Yet More Gaming!

Mike's holiday all-day game session was so much fun, I decided to keep the party going - especially for those who couldn't make it last Tuesday. A lot of people showed up - Mike, George, Pradeep (a friend of George's), Alex, Chris, Ken, JD, Matt R, Jeff, and myself. That's a houseful, and we managed to stick to (mostly) two tables. We also got through more than three pizzas and a lot of snacks. 

First on the table was a quick round of Mamma Mia!, one of my favorite light games of all time, and one that Dave claims he won't play with me because I'm too good at it. Not today, as I sucked mightily with only two orders filled by game end. George was in the same boat, Matt and Mike did somewhat better, but first-timer Pradeep got seven of his eight orders filled. Clearly we'll need to watch him closely. Jeff, who got my address from our group database (which I did not know existed, and had information from more than six years ago in it), had showed up at my old house about 20 minutes away, but we waited for him to arrive before starting our next game.

Which was Power Grid, using the US map and excluding the NW part. We weren't sure which of the two western areas to exclude, and so we diced for it and the Great Northwest lost out. I will not lie - I consider myself a pretty good Power Grid player, and feel I do well in estimating how much money I will need during the course of a turn, even if I'm placing cities and gathering resources last. And I was - I built one or two extra cities on the second turn, putting me permanently in first place for most of the game. I made good choices when it came to power plants, getting just enough to do what I needed and not a lot more, and was able to power them most of the time (I was short only in the first couple of turns, mostly because I wanted to establish my territory early). 

This strategy worked pretty well for me - I was the second to place my initial city and picked the NE corner near NYC, and never hurt for places I could expand to. It should be noted that you play with only five areas (not six) in a six player game, the trigger to go to Step 2 is six cities built instead of seven, and the game ends when someone has built 14 cities. 

My initial purchases were for garbage (something I rarely had competition for), then a mixed oil/coal plant, and a low end wind farm. Mike was going for the nukes, and everyone else seemed to be running into placement problems as the game went on. Only one person went West, and that was first-timer Pradeep, who seemed to run into cash problems pretty regularly. Not surprising for a new player, but it didn't affect me much as he was firmly established in the Mississippi Valley, while I was on the other side of the Appalachians right up to the end. 

Then came the fateful turn, the one where I realized that at 11 cities built and good income for the past several turns, and the capacity to power 12 cities (and no one within reach who could beat me, although I was a little concerned about Mike), that if I built up to 14 I'd almost certainly win. Even better, I needed two garbage to fill out my resources, and thus had almost no costs above having to buy an extra power plant and replace one of my old ones. I replaced the garbage driven 3 plant with a garbage driven 5 plant to get to eight, and spent a bit more than I wanted to, but was still in good shape. Mike noticed by the time we got to buying resources that I could end the game if I had enough cash, and that was a true statement - I had close to 100 Electro at that point after buying my plant. I was able to build three more cities easily, and no one else was able to power more than 11 plants, and thus I pulled out the win right after we'd gotten to step 3. A really fun game, and I have no idea how I was able to pull ahead and stay there for so long. I blame my opponents. ;-)

Ken, Chris, Alex, JD, and the pizza arrived about this time, so after a little chewage we split up into two groups. Mike, Ken, Chris, Alex, and JD all played Indonesia, the "small" Splotter game from the folks who gave you Roads and Boats, while Pradeep, George, Jeff, Matt, and myself tried out Android. For about five hours. And got through half of the game. 

What to say about Android? It's unusual in many respects - very strongly themed, asymmetrical player characters, bit-rich enough to make Le Havre blush, gorgeous to boot, and some very clever interlocking subsystems. There's the Conspiracy, there's individual plots, there's the whole Light/Dark shifting system that encourages you to screw the other players, the novel vector-based movement system (with calipers, no less). There are two evil corporations to blame, witnesses/suspects to pin the crime on (or gun down), a multi-faceted economic system in the form of "favors", and more options than you can shake a stick at. 

And Fantasy Flight didn't even tell us it was coming. 

Make no mistake, this game is a monster. So much so that I wouldn't consider playing with five players again. It took up my entire kitchen table and we had so little space we had to put four of the six suspect sheets on a box full of wine next to the table. Explaining this game is a bear, and I really wish I'd spent about an hour coming up with a cohesive plan as to how to explain it all. Fortunately, everyone seemed to get *most* of the rules down. Strangely, people really struggled with the whole "negative means innocent" thing, despite me explaining that you have to *prove* guilt, and the numbers measured guilt. I must have gone over what the Perjury tokens did about 30 times, pretty much every time someone drew a non-numeric piece of evidence. The thing we didn't have trouble with, or at least too much, was the whole lightshift/darkshift idea, especially since Matt figured out that there was a direction arrow on the top of all the Twilight cards that made it easier. My thematic explanation is that you "bank" up a bunch of light points when you lightshift, and spend them by moving toward the dark side when you play a light card. 

Much of the time was spent figuring out what you could and couldn't do, and reading the cards, and figuring out a few things (like whether or not you draw a card if your hand is full but it's not by your choice, such as with a Dark card played on you - the rules are a bit vague, although there is a reference buried in one section, and most of the other mentions of the rule say you can't draw over the hand limit under very specific circumstances, leading one to suspect that there might be exceptions). This is *very* clearly a game where you need to understand what every detective playing can do, what will bring them success, and what you can do to bring them down. Yes, you get a sheet explaining all of that, but to be honest there is so *much* going on in the game that I was suffering from a certain amount of sensory overload (and I was teaching the game, as well!)

After the first week, we all decided to pack it in. There was a *ton* of evidence on each of the suspects (this was how most of us spent our time), the Conspiracy was almost entirely filled in, with some very interesting paths (some destinations have five, count 'em, five links), but when it came down to it, Mark Henry had gotten the most evidence against him (poor little clone!), giving Matt an extra 23 points thanks to the Conspiracy. He also did quite well with Conspiracy markers. To be honest, I was focusing on keeping my plot going in the right direction, which turned out well, and trying to raise some money for Rachael (which I forgot to add into my final score of 44, which should have been 46). Matt, however, nailed it with 88 points. 

I can see how there was a real rush to fill in the Conspiracy on a regular basis because of the extra VP for filling in a row or column, but at the same time it seemed to me that this also gave everyone enough information that we'd have been vying for the various favors that now had VP during the game as well as trying to kill suspects. Hard to say. I do know that I found this game as difficult to keep track of as a monster wargame, as everything interconnects - the personal life of the detectives, their personal ambitions and flaws, the twilight cards, the conspiracy - it's really an amazing design in many ways, but it will suffer from being a high end game, something that casual gamers might buy, but would only play once. This game is for the hard-core, and you know I'm talking to you.

Now that I've played, I feel like I could get the teaching down a bit quicker, but it will still take 20 minutes or so. Everything hits at once, so no chance to teach a little, then have people learn other stuff as it becomes relevant. I'd also play with three, four tops unless you like a lot of downtime. I missed playing Dark cards several times because I was looking up rules and didn't realize people were halfway into their turns much of the time, and that's a really critical part of the game. 

On the plus side, every character has different strengths and weaknesses, and while that 15VP for nailing the guilty party is a pretty nice bonus, at the same time you can do just as well if you have good happy endings to your plots, maybe more if there are a lot of links to bonuses in the conspiracy. As such, there's an incredible amount of depth in the game (and to the backstory - it's essentially Blade Runner with a space elevator and a moon base added in), and if this is the sort of thing you like (and you have the space, time, and friends to play with), you'll enjoy it quite a bit. 

One last thing - This is not a "figure out who did it" game. It's a "nail the evidence to the person you want to go down for the crime" game, in practice if not in theory. It's a bit like Schroedinger's Cat - some one is guilty, but you won't find out until you end the game, and right up to that point no one knows who it is and in fact *cannot* know who it is - there's no smoking guns, no damning testimony, just a rather abstract system that will drive mystery fans nuts. No, this game is about the detectives, what drives them, and what drives them slowly insane. As a man who sees people as deeply flawed, no matter how good their intentions are, this game speaks to me in a very visceral sense in much the same way that Bstar-G speaks to my occasional paranoia, and I hope to see it on the table often once we start getting a few more people up on the ruleset. 

I'll say this - there is no way I'm teaching this game at a con, or even playing it unless I know the parties involved. Take that as you will.

The Indonesia game (which had morphed into an Acquire game) upstairs finally broke up, and we were back down to six, with Ken taking the place of Jeff in our initial group. Ken and Pradeep hadn't played Medici before, and Matt did a great job of explaining the rules. Off we went! I started with a focus on fur and cloth, but Mike screwed me up by collecting fur as well. Since he would bid after me in nearly every auction, that didn't bode well. What really nailed me, however, was mis-remembering my color (I was black, but thought I was green for 20 seconds), and when Ken bid 26 on a very nice Gold/5 Fur/5 Cloth set, I thought I wouldn't have any money left for future bids (I would have one slot remaining), so I passed. In fact, I had 32 points, and this would have fit my hand quite well. I ended up having to draw at the end of the round, and drew utter crap. My own fault, but it killed me in the game and I ended up a distant last. I can't quite remember who won, but I do know that four players (Matt, Ken, George, and Mike) all finished within a few points of each other, perhaps one or two points separating each one. A phenomenal game, just one I played about as badly as I've played ever. 

However, there were many cries of "21!" throughout, so my now legendary overbid from years past lives on. Yay.

George, Matt, and Pradeep all took their leave at this point, and Mike, Ken, and myself played one last game: Ticket to Ride: Go Home Santa, The Freakin' Holiday's Over Edition. Mike and I had played at Salishan in early December, and Mike won by consistently drawing routes that fit in with his Oslo/Stockholm/Helsinki axis. This time, I went for the same route as Mike had before, and it was clear we were going to compete for these routes regularly. I would steal one from Mike, then he'd steal one from me. Ken, meanwhile was running the other arm of the X from us, going from Helsinki in a northwesterly direction, the only person really going into northern Sweden/Norway.

At least, he was right up until Mike played 15 cards to take the long Murmansk route. Ken realized that he too needed to get into Murmansk, and snapped up the other route into that city, screwing Mike up to no end. We were all drawing tickets like madmen, so much so that there was a single ticket in the deck at game end. I got kind of lucky with my draws - the initial draw gave me four similar tickets, and I was able to get two out of the next one, and singles out of the next two (although the last one gave me a bit of a scare as time was clearly running out). Ken ended the game by playing all of his trains, literally, including a one-spacer for the very last turn of the game. 

At this point, Mike had a commanding lead, and if he could generate the most tickets he's be a winner. Imagine my surprise to realize that both he and Ken had unfinished routes, while mine were all completed! In fact, I'd been able to lay five or six more trains down during the last couple of rounds, which is unusual for me (I'm usually finding out about that time that I'm not going to finish what I started). Mike got up over 100 points in the final tally, Ken was behind him about 15 or so points, and we stopped counting my points once I got to Mike's score and still had five tickets left to score. I guess I done good. 

Ten more hours of gaming, with barely any time wasted on managing the dogs, eating, eliminating, all of those pesky distractions. Thanks to all who attended, especially Pradeep, who got thrown in the deep end in a big way, and took it all in stride. It was also nice to game with George and Jeff again, but to be honest it's a great group and just about anyone is my favorite partner when it comes to the Rip City Gamers. 

Of course, we were having all of this fun as the news of Israel invading Gaza was coming over the airwaves. I do not pretend any favoritism in this conflict - I think both sides make good points as well as bad - but I do know that this part of the world will never know peace as long as Israel exists as a state. I have a rather uncomfortable feeling that had the Confederate States managed to secede successfully (and in many ways, they actually *did* after Reconstruction failed and they set up an apartheid system that lasted for nearly 100 years - I *do* "read books" from time to time), that we would be fighting the same kinds of battles with them. We are all deeply flawed, and sometimes it just breaks my heart.

The End of Cable Television

I'm saying it now - cable and satellite television will be the surprise casualties of the economic downturn. 

Local stations are starting to require higher fees in their contracts, which the cable and satellite companies are refusing to pay. In my area, Dish Network no longer carries the ABC affiliate, which will make things interesting when Lost starts airing in a few weeks. Why? Fischer, who owns the affiliates in Yakima, Seattle, and Portland, wants to get as big a piece of the pie as all of the other cable stations, claiming that the downturn has resulted in considerably less advertising revenue (all of those car dealerships going under, for example), and they can only cut staff so much. That means they have to make up the difference somewhere, and if Dish starts charging more for locals people will cut back on their other choices. Belo (which owns several NBC stations around the country, including my local affiliate) had a similar contract dispute with Cox Cable last year, just in time for the Super Bowl. 

Of course, the real issue comes down to advertising as a revenue stream for media in the US, and a huge piece of the pie it is. 26,000 journalists have lost jobs since October, and my local newspaper, The Oregonian, has already tried to cut costs by combining the business, main, and local sections into one section on Mondays, and I fully expect them to do it for the rest of the week within a couple of months as advertising revenue evaporates (they've already lost the classified ad business, the other major economic component, to Craigslist and the Web). 

So what does this mean? I believe that the One Size Fits All model that cable has been able to pioneer, where you get a bundle of channels and can't choose a la carte, is going to die, and with it the cable and satellite companies. What will take it's place is, as you might expect, Internet-delivered programming on a show-by-show basis, paid for by the end user without the middle-man (other than your ISP getting the connection fee for broadband). Suddenly, the Apple TV seems like a good idea... While you won't be able to get network financial assistance up front to put together a program, you will see a shift very similar to what happened with music over the last five years - you'll buy what you want to watch, and watch it when you want to. The biggest issue - it will require you to be computer-savvy enough to get to a web page, and it will require a broadband-speed connection. 

What will happen to the networks? They'll hold on - to a point. The really good stuff will move over to webcasts (and, arguably, they already have - most network shows are viewable on your computer shortly after they are broadcast, and with relatively few ads). The networks will still have programming, but anyone with the ability will simply buy an Apple TV-like product that allows the data to stream to their television (and the good ones will have an input for an HD antenna feed for the on-air stuff) that will allow you to record those programs. With hard disks in the terabyte range at present, and new technology promising to make larger, faster, and sturdier storage available in the very near future, you'll see even DVDs start to fade from sight. 

What's the timetable? I'll be conservative and say that most people will move to pay as you go webcast episodes of programs as well as movies within the next five years. Improved compression algorithms will make this more palatable, as will Wi-Max nets, and you'll only need one box for everything except console games (and if the big players in that market were smart, they'd create plug-in cards that you insert in the box as well, perhaps with a breakout box for controllers, etc). Given how *fast* the economy has tanked, and the enormous effects it's had on business, it could happen even faster. Because the last thing people will dump before their health insurance and the mortgage is the A/V, and they'd rather buy a device now. 

Look me up in five years and see if I'm right.

Tuesday Gaming At Mike's

Snow, a rather stubborn case of cellulitis, the holidays, a new granddaughter, and Chris' gaming retreat at the start of the month all conspired to kill Tuesday gaming in December for me. As of yesterday, I had missed all four sessions (which includes those cancelled because of all the snow we got this month - Portland is not a town that deals with snow in what anyone would term an "effective" way). Thank goodness Mike held an all-day session at his place, which I was so excited about I showed up before anyone else!

While we waited, Mike and I pulled out Dominion (which may be our new "summoning" game while we wait for more people to show up, you can even drop people into an ongoing game without too much trouble, although they'll be behind), picking random action card decks. A quick perusal on my part and it was pretty clear that by far the best strategy was going to be trying to pick up Mine cards and a couple of Cellars and just try to get those Copper cards upgraded as quickly as possible. At least, that was the strategy that looked like it would work to me, and boy howdy did it ever work. I ended with six of the eight Province cards, a good half of the Duchies, and a stack of Estates. Mike never had a chance. I may be getting this game down...

Greg showed up just in time for us to try out the new Lost Cities boardgame, and Mike had explained about half of the game (not much time at all) when Jim arrived as well. The game has gotten a certain reputation as a weak game modeled on a successful card game, but I didn't find that at all. Like the card game, you play a card, then draw a card, and you have to build them up in numeric order. There are no Agreement cards to multiply your total, nor are the high-value cards all that high-value anymore. Instead, each card allows you to move one of your explorers up the track for that suit, with big bumps from -10 to 5 and from 15 to 30 (where there is also a bridge on each track, important for ending each round). One of your explorers has a pituitary issue, and it is worth double the value on that track, even if you're in the negative range. You still discard onto a pile for each of the various suits, and can draw from those piles. There are also spaces on the board that give bonus points, extra moves, and artifact tokens that you collect throughout the game, and these are public knowledge (a good thing) and change from round to round. I found myself ignoring what was on a track in favor of getting my Big Kahuna up to the 50 space in each of the three rounds, and won handily. 

Some of the elements of the card game are simply not present. Because the 10 cards aren't handing your opponent ten points (you now play cards to move spaces, not to gain that many points), that's not a terrible discard, even early in the game. It's still better to discard cards your opponents can't use because they've passed them by, but it's not nearly as critical as in the card game. That means your decisions aren't as difficult - focus on your Big Kahuna (it was the first thing I placed in every round), and use the Extra Move spaces to get it along the track quicker if you don't have the cards. 

What saves the game is the "timer" - the round ends when five explorers have gotten over bridges over the combined tracks, or when the cards run out. In our game, one ended with explorers, one ended with cards, and one ended with both occurring simultaneously. As a result, you are trying to get in as many cycles as you can (just like the card game) before time runs out. Of course, drawing from discard piles can slow the game down a bit, but with four players that isn't going to help much unless everyone is doing it. 

The other high point of this game is that you can explain it easily to non-gamers, unlike the original. I taught my wife to play the card game, and she never did get it (or never cared to). I'm pretty confident she'd get the boardgame version, so it's probably more appropriate for families with kids in the 8-10 demographic. I walked away from the game very excited about it, but then again Cooley's Law almost certainly applies, and as I've typed out the recap I find myself seeing the big problem pretty clearly - for gamers, the decisions are all pretty obvious given your hand. This one will stay on the bubble for now.

By now a few more people had arrived - Rita and KC, and Mike's son Colin wanted to join in (his friend Rochelle came by in the next hour or so, and was a very nice addition to the group). Since there have been so many comparisons between Agricola and Le Havre recently, we decided to play side-by-side games, with Rita, Greg, and myself playing Le Havre. This was my first game, and Greg did a great job explaining the rules to me, so well that I had very few issues during play in what is a pretty involved game when you take all of the buildings into account. Greg won, of course, but that was largely because I got stalled between getting my second liner or the bank when I foolishly used one too many bricks to buy an iron (should have used a cow), and so lost one cycle. Scores were 230 to 200 to 130, with Rita in the rear having to worry a lot more about food than, say, me (I had six ships at the end of the game, enough to generate 16 food a turn!)

The game is far too complex for me to summarize here, but it's definitely in the "resource management" realm. It manages to avoid what is the Achilles' Heel of Agricola, the individual hand of Minor Improvements that can make or break your chances of winning. It was a long game (both took around 3 hours including 'splainin'), but time flew by on both tables and suddenly it was 2pm and no one had eaten lunch! I'm quite taken with the game, and am looking forward to giving it a solitaire outing or three in the future. A definite thumbs up from me, and for an impulse purchase (someone in the group had ordered several and I was the last one to sign on), a big and very pleasant surprise. My only complaint is that the board can become a bit of a mess, but that's a pretty minor complaint. 

After a little chow, I managed to convince Colin, Jim, and Rochelle to play Ghost Stories, the new coop game set in ancient China. If you liked A Chinese Ghost Story, this game uses much of the same mythological elements - Chinese ghosts are totally badass. It's also a very difficult game if you have no clue as to what you are doing. I had read the rules ahead of time, but missed the errata about reducing the cost to exorcise a ghost when a Tao marker was on the appropriate villager space BY one instead of TO one, but it didn't help much - we still got wiped after killing only 13 ghosts (20 more in the deck before Wu Feng, and our boards were all filled up). Note to self - you must start exorcising ghosts *very* quickly, as Colin had one run where he ended up placing four ghosts in *one* turn! I hear it's a tough nut, much like Pandemic, and I look forward to trying it out solitaire. Note that the rules are a hard parse, as they use white text on black paper with dark blue notes that are tough to read (although more thematic), and the icons on the cards and village tiles were a bit difficult to get used to. Still, I do like coop games right up to the point where it comes down to how the cards come out, which is the Achilles' Heel of *this* particular genre (semi-coops such as Bstar-G and Shadows Over Camelot excepted), so I'm not sure how much play this will see in the group, especially given how totally awesome Bstar-G is. Having a solitaire variant is a big plus, however, so I'm still glad I got it. 

Last up was the latest (fifth, by my count) edition of Cosmic Encounter, most recently redone by Fantasy Flight. I have the Eon (original) edition, although I never did get the last two expansions (kickers, flares for the later aliens, etc), and later the Mayfair games that were more or less a reprint of the Eon set but with all of the parts and the moons and lucre separated out into the More Cosmic box. The new set retains most of the elements of the original, tweaks some powers, excludes lucre and moons, and adds in a few new powers. The components are awesome - no more System Hex, now you just have five discrete planets in your color, and the art is the usual flashy stuff from FFG, plus really cool flying saucers for your tokens that look remarkably like nipples. Yes, I need to seek professional help, thank you for caring. 

Explaining this game took a lot more work than I'd remembered, but people seemed to get into it very quickly. Greg was the Mirror, which could transpose the digits on an attack card (from 04 to 40, for example), but it was done for both players and had to be done before cards were revealed. Dave was the Cudgel who removed extra tokens when he won, which sounded really great except he hardly ever won a challenge (he started and ended the game, so I think he ended up having exactly four challenges). I was the Vulch and got to pick up all of the Artifact cards (Cosmic Zap, etc) that other people discarded or played (an OK power), Colin was the Warrior, who got bonus attack points with every combat he won or lost, and Rochelle was the Pacifist, and as such those Negotiation cards were very useful for her (she won challenges if she played them).

Two high points of the game (at least for me) - Rochelle attacking me with a Negotiation card, me Cosmic Zapping her power, her Card Zapping my Cosmic Zap. Well done, madam, well done! The other came at the very end of the game, when everyone had four off-system bases, and Dave invited everyone to ally with him to take one of Greg's bases (note that Dave was down to just two bases, so lost his power pretty early, but was frequently invited to ally). Greg swapped the digits, but Dave had the wild Pacifist flare and played a Negotiation card, so he ended up with the same value card as Greg, and since everyone was allied with him but Greg, all of us won - but Greg. I guess Dave could have forced the two of them to negotiate a deal, and thus he and Greg could have won, which is *totally* what I would have done in his place. I actually had thought that he had some card that sent your allies back to their planets, then realized he had just drawn a new hand just before he'd chosen an encounter card, so that wasn't something he'd have planned.

All in all, this is the set to get. The gameplay is the Cosmic you remember (which may or may not be a good thing - this is old school gaming, which means things are completely random in many ways, and while good play will help you win, at the same time it's extended wackiness), the components are awesome, the rules and powers are very clear, and the whole feel makes it seem like an entirely new game. One nit - FFG apparently felt like it had to change almost every term in the game - compromise became negotiation, challenge cards became encounter cards, the hyperspace cone became the hyperspace gate, etc - and so I found myself using incorrect terminology frequently. Since many of the powers require precise terminology, experienced Cosmic players might take some time to adjust. I will say this - I don't see the older editions coming out ever again. This one is far too pretty. 

And with that my brain started to spiral down the drain after ten hours of gaming goodness. In fact, it was so much goodness that I decided to host another full-day session at my place this Saturday just to keep the party rolling. Because I've *got* to get Android on the table at some point, and this may be my only chance before Lorna's big Eugene Games Gala in about a month or so. 

Thanks again to Mike for hosting, who went out of his way to provide everyone with yummy food, not to mention a great space for gaming.

Christmas Bonus

I know there haven't been a lot of reports on gaming sessions recently, partly because of weather, but that should change very soon. I will say that I spent quite a bit of the last 10 days trying desperately to figure out all of the rules holes in Fields of Fire. Once I get some time to myself (in the next few days) I plan to give it a good try now that I've gotten my BGG group game over with (or at least as far as I was willing to continue with it). I'm also running through the rules for Unhappy King Charles!, which looks like a winner in many ways. It's so funny to read rules for games that came on the same day, and see one that makes perfect sense and the other, well, doesn't much of the time. It's frustrating, but if you are at all interested in the concepts that FoF presents (command structure which contains almost all of the decision points, combat and enemy action are all done more or less by the AI), it's worth the work. If you can't tolerate very loose and conceptually poor rules, you may want to wait a few weeks until there's a FAQ out to fill in the gaps. Man, there are a lot of gaps. 

It appears that we may actually melt out of this sloppy snowy mess we have here in Portland in the next few days. I can't imagine how many retail stores will go out of business as a result of what was essentially a weekend and a half of dangerous road conditions, and another afternoon of perhaps the worst traffic snarl in Portland history brought on by a decision by the state (ODOT) to deice a major section of I-5. We walked right into it, which necessitated a 2 hour trip from one side of the freeway to the other so that I could get a prescription filled. After observing the behavior of people, I'm pretty sure that when civilization collapses we'll all be eating each other. 

In the words of the immortal Steve Jobs...

"Oh, just one more thing..."

I am, as of Tuesday, December 23rd 2008, at 2:15pm, a grandfather. Lylah Michelle Grace Madosik, weighing in at 7.1 lbs, 20 inches. Mother and child are doing very well, but I'm still getting used to the idea that my genetic legacy is breathing on her own. Only two more years until she understands enough English to play Dominion...

Best Christmas present... ever!

I'll Be Busy For Christmas

In addition to my new favorite game, "Will My Grandchild Be Born During A Severe Weather Event?" I've been getting a lot of new stuff in the mail lately. Here are my *very* early and initial thoughts on them...

1) Fields of Fire - This is a solitaire game, a rarity these days outside of play on a computer. You play a Battalion commander focusing on a single company of soldiers who have a very specific mission (there are 21 in the game) from three different eras - 1944 Normandy, Korea, and the Vietnam lowlands. That's quite a trick to pull off, as the core of the game is the command net and getting the forces you need to where you want them, as once they get there they'll start shooting like crazy. You actually have to issue orders to them to stop, or to shoot at something more dangerous. It's a little like Burning Blue, where you set up a plan as the Luftwaffe, then send the boys off to do it. Of course, you have a little more control as you can issue orders to reflect the changing nature of the battle as it evolves, but there's no question that planning is the kernel of this game that all else revolves around. Unfortunately, a really badly organized and nearly exampleless ruleset makes learning the game much more difficult than it needs to be, and since it's a solitaire game, you're learning it in a vacuum. See my previous post for how I'm trying to both learn and teach others the system, which I think is about as well conceived as I've seen. As Lee Brincombe-Wood put it, this game will have a FAQ as long as your arm and completely rewritten rules when the next expansion comes out. 

2) Unhappy King Charles - Every so often, GMT puts out a game that was clearly something they weren't thrilled about publishing for some reason, but felt obligated to do so for legal, ethical, or PR reasons. Manifest Destiny felt like that, with it's playtest-version clip art still in place and art that spanned the gamut from copies of classic oil paintings to cartoony cel drawings. Very jarring. However, MD is a great game, one of my favorite multiplayer strategy games. UKC is like that, I think. The map is nice, but the counters look like they were done twenty years ago - teeny art scans in the middle of counters with a solid color background. I like the counters in We the People better, which is an excellent comparison as this game is based strongly on that seminal CDG title. Feedback so far has been good, and I certainly don't have any *other* games about the English Civil War (the one during the 30 Years War), at least at the strategic level. Nice to have another relatively light CDG that will play in an evening, and I have no doubt that my good friend Mike will want to play, he having been one of those socially maladjusted folks who dresses up in funny costumes and stands in a field until someone tells him he's dead.

3) Combat Commander: Pacific - The third installment of this groundbreaking series. The first volume, Europe, was incredible, and the scenarios all felt exciting. I've had more trouble getting into the Mediterranean scenarios, in part because they seem to be less balanced, although that might just be because the minor power decks have such poor discard values and card mixes. Even the Paratrooper pack (or as Mike says, seeing as there are no Brits in it (which there weren't, officially, at the time of it's release, in the CC system), Yanks and Cranks. He's very proud of the Brits in the 1st at Arnhem, perhaps there will be a Market-Garden pack at some point. Pacific brings a lot of new things to the table, especially in terms of the Japanese. There are morale values up to 11 on those guys, and they are built to close and engage. Eek. There are Banzai rules that act as a mass rally then move order, infiltration rules that look absolutely brilliant, and a few other things like caves and beach invasions. Here's hoping this game refreshes the entire system. 

4) Not enough Combat Commander? How about a Stalingrad pack? With new counters? A ton of maps? And, perhaps most exciting of all, a campaign game that plays out over multiple scenarios? I think Stalingrad is for you. If you ever played the original Squad Leader and saw the Tractor Works that was on the map at, oh, 1/1000th the size it should have been (the designer notes for that game said it would take several of the 8.5"x22" maps to fit), now you can get a map that is more or less nothing but Tractor Works, except for the rail access running through the middle. And who couldn't use a Molotov Cocktail Launcher for the holidays, especially on New Year's Eve? I have no idea how I'll get in another 23 games of Combat Commander, but it's nice to know that if I'm snowed in with another player I've got at least a few days of distraction on hand. 

5) Texas Glory - Columbia Games is a strange beast. Having met the owner, I have a small insight into why (he's a bit of a rugged individualist, which you'd have to be as an American living on the border of Canada). Some years ago he decided to stop selling to distributors entirely because he felt that discounting was killing his online store sales, selling only directly. That lasted a short time, then back to stores and online shops. Fortunately they're still cranking out the great block-based games that are their raison d'être. However, I had thought that they stopped using their preorder system some years ago as well, so I didn't think to contact them when I moved a bit more than a year ago, and when they *hadn't* stopped their preorder system after all, we were all surprised when Texas Glory went to my old address then came right back to them. Now I can *really* remember the Alamo. And everything around it for at least several miles. To be honest, I've pulled the rules out of the box and that's about it, but it appears to be a relatively short block game in the vein of Hammer of the Scots, at the operational level or thereabouts, so while you'll have Crockett and Co holed up in the nation's cheapest car rental agency, it isn't the focus (at least, I don't think it is). With all of these other games out, this one is likely to just sit on the shelf unless someone tells me what a great game it is.

6) I try not to boast a lot. Really. Especially about things that I've just gotten lucky at, like hitting the being born lottery and being able to retire at 40, things I had zero control or influence over. When things drop in my lap, I might bring it up once or twice, but I don't like to mention it too much because it feels like I've gotten away with something more than having earned it. The old Protestant Work Ethic, virtually a lifestyle choice for my father, just keeps hanging on in the back room of my head. So it is that I reluctantly mention that I scored perhaps the most incredible deal on wargames I've ever gotten, and it's all thanks to Eric who notified me that Avalanche Press was having it's Gold Club member sale for two days, and it appeared that the 45% discount applied even to their crazy "buy these seven huge games for $300" specials. I got in within four hours and picked up a huge Second World War at Sea bundle priced at $280 for $163, including shipping. Seven games, including the enormous Leyte Gulf package that retails for $199. In other words, six other games that are for all practical purposes free. All are smaller than that, of course, but it's close to $500 worth of games if you paid retail for them. 

I have none of the SWWaS games, partly because I have a few of the Great War at Sea games and found them a bit disturbing on a couple of levels. First of all is that while they have a tactical element, which to me means pushing a bunch of ships around in formation to keep them from ramming each other, it's completely uninterested in formations. In fact, it feels a lot more like high-level air combat but without things like momentum and vectors. Second is that the strategic game seemed to be difficult to figure out for some reason - Chuck and I gave this a good go one rainy Saturday, stopped to go to lunch, then looked at the game and decided to play something else instead after. All of those crazy pages and pages of ship damage records don't help, anything with more than six ships becomes onerous to track. 

I'm really hoping that SWWaS, with more of a focus on air operations, will have a better feel. No one cares how the ships are formed up at Midway, as trying to get down to the individual aircraft level isn't really my thing, and I'm perfectly happy to play a game with a higher level of abstraction. However, I'm the first to note that Avalanche struggles with putting together a tight set of rules, and I'm hoping that this game will be more playable than GWaS was. 

Eric noticed within a day that Avalanche had quickly figured out that this was far too good of a deal, and so they extended the exclusions on the Gold Club sale to the specials, but I've not seen anything telling me that my particular purchase has been voided, sorry. However, I also haven't seen the games yet either. Seeing as I am still waiting for one module from the Panzer Grenadier bundle I got over the summer (and the Cassino '44 module has been so late, which I paid for in July), I only feel a little guilty at getting away with this one. Assuming I have. With bad weather closing in, I'm hoping it arrives today, as otherwise there's every chance it won't get here before Christmas. The *real* trick will be to explain to my wife that it was a deal I couldn't pass up.

One last note on the Avalanche order - A lot of people buy these with the intent to resell them, that is not the case with me. That isn't to say that I won't resell it at some point, although I'm more and more loathe to do that with almost any of my wargames, but I'm not going to keep them in shrink, keep them unpunched, etc. I am going to need another bookshelf, though...

Twelve new games in a couple of weeks. And I keep whining that there are too many games and not enough time. I just hope that when all of my wargaming friends retire, all of us are mentally with it enough to keep up the wargaming, although I have a hunch we won't be able to see the board by that time, much less read the counters. Sigh.