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

Board Game Madness 6/26

Fun:

• Le Tour de Geek moves on to the third stage with Ticket to Ride holding on to the Yellow Jersey (overall leader). That’s because stage two was gateway games. Current round is for tension/excitement. Pandemic is leading, but Battlestar Galactica (my top vote) has the most “win” votes. This is really fun!
• Ridiculously good terrain with Heroscape
• Pimp My Game I: Quarriors playmats
• Pimp My Game II: Quarriors scoring pieces. These are phenomenal!
• Pimp My Game III: Tablecloth play mat for Race for the Galaxy
• Pimp My Game IV: Cool idea to paint meeples with images – in this case Romeo and Juliet
• Good Eats: Meeple Sugar Cookies
• Custom joke roles for Last Night on Earth: Kool-Aid, Chuck Norris and Snake Pliskin
• For those looking to catch up, there’s a geeklist of all of the Wil Wheaton TableTop episodes
• Funny geeklist of “Goofiest Game Covers”

New Games:

• Recently released: Ghost Pirates, Four Taverns

iOS:

• Le Havre released
• Magic 2013 released
• Summoner Wars submitted, release imminent

News:

• CBS is picking up Draw Something to air on television. For those not in the know (I barely am): This is a Zynga game that is playable on the Internet and is expected to be a high-tech version of Pictionary and Win Lose or Draw.

Recently Played:

• I’m looking forward to the summer so I can get more gaming in. Vacations are really good for that. Also there’s a monthly board game night coming up this week. Only thing I logged this week was a game of Core Worlds with my wife. And I had to take out the garbage to get that one!

Happy Gaming!

Credits: BGG, Purple Pawn

Board Game Madness 6/19

Fun:

• Want to have fun with your friends? Get one of these anti-gravity timers. I guarantee you they’ll be too busy paying attention to the hourglass and they’ll miss the objective, therefore handing you the game. Bank it.
• Destination Gaming: Play Pandemic away from the masses so that you might be able to avoid catching any contagions.
• For those who have played Tales of the Arabian Nights, there’s apparently an inside joke at the end of the book (I’ll have to check my copy). But even to an outsider it’s pretty funny. Apparently this continues a tradition in this game if you read the comments at the bottom.
• Pimp My Game: Custom dice bag for Zombie Dice. Niiiiiiiiice (Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains)
• Pimp My Game II: Someone made a custom water level tower for Forbidden Island that is amazing!
• Pimp My Game III: I’ve often thought of the lazy susan as a great gaming tool and my custom gaming table in my head has one. But someone gussied theirs up really nicely. It works really nicely with Core Worlds.
• Pimp My Game IV: Those that have played Quarriors! know how frustrating the scoring tokens are in that they are very close in color. Here’s some custom tokens that someone made.
• Possibly the most gorgeous set of Backgammon that I have ever seen
• Geek Love: Someone proposed in a game of Innovation.  Very cute idea!
• Someone decided to have some fun with backgrounds and created some beautiful pictures from the ships in Merchants and Marauders. It’s too bad they didn’t use custom painted ships if they went to all this trouble: 1 2 3 4
• “Whooa, there goes Tokyo, there goes Godzilla! Whoo-oooo-ooo.” (Name the group)
• Those who know me know I’m big into cycling. More doing than following. But BGG is doing their own “Le Tour de Geek” which is just getting started. It is a 14 stage race between games a la Geek Madness in March. But this one is actually comparing different aspects of a game including mechanics, value, player interaction, etc. The goal would be to name the most complete game. It sounds fascinating.

New Games:

• Tokaido: For those in need of serenity, a new game is coming out of Japan which has you travelling the “East Sea Road”. You meet other people, eat, collect items and visit interesting places. If you’ve done the most interesting things along the road, you win. They tout it as a zen game that is peaceful and easy to pick up.
• Princes of the Dragon Throne: Card game where you play a young dragon trying to take over the throne. Area control and resource management with a deck building/drafting mechanic from the company that brought you Alien Frontiers.
• Recent releases: Eclipse (2^nd Ed.), Skeleton Island, Samurai Battles

iOS:

• Hacienda released
• Neuroshima Hex released for Android
• Le Havre submitted (imminently available)
• MechWarrior: Tactical Command due this summer
• 7 Wonders companion that keeps score and gives card info among other things released this week. The most interesting thing though is the new wonder called “Cupertino”, after Apples proposed new headquarters. This wonder changes its abilities depending on the stock price for Apple. Crazy!
• Alien Frontiers has returned to Kick Starter, but for the iPad. They need 15K to finish programming.

News:

• More Settlers of Catan environmentalism: Some Yale students developed a variant called Settlers of a Green Future that will be used as part of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. You choose a political philosophy which give you access to green policy cards. You can also team up with other players to form eco-cooperatives.
• Violence in Myrtle Beach after one Taboo player punched another during an argument over rules. Oh yeah, the offender was an Elvis Impersonator too.
• Comicbookresources.com took an interesting look at what movies need to become board games (as opposed to the reverse trend we are seeing today. They chose Brewster’s Millions (great idea!!!!), Chinatown, Psycho (ok that’s going to be weird), Apocalypse Now and Battleship (wait, that’s a joke, right?)

Recently played:

• Another slow week for me. What am I doing? I was biking a ton and completed the Ride to Montauk this past weekend. Now that that is done, I fully plan on getting back to gaming. Hmmm… what to play, what to play?
• I did get a couple of games of Zombie Dice in with the kids

Happy Gaming!

Credits: BGG, Purple Pawn, Google News

Board Game Madness 6/12

Fun:

• Boy, miniature combat games have the most awesome looking tables. Here’s one from HeroScape.
• Jaws reboot starring meeples?
• Very funny geeklist predicting the future of board games. Some of the jokes are BGG insiders, but the bulk are very funny.

New Games:

• CO2: First there was Settlers of Catan Oil expansion. Now Stronghold Games puts out an area control game that’s friendly (or harmful) to the environment. Manage the tide of pollution in the 1970s as the government investing in private companies that have solutions. Go green, make money and manage resources like knowledge to obtain clean and sustainable energy. Release October 2012, and no I have no idea what the carbon footprint of this game is.
• Plato 3000: Card game for 2-4 where you use rummy rules to build a civilization. Release imminently 2012.
• Recently released: Pittsburgh 68, Dixit: Journey, FitzIt, Tournay, Uncharted: The Board Game, Divinare, Monster Chase

iOS:

• Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 release June 20^th
• Quirkle later this summer
• iOS 6 to be released this fall, although unsure of feature set

News:

• To support the brick and mortar stores (aka FLGS), companies are now releasing their games earlier to the local shops and delaying to online retailers. That’s very interesting and I think a really good idea. Right now Queen Games (Fresco) and AEG (Thunderstone) are doing it. I wonder how it’ll effect the shops that also have heavy online presences.
• The world record for longest time playing a single game was broken on the 9^th. These guys were playing Stratomatic Baseball, a game I played incessantly in college.
• Top 100 games everyone should play, as per the Games for Change. This one is crowd sourced through June 20^th. Go ahead and vote!

Recently played:

• Another light week except for Blood Bowl, where my Necromantic team the Death Rockers pulled an upset in the opening round of the playoffs over the Warpstone Rejects (Skaven)and now vault into the semifinals of the Montauk Cup. Opponent still unknown.

Happy Gaming!

Credits: BGG, Purple Pawn