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 May 8, 2008
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Columnists
Boardgame News columnists come in three varietals, as wine aficionados might say. This page combines the columns of everyone listed below; to single out the works of one writer or check out someone's biography, click on that person's name.
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These folks each write a weekly or biweekly column of their thoughts about the world of boardgames. The ludic line-up breaks down as follows:
At the start of 2008, the writers responsible for the blog Gone Gaming joined forces with Boardgame News to provide game fans with a concentrated burst of gaming strategy, analysis, and silliness. Usually groups join forces to wreak mayhem and take over the world, but you know how gamers are... All of the Gone Gaming posts by these writers have been ported into the Boardgame News archives to showcase their past work and create an artificial continuity that has BGN publishing stuff before it even came into existence! You can scan the writings of all of the Gone Gaming writers at once, or you can view them one-by-one: Note that Kris Hall was writing for both BGN and Gone Gaming throughout 2007, so his work is divided between two links above. |
These brightly shining, yet rarely seen writers are technically known as "at large contributors," which means they drop in whenever they feel like it, show us something cool over tea and cookies, then vanish out the backdoor when it's time to do dishes. No matter—we still love them. Many of those listed below were once regular columnists, so there's a lot of writing hidden in them thar links:
These writers focus on goings-on in their part of the world, except for Ward Batty, who apparently covers the entire globe. Most of them write infrequently—some of them, never—and that's something I need to rectify in the future. For now, the International columnists are:
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HeadlinesMay 9, 2008 - Kris Hall: Pirate ImpressionsMay 8, 2008 - Aaron Lawn: Trade Show Ramblings May 7, 2008 - Dale Yu: The New and Improved Game Room May 7, 2008 - JESS: Castellers by Reiner Knizia May 6, 2008 - Melissa Rogerson: Why you lost May 5, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Sportswomanship May 4, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Too Lazy to Game May 3, 2008 - Matt Carlson: A Game About Farming May 2, 2008 - Kris Hall: Visit the Neighbors May 1, 2008 - Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part One: Mechanical Evolution April 30, 2008 - Dale Yu: Reorganizing the Basement April 30, 2008 - JESS: Feria Jugar x Jugar 2008 |
Articles
Kris Hall: Pirate Impressions
By pure coincidence, my family came into possession of two pirate games in the last three weeks. Some days ago, my eldest daughter was given the game Pirateology as a belated birthday gift, and then my copy of GMT’s Blackbeard arrived this week. Both games have a fine physical production, but both play very differently.
Aaron Lawn: Trade Show Ramblings
Ah, lateness. This column was written two weeks ago, just missing my Thursday appearance… Hooray!
I’ve just wound my way back into California after a three day stint at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas. As you may or may not know, GTS1 is the trade show for the Hobby Game Industry2. As far as board games, especially Euro-style board games, it’s an odd show to report on. Why odd?
Posted by Aaron Lawn on May 8, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Aaron Lawn
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Dale Yu: The New and Improved Game Room
Well, I was going to write a huge article on the things I love to have in my game room (since I now have a new game room!), but Mary Prasad beat me to it! (If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend taking a gander at her article on game room accessories.)
Instead, I’m going to concentrate on a few things about my new recreational space, and it will take the form of a photo essay… Smaller pics will show up on the screen as you read the column, but you can click on the pictures to see the full-size pics!
JESS: Castellers by Reiner Knizia
Devir will publish Castellers, an all brand new game by Reiner Knizia.
Posted by Jesús Torres Castro on May 7, 2008 at 12:30 AM in Columnists > Jesús Torres Castro - Spain
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Melissa Rogerson: Why you lost
Next time you lose when playing a boardgame, here are some excuses that you might want to roll out.
Or maybe not.
Posted by Melissa Rogerson on May 6, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Melissa Rogerson
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Scott Tepper: Sportswomanship
This past week, at my non-gaming job, I was on the phone with one of our vendors, when in the middle of the call, she stopped our work-related discussion and apologized. “I’m sorry”, she said excitedly, “but I just received an email from a friend, and it’s affected me so much that I have to share it with you.” She then asked if I had seen the video that was going around about the womens college softball teams. I replied that I had no idea what she was talking about. She happily recounted the details, exclaiming that we don’t hear enough stories about sportsmanship and probably wouldn’t have heard this one if it revolved around two men’s sports teams.
Posted by Scott Tepper on May 5, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Scott Tepper
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Valerie Putman: Too Lazy to Game
Ok, not really. I got a call this afternoon with a last minute offer to play games and I went. I had a great time playing Dominion, Agricola, and ItYotD. But I must admit, I hesitated. It’s nearly the end of the semester and as burnout sets in, an evening pretending to be a vegetable instead of trying to farm them can be very tempting. How many of you have had a battle of the couch vs. the game lately? Who usually wins?
How lazy are you feeling? As the school year nears the end, I do find that I am less likely to squeeze in an extra night of gaming. Actually, this has been a crazy year with our 10-year University accreditation visit (lots of awful paperwork and meetings), my application for tenure (lots of awful paperwork and stress), and the regular stuff. Early in the fall I gave up my weekly pub game night and I made far fewer gaming trips this year. I really can’t wait to get back to a more regular gaming schedule this summer. But on a school night, an evening of snuggling on the couch with honey bunny and Bones often wins out over that game of 1960 I keep meaning to have hubby teach me.
Posted by Valerie Putman on May 4, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Valerie Putman
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Matt Carlson: A Game About Farming
Have a hankering to play a boardgame themed around trying to scratch a subsistence off the land? Cultivate crops and harvest them in order to try and provide for your family. What game am I talking about, none other than The Farming Game. Wait, were you thinking about some other farming game?
Posted by Matt J. Carlson on May 3, 2008 at 02:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Matt J. Carlson
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Kris Hall: Visit the Neighbors
How many organized gaming groups are there in the USA? I have no idea, and no idea on how to find out.
Not that it matters to most gamers. A gaming group in the next county might as well be on the other side of the country for all the interaction that goes on between neighboring groups. Most gamers interact face-to-face with members of other gaming groups at conventions or not at all.
Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part One: Mechanical Evolution
I’m going to be the first one to officially call it: 2008 is the Year of the Dice (at least in the slightly delayed American market). I think To Court the King (2006) really got the current trend going, but since its release we’ve seen several notables including Kingsburg (2007), Airships (2007), and The Catan Dice Game (2007). Going by other publications like Alhambra: The Dice Game (2006) and the forthcoming Ra: The Dice Game (2008?) I’m starting to think that every board game is going to have a dice game too.
Thus, I’ve decided to start a multi-part look at dice games. This week I’m going to concentrate on the mechanics by looking at how dice games have been played over the last several decades and how those general mechanics have evolved over time. Then in future articles I’m going to look at how to control the randomness of dice and I’m going to review several of the most notable games.
As a final tease for this week’s article, let me say that if you keep on reading, there’s a neat diagram toward the end.
Posted by Shannon Appelcline on May 1, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Shannon Appelcline
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Dale Yu: Reorganizing the Basement
Well it’s been a busy week here at the homestead… My basement remodeling is just about complete, and I’m in the process of moving all of the games back inside from the garage where they’ve been stored for the past 8 weeks. It’s a fairly painful process as I’ve lost about 40% of my total storage space due to the renovations… The good news is that my games are now being displayed in a “public” portion of the house as opposed to being crammed into a storage closet in the basement. I’m having to triage each game to decide whether it’s good enough to stay in the collection or not—and I’m likely going to have a firesale at some point to move the extras out!
JESS: Feria Jugar x Jugar 2008
Feria Jugar x Jugar, May 1-4, in Granollers (near Barcelona, north-east Spain).
Many gaming activities, tournaments, Roberto Fraga as star guest game author, the second Granollers Game Design Competition, and a brand new Reiner Knizia’s game published by a Spanish company.
Posted by Jesús Torres Castro on April 30, 2008 at 12:30 AM in Columnists > Jesús Torres Castro - Spain
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Scott Tepper: Gathering of Friends 2008 Part III / Kit-Con
Even though you may be tired of hearing about The Gathering of Friends, one of its events, the annual Gameshow, is so interesting that I can’t resist one last column about it. This year’s production, which was run by Friedemann Friese, Andrea Meyer, Valerie Putman, and Dale Yu, seemed to have drawn more participants (at least 120 people in teams of 4 people) than even last year’s gameshow. My conjecture here is based solely on the high temperature to which the room rose as a result of being packed with so many people.
Posted by Scott Tepper on April 28, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Scott Tepper
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Valerie Putman: Game X = Dominion
The new game coming out from Rio Grande Games finally has a name—Dominion! The designer is Donald X. Vaccarino and he showed the game to Jay Tummelson at Origins last summer. Jay asked me to give the game a play and see what I thought—and my life hasn’t been the same since. Jay saw how much I loved the game and asked me to be the developer on the project. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Posted by Valerie Putman on April 27, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Valerie Putman
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Kris Hall: Holes in the Line
There was a time when, if someone mentioned the phrase “war game,” gamers would immediately think of hex-grid maps and cardboard counters. Avalon Hill and SPI and their smaller brethren thrived for a while by churning out hundreds of games with zones of control and combat results tables.
Nowadays, I can think of at least two major sub-genres of the war game genre, and neither one is necessarily dependent on hex-grid maps or cardboard counters. I’m talking about card-driven war games and wooden block war games. Both these sub-genres are currently popular, and show no signs of becoming less so. In fact, many of the most popular conflicts for war gamers are well-covered by games in these categories. If you’ve been following my columns over the last few weeks, then you know that there are two different grand-strategic card-driven war games about the American Civil War (For the People, and The Price of Freedom) with yet another on the way (Lincoln’s War).
But today I want to talk about two popular conflicts that are not covered by games in both of these genres, and how surprisingly that is.
Aaron Lawn: On the Road
[Editor’s note: Aaron is on a working vacation in Las Vegas at the GAMA Trade Show. He’ll fill us in next column on what he discovered at the show.]
Posted by W. Eric Martin on April 24, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Aaron Lawn
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Dale Yu: Two Mini-Reviews (one for the adults and one for the kids)
This week, I’d like to take the chance to talk about two things that deserve a bit more attention… First is the game Rugby World by Ghenos Games. I will not / can not do a full review at this point as I’ve only played it twice (and neither was a full game), and I really do not to do full-on reviews without at least three full plays of the game. The other is a new book, “The 15 Greatest Board Games in the World”, a new release from Klutz Games.
Melissa Rogerson: Family Festival - of games?
At a “parents’ get-together” at school this evening, I was approached about participating in the school’s upcoming family festival.
The idea of the event is to have a day for families to spend time together (with other families as well as with their children), trying something new and generally having fun.
After the success of our Family Game Nights at school, they are keen to have a room for people to try out some games - and for us to organise that.
Posted by Melissa Rogerson on April 22, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Melissa Rogerson
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Scott Tepper: The Gathering of Friends 2008 Part II
While the Gathering of Friends is a fantastic occasion to play rare games and recent releases, is also provides the opportunity to play some unpublished prototypes. In fact, a competition called the Game Of The Afternoon takes place annually at the Gathering that challenges game designers, and game designer wannabes, to create a game out of a selected set of items.
Posted by Scott Tepper on April 21, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Scott Tepper
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Valerie Putman: Prose On Cons—The Gathering of Friends 2008, Part III
My last two Gathering reports were written very quickly because I wanted to get back to the party. Sadly, the party is over now and my far-flung friends have all left. I had a perfectly normal week including a game night with my local game group and I slept in this morning for the first time in over three weeks. I think I’m finally ready to reflect on the whirlwind that was the Gathering of Friends 2008.
Posted by Valerie Putman on April 20, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Valerie Putman
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Larry Levy: Gathering Memories—Trends
Well, it was another wonderful visit to The Gathering of Friends. I’ll get to my impressions on the games I played in a day or two, but first let me relate what I thought were the two main trends for this year’s con. 2008 was
The Year of the Dice
Dice get a bad rap because of their role in Roll ‘n Move games. But lately, we’ve been seeing more and more games that include clever and original ways of using dice. And this year, the concept seemed to hit critical mass. The dice were everywhere! Recently published games like Stone Age, Shanghaien, Six, Jamaica, Risk Express, and Airships used them in interesting ways. (By the way, I was very pleased to see Airships getting lots of play throughout the week. Maybe now that the RGG version is out, this game will start to get the attention I feel it deserves.) And dice were even more prevalent in the prototypes. I helped playtest some games for Alea and two of the three games I played featured dice in central roles. Dice in an Alea game—what a concept! Then there was Matt (Pandemic) Leacock’s dice game that was getting a huge amount of play; just about everyone is certain this one will get published. Brian Yu showed me one of his designs that was a lot of fun and will probably be appearing in a Mattel box sometime soon. Even Friedemann Friese had a dice game prototype and it was also very enjoyable.
Matt Carlson: The Gamers Determine the Reality
Once again I find that some of my more interesting gaming reflections come from my weekly high school gaming group. This week a student brought in one of his favorite games, Pirateer. While it isn’t quite my cup of tea, they played it all afternoon long and seemed to have more fun than anyone else in the club.
Posted by Matt J. Carlson on April 19, 2008 at 04:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Matt J. Carlson
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JESS: Heckmeck-WM 2007
The 2nd. Heckmeck-WM, the world championship of Reiner Knizia’s Pickomino, was celebrated in Munich.
We have a new World Champion, June Beckmann.
Posted by Jesús Torres Castro on April 19, 2008 at 12:30 AM in Columnists > Jesús Torres Castro - Spain
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Kris Hall: Vinci--A Game that Should Be Reprinted
The Wednesday night meeting of the Appalachian Boardgamers turned out to be about just one game (at least for me; the night owls maybe played another): Vinci. We had six players participating in this civilization-and-conquest game. A couple of the guys hadn’t played Vinci before, and they soon joined the ranks of the game’s admirers. The worst thing that you can say about Vinci is that it is out of print.
Vinci was designed by Philippe Keyaerts and published by Descartes in 1999. I believe it has been a fairly popular game, and has some truly devoted fans who have played it dozens or even hundreds of times. Ted Cheatham likes to describe Vinci as “History of the World in two hours.” This is an accurate hint at the genre of the game, but unlike History of the World, Vinci is not a dice-fest.
Shannon Appelcline: Helping Losers
What’s the worst part about losing?
Unless you’re playing in some gladiatorial win-or-die type arena battle, it’s probably the experience of knowing you’re going to lose, then having to play on for hours more. As you’d expect the problem gets worse both the longer a game is and the more strategic (and less random) a game is.
Fortunately, many games have catch-up mechanisms built into them. They’re generally an element that I appreciate greatly in games. On the other hand, you also have to be pretty careful. Between El Grande (a game which is overly tense because of the catchup mechanism) and Liberte (a game which I recently played where I admired the catchup mechanism), there’s room for both bad and good, and that’s what I’m going to talk about this week.
Posted by Shannon Appelcline on April 17, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Shannon Appelcline
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Dale Yu: Games from the Gathering of Friends
I’m still trying to catch up from being gone for 10 days at the Gathering of Friends, but I thought I’d try to give my short opinions of the games that I managed to play during the event… Before I get there, a few other things to note. First, the Gathering is becoming more about hanging out with friends than playing games. I had a great time going out to dinner with my friends and spending time catching up with them. Second, the Gathering is getting to be so big that it’s hard to hang out with all of my friends eventhough there are 10 days! But, the more the merrier! Finally, I don’t think that any of the Nuremberg games will ever make the Top 10, but there were a number of solid entries – though it took a bit of weeding through to find them! Now, onto the games… Please note that I’m leaving out most of the details/mechanics of the games as I’m sure that you’ve read about that somewhere else (and I really don’t have the time/inclination to regurgitate them here)
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.
Posted by Fraser McHarg on April 15, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Gone Gaming > Fraser McHarg
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Scott Tepper: The Gathering of Friends 2008
If you are one of the two people who read my column(Hi mom!), I owe you an apology. Due to some crazy scheduling, I wasn’t able to finish last week’s column in time to post it before deadline. I plead poor time management, your honor. The first part of my excuse was due to the fact that a week and a half ago I was in Florida celebrating a friend’s birthday. Scheduling the travel was a challenge due to The Gathering of Friends the following week. My friend Nataline, who now lives in California, was also going to The Gathering, had her own travel issues as well. She was having trouble finding a direct flight to Columbus. Our resultant travel plans ended up rivaling the programming decision planning needed to play RoboRally.
Posted by Scott Tepper on April 14, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Scott Tepper
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Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons—The Gathering of Friends 2008, Part II
The week is nearly over and I haven’t played half of the games that I wanted to try. Here are a few of the ones I have tried….
Hanging Gardens This quick, light set collection game has an interesting card (should have been tiles!) placement mechanism that will make good use of your Tetris skills. I wouldn’t mind picking up a copy of this one.
Metropolys The newest Ystari release isn’t the smash hit that their previous releases have been (for me), but it was fun. Players have buildings valued 1 – 13 that they place around the city. The turns are really more like auctions since the players continue to place higher value buildings until all but one player passes. That is then the only building to remain on the board. The game ends when a player has placed all 13 buildings. I highly recommend the advanced game with some hidden scoring bonuses at the end.
Posted by Valerie Putman on April 13, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > Valerie Putman
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W. Eric Martin: Kid Love/Adult Hate
I’ve started to post my impressions of new titles from the Gathering of Friends elsewhere on BGN, so this column will be somewhat short, although still longer than the previous two I was supposed to write. My freelance writing has been sucking up mucho time in the past few months thanks to a ghostwriting project (with me joining a half-dozen other writers on a health book that the original author couldn’t complete in time) and lots of smaller assignments, so the columns have had to be put aside in favor of news.
Posted by W. Eric Martin on April 12, 2008 at 01:00 AM in Columnists > W. Eric Martin
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