Top 10 games for April

#10: Puerto Rico (1 play)
I played what may have been my closest game of this ever. Five
players, only 3 or 4 point spread between first and last, very high
scores (all around 50), and the game ended by running out of victory
points and colonists. I continue to worry about factory strategy
dominance, but not too much.

#9: Zirkus Flohcati (3 plays)
Rapidly ascending as one of my favorite fillers. To me, this is a bit
of a surprise because I don't usually like Rummy games and this
certainly has some Rummy flavor.

#8: Princes of Florence (1 play)
Luke, Alison and I played an AMAZING game of Princes at the Gathering.
Luke had the "G8 game timer" and we played with it all agreeing to
play as fast as we could. We didn't time the auctions, but we did
time player turns. The whole game, setup and play included came in
under 30 minutes. Wow. What a rush. We all made mistakes, but the
game was very close in the end. It was a very different experience
from "normal" princes, but I highly recommend trying it some time.

#7: Gulo Gulo (3 plays)
This is a new dexterity game from Zoch. It probably won't appear on
the top 10 again, but it's cute, clever, and deserves mention for
having adorable plastic wolverines.

#6: King Lui (4 plays)
A great new filler. I think this may prove to have more depth after
people have played it a few times than people are realizing. The
reluctance to take large piles for fear of going over is justified,
but often by not taking them you grant someone else a huge windfall.
Some interesting possibilities.

#5: Europa Tour (4 plays)
I'm looking forward to the African and US version of this as well. It
works well with 2 too. A nice "heavy" filler, or "light" main course.

#4: Coloretto (6 plays)
If "It's Mine" is "speed Ra", then this must be Ra, but it's not. I
find this very much like "It's Mine" with some interesting tactical
choices, especially when played with fewer players.

#3: Paris Paris (4 plays)
On my first play, I wasn't that impressed, but during my second game
something "clicked" and I really like this. The "untwisted" map on
BGG is a useful tool and counting tile usage is critical, but the
player impact on what is scored and what isn't is clearly where this
game shines.

#2: Balloon Cup (6 plays)
Clearly, I'm a sucker for card games where players compete on several
"flags" (Battle Line, Lost Cities, Tabula Rasa, etc.). I'm beginning
to speculate the luck factor here may be higher than I thought at
first, but it's a lot of fun all the same. I've found a strategy of
hording gray cards to be very effective at forcing opponents into
sub-optimal play.

#1: Amun-Re (4 plays)
I am really not sure why I like this game so much. Usually, I can
identify a particular new/clever mechanism, a thematic element, a
particular decision tension, nice bits, or *something* that makes me
like a game. Here, I can't put my finger on it, but I really enjoy
it. The mechanisms are good ones, but nothing especially new. I
suppose they simply fit together in a pleasing way. Plus, the gloss
of using a pyramid pricing scheme in a game about building pyramids is
just great.

Crosswords

A crossword puzzle all about board games I wrote has been published in
this month's edition of The
Games Journal: href=http://www.thegamesjournal.com/puzzles/Crossword1.shtml>http://www.thegamesjournal.com/puzzles/Crossword1.shtml.

This is actually my second effort at crossword writing. My first
version was probably too hard to do without extensive Internet
searching, but feel free to try it out.

Cathedral "Polystone" edition

I recently got Cathedral from Gamescape in Palo Alto while visiting
there. I picked up the "polystone" version which means the pieces are
made of a hard resin material and the picture on the box made them
look very nice. Unfortunately, upon opening it I found that the two
different colors of pieces were very hard to distinguish in low light
and even in good light were quite similar. Fortunately, the folks at
Gamescape were very nice and allowed me to exchange it for the wooden
version, but I thought it was worth warning others that the Polystone
version has some serious issues.

Boardgame Quality Metrics

People try to measure how good a boardgame is in many ways, such as
ratings and counting number of times played. Total number of plays is
probably one of the most common. As a measure of how "good" a game
is, it's not bad, but it doesn't take into account length of the game
or replayability over time. That is, a 15 minute game that's played 6
times is probably not "better" than a 3 hour game that's played 3
times. On the other hand, using total time playing has problems on
the low end: A 15 minute game played 10 times is probably "better"
than a two hour game played twice. Further, a game played every other
week for a year is probably "better" than one played every day for a
month and then never again.

Various other metrics have been suggested, including Joe Huber's
"happiness" metric which works well, but requires a lot of
bookkeeping. So, I've been trying to identify a metric of game
"quality" that meets the following criteria:

• Doesn't bias unduly for or against long or short games
  
• Doesn't require ratings
  
• Doesn't require overly detailed records
  
• Doesn't overly credit "fad" games that get played a lot for a
  little while
  and then never again
  
• Does bias towards "classics", though not overwhelmingly
  
• Measures "replayability" in some form
  
• Is easily understood and doesn't require deep understanding of
  statistics
  
• Is easily calculated
  
• Can be readily used on a per year basis or on a "all-time" basis
  

So, after careful consideration and analysis, I've come up with a
metric that I like and thought I would share it and suggest it to all
:-) I've actually suggested this metric before, off-handedly but I
like it even more now that I've looked at the actual statistics for my
own games.

The metric is the "month metric", in which a game receives 1 point for
every unique month in which it is played. For example, I played
Medici in both February and March of this year, so for the year it
scores a "2", but it also was played in 5 different months over
2000-2001, so it's total score is a "7".

For my own games, only a dozen games have an all-time score above 10
and there's a nice distribution below that. For the year, naturally a
"12" is the highest possible score, though I had no game above 7, but
a solid group (9 games) at 6 or above. The other nice thing about
this metric is that I find it is (probably unsurprisingly) heavily
correlated with all of the other metrics discussed (# plays, total
time playing, "happiness").

Advocacy of Board Games

Over the past few years, I've seen several discussions about board
game advocacy. In the past, I've had the opinion that board game
advocacy wasn't actually a good thing. I've relatively recently (the
past 6 months) changed my mind.

My original thinking was as follows: "advocacy", or trying to spread
the word about board games is motivated by several desires, one of
which was to increase the number of board gamers out there.
Unfortunately, more people isn't always a good thing. More people
means a bigger market, and means more money is involved, and money can
be a bad influence as well as a good influence. Take the Internet,
for example. Back in the "old days", the net had a nice small
"community" feel. People shared information, were self-policing, and
were usually fairly "neighborly". In contrast, the net today involves
a lot of outside policing, discouraging of sharing information, and is
often an unfriendly place. However, in return we've gotten a great
deal. There are a great many exciting communities, a wealth of
content, and long term commercial viability, even if many .com's blow
up along the way. I didn't see the same benefits for growth of the
board game community. As it is, I have more than enough games to
play, more than enough people to play them with, and noone complains
if people share rules, post them online, or otherwise do things that
a "big business" involvment might prevent. However, I've come to the
conclusion that the benefits of growth outweigh the costs, especially
if as a community, we're careful.

Specifically, the reasons I see for advocating board games are many
fold:

"Lost Spielfrieks"

There's a lot of people out there who don't know these games of
ours exist, and when they discover them, they are thrilled and excited
and it brings a great deal of happiness to them. Advocacy helps make
people aware of these games who may be very interested but aren't
otherwise aware of them.

Casual Gamers

I used to be more skeptical on this point, but I now believe there
are a lot of people out there who may never become heavy gamers but
genuinely enjoy these games of ours occasionally. This may be as
often as monthly or as infrequently as a couple of times a year, but
they're out there. I'm often reluctant to push my hobby on my friends
or family, but often find that I don't need to push; they pull. After
a surprising interest last year, I brought several games to
Thanksgiving this year, my cousins, uncles, aunts and parents all
enjoyed the games (Zirkus Flohcati, Puerto Rico, TransAmerica were all
big hits). Sharing games with casual gamers is a good thing.

Social Good

This is the arrogant reason where I say "my hobby makes the
world a better place", and maybe I'm just deluded, but seeing articles
that show that href=http://www.alzheimersupport.com/library/showarticle.cfm/ID/1650/e/1/T/Alzheimers/>playing
games helps prevent Alzheimers or Frank Hamrick's href=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spielfrieks/message/22215>story
about playing games at the Ronald McDonald House really make me
believe that games are a good thing. This is in no way to imply that
any other particular hobbies aren't good for society, it's just
that I think board games are a good one.

Market Size

While I have some concern that a too large market has the
potential to make the board gaming industry too much about money,
having it be large enough to support the game designers and companies
is obviously important too. Many many games are produced out of love
of games rather than love of money, but if "board games" as a product
are a complete failure, the quality (at least of production) and
availability will drop. I don't want to see the board game industry
ever become as big business focuesed as certain other entertainment
industries (music, movies, or even mass market toys), but I don't
think there's much risk of that. A moderate increase (say, a factor
of 2-5 in the US) would do a lot to improve the success of companies
like Alea (part of Ravensburger) and Rio Grande.

Given this thinking I've been pleased to see these two recent
"mainstream press" articles
on these games of ours, one in href=http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/021209/misc/9diversions.htm>US
News and another in href=http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2002/foth021125.htm>The Motley Fool.

Extended Essen Thoughts/Photos, Sackson Auction list

I've put up my Essen 2002 photos. I've
also played several games of Trias, ad acta, ZooSim, and Fische
Fluppen Frikadellen, and all have held up well. The only one I'm
beginning to have some questions about is "ZooSim", which seems to
have a bit of a rich-get-richer problem. Next time I play I think
I'll play with a fixed income variant. That is, everyone gets 3
income at the end of each round.

I've cataloged my acquisitions from last week's Sackson auction. I
came home with:

ASAP, Ad Liners, Avante, Bazaar, Buried Treasure, Casablanca, Cloak &
Dagger, Corporate Pursuit, Das Erbe des Maloney, Das Super-Blatt,
Dragonriders of Pern, Eddie's Eleven, Focus, Foil, Fuedal, fun-et-iks,
Gold Connection, Gold am Yukon, High Hand, Jumpin, Lone Wolf and Cub
Game, Mad Marbles, MageStones, Maze, Mississippi, Mr. President, New
World, Oil Tycoon, Orbit War, Perfect Wedding, Phlounder, Ploy,
Quinto, Robin Hood, Round Four, Scoop, Stocks & Bonds, Stop Thief,
Swoggle, Tribond, True Colors, Twister, Twixt, Ultimate Stratego,
Whosit?, and Xanth.

In particular, I have more than one of Buried Treasure, Gold
Connection, Phlounder, and Mr. President and would be open to trades
or purchases.

Sackson Auction

The first part of the auction was a series of "box lots", where 1 to 3 boxes
full of games were auctioned at once. They went for prices ranging from $15 to
over $300, typically $50 or so per box. There were about 350 boxes done this
way. They included miscellaneous junk, prototypes, sid's notes, and valuable
stuff like Eon CE expansions. Many spielfrieks won lots.

After a short break, they started the individual game auctions. Most of this is
older stuff and often went for quite a bit individually. A 1941 Wizard of Oz
board, with no box, pieces or rules went for $190. Few spielfrieks I noticed
bid on these.

Finally, part way through the individual games, they did the shelf lots, where
the most spielfieky style games were. Many 3M games, as well as a lot of
German games went in these lots. Among other things, I got myself an instant 3M
bookshelf collection.
The SPI games brought some of the higher prices of the event.

The whole auction wrapped up around 7, and a small amount of trading amongst
buyers occured. Overall, a very nice event.

An important note was that despite selling about 10,000 games, this was only a
little more than half of the collection. The rest will be auctioned in the
spring.

Cannes

I played Cannes, the new Splotter release. It's been characterized as
"Roads and Boats"-lite, and while it certainly shares several
qualities with R&B, it stands nicely on its own without supplanting
R&B or feeling less interesting than R&B.

The theme is about making movies, which require a variety of resources
(computers, people, and beer, which produce special effects, scripts
and stars, in various combinations) in multiple stages. There are
multiple types of movies (sci-fi movies, action movies, and the
amusingly translated "girlie movies" aka chick flicks) which require
different resources. This part of the game is interesting, but not
especially novel.

The really clever part of the game is how you access the resources and
production mechanisms. There are hexagonal tiles, which players
control the layout of, and then each player has five rods which they
use to form a "network" of connections between tiles. Only those
tiles connected to one's network are usable. This means you have to
carefully layout tiles and gradually change your network as your
resource and production needs change, all while other players are
impinging on the same space. Further, only a limited number of
resources can be retained between turns.

The play is very tense, and the timing of the endgame is interesting.
Like in Roads & Boats, the key to doing well seems to be to set up a
production "machine" as quickly as possible, and then run it longer
and better than the other players. Of course, other players may
attempt to interfere with your machine. Overall, the tension and
interaction was very nice, and the theme was engaging and fun, though
one player found the production hierarchy a little non-intuitive.

The components are also worth mentioning, as they are somewhat nicer
than many Splotter games in the past. They aren't quite up to the
major German publishing standards, but they are very nice all the
same, particularly more so than Roads & Boats.

I look forward to playing this one more, and if this sort of
production game is interesting to you, I highly recommend it. The
network mechanism is very new feeling, so I can't quite compare it to
anything else I've played, which alone makes this game worth trying.

Just back from Essen, first comments

Well, I just got back from Essen, and thought I'd post some quick
comments. This is my second time to Essen, and you can href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/essen/>read about my trip in 2000, if you want. This year,
I was only there for the end of Thursday and all of Friday and
Saturday. The "buzz" of the fair was Friedman Friese's new game
"Fische Fluppen Frikadellen", in which players can switch between
tables and multiple copies of the game. I didn't get a chance to play
this, but it seemed very well received.

I'll discuss other games below, but another nice thing about Essen
this year was I knew far more people there. It was great to see Scott
Alden, Greg Schloesser, James Miller, Mik Svellov, and many others.

Trias

This game of plate tectonics from Gecko Games was featured in the Doris
& Frank booth, and though the art was by Doris, the game was not by
Frank, but Ralf Lehmkuhl. I was very impressed with this game, and it
seems to have a variety of interesting options and the continental
drift mechanics are very nice. I'll try to write more later, but the
basic idea is one is competing for control over the new continents
that are being formed. On each players turn, they have some control
over the drift, and then action points to do things such as force more
drift, reproduce, move, and the like. Very nice. The only negative
comments I heard was that it was a bit dry, but I didn't find it so,
and unless players are very ponderous, it moved along at a good pace.

color=f8f0ff>ad acta

This small production game has a theme that seems hard to make
interesting: paper pushing. But, the game is quite fun, and lends
itself well to its theme. Each player runs an office, and documents
get pushed around and processed by various offices before being filed.
Precise timing of this processing is key to the game, as different
documents score different points depending on when the are filed. The
game is all about queue management, as documents come in to offices on
a last in first out basis. A few special action cards mix things up
nicely. Some found parts of a little too chaotic and hard to track,
and I see where he's coming from, but I very much enjoyed and
recommend the game.

color=f8f0ff>ZooSim

This is a beautifully produced new game from Cwali, where players
produce competing zoos, attempting to attract the most visitors. This
game has a few nice mechanics that interlock nicely. Players
participate in a series of blind auctions for tiles which are layed in
a domino-like fashion, and compete for dominance in several categories
(types of animals and trees) as well as receiving bonuses for creating
path loops. I like auction games, so that part appealed to me, but I
found the other aspects very engaging as well. The art is also very
nice, though some speculated that people might assume it was a
children's game because of it. In any case, highly recommended.

color=f8f0ff>Canal Grande, FFF, Cannes, Age of Steam

These 4 also got a lot of good buzz (highly rated in the Fairplay
booth, and spoken of highly by those who'd played), but I didn't get a
chance to play them. I picked them all up except for Age of Steam.
I'll comment more once I play them.

color=f8f0ff>Rumors

Many people commented to Friedemann Friese that Frisch Fisch should be
republished. He commented on a certain irony in this because
apparently it took several years to sell out, and only once it had
completely sold out did an upsurge of interest start. The possibility
of another publisher doing an edition of Frisch Fisch seemed to be in
mind, but nothing specific, of course.

I also heard some other folks mumbling about the possibility of
Friedeman doing a new game for Alea. Would the box be green?

Nothing in the way of details, but a new Reiner Knizia "big" game from
Hans im Gluck is supposedly going to be out at Nurnberg, and
presumably this is the Egyptian game Chris Lawson mentioned last
month.

I'll post more later, with photos...

Going to Essen

Despite having lots of interesting topics to write on, I haven't had
the time to write here lately. Hopefully, I'll get time to write
about Lord of the Rings: Sauron, Roads & Boats, and some Lord of the
Rings: The Confrontation strategy.

All this will probably have to wait though, since I'm off to Essen,
and presumably that will be the most interesting thing to write about
for a little while. I hope to have some stuff up here early next
week.