Journal

Dominion has emerged as our group's favorite game, with many plays of all expansions. But even more than that, this year we focused on playtesting and developing my own board game, Hunt or Gather, which I have self published on The Game Crafter, in order to print on demand copies to send for blind playtesting.

Dimes

• Hunt or Gather 66
• Dominion 39
• San Juan 21
• Cribbage 13
• Thunderstone 11

Fives

• Castle Panic 9
• 7 Wonders 7
• Coloretto 6
• Eminent Domain 6
• Elfenland 5
• Witch's Brew 5

posted by Nils Devine  # 7:24 PM 0 Comments

My goal here is not to completely reinvent Monopoly. If you want to play a good game based on some aspect of Monopoly that you link, watch Board Games with Scott 070 - Breaking Up the Monopoly. The goal here is to fix the way people play the game, bringing it back closer to the original intent of the game. I have borrowed and elaborated on ideas from one or more boardgame podcasts.

What would you change about Monopoly? Should the game look different? How would you change the rules?

I would change Free Parking to Paid Parking. This will help to discourage the house rule where people collect a pot of all paid fines when they land on that space. That way of playing arbitrarily lengthens the game, making for a bad play experience.

As a flat tax it will hurt the players who are further behind, bringing the game to a close faster, one of the primary complaints with this game.

From a thematic point of view, this change to Paid Parking will make perfect sense to our increasingly urban population. For the growing majority, parking simply is not free.

What elements of Monopoly would you keep?

I would keep the rule that states "If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder."

The only problem with this rule is that most people don't seem to know it. To encourage people to learn the rule, I would add a new space to the center of the board titled "Auction House", to make people ask the quesion, "what is that?" and look it up. The rule could even be written directly on the board.

posted by Nils Devine  # 3:33 PM 0 Comments

I tried out using Ubuntu for a couple weeks, and I must say it's pretty awesome. But there are two show stoppers. First, I need Photoshop, Gimp is just, well, gimpy. Second, Netflix streaming does not support Linux. We could watch from the Wii in the living room, but the LCD in the office is so much nicer.

So I tried formatting the drive NTFS, FAT32, but nothing worked, Windows just couldn't see my hard drive. I located my drivers CD and pressed F6 during the initial setup. No luck. Finally, when I was about to resort to setting up a VirtualBox, I found this barely intelligible post in a dell forum:

Its a common problem with Dim 8400. what you can do is enter into BIOS and expand drives and goto sata operation and change it to RAID AUTO/ATA.

Posted by karthiktkv1 on 20 Dec 2008 3:00 AM

That solved it!

posted by Nils Devine  # 1:22 PM 0 Comments

Dimes

Dominion (22)

Now technically I ought to include all of the expansions along with this base game, which would bring the total to 53, but I prefer to record it under the set which played the most significant role in the game.

Cribbage (15)

Of these plays probably 2 or 3 were proper competitive games against one or more live opponents. Many were solitary games on my iPhone, others were cooperative games, which are great fun but much shorter than traditional Cribbage.

Dominion: Prosperity (15)

This is the latest expansion and by far the greatest. If you own the base game and are trying to decide which expansion to get, this is the one.

Race for the Galaxy (11)

I haven't found a live opponent for this one. It's a brilliant game, but the learning curve is a real bitch. I just play it on my netbook against AI.

Ca$h 'n Gun$ (10)

A party game, with guns!

Snow Tails (10)

A crazy little race game, best played fast and reckless, have to try it with a timer sometime.

Sorry! Sliders (10)

Bowling in miniature, fun dexterity game.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (10)

This is easily the game with the longest playtime on this list, but made the list because I lugged this enormously heavy game to Ireland and Maine.

Nickels

Dominion: Alchemy (8)

The only expansion I don't own. But it's still good, it is Dominion after all.

Dominion: Seaside (8)

I still haven't mastered the multi-turn combinations this expansion enables, need to play it some more.

Guillotine (8)

Nice light game of chopping off heads.

Zombie Dice (7)

This one's probably under-reported. It's a simple little craps/blackjack style press your luck game, only own it on my iPhone I'm afraid.

Forbidden Island (6)

Wow, got this one for Christmas and it's already made the list. Maybe a little easy, but it plays fast and is probably the best introduction to cooperative games.

Small World (6)

It's rare that a light war game plays equally well during a lunch hour and at home with my girlfriend, but this one hits the spot. And there are even a couple expansions out that we don't own yet.

Catacombs (5)

A dungeon crawl dexterity game, this one is ready for some custom scenarios and I hope they come out with an expansion.

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game (5)

Loving the trend of packing more game into less time, this is a D&D style dungeon crawl that plays in about an hour. And I've only played the first couple adventures...

Formula D (5)

I don't know how the game designers did it, but every time we play this game the person who is in the lead midway through the race gets passed in the last corner. You'd think there would be runaway leader problems without any obvious built in catch-up mechanisms like Snow Tales, but there aren't.

Prophecy (5)

A fantasy adventure game somewhere between the pure storytelling of Arabian Nights, and the other dungeon crawl games. We've modified the rules to make it play faster and reduce the role of luck. This is a slightly older game, pre-dating the trend towards shorter play times.

Honorable Mentions

These games are among my favorites and should have made the cut.

Citadels (4)

Nice easy game to teach, but once you get into it one of those head games where you're trying to anticipate what other players are thinking. The meta game is constantly evolving as the group gets better at playing.

Fairy Tale (4)

Like Citadels this also has a card drafting element, but without the down time as you're waiting for other players to pick their roles. Hard to say which one I like more, though this one is slightly less torturous on the brain-part.

posted by Nils Devine  # 10:21 AM 0 Comments

The first is our pacing, and I'm not talking about slow play (you almost got away unscathed Dan). I'm talking about the rise and fall of our deck engines. What I'm proposing is that a deck which is really working well, pulling big 8+ coin hands, when the last Province is purchased, will not score as well as a deck which is sputtering out and choking under the weight of its own kingdom cards at the end.

We often get caught up in this ideal plan, some perfect set of cards we'd like our deck to start producing hand after hand, that we forget this is ultimately a race game, and hesitate to purchase victory cards.

Another thing which I've observed, in myself and others, as an over-abundance of +action cards. Ending a turn with extra actions is probably a waste, when you could have ended with something to get you extra coin, buys, or card draws (in hopes of pulling more coin). The goal of each hand is to end up with enough purchasing power to get the cards you want. You can't buy anything with actions (well, mostly not), but a nice big card-drawing terminal action should let you grab some more coin. We have, at least, gotten much better about picking up enough Silver and Gold.

posted by Nils Devine  # 8:45 PM 0 Comments