Valerie Putman

This section contains the columns of Valerie Putman. Valerie will be posting her column on Sundays.

About Valerie Putman:

Valerie Putman grew up playing backgammon, Mille Borne, Pathfinder, and Clue with her mother, and chess and Dungeons & Dragons with classmates. As a teenager she tried to deny her true geek in order to fit in, but by college she was again playing games like Risk, Rummikub, and Magic: the Gathering. By 1994 board gaming was her primary hobby and her way to meet new people when she moved to Athens, GA for graduate school and to Columbus, Ohio seven years later for a job as a professor at a small, liberal arts University. Valerie now travels to board game conventions as often as possible to see the friends she has made through board gaming over the years, and, of course, to make new friends, too.

Valerie lives in Columbus, Ohio in the United States.

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Headlines May 11, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Who Needs Rules? May 4, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Too Lazy to Game April 27, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Game X = Dominion April 20, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Prose On Cons—The Gathering of Friends 2008, Part III April 13, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons—The Gathering of Friends 2008, Part II April 6, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons—Gathering of Friends 2008, Part I March 30, 2008 - Valerie Putman: My Ugly Side March 23, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Before The New Stuff Gets Here March 16, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Defining Moments March 9, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Spielbox Magazine Freebies March 2, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Gone Fishing February 24, 2008 - Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons--Gulf Games, PrezCon, etc.

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Articles

Valerie Putman: Who Needs Rules?

As the last week of classes finished up, one of my colleagues had a bunch of us over for home brewed beer, good food, and good times.  My friends at work know that I’m a board gamer and, in fact, the host and his wife owned Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.  As the grown ups became a bit boring for their 3 year old to hang out with, he pulled out Settlers and started rolling the dice and playing with the cards.  Later, I was asked if I wanted to see the “boat game” and was delighted to see he meant Serenissima!  We opened the board up and loaded it with boats (at least 3 or 4 in each space) and pushed them around the open seas (and even across land when he felt like it).

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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. 

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons—Gathering of Friends 2008, Part I

The fun has just begun here in Columbus, Ohio at the Gathering of Friends but I have a few new games to tell you about…

Code Omega Like Ubongo, players race to complete puzzles in simultaneous play.  Instead of working odd-shaped pieces into an odd-shaped box, players are lining up strips and match up a stripe of codes.  The linear pieces are easier to methodically try in every orientation permutation and so play might be a bit more algorithmic than Ubongo.  Scoring is still unnecessarily convoluted. 

Ubongo Das Duell This two-player Ubongo game is more similar to the original, but with 21 different shapes to be arranged in the playing area.  Both players are working on the same puzzle with the same shapes at the same time, which I like very much.  When one player solves it, the other player can stop and still see what the solution should have been.  Also, the winner simply wins a point and the first player to five points wins.

Since I really like speed puzzle games, Code Omega and Ubongo Das Duell were both instant hits for me.

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Valerie Putman: My Ugly Side

Truth be told, I’d like to write about the game that I’ve been playing for the last eight months.  I’d like to write about the game that has constantly occupied my mind for the last month.  I’d like to write about the game that I am working on non-stop this weekend to make sure that it is ready for the Gathering.  But it’s a prototype and I can’t.  I’ll just say that I am developing a game for Rio Grande Games from a new designer and I like it very much.  So what can I write about this week?  How about if I own up to the ugly side that games can bring out in me.

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Valerie Putman: Before The New Stuff Gets Here

The Gathering of Friends is right around the corner.  This means that many of the new Nuremburg games and a gaggle of prototypes will be available to play soon.  Of course, I still haven’t tried all of the new Essen releases!  I decided to look back at the Essen Preview lists and Geeklists and see what’s left that I missed before the new stuff gets here and try to play as many as I could during my Spring Break.

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Valerie Putman: Defining Moments

In Developmental Psychology, the start of adolescence is clearly defined as the onset of puberty.  The end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood, on the other hand, is a lot fuzzier.  For example, it may start with marriage or parenthood or financial independence or the right to vote. When I poll my Psychology 100 class, many of them can’t decide if they are adults or not.  In academia, there is a clear defining moment when a professor has achieved their rightful place in the ivory tower—tenure.

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Valerie Putman: Spielbox Magazine Freebies

This week the latest issue of Spielbox magazine showed up on my doorstep along with a new building tile for Cuba.  (The building even bears the Spielbox logo!) For the cost of 2 white, 1 blue, and 2 red cubes, the building produces a rum when activated.  While I’ve played and enjoyed Cuba, I didn’t love it enough to buy a copy.  So, like many of the other expansions that have come my way, this one will get passed along to Dale or the CABS club copy of the game.

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Valerie Putman: Gone Fishing

Sorry!  Poor planning on my part. I left town for the weekend without posting my column first and now I’m writing this on my Nintendo DS Opera browser with a battery that’s about to quit.  I’ll do better next week!
I’d rather be gaming,
Valerie Putman

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Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons--Gulf Games, PrezCon, etc.

Sigh.  What kind of convention reporter am I when some of the biggest gaming events of the year are going on around the country and I’m stuck at home?  Well, I’m the kind of reporter who still has a few weeks to go before she hears about tenure at her real job and an important meeting on Friday afternoon.  Of course, if I had known that we would have a snow day on Friday….  Sigh.

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Valerie Putman: Nothing Wrong But Nothing Special

It was a light gaming week.  During an unexpected snow day I got in a game of Through the Ages.  What a fantabulous game.  It hasn’t lost its shine for me one bit.  At game night an old favorite came out, Euphrat & Tigris.  This game still gives me goose bumps every time I play it.  Oh, and I played Key Harvest.  It was fine.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s nothing special.

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Valerie Putman: Polling all Boardgaming Phone Geeks

Two years ago I made a New Year’s Resolution to track my games played.  For nearly 8 months I faithfully wrote down my games played in a notebook and then logged on to Boardgamegeek.com when I got back to my computer to use the tracking system available through the profile.  I’d often find that I didn’t have my notebook on hand, so soon I had slips of paper, napkins, and receipts strewn around my office waiting to be entered.  Eventually, I gave up.

Recently I’ve been noticing a lot of boardgamers keeping track of their games played on their cell phone or PDA.  Many of them access their BGG profile while they are playing and enter the games as they go.  I’d like to get back to logging my games and I think this is the way to go.  Besides, I need a new phone

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Valerie Putman: Personality of a Gamer

Personality theories vary in terms of the number of personality traits that they identify and measure.  One of the most commonly used personality tests in Psychology is the NEO-PI, based on the “Big Five” personality traits identified by Costa and Mcrae.  The “Big Five” are: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.  (For more information on the theory, there is a good Wikipedia entry.)

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Valerie Putman: That Depends…

I had a really good day of gaming--Tichu, Notre Dame, Age of Steam, Agricola, Phoenicia, and Caylus.  The decision to end the night with Caylus happened when there were three of us were sitting at the table and one of us had to leave in 1 ½ hours.  We were all fairly fast players and had played Caylus many times, so it was going to be easy to finish in time.  Just as we were about to start, two more players wandered up and asked, “Can we join?” They were fairly new to the club and I wanted to be welcoming, but five-player Caylus with two unknown players was likely to take too long.  So I said, “That depends…”

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Valerie Putman:  Good Day Columbus

This Friday over 50 members of my local game club (CABS) woke up at the crack of dawn in order to be on television.  The FOX morning show, Good Day Columbus, was sending their traveling reporter, Johnny DiLoretto, to film a few live spots.  We filled the room with visually appealing games, set up and ready to play, and readied our best gaming evangelism for the media spotlight.

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Valerie Putman: The Reluctant Gamer

When you are playing with hardcore hobbyists, you can have a less than ideal game night with some pretty awful games and be sure that everyone will still come back for more.  But not everyone has a club full of hardcore hobbyists to play with regularly.  For some, their only chance at gaming is when they are able to convince the reluctant gamers in their lives to humor them.  Reluctant gamers are far less forgiving when things go wrong, and this puts a lot of pressure on the gamer to get things just right.

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Valerie Putman: 2008 Itinerary

As many of you know, my favorite part of the boardgaming hobby is meeting up with friends from all over for several days of non-stop gaming and socializing.  I started attending conventions in 1998 (Dragon*Con and Magnum Opus Con).  I started traveling farther for conventions in 2002 when I left my Georgia game group and moved to Ohio, using game events as an opportunity to go back and visit my friends.  Each year I added a few more events and added to the circle of friends that I just had to visit.  In 2005 I attended my first invitational events and made my first trip to Essen.  I peaked in 2006 with 17 game events (not including local one day events) totaling 70 days of gaming nirvana.

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Valerie Putman: In the Year of the Dragon

Hey, let’s play ItYotD (sounded out like a funny pronunciation of idiot)! Hmmm… let me try again.  Anyone interested in In the Year?  YoD?  Dragon?  Year?  I’m having a harder time shortening the name of In the Year of the Dragon than I do with the current decade.  (Because the naughties is such a perfect term!) Regardless, I love the game and I’d like to play.

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Valerie Putman: Holiday Party, Trying Not To Say the A Word, and Surprise Guests

Okay, I’ll just go ahead and admit now that this is a last minute hodge podge of randomness.  It’s the holiday season, but that’s not my excuse.  In fact, with school out for over a week and our family holiday celebrations postponed until January, I could have used this week to get ahead on the next two months of columns.  But who are we kidding—I waited until the last minute.

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Valerie Putman: Can I Play?

In August I joined a gym (the local Jewish Community Center) and usually I get my workout in first thing in the morning before heading to school.  When my day gets a late start (which will be every morning for the next 5-½ weeks while I’m on winter break!), I finish my workout closer to lunch time.  I pass a group of tables on the way out, and I’ve noticed that around lunch time you can usually see a table or two of little blue-haired ladies playing Mah Jongg.  I’ve often thought that the perfect retirement community would be a bunch of gamers and I’d be that little blue-haired lady playing games all day.  So I pass them and feel a twinge of envy—I want to play.

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Valerie Putman: For Beginners

Last night I played three games of Agricola.  The first two were teaching games and I insisted on playing the family version (no minor improvement cards or occupation cards).  Since I had the only copy of the game, they didn’t have a choice!  They were all intelligent gamers and could have played the full game without any difficulty, but I wasn’t interested in a game that would take twice as long while they read their cards, learned the rules, reread their cards, became paralyzed by the array of decisions, reread their cards for some kind of direction, asked for rules clarifications or strategy hints, and again consulted their cards.  I think that using the cards in the teaching game nearly doubles the game length and I become bored to tears.  I was much happier when the second group, after feeling out the overall game progression in the family game, opted to play a second game in order to try playing with the cards.

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Valerie Putman: Essen Preview Review

The time has come for me to look back over the expansive Essen preview list and see just what I’ve gotten to play so far.  Here is a list, from favorite to least favorite, of the Essen games that I’ve played so far!

Agricola My favorite game from Essen so far.  I’ve played about 20 games, trying every deck, the family game, and with 2–5 players.  I still have to try the solo game.
Wabash Cannonball This is a fantastic train game that plays in about 30–45 minutes.
Glik I love puzzle games, and this is a great one for 2–4 players with a Ricochet Robot movement mechanism.

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Valerie Putman: Prose on Cons—BGG.con, 2007

Last weekend I was in Dallas, Texas with 550 other gamers for four days of Boardgamegeek.con.  When trying to compare it to another US show, the closest I can come up with is Origins, but with just the Board Room (many times bigger) and the boardgame venders and publishers, without all of the other stuff.  No show is perfect, but this show does a really great job of catering to the boardgamers and what we really want to do—play games.

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Valerie Putman: Gone Fishing at BGG.con

Sorry, no column this week.  Valerie is at BGG.con in Dallas!

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Valerie Putman: Why Agricola is like a shoe sale

During each turn in Agricola you use one of your family members to take an action.  Many of those actions involve collecting resources that may have piled up if no one has taken them for several rounds.  For example, one action allows you to collect a reed (needed for the roof when building and renovating huts).  Each turn that no one collects the reed, another one is added to the pile.  Eventually, you find yourself staring at a pile of 6 reeds and you think, can I really resist?  It’s like a shoe sale.  You weren’t looking for reeds (new shoes), you really have something else you should be spending your action (money) on instead, and the truth is that they will sit on your player mat (shoe rack) unused (never worn).

I enjoy games with more options than you can possibly try all in one turn--or even in the entire game.  In Agricola you start with more than a dozen available actions (though the exact number varies depending on the number of players) and you add 14 more by the end of the game.  Each player starts with 2 family members and unless you have a rare occupation that allows for early births, you won’t be growing the family until at least round 5.  Over the course of the game, a player will have somewhere between 28 turns (if you never grow your family) and perhaps 50 turns (though that is a very high estimate).  There’s a lot to do before the end of the game and you don’t have many turns to waste.

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Valerie Putman: Gone Fishing—Great Lakes Games

I’m afraid I’m too busy playing all the new Essen releases this weekend to write about them.  That just means I’ll have something worth reading next weekend!  See you then!

I *am* gaming!
Valerie Putman

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Valerie Putman: Starting with the A’s—Agricola, Amyitis, and Antler Island

Asking someone to bring you back games from Essen is a huge favor.  They have very limited suitcase space and very strict weight limits.  Of course, if you brought them back a suitcase worth of games last year—they kind of owe you!  This year I didn’t make it to Essen, but I was very happy to get a few of the new Essen releases into Dale’s suitcase.  I’m also happy to help him try out all of his new toys as well!  So for the next few weeks I will likely be reporting on the new games as they hit the table.

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Valerie Putman: Ticket to Ride Everywhere

How many of you have gone on vacation and brought home a souvenir to remember the place—perhaps a snow globe or a post card?  I know one guy who collects Monopoly games everywhere he goes—and they are out there.  You can get a Monopoly themed for just about anything.  But what’s the point?  They play the same, so additional copies are just for show.  Now imagine Ticket to Ride collectibles—with new maps, new tickets, but few if any new rules, available at every tourist attraction and vacation destination.  After a trip to Disney World, you pick up a copy of Ticket to Ride Disney and relive your vacation by planning your routes between the amusement park attractions.  You have fond memories of your trip to New York City?  Break out the Ticket to Ride NYC with subway and bus routes to retrace your steps.

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