Scott Tepper

This section contains the columns of Scott Tepper. Scott will be posting his column on Mondays.

About Scott Tepper:

Scott grew up in a game-centric family who regularly played Hearts, Bridge, Backgammon and most of the games you could find at a Toys R Us. He developed the collector bug early and collected comic books through his teens and into his twenties. Several years ago, Scott discovered and started collecting Eurogames. When the first CHITAG came to Chicago, he volunteered to help and ended up working at the Rio Grande Games booth. He has been happily demoing games for Rio Grande Games at conventions ever since.

Scott lives in Chicago where he oversees the operations of a manufacturing/importing company. He recently moved into a new condo that was chosen because it had enough room to display all of his games.

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Headlines May 12, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Market Research May 5, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Sportswomanship April 28, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Gathering of Friends 2008 Part III / Kit-Con April 21, 2008 - Scott Tepper: The Gathering of Friends 2008 Part II April 14, 2008 - Scott Tepper: The Gathering of Friends 2008 March 31, 2008 - Scott Tepper: If It Angst Provokes, Don’t Fix It March 24, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Close To You March 17, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Utopia Review March 10, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Randycon 2008 and Illicit Gaming Accessories March 3, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Nothing Much To Add February 25, 2008 - Scott Tepper: Great Expectations February 18, 2008 - Scott Tepper: How Long Has This Been Going On?

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Articles

Scott Tepper: Market Research

Regular readers of my column will recall my lamenting the absence of a good game store in my hometown, Chicago.  Sure, we have a Go The Game Store(if you want to pay $23 for parking at Navy Pier), and Gamer’s Paradise(where you’re more likely to find Zobmondo than Agricola), but if you want to find a recent release, you’re out of luck.  Now before you heatedly point out that Games Plus is just the sort of game store gamers love, let me remind you that Mount Prospect, the home of Games Plus, isn’t Chicago.  A 40 minute drive, there and back, isn’t too bad if you have nothing planned for a Saturday and feel like a roadtrip, but it’s not very convenient if you want to pick up a last minute birthday gift for your niece or nephew. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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Scott Tepper: If It Angst Provokes, Don’t Fix It

Color me a convert.  Now that I’ve played it repeatedly, I’m loving Agricola.  Yes, yes, everyone and their sister-in-law has already played it to death, but I’ve always been something of a non-conformist.  Although, I suppose admitting that Agricola has cast its spell on me now makes me a conformist, doesn’t it?  It’s not the pound-and-a-half of wooden pieces, nor the 344 cards which will make the game different every time you play Agricola, that has ensnared me.  No, it’s that glorious, amorphous ingredient not seen in most boardgames: turn angst.

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Scott Tepper: Close To You

On his whirlwind bookwriting tour, Rick Thornquist (remember him?) was passing through Chicago last week and ended up staying with me for a few days.  It was rather brave of him, knowing in advance, as he did, that my abilities as a host are severly limited; my culinary repoitoire consists of boiling water for pasta, putting a pizza in the oven, making French toast, ordering take-out Chinese food, and microwaving a frozen dinner.  Rick stayed long (or short) enough to experience all but the latter.  In exchange, Rick taught me how to play In the Year of the Dragon and Agricola. 

I know.  It wasn’t really fair…………for Rick. 

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Scott Tepper: Utopia Review

It’s amazing how easy it is to distract grown men (and occasionally a woman or two, although they tend to be more level-headed in this respect) with a little sparkle.  One can find examples of this sort of misdirected focus anywhere.  When I was in New York City, a woman wearing a tiny sequined dress got out of a cab in Times Square.  As she walked by, I noticed that the gazes of the men with whom she crossed paths were focused not on her eyes, but rather certain parts of her outfit.  Apparently the cosmetics industry similarly believes in this type of allure, as they seem to add glitter or sparkle or shine to just about every product that a woman can put on her body.  The intent, I surmise, is to direct men’s attention to a particular location.

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Scott Tepper: Randycon 2008 and Illicit Gaming Accessories

So this past weekend was Randycon.  I know.  You’ve never heard of it.  To call it an actual convention is a little bit of a stretch.  It’s named for our friend, Randy Chertkow, who started our weekly gamenight.  Years ago he decided that for his birthday, all he wanted to do was get together with friends and play games for the entire weekend.  So he contacted a hotel, booked their meeting rooms for the weekend, and arranged a special rate so that it would be more convenient and inexpensive for his friends to stay at the hotel.

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Scott Tepper: Nothing Much To Add

Well, if Valerie can take the day off, I don’t see why I....

Actually, I had two sets of rules to edit this week, so I didn’t get to finish my column about Utopia.  But I should have it finished for you by next week.

In the meantime, just in case you don’t watch American Idol (which I don’t)… My friend, Mike, told us at Gamenight about an Idol contestant in this season that was amazingly talented.  So I went on Youtube.com and searched for “Imagine” and found David Archuleta’s performance, and it was indeed amazing.  It gave me goosebumps.  I would happily spend money to buy a full recording of him singing that song.  Now I might have to watch the show...Ack!

Happy Gaming!

Scott

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Scott Tepper: Great Expectations

Played Betrayal at House on the Hill twice this past week.  It was probably the 20th time or so that it’s hit the table in our gamegroup.  So there’s no question that I’ve gotten my money’s worth.  Everyone has their own idea of what makes a successful game acquisition.  I tend to feel that if a game gets pulled off the shelf repeatedly by anyone in my group, the game was a worthwhile purchase.  I hesitate, though, to label a game, even though it gets many plays, as “great”.  Once you start slapping superlatives on a game, people who haven’t played it start raising their expectations.  Not so bad if you’re trying to market a game, but not so good if you’re a reviewer and the crowd is brandishing pitchforks. 

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Scott Tepper: How Long Has This Been Going On?

If you don’t live in Chicago, you may be unaware that the Chicago Transit Authority is renovating the tracks and train stations around the city.  The project, which will last years and cost millions of dollars, involved shutting down a set of tracks at the one of the busiest stations, and reducing the number of trains by 35% at rush hour.  The result of this madness is a 40+% increase in travel times, and train cars at rush hour that are packed more tightly than the components in a closed box of Colosseum.

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Scott Tepper: Getting To Know You, Gamer Style…

Due to several factors, the regular host of our weekly gamenight had to relinquish hosting last year.  As several of us juggled the responsibilities for a while, I was recently able to offer up my place as a stable gaming venue.  Unfortunately, over the last year, we lost a good percentage of our regulars.  This wasn’t entirely due to our lack of a reliable location.  Other factors, such as new babies, extra-curricular activities, the possible sale of our main host’s condo, and a book deal, all conspired to destabilize our consistent gaming. 

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Scott Tepper: Robotics Review

Have you ever played a game where you thought, “Hmmmm, this game seems almooooooost like it’s a great game.  It just needs a little tweaking.” Well, unfortunately, that’s not quite what I was thinking after playing Robotics, the new game by Mario Coopmann, published by Pegasus Spiele, that I picked up in Essen solely because the artwork on the box was fantastic.  Shame on me!

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Scott Tepper: That’s No Lady, That’s My Strife!

A friend of one of my friends has been to my house once or twice to attend my game days.  He’s seen my game collection and knows how much I enjoy playing games, so I wasn’t surprised to receive the following email the other day.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent:

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Scott Tepper: For Hype’s Sake!

I have a confession.  Maybe you should sit down, first.  Now, brace yourself………I haven’t played Agricola yet.  I know, I know.  Heaven forbid I should make it to January without playing THE new game that I brought back with me from Essen last October.  But worse, I’m admitting it out loud. 

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Scott Tepper: Review of Down Under

Some people can resist the wily charms that tile games exude.  I am not one of them.  Maybe it’s because this genre of game generates a different board each time you play it, or maybe it’s because at the end of playing you are left with a mini work of art, or maybe it’s the experience of seeing the gameboard develop and evolve during a playing.  Whatever the reason, I am eternally enamored with games that allow the non-artist in me to feel like I’ve contributed to the final resultant tableau.

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Scott Tepper: Auld Game Syne

So last week was New Year’s, and with that came my annual New Year’s Eve game party.  I think this was my 7th year hosting it, which, now that I think about it, is pretty wild.  My parents didn’t entertain much when I was growing up, so throwing a party for 40 people is an art that I’ve had to learn by doing.  My hosting this annual party really came out of a desire to not be in a bar on NYE.  My friends and I celebrated New Year’s a few times at a country/western bar that we frequented regularly but it wasn’t a very enjoyable experience since the event would attract people who went not because of the atmosphere or the people, but rather as a way to get their money’s worth of alcohol at an open bar.  Spending New Year’s eve in a haze of cigarette smoke surrounded by sloppy drunks…Whoo-Hoo!

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Scott Tepper: The 2007 Scotties

I know it’s the “thing” to do at the end of the year to say what your favorite game of the year is, but I have a hard time doing that.  It’s like Sophie’s Choice for me when someone asks me what my favorite game is.  How can you choose between all your children?  While it’s difficult for me to make a general statement about which game of 2007 is the best, I don’t have a problem when the field of comparison is narrowed down.  So here is my list of best games of 2007in very specific categories, or as I am choosing to call it, “The Scotties”.  Do you have any to add?  Maybe I’ll include yours in next years’s list.

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Scott Tepper: The Gaming Song

(Sung to the tune of The Christmas Song)
(and dedicated to my BGG Secret Santa who was very generous)

Boxes that open with a tooting tone
Plastic money that glints of gold
Multi-colored bits of glass, wood and stone
and boards that bend with linen folds

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Scott Tepper: The Circle

Being a game demoer at Essen can be a double-edged sword.  You do have behind-the-scenes access to the convention, but if you’re working at a booth, your access to other booths during the show is limited.  So if you want to do any shopping for games, it must be done either before the start of the show, when most of the game publishers haven’t finished their booths, or in the one hour before the halls open each day once the show has started.  Then you have to worry about the people who run the booths actually being at their booths early so that you can buy their games.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to return to some booths two or three times because their workers don’t arrive until about five minutes before the show starts.

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Scott Tepper: Games Magazine’s Top 100 Traditional Games

There was a time when I looked forward to…no, scratch that…coveted the Games 100, the annual list of the 100 best board games of the year according to GAMES Magazine.  When my obsession with games really started taking off, the Games 100 was like a beacon illuminating my way to a plethora of good games that I’d never heard of.  I would take a pen and marker, then circle and highlight the games and dog-ear the pages in a cryptic code to signify a kind of order of acquisition.

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Scott Tepper: Laugh, Clown, Laugh

I have a broken sense of humor.  Well, that’s not exactly right.  What’s broken in me is my ability to tell a joke.  I cannot tell a joke to save my life.

A guy walks into a bar with a dog.  No, wait, it’s a restaurant.  And it was a cat, not a dog.  Damn.  Let me start again…

You get the picture. 

Quizzically, though, I love to laugh.  I’ll laugh at pretty much anything (puns usually only cause me to groan, however).  My siblings and I all learned to laugh in the face of adversity.  To the amazement of outsiders, this ability has served us incredibly well over the years.  So imagine my delight, as I start to play and acquire more and more games, that a lot of people in this industry have senses of humor.  No, strike that, good senses of humor.

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Scott Tepper: ChiTAG 2007

All right, so a lot of you were at BGG.con last week.  Some of us unfortunates weren’t able to make it to Dallas, TX for the weekend, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any gaming goodness to be had elsewhere. I spent last weekend demoing for Rio Grande Games at ChiTAG, the Chicago Toy and Game Fair.  Although this show no longer technically takes place in Chicago but rather in Schaumburg, IL, the attendees were so happy not to be paying the $20+ dollars charged by the previous venue, The Navy Pier, just for parking, that no one seemed to care where in the Chicagoland area the show was taking place.

From my totally unscientific vantage point, it appeared that there were more attendees this year as compared to last year.  The crowds on Saturday were certainly larger.  As in previous years, the families that I encountered not only seemed to be having a good time, but were genuinely surprised that so many games could be found that they didn’t know existed.  And that’s the whole point of ChiTAG: to bring games to people who don’t know anything about them.  Unlike at Essen, where the attendees tend to be looking to augment their collections or are hunting for the next Puerto Rico, at ChiTAG a good percentage of the people attending have never even heard of Carcassonne.

It’s like the show, What Not To Wear on TLC.  Have you seen it?  The co-hosts take a woman who has—let’s just say it—no taste, and they educate her about clothing and styles that look better than what she has grown accustomed to wearing.  Often the inappropriate dressers put up a fight at the beginning and resist the lessons of taste that the co-hosts attempt to teach.  By the end of the episode, though, the fashion victims learn something about fashion and admit that they feel much better about themselves now that they are dressing in clothing that suits them better.

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Scott Tepper: Gipsy King Review

Corné Van Moorsel, the designer behind the Cwali label, has produced a mixed bag of games.  Most of his games seem to fly under the radar, although a few have garnered maybe a moderate amount of attention.  O Zoo le Mio, Streetsoccer, and Isi all seemed to be generally well received, but didn’t create huge buzz.  Factory Fun, which was released at Essen last year, was one of the show’s hits.  Here was a game that was different from everything else, and it worked.  True, it didn’t appeal to everyone because of its brain-burning puzzle feel, but no game pleases everyone.  So when I was running through the halls at Essen and saw Gipsy King, which I had heard very little about, I thought that the risk/reward ratio was pretty low given Cwali’s track record.  I’m pleased to report that after playing Gipsy King I don’t feel like my money was wasted.

Like many Cwali titles, Gipsy King is pretty abstract with only a thin veneer of theme.  In fact, where most games have a paragraph introducing an overview of the gameplay, Gipsy King only has three-and-a-half cryptic sentences that don’t quite explain what the game is about.  Had there been possibly more space in the two pages of rules, perhaps Corné would have explained that the players will be adding gypsy wagons belonging to their families to the modular gameboard.  The larger groups you can form, as well as your groups’ dominance around lakes stocked with fish, will earn you points.  At the end of two rounds, whoever has the most points wins.

The components are simple, but appropriate.  A set of 15 numbered tiles comprised of three or four hex-shaped spaces depict land and lakes.  The lakes contain between 0-5 fish.  At the beginning of the game the tiles are arranged randomly into any sort of circle-ish shape.  The players each take a set of 18 like-colored wooden trailers and set one aside to be used to display turn order.  I need to make the point here that the colors used for the trailers are NOT conducive for color-blind players.  The brown, orange and red used may be a little difficult to discern.  I imagine that with a permanent marker you could draw a symbol on some of the trailers to differentiate them.

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Scott Tepper: Essen 2007…the Remains

An oversight made in my Essen column two weeks ago needs to be corrected.  I inadvertently left out one of the games we were demoing at the Rio Grande Games booth—and quite the omission it was.  It could only be a result of being sleep deprived that I did not include Darjeeling in the list of games we were showing.

In Darjeeling, you are a shipper of tea.  In contrast to most games, the first thing you do on your turn is collect victory points, if you have any to collect, from the display of wooden boats.  The number of points you take is equal to the number of your colored cubes times a multiplier which reflects how long your boat(s) have been at sea.  Then you move your worker around a variable “board” made up of tiles that contain one, two or three halves of differently colored cartons.  If you can, (and more importantly, choose to) make complete cartons from the tiles you have collected, you can discard them to place cubes on the highest scoring multiplier on the “sea”, simultaneously reducing the values of all the other boats.  Finally, you can score a bonus depending on the type (color) of tea you ship according to a clever little device with barrels rolling down an inclined plane.  The longer it has been since a kind of tea has been shipped, the greater your bonus will be.  The game moves along briskly, and you have some nice choices of whether to try for shipping small quantities of tea more often, scoring only small amounts of points more frequently, or aiming for larger quantities of one kind of tea, which will be a greater target for your opponents to try to reduce on the sea multiplier. 

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Darjeeling is going to be a strong contender for the 2008 Spiel des Jahres nomination.  It has everything the SDJ judges seem to be looking for: the rules can be taught quickly (in about 5-6 minutes), it plays in an hour or less, the game can be grasped by children but it is engaging enough for adults to play without the kids, the theme and mechanisms do not duplicate previous SDJ winners, and the production value is nice.

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Scott Tepper: The Price Is…Wrong?

Today I was going to finish up with some of the Essen tidbits I had left out of my previous report, but that’s just going to have to wait.  An interesting little development has cropped up in the US boardgame world, and I thought you should know about it.  Early Friday, Tom Powers, one of the nicest men in this industry and also the man behind Boardsandbits.com, posted a forum thread on Boardgamegeek informing the general public about a recent change in Mayfair’s pricing policy.  Apparently, Mayfair is now limiting the amount of discount its distributors and retailers can give their customers.  Retailers can no longer offer their customers a greater discount than 20% off of list price on Mayfair products.

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Scott Tepper: My 2007 Essen

Well, I’m back.  I apologize that this column is submitted a little late, but I just got back into town after traveling….um…I’m too tired to figure out how long I’ve been up because it’s been quite a while since my flight from Frankfurt left at 8:00a, and I had to leave Essen on the 2:00a train to make it into Frankfurt early enough.  So if you find any typos in the review of the past 9 days below, you can attribute it to the sleep deprivation.

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Scott Tepper: Making the World a Smaller Place (aka. Snapshot of Köln)

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so today’s column is going to read like adulation of Jeff Allers work.  Since I was busy getting ready for my impending trip to Essen, Germany this past week, there wasn’t time to get any gaming in, but that’s not to say I don’t have anything interesting to recount on my Journey to Essen this year.

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Scott Tepper: On Building Triangles, Cubes, and Spaceships.

As Val pointed out yesterday, Rick Thornquist is traveling cross-country on his national Galaxy Trucker tour.  He made a short stop in Chicago and was able to teach me (amongst other things) how to play this new game by Vladimir Chvatil.  Since it seems everyone else has played and given overviews about this new game I don’t need to go into detail about its mechanisms and can start right in on my impressions.

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