W. Eric Martin: Project 30 Results, and a Weekend Game Blitz

At the start of August 2008, I posted a column on Project 30, an attempt to teach thirty games to thirty people in thirty days. The 30 days have come and gone, as days are wont to do, but did I make the other numbers?

Not quite. Over that timespan, I taught 24 games to 32 people. For accounting purposes, once I taught one person a game, that game wouldn’t count if I taught it to someone else (although that person would count if I hadn’t taught him or her anything previously). Instead of listing the names of everyone I taught, I’ll summarize them as gamers, friends, in-laws, and friends of friends and in-laws.

While I had only three regular game days during that time, a friend visited from out-of-state, my wife and I invited people over for dinner, and we traveled to North Carolina (State motto: “First in flight, 43rd in moving over to the right so others can pass") for a huge family gathering. I brought a box of games to that last outing and made an effort to find games that would be easy to teach to others. The complete game list for Project 30 includes:

• Pulling Strings – now reviewed on BGN
• Sixis
• TZAAR
• Advance copy of a 2009 publication to be named later
• Oregon
• Octego – now reviewed on BGN
• Carpe Astra
  
• World of Warcraft: The Adventure Game
• Rythme & Boulet
• Say Anything
• 10 Days in Asia
• Robot Master – now reviewed on BGN
• Yahtzee Free for All
• Familienbande
• Bohnanza
• Escalation!
• Geschenkt
• Ticket to Ride
• Werewolf
• Agricola
• Tiki Topple
• Poison
• La Soupe a Gertrude
• Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries

• Ticket to Ride is the same fantastic, introductory Eurogame it was when it debuted in 2004; players got it immediately, asked to play again, and were clearly enmeshed in thinking about strategy during play.

• Werewolf and Rythme & Boulet can be played with kids as young as six, but be prepared for rules skirting and outright cheating by those who love to peek or say they did something that they didn’t. I plan to post a review of Rythme & Boulet after another game or two.

• Say Anything gets the nomination for “Best Game to Teach Drunk People Who Asked for a Game that Requires No Thinking.” I taught the game to a small group that became a larger group that then carried on without me while I did something else; the only drawback is that after a 12-15 games, many of the pens are running out of erasable ink.

• Playing Agricola in the new English edition is even better than before since it’s easier to teach people the rules, that is, I don’t have to repeat things three or four times before people remember; they can read the gameboards themselves.

• Sixis is a fun dice game from Asmadi Games that I will review soon. It’s a touch more involved than Knizia’s Easy Come Easy Go with increased competition for goal cards and multi-turn planning.

Despite what I noted in the last paragraph, if I had started Project 30 one week later, I would have smashed the games played total. My wife and I are hosting a South Korean student for six weeks, the eighth such student we’ve hosted over the past decade. Fifteen-year-old Seung-Chan mentioned in his profile that he liked to play baduk and chess, so naturally I hoped to press lots of other games on him as well.

Mission accomplished – in the two days since he’s arrived from New York, a stopover on his journey, we’ve played (big breath) Qwirkle, Easy Come Easy Go, Take it Easy!, Diamant, Chess, TZAAR, YINSH, Ticket to Ride, Circus Flohcati, Dominion, PÜNCT, and Metro. What’s more, we’ve played most of those games two or more times as he’s eager to test out new strategies again and again to see what will work. Seung-Chan starts school this coming Tuesday, so the games played total should drop off then, but for the next couple of days I’ll be laboring to play from morning to midnight.

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