W. Eric Martin

The collected columns of W. Eric Martin, who (generally) posts on alternate Saturdays. He does most of the news, previews, reviews, etc., so sometimes he slacks off on the column writing. Sorry about that. Here's what Eric has to say about himself:

A full-time freelance writer since 1999, Eric's first publishing credit dates to 1997 when he wrote about international game shows for GAMES magazine. Over the years he's written numerous business, technology and nutrition articles, in addition to co-authoring two books: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar and Tools of Timekeeping: A Kid's Guide to the History and Science of Telling Time. This despite being an expert in neither time-keeping devices nor coffee shop management. Research is the key, my friends.

In 2006, he started placing reviews and coverage of games in mainstream publications such as Discover, Scuba Diving, The Bark, Chile Pepper, Coffee, Tropical Fish Hobbyist, and Sheep! (Truly there's a magazine for every specialty.) When Boardgame News editor and founder Rick Thornquist stepped down in November 2006, Eric decided this would be the perfect time to dump the technology and nutrition articles he had been writing and devote himself to writing about games, first and foremost.

Eric lives in Concord, NH with his wife Linda, his son Traver and three big dopey cats.

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W. Eric Martin: Games for Soldiers 2009

I don’t have the best record in following through on projects that I start. (If you’ve failed to notice this tendency, despite such evidence as the months-late game giveaway to BGN members or the lag time in raising the BGN membership rate, then ignore that libel directed against my person. I’m a paragon of timeliness!) Thus I’m only now posting the results of the 2009 Games for Soldiers Drive, roughly three months after the drive ended with nearly $1,000 in the kitty. In particular, I want to thank:

• Alfredo Nevarez at Thought Hammer for once again donating the funds raised at the BGG.con Midnight Madness drawing, funds that amounted to $400.
• Ted Alspach of Bézier Games, who donated a case of Beer & Pretzels (12 copies) and a case of Rapscallion (30 copies!) – if the word “rapscallion” somehow makes it into modern Army slang, we’ll know who to blame.
• Steve Jones at Blue Panther LLC, who donated a half-dozen games, including Pulling Strings and Duck Duck Boom.
• All of the individual donors of both money and games, of whom I once again forgot to ask permission to use their names in a follow-up post, so I won’t call them out by name in case they wish to remain anonymous.
• All those who renewed their BGN membership during the drive to take advantage of my offer to redirect $10 of each such payment toward Games for Soldiers.
• Dan Yarrington at Myriad Games in Salem, NH for once again handling the order and kicking extra bucks into my account to purchase another eight decent-sized games.

Here’s the pile of loot purchased with that money, along with game donations from a few sources:

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W. Eric Martin: Two, Two, Two Games in One!

I’ve played a trio of new games in the past couple of months that have the unusual quality of featuring two games within the same game: Mystery Express, Cornucopia and Martinique. How did these mash-ups turn out? Anyone recall a David Cronenberg flick from the mid-1980s?

Let’s start by looking at the new Days of Wonder title from Antoine Bauza and Serge Laget. I’ve played an advance review copy of Mystery Express three times now, and feedback from players has been all over the board. (I’ll post a complete review in the next couple of weeks, prior to the game’s general release.) The most damning criticism has come from two people who have refused to play the game again due to one aspect of its design. What’s more, a third player skipped game night this past week because I had expressed a desire to play Mystery Express again that session.

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W. Eric Martin: Aiming for Perfection

I purchased the Rush Hour iPhone app in mid-February 2010 and have already completed 300+ of the 2,500 puzzles included. In case you couldn’t guess, I like it.

Rush Hour, for those of you who haven’t played, is a sliding block puzzle from Nob Yoshigahara in which the solver needs to manipulate various blocks in a grid in order to slide the target red car out the slot in the right-hand side of the grid. Vehicles move only forward and backward based on their initial orientation and cannot be picked up or reoriented. As with the plastic version of the puzzle published by ThinkFun, the iPhone app divides the puzzles into four layers of difficulty, with a player being able to choose the difficulty as he wishes.

One nice addition to the app over the physical game is that each puzzle tells the player the minimum number of moves in which the puzzle can be solved – but this number isn’t revealed until the player has solved the puzzle. So you slide, slide, slide, solve – “ooh, I can do this puzzle in two fewer moves. Let’s try it again.” Once you’ve found the minimum solution, the checkmark in the directory indicating that you’ve solved a puzzle changes to a star.

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W. Eric Martin: Stupid Fun

One of the game categories missing from the BoardGameGeek advanced search function is “stupid” – as in “this game is so stupid that you have to play it.” Stupid games embody the maxim that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, only how you play. When you play a well-designed stupid game, you think only of how much fun you’re having and don’t worry about where you place in the standings. The experience of the game itself provides all the satisfaction you need.

A few truisms about stupid games:

1. They tend to be short. While it might be possible to design a 120-minute stupid game, I’ve yet to see one. These games provide a quick emotional jolt, not a feeling that could be sustained for hours.

2. The more, the merrier. Stupid games tend to be at their best when you have the most players that the game permits. The game is a catalyst for fun, with players providing the raw material, and the more people you have around the table, the more likely they are to react to one another.

3. The strategy is there if you want to look for it. You can play a stupid game thoughtlessly and concentrate only on having fun – many people do – but you can typically get better at the game if you care to do so.

With that out of the way, here’s a trio of stupid games that I’ve enjoyed over the past few months. Note that I received review copies of each of these games.

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W. Eric Martin: Lessons for Game Publishers – Practice Parallelism

In early February 2010 I played the published version of Stefan Feld’s Macao for the first time, and while I found the game intriguing in the usual alea/Feld manner of not knowing how everything fits together on the first play and making somewhat random moves that may or may not pan out (see In the Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame, Rum & Pirates), the other players and I were confounded by card text that exhibited a common grammatical problem, namely non-parallelism.

Parallelism, also known as parallel construction, is the practice of words, clauses and phrases agreeing with one another when they are used in series in a sentence, e.g. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The verb in each clause is in the simple past, which allows a reader or listener to process the meaning of the sentence more easily than she would with something like “I came, I saw, I was conquering.” (Let’s ignore for the moment that the two sentences don’t mean the same thing – I’m considering structure for now.)

We tend to overlook non-parallelism in casual speech – “I’m going shopping, taking in a movie, and will see you tonight” – but such mismatches strike the ear abruptly when encountered in more formal situations. Take this example from Macao‘s back cover: “Who will have the best plan and can acquire the most prestige by the end of the game?” While not incorrect, the “will have” and “can acquire” are jarring. Far better would be this sentence: “Who will have the best plan and acquire the most prestige by the end of the game?”

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W. Eric Martin: First Impressions – Rattus, Jaipur, Cornucopia

Time to take a look at a trio of new games, all of which have hit the market since December 2009 or are on the way to store shelves as of this date. Note that I received review copies of all three games.

First up, Rattus from designers Åse and Henrik Berg (Oregon) and publisher White Goblin Games. In case you didn’t guess from the name and the furry faces on the box cover, Rattus is themed around the Black Death, with player cubes dying off again and again as the plague travels throughout Eurasia.

One face-down rat token starts on each region of the board. On a turn, a player adds one or more cubes to one region, with the upper limit of new arrivals being the number of rats in the area; optionally takes one of the six special characters; optionally uses the powers of any characters he holds; then moves the plague figure to a new region of the board, most likely spreading more rats along the way.

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W. Eric Martin: The Game of Everlasting Agony

The Game of Everlasting Agony is one of my wife’s favorites. Yes, I realize that statement could be used against me should we ever find ourselves in divorce court, arguing over who spiked whose drink with poison after the dining room mysteriously burned, but I’ll take that chance.

The short description of The Game of Everlasting Agony is “20 questions, but with way more questions.” You need at least two people to play, but you can play with any number. One person thinks up an answer to be guessed, then everyone else asks question after question until they finally grind their way to the answer. What makes the game fun(?) is that you can think of absolutely anything when coming up with an answer to be guessed. Previous answers have included:

• Solipsism
• Hitler’s moustache
• A particular word balloon in an Archie comic
• The question “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” (a question which Linda always asks first, but since I was looking for the question itself this answer proved to be more of a challenge than it might seem at first glance)
• U.S. presidential veto power
• The Earth’s crust
• Porridge that’s too hot
• JFK Jr.’s penultimate fart

This last answer took 90 minutes of questions to be discovered, the longest that any such game has taken. The secret to a good answer is that it must be difficult for the guessers to discover but not impossible. We’ve played the game with a number of our foreign exchange students, for example, and in those cases we had to restrict potential answers to our pool of common knowledge and shared experiences.

If you’re looking for something to do on long car rides, try The Game of Everlasting Agony. I can’t say that you won’t be sorry you did – because sometimes you will be – but I’d still recommend it…

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W. Eric Martin: “Want to Play a Game, Dummy McStupidson?”

December is the month when U.S. newspapers, searching for holiday fodder to fill pages, publish round-ups of various items that readers might want to buy for others for holiday presents: new tech gadgets, DVD boxed sets, expensive kitchen tools of limited use, and (of course) board games. Since these newspapers tend not to have a person on staff who covers board games on a regular basis – and by “tend not to have” I mean “never ever ever“ – the person reviewing the games is whoever ends up within the editor’s line of sight come assignment time.

In some cases this person does have more than a passing familiarity with games. I worked for a game store in San Francisco in the early 1990s, and each November or December we’d be visited by San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, who would leave with a huge stack of free games as chosen by our manager. His game round-up would be posted shortly thereafter, and readers would then swarm into the store to pick up whichever games had most struck his fancy. LaSalle wasn’t a game expert, but he knew his way around the table and never blundered when describing games. (Music critic Joshua Kosman wrote the 2009 game round-up, and also comes across as someone who knows the field better than the average Joe.)

Unfortunately, not all assigned game reviewers are that competent. Witness the December 2009 game review article in the Star-Telegram, a paper located within spitting distance of BoardGameGeek, the largest, most comprehensive gaming website in the world, which hosted a game convention of 900 players just one month earlier. The reviewers write that “after 25 minutes, we still couldn’t figure out how to start (Incan Gold) and play the first round,” so they abandoned the game and instead played Life. Pandemic is dismissed as “[n]ot a party game. This one requires lots of time and total focus” – as if you should be expecting hours of giggles when you pick up a game titled Pandemic.

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W. Eric Martin: Games Workshop, BGG and You

BoardGameGeek has had more than its share of foofarahs – dust-ups about trivial issues that create monstrously long threads filled with heated posts – and the latest to grace the site comes in the aftermath of a request from Games Workshop to remove user-generated files that contained material that GW believed infringed on its intellectual property. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter in late November 2009 that named four specific files, BoardGameGeek removed those files; due to an additional request from GW that BGG “remove any remaining images, text and files which infringe Games Workshop’s intellectual property rights,” BGG admin Matthew Monin reviewed more than 700 other files and removed those that seemed to fit that description.

Since Monin notified users that their files had been pulled, news of the file removals soon exploded over the BGG front page, with users giving retaliatory “1” ratings to various GW titles, vowing to boycott GW, urging a boycott of Fantasy Flight Games (which has a license for some GW properties), and lobbying to have all GW titles removed from BGG.

Well.

Seth Owen had a perceptive post about this topic on his Pawnderings blog, and I repost it here with his permission:

Lessons Learned from the Games Workshop/BoardGameGeek controversy

I think there are three different, but related, aspects of this whole brouhaha on BoardGameGeek that everybody can take away as lessons learned if they choose – although some may not.

The first is Games Workshop’s aggressive defense of its intellectual property. I was unaware of the Warhammer/World of Warcraft connection and I can understand how GW may feel quite burned by that experience. I think they were within their legal rights on 90% of what they claim, although on some specific points their IP policies make claims unsupported by the actual state of the law. The reality is that those assertions will probably stand until they tangle with someone with the economic resource sand interests to contest it. On the other hand, there’s serious grounds for doubting the wisdom of their approach. Making a significant portion of your most dedicated fans angry with you seems like a very bad business idea. While most of GW’s customers are not on BGG or members of GW fan sites, those who are tend to be the opinion leaders in their groups and probably have an influence outside of mere numbers.

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W. Eric Martin: First Thoughts on Tobago, Mosaix, Loyang, Beer & Pretzels, and Gonzaga

I’ve played a few games that debuted at Spiel in late October 2009 at least twice, so I thought I’d offer early impressions, with more detailed reviews to follow once I’ve played them a sufficient number of times. Here goes:

• Tobago – Bruce Allen has created a fun deduction-style game that contains no deduction. On an island with different types of terrain and landmarks, players play cards that reduce the possible locations of a treasure until only one spot remains. (Cards have pictograms noting things like “adjacent to a palm tree,” “not within two spaces of a mountain,” and “in the largest lake.") Once a player reaches that spot with his land-cruiser, that player and everyone else who has contributed to isolating the treasure gets a share of the loot, with those who contribute more getting more shares and those who contribute later in the discovery process getting first dibs. This scoring method encourages players to cooperate in a treasure hunt, even if they’re nowhere near the treasure; cursed treasures create an incentive not to go it alone as you risk taking nothing home despite all your work.

In September 2009, designer Bruno Faidutti described Tobago as “the first serious contender” for the 2010 Spiel des Jahres, and I can see where he’s coming from as the game has enough luck to allow players to come back from early deficits and enough skill that players who care to do so can play better than casual folks.

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W. Eric Martin: Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife?

So, Spiel – I suppose that I should write a paragraph or twenty about the show, having spent four days in Germany checking out dozens of new games, but I’ve had to catch up on other work since returning and have had time to write about games only in the past few hours. As a result, I thought I’d focus on only one game in this column and leave the rest of the material for later reports.

One of the consistent elements of Spiel – one aspect that makes the show what it is – is the search for the unexpected wonder, for the game that pulls your mind in a new direction. Every time you encounter someone new in the halls, you ask, “What’s the best thing you’ve played?” When people asked me this on Thursday and Friday, I had little to say since I had played few games, instead spending time talking to designers and publishers. Tobago had struck me the right way – a feeling confirmed by two subsequent plays – and Tikal II had everything that you’d want in a Kramer/Kiesling design other than being published and available (the game is due out in 2010 from GameWorks), but neither of these games seemed like a good answer.

Thankfully I found the answer Saturday afternoon while helping to demo games at the BoardGameGeek booth, that magical game being Aargh!Tect, a Walter Obert design that I had somehow not heard of despite writing a Spiel preview that ran to several hundred pages. As often happens at Spiel, we played with somewhat dicey rules as Scott Alden, aka Aldie, had played once or seen people playing or watched mimes interpreting the rules or received a telegraph that summarized the rules. We knew some percentage of the game play anyway and winged it for the rest, using our gamer-fu to fill in the holes. Thus I might be wrong on the specifics of game play, but I don’t care because I had so much fun playing the game. (English rules will supposedly be available on the Heidelberger Spieleverlag website by mid-November 2009.)

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W. Eric Martin: Another (Nearly) Empty Column

Once again I’m taking a leave of absence from my column. Tragic, I know. Given the choice of writing something here or working on the Spiel preview for people who are willing to pay for that work, I’m taking the latter course of action. If you plan to attend Spiel 09 in Essen next month, I recommend signing up as a BGN member and checking out this enormous preview, a preview that will continue to grow for another six weeks until I’m on the bus to Boston and heading toward my plane to Europe. Monthly memberships are available if you want to sample the wares before digging deeper into your wallet. Sign up now – I’ll be glad you did! (You will, too.)

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If you’re wondering what to get that gamer in your life for his or her birthday, consider customizing a game to put that player in the midst of the action. One friend of mine did that for another gamer – someone he’s played games with for roughly three decades – honoring that person by putting him on par with dwarves and trolls in Small World:

The rules for Teds are “Whenever you roll a die and don’t like the result, you may roll again, but only once per die.” As my friend explains, “Ted rolls terribly and always has, so this is our gift to him. Banking allows a player to roll the die twice at the end of a turn and get that much bonus gold. You see immediately how Banking Teds are awesome. Purely by chance in the second game, Ted got first shot at Commando Teds – also a killer.”

My friend’s only regret about immortalizing Ted: “I didn’t make little Ted tokens which would have been a hoot, but time-consuming.”

(Note: As exciting as an army of Teds might be to some, Ted is not a winner in the Small World design contest held by Days of Wonder. News on which designs did win on Monday, September 14, when I’ll detail the expansions – yes, plural – that will debut at Spiel 09 in October.)

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W. Eric Martin: This and That

Seung Chan, our exchange student from South Korea, headed home last week, so for the first time in months I don’t have a guinea pig in the house willing to play any game that I throw onto the table. Okay, “willing” might not be the right word, but he was often game to try anything, no matter how questionable it looked. Often all he asked in return was to play Le Havre yet again. Hardly the worst request you can hear!

I’ve played Le Havre about twenty times now, with about half of those games being two-player, and in each game I feel like I discover something new about how to game the system for a few coins, or build certain buildings more efficiently, or maximize my investment into a resource conversion. Hoo boy, that’s hardly a description that will sell someone on playing the game if they’re not already familiar with designer Uwe Rosenberg or Eurogames in general, but if you like tightly-wound business games with a high sink-or-swim factor, then this one is for you.

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W. Eric Martin: Reality Check

I’ve reviewed a number of games in the first half of 2009 that are, shall we say, less than inspiring in terms of their game play, graphics and replayability. CrossWise, Senet, Tenka, Roman Taxi, Bill of Rights, Path and other such titles might find fans elsewhere, but I’m not going to be signing up on their Facebook pages, if you know what I mean.

Former BGN columnist Frank Branham, taking pity on the designers and publishers of such games, suggested that I offer a reality check for this group, a for-hire service in which I’d review a game prior to a company going to print. I’d offer private feedback on the game, identify confusing aspects of the design or rules, point to similar titles already in print, and provide a general warning about the risks of publishing. For a 2005 article in Knucklebones, for example, I spoke with Jim Albea about his game Plateau. As Albea said at the time, “Printing 10,000 [copies] provided all sorts of price breaks. On that run I was able to get the production cost below $2.00 per set.” While that cost sounds low, Albea had sold fewer than a thousand copies a year after the game’s publication, despite (or perhaps because of) Plateau being a well-designed but plain-looking abstract strategy game.

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W. Eric Martin: Reviews Under Review

Over the past two years, several Boardgame News readers have asked about my game reviews, so I thought I’d take a column to spell everything out, both for readers and for designers and publishers who might send games for review.

My primary goal when reviewing a game is simple: Give BGN readers enough information so that they can decide for themselves whether they’ll want to play the game. I know that my tastes don’t match anyone else’s. Each of us will approach the table with different goals for what we want out of the playing experience. Even if you and I enjoy the first ten games we play, we’ll spit blood at each other over game number eleven. On the other end of the spectrum, no matter how different your background from mine, I’m confident that we can find games that we’ll both want to play.

Given that game design is an art, I have no desire to convince you that my tastes and preferences are superior to yours. They aren’t; they’re just different. Instead I try to acknowledge those tastes and preferences within a review so that you can process the information and experience that I provide into something usable. Take, for example, my negative review of Wizard’s Gambit in May 2008. The game did nothing for me; actually it annoyed me, both through the restrictively forced game play and the poor graphics, and I said as much in my review – yet two people contacted me the day that my review was published and asked to purchase the review copy from me. For them, all the negative elements that I had found were positives, or rather they at least recognized elements of the game that they might enjoy and were curious enough to want to play it. Mission accomplished!

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W. Eric Martin: 10 Different Days in Asia

I’m usually not one to create game variants willy-nilly, but on a recent weekend with four gamers around the table, we started experimenting with 10 Days in Asia, the fourth title in Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum’s 10 Days series. (If you’re not familiar with this game or any others in the series, check out my review of 10 Days in Asia for details on the gameplay of this Racko-inspired design.)

The first variant was simply a truncated version of the game. After shuffling the tiles face-down, players draw tiles one at a time and place them in their racks like normal – except that the game is now over at this point and whoever created the longest series of connected tiles wins. Simple, no? One of the arguments against the 10 Days series is that luck of the draw in the set-up round determines the ultimate winner. Anyone who sides with this point of view is encouraged to adopt this variant as you can then play the game twenty times in the span of one normal game.

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W. Eric Martin: Approaching the Void – Waterloo and Opaque Design

While Boardgame News focuses on new game releases, with columnists sometimes branding anything that came out more than six months ago as “old,” I like to sample games of all vintages. Some people talk of belonging to the Cult of the New; I belong to the Cult of the New-to-Me. After all, the best way to learn more about games and game design is to play more games, no matter when they were published. This approach leads to me playing lots of stinkers, sometimes multiple times as I try to determine where the engine is misfiring and whether the problem is built into the design or fixable, but as long as the play partners are good people, even bad games can create enjoyable experiences.

Since I’m always trying to recruit new people to gaming, whether in bookstores or on Craigslist or elsewhere, one aspect of game design that I pay close attention to is a game’s clarity – that is, how easy it is for a new player to understand what actions she can take and how those actions will move her toward the winning conditions. This latter clause is the important point as simple rules do not automatically translate to a game having clarity. Think of Chicago Express as a counter-example. On a turn, each player takes one of only three different actions – auction, expand, develop – and each of those actions is easy to understand in the abstract. But how do those actions move you toward the final goal of having the most money? That knowledge comes only by playing the game, possibly multiple times, to experience the Goldbergian cascading effects.

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W. Eric Martin: Q: Where’d You Get the Idea for This Game?

A: I read a book on the topic.

A: I saw a television documentary that highlighted this issue.

A: It came to me in a dream.

A: My neighbor introduced me to the Sudanese child that they’re adopting, and we started talking about that nation, its history, and so on.

A: A fortune cookie gave it to me.

A: I was huffing oven fumes and somewhat delirious, and I began to hallucinate – or at least that’s what I tell myself now. It was only a hallucination and not a real pink sabertooth tiger that materialized in my kitchen. A hallucination makes a lot more sense, dontcha think?

A: I stole it from a less successful designer.

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W. Eric Martin: Promo-a-Go-Go

No one likes to discover that her newly opened game is missing a piece. Even if the absent bit is only the twentieth cube in a set or an easily replaced pawn, you’re still pinched by anger and frustration. You’ll have to find the publisher’s contact information, compose a letter, then wait for a week or two (or several) to see whether the promised replacement part actually arrives. Even worse, future purchases from the same publisher will bear a modicum of worry that you’ll be disappointed once again.

What’s surprising, though, is how these same feelings overcome you upon the announcement of a new pawn or type of cube for an already existing game. While some are excited by the new possibilities that such material portends, you become frustrated by the thought that the game you currently own – the game you previously enjoyed and felt satisfied by – now feels incomplete. “I don’t own the whole game any more,” you say. “The publisher is using this game as a cash cow and ripping me off by producing something extra just because he knows that people will buy it.”

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W. Eric Martin: Sales Tools for Game Designers

As in any creative field, the number of amateur or aspiring game designers far surpasses the number of professional or established designers – and even designers with an established track record can’t find a home for all that they create. Two companies established in 2008, Cloudberry Games and BoardGamesNow, are trying to alleviate the woes of would-be game designers by offering them a different path to publication, one that takes the designs directly to the potential end-users: gamers from all parts of the world.

Cloudberry Games was founded by general manager Rustan Håkansson, along with his wife and gaming partner Nina and his friend Pontus Nilsson, who has worked with Håkansson previously on other game projects. Håkansson, a former sales manager for the Swedish game distributor Vincit AB, has seen the inner workings of the industry first-hand. “Mostly it is focused on making print runs as big as possible, which means a need to adapt the games so that they are suitable for as large an audience as possible,” he says. “Standard publishers cannot publish great games for small audiences. The other end of the scale are the new authors who are struggling to raise interest in their creations and be picked up by a publisher; when they fail to do so, they print themselves, or the game is lost to the world. Self-publishing most often becomes a major project, costing a lot of time and money that the author would prefer to not spend.”

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W. Eric Martin: Old Bearded Man, and Young Not-So-Bearded Man-to-Be

I’ve been fortunate during the 2008-2009 school year to have an avid game player under my roof, someone who will play all sorts of titles again and again – sometimes with a heartfelt groan and a thrashing of fists, mind you, such as when I pressed Tyrants of Rome on him for a third time. (The game was short, thankfully.)

Seung Chan knew only Go when he arrived at my house as a foreign exchange student from South Korea, but I pressed several games on him, and soon he was thoroughly obsessed. Even better, he would ask to a play a new game several times in a row to try to build on what he learned in the first game or two. Within a few days of his arrival in August 2008, we had played five games each of most of the GIPF line-up, a half-dozen or more games of Airships, Aquaduct, 10 Days in Asia and Schachjagd, and every flavor of Ticket to Ride.

Our most recent gaming obsession is Wolfgang Kramer’s Expedition, which Queen Games published in the mid-1990s. Expedition – or, as we call it, “Old Bearded Man” – is an updated version of Wildlife Adventure (Ravensburger, 1985) and was itself updated in 2005 with a National Geographic theme, once again published by Ravensburger. (Presumably Queen Games will maintain the pattern with a new edition in 2015.)

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W. Eric Martin: Knizia on Keltis, Masters Gallery and More

Reiner Knizia was the Spiel des Jahres bridesmaid for more than a decade, coming close to winning Germany’s Game of the Year award with Blue Moon City (2006) and Ingenious (2004), which both received nominations, in addition to receiving recommendations from the SdJ jury for Carcassonne: The Castle (2004), Amun-Re (2003), Winner’s Circle (2001), Taj Mahal (2000), Money! (1999), Tigris & Euphrates (1998), Through the Desert (1998), and Modern Art (1993), among other titles. Many in the game industry wondered whether Knizia would ever take home the big red poppel, likening his also-ran status to actress Susan Lucci’s, who won her first (and only) Emmy for lead actress in a drama on her 19th nomination for the award.

Knizia’s luck finally changed in 2008, however, when he won both Kinderspiel des Jahres for Wer war’s? from Ravensburger and Spiel des Jahres for Keltis from Kosmos. (More precisely, his luck mostly changed for the better. He missed the SdJ awards ceremony and photo op due to travel delays following an appearance at the Origins game convention in Ohio.) Funny thing is, Keltis isn’t exactly the game that Knizia had submitted to Kosmos, and that game’s existence is a good case study for how designers and publishers work together to develop a game and bring it to market.

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W. Eric Martin: Toy Fair 2009: I’ve Never…

While planning for a trip to Toy Fair 2009 in New York, I was discussing the event with my wife Linda and explaining how Toy Fair – and Nuremberg and other such trade-only events – differs from something like Spiel, the giant open-to-public game convention in Essen, Germany. At Toy Fair, hardly anyone plays the games on display, and if they do, they get a brief description of the game and go through half a turn before moving on to something else. This “wham bam thank you ma’am” processing of new games comes about for many reasons:

1. Toy Fair attendees have a limited amount of time at the show. I’m interested in nothing but games, so I’m free to ignore the Gwen Stefani doll line, and Hannah Montana cheese graters, and all of the other non-game items. Retailers and distributors, on the other hand, have a small section of games amongst their larger inventory, so they need to visit far more vendors than I do.

2. Toy Fair attendees have a limited knowledge of games. If you don’t specialize in games as a retailer or distributor, then you don’t care about their origins or the details of how they play. While talking with Gamewright or Winning Moves, I make sure to ask whether a title has previously appeared in Germany or elsewhere because Boardgame News readers will want to know that type of information. The general public – not so much. What’s more, the person demoing the game frequently can’t explain it in enough detail for me to feel comfortable describing it to others. I’m left falling back on the game’s theme, which is rarely an indicator of how the game is played.

3. Toy Fair attendees buy games for different reasons than gamers do. I buy a game because I care about the game play, about the unique gaming experience that I expect it to provide. Retailers purchase games to fulfill a market request, to have a game in stock to sell to the parents of girls ages 6-10 or some other identifiable market.

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W. Eric Martin: Short Stories

Thought I’d clear my bookmark file with a number of short items that probably merited a “Media Watch” item but were buried by the passing of time. First, though, a couple of thoughts on new games:

• Antoine Bauza’s Hurry’Cup is the first racing game that I know of which has a real-time racing element to the game play. Each round, colored dice are shaken in a cup, then revealed, at which time players must grab the matching colored gear shift from the center of the table to determine part of their speed for the round. I’m undecided on the game as a whole, but this aspect of the game made me smile.

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W. Eric Martin: Top Ten Games

Editor’s note: Shannon Appelcline is taking the day off – apparently today’s a holiday of some kind – so I’m filling in for him.

The end of the year often brings about reflection and reminiscing on the promises we made, kept and broke, on the changes we’ve experienced, and on our accomplishments, both good and bad. In that spirit, Chris Kovac, in his self-designated role of firestarter on the Spielfrieks mailing list, asked gamers to summarize their gaming in 2008. Many people ran down the titles they viewed as winners, losers, and yet-to-be-determineds, while some singled out 2008 as the worst year for new games in their memory.

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