http://www.columbia.edu/~tir2101/nycgamer.html Welcome to my board game blog. I plan to share a wide variety of thoughts, reflections, musings, and ramblings on eurogames here. If you have no idea what eurogames are, then check out the description of german-style board games at Wikipedia, browse the forums at BoardGameGeek, read the latest news at Boardgame News, and try your hand at a game or two on BrettspielWelt. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or other reactions. Along the sides of this webpage you can see an image of each of the last 200 board games that I have played. Thanks for reading the NYC Gamer and enjoy! en-gb /nycgamer-banner.gif /nycgamer-banner.gif http://games.fooville.net/index.html#QuantifyingFun Greg Williams recently posed the question over on the BoardGameGeek forums: "Why do you log your plays?", referring to the practice of tracking every board game that one plays using a tool available on BGG for doing so. People had all sorts of answers for why they do or don't bother keeping track of every time they play a board game, but the question made me wonder why I bother to go through this process of keeping accurate records of my time spent enjoying this hobby. I realized that many of the advantages of logging your plays stem not from BGG itself, but rather from John Farrell's "Extended Stats website." http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Hansa Hansa is a game of creating and maintaining loops. There are four possible loops that you need to be aware of and consider throughout the course of the game. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Extension John Pizer, Joseph Lane, Madame, Spring-Heeled Man, and Abberline. These are the new suspects in the Whitechapel district of London. The night still covers the gloomy alleys with darkness and only a few corners are still illuminated by the gaslights, and the mood is set for a tense game of Mr. Jack yet again. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Antiquity Antiquity is brutal. That is simply the most obvious adjective to describe it. Antiquity is unrelenting, vicious, and merciless. It is a game of pollution and graves. It is a game of treading water in a small pool teeming with piranhas. It is a game of survival. And it is a pure joy to play. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Online It is counterintuitive but true that making board games freely available to play online may in fact lead to increase sales. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#MatthewsMasterpieces Jason Matthews' first published game was Twilight Struggle in 2005, and based on its success, he went on to publish the strikingly similar 1960: The Making of the President in 2007. Having played the former 9 times and the latter 5 times, I'm now going to endeavor to distinguish and critique these two games. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Trends Just thinking about the games I've been playing lately and the games I want to play/get lately, and thought I'd throw out a few questions that I'd love to hear your answers on, and figured I'd answer them myself while I'm at it. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#FiveandDime2007 January can only mean one thing, another Five and Dime List of course. Every list has to have a twist to make it unique, and since I did not do one last year, this one will be a comparative list that highlights how many times I played each game not only in 2007 but also in 2006. This means I will be able to see whether a game is on the rise or interest is declining, and maybe realize that a game I used to enjoy plenty in 2006 did not see enough table time in 2007. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Cult of the New I have recently become fascinated by a relatively new feature on John Farrell's Extended Stats website for BoardGameGeek users. This feature doesn't even have a name yet, but is described on the site as a graph depicting the "proportion of games designed in a particular year played each quarter, i.e., how much do you play new releases?" http://games.fooville.net/index.html#PickingThePerfectGame Sometimes it feels like I spend as much time trying to decide which game to play as I do actually playing games. This is the inevitable downside of having a collection that has grown out of control over the past few years. With the great variety of over 150 games comes the great dilemma of picking one to play when the opportunity arises. http://www.columbia.edu/~tir2101/nycgamer.html#GamesoftheYears Spiel des Tom? Deutscher Spiele Tom? The best I could come up with was "Games of the Years" but I suppose it is the most descriptive and clear of the bunch. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Fraternizing Disdain for dice and games that use them is clearly a common feeling among eurogamers. It's not surprising, given the fact that most of us have embraced eurogames as the luck-minimizing and strategy-maximizing alternative to traditional American games, such as Monopoly and Risk. However, after playing Martin Wallace's Byzantium for the first time the other day, it struck me how heavily some of the most treasured eurogames rely on the use of dice. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#MapsGalore Here is a table of the 103 variant maps for Age of Steam, Ticket to Ride, and Power Grid, including 62 Age of Steam maps, 27 Ticket to Ride maps, and 14 Power Grid maps. The table includes a photo of each map, the name of each map, the designer, and a link to where you can find out more information about each map. Please let me know if you see any omissions or mistakes. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#candcgamefactory Whether I am engaging in battle with British tanks, Carthaginian elephants, or dwarves and goblins, unfortunately I cannot count myself among the innumerable fans of the Richard Borg Commands and Colors series of board games. However, before I lanch into articulating my reasons for going against the grain when it comes to this highly touted quadrilogy of games, let me start by emphasizing that I do not bieve that any of these are bad games, but rather that they are merely okay and I fail to see what is so great about them. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#HabaSplotter We all know about the great publishers like Rio Grane Games and MayfairGames, and their many wonderful light, medium-weight, and heavy games. However, I've recently had the pleasure of playing gams that actually fall outside that spectrum, despite its incredible breadth. Haba and Splotter Spellen ae the two publishers I'm speaking of, while the former publishes ultra-light games, the latter publishes ultra-heavy games. What is incedible is that both publishers and their games are fabulous! http://games.fooville.net/index.html#HeyGeekList Have you ever been mid-conversation when you blurt out (or if you have more restraint than me, have the urge to blurt out), "Hey! There's a GeekList about that!"? http://games.fooville.net/index.html#SuperFillers I am on a quest to find an elusive subtype of game, specifically Super Fillers that are best suited for 2 players. I want to find Super Fillers that are great for 2 players, not games that simply work for 2 players. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Patience Patience is normally a virtue, whether in gaming or not. However, this is a list of games where it is not always a virtue. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Storage This is an update to the photomontage of my collection throughout 2006, which I posted almost nine months ago. My collection has continued to grow at a steady pace and outgrew the shelves I had been using, so I finally sprung for some new shelves and just finished building them. Below is a picture of my new pride and joy. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Simplicity After recently playing and thoroughly enjoying Kreta by Stefan Dorra, I began to think about how important simplicity is in setting apart good eurogames. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#GeekGold Have you ever wondered how much all that GeekGold you've been collecting is really worth? If you figured it was a worthless virtual currency, then think again! Turns out your GeekGold is worth more than the Mexican Peso, Japanese Yen, Indian Rupee, and a whole host of other national currencies. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#GameSpot The recent review of Settlers of Catan for the Xbox 360 written by GameSpot was somewhat eye opening. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Nine Nine games in three days. Four heavy games (Liberte, Imperial, Die Macher, Antiquity) and five light games (StreetSoccer, Lord of the Rings - The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition, Bamboleo, eBay Electronic Talking Auction Game, Chairs). It all added up to a fun and brain-burning weekend. Two of the games I already own and am glad I do (Die Macher and StreetSoccer). Three of the games are on my wishlist (Liberte, Imperial, and Chairs), with Liberte having been on the list for years, and Imperial and Chairs both being added after my first play. One of the games was already purchased after the weekend because it was only $4 on eBay (eBay Electronic Talking Auction Game). I am glad I had the chance to try the other three games, but probably will not be getting any of them (Antiquity, Lord of the Rings - The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition, and Bamboleo). It all adds up to nine good game and one great weekend. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#DuneSession I had the opportunity to play the board game Dune three times over the past month with different groups of people and was struck by how remarkably different all three games were. So what set each of my three games apart from each other so distinctly, let us take a closer look at the individual games themselves: Game 1 (He Who Controls the Spice Controls the Universe), Game 2 (One Witch Shy), and Game 3 (Blink and You Missed It). http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Merrier Most people can probably agree that the number of players that a game should be played with does not always (maybe even often) line up with the number of players that the game says it can be played with on the box. What everyone does not agree on is what the optimal number of players for each game actually is, assuming it does not match what the publisher claims. I have become interested in discovering the optimal number of players for each game so that I know what niche each game is best suited to fill, but this is not an easy task. http://games.fooville.net/index.htmlColor Metro, Entdecker, Australia... What do these three things have in common? If you guessed that all three of these games limit a persons color selection based on the number of players in the game then you are correct. As is probably clear from the title, this is a big pet peeve of mine. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#BGIA You like me? You really like me! Yes, it is true, I had my very own Sally Field moment today when the Board Game Internet Awards were announced this morning on Boardgame News and BoardGameGeek. You can see the full list of winners on the Gone Gaming blog. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Hilinski After reading so much about Crokinole on BoardGameGeek, I finally decided that I had to have it. I read countless threads to research where to purchase a high quality board, and came up with a list of four possibilities. While all four retailers had received high praise on BGG, I finally settled on a Hilinski board because the idea of owning a unique, one-of-a-kind board was just too great too pass up. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#CrystalBall It happened to the movies, it happened to video games, it is happening to board games... Sequel Mania. What do you foresee in 2007? Let us all look into our crystal balls to predict the next big reinvention of the wheel. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#PowerGridReview I generally agree with the masses, the BoardGameGeek masses that is. My tastes and those of BGG at large very rarely diverge, but Power Grid stands out as the most prominent instance of this rare occurrence. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#WallensteinSession The year was 1618 and the Thirty Years War had just begun. The Peace of Westphalia was decades away, and there was much bloodshed and revolting to be done in the meantime. Five mercenary leaders came together to lay their claim to the regions of Brandenburg, Sachsen, Kurpfalz, Bayern, and Osterreich, but only one would emerge victorious after two vicious years and two lean winters. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#BGGCON06 400 lucky BGGeeks just got done with four amazing days of gaming at what sounds like the most wonderful convention ever, but that does not mean that the rest of us cannot dream. So what would you have played if you had gone? My list is a mile long... http://games.fooville.net/index.html#CarcassonneReview Carcassonne is a tile-laying eurogame, which was designed by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede in 2001 and was awarded both the Spiel Des Jahres and the Deutscher SpielePreis that year. Carcassonne is often touted as one of the best gateway games (along with Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride) for introducing non-gamers to the hobby of strategy board games, and it is true that the game can definitely be used as a gateway game. However, this review is meant to explain how Carcassonne can be played as a deep and heavy game along the lines of Tigris and Euphrates and Caylus. If played under the following conditions, Carcassonne can become a highly strategic and extremely replayable game with no more luck than a game of Tigris. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Essen06 Another Essen Spiel has come and gone, meaning that it is time to flood the Internet with innumerable post-Essen reports on all the new game releases. This is only the second Essen since my obsession with eurogames began, but I have read so much coverage of the convention that I figured I might as well jot down my thoughts. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#CollectionCollage My fully updated collection list with individual comments on each game can always be found on my profile at BoardGameGeek, but here is a nice photo collage of my collection over the past year. One of the forum threads that I started a while back on BoardGameGeek dealt with game storage issues, specifically Crushing vs. Warping, so I am always keen to hear more comments on how people store their collections. Here is how I have stored mine over the past year. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#PredictiveAwards With the recent announcement of the winners of both the International Gamers Awards (IGA) and Deutscher Spiele Preis (DSP) for 2006, I thought it would be interesting to see which award most closely matched my game ratings on BoardGameGeek, so that I could know which award would have the best predictive power for the purpose of finding more games that I would enjoy. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#FirstistheWorst As the timeless childhood adage (and one of the best examples of sour grapes) tells us: First is the worst, Second is the best. However, this rarely holds true in the world of board games. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#BreeseNight Game designer Richard Breese visited the Columbia Strategic Simulation Society on March 23, 2006. A summary of the members in attendance, the games played, and the winners is available here. Many games were enjoyed, such as Caylus, Ra, and Blokus, but the stars of the night were the two prototypes of upcoming games brought by Mr. Breese all the way from England. He brought prototypes of both Reef Encounters of the Second Kind and Fowl Play. He was even kind enough to bring two copies of the Keythedral Expansion for me, as well as copies of OKudos for everyone in attendance! http://games.fooville.net/index.html#DesignersFavorites While many game designers choose to refrain from publicly rating games, there are a number of designers who have rated numerous games. Here is a list of the prominent game designers that have rated games and their favorite games. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#BestChristmas This is a companion list to the previous list I created in July, entitled "Best Birthday Ever." http://games.fooville.net/index.html#SanMarcoReview Decisions, decisions, decisions. Whether to go for a banishment and transfer, or to build a bridge and move the Doge? How many limit points to take? Which regions to go after; should it be Santa Croce and Dorsoduro or Castello and San Polo? What is everyone else going to try to do? These are just some of the many questions you will face during a game of San Marco. What difficult, agonizing questions the game poses, and what brain-burning fun it is. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#ThroughtheDesertReview When you first open the box of Through the Desert, and see all those pastel camels and severed plastic palm trees rolling around there, you may wonder whether you have made a mistaken in picking up Herr Knizias own favorite design. Let me reassure you that you have not. In fact, far from it. In this game you will find many hours of engrossing gameplay hidden behind childish-looking pieces and straightforward rules. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#BestBirthday I know what you are thinking: another stupid list about the games that someone recently acquired? I do apologize, but I could not resists the opportunity to brag a little.