Salishan 2008 Gaming Retreat, Part 3

On to Friday afternoon. Returning from the beach, Chris introduced JD and I to a game in a VHS video box called Scripts and Scribes. The game is a set collecting game very similar to For Sale, with a sorting segment that feels like a complex version of Honeymooner's Bridge, and an auction segment that feels remarkably like For Sale. It's a small press effort, with interesting medieval church iconography on the cards (although this game could be about absolutely anything - For Sale has a stronger theme). The entire game took about five minutes to explain and about 15 more to play. While the sorting segment is a bit more interesting than For Sale, I'm not seeing myself taking the time to find this particular title. On the other hand, if you thought For Sale needed a little sexing up, this might be a winner for you. IIRC, I beat out Chris slightly for the win.

The three of us were joined by Eric, and we pulled out Dominion, a game that uses the best elements of CCGs, and played the most entertaining game I've gotten in of this title yet. We used random card decks that included Gardens, the Witch, and the Thief, along with Moneychangers, Markets (they seem to show up in everything), and a few other things that escape me right now. At about the 2/3rds mark in the game it occurred to me that Gardens were a better buy than 2VP cards, and getting very close to being a much better buy than Provinces (which Chris was snapping up at a rapid rate), so I started grabbing every Garden I could, with Eric trying to take the others. However, I didn't think to take the cards that let you discard cards, so I was stuck with my Curse cards at the end. I also had 59 cards in my deck (Ack!), so my Gardens were only worth 5 points each instead of 6. To Chris' great disgust, we ended up tying for the win. Hee hee!

I neglected to mention a playing of Hanging Gardens, a game that Rita taught Pahdame and JD and I. It's a cute little tile collecting game with a fairly clever semi-solitaire point generation system that saves it from being meh, but saves it in a pretty big way. You get to draft cards that are divided into six sections, and one to three of those sections has symbols in them. You must place the card on your existing cards so that the symbols lie on top of other cards, but the blank spaces can extend out. Once you get three or more symbols connected orthagonally, you can place a marker on that group and pick a tile from another draft pile, based on how many symbols are in your set. The tiles themselves also form sets in varying ways, and the point is to score as many points as possible when the card stack runs out. IIRC, JD, Pahdama and I all scored 29 points and matched on every tiebreaker so we all shared the win. Cute, quick, and the card placement section has enough depth to it that this would make a good filler, although it's a bit component heavy for what it is. The board in particular seems kind of gratuitous. 

After all of this gaming and then dinner, it was time for Ben, Ken, and myself to try out Starcraft: The Boardgame. I suggested this because I've more or less lost interest in most multiplayer strategy games in the vein of Twilight Imperium and Axis and Allies, and wanted to give this title a try before selling it off. I'm very glad I did, because this game is much better than those other two for a couple of reasons. First of all, the map scales to the number of players and can be connected via "z-axes" that allow you to more or less prevent any part of the board from becoming a fortress with a single way to get there. Second, you are limited to choosing four orders to assign to various planets over the course of a turn, which you place in a stack on each planet, all players sharing the same stack. If I place an order on Planet X, then Ken places an order on top of it, when we get to the Execute part of the turn Ken's order is executed before mine will be. There are only three orders, but the timing is really crucial. It also means that you can surprise another player by playing a token on a planet they have a base on as your last placement and they may not be able to react to it, so turn order is important (although it shifts rather than using an auction mechanism). 

I have to tell you that this game is a bitch to explain. I must have spent a good 45 minutes on it, and that was with Ben helping me out. And I didn't even *get* to combat. It was insane, and a couple of turns in I was feeling that this was a game that wasn't going to see more play from me. Once we started mixing things up, it did get much more interesting, and we found that it was pretty easy to beat back the leader only to get beat back yourself on the next turn. There are various timing elements in the game to keep it from taking all night (although we did spend a good 5 to 6 hours playing, but mostly because of unfamiliarity), and I'd imagine that three knowledgeable players could cover this within a couple of hours. The sad thing is that I can't imagine that we'd ever have three knowledgeable players unless it was Ken, Ben, and myself. 

I played one of the Terran factions, and discovered that the units got expensive quickly, even compared to the other two players. We had two resource areas go fully depleted early on, and mine was a gas source, so a good half of my units, mostly the powerful ones, never got built, although I did pretty well with combat. Ken's Zergs looked almost unstoppable, but a combined Protoss (Ben)/Terran campaign did the trick, although we were *one* card away from Stage 3 and a Protoss victory through his special victory condition. On the next turn, Ken and I went after the Protoss and I very nearly met *my* special victory condition, but couldn't attack the sixth resource area I needed because I belatedly realized that Ben had built air defenses and I had to attack from the planet itself (which I could have done had I realized this and added a second Movement action to that planet). 

At this point it was after midnight and time to stop. I think we were probably a turn or two away from finishing, and everyone agreed that we'd done what we set out to do. The game is much much cooler than it appeared at first blush, with the game flowing pretty easily once we started getting through all of those nagging rules questions that required digging through the 48 page rulebook. My god, they are a mess. Still, we all felt it was pretty good, with the very strong caveat that we would not be too thrilled to play a game at a con with people we didn't know, whether they knew the game well or not (I could see major arguments breaking out over tiny rules issues), and it was a difficult game to teach (although I can see ways to streamline it now that I've gotten a game or two in). Major kudos to Ben and Ken for sitting through our play session, and I think they both walked away with the same impression I had - good game, tricky to get on the table. This one I'll keep, and hope that it works well for two players (unlikely, as it's too hard to beat someone up once you've been beat up yourself). 

That was it for Friday. The next and final report will cover Saturday in it's entirety.

Salishan 2008 Gaming Retreat, Part 2

Friday dawned bright and early. Particularly early for me, as I didn't manage to get to sleep until after 4am and I was awakened by a gorgeous vista from the loft around 7:30am. Not that I was about to let only three or so hours of sleep deter me from a great gaming day!

After Mike prepared us breakfast (a treat as I usually have cereal and OJ and not much else), the three of us sat down to play the latest Ticket to Ride game, Nordic Countries. Or, as I have put it on various occasions, TtR: Elf Edition, TtR: Santa Klaus is Komming To Town, and TtR: That Reindeer Has A Really Cold Nose Edition. The game is intended for two or three, and has it's own twists: Locos are only for the ferries and tunnels and can be picked up just like any other card (but there are tons of ferry and tunnel routes), and the bonus is for the most tickets rather than longest route. 

I was surprised to see myself all alone in the southern climes near Oslo at first, building up along the coast of Norway and over to the northern end of the Gulf of Bothia (if that's what it's called - the northern arm of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden). I struggled to complete the northernmost route, which required either red cards and locos or the long green tunnel. Finally completed, I started grabbing tickets, which required me to do a little building but not much. I finally ran into trouble when Chris finished off his train supply (you only get forty instead of forty five train markers) and I was one card away from having what I needed to finish a shorty route I'd picked up at the end of the game. Mike had run away with the game by finishing his routes early, then drawing tickets that matched up with existing routes. I think he ended with more than 100 points in tickets, not counting the bonus. 

I really like the TtR series, but have a nagging suspicion that the game requires a larger map and more players to work effectively. The problem is that the luck of the draw in tickets can make an enormous difference in how people score as you are more likely to cover significant ground on a smaller map and thus can grab those routes easily. I did pretty well with routes, but had chosen long high-paying routes from my initial selection and that one long red route took me several cycles to collect as we sat on the draft pile for several turns. That's not to say the game isn't good (it's certainly less of a problem than it was with Switzerland), but I prefer the larger maps and especially the US and Maerklin over the others. 

At this point, Mike decided to shower, so Chris taught me Hill 218, a very simple militarily themed card game that plays in about 10 minutes or less, making it excellent filler. Each side has a deck of cards that have three attributes: where you can place it in relation to the cards you already have, what enemy cards around it you can remove based on that card play, and what pre-existing cards you must have played to support that removal. A few cards allow removal without support, the artillery card at range. The point of the game is to place a card in your opponent's home base area, which are found on either side of the central "Hill 218" card. It's a very easy game to play, and you'll need to learn the basic tactics needed to remove the opponent's cards and what positions are most critical for your own protection. Good play will defeat poor play every time if you are occasionally stymied by luck of the draw, and it's just right for the size and length it is. Highly recommended as a travel game, as it can be played in an airport if perhaps not on your tray table. Chris, of course, beat me handily in our first game after I made a rookie mistake, and while he had a tougher time in the second game he won that as well. 

Around this time, the waves of new faces started arriving: first Lorna, then KC and Rita, Ben and Pahduma, Matt R, and JD. Time to start playing the more involved games, and since Lorna was going to have to leave later that afternoon she got to select her first game, which was Age of Scheme, a Winsome Games train/stock game placed in about the same region as After the Flood, although clearly with rails or camels or something and "marriages" instead of stock. Like the well-received Wabash Cannonball game, you place wooden cubes as track, stock is relatively rare, and you want to be the one connecting two lines with the one you have all the stock in. 

In our game, we had six players and that may have been too many. With only four shares of stock per line, there was a huge advantage if you went right after people who made the connections, so it was nearly impossible to set up people taking their turn with four other players between you. Rita and I found ourselves with relatively little stock (four shares each) compared to five or six for the others, and by about halfway in it was clear that with everyone diversified there was no way I could move without helping the leaders, so I just started taking the "Business" option and giving myself $5 per turn. I came in dead last. Given the somewhat snarky nature of the game's name (related to the rift between Martin Wallace and the owner of Winsome Games over the Age of Steam copyright), and the deterministic end, I can't recommend this, at least with six. Sadly, this game was the most disappointing of anything I played over the weekend.

The other group had finished their game, so we jumped right into a great game of Power Grid: Korea with Rita, Pahduma, JD, and myself. I consider Power Grid to be one of the few games I'm particularly competitive at, which is a little strange because I'm generally poor at bidding games because I can't quickly and accurately estimate how much a given item is worth. Korea is a relatively new map, and I picked it over the China map because both JD and Pahduma had never played before and it only had one special rule: there are two resource markets, one for the North and one for the South, and you can only purchase resources from one or the other in a given turn. We chose not to use the two northernmost areas, as they typically had very expensive connections compared to the rest of the board, and so fit into the very dense South areas. JD started near Seoul, with me just to the south, Rita even further south, and Pahduma on the eastern coast. 

Our game was very unusual in that the larger plants came out early, and we got to the midgame pretty quickly, perhaps five or six turns. Once we had the good plants, however, things slowed down a lot. We had perhaps seven or eight turns where no one wanted the current plants as they would have been a drain on us, and we had more or less filled up the map at that point (preventing a win by, I think, Pahduma that JD and I had to fill in the remaining cities). After what seemed an incredibly long time where very little happened other than Rita, JD, and myself competing for either garbage or nukes, I found myself fortuitously buying first right after we hit step 3. I had amassed over 300 Elektros, burned down a little because of the city-expansion frenzy to prevent Pahduma's hitting 17 cities and taking the win with the most powered cities, and after having enough to power 13 cities, I then expanded in five or six cities, enough to hit 17 and clench the win. This was a good map for 4, and not a bad choice for a teaching map in some respects. It would have been interesting to see how the game would have come up with a more balanced plant sequence, but that's what makes the game great.

There were four more games to be played on Friday, which I will leave to the next post. JD, Chris, and myself did take a little break at this point to go see a rather spectacular sunset on the beach, with the sun merging into the haze on the horizon. Many pictures were taken, but I was glad I had both my hat and my heavy coat on. So far, I hadn't done terribly well in play other than the Power Grid game, but that was such a sweet win that I had enjoyed the weekend tremendously by this time.

Salishan 2008 Gaming Retreat, Part 1

Two years ago, the threat of inclement weather for drivers trying to negotiate the Cascade Mountain passes between Portland and Sunriver convinced me to ask Chris to host our fall game retreat at his family's vacation home in Salishan on the Oregon Coast, making it our premier weekend after the leaves begin falling. This was the first year I was able to make it out, the last two years having seen conflicts with my choir performance schedule. 

Keep in mind that most of the gaming retreats our group has, including WBC-West, have been at my family's Sunriver vacation house, and thus I've been the host for almost all of them. While I have been to a gaming retreat at Salishan at Chris' place before, it was an extra addition to the usual twice-yearly euro retreats. Still, this was really the first *big* retreat I'd been to when I wasn't the guy in charge, and I have to say that it was a very nice change. 

We had a ton of people coming in and out over the time I was there, and I left a little early, both to get back for holiday events on Sunday and so that JD could get back on Saturday night (which we accomplished about 10 minutes before midnight!) Among the attendees were myself, Chris, Mike, Matt R, KC and Rita, JD, Ken R, Eric, and non-RCG folks (technically) Lorna, Ben C, Pahduma (hope I spelled that even remotely correctly), and Ken C. That's 13 people, more than we've ever had at Sunriver. I'm hoping that we can continue this tradition in the future at Sunriver as well, as the new faces spiced things up very nicely, although of course the old-timers are always nice to have around. 

First off, a huge thanks to everyone who prepared meals. They seemed to be relatively easy to prepare, and every one was delicious and allowed everyone else to get in a lot of gaming. We may try this at Sunriver as well in the future. I chose early not to prepare a meal, mostly because I felt that I could get the pass this once due to my previous retreat hosting duties. I have to say, while I love hosting, it is nice once in a while to leave a house without feeling like I've forgotten to make a bed or turn down the thermostat and leave it to someone else to do. Of course, those who stay until the end of the Sunriver retreats know the drill and it's gotten to be very easy to do, but the break was nice and increased my enjoyment of this particular session.

Secondly, a huge thanks to Chris for his incredible prep work, hosting, and general pleasantness to be around. He and I have very similar senses of humor (ironic, perverse, quick, occasionally biting but well-intentioned), and he's a joy to game and hang with. Special kudos to using a Geeklist format to plan gaming activities, similar to what we've done with WBC-West, but the first time it's happened for a more casual retreat, and the first time I've seen it done via Geeklist. 

Thirdly, a huge thanks to everyone who came. While I wasn't involved in every game, and felt that I stayed exactly as long as I should have (Thursday evening through late Saturday), there was a great vibe in the house, and a special shout-out to Pahduma for jumping into some incredibly complex games with a smile and a willingness to enjoy herself. This woman, who is not a native English speaker, took on Power Grid twice, as well as playing a Cylon in BstarG. Ben, from what I've seen you have a keeper. Everyone, however, was a joy to game with, and that's a big part of why Rip City Gamers is such a special group. The laughter was more or less non-stop throughout the entire weekend, not an easy thing to do with twelve people crammed into a house of this size - even at Sunriver it would have been a big stretch.

Onto the games. I considered a Geeklist, but think that the blog format is a better one in this case as no tracking is really required. In this first section, I'll cover our Thursday night game.

Thursday night was Mike, Chris, and myself after Lorna and a few others discovered they couldn't come out until Friday morning, so rather than Mike and I playing Warriors of God, it was the three of us playing After the Flood, one of Wallace's new titles from his new Treefrog imprint. 

AtF, despite the acronym, is not about a government agency, nor is it particularly biblical (as the name led me to believe). Instead, it is a typical Wallace game strongly themed on the ebb and flow of civilizations in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent from the Sumerian period through the Assyrians. It is more or less the same scope as Chariot Lords, although clearly a much different game with different objectives. Chris called it a wargame, but I felt it lacked a strong enough commitment to the historical events rather than just a framework for a very nice Euro, but it was still a very intriguing title. 

You spend the game building cities in the Crescent area of the map, which gives you some Special Mutant Powers in some locations, but also the opportunity to score particularly good points by upgrading cities as well. The outlying areas provide places to exploit various resources, which utilizes a system of cubes and disks to represent various materials and produced goods. You get these goods through the use of placing workers on the board, which costs resources in and of itself, and then trading up. For example, you might use a textile good to place two workers in a space that has metal and wood. Wood is only good for upgrading cities, but the metal can then be transformed by workers in a Tool Maker box into a Tool disk, which can then be used to upgrade to lapus lazuli. You start with a set of grain and textiles at the start of every turn, and it is understanding how to leverage these goods that will determine the winner.

Complicating matters is the presence of the armies of expanding peripheral civilizations such as Egypt and the Chaldeans. Each of the five turns there are three different civs that can appear, each of which has a particular starting area (which you must have a majority of workers in) and a strength, measured in units (this ranges from 3 up to 12). You can increase the number of units by a Special Mutant Power and by paying resources. These armies can expand across the board, and they prevent trade by anyone except the army owner in spaces they go into. They can also destroy cities, fight other armies, and generally allow players to have their way, although they do have some limits. 

This was the first game of AtF for both Mike and myself, and I found myself short of resources to do what I needed to do in the first two turns. By the third turn, I was starting to understand how to allocate the grain and textiles so that I could produce the various goods necessary to improve my cities and get the really big points, although you can generate a ton of points through army expansion as well. Chris, of course, had played twice and that was a huge advantage to him. He knew how to crank the resource machine, and managed to field enormous armies nearly every turn. While the game can tend to have huge leaps forward in points for some players and not for others, Chris was clearly winning handily by the fourth turn, and while Mike and I made a bit of a run at it we simply couldn't catch up. I was making some astute plays late in the game (the use of Scribes to shift workers is particularly useful, especially late in a turn), but in a five turn game, it's difficult to compete if you've screwed up two of them. 

All in all, I like the game, although I wouldn't quite put it at the top of the pile just yet. For one thing, it requires exactly three people, and takes a good three hours to play (our game, including 'splainin', took four hours). There is a tremendous amount of thinking required, and about turn four I was thinking that for this much work I'd just as soon be playing a wargame rather than a strategy game. There are many things to look out for, and trying to cover all of your bases can become difficult. Still, this is a very good game from Martin Wallace, and I will almost certainly invest in a copy at some point when Martin has his website updated and you can actually order it from the store (Chris' copy was from a "buy these three games in a package" deal that was as much preorder as anything else). I definitely liked it better than Steel Driver, which felt like Wabash Cannonball but more involved (not as good a think as I'd have liked). I do feel that the title could be misleading, especially for Christians looking for a game that reinforces their faith - there are no religious or Christian elements in the game at all, not even Hebrews or going into bondage. In fact, it could be argued that the game "glorifies" many of the antagonists of the Hebrews - Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians, all of the civilizations that went through the Eastern Med on their way to smack each other. Oddly, the aforementioned Chariot Lords *does* include the Hebrews, at least for a couple of turns. 

Of course, for me this isn't really a selling point (or not), just my take on a poorly chosen title from someone who almost certainly doesn't understand American religious habits. 

In my next post, I'll cover the Friday games, including a detailed description of Age of Scheme and Starcraft.

New Year's Resolutions - The GeekList

I've created a GeekList to better track my resolutions, which you can find here. Please feel free to comment. I've tried to incorporate some of the comments made so far, but feel free to restate them if you wish. New comments are definitely welcome as well, that's why I put up the GeekList.

Special Note to TV: There are ten resolutions *just* for you, my friend. ;-)

New Year's Resolutions

I figure if I start a month early, I've got a much better chance of beating the rush of resolutions and best (and worst) of 2008 blog entries that will overwhelm the 'Net in about three weeks. 

Rather than resolutions, these are some modest goals I've set for myself in 2009 vis a vis gaming. At this time, this is a working list, not a final list, and I'm always interested to see whether or not people think that these projects are a complete waste of time (or not). 

1) Play through every SPQR Deluxe battle using the Simple Great Battles of History rules. This is just the stock SPQR battles (five, I think, including Zama and Cannae), but also the Deluxe scenarios that originally came with the first four expansion modules (War Elephant through Africanus). Note that one of the original War Elephant scenarios, one including Antiochus the Lame and more elephants than you can roll rampage for in a day, was not added to the Deluxe scenarios, instead replaced with Bagradas Plains because the original scenario was much closer to Alexander's era than Hannibal's in terms of weapons systems. I'm planning at least a couple of smaller scenarios, then moving up to running through the rest in historical order. My goal is to play one every month, but get the first two learning games in before the end of this year to get myself refreshed. I will document each of these games on this blog. In case it wasn't clear, my intent is for this to be a solo effort, as most of these battles were blowouts and less than fun for one side or the other. I will not cover scenarios from C3i (other than Bagradas, which was originally from that magazine), nor from any expansions that came afterwards, such as Jurgutha or Barbarian. For now, it's about getting through that one box and that set of scenarios.

2) Play a monster game as part of a team. And by "monster," I don't mean playing the Edge of the World scenario in Case Blue, but a multi-map big game with more counters than a single person should be allowed to control. The candidates for this are a little tricky, as the wargamers in my group like different games for different reasons. OCS we might find four people for, EFS looks like there is a small chance of four, Grand Tactical (Devil's Cauldron) looks like just Jesse and I, and I don't know that I'd ever get enough people interested in 1914: Twilight in the East without traveling south on I-5 to play the designer. I suppose that you could also consider EuroFront as a monster, although like most grand strategic ETO games you have the issue of whoever runs the Western Allies sitting on their tukuses (tuki?) for the first half of the game.  Of course, WBC-West is the best chance for long-term play, and we could almost certainly get four people playing a game for two days straight, which to my mind would qualify so long as it was a really big map. However, I'm not fussy. I'd just like to try out a team game. Note that there is some slight chance I'll do this in late December with Mike and Chuck playing EFS, but with Lylah the imminent grandcritter due at exactly that time, I'm not counting on that.

3) Contribute back to the hobby. I've done this in various ways over the years, from organizing a game group and retreats, to participating in podcasts, to this very blog. Assuming, of course, that you can wade through my political diatribes to get to the gaming parts. ;-) What I'm thinking of specifically this time around is helping people to learn wargames, either through a video (a la Boardgames with Scott) or else through use of Flash animation, or even perhaps through community outreach at Jesse's store. As not only someone who generally does the 'splainin' when our group learns a new game, but someone who has actually been *paid* to both develop and deliver technical material (what fools my evil overlords were), I think that this is a good niche for me, and one that has some chance of success. Of course, if I do a good job there will be pressure to continue to produce learning materials...

4) Try games from companies other than the ones I buy from now. That list is really fairly short, and includes GMT Games, MMP on the top tier, with Columbia, L'n'L Games, DVG, Simmons, Avalanche Press, and Decision on the second tier. Academy Games is a new player with only one title (Conflict of Heroes), but it's definitely on the list. There are game companies I've learned to stay away from, including Critical Hit who had some of the most antagonistic customer support I've ever seen. However, there are tons of other, mostly tiny, wargame publishers out there, including several that do DTP designs such as Khyber Pass Games. This is an area where I could use a lot of help from the great unwashed masses out there, if anyone wanted to suggest a particular game from a publisher not listed above. Unfortunately, since I'm signed up to preorder almost everything coming from GMT and MMP, I may need extra help finding places to *put* all of these games, so I'll be picky for now. I should hurry with this effort, as the economy may kill many of the very companies I'd like to try out before I'm able to pick these games up!

5) Play a full campaign game of anything, preferably something manageable. By "campaign" I mean a game that covers the full history of a particular theater or event that is the longest scenario in the box. An example would be to play the full game of the SCS title Afrika II that runs some 30+ turns. Actually, that's probably the game I'll pick. This would be a game I'd leave set up on a sidetable and I'd play over a long period of time. There is also every possibility that this would be a solitaire specific game such as Fields of Fire, but I'd like for it to be as sweeping as possible and that game may not qualify. Note that this is unlikely to occur with a monster game in 2) above, mostly because while I'd like to play a team monster I don't think I'd be playing, say, the Case Blue game in campaign form, at least not just yet. That's almost certainly more time than I can devote without it becoming a lifestyle choice.

6) Play at least one naval game such as Flying Colors or War Galley. 

7) Play Burning Blue at least once against a live opponent. This may mesh up with 8) below.

8) Play at least two long-term games via VASSAL. Eric and I are starting a Pursuit of Glory game (after an abortive attempt screwed up by some problems with the beta module that we're leaving off after one turn), but I'd like to get one other game in. Generally this is a bad idea because historically I've tended to wake up at 2am thinking about how that Austro-Hungarian unit is out of position and that I should really have moved it somewhere else, but so far our PuG game has not had that problem, mostly because I have no idea what constitutes "out of position" so far. 

9) Get through all of the Conflict of Heroes scenarios. I've played five times, teaching the game every time with the first scenario, and usually as the Russians (which means I have yet to win). Time to get into the other scenarios and find out if this game is really the real deal when the entire system is in use.

10) Attend one out of town con focused on wargaming. That means that the Eugene Games Gala that Lorna puts on doesn't count. Chances are excellent that this will be a GMT Games weekend in April, something I can drive to now that gas is under $2/gal. 

Ten things is more than enough, even if many of them are relatively small goals, achievable with a single event or game. A few of them are more grandiose, such as the SPQR scenarios or the monster game play, and especially the training video idea, which requires me to figure out how best to present information and probably learn at least one new tool. I'll keep you posted as the year progresses as to how I'm doing.

Thanks again for feedback on the list. Suggestions for different goals or changes to the ones I've listed here are welcomed, and I'll post a final list at month's end.