Played a bunch of new games

The rate at which I play new games has been relatively steadily declining by 10-20% per year, until this year, when it looked like it might fall by by over 50%. As of last week, I had only played 29 new-to-me games this year (down from 73 in 2007, and a lot more in preceding years). But, yesterday I got to play a bunch (7) of new-to-me games, and I played two others earlier this week and that's worthy of a capsule reviews post. Because these are all based on one or two plays, they're probably, if anything, slightly over-inflated since I tend to like new things.

Tribune. [BGG] This obviously has a lot of positive buzz and it's fairly well deserved. It seems to have captured the positive qualities of a lot of role-selection/worker-placement games while playing in a reasonable time. The multiple parallel paths to victory quality is very nice. A-

Dreizehnte Holzwurm. [BGG] I got this as a "sweetener" in a trade over 5 years ago and only just got around to playing it. That's a real shame since it's a cute game of tactical cardplay and brinkmanship. The comparison to 6 nimmt! is a fair, but tenuous one. A nice filler. B

Handelsfursten. [BGG] A sort of generic Knizia filler card game. The game actually feels like it ends a little quickly for the number of potential opportunities for choices. In the end, it just didn't leave much of an impression, but makes a good filler. B

Container. [BGG] This is clearly a really neat economic game. It's also as try as the theme (container ships) would suggest. The system of A produces, B buys and resells to C who then auctions it to D, where A!=B, B!=C and C!=D is a little hard to wrap your head around, especially since the auction payouts are matched by the bank and the fact that your most common good type is thrown out. A little too much arbitrariness and dryness in an otherwise strong package. If I felt at all engaged, the rating would go up a lot. B-

Neue Heimant. [BGG] A cute little little auction game, but not one I enjoyed because the game has multiple sever "cliffs" in the final scoring. By that I mean an small change in where something gets built at the end of the game has a radical impact on scores. I like that kind of chaos/subtlety in the incremental mechanisms of games, but in the final scoring it's just sort of annoying. C

Witch's Brew. [BGG] A cute little role selection game with a nice cardplay twist. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to its potential, in that the cardplay ends up feeling a bit too uncontrolled. But, maybe that's just inexperience. I should try this one a few more times before I make a real judgement. B+

Jamaica. [BGG] Wow. The art on this (same artist as Animalia) is beautiful and remarkably functional as well. It's definitely a "family game" but it's clever and quick. The multiple resources required to run the race and the ebb and flow of the cards makes for a nice experience. This was the biggest hit out of this crop of games. A

Cannonball Colony. [BGG] Cute little tactical conflict game. I wasn't going to call it a "wargme", but I guess it simply is. For the right person, this is probably a great game. For me, not so much. Too much pure direct conflict and the geometric and tactical nature was just not sufficiently engaging. C

Shadow Hunters. [BGG] A nice fun hidden alliances game. Some players are Hunters, some are Shadows, and some are Neutral, but you don't know who, so you go around attacking each other and gathering information. I think I agree with Felix's comment that it's better than Bang!, but scratches the same itch. Plus, it plays in much less time than it claims (30 minutes, not an hour). Not a lot of depth, but it's fun and that's the point of this sort of game. B+

BaordGameGeek and AppEngine

AppEngine is fun. I've been fiddling on a number of personal projects using it lately, some involving BoardGameGeek. A month ago, I posted there, but forgot to post here: I made a fun BGG collection comparison tool. The combination of the BGG XML API and AppEngine with urlfetch (and ElementTree) makes writing BGG "add-ons" pretty easy. I'll certainly keep writing more, but other people should write some too. Don't know python? Well, it's a nice language and worth learning. :)

And, to get you started, here's the (sloppy, not cleaned up, but functional) bggcoll.py library for fetching collection info from BGG. It lets you do things like:

coll = bggcoll.GetCollection(username)

while doing all the nice things like stuffing it in memcache, the datastore, and only refetching it from BGG if the local copy is stale.

Quick iPhone app reviews

I installed the 2.0 update and downloaded and played with a bunch of the apps. Except for Enigmo, all the apps I tried were free. The high points are Cube Runner, Aurora Feint, Shazam, and Google Mobile App. Here's my quick impressions:

Games:
I tried several of the free ones, and based on experience with the Desktop game, I bought Enigmo. The iPhone definitely has potential as a gaming platform.

Cube Runner: This is a nice little game that uses the accelerometer. The control is nicely sensitive and the game is cute, but it gets sort of old quickly, but it's fun enough to do in an idle minute I'm unlikely to delete it.

Aurora Feint: This has some role-playing game back-story, which I haven't really figured out, but it's a great little Tetris like game. You've got blocks of the 4 elements and you're trying to get them in rows of 3 or more, in which case they disappear. It's got good use of the touch screen, and you can even rotate the phone to switch gravity, which is a nice (literal) twist on the game. Good graphics, good play, good sound, and who knows, the bigger game might be interesting too.

Enigmo: I enjoyed the desktop version of this and the iPhone version is a remarkble port. The controls are sometimes a little finnicky, but it works and the puzzles are great.

PhoneSaber: Makes your phone make lightsaber noises as you swing it around. Gratuitous fun demonstration of the accelerometer. Don't let go.

Blip Solitaire: A pretty basic game that uses the touch screen. Not really any fun. Haven't deleted it yet, but probably will.

Spinner: Another acelerometer based game, but just not that compelling. Not intuitive and once you figure it out, not that fun. I'll play Cube Runner instead.

Music/Audio:
Shazam & Midomi: These are two "music id" services. Both let you hold the iPhone up to playing music and it will try to identify the song. Shazam seems to work better for music over the radio and has a reasonably nice interface, including of course "Buy from iTunes" buttons, but also has "Watch on YouTube" buttons. Very nice for IDing a song on the radio in the car. Midomi is also pretty good, but it's key feature is that it lets you sing or hum a song, instead of just actual music. It does pretty well, and my kids got a kick out of singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and having it recognize it.

Remote: A very nice and remarkably responsive interface to control iTunes on your desktop. It makes me want to get an AirPort Express.

Jott: Transcribes little voice recordings. It's not as featureful as the full Jott service, which I hope they will fix. The transcription latency is also really high, and while you can get your notes emailed to you, it's on a daily basis, not ASAP. If this improves, it will be great. For now, it's more of a net (slow) trick.

VoiceNotes: A basic voice recorder. The interface is a little clunky for most of the circumstances I've used a voice recorder in the past.

Internet:
Google Mobile App: This is QuickSilver for your iPhone. If you haven't used QuickSilver, it's a cool mac app that doesn't do anything new, but does a lot of old things better. The Google Mobile App doesn't really do anything you can't do in Safari, but it's better at doing them than Safari. Basically, it saves a lot of typing by doing search term completion, web site URL completion and background searching. The web site URL completion alone is worth it to me, since the iPhone's (otherwise excellent) keyboard spelling correction doesn't do so well with URLs.

Twitteriffic: I'm not really big into Twitter, but this seems like a decent/nice interface to reading and posting. That said, I hear people raving about how great this is, and I don't quite get it. It's good, and includes nice things like easy posting of pictures, but really, I don't see the excitement.

LifeCast: I haven't really tried this one out much, but it seems like a nice interface to mobile blogging (Blogger or Tumblr). It doesn't seem to know about the fact that Blogger supports multiple blogs per user so I haven't tried it yet.

Yelp: I was hoping this would be great, since I really like the web site, but it couldn't find any restaurants near my home, which is just wrong.

Content:
WeatherBug: A decent weather app, but rather than showing cached results and indicating it somehow while it loads the updated information, it blanks out the information, which is annoying, especially when looking for forecasts which don't change that often.

eReader: A book reading application that comes with a couple of free books. A decent first pass, but it's missing a lot of features I'd want like bookmarking, line spacing adjustment and such. Plus, the page flipping UI gets the z-order wrong when going backward, which is a little bit dissonant.

NYTimes: Not bad, but nothing special as an alternative to the web site to read the news.

I play games with other people

Reading (and posting to) one of the latest "Do ratings matter?" threads on BGG it occurred to me that there's a subtext here that bugs me. The argument usually starts as a generic "why would you care what other people think?" kind of thing but the subtext is that the enjoyment of other people (eg, your opponents) doesn't matter, and therefore other people's opinions don't matter.

Other people's opinions matter, because I play games with other people. If one has a limited circle of people you game with, they may be the only ones you care about, but I, and most people I game with play with lots of different people, and are constantly introducing new people to the hobby and playing with more casual gamers. Even this year, which has been a really slow year, nearly half the people I've played with have been "new people". So, to that end what a "random gamer" thinks matters, in that I play with a "random gamer" on average more than once a week.

In detail, over the past eight and a half years, I've played with two new people a week, on average. My wife, who I've played the most games with only has played in 25% of the games I've played. The next most frequent gamer barely breaks 10%. Over 50% of the people I play with, I only have ever played a few games with, so knowing what games a "random gamer" is more likely to like is useful. Of course I use my own judgment, but I can't always predict what's going to succeed and fail with other gamers. For example, I personally never would have realized the extremely broad appeal of super-hits like Ticket To Ride or Carcassonne, or realized how universally I should be careful about inflicting something like Vabanque on other people.

Of course, to repeat a comment from the above thread ratings are meaningful but not oracular. For a shared activity like games, other people's opinions matter to me, and ratings are one way to get some insight into the opinions of all those gamers who I'm going to play with who I haven't met yet.

Almost 4, Almost a boardgame geek

(warning: This is an "Isn't my child so cute?" post)

I play a lot of games with my almost 4-year-old daughter.  Most of the time when I ask her if she wants to play a game, she declares "Yeah! Let's play a game I've never played before!"  While I have a large collection, this occasionally proves problematic, as lots of them aren't quite suitable for a 3-year-old.  But whenever she decides she is too overwhelmed by the rules, or is just sick of playing, she suggests "Ok, now let's play my version.", which are usually an extremely complex set of steps with no actual goal, but she imitates the general structure of game rules quite well.

A week or so ago, we were in a games store and she'd look around commenting which ones we had at home and asking about games she thought looked interesting.  Then, she turned to me, perplexed, and asked "Daddy, where's Race for the Galaxy?".  This is a game she's never played before, just heard me talk about.  In fact, she's asked, and I've demurred saying we'd play it when she was older.  Her response, "Ok, we'll play that when I'm 6."  Who knows, maybe she'll be ready.

A few weeks ago, after trying a game that was a bit too hard for her (Chateau Roquefort), I suggested we play something a little less complicated.  She protested, "I like complicated games.  Let's play another complicated one."

Finally, today we had some friends over and one of their kids said to her, "You have a lot of games.  How many do you have?" and she replied, "I don't know, but Daddy could check the database."

Spin and Axis reviews

I just finished reading Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson, his sequel to Spin. Spin was exceptional. Sadly, Axis doesn't quite achieve the same level. It's not bad. It's perfectly good science fiction. Heck, it's probably even above average, but it's hard to evaluate in an unbiased way, given the my expectations were unreasonably high going in.

So, what was good and not-as-good about Axis? It's going to be easier to rave about Spin and then complain where Axis falls short by comparison, while giving it credit where it's due, so that's how I'll do this. So, Spin was exceptional.

Spin has outstanding characters an engaging and deep plot and good science fiction ideas. But to me what really sets Spin apart is the way it paced it's build up, incremental delivery, and final dramatic payoff. One ubiquitous problem in fiction, especially science fiction, is the story that builds up, builds up, and builds up some more, without giving you any real narrative resolution or "payoff" until the very end. Further, that final payoff often falls short, especially since there's been such a big build up. So, you get a story that builds tension, dramatic energy, and then it turns out that the author was just good a writing tension and dramatic energy, not that the story actually had anywhere to go. Now, some novels, like Snow Crash do this, but the build up is so amazing along the way, it doesn't matter if the payoff is less than satisfying. Heck, something like Rendevous with Rama sort of set the standard in this way by not even really bothering with a payoff at all. In contrast, Spin has none of these failings.

Spin does a lot of build up, but it does a few remarkable things. First, it has that Snow Crash attribute of a compelling milieu for the build-up with great characters such that it doesn't even critically need a payoff. Second, it actually does deliver great incremental payoff. There are multiple points along the story where plot elements are actually resolved rather than just teased at. Finally, the ending payoff is more than just satisfying. It's a creative twist on top of the book, which is full of creative twists. And, as mentioned above, the characters are outstanding. Diane and Jason in particular are compellingly written and deeply familiar characters. And finally, while this is less of a problem in science fiction in general, it doesn't fall prey to the "sit-com syndrome" of having an odd compulsion to reset the state of the universe at the end of the book to match the state at the beginning. So, Spin is exceptional.

Axis is good. It has some incremental payoff. It has some good characters. It's got nice plot elements. But, it doesn't have great characters and it does that standard big build-up thing without having the final payoff to really make it worth it. Actually, let me qualify that. The final payoff is pretty good, even if it's not a total resolution, but so much of the book is tied to that payoff, it's hard for it to succeed. Even some of the interesting sub-plots are unnecessarily held until the end. Overall, I wouldn't strongly recommend Axis, but nor would I suggest you skip it. In contrast, you must read Spin.

Amusing StreetView vignette

An amusing StreetView vignette from Liberty, MO I discovered when browsing around. Move north one step (click the arrow by the N) at a time to watch the story unfold. 13 clicks total, then look to the right.


View Larger Map

2008 SdJ Virtual Stock Market

As I did in 2005 and 2006 (but not 2007), I'm running a virtual stock market to attempt to predict the winner of the SdJ. It was right in 2005 and 2006. Play it here or discuss it here on BGG.

The market's been up for a few hours and Stone Age and Keltis are the favorites.

Next stage of migration and a warning

So far, I'm pretty happy with my move to blogger so the next thing to try moving my 250+ posts from my old blog over here. The good news is Blogger has a GData API and the better news is that Robert Love has already written a blosxom to Blogger import tool. I made a few modifications:

• Treats path elements as tags when posting to Blogger
• Parses the meta-date tag correctly for posts with specific publication dates
• Emits a mapping of blosxom filenames to new URLs so you can set up a redirect map

Here is my version of py2blogger. So, I'm planning on loading things up. I believe have have FeedBurner and Blogger configured such that people using the RSS feed should see nothing. But, there's a chance I've done something wrong and this feed will explode with bunches of old posts. If so, I apologize in advance.

Assuming this goes well and I continue to be happy with it for a few more weeks, I'll set up redirects on my old blog then. But, in the mean time feel free to browse the archives. I know there will be a bunch of formatting/linking problems in the old posts, which I'll try to fix over time, but if you notice anything profoundly amiss, please let me know.

Luck, Skill and Experience in games

People talk a lot about"how much luck" a game has, without a lot of specificity as to what that means. Sure, most people are talking in general terms anyway, so there's not a lot of need to deconstruct it, but where would be the fun in that?

I think a decent model for deconstructing "luck in games" as follows: Each player has a "skill" (S) which we'll treat as constant over the span of a single game. Over time this may improve or degrade. Second, each game has a distribution of "luck" (L) or "random factors". Finally, each play of a game, there is a distribution of "performance" (P) or "how well you played". Then to determine the winner, we take S+L+P for each player (where L and P are random variables) and whoever is higher ends up winning. For some games, such as chess, L is essentially 0.

Additionally, the absolute values of these don't really matter, so we can just put some stakes in the ground. Let's just define a "typical novice" as having S=0. Of course, this means some people have negative skill, but that's fine. I also believe that while there are variations in P, from game to game, that it's actually relatively constant. So, let's define P as being a gaussian with variance of 1. When talking about a game, we regularly talk about its "depth" and learning curve, and let's call the difference between S for a "world-class" player and a novice "D", for depth. The units for D are defined by the fact that we've defined P as variance 1. Tic-Tac-Toe has a D well under 1, while something like Chess or Go could easily have D of dozens or higher. Another way to think of D (for games with no luck) is "how many distinct levels of play does the game have?". So, if Joe is a novice at a no-luck game and he is always beat by Fred, and Fred is always beat by Mark and Mark is usually, but not always beat by the best players in the world, then that game is D=2.5. For games with luck, the number of distinct levels of play is roughly D/(L+1). The notion that P is fixed variance of 1 breaks down for games with no choices, like Bingo, because it leads to L being infinite, but I'll ignore that problem for now.

Now, this model has some issues. It doesn't represent atypically non-linear skill curves well. It doesn't handle cases where the performance variation is strongly skill-dependent, or where there are other cross terms. It doesn't model "style" differences well, where you might get circular skill relationships. But, I think it does alright at representing the relationships.

Other than being a fun toy model, I think this actually is a useful, if arcane, way to talk about games. Further, it highlights a category of game I suspect I like more than most people. What I really want in a game is one where L>1 and D>2*L. Further, I mostly don't want D to get too high though, as that makes it too likely that opponents will be badly mismatched. That is, I want a game where luck is more important than how well you play in a particular game, but long term experience trumps both of these, but not by a huge factor. In this kind of game, there's enough luck and variation depending on the players' performance that a novice has a chance, albeit a very small one, against an expert.

Some concrete examples, of my opinions:


The most useful thing this illuminates for me is that I like high-luck, high-depth games. Unfortunately, there's not a ton of them. Heroscape, Race for the Galaxy, Battle Line, Lord of the Rings, and Funny Friends (sort of) are decent examples though. Further, I often find myself arguing that these games are not "high-luck" (contrary to what I just said), because I think a lot of people when they say high-luck mean (L/D) and these all have reasonably low values for L/D. But, maybe I'm misinterpreting, and people mean L/R, in which case they're right, the game is high-luck, but that can be more than made up for with experience. What other high-luck, high-depth games would you recommend?

A lot of people clearly have strong biases toward the left edge of the plot, or the upper left, or even the center. Where on the plot do you tend to prefer? Or, is the plot even a useful breakdown to anyone other than me?