Board Game Madness 7/31 - Olympics Edition

I was on vacation last week, but back this week with another entry. The Olympics is gaming, right? Just more sports than sitting down and moving meeples...

Fun:

• From the Spiel podcasters, a 43-minute video documentary on the manufacturing process of board games
• Interested in opening a game store? I had been seriously toying with the idea about 6 or 7 years ago. Game owner Michael Bahr published his 5 biggest mistakes made by game store owners.
• Pimp My Game: Someone made a custom Blood Bowl pitch that has blown everyone’s mind. It looks dangerous!
• Pimp My Game II: If you want to replace your paper money in games, then feel free to order these industrial resource chips (glorified poker chips) from I Will Never Grow Up.
• Good Eats: Settlers of Catan birthday cake
• Funny geeklist featuring comments from the lowest raters of some of the most highly rated games. My favorite is Puerto Rico: “Played 4 times........annoying is the nicest thing I can come up with. Only way I play this again is if a table of swimsuit models asks me to join them.”
• Fun “Name That Game” contest. Oh and I haven’t the foggiest idea on some of these!
• Some fun board game title mashups. My favorite is “Kitty Admiral”, also “Monster for President”

New Games:

• Il Vecchio: Use your family members to roam the Tuscan region of Italy and recruit followers and collect money in order to overtake Italian provinces. The more you have, the more you can do. The game play seems very similar to El Grande, or at the very least the mural restoration of Fresco.
• Helvetia Cup: Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis is quite familiar with my love for Blood Bowl. Helvetia Cup seems to be closer to “soccer”, but pits fantasy races against each other nonetheless.
• Recently released: Alien Frontiers: Factions, Lyssan, Danube 20, Dragon Clash, 7 Wonders: Cities, LOT, Banners of Betrayal, Dungeon Command: Heart of Cormyr, Dungeon Command: Sting of Lloth, Dominant Species: The Card Game, Rodeo Rummy, Starship Merchants, Indigo, Chupacabra: Survive the Night, Go Goblin Go!, 1830 Cardgame

iOS:

• Ticket to Ride: Europe Pocket (iPhone version) – hopefully they’ve fixed the notification issues that the original pocket has which makes online asynchronous play unmanageable
• San Juan release beginning of August
• Café International release end of July (wait, that’s today, isn’t it?)
• Can’t Say That! (a.k.a. Taboo) released
• Sixes (a.k.a. Quirkle) released
• Pandemic in development
• Race for the Galaxy in development
• Through the Ages due September
• Age of Industry due 2013
• Dominion in Alpha testing
• Alien Frontiers kickstarter funded and game due in August (?)
• Agricola due this fall
• Eclipse in development
• 7 Wonders in development

News:

• Geek and Sundry (Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton) have teamed with Target stores to feature TableTop games in Target with a sticker saying “As Seen On…”. This is pretty amazing for a fledgling Google investment.
• For those familiar with the TED talks hosted by Google, Spoiled Flush Games recently gave a talk about board games. I have not had a chance to preview it yet though, so I don’t know how good it is.
• The Games in Education Symposium is going to be in Troy NY this week

Recently Played:

• On vacation, there was a decent amount of gaming including many games of Dominion and No Thanks. We also taught our friends Qwirkle and 7 Wonders.

Happy Gaming!

Credits: Board Game Geek, Game Salute, Purple Pawn

Board Game Madness 7/17

Thanks:

This past weekend I celebrated my 500 month birthday. Do the math if you like, but it was done because I thought that 40^th birthday celebrations were too much the norm. So I decided to do something a little different and celebrated it with my own 2-day board gaming convention. I thank all of my guests and hope that they had a great time. I know I did!

I also need to thank Dave V., the owner of The Game Table in Mineola, NY. I am a firm believer in establishing a relationship with your local game store. While I do pepper my support around to the different game stores in the area as well as some online, I am very excited by what The Game Table has done for the local community and therefore they are my go-to store. We host our Blood Bowl league there and one of these days my son will probably have his birthday party there. Dave came to the party and told me he wasn’t giving me a gift (which I told everyone not to do), but thanking me for being involved in the community and of course for bringing him business. It is not often that a retail owner establishes a personal relationship with his customers, but he and his staff really make the store accessible and are strengthening the gaming community on Long Island. The game of Kingdom Builder that he brought was played and covered below. Thank you Dave and please keep up the great work you are doing for Long Island gamers!

Fun:

• Gaming across the world: One stop on the tour of gaming locations will of course HAVE to be Carcassonne. It has some awesome looking walls.
• Custom box to transport Pandemic. Just watch out for the TSA…
• Pimp My Game: Custom Super Dungeon Explore board which is really awesome looking
• Pimp My Game II: Custom brain tokens for Zombie Dice – may have to do this myself…
• Pimp My Game III: Waterproof Settlers of Catan
• And this is why you use dice with square corners…
• Rubik’s Carcassonne
• Awesome looking meeple tattoo
• How about playing Forbidden Island – wait for it – ON a forbidden island?
• Dodecatandron
• Another gaming proposal
• Apparently the old captains from the original Space Hulk are very upset about not making it into 3E
• Two of my friends tell this story about how they pulled out a game of Uno at a wedding once. Sorry, that pales in comparison to this one.
• Someone converted the rules and cards for Agricola into braille
• Recent aerial photos have revealed the true location of Catan!

New Games:

• Recently Released: D-Day Dice, Divided Republic, Milestones

iOS:

• Nightfall expansion Martial Law due in August
• San Juan coming soon
• Medieval Merchants (straight to iPad) due end of summer 2012
• Lost Cities coming in late July/early August

News:

• The 5^th annual Dice Tower awards (Tom Vasel) were announced. The winners are:
• Best Game: Eclipse
• Best Family Game: King of Tokyo
• Best New Game Designer: Kevin Lanzing (Flash Point: Fire Rescue)
• Best Game Reprint: Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War
• Best Production Values: Mansions of Madness
• Best Small Publisher: Indie Boards and Cards
• Best Party Game: Dixit Odyssey
• Best Game Expansion: Summoner Wars: Master Set
• Most Innovative Game: Risk Legacy
• Best Game Artwork: The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
• Best War Game: A Few Acres of Snow
• Best Game Theme: Flash Point: Fire Rescue
• Best Digital Board Game: Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
• Hall of Fame Inductees: Yahtzee, Werewolf, Lord of the Rings
• Great story about a couple of widows who have been playing Scrabble regularly in England and have kept their scores over the years. They’ve racked up over a million points between them playing with a 1959 version of the game.

Recently Played:

• Whoa, 500 months old! At the party we played quite a few games:
• On day one I learned Merchant of Venus (original edition). Pick up and deliver game that is a little more accessible than Age of Steam. It was a bit fiddly and there was a decent amount of downtime, but all the players kept the game moving for the most part. I’m interested in what the new print will look like.
• Pandemic was next on the list and we taught a new player but still won with 5 virulent strain epidemics and the purple mutation cards.
• We didn’t get enough of Pandemic, so we decided to play Forbidden Island afterwards
• After dinner, we decided to play Core Worlds and I badly misplayed it, although I still got 33 points.
• Day two started with an attempt at Wok Star, but unfortunately a couple of friends of mine had a son that wasn’t really letting them play and this game requires full attention. We eventually abandoned it and went for Qwirkle which is a bit easier to play under those circumstances
• The next game that came out was Kingdom Builder, the recent Spiel des Jahres winner, courtesy of The Game Table. Everyone commented on how much it looked like Hacienda, a game I’m not particularly fond of. However this game was very intriguing. It’s got tons of replay potential and while I only rated it a 6 on BGG, I believe that this is because we played with 3 players and there wasn’t nearly the amount of competition for resources that I thought it would be. I am very eager to play with 4 players, where that contention will be more pronounced and there is where I believe the game will shine and likely raise my rating.
• We finished off the party with an epic game of Power Grid on the Korea map with the expansion power deck. I haven’t won this game in quite some time, but two of us built to 18 cities and I came out with more money and took the game. It was very exciting and everyone played really well.

Happy Gaming!

Credits: BGG, Purple Pawn, Game Salute News, Google News

Board Game Madness 7/12

Fun:

• Pimp My Game: Don’t pull the wool over your friends’ eyes, but this implementation of Flash Point: Fire Rescue is really cool
• John-Michael Gariepy speculates what the top ten most desirable Magic: The Gathering Cards are.

New Games:

• 1969: The cold war hits again and it’s all about the race to the moon. Play the US, Russia or one of the European powers and sabotage your opponents and be the first to fly safely to the moon. Release October 2012.
• Recent releases: Scripts and Scribes: The Dice Game, Empire Express, Lock ‘n Load: Honneur & Patrie, Next War: Korea, World at War: Into the Breach, Thunderbolt Apache Leader

iOS:

• Haggis released (solo only for now)
• Summoner Wars released (free with four factions – extra factions can be bought in total for $7.99 or individually for less)
• Thunderstone nearing release
• Café International (1989 Spiel des Jahres winner) to be released later in July
• There’s a new iOS app for BGG

News:

• The Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s game of the year, has been announced. This is the Academy Award for Best Picture in board gaming. Kingdom Builder, from Dominion’s Donald X. Vaccarino, beat out Eselsbrucke and Vegas. Note that this award tends to move towards the family games. So it’s the equivalent of Disney/Pixar taking best picture every year.
• The Kennerspiel des Jahres is the strategy gamer’s version of the Spiel des Jahres and this year’s winner is Village, by Inka and Markus Brand who also designed A Castle for All Seasons. It beat out K2 and Targi.
• Interesting to note, according to Purple Pawn: Tom Felber, chairman of the SdJ jury, complained that “many of the games reviewed this year were ‘not fully developed in all areas’”. Some have wondered if the increase in releases and boom of game designers and introduction of Kickstarter as a funding source is diluting the market.
• Chicago has turned their streets into a giant Monopoly game
• According to Gizmodo, a computer is now capable of watching you play a game for only two minutes, learn from your strategies and beat you senselessly. It’s only done it with abstract games, so I’d like to see how it does with Agricola.
• Learning from Risk can help you run your small business

Recently played

• Some gaming on my vacation included a few games of 7 Wonders and Blokus (with the parents!)

Happy Gaming!

Credits: BGG, Purple Pawn, Game Salute, Google News

Board Game Madness 7/3

Independence Day edition! Happy July 4^th.

Fun:

• Massive PitchCar game takes up tons of table space and a large room unto itself
• Someone converted a bunch of beer coasters into a game of Carcassonne
• How about playing Castle Ravenloft with the Avengers heroes: Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man
• Le Tour De Geek rolls on into stage 5 with the Intellectual Challenge. Chess has my vote on that one. Pandemic recently took over the Yellow Jersey from Ticket to Ride after stage 4’s thematic fit. I think that was more Settlers falling like a lead balloon on that rather than Pandemic soaring over the top. The next stage is memorability.
• A very interesting read on how copyright and trademark laws affect the gaming industry
• Want gaming t-shirts?
• Someone made a LEGO version of The Settlers of Catan!

New Games:

• Tzolkin: The Mayan Calendar: What’s the point of playing this game if the world is ending this December? Get it??? Mayan calendar? Ugh. This game is touting a “new” mechanic of dynamic worker placement where what they do depends on where they are on the board, but that changes as the gears of the calendar turn through the game. Release October 2012.
• Goblins, Inc.: The gobbos of their big firm are looking for a new CEO. The corporation makes gigantic doomsday robots to destroy the world. This is a dice game where form partnerships, build your robots and battle it out trying to attain secret achievements. Release October 2012.
• Suburbia: It’s SimCity the board game. Lay down tiles to build up the town into a major metropolis. No Godzilla in this game though. Release October 2012.
• Recently released: For the Win, Red Winter, Four in a Square

iOS:

• Summoner Wars still imminent (already submitted)
• Haggis imminent (already submitted)
• Kickstarter campaign for Mage Knight

News:

• Fantasy Flight Games and Stronghold Games have resolved the whole Merchant of Venus debacle, where both got the rights to put out the same game. FFG will proceed with publishing, but Stronghold will be involved, as the board will be double-sided now. The classic game (Stronghold) on one side and the newly reimagined FFG version on the other. I assume Stronghold is getting a cut of some type.

Recently played:

• Well, my Death Rockers have been knocked out of the LIBBL Montauk Cup playoffs. I lost 1-0 in the semi-finals to the NY Knicknevins, the eventual champions. Sad day in Blood Bowl. However, I plan to bring the team back for their second season. I’m really enjoying them.
• Game night was this past week for our local group. I learned how to play Last Will, led a game of 7 Wonders and we broke open a new set of Cards Against Humanity, courtesy of one of our grateful regulars (thanks again!)
• Travelling to visit friends, some gaming has occurred. So far: Blood Bowl: Team Manager and 7 Wonders. The 7 Wonders game was with the new iPad companion app that was awesome! My wife played Cupertino on a day that the Apple stock went up. She came in second.

Happy Gaming!

Credits: Board Game Geek, Game Salute, Google News