Because I didn’t stick around for Sunday, I didn’t have a chance to contribute to One Cool Thing I Saw at GenCon 2008. But it’s okay, because Josh Roby covered it for me: Zombie Cinema.

This was the first thing that I saw at the con that actually blew me away. Essentially, Eero Tuovinen took a simplified version of Tim Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch resolution rules and crossed them with the corruption track rules from Reiner Knizia’s The Lord of the Rings cooperative game to create a snappy zombie story boardgame. The mechanics are simple enough to be taught quickly, making it a natural gateway game into These Games Of Ours; however, there seems to be enough depth to be a lot of fun for veterans as well. Even better, the rules are delivered with boardgame-style rigor, leaving nothing to handwaving.

And the kicker. Eero is planning on releasing additional board overlays, allowing the same basic mechanic to be used in other genres as well. Then he said, “Heist game” and I was sold.

I have yet to play, and so it’s possible that the luster might be rubbed off after stepping through a story with these rules. And yet, I don’t think so. In terms of overall coolness, this has my vote for Best New Hotness from GenCon 2008.

Even if you don’t know Go, these are funny.

You’ll need to read the text box on the side to get a sense of what’s going on, though.

Go Lesson One
Go Lesson Two

Then go here right now to download and install the Ingenious PC game. Apparently, you have to install it today or it won’t work.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve linked to this before, but I happened upon this article again, and I think that it’s great.

Gaming Koans

My favorites:

An aspiring game designer came to see Knizia to learn how to design games. Knizia brought out a blank deck of cards, some plain wooden cubes, and a pair of faceless dice. The designer waited, but nothing else happened. “Why are you not teaching me how to design a game?” asked the designer. Answered Knizia, “I have given you everything you need to design the game. I cannot also give you the game.”

Olotka was once singing to himself in a field when it began to rain. One his students ran up to him and said that he should come inside before he got wet. Olotka looked at the water dripping off of the head of his student and replied, “I am not wet. I am playing Cosmic Encounter. You are wet.”

Illinois Central College is going to begin offering a degree in game design.

HT: Yehuda Berlinger

(P.S. Yes, I was reading an Israeli blogger who informed me about something happening in my home town. The Internet is weird.)

The picture quality isn’t great, but I found this to be impressive.

(cross-posted to Boardgame Geek)

(I borrowed “bugs on drugs” from Ron Edwards. Thanks!)

Continuing the Buka Invasion, Crystal and I moved onto Buka vs. Pillar. I’ve been wanting to try out this combination for a while. First, I thought that the Pillar could have a couple of tricks available to combat the Buka. Second, I’m wanting to work on discovering what “good” Pillar play looks like.

Disclose is a powerful tool against the Buka. Part of the trick to fighting against bluff is tracking how many of the Fire and Earth bluff cards have gone by. Disclose lets you locate them early. Also, it then lets you better target the use of your Caterpillar cards. Several times I was able to flush out Bluff cards from Crystal by setting up power requirements that she couldn’t meet without using or discarding a Bluff character.

The converse is that there were several times when Crystal simply used the Bluff card as a support, matched to the right element, and there was nothing that I could do. So, knowledge is power, but it’s not all-powerful. Indeed, Crystal pulled the wool over my eyes at one point, slipping an empty bluff through. Her metagame skills paid off, earning her a win that I could have dismantled. Grr.

I also discovered that it’s important to try to flush out those high-power Buka characters. There really aren’t that many, as most Buka cards hover around 3 or 4 points of power. If you can force them to be played at a bad time, it can definitely help in the endgame. In the first game, where I was able to do this, I was able to earn some dragons fairly cheaply, simply by leading with high-powered characters that Crystal couldn’t match.

I’m also poking at the idea of “buying down power” by calling bluffs, even if you know what they are. Remember, a called bluff is discarded, even if it is the correct element. If staying in the fight is a good thing (e.g. you could earn two dragons), then it might be worth calling the bluff, simply to remove those two points of power. That can make the difference between staying in a fight and losing altogether. I haven’t figured out which are the right times to do this, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Crystal also figured out a couple of good ways to churn her hand while gaining ground. The best one involved the use of the Quartermaster (play as many supports as desired) with the Letter of Marque (can’t call bluff). She just played those two cards, then dumped the rest of the cards as bluffs. Bingo! Instant 12 points of power, a brand new hand, and nothing for me to do but retreat. She’s done similarly with the 3-capacity ship that lets you load it immediately. This ability to churn is a major strength of the Buka.

Now, to the Pillar side of things.

The Pillar actually have a number of hefty characters. This is important to keep in mind. However, I think that the temptation is to view their potion boosters as ways of increasing their power. That’s not really the case. Rather, the potion boosters provide [i]flexibility[/i]. I think of them as adding mutability. Using the potions, you can mold your characters into what you need them to be. Indeed, I found that using a “mutated” character early in a battle was a pretty good idea, saving unmodified characters for later in a battle, when I needed the booster/support action to put away the battle.

Also, because the Pillar can be booster-dependent, it can be a good idea to consider yielding the right to start a battle so that you will be able to play boosters. Also, don’t forget that Free boosters can be played on the first round, so dropping a Caterpillar or Giant Butterfly Morningwind on your first turn can be good, if you’re needing to churn your hand a bit.

I also think that the Pillar need to move pretty quickly through battles. In this way, they are similar to the Aqua, in that they are actually fairly balanced in their Fire/Earth distribution, but individual cards tend to be fairly unbalanced. So they tend to have little staying power, except that which is provided by the potions. Pillar can’t really afford a slugging match. I know this, because I got into a costly slugging match in this game which gained me nothing.

I used the Caterpillars mostly to force her to burn through her characters, especially trying to force out the Bluff cards. Because the Buka values tend to be on the low side, this was pretty effective, particularly Caterpillar Lightseeker, which eats 5 points of power. Finding 5 Fire or 5 Earth in a Buka hand can be quite painful. Combined with Disclose, I could judge how hard to push with the Caterpillars, trying to make her pay to stay, rather than retreat.

Of course, being so booster-oriented, I took a beating from the Buka lookout (discard all boosters or all supports) and the Coxswain (discard the entire combat area when coming off a ship). Force those out early, if you can.

So, what was the final outcome? We’re still in the middle of this match, as it got late, but we currently stand 3-3 after two games. Definitely better than my Vulca outing against the Buka. Also, I felt less encircled by the ships, for some reason. This could just be familiarity, but I’m not sure. I felt like I was able to reach across the table and disrupt Crystal’s plans more effectively with the Pillar, and it shows in the current scores. I guess that we will have to see how it all turns out.

I’m not totally sure who will be the next people to oppose the Buka onslaught. Maybe the Aqua, as they are one of my favorite decks. Maybe the Khind, as they apparently have the Buka fits in playtest. Stay tuned….

(cross-posted at Boardgame Geek)

My wife has decided to work on mastering the Buka. In particular, she is attracted to the mind games that you can play with the bluffing ability. So, on Sunday, we had a strategy discussion about the Buka and then sat down to play. To make it straightforward, I decided to use the Vulca. High Fire values (to counter the Earth slant that the Buka have) and lots of denial cards, but no “tricksiness”. We were also going to play to five crystals

I was massacred.

One of the things that I’ve found that people miss about “bluffing” is you have to use it as part of the larger metagame. You have to set up expectations that extend beyond the current game. Crystal understands this instinctively. For the last couple of outings, she has only used matching bluff cards, which has driven me off from calling her bluffs. I’m sure that she will now start slipping an empty in, from time to time, because she can.

The upshot of this approach is that Crystal picks up the occasional dragon by drawing me out into calling her bluff. Then, beyond this, she establishes her bluffing “space”, which will actually give her more freedom to use empty bluffs in the future.

Also, based on a couple of previous discussions, Crystal finally connected with the idea that the game has auction elements, a la Shannon Appelcline’s article. This produced skillful play on her part, as she forced me to expend four or five cards on one-dragon fights on a regular basis.

We had also discussed how the Buka are a really fast deck that rarely gains a two-dragon win. So, she quickly hit upon the strategy of attracting a dragon or two then blitzing through her deck quickly, both through the occasional bluff and through quickly loading her ships. This was frighteningly effective.

For myself, it was horrifying to be on the receiving end of the Buka. Certainly this is not a deck that plays itself, but seeing Crystal’s developing skill with the deck was scary. I always felt like I was under attack from two directions. On the one hand, I had to fight the actual battle in process. But, invariably, there were ships that were filling up at the same time. There were several fights that Crystal would slow-play, keeping the power level low, just so that she would have more time to fill her ships. There wasn’t really anything that the Vulca could do to stop it, either.

Pandemonium was nice, as it prevented the play of support cards, which pretty much guts the Buka deck, and Cast Cataclysm was an effective nuke on the bluffs, but, in the end, the Vulca could not stand up to the rapid-fire assault of the Buka. After our third games, Crystal stood at eight crystals, while I still had not earned a single one.

Next time, I’m bringing the Pillar. I think that the disclose ability could be quite handy against the Buka. I’ll report back….

A Puerto Rico cake. Goes nicely with the gingerbread Tikal board.

Boardgames and food. Two great tastes that taste great together. Especially like this.

For Christmas, Raquel gave me a hand-crafted Senet set. For those of you who don’t know, Senet is an ancient Egyptian game; indeed, it is one of the oldest games that is still extant. Younger games that are related to Senet include Backgammon and Parcheesi. (You can give it a try here.) I’m finding that I’m increasingly a sucker for quality hand-crafted games, plus it was the chance to learn a new game, so I was pretty excited.

What with this and that, I hadn’t actually used my Senet set until last night, when I taught Crystal how to play. We really enjoyed the game, especially the “throwing sticks” which are precursors to dice. Along the way, I read Crystal a bit from the rules that Raquel had provided:

Senet appears in one of the [Egyptian] creation stories: Djehuty (Thoth) invented Senet as a way to help the poor skygoddess Nut. Nut had been cursed by her husband Ra-Atum because she had been unfaithful and was now pregnant with the earth-god Geb’s children. Ra-Atum’s curse stated “that Nut could not give birth to any children during the 360 days of the year”. Djehuty challenged the gods to games of Senet, with time as the prize, and, winning, was able to add 5 extra days to the year (which were not so cursed). Nut was then able to have her children on each one of the 5 extra days: Ausare/Wesir (Osiris), Her-Wer (Haroeris), Setekh (Seth), Aset (Isis), and Nebet-Het (Nephthys). (Source: Daniel U. Thibault, David Horizon Book of Daily Life in Egypt, p. 48)

When I read this, Crystal replied, “I’m sure glad that those gods aren’t in charge of the universe.” I agreed, noting that most pantheons are like dysfunctional families. Then Crystal mentioned something profound. “Just think about celebrities,” she said. “They are our gods, and look at their lives.” I was struck by this thought. Is this why we celebrate the failures of our celebrities? I think so.

After all, we like our gods to be dysfunctional. That way they can be just like us.

Look at the nifty thing on my links page. It’s a widget that shows the last few games that I played, complete with links to Boardgamegeek.

More useless information spread abroad on the Internet! Rejoice!

I remember reading about Robert Asprin, who was in the middle of working on a fairly bleak book called The Cold Cash War. (I’ve read it; it’s bleak.) To keep his spirits up, he started working on a side project. Something happy and cheery to be a rest from his harsher main project. The result was Another Fine Myth, which kicked off the long-running Myth series. It’s pretty funny stuff, too.

All that to say: I recently took stock of my life, and it’s full of dark, depressing topics. Even my creative work is pretty dark right now. I’m making good progress, and I don’t want to give up on my Dirty Secrets work, for instance. Nonetheless, I think that I need a side project. Something happy and light-hearted, so that I won’t completely drive myself into a blue funk.

All that to say: I’ve decided to revise Junk. That’s right! Beer-guzzling redneck mecha combat is coming back! Woot!

For those of you who like Ra, you should really check out this thread. Someone has put together a computer version of Ra with AI players. And, best of all, it’s free!

Look what I found!

YINSH potential rules
PÃœNCT potential rules

Some thoughts.

YINSH potential–Simple and useful. I had been wondering how Burm would incorporate the feel of YINSH into GIPF. A potential that moves like one of the rings is quite clever. It does feel like a variation on the ZÈRTZ potential, but the differences are significant enough and could be very useful in play.

PÃœNCT potential–Complex, weird, and quite possibly very powerful. There are bunches of rules involved with this one, so I know that I’m going to need to sit down with a gameboard to really get a sense for what’s going on here. However, I can see how Burm is trying to incorporate the crisscrossing and immobilizing from PÃœNCT into the potential. Parts of the potential feel like a variation on the DVONN potential, but the ability to neutralize an opponent’s GIPF or, even better, make another GIPF during play, could be very powerful at the right moment.

I’m really excited. I’ve been looking forward to these potentials for quite some time now, and I’m looking forward to being able to play with these rules.

Whose turn is it?