Where do you play so many games?

In response to my October games summary Iain asked where I play so many games.
I've been meaning to write an entry that answers that as part of it, so here's that post.

I'm very lucky to live in Boston which has likely the highest
concentration of "German" gamers in the US. Further, I'm lucky in
that non-gamer friends tend to like to play games a lot even if not in
the overall quantities I tend to. Finally, my family (wife, parents,
brother, in-laws) all have some interest in playing games. This
combination of factors means I get to play a lot of games.

In terms of the particulars, my gaming occurs in a few venues:

• Hosted Sessions. Lots of individuals in the greater Boston area hold semi-public sessions on a weekly or monthly basis at their homes. Further, there are a number of private sessions which often have a higher fraction of casual gamers.
  
• Gaming Events. These are periodic public and invitational events like the Unity Games events and the Gathering.
  
• Friends. These aren't so much "sessions" as having frineds over or being out with friends and playing some games.
  
• Family. As I mentioned, my family enjoys playing games. These won't usually be involved sessions, usually 1 or 2 games in an evening.
  

Before my daughter was born we hosted a monthly private session with
usually about 8 people attending, typically half regular gamers and
half people who don't game outside of my session. I expect we'll
resume these at some point.

Of the four categories above, about 40-50% of my gaming is at hosted sessions and 15-20% in each of the other three categories. One friend runs a weekly session at which I play an average of about 3 games so that represents a good fraction of the monthly gaming alone.

Election Analysis Errors

In an analysis
by Mark Newman (currently down), he presents some interesting pictures including
some nice cartograms. His final graph presents a remarkable
observation: There are two Americas, but not the two we think. There
are a small but sizable number of counties (roughly 400) that went
extremely strongly for Kerry and the rest of the counties which were
less polarized to varying degrees. It's a striking result. It's not
true though.

Upon thinking about this histogram, I couldn't imagine how this could
happen. Was this some sort of odd gerrymandering? Almost no
statistics on this scale ever show the kind of dramatic "edge". It's
not impossible, just unlikely. I skimmed through the USA Today data
and couldn't find any of the 400 "super-Kerry" counties. So, since I
couldn't find the raw data anywhere, I did what Dr. Newman presumably
did: I collated the data from the href=http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/president.htm>USA
Today site. Now, I don't know what tools he used, but I wrote a
couple of perl scripts to reformat the data for analysis. I ran it
through my scripts and I got a very similar result to Dr. Newman's,
though not quite the same: 362 counties voted over 98% for Kerry.
Wow. So, I decided to look at some of them, since I hadn't been able
to find one before. One of the counties was that of "Cape, NJ". I
went to the USA Today site to check out this county, to find it
doesn't exist. But, there is a "Cape May, NJ". Aha, there are 362
counties in the US with spaces in the names! Further, the balance of
those between 362 and his 400 is probably due to another data anlysis
bug caused by the fact that the numbers have commas in them.

In truth, there are no counties which voted more than 93% for Kerry,
never mind 400 which voted over 98% for Kerry, however I might wish
that to be true. There's only one voting region that went over 98%
for Bush: Glenwood Pit., ME. Maine
reports by town, not by county. There are two people there. They voted for Bush.

I'm sure this was an unintentional error (in fact, according to href=http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/36803>post on MeFi he had
removed the histogram before the site went down), but I was surprised
at the extent to which it wasn't questioned. Outrageous results
shouldn't be uniformly dismissed because it's often the outrageous
that's important, but at the same time, it should be greeted with a
greater degree of skepticism.

October 2004 Games

30 games played, 27 titles (7 new to me) over 8 sessions with 33 different people.

Hot Games for October, 2004

Goa (1 play)

Some of the shine is beginning to come off of this, but it's still great.

Victory & Honor (1 play)

Clever, different, interesting trick taking game.

Goldbrau (1 play)

Fun combination of business and simultanous action selection.

Puerto Rico (1 play)

I somehow went months without playing this. I apparently forgot a great deal of strategy.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 play)

Another great and extremely clever trick taking game

Exxtra (2 plays)

An underplayed filler.

Ticket to Ride (1 play)

I managed to complete about 7 routes and still lose.

Crokinole (2 plays)

One of many perennials.

Ra (1 play)

Another old favorite.

Heroscape (1 play)

I continue to be surprised how much I enjoy this...

A few Essen '04 releases

I recently played a few of the new Essen releases, "Tanz der Hornochsen", "Leapfrog" and "Pompeji". All of them were reasonably good, but none were amazing.

Tanz der Hornochsen. A boardgame (barely) version of "6 nimmt!" It's fun and it's got some good twists above and beyond the basic gameplay, which closely resembles 6 nimmt!,
but in the end, I'm not sure it adds that much. What does seem possible is that this may do better with fewer players while the original prefers more like 5 or 6 players. The tiles are a bit annoying compared to cards and the whole aspect of everyone having the option to buy cards before each turn really messes up the pacing. Fun, but I may mostly stick to 6 nimmt!, and I'm usually a big fan of novelty.

Leapfrog. A light little "race" game. It's not really a race game in the traditional sense, more of a second-guessing/simultaneous-selection game. Light, cute fun. It plays quite fast as well.

Pompeji. A game with a lot of luck, but a really nice bit of gameplay which involves running from the erupting volcano. Certainly not the deepest game, but there are interesting tactical choices and even some strategic planning. Some of the turn timing seems to introduce more luck than is warranted though. Running from a volcano is entertaining.

History

A leader of great charisma rose rapidly through the ranks, and despite not getting a majority of the vote, became the leader of the country. He
had a
checkered past, but was a man of strong character. Shortly after coming to power, a major national landmark, an important building, was destroyed.
The attack was perpetrated not by another nation, but by a group who's ideology went against the very spirit of the nation. Unfortunately, this
attack was used as a basis for instituting laws and policies which heavily restricted civil rights and went against fundamental rights granted in
the constitution. The attack also united the nation with a strong national pride. This charismatic leader went on to engage in unprovoked
invasions of multiple countries and large portions of the rest of the world strongly opposed his actions. From there, things got far far worse.

The history I'm talking about is of course that of Germany in the 1930s, the rise of Hitler, the burning of the Reichstag by the communists, the
Enabling Act and subsequent invasions that are part of the much more well known history. I've never been a big fan of history, but it seems
imporant to know. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
it. -- George Santayana

Lost Valley & Goldbrau

I recently played Lost Valley for the second time. Unfortunately, I have to report that my earlier impression was correct. It's nicely produced and if you really like exploration games, you could get into it, but
it is rather mechanical and nothing exciting. None of the mechanics really combine in interesting ways. You just do it and there's not a lot of fun, strategy or tactics. It is beatifully produced though.

Goldbrau, on the other hand, was quite good despite playing with three (I hear it is better with four) and getting one rule wrong for 2/3 of the game. I expect with four and the correct rules it would be very good. It combines
elements I like (business game, simultaneous action selection) with some clever mechanics (the brewery/beergarden split, the boss mechanic) along with being generally well crafted. It is a little fiddly and isn't perfect, but
it's quite good.

The Triumph of Semantic Markup

Semantic markup is the new big thing, the semantic web and all that. I see it less as a cool new thing and more of a returning to our roots,
or at least the roots of the web as I saw them when it first started in the early 90s.

Back in the early days of the web (1993), I had a mantra I used when explaining HTML markup to people "Semantic, not Literal". That is, an html H1
tag does not mean "bigger font". It means "1st level heading". HTML markup was meant to be semantic, and not for any aesthetic reason. It wasn't
even for the reason of browser independence (though, had people stuck to semantic markup, this whole WML thing would have been simpler). It was
for the reason that semantic markup is much more powerful from an information access point of view. Specifying a font color is nice, but it came
at a cost of semantic ambiguity. Of course, HTML was never really fully semantic markup, it was just an appealing dream. People fell in love
with the FONT tag and a variety of other literal markup tags and mechanisms. The hope for semantic
markup was lost, and HTML became very much a literal presentation markup language.

Then, to add insult to injury, things like DHTML came along, flaunting the fact that HTML had become a presentation markup language, not a semantic
markup language. I resisted learning DHTML for a while because of this. Once you give in and accept HTML as a presentation language, DHTML is
sort of neat. When I first learned about CSS, I had some hope that perhaps it restored some of that semantic markup quality. Sadly, it did not.
It does do a decent job of abstracting out "style", but HTML is still essentially purely presentational. CSS allows it to presented in a variety
of styles, though, and it's nice having a relatively universal standard for those style details.

But looking at the web now, the power of semantic markup is winning out again. href=http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html>RSS has become an extremely rapidly growing and popular scheme
for information delivery. RSS
is a pure semantic markup with all the presentation details left up to HTML. I currently read well over 100 RSS feeds, only a fraction of which
are from blogs which prompted the success of RSS. This blog itself is accessible via RSS and many of the readers
access it that way. I read the
comics, the Times, a grab bag of web sites, a few search engine queries, and even a mailing list, all via RSS. It's very gratifying to see
"semantic, not literal" finally getting a lot of traction.

Two other random thoughts on RSS: I expect it won't be long before some RSS feeds start including advertising entries. It surprises me I haven't
really seen them yet. I just hope when the time comes it isn't overwhelming. There are some feeds I would keep reading even with a reasonable
dose of ads. Most, however, I'd stop reading if ads started being included. Until then, it's a nice little garden. The other thought is that
blogs,
as the progenitor of RSS, share other qualities with the early days of the web. In the early days of the web, the thing to do was have your
own personal homepage you created. Rapidly, as most people had nothing they wanted to put on such a page, having a homepage became something that
while many people had them, it was more commonly something a university or corporation had, not an individual. Further, in the early days of the
web, the goal (as much as there was a "goal") was to share information. You weren't trying to drive banner hits, collect demographic data or
derive revenue. While some (many?) blog writers may now have those goals, the biggest goal I've observed is wanting to be read. RSS is a great
way to make it easier to be read.

(Footnote: If you're looking for a great way to read RSS feeds, there are a variety of href=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=rss%20aggregator&btnG=Google+Search>RSS aggregator applications, but I will highly
recommend Bloglines as an outstanding web based reader.)

Somerville Parents' Group

My wife and I looked around to try to find a parenting group in Somerville, with little success initially. Then, one day we were downtown Boston
with the baby and a stranger in the elevator struck up a conversation, asking how old our baby was and whatnot. She asked where we lived and when
my wife said Somerville, she said "Oh, I was in a great new mothers group in Somerville!". So, she sent us the info and now my wife has been going
to this group.

Apparently though, they don't have much of a web presence, but they want to at least be findable by google, which is part of the reason for me to
post here about it. They have a members-only Yahoo Group: Somerville Moms, but it's hard
to find. They meet on Thursdays in Somerville. So, if you're looking for Somerville parents group, parenting group, mothers group or mom's group,
hopefully you'll find this. They also have support groups in Arlington, Brookline, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, Medford, Newton, Stoughton,
Watertown, and Westwood. Their info number is 617-614-1967. I hope this entry helps other folks find these groups.

The same organization that runs these groups also runs a fathers' support group, but only in Newton. Anyone know of a fathers' group in
the Somerville, Cambridge, or Medford area?

Back from an outage

Well, my server finally died. It has served well for over 5 years,
but some combination of problems including some sort of disk problem
caused it to finally give up the ghost. I finally got a new server
and am in the process of restoring everything to its former glory. A
lot of stuff doesn't work, and I'll post here when everything is back.
At the moment, all the static content (my
homepage, miscellaneous other pages) is back, this blog is back,
but all dynamic content (the BGRS,
RGBRollcall, Game store database, Heroscape unit generator, etc.) is
down. I hope to have it back soon. If you notice any errors with
aspects of the site that I list as "back up", please
let me know.

Update 10/14, 12:21am: The game store database is back up.

Update 10/14, 12:31am: The Heroscape Unit Generator is back up.

Update 10/14, 8:02pm: The saved Heroscape units are accessible again.

Heroscape Review

I wrote briefly about Heroscape
earlier, but its worth writing more. Heroscape is fundamentally a
miniatures game. I don't usually like miniatures games. They're
logistically annoying to play, lacking in good ways to keep track of
things like which units have moved already, sometimes requiring
rulers, frustrating rules about base contact and various other things.
Further, they tend to be really really complicated with lots of rules
aimed at enhancing the simulation, rather than enhancing the game.
Finally, a lot of them expect you to paint miniatures. Many people
enjoy that, but I don't have the time, patience or interest.
Heroscape manages to be different. I'll discuss the specific ways it
avoids these problems at the end.




Overall, this is a very good game. It's biggest "flaw" is that it
has a lot of luck. If substantial amount of luck bothers you, this
game is definitely right out. Despite that, it also has a lot of
strategy and tactics. It also has a lot of bits. It also has a lot
of opportunities for variation. It also has a lot of skill. It's got
a lot of themes. It's got a lot of fun. It's got a lot of luck.
It's got a lot of everything. Some might ask how a game can have both
a great deal of skill and a lot of luck. In other places a
theoretical game "ChessDice" has been suggested to explain such an
idea. In "ChessDice", two people play a game of chess. Then, each
rolls a six-sided die. The winner of the chess game adds one to their
roll. The higher roll wins. This is a rather silly game, but it's
got a lot of luck and a lot of skill. Heroscape is much the same way;
it's got a lot of skill, but there's so much luck that it only makes a
moderate impact. Unlike ChessDice, Heroscape is fun.

Another quality Heroscape had that some will enjoy and others won't is
the thematic dissonance. It can be very engaging in a geeky sort of
way to get into the idea of Vikings vs. Robots, for example. On the
other hand, some may find this a barrier to being engaged in the
theme. It doesn't do it for everybody. For that matter, it has a
violent theme; most scenarios have a goal of "defeat all of your
opponents units". At least it isn't collectible. (It is "expandable")

Enough with all the qualifications as to why some will not like it.
It's a really good game. The components are stunningly good. They
are beautiful, integrate well with the gameplay, are great little toys
and are complete. The provided unit cards address are well designed
and clear. The terrain is outstanding. The scenarios are fun and
clearly playtested. The initial army draft provides for a variety of
interesting strategic options. The units abilities are well balanced
and interesting. The complexity is close to what I'd consider
optimal. It's complex enough to be interesting but simple enough to
play quickly and cleanly.

The game is not collectible, but it is expandable. Further, because
they used standard miniature sizes, many have suggested using
miniatures from other games to use with Heroscape. I created the
HeroscapeUnitCreator with this in mind. All the same, I've only so
far played with the standard units and they provide a rich and
complete gaming experience which I don't feel will be exhausted any
time soon. I'm sure sometime I'll enjoy adding figures, but for now
there are enough interesting combinations of the provided units for it
to be very compelling. Further, the scenarios (both included, and
downloadable from the web site)
provide some interesting and well tested variations such as fog, acid
mist and mud.

The game succeeds by keeping the core of the game simple. The special
powers of each unit add a richness that prevents it from getting
tedious. The terrain system adds an understandable but deep set of
tactical options. And yet, they've done a very good job of leaving a
lot of things out. There are no "cover" rules, you either have line
of sight or not. There are never any penalties, only bonuses. There
is no facing. There are no squad coherence rules. There is only one
kind of damage. No unit has special powers that have to be looked up
anywhere other than on their card. Terrain and range don't interact.
Being one step higher than an opponent is just as good as being two
steps higher. Any number of rules could be argued for on simulation
grounds, but they've done a good job of picking a set that makes for a
good game. In the end the rules they picked make for interesting and
fun tactics.

The "ergonomics" is also very good. Something as simple as the unit
cards and the turn markers solves many of the bookkeeping problems
associated with miniature games. The "thematic dissonance" I
mentioned makes the units easily distinguishable in general. Yes,
there's three different Viking groups, but imagine if the game were
all Vikings. The hex based terrain allows attractive and interesting
layouts with simple and unambiguous movement and range measurements.
Line-of-sight is the only aspect that could even be vaguely debatable,
and I've found it easiest to just play "when in doubt, yes, you have
LoS".

As a great many people have pointed out, the components are simply
amazing. The miniatures are beautifully sculpted and painted. The
terrain is attractive and durable. The cards and other miscellaneous
components are nicely produced. Finally, all of this is produced for
an emminently reasonable price.

In the end, this is certainly the best miniatures game I've ever
played. It's not the deepest but it is the most attractive, most well
designed and most fun. If the qualifications above (lots of luck,
thematic dissonance, fighting game) don't turn you off, you're likely
to enjoy Heroscape.