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.

• Those on BoardGameGeek who want separate listings for Reiner Knizia’s Spiel des Jahres-winning Keltis and the non-SdJ-winning Lost Cities: The Board Game should note that the two games have separate rankings on the weighted game list – downloadable from this page – that Knizia provides for Kniziathon game tournaments. When the designer himself considers the games to have differing difficulty levels, well, that’s as good an argument as any other I’ve seen.

I’ve played a handful of games the LC:TBG way and only a couple Keltis-style. The two are obviously similar – almost identical twins even – yet they’re not the same; Keltis lets a player escape from a hand weighted with high numbers, thereby letting him avoid making tough decisions over what to play when and which cards to discard to hold off on committing to a color. I’ll post a review once I’ve played a few more times.

• In October 2008, Philly.com reported that Wei-Hwa Huang, who did development and graphic design work on Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy, won the second annual (Philadelphia) Inquirer Sudoku National Championship, completing an advanced puzzle in a duel with defending national champion Thomas Snyder in less than eight minutes to win $10,000. Both Huang and Snyder will compete in the Third World Sudoku Championship in Slovakia in April 2009.

• Sample paragraphs from an article in the (UK) Belfast Telegraph:

Monopoly has topped a poll as the greatest board game of all time....

The poll of 3,000 board game enthusiasts was conducted by global research company www.onepoll.com.

Nine out of the top 10 board games are more than 20 years old, with Articulate being the only one invented this side of the millennium....

A spokesman for www.onepoll.com said: “It is astonishing to think that with the thousands of board games now available on the market, adults still prefer to sit down with a more traditional game such as Monopoly, Scrabble or Chess.

“It just proves that the old games are the best games.”

Is that what the poll proves? Hard to tell since the website doesn’t detail the questions asked, how the poll was conducted or who was polled.

• From an article in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant:

If you’re poor and don’t own a car, grocery shopping can be a time-consuming, crosstown journey. Or it can mean walking to a nearby convenience store with prices that quickly deplete your wallet.

Four sociology students at Manchester Community College who studied the difficulties that low-income people have obtaining food have created a board game to raise awareness of the issue....

The goal is to obtain as much food as possible, but there are no winners....

Brian Kosilla, one of the students who helped create the game, said he was most surprised by the difference in prices at supermarkets and convenience stores. The students found that a loaf of bread cost 99 cents at a supermarket and $3.19 at a convenience store.

I’m skeptical that such efforts lead to anyone learning anything about hunger and poverty – other than those doing research into such topics in preparation for designing a game, that is. Maybe it’s my cynical nature talking, but a more valuable lesson would seem to come about by taking away all of someone’s monetary resources and forcing them to live for a week on a limited budget.

Better still, instead of using games like The Game of Lie and Monopoly for inspiration – despite Monopoly being the “greatest board game of all time” – design a game in which the nature of shortages and resource management is integrated into the game play. Think of Agricola, which forces you to scrounge up enough food or be seen begging. Think of In the Year of the Dragon, which forces you to pay food equal to the number of your palaces or lose people. You want a sugar-coated pill to get your message across, but educational board games tend to be more like jelly smeared on a brick.

• The above rant also applies to Credit 4 Life, an educational patented board game that is “a fun and interactive method to visually demonstrate how easy it is in today’s economy to get into debt when you leave school.” Payments taken via Visa and Mastercard on an incredibly poorly designed website.

• Here’s a headline from an article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette: Manitowoc couple creates 17th board game.

Read deeper, however, and you realize that every game “created” by this couple is a themed version of Monopoly, the latest of them being Post Office-opoly: Love Stamps Edition. Now, while Monopoly is the “greatest board game of all time,” I have a problem associating the word “created” with the replacing of names and images on one gameboard with different names and images.

• One more “ten best games for the holidays” list, this time from Canadian broadcaster CTV. Notable titles on the list include The Settlers of Catan, Blokus 3D, and oldie-but-goodie The Amazing Labyrinth Game.

• And another such article ran on BCLocalNews.com (with the “BC” standing for “British Columbia"), but this time the reporter pretty much let a game store owner go wild by listing and describing all sorts of hobby and designer games, including The Settlers of Catan, Wings of War, Monsterpocalypse (albeit spelled incorrectly), Hey! That’s My Fish!, Zooloretto, Cloud 9 and Ticket to Ride.

• An article in the (Prescott, Arizona) Daily Courier took a more general approach, as noted in the opening paragraphs:

The newest board game craze to sweep the nation - and Prescott - is Eurogames.

Haven’t heard of them? Don’t worry. Prescott residents Bob and Sara Harder are keen to introduce local residents to the new board game trends.

Which three Eurogames are mentioned in this article? The same three that turn up time and time again.

• I received a thank you card from a soldier in Camp Taji in Iraq, who had received one of the holiday game packages that I mailed in early December 2008. The card reads as follows: “Thank you so much for your kind games. We look forward to playing them. True, I’ve never heard of any of them, but I’m always up for something new and adventurous. Thanks for taking the time to consider us. I hope your holiday season is a blessed and joyful one. Please take care.”

• A big announcement is coming in a few days. Need time to prepare first…

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