Gone Gaming

Shannon Appelcline: The Good & The Bad of Tobago

My articles often arise from my gaming experience. Usually, ideas arise from individual games, but once I’ve got a topic I then try and generalize it, so I can talk about a commonality among many games. But every once in a while, some thing stands out originally enough that I really only have one game to talk about, and that’s the case this week.

So, though it may look like I’m picking on Tobago this week, that’s in part because it’s doing some neat and new stuff--even if I don’t like the final form that it took.

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Fraser McHarg: Was a trip to Essen enough to stop the purchasing?

So after spending months in Germany, attending Essen and various stores across Europe last year you would think that we would have finished buying games for now wouldn’t you?

Not quite.  At the end of January we went to CanCon/Australian Games Expo.  There were quite a few retailers there and MilSims have their big sale.

The temptation was too much.  Here’s what we got.

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Shannon Appelcline: Small Press Interviews: Tasty Minstrel Games

Tasty Minstrel Games made its big premiere this month with the release of Homesteaders and Terra Prime. This article continues my Small Press Interviews series by talking with Tasty Minstrel Games’ founder, Michael Mindes.

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Matt Carlson: Thundersolo

Just as I was about to leave for a very long stay in Paris, a box containing Thunderstone arrived at my door.  AEG’s game has many mechanical similarities to Dominion, my favorite game of the past several years, so I was anxious to try it out.  Alas, in the hustle of packing and preparing I wasn’t able (or allowed anyway) to arrange to play even a single game, but I WAS granted a concession to be allowed to bring the game along.  While I haven’t yet been able to round up an opponent (or convince my wife to play), Thunderstone does have one advantage over Dominion.  It has a fairly passable solo game.

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Shannon Appelcline: Turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into an iPhone Game

I spent the last several months of 2009 working on turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into a fully functional iPhone game. Some 8,000 lines of code later, Money is now available from Apple’s iPhone store. If you’d like to support the continued development of good Eurogames for the iPhone platform, please consider picking up a copy; we’re offering it for a sale price of $1.99 through Sunday (that’s January 24, 2010, if you’re viewing this article from the future), at which time it’ll pick up to our normal price of $2.99.

With that crass commercialism out of the way, I’m going to spend the rest of this article talking about three of the particular problems that I faced adapting a Eurogame for the iPhone environment, focusing on depicting and playing the game. If you’d like an inside look at this sort of thing, read on.

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Fraser McHarg: Different types of boardgame convention

In a couple of weeks we are heading off to Canberra (about a seven or eight hour drive) for CanCon/Australian Games Expo.  This will be my fourth convention since September, starting with Monde de Jue followed by Essen and BGG.CON.  Yes it was a big travelling year, the biggest ever in fact.

They are all quite different types of convention.

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Matt Carlson: Infinite City

As noted in Eric’s Twitter feed, Alderac Entertainment’s tile-laying game - Infinite City - should be in U.S. stores next week after making its way through several customs and shipping snafus.  I was lucky enough to be given a preview copy and have been able to check it out before its general release here.  Players lay tiles from their hand to form a grid, placing their markers on each tile they put down.  The basic goal is to cluster your markers together on adjacent tiles for points in the endgame scoring, but placed tiles often have special abilities to keep things interesting.  While the game advertises a 45 minute game for 2-6 players, I don’t really recommend it for more than 2 or 3 players.  It seems to be a decent game for two or three players, but with more players the game becomes far too chaotic for a game that lasts nearly an hour.

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Shannon Appelcline: 2009 in Review: The Board Games

As 2010 dawns upon us, the time has come to look back upon 2009 and see what trends and major events affected our world. In recent years, I’ve turned this question toward the gaming world, in articles such as 2008 in Review: The Board Games, The Year in Review: 2006, and The Year in Review: 2005.

Today, I’m going to continue that with a look at 2009. In short, it’s a story of domination, repetition, cooperation, bifurcation, and maturation.

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Fraser McHarg: Breaking the Power Grid drought

As a self confessed Power Grid completist I don’t play the game anywhere near enough.  Not a single game the whole time we were overseas.  Daughter the Elder had expressed interest, but unfortunately Melissa will very rarely play.

Finally, a few weeks after returning home I managed to break the Power Grid drought.

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Matt Carlson:  A Heroscape Christmas

As you read this, I’m well on my way up north to spend time with my extended family.  For the past few years, that also includes a Heroscape setup on the downstairs pool table.  I had a spare master set I left with my mother for the nephews to play with, and it has become an integral part of the grandparent experience.  In between the standard outdoor activities (skating, hockey, sledding, snowball fights, etc…), my nephews (and a couple nieces) have played an awful lot of Heroscape.  This Christmas I have an extra special surprise for them.  I was privileged to get my hands on a preview copy of the next Heroscape release, Master Set 3: Battle for the Underdark, that should be available in early January.  As it’s so new, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the new set.

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Fraser McHarg: My BGG.CON

Mary Prasad has given an extensive coverage of what goes on a BGG.CON, so extensive in fact that if I had a TARDIS I would jump in and go back and do some of those things I missed.

This was my second BGG.CON and from the outset I was intending to play some longer games.

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Matt Carlson: Me vs the Big Picture

This past Wednesday afternoon I got a chance to play one of my favorite boardgames, Through the Ages.  For those that haven’t tried it, it is a great civilization building game where players must balance limited actions to manage food and ore production in order to produce workers, technology, buildings, and military might with the end result of producing culture (points).  I love the pressure to keep everything in balance while striving to climb the ladder of improvement in multiple areas at once.  It does a great job of simulating a great span of civilization and can play in just a few hours (although with four players it can get a little long).  The card-drafting mechanism helps prevent players from setting into any one optimal strategy every game.  I love building up my civilization over time, slowly becoming the powerhouse I know my country should be.  Unfortunately, every time I play the game I discover I’m not very good at it.

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Shannon Appelcline: Intrigue by the Seaside

There’s no doubt that Dominion is one of the great success stories of 2008-2009 in the boardgaming world. I’ve played it more than anything since my gateway games of Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Memoir ‘44. Though I adore the ability to just pull out any 10 decks of cards and have it work, I’ve also enjoyed the sets of carefully constructed cards found in each Dominion rulebook. Thus, I was disappointed when I started playing Seaside and learned that there were no preconstructed decks that combined Seaside with previous expansion Intrigue.

What follows are three preconstructed decks with do use cards from both sets--the last of which also throws in a few cards from the base set. Each of these sets has been playtested to make sure that they were fun (though I only modified the third set, which took three tries to get right). I’ve included some strategy notes which you may or may not want to read before you try out each deck.

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Aaron Lawn: BGG.con Musings

Another BGG.con has come and gone, marking the fourth year that I’ve traveled to Texas.  This year marked the first year that I actually felt like the con has passed a milestone, transitioning from a small to a mid-sized event.  I felt the first hints of it last year, but this year it was definitely too much to expect to recognize most faces.  With over 900 attendees, there are many more people bustling about than I could track and remember.

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Matt Carlson: Holiday Guides and iPhone apps

I’ve been off visiting family on an extended holiday break, so haven’t had much time to play more meaty boardgames.  Most of my spare writing moments have been spent working for the site Gaming With Children.  Feel free to drop by there to check out my Holiday Shopping Guide for 2009.  I’ve been writing them since 2003, which I think is one of the oldest ongoing holiday boardgame guides (Okay, let’s just ignore the decades-old Games 100.) In an effort to promote boardgames to a wider audience I also put together a guide of boardgames to tempt the average video gamer. With all this traveling, the only new stuff I have to offer is a rundown of a few of the newer puzzle/boardgame type iPhone applications.

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Shannon Appelcline: Some Thanks for Alea Games

At the start of 2009, I decided to play through the entire corpus of Alea Games. Too many of them sit forlornly on the shelves nowadays, not as cool as the new kids like Agricola (aka Puerto Rico Killer), Dominion (aka San Juan Killer), and Twilight Struggle (aka Mammoth Hunters Killer). So I opted to spend some times with old friends and remember why they too were hoopy froods in their time.

Last Thursday I finished the play of my 22nd and final Alea game for the year, In the Year of the Dragon, and this Tuesday I finished my write-ups of the first twenty-one Alea games on my personal blog (with Alea Iacta Est still waiting for a few more plays after an American release ... someday ... before I discuss it). Today I’d like to share with you some lessons learned, some high points, and some low points.

And I also want to say thanks to Alea developer Stefan Brück, who’s added some really fine games to our joint collections.

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Matt Carlson: Is it a game for kids, or just a toy?

As a quick check of my last few posts demonstrates, I’ve been on a quest to find some games to play with my up and coming three year old son.  In an interest to find games that I would also enjoy, I have tended to err on the older side of the age bracket.  Unfortunately, that has usually resulted in games that were fun to fiddle around with, but weren’t quite played “as written”.  After my last few posting on kids games, I was given the opportunity to check out a few more titles that were on the younger side of things.  While they were all quite a hit with my son, and we continue to play with them on a regular basis, I find that they tend to lack enough “game” qualities to escape the moniker of “toy”.

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Sunday Pt 2 of 2 with some bonus Monday

Time for my final Essen post, we are now back from our criss crossing of Germany.  Get a map of Germany and draw lines Essen - Berlin, Berlin - Munich, Munich - Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe - Leipzig and Leiipzig - Wuppertal and it covers a fair percentage and also explains how we have chalked up over 8000km since mid August.

Anyway, since we are back in Wuppertal I have access to my Essen notes…

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Sunday Pt 1 of 2

Why part 1 of 2 you ask?  Because we are currently in Munich (just back from the games night at Hans im Gluck’s offices) and my notes are probably back in Wuppertal so I cannot provide the normal details.  Also because the full story of Sunday does actually continue on to Monday.

However back to Sunday.

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Shannon Appelcline: With Strange Aeons Even Dice May Die

Once more Halloween is upon us. It’s a time of year that always gets me thinking about ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night. However, as I wrote last year in The Problem with Horror Games, the horror genre hasn’t transferred very well to board games.

Despite that, there’s one horror subgenre where publishers--mostly American publishers--have been very active in for many years. That’s the subgenre of Cthulhu games (or Lovecraft Games or Mythos Games, as you prefer). This Halloween I’m going to spotlight them by taking a creepy tour through about twenty-five years’ worth of Cthulhoid ludographics.

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Saturday

That must be a good dinner that I am missing out on!

Melissa had told me two things about Saturday.  One it was busy compared to other days and two it was costume day.

Both these things are very true!

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Friday (slightly delayed)

I’m on a roll here computer wise, so here comes another day’s report.

Melissa had many appointments booked, so I spent a lot of time with Daughter the Younger and some time with Daughter the Elder when she could drag herself away from the Lookout booth.

Thus I spent quite a bit of time with Daughter the Younger at Galleria where they have various different jumping castle type things and cruised some of the other halls.

I did get to play some slightly longer games though.

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Thursday (slightly delayed)

Remember how I said the Spiel was really big.  Thursday is not really a busy day, but a closing time there were queues to get out!!

I have finally managed to grab more than a few minutes computer time by sending Melissa out to dinner and staying back at the hotel, so we will see how far I can catch up.

Thursday was the day I started to play some games.

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - Press Day

Press Day, aka Setup Day Two.

Another brief report snatching computer time before breakfast.

I skipped the official press conference as it was in German and my official translator was in attendance.

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Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - A bit of Setup Day

Welcome to number one in a series of what will probably be brief reports.  Brief due to having to actually do stuff at Essen, wrangle children and computer time :-)

We got back from Rome on Monday afternoon, did lots of washing and repacked and then at Tuesday lunchtime drove down to Essen and checked into our hotel.  We then headed off to the Spiel.

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