BIG NEWS DU JOUR

As hinted earlier, it appears that the Gamewire--under a new name, presumably, but the old management--will rise again, judging from Rick's announcement on BGG. The trick will be keeping it commercially afloat; they'll probably get my $20, at least, but it'll be interesting to see how many subscribers they get (assuming they do, in fact, go with the subscriber model). Looks like all the old Gamefest crowd (and then some) is going over, which is interesting.

Can't wait to see it!

QUICK HITS

(Looknig for some tight, focused, orderly in-depth commentary on games? Sorry. Try again later...)

First, a sports note: Gosh darn it to heck.

Hey! There's a new game coming out! And the designer--dsflkjsdl;kj kjhsfdkjh; he's one of the Virginia kjhsfdkjhs, they're descended from English royalty--wants us to help develop it for him! Let's run out and do it! It's about freestyle rap! (More seriously, the survey is interesting to at least look over, to see how a marketing student goes about designing a game.)

Does anyone have a good reason handy why I'd want to keep both the new and the old Entdeckers? Which should I keep?

Why on earth does the National Geographic version of Expedition has a different map from the older version? When I finally got my copy and saw that Cahokia Mounds wasn't in this one, I was almost hysterical. (I got Lost Valley in the same box this morning--three days from Portland with standard shipping! Sweet!) Actually, it seems like this would be a good game to have various "maps" of--say, one for each continent, or one for just Civil War battlefields, or what-have-you.

Two games enter today...and the "outta here" pile has grown to thirty-one. Ten left earlier this week, so we're in the forties. I wish there was a way to see how many people on BGG have a particular game checked for "notify me of sales and auctions," so I could see if it's worth putting something on BGG for a little while. Basically, I'm going down the shelves, and imagining a group over for games, and someone pointing to the box, and saying "Hey, let's play that!" What would I say in reply? If I say "I dunno...how about some other game?" it goes on the pile. This technique spares a lot of games I've never played, but still sound interesting. Anno 1503, a perfectly acceptable game, is outta here since, if someone wanted to play it, I'd try to talk them into a better-than-acceptable game.

Some games are killing me. Shadows over Camelot, for instance. Most groups, I'd try to find something else. The more I reflect on the game, the more something about it just seems off, somehow. That said, I'm an Arthuriana junkie, so it gets bonus points. And it's so purty...

Just looked over the shelves again; found another four games for the pile.

(Holy cow! I just put in this promo CD from Landmark Theatres from, like, years ago, and the database iTunes uses to pull off track names actually found the thing. A-mazing. This is shaping up to be one of my more random Quick Hits pieces.)

Tamsk I'm keeping, since even though I'm terrible at it and wouldn't like to play it again, I'd like to have the whole GIPF series handy--especially since I harbor a mad dream of playing a "full game" of GIPF--start with the original, and actually use all the potentials. It'd probably take a week to play through the enormous chain of side games, but I'm curious what kind of experience it would be.

I passed up a chance to buy, on eBay, a copy of a game billed as a cross between Go and the Civil War. Thank you; I'm proud of me, too. I think it was won by a St. Louisan, if I remember folks' eBay handles right, so I may try to wrangle a look at it when I'm in town.

(Lyrics page link coming up; I think it's cleanish of teh spyware but who knows.) Am I the only one who listens to Tom Waits to cheer up? "Wow. I don't have it that bad," I say to myself.

More sports: For the first time in my life, the Blues are horrible. I'm not sure how to deal with this. I've seen them good, I've seen them mediocre, I've seen them great; I've seen them overachieve and underachieve; but every year of my alert life they've at least been decent enough to make the playoffs--which, granted, in the NHL is not an enormously high bar. But this year, they're just a bunch of no-good overpaid (even now) has-beens and never-wuzzes "coahced" by The Amazing Mike Kitchen, and our best player basically just sat around and ate pie during the "extended offseason" and now he's out with an injury again, having only played three games. (Sorry, Keith; I know you can pound me even with a gimpy...whatever it is. It's not like I wouldn't have just eaten pie if I were out of work for a year....mmm, pie. I like pie.) Bah.

For this week's batch of cookies, having finally polished off all my gingersnaps (with some assistance), I made chocolate chip cookies. I decided that my favored recipe had pretty wussy levels of vanilla, so I upped the dosage on that and used vanilla-infused chocolate chips. I considered buying a case of Vanilla Coke to chase 'em down, but even I thought that would be overdoing it. I like 'em. Alfred's cooking philosophy: "When in doubt, add more of the strongest flavoring and hope that masks whatever you did wrong." (I like baking, but not actual cooking. I've been lazy enough to eat a TV dinner for, um, dinner four days in a row, but I'll knock myself out making dessert. It's wierd.)

In general, my rule for cooking is this: If it requires more than two bowls to assemble, it's not happening. I have a fairly small kitchen, so "ease of preparation" is one of the biggest concerns, which rules out a lot of my favorite food-foods from home, and which I use to rationalize nuking stuff in the microwave.

Where the heck is my copy of El Grande? I didn't sell that back in Austin sometime, did I? I knew I was crazy back then, but not that crazy. Maaannnn...I paid $12 for that, too.

Well, that was a good brain dump for a Saturday evening. I have an interesting feature brewing, assuming I can get the scanner to behave...

ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Greetings, one and all, and welcome to this week's edition of ABOTB. Lemme tell ya: Nobody can top me when it comes to coming up with catchy acronyms. ABOTB...MR&TLU...ten pounds of catchiness in a five-pound bag. Sorry it's late, by the way--it's been kind of a long day or two, but I'm glad I did wait, since it brought another couple of entries to my attention...

This week's episode is dedicated to Alton Brown, whose recipe for hot chocolate has changed my world. I know the recipe says that the cayenne pepper is "optional," but it is so not. Put in more than you think you need; way more if you amount you think you need is "none." The only downside is that I can never have hot chocolate from mix again. Luckily, one thingy of mix from that recipe should last me a good while.

On to the links!

Some new blogs out there worth keeping an eye on (I hope). First, discovered via Coldfoot, is The Board Game Blog, which seems to be aggregating posts from various places--mostly Gone Gaming and BGG. The goal is to update it twice daily; not exactly sure what the criteria is, but it's a good idea.

Also, we have The One Hundred, the results of a poll of 65 gamers (mostly eurogamers) asked to list their fifteen favorite games. The actual results, as such, haven't appeared yet. Curious to see the list of those polled, too. (If anyone's wondering, I wasn't one of them. I don't think.)

Finally, there's Habergamer, Mark Haberman's new blog. Neat post starting off on "chaos" and interaction in games...

What else is new...

One con enters, one con leaves. Leaving, of course, is Essen, which has been done for a little while now, but has inspired a great series of posts, with pictures, of the convention-plus-vacation the Brookses were on. That was just the first post; check out more on the main page (until it scrolls off, anyway...)

Entering is BGG Con, the convention oh-so-close to me that I can't go to in Dallas. The best writing on BGG Con I've found is from Yehuda, who leads us off with the tale of his epic journey to (and within) Dallas. It can only go up from there, experience-wise...

Some good stuff (as usual) over on Gathering of Engineers. First we have a peek into the financial challenges faced by a small game company. Hint: They're considerable, even when nobody's taking a salary. Dug and Eric reflect, with differing results, on when to stop growing the collection. I think I'm finally there, personally; the numbers are definitely going down. Nothing comes in without other games leaving. I've taken dozens of games off the shelf that are going to go outta here, and I've divided them up into eBay fodder, Noble Knight fodder, and Metagames Trade-In Fodder. My problem is that most of the games I don't want anymore (and they are legion) draw so little interest on eBay that it's not worth my time to list them, hound the buyers for my money, ship them out, etc etc. I mean: Selling a game on eBay that gets five bucks eats up a big chunk of time I could spend doing more important things--selling on eBay isn't my job, after all. I don't sell anything on eBay unless I'm reasonably confident I'll get at least $25 for it, before shipping. If it's less than that, I try to trade it in somewhere.

(Today, for example, I took ten small, horrible games to Metagames and traded 'em in for WildLife and the new Blue Moon expansions. (10 bad) < (3 good), I say.)

Antike: Is it any good? In one corner, we have Mikko; in the other, Chris Farrell (who has had a bad run, lately, of games he dislikes). It certainly seems to have trouble with three players out of the box. Not getting Neuland when it came out is haunting me to this day; this puts me closer to getting Antike that I would be otherwise. I think I can probably do without Indonesia, though, despite my Splotterholic tendencies.

Mr. Ekted provides an intersting look at the structures of games, and suggests that rules could be written better to reflect them. The conclusion that game rules should be written by computer programmers seems a little "off," somehow, but I heartily agree that when the flow of the rules doesn't match the flow of the game, the game becomes much harder to learn. Explaining rules verbally is a similar task--I've found that people assume that the game unrolls in the order you explain the parts in, so it's important to not backtrack more than you absolutely have to.

More next week--with any luck, on Thursday night again--for more of the Best of the Blogosphere (unless The Board Game Blog makes this obsolete, of course)!

QUICK HITS

We are informed, in a comment in the Where to Go from Here post, that Rick Thornquist may be back in the saddle before we know it. Here's hoping!

The latest Dice Tower is up, with a cool prize--a copy of Memoir '44 with all the expansions. I'll have to enter this one--the expansions are waaaayy too rich for my blood otherwise.

Tom and Joe's suggested pronunciations for "Descartes" include "Dess-a-cart," "Deh-car-tays," and (what was finally decided on) "Dess-car-tays." Makin' it too hard, guys; one too many syllables here: "Day-cart." (It's a French pun--it sounds like "dés" (dice) and "cartes" (cards).) Spend my whole life speaking French and this is what I do with it...

I'll also note with interest that Joe's favorite Card-Driven Wargames are the "least manly" of the series--We the People, Hannibal, Sword of Rome, Wilderness War...odd, that.

My wild, happy, free life is almost over: November is shaping up to be an absolutely nuts month, work-wise. I may be posting less, with all my work; I may be posting more, to keep from going insane--I'll need to write about something other than Babylonian merchants, supplying frontier posts in the Civil War, and the life and work of Gary Gallagher.

Speaking of school, there's gotta be a better way than exists now for registering for classes. For instance, I need to get into this ten-seat proseminar next semester, but simply because the last two digits of my ID are between 68-75 I have to register in the second-to-last block of time with my similarly-numbered brethren. If a seat doesn't open up, well...then that's going to be a problem, and I have been promised that if it comes up I can rest assured that a policy will be in place by the next semester to deal with it. Most schools I've been associated with have some similar scheme, where when you register depends on what letter your name starts with, what number your ID starts with, or some other semi-random method. The problem, of course, is that seats in courses are (often, but not always...) scarce commodities, which the university has to distribute in some non-economic fashion. The current system, though, rewards accident of birth and quick reflexes--God forbid you sign on at 10:06 if your block opened at 10:00. In that six minutes anything can happen--up to and including having the registrar's server crash or block new connections, which is what happened to me last semester.

Why not just have it be a lottery? I mean, have everyone submit a proposed schedule, and then at Day X have a big ol' computer sort everyone into their classes. If there are as many or fewer students trying to register for a class than there are seats--great. If not, there are a few ways to do this. First, you could just seat people in there randomly. If that seems crude, you could start, say, with (I dunno) grad students or upper-division students first, then lower division students. (Most universities seem to try to make sure seniors and grad students get whatever classes they need; this isn't pure self-interest.) If, after putting in grad students, the seniors, and the juniors there are a few seats left, but not enough for all the sophomores, then allocate the remaining seats to them randomly.

This system wouldn't make people register at a certain hour of the day, when they might have to work or be in class. It wouldn't give any student an unfair advantage due to their name or reflexes. You could leisurely meet with your advisor, if necessary, and at some convenient hour submit your schedule, just as long as you get it in by a particular deadline, and you'd have a few weeks to do so. Hey--you could even submit a conditional schedule--"Try to register for History 100 first, if I miss that, try History 120," and so on.

The more I think about this, the more it strikes me as an extremely obvious way to do course registrations. Does any school do it this way? If nobody does, why not? There's gotta be some reason, right?

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

Well, as mentioned earlier (and elsewhere, and often) there's no Gamewire these days. It looks like there will still be occasional press-release-style notices, but nothing's gone up yet, so I'm not hopeful.

There's been talk around about what to do now, how to replace GW as a source of news about what's coming out when. I thought I'd toss out my two cents (this post serves as a partial answer to various email I've gotten lately, too.) (Rick, if you're reading this, feel free to chime in, either to my email or in the comments, with any corrections or advice of your own.)

The big hurdle is that it's an enormous amount of work. As with many large problems, maybe the solution is to distribute the effort across a large number of people. For instance, one person could be assigned to smoke out what's going on over at Kosmos, someone else could keep tabs on Z-Man, and so on and so on. Someone else could be a coordinator, in charge of posting releases and notes they get from designers and companies. (Like this email I just got today about a "cooperative chess variant.") This would all get posted on a central website...somehow. I'm an idea rat with basic HTML skills, whaddya want.

The idea is to make it so nobody has to devote more than a few hours a week to the project, so nobody's swamped and everyone's Burnout Clock is kept as far from midnight as possible.

Anybody know how Spielbox does it?

Sidebar: Discovered via Spielbox, this, one of the odder game (?) ideas I've ever seen.

Comments?

"I'M GOING TO TAKE MY UNDEFEATED SELF UPSTAIRS."

Another fairly useless geeklist I nevertheless enjoyed.

UPDATE 10/26: Why did I call this list "useless"? I guess it was a little obscure, and the reference was a little while ago. A few weeks ago there was a funny (I thought) list that was an "anthropological report" on Meeples. There was some debate around as to whether that was a funny list, or part of What's Wrong With Geeklists--i.e., it was useless, as it doesn't categorize games in a useful way, doesn't help one with the games, etc etc etc. I took the tack that I find several such "useless" lists to be Good Things, at least when I think they're clever or funny. In other words, I don't find the utility of a list to be the determining factor of whether I like one or not. I thought that many of the criticisms leveled at the M33PL3S list could apply to this one, as well, and provided another data point that there's more to a good geeklist than usefulness.

But since I needed a paragraph to explain that, and at least one person was upset enough to comment on it, I suppose I could have phrased it a lot better...

MY (EXTENDED) WEEKEND

At 3 PM on Sunday afternoon, on US 75 just north of downtown Dallas, I started laughing hysterically. By any reasonable standard, it had been a five-star weekend. I did some schedule rearranging at the library, and took a long weekend off (coinciding with Missouri State's "fall break"), and headed to Austin to poke around the libraries and spend time with my friends from my undergrad years.

The trip down had been unusually smooth. I had a "police escort" through Oklahoma, which may or may not have made travelling down US 69 much faster; neither the highway patrollman nor I will ever tell. (At least not here.) No traffic at all through Dallas, and not a smidgen of trouble south to Austin. I arrived at Jeff's at 2 PM on the dot, recovered briefly, and then went over to say my goodbyes to Poland-bound Russ.

That was cool. It was strange to see that house, where I spent the vast majority of my Wednesday nights in college playing games, empty and dark. It was also strange to see it in broad daylight--it has green trim! Who knew? Russ was kind enough to let me take away or buy a few of the remnants of his collections of games and Go World magazines. After this, I did something I never did in my life, namely lock my keys in my car. I was freed in just half an hour or so, and I'd like to take the time now to tell one and all that Star-Rite Towing & Locksmithing provide fast, courteous, and professional roadside service, and I salute them.

Got a few games in, too. I played Havoc for the first time, a pair of three-player games against Tim and Adam. It was pretty good, but with three it seemed as though that straight flushes were a bit on the common side. I'd like to play this with more players, see if the cards get a little tighter.

Played some old favorites, too: Flowerpower, Ingenious (a glorious victory with Jeff against Adam and Marty in a partnership game), Attika...and another new game, Parthenon, which has been getting a fair bit of buzz.

Marty and I played a three-player "short" game (two "years," not three) against...somebody, I forget his name. (Sorry!) Marty won; he and I declared it "interesting." Now, a lot of times I say "interesting" when I mean "I'm not sure if it's good, but there's something here." I don't mean that this time; this time, I mean "This game is terrible and I'd prefer to never play it again." Chris Farrell mentions my big problem with it: The cards that provide harbor conditions and sea travel events are ridiculously powerful. I could have won that game, but in one turn both my fleets were wiped out by storms. Whee! That put me in a hole I could never get out of. Previously in the game, I stumbled across a huge windfall--equally due to my play. I think, for a "serious" euro game, this level and influence of luck is absolutely preposterous, and I don't think it adequately represents the realities of long-distance trade, either.

So I call "BS" on Parthenon. As Chris also mentions, though, there's some good stuff in the game, so there is an actual "interesting" aspect to the game. I'd like it better, a lot better, if it had a few changes. First, the game should have more years--even more than the "full game's" three--The cards need to change around more often. Second, the magnitude of the cards' effects needs to be toned down. As of right now, they absolutely drive the game and can overwhelm any decision the players make very easily. They need to modify and influence player behavior, not negate it.

I like the "wonder" powers, I like how it feels as though you're building a civilization, it's just that all the good parts go by the wayside when it's time to discover what the seas and fates are up to. In a three-player game, trading between players was often not so useful; nobody seemed to have the "right" rare commodities, and basic commodities are...not so useful, most of the time. There's better out there, and if the system and mechanics ever get cleaned up and paired with better cards, I'd love to try this one again. It has a lot of color, and clever rules...

Tim was kind enough to tell me about a gas station with relatively cheap gas, about $2.46 a gallon--ten or twenty cents lower than most of the stations in town. (If thirty cents more expensive than Springfield gas.) I tried to get there right before I hit the highway, but word of this place had spread fast and it had turned into a Lord of the Flies situation--lots of honking, rude gesticulating, near-accidents...just a bad scene. I decided--after almost getting rammed by a huge truck "racing" me to a pump--to get gas at the next station...which had nobody gassing up, which was selling gas for $2.49 a gallon, and where I didn't feel like somebody was going to whip out a gun. Great times...

One of the big goals of the weekend was to get my games back. See, when I graduated, I was planning on moving to Lithuania--and, in any event, all my stuff wouldn't fit in the van going back home, so I left a fair number of games with friends still in town. It was generally assumed that they'd be in their keeping for, I dunno, a couple of years, tops. Well, here we are, five years later...

There were only a few games I forgot I ever owned, and a few more I wished I'd forgotten I ever owned. (J.U.M.P. into the Unknown, anyone? How about Plague and Pestilence?) By Sunday morning, they had all been collected together, packed in big cardboard boxes, and after some Tim-assisted rearrangement of the back of my pickup truck, all the boxes were loaded in and I was ready to head back north. It was great to get the whole "family" back, as I sometimes mockingly call the collection.

I was nearing Dallas, and suddenly thought to myself Gettin' dark. Evening already? Looked at my watch: 2:30. Hm. I then had a vivid thought for someone travelling with several cardboard boxes full of cardboard and paper in the open bed of his truck:

I wonder if it's supposed to rain?

Shortly thereafter, I saw the first drops of mist on the windshield.

I had a few options here. It looked like I was on the leading edge of the rain, and that it got clearer farther north. I also had an appointment later that night in Springfield. All this combined to talk me into the notion of driving like an escaped convict to get past the clouds as soon as possible. Which, of course, just meant that I was about to hit traffic...just as the rain really started to pick up.

And that's when I started laughing, at the impending absurdity of it all--waiting years to get the games back and now they all get turned to mush in a rainstorm...

OK, now what?

Again, a few options. None of the boxes was packed-packed, with games and books right up to the top. So, any damage would only come after the tops of the storage boxes had soaked all the way through and then started dripping down--or, worse, the tops of the storage boxes were soaked and torn away. I was still moving at a reasonable speed, so the turbulence caused by the cab might drive off a lot of the rain--but if this traffic got worse, and I was forced to stop here on the highway, that'd be all she wrote. I moved the rear-view mirror around, and the boxes still looked not-soaked, for the most part.

I remembered I had a tarp in my toolbox in the truck bed, and vaguely knew how to attach it. If I could get off--and under something covered--I'd be in good shape. I didn't like my odds of getting off and immediately finding a parking garage without having to stop at a few lights, though. So...on I went, hoping that I'd miss having to stop entirely before I could find an easily-accessed garage or gas station.

This is already dragging, so I'll cut to the chase: I did eventually pull off, in Allen TX, and the boxes had just a few big drops on them by the time I got the tarp on. It got me thinking, though, about what would happen if I were to lose all the games somehow. Would I replace them? No, probably not; it took ages and ages (and $$$ and $$$) to get all these together; I'd probably have a whole different strategy the next time around...if I wanted to stay in at all. I could see just...moving on, if something sudden and catastrophic were to happen to the games. Probably, though, I'd get games again, but only about thirty or forty, tops. A shelf or two. My relationship to the hobby would be totally different. No more collecting, no more studying games and having the big library people can draw on, no more being "that guy with all the games." I'd become...another gamer.

Shudder.

It's easy to be philosophical, now, with all my games safe and sound (relatively speaking), and not facing the prospect of not having them all.

I did decide, though, to have not quite so many games around. Maybe sell, I dunno, fifty of them. A hundred? Two hundred? Who can say, but it's time for a cull, and a fair-sized one. Anyway, Kuk-Nuk is outta here one way or another.

With all the drama, I missed my Springfield appointment. Ah well...

On Monday night, George and Terttu Hummasti were kind enough to invite me (and three others) to their lovely home to play a few games. These were the first non-solo games I'd ever played in Springfield (well, except for Clout, I guess), so it was something of a momentous occasion, if only for me. We played Acquire--which I won, for the very first time ever. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. I then taught the crowd Dragon Delta, which seemed to be a big hit; George won that one. That's probably the best game for introducing the "programmed move" mechanic to people. My sense is that this isn't a RoboRally crowd. (Not a bad thing, in and of itself.) We closed out the night with a game of Medici, where I finished an exceedingly close third--three points behind the winner! A grand time, methinks...

All in all, about as good a weekend as I could have hoped for. Many thanks to Jeff and Jonobie for letting me inhabit their guest room again; to them, Adam, and Tim (and Marty) for housing my games lo these many years; and to everyone I got to see and play games with this long weekend.

ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Welcome back, everyone!

This week's dedication, and first link, goes out to Russ, longtime host of RussCon, the weekly game night in Austin that was always the highlight of my week in Austin. He's off to greener pastures now--or at least Poland--and I'd like to take a moment to thank him, again, for all the good times he provided. He also has a neat Poland-themed post on his blog this week.

Speaking of an end to a period of great times, the Gamewire has come (is coming?) to a close. This is a great shame--it was far and away the best source of English-language game news around, I think. A void is opening, considering the demise of The Games Journal and Gamewire. Thanks for all the great reports, news, and reviews, Rick! I suppose, once again, that the question is "What now?" I don't know the answer to that; it seems that game reporting will remain an ill-remunerated task for some time, so it's probably going to take a group effort--organized, or less so--to get this game news collected again. We shall see what comes of this...

In other news, everyone's back from Essen, bearing with the absolutely bignormous cache of games. Billygames members made a good haul, for instance. V. jealous.

Game Store Confidential reveals, once again, why I don't want to run a game store, and would prefer to avoid retail. Great read...

What do we mean when we say one game is "-----like"? Mikko discusses (linking to further discussion) the notion that Through the Desert is Go-like. I try to not take these similes too seriously; there are ways that games feel like other games, but rarely are these sufficiently exact to impart useful strategy lessons.

See y'all next week!

QUICK COMMENT

Gosh darn it to heck.

With that quick baseball comment out of the way...

I'm on the road as you read this, probably, headed to Austin for some work/fun for the long school-break weekend. I'll try to get the BotB posted on Thursday night like usual, but then again it may be late.

(Honestly, Houston outplayed the Cardinals the whole series, and definitely won fair and square. I'm not as disappointed as I was last year, when the Birds got swept out of the World Series--that just sucked. This is just plain ol' not great, but I can deal. I hereby declare the Astros to be my rooting interest in the World Series of 2005.)

ACTUAL GAME CONTENT!

I know! Isn't it wild! I haven't talked about an actual game in I-don't-know-how-long. It's coming, but first some random commentary:

Is it just me, or is the general tone of BGG a little snippier, a little snarkier lately? It seems like more often there's an inflammatory comment or geeklist (one today, since pulled down, even generated a probably-fatuous threat of legal action against the GL's creator), and I find myself about to type a response and think...Nahhhh. Basically there seem to be a lot of sticks up a lot of people's butts these days.

Lots of nice piccies from all over for Essen. I don't want to go just to see the new games, and have a crack at some of the old games, although that'd be nice--I want to go just to be in such an immersive, immense game atmosphere. When I was a little kid I had a phase (as do most boys, at least in my US experience) of being really "into" cars, and I loved to be taken to the car show. Obviously I (and my parents) had no ability/intention to buy anything, but I was intoxicated by the lights, the crowds, the noise, and the displays. Some of the Essen booths are flashy, others more primitive (although the game looks neat), but it just seems like such a carnival.

OK, yeah, and the used game dealers.

Anyway, for me, the ones to watch look like Mesopotamia, the new Carcassonne (the tiles...I'm a sucker for that art), Aloha (must...get...every...Cwali...product), and maybe Hacienda. Siena just looks like such a unique experience...anyway, there are always enough toys out there to overflow the toybox. Since I hit 1000 BGG "own list" entires, the drive to buy games has (mercifully) substantially decreased. I'll probably sell some off soon.

So, I got a game in, a solitaire playing of Target Arnhem, the convention freebie Multi-Man was giving out. I paid a little for mine, to cover shipping and handling.

Many Japanese-designed wargames tend to be small, which is why I seek them out: They store easily and are nice and apartment-sized. This one is basically an 11x17 map with about ninety counters. The map is mostly the turn track, off-map movement boxes, and other miscellany--there are fewer than 100 hexes, total. As the title suggests, it's a game of the Market-Garden campaign of WWII.

It's billed as a game to introduce newcomers to the hobby, but with enough muscle to satisfy the "real" wargamer. That's my definition of a good gateway game, basically--simple but deep--and I like Japanese wargames, so I gave it a shot.

It has some clever bits. Each unit may move two hexes each phase, armor or infantry, but the mechanized units move in three phases a turn while the infantry move in just two; it's a clever way to have a movement allowance that doesn't clutter the counters and is easily internalized.

Each unit is rated for combat strength and endurance. Units can absorb hits (without loss of combat effectiveness, à la Battle Cry, etc) until they reach their endurance level, then they're destroyed. The paratroopers have middling combat values (threes and fours), but the highest endurance--they can take a lot of punishment. German armor has stronger CVs, but weaker endurance. German infantry is horrible, used as roadblocks as much as anything (I think). Allied armor is the king of the battlefield, with high CV and Endurance ratings, but there isn't enough of it (there never is, for the true grognard). There's a CRT, which always makes me grumble a little, but it's an interesting one. It's extremely bloody, for one thing, with most attacks at the game leading to one or two hits for the attacker and one or two for the defender. It's hard to really blow anything away, unless it's a lone German infantry unit sitting out in the open. Then it's easier.

One can also "heal" one's units. Instead of moving or attacking in a given phase, an in-supply unit can remove one damage point, at the cost of one supply point. The Allies have unlimited supply points off-map, but it's hard to trace a line to them. Most units have far more limited supplies available; most formations (each airborne division is tracked separately, as are the SS and Wehrmacht) get just one point a turn (the Wehrmacht gets (1D6)/2, rounded up). This means that units on the defensive--that don't have to move and don't have to attack--can fix themselves quickly. The attacker, then, has to be ruthless if he wants to eliminate opposing units, and it's hard to stop to refit. Of course, that just means that when the opposing reinforcements come in, they have some exhausted units to face.

The Allied player wins by holding all of Hell's Highway, from one end of the map to the other, otherwise the Germans win. I'm thinkin' it's about as difficult to win as the Allies to win in the game as it was historically, but I've only played it the once, solo, so who knows.

All that said, it just didn't feel very...Market-Gardeny. There wasn't much of a sense that I was anywhere special, it lacked the kind of narrative I look for in a game. I really like a lot of the rules, and maybe a bigger situation, with finer-grained units and terrain, and a larger stage and cast generally, would make it shine more. Sometimes wargames can be less than the sum of their parts; this is one of those times.

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

So, inspired by Ryan Bretsch's post on Gamefest, and the comments therein, I started thinking about the role that blogs play in the little world of internet gaming commentary, and the advantages and disadvantages they have over other sites--particularly "online magazines" like The Games Journal.

Of course, the two main characteristics of blogs are both advantages and disadvantages compared to an edited site.

First, they're personal. Greg Aleknevicus would no more have published my ramblings about my oven mitts than plunge his eyes out with a spoon. And he would be right to refuse it, since it's about me rather than games. This blog's focus isn't so much games as "me." I'm considered a gameblogger because, well...I mean, I have a thousand games. Games are a big part of my life, and a major interest, so I write about them a lot since they're what I think about. (At least they're what I think about and feel like writing about.) I also like college football, so I toss that in sometimes. I like reading blogs since I like to sense the personality behind the blog as a whole, like I'm in the company of a gamer, not necessarily reading about games. An edited site like TGJ can be more focused on games, and while it doesn't reach a different audience, it does scratch a different itch than a blog does.

Also, they're not edited. I consider myself a reasonably decent off-the-cuff writer, but I have my share of typos and errors. Sometimes I go back and polish something--especially if I'm particularly pleased with the post--but more often as not I let it go and move on. That there's no editing process (other than self-revision) adds to the immediacy of blogs, but detracts from the style somewhat. Again, a trade-off.

I think that blogs and edited content arenas can cohabit well enough, despite the conventional wisdom that blogs killed off TGJ. (Somebody should get The Buggles to write a song about it. It's not like they're doing anything else. Anyway.) The problem may be that there just aren't that many writers out there. The size of the "Serious Gamer" population isn't immense, and the subcategory of "Writers on Games" is even smaller--it doesn't pay (for the vast majority of us) and takes up considerable time. Hence the popularity of blogs--you can do it on off-hours (such as 1 AM, in this case), and it requires as much investment as you feel each post deserves.

I mentioned earlier that bloggers are "going to have to step up in a big way" to make up for the loss of The Games Journal; on further reflection, that's not quite accurate. Of course, I hope that this inspires all bloggers who discuss games to make their blogs better--we should be doing this anyway--but the particular qualities of blogs make it impractical to assume that the game-blogosphere, itself, will fill the void that TGJ left in the internet--any more than TGJ satisfied whatever it is that drives us bloggers to blog.

I think, however, that in the future (near- and long-term) we'll see a number of things arise on the internet that will provide good, TGJ-like game content. I think that game discussion on blogs will improve as we bloggers learn (and develop) the tricks of the trade--it's still such a young medium, after all. I think other game-content sites like TGJ will spring up. I think a lot of stuff will happen that I don't expect, and haven't dreamed of. (Such has been the way of the internet since DARPANET. It's been the way of the world since longer than that.) I think the biggest factor will be to get more people writing about games--anywhere; BGG, blogs, somebody should start a wiki again. Get some momentum going for people writing, at least semi-seriously, about the hobby.

As I mentioned in my comment on Ryan Bretsch's post, I'm optimistic about the future, even though I don't know what it is.

ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

The blogs this past week focused on two things, one a perennial happy event, the other the end of an era. Second part first.

This week's issue of BotB, and the subject of a number of blog posts, is dedicated to The Games Journal, which on the tenth wrapped up an impressive five-year run of producing some of the finest web-based game content. We blogs are going to have to step up in a big way if we want to somehow replace all it managed to do. Among the bloggers commemorating The Games Journal are Rick Thornquist, Mikko Saari, Coldfoot, Rick, and Yehuda in his Gone Gaming column. I particularly liked the last one, as it was a nice digest of some of TGJ's highlights. Well done, again, to Greg Aleknevicus, Frank Branham, and everyone else who contributed over the years.

(And there's something to be said for actually saying goodbye, rather than just waiting for everyone to forget you exist, like Spielboy. At least that seems to be what happened over there.)

The other big event, of course, is Essen. I want to go to this thing so badly, you can hardly imagine. It's not to be, though, until I get a lot more control over my schedule than I have now--I can't just call up Dr. Hummasti and say I have to blow off my exam because I'm going to be in Germany looking at games and trying to figure out if, at the end of my stay, I should just throw away all my excess clothes and toiletries to make room in my luggage for more games.

Or is that just me?

Anyway, a lot of bloggers are in the Messe poring over the latest and greatest games. For my money, the granddaddy of Essen reports remains Rick Thornquist, for his huge volume of pictures and text. There's a reason he's the first professional English-language boardgame reporter. Mikko is also doing reports, at least as long as his hotel's DSL stays up. Greg Schloesser and Chris Farrell are also there, and we're just left to imagine the wonders seen by their eyes. There's a maintained BGG forum thread of the Essen blog posts, so I'll refrain from listing all of them here--check them out!

I do like Jeff's desperate plea to Essen-goers. In fact...if any Essenites are reading this, and trip over a copy of Union vs. Central, shoot me a message. Heck, if you're not in Essen and have a copy you're willing to trade, shoot me a message.

What else...

Dug at GoE discusses the "Calculus of Wargaming," essentially, how he decides whether to buy a wargame. Scroll down for some earlier commentary about Euros. I don't buy as many wargames now as I once did; these days, I seem to mostly stick within particular series--the American Revolution series is automatic (I gotta get some turns in of Savannah), I take a long look at the "Card-Driven" games, but mostly a game has to get some pretty serious good press--or be something intriguingly new and different--to get my attention these days.

Mr. Ekted solves all the problems with game awards. Anything that gives, say, me more power over who gets what award is fine with me. (*cough*) Favorite passage: "If I told someone I played Euro-games and they replied, 'You mean like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride,' it would take all my willpower not to gag." Yikes! Don't tell him you like Cranium or Bunco or he might go on an eight-state killing spree.

Even if we could "fix" awards, though, would we want to? I suppose we could always find something else to sit around and kvetch about, but complaining about the unworthiness of award winners has become something of a festival rite for us gamers, one of the ways we count the passage of the seasons. I mean, imagine if one of the awarders decided to do something totally crazy, for the rest of our lives we'd be like "Remember 2005? When the DSP went to The Ballerina Card Game? Yeah, that was the same year my son was born." It's how we organize time.

Yehuda gets three mentions this week--one for his ode to The Games Journal, and two more for The Language of Love and his Yom Kippur post. Gmar hatima tova...

I have two words for Joe Steadman, who is frustrated with certain aspects of ASL, and those two words are "Up" and "Front." UF doesn't solve all the "clear skies" problems that ASL (and most squad-level games) has, but it does far better than most. This actually reminds me of my biggest peeve of wargames--which I expounded on at obscene length for an upcoming "Musings On..." installment--which is that most wargames give way too much control and knowledge to the players. I've demonstrated the ability to rant about this for 1000+ words at a crack, so I'll stop now.

Don't think I won't return to this, though.

Finally some images sent to me by a BGG correspondent in France. Not really a blog, sure, but I'm a complete sucker for tiny little ships. Which reminds me that the spiffied-up, GMT version of Flying Colors is starting to charge--if you're looking for a playable Age of Sail game that lets two players play Trafalgar, act now! It doesn't come with little ships, but that can be fixed if you so desire.

DISCOVERY

Been another busy week. Not much time for gaming, or doing much of anything but reading for class (and not even all that's done). It'll be good to have a long weekend in a little bit.

So as to avoid burnout, I decided to spend some time this afternoon baking. I like ginger--ginger ale (good), ginger beer (better), anything at all with ginger in it...so, today, I made gingersnaps.

There's a hierarchy, I've learned, in the gingersnap world:

• Store-bought gingersnaps
• Homemade gingersnaps
• Homemade gingersnaps made with fresh ginger
• Homemade gingersnaps made with way in blazes more ginger than the recipe calls for

I ground down a whole, serious, man-sized hand of ginger into the battter. I'd have had even more but I spaced and forgot to put plastic wrap over the grater (keeping it all together). Good stuff.

Game content coming maybe tomorrow, depending on how efficiently I can make these copies of Civil War letters I have.

WOOHOO!

Finally. I'd just like to take a moment to swear eternal vengeance on ABC Sports, though, for cutting away from the game, although the Minnesota-Michigan game was pretty entertaining.

MR&TLU, COLLEGE FOOTBALL EDITION

(OK, basically all my readership's not going to find this very interesting. Sorry! Sometimes I get a little self-indulgent, and this is one of those times.)

I may have mentioned a time or two that I attended that superlative institution of higher learning, The University of Texas at Austin. As a lifelong fan of college football--for most of my formative years, I had only the St. Louis Football Cardinals to root for, and that's no fun--I adopted the quasi-religious fervor of UT football rootership (which is different from Texas A&M football rootership, which drops the "quasi-") as my own.

Thus, fall and winter Saturdays are big days for me, as I have the Mizzou Tigers of my youth, the Texas Longhorns of undergraduate life, and now the MO State Bears of grad school to psychically urge on--but most of my energies are expended on the Longhorns, particularly since they're the only ones with national title aspirations.

For the past several years, UT's hopes have crashed mightily against the rocky shores of Okhaloma at the Cotton Bowl. (I'd ordinarily cast aspersions here at OU, but I don't know for sure that Dr. Miller's not reading this.) Sometimes, especially in October, I snap awake at night screaming 63-14! 63-14! and I need to drink some wam milk and do some medtiation before I can go back to bed. Sometimes I stab a picture of Chris Simms, too. (This old one's getting kind of torn up.)

So, even though UT's been fantastic this season and OU's been...not so fantastic, really, I'm still apprehensive going into this weekend's game. I'll be at work for most of it--not sure if that'll help or not.

What also doesn't help are these:

The shame of this household.

Those, friends, are Officially-Licensed OU oven mitts. My mother gave them to me; I doubt she knew what the little "OU" symbols meant, especially to Texas Exes. I expect to get Kansas Jayhawks socks and and a Texas A&M Aggie umbrella for Christmas. They're not even good oven mitts. They mock me every time I get muffins or lasagna or baked chicken out of the oven. You must use us! Ha ha! But we'll get your hands burned anyway after two seconds! You'll note the old-world craftsmanship in those mitts, particularly in the decorative stitches.

So, tomorrow night, expect either a flurry of activity or a three-day sulk, depending on what happens that afternoon. After I get new oven mitts one way or another.

ALFRED'S BEST OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

After a good night's rest, we're back. By Wednesday night I was sufficiently tired I forgot about the Missouri Compromise. (No offense to those who never knew it existed in the first place. For those of us in the US History biz, it's a bigger deal. I'll have to erase this introductory remark when I start angling for tenure.) This week's episode is totally being dedicated to sleep.

Let's see what the Links Fairy brought us this time...

If you take my enthusiasm for the Clash for a Continent games, and average it with Chris Farrell's opinion, you get a guy who's never heard of the game. I mention it not so much for the sake of balance, but that I always think it's interesting when two thoughtful gamers (if I may include myself as one) can see so many aspects of a game totally differently. One man's inferior ripoff is another man's brilliant improvement. Ah well; we have plenty of other games to play if we run into each other.

Plenty of good stuff on Gone Gaming; reading Tichu strategy articles reminds me of smiling and nodding when I'm being talked at by someone who knows far, far more about something I just don't understand: "Sure...definitely...of course...sure, sure...yeah..." I don't think I'll ever understand that game.

Over at Tao of Gaming, Brian has a post on estimation that's worth reading; it's mostly not about games explicitly but there's some, and it's all good.

How do games get made? Hasbro has a three-shift factory churning out game after game around the clock, with robots and legions of deft employees. Other places are more clothespin-centric. I call this the "quilting bee" method. Havoc sounds neat; I'll have to give it a try sometime.

(I am, as I type this, also watching on TV out of the corner of my eye two Swedes play professional, competitive table tennis. This is so far outside my experience of the game it's not even funny. It's enthralling. I don't really have enough depth perception to play any racquet sports, so it's amazing to watch someone, fifteen feet away from a tiny table, return a tiny ball high in the air with enough spin to corkscrew back and hit the other side. Amazing stuff. Just a sidebar...)

Over at Naturelich, we have the first two installments of the Naturelich GeekList Aggregator. Check 'em out!

Selling my copies of Ironclads and the expansion thereof was one of the bigger mistakes I ever made when it comes to collection management--right up there with buying Kuk-Nuk for the equivalent of two candy bars. (Mmm...candy...) Mr. Nizz shows us why I should have kept them around (and bought nifty metal figgies for 'em).

Keep up the good posts!

PRICK UP YOUR EARS

A great episode of Boardgames to Go. Discussion with Mike Siggins on the possibilities of Euro-Wargame hybrids. As a "hybrid type," I'm all aboard. (Best line: "The rules may be 64 pages long and completely unintelligible, but if the map's nice you're on a roll.") Magnificent stuff.

QUICK BASEBALL COMMENT

From an ESPN article on Reggie Sanders's great day yesterday for the home team:

[Reggie Sanders] is also a guy you'd love to have drop over and borrow the power tools. If Cincinnati first baseman Sean "The Mayor" Casey quit tomorrow to become a country singer, Sanders might win a poll as the nicest, earthiest, most courteous player in a big-league clubhouse.

(Emphasis mine.) I don't think he meant "earthiest".

WHITHER THE GEEKLIST?

In last week's episode of Best of the Blogosphere, I posted a link to a Boardgamegeek geeklist I found amusing, an "anthropological report" on Meeples. I thought it was funny, anyway. It inspired an interesting comment thread over on Mikko's Gameblog which deserves further comment.

As I mentioned over there, if Sturgeon's Law applied to geeklists it'd be an improvement--10% signal would be a big step forward. As Greg Aleknevicus points out in the comments, there's a long parade of geeklists about...just...nothing. At least it seems that way to me. (And, I guess, the rest of us.) Look! It's this half-week's installment of Games I Found at a Thrift Store; o frabjous day, it's someone else putting together a list of games that he hopes his wife will like--please add your own suggestions! There's no way this won't look like all the other geeklists on the same topic!

I should mention that, of the geeklists I've put together, most of them have been useless--unless you were after GeekGold, that is. My most popular lists were my contests, where I gave away some of the vast fortune of GG I had amassed submitting games to the database. They served no "purpose" at all except to give a moment's amusement. Kind of like the meeples.

I thought my contests were relatively clever, and I got enough entries every week--fifty to a hundred, about--to suggest that others did, too (or else that many people were desperate for GG). A "good" list, in my opinion, should be either

• Useful--say, a list of all the expansions for a game, with comments as to what they contain and commentary on their quality;
• Thought-provoking--The lists that Jay (ynnen) puts out are good examples; finding some class of mechanics and discussing games that fit them. I often think about games a little differently after a good list of these;
• Funny--and, preferably, kind of original--basically:
• Clever.

Thing is, I'm guessing everyone who posts a geeklist thinks their lists are original, clever, and one or more of useful, thought-provoking, or funny. Nobody says "I'm going to toss up a boring, stupid geeklist that's been done a thousand times." Judging, however, by what kind of recommendations lists get--most are lucky if they get ten--the lists as a whole just aren't that inspiring.

What is to be done?

I dunno. I like the suggestion over at Naturelich that some sort of digest of them might be useful to maybe keep some from scrolling off the screen. It might also be nice to be able to rate lists by various criteria other than "Recommended"--say, recommending a list as "Useful," "Funny," or stuff like that. As long as I'm proposing that people who aren't me do a lot of work, why not let us be able to sort the geeklists for a particular game by recommendations or my "Usefulness" rating?

The big thing would be to put something in the water that makes people check the vast archives of geeklists before they post something. Maybe--just maybe--someone else has put together a geeklist of games for newbies, or asked for recommendations for block wargames. It's crazy, but you never know! It would also be good--maybe delivered via aerosol spray trucks driving up and down the streets--for postulant list-makers to develop senses of humor, taste, and decorum that more closely align with mine.

In other words, I don't think we're getting anywhere unless we have GL's submitted to admins for approval, and not only is that not going to happen but I think the side effects could be worse than the original disease.

ALWAYS A GOOD THING

I entered my turn of an online three-player Alhambra game in last place, down eleven points. I sensed a comeback on the wind, though. I sat down, checked everyone's most recent card draws, and figured out that if I bought every single building on the board--which I could--I would almost certainly lock out the last tile from being taken (there was just one left in the bag), which otherwise would drop me from first to a tie for second in palaces. Furthermore, they all fit together to bring my wall up from 18 to 24 points. I got it all worked out--and won by one point. I celebrated by acting out some very poor sportsmanship in my last-second victory; luckily one of the advantages of playing on the internet is nobody can see you pump your fist or hear you holler "In your face, semi-anonymous interweb people!"

To get the obvious criticisms out of the way:

You were just lucky! If you had played better you wouldn't have had to go through all that! That's not a "strategy"!

To which all I can really say is: "Scoreboard."

POSTSEASON REPORT (WARNING! BASEBALL CONTENT!)

Tim asked what the odds were for the Padres in the Cards-Pads National League divison series. I have to admit, I (as a Cardinals fan) started breathing easier after the good guys lit up an injured (who knew?) Jake Peavy. I like the Cardinals winning this series, but the Braves/Astros will be a tougher nut.

Most of the experts see the Astros making the World Series for the senior circuit; they make a good argument. Their best three pitchers are the cream of the crop, but their lineup...man. That's some serious mediocrity around Berkman and Ensberg (who's due to drop that feather any day now). I think there's a sense--and it's true--that the Cardinals are overrated, not as good as last year...but they're still a darn good team. You can be not as good as their hype and still be pretty good.

It'll all depend on how healthy Chris Carpenter is, and he gave redbird fans ulcers his last few starts (although today against the Padres he was acceptable). The defense, lineup, and bullpen are great (the lineup, though, isn't last year's by any means). I think Houston will beat the Braves, but I'm not sure whom to favor in an Astros-Cardinals series. If the Cardinal starting pitching can keep it together well enough to corral the Astros lineup, the Cardinals will win. I'm not at all certain that will happen, though; I think the Cards will be lucky to get four runs in games that Clemens, Pettite or Oswalt start, which will probably be five or six of a seven-game series. I think the Astros have an edge, but a slim one.

The real question, of course: Which team's light-hitting catcher will provide more heart, grit, and leadership?

GOT SOME WORK TO DO

Well, the time's coming up for a research junket. I'm looking at hitting the Center for American History and the Texas State Archives the weekend of Oct. 20-23 (MO State's fall break). Anyone in the neighborhood have any ideas?

I KNOW I'M EXCITED

I was a subscriber to Command Magazine during most of its existence, and while I've traded away about half the games I ever got from them, on the whole the memory getting a Command every other month brings more smiles than frowns. One of the big frowns was...

...and anyone here who subscribed to Command knows what I'm about to bring up...

...Warmaster Chess 2000.

One issue, the game that was planned just wasn't coming together and, desperate, Ty Bomba (the editor) tossed together some chess variants, made up some counters for 'em, and sent 'em out. This brought on white-hot fury from the subscriber base, but, undaunted, Command over the next few issues just brought out more sketchy chess variants. (Albeit with "real" games also in the issue.) Soon after, Command slipped under the waves for good.

So you can imagine that I started twitching uncontrollably when I saw that Ty Bomba has come out with a bunch of checkers variants.

(Anyone who thinks checkers is lame should add another ring of squares and play International Draughts before they start coming up with...with this stuff.)