W. Eric Martin: Has This Bean Done Before?

Alas, the column will be a short one this week. I’ve spent most of my game-writing time for the past week contacting companies for Essen information and preparing more game previews along the lines of the Key Harvest, Amyitis and If Wishes Were Fishes previews that have run over the past couple of weeks.

As for my game playing, it has consisted largely of daily games of Qwirkle, although I did give Hammer of the Scots a try this past week. I have no background in war games, and despite reading the rules at least four times, I had a hard time keeping all of the details in mind prior to playing: these two nobles have multiple homes, this one noble doesn’t exist for the English, Edward can winter one year in Scotland but not consecutive years, and so on. If I knew the history of the English-Scottish conflict—or had at least seen Braveheart—perhaps all these exceptions would seem normal and easy to absorb. As it was, I referred to the rulebook again and again throughout the game.

I also had my head handed to me as I left Wallace in a poor position and didn’t make him retreat when he had the chance, allowing my opponent to kill him and kickstart a flood of noble conversions to the English side of the battle. In retrospect, I should have fought harder for the middle of Scotland rather than sticking to the northern region and allowing my opponent to build his forces in the south of Scotland. Ah, well, perhaps I’ll turn into a wargame player yet.

Instead of game night this past week, we held a bean-making party. As I’ve posted a couple of times in the news section, Lookout Games is publishing a special edition of Bohnanza in honor of the game’s 10th anniversary that will include artwork from fans. Lookout will publish approximately 3,000 copies, and the game will include 104 pieces of original art: 6 Garden Beans, 8 Red Beans, and so on up to 20 Blue Beans. In each bean category, one winner will be chosen, and that person will receive €`100. Small monetary prizes will be awarded for others in each category, and everyone who has artwork chosen will receive a copy of the expansion.

My wife Linda is a huge Bonanza fan, and she had her artwork completed and submitted in early March. Since these submissions should probably be kept on the down-low until the final decisions have been made, I’ll just say she drew on her college background of Slavic studies to create an awesome Red Bean.

When Hanno Girke at Lookout extended the submission deadline to June 15—you have a few more days!—we decided to organize a bean-making party and make sure that New Hampshire would be well represented in the final set. Six of us created one or two images each, using watercolors, pastels, collage, colored pencils, and Photoshop to cover seven of the eight types of beans in the base set. My Fire Bean came out mostly as I had envisioned it, although it’s not quite as spectacular as I had hoped. Once Lookout Games announces the winners, I’ll run our various entries on BGN, whether to celebrate our glory or complain that we wuz robbed.

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