Beer and Pretzels 2016

It's been a great week of gaming, culminating in my weekend con trip of the year at Beer and Pretzels 2016 in Burton on Trent. Wednesday I went to Manchester with Ian, so once I'd finished my presentation slides we played a few games on the iPad (including 6 Nimmt! which works better than I expected pass and play). Thursday was Games Night featuring 6 Nimmt! (again) a couple of games of Race for the Galaxy, King of Tokyo and a couple of games of Zombology. Friday I had a night off gaming and an early night to try to recover from a few bad nights sleep and to ready myself for the early start.

Five AM on Saturday I planned to quickly turn off the alarm and get ready as quietly as possible to avoid disturbing The Wife (who doesn't deserve a 5am start just because I want to go gaming). Sadly at 4:58am every house alarm in the street (including ours) went off due to a very brief power outage. I sprinted downstairs to turn it off, The Wife, thinking it was a fire alarm had dashed into The Daughter's room, where she was happily sleeping through it! The Wife went back to bed and I got in the shower only for it to happen again and this time The Wife has to sprint downstairs. Sub-optimal.

Still, it meant I was definitely awake and didn't miss my train to Burton! Beer and Pretzels has been held in the lovely Burton Town Hall for the last 27 years, but sadly this may well be the last one. The council are putting the rent up by a huge amount and Sal and Phil who organise it have yet to find a suitable replacement venue. Three out of the last four years I've been down and met up with Terry, one of my old Bedford gaming chums, for a great weekend of gaming, beer and catching up with friends.

On Saturday Terry and I played a few games with Paul and Carol and their friends Tony, Callum and Phil and a few 2-player games together. We started with Kodama, then Port Royal, Zombology, Magnum Sal, Roll for the Galaxy (ticked offf my ten plays list!), The Voyages of Marco Polo, Patchwork a couple of times, Murano, Kodama again and ended with another play of Port Royal.

Port Royal, Magnum Sal, The Voyages of Marco Polo, Patchwork and Murano were all new to me and all good games. Patchwork stood out as my favourite of the bunch with Port Royal and Marco Polo also particularly good fun. I can see Port Royal being popular at Games Night, so I might have to get that. As I expected, Kodama is growing on me the more I play it, I imagine I'll tick off the remaining 7 plays required to get to ten quite quickly.

Sunday was a shorter day as I had to get the train home at 5:30, but I still managed another 9 games. We played Oh My Goods!, Kodama (again), Roll for the Galaxy (again), Burano, Kigi, Koi Pond, Port Royal (again), Hamsterbacke and Roll again!

Oh My Goods!, Burano and Hamsterbacke were all new to me and it's becoming clearer to me that I'm moving towards lighter games. I thought Oh My Goods! was great fun, and surprisingly deep for a little card game. Hamsterbacke was also very enjoyable with plenty of screwage.

Burano on the other hand (where I was flailing around completely unsure of what I was doing) I really didn't enjoy. It has a mechanism where at the start of each round you have a minute to build a pyramid of cubes which affected what actions you could take for the next 12-16 rounds. It was immensely frustrating since as a beginner I had no idea what to do and then ended up hamstrung for the next 45 minutes four times during the game. What's more, it's didn't seem to add anything to the game. Needless to say I am not a fan.

All in all a fantastic weekend. Patchwork was my favourite of eight new to me games, putting me well on the way to my 24 new to me games this year goal. We played three games three times: Kodama (which Paul bought after our play), Roll and Port Royal.

In addition, I spent 8 hours programming on my German language app on the train journeys and on Sunday morning!

Next week will be noticeably quieter!

A Little Encouragement

I've been quite busy with work again this week, including another long day's trip to our corporate UK head office in Manchester. But regardless I bravely soldiered on and got loads of gaming in. It's a hard job but someone's got to do it and, selfless man that I am, I took one for the team. You guys owe me.

Wednesday's Games Night suffered extreme attrition and ended up just being Ian and me. We played Lost Cities, Firefly (one towards my ten plays goal!) with the Pirates and Bounty Hunters expansion (for the first time) and Carcassonne: The Castle (one towards play every game I own once this year). Firefly was done and dusted in only 65 minutes! That's about half the length of my shortest game to date. Ian and I have both played it a few times so we knew what we were doing and that made a big difference. I liked the new story card from the expansion, but we didn't really play and of the expansion PvP rules, just by being good space citizens rather than any determined effort not to.

Thursday's trip to Manchester was with DJ and Mal, two Games Night regulars who had cried off on Wednesday. As usual, we ended up playing a bunch of board games on the iPad during the journeys, mostly Carcassonne and Hey! That's My Fish! We also played a few games of my Martian Dice app on my phone :-)

Then Saturday I finally made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in what feels like centuries. It was a great evening, I only played a couple of games, but it was great to catch up with everyone there and the games were good ones that helped towards my ten plays goal (Homesteaders and Aqua Romana - which is now ticked off the list).

Finally, as I was leaving I spoke briefly to a few Newcastle Playtest regulars. Last time I went to Newcastle Playtest (also some time around 1530, I'm pretty sure Henry VIII was still on the throne), I'd left a copy of Zombology with Dan for him to take to the UK Games Expo playtest event. I've not seen Dan since, so I don't know if he got a chance to try it out, or what the feedback was, but I hope to see him next week. Olly said it felt like he hadn't seen me in ages, and I said that I'd missed the last couple of sessions due to travelling for work. I jokingly said it must have been weird having a session that didn't start with a couple of games of Zombology (it's our staple opening game while we wait for people to arrive). But it did! Dan took it along and they all played it without me! A good sign.

That and another event during the week are starting to restore my confidence. On Tuesday I was out of the office at a networking event where I bumped into a friend of a friend who recognised my name and company name from my badge. She asked if I was the game designer and we chatted about that for a bit. I told her about Zombology (She started it! I didn't pounce on her like a lion that hadn't been fed in months! Well actually I did, but in the sort of genteel way that's acceptable at a work conference). I happened to have the prototype on me (it was in my bag for Wednesday's train trip where it didn't see any action), so I showed it to her and explained the premise. The combination of zombies, wacky science and a £9 price point combined into enough excitement for her to pre-order a copy there and then. Maybe selling 150 won't be so hard after all...

They Tried and Failed?

... They tried and died. That quote seems somehow appropriate this week.

It's been another busy week. Monday I was travelling for work with Ian again, so there was iPad gaming on the train (complete with another game of Galaxy Trucker, towards my ten plays goal) and then Tuesday was Newcastle Playtest.

I was pretty knackered though, so I left about nine o'clock after three games of Zombology and one of Dan's Ming Voyages. It was a really good turn out with eight of us including two new people and it was good to get some games of Zombology in with more players than the usual three or four we manage in my work lunchtime sessions. We played two games with six players and then when the new members arrived we played an eight player game. Because I'd missed the session last month it was the first time these guys had seen the most recent (and fairly large) changes. They liked some aspects of it, but weren't so keen on others, especially the reduction in control. The previous version let you keep a card between rounds. This gave you a lot more control as you could prevent a card going to an opponent, and could keep a card that would potentially let you complete one of the suits, thereby controlling which suits were scored at the end of the game. The downside was that all the good cards were being kept by players, completely knackering the drafting element.

I'm ok with it not being a very strategic game, it's supposed to be a 10-15 minute filler like 6 Nimmt! which also has very little control. I also like the way the drafting gives you increasing information about which cures are possible as the game plays out.

Between us we had a few new ideas to try out, and on Thursday lunchtime I got to try out one of those - dealing all the cards up front. This was a spectacular failure. It tried, and died! With only three players and all the cards dealt at the beginning of the game you know by the end of the third turn which suits can be cured (in our case: none!), which sucks a lot of the fun out of it.

I've some other ideas from Tuesday to try out, but they need new components, so will take a little longer to organise.

Thursday was Games Night which included a couple more games of King of Tokyo (which is fast becoming a favourite) towards my ten plays goal. Both our games were six player and we found there was very little incentive to stay in Tokyo till the start of your next turn for the two points. The winners of both games never went in to Tokyo at all! We're considering trying a house rule next time to encourage Tokyo hogging ...

Finally, on the weekend I did a bit more work on my German app. A bit of refactoring and adding some new functionality. It's slowly coming together.

This week I really need to crack on with Vacuum so I can try it once before I go to Germany. Ideally, I need to get it printed and playtested during the week...

Good progress on my goals for the year this week, but not on my more pressing aims regarding Vacuum and Germany. I need to sort myself out!

After The Drought, The Deluge

Believe it or not it had been several weeks since I last played a board game against a human opponent. I've had to cancel the last three of my regular Thursday Games Nights for various reasons and I've been putting off playtesting at lunchtime as I've had a bunch of ideas in my head for Zombology that I've not gotten around to doing the graphic design on, let alone printing out.

The gaming drought ended on Tuesday with a trip to Manchester for work with my boss Ian, a regular Games Night attendee. I always take my iPad which is stacked with board game conversions so we played a bunch of those - I think ten all told!

That evening I was babysitting for some friends and I put the hours to good use, doing the graphic design for the box labels and the rule books for the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance and their bonus copies of Zombology. With that finally done I could print them out on Wednesday and finish the copies off ready for posting:

There was no Games Night again on Thursday, but only because I was off to Bedford on Friday night for a Games Day with Terry and Andrew, two of my gaming buddies from my time in the south.

I spent Friday and Saturday nights' train journeys doing the graphic design for the next version of Zombology which has some sweeping changes from the December version. As yet I don't know if it will make things better or worse, but it will be interesting to see how it pans out, once I've printed it out and got it to the table. I'm trying to address a few things: one is some issues with the graphic design, another is a few things to add theme. I've also got some concerns about how easy it is for one of the players to win (as opposed to everyone lose).

In addition, a recent change allowing players to keep a card between rounds, which has been almost universally popular, is disappearing. The change was introduced to give the players more control and to make the game more strategic but, to be honest, a ten minute drafting game needs to be fun more than strategic. Allowing players to keep a card meant that the good cards were retained so the drafting aspect was knackered - it was only the dross going round.

As with any large changes to a game, I'm expecting that some bits of it will be an improvement and some bits a step backwards. I'll have to play it a few times to work out which are which and then start honing the game again.

Or the new version might just be dreadful and I'll have to roll back to the previous version!

Saturday's games day was a great day. It was great to catch up with Terry and Andrew and we played seven games, of which I'd only played Fresco, Firefly and Las Vegas before. The games I was introduced to: Machi Koro, Orleans, Red7 and Roll for the Galaxy were all entertaining, with Roll for the Galaxy being my favourite of the day. Roll is similar to Race and clearly of the same theme and feel, but it's different enough to have made it high up on my wish list. Race is a favourite with my Games Night crowd and I think Roll will be too.

Plus a game of Firefly is a step towards having played every game I own at least ten times :-)

This week Games Night is back and then my friend Paul is up from York on Saturday. The deluge continues!

Bringing People Together

The Daughter was up between 4:15 and 4:30 every day last week, so I didn't get as much done as I had intended on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology. Still, the clocks have changed now, so I'm hoping that she'll be sleeping to something past five on summer time, and I can start going to bed a bit later myself - and get the last couple of copies finished off and then get them all in the post. It's Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, so that'll be a late night and then there's Games Night on Thursday, so I'll have to fit the construction in around those.

So, not much progress to report but and interesting thing did happen on Tuesday. I went to Manchester again for work (it's becoming a regular occurrence since we were bought by an American corporation whose UK headquarters are in Manchester). It's often my boss and I who go down, and since he's a Games Night attendee, I usually take my iPad full of board games to help us while away the six hours of train journeys. The boss couldn't make it this week, so I opened it up to the floor and Sam one of our two new starters came instead. Sam's also a gamer, so the iPad came too. We played a lot of games on the two journeys many of which Sam hadn't played before. The last game of the first journey was Carcassonne (new to Sam) which Sam won despite my literally hundreds of games of experience.

The second journey was very busy - the train was crammed. Fortunately we'd booked seats and so had table space to play some more games. As we pulled out of Manchester, I offered Sam another game and he chose Carcassonne again. Sam and I were sat diagonally opposite each other on a four person table and we'd been on the move for about 5 minutes before the guy sat next to me started offering Sam advice! As the game went on Mr. Random Stranger helped Sam out a few times - he could sense I was the more experienced player and so was helping 'the underdog' :-)

The game came to an end, and seeing as Mr. Random Stranger hadn't got off yet, I asked if he wanted to play too. Pat (his name as it turns out) happily joined in and we spent the next hour and a half playing three player games until Pat got off at York. It turns out Pat had been to Beyond Monopoly (the games club in York I used to frequent when I lived there) and knew Jon, the guy who runs it (who used to help me playtest games when I ran Reiver Games). It's a small world. I also felt like I vaguely recognised Pat, though that might be my imagination, I've met a lot of people through Reiver Games, and I'm often bad at remembering names and faces.

In case you ever read this Pat, it was a pleasure to meet you - thanks for joining in!

Willkommen zu Hause!

It's been a busy week. A couple of days in the office and then three days on a work trip to Germany. It was only my third time in Germany which is a bit weird since German is the closest thing I have to a second language (which is a long way from a second language!). At school I did five years of French and three of German and by the end of that I felt more comfortable in German than French. Then both my French and my German languished for many years before I started Reiver Games and travelled to Germany to attend Essen. I tried while there to practice my paltry German and on my return I took a couple of years of German classes at evening school, ready for my second Essen and beyond.

Essen 2010 was only my second trip to Germany and with Reiver Games collapsing, it was my last until this Wednesday. My boss and I went to Tübingen for a meeting on Thursday but it took us most of the day on Wednesday to get there and then most of Friday to get back.

As I mentioned last week, in preparation for the two full days of travelling with my boss (a Games Night attendee) I'd purchased a few more games for my iPad: Small World, Settlers of Catan, Forbidden Island and Pandemic. As it turns out, we left checking in until we arrived at the airport (both times!) and ended up only spending one flight sat next to each other, so our gaming opportunities were fairly limited. We only played Pandemic of the new games I'd bought (which is a nice app that I'm glad I bought).

It was a good trip and I liked Tübingen a lot, as well as what little I saw of Baden-Württemberg (out of the window on the bus from Stuttgart airport to Tübingen, while trying to concentrate on Lords of Waterdeep and Stone Age :-) ).

Now that I'm back I need to concentrate on Zombology. I made some sweeping changes to Zombology a few weeks ago. Since then I've made a few corrective changes each weekend trying to get the new version fairly stable, ready for sending out to the NaGa DeMon competition winners. I think I'm almost there. Last week's version played well but was possibly a bit too easy, I'll see if I can make a few tweaks and then get cracking on the winners' copies. Writing the new rules is the first priority and I'll need to lay in some more printer ink for that too...

Electronic Board Gaming

As I mentioned last week, my role at work has changed slightly over the last couple of years, moving towards Project Management and away from Software Engineering. As part of that I've been making more trips for work, often with my boss, Ian. Ian just so happens to be a Games Night attendee, so when we travel, I take the iPad and its collection of board game apps.

I used to be a very keen computer gamer as a kid, mostly RPGs and RTSs with a little first-person action thrown in too. As the games became more realistic, I started getting worse and worse motion sickness, so I gave up gaming. Similarly, my hobby design efforts moved from tiny bits of computer role playing games to fully fledged board games and Reiver Games was born.

As I became more and more interested (some would say obsessed!) in board games, computer games completely fell by the wayside and I stopped playing them altogether. Board games gave you a greater mental challenge in a shorter timeframe, without the frustrating dexterity element of having to push the buttons in exactly the right order at the right time.

I was a late adopter of smart phones, but we've had an iPad for a number of years and the draw of Carcassonne on the iPad (and later Windows Phone) sucked me back in. Being able to play good board games on my own when I had time to kill and no opponent was a fun way to fill the time, without the joylessness of soloing a game (which somehow feels lonely in a way that playing against a computer opponent does not).

The last two years I've been to a big conference in North America (Vancouver in 2012 and Minneapolis in 2013), and I've been with colleagues who come to my Games Night, so I've taken the iPad and we've whiled away the airports, connections and transatlantic flights playing games. I love board games (obviously!), but there's a time and a place for physical games and, for the vast majority of them, being crammed into cattle class on a transatlantic flight isn't it. But the iPad lets you play decent, complex, strategic games with almost no space requirements and as an added bonus you get a lot of the bookkeeping taken care for you and there's no setup or packing away time.

The Wife would tell you otherwise, but I'm actually a fairly conservative board game purchaser. I don't buy many games, and those I do I'll get rid of if I don't like them or stop playing them. I rarely buy a game without playing it a few times first (Firefly the Board Game and X-Wing Minis are a couple of recent exceptions to that rule). Strangely, the same is true of iPad board game apps, despite the much lower price point. Until recently, almost all the apps I bought were games I owned the physical version of, and I've only ever bought one game I'd not played before (Army of Frogs, and that was because I am big fan of Hive which doesn't have a native iPad version). Since the start of the year I've done two trips to Manchester for work (3 hours on the train each way) and next week I'm off to Tuebingen in Germany - pretty much 8 hours of travelling each way - again with my boss Ian.

We usually play Ra a lot, plus Hey! That's My Fish! and more recently Lords of Waterdeep and Puerto Rico. For the German trip I've also invested in Catan (I've previously owned a physical copy), Pandemic (I own a physical copy), Small World (I've played it a few times, but don't own it) and Forbidden Island (played quite a lot, but don't own). It would appear that I'm loosening up a bit.

With all this choice, the two games I play the most solo are Carcassonne (when I've got a few spare minutes) and Eclipse (which I own) when I'm on a journey and I've burnt out my travel companions!

While I'm very happy to play board games on the iPad pass-and-play with friends, I never play online games - either real-time or turn based. There's something about board games that I think is lost in translation if you're not all interacting in the same physical space.

Do you play electronic versions of board games? Which are your favourites?