, she is pretty much correct!

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Fraser McHarg: It has been a busy busy year and it is only March

We spent a fortnight down at the beach during January (note I am in the Southern Hemisphere) where lots of game playing was done and Agricola hit the table many times.

Fast forward to last Saturday and it was played for the first time since the beach.  Not due to a lack of interest, just due to a lack of time.

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Fraser McHarg: Tales of my FLGS

Melissa mentioned last week that a friend of ours had recently resigned from our main FLGS.  We still know some of the staff very well, but this would be the first time in living recollection that we haven’t had a friend working at the store.  My association with the store goes back to my university days, when I changed from being a customer to a staff member.

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Fraser McHarg: Do I Have Rule Apathy or Ruleophobia?

I played my first game of Roads and Boats last weekend.  Thanks to Gregor for running the rules explanation.  Melissa bought this for my birthday 18 months ago.  I punched it and looked at it—then waited for an opportunity to play it with somebody who already knew how to play.  Why did I wait so long?

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Fraser McHarg: Two weeks at the beach, part of the way through

We are slightly over halfway through our two week beach holiday.  The weather has not been as beach-friendly as previous years, which means more time for books and games.
Present for the entire time have been Melissa, Daughter the Elder (nine and a half), Daughter the Younger (heading towards five) and myself.  We have had two visitors who each stayed for two nights to help make use of the 4+ player Agricola cards.  Our first visitor was Tom Lehman as part of his Australian holiday and the second was our friend Vincent who came down for a weekend.

My current count is six books, four children’s books and seventy-three plays of twenty-one games.

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Fraser McHarg: Innovation and Creative Thinking

Over the years a lot of creative thinking and innovation has gone into boardgames.  Off the top of my head here’s a few:

• Redmond A. Simonsen’s discovery of the back of the counter
• Variable player powers in Cosmic Encounter
• Victory Point tracks on the game board
• Card driven games
• Role selection with privilege
• The spinner in The Same Game with the three different categories

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Fraser McHarg:

The games that we are giving for this Christmas can be broken into a number of categories.  A significant number of them come from Amazon.de because they have, or had, a deal where shipping from Germany to Australia was a flat 14.00 Euro regardless of the order.  Amazon.de don’t stock all German games, but they do stock a significant number of games compared to their counterparts in other countries.

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Fraser McHarg: After Being Defeated by the Rules, the Play Made It Clear…

There have been a few games where I have found myself utterly defeated after reading the rules. Instead of knowing how to play the game I have no idea at all, in some extreme cases I know less about the game than I did before I started and also I am no longer entirely sure what my phone number is.

In pretty much every case this has been cured by playing the game, preferably with somebody who knows how to play it.

Games where I have been defeated by the rules include Coloretto, Mamma Mia!, Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, Tigris & Euphrates and Air War (OK I will admit that the last one was not at all recently).

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Fraser McHarg: Working Through the Pile

Around Essen time we decided to make an effort on the pile(s) of unplayed games.  This also included playing some new (to us) things at games nights etc.

Starting off with our games:

Australian Rails - Melissa’s first foray into crayon rails, my second (or possibly third - I have dim memories of friends playing a crayon rail game a decade or so ago, but don’t entirely remember if I played or not, which probably means that I didn’t).  Melissa enjoyed it, which means that some of our crayon rail games might hit the table soon.

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Fraser McHarg: Signs that You Might Be Thinking of Essen Just a Little Too Much

o Prior to the media day you are constantly checking boardgamegeek, boardgamenews, Frank’s site and other places for the first snippets of information and complaining when there isn’t any there

o Planning to SMS “Ready, Set, Go!” to people who are at Essen at the exact time the doors open to the public.

o Posting to blogs, BGG and mailing lists about Essen envy

o Knowing the airfare to Essen

o Knowing which hotels at Essen still have vacancies

o Know that if you take the child who has a passport that your luggage allowance will be doubled

o Searching out German rules for new games on the internet, emailing your partner/spouse/friend with access to a printer to print them out so you can determine whether or not to place an order with your Essen “personal shopper”

o Wanting to go to the airport and ask for a ticket “on the next flight to Germany”

o Being prepared to ditch a local community event that you have put at least 100 hours work into to go to Essen instead

o Knowing what time the doors at Essen close, factoring in time for the Essen correspondents to type up their reports and then you start checking

o Having Aldie say “You are jonesin’ for some Essen”

o When ringing your spouse on the phone you say “I’m not at home, but I am not at the airport”

If many of the above apply to you then, to quote Aldie, “You are jonesin’ for some Essen”

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Fraser McHarg: To Retheme or Not to Retheme, That Is the Question

It is not an uncommon practise for games to be reissued in a rethemed version.  Usually with only minor differences, if any, from the original apart from the theme.  Sometimes there may be quite a few changes or additions compared to the original, but does that just make it a “second edition” or does it require the retheming?

Here’s a few:
Schotten Totten to Battle Line
Revolution to Atlanteon (OK only one entry)
Tycoon to El Capitan
Dune to Twilight Imperium Universe Dune?

There are some rethemings that seem sensible or reasonable.  In some cases the original version is out of print, so the opportunity exists, or possibly the original artwork is no longer available so it is going to be recreated anyway.

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Fraser McHarg: Duel in the Dark

I first played Duel in the Dark back in June at the Australian Games Expo.  It was just the one game with Zev from Z-Man games explaining the rules, I was quite taken by it.

Only a limited number of copies have hit Australian stores so far and Greg managed to get one of those.  He has been playing it at lunchtime at work, but unfortunately he is now working in another part of the city, so I had to wait until Thursday night.

We played six games in a row.  Three different nights with different weather and we played each night twice, once as the Germans and once as the British.  We were playing the basic rules.

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Fraser McHarg: Transformers Risk and Some Other Things

In general I am a believer in replaying games.  It’s one of the reasons I buy games I like, so that I can play them again next week, next month, next year or next decade.  At Gamers@Dockers sessions however, I quite often find myself playing new games, either physically new, or games that I haven’t played before.

On some occasions this is because it is a game that I haven’t played before, but I wanted to and because somebody was there who had the game and new how to play it I seized the opportunity.  Sometimes it is because someone has just bought and brought a new game and wants to try it out.  One of our members runs a OLGS so he often brings demo copies of new stock to play.  Other times somebody just wants people to play their favourite game(s) and is recruiting people to play.

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Fraser McHarg: Gaming Events, Big and Small

I was thinking recently of games events that I go to now as well as games events that I used to go to and games events that I either will or would like to go to in the future.

One significant impact on my attendance at these events has been, what can best be described as, which phase of life I am in.  For me there have been three main phases that have been relevant.

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Fraser McHarg: Pirates and Culling

On Friday night we played a five player game of Pirate’s Cove .  Three players were new to the game and one of them was relatively new to gaming in general.

The rules explanation went reasonably quickly, although as Melissa and I were dredging particular rules out of our collective memories, I figured that it had been quite a while since the last time either of us had played it.

On the first turn I went to cannon island and all four of the other players went to sail island where a length and destructive battle ensued.  Amongst my trouble free loot was quite a bit of gold and Billy Bones’ Parrot.  This parrot allows you to always fire your total number of cannons, regardless of crew number.  Needless to say, since I was already at cannon island I spent all my gold to raise my cannon to five.

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Fraser McHarg: Harry Potter (Spoiler Free) and Some New Games

If you are a fan of Wimbledon Tennis or Test Match cricket and live in Australia, the timezone difference between the UK and Australia can work against you unless you are an insomniac, as these events are usually on in the middle of the night Australian time.  One of the few times that events in the UK work for us is with the release of the Harry Potter books.  One minute past midnight on Friday night in the UK is a quite pleasant one minute past nine o’clock in the morning here (on the East Coast) of Australia.  Melissa got up and went out in the fog to get it, came home and read it.  By early afternoon she had finished so then it was my turn.  I am not quite as quick a reader as Melissa, but with interruptions for things like dinner and children I had finished it by a little after midnight.  Now it is safe to look at the internet again, we cannot be spoiled!  For the record, I liked it and will say no more as I am sure there are plenty of people who haven’t read it.

This has nothing to do with gaming of course, other than that all of Saturday suddenly vanished due to Harry Potter, so no games got played and nothing got written.  Oh and also I don’t think there are any decent games based on Harry Potter.

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Fraser McHarg: Some Games With the Kids

Recently Melissa was sick and spent the day in bed, during the day amongst time spent in the cubby house, meals, reading (for Daughter the Elder) and the occasional DVD both the girls wanted to play games.  Although there are some games that we all play together, this day was a day of two player games.

First up was the Stock Market Game.  Daughter the Elder has been quite a fan of this for a while, I was when I was young too.  She tends to hoard her cash a little too much instead of buying and selling, but still does quite well.  For some reason she was getting bored after a while and called this game early, she was worth twice as much as me.  Every game of this I have logged has been with her, we are rated #2 in plays for this game at about half the #1 player.

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Fraser McHarg: The Australian Games Expo 2007

Last week we went to the Australian Games Expo in Albury (a bit over three hours drive from Melbourne and six to seven hours from Sydney, the two main population centres in Australia).  The expo officially ran on Saturday and Sunday, we arrived on Friday afternoon and left on Monday morning.

Last year we stayed at the Hume Inn and used their function room one very cold night.  We thought that if it was heated it would make an excellent evening games venue.  Local resident and tournament organiser Neil Thomson made enquiries and a deal was struck that we could have their function room for free if thirty bookings were made at the motel.  This was achieved and we had the function room for gaming on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

Last year I played in both the Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne tournaments.  It meant that my daylight hours were driven by the tournament schedule and there was very little time to browse, chat or play other games, especially longer games.  This year I decided to go sans-tournament and make my time my own.

Here are the games that I remember I played.

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Fraser McHarg: School Games Night the Second

As forewarned by Melissa last week, we held another Family Games Night at Daughter the Elder’s School on Friday.  We had twenty-five adults and thirty-five children.  This year in terms of adults explaining games there was just Melissa and myself as well as contributions from Daughter the Elder.  You can read about last year’s session here.

This year we were scheduled from 4:30 pm until 7:30 pm, which was actually ended up being 8:30 pm.  It was also designed to be a fund raiser via our friendly internet games shop in that the school will get 10% of any orders.

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Fraser McHarg: An Autumn Evening at Gamers@Dockers

Gamers@Dockers is the gaming group that dacoutts, Reggy and myself founded around two years ago, handily situated at the building where we worked at the time.  Two of us are still with the organisation, but only one of us still works in the building.  We started fortnightly (that’s once every two weeks for those places unused to the f word) and moved weekly a few months later.  We were up to about twenty a fortnight and after the initial move to weekly numbers dropped to about a dozen or so a week, but are now back to above twenty each week. 

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Freaser McHarg: Game Things I Learnt Playing Games Yesterday

Some people can push their luck much more than others

In Gopher It! there are three sorts of food cards you can draw.  Each one has one, two or three food items.  You can draw up to four cards, however if you draw two of the same type of food consecutively you turn is immediately over and you have to discard any cards you picked up that turn.  If you get no repeats, or stop before you do, you can put the food in your larder.  If you get exactly six of items of one sort of food, you empty your larder for a Gopher Trophy.  The first person to three trophies is the winner.

I was playing this with Daughter the Younger and she was consistently picking up four cards and very rarely getting a repeat card.  It seemed like about half the time I was getting a repeat as my second card, the other half of the time it was usually the third of fourth card that was the repeat.

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Fraser McHarg: International Gamers

Or should that title be International Gamers of Mystery?  Perhaps not.

Anyway, thanks to places like BGG, BSW and SBW (and others) gamers who travel have a much better chance of getting in some games as they travel or relocate around the world.

This is particularly true when our International Gamers are visiting places that have established clubs or groups with some sort of web presence, either via BGG or elsewhere.

Let us take Melbourne, Australia, as an example – since that is where I live.  There are two weekly groups (Billabong and Gamers@Dockers) as well as one monthly group (EuroGamesFest Melbourne), not counting the occasional convention.  Take note, most groups are usually more active than their websites may imply.  There are also plenty of private groups and maybe other groups that are just not advertising themselves out on the world wide web.

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Fraser McHarg: Our Racing Games

We have a few racing games (i.e. where you are involved in a race of something, as opposed to just racing to victory by building a civilisation or by filling your sheep station full of sheep).  They are, alphabetically, Alan Jones Formula 1 Grand Prix Racing Game, Formula Dé and Um Reifenbreite.  I am reasonable certain that I used to have Auto Racing, but that end up being locked in the boot of a car which I could no longer get open and the car ended up being traded for a slab of beer with the game still locked in the boot, so it doesn’t really count.

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Fraser McHarg:  Some Early Thoughts on CRTs and Card Driven Games

I had pretty much drifted out of wargames before card driven wargames became popular and as such have only relatively recently played any card driven games.  My experience so far is limited to Memoir ‘44, Command and Colors: Ancients and Combat Commander: Europe, although I expect this list to grow over time.

I suppose I grew up on CRTs (Combat Result Tables), sometimes they were on charts on other games they were printed on the map or board.  Usually it was just a matter of adding up the attacker’s strength and the defender’s strength dividing the attacker’s total by the defender’s and finding the ratio on the CRT.  Then roll the die, in some games a modifier was possible due to other factors such as air support, weather etc.  The die roll meant that usually you were not entirely sure of the result.  To me the randomness of the die roll meant that it was the influence of things that you could not control, or had not taken into account when planning the attack.  Depending on the game it could be anything from local weather conditions, morale, timeliness of supplies, improperly maintained equipment or just plain dumb luck.  If you had a huge majority you could be reasonably confident of a victory, however the smaller your majority the less confident you could be of any level of success.

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Fraser McHarg: Last 30 Days Revisited

Back in October 2006 I discovered a feature on BoardGameGeek which showed you the games you had logged as played in the last 30 days, with the recommended image for each.  I thought it was time to revisit this and see the differences.

My earlier entry was made not long after our month at Melbourne Museum and spring had not sprung weather wise.  This thirty day period covers a hot summer, back to work for the parents, back to school and kindergarten for the girls and this year Daughter the Elder has homework and it is our preference that homework is done before games.

There are a lot less games played over the last thirty days than back in September/October last year.  A lot of this due to weather and work/homework commitments.

So here are my play counts (face to face only) from the last 30 days.

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Fraser McHarg: An Old Book We Found

One of the things we found recently when clearing up at Melissa’s father’s Bridge club was the 1954 title Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions by David Blackwell and M.A. Girshick.

It has some interesting definitions about games.

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Fraser McHarg: Tournament Games

I was reminded recently by a thread over at BGG that I am not a big fan of the concept of multi-player Euros as tournaments.  I am not against tournaments per se, I am not against competitions or competitive playing of games (in fact some may say quite the opposite), but I believe that the majority of multiplayer (three or more) Eurogames are not suitable for competition play.  There are many games and types of games that are, but just not many Euros.

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