Various Kinds of Progress

I usually try to keep these posts focused, but I haven't had much time for blogging lately, so you're getting an omnibus update today.

I can now say that my "Rottweiler" project, about which I've maintained a mildly coy level of secrecy, is the Railways of the Western U.S. expansion to Railways of the World. FRED Distribution (aka Eagle Games) has announced that it will be published in Q1 2011, less than a year from now. (Regular readers already know that Railways of the World is the new reprint of the original Railroad Tycoon board game, pretty much my favorite game of all time.) I'm very excited about this, but I am trying to be patient about waiting till next year to see it in shrinkwrap at my FLGS. (As always, I want my instant gratification, and I want it now!)

The fate of Continental Rottweiler is still to be decided. Stay tuned.

In my last post, I wrote about returning to Mac programming and re-writing my venerable Solitaire Till Dawn product. That project is coming along nicely, although I wish I had more time to devote to it. Just a few minutes ago, I reached an exciting milestone: I played and won an entire game of Klondike in the new version. Now that may sound like it's almost done and ready to go, but that's not true at all. This is about the stage where the monster tries to stand up from the slab and take a few uncertain, shambling steps. The polished performance of "Puttin' on the Ritz" is still a long ways off. But I'm encouraged, and starting to think about choreography (so to speak).

Last weekend Helen and I again attended KublaCon, probably our favorite boardgame convention. We had a great time as always. This year I found myself mostly concentrating on unpublished games: Spatial Delivery and Rottweiler both got a workout, and I was privileged to play Seth Jaffee's expansion to his own Terra Prime. (Here's a sneak preview: I really liked it.) And our good friend and member of our weekly gaming group Marlin Deckert won the KublaCon Game Design contest with a really elegant abstract game he calls "Tripletts". I hope and expect to see it on store shelves in the not too distant future. (And by the way: that makes three members of our game group who have won that contest: Marlin, Candy Weber with her game Leftovers, and yr. obed. serpent, myself.)

As always, we came home with more games than we set out with. There were no exciting new releases to look for this year, which was a bit disappointing. We had already seen all the hot new games. Nevertheless, we improved our collection by trading away a few things we've found we didn't care for, and their slots on the shelf will be filled with our new acquisitions. These include Canal Mania, Attika, the Alchemy expansion to Dominion, Mission Red Planet, and a few others.

And now I'm going to go clear off the game table so we can play one or two of them!