http://www.columbia.edu/~tir2101/nycgamer.html Welcome to the DC Gamer where you will find a wide variety of thoughts, reflections, musings, and ramblings on board games. If you have no familiarity with modern board games, then check out the description of "german-style board games" at Wikipedia, browse the forums at BoardGameGeek, read the latest news at Boardgame News, see this listing of Awards, check out the archives of the Games Journal, and try your hand at a game or two on BrettspielWelt. Along the right-hand side of this webpage you can see thumbnail images of the last few hundred board games that I have played. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or other reactions. Thanks for reading the DC Gamer and enjoy! en-gb /nycgamer-banner.gif /nycgamer-banner.gif http://games.fooville.net/#Columbus Arriving in Columbus, Ohio at three o'clock in the morning on Thursday, June 24 after a long drive was not a particularly auspicious start to my first time attending a large convention (i.e., not BGG.CON), but it turned out great in the end. The 35th Annual Origins Game Fair just wrapped up and I'm here to report back on the new and not-so-new games that I tried as well as the convention experience generally. http://games.fooville.net/#Specialization There are many joys of gaming, but one joy that a few recent games have denied me is the joy of specialization. Many games allow players to score points in a variety of categories or through a variety of methods, and determine the ultimate results by adding up your points in each of the possible categories or achieved through each of the possible methods. However, only some of those games truly allow you to specialize and devise a unique path to follow as you attempt to gain as many points as possible, sometimes neglecting certain categories or methods for the sake of focusing on others. Many games prevent or discourage specialization by overly rewarding a generalist approach that does a little bit of everything, which effectively blocks players from trying and exploring specialized - and dare I say interesting - strategies. http://games.fooville.net/#Award2009 A third consecutive year with a non-German designer winning my Game of the Year would have been unthinkable in the 1990s, but in this day and age it is perhaps not even noteworthy. The globalization of board game design over the past decade has been remarkable, and these days we have great designs coming from all corners of the world, and especially from all corners of Europe. http://games.fooville.net/#JJCon The worst thing about recently moving from NYC to DC was leaving behind all of the friends with whom I played board games. Sure I miss the restaurants, and the theater, and the convenience, among other things, but the people back in NYC top the list. The isle of Manhattan does not have a particularly robust or organized board gaming community, as opposed to other cities across the country such as Denver, but there is a smattering of gamers who I have had the pleasure of meeting over the past few years. I managed to convince two of them - John and James - to travel down the coast to visit DC on two different weekends in January. http://games.fooville.net/#FiveandDime2009 Another year of gaming is in the books, which means it is time to analyze the statistics and come up with a new list of Evergreens, Falling Stars, and New Contenders. This is my fourth full year keeping track of my games played, so I have created a chart that encompasses all four years of data from 2006 through 2009. http://games.fooville.net/#InwiththenewQ3Q4 The number of new games being released each year is absured, and my urge to try as many of them as possible is even more absurd. I tried 77 new and new-to-me games in the second half of 2009 and am here to report on my findings. http://games.fooville.net/#InwiththenewQ1Q2 Out with the old, in with the new - it is a way of life for many in the board game hobby. I love to revisit old classics from time to time, but nothing beats exploring a new game, learning the rules and working your way through that first play as you see how the game comes together and the mechanics interact. As I discussed last month, many games lose their appeal after you have played them a few times because the sense of adventure is gone and the spark of interest that unfamiliarity breeds is extinguished. In that spirit of constantly trying new games and exploring their rule sets, I decided to mentally revisit all of the new and new-to-me games that I played during the first half of 2009 and share my thoughts on them with you. http://games.fooville.net/#Essen09 Essen is dead; long live Essen. The International Spieltage in Essen, Germany closed its doors on Sunday, and there are 359 days until those doors reopen, which should leave us just enough time to sort through the roughly 600 new board games that were released at the fair. Despite the fact that I didn't attend Essen, have only played a few of the games discussed herein, and the fact that my last attempt at an Essen recap in 2006 was more than a bit off base (e.g., underestimated Imperial, overestimated Gheos, but at least I was right about Anasazi and Justinian, let alone Knizia's Genesis); I am nevertheless going to try to breakdown some of the potentially most noteworthy releases at Essen 2009. How do I propose to do this? Scientifically of course, and also based on more than a little hearsay thanks to the tireless reporting efforts of attendees such as Kulkmann and Melissa. http://games.fooville.net/#GettingBetter Many games lose their appeal after you've played them a few times, maybe most games. You spend months looking forward to their release, perhaps you even pre-order the game and then check the FedEx or UPS tracking number constantly once it finally ships. Then it arrives and you eagerly tear off the shrink wrap, punch out all of the pieces, bag them, and read the rules (if you haven't already downloaded and read a PDF of the rules). You bring the game to game night and convince the group to give it a try. If you're lucky it's a blast and everyone enjoys it. Then you play it again a couple weeks later, and maybe a third time within a month or two. It's still fun but it's no longer shiny and new. It's still enjoyable, but not quite as exciting and the sense of adventure is gone. Then again, this may not sound like a familiar pattern to you, but it certainly is to me. That's why I particularly treasure games that get better the more you play them. These are games that may not even be very good the first time you play them due to the lack of familiarity with the system or possibilities, but if you give them a chance, they'll repay you many times over. It's a small crop of games, and a disparate one as well. They're treasures in my collection because this is the type of game that never gathers dust as it ages. The only thing they really have in common is that they all fell flat at first, and now their vintage is properly aged and coming into its own. http://games.fooville.net/#Paranoia One game just barely missed the cut to be one of the Final Five in my Best in Show article last month highlighting my favorite games from 2008. It is a game where you play the people just as much as the game itself, if not more so. It is a game that you simply have to experience and go along for the ride, and it is one of the most group-dependent games, meaning that your experience will depend in much greater part on the other people involved than in most other games. The game is Battlestar Galactica, based on a television series that ran from 2004 to 2009, which in turn was based on an older television series from the 1970s. http://games.fooville.net/#Frozen The wooden hut wasn't much, but the bearskin rug on the floor really tied the room together. It was a snug fit for Titus and Andrea, recently married and both orphaned by the Plague, which had ravaged their idyllic central European countryside for centuries. The hut was surrounded by a plot of bare land, but they were an industrious couple and set out at once to develop the land, plowing the fields, sowing crops, and building fences to raise livestock. http://games.fooville.net/#Award2008 The annual board game award season is upon us. The committee members for the Spiel des Jahres have just recently announced their nominees for game of the year from the previous year, and the committee members for the International Gamers Award will soon follow suit, among many others. You'll be inundated with recommendations from people whose opinions you've come to trust and rely upon. But before all that gets too far under way, it's time first for an award that's neither brought to you by a committee nor by someone whose opinion you necessarily trust. It's my very own NYC Gamer award. http://games.fooville.net/#Zoch It all started innocently enough. I'd played Bamboleo a few times before and I was learning to play Zoch Verlag's earlier offering Bausack. I'd gone from removing strangely shaped wooden blocks from a teetering structure to adding strangely shaped wooden blocks to an increasingly teetering structure. It seemed like a natural fit to combine the two, removing a block from the Bamboleo board and then adding that same block to your Bausack tower. I had no idea how far the concept could go. http://games.fooville.net/#Diplomacy Allan B. Calhamer is a genius. Move, support, hold, and convoy. It's an amazingly simple system that underlies an incredibly complex game of psychological warfare. It's also an admirably adaptable system that has been modified to fit over a thousand variants of the original. The "game" is Diplomacy. http://games.fooville.net/#SixCrowd Five is perfect, six is a crowd. You've got a great night planned with El Grande, Wallenstein, and Santiago on tap, but then that dreaded sixth person shows up and your plans are dashed. What's a game group organizer to do? Six is the dreaded number of people. There are countless threads in the forums on BoardGameGeek inquiring desperately for recommendations of board games that work well with six players. People inevitably respond with their best efforts, with games that work with six, with games that are okay with six. That's a disservice to the people and to the games. The only real answer when you have six people is to play two three-player games. http://games.fooville.net/#JoeandBob I have two acquaintances at work, let us call them "Joe" and "Bob," who adamantly refuse to learn any modern board games. Both Joe and Bob enjoy and somewhat frequently play Chess, Scrabble, and Poker. They're intelligent and clearly enjoy board games. Joe has also expressed nostalgic interest in Risk. They're an interesting case study in the spread of modern board games because I've tried everything I could possibly think of to interest them in trying a modern board game and, being the lawyers that they are, they have an abundance of counter arguments to explain and justify their disinterest. http://games.fooville.net/#FiveandDime2008 Gamers have an obsession with round numbers for some inexplicable reason. Every year around this time we flock to compile our Five and Dime lists. These are lists of games that we played at least 5 times in the previous year and at least 10 times in the previous year. http://games.fooville.net/#Team Four-player games are a dime a dozen, but four-player games that allow players to compete as 2 two-person teams are diamonds in the rough. An exceedingly small percentage of four-player games let the players divide themselves into two teams to square off against each other with a partner at their side. http://games.fooville.net/#NovemberMadnessPart2 November was so chock full of gaming that discussing the 158 games that I played last month couldn't possibly fit into a single article. A couple of weeks ago I wrote Part 1 of this series where you'll find my ranking of the 30 new releases I've played, from my favorite 2008 games such as Ghost Stories, Planet Steam, and Chicago Express down to my least favorite new games such as Boss Kito, Stone Age, and Street Paintball. In addition, since I'm breaking down the games played into topical categories rather than going through them chronologically or alphabetically, Part 1 covered all of the cooperative games and all of the racing games. I'll try to fit the rest of November Madness into this Part 2 and save you from drawing it out into a trilogy. There are a few more categories to go though, so this might mean trying to be concise, which has never been my forte. http://games.fooville.net/#Reading It started with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, as so many geek journeys do. I read the quadrilogy (including The Hobbit) once, twice, and eventually came back for a third time. I visited Tolkien's Eagle and Child pub in Oxford to really get the full effect. Eventually I moved on to try other Tolkien works, but they didn't keep my interest in the same way and I gave up on Tolkien. Next up was Frank Herbert's Dune. It blew me away. I read it once and knew that I hadn't even scratched the surface, so I read it again. http://games.fooville.net/#NovemberMadnessPart1 The "big dance" is still four months away, but my personal gaming madness was definitely November. I played more board games in November than in any previous month, many of them new releases thanks to the fabulous BGG.CON in Dallas, so I thought it might be worthwhile to share my initial impressions to help you formulate your post-Essen shopping lists. Hopefully I can help you winnow your shopping list down a bit if it has grown out of hand, but also help you spot a potential gem or two to throw on the pile that you might have previously overlooked. http://games.fooville.net/#VarsityGeek Athletics and geeks don't usually mix, but when it comes to board games anything is possible. There are board games about every corner of the globe and every historical time period so why not a few about sporting events. Board games based on sports are an odd breed because they're an exercise of the mind that simulates an exercise of the body. You can partake from the comfort of your living room without hardly moving a muscle. While it's not a particularly common theme for modern board games, it does have its advantages. http://games.fooville.net/#Krakow Peter Struijf's vivid, engaging, and evocative writing style has captured the attention of many BGG users over the past week, but just in case you've missed his posts in the avalanche of new forum posts each day, I thought I'd group them all together here. Peter founded Geode Games to self-publish his game Krakow 1325 AD, and he visited the recent Essen game fair to promote it. Peter is now writing a series of articles about his awe-inspiring experiences at Essen. I've found these articles to be some of the most interesting and enjoyable writing on BGG in recent memory and thought I'd highlight them here to call your attention to them. They're humorous and light-hearted, yet thoughtful and poignant at times (which is eerily analogous to the artist's drawing style and the flavor text of the cards in the game). http://games.fooville.net/#GeekGoldOctober2008 It's time for my biannual update on the state of the GeekGold. The last time I did this was April 1, 2008, which prompted someone to ask if this was all an elaborate April Fool's joke because they had no idea that GeekGold was worth actual money. This is certainly not a joke. GeekGold is worth more than many national currencies. If you're not familiar with the auctions in which people offer a set amount of U.S. dollars and BGG users bid how much GeekGold they will pay to receive that money, then check them out. http://games.fooville.net/#BullsAndBears With the real stock market in shambles, perhaps it's time to play stock market board games instead of gambling with the real thing. We've all seen our portfolios take a tumble recently, but there are a number of board games out there that will allow you to amass a fortune, growing your net worth to dizzying heights... if you time these faux markets right and manage to adhere to that age old adage - buy low and sell high. http://games.fooville.net/#Grandfather It seems my Attia Family Tree article from last month may present an incomplete picture of the worker placement geneaology. I left out any mention of the game and its designer who may very well be the grandfather of worker placement - Richard Breese's Keydom. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#PennySaved I was recently blamed by a friend for my articles on this website making him spend over $100 on board games. I know I am wont to effusively praise most games on here, so I am going to make an effort here to come up with an Anti-Top 50 list of games. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#AttiaFamily "Good poets borrow, great poets steal." The landscape of the board gaming hobby hasn't looked the same since an unknown game by an unknown designer from an unknown publisher burst onto the scene in the autumn of 2005. http://games.fooville.net/#BGN I made my Boardgame News debut today with the republciation of an edited version of my Survival Games article. You can view a list of my collected works as well as my brief biography on Boardgame News. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#Teaching Teaching a board game is partly an art that cannot be precisely explained or routinized, but it is also partly a science that can be analyzed and discussed to some extent. While your method of teaching always needs to remain adaptable to the circumstances, the game, and the pupils, there is a basic framework that can be (and should be, in my humble opinion) applied across the board. http://games.fooville.net/index.html#SurvivalGames From trains, to farming, to a cathedral in Paris, it doesn't matter what the setting is when I have the opportunity to fight the game system itself, in addition to my fellow players. While the game is not a traditional opponent, there are a handful of games where you struggle against the game just as much, if not more, than you struggle against your more traditional human opponents. 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 resist the opportunity to brag a little.